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Comment author: Nornagest 30 June 2014 07:54:13PM *  6 points [-]

Not everything that takes place in an author's fiction is indicative of something they support.

This, however, is a recurring theme in Eliezer's work. I don't think I fully grok the motivations (though I could hazard a guess or two), but it's definitely not just HJPEV's supervillain fetish talking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 July 2014 05:43:34AM 13 points [-]

Agreed, it's also Eliezer's super-villain fetish thing.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 27 June 2014 07:00:16AM 5 points [-]

Consequently the actual annual income distribution and the power law distribution cannot actually be the same distribution; they have different support.

Every actual population differs from a parameterised mathematical function with few parameters, and for pretty much anything you can measure, if the mathematical distribution has infinite support, there will be some reason that the population cannot. But the question to ask is not, are they different, but, does the difference make a difference?

The way to answer this question is to repeat the analysis in the paper Eugine cited using a truncated power law. The bounds must be placed at the limits of what is possible, not at the accidental maximum and minimum values observed in the current population, as the point here is that the population is not fully exploring the tails.

I have not done this, but I did once do a simulation for the Cauchy distribution (which has no mean), finding empirically the standard deviation of the mean of samples of size N. Each individual set of N values has a mean, but they will be wildly different for different samples. Increasing N does not reduce the effect for any practical value of N (and I did this in Matlab, which is optimised for fast number-crunching on arrays). This is completely different from what happens for sample means drawn from distributions with finite mean and variance, whose means converge with increasing N to the population mean.

For my experiment with the Cauchy distribution, not a single one of my samples had to be rejected due to exceeding the limits of finite precision arithmetic. The absence of infinite tails from the samples made no difference to the experimental results, even though it is the presence of those infinite tails that gives the Cauchy distribution its lack of moments.

This may look like a paradox. You have two distributions, the Cauchy distribution and its truncation at 1e50 or wherever. The former has no moments, and the latter does. Yet the empirical behaviour of samples drawn from the latter agrees with mathematical analysis of the former, even though in the latter case the standard deviation of the sample mean must converge with increasing sample size to zero, and in the former case it remains infinite.

The resolution of this paradox lies in the fact that as the variance of a distribution that has a finite variance becomes larger and larger, the rate of convergence of sample means becomes slower and slower. For the Cauchy distribution truncated at +/- X and a sample size of N, for large X and N the variance of the sample mean is proportional to X/N. If we take the limit of this as X goes to infinity, we get infinity, independent of N. If we take the limit as N goes to infinity we get zero, independent of X. The behaviour found when both X and N are finite will depend on which is bigger. When X is very large, even the entire population (conceived as a sample from an underlying data-generation process) may not give a good estimate of the distribution mean.

Taleb and Douady's point is that for a power law distribution, wealth owned by the top 1% is subject to this phenomenon. A larger population will explore more of the tail of the distribution, and unlike the normal distribution, the tail is fat enough to give a different value for the statistic. The "true" distribution does not have to actually have infinite support, for the entire population of a country to be insufficient to explore the tails.

The authors draw the implication that as both population and technological development grow, the top 1% will be found to have larger proportions of the wealth, not because of any change in the mechanisms of society to favour them, but because more of the sample space is being explored. "So examining times series, we can easily get a historical illusion of rise in wealth concentration when it has been there all along." (Presumably one could quantify the effect and correct for it.)

A possibility that the paper does not raise is that instead of calculating the actual wealth held by the actual top 1%, you could estimate the Gini coefficient from the whole population, and calculate a theoretical 1% wealth. This may be substantially more. The authors suggest that Pareto's empirical observation of the 80/20 rule, which implies 53% wealth held by the top 1%, might actually correspond to a figure of 70%.

This could be spun in opposite ways. If you want to boom freedom and boo levellers, you can point to this and say there's always more room at the top. If you want to boom equality and boo the rich, you can say that the true situation is even worse that the 1% figure says, indeed that the figure is a systematic underestimate, a piece of evil propaganda used by the rich to conceal the true extent of the inequality inherent in the system.

Take your pick.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 July 2014 12:50:19AM 2 points [-]

A possibility that the paper does not raise is that instead of calculating the actual wealth held by the actual top 1%, you could estimate the Gini coefficient from the whole population, and calculate a theoretical 1% wealth.

Taleb would probably object on the grounds that the above will lead misleading results if the population is actually composed of a supper position of several distinct populations with different Gini coefficients.

Comment author: drnickbone 30 June 2014 06:31:01AM *  0 points [-]

Or moving from conspiracy land, big budget cuts to climate research starting in 2009 might have something to do with it.

P.S. Since you started this sub-thread and are clearly still following it, are you going to retract your claims that CRU predicted "no more snow in Britain" or that Hansen predicted Manhattan would be underwater by now? Or are you just going to re-introduce those snippets in a future conversation, and hope no-one checks?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 July 2014 12:32:13AM 6 points [-]

Since you started this sub-thread and are clearly still following it, are you going to retract your claims that CRU predicted "no more snow in Britain" or that Hansen predicted Manhattan would be underwater by now?

I was going from memory, now that I've tracked down the actual links I'd modify the claims what was actually said, i.e., snowfalls becoming exceedingly rare and the West Side Highway being underwater.

Comment author: drnickbone 29 June 2014 11:43:12PM *  0 points [-]

Seems like a bad proxy to me. Is snowfall really that hard a metric to find...?

Presumably not, though since I'm not making up Met Office evidence (and don't have time to do my own analysis) I can only comment on the graphs which they themselves chose to plot in 2009. Snowfall was not one of those graphs (whereas it was in 2006).

However, the graphs of mean winter temperature, maximum winter temperature, and minimum winter temperature all point to the same trend as the air frost and heating-degree-day graphs. It would be surprising if numbers of days of snowfall were moving against that trend.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 June 2014 03:21:40AM -1 points [-]

I can only comment on the graphs which they themselves chose to plot in 2009. Snowfall was not one of those graphs (whereas it was in 2006).

Interesting. I wonder why they're no longer plotting some trends. Maybe because it's too hard to fit them into their preferred narrative.

Comment author: asr 30 June 2014 02:12:35AM 1 point [-]

Having a top-level domain doesn't make an entity a country. Lots of indisputably non-countries have top-level domains. Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 June 2014 03:18:35AM 4 points [-]

Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.

Well, it's sufficiently independent of the UK to function as a tax haven. It's definitely one of those entities that's on the fuzzy boundary between country and non-country, along with Hong Kong and (in a slightly different way) Dubai.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2014 04:29:36PM 1 point [-]

Same applies to (say) Hong Kong and yet I can't recall anyone calling Hong Kong a country.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 June 2014 11:19:34PM 3 points [-]

I can't recall anyone calling Hong Kong a country.

Well ICANN for starters.

Comment author: EHeller 28 June 2014 04:14:57AM *  2 points [-]

The explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.

This makes sense if we assume marriage is causal for class. i.e. the people who don't heed the call of the short term and do marry have better outcomes and end up higher class. Choosing marriages naturally sorts people into class, by this model.

Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased 'economic uncertainty' for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce. Its also worth pointing out that in the lower classes divorce is usually less costly for the man (the wife is more likely to be working at a similar paying job, the man has less stuff to lose)

Personally, I found the book Red Families/Blue Families pushed me away from the first explanation and toward the second (full disclosure, this is part of a larger trend of me growing increasing liberal over the last decade and a half or so.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 June 2014 11:12:39PM 5 points [-]

Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased 'economic uncertainty' for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce.

There were many historical periods with much much greater economic uncertainty, they also had higher marriage rates.

Comment author: pragmatist 29 June 2014 07:50:19AM *  5 points [-]

The only example of a successful prediction in your article is a rise in "mean surface temperature" which as I mentioned in the grand-parent is not hard to fudge

Your evidence that the weights used to calculate mean surface temperature are fudged in favor of global warming is a link to the "VERY ARTIFICIAL correction" in the CRU code. But that correction was not applied to global mean surface temperature data. It was applied to historical tree-ring data in order to account for the discrepancy between recent temperatures calculated using tree-ring data and recent temperatures calculated using other means known to be more reliable.

Uncorrected, the tree ring data suggests a decline in temperatures beginning around 1940 and continuing to the present. We have plenty of evidence that this is not in fact correct from actual thermometer-based records, so the correction was applied as a proxy for the unknown cause of this recent divergence. Now this does perhaps "hide" the fact that tree-ring records are not trustworthy (although CRU published papers explicitly mentioning this supposedly hidden fact), but it does not show that actual thermometer-based temperature records are being artificially tampered with to produce global warming.

It seems to me that ESR misrepresents this fact (although perhaps he was unaware of it) when he characterizes the "correction" as being applied to "Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions", with no mention of tree rings.

And I am very skeptical that temperature records over a very recent decade (the basis for the article I linked) have had significant external weighting applied to them to "fudge the results". The problem of changing station locations may necessitate differential weighting over longer time frames, but just from 2002 to 2011? I don't believe you. If you have any evidence suggesting that this is what is going on, I'm interested to see it.

The rest of said article reads like an attempt to (preemptively?) explain away failed predictions.

It doesn't read that way to me.

And yet for some reason all said predictions fail in the same direction.

Probably due to politically motivated reasoning. I'm not denying that climate change activists often make exaggerated and unwise predictions about the impact of climate change, especially in the popular media. I am denying your claim that the predictive record of climate science is entirely negative. There are climate models that have done pretty well, at least when it comes to global trends.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 June 2014 02:37:52PM -1 points [-]

Here is the article I linked to above. Note that it implies a different conclusion about recent temperature trends. Do you have any evidence for preferring your letter to the editor over the article Eric discusses besides it confirming your pre-existing belief?

The rest of said article reads like an attempt to (preemptively?) explain away failed predictions.

It doesn't read that way to me.

Have you even read the article you linked to? Here are the first four sentences:

Early climate forecasts are often claimed to have overestimated recent warming. However, their evaluation is challenging for two reasons. First, only a small number of independent forecasts have been made. And second, an independent test of a forecast of the decadal response to external climate forcing requires observations taken over at least one and a half decades from the last observations used to make the forecast, because internally generated climate fluctuations can persist for several years.

Comment author: pragmatist 28 June 2014 06:39:29AM *  5 points [-]

Also, on the occasions when global warming believers make independently verifiable predictions with definite dates they inevitably fail to occur as shown by the fact that Britain still has snow and Manhattan isn't under water.

Yes, some global warming believers have made predictions that have been falsified, but "inevitably fail to occur" is wrong. Here's a counterexample.

Julia Hargreaves does a lot of work evaluating predictive climate models, and her conclusion is that there are reliable models for predicting broad global climate response to anthropogenic forcing, but we don't currently have trustworthy predictions at the sub-continental scale. So I think it is appropriate to be skeptical about confident and precise predictions about what will happen in particular parts of the world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 June 2014 08:50:49PM -2 points [-]

Yes, some global warming believers have made predictions that have been falsified, but "inevitably fail to occur" is wrong. Here's a counterexample.

The only example of a successful prediction in your article is a rise in "mean surface temperature" which as I mentioned in the grand-parent is not hard to fudge, heck I also linked to data that gives opposite conclusions in the grand-parent. The rest of said article reads like an attempt to (preemptively?) explain away failed predictions.

Julia Hargreaves does a lot of work evaluating predictive climate models, and her conclusion is that there are reliable models for predicting broad global climate response to anthropogenic forcing, but we don't currently have trustworthy predictions at the sub-continental scale. So I think it is appropriate to be skeptical about confident and precise predictions about what will happen in particular parts of the world.

And yet for some reason all said predictions fail in the same direction.

Comment author: komponisto 27 June 2014 08:27:38PM 1 point [-]

To be explicit about something I wasn't explicit about in my other reply:

The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is "wrong", for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} is

Again, I disagree; it's a useful set for practical purposes

There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the "wrongness" of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists' ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.

But I can't be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 June 2014 03:44:20AM 0 points [-]

But I can't be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).

If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you've utterly failed since it appears you didn't know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 June 2014 04:59:50PM *  1 point [-]

http://xkcd.com/1321/ (SCNR).

More seriously, are you implying that any increase in the variance is irrelevant so long as the mean doesn't change much?

Also, on the occasions when global warming believers make independently verifiable predictions with definite dates they inevitably fail to occur as shown by the fact that Britain still has snow and Manhattan isn't under water.

Who predicted that Britain would no longer have snow or Manhattan would be under water by 2014?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 June 2014 01:18:39AM 0 points [-]

More seriously, are you implying that any increase in the variance is irrelevant so long as the mean doesn't change much?

I never said anything about an increase in variance, temperature records haven't been around long enough for it to be hard to find record setting temperatures somewhere. Also, I notice you're shifting your hypothesis from "temperatures are rising" to "variance is rising".

As for the argument in the linked comic, when wine grapes can be grown in England and Newfoundland, as was the case during the medieval warm period I'll start taking arguments of that type seriously.

Who predicted that Britain would no longer have snow or Manhattan would be under water by 2014?

The Climatic Research Unit for the no more snow in Britain. The Manhattan underwater one (or at least the West Side Highway) is Jim Hansen.

Comment author: satt 26 June 2014 03:55:59AM *  2 points [-]

If I understand Taleb correctly, his objection is that if X's distribution's upper tail tends to a power law with small enough (negated) exponent α, then sample proportions of X going to the distribution's top end are inconsistent under aggregation, and suffer a bias that decreases with sample size. And since the Gini coefficient is such a measure, it has these problems.

However, Taleb & Douady give me the impression that the quantitative effect of these problems is substantial only when α is appreciably less than 2. (The sole graphical example for which T&D mention a specific α, their figure 1, uses α = 1.1). But I have a hard time seeing how α can really be that small for income & wealth, because that'd imply mean income & mean wealth aren't well-defined in the population, which must be false because no one actually has, or is earning, infinitely many dollars or euros.

[Edit after E_N's response: changed "a bias that rises with sample size" to "a bias that decreases with sample size", I got that the wrong way round.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 June 2014 01:36:27AM 0 points [-]

But I have a hard time seeing how α can really be that small for income & wealth, because that'd imply mean income & mean wealth aren't well-defined in the population,

Um no. They're not well defined over the distribution, they will certainly be well defined over a finite population.

which must be false because no one actually has, or is earning, infinitely many dollars or euros.

You seem to be confused about how distributions with infinite means work. Here's a good exercise: get some coins and flip them to obtain data in a St. Petersburg distribution notice that even though the distribution has infinite mean all your data points are still finite (and quite small).

Comment author: Lumifer 24 June 2014 05:43:55PM *  1 point [-]

Well, the US forces actually attempted not to rig them.

No need to, the locals can do everything necessary. The US forces just provided the money and prevented the "undesirables" from playing.

Whichever laws you invoked when you said implied that "old-style colonialism won't work in our time" is a reasonable hypothesis.

I did not invoke any laws of nature. I think that in the current social, political, informational, military, etc. global environment the old-style colonialism is highly unlikely to work. No laws of nature are involved in this assertion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2014 04:23:11AM 4 points [-]

I think that in the current social, political, informational, military, etc. global environment the old-style colonialism is highly unlikely to work.

Can you be specific about what you think is the relevant change?

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 24 June 2014 01:33:06AM 3 points [-]

People always mention the Butterfly Effect as if it is an unmitigated disaster for humans: it's kind of like Nature saying FU, you are never going to be able to predict me.

And it's true that the Butterfly Effect makes it very hard to make good predictions about the weather. But it also has an upside, because it means if we somehow do figure out how to make good predictions, than we should also be able to easily control the weather. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can cause a tornado in Kansas, and we know this, then we should be able to prevent the tornado in Kansas by having another butterfly flap its wings in Osaka (or whatever).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2014 04:20:44AM 2 points [-]

The problem is that the weather also has many variables. While the chaos implies control principal works for low dimensional chaotic systems, e.g., the three body problem in orbital dynamics, I'm not sure how well it would work for weather.

Comment author: Ander 26 June 2014 12:11:25AM 1 point [-]

Excellent post!

Regarding ways that the questions might be disanalogous: For temperature data, I don't think that many people would question the data, average temperatures seem like good, hard facts to me. But some people might question unemployment data that they were presented with, stating that the measure of unemployment is flawed because it only measures people actively looking for work who are still eligible to receive unemployment. Some people 'fall off' and just become long term unemployed that no longer get counted in the statistics.

Perhaps you might note that some measure of 'percentage of population that is employed (adjusting for demographics changes)' would work better as the 'data' for some people?

Also, the post made me realize that in both of these two cases, the belief that I actually have (agree with both hypotheses), were formed due to the theory, and not due to looking at any empirical data. That is, when I hear empirical data in support of climate change, I think: 'well, obviously!', not 'here is the data that should be strengthening my belief in climate change'. I also realize that I haven't investigated and seen any data either way regarding whether minimum wages really do increase unemployment or not, and maybe I should do that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2014 02:26:04AM *  -2 points [-]

For temperature data, I don't think that many people would question the data, average temperatures seem like good, hard facts to me.

Not really. The problem is we don't have uniformly spaced weather stations all over the earth. Furthermore the locations of the stations we do have tend to change over the time period of interest. (The various proxies suffer from similar problems.) Thus it's necessary to apply weights to the data we do have to correct for this. Unfortunately, the weights are semi-arbitrary in practice and as we learned from the leaked climategate e-mails frequently have the warming built in.

That is, when I hear empirical data in support of climate change, I think: 'well, obviously!', not 'here is the data that should be strengthening my belief in climate change'.

What's your reaction to the data that shows a lack of warming over the past 17-years?

Comment author: Suryc11 25 June 2014 08:07:15PM 1 point [-]

Hm, I'm confused. I agree that at least part of the disagreement was over Arthur's willingness to lie for his cause, but how is that not captured by Viliam_Bur's post?

Lying for a cause or otherwise playing "dirty" to win for your cause, as Arthur seemed to be advocating, seems to straightforwardly line up with Viliam_Bur's theory about "Nice Greens", "Nasty Greens", "Nice Blues" and "Nasty Blues"; specifically, in this theory, Arthur would be a "Nasty" player on the side of progress/civilization/neoliberalism-ish/etc. and Yvain would be a "Nice" player on the same side.

I guess I'm not sure what you mean by tone?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2014 02:07:17AM 5 points [-]

The nastiness Viliam talks about is mostly in the form of trolling or making insulting statements with little semantic content. Lying of the type Arthur advocates goes beyond that since it injects false statements into the discussion and tends to result in one's side filling up with people who believe said lies and thus willing to lie further.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 25 June 2014 12:42:09PM *  1 point [-]

Europe is more equal on empirical measures such as the Gini Coefficient.

The comment in Talebs aphorisms does not refute that, because it is not evidence based. Instead, Taleb is making some sort of circular, ideology driven argument...that Europe is "socialist" and under "socialism" the state runs everything., therefore no healthy competition, therefore stasis..but no. in Socially Democratic Europe, the government does not intervene in the boardroom.

What's more, the empirical evidence actually contradicts Talebs untested expectation:

"according to the latest Global 500 CEO Departures™ study by global public relations firm Weber Shandwick, departing European chief executives were also more likely to be forced out of office than North American and Asia Pacific CEOs during this 2007 time period."

http://www.reputationrx.com/Default.aspx/CEOTURNOVER/GLOBAL500CEODEPARTURES%E2%84%A2andCEODEPARTURESSTUDY%E2%84%A2

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2014 02:00:34AM 2 points [-]

Europe is more equal on empirical measures such as the Gini Coefficient.

Here is Taleb's paper about the problems with measures like the Gini Coefficient.

Comment author: Suryc11 24 June 2014 07:58:38PM 2 points [-]

Relevant SMBC. It illustrates my political theory that in every political conflict that seems to be between Greens and Blues, there are actually four sides of the conflict, let's call the "Nice Greens", "Nasty Greens", "Nice Blues" and "Nasty Blues". And there is more than one line of conflict.

Officially, "Nice Greens" + "Nasty Greens" and "Nice Blues" + "Nasty Blues" should be the only existing coalitions. But there is also the value of niceness, which somehow connects "Nice Greens" and "Nice Blues", and puts them into often unconscious opposition against the "Nasty Greens" and "Nasty Blues". Being nasty is a personality trait... for a "Nasty Green" it is often easier to become a "Nasty Blue" (different slogans, but generally the same behavior) than a "Nice Green" (different everyday behavior both among the enemies and the allies).

Yup, and that is almost exactly what (at least part of) the relatively recent disagreement between Yvain and Arthur Chu was about. See http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2014/02/on-some-criticism-of-lesswrong/ and http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2014 03:56:14AM 4 points [-]

The disagreement wasn't just about tone. It was about Arthur Chu's willingness to lie for his cause. The only reason it appeared to be mostly about tone is that Yvain didn't make the strongest argument he could have.

Comment author: James_Miller 24 June 2014 05:05:20PM 3 points [-]

If the falling price of gene sequencing lets us determine a lot about how genes influence human behavior social scientists, I predict, will get a lot better at figuring out the causal effects of social programs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2014 02:26:35AM 6 points [-]

Once social scientists get past their taboo against genetic explanations.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 24 June 2014 08:29:38AM -2 points [-]

Europe is also more equal than the US. The counterargument put forward to that is that the Iron Curtain countries were not particularly egalitarian. My countercounterargument is that social democracy is not commensurable with single party state socialism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2014 01:44:36AM *  2 points [-]

Europe is also more equal than the US.

That is precisely the claim being disputed. In particular, as Taleb points out in the document I quoted in the great-grandparent, when you stop trying to use static measures of inequality and instead base it on the amount of turnover at the top, you see that Europe is much more unequal (almost an oligarchy) than the US.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 June 2014 05:16:38PM 1 point [-]

They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.

Elections are no big deal. Mugabe holds elections, Putin holds elections, hey, even Assad recently held elections.

Old-style colonialism wasn't based on crushing military superiority

Yes, it was. Certainly, it wasn't just military superiority, especially once the colonies were established, and the British, for example, became masters of control through political and financial means as well. However the military strength was the underlying bedrock.

Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?

Which particular laws of nature do you have in mind?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2014 02:26:29AM 1 point [-]

Elections are no big deal. Mugabe holds elections, Putin holds elections, hey, even Assad recently held elections.

Well, the US forces actually attempted not to rig them.

However the military strength was the underlying bedrock.

Disagree. Military strength was based on a bedrock of competent management.

Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?

Which particular laws of nature do you have in mind?

Whichever laws you invoked when you said implied that "old-style colonialism won't work in our time" is a reasonable hypothesis.

Comment author: Manfred 23 June 2014 10:28:31PM *  0 points [-]

Caring about times within some time limit in a single reference frame is sufficient.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2014 12:51:06AM 2 points [-]

The problem with a time limit is that it encourages you to not care what happens afterwards.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 23 June 2014 12:48:31PM *  1 point [-]

Apple's and oranges. Virtually nowhere is socialist in the one party state sense.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2014 12:27:05AM 3 points [-]

The point is that Europe is more socialist than the US.

Comment author: komponisto 22 June 2014 08:15:52AM 1 point [-]

Let's pause for a moment for a meta-level reflection. You're engaging in metacontrarianism, with the relevant uneducated/contrarian/metacontrarian triad being:

Dubai is a country / No, Dubai is part of the UAE / Dubai has a lot of power and autonomy within the UAE.

The trouble with metacontrarianism is that metacontrarians often seem to forget that even if they're right -- that is, even if the third level of the triad is true -- the first level is still wrong. In some sense, you have to pass through the second level in order to legitimately claim the mantle of the third. (Here, "pass through the second level" means not "go through a stage of being at the second level" so much as "understand why, and in particular that, the second level is an improvement over the first".)

I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she's never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE's version of Istanbul, Bob's model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice's, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it "might as well" be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.

Now, to return to the object level, I don't actually see why Carol's model is better than Bob's. I don't know that much about the internal politics of Turkey, but I assume that Istanbul, being a major city, is culturally and demographically different from most of the rest of the country, wields a lot of influence in the country's politics, and has governmental policies that most other parts of the country don't have. For that matter, the same is true of New York City, whether regarded as a part of New York State or of the United States. In neither of these cases do I see any need to give up the model that has these cities being politically subordinate to the nation-states (or states) that contain them, and I don't see how the case of Dubai within the UAE is any different (or, anyway, different enough). And, conversely, even if Monaco is heavily influenced in its policies by neighboring France, I don't see that as sufficient reason to remove from my model the notion that Monaco is an independent state, because otherwise we might as well say that Canada is part of the U.S., et cetera.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 June 2014 04:23:03AM 1 point [-]

I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she's never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE's version of Istanbul, Bob's model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice's, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it "might as well" be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.

The difference is that the various Emirates of the UAE (including Dubai) have far more internal autonomy then even US states to say nothing of Istanbul.

Comment author: TheMajor 22 June 2014 10:51:15AM 6 points [-]

To phrase your result in terms a physicist would use: an all-time integral of a scalar function (happiness) is not Lorentz-invariant. But rather than draw a philosophical conclusion from this I would suggest modifying the equation for total happiness. If I recall correctly the standard method is defining a happiness density (over space), so rather than state "There is X amount of happiness at this point in time" you would state "At this point in time and space there is Y amount of happiness being created/destroyed", and then define the total happiness as an all universe integral (so you integrate over spacetime).

I do hope that I'm not making some elementary mistake (imagine the embarrasment), but this thread seems to fall in the general category of 'attempting to draw philosophical conclusions from a limited understanding of modern physics'. I remember reading material here on LessWrong that warns about this, such as adding up to normality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2014 06:17:54PM 4 points [-]

To phrase your result in terms a physicist would use: an all-time integral of a scalar function (happiness) is not Lorentz-invariant.

Yes it is, since Lorentz-transformations have determinant 1, i,e., are measure-preserving. The issue in the example is that happiness isn't a function on all of space-time, it is a function on the world lines of being capable of experiencing it.

Comment author: dankane 22 June 2014 07:33:27AM 5 points [-]

So utilitarianism has known paradoxes if you allow infinite positive/negative utilities (basically because infinite sums don't always behave well). On the other hand, if you restrict yourself, say to situations that only last finitely long all these paradoxes go away. If both devices last for the same amount of subjective time, this holds true in all reference frames, and thus in all reference frames you can say that the situations are equally good.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2014 06:10:29PM 3 points [-]

On the other hand, if you restrict yourself, say to situations that only last finitely long all these paradoxes go away.

If you restrict to finitely long situations, you wind up with weird effects at the cutoff window.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 June 2014 06:03:36PM *  1 point [-]

You're arguing issues of cartography, not geography.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 07:13:56PM 3 points [-]

No, I'm saying that the people asking whether something is "ontologically basic" are arguing cartography. Also it's funny how they only ask the question of things they don't believe exist.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 15 June 2014 03:10:57PM -2 points [-]

I think you missed the argument.

If you have a subculture or other group of people whose experience is strongly correlated with one another, and their conduct repels or silences anyone whose experience disagrees with theirs, then their view of the world will be missing a lot of information and will contain systematic biases.

We have words for this in various areas, such as "groupthink", "filter bubble", "circlejerk" ....

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 04:59:26PM 5 points [-]

So let me get this straight? You're trying to argue that we should avoid saying things that make people feel uncomfortable in order to prevent groupthink?

Comment author: pragmatist 20 June 2014 05:42:34AM -1 points [-]

He hates the non-Plus atheists. ("Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist ... and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.”" -- source)

I don't think he's saying he hates all non-Plus atheists (whatever that means) here. It seems to me he's saying that he hates atheists who don't see atheism as a part of a broader network of commitments or values, or resist the idea that it should be seen as such. He goes on to say, "there is more to my atheism than simple denial of one claim; it’s actually based on a scientific attitude that values evidence and reason, that rejects claims resting solely on authority, and that encourages deeper exploration of the world".

That actually seems like a pretty reasonable position to me (although "hate" is admittedly a strong word to use in this context). If indeed there are people who see atheism as fundamentally disconnected from general-purpose rationalism, or who don't see the promotion of atheism as a mere corollary of the promotion of a general rationalist worldview, or who object to making the atheist movement about rationality and science rather than mere disbelief in god, then I do think those people are wrong.

It does seem odd to me that there would be a significant number of atheists who adopt this kind of view, though, so maybe Myers is attacking a strawman here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 04:57:28PM 5 points [-]

If indeed there are people who see atheism as fundamentally disconnected from general-purpose rationalism, or who don't see the promotion of atheism as a mere corollary of the promotion of a general rationalist worldview, or who object to making the atheist movement about rationality and science rather than mere disbelief in god, then I do think those people are wrong.

The problem is that's not what Myers was trying to do with Atheism Plus. The values he wanted to introduce were those of the "social justice" crowd, a.k.a., the people who believe that certain scientific opinions are inherently "unjust" and shouldn't be heard, that their cause is so noble that it justifies lying and falsifying science.

Comment author: gwern 21 June 2014 03:36:29AM *  0 points [-]

And yet, NYC is still there, and unlike Rome post-barbarians, has only grown in population.

EDIT: and to expand on my point with Rome, disturbances are very common in great metropolises and imperial capitals; pointing to a blackout from over a third of a century ago as indicating the decline of America is like pointing to the Marian or Gracchian riots in Rome as indicating the fall of the Roman empire. (What, you don't remember either? Exactly.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 04:31:53PM 2 points [-]

As it happens I am familiar with the Gracchian riots, they certainly weren't indicative of the fall of the Roman Empire as the Roman Empire didn't exist then; however, the riots were most definitely indicative of the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 21 June 2014 01:27:54PM 0 points [-]

Interesting, but this does not exactly mean the concrete is incoherent, more that QM isnt playing ball.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 04:17:05PM *  2 points [-]

I could do this with any other theory of physics just as easily, e.g., in Newtonian mechanics are are particles ontologically basic, or are points in the universal phase space?

Edit: Also, I never said the concrete was incoherent, I said the concept of "ontologically basic" was incoherent.

Comment author: gwern 19 June 2014 08:10:08PM 8 points [-]

Maybe I'm mistaken and most of the membership here views Less Wrong as a "super high G" community, but I don't.

How much time do you spend with normal people? What's your score on Murray's high-IQ bubble checklist?

but still, for Ivy Leaguers, who have a high level of clout in our society, to have an average IQ around that level, does not address the question of whether additional IQ above that level has diminishing impact.

No, but the original claim was clearly wrong. Society is dominated by high-IQ people. Diminishing returns seems to be weirdly interpreted as 'no returns' in a lot of people's minds.

It may help if I quote a bit of what I've written on a similar issue before about diminishing returns to research:

The Long Stagnation thesis can be summarized as: "Western civilization is experiencing a general decline in marginal returns to investment". That is, every $1 or other resource (such as 'trained scientist') buys less in human well-being or technology than before, aggregated over the entire economy.

This does not imply any of the following:

  1. No exponential curves exist (rather, they are exponential curves which are part of sigmoids which have yet to level off; Moore's law and stagnation can co-exist)

    Sudden dramatic curves can exist even amid an economy of diminishing marginal returns; to overturn the overall curve, such a spike would have to be a massive society-wide revolution that can make up for huge shortfalls in output.

  2. Any metrics in absolute numbers have ceased to increase or have begun to fall (patents can continue growing each year if the amount invested in R&D or number of researchers increases)
  3. We cannot achieve meaningful increases in standards of living or capabilities (the Internet is a major accomplishment)
  4. Specific scientific or technological will not be achieved (eg. AI or nanotech) or be achieved by certain dates
  5. The stagnation will be visible in a dramatic way (eg. barbarians looting New York City)

Similarly, arguing over diminishing returns to IQ is building in a rather strange premise to the argument: that the entities in discussion will be within a few standard deviations of current people. It may be true that people with IQs of 150 are only somewhat more likely to be billionaires ruling the world than 140, but how much does that help when you're considering the actions of people with IQs much much higher? The returns can really add up.

To take an example I saw today: Hsu posted slides from an April talk, which on pg10 points out that the estimates of the additive genetic influence on intelligence (the kind we can most easily identify and do stuff like embryo selection with) & estimates of number of minor alleles imply a potential upper bound of +25 SD if you can select all beneficial variants, or in more familiar notation, IQs of 475 (100 + 15 * 25). Suppose I completely totally grant all assumptions about diminishing marginal returns to IQ based on the small samples we have available of 130+; what happens when someone with an IQ of 475 gets turned loose? Who the heck knows; they'll probably rule the world, if they want.


One of the problems with discussing this is that IQ scores and all research based on it is purely an ordinal scale based on comparing existing humans, while what we really want is to measures of intelligence on a cardinal scale which lets us compare not just humans but potential future humans and AIs too.

For all we know, diminishing returns in IQ is purely an artifact of human biology: maybe each standard deviation represents less and less 'objective intelligence', and the true gains to objective intelligence don't diminish at all or in some cases increase (chimps vs humans)!

(Hsu likes to cite a maize experiment where "over 100 generations of selection have produced a difference in oil content between the high and low selected strains of 32 times the original standard deviation!"; so when we're dealing with something that's clearly on a cardinal scale - oil content - the promised increases can be quite literal. Intelligence is not a fluid, so we're not going to get 25x more 'brain fluid', but that doesn't help us calculate the consequences: an intelligent agent is competing against humans and other software, and small absolute edges may have large consequences. A hedge fund trader who can be right 1% more of the time than his competition may be able to make a huge freaking fortune. Or, a researcher 1% better at all aspects of research may, under the log-normal model of research productivity proposed by Shockley, be much more than 1% more productive than his peers.)

We know 'human' is not a inherent limit on possible cognition or a good measurement of all activities/problems: eg chess programs didn't stagnate in strength after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, having hit the ceiling on possible performance but they kept getting better. Human performance turned out to not run the gamut from worst to best-possible but rather marked out a fairly narrow window that the chess programs were in for a few decades but passed out of, on their trajectory upwards on whatever 'objective chess intelligence' metric there may be.

(I think this may help explain why some events surprise a lot of observers: when we look at entities below the human performance window, we just see it as a uniform 'bad' level of performance, we can't see any meaningful differences and can't see any trends, so our predictions tend to be hilariously optimistic or pessimistic based on our prior views; then, when they finally enter the human performance window, we can finally apply our existing expertise and become surprised and optimistic, and then the entities can with small objective increases in performance move out of the human window entirely and it becomes an activity humans are now uncompetitive at like chess but may still contribute a bit on the margin in things like advanced chess, and eventually becomes truly superhuman as computer chess will likely soon be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 03:07:30AM 2 points [-]

The stagnation will be visible in a dramatic way (eg. barbarians looting New York City)

That happened a while ago.

Comment author: Lumifer 19 June 2014 03:09:23PM 1 point [-]

The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy

I don't think it mattered what the US attempted to establish and, actually, I don't think it tried any such thing anyway.

In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority. Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times, I am pretty sure that's not what OP has in mind.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 02:10:37AM 2 points [-]

actually, I don't think it tried any such thing anyway.

They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.

In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority.

Old-style colonialism wasn't based on crushing military superiority, during the British Raj the number of British born troops in India was a tiny fraction the the native troops. Thus the British relied on the cooperation of large numbers of Indians and Indian troops.

Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times,

What do you mean by this? Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?

Comment author: FiftyTwo 20 June 2014 01:21:58PM 3 points [-]

I have invented a wormhole with ends separated by ten seconds in time. Unfortunately the power requirements scale exponentially with size so its not practical for anything larger than photons, but it does mean I can send information back in time. How would you exploit this?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2014 01:52:38AM 8 points [-]

Attempt Harry's trick to solve NP problems.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 June 2014 12:00:05AM 1 point [-]

For certain conversations, yes. Others, no.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 June 2014 04:19:34AM 6 points [-]

For certain conversations, yes. Others, no.

For conversations about the topic that don't involve you conceding all points to him, yes.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 June 2014 02:29:51AM 1 point [-]

Uh, that's what I said.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 June 2014 02:33:39AM 1 point [-]

In that case, I don't understand the comparison you're making in the grandparent.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 June 2014 12:52:59AM *  -1 points [-]

I think trolling also requires a fair amount of callousness towards the harm/pain etc you're inflicting through your stunt. I prefer, when possible, to engage in something like civil disobedience, where you can show your commitment to your cause by being willing to accept suffering for yourself (jail, beatings, etc) rather than demonstrating the strength of your opinion through your willingness to hurt others.

This requires that you only use such techniques to criticize people who can hurt you, though. What about people who can't hurt you, but who can hurt someone else — for instance, their own children? How would you apply this principle to, say, anti-vaccinationists? Provoke them by illicitly vaccinating their children without their consent, thus risking jail for battery? Doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 June 2014 02:20:18AM 1 point [-]

Provoke them by illicitly vaccinating their children without their consent

That's not trolling, that's battery at least.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 19 June 2014 12:24:52PM 2 points [-]

He may be wrong, but that doesn't mean that you can't have a useful conversation, and to do that, you'll need to pick words.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 11:37:04PM 4 points [-]

In order to have a useful conversation about the topic it will be necessary to challenge his implicit claim. If he insists on making that impossible then its not possible to have a reasonable conversation with him.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 17 June 2014 02:01:31AM 0 points [-]

If you want to give an example of successful Westernization, Japan is a terrible example.

In the 17th century, the Dutch broke the commercial monopoly the Portuguese had over Japan, and the infighting between Dutch and Portuguese bothered the Japanese so much that they closed off the country. Only the Dutch (who had the wisdom to never use missionaries) were allowed to keep trading, and only through one port in one island.

Fast forward to Commodore Perry and his gunboat diplomacy. Panicked, the Japanese quickly copied the ways of the West, including the industrial revolution and the German education system, and by the next century they had become an imperialistic oppressor over much of East Asia. It took WW2 to put a stop to that. Then the Americans took charge of ruling the country until it didn't appear to be a threat anymore.

During the 1980's it seemed Japan was headed for big things, but they didn't know what to do with that promise. Maybe they panicked again. Now Japan is a toothless beast, unsure of its future, economically uncertain (still the world's 3rd, but stagnant), and demographically doomed.

I was tempted to give Siam as a successful example instead, if only because they managed to never be colonized, but right now they're such a political joke that my first impression on this matter stands: there's no way colonization can end well.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 02:13:22AM *  4 points [-]

I was tempted to give Siam as a successful example instead, if only because they managed to never be colonized,

The reason Siam was never colonized was that it served as a buffer state between British Burma and French Indo-China. This suggests another method to avoid colonization. Play rival would-be colonizers against each other.

Comment author: Lumifer 18 June 2014 09:06:56PM *  1 point [-]

I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia

Well, in practical terms "setting up" a thalassocracy in such places would have to start with landing a pretty sizeable army on the shore and fighting it out with the locals. Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan (and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...).

"Nation-building" in the Middle East and environs has been a pretty miserable failure so far.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 02:10:59AM 1 point [-]

Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan

The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy, i.e., hand over power to the locals as quickly as possible, I believe Daniel's plan would avoid this.

(and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...)

The problem both the Russians and British had was interference by rival powers, the US and Russia respectively. The Russians also had the problem that the economic system they wanted to impose being dysfunctional.

Comment author: Punoxysm 17 June 2014 03:31:05AM *  2 points [-]

Meiji Japan did lead to an authoritative, militaristic culture whose legacy includes WWII.

But also, there's a large difference between being targeted for economic subjugation only (as Japan was) and being targeted for territorial control (as in, imperial subject moving onto your land en masse), as the native Americans, native Australians, and Maori were.

Meiji Japan is overall a relative success story, but it depended on more favorable factors than just Meiji era policy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 01:57:43AM 3 points [-]

But also, there's a large difference between being targeted for economic subjugation only (as Japan was) and being targeted for territorial control (as in, imperial subject moving onto your land en masse), as the native Americans, native Australians, and Maori were.

Part of the reason Japan wasn't targeted for territorial control is that it was clear to everyone that Japan would be able to resist.

Comment author: Salemicus 16 June 2014 10:29:46PM 7 points [-]

I deliberately gave the "if you were a chieftain" example because spontaneous reorganization is almost as difficult as making your enemies spontaneously nicer.

And I deliberately gave the example of Japan. I don't know enough about Native Americans to say exactly how I'd go about the equivalent of a Meiji Restoration, but that's what I would attempt. I'd pass laws mandating compulsory Westernisation, forcibly settle the nomadic peoples, do my best to Christianise the country, and try and import as much technology and Western practices as I possibly could. And naturally I'd try and crush my rivals to make sure there was no alternative plan. I'd have tried to make Western contact as much of an opportunity as possible - Western imperialism was the best thing that ever happened to the country my family are from.

Also there are examples from history of colonized people who suffered less than others

Definitely so. The ones who suffered less are generally the ones who adapted. There is no alternate history where a nation of nomadic hunter-gatherers are wandering the Great Plains hunting buffalo in 2014. And frankly that would have been a pretty miserable outcome even from the Native Americans' perspective. Unfortunately, it's that rather romantic vision that inspires, rather than a more pragmatic one of a rich and populous Native American nation, but which is culturally not much different from its "American" neighbours.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 01:51:38AM 4 points [-]

I don't know enough about Native Americans to say exactly how I'd go about the equivalent of a Meiji Restoration, but that's what I would attempt.

Then Japanese were much more similar to the Europeans then Native Americans. For starters they had a government. Furthermore, they had developed some institutions that were similar to western institutions, or at least more similar than anything else outside the West.

I'd pass laws mandating compulsory Westernisation,

First you'd need to create a bureaucracy capable of enforcing laws.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 12:51:59AM 12 points [-]

It's possible to continue a conversation with someone who's every statement is laced with "nigga" but it takes effort. And no one is obligated to expend their energy on having a conversation with me

Conversely, it also take effort to carry on a conversation when you're constantly trying to avoid saying "um".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2014 12:30:42AM 9 points [-]

It can be worth it to pause and reconsider your language even if the offensiveness of a word or idea is exactly the subject of your dispute. When I hosted a debate on "R: Fire Eich" one of the early speakers made it clear that, in his opinion, opposing gay marriage was logically equivalent to endorsing gay genocide (he invoked a slippery slope argument back to the dark days of criminal indifference to AIDS).

This is not just about the same word having different meanings. His feeling contains an implicit substantive claim about slippery slopes (not to mention a false narrative of the early history of AIDS).

Comment author: Nornagest 16 June 2014 10:16:48PM *  6 points [-]

Those aren't bad. I'd been rather fond of the World of Darkness 2E version (by the same company), which medievalists, recovering Catholics, and history-of-philosophy geeks might recognize as the seven Christian virtues altered slightly to be less religion-bound; but these look better-defined and with less overlap.

There do some to be some lacunae, though. I don't think justice fits well under compassion, nor conscientiousness under conviction (I'd put that under temperance); and nothing quite seems to cover the traditional virtue of prudence (foresight; practical judgment; second thoughts).

I'll have to think about less traditional ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2014 03:07:29AM 5 points [-]

I don't think justice fits well under compassion

Thinking about this people making this mistake explains a lot of bad thinking these days. In particular, "social justice" looks a lot like what you get by trying to shoehorn justice under compassion.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 June 2014 06:41:28PM *  7 points [-]

With pleasure!

Ok, so the old definition of "knowledge" was "justified true belief". Then it turned out that there were times when you could believe something true, but have the justification be mere coincidence. I could believe "Someone is coming to see me today" because I expect to see my adviser, but instead my girlfriend shows up. The statement as I believed it was correct, but for a completely different reason than I thought. So Alvin Goldman changed this to say, "knowledge is true belief caused by the truth of the proposition believed-in." This makes philosophers very unhappy but Bayesian probability theorists very happy indeed.

Where do causal and noncausal statistical models come in here? Well, right here, actually: Bayesian inference is actually just a logic of plausible reasoning, which means it's a way of moving belief around from one proposition to another, which just means that it works on any set of propositions for which there exists a mutually-consistent assignment of probabilities.

This means that quite often, even the best Bayesians (and frequentists as well) construct models (let's switch to saying "map" and "territory") which not only are not caused by reality, but don't even contain enough causal machinery to describe how reality could have caused the statistical data.

This happens most often with propositions of the form "There exists X such that P(X)" or "X or Y" and so forth. These are the propositions where belief can be deduced without constructive proof: without being able to actually exhibit the object the proposition applies to. Unfortunately, if you can't exhibit the object via constructive proof (note that constructive proofs are isomorphic to algorithms for actually generating the relevant objects), I'm fairly sure you cannot possess a proper description of the causal mechanisms producing the data you see. This means that not only might your hypotheses be wrong, your entire hypothesis space might be wrong, which could make your inferences Not Even Wrong, or merely confounded.

(I can't provide mathematics showing any formal tie between causation/causal modeling and constructive proof, but I think this might be because I'm too much an amateur at the moment. My intuitions say that in a universe where incomputable things don't generate results in real-time and things don't happen for no reason at all, any data I see must come from a finitely-describable causal process, which means there must exist a constructive description of that process -- even if classical logic could prove the existence of and proper value for the data without encoding that constructive decision!)

What can also happen, again particularly if you use classical logic, is that you perform sound inference over your propositions, but the propositions themselves are not conceptually coherent in terms of grounding themselves in causal explanations of real things.

So to use my former example of the Great Filter Hypothesis: sure, it makes predictions, sure, we can assign probabilities, sure, we can do updates. But nothing about the Great Filter Hypothesis is constructive or causal, nothing about it tells us what to expect the Filter to do or how it actually works. Which means it's not actually telling us much at all, as far as I can say.

(In relation to Overcoming Bias, I've ranted on similarly about explaining all possible human behaviors in terms of signalling, status, wealth, and power. Paging /u/Quirinus_Quirrell... If they see a man flirting with a woman at a party, Quirrell and Hanson will seem to explain it in terms of signalling and status, while I will deftly and neatly predict that the man wants to have sex with the woman. Their explanation sounds until you try to read its source code, look at the causal machine working, and find that it dissolves into cloud around the edges. My explanation grounds itself in hormonal biology and previous observation of situations where similar things occurred.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 June 2014 01:22:02AM *  7 points [-]

So to use my former example of the Great Filter Hypothesis: sure, it makes predictions, sure, we can assign probabilities, sure, we can do updates. But nothing about the Great Filter Hypothesis is constructive or causal, nothing about it tells us what to expect the Filter to do or how it actually works. Which means it's not actually telling us much at all, as far as I can say.

Yes it is causal in the same sense that mathematics of physical laws are causal.

In relation to Overcoming Bias, I've ranted on similarly about explaining all possible human behaviors in terms of signalling, status, wealth, and power. Paging /u/Quirinus_Quirrell... If they see a man flirting with a woman at a party, Quirrell and Hanson will seem to explain it in terms of signalling and status, while I will deftly and neatly predict that the man wants to have sex with the woman.

You do realize the two explanations aren't contradictory and are in fact mutually reinforcing? In particular, the man wants to have sex with here and is engaging in status signalling games to accomplish his goal. Also his reasons for wanting to have sex with her may also include signaling and status.

Comment author: Nornagest 16 June 2014 10:16:48PM *  6 points [-]

Those aren't bad. I'd been rather fond of the World of Darkness 2E version (by the same company), which medievalists, recovering Catholics, and history-of-philosophy geeks might recognize as the seven Christian virtues altered slightly to be less religion-bound; but these look better-defined and with less overlap.

There do some to be some lacunae, though. I don't think justice fits well under compassion, nor conscientiousness under conviction (I'd put that under temperance); and nothing quite seems to cover the traditional virtue of prudence (foresight; practical judgment; second thoughts).

I'll have to think about less traditional ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 June 2014 01:03:55AM 3 points [-]

Well, with your modifications these map pretty clearly to six of the seven Christian virtues, the missing one being Hope.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 June 2014 09:45:16AM 2 points [-]

a new bitcoin block comes out every five minutes

Ten minutes, on average.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 June 2014 12:45:28AM 2 points [-]

Thanks.

Comment author: James_Miller 10 June 2014 10:06:52PM *  7 points [-]

I remember reading in Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography that China asked him to set up a Singapore in China, but Lee said this wouldn't be possible.

More practically, let's get a copy of Lee's DNA and when the technology becomes available make a few thousand clones of him that in 20 years can be made mayors of major cities.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2014 09:17:01PM 2 points [-]

You might have problems reproducing his upbringing. ;)

Comment author: James_Miller 14 June 2014 08:09:57PM 1 point [-]

For how long would you have to control the computing power? Would having control of a massive number of computers for a few minutes be enough?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2014 01:45:07AM 6 points [-]

The more damage you want to do the longer it takes.

Would having control of a massive number of computers for a few minutes be enough?

Definitely not. To give you a sense of scale, a new bitcoin block comes out every five minutes and it would take control of the block chain for multiple 'ticks' to do serious damage.

Comment author: Vulture 10 June 2014 09:49:40PM 7 points [-]

Really? I feel the same way as Lumifer and asusmed that this was the obvious, default reaction. Damned typical-mind fallacy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 June 2014 12:04:17AM 4 points [-]

I also feel the same way, but in my experience most people don't.

Also as RobinZ pointed out here things get fuzzy in the limit where one has to taboo "government".

Comment author: Lumifer 04 June 2014 05:45:47PM *  5 points [-]

I think half an hour to go and vote is probably more effective than half an hour of loudly proclaiming

The problem is that the party, when considering whether to change policies, has no idea who voted for/against it for which reason. All it knows is that it gained or lost certain number of voters (of certain demographics) in between two elections.

If issue Z is highly important to you and you vote on the basis of the party's attitude to it, how does the party know this if the only thing you do is silently drop your ballot?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 June 2014 01:53:16AM 4 points [-]

If issue Z is highly important to you and you vote on the basis of the party's attitude to it, how does the party know this if the only thing you do is silently drop your ballot?

Vote for a third party that cares about Z.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 05 June 2014 06:47:27AM 1 point [-]

Well. Politics is the mind-killer. Surely such a fact-checking site would be prone to all the hacks politics can master to ''limit'' its effect. Wikipedia and Vroniplag are good (real: illustrative) examples of this.

Whether I have ''hope''? My post wasn't about hope but intended to point out structures with 'critical mass' that did have an effect. One can learn from that. How to build on these, tweak their logic to maybe achieve a better result.

A critical mass is in my opinion always needed to have any noticable effect because local uncoordinated effects are dealt with by self-stabilizing effects of the existing norms (politic powers can use e.g. regression toward the mean, coordinated salami tactics, fogging and noise).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2014 06:51:28AM 4 points [-]

Politics is the mind-killer. Surely such a fact-checking site would be prone to all the hacks politics can master to ''limit'' its effect.

Not to mention the fact-checkers themselves are subject to being mind-killed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2014 06:41:46AM *  3 points [-]

Darwin apparently originated the concept of lumpers and splitters. Both lumping and splitting are enormously useful for thinking about reality — and it’s even more useful to understand that you can do either depending upon the circumstances and your needs — but as the Troublesome Inheritance brouhaha shows a lot of people who think they are really smart can’t handle F. Scott Fitzgerald’s challenge of holding two ideas at once (e.g., lumping and splitting) and still function.

In general, Wade’s critics have a hard time dealing with complexity (in other words, they aren’t as smart as they think they are). Chuck deals extremely well with complexity (i.e., he’s really smart).

Steve Sailer

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2014 03:30:39AM 5 points [-]

I'm thinking that the website should be strongly devoted to neutrality or objectivity, as is Wikipedia.

The problem is that wikipedia isn't that good at finding the truth about controversial topics.

Comment author: Nornagest 04 June 2014 08:26:16PM *  19 points [-]

I don't feel like digging up the whole sordid backstory (though this would be a good starting point), but I get the impression he's upset that we're not a vector for his politics.

That whole "mindkiller" thing really rubs some people the wrong way; for such a person, politics are so bound up with ideals of rationality that staying away from them looks not just ignorant but willfully and maliciously so. (Compare the "reality-based community" on the left, or Eric Raymond's "anti-idiotarianism" on the right. Not that we're entirely innocent of this sort of thinking ourselves.) Combine that with the absurdity heuristic and our bad habit of parochialism in some areas, and you've got most of the ingredients for a hatchet job.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2014 02:54:09AM 11 points [-]

I don't feel like digging up the whole sordid backstory (though this would be a good starting point), but I get the impression he's upset that we're not a vector for his politics.

More specifically, he's upset that we're willing to tolerate people who point out that many of his ideology's claims are in fact falsifiable and false.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 June 2014 03:35:32PM 9 points [-]

Consider also that "don't argue with idiots" has much of the same superficial appeal as "allow the government to censor idiots".

The former has a fair amount of appeal for me and the latter I would find appalling and consider to be descent into totalitarianism. I don't think this comparison works.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2014 01:30:31AM 5 points [-]

You are atypical in this respect.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 June 2014 12:51:18AM *  2 points [-]

Ideologies frequently make falsifiable statements.

Ideologies rarely make easily falsifiable statements.

Karl Marx said that a proletarian revolution will lead to heaven on Earth. This is a falsifiable statement (and it was successfully falsified), but in order to falsify it you have to try it which is often all an ideology wants.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2014 05:41:15AM 3 points [-]

Ideologies rarely make easily falsifiable statements.

Agreed, my point is that it is still meaningful to speak about ideologies being right or wrong.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 03 June 2014 05:41:29AM *  -1 points [-]

Do you feel angry, defensive, threatened, annoyed, or aggressive when you think about politics? Then you might be an ideologue. Do you feel curious, compassionate, thoughtful, surprised, or playful when you think about politics? Then you might not be an ideologue. Personally, my intuition is that a conversation in most any domain, politics included, with a curious thoughtful person is likely to be much more productive than a conversation with an angry, defensive one (where productivity is defined as learning what the truth is).

Rather, if someone describes himself as "non-ideological" that generally means he's bought into his ideology so strongly that he no longer perceives it as an ideology.

I know nothing about Australian politics. Am I allowed to refer to myself as non-ideological when it comes to Australian politics? Or do I have an ideology regarding Australian politics that's so strong that I don't even perceive it as an ideology? ;) [winky face is supposed to put you in a curious, playful mindset ;)]

To take my point even further: do I have an ideology regarding the best way to use a bucket full of Legos? What is it about politics that causes everyone to have an ideology a priori? It sounds as though you think that thinking about politics the same way I think about the best way to use a bucket of Legos is somehow ruled out by definition. Would you say that's an accurate summary of your position?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2014 12:20:14AM 4 points [-]

I know nothing about Australian politics.

Yes, you do. I assume you're at least aware that it's a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with norms resembling those on other advanced western democracies.

Am I allowed to refer to myself as non-ideological when it comes to Australian politics?

You have an ideology about how governments ought to work, you may not know enough about Australia to know what its doing wrong or which party is closest to pushing things in the wright direction, but if you did the research you'd either find yourself sympathizing with one of them or conclude that all of them are insane and advocate some radical (from the point of view of internal Australian politics) position that hardly anyone there is advocating.

Let's replace Australia with something like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Belarus, or Kazakhstan. I'm guessing you probably know about as little about at least one of those countries as you know about Australia and yet you probably have opinions about what's wrong with those countries.

To take my point even further: do I have an ideology regarding the best way to use a bucket full of Legos?

You have priors and preconceptions about it.

What is it about politics that causes everyone to have an ideology a priori?

Because the word "ideology" is generally used to refer specifically to politics.

Comment author: Lumifer 03 June 2014 03:17:32PM 0 points [-]

I am not sure "truth" or match to reality is a useful metric to apply to ideologies. Ideologies are mostly normative and prescriptive. Their two basic ways of failure are (1) produce a system which is unlike what the ideology wanted and/or expected; and (2) produce a system which you find unacceptable because of a major mismatch with your values.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2014 12:03:34AM 3 points [-]

Ideologies frequently make falsifiable statements. They tend to say X is true so one should do Y to produce good outcome Z. The statements "X is true", and "doing Y produces outcome Z" are both falsifiable. Granted the statement "outcome Z is good" is harder to analyze given the current state of metaethics, but in practice one can get remarkably far just looking at the first two statements.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 03 June 2014 03:56:31AM -1 points [-]

Interesting! That's a notion that I would generally associate with the postmodernist academic left.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 04:00:54AM 4 points [-]

The difference is I believe that some ideologies are truer, i.e., better correspond to reality, than others.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 03 June 2014 02:57:28AM *  1 point [-]

It's probably used that way in practice, but it does seem likely to me that there's a useful concept lurking around here. I've definitely noticed that some people are much more inclined to stick with their guns in an attempt to save face during disagreements than others, and I think I've observed long-term changes in that personality characteristic in myself over the years.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 03:02:52AM 3 points [-]

So what you're talking about is susceptibility to peer pressure?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 03 June 2014 02:49:02AM *  0 points [-]

I noticed something interesting reading the comments on this thread. I consider myself to be someone who's politically non-ideological (that is to say, I don't identify with any particular political affiliation), and when I wrote my post, I was feeling playful... I didn't have any strong feelings about what I was writing about. Similar to how one might feel if one was trying to figure out the best strategy for beating a video game. However, reading the comments to this post, I find myself getting annoyed with the commenters for the political bias I perceive in them. The emotion I feel is similar to how I felt talking about politics during an earlier period of my life when I would classify myself as politically ideological. Therefore, I propose that the politics "mindkiller" functions as something of a memetic virus, in the sense that if someone starts to converse in a partisan way, others are likely to respond in kind. The quote in this post constitutes further evidence for this position.

Takeaway: Think really carefully before discussing something in a partisan way, especially if it's never been discussed in a partisan way before.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 03:00:53AM 6 points [-]

I consider myself to be someone who's politically non-ideological,

I think the problem is that being "politically non-ideological" is a meaningless phrase. Rather, if someone describes himself as "non-ideological" that generally means he's bought into his ideology so strongly that he no longer perceives it as an ideology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 02:00:21AM 6 points [-]

As Taleb points out here it's not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality.

In the U.S., when I look at a room with hotshot businessmen in 2014, I know that the 2024 one will be different (except for businessess subject to bailouts). The same cannot be said in Europe or in places where the state is powerful. And if I look at the bureaucratic and academic establishments, the only people who would drop out of the 2014 cohort are the retired/deceased ones.

Static measurements of inequality are defective (in addition to their traditional lack of mathematical rigor). True equality in income is probabilistic: it requires downward mobility. This should map to opportunity. I quickly wrote down the sketch of what such a true measurement of equality would be like.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIX3AzcHFkaGtORkU/edit

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:54:45AM 7 points [-]

Re: Capitalism.

Even if we accept the premise that socialism reduces inequality, your argument boils down to that we should make the poor a little worse of (relative to where they'd be otherwise) in order to make the rich significantly worse of in the name of "fighting inequality".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:49:29AM *  7 points [-]

Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees at a large cost.

This is the natural evolution of every enterprise under the curse of success: from making a good into selling the good, into progressively selling what looks like the good, then going bust after they run out of suckers and the story repeats itself ... (The cheapest to deliver effect: "successful" cheese artisans end up hiring managers and progress into making rubber that looks like cheese, replaced by artisans who in turn become "successful"…).

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: buybuydandavis 02 June 2014 07:40:02PM *  3 points [-]

Note that much of US government at all levels is a civil service next to impossible to remove by political means, and I assume this is similarly true in most politically "stable" countries.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:28:15AM 3 points [-]

I assume this is similarly true in most politically "stable" countries.

Well, during the 19th century the US had a system whereby the entire civil service was replaced whenever the party in power changed.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 June 2014 09:15:55PM *  3 points [-]

While I agree, I think that was his intent.

The first idea of "be a sheep" seems like John is actually engaged in wanting to have a serious discussion about politics. He lacks the knowledge that he's advocating liquid democracy but that's sort of okay.

The second paragraph of capitalists vs. socialist on the other hand is hard to address on a serious level. When Lenin got to power in Russia he didn't attempt to introduce socialism directly but tried to put state capitalism into motion because he didn't consider Russia to be advanced enough to introduce socialism directly.

Sticking with capitalism for a while till socialism can be introduced is what Lenin advocated. Moldbug knows his history. John doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that his compromise is basically what Lenin advocated 100 years ago.

Furthermore John probably means something different when he says socialism then Lenin did 100 years ago. The problem is that I honestly don't know what John means. The notion of John that "we" can stick with capitalism presupposes that we are capitalist. Does John means that Germany is capitalist and not socialist? Scandinavia? I have no idea. On the other end of the spectrum there are various libertarians who say that the US isn't pure capitalist.

But even if I would know what he means, framing the debate that way is problematic. I think it's much more useful to discuss whether markets are better than hierarchical structures to solve certain problems than to discuss government vs. private ownership.

The frame also ignores issues such as whether companies are lead by their owners or by hired MBA's who get payed on short term metrics and who have no real incentives to act in the long term interest of the company. The frame isn't helpful for discussing issues such as an unconditional basic income or single payer healthcare.

I can keep my sanity if I talk with someone who's a racist and spreads a lot of bad memes. I can also keep my sanity when I hear someone talk about capitalists vs. socialist. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't speak up when someone spreads harmful memes in any of those cases.

To come back to Moldbug, the interesting thing about the post that you linked is that his prediction about bitcoin turned out to be wrong. Bitcoin trades higher than when I wrote the post and is very far away from 0.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:22:51AM 3 points [-]

To come back to Moldbug, the interesting thing about the post that you linked is that his prediction about bitcoin turned out to be wrong. Bitcoin trades higher than when I wrote the post and is very far away from 0.

Well, his prediction about what the central banks and governments would do was wrong. His prediction about what effect such actions would have may very well have been correct.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 02 June 2014 08:57:13AM *  4 points [-]

just find someone who shares your values in addition to the other stuff.

It seems to me that modern day politics consists of people sheepily cheering for their values team without looking into whether their team's proposed policies actually further their values - which largely seems to be the proposition here.

I see some glimmer of sense in wanting a less ideological leader in creating a system to further a set of values, but it doesn't seem likely that the least ideological will win a competition for leadership in ideological organizations, or that they would be the best choice as the head of the group if they were, as furthering the ideology seems more effective for gaining and keeping power than efficiently putting the ideology into practice.

As long as there is a war to be fought for power, you want someone good at war. When the war is won, then you want the guy who can win the peace.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:14:48AM 3 points [-]

Also, could you taboo "ideological". I suspect in practice it tends to mean some combination of "disagrees with me" and "contrarian".

Comment author: Punoxysm 02 June 2014 01:38:13AM 0 points [-]

As far as "be a sheep"; most people are doing this already to some extent. They draw their opinions from a combination of media they watch and friends and social groups they identify with. Directly evaluating a policy can be very difficult, so they instead rely on a network of trusted opinions.

Letting people do it totally passively, however, could be bad. We know that people lean heavily towards default behavior when possible. So if the person you mirror starts deviating substantially from what you expect of them, you will be unlikely to change your preferences in a timely manner.

There's a whole host of other problems with such a system that make its marginal advantages seem not worthwhile.

Capitalism vs socialism debates generally happen without acknowledging that the vast majority of the world uses a relatively narrow spectrum of hybrid systems. Some free markets, some social safety nets and regulations.

Pure socialism and pure free markets have rarely existed at any sort of scale or for any substantial length of time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:12:15AM 3 points [-]

Pure socialism and pure free markets have rarely existed at any sort of scale or for any substantial length of time.

Um, Soviet Union, Cuba.

Comment author: 9eB1 02 June 2014 06:03:49AM 1 point [-]

Letting people do it totally passively, however, could be bad. We know that people lean heavily towards default behavior when possible. So if the person you mirror starts deviating substantially from what you expect of them, you will be unlikely to change your preferences in a timely manner.

You could designate a group of people to set your vote for you (since we are sheep, we should call them wolves, but of course that doesn't strike the right emotional chord [except that it might foreshadow a foreseeable outcome of such a program]), and fall back on personal research if there isn't a majority or supermajority or whatever.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 01:07:32AM 6 points [-]

You could designate a group of people to set your vote for you

I believe they're called "political parties".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 12:57:41AM 4 points [-]

Every person who has skin in the game knows sort of what is bullshit and what is not, since our capacities to rationalize —and those of bureaucrats and economists —are way too narrow for the complexity of the world we face, with its complex interactions. And survival is a stamp of statistical validity, while rationalization and narratives are the road to the cemetery.

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 12:55:59AM 2 points [-]

Financial inequalities are ephemeral, one crash away from reallocation; inequalities of status & academobureaucrat "elite" are there to stay

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: Lumifer 30 May 2014 11:42:52PM 0 points [-]

I've heard that Russian control of Ukraine would be better for Ukrainian Jews.

Given this, doesn't look likely.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2014 05:04:50AM *  1 point [-]

Well Masha Gessen is not necessarily the most trustworthy source on these matters.

Comment author: palladias 26 May 2014 11:25:07PM 3 points [-]

Dear hivemind: Any suggested interventions/experiments for a lack of appetite?

I haven't felt hungry in at least a month. I still eat, obviously, but I do it out of conscientiousness rather than desire, and have about one meal a day, with a couple of snacks that probably don't add up to a full meal throughout the day. I've had periods of no appetite before, but they usually resolved themselves within a week or so. I tried not eating when I wasn't hungry, assuming I'd wind up hungry, but this just resulted in my not eating at all for a day and a half.

Suggestions?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 May 2014 11:35:11PM 1 point [-]

I tried not eating when I wasn't hungry, assuming I'd wind up hungry, but this just resulted in my not eating at all for a day and a half.

Well, fasting for a day is generally considered good for one's health.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 15 May 2014 12:38:55PM 0 points [-]

They think that certain topics they discuss in a nuanced way among themselves might be used for crude propogandistic purposes by others....like you're doing right now.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2014 06:20:46PM 2 points [-]

They think that certain topics they discuss in a nuanced way among themselves

Is "nuanced" supposed to be a euphemism for "not corresponding to reality"? Because near as I can tell even when they talk among themselves they avoid mentioning said "unjust" scientific opinions and act lie they believe their own lies.

This is not surprising, as I described here once you start lying to attract people to your cause, your cause will be staffed by people who believe said lies. And if there really is some inner circle which free discusses the truth, how do you know they're goals are at all related to the goals that attracted you to the movement?

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 25 May 2014 03:54:09PM 0 points [-]

Who said it was a fallacy? Seems like a valid argument to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2014 06:11:34PM 1 point [-]

The article you linked to for one.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 21 May 2014 04:30:11PM *  1 point [-]

Vipul Naik's concept of a twofer: the attempt to undermine a claim by combining two objections that would be substantiated by opposite empirical facts, and by arguing that one of the objections must hold regardless of how the facts turn out to be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 May 2014 08:16:32PM 1 point [-]

That's not necessarily a fallacy. That's more of an application of the law of the excluded middle.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 20 May 2014 12:20:40AM *  3 points [-]

I haven't seen good attempts to answer that, just agitation about the problem, which is sad because it seems important. In my amateur syncretic speculations I try to look at theology from the lens of theoretical computer science (esp. algorithmic information theory) and there you have an infinite hierarchy of oracles, there's no escaping diagonalization. It makes me wonder if human intuitions about omniscience &c. are screwed up because simple self-reference problems show some of our naive conceptions of infinity to be logically impossible. It's possibly possible that a very clever, very fundamental formalization of the self vs. non-self (same vs. not-same) distinction would "solve" the problems but I don't know if any philosophically-inclined mathematical logicians think that's plausible.

There are also sideways-bending ideas about the role of "faith" in hypercomputation, and the possibility of logical ("acausal") influence between arbitrarily distant oracle machines in the arithmetical hierarchy. (I'm not comfortable with the math, I can't tell whether a machine's oracle would "screen off" all higher degree oracles; I vaguely suspect the fomal analytical reifications are too brittle to say, but I'm totally not a mathematician.)

I sometimes try to analogize the self-reference/infinity problem to the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem in mechanism design, where a seemingly simple epistemic problem turns out to have no solution. I find it funny to think of what the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem and things like it would imply about a God that is actually three distinct persons.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2014 05:35:18AM 1 point [-]

There are also sideways-bending ideas about the role of "faith" in hypercomputation,

I'm slightly more familiar with the theory of infinite cardinals than hypercomputation. Well, inaccessible cardinals and large cardinal axioms more generally have the property that their consistency can't be proved in ZFC in a very strong sense, i.e., adding any number of Godel statements doesn't help. Conversely, they can prove the consistency of ZFC unconditionally.

More generally, there is a hierarchy of large cardinal axioms where each one unconditionally implies the consistency of the ones below it but by Godel's second incompleteness theorem, they're consistency can't be proven (in a strong sense) from any ones below it.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 21 May 2014 01:21:54AM *  -1 points [-]

Is my computer (my real computer, not an imaginary one programmed with an imaginary AI) "behaviourally aware"? It even runs tests on itself and reports the results.

Yes, actually? To the extent that a worm is aware.

We don't normally use the word "aware" to describe it, but what it's doing seems very, very close to the things we do describe with the word awareness.

The problem is clearly an empirical one.

Then I've misunderstood your claim. The Hard Problem of Consciousness as popularly understood is that even if we understand all the mechanisms of thought to the point that we can construct brains ourselves, it won't explain the subjective experience we have. We can understand the universe with mathematical precision down to the last photon and it still wouldn't explain it. Seems like a non-empirical question to me. That's why they call it subjective experience.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 May 2014 02:26:01AM 0 points [-]

The Hard Problem of Consciousness as popularly understood is that even if we understand all the mechanisms of thought to the point that we can construct brains ourselves, it won't explain the subjective experience we have. We can understand the universe with mathematical precision down to the last photon and it still wouldn't explain it. Seems like a non-empirical question to me.

The common meaning of "empirical" is something based on experience, so it seems that the Hard Problem of Consciousness fits that definition.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 May 2014 07:02:26PM 0 points [-]

True, but that's an issue of raw compute-power, rather than some innate Friendliness of the algorithm.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 May 2014 02:09:07AM 0 points [-]

Not just raw compute-power. An approximation to AIXI is likely to drop a rock on itself just to see what happens long before it figure out enough to be dangerous.

Comment author: ChristianKl 11 May 2014 11:41:17PM 0 points [-]

His low blood pressure does show up in medical tests. The question of why the body set blood pressure at a certain point is largely unsolved.

In our academic system mainstream medicine doesn't investigate psychological issues and psychology generally doesn't investigate physiological issues like body temperature.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2014 03:47:17AM 1 point [-]

His low blood pressure does show up in medical tests.

Yet, for some reason the intervening mechanisms don't?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 May 2014 11:27:48AM 1 point [-]

If birth control had been as widespread as it is among present-day non-religious WEIRD people, the time since ancient Egypt to today would have been more than enough.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, May 5 - 11, 2014
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2014 03:44:57AM 3 points [-]

Yes, it's also interesting to look at the reasons why it wasn't widespread for much of the time in question.

My guess is that memetic evolution suppresses birth control faster than genetic evolution can adept to it. Periodically we get outbreaks, like present-day non-religious WEIRD culture, where the suppressing memes collapse due to events in the larger memetic ecosystem.

Comment author: Cube 14 May 2014 03:47:37PM -1 points [-]

What kind of things override loss of life and and can be widely agreed upon?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2014 03:14:26AM 2 points [-]

In the self-driving car example, say "getting to your destination". Keep in mind that the mere act of the car getting out on the road increases the expected number of resulting deaths.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 May 2014 07:57:54PM 1 point [-]

Of course we haven't discovered anything dangerously unfriendly...

Of course we have, it's called AIXI. Do I need to download a Monte Carlo implementation from Github and run it on a university server with environmental access to the entire machine and show logs of the damn thing misbehaving itself to convince you?

Or anything that can't be boxed. Remind me how AIs are supposedmtomgetnout of boxes?

AIs can be causally boxed, just like anything else. That is, as long as the agent's environment absolutely follows causal rules without any exception that would leak information about the outside world into the environment, the agent will never infer the existence of a world outside its "box".

But then it's also not much use for anything besides Pac-Man.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2014 03:07:43AM *  4 points [-]

Of course we have, it's called AIXI.

Given how slow and dumb it is, I have a hard time seeing an approximation to AIXI as a threat to anyone, except maybe itself.

Comment author: bramflakes 13 May 2014 07:49:47PM 2 points [-]

It wasn't a good outcome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2014 02:54:59AM 0 points [-]

Neither was ending the Vietnam war. For that matter, did the Non-Aligned movement accomplish much of anything besides providing cover for various dictators?

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 19 May 2014 07:50:47AM *  0 points [-]

It is a simple case of parsimony.

The brain and the physical world in general are sufficient to explain consciousness, so therefore any assumptions beyond that get a complexity penalty.

And...that's the only reason. All your "possibilities" are indeed possible... but improbable. I don't reject the idea that consciousness could theoretically reside outside the brain, but it's much more parsimonious to assume it does not.

I've read a fair amount on Less Wrong

If so, I take it you already understand about parsimony and its importance for hypothesizing, since there has been a good deal of discussion about that. Additionally, as a neuroscience major you have sufficient background to at least agree that consciousness could theoretically be an entirely physical phenomenon. You've got all the background information you need to make the required inferences.

So for my own curiosity, do let me know: Was reading above sufficient to cause you to alter your belief, and do you now know that consciousness probably (more probably than "50/50") is an entirely physical phenomenon which centers around the brain?

Edit: Reading your other comments, you still don't get parsimony.


Hypothesis 1: I have only two left toes.

Hypothesis 2: I have only two left toes and own a bunny rabbit hat.

1 is more parsimonious than 2. It's not 50/50.


Hypothesis 1: The brain is enough to explain the evidence of consciousness

Hypothesis 2: The brain is enough to explain the evidence of consciousness, but there are additional things which are also conscious, only we can't observe them.

1 is more parsimonious than 2. It's not 50/50.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2014 02:28:54AM *  1 point [-]

The brain and the physical world in general are sufficient to explain consciousness

The problem is that they aren't, as Richard explains here.

Comment author: Benito 15 May 2014 07:09:56AM -1 points [-]

From an external point of view, the situation is analogous. Every time everyone's ever died, the evidence of their consciousness has ceased, and whenever a song has turn off, the evidence of it's being on has ceased. So to say that one has definitely ended, whilst the other one is fifty-fifty, seems a mistake.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2014 04:28:58AM -2 points [-]

The difference is that with consciousness there is also an internal point of view, with songs there isn't.

Comment author: Benito 14 May 2014 08:30:00AM *  7 points [-]

"We have a number of situations in which we can hear music in this world e.g. Hitting play on your laptop. However this is just the data we have; there are many situations we don't know about. Can we really say that when a song stops, it doesn't continue somewhere else? Personally I see no reason to believe this. At best we're talking fifty-fifty here."

The situations that cause music to be heard are exceedingly complex and are not likely to happen in other parts of the universe by accident. Similarly, the situations which cause consciousness are exceedingly complex, involving so many substructures and modules working in some currently unfathomable way (Daniel Dennett suggests the need for competition ). Even if you think it's likely that all of the necessary parts exist elsewhere in the universe, that's like saying you think music exists somewhere else in the universe - it doesn't explain why you expect the music that stops here to keep on going elsewhere. There's nothing so special about consciousness that it probably just jumps out of the atoms it's being run on - that's magical thinking. Of course, if you are thing like that, maybe you are religious, and you have to contend with everything we know about the mind so far in cognitive science etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2014 05:33:17AM 0 points [-]

"We have a number of situations in which we can hear music in this world I.e. Hitting play on your laptop. However this is just the data we have; there are many situations we don't know about. Can we really say that when a song stops, it doesn't continue somewhere else? Personally I see no reason to believe this. At best we're talking fifty-fifty here."

The situation is not analogous since whether the song stops or continues where it can't be heard no one experiences it. Consciousness, on the other hand, is always experienced by the conscious entity.

Comment author: shminux 14 May 2014 02:47:12AM 3 points [-]

First, feel free to state your favorite model, or at least some starting point, e.g. "all information in the brain is duplicated in an extra-brane substrate not interacting with the currently known physical forces, such as electromagnetism", or "the mind is not located in the brain, the latter is only a conduit it uses to communicate with other minds", and we can start refining it, eventually finding what it predicts. Then we can start looking whether relevant experiments have been done.

For example, the observation that damaging a certain part of one's brain leads to cognitive changes may or may not be relevant, depending on the model used.

Similarly, noting that ape brains are very similar to human, yet monkeys have no souls is only an argument against some specific models.

Another example: an experiment that tests whether a person reporting an out-of-body experience is able to read a message secretly hidden on the upward-facing part of a ceiling fan would not falsify an epiphenomenal model where a soul simply accumulates the memories and personality, only to separate some time after the brain death becomes irreversible.

So, pick your model.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2014 04:04:03AM 2 points [-]

First, feel free to state your favorite model, or at least some starting point

So you're asking me to pick some hypothesis to privilege.

Comment author: gjm 13 May 2014 11:57:12PM *  0 points [-]

"Returning" and "remaining" (as you put it in your last bullet point) are very different things. The latter seems to require that we are, or have, something like souls that, despite their immateriality and apparent complete inaccessibility to any sort of scientific investigation, are the true bearers of our identity and consciousness. This is very, very hard to square with (e.g.) the copious evidence that "the mind is what the brain does" and I think it's reasonable to regard it as pretty much refuted.

"Returning" is another kettle of fish entirely. It covers, e.g., (1) resurrection of the sort envisaged by religions like Christianity, (2) later reconstruction by some sort of superintelligent agent, and arguably (3) cryonics if that turns out to work. Not to mention other exotic options like (4) we are in a simulation and whoever's running it wants to resurrect us. Note that for some of these options our putative resurrection takes place entirely outside our world. Evidence for or against is going to have to be indirect (e.g., some guy turns up, works a sufficiently dramatic set of miracles, and explains that he is an emissary of the gods, who by the way are going to resurrect everyone whose surname begins with a vowel; or many things of this kind that might have happened fail to happen, constituting evidence against resurrection).

Mostly, though, the reason to reject resurrection (unless you happen to think you are in possession of some kind of divine revelation or something) is Occam's razor. Yeah, it might turn out that we're in the Matrix and the computers running it are going to give us all second chances, but that's a much more complicated possibility than that our world is "the" world. And no, the odds aren't 50/50, for the reasons others have given and linked to; you can't make everything equally likely on pain of inconsistency, and in-some-sense-on-average more complicated things must be less probable.

I think you'll probably find a strong (but not unanimous) consensus among LW-rationalists that: consciousness is a property of physical systems and doesn't involve immaterial souls (unless, e.g., you define those in some way reducible to properties of physical systems); it, or something "equally good", could exist on other substrates besides ours; "survival" (consciousness remaining after we die) is monstrously unlikely; "resurrection" (consciousness returning somehow after we die) is possible in principle and may some day happen to some people via technological wonders like "uploading"; there is no good reason to expect "resurrection" to be on offer to the human race at large and it should be regarded as very unlikely for Occamish reasons.

(I would expect most of the dissent to come from people who, despite being LW-rationalists, are adherents of a religion that says there's some kind of afterlife.)

[EDITED to add: there might also be a substantial fraction dissenting on the grounds that some of the key notions are ill-defined; for instance, that we don't really know what "conscious" means beyond the fact that one particular bunch of things -- namely, us -- seem to have it; or that personal identity is fuzzy and in putative cases of "resurrection" there really isn't a fact of the matter as to whether the "before" and "after" are actually The Same Person.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2014 01:18:10AM 1 point [-]

there might also be a substantial fraction dissenting on the grounds that some of the key notions are ill-defined; for instance, that we don't really know what "conscious" means beyond the fact that one particular bunch of things -- namely, us -- seem to have it; or that personal identity is fuzzy and in putative cases of "resurrection" there really isn't a fact of the matter as to whether the "before" and "after" are actually The Same Person.

I'm not sure I agree. "Consciousness" strikes me as being as well-defined as concepts like "anticipation" and especially "experience" that are used in the foundations of empiricism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2014 01:10:44AM 1 point [-]

The problem with asking a question like that in this forum, is that most people here have been trained not to recognize the referent of the word "consciousness" and thus tend to confuse it with its correlates.

Comment author: shminux 14 May 2014 12:50:21AM *  2 points [-]

What is the likelihood of something happening for which you have no data that would allow you to predict it

It depends on where your priors come from. If you mean Knightian uncertainty, then this is a whole area of research. Afterlife is not like that.

There is plenty of experimental data to falsify the afterlife model. If you take the souls model seriously, there are concrete testable predictions it makes, these have been investigated and found to be false. The video, among many other sources, discusses a bunch of them. Based on the results of these experiments we can evaluate the probability of afterlife, and the number is tiny, though the exact number would depend on who does the calculations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2014 01:06:11AM *  2 points [-]

If you take the souls model seriously, there are concrete testable predictions it makes, these have been investigated and found to be false. The video, among many other sources, discusses a bunch of them.

I don't have time to watch the video, can you give an example? The only experiments I can think of leave the experimenter apparently unable to report the results.

Edit: Ok, there have been reports of some experimenters who have successfully reported positive results, but not in a reliable or reproducible manner.

Comment author: Eneasz 13 May 2014 10:15:52PM 6 points [-]

Not much has been said cuz there ain't much to say about things that don't exist. Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn't even advanced rationality - it's reductionism 101. I believe there was a Intelligence Squared debate on it just a few days ago that rehashed all the same old ground if you'd like a refresher. Here we go.

Giving a prior of .5 is ridiculous. Something for which you have no evidence and which breaks several known laws of physics should begin with a seriously tiny prior. You're being heavily influenced by social traditions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2014 12:52:20AM 1 point [-]

This isn't even advanced rationality - it's reductionism 101.

Rather it's self-defeating reductionism, of the kind where you start by arguing that the only meaningful questions are based on experiences and anticipated experiences, and end by concluding that the concept of "experience" is meaningless.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 May 2014 01:19:32PM 0 points [-]

I think the privilege model is neither completely true nor completely false, and one of the ways it falls down is that it's framed as absolute about members of groups (and according to a static list) rather than being about a statistical tilt.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 May 2014 01:22:24AM 2 points [-]

The problem is as I mentioned, to the extend it is true, it doesn't correspond to the connotations of the word "privilege".

Comment author: [deleted] 11 May 2014 08:39:35AM 2 points [-]

Because that is the side with the power.

Which one do you mean, social power or structural power?

In response to comment by [deleted] on A Dialogue On Doublethink
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 May 2014 12:12:42AM *  8 points [-]

I'm not sure I agree with Yvain's post.

One issue, with the abortion example:

Moldbug later uses the example of pro-lifers protesting abortion as an example of an unsympathetic and genuinely powerless cause. Yet as far as I can tell abortion protesters and Exxon Mobile protesters are treated more or less the same.

Well, there are laws limiting the ability of pro-life activists to protest outside abortion clinics. There are no analogous laws for Exxon Mobile.

His claim about how social power can't overcome structural power is dubious. Tell that to Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich or GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. To be fair to Yvain both these incidents happened after the article was written and it appears he has at least moved in the direction of updating on them.

Also Yvain says:

Social power is much easier to notice than structural power, especially if you're not the one on the wrong end of the structural power.

This is pure BS. Structural power is very easy to notice, look at the org-chart. It is social power, as Yvain defines it, that is much harder to notice.

Comment author: fezziwig 12 May 2014 08:08:10PM 1 point [-]

Yes, it's pretty much impossible to tell a lie without hurting other people, or at least interfering with them; that's the point of lying, after all. But right now we're talking about the harm one does to oneself by lying; I submit that there needn't be any.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2014 09:57:44PM 1 point [-]

Did you even read the comment I linked to? It's whole point was about the harm you do to yourself and your cause by lying.

Comment author: fezziwig 09 May 2014 07:47:45PM 2 points [-]

You've drawn an important distinction, between believing a lie and telling one. Your formulation is correct, but Eliezer's is wrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2014 02:02:47AM 7 points [-]

Telling a lie has it's own problems, as I discuss here.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 May 2014 11:36:08PM 1 point [-]

I don't intend to bicker, I think your point is a good one independently of these examples. In any case, I don't think at least the first two of these examples of the phenomenon you're talking about.

Well, the most famous (or infamous) is Kant's argument the space must be flat (in the Euclidean sense) because the human mind is incapable of imagining it to be otherwise.

I think this comes up in the sequences as an example of the mind-projection fallacy, but that's not right. Kant did not take himself to be saying anything about the world outside the mind when he said that space was flat. He only took himself to be talking about the world as it appears to us. Space, so far as Kant was concerned, was part of the structure of perception, not the universe. So in the Critique of Pure Reason, he says:

...if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. (A42/B59–60)

So Kant is pretty explicit that he's not making a claim about the world, but about the way we percieve it. Kant would very likely poke you in chest and say "No you're committing the mind-projection fallacy for thinking that space is even in the world, rather than just a form of perception. And don't tell me about the mind-projection fallacy anyway, I invented that whole move."

Another example was Lucretius's argument against the theory that the earth is round: if the earth were round and things fell towards its center than in which direction would an object at the center fall?

This also isn't an example, because the idea of a spherical world had in fact been imagined in detail by Plato (with whom Lucretius seems to be arguing), Aristotle, and many of Lucretius' contemporaries and predecessors. Lucretius' point couldn't have been that a round earth is unimaginable, but that it was inconsistent with an analysis of the motions of simple bodies in terms of up and down: you can't say that fire is of a nature to go up if up is entirely relative. Or I suppose, you can say that but you'd have to come up with a more complicated account of natures.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2014 12:41:52AM 0 points [-]

Kant did not take himself to be saying anything about the world outside the mind when he said that space was flat. He only took himself to be talking about the world as it appears to us. Space, so far as Kant was concerned, was part of the structure of perception, not the universe.

And in particular he claimed that this showed it had to be Euclidean because humans couldn't imagine it otherwise. Well, we now know it's not Euclidean and people can imagine it that way (I suppose you could dispute this, but that gets into exactly what we mean by "imagine" and attempting to argue about other people's qualia).

Comment author: Lumifer 08 May 2014 05:18:26PM 0 points [-]

The need for nutrition or reproduction exists only in the outside view.

From the point of the inside view, however, there is the need to eat things which will satisfy hunger and produce a feeling of satiation. There is no hardwired instinct for nutrition.

In the same way, from the inside view, there is the need to have sex and the impulse to care for children. Evolutionary speaking, that's sufficient because birth control is a recent invention.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2014 10:36:54PM 1 point [-]

Evolutionary speaking, that's sufficient because birth control is a recent invention.

I'm not convinced that's true. I believe something resembling condoms, made of cotton or animal intestine, goes as far back as ancient Egypt.

Comment author: ChristianKl 08 May 2014 01:07:58PM 0 points [-]

I do think that what you have can be caused by severe emotional trauma. If that's the case it basically explains why the tests that doctors run come up empty.

There are defense mechanisms that the body can use in cases of trauma that lead to reduced blood circulation which in turn messes up temperature regulation and shows itself as low blood pressure.

That means that the first step would be to move to a safe environment where you aren't constantly exposed to severe emotional trauma. Did you already make that step?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2014 10:21:38PM 0 points [-]

There are defense mechanisms that the body can use in cases of trauma that lead to reduced blood circulation which in turn messes up temperature regulation and shows itself as low blood pressure.

And these mechanisms don't involve anything that would show up on medical tests?

Comment author: Drayin 03 May 2014 07:23:44PM 4 points [-]

I see Larks' point.

The movement data is action-relevant for me, as I'm spending several hours a week going to meetup groups purely to recruit GiveWell donors. I've found skeptic/atheist groups particularly fertile, and lefty political groups (and 'A' rather than 'E' groups generally) the opposite. I haven't tried any conservative or libertarian groups yet.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2014 09:08:17PM *  8 points [-]

I haven't tried any conservative or libertarian groups yet.

Given that conservative (I believe especially evangelical groups) donate the most to charity, it's probably worthwhile checking them out.

My understanding is that their current approach to the inefficient charity problem involves organizing trips to the countries in question and having members personally help the charity. While this is clearly not the most efficient approach, it does help with the "most of the money winding up in the hands of middlemen" problem while also generating warm fuzzes.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 06 May 2014 11:04:31AM *  5 points [-]

Uhm, upvoted the comment, but don't completely agree with the linked article.

It suggests that when fans of something are worried when it becomes too popular, they object against losing their positional good. That's just one possible explanation. Sometimes the fact that X becomes widely popular changes X, and there are people who genuinely preferred the original version. -- As a simple example, imagine that tomorrow million new readers will come to LW; would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on what happens to LW. If the quality of debate remains the same, that it's obviously a huge win, and anyone who resents that is guilty of caring about their positional good too much. On the other hand, the new people could easily shift LW towards the popular (in sense: frequent in population) stuff, so we would get a lot of nonsense sprinkled by LW buzzwords.

I can imagine leftist groups believing they are working "more meta than thou"; solving a problem which taken in isolation doesn't seem so important (compared with the causes effective altruists care about), but would start a huge cascade of improvement afterwards (their model of the world says so, your model doesn't). Making mosquito nets instead is not an improvement according to their model.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2014 09:05:21PM 1 point [-]

It suggests that when fans of something are worried when it becomes too popular, they object against losing their positional good. That's just one possible explanation. Sometimes the fact that X becomes widely popular changes X, and there are people who genuinely preferred the original version.

That doesn't explain why the new X looks much more like an extreme version of the popular version of X rather than the original X.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 10 May 2014 03:08:45PM 2 points [-]

Assuming you're found out.

If you are scrutinised, in different siutations, by someone who cares about consistency, the benefit of inconsistent signalling vanishes.And noone is scrutinsed more than a politician in a healthy democracy. People read reports of politicians contradicting themselves and being inconsistent, and infer that politicians are unusually hypocritical.

But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence The ordinary persons hypocrisy is not publicised becausd the ordinary person does not have reporters following them round. The ordinary person typically moves in a number of fairly disjoimt circles -- the workplace, family, same-sex friends and so on -- signaling different loyalties to each. The existence of Chinese walls is even humorously acknowledged: "what happens in X stays in X".

Inconsisten.cy reaches a peak when communicating with completely unconnected individuals and groups. My go-to example is a telesales operative Iwho would ring various people during the crude of a day and agree with every word they said. Her customers were of course unknown to each other and in no position to compare notes,.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2014 03:40:00AM 2 points [-]

Well, in the example you cited, the Vicar of Bray, one is dealing with the kind of religious fanatics who are likely to have low tolerance for hypocrisy and may very well do some investigation into one's history.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 May 2014 12:22:21AM 1 point [-]

The more power you have, the more damage you can do through ignorance.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2014 05:31:57AM 2 points [-]

Do you mean individual or collective power? Individually the average poor citizen may not have much power, but collectively they can do stupid things like voting for the candidate promising to "make the rich pay their 'fair share' ".

Comment author: James_Miller 10 May 2014 12:11:07AM 5 points [-]

It's hard to imagine technological development in the agricultural sector that causes farmers who own their own land and tools to starve.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2014 05:28:25AM *  5 points [-]

If the farmer invests in cash crops and than the price of said crops collapses.

Granted this is less of a problem for farmers then other industries where you may have a harder time changing what you produce quickly.

Edit: Also the example in the parable doesn't work since Alex could produce enough food for himself on his farm during the first year. Thus it's not clear why he couldn't do so again.

Comment author: pragmatist 09 May 2014 11:21:17AM *  -1 points [-]

The argument against symmetry is that the privileged perspective is massively over-represented in prominent cultural productions (movies, books, op-eds, etc.), so underprivileged people have many more resources available that allow them some access to the experiences of the privileged. See this, for instance.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2014 12:00:43AM 1 point [-]

privileged perspective is massively over-represented in prominent cultural productions (movies, books, op-eds, etc.)

Really? What definition of "privilege" are you using here? I agree that certain perspectives are over-represented in cultural products, but those are not the same ones that the SJ-types call "privileged".

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 08 May 2014 01:34:55PM 2 points [-]

This is why ever since I learned QM properly I thought Boltzmann Brains based purely on quantum fluctuations were silly. Just because you can dice the vacuum state up so it looks like things are going on until you finish off the math, doesn't mean that anything is actually going on. It just means you chose a silly coordinate system for the problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2014 01:50:16AM 0 points [-]

Interesting, reading this I just realized how incomplete the Schrodinger equations is without a corresponding theory of what Eliezer once called "reality fluid".

Comment author: So8res 09 May 2014 01:12:23AM 10 points [-]

Keep in mind here that I'm steelmanning someone else's argument, perhaps improperly. I don't want to put words in anyone else's mouth. That said, I used the term 'purity' in loose analogy to a 'pure' programming language, wherein one exception is sufficient to remove much of the possible gains.

Continuing the steelmanning, however, I'd say that while no human can achieve epistemic perfection, there's a large class of epistemic failures that you only recognize if you're striving for perfection. Striving for purity, not purity itself, is what gets you the gains.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2014 01:38:07AM 6 points [-]

Yes, as Eliezer put it somewhat dramatically here:

If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy.

To expand on this in context, as long as you are striving for the truth any evidence you come across helps you, but once you choose to believe a lie you must forever avoid dis-confirming evidence.

Comment author: blacktrance 08 May 2014 04:53:50PM *  4 points [-]

Having correct beliefs does not mean expressing them. If I traveled back in time to medieval Rome, I would still believe that Jews aren't inherently evil and that Christ did not rise from the dead, but it would be unwise for me to be too public about those beliefs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 May 2014 11:17:34PM *  4 points [-]

Nickpick: my understanding is that even in medieval Rome a lot of people didn't consider Jews inherently evil. At least to the extend that they were willing to engage in business dealings with them.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 08 May 2014 09:15:23AM -1 points [-]

Belief is for many things, including signaling.

Instrumentlal rationality and epistemic rationality aren’t the same. Epistemic rationality seeks to maxmise knowledge, truth and consistency. Instrumental rationality seeks to maximise efficiemcy, gain and personal utility.One area they come apart is signalling, the implicit and explicit ways we tell others what kind of person we are.  The instrumentally rational way is to signal is to maximise your utility by sending out  agreeable signals to whichever individual or group youhappen to need something from. This Vicar-of-Bray style behaviour will lead to your making highly inconsistent statements in the limit. If you want to signal sincerity, you will need to believe them too.So you will end up with inconsistent beliefs. So,IR+signalling is inconsistent with ER. 

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 May 2014 11:15:00PM 4 points [-]

Of course the more times you switch sides, the harder it becomes for anyone to take your sincerity seriously.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 May 2014 10:10:32PM *  -1 points [-]

How many derogatory memes (in the internet sense, pictures with words on them) exist about Warren Buffet compared to Bill Gates?

You can't deny that one of the two is easier to laugh at. You might believe this to be morally wrong or undesirable for other reasons, but it seems to be obviously true.

In response to comment by [deleted] on A Dialogue On Doublethink
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 May 2014 11:11:00PM 3 points [-]

To be fare, I suspect a large number of the anti-Gates memes are by other geeks fighting the open/closed source holy war.

Comment author: V_V 04 May 2014 10:18:20AM -1 points [-]

Sure, many informal fallacies derive from useful heuristics. The problem is occurs when these heuristics are used as hard rules, especially when dismissing criticism.

For instance, the typical 'privilege' argument is: "You are white/male/heterosexual/cisgender/educated/upper class/attractive/fit/neurotypical, therefore your arguments about non-white/female/gay/transgender/uneducated/working class/unattractive/fat/neuroatypical people are wrong."
It is reasonable that people with certain life experiences may have difficulties understanding the issues of people with different life experiences, but this doesn't mean that you need to share life experiences in order to make an informed argument. The "therefore you are wrong" part of the privilege rebuttal is a fallacy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 May 2014 12:29:41AM 4 points [-]

It is reasonable that people with certain life experiences may have difficulties understanding the issues of people with different life experiences

Notice that this steelmanning of 'privilege' is completely symmetrical, i.e., an "unprivileged" person would have the same problems with respect to the "privileged" person as conversely. Given that this "steelman" has no connection to the common use of the word "privilege" the question arises, of why that word is being used at all? The answer, I suspect, is in order to sneak in the connotations from the regular meaning of the word "privilege".

Comment author: gwern 06 May 2014 03:33:13AM 11 points [-]

I don't think karma matters as much as people think it does, but if that's the only reason, LW could be programmed to look on PB.com for a matching username and increase karma based on the scores or something, much more easily than an entire prediction market written.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 May 2014 03:52:18AM 1 point [-]

That has the problem that people can inflate their scores by repeatedly predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 06 May 2014 06:07:05AM 4 points [-]

Which side are you claiming to be crackpots?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 May 2014 01:18:00AM *  4 points [-]

Seriously, I can't see how anyone could claim that Jesus was ahistorical who isn't some combination of doing reverse-stupidity on Christianity or taking an absurd contrarian position for the sake of taking an absurd contrarian position.

Edit: fixed typo.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 06 May 2014 09:31:50AM *  6 points [-]

Tradition, I guess.

In the Age of Sequences, Eliezer sometimes posted rationality quotes, in the article text (1, 2, 3, etc.). Things written by Eliezer in that era are probably automatically considered Main-level. And the new Rationality Quotes threads don't seem worse than the traditional ones -- if we look at the highly voted quotes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 May 2014 01:04:26AM 8 points [-]

Things written by Eliezer in that era are probably automatically considered Main-level.

Well, discussion didn't exist back than.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 April 2014 08:02:48PM 2 points [-]

As I understand it, a problem the privilege model is designed to address is people who ignorant about important difficulties, and are unwilling to listen. "Privilege" raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend. Of course, psycho-chemistry being what it is, it gets other people to become more rigid, to melt down, or to explode.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 May 2014 02:32:52AM *  2 points [-]

"Privilege" raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend.

In a way that has no reason to correlate with the truth of the issue under discussion.

Comment author: dthunt 05 May 2014 07:22:45PM -1 points [-]

I'm rather curious;

If you take people across a big swath of humanities, and ask them about subjects where there is a substantial amount of debate and not a lot of decisive evidence - say, theories of a historical Jesus - how many of those people are going to describe one of those theories as more likely than not?

Like, if you have dozens of theories that you've studied and examined closely, are we going to see people assigning >50% to their favored theory? Or will people be a lot more conservative with their confidence?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 May 2014 01:21:23AM 0 points [-]

If you take people across a big swath of humanities, and ask them about subjects where there is a substantial amount of debate and not a lot of decisive evidence - say, theories of a historical Jesus

Could you have picked an example where one side isn't composed entirely of crackpots?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 May 2014 01:18:04AM 6 points [-]

"Corrupted hardware"-type arguments can suggest you should doubt your own justifications for deceiving others.

You should even more doubt your motivations for deceiving yourself.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 May 2014 03:45:03PM *  0 points [-]

it's [probably] impossible for humans to understand a world that [isn't subject to mathematical analysis].

This is my claim, and here's the thought: thinking things are natural, physical objects and they necessarily have some internal complexity. Further, thoughts have some basic complexity: I can't engage in an inference with a single term.

Any universe which would not in principle be subject to mathematical analysis is a universe in which there is no quantity of anything. So it can't, for example, involve any space or time, no energy or mass, no plurality of bodies, no forces, nothing like that. It admits of no analysis in terms of propositional logic, so Bayes is right out, as is any understanding of causality. This, it seems to me, would preclude the possibility of thought altogether. It may be that the world we live in is actually like that, and all its multiplicity is merely the contribution of our minds, so I won't venture a claim about the world as such. So far as I know, the fact that worlds admit of mathematical analysis is a fact about thinking things, not worlds.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 11:06:21PM 1 point [-]

thinking things are natural, physical objects and they necessarily have some internal complexity. Further, thoughts have some basic complexity: I can't engage in an inference with a single term.

What do you mean by "complexity"? I realize you have an intuitive idea, but it could very well be that your idea doesn't make sense when applied to whatever the real universe is.

Any universe which would not in principle be subject to mathematical analysis is a universe in which there is no quantity of anything.

Um, that seems like a stretch. Just because some aspects of the universe are subject to mathematical analysis doesn't necessarily mean the whole universe is.

Comment author: Jiro 04 May 2014 02:24:29AM *  0 points [-]

There's a difference between "can't imagine" in a colloquial sense, and actual inability to imagine. There's also a difference between not being able to think of how something fits into our knowledge about the universe (for instance, not being able to come up with a mechanism or not being able to see how the evidence supports it) and not being able to imagine the thing itself.

There also aren't as many examples of this in the history of science as you probably think. Most of the examples that come to people's mind involve scientists versus noscientists.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 10:55:25PM 1 point [-]

There also aren't as many examples of this in the history of science as you probably think.

See my reply to army above.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 May 2014 07:00:59PM 2 points [-]

Name three (as people often say around here).

In response to comment by [deleted] on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 10:52:58PM *  1 point [-]

Well, the most famous (or infamous) is Kant's argument the space must be flat (in the Euclidean sense) because the human mind is incapable of imagining it to be otherwise.

Another example was Lucretius's argument against the theory that the earth is round: if the earth were round and things fell towards its center than in which direction would an object at the center fall?

Not to mention the standard argument against the universe having a beginning "what happened before it?"

Comment author: [deleted] 04 May 2014 07:10:15PM -1 points [-]

that race and sex don't correlate with anything significant

If you define “racism” and “sexism” that broadly, sure, but there are plenty of people who use the terms more narrowly, and wouldn't call David Epstein racist for pointing out that the Kalenjin comprise a sizeable fraction of marathon champions for genetic reasons.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Some Tools For Optimizing Our Media Use
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 10:44:11PM 2 points [-]

David Epstein racist for pointing out that the Kalenjin comprise a sizeable fraction of marathon champions for genetic reasons.

What about calling people like Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray racists for pointing out the correlation between race and IQ?

Also mbitton24's claim was that said memes were "almost impossible to misuse", and some people do in fact define the terms very broadly.

By the way what do you think are reasonable definitions of the terms?

Comment author: Johnicholas 26 April 2012 09:27:57PM -1 points [-]

Thanks, I'll replace the sentence with "Humancentrism is analogous to racism or sexism". It's no defense, but I'm not intentionally trying to use dark arts of persuasion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 03:54:38AM 6 points [-]

Humancentrism is analogous to racism or sexism

In the sense that all the above are vaguely defined accusations, that are frequently used to suppress certain statements (many of which are true) and as a result lead to bad policy because it's based on false beliefs? In that case I agree.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 03:38:31AM *  6 points [-]

Racism is bad
Sexism is bad

(..)

Belief without evidence is bad
Defining one’s terms before an argument is good

Note the contradiction between the two sets of memes above. The first set of memes involve condemning a vaguely defined concept and frequently involve encouraging people to believe things, e.g., that race and sex don't correlate with anything significant, despite nearly all the evidence suggesting otherwise.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 May 2014 08:29:39PM *  0 points [-]

Hold on now, you're pattern matching me. I said:

I can't say for certain, of course, that every possible universe must run on math, but I feel safe in claiming that we've never imagined a universe, in fiction or through something like religion, which would fail to run on math.

To which you replied that this is a fact about me, not the universe. But I explicitly say that its not a fact about the universe! My evidence for this is the only evidence that could be relevant: my experience with literature, science fiction, talking to people, etc.

Nor is it relevant that science is full of people that say that something has to be true because they can't imagine the world otherwise. Again, I'm not making a claim about the world, I'm making a claim about the way we have imagined, or now imagine the world to be. I would be very happy to be pointed toward a hypothetical universe that isn't subject to mathematical analysis and which contains thinking animals.

So before we go on, please tell me what you think I'm claiming? I don't wish to defend any opinions but my own.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2014 01:44:30AM 1 point [-]

So before we go on, please tell me what you think I'm claiming?

You said:

I just also think it's a necessary fact.

I'm not sure what you mean by "necessary", but the most obvious interpretation is that you think it's necessarily impossible for the world to not be run by math or at least for humans to understand a world that doesn't.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 May 2014 02:17:45PM -1 points [-]

Absolutely, it's a fact about me, that's my point. I just also think it's a necessary fact.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 07:57:13PM 1 point [-]

I just also think it's a necessary fact.

What's your evidence for this? Keep in mind that the history of science is full of people asserting that X has to be the case because they couldn't imagine the world being otherwise, only for subsequent discoveries to show that X is not in fact the case.

Comment author: Jiro 03 May 2014 03:10:40PM 0 points [-]

People could imagine such a thing before studying nature showed they needed to; they just didn't. I think there's a difference between a concept that people only don't imagine, and a concept that people can't imagine. The latter may mean that the concept is incoherent or has an intrinsic flaw, which the former doesn't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 07:55:07PM 0 points [-]

People could imagine such a thing before studying nature showed they needed to; they just didn't. I think there's a difference between a concept that people only don't imagine, and a concept that people can't imagine.

In the interest of not having this discussion degenerate into an argument about what "could" means, I would like to point out that your and hen's only evidence that you couldn't imagine a world that doesn't run on math is that you haven't.

Comment author: Drayin 03 May 2014 07:23:44PM 4 points [-]

I see Larks' point.

The movement data is action-relevant for me, as I'm spending several hours a week going to meetup groups purely to recruit GiveWell donors. I've found skeptic/atheist groups particularly fertile, and lefty political groups (and 'A' rather than 'E' groups generally) the opposite. I haven't tried any conservative or libertarian groups yet.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 07:38:30PM 4 points [-]

and lefty political groups (and 'A' rather than 'E' groups generally) the opposite.

That's because lefty and 'A' groups are mostly about signalling one's virtue, thus someone who shows up and starts telling them how none of the 'virtuous' things they've been doing are actually helping people is most certainly not welcome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 04:58:12AM *  1 point [-]

a way to quickly evaluate any proposed new form of government or legal system: ask the proposer how arrest is distinguished from kidnapping, and search and seizure from trespassing and theft -- if they can't give a good answer, the proposal is based on ignorance and you need not waste any more of your time on it

Nick Szabo

Comment author: CellBioGuy 27 April 2014 05:38:34AM 0 points [-]

Various forms of solar are probably one of our better bets, though I'm not convinced that large chunks of the recent gains don't come from massive effective subsidy from China and eventually the cost of the materials themselves could become insignificant compared to complexity and maintenance and end-of-life-recycling cost which are not likely to decrease much. Though battery performance... I haven't seen anything about it that even looks vaguely exponential.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 04:20:31AM 2 points [-]

though I'm not convinced that large chunks of the recent gains

I get the impression that most of the "recent gains" consist of forcing the utilities to take it and either subsidizing the price difference or passing the cost on to the customer. At least, the parties involved act like they believe this while attempting to deny it.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 April 2014 04:26:49PM *  1 point [-]

That could be true but doesn't have to be true. Our ontological assumptions might also turn out to be mistaken.

True, and a discovery like that might require us to make some pretty fundamental changes. But I don't think Morpheus could be right about the universe's relation to math. No universe, I take it, 'runs' on math in anything but the loosest figurative sense. The universe we live in is subject to mathematical analysis, and what reason could we have for thinking any universe could fail to be so? I can't say for certain, of course, that every possible universe must run on math, but I feel safe in claiming that we've never imagined a universe, in fiction or through something like religion, which would fail to run on math.

More broadly speaking, anything that is going to be knowable at all is going to be rational and subject to rational understanding. Even if someone has some very false beliefs, their beliefs are false not just jibber-jabber (and if they are just jibber-jabber then you're not talking to a person). Even false beliefs are going to have a rational structure.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 04:04:50AM 1 point [-]

I can't say for certain, of course, that every possible universe must run on math, but I feel safe in claiming that we've never imagined a universe, in fiction or through something like religion, which would fail to run on math.

That is a fact about you, not a fact about the universe. Nobody could imagine light being both a particle and a wave, for example, until their study of nature forced them to.

Comment author: Vaniver 29 April 2014 08:20:08PM 1 point [-]

And what's with this "You are trying to submit too fast"? I'm not allowed to post too many comments in a row?

Yes. If I remember correctly, LW also implements some form of slow-banning (the amount of time required between your comments depends on your total karma), but I may be recalling a feature request as an implemented feature.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 03:37:51AM 1 point [-]

I thought it was caused by having a lot of recent posts downvoted.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014
Comment author: 9eB1 27 April 2014 07:38:35PM 2 points [-]

Even if your combined income decreases, your combined consumption probably increases, because many goods are non-rivalrous in a marriage situation. See here for a discussion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 03:14:42AM 1 point [-]

your combined consumption probably increases,

I believe you meant decreases.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 May 2014 02:35:40AM *  1 point [-]

Latin it is! I'll bet some people won't enjoy the return of a world-spanning political authority communicating in a language no normal person knows though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2014 04:25:14AM *  2 points [-]

That's their problem.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 May 2014 04:07:33AM *  0 points [-]

I suggested this division of causes because, first, people who earn to give may join the upper or at least upper middle class. It seems harder to advocate for things like socialism when your peer group is rich. Your opinions aren't going to earn you praise or friends and friends and connections are really important for making money. It's also hard to devote time and energy to maintaining odd views when you're focused on a career that isn't directly involved with acting on those opinions. You're losing some potential synergy. It also possible that, second, the usefulness of cash donations varies with whether the cause has support among the rich or poor, although this might work the other way in that I would expect causes that favor the poor to need money more.

But with a topic like abortion this all seems unclear--although opinions on abortion do correlate some with income, I don't think that correlation is a strong as with outright economic redistribution. What do you think?

If you want to suggest a more clearly neutral topic than abortion I would be interested to hear it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2014 04:24:19AM 1 point [-]

It seems harder to advocate for things like socialism when your peer group is rich.

Um, there a lot of rich people who at least profess socialist views, the common somewhat dismissive term for them is champagne socialist.

Comment author: Punoxysm 27 April 2014 09:27:18PM *  8 points [-]

I have to say, I seriously don't get the Bayesian vs Frequentist holy wars. It seems to me the ratio of importance to education of its participants is ridiculously low.

Bayesian and frequentist methods are sets of statistical tools, not sacred orders to which you pledge a blood oath. Just understand the usage of each tools, and the fact that virtually any model of something that happens in the real world is going to be misspecified.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2014 04:14:59AM 1 point [-]

Part of it is that Bayesianism claims to be not just a better statistical tool, but a new and better epistemology, a replacement and improvement over Aristotelian logic.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 May 2014 11:56:55AM 2 points [-]

If the AI wants to recruit people by role-playing a person, it can pretend to be a busy person who doesn't have time for social life. Or something more creative, like a mad genius suffering from extreme social phobia, a paranoid former secret service agent, or a successful businessman who believes that connecting their online persona with their identity would harm their business. There is no need to appear personally anywhere. It's not like people suspect a random blogger to be an AI in disguise.

Even if you want to create a cult, it's not necessary to meet people personally. Most Falun Gong members have never seen their leader, and probably don't even know if he's still alive. He could easily be an AI with a weird utility function. Maybe some people would refuse to join a movement with an unknown leader. So what? Someone else would join. And when you already have the "inner circle" of humans, other members will be happy to meet the inner circle members in person. Catholics interact with their priests more often than they do with the Pope. And if the Pope would secretly take commands from an AI hiding in the depths of Vatican, most Catholics wouldn't know.

You could pretend to be a secret society trying to rule the world. If you tell humans "we will help you become a president, but in reality you will be our puppet, and you will not even know our identity", many people would be okay with that, if you demonstrate them that you have some power. You could start the trust spiral e.g. by writing a successful thesis for them, giving them a good advice, or just sending them money you stole from somewhere; just to prove that if they do what you want from them, you can deliver real-world benefits in return.

If you want to have a blogger persona, you could start by contacting an already good blogger, and make a deal with them that they will start a new blog and publish your articles under their name (because you want to remain anonymous, and in exchange offer them all the fame). You could choose a smart person who already agrees with most of your ideas, so it would seem credible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2014 01:29:02AM *  2 points [-]

Do what Satoshi Nakamoto did and intentionally hide behind internet anonymity. Do this right and it will make you seem like an ultra-cool uber-hacker cyberpunk.

Comment author: dougclow 01 May 2014 10:44:39AM *  8 points [-]

An AI controlling a company like Google would be able to, say, buy up many of the world’s battle robot manufacturers, or invest a lot of money into human-focused bioengineering, despite those activities being almost entirely unrelated to their core business, and without giving any specific idea of why.

Indeed, on the evidence of the press coverage of Google's investments, it seems likely that many people would spend a lot of effort inventing plausible cover stories for the AI.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2014 01:24:39AM 2 points [-]

This raises interesting questions about who (or what) is really running Google.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 11:25:31PM 7 points [-]

Predictors have an incentive to predict likely-events-of-low-consequence when they are not harmed by their errors. But in the real world, what matters is warning about events of high consequence. In the real world, the latter can only be revealed through skin-in-the-game as the supposedly "good predictors" go bankrupt.

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 11:21:22PM 11 points [-]

People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Steven Pinker

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 04:25:50AM 1 point [-]

Suppose you distrusted everything you had ever read about science. How much of modern scientific knowledge could you verify for yourself, using only your own senses and the sort of equipment you could easily obtain? How about if you accept third-party evidence when many thousands of people can easily check the facts?

Interestingly enough, this was the original idea behind science. Hence, the motto of the royal society nullius in verba, or in English "Take no one's word for it".

Comment author: Will_Newsome 30 April 2014 01:29:10PM *  2 points [-]

At the cost of wide inferential distances, God as something like actus purus would be a neat singular solution to a bundle of seemingly closely related problems in their partially unknowable limits, so to speak. (Theology as king of the kinds of reason, infinite-God as their ultimate progenitor.) A cosmically monolithic but finite god "solves" such problems to only a finite degree and leaves an infinite-God-shaped hole in metaphysics. So even after exploring the complex internal mechanics of this monolith you still might as well fill the infinite-God-shaped hole with an infinite God concept to signify the hypothesis that a satisfying ultimate solution necessarily "exists" even if we don't know it yet and will only ever discover finitely many bits of it. But I'm talking metametaphysics (more like epistemology of metaphysics) here which is a field I've read very little about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 04:19:30AM 2 points [-]

I have to ask. Which infinity?

Comment author: Lumifer 30 April 2014 02:41:33PM 0 points [-]

checking which arguments are rational is one of the steps in figuring what' real

I am not sure this is (necessarily) the case, can you unroll?

Generally speaking, arguments live in the map and, in particular, in high-level maps which involve abstract concepts and reasoning. If I check the reality of the stone by kicking it and seeing if my toe hurts, no arguments are involved. And from the other side, classical logic is very much part of "rational arguments" and yet needs not correspond to reality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 04:03:53AM *  1 point [-]

If I check the reality of the stone by kicking it and seeing if my toe hurts, no arguments are involved.

That tends to work less well for things that one can't directly observe, e.g., how old is the universe, or things where there is confounding noise, e.g., does this drug help.

Comment author: CCC 30 April 2014 01:24:13PM 0 points [-]

You have a point - a man who takes on only easy problems, in any field, will have a higher success rate than a man who takes on only hard problems, irrespective of actual skill level.

I think that what makes evaluating a lawyer in particular difficult is that it is very hard for a non-lawyer to easily distinguish easy from hard problems. For car mechanics, I know that replacing the oil is a much simpler job than replacing the engine; but when looking over a lawyer's history, I can't easily evaluate the relative difficulty of his previous successes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 April 2014 11:57:27PM 0 points [-]

For car mechanics, I know that replacing the oil is a much simpler job than replacing the engine

On the other hand, if I come in complaining that the car is making funny noises, it's a lot harder to see whether this is an easy or hard problem. Another example, I come in for a routine inspection and he tells me that some part I've never heard of needs replacing and it's going to be expensive. I have no way to check short of going to a different mechanic and then some figuring out who to trust.

Comment author: Lumifer 25 April 2014 03:25:36AM 0 points [-]

I can't but note that the world "reality" is conspicuously absent here...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 April 2014 06:28:23AM 0 points [-]

A definition of "rational argument" that explicitly referred to "reality" would be a lot less useful, since checking which arguments are rational is one of the steps in figuring what' real.

Comment author: Mestroyer 29 April 2014 03:59:42AM 1 point [-]

A first approximation to what I want to draw a distinction between is parts of a hypothesis that are correlated with the rest of the parts, and parts that aren't, so that and adding them decreases the probability of the hypothesis more. In the extreme case, if a part of a hypothesis is logically deduced from the other parts, then it's perfectly correlated and doesn't decrease the probability at all.

When we look at a hypothesis, (to simplify, assume that all the parts can be put into groups such that everything within a group has probability 1 conditioned on the other things in the group, and all groups are independent). Usually, we're going to pick something from each group and say, "These are the fundamentals of my hypothesis, everything else is derived from them". And see what we can predict when you put them together. For example, Maxwell's equations are a nice group of things that aren't really implied by each other, and together, you can make all kinds of interesting predictions by them. You don't want to penalize electromagnetics for complexity because of all the different forms of the equations you could derive from them. Only for the number of equations there are, and how complicated they are.

The choice within the groups is arbitrary. But pick a thing from each group, and if this is a hypothesis about all reality, then those things are the fundamental nature of reality if your hypothesis is true. Picking a different thing from each group is just naming the fundamental nature of reality differently.

This of course needs tweaking I don't know how to do for the general case. But...

If your theory is something like, "There are many universes, most of them not fine-tuned for life. Perhaps most that are fine-tuned for life don't have intelligent life. We have these equations and whatever that predict that. They also predict that some of that intelligent life is going to run simulations, and that the simulated people are going to be much more numerous than the 'real' ones, so we're probably the simulated ones, which means there are mind(s) who constructed our 'universe'." And you've worked out that that's what the equations and whatever predict. Then those equations are the fundamental nature of reality, not the simulation overlords, because simulation overlords follow from the equations, and you don't have to pay a conjunction penalty for every feature of the simulation overlords. Just for every feature of the equations and whatever.

You are allowed to get away with simulation overlords even if you don't know the exact equations that predict them, and if you haven't done all the work of making all the predictions with hardcore math, because simulation overlords have a bunch of plausible explanations, how you could derive them from something simple like that, because they are allowed to have causal history. They are allowed to not always have existed. So you can use the "lots of different universes, sometimes they give rise to intelligent life, selection effect on which ones we can observe" magic wand to get experiences of beings in simulations from universes with simple rules.

But Abrahamic and deistic gods are eternal. They have always been minds. Which makes that kind of complexity-reducing correlation impossible (or greatly reduces its strength) for hypotheses with them.

That's what I was trying to get at. If that's not what ontologically basic means, well, I don't think I have any more reason to learn what it means than other philosophical terms I don't know.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2014 04:40:51AM 1 point [-]

A first approximation to what I want to draw a distinction between is parts of a hypothesis that are correlated with the rest of the parts, and parts that aren't, so that and adding them decreases the probability of the hypothesis more. In the extreme case, if a part of a hypothesis is logically deduced from the other parts, then it's perfectly correlated and doesn't decrease the probability at all.

So you mean like a mind that's omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect?

They have always been minds. Which makes that kind of complexity-reducing correlation impossible (or greatly reduces its strength) for hypotheses with them.

Why? AIXI is very easy to specify. The ideal decision theory is very easy to specify, hard to describe or say anything concrete about, but very easy to specify.

If you're willing to allow electro-magnatism which is based on the mathematical theory of partial differential equations, I don't see why you won't allow ideal agents based on decision/game theory. Heck, economists tend to model people as ideal rational agents because ideal rational agents are simpler than actual humans.

Comment author: Mestroyer 28 April 2014 03:43:30PM 1 point [-]

Perhaps I'm misusing the phrase "ontologically basic," I admit my sole source for what it means is Eliezer Yudkowsky's summary of Richard Carrier's definition of the supernatural, "ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities." Minds are complicated, and I think Occam's razor should be applied to the fundamental nature of reality directly. If a mind is part of the fundamental nature of reality, then it can't be a result of simpler things like human minds appear to be, and there is no lessening the complexity penalty.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2014 02:40:54AM 0 points [-]

I don't think "ontologically basic" is a coherent concept. The last time I asked someone to describe the concept he ultimately gave up. So could you describe it better than EGI?

Comment author: [deleted] 27 April 2014 05:29:54AM 1 point [-]

If you're that worried, link to the wikipage which defines away that connotation, like "I'm tapping out.".

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2014 05:36:01AM 1 point [-]

Signaling doesn't work that way. I'd think someone who reads Game blogs would know that.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 April 2014 05:19:59AM 1 point [-]

Right, but then we invented "Tapping out" so that wouldn't become an issue.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2014 05:23:06AM 1 point [-]

"Tapping out" can be interpreted as conceding and is thus low status.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 April 2014 05:29:44PM 2 points [-]

What's the current policy on bare downvoting, as in downvoting a comment/post without giving at least a short explanation for why one did so? I've had some comments downvoted recently, and without explanations it's frustrating and a poor feedback mechanism.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2014 05:16:37AM 1 point [-]

What's the current policy on bare downvoting, as in downvoting a comment/post without giving at least a short explanation for why one did so?

Well, Eliezer's policy tends towards "replying to downvote-worthy comments tends to start flame wars and is thus discouraged".

Comment author: april_flower 21 April 2014 06:58:06PM 12 points [-]

How strong is the evidence in favor of psychological treatment really?

I am not happy. I suffer from social anxiety. I procrastinate. And I have a host of another issues that are all linked, I am certain. I have actually sought out treatment with absolutely no effect. On the recommendation of my primary care physician I entered psychoanalytic counseling and was appalled by the theoretical basis and practical course of "treatment". After several months without even the hint of a success I aborted the treatment and looked for help somewhere else.

I then read David Burns' "Feeling Good", browsing through, taking notes and doing the exercises for a couple of days. It did not help, of course in hindsight I wasn't doing the treatment long enough to see any benefit. But the theoretical basis intrigued me. It just made so much more sense to be determined by one's beliefs than a fear of having one's balls chopped off, hating their parents and actively seeking out displeasure because that is what fits the narrative.

Based on the key phrase "CBT" I found "The now habit" and reading me actually helped to subdue my procrastination long enough to finish my bachelor's degree in a highly technical subject with grades in the highest quintile. Then I slipped back into a phase of relative social isolation, procrastionation and so on.

We see these phenomena consistently in people. We also see them consistently in animals being held in captivity not suited to their species' specific needs. I am less and less convinced that this block of anxiety, depression and procrastination is a disease but a reaction to an environment in the broadest sense inherently unsuitable to humans.

The proper and accepted procedure for me would be to try counseling again, this time with a cognitive behavioral approach. But I am unwilling to commit that much time for uncertain results, especially now that I want to travel or do a year abroad or just run away from it all. (Suicide is not an option) What lowers my odds of success even more is that I never feel understood by people put in place to understand in various venues. So how could such a treatment help?

I am open to bibliotherapy. I don't think I am open to traditional or even medical therapy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2014 04:34:48AM 0 points [-]

But the theoretical basis intrigued me. It just made so much more sense to be determined by one's beliefs than a fear of having one's balls chopped off, hating their parents and actively seeking out displeasure because that is what fits the narrative.

If by psychological treatment, you mean the Freudian kind, that's mostly BS.

Comment author: Murska 26 April 2014 03:25:52AM 0 points [-]

Assuming you mean that things you believe are merely 'unlikely' can actually, more objectively, be less likely than things you believe are outright 'impossible', then I agree.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2014 07:48:51PM 2 points [-]

What I mean is that the conjunction of possible events will be perceived as unlikely, even if enough events are conjoined together to put the probability below what the threshold for "impossible" should be.

Comment author: CCC 25 April 2014 09:45:37AM 1 point [-]

A highly competent legal team may allow a guilty man to get away with a crime, yes. And an incompetent legal team may allow an innocent man to get convicted.

But a very competent legal team which normally takes cases where the defendant is guilty will do very badly by this metric; while an incompetent legal team might get a lot of innocent clients might do very well by the same metric.

If I wish to select a lawyer to defend me in a trial, then I know whether or not I am guilty of whatever I am being charged with. I do not know how many of the lawyer's previous clients were guilty; nor how many were wrongfully convicted, or wrongfully released. Thus, a mere count of previous victories in court is potentially a poor measure of the lawyer's effectiveness.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2014 11:54:15PM 1 point [-]

Thus, a mere count of previous victories in court is potentially a poor measure of the lawyer's effectiveness.

Yes, and the same problem can exist for plumbers, car mechanics, and doctors.

Comment author: Murska 25 April 2014 10:46:48AM 1 point [-]

I am confused now. Did you properly read my post? What you say here is 'I disagree, what you said is correct.'

To try and restate myself, most people use 'unlikely' like you said, but some, many of whom frequent this site, use it for 'so unlikely it is as good as impossible', and this difference can cause communication issues.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2014 11:26:05PM 2 points [-]

My point is that in common usage (in other words from the inside) they distinction between "unlikely" and "impossible" doesn't correspond to any probability. In fact there are "unlikely" events that have a lower probability than some "impossible" events.

Comment author: Murska 24 April 2014 11:35:21PM 0 points [-]

If I understand you correctly, then I agree. However, to me it seems clear that human beings discount probabilities that seem to them to be very small, and it also seems to me that we must do that, because calculating them out and having them weigh our actions by tiny amounts is impossible.

The question of where we should try to set the cut-off point is a more difficult one. It is usually too high, I think. But if, after actual consideration, it seems that something is actually extremely unlikely (as in, somewhere along the lines of 10^{-18} or whatever), then we treat it as if it is outright false, regardless of whether we say it is false or say that it is simply very unlikely.

And to me, this does not seem to be a problem so long as, when new evidence comes up, we still update, and then start considering the possibilities that now seem sufficiently probable.

Of course, there is a danger in that it is difficult for a successive series of small new pieces of evidence pointing towards a certain, previously very unlikely conclusion to overcome our resistance to considering very unlikely conclusions. This is precisely because I don't believe we can actually use numbers to update all the possibilities, which are basically infinite in number. It is hard for me to imagine a slow, successive series of tiny nuggets of evidence that would slowly convince me that Zeus actually exists. I could read several thousand different myths about Zeus, and it still wouldn't convince me. Something large enough for a single major push to the probability to force me to consider it more thoroughly, priviledge that hypothesis in the hypothesis-space, seems to be the much more likely way - say, Zeus speaking to me and showing off some of his powers. This is admittedly a weakness, but at least it is an admitted weakness, and I haven't found a way to circumvent it yet but I can at least try to mitigate it by consciously paying more attention than I intuitively would to small but not infinitesimal probabilities.

Anyway, back to the earlier point: What I'm saying is that whether you say "X is untrue" or "X is extremely unlikely", when considering the evidence you have for and against X, it is very possible that what happens in your brain when thinking about X is the same thing. The hypothetical skeptic who does not know to use the terminology of probabilities and likelihoods will simply call things he finds extremely unlikely 'untrue'. And then, when a person who is unused to this sort of terminology hears the words 'X is very unlikely' he considers that to mean 'X is not unlikely enough to be considered untrue, but it is still quite unlikely, which means X is quite possible, even if it is not the likeliest of possibilities'. And here a misunderstanding happens, because I meant to say that X is so unlikely that it is not worth considering, but he takes it as me saying X is unlikely, but not unlikely enough not to be worth considering.

Of course, there are also people who actually believe in something being true or untrue, meaning their probability estimate could not possibly be altered by any evidence. But in the case of most beliefs, and most people, I think that when they say 'true' or 'false', they mean 'extremely likely' or 'extremely unlikely'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2014 01:28:45AM 1 point [-]

What I'm saying is that whether you say "X is untrue" or "X is extremely unlikely", when considering the evidence you have for and against X, it is very possible that what happens in your brain when thinking about X is the same thing.

Disagree. Most people use "unlikely" for something that fits their model but is unlikely, e.g., winning the lottery, having black come up ten times in a row in a game of roulette, two bullets colliding in mid air. "Untrue" is used for something that one's model says is impossible, e.g, Zeus or ghosts existing.

Comment author: brazil84 23 April 2014 08:53:46AM 0 points [-]

What if the brakes now work, but not necessarily quite as well as they did before? If an auto mechanic tells you your car is totaled, how do you know he's correct?

That depends on the details of the problem. In a sense the same is true for lawyers. I agree that there are quantitative differences about exactly how likely you are to get a good estimate with what amount of certainty between these examples but I don't think it's large enough to make a qualitative difference in the analysis.

Those are interesting questions, but unfortunately you have basically ignored two of the three questions I asked you. As mentioned above,these were real questions aimed at getting a better grip on where we agree. It's difficult enough to discuss these kinds of things without having the other person dance around the issues. I don't engage with people who do this . . . .goodbye.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2014 01:49:51AM 1 point [-]

Those are interesting questions, but unfortunately you have basically ignored two of the three questions I asked you.

I figured the answers to those were easy to extrapolate from what I wrote, in any case here they are.

Do you agree that in litigation there is a much more of a problem of extraneous factors making it difficult to assess the lawyer than extraneous factors in auto repair making it difficult to assess the mechanic?

I agree that this is more of a problem for lawyers, although I'm not sure how much more.

Do you agree there are also problems with doctors spending energy on signalling, (although perhaps not as bad as with lawyers), for example, caring about where a doctor went to medical school; prestigious internships; and spending money on impressive facilities?

It is, but I've never heard anyone say that there is no point going to anything besides the top tier medical schools.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 April 2014 01:07:46PM 0 points [-]

Not lynching rich bankers means choosing to cooperate. Having a social landscape that's peaceful and without much violence isn't something to take for granted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2014 01:32:48AM 1 point [-]

How would you apply that to Lumifer's second example?

An unattractive girl watches an extremely cute girl get all the guys she wants and twirl them around her little finger. "That's not fair!" she says.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 April 2014 12:53:30AM 1 point [-]

Oh, but the developer will provide jobs, and serve as an attractor for other businesses, and generally lift the area economically, and pay taxes into state coffers, and there will be gallivanting unicorns under the rainbows, and the people will look at the project and say "This is good".

If you believe what the state will tell you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2014 03:13:16AM 1 point [-]

So whether that example fits with the first set depends on whether the state's claim that the project is good is true, and thus whether this example it is perceived as fitting with them depends on whether the perceiver believes the claim. Similarly, the Lamborghini example fits if one accepts the Marxist theory about the origin of income inequality.

Now we come to your example of the two girls. It's hard to make it an example of "fraud or abuse of power" (although it might be possible with enough SJ-style rhetoric about how beauty is an oppressive social construct). Notice that it is similar to the Lamborghini example otherwise, in particular it seems like the kind of thing that fits in the category whose archetypical member is the Lamborghini example.

So we can now reconstruct a history of the meaning of "unfair". Originally, i.e., about a century ago, it meant basically "fraud, cheating, or abuse of power". As Marxism became popular it expanded to include income inequalities, which fit that definition according to Marxist theory. Later as differences of income became one of the archetypical examples of "unfairness" and as the theory underlying its inclusion became less well-known, more things such as the two girls example came to be included in the category. See the history of verbs meaning "to be" in Romance Languages for another (less mind-killing) example of how semantic drift can produce these kinds of Frankencategories.

[Meta] Server Slow

9 Eugine_Nier 04 February 2013 12:04AM

Is it just me or has the server being unusually slow the past couple of days?  During particularly bad times I'm even getting various HTTP errors.

 

Comment author: michaelkeenan 03 February 2013 04:24:33AM 13 points [-]

An example is in Federalist No. 10. Madison is trying to design a political environment resilient to the corrupt effects of factions:

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are the different classes of Legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction, must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes; and probably by neither, with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling, with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

It is in vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm: Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all, without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another, or the good of the whole.

His concrete solutions are to choose representative democracy over direct democracy, and to have large republic rather than a small republic.

A more recent example would be last year's ban on members of Congress trading stocks based on the inside information they have as lawmakers. I think Milton Friedman's point is that one should direct efforts toward supporting policies like that, rather than trying to elect politicians who are too ethical to insider-trade.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2013 04:49:21AM *  2 points [-]

Why is this comment at -1 yet 100% positive?

It then goes to 0 and 0% positive when I up-vote it.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 February 2013 08:58:08PM 1 point [-]

Huh, what definition of "racist" are you using here?

It's basically about putting a low value on the life on non-white civilians. In addition "I would do to foreigners, what Ann Coulter would do to them", is also a pretty straight way to signal racism.

I'm not sure what you mean by "racist", however is your claim supposed to be that this somehow implies that the conclusion is false/less likely?

I haven't argued that fact. I'm advocating for having a broad number of words which multidimensional meaning.

I see no reason to treat someone who makes wrong claims about race and who's personal beliefs cluster with racist beliefs in his nonscientific statements the same way as someone who just makes wrong statements about the boiling point of some new synthetic chemical.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 10:01:23PM *  5 points [-]

It's basically about putting a low value on the life on non-white civilians.

So would you call the bombings of civilians during WWII "racist"?

I haven't argued that fact. I'm advocating for having a broad number of words which multidimensional meaning.

So you would agree that there are some statements that are both "racist" and true.

I see no reason to treat someone who makes wrong claims about race

What do you mean by "wrong"? If you mean "wrong" in the sense of "false", you've yet to present any evidence that any of Satoshi Kanazawa's claims are wrong.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 February 2013 04:27:52PM -2 points [-]

Is Newtons theory of gravity true or false? It's neither. For some problems the theory provides a good model that allows us to make good predictions about the world around us. For other problems the theory produces bad predictions.

The same is true for nearly every scientific model. There are problems where it's useful to use the model. There are problems where it isn't.

There are also factual statements in science. Claiming that true and false are the only possible adjectives to describe them is also highly problematic. Instead of true and false, likely and unlikely are much better words. In hard science most scientific conclusions come with p values. The author doesn't try to declare them true or false but declares them to be very likely.

It's also interesting that the person who made this claim isn't working in the hard sciences. He seems to be a evolutionary psychologist based in the London School of Economics. In the Wikipedia article that desribes him he's quoted as suggesting that the US should have retaliated 9/11 with nuclear bombs. That a non-scientific racist position. He published some material that's widely considered as racist in Psychology Today. I don't see why "racist" is no valid word to describe his conclusions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 07:31:16PM *  5 points [-]

In the Wikipedia article that desribes him he's quoted as suggesting that the US should have retaliated 9/11 with nuclear bombs. That a non-scientific racist position.

Huh, what definition of "racist" are you using here? Would you describe von Neumann's proposal for a pre-emtive nuclear strike on the USSR as "racist"?

He published some material that's widely considered as racist in Psychology Today. I don't see why "racist" is no valid word to describe his conclusions.

I'm not sure what you mean by "racist", however is your claim supposed to be that this somehow implies that the conclusion is false/less likely? You may want to practice repeating the Litany of Tarski.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 06:51:31AM 26 points [-]

[S]econd thoughts tend to be tentative, and people tend not to believe that they are being lied to. Their own fairmindedness makes them gullible. Upon hearing two versions of any story, the natural reaction of any casual listener is to assume both versions are slanted to favor their side, and that the truth is perhaps somewhere in the middle. So if I falsely accuse an innocent group of ten people of wrongdoing, the average bystander, if he later hears my false accusation disputed, will assume that five or six of the people are guilty, rather than assume I lied and admit that he was deceived.

-- John C Wright

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 06:06:48AM 61 points [-]

It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

-- Milton Friedman

Comment author: Nornagest 01 February 2013 08:35:08PM 13 points [-]

While I pretty much agree with the quote, it doesn't provide anyone that isn't already convinced with many good reasons to believe it. Less of an unusually rational statement and more of an empiricist applause light, in other words.

In any case, a scientific conclusion needn't be inherently offensive for closer examination to be recommended: if most researchers' backgrounds are likely to introduce implicit biases toward certain conclusions on certain topics, then taking a close look at the experimental structure to rule out such bias isn't merely a good political sop but is actually good science in its own right. Of course, dealing with this properly would involve hard work and numbers and wouldn't involve decrying all but the worst studies as bad science when you've read no more than the abstract.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 05:56:24AM 4 points [-]

if most researchers' backgrounds are likely to introduce implicit biases toward certain conclusions on certain topics, then taking a close look at the experimental structure to rule out such bias isn't merely a good political sop but is actually good science in its own right.

Unfortunately, since the people deciding which papers to take a closer look at tend to have the same biases as most scientists, the papers that actually get examined closely are the ones going against common biases.

Comment author: ChristianKl 31 January 2013 09:16:06PM 0 points [-]

Look at where those autonomous cars are developed, and by whom.

In Germany BMV and Audi develop autonomous cars. In Japan Toyota develops them. The US carmakers don't but Google does develop them.

The US is probably one of the countries where the price you have to pay when your car accidently crashes a pedestrian is highest. If you want to bring a new techonlogy to market that's likely to kill people by accident the US might be the worst place.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 05:18:52AM 1 point [-]

In Germany BMV and Audi develop autonomous cars. In Japan Toyota develops them. The US carmakers don't but Google does develop them.

I think this has more to do with the fact that US automakers have major financial problems and thus can't afford to spend large amounts of money on speculative research.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 31 January 2013 12:05:41PM 4 points [-]

it's better to have a name that doesn't give a new person all kinds of weird initial associations as their first impression.

Yeah, though I buy into much of what Kurzweil has to say, Singularity has always rubbed me the wrong way - too much of Omega Immanentizing the Eschaton for me.

Is there any other snappy term out there for the idea that we're headed for very big changes through exponential performance improvement in lots of technologies?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2013 03:29:49AM 2 points [-]

Yeah, though I buy into much of what Kurzweil has to say, Singularity has always rubbed me the wrong way - too much of Omega Immanentizing the Eschaton for me.

Changing the name doesn't change the fact that they're trying to Immanentize the Eschaton.

Comment author: Elithrion 31 January 2013 05:32:06AM *  0 points [-]

(Quote from a later post, because I wanted to respond higher up in the thread...)

In reality, debit cards, credit cards, and charge cards are pretty much always available wherever checks are accepted.

One instance I can think of where this is not the case is rent payments, many (most?) of which are still done by check by default.

But in any case, the very fact that many poor Americans are underbanked (which you say leads them to prefer checks) demonstrates that the US banking system is inferior to the European, although this is probably more a result of bad overall regulation and market structure than being "behind" on technology. That said, I don't think either system is especially innovative, except perhaps in the (sometimes unfortunate) sense of creating new financial products. If we want to find actual consumer banking innovation, it seems to be primarily occurring in the developing world, where we're seeing things like microlenders, interesting savings products, phone-based money transfer (and the usage of airtime as an alternative currency), and so on.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2013 05:53:02AM 2 points [-]

If we want to find actual consumer banking innovation

Bitcoin.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 January 2013 03:35:30PM *  0 points [-]

Let's note that you are equating "human biodiversity" specifically with "white supremacy" here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 January 2013 04:39:11AM *  2 points [-]

Not entirely, I was merely going off the fact that the groups whose populations in the west are expending the fastest tend to be groups who HBD researchers consider less intelligent than whites.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 January 2013 08:16:48PM 3 points [-]

BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical. But of course comparing people-novels-were-written-about then with people-novels-are-written-about today isn't as significant as comparing the median person then with the median person today, and I'd guess the latter comparison would show much greater differences.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Humans in Funny Suits
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2013 05:48:38AM *  1 point [-]

BTW, I seem to recall being surprised by how non-alien characters by Dostoevsky were: it seemed as though differences between that culture and mine were mostly cosmetic or technical.

I suspect this may be because you read authors whose culture were significantly different from yours as part of your education, whereas Eliezer got his ideas for what an 'alien' culture would look like by looking at aliens as written by contemporary writers.

Comment author: syllogism 29 January 2013 12:21:42AM *  3 points [-]

I don't really understand the legal problem.

Why can't the law just be, if you're behind the wheel of an autonomous car in possession of immediate over-ride, then you're exactly as liable as a normal driver?

Now, in practice, if something goes wrong you're going to be in a terrible position to stop it, because you're going to not be paying attention. But the law can just be "Well, you have to be paying attention or you're liable!" --- even if that really just amounts to the fact that you're taking on different risks driving this autonomous car.

The law exploits this illusion of control people have all the time. Why not here?

Of course, this means you can't just read a book while your car drives itself --- at first. As the market penetration increases and the software improves, and people get more comfortable, the laws will be relaxed. Especially because the more driverless cars on the road, the safer they will be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2013 12:44:29AM 4 points [-]

Why can't the law just be, if you're behind the wheel of an autonomous car in possession of immediate over-ride, then you're exactly as liable as a normal driver?

This assumes that there is someone in the car for starters.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2013 08:17:18PM *  3 points [-]

Remember, the English word 'villain' originally meant 'peasant'/'serf'. It sounds like a safe assumption to me that the peasants were treated as subhuman creatures by most people above them in station.

James A. Donald disagrees.

A yeoman was the lowest rank of landowner, one who worked his own land or his families land, in modern terminology a peasant farmer. A villain was a sharecropper, a farmer with no land of his own, semi free, more free than a serf, though not directly equivalent to the modern free laborer. Naturally yeomen had a strong vested interest in the rule of law, for they had much to lose and little to gain from the breakdown in the rule of law. Villains had little to gain, but less to lose. People acted in accordance with their interests, and so the word yeoman came to mean a man who uses force in a brave and honorable manner, in accordance with his duty and the law, and villain came to mean a man who uses force lawlessly, to rob and destroy.

It makes quite a bit of sense. Since incentives matter I would tend to agree.

Since I know about the past interactions you two have had here, I would appreciate you just focused on the argument cited not snipe at James' other writings or character.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 10:43:21PM 2 points [-]

I'm curious what you thing more generally of the article you linked to? Specifically the notion of natural rights.

Comment author: Multiheaded 27 January 2013 04:49:11PM *  3 points [-]

Um, I really don't think so. This argument appears to imply that, if "conservatism" is a costly, complex and unreliable effort to keep a system somewhere between two or more "attractor" end-points, then one should seriously try to predict what those end-points could be like, and whether facilitating a gradual "slide" towards one of them could not be a better use of time and resources then keeping up the unstable equilibrium.

E.g. consider how increasingly open and permissive Western culture has been growing in regards to sex, or how privacy norms have been eroding in the last decades, or how "democracy" has been losing substance and legitimacy in favour of de facto oligarchic or bureaucratic rule in the post-war world order.
It might make more sense even for a person who dislikes some particular accompanying changes to consider the range of probable outcomes for such trends - and whether trying to ensure a better, less destructive transition to such an outcome could be more worthwhile than a hopeless defense of the current state or trying to launch a counter-trend.

(With the above examples: improving sex ed and correcting biased feminist/etc dogma instead of preaching puritanism/monogamy. Providing citizens with ways to spy back on their governments and corporations instead of trying to curb the ominpresent surveillance. Developing better expert-driven, liberty-preserving political systems, like futarchy, instead of clinging to the facade of elected officials driving policy.)

what makes you think you can manage social change?

We see that similar kinds of social change can be managed or steered in better or worse ways (e.g. the denazification of Germany versus its treatment after WW1 or the West's handling of USSR's collapse). Meanwhile, attempting to keep a society, its politics or culture in a stasis has had ended with an uncontrollable shift (late USSR) or an explosion (Chinese Empire, Japanese Shogunate) every single time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 08:05:43PM *  5 points [-]

Um, I really don't think so. This argument appears to imply that, if "conservatism" is a costly, complex and unreliable effort to keep a system somewhere between two or more "attractor" end-points, then one should seriously try to predict what those end-points could be like, and whether facilitating a gradual "slide" towards one of them could not be a better use of time and resources then keeping up the unstable equilibrium.

Um no, conservatism is an attempt to keep society at a relatively stable point.

What makes societies stable is being at Schelling points, and one way a Schelling point can be stable is to have an established tradition behind it. Another way to have a stable Schelling point is to move it to a maximally extreme position, the problem with this approach is that it's nearly always possible to become more extreme and the society will collapse before you can become extreme enough. Ok, a counter movement frequently occurs when society starts to collapse pushing the trend in the other direction, but you seem to be arguing against such movements.

It might make more sense even for a person who dislikes some particular accompanying changes to consider the range of probable outcomes for such trends - and whether trying to ensure a better, less destructive transition to such an outcome could be more worthwhile than a hopeless defense of the current state or trying to launch a counter-trend.

Looking at history there are also many inevitable-seeming trends that failed or were even reversed, e.g., the trend towards absolute monarchy in the 18th century, the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, the expansion of communism in the late 20th century.

(With the above examples: improving sex ed and correcting biased feminist/etc dogma instead of preaching puritanism/monogamy. Providing citizens with ways to spy back on their governments and corporations instead of trying to curb the ominpresent surveillance. Developing better expert-driven, liberty-preserving political systems, like futarchy, instead of clinging to the facade of elected officials driving policy.)

I have another example for you: with the trend towards a wider acceptance of torture (e.g., war on terror) we should manage it my formulating rules for when torture is and isn't acceptable rather than keeping to a no torture policy.

Meanwhile, attempting to keep a society, its politics or culture in a stasis has had ended with an uncontrollable shift (late USSR) or an explosion (Chinese Empire, Japanese Shogunate) every single time.

It only seems this way because the instances when a society failed to change are less memorable.

Comment author: Multiheaded 27 January 2013 05:15:23PM *  1 point [-]

In fact devolving into a lasting supercivilization based on torture is closer to what I had in mind in the parent.

And note that Western liberalism/progressivism has pretty much created the first culture in history with strong norms against torture (extending to things like child discipline). It's inconsistent and hypocritical in applying those norms to itself, true (especially regarding imprisonment) - but I'd still consider it a kind of moral progress that a Western citizen would be more likely to lose sleep and make some noise about police brutality, waterboarding, etc than a Russian, Chinese or, say, Singaporean one. To say nothing of the subjects of past empires.

This recent aversion to torture seems to endure despite the high perceptions of crime, terrorist threats, etc (see the latest scandal over Zero Dark Thirty) - and wouldn't it be a very convenient thing for a "rational", non-squeamish social engineer to optimize away? And then where would the slippery slope end?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 07:32:27PM *  3 points [-]

And note that Western liberalism/progressivism has pretty much created the first culture in history with strong norms against torture

I agree that Western civilization has many unique accomplishments, I would argue that it is therefore worth defending.

(extending to things like child discipline). It's inconsistent and hypocritical in applying those norms to itself, true (especially regarding imprisonment)

I'd argue that these are examples of taking the prohibition too far. In any case if Western civilization collapses because parents failed to adequately pass it on to their children, or because it is no longer capable of dealing with crime (for example), its replacement will likely have a lot fewer prohibitions on torture, and probably no free speech or free inquiry, nor anything resembling democracy.

and wouldn't it be a very convenient thing for a "rational", non-squeamish social engineer to optimize away? And then where would the slippery slope end?

This is actually my biggest issue with "progressives", you destroy traditional Schelling points on the grounds that they're arbitrary and "irrational" and then discover you have no way of taking non-extreme positions.

Comment author: Multiheaded 27 January 2013 01:21:40PM *  -1 points [-]

Indeed, the problem is that it is hard to keep [an] unstable process in equilibrium, and the self-reinforcing processes go too far. At [the] same time, if you take a terribly religious population where we burned witches, or where they stone the rape victims to death, it is easy to imagine that on the other end of the slippery slope - if the slope is at all inclined in the other direction - the life is massively better...

...It seems deceptively simple - when nail goes up, turn off magnet, when nail goes down, turn it on - but if you do so you get rapidly increasing oscillations - you have to have a circuit that blends in first and second derivatives of the position into the control signal. A great deal of complexity for a very simple unstable system.

This is the best one-paragraph technical argument against "small-c conservatism" (social, cultural, etc) that I've ever read.

Edit: "the best" doesn't necessarily mean "totally overwhelming"; I just find it a very good illustration of the inherent problems and opportunity costs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 04:00:39PM 2 points [-]

This is the best technical argument against "small-c conservatism" (social, cultural, etc) that I've ever read.

If this is the case, i.e., if this really is the best argument against conservatism you can come up with, it strikes me that you should become a conservative. Notice that this type of argument is even stronger against anything else, i.e., what makes you think you can manage social change?

Comment author: Multiheaded 27 January 2013 12:52:42PM 2 points [-]

I've found an excellent negative-utilitarian critique of the "stability/X-risk-reduction" mindset.

Brian Tomasik argues that human extinction might be greatly preferrable to creating a lasting supercivilization(s) more tolerant of suffering/torture and willing to induce it than ours. Thus, he argues that we should devote way less effort to averting X-risks in themselves, and way more to improving our current society + simultaneously increasing the odds of a future that's not abhorrent to our values.

Targeted interventions to change society in ways that will lead to better policies and values could be more cost-effective than increasing the odds of a future-of-some-sort that might be good but might be bad.

I'm inclined to agree.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 03:41:15PM 2 points [-]

I've found an excellent negative-utilitarian critique of the "stability/X-risk-reduction" mindset.

Existential risk is by far not the only risk of unstable societies. In fact devolving into a lasting supercivilization based on torture is closer to what I had in mind in the parent.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 January 2013 01:59:33AM *  1 point [-]

A good counter example.

Vegetarianism is another one -- I don't think many vegetarians wish eating meat was illegal.

It's curious but heartening that a country as seemingly catholic as Italy still accepts the right of others to choose differently. As opposed to, say, Ireland.

Yep. When people complain of the Church's influence in Italian politics, I tell them about Ireland (I studied there for a year), including stuff like alcohol sales being banned on Good Friday. (OTOH, the Church does have ridiculous privileges fiscally in Italy, among other things.)

Who the hell is downvoting everything, anyway?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Notes on Autonomous Cars
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 04:22:18AM 2 points [-]

Vegetarianism is another one -- I don't think many vegetarians wish eating meat was illegal.

Given their stated reason for not eating meat, a reasonable argument could be made that this behavior is hypocritical.

Comment author: Kindly 26 January 2013 03:04:33AM 3 points [-]

Just because you, personally, object to eating babies, doesn't mean you have any right to say whether eating babies should be forbidden to others!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 12:37:17AM 1 point [-]

Very well, I have a preference too, I prefer that people who kill small children receive the death penalty. Put the electric chair next to the kitchen, you follow your preference, and I'll follow mine.

(With apologies to Charles James Napier.)

Comment author: Kawoomba 27 January 2013 12:12:11AM -1 points [-]

If you've "seen a lot of instances of people who prefer not to drive SUVs themselves attempting to take away the rights of those who do" you seem to have observed the same pattern I did. As for the "force our preferences about cars", I do not know what you mean, since it's not a topic I'm particularly invested in. Personally, I use whatever gets me from A to B comfortably and safe, signalling be damned.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 12:30:12AM 1 point [-]

Personally, I use whatever gets me from A to B comfortably and safe

I also like the as much ability to choose what point B is, not to mention, the ability to decide at B whether to go to C or back to A without planning out the whole trip ahead of time. This is why I prefer cars to public transportation.

Comment author: Kawoomba 26 January 2013 06:57:24AM 0 points [-]

I don't like chocolate - I object to chocolate - Chocolate should be illegal!

I'm not confusing those, I claim those are all too easily confused in the general population.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 12:27:36AM *  4 points [-]

I'm not confusing those,

Looking at all your comments in this thread, it seems to me that you are. At the very least you don't seem to have exerted any effort thinking about how to tell whether something is like chocolate or like baby-eating.

Comment author: Kawoomba 26 January 2013 07:00:57AM -1 points [-]

Which would exactly be supporting my point of "I don't like / object to X, so it should be forbidden for everyone!" I could have used your sentence just the same.

If you think of evidence that would contradict my claim, it would be people who oppose (or even just don't like) X not wishing for X to be illegal.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2013 12:00:53AM 0 points [-]

Which would exactly be supporting my point of "I don't like / object to X, so it should be forbidden for everyone!" I could have used your sentence just the same.

At this point your argument appears to be "I and people similar to myself like to force our preferences about cars down other people's thoughts; therefore, so does everybody else". Sounds like a case of psychological projection to me.

Comment author: Kawoomba 25 January 2013 10:07:31PM 1 point [-]

As is often the case, people confuse a "autonomous cars are not for me" with "autonomous cars - what nonsense, should not be allowed!"

That particular claim I personally witnessed only once or twice - which counts for little. However, I've seen the more general pattern all too often: "I personally object to X, therefore X should be forbidden for everyone." Gay marriage, abortion, THC, you name it. It's rare to find a stance of (hyperbolically speaking) "I object to that activity, but I will fight to the death for your right to do it.", or even to legally tolerate it. As such, even a priori (but based on the posteriors on many other issues) I'd expect for that pattern to apply to autonomous cars as well.

Instantiated to this instance: People who don't want autonomous cars because they deem them unsafe, or because they prefer to drive their SUVs themselves, would not mind taking away the rights of others to use them. At least, that's my claim.

(If someone feels strongly such a phenomenon does not exist and we find a good way to gather broader evidence, we could set up a bet, going to a charity of the winner's choice.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2013 03:39:38AM *  2 points [-]

People who don't want autonomous cars because they deem them unsafe, or because they prefer to drive their SUVs themselves, would not mind taking away the rights of others to use them. At least, that's my claim.

Frankly, I've seen a lot more instances of people who prefer not to drive SUVs themselves attempting to take away the rights of those who do than the other way around.

Comment author: Kawoomba 25 January 2013 10:07:31PM 1 point [-]

As is often the case, people confuse a "autonomous cars are not for me" with "autonomous cars - what nonsense, should not be allowed!"

That particular claim I personally witnessed only once or twice - which counts for little. However, I've seen the more general pattern all too often: "I personally object to X, therefore X should be forbidden for everyone." Gay marriage, abortion, THC, you name it. It's rare to find a stance of (hyperbolically speaking) "I object to that activity, but I will fight to the death for your right to do it.", or even to legally tolerate it. As such, even a priori (but based on the posteriors on many other issues) I'd expect for that pattern to apply to autonomous cars as well.

Instantiated to this instance: People who don't want autonomous cars because they deem them unsafe, or because they prefer to drive their SUVs themselves, would not mind taking away the rights of others to use them. At least, that's my claim.

(If someone feels strongly such a phenomenon does not exist and we find a good way to gather broader evidence, we could set up a bet, going to a charity of the winner's choice.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2013 02:59:53AM 2 points [-]

"I personally object to X, therefore X should be forbidden for everyone."

You seem to be confusing "I don't like X" with "I object to X". The following two examples should help illustrate proper usage:

I don't like chocolate.

I object to baby eating.

Comment author: Kawoomba 25 January 2013 05:49:09AM 1 point [-]

There are counterexamples (e.g. renewable energy), but from the internet itself to MS, Intel, Google, FB, Sun, Cisco, IBM, the market and the market innovators (if not the manufacturing) were centered on the United States. Look at where those autonomous cars are developed, and by whom.

What are you thinking of that makes you so incredulous?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 06:30:50AM 1 point [-]

From the context in the grandparent it seemed like you were arguing against the notion that the US is the early adapter.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 January 2013 03:52:24AM 0 points [-]

Or am willing to rent a car when I do.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 04:09:39AM 3 points [-]

You still need to have a driver's license to do that.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 24 January 2013 08:25:54AM *  4 points [-]

There's too much male identity attached to driving, not only are cars used to show off status, but so is the driving style you use them with.

Obviously, this is quite cultural. Apparently in Stockholm (Sweden), only about one quarter (link in Finnish) of 18-year olds acquires a driving license, though many get one later on when life circumstances change. In the Helsinki region (Finland) as well, there has been a bit of a reported decline in the popularity of driving licenses among the young, though it's unclear to what extent the statistics actually support this. In cities that have a good public transport system, people can easily grow up with the notion that owning a car simply isn't necessary.

(I don't have a license myself, and although I know many who do, I've never gotten the impression that not having one would be considered particularly unusual. Of course, my normal social circles are rather unrepresentative of the population at large.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 03:22:30AM 2 points [-]

In cities that have a good public transport system, people can easily grow up with the notion that owning a car simply isn't necessary.

Assuming you never what to leave the city.

Comment author: Kawoomba 24 January 2013 01:23:16PM 1 point [-]

Obviously, this is quite cultural.

Yes of course. (Unfortunately, ) the benchmark culture inhibiting or furthering progress on such trends still seems to be the United States, where due to the distances involved, and the typically abysmal public transportation system, personal mobility by car is usually a central component of everyday life. It is in principle possible for such progress to emerge in, say, Japan, as it did in the mobile communications market. However, such progress has typically been insular. To truly make the jump to the "mainstream", the canary in the coal mine has historically been the US.

I don't have a license myself

But ... but ... how do you drive your Lamborghini?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 02:57:17AM 1 point [-]

To truly make the jump to the "mainstream", the canary in the coal mine has historically been the US.

Given the recent history of technological innovation, WTF are you talking about?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 02:29:52AM 3 points [-]

Keep in mind that these developments will not be occurring in a vacuum, but in the context of other types of autonomous drones being developed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 02:28:22AM 7 points [-]

One thing that hasn't been been mentioned is what kind of security the car's operating system has. Image what will happen after the first major autonomous car-virus, especially if the virus is malicious rather than merely incidentally introducing bugs. Keep in mind it's not to hard for a virus to be very malicious since autonomous cars need to know what pedestrians are in order to avoid hitting them.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2013 06:13:06PM 2 points [-]

I still find it useful to play it back in my head to remind myself to actually think whether what I'm doing is right "nyan, always do the right thing".

I think that we agree on enough that if people "did the right thing" it would be better than the current situation, if not perfect.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes January 2013
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2013 01:49:12AM 2 points [-]

I think that we agree on enough that if people "did the right thing" it would be better than the current situation, if not perfect.

That's not at all clear.

Comment author: handoflixue 23 January 2013 09:45:53PM 2 points [-]

What's the translation of that? I'd nuke any AI that didn't speak English by default, since the time spent figuring out what it meant just gives it more time to transmit messages, but it seems unfair to exclude foreign language entries here :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 January 2013 11:30:46PM 5 points [-]

What's the translation of that?

It's a quote from Dante's Inferno that was apparently meant to be partially recognizable gibberish. Think an Italian version of Jabberwocky.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 21 January 2013 09:24:54PM 2 points [-]

It sounds to me like you're implicitly enforcing a Cartesian separation between the physical world and the algorithms that agents in it run. Properties of the algorithms that agents in the world run are still properties of the world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 January 2013 09:44:50PM 1 point [-]

I don't see why I'm relying in it anymore than than the VNM-utiliterian is.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 07:46:28PM *  5 points [-]

Since most new ideas are bad, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 19 January 2013 09:56:13AM 1 point [-]

What is a deontological concept and what is a non-deontological concept?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 05:59:16PM 3 points [-]

After thinking about it some more, I think I have a better way to explain what I mean.

What is freedom? One (not very good but illustrative) definition is the ability to make meaningful choices. Notice that this means respecting someone else's freedom is a constraint on one's decision algorithm not just on one's outcome, thus it doesn't satisfy the VNM axioms.

Comment author: MugaSofer 21 January 2013 04:37:55PM -2 points [-]

How is being dishonest in the other direction going to help you pass a lie detector?

I suspect I missed the point of this comment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 05:41:22PM *  1 point [-]

Given the way memory works, people probably remember only the number they want to believe and a vague idea of which way they're biasing it. So when presented with a "lie detector" they try to compensate for their bias and wind up overcompensating.

Comment author: MugaSofer 20 January 2013 03:13:32PM -2 points [-]

My point is that, while an agent that is not confused about its values will not change them in response to rationality (obviously,) one that is confused will. For example, a Nazi realizing Jews are people after all.

Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 12:45:54AM 1 point [-]

For example, a Nazi realizing Jews are people after all.

Taboo "people".

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes January 2013
Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 19 January 2013 08:35:48PM *  1 point [-]

I don't know what you have in mind by your allusion to Morgenstern-von Neumann. The theorem is descriptive, right? It says you can model a certain broad class of decision-making entities as maximizing a utility function. What is VNM-rationality, and what does it mean to argue for it or against it?

"People should aim to be VNM-rational." I think of this as a weak claim, which is why I didn't understand why people appeared to be arguing against it. I concluded that they probably weren't, and instead meant something else by utilitarianism, which is why I switched to a different term.

If your goal is "to do the greatest good for the greatest number," or a similar utilitarian goal, I am not sure how the VNM theorem helps you.

Yes, that's why I think of "people should aim to be VNM-rational" as a weak claim and didn't understand why people appeared to be against it.

What do you think of the "interpersonal utility comparison" problem? Vladimir_M regards it as something close to a defeater of utilitarianism.

It seems like a very hard problem, but nobody claimed that ethics was easy. What does Vladimir_M think we should be doing instead?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 12:35:31AM *  1 point [-]

"People should aim to be VNM-rational."

What definition of "should" are you using here? Do you mean that people deontologically should aim to be VNM-rational? Or do you mean that people should be VNM-rational in order to maximize some (which?) utility function?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 19 January 2013 09:56:13AM 1 point [-]

What is a deontological concept and what is a non-deontological concept?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 12:30:03AM 0 points [-]

I thought I had made that clear in my second sentence:

If you don't agree, I challenge you to give a non-deontological definition [of freedom].

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 19 January 2013 09:54:28AM *  1 point [-]

You want me to say something like "worse with respect to some utility function" and you want to respond with something like "a VNM-rational agent with a different utility function has the same property." I didn't claim that I reject deontologists but accept VNM-rational agents even if they have different utility functions from me. I'm just trying to explain that my current understanding of deontology makes it seem like a bad idea to me, which is why I don't think it's accurate. Are you trying to correct my understanding of deontology or are you agreeing with it but disagreeing that it's a bad idea?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2013 12:28:41AM 1 point [-]

You want me to say something like "worse with respect to some utility function" and you want to respond with something like "a VNM-rational agent with a different utility function has the same property."

No, I'm going to respond by asking you "with respect to which utility function?" and "why should I care about that utility function?"

Comment author: TsviBT 17 January 2013 03:03:43AM 1 point [-]

Huh? How so?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 January 2013 09:22:49AM 1 point [-]

Replace the "corn god" in the quote with a sufficiently rational utiliterian agent.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 January 2013 07:26:59PM 0 points [-]

Have worse consequences for everybody, where "everybody" means present and future agents to which we assign moral value.

You've assumed vague-utilitarianism here, which weakens your point. I would taboo "make everything worse" as "less freedom, health, fun, awesomeness, happyness, truth, etc", where the list refers to all the good things, as argued in the metaethcis sequence.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes January 2013
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 January 2013 09:21:11AM -2 points [-]

You've assumed vague-utilitarianism here, which weakens your point. I would taboo "make everything worse" as "less freedom, health, fun, awesomeness, happyness, truth, etc"

Nice try. The problem with your definition is that freedom, for example, is fundamentally a deontological concept. If you don't agree, I challenge you to give a non-deontological definition.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 18 January 2013 08:08:05AM 1 point [-]

Taboo "make everything worse".

Have worse consequences for everybody, where "everybody" means present and future agents to which we assign moral value. For example, a sufficiently crazy deontologist might want to kill all such agents in the name of some sacred moral principle.

At the very least I find it interesting how rarely an analogous objection against VNM-utiliterians with different utility functions is raised. It's almost as if many of the "VNM-utiliterians" around here don't care what it means to "make everything worse" as long as one avoids doing it, and avoids doing it following the mathematically correct decision theory.

Rarely? Isn't this exactly what we're talking about when we talk about paperclip maximizers?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 January 2013 09:16:46AM 1 point [-]

Have worse consequences for everybody, where "everybody" means present and future agents to which we assign moral value.

When I asked you to taboo "makes everything worse", I meant taboo "worse" not taboo "everything".

Comment author: katydee 18 January 2013 07:26:47AM 0 points [-]

I agree, but I think most pundits just take one thing, decide it's the most important, and project it. A lot of pundits probably do this explicitly because they have to push a certain political narrative while others fall into the "narrative forecasting" trap that Qiaochu_Yuan describes in this excellent comment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2013 07:42:54AM 2 points [-]

Also because it's computationally difficult to figure out how multiple trends will interact.

Comment author: katydee 18 January 2013 07:24:41AM 5 points [-]

Did you read the letter? Huxley thought the Brave New World society would be set up "within the next generation" thanks to the advent of psychoanalysis and hypnosis and the combination of these techniques with psychoactive drugs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2013 07:34:48AM 1 point [-]

Interesting, I am reminded of a Milton Friedman quote where he says that in retrospect his predictions were right about what would happen, but wrong about when.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 18 January 2013 05:58:20AM *  4 points [-]

I also have no idea what people mean when they say they are deontologists. I've read Alicorn's Deontology for Consequentialists and I still really have no idea. My current interpretation is that a deontologist will make a decision that makes everything worse if it upholds some moral principle, which just seems like obviously a bad idea to me. I think it's reasonable to argue that deontology and virtue ethics describe heuristics for carrying out moral decisions in practice, but heuristics are heuristics because they break down, and I don't see a reasonable way to judge which heuristics to use that isn't consequentialist / utilitarian.

Then again, it's quite likely that my understanding of these terms doesn't agree with their colloquial use, in which case I need to find a better word for what I mean by consequentialist / utilitarian. Maybe I should stick to "VNM-rational."

I also didn't claim to be an ultrafinitist, although I have ultrafinitist sympathies. I haven't worked through the proof of the VNM theorem yet in enough detail to understand how infinitary it is (although I intend to).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2013 07:26:51AM 1 point [-]

My current interpretation is that a deontologist will make a decision that makes everything worse if it upholds some moral principle, which just seems like obviously a bad idea to me.

Taboo "make everything worse".

At the very least I find it interesting how rarely an analogous objection against VNM-utiliterians with different utility functions is raised. It's almost as if many of the "VNM-utiliterians" around here don't care what it means to "make everything worse" as long as one avoids doing it, and avoids doing it following the mathematically correct decision theory.

I also didn't claim to be an ultrafinitist, although I have ultrafinitist sympathies. I haven't worked through the proof of the VNM theorem yet in enough detail to understand how infinitary it is (although I intend to).

Well the continuity axiom in the statement certainly seems dubious from an ultafinitist point of view.

Comment author: katydee 18 January 2013 02:57:19AM *  11 points [-]

Did Orwell and Huxley actually believe in the dystopias they were writing as predictions of the future?

Yes and yes. This letter from Huxley to Orwell is also illuminating.

In my original draft of this post I expanded the discussion of these points considerably, but ultimately decided that it was distracting and that the post was perhaps too long anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2013 05:47:51AM 2 points [-]

As for Huxley, I would like to point out:

1) Brave New World was set in the far future.

2) Many of the trends he was generalizing from, e.g. improvements in biotechnology and disintegration of the traditional family structure, have continued since his time.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 18 January 2013 05:04:03AM 2 points [-]

I have no idea what people mean when they say they are against utilitarianism. My current interpretation is that they don't think people should be VNM-rational, and I haven't seen a cogent argument supporting this. Why isn't this quote just establishing that the utility of babies is high?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2013 05:30:57AM *  1 point [-]

Well, Alicorn is a deontologist.

In any case, as an ultafinitist you should know the problems with the VNM theorem.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 January 2013 01:51:22AM 1 point [-]

They almost certainly are on the margin (think taylor series approx of utility function). Get to the point where you are talking about killing a significant fraction of the sparrow population, then there's no reason to think so.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes January 2013
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2013 04:34:19AM 2 points [-]

They almost certainly are on the margin

True, but this doesn't apply to MugaSofer's claim that

there is presumably a number of sparrows worth killing for.

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 August 2012 08:22:43PM *  -1 points [-]

Norway might not have a death penalty, but Norwegians are probably OK with having a military, and a military's role does cover stopping violent insurgents with lethal force. What it does is defence, not judgment. Like I said, by accepting Breivik's narrative of his "insurgency", Norway can use an extraordinary circumstance to justify an extraordinary response, and then return to "normality".

(Jeez, I just realized this sounds a little like Carl Schmitt. Ah well, fascist times call for fascist measures.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 09:59:44AM 1 point [-]

Well, they did more-or-less this with Quisling.

Comment author: pragmatist 17 January 2013 07:37:18AM *  6 points [-]

As far as I can tell, there is more discussion of Moldbug on this site than there is of any other contemporary non-scientific non-LW figure. Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?

I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of "map vs. territory" and "Bayesian evidence". Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery. I suspect this is primarily due to historical reasons dating back to the Overcoming Bias days, as well as the fact that Moldbug's writing style is more "nerd-friendly" than that of many other idiosyncratic political theorists.

For reasons such as these, some Moldbug enthusiasts here seem to operate on the assumption that anything written by Moldbug is by default a good topic of conversation on this site. I suspect that if the points made in the OP were written by someone other than Moldbug, they would not have been posted here. The filters used to determine which of Moldbug's ideas are good topics of discussion here are far too permissive. I don't think a ban is the correct response, but I do think that Moldbug fans need to be more reflective about what these discussions are contributing to this site.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 09:19:18AM 0 points [-]

Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?

I'm not sure, although comparing him with the examples you site in your next paragraph certainly makes him seem much more worthy. Seriously, could you have found someone whose philosophy does not contradict basic economics?

I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of "map vs. territory" and "Bayesian evidence". Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery.

Could you site another example of a discussion post that's a link to Moldbug?

Comment author: Athrelon 16 January 2013 05:01:56PM 8 points [-]

That Communism would have fizzled in 1500 is a fact about the strength of non-Communist structures in the Middle Ages. That Communism succeeded in 1917 is a fact about the strength of pro- vs. anti-Communist structures at that time. Strength changes over time; that does not negate the fact that strength (probabilistically) determines victory.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 01:23:23AM 1 point [-]

And yet institutions with strength managed to loose it.

Comment author: MugaSofer 16 January 2013 02:40:32PM *  -2 points [-]

Interesting analogy. If we accept that utilities are additive, then there is presumably a number of sparrows worth killing for. (Of course, there may be a limit on all possible sparrows or sparrow utilities may be largely due to species preservation or something. As an ethics-based vegetarian, however, I can simply change it to "sparrows tortured.) I would be uncomfortable trying to put a number on it, what with the various sacred value conflicts involved, but I accept that a Friendly AI (even one Friendly only to me) would know and act on it.

Maslow's Pyramid is not intended as some sort of alternative to utilitarianism, it's a description of how we should prioritize the needs of humans. An imperfect one, of course, but better than nothing.

How sure? Based on what? What would persuade you otherwise?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 01:15:22AM 1 point [-]

If we accept that utilities are additive

Why?

Comment author: MixedNuts 16 January 2013 06:28:07PM 2 points [-]

Yeah, if the English language had any words for feelings that aren't hopelessly vague, we wouldn't have those silly arguments about catchy proverbs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 01:13:32AM *  6 points [-]

Yeah, if the English language had any words for feelings that aren't hopelessly vague

I suspect this is because of large psychological differences between humans. Specifically, not all humans experience all feelings; thus when a human hears a word referring to a feeling he hasn't experienced he assumes it refers to the closest feeling that he has.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 January 2013 06:13:25PM *  5 points [-]

"My baby is dead. Six months old and she's dead."
"Take solace in the knowledge that this is all part of the Corn God's plan."
"Your god's plan involves dead babies?"
"If you're gonna make an omelette, you're gonna have to break a few children."
"I'm not entirely sure I want to eat that omelette."

-- Scenes From A Multiverse

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 12:55:41AM 2 points [-]

This works equally well as an argument against utilitarianism, which I'm guessing may be your intent.

Comment author: AlexSchell 16 January 2013 11:38:37PM 1 point [-]

This is interesting and suggests that I and the people I talk to about such things are unusual. Do you mean people don't extrapolate from the inaccuracy of such reports, or to they find them to be not too inaccurate?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2013 12:46:01AM 2 points [-]

The people I have in mind say something along the lines of "But the newspaper reports are the only information we have, therefore we have no choice but to believe them".

Comment author: beoShaffer 16 January 2013 03:34:25AM 0 points [-]

For some reason my comment isn't displaying properly. It should end with a link to plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism .

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 January 2013 05:47:01AM *  1 point [-]

You do realize you can edit your comments?

Comment author: [deleted] 16 January 2013 04:55:29AM 0 points [-]

If these really are synonyms, then doesn't signaling win by having fewer syllables?

Whoops, I was unclear. When I said it seems like "it's usually used to mean exactly the same thing", I meant that some people on Less Wrong use it that way, not that that's the correct usage.

Using it as a synonym of emotion would indeed be wrong, but I haven't noticed people using it that way. Got a concrete example?

I suppose the only example that comes to mind is the term "affective death spiral", which doesn't seem (to me) to have anything in particular to do with affect rather than emotion. I'm tempted to declare "affect heuristic" an abuse of the term as well, except that "affect heuristic" is a term that's actually used by experts.

I also disagree with the definition you gave, though; it fails to capture what I see as the defining quality of affect that distinguishes it from emotions in general, which is that it has only one axis which runs from good to bad.

Is that your best guess based on seeing the term used many times, or do you have some other type of evidence? That "defining quality" doesn't seem to agree with what Wikipedia says at all.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Suggestion: site-wide taboos
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 January 2013 05:44:48AM 1 point [-]

I suppose the only example that comes to mind is the term "affective death spiral", which doesn't seem (to me) to have anything in particular to do with affect rather than emotion.

Googling for the phrase, the first hit is the LW wiki article about it.

Comment author: MrMind 14 January 2013 05:44:13PM *  7 points [-]

On a lighter side, this study reinforces (by a small quantity, due to all the caveat outlined in the comments) my idea that women are as promiscuous as men, but they are culturally forced to lie about that: not really big news.

On a more interesting side, the "fake lie detector" is another one of the techniques that are used to circumvent lies that occur even in anonymous surveys: the first that I heard of, anyway, was employed in a survey regarding illegal owning/hunting/farming of something in some parts of Africa (yes, I've lost almost all the details: can someone point me to the original article?). It consisted of telling people that for some answers, you need not to answer truthfully, instead you needed to throw secretly a dice and report the answer that came up. Apparently this, instead of randomizing the answer, gave the 'farmer' an excuse to tell the truth (yes, I really need to dig up the source).

ETA: see Alicorn's comment for the exact reference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 January 2013 05:00:55AM *  3 points [-]

On a lighter side, this study reinforces (by a small quantity, due to all the caveat outlined in the comments) my idea that women are as promiscuous as men, but they are culturally forced to lie about that: not really big news.

What do you mean by "equally promiscuous"? Do you mean that women and men have the same average number of sex partners? Than this follows from basic arithmetic and I don't see why this study is relevant. Do you mean that they have the same average desired number of partners? Than this study has nothing to say on the subject.

Comment author: AlexSchell 15 January 2013 06:25:38PM 5 points [-]

This is pretty much the default state of everybody who has read one or two media reports of events they've been directly involved in.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 January 2013 04:43:08AM 3 points [-]

One would think so, but this hasn't been my experience with people.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 January 2013 09:22:10AM 4 points [-]

I wonder to what extent this was caused by people overcompensating for the lie detector.

Comment author: Desrtopa 14 January 2013 05:47:24AM *  0 points [-]

Not exactly. There's no federal law against gambling, and states have their own restrictions. But restricted is not the same as illegal; states that do not allow licensed casinos do not necessarily have any laws against citizens making bets with each other over which money changes hands, when done on a non-commercial basis.

And of course, there are other forms of licensed gambling, including that which is run by the state.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 January 2013 06:12:34AM 3 points [-]

Well, US regulators are attempting to declare intrade illegal.

Comment author: anotherblackhat 13 January 2013 10:02:46PM 0 points [-]

Consider the intuitively simpler problem of "is something a universal turing machine?" Consider further this list of things that are capable of being a universal turing machine;

  • Computers.
  • Conway's game of life.
  • Elementary cellular automata.
  • Lots of Nand gates.

Even a sufficiently complex shopping list might qualify. And it's even worse, because knowing that A doesn't have personhood, and that B doesn't have personhood doesn't let us conclude that A+B doesn't have personhood. A single Transistor isn't a computer, but 3510 transistors might be a 6502. If we want to be 100% safe, we have to rule out anything we can't analyze, which means we pretty much have to rule out everything. We might as well make the function always return 1.

OK, as bad as that sounds, it just means we shouldn't work too hard on solving the problem perfectly, because we know we'll never be able to do so in a meaningful way. But perhaps we can solve the problem imperfectly. Spam assassin faces a very similar kind of problem, "how can we tell if a message is spam?" The technique it uses is conceptually simple; Pick a test that some messages pass and some fail. Use the test on a corpus of messages classified as spam and a corpus classified as non-spam, and use the results to assign a probability that a message is spam if it passes the test. In addition to the obvious advantage of "I can see how to do that for a non-person predicate test", such a test could also give a score for "has some person-like properties". Thus we can meaningfully approach the problem of A + B being a person even though A and B aren't by themselves.

What kind of tests can we run? Beats me, but presumably we'll have something before we can make an AI by design.

One problem with this approach is it could be wrong. It might even be very wrong. Also, training the predicate function might be an evil process - that is, training may involve purposely creating things that pass.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 January 2013 05:10:27AM 1 point [-]

Consider the intuitively simpler problem of "is something a universal turing machine?" Consider further this list of things that are capable of being a universal turing machine;

  • Computers.
  • Conway's game of life.
  • Elementary cellular automata.
  • Lots of Nand gates.

Depending on what you mean by "capable", I'd add "a bunch of silicon and germanium atoms" to the list.

In response to comment by [deleted] on On private marriage contracts
Comment author: Decius 14 January 2013 04:15:48AM -2 points [-]

Arranged marriages, like work, often involve driving external factors that don't amount to 'coercion'. Forced marriages, like slavery, always involve coercion. (The definition of coercion is the border dispute here). Do you concur? Or is there a continuum of marriage where "It sure would be nice to have grandkids someday" is only a matter of degree different from "If you refuse you will be stoned to death" or even "You have married this person."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 January 2013 04:30:43AM 5 points [-]

What about a more realistic scenario: if you refuse, you'll be disinherited?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 January 2013 10:51:02AM *  3 points [-]

I would have framed it as a bet: I bet you $50,000 that you will cheat on me before I ever do. I think the government of my country would refuse to enforce that (gambling is restricted, I can't even access the websites of certain prediction markets as my ISP will block them), but I would've expected the US to have no problem with that.

In response to comment by [deleted] on On private marriage contracts
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 January 2013 04:19:37AM 6 points [-]

Gambling is illegal in the US except in specially licensed casinos.

Comment author: Nornagest 13 January 2013 02:47:41AM *  4 points [-]

I can think of two big indirect benefits here. The first is perceived social legitimacy, which I don't think I need to elaborate much on: government recognition of a form of marriage implies formalized social approval of that type of relationship; "husband" and "wife" carry powerful private associations beyond "long-term girlfriend/boyfriend"; and in most modern societies the state's entangled enough with the institution of marriage that I'd expect a purely private claim to marriage status to feel like a cheat to many people.

The second seems more interesting. One of the reasons that "wife/husband" legitimizes a relationship and carries implications of stability, status, etc. is that it's potentially expensive: not so much in the sense of initial cost (which is usually substantial, but also almost entirely private), as of dissolution cost. If you get married, at least one party to the marriage is signing up for an institution that they can reasonably expect to extract a lot of money if the relationship is ever dissolved: legal fees, alimony, et cetera. (Child support used to fall into this category too; not so much anymore, but the previous state of affairs probably still contributes to the social position of marriage.)

The existence of these costs provides a very powerful and almost universally recognized signal of commitment, and of all the personal qualities that go with it. And many societies use that to informally gate positions: I've heard, for example, that it's hard to achieve higher officer ranks in the US military if you're not married, and similar conditions apply to at least some of the corporate hierarchies I've been exposed to. But most of these costs vanish if the union isn't legally recognized, and I'd expect a good chunk of the signaling value they carry to vanish with them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 January 2013 08:28:42AM *  3 points [-]

The first is perceived social legitimacy, which I don't think I need to elaborate much on: government recognition of a form of marriage implies formalized social approval of that type of relationship; "husband" and "wife" carry powerful private associations beyond "long-term girlfriend/boyfriend"; and in most modern societies the state's entangled enough with the institution of marriage that I'd expect a purely private claim to marriage status to feel like a cheat to many people.

Said social legitimacy is itself frequently also legally enforced, e.g., there having been cases of Catholic adoption agencies being shut down because they refuse to let gay couples adopt.

Comment author: h-H 13 January 2013 03:01:46AM *  6 points [-]

The idea that Christianity was born under a foreign military occupation and had to compromise with it & Islam didn't and went on to make it's own empire is correct.

But the author's assertion that Islam can be nothing but theocratic -"it lacks separation of church and state"- is far from accurate. In the first place, the first Muslim civil war was fought over the question of whether government was secular (Sunni's) or theocratic (Shi'a) and was resolved in favor of the secular side. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims past and present theoretically & practically confirm secular over theocratic government is not a minor footnote, the author paints with a very wide stroke here.

Muslims did have institutions besides the basic Caliphate structure, in fact the Arabs borrowed quite heavily from the Roman/Byzantine tradition in the early (Umayyad) years, going on to absorb the Sassanid modes of government in latter (Abbasid) times. Successive Muslim kingdoms and empires mixed and merged those traditions with their own according to their specific tradition (Turkish, Berber etc) well enough to rule over vast swathes of the old world and their numerous peoples and traditions for well over a millennium, continuing to this day. So the claim that "Islam" lacked/s institutional ingenuity/flexibility is moot. All 'civilizations' have up and down periods, history is not so simple as to be explained from first principles yet.

He makes another inaccurate assertion; that Europeans left the Middle Easterners and co. in the dust because of "separation of church and state".

The advancements in science and technology the Europeans used to gain an edge with weren't hindered by the church by the sixteenth century or thereabout when the Ottomans began receding. In fact some of those discoveries were made by men of the church in the first place. My point being; church and state as in "political and religious power lying in separate hands" isn't what gave the Europeans an advantage, my own opinion is that geographic and ethnic factors played that role but that's a post of it's own so I'll stop here.

As an exercise, does "give unto Ceaser ..." explain why say, the Chinese succumbed (Unequal Treaties, Opium Wars)? Does democracy? The United Kingdom is both a democracy and fairly prosperous, but current china is an authoritarian 'People's Republic' and seems poised to be even more prosperous. Yes there are differences in scale but then wasn't Qing China -the guys who lost the Opium Wars- much larger and more populous than the British Isles back then too? Whatever it was that made the British beat the Chinese back then or makes China ascend so quickly today as to leave All of Europe combined let alone the UK in its dust, it's clear that simplistic answers like "Separation of Church and State" or "Favorite Ideology" are not sufficient if you want to say something meaningful about history.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 January 2013 07:55:48AM *  3 points [-]

As an exercise, does "give unto Ceaser ..." explain why say, the Chinese succumbed (Unequal Treaties, Opium Wars)?

China had in a sense the opposite problem from the Islamic world, no concept of a legitimate institution independent of the central government.

Whatever it was that made the British beat the Chinese back then or makes China ascend so quickly today as to leave All of Europe combined let alone the UK in its dust,

Careful, 20 years does not a historical trend make. The only reason it appears this way is that a European bubble is in the process of collapsing, whereas China's hasn't yet.

Comment author: GLaDOS 10 January 2013 07:15:15PM *  3 points [-]

China and the politics of human biodiversity

Half-Sigma's probably last post on his old blog. HBD has no future?

I believe that the taboo against HBD will last indefinitely. As the scientific evidence mounts ever more so in favor of HBD, the taboos against speaking about it only seem to grow stronger. In 1994, the Bell Curve was published and generated massive coverage in the media. Now, if it were published today, it would be blacklisted and left unmentioned. I remember first becoming aware of HBD in 2005, when Cochran, Harpending, etc. published their article about Azhkenazi intelligence, and I read about it in an online news piece. Steven Pinker seemed to have taken note of it, and later said that the most dangerous idea in science was that ethnicities differ in talent and temperament because of their genes. I seriously doubt anyone would mention such an explosive piece of writing in today's news media. Ever since James Watson talked about racial differences in intelligence, and he lost his job, it has been clear that even mentioning HBD will cost you your career - even if you helped discover DNA.

Different HBD writers have discussed when and under what conditions HBD will be commonly accepted by Americans. At this point, I don't think Americans will change on their own. While truths last forever, taboos against them can last for centuries. As America and Europe become less white, there is less and less chance that whites in those places will talk about non-whites are different from them. I think America and Europe will be in an Orwellian state of denial about HBD onward and onward, and they won't change that on their own.

But, Chinese scientists don't grow up in a culture which forbids HBD research. If anything, the Han would love to prove their superiority. The question is: will Chinese elites adopt Western attitudes towards race and racism? If they do, they too may forbid their scientists from researching HBD, because doing as much will make them appear parochial and uncouth to the greater world community.

If they don't, and instead embrace their ethnic heritage, then I see no reason for them to back off from HBD, and every reason for them to talk about how Chinese have bigger brains than whites, are more cooperative and are all together less animalistic than whites are, for all the reasons Rushton laid out.

In short, it boils down to this: will Chinese elites seek to become part of the greater global community and line their pockets, or will they cling tightly to their parochial identity and rage against all who oppose their path to power? That may yet be the great matter of the 21st century, much the way it was with how Germany had to confront that dilemma a century ago.

Which road will they take on this?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 January 2013 10:09:13PM 5 points [-]

The question is: will Chinese elites adopt Western attitudes towards race and racism? If they do, they too may forbid their scientists from researching HBD, because doing as much will make them appear parochial and uncouth to the greater world community.

Assuming HBD is correct, as the west becomes less white, it will also become less intelligent and hence less powerful, this will mean that the Chinese have less reason to care what the west thinks of them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 11:30:17PM 4 points [-]

BTW, your footnote links are broken.

Comment author: abramdemski 08 January 2013 04:26:34AM 0 points [-]

Very true! But that is a problem that already needs to be solved, separately. :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 11:17:45PM 0 points [-]

Yes, and friendliness is already a hard enough problem, without people dumping the hard parts of other problems into it.

Comment author: RobbBB 09 January 2013 01:30:55AM 0 points [-]

Simplicity is an important consideration. There are many more ways for complex universes to have violated our expectations already, while still making sapience possible, than for simple universes to have done so. That is, the space of simple universes is much more constrained by anthropic principles than is the space of complicated ones; so it is surprising that we seem to have found ourselves in a universe largely describable with very simple and uniform logic and mathematics, since there are many more ways to be complicated than to be simple. And this surprising fact may suggest that exotic logical, mathematical, or metaphysical structures do not exist, or are in some other respect not candidates for our anthropic reasoning. In other words, we can draw a tentative inductive conclusion regarding whether spacetime is nonstandard overall by considering all the ways in which our theories to date have been surprisingly successful and general while appealing almost exclusively to the simplest (which often corresponds to 'most standard,' with a few important caveats) conceivable systems. This won't be conclusive, but it's at least suggestive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 11:13:50PM 1 point [-]

There are many more ways for complex universes to have violated our expectations already, while still making sapience possible, than for simple universes to have done so.

How do we know they haven't?

Comment author: [deleted] 09 January 2013 08:45:50PM 3 points [-]

Why is having only one class of citizen a good idea?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 10:58:45PM 11 points [-]

Because it works well as a Schelling fence.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 January 2013 03:18:43AM 1 point [-]

I've sort of gone back on one specific piece of evidence, which was that contrarians on some issues tend to have much stronger arguments, and therefor are probably right.

Yvain explained that quite well by noting that believers of popular belief have no incentive to seriously engage contrarians, lest they "legitimize" them or appear like they were taking them seriously. It is much more individually beneficial to point and laugh.

An extension of that, though is that you can get signalling absurdity arms-races that cause the mainstream position to become as absurd as possible. (see for example, Australia banning small-breast porn and most of the world banning drawn loli porn because "can't let those damn pedos get off").

Yvain ignored the implications for mainstream belief quality (at least as far as I could tell). But it seems pretty damning to me.

That's what the quoted comment was referring to.

I'm unsure where I stand relative to you, Konkvistador, Moldbug, etc in all this. I'm still mostly Universalist in morality (universal brotherhood fuck yeah, let's tear apart and rebuild the universe if it disagrees, etc), but pretty much reject all of its factual claims about literal equality, effectiveness of collective governance, etc. If you like, we could talk in more detail about this. (I would like that; I'm interested in your view, but haven't had a chance to figure it out).

Don't know why you think I'm smarter or more diligent, but you're right that I think politics is a waste of time (except to root out political crud that you didn't know you had, which is what I've been doing recently).

Now join me in my meta-meta-meta-contrarian ivory tower

Lulz. Thank you for inviting me.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 10:53:12PM 0 points [-]

universal brotherhood fuck yeah, let's tear apart and rebuild the universe if it disagrees

Good luck with that.

Comment author: ewbrownv 08 January 2013 11:16:23PM 1 point [-]

Why would you expect the social dominance of a belief to correlate with truth? Except in the most trivial cases, society has no particular mechanism that selects for true beliefs in preference to false ones.

The Darwinian competition of memes selects strongly for those that provide psychological benefits, or are politically useful, or serve the self-interest of large segments of the population. But truth is only relevant if the opponents of a belief can easily and unambiguously disprove it, which is only possible in rare cases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 10:42:41PM 3 points [-]

Or if acting on the damage caused by having a bad model of reality is worse than the signaling benefit of the false belief.

Comment author: Vaniver 08 January 2013 08:31:58PM *  1 point [-]

That's fine; I might move the conclusion up to the introduction, like this (my edited version):

Further, one must consider the quality of life reduction that one would likely experience in a post-nuclear war world and discount accordingly. Even if your fallout shelter succeeds, it will only partially mitigate the harm done to you by nuclear war, not erase it completely. You may have enough medicine stockpiled to prevent enough diseases that you eventually die of old age, but the prospects of curing old age or undoing death require medical and scientific progress that require large and advanced human civilization. Unfortunately, full-scale nuclear war is very likely to impair medicine and science for quite some time, perhaps permanently.

Seeking to buy QALYs by investing in a fallout shelter is buying them when they're lower quality, and unlikely to be delivered, and thus probably underperforms other investments.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 January 2013 09:48:25PM 4 points [-]

Seeking to buy QALYs by investing in a fallout shelter is buying them when they're lower quality, expensive

This is highly dubious. You probably have much cheaper low hanging fruit in the event of a disaster, than otherwise.

Comment author: DaFranker 07 January 2013 09:21:08PM 2 points [-]

I really want - emotionally - to upvote this, but I'm looking for some kind of content I haven't already read in simpler form and not finding any.

Perhaps I'm too tired to catch on to the real message? All I can see is "Maximize expected utility to the best of your knowledge and ability. No, really, do that." Then it gets refactored with reasonable-sounding categories and labels that seem useful to describe general patterns of expected utility in the more restrained domains of conceptspace that they're meant for, along with good tips of things to remember to take into account for the EU calculation.

Anyone care to enlighten me as to what I'm missing? Or perhaps I'm just missing the usefulness of the post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 January 2013 09:10:29PM 0 points [-]

Anyone care to enlighten me as to what I'm missing?

A very "clever" utility calculation, where by "clever" I mean wrong.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Don't Build Fallout Shelters
Comment author: katydee 07 January 2013 03:18:24PM *  6 points [-]

With a given probability of nuclear war, we don't care about the utility difference between war and not war; we care about the difference between preparations succeed and preparations fail, which is the probability we are trying to control when buying a fallout shelter.

I'm not sure I agree. When optimizing for utility across one's lifespan, it's important to note that years of post-nuke life are both more expensive and carry less utility than years of non-nuke life. So when you evaluate the utility/dollar of building a fallout shelter and compare it to the utility/dollar of other potential investments, you need to put a discount factor on the years of life you expect your shelter to gain for you in the event of a war.

For instance, if I expected with 50% confidence a nuclear war that will certainly kill me if it occurs while I am unprotected and were presented with the following options:

  • Option A: Purchase a bomb shelter that will grant ten years of post-nuke life in the event of a nuclear war but will grant no benefit in the event of no nuclear war

  • Option B: Purchase an experimental health intervention that will grant on average five years of additional healthy life in the event of no nuclear war, but have no effect in the event of a nuclear war (as I'll die before getting to benefit)

I would probably consider option B to be superior to option A, because my intuitions suggest that the utility of post-nuclear life would be massively discounted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 January 2013 09:01:49PM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure I agree. When optimizing for utility across one's lifespan, it's important to note that years of post-nuke life are both more expensive and carry less utility than years of non-nuke life. So when you evaluate the utility/dollar of building a fallout shelter and compare it to the utility/dollar of other potential investments, you need to put a discount factor on the years of life you expect your shelter to gain for you in the event of a war.

Um, utility tends to have diminishing returns in material possessions, hence the utility comparison goes the other way.

Comment author: HalMorris 08 January 2013 03:43:53PM 0 points [-]

In authoritarian countries, hi..storically, engining and science has provided some of the best independent thinkers.

In the US, I think we need much better education in science and engineering, including an appreciation for scientific thought processes and scientific culture -- not necessarily engineers in the White House, but somebody there who appreciates engineers and science.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 January 2013 08:25:38PM 3 points [-]

And yet, it is the US that tends to be ahead of authoritarian countries in science and technology.

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 January 2013 08:31:06PM 1 point [-]

The US didn't had an engineer as president since Herbert Hoover. China is currently run by Hu Jintao who studied hydraulic engineering. The president before Hu, Jiang Zemin got a degree in electrical engineering. China's current vice president studied chemical engineering.

Having more people with science and engineering backgrounds into political leadership positions seem like a good idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2013 09:20:55PM 4 points [-]

Having more people with science and engineering backgrounds into political leadership positions seem like a good idea.

I'm not convinced.

Comment author: Multiheaded 07 January 2013 07:50:15PM *  1 point [-]

Spengler notoriously predicted that a Caesar-like figure could, in his lifetime, reinvigorate the European civilization and end its weakness and complacency, at least for a while. I think we all know how well that turned out. (Although he criticized Hitler's lack of refinement, sophistication and aristocratism after voting for him.)

That might suck for the feminist women who have signed up for cryosuspension and survive the ambulance ride across time, but I think I could handle it. ; )

Do you think you'd be able to persuade many of today's people - not just women who don't like the idea of patriarchy, etc - to support building a society that they find cruel and morally abhorrent on the sole argument that it might be "sustainable" and colonize the stars, etc? [Edit: couldn't make heads or tails of my grammar upon revision, simplified this.]

Unless you personally want to participate in it and are confident you'd enjoy it... how is optimizing for a powerful and self-sustaining fascist/baby-eating/etc society (e.g. Ancient Rome as it would look to us, with genocides and crucifixions and slave fights) different from just building a computronium-paving AI and putting a memory of our culture and knowledge into it? It would also last for a long time and build big things. It might even be programmed to derive utility from making and comprehending our kind of art, texts, etc. Would it be a good deal to let it destructively assimilate/enslave/whatever "our" branch of humanity, just because we are too fragile and might not last long?

These writers might have followed the lead of their predecessor H.G. Wells, who advocates in his works that an aristocracy of the mind should run things.

You do understand that even in his day Wells became a byword for naive liberalism and belief in progressivist technocracy? His so-called "aristocracy of the mind", and the manner in which it was supposed to rule, was worlds apart from "future feudalism" (although I think both are tyrannical upon closer inspection). See Orwell.


As to the (sickening and perverse IMO) idea of a Hari Seldon - with all that it implies - here's a quote from Chesterton, the great crusader against "nihilism" and anti-humanism:

In the July 10, 1920 issue of The Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton took issue with both pessimists (such as Spengler) and their optimistic critics, arguing that neither took into consideration human choice: "The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down; the progressives believe it is a clock that they themselves are winding up. But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler#Aftermath

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2013 09:14:21PM 1 point [-]

Re: Stability:

I don't get your position. Are you arguing that we should support a "moral" society even if it's unstable and hope(pray?) it doesn't collapse into something much worse than the stable society we could create if we actively attempt to?

In the July 10, 1920 issue of The Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton took issue with both pessimists (such as Spengler) and their optimistic critics, arguing that neither took into consideration human choice: "The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down; the progressives believe it is a clock that they themselves are winding up. But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty."

Weren't you attempting to arguing earlier that treating humans as capable of morally significant choices was a cardinal sin?

Comment author: satt 06 January 2013 08:04:52PM 9 points [-]

One thing I've noticed is that in nearly any controversy where the adherents of the heterodox position show signs of basic mental stability, the arguments for heterodoxy are stronger than the arguments for orthodoxy.

Is this true? A priori I could see this go either way, and my personal experiences don't add much evidence here (I can't recall many controversies where I've probed deeply enough to conclusively weigh orthodoxy against heterodoxy).

A weaker statement I'm more sure of: the arguments for orthodoxy one hears from most people are weaker than the arguments for heterodoxy, because most people have little reason to actually look up whatever factual basis the orthodoxy might have. (I've seen someone make this point somewhere on Yvain's blog but can't remember who.) For example, I haven't bothered to look up the precise scientific arguments that'd justify my belief in plate tectonics, but a shrinking earth theorist probably has, if only to launch a counterattack on them. (Corollary: I'd have a good chance of losing an argument with a shrinking earth theorist, even though plate tectonics is, well, true.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2013 08:59:59PM 0 points [-]

Of course, this means the supporters of orthodoxy are in the worst position to judge when they should be updating their position based on new evidence.

Comment author: abramdemski 07 January 2013 12:57:39AM 0 points [-]

We should get this automatically in many cases. Classical logic can think about dialetheism and other possibilities by inventing negative predicates for every predicate, say. The rules relating positive to negative can then be chosen at convenience. (In first-order logic, we would need to invent a negative predicate separately for each positive; in second-order logic, we could make a general statement to the effect that each positive predicate has a negative, and make statements about how they combine.)

That's one reason we don't need to worry too much about which logic is correct; as johnicolas keeps pointing out, the existence of encodings means (at least in many cases) we get the same power regardless of what choice we make.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2013 07:13:14AM 1 point [-]

True, but these kinds of tricks might make hash of its utility function.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013
Comment author: RichardKennaway 06 January 2013 11:22:14AM -1 points [-]

I don't really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet?

Like cracked.com and 4chan? Sensibleness is not the filter for popularity on the internet.

That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...

Different people respond to different forms. Some are suckers for a man in a white coat intoning "studies have shown". Some will lap up Deep Wisdom from anyone in Tibetan robes. Some will believe anyone who shouts at them loudly enough. (Makes for some interesting dynamics on PUA and NLP forums, where assertion is alpha, but both agreement and disagreement are beta.)

However, I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article.

It's more that you can write the same content with a completely different 99%, with many completely different 99%s. Ayn Rand, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Feynman could have written the same content, in different ways. How does one determine whether one is responding to the clothing of the message, rather than the content? The red pill idea is particularly attractive to anyone who thinks they're smarter than those around them. And look where we are, LessWrong, where "contrarian" is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.

I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it's exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn't get the point across.

Skilful means, as the Buddhists put it. But of those who think they learned something from that article, how many would have learned whatever message the writer might have expressed in the same style?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2013 04:28:41AM 4 points [-]

And look where we are, LessWrong, where "contrarian" is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.

Can you link to an example of someone using it as a compliment? I don't think this is actually the case. It's simply much less of an insult here than it is in most "skeptic" communities.

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 06 January 2013 07:51:06AM -1 points [-]

On immigration, not necessarily limited to the united states. I find laws that discriminate based on national origin to be unfair, in the sense that they limit good outcomes arbitrarily. On the other hand, I do not know of a way to transition to more lenient immigration laws successfully (though I haven't thought about it much and it's far from my areas of interest). I want to know if there are arguments for limiting the rights of immigrants (legal or not) that aren't rooted in excessive self-interest ("they took our jobs!") Or perhaps xenophobia.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2013 04:21:44AM 4 points [-]

It is clear that some countries are more productive and generally nicer places than others. Why is that? A large part of it is because of the people in those countries. (I'll not get into the question of whether genetic or memetic differences are more important since it's not directly relevant to my point.) Thus it makes sense to restrict immigration from the type of people likely to make the country a worse place to live.

Comment author: Peterdjones 05 January 2013 09:58:34PM -1 points [-]

In a way that increases the chance victims will die or be injured in a confrontation. It's choosing to stand at the end of an arms race.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 January 2013 06:45:35AM 1 point [-]

In a way that increases the chance victims will die or be injured in a confrontation.

It also increases the chance the aggressor will die or be injured, thus reducing the motivation to become an aggressor and decreasing the chance that a confrontation occurs in the first place.

Comment author: Peterdjones 05 January 2013 04:55:28PM -2 points [-]

If they are predominant amongst agressors and victoms alike, that obviously cancels through. In fact, if one had ones druthers, no ratioanl individual would want to be sitting at the end of an arms race.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2013 08:55:03PM 2 points [-]

If they are predominant amongst agressors and victoms alike, that obviously cancels through.

My point is that it doesn't. Aggressors are the ones who have an advantage in combat, e.g., those who are stronger or have the free time to train. Guns reduce the "strategic inequality" between those in the biggest advantage in combat and those with the smallest.

In response to Just One Sentence
Comment author: hankx7787 05 January 2013 06:20:19AM *  0 points [-]

deleted

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2013 06:34:02AM 4 points [-]

Taboo "paranormal".

Comment author: TimS 04 January 2013 02:19:01PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not trying to criticize your libertarian argument - I'm actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It's just that interpretive difficulty isn't a difference between statute and contract.

Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
- differing policy preferences of individual legislators vs. different economic incentives of contract counter-parties.
- issues can be unanticipated by all parties, which means the outcome of a dispute is essentially random (from an ex ante perspective).

In short, it's just a fact about language that your choices don't really affect the clarity of your legal obligations (either statutory or contractual). The deadweight loss of regulation isn't a result of unclear regulation - even the clearest distortion of the market outcome costs some surplus value from the transaction.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2013 06:05:35AM 1 point [-]

Well, I suppose the question is how the unbreakable-vow magic interprets it.

Comment author: gwern 04 January 2013 07:52:40PM -2 points [-]

The argument from silence works both ways.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2013 05:54:13AM 0 points [-]

Except, we know that they aren't in fact used for education.

Comment author: ikrase 04 January 2013 05:43:13AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I thought I heard somebody say they are spontaneously generated in places of extreme rank immorality, death, or negative utility (in which case WWII probably generated many of them due both to city bombings and the Holocaust, for example).

Does anybody know what happens to Dementors re: Muggles? They cannot use the Patronus. Do wizards collect them all at Azkaban, or what?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2013 05:50:06AM 1 point [-]

Does anybody know what happens to Dementors re: Muggles?

In cannon, according to word of God, muggles cannot see dementors, but dementors can induce depression in muggles, and in extreme cases put them in a coma.

Comment author: HalMorris 03 January 2013 11:09:03PM 0 points [-]

the result of enormous quantities of previously untapped natural resources and a previous lack of infrastructure.

Previously untapped natural resources are a good thing, esp. along with a well enough educated population with a good work ethic.

Previous lack of infrastructure? I'm not sure how that can be an advantage.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 January 2013 11:56:35PM 4 points [-]

Previous lack of infrastructure? I'm not sure how that can be an advantage.

One way to a have a fast growth rate is to start out very low.

Comment author: HalMorris 03 January 2013 11:21:46PM 3 points [-]

The U.S. may have been lucky because initially it was strung out along a seaboard which provided good transport and communication for the time, and as the U.S. spread into the interior, massive improvements in communication and transportation came along just in time, so we could have the cohesion that up til then was very hard to achieve except in a small state.

Some of the Federalist papers argued the opposite of what Montesquieu's point -- that a surplus of talented and ambitious people would tend to keep each other in check.

Anyway, Singapore poses a different question -- not whether small or large countries are best suited to democracy, but whether Singapore's (undemocratic) system could be made to work in a big country with rich and poor sections, and other wide variations of interest. Maybe Singapore, due to its nature could be administered well by one great CEO, but we haven't seen that sort of thing work well on a continental scale except maybe for short periods of time (usually followed by a traumatic succession crisis).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 January 2013 11:54:36PM 3 points [-]

By the way Bryan Caplan has a blog post questioning how "undemocratic" Singapore really is.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 January 2013 08:16:46PM 2 points [-]

The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.

If they laugh, that proves I'm right;

Note the difference in meaning between the two italicized phrases?

Consider "proves" replaced by "is evidence in favour of". It doesn't change my point.

if they boo, that proves I'm right.

What did I say that could reasonably be interpreted this way?

That's the other half of the pattern -- which you obligingly go on to complete:

Laughter is evidence that you're right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you're onto something.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2013 08:31:26PM *  1 point [-]

That's the other half of the pattern -- which you obligingly go on to complete:

Laughter is evidence that you're right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you're onto something.

Did you read the sentence I wrote after that one?

Indifference, or a non-extreme negative reaction is thus evidence that you're wrong.

Comment author: Emile 02 January 2013 12:16:48PM 2 points [-]

That's a much better example than mine and I'm annoyed I didn't think of it first. If that's true, than we should expect proportionally less conservative women in higher education, regardless of major (and the effect should remain once you control for intelligence and/or social class).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2013 05:52:52AM 1 point [-]

(and the effect should remain once you control for intelligence and/or social class).

To the effect those aren't correlated with being conservative.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 January 2013 05:50:32AM 3 points [-]

By the end of 2014 the average observer in a city with a population over 300,000 in the United States will see a drone aircraft in the sky once a month or more. By 2017, every day.

In response to comment by [deleted] on New Year's Prediction Thread (2013)
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2013 05:48:44AM 2 points [-]

Probability?

Comment author: TimS 02 January 2013 04:40:12PM 0 points [-]

I upvoted Vladimir's post - but I don't think the lack of "accepted exception" means you should stop these discussion threads.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2013 05:33:27AM *  3 points [-]

There isn't an an official ban on politics either. The much cited "politics is the mind-killer" post, merely argued against using political examples in non-political contexts.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 02 January 2013 08:25:11PM 0 points [-]

It didn't seem directly relevant to TimS's comment.
That said, it would be a remarkable coincidence if a framework reliably motivated right action without corresponding to reality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2013 04:36:13AM 1 point [-]

Depends, how are you judging which action is "right", do you have any way to judge independent of the framework?

A lot of religions motivate a lot of right actions. They motivate even more if you let a religion judge the rightness of the action it motivates.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 02 January 2013 08:51:34PM 8 points [-]

The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.

Nonsense. All it takes is that the audience want to believe it. Experience is not truth; a large part of people's "experience" is their own beliefs. This is just the same death spiral again. If they laugh, that proves I'm right; if they boo, that proves I'm right.

It's necessary to get society to the point where it's possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.

The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2013 04:17:11AM *  3 points [-]

The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.

If they laugh, that proves I'm right;

Note the difference in meaning between the two italicized phrases?

if they boo, that proves I'm right.

What did I say that could reasonably be interpreted this way?

(Edit: thinking about it, I think I see how you got that impression: Laughter is evidence that you're right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you're onto something. Indifference, or a non-extreme negative reaction is thus evidence that you're wrong.)

That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?

Seriously, could you at least try not to straw-man my position?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 02 January 2013 05:37:25PM *  0 points [-]

I generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.

That is, if I endorse the privilege framework because I believe it effectively motivates right action according to my values better than the alternatives, then one option is to embrace it and act accordingly. If my belief is correct, one consequence of that will be that I am more reliably motivated to act rightly by my values. If I also talk about my actions and my motivations for those actions, I will provide evidence of that to others, thereby encouraging them to also embrace the privilege framework (at least, insofar as they share my values, and possibly even if they don't).

In the meantime, they won't, and (as you say) we won't be perfectly efficient. Hysteresis is like that.

The advantage of hysteresis is that if it turns out I'm wrong and the privilege framework doesn't optimally motivate right action, there's a greater chance of collecting evidence of that truth before we've collectively invested too much in a suboptimal practice.

Given how often we're wrong about stuff, that seems like a worthwhile advantage to preserve.

I could probably word that more succinctly as "Practice beats proselytizing."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2013 07:02:32PM 1 point [-]

I generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.

Whatever happened to the corresponding-to-reality aspect?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 02 January 2013 09:10:29AM *  14 points [-]

This is true regardless of whether the "things you can't say" are true. Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It's a death spiral. All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you're wrong.

There are no red pills, only blue pills with red sugar coatings.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2013 06:54:07PM 6 points [-]

This is true regardless of whether the "things you can't say" are true.

Not quite. The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.

Nevertheless, I agree that the joke is no substitute for an argument. It's necessary to get society to the point where it's possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 02 January 2013 05:30:35AM *  14 points [-]

That's the opposite of the point being made in the post, not a generalization of it.

At least, if I've understood you correctly — you're saying that when people make jokes about coercive/irresponsible men and passive-aggressive/nagging women, they are expressing a universal truth that society refuses to hear stated. To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as "All relationships are abusive".

The post TimS links to asserts, rather, that these jokes represent a blurring of distinctions that society fails to recognize. There actually do exist relationships that are more consensual and ones that are more abusive — the distinction — but insofar as everyone pretends that all men are coercive and all women passive-aggressive, they blur this distinction.

Moreover, blurring this distinction provides cover for the actual abusers by making the good relationships out to be just as bad as the abusive ones. If everyone is required to talk about their relationships in nonconsensual/abusive terms, then the people in consensual relationships cannot distinguish themselves as such. Hence, the post: "Even though Rowdy's brother-in-law wasn't really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn't want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would."

It's a little like Soviet-era "moral equivalence" arguments, or more generally the tu quoque fallacy, when tu don't actually do quoque!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2013 06:12:01PM -2 points [-]

To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as "All relationships are abusive".

Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to dismiss opposing arguments when you start by "grossly oversimplifying" them into something clearly false.

Comment author: TimS 02 January 2013 03:58:42AM 15 points [-]

This post about jokes and attitudes the provide cover for bad social actors really caught my interest. But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.

The point of the blog post is that jokes about certain gender and relationship stereotypes (men are idiots, women are the ball-and-chain) allow actual abusers slide by under the radar by asserting that they are joking whenever they are publically called out on inappropriate behavior. It really resonated with me - and to be frank, it seems aimed at the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2013 04:35:18AM 5 points [-]

I'd generalize the point more broadly to say that jokes are a good way to get things you otherwise can't say past the radar.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2013 03:26:49AM 10 points [-]

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

-- Larry Wall

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2013 03:24:52AM 8 points [-]

[Physics] has come to see that thinking is merely a form of human activity…with no assurance whatever that an intellectual process has validity outside the range in which its validity has already been checked by experience.

-- P. W. Bridgman, ‘‘The Struggle for Intellectual Integrity’’

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2013 02:20:45AM *  2 points [-]

Tainter’s studied societies are also Malthusian agricultural ones, it’s hard to know if the same logic will generalize past the industrial revolution.

Well, a case could be made that industrial societies are what Wittfogel called hydraulic empires only with energy rather than water as the vital centrally controlled resource. Then again none of Tainter's examples appear to be hydraulic empires.

Comment author: prase 01 January 2013 01:55:40AM *  4 points [-]

From my personal experience with politics, I'd conclude that people in smoke filled back rooms selecting candidates is mostly a correct description of affairs, although our countries and political habits may differ. (I have participated in three party primaries where all candidates were selected in this way and only later were formally elected by the party members. During the last election, there was an actual smoke filled back room where people discussed things.) On the other hand, I wouldn't thnik that those powerful smokers are intelligent. (Our current district chairman is a moron who doesn't distinguish between Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to say the least. His political skills aren't that abysmal but he is certainly no genius even in this respect. Our local deputy isn't much better.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2013 02:13:49AM 1 point [-]

From my personal experience with politics, I'd conclude that people in smoke filled back rooms selecting candidates is mostly a correct description of affairs, although our countries and political habits may differ.

I suspect this is less true in the US, where the parties hold primaries which can be competitive if a non-establishment candidate bothers to organize, that's how the Tea Party got many of its candidates on the Republican ticket. On the other hand, in your country it appears to be a lot easier for a new party to become electorally viable.

Comment author: Emile 31 December 2012 05:08:54PM 15 points [-]

Other factors that could explain:

The difference is not as large, either because of the file drawer effect, or because someone selected / massaged the data to make the difference look bigger (the researcher or the journalist).

Selection effects: men and women may go into economics for different reasons; for example (as a bit of a caricature); men who want to get obscenely rich study economics to get into business, and women who want to get obscenely rich try to marry into money, and money-grabiness is correlated with pro-free market views.

Differences in peer groups: there seem to be more men than women majoring in economics, so assuming one's views are influenced by peers of the same sex, it seems likely female students will have more non-economist peers.

Differences in conformity: women may conform a bit more to widespread social views (at least, to views of "their social class") and/or compartimentalize more between what they learn about a specific topic and their general views. This would mean female scientists would be slightly less likely to be atheists in religious countries, female theology students would be slightly less likely to be fanatics in not-that-fanatical societies, etc.

Changes in major: I don't know how frequent changes of major are, but if they are frequent it seems likely you'd see more women than men coming from social sciences in economics (and more men coming from mathematics).

Different subfields in economics: Maybe "economics" shouldn't be considered one big blob - there may be some subfields that have more in common with other social sciences (and thus have a more female student body, and a more "liberal" outlook), and some more in common with maths and business.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2013 12:15:09AM 20 points [-]

Selection effects: men and women may go into economics for different reasons; for example (as a bit of a caricature); men who want to get obscenely rich study economics to get into business, and women who want to get obscenely rich try to marry into money, and money-grabiness is correlated with pro-free market views.

Another version of this idea that I was going to post: is that conservative women are more likely to become stay-at-home moms and thus liberal women will be overrepresented in all jobs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2012 10:58:24PM 7 points [-]

If you were ever wondering why Congress has a 95% incumbency rate despite an approval rating in the high teens, this study may be worth a read.

I think this statistic is hugely misleading. I suspect if one were to ask the people disapproving of congress whether their complaint is that it's too liberal or too conservative or otherwise ask what they thing is wrong with it, you'd find out that the current congress is actually a "reasonable" compromise situation.

Comment author: Desrtopa 30 December 2012 03:35:38PM *  0 points [-]

Remember how earlier in HPMOR (chapter 47) Harry swore to take as an enemy whoever it was that killed Narcissa Malfoy? It was no an unbreakable vow, but the same principle applies. Not only was he very careful, with many conditions laid upon the pledge, but the first condition said that Draco could release him from the pledge at any time. There is no danger of a vow like that being not perfectly thought out, because if something goes wrong, you can just have whoever you swore it too annul it. I understand that getting a perfect wording is not trivial, but if you just keep a human in the loop like that, you can avoid most errors.

Harry is one of the most intelligent and rational people in the world, and took great care in designing that oath, (which, as you point out, is not unbreakable,) and he's still in a position for it to screw him over, since if Draco's father has been doing his best to change his son's sympathies, then Draco may not be inclined to release Harry from the Vow even if it turns out Dumbledore burned his mother for good reasons.

If Harry had taken an Unbreakable Vow, then even with the escape clause, he would probably be obligated to treat Dumbledore as his enemy right now, with no way to get Draco to release him from it.

There's plenty of danger in an imperfectly thought out vow, even if you add a clause that someone can release you from it. Having someone who could release you from your vow isn't much help if you're already dead due to having been unable to act in self defense, for instance. Supposing you have to go down to the equivalent of a local police station to get released from a Vow, I would suggest that this probably retains most of the problems of being unable to break the vows at all.

In a certain sense I am talking about them, as the whole thing started from a discussion of what would happen if we used a specific method to get around the disadvantage, but in practice I am not really talking about them, as with the downside basically gone, there is no real difference between them and an Unbreakable Vow like in canon, with no downside. In other words, I am talking about Unbreakable Vows with no downside, but that could either be the ones we were talking about (with the downside, but with it overcome) or the simpler version which does not have a downside to start out with, and it does not really matter which.

If you think it doesn't matter which, I have to suspect that you're not thinking very hard of the implications of the MoR method.

Not everyone can be easily imperiused, nor is everyone capable of casting the spell, and it is probably impossible for a single person to keep a large number of people imperiused at once (canon doesn't say whether it's possible to imperius more than one person at a time, but provides no evidence that it is, and if it were, we could expect people like Voldemort to make extensive use of this.)

If the people being used as binders are not controlled perpetually, then we have a segment of the population which is being victimized in what many humans would regard as one of the most abhorrent ways possible, being routinely mind controlled into performing acts to which they would not consent of their own volition. These people, to put it lightly, do not like the segment of the population which is doing this to them. The people exploiting them need to make arrangements to keep them safely under control, as with chattel slavery. If such arrangements aren't strong enough, they're likely to engage in violent uprisings (although unlikely to succeed if and when they do, they're less powerful and less well coordinated.)

Not only does the society have to invest labor and resources in keeping this segment of the population under wraps, any enemies who want to destabilize this society would do well to target this system. Kind of like the helot system, which was convenient for the Spartans in terms of productivity and military strength, except for the fact that any time they stayed away from home for too long, they were in danger of a revolt, and they had to make all the other city states they dealt with swear to support the system, since it would be so dangerous for them if anyone tried to destabilize it.

You can increase the security by keeping the people shut away somewhere, but then you lose the productivity of the people being used as binders.

Probably the most efficient method would be to force all the binders into unbreakable oaths not to rebel. You are, of course, still losing a significant portion of the total magical powers of the population by using unbreakable vows en-masse like this, and far from other countries seeing and wanting to copy this system, they're liable to see it as either an exploitable weakness or a human rights violation, in which case this society could be facing trade sanctions, embargoes, or even war.

And of course, you still have the issue of how society undergoes the steps to reach this point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2012 10:16:40PM 1 point [-]

Probably the most efficient method would be to force all the binders into unbreakable oaths not to rebel. You are, of course, still losing a significant portion of the total magical powers of the population by using unbreakable vows en-masse like this, and far from other countries seeing and wanting to copy this system, they're liable to see it as either an exploitable weakness or a human rights violation, in which case this society could be facing trade sanctions, embargoes, or even war.

Look at how effective those are in the real world. You have countries ignoring sanctions and embargoes because there's a lot of money to be made that way. As for wars with large coalitions, you have the inevitable issues of members suspecting other members of not holding up their end of the war, or using the war to unfairly increase their power vis-a-vis the other members of the coalition.

Of course, it's not hard to solve all these problems using unbreakable vows, but well. ;)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2012 09:44:20PM 2 points [-]

Would you apply similar logic to a police officer deciding whether to enforce the judge's decision? What about a general deciding whether to stage a coup against a democratically elected president?

Comment author: buybuydandavis 29 December 2012 12:19:09PM 0 points [-]

I reckon Voldemort accidentally performed a ritual, sacrificing Lily Potter and granting Harry Boy-Who-Lived status. But ... it's certainly not worth rejecting out of hand.

I reckon that was Dumbledore's and Lily's (and maybe James') plan.

What's the evidence that Voldemort actually cast a killing curse at Harry? That he tried to kill him in any way?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 December 2012 10:07:54PM 2 points [-]

What's the evidence that Voldemort actually cast a killing curse at Harry?

It's possible to determine the last spell cast by a wand.

Comment author: Document 29 December 2012 04:17:38PM 0 points [-]

Do deleted comments still appear on the list of comments by that user?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 December 2012 09:58:33PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure. I suspect it might depend on who deleted them.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 29 December 2012 02:40:10AM *  -1 points [-]

There's a difference between asking for criticism of a post/argument that you nonetheless hope to be good, and intentionally making a bad argument so that you will be criticized.

I think the difference I'm talking about is well understood.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 December 2012 09:56:22PM 1 point [-]

Basically, would Socrates be considered a troll?

Comment author: Solvent 29 December 2012 12:02:18AM 0 points [-]

It's a kind of utilitarianism. I'm including act utilitarianism and desire utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism and whatever in utilitarianism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 December 2012 09:43:41PM 1 point [-]

Ok, what is your definition of "utilitarianism"?

Comment author: Solvent 28 December 2012 11:47:36PM 0 points [-]

What do you mean by "utilitarianism"? The word has two different common meanings around here: any type of consequentialism, and the specific type of consequentialism that uses "total happiness" as a utility function. This sentence appears to be designed to confuse the two meanings.

Yeah, my mistake. I'd never run across any other versions of consequentialism apart from utilitarianism (except for Clippy, of course). I suppose caring only for yourself might count? But do you seriously think that the majority of those consequentialists aren't utilitarian?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2012 11:58:55PM 1 point [-]

Well, even Eliezer's version of consequentialism isn't simple utilitarianism for starters.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 28 December 2012 01:32:22PM *  -1 points [-]

Trolls are generally people who post with the hope of invoking a negative reaction (e.g. negative responses, flames, downvotes, censorship, bans). Identifying trolls is often a harder job than defining them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2012 11:24:50PM 1 point [-]

So does asking for criticism of your argument count as trolling?

Comment author: Solvent 27 December 2012 10:38:43PM *  2 points [-]

Here's an old Eliezer quote on this:

4.5.2: Doesn't that screw up the whole concept of moral responsibility?

Honestly? Well, yeah. Moral responsibility doesn't exist as a physical object. Moral responsibility - the idea that choosing evil causes you to deserve pain - is fundamentally a human idea that we've all adopted for convenience's sake. (23).

The truth is, there is absolutely nothing you can do that will make you deserve pain. Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve so much as a stubbed toe. Pain is never a good thing, no matter who it happens to, even Adolf Hitler. Pain is bad; if it's ultimately meaningful, it's almost certainly as a negative goal. Nothing any human being can do will flip that sign from negative to positive.

So why do we throw people in jail? To discourage crime. Choosing evil doesn't make a person deserve anything wrong, but it makes ver targetable, so that if something bad has to happen to someone, it may as well happen to ver. Adolf Hitler, for example, is so targetable that we could shoot him on the off-chance that it would save someone a stubbed toe. There's never a point where we can morally take pleasure in someone else's pain. But human society doesn't require hatred to function - just law.

Besides which, my mind feels a lot cleaner now that I've totally renounced all hatred.

It's pretty hard to argue about this if our moral intuitions disagree. But at least, you should know that most people on LW disagree with you on this intuition.

EDIT: As ArisKatsaris points out, I don't actually have any source for the "most people on LW disagree with you" bit. I've always thought that not wanting harm to come to anyone as an instrumental value was a pretty obvious, standard part of utilitarianism, and 62% of LWers are consequentialist, according to the 2012 survey. The post "Policy Debates Should Not Appear One Sided" is fairly highly regarded, and it esposes a related view, that people don't deserve harm for their stupidity.

Also, what those people would prefer isn't nessecarily what our moral system should prefer- humans are petty and short-sighted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2012 11:12:33PM 1 point [-]

I've always thought that not wanting harm to come to anyone as an instrumental value was a pretty obvious, standard part of utilitarianism, and 62% of LWers are consequentialist, according to the 2012 survey.

What do you mean by "utilitarianism"? The word has two different common meanings around here: any type of consequentialism, and the specific type of consequentialism that uses "total happiness" as a utility function. This sentence appears to be designed to confuse the two meanings.

The post "Policy Debates Should Not Appear One Sided" is fairly highly regarded, and it esposes a related view, that people don't deserve harm for their stupidity.

That is most definitely not the main point of that post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2012 01:20:37AM 7 points [-]

I was asked to post the following by an anonymous member.

There is a very big issue which this new policy fails to address:

Self defense is a widely advocated legal right in most jurisdictions. For instance, if someone is about to press a button that will activate a bomb which would kill you, and you have no other means of stopping them, in many jurisdictions you have a right to shoot them. Even when the offending party is not legally at fault (e.g. is insane).

This right puts extra burden of moral responsibility on the people that make certain claims. If someone made an unjustified claim that a button on your cellphone would trigger a bomb, and you get your face smashed against the ground by the concerned bystanders or the police - or get shot - the person that made that claim will take the fall for the incident even though formally it can be said that this person has never advocated any violence.

One can clearly see relevance of the above hypothetical to organizations and individuals which make broad and specific claims with regards to dangers and existential risks. Such as Singularity Institute, or a famous Friendly AI proponent Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, known for his somewhat dramatic statements with regards to dangers and risks posed by certain types of software and by completion of some specific projects.

Many replies in comments section on the censorship(sic) proposal on LessWrong do not seem to indicate that the authors accept this moral burden, instead seeing it as a fallacy. For instance, in http://lesswrong.com/lw/g24/new_censorship_against_hypothetical_violence/84qx , Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes:

Point one: We never said X->Y. We said X, and a bunch of people too stupid to understand the fallacy of appeal to consequences said 'X->violence, look what those bad people advocate' as an attempted counterargument. Since no actual good can possibly come of discussing this on any set of assumptions, it would be nice to have the counter-counterargument, "Unlike this bad person here, we have a policy of deleting posts which claim Q->specific-violence even if the post claims not to believe in Q because the identifiable target would have a reasonable complaint of being threatened".

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 December 2012 09:29:14PM -2 points [-]

EY has publicly posted material that is intended to provoke thought on the possibility of legalizing rape

This looks like a complete misinterpretation, albeit one I've seen several times. The context of this is the novella Three Worlds Collide. (Spoilers follow). In that story humans meet two races of aliens with incompatible values, the babyeaters and the superhappies. The superhappies demand to modify human values to be more compatible with their own; and the author's perspective is that this would be a very bad thing, worth sacrificing billions of lives to prevent. This is the focus of the story.

Then we find out that in this universe, rape has been legalized, and it's only a little more than a throwaway remark. What are we to make of this? Well, it's a concrete example of why changing human values would be bad. Which, given the overall story, seems like the obvious intended interpretation. But hey, male author mentioning rape - let's all be offended! His condemnation of it wasn't strong enough!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2012 11:43:43PM 1 point [-]

But hey, male author mentioning rape - let's all be offended! His condemnation of it wasn't strong enough!

Who said anything about being offended?

Comment author: Emile 26 December 2012 02:24:45PM *  7 points [-]

Interesting. A couple hypotheses:

1) Admins overestimate the effect that certain policies have on behavior (they may underestimate random effects, or assign effects to the wrong policy); just like parents might overestimate the effect of parenting choices, or managers overestimate the impact of their decisions ("we did daily stand-up meetings, and the project was completed on time - the daily stand-up meetings must be the cause!").

2) Eliezer is more concerned about the public image of LessWrong (both because of how it reflects on CFAR and SIAI, and on the kind of people it may attract) than you are (were?) about the everything-list.

For what it's worth I'm fine with moderation of stupid things like discussing assassinations, and of banning obnoxious trolls and cranks and idiots, and the main reason to refrain from those kind of mod actions would be to avoid scaring naive young newcomers who might see it as an affront against Sacred Free Speech.

Your testimony of a case where you still have quality discussion with very light moderation makes me slightly less in favor of heavy-handed moderation.

(I'm not sure that the moderation here is becoming "stronger" recently, as opposed to merely a bit more explicit)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2012 11:32:48PM 9 points [-]

For what it's worth I'm fine with moderation of stupid things like discussing assassinations, and of banning obnoxious trolls and cranks and idiots, and the main reason to refrain from those kind of mod actions would be to avoid scaring naive young newcomers who might see it as an affront against Sacred Free Speech.

No, the main reason is to avoid evaporative cooling and slippery slopes, a.k.a., the reasons free speech is such a sacred value.

Keep in mind Eliezer himself would be considered a crank by most "mainstream skeptics".

Comment author: wedrifid 26 December 2012 04:08:10AM 19 points [-]

Why would this post need to be deleted?

Because people can reply to it and some replies are disagreements.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2012 04:31:06AM 9 points [-]

So, there might be comments on LW of people disagreeing with Eliezer's policy. The horror.

Comment author: ChristianKl 25 December 2012 02:16:06AM *  15 points [-]

On of the most challenging moderation decisions I had to do at another forum was whether someone who argues the position "Homosexuality is a crime. In my country it's punishable with death. I like the laws of my country" should have his right of free speech. I think the author of the post was living in Uganda.

The basic question is, should someone who's been raised in Uganda feel free to share his moral views? Even if those views are offensive to Western ears and people might die based on those views?

If you want to have a open discussion about morality I think it's very valuable to have people who aren't raised in Western society participating openly in the discussion. I don't think LessWrong is supposed to be a place where someone from Uganda should be prevented from arguing the moral views in which he believes.

When it comes to politics, communists argue frequently for the necessarity of a revolution. A revolution is an illegal act that includes violence against real people. Moldburg argues frequently for the necessity of a coup d'état.

This policy allows for censoring both the political philosophy of communism as well as the political philosophy of moldbuggianism.
Even when I disagree with both political philosophies I think they should stay within the realm of discourse on LessWrong.

A community which has the goal of finding the correct moral system shouldn't ban ideas because they conflict with the basic Western moral consensus.

TDT suggests that one should push the fat man. It's a thought exercise and it's easy to say "I would push the fat man". In a discussion about pushing fat man's on trolly I think it's valid to switch the discussion from trolly cars to real world examples.

Discussion of torture is similar. If you say "Policemen should torture kidnappers to get the location where the kidnapper hid the victim" you are advocating a crime against real people.

Corporal punishment is illegal violence.

Given the examples I listed in this posts, which are cases where you would choose to censor? Do you think that you could articulate a public criteria about which cases you censor and which you will allow?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2012 03:26:48AM 1 point [-]

Discussion of torture is similar. If you say "Policemen should torture kidnappers to get the location where the kidnapper hid the victim" you are advocating a crime against real people.

No you're advocating changing the law. It's not a crime once/if the law is changed.

Corporal punishment is illegal violence.

Depends on where you are.

Comment author: ChristianKl 25 December 2012 02:19:29AM *  7 points [-]

Bonus:

Consider what's likely to be covered 50 years in the future.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2012 03:12:19AM 5 points [-]

For something like that, consider the algorithm you use to answer it. Then consider why the output of said algorithm should at all correlate with future social trends.

Comment author: Plasmon 25 December 2012 07:03:31AM *  0 points [-]

The thing is discussing desirability of violence and carrying out violence are not necessarily done by the same person. Indeed historically they usually aren't.

Certainly. I consider this to be evidence that the people discussing the desirability of violence do not actually believe what they are saying. They are merely attempting to raise their status in an in-group which hates the group against which violence is being discussed.

Due to hate speech laws, you may have less legal protection than you expect.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2012 02:57:38AM 1 point [-]

Certainly. I consider this to be evidence that the people discussing the desirability of violence do not actually believe what they are saying.

Not necessarily. It could be division of labor since the people who are good at figuring out which violence to do are not necessarily the same people good at doing violence.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 24 December 2012 06:48:24AM 0 points [-]

The problem is that different equivalent formulations will make different things ontologically primitive.

Perhaps in this case we could say "the ontology of the universe is one or the other but I can't tell which, so I'll just have to be uncertain". Do you see any problems with this, or have any better ideas?

How do you know there is a fundamental level, as opposed something like a void cathedral?

Can you give an example of a mathematical formulation of a void cathedral, just to show that such a thing is possible?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 December 2012 04:09:41AM 1 point [-]

Can you give an example of a mathematical formulation of a void cathedral, just to show that such a thing is possible?

One description is something like the following: take the space of computable universes that agree with our observations so far. Rather than putting an Occam prior over it, put an ultrafilter on it. One can pick the ultrafilter so that the set of universes where any particular level is fundamental has measure zero.

Comment author: handoflixue 24 December 2012 09:34:52PM 0 points [-]

I'd ask if there's any evidence of removal but... I can't imagine anything other than Eliezer saying "Yep, I deleted it" would do the trick.

Well, actually, does this software ALLOW deletions, or does deleted comment get replaced with a "Deleted Content" placeholder? Because if it's the latter, a link to that placeholder would be decent evidence :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 December 2012 12:05:45AM 1 point [-]

It only gets replaced with a place holder if there are replies.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 24 December 2012 07:19:01PM 9 points [-]

idiots repeatedly make up crap

Idiots make up crap. You probably can't change this. The more significant you are, the more crap idiots will make up about you. Idiots claim that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim terrorist and that George Bush is mentally subnormal. Not because they have sufficient evidence of these propositions, but because gossip about Obama and Bush is thereby juicier than gossip about my neighbor Marty whom you've never heard of.

Idiots make up crap about projects, too. They say NASA faked the moon landing, vaccines cause autism, and that international food aid contains sterility drugs. It turns out that scurrilous rumors about NASA and the United Nations spread farther than scurrilous rumors about that funny-looking building in the town park which is totally a secret drug lab for the mayor.

But everyone else should be advised that any such 'hypothetical' would have been deleted from LW in accordance with our anti-discussing-hypothetical-violence-against-identifiable-actual-people policy."

How about treating the hypothetical as the stupidity it is? "Dude, beating up AI researchers wouldn't work and you're a jerk for posting it. There are a half dozen obvious reasons it wouldn't work, if you take five minutes to think about it ... and you're a jerk for posting it because it's stirring up shit for no good reason. Seriously, quit it. This is LW, not Conspiracy Hotline."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 08:08:16PM *  8 points [-]

There are a half dozen obvious reasons it wouldn't work, if you take five minutes to think about it

And yet, when attempting to list them, the only one anyone from SIAI can seem think of is bad PR.

Comment author: Desrtopa 24 December 2012 07:50:10PM 0 points [-]

If the violence is a bad idea, which in nearly all cases it probably would be, other commenters are likely to point that out. Having people inspired to carry out acts of violence in spite of other members pointing out that it's unlikely to bear good results is possible, but unlikely, whereas having people judge the community negatively for discussing such things at all is considerably more likely.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 08:00:34PM *  2 points [-]

If the violence is a bad idea, which in nearly all cases it probably would be, other commenters are likely to point that out.

Can you point to an example of this actually happening?

Comment author: wedrifid 24 December 2012 12:59:11AM 1 point [-]

Or Really Extreme Altruism?

This is an example of why I support this kind of censorship. Lesswrong just isn't capable of thinking about such things in a sane way anyhow.

The top comment in that thread demonstrates AnnaSalamon being either completely and utterly mindkilled or blatantly lying about simple epistemic facts for the purpose of public relations. I don't want to see the (now) Executive Director of CFAR doing either of those things. And most others are similarly mindkilled, meaning that I just don't expect any useful or sane discussion to occur on sensitive subjects like this.

(ie. I consider this censorship about as intrusive as forbidding peanuts to someone with a peanut allergy.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 09:32:50AM 7 points [-]

The top comment in that thread demonstrates AnnaSalamon being either completely and utterly mindkilled or blatantly lying about simple epistemic facts for the purpose of public relations. I don't want to see the (now) Executive Director of CFAR doing either of those things.

Yes and if the CFAR Executive Director is either mindkilled or willing to lie for PR, I want to know about it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 08:40:40AM *  12 points [-]

I don't necessarily object to this policy but find it troubling that you can't give a better reason for not discussing violence being a good idea than PR.

Frankly, I find it even more troubling that your standard reasons for why violence is not in fact a good idea seem to be "it's bad PR" and "even if it is we shouldn't say so in public".

As I quote here:

if your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place.

Edit: added link to an example of SIAI people unable to give a better reason against doing violence than PR.

Comment author: Jabberslythe 24 December 2012 06:12:35AM 5 points [-]

I think piracy cases are pretty similar to marijuana cases (they are even less likely to be enforced actually) which he said won't be banned.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 07:54:07AM 8 points [-]

I don't think Konkvistador was talking about software piracy.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 December 2012 02:44:30AM 8 points [-]

It has a net negative effect because people then go around saying (this post will be deleted after policy implementation), "Oh, look, LW is encouraging people to commit suicide and donate the money to them." That is what actually happens. It is the only real significant consequence.

Now it's true that, in general, any particular post may have only a small effect in this direction, because, for example, idiots repeatedly make up crap about how SIAI's ideas should encourage violence against AI researchers, even though none of us have ever raised it even as a hypothetical, and so themselves become the ones who conceptually promote violence. But it would be nice to have a nice clear policy in place we can point to and say, "An issue like this would not be discussable on LW because we think that talking about violence against individuals can conceptually promote such violence, even in the form of hypotheticals, and that any such individuals would justly have a right to complain. We of course assume that you will continue to discuss violence against AI researchers on your own blog, since you care more about making us look bad and posturing your concern, than about the fact that you, yourself, are the one has actually invented, introduced, talked about, and given publicity to, the idea of violence against AI researchers. But everyone else should be advised that any such 'hypothetical' would have been deleted from LW in accordance with our anti-discussing-hypothetical-violence-against-identifiable-actual-people policy."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 07:47:28AM 8 points [-]

"Oh, look, LW is encouraging people to commit suicide and donate the money to them."

Well, are you?

idiots repeatedly make up crap about how SIAI's ideas should encourage violence against AI researchers, even though none of us have ever raised it even as a hypothetical,

True, but you have said things that seem to imply it. Seriously, you can't go around saying "X" and "X->Y" and then object when people start attributing position "Y" to you.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 08:24:35PM *  1 point [-]

But what if none of them know which of them expanded first? There might be several forces colonising the galaxy, and all keeping extremely quiet so that they don't get noticed and destroyed by and older civilisation. Thus no need for a great filter, and even if UFAI were common we wouldn't observe it colonising the galaxy.

This requires either:

  • Interstellar travel is much slower than seems to be possible (a non-trivial fraction of the speed of light)
  • "Colonizing" or rather fully exploiting the resources of a star system or other object takes a long time and is also for a long time more economical than just expanding again to grab the low hanging fruit a few light years away.
  • That no civilization in our galaxy has a head start long enough to win. My best estimate is that a few hundred thousand years before any other is more than enough.

It seems much likelier that we are alone in the galaxy. Either civilizations are pretty rare or we are the oldest one. If the latter is true this seems anthropic evidence in favour of the simulation hypothesis.

Your argument works much better on a much larger scale, for example it does take millions of years for light to travel between galaxies.

But what if none of them know which of them expanded first? There might be several forces colonising the Virgo Supercluster, and all keeping extremely quiet so that they don't get noticed and destroyed by and older civilisation. Thus no need for a great filter, and even if UFAI were common we wouldn't observe it colonising the Virgo Supercluster.

~110 or ~200 million year head start on intelligent civilization building life on a Earth like planet still doesn't seem obviously unlikely.

But what if none of them know which of them expanded first? There might be several forces colonising the visible universe, and all keeping extremely quiet so that they don't get noticed and destroyed by and older civilisation. Thus no need for a great filter, and even if UFAI were common we wouldn't observe it colonising the visible universe.

This is almost certainly true, but at these scales the speed limit of the universe is a potent ally. By the time anyone notices you are doing anything many hundreds of millions of years of you already doing whatever you wanted to do with the local matter have passed.

Also see metric expansion of space. The farther away an object is, the faster it recedes from us.

In response to comment by [deleted] on UFAI cannot be the Great Filter
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 06:19:15AM 1 point [-]

It seems much likelier that we are alone in the galaxy. Either civilizations are pretty rare or we are the oldest one. If the latter is true this seems anthropic evidence in favour of the simulation hypothesis.

Or it could be anthropic evidence that the first mover advantage is so large that the first civilization to expand prevents all others from even developing.

Comment author: Osuniev 23 December 2012 02:36:59AM *  0 points [-]

"How is this relevant?"

It is relevant because i you cannot find any experimental differences betweenn you and a you NOT experiencing, then maybe there is no such difference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 06:02:30AM 1 point [-]

i you cannot find any experimental differences betweenn you and a you NOT experiencing

I cannot present you with evidence that I am experiencing, except maybe by analogy with yourself. I, however, know that I experience because I experience it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Beware Selective Nihilism
Comment author: Wei_Dai 23 December 2012 01:37:01AM 2 points [-]

This topic probably deserves more thought than I've put into it, but it seems to me that you can tell what things are ontologically primitive in in reality by looking at what objects the fundamental laws of physics keep track of and directly operate upon. For example in Newtonian physics these would be individual particles, and in Quantum Mechanics it would just be the wavefunction. (Of course at this point we don't know what the fundamental laws of physics actually are so we can't say what things are ontologically primitive yet, but it seems pretty clear that it can't be human beings.)

it's not obvious to me that this straightforwardly means that those more fundamental physical systems are more ontologically primitive than human beings

Ontological primitiveness seems like a binary property. Either something is kept track of and operated upon directly by the fundamental laws of physics, or it isn't. I can't see what sense it would make to say one thing is "more primitive" than another.

(It may be that there is more than one concept of "ontological primitiveness" that is useful. I think my definition/explanation makes sense in combination with my recent posts and comments, but you may have another one in mind?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 04:51:19AM 1 point [-]

This topic probably deserves more thought than I've put into it, but it seems to me that you can tell what things are ontologically primitive in in reality by looking at what objects the fundamental laws of physics keep track of and directly operate upon. For example in Newtonian physics these would be individual particles, and in Quantum Mechanics it would just be the wavefunction.

The problem is that different equivalent formulations will make different things ontologically primitive.

(Of course at this point we don't know what the fundamental laws of physics actually are so we can't say what things are ontologically primitive yet, but it seems pretty clear that it can't be human beings.)

How do you know there is a fundamental level, as opposed something like a void cathedral?

Comment author: prase 23 December 2012 01:21:21PM 0 points [-]

Can you elaborate? I am not sure if I understand what actually is the argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 04:39:37AM 1 point [-]

For example, I'm less likely to attempt to brake into a house if I think there's a reasonable chance of it having armed defenders.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 23 December 2012 11:30:27AM *  7 points [-]

I tried to get one of my friends to read MoR and he quit after about Chapter 20 because he was getting annoyed at how the children weren't acting like children. I think from his point of view, the disparity you're identifying between Hermione and Harry, say, doesn't count as mishandling Hermione so much as mishandling Harry... as far as my friend's point of view is concerned, Hermione acting silly is a completely appropriate response to what she's been through, and there is something deeply wrong with Harry Potter.

And... this is hard to talk about because I feel like I constantly have to make sure what I'm saying doesn't count as Clueless Male Cluelessly Defending The Patriarchy. I have some small understanding of male privilege. It would be nice if I could be given the benefit of the doubt on this. (Now I'm trying to figure out if that counts as Clueless Male Cluelessly Defending The Patriarchy...)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 03:31:09AM 3 points [-]

And... this is hard to talk about because I feel like I constantly have to make sure what I'm saying doesn't count as Clueless Male Cluelessly Defending The Patriarchy.

Don't worry about it. Complaints about "Clueless Male Cluelessly Defending The Patriarchy" are mostly an excuse to enforce norms about things you can't say.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 02:03:16AM 11 points [-]

I find that threatening hypothetical violence against my interlocutor can be a useful rhetorical device for getting them to think about ethical problems in near mode.

Comment author: Larks 23 December 2012 11:01:04PM 4 points [-]

Does advocating gun control, or increased taxes, count? They would count as violence is private actors did them, and talking about them makes them more likely (by states). Is the public-private distinction the important thing - would advocating/talking about state-sanctioned genocide be ok?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2012 01:54:53AM *  3 points [-]

What about capital punishment and/or corporal punishment?

Comment author: Decius 22 December 2012 03:38:03PM 0 points [-]

What would be different, to you, if you weren't experiencing anything, but were physically identical?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2012 01:44:46AM 3 points [-]

I wouldn't be experiencing anything.

Comment author: kodos96 22 December 2012 07:45:52AM 0 points [-]

??? Ok, skipping over the bizarre irrationality of your making that assumption in the first place, now that I've clarified the situation and told you in no uncertain terms that I am NOT planning on conducting such an experiment (other than inside my head), are you saying you think I'm lying? You sincerely believe that I literally have a pen and paper in front of me, and I'm going through MixedNuts's comment history and writing out sacred names for each occurance of "G-d"? Do you actually believe that? Or are you pulling our collective leg?

In the event that you do actually believe that, what kind of evidence might I provide that would change your mind? Or is this an unfalsifiable belief?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 07:56:14AM 1 point [-]

Oops. See my edit.

Comment author: Decius 21 December 2012 06:01:07AM 0 points [-]

Consider the possibility that you are not experiencing everything that humans do. Can you provide any evidence, even to yourself, that you are? Could a p-zombie provide that same evidence?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 07:42:13AM 1 point [-]

Consider the possibility that you are not experiencing everything that humans do.

How is this relevant? My point is that I'm experiencing what I'm experiencing.

Comment author: Decius 22 December 2012 03:40:16AM 0 points [-]

You're following narrative logic there. Also, using the definitions given, anyone who unilaterally starts a war is Evil, and anyone who starts a war consents to it. It is logically impossible for Good to defeat Evil in a contest that Evil did not willingly choose to engage in.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 07:35:56AM 1 point [-]

What if Evil is actively engaged in say torturing others?

Comment author: kodos96 21 December 2012 05:47:36AM 1 point [-]

What???!!! Are you suggesting that I'm actually planning on conducting the proposed thought experiment? Actually, physically, getting a piece of paper and writing out the words in question? I assure you, this is not the case. I don't even have any blank paper in my home - this is the 21st century after all.

This is a thought experiment I'm proposing, in order to help me better understand MixedNuts' mental model. No different from proposing a thought experiment involving dust motes and eternal torture. Are you saying that Eliezer should be punished for considering such hypothetical situations, a trillion times over?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 07:16:57AM *  2 points [-]

What???!!! Are you suggesting that I'm actually planning on conducting the proposed thought experiment? Actually, physically, getting a piece of paper and writing out the words in question? I assure you, this is not the case. I don't even have any blank paper in my home - this is the 21st century after all.

Yes I know, and my comment was how I would respond in your thought experiment.

(Edited: the first version accidentally implied the opposite of what I intended.)

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 December 2012 05:48:39AM *  2 points [-]

I can't think of any particular reason that wouldn't work, unless Voldemort or the Death Eaters in general have some way of stopping them prior to the attack. Maybe the anti-disapparition jinx (which is an area of effect spell rather than a targeted one according to the Potter wiki) also affects portkeys? Or perhaps there's another spell. The Death Eaters might simply jinx their targets' houses before attacking.

If there weren't some way of preventing people from using them, I'd think having a portkey in the house in a readily accessible place, to teleport out of harm's way, would be standard response for anyone at particular risk in the war. Given that this apparently didn't stop the Death Eaters, I assume that it's preventable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 06:49:04AM 1 point [-]

Given how poorly the war was going for the OotF I wouldn't be surprised if by that point they were suffering from a shortage of safe houses.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 21 December 2012 04:57:29AM *  2 points [-]

If you need more evidence, vg'f rkcyvpvgyl zragvbarq va rneyl Nhgube'f Abgrf obgu gung Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg naq gung Ryvrmre jnf trahvaryl fhecevfrq ng ubj ybat vg gbbx crbcyr gb trg guvf. Punyx vg hc gb n pbzovangvba bs crbcyr orvat hasnzvyvne jvgu pnaba, crbcyr nffhzvat Ryvrmre jnf gevpxvat gurz, naq vyyhfvba bs genafcnerapl...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 06:37:03AM 5 points [-]

I think part of the issue is that Eliezer decided to portray being a good manipulator realistically with the result that Quirrell successfully managed to manipulate half the audience.

Comment author: HalMorris 21 December 2012 04:29:50AM *  2 points [-]

I'm probably about to slip on a banana peel by not being ironic here, considering the fantastic positive karma scores people are racking up with irony but fools rush in and maybe I am one.

One of the major purposes of Less Wrong is allegedly the promotion of more rational ways of thinking among as large a fraction of the general population as we can manage to reach.

I would like to think this is true because unless we find some way to improve the level of thinking among those people who elect our governments, we will either have to live with their mistakes, or attempt to overcome them through force or secrecy and subtlety (like the nice fantasy of Asimov's 2nd foundation). If we do the latter, we will probably, like most intelligentsia who tried to do the right thing for everybody's sake, sell our souls to the devil, and end up killing each other off as the Jacobins and Bolsheviks did (It's a historical and I think thought-provoking fact that they did just that - I hope I'm not surprising too many people with this statement) . Or maybe we will take it upon ourselves to control things via super technology, thereby bringing on the Singularity before we have any idea what is required for that to be anything but a disaster.

But I fear that for most of us it seems that, "as large a fraction of the general population as we can manage to reach" is indeed a tiny minority. If that is so, I don't see how we can avoid the dilemma I mentioned above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 06:23:18AM 2 points [-]

But I fear that for most of us it seems that, "as large a fraction of the general population as we can manage to reach" is indeed a tiny minority.

I'm not sure about that. Where did most of today's ideas about politics and economics, specifically the ones influencing how politics and economies are run, come from? I would argue that they're third or fourth hand versions of ideas originally developed by small circles of "intelligentsia", similar to LW, several generations ago.

Comment author: kilobug 21 December 2012 10:18:38AM 2 points [-]

My own view on gun control is that it's a kind of prisoner's dilemma equilibrium, with the "high gun" equilibrium (US) being the defect situation, and the "low gun" equilibrium (France) being the cooperate situation. And that like many cases of real life prisoner’s dilemma, an "external power" (in that case the state) enforcing the cooperation by adding an additional penalty to defection can work, but doesn't always work.

I definitely think the French situation is much saner than the US one, but I just don't know if it's realistically possible to apply it in the US.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 06:06:09AM 3 points [-]

An important point is that guns take less skill and strength to use effectively than other weapons. Thus someone without much strength or the free time to acquire the relevant skill may well prefer an environment where guns are the strategically dominant weapon. Or as the famous quote goes:

God made some men bigger and stronger than others, but Mr. Colt made all men equal.

Comment author: Desrtopa 22 December 2012 04:21:25AM -2 points [-]

I don't see how it's remarkable. Someone has to decide which sequence articles to rerun when, it's not as if the sequence reruns are random and independent of human intervention.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 04:54:40AM 2 points [-]

Aren't the sequence reruns in chronological order?

Comment author: Emile 21 December 2012 08:45:10PM *  2 points [-]

I think you're missing Eugine's point.

Consider someone that may or may not rape your daughter - the probability that he does so is function of how likely it is you'll spend your day and nights hunting him down in order to slowly torture him to death, with no concern for law or personal safety.

Consider an earthquake that may or may not destroy your house. The probability that it does so is independent of what you precommit to doing afterwards.

Sure, in both cases we can prevent the tragedy through other ways, but that's not the main issue.

(Edit: Oops, thanks Eugine)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2012 04:52:04AM 2 points [-]

Correct.

B.T.W., I think you left out a word like "rape" or "kill" from the first example.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 05:15:39AM 9 points [-]

This is actually a reasonable strategy. A pre-comitment to revenge is useful, but there's no point getting revenge on nature.

Comment author: RobertLumley 20 December 2012 11:16:50PM 4 points [-]

The borders of gun states vs non gun states would be interesting.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 05:02:15AM 4 points [-]

Not necessarily since it's easy to move guns across them.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 December 2012 04:23:22AM *  0 points [-]

So basically: Redomain your utility function by composing it with an adaptor. Where the adaptor is a map from new-ontology -> old-ontology. Construct the adaptor by reverse-engineering your algorithms. Have I got that right?

Edit: No this sucks. Sometimes the old ontology doesn't make sense. I must think more. /Edit

That's a good statement of the problem, but I can see that "reverse engineer your algorithms" is the hard part, and we've just bottled it up as a black box. There's no obvious way to deal with cases that couldn't exist in your old ontology (brain damage can't exist in a simple dualist ontology, for example), or cases where there's a disagreement (teleportation and destructive-scan + print are different when things are ontologically basic, but more advanced physics says they are the same).

Some help may come from the fact that we seem to have some builtin support for ontology-shifting. It does happen successfully, though perhaps not always without loss. On the other hand people with the same ontology don't seem to diverge much by getting their through different update-chains.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Beware Selective Nihilism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 04:41:33AM 1 point [-]

On the other hand people with the same ontology don't seem to diverge much by getting their through different update-chains.

Not necessarily. Compare the positions of Multiheaded and yourself/Konkvistador w.r.t Moldbuggery.

Comment author: Decius 21 December 2012 12:06:44AM 0 points [-]

If it is in principle possible to experience differently from what a quantum scan of the brain and body would indicate, but behave in accordance with physicalism ... how would you know if what you experienced was different from what you thought you experienced, or if what you thought was different from what you honestly claimed that you thought?

Pardon?

How could you tell if you were experiencing something differently from the way a p-zombie would (or, if you are a p-zombie, if you were experiencing something differently from the way a human would)?

But if you are a sentient cat (roll with it) then you have evidence of the epiphenomenal cats, even though this evidence is inherently subjective (since presumably the illusions are also seemingly sentient, in this case.)

In every meaningful way, the cat fairy is a cat. There is no way for an epiphenomenal sentient cat to differentiate itself from a cat fairy, nor any way for a cat fairy to differentiate itself from whatever portions of 'cats' it controls (without violating the constraints on cat fairy behavior). Of course, there's also the conceivability of epiphenomenal sentient ghosts which cannot have any effect on the world but still observe. (That's one of my death nightmares—remaining fully perceptive and cognitive but unable to act in any way.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 03:48:44AM 1 point [-]

How could you tell if you were experiencing something differently from the way a p-zombie would (or, if you are a p-zombie, if you were experiencing something differently from the way a human would)?

I am experiencing something, therefore I am not a p-zombie.

Comment author: Decius 20 December 2012 05:28:54AM 0 points [-]

There's a little bit of 'because secret police don't officially exist' and a little bit of 'because soldiers aren't police'. Also, common language definitions fail pretty hard when strictly interpreting an implied social contract.

There are cases where someone who is a soldier in one context is police in another, and probably some cases where a member of the unofficial police is also a member of the police.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 03:39:46AM 1 point [-]

There's a little bit of 'because secret police don't officially exist'

Well, they generally do actually. They're called 'secret' because people don't know precisely what they're up to, or who is a member.

You can replace them with regular police in my hypothetical if that helps.

Comment author: Decius 19 December 2012 07:53:04PM 0 points [-]

Did all of the participants in the violent conflict voluntarily enter it? If so, then they have consented to the outcome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 03:35:08AM 2 points [-]

Did all of the participants in the violent conflict voluntarily enter it?

Generally not, actually.

Comment author: kodos96 20 December 2012 05:59:39AM *  0 points [-]

Thought experiment: suppose I were to tell you that every time I see you write out "G-d", I responded by writing "God", or perhaps even "YHWH", on a piece of paper, 10 times. Would that knowledge alter your behavior? How about if I instead (or additionally) spoke it aloud?

Edit: downvote explanation requested.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 03:27:59AM 1 point [-]

1) I don't believe you.

2) I don't respond to blackmail.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 December 2012 08:19:05AM *  4 points [-]

I must express deeply cynical suspicion that "meta-Greens" are either ① trying desperately to erect a sophisticated, academy-compatible veneer to justify the unjustifiable actions of object-level Greens; or ② as Clever Arguers, rationalizing defenses for their deeply ingrained Green upbringings, which they are not yet enlightened enough to question.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2012 02:31:22AM 2 points [-]

I must express an objection that you seem to be using cynicism and ad hominem to avoid addressing the substance of my argument.

Comment author: Decius 20 December 2012 12:38:32AM 0 points [-]

I don't see your criticism about the cop and the soldier; is it in a fork that I'm not following, or did I overlook it?

Assuming that the social contract requires criminals to subject themselves to law enforcement:

A member of society consents to be judged according to the laws of that society and treated appropriately. The criminal who violates their contract has already consented to the consequences of default, and that consent cannot be withdrawn. Secret police and soldiers act outside the law enforcement portion of the social contract.

Does that cover your criticism?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 03:54:48AM 2 points [-]

Secret police and soldiers act outside the law enforcement portion of the social contract.

Why?

Comment author: Decius 19 December 2012 08:12:13PM 3 points [-]

Murder (law) and murder (moral) are two different things; I was exclusively referring to murder (moral).

I will clarify: There can be cases where murder (law) is either not immoral or morally required. There are also cases where an act which is murder (moral) is not illegal.

My original point is that many of the actions of Jehovah constitute murder (moral).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 03:52:59AM 2 points [-]

What's your definition of murder (moral)?

Comment author: Alsadius 19 December 2012 09:31:07AM 1 point [-]

Do you think that gods are less powerful than politicians? Good intentions and unlimited power are not always a good combination. I would trust Harry with literal omnipotence more than most people, but he's far too arrogant to be trusted with enormous-but-not-unlimited power, of the sort where he can screw things up better than he can fix them.

Have you ever read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books, by chance? There's a character who I'm very much reminded of by this conversation. (Spoilers from the first 3 books follow)

Gur ybeq ehyre jnfa'g ernyyl n avpr zna, ohg ur jnf npghnyyl n tbbq thl va fbzr vzcbegnag frafrf bs gur jbeyq, naq ur yvgrenyyl hfrq gur Jryy gb fnir gur jbeyq. Ohg uvf fnivat bs gur jbeyq nyfb erdhverq gur rasbeprzrag bs n gehyl njshy srhqny fbpvrgl, jvgu mbzovr nezvrf(gur xbybff), abovyvgl jub jrer rkcrpgrq gb encr crnfnagf naq yrtnyyl erdhverq gb zheqre gurz nsgrejneqf, naq greevoyr crefrphgvba bs uvf bja crbcyr. Naq guvf jnf yvgrenyyl gur orfg ur pbhyq qb gb fnir gur jbeyq, orpnhfr bapr ur unq zbqvsvrq gur jbeyq gb cerirag vgf qrfgehpgvba, uvf cbjre gb punatr vg shegure jnf tbar. Naq va gur raq, ur ehyrq bire uvf perngvba sbe n zvyyraavhz, hagvy ur jnf zheqrerq ol na natel qvffvqrag orsber ur pbhyq znxr vg evtug. Fnmrq vf npghnyyl bzavcbgrag(be ng yrnfg, nf pybfr gb vg nf ur arrqf gb or), fb Fnmrq pna svk uvf zvfgnxrf, ohg gur Ybeq Ehyre jnf genccrq ol uvf bja fhpprff.

V jbeel terngyl gung Uneel zvtug jvaq hc n ybg zber yvxr gur Ybeq Ehyre guna yvxr Fnmrq vs ur fgnegf zrqqyvat jvgu gur ynjf bs gur havirefr.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 03:21:27AM *  2 points [-]

Do you think that gods are less powerful than politicians? Good intentions and unlimited power are not always a good combination. I would trust Harry with literal omnipotence more than most people, but he's far too arrogant to be trusted with enormous-but-not-unlimited power, of the sort where he can screw things up better than he can fix them.

I'm not sure I'd even trust him with omnipotence, since presumably even an omnipotent agent is still bound by the laws of logic and mathematics. In any case omnipotence without omniscience, at least, strikes me as recipe for disaster.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 December 2012 03:45:40AM *  14 points [-]

Moody drops all sorts of information, true and false, in his conversations and, when meeting that person again, will see if they recall it.

This is one of the ways he tests for Polyjuice users, animagi, and evil twins.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 02:56:05AM 2 points [-]

This is also a great technique for mapping out social networks, conspiracies, etc.

Comment author: kilobug 19 December 2012 09:19:13PM 2 points [-]

The thing is that people aren't perfect rationalists, and part of being a good rationalist is acknowledging your own flaws and limitations.

If you accept to kill, you'll kill, even in situations where killing wasn't necessary, because you'll stop searching the hypothesis space when you find a solution that involves killing. Or because you'll estimate that killing one will save two, but your estimation was flawed - you killed one, and yet the two still die. And it's also something you should know about the way humans work, that once you did something once, it's easier to do it again - and the killing curse seems to model that quite well.

Harry putting himself a "I'll not kill" rule is him forcing himself to find solutions that don't require killing. Especially when you see how his "dark side" work, finding solutions to "impossible" problems when really pressured to do it, it doesn't seem irrational from him to test the hypothesis that he, with his rationalist training, and his "dark side" creativity, can find solutions that don't involve killing. And that only if that hypothesis is falsified, he'll resort to killing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 02:45:43AM 5 points [-]

I think Harry's mistake is that he has left himself no setting between, "no killing" and "all bets are off".

Comment author: JenniferRM 20 December 2012 01:06:42AM 13 points [-]

I was like you once (though better perhaps, because I did it earlier) but then I transcended such egocentric pseudo-virtue and reached the true apex of apolitical virtue: faith respecting apologetic detachment.

The critical turning point was when I realized that naive Thing-following of the part of the masses was actually a critical element in the cohesiveness of our civilization. By ignoring Things, and emotionally disengaging from naive Blue/Green loyalty I was actually subtly defecting on the constituent civic elements of our goodarchy for the sake of scoring points in a silly meta-political status game.

Tragically, my self modification in this regard was so successful that I could no longer participate in good faith in the hallowed and respectable rallies of the Blues nor could I non-ironically march with the Greens in their enthusiastic chariot parades... even as I now respect both of these activities. However, to authentically respect the rustically charming virtue of my people's simplistic social forms I have found myself hanging to the side and modestly cheering for the good hearted participants on both sides of this ancient (and ultimately adaptively balancing) social division. Given the realities of inferential distance, I generally fear that if I say too much I might accidentally turn some of these good hearted folk into the sort of cynical and egocentric person that you've revealed yourself to be by ostentatiously revealing your ignorance of the Thing while claiming a privileged epistemic position.

However, worry not! You too can support the traditional forms of our goodarchy merely by recognizing that you are unmindfully flawed as I once was. You can join me in being mindfully flawed in a way that minimizes damage to the naive virtue embodied by those who are akin to the pH balanced byproducts of chemical reactions common to our great planet.

However... I would be remiss if I failed to mention that you should give me credit for your newly acquired awareness of your "rationally" induced civic defects. Explaining the sources of one's virtue is itself a virtue, and I'd clearly be the one who deserves the credit for your virtue, even as I recognize the tragic and accidental circumstances that lead to my ability to be more benevolently prudent than you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 02:39:51AM *  8 points [-]

I would like to point out that the position you're arguing for could reasonably be called meta-Green. The meta-Blue position would be to attempt to destroy the whole Blue-Green political system on the grounds that it's irrational. As a meta-Green myself, I agree this would be a bad idea, but now that I've pointed this out, you should have an easier time marching non-ironically with the Greens.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 19 December 2012 09:00:50PM *  0 points [-]

In the paragraph you refer to:

Nevertheless, this approach hardly seems capable of being extended to work in a future where many people may have nontraditional mind architectures, or have a zillion copies of themselves running on all kinds of strange substrates, or be merged into amorphous group minds with no clear boundaries between individuals.

Maybe we have no substantive disagreement. If your point is that a million copy super intelligence will have issues in morality because of their ontologies that we don't currently have, then I agree. Me, I think it's kind of cheeky to be prescribing solutions for the million copy super intelligence - I think he's smarter than I am, doesn't need my help much, and may not ever exist anyway. I'm not here to rain on that parade, but I'm not interested in joining it either.

However, you seemed to be using present tense for the crisis, and I just don't see one now. Real people now don't have big complicated ontological problems lacking clear solutions. That was my point.

The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it - just knock it off.

I find discussions of metaethics interesting, particularly in terms of the conceptual confusion involved. It seemed that you were getting at such issues, but I couldn't locate a concrete and currently relevant issue of that type from your post. So I directly asked for the concretes applicable now. You gave a couple. I don't find either particularly problematic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 02:15:16AM 1 point [-]

The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it - just knock it off.

I don't see how this addresses the problem.

In response to comment by [deleted] on By Which It May Be Judged
Comment author: Decius 19 December 2012 12:55:28AM 0 points [-]

"Murder" is roughly shorthand for "intentional nonconsensual interaction which results in the intended outcome of the death of a sentient."

If the secret police break down my door, nothing done to them is nonconsensual.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 December 2012 05:47:59AM 4 points [-]

If the secret police break down my door,

Any half-way competent secret police wouldn't need to.

nothing done to them is nonconsensual.

You seem to have a very non-standard definition of "nonconsensual".

Comment author: Decius 19 December 2012 12:43:07AM 0 points [-]

Well, if I was wondering if a uniformed soldier was a combatant, I wouldn't ask them. Why would I ask the secret police if they are active participants in violence?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 December 2012 05:46:47AM 1 point [-]

So cop-killing doesn't count as murder?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes December 2012
Comment author: simplicio 18 December 2012 05:12:22PM 3 points [-]

Another example: a person who commits a murder may be able to point to a troubled past - for example, an abusive parent. The implication is that responsibility is a conserved quantity (like probability mass), so if the parent is guilty, then the murderer must be LESS guilty - that's what the 'Officer Kripke' defense wants us to conclude, and that is the (characteristically leftist) misunderstanding of responsibility.

The symmetrical (characteristically conservative) mistake is to imagine that any discourse about exogenous factors contributing to a willful bad act (bad education etc.) is 'letting the criminals off the hook.'

Broadly speaking, we want to increase the prevalence of moral luck (perhaps by some manner of social engineering) while still holding individuals as morally responsible as before.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 December 2012 05:29:47AM 0 points [-]

Broadly speaking, we want to increase the prevalence of moral luck (perhaps by some manner of social engineering) while still holding individuals as morally responsible as before.

I would like to point out that this is more-or-less what the system was focused on doing before "liberals" started disassembling it.

Comment author: Eneasz 17 December 2012 05:12:56PM 1 point [-]

I have always assumed that their magics cannot interact in any way without destroying each other and having devastating effects on the casters. Likewise, they can't touch each other. Thus the sense of doom when they approach each other, and the need for Harry to completely undo his transfiguration (as Quirrell couldn't cast anything on it), and him wearing a glove so he wouldn't directly touch Quirrell's transfigured rocket. In the duel the two spells actually touched, destroying both. Since magics are an extension of a person (hypothetical) it was almost like the two of them touched physically. Tossing his wand helped Quirrell put some magical distance between the two of them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2012 05:05:06AM 2 points [-]

Thus the sense of doom when they approach each other,

So the HPMoR universe is kind enough to warn people with a sense of doom before they do something likely to result in a magically devastating effect. Interesting.

Comment author: Decius 17 December 2012 10:27:08PM 0 points [-]

Torture and murder are not the most moral things to do in 1.00000 00000 00000*10^2% of exemplified situations which require moral judgement.

Are you going to taboo "torture" and "murder" now?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2012 04:23:04AM 6 points [-]

Torture and murder are not the most moral things to do in 1.00000 00000 00000*10^2% of exemplified situations which require moral judgement.

Well, that's clearly false. Your chances of having to kill a member of the secret police of an oppressive state are much more than 1/10^16, to say nothing of less clear cut examples.

Comment author: handoflixue 17 December 2012 09:14:50PM 2 points [-]

I've got a lot of exposure to "golden age" science fiction and fantasy, so going back a few decades isn't hard for me. I just don't get exposed to many other good sources. The "classics" seem to generally fail to capture that foreignness.

If you have recommendations, especially a broader method than just naming a couple authors, I'd love to hear it. Most of my favourite authors have a strong focus on foreign cultures, either exploring them or just having characters from diverse backgrounds.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2012 04:07:37AM 1 point [-]

I've got a lot of exposure to "golden age" science fiction and fantasy, so going back a few decades isn't hard for me.

Which time period do you mean by this? "Golden age of science fiction" typically refers to the 1940's and 1950's, "golden age of fantasy" to the late 1970's and early 1980's. If you mean the latter time period, read stuff from the former as a start. Also try going back at least a century to the foundational fantasy authors, e.g., Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Morris's The Well at the World's End. Go even further back to things like Treasure Island, or The Three Musketeers. Or even further back to the days when people believed the stuff in their "fantasy" could actually happen. Read Dante's Divine Comedy, Thomas Moore's Utopia, an actual chivalric romance (I haven't read any so I can't give recommendations).

A good rule of thumb is that you should experience values dissonance while reading them. A culture whose values don't make you feel uncomfortable isn't truly alien. Also for this reason, avoid modern adaptations as these tend to do their best clean up the politically incorrect parts and otherwise modernize the worldview.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 16 December 2012 11:12:56PM -1 points [-]

... in a world where men get pregnant?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2012 03:20:52AM 3 points [-]

Really, I'm impressed it took this long for someone to point out one of the fundamental problems of the gender-swap test.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 December 2012 11:58:06PM 0 points [-]

That's not helpful, especially in context.

Apart from implying different subjective preferences to mine when it comes to conversation this claim is actually objectively false as a description of reality.

The 'taboo!' demand in this context was itself a borderline (in as much as it isn't actually the salient feature that needs elaboration or challenge and the meaning should be plain to most non disingenuous readers). But assuming there was any doubt at all about what 'contrived' meant in the first place my response would, in fact, help make it clear through illustration what kind of thing 'contrived' was being used to represent (which was basically the literal meaning of the word).

Your response indicates that the "Taboo contrived!" move may have had some specific rhetorical intent that you don't want disrupted. If so, by all means state it. (I am likely to have more sympathy for whatever your actual rejection of decius's comment is than for your complaint here.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2012 12:46:29AM 0 points [-]

Decius considered the possibility that

torture and murder are objectively the most moral things to do in noncontrived circumstances.

In order to address this possibility, I need to know what Decius considers "contrived" and not just what the central example of a contrived circumstance is. In any case, part of my point was to force Decius to think more clearly about under what circumstances are torture and killing justified rather than simply throwing all the examples he knows in the box labeled "contrived".

Comment author: wedrifid 16 December 2012 11:26:31PM *  0 points [-]

Taboo "contrived".

"The kind of obscure technical exceptions that wedrifid will immediately think of the moment someone goes and makes a fully general claim about something that is almost true but requires qualifiers or gentler language."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 11:30:20PM 0 points [-]

That's not helpful, especially in context.

Comment author: Decius 15 December 2012 02:32:31AM 0 points [-]

Suppose that the writer of the book isn't moral. What would the text of the book say about the morality of the writer?

Or we could assume that the writer of the book takes only moral actions, and from there try to construct which actions are moral. Clearly, one possibility is that it is moral to blatantly lie when writing the book, and that the genocide, torture, and mass murder didn't happen. That brings us back to the beginning again.

The other possibility is too horrible for me to contemplate: That torture and murder are objectively the most moral things to do in noncontrived circumstances.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 11:22:41PM 1 point [-]

The other possibility is too horrible for me to contemplate: That torture and murder are objectively the most moral things to do in noncontrived circumstances.

Taboo "contrived".

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 December 2012 03:51:19PM 8 points [-]

The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.

Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions, and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Robert Peele

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 11:08:01PM 2 points [-]

The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Agreed. It's also not the lack of police visibly dealing with crime.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 December 2012 11:35:39AM *  1 point [-]

I've been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life

People getting their way to the unfair detriment of others through arse-licking does happen a lot where I am, and not always in sexualized ways. (And it's not the “sexualized ways” part that bothers me,¹ it's the “unfair detriment of others” part.)


  1. Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 10:54:29PM 1 point [-]

Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.

Picture that situation gender-swapped.

Comment author: timtyler 15 December 2012 10:21:14PM 0 points [-]

A dictatorship isn't the only resolution to Arrow's theorem. Anyway, this sounds like a rather weak argument against the position.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 04:50:35AM 2 points [-]

It's an outside view argument.

In response to comment by [deleted] on By Which It May Be Judged
Comment author: Decius 15 December 2012 12:41:27AM 0 points [-]

Code, instructions, and many things that can be expressed as information are only incidentally knowledge. There's nothing evil about writing a program and then deleting it; there is something evil about passing a law which prohibits programming from being taught, because programmers might create an unfriendly AI.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 04:21:47AM 1 point [-]

Code, instructions, and many things that can be expressed as information are only incidentally knowledge.

Well, the knowledge from the tree appears to also have been knowledge of this kind.

In response to comment by [deleted] on By Which It May Be Judged
Comment author: handoflixue 14 December 2012 10:30:48PM 1 point [-]

The race was explicitly designed to try and avoid "humans in funny suits", and have a culture that's probably more foreign than the 1960s. But I'm only 29, and haven't traveled outside of English-speaking countries, so take that with a dash of salt!

On a 0-10 scale, with myself at 0, humans in funny suits at 1, and the 1960s at 2, I'd rate my creation as a 4, and a subset of humanity exists in the 4-5 range. Around 5, I have trouble with the idea that there's coherent intelligent reasoning happening, because the process is just completely lost on me, and I don't think I'd be able to easily assign anything more than a 5, much less even speculate on what a 10 would look like.

Trying to give a specific answer to "how alien is it" is a lot harder than it seems! :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 04:12:55AM 3 points [-]

The race was explicitly designed to try and avoid "humans in funny suits", and have a culture that's probably more foreign than the 1960s. But I'm only 29, and haven't traveled outside of English-speaking countries, so take that with a dash of salt!

Well reading fiction (and non-fiction) for which English speakers of your generation weren't the target audience is a good way to start compensating.

In response to comment by [deleted] on By Which It May Be Judged
Comment author: AlanCrowe 14 December 2012 01:29:35PM 0 points [-]

My original draft contained a long ramble about permanent Malthusian immiseration. History is a bit of a race. Can society progress fast enough to reach the demographic transition? Or does population growth redistribute all the gains in GDP so that individuals get poorer, life gets harder, the demographic transition doesn't happen,... If I were totally evil and wanted to fuck over as many people as a could, as hard as a I could, my strategy for maximum holocaust is as follows.

  • Establish free mother-and-baby clinics
  • Provide free food for the under fives
  • Leverage the positive reputation from the first two to promote religions that oppose contraception
  • Leverage religious faith to get contraception legally prohibited

If I can get population growth to out run technological gains in productivity I can engineer a Limits to growth style crash. That will be vastly worse than any wickedness that I could be work by directly harming people.

Unfortunately, I had been reading various articles discussing the 40th Anniversary of the publication of the Limits to Growth book. So I deleted the set up for the moral dilemma from my comment, thinking that my readers will be over-familiar with concerns about permanent Malthusian immiseration, and pick up immediately on "aid as sabotage", and the creation of permanent traps.

My original comment was a disaster, but since I'm pig-headed I'm going to have another go at saying what it might mean for ones moral intuitions to throw error codes:

Imagine that you (a good person) have volunteered to help out in sub-Saharan Africa, distributing free food to the under fives :-) One day you find out who is paying for the food. Dr Evil is paying; it is part of his plan for maximum holocaust...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 04:04:44AM *  1 point [-]

Imagine that you (a good person) have volunteered to help out in sub-Saharan Africa, distributing free food to the under fives :-) One day you find out who is paying for the food. Dr Evil is paying; it is part of his plan for maximum holocaust...

I would be very happy that Dr. Evil appears to be maximally incompetent.

Seriously, why are you basing your analysis on a 40 year old book whose predictions have failed to come true?

Comment author: Armok_GoB 14 December 2012 02:06:31AM 0 points [-]

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, problem solved.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2012 09:03:33PM 1 point [-]

This creates a trivial inconvenience.

Comment author: Ghatanathoah 14 December 2012 10:50:58AM 0 points [-]

Your comment is mostly correct, except this is a total stawman of Roissy's position.

I was under the impression that Roissy's position was:

  1. People want to spread their genes.
  2. People want to choose who they spread their genes with through sexual reproduction in order to increase the odds that the other person's genes will be good.
  3. Rape is bad because if it successfully impregnates the victim it causes them to spread genes that they don't want to spread.
  4. Cuckoldry also results in an individual spreading genes they don't want to spread.
  5. Therefore, cuckoldry is as bad as rape.

Have I gotten this incorrect in some fashion?

Now, of course I don't deny that cuckoldry is a truly awful thing to do to someone. But that particular chain of reasoning as to why it is awful is really, really bad.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2012 08:48:51PM 5 points [-]

I haven't read Roissy, but Robin Hanson's argument for why cuckoldry is as bad as rape was based on a survey of men showing that most would rather be raped than cuckolded.

Furthermore, the fact that Roissy isn't interested in having children shows that he's not confusing evolution's motives with those of humans.

Comment author: Posterity 13 December 2012 05:45:58AM 2 points [-]

Analogous in what way?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 December 2012 04:06:55AM 2 points [-]

Both involve taking a mathematical result about the only way to do something in a way that satisfies certain intuitively appealing properties, and using it to argue that we therefore should do it that way.

Comment author: MixedNuts 14 December 2012 02:50:32AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, or at least put the option to be evil somewhere other than right in the middle of the garden with a "Do not eat, or else!" sign on it for a species you created vulnerable to reverse psychology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 December 2012 03:21:14AM 2 points [-]

My understanding is that the vulnerability to reverse psychology was one of the consequences of eating the fruit.

Comment author: MugaSofer 13 December 2012 09:06:20AM 1 point [-]

Well ... is it? Would you notice if your morals changed when you weren't looking?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 December 2012 03:05:51AM 1 point [-]

I probably would, but then again I'm in the habit of comparing the out of my moral intuitions with stored earlier versions of that output.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 05:42:53AM 9 points [-]

This type of argument strikes me as analogous to using Arrow's theorem to argue that we must implement a dictatorship.

Comment author: shminux 10 December 2012 04:00:55PM *  2 points [-]

Scott Adams on the same subject, the morning after your post:

fairness isn't a real thing. It's just a psychological phenomenon that is easily manipulated.

[...]

To demonstrate my point that fairness is about psychology and not the objective world, I'll ask you two questions and I'd like you to give me the first answer that feels "fair" to you. Don't read the other comments until you have your answer in your head.

Here are the questions:

A retired businessman is worth one billion dollars. Thanks to his expensive lifestyle and hobbies, his money supports a number of people, such as his chauffeur, personal assistant, etc. Please answer these two questions:

  1. How many jobs does a typical retired billionaire (with one billion in assets) support just to service his lifestyle? Give me your best guess.

  2. How many jobs should a retired billionaire (with one billion in assets) create for you to feel he has done enough for society such that his taxes should not go up? Is ten jobs enough? Twenty?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 04:59:20AM 1 point [-]

fairness isn't a real thing. It's just a psychological phenomenon that is easily manipulated.

I could replace "fairness" with "truth" in that sentence and come up with equally good examples.

Comment author: shminux 12 December 2012 12:49:21AM 0 points [-]

All good points. I was mostly thinking about an evolved paperclip maximizer, which may or may not be a result of a fooming paperclip-maximizing AI.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 04:46:24AM 1 point [-]

An evolved agent wouldn't evolve to maximize paper clips.

Comment author: MugaSofer 11 December 2012 09:09:35AM 1 point [-]

Cached thoughts regularly supersede actual moral thinking, like all forms of thinking, and I am capable of remembering this experience. Am I misunderstanding your comment?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 04:42:59AM 1 point [-]

My point is that in order to "fully reprogram" someone it is also necessary to clear their "moral cache" at the very least.

Comment author: RobbBB 11 December 2012 02:55:52AM *  2 points [-]

Eliezer thinks we'll someday be able to reduce or eliminate Magical Reality Fluid from our model, and I know of no argument (analogous to the Hard Problem for phenomenal properties) that would preclude this possibility without invoking qualia themselves. Personally, I'm an agnostic about Many Worlds, so I'm even less inclined than EY to think that we need Magical Reality Fluid to recover the Born probabilities.

I also don't reify logical constructs, so I don't believe in a bonus category of Abstract Thingies. I'm about as monistic as physicalists come. Mathematical platonists and otherwise non-monistic Serious Scientifically Minded People, I think, do have much better reason to adopt dualism than I do, since the inductive argument against Bonus Fundamental Categories is weak for them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 04:11:14AM *  1 point [-]

Eliezer thinks we'll someday be able to reduce or eliminate Magical Reality Fluid from our model, and I know of no argument (analogous to the Hard Problem for phenomenal properties) that would preclude this possibility without invoking qualia themselves.

I could define the Hard Problem of Reality, which really is just an indirect way of talking about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Personally, I'm an agnostic about Many Worlds, so I'm even less inclined than EY to think that we need Magical Reality Fluid to recover the Born probabilities.

As Eliezer discuses in the post, Reality Fluid isn't just for Many Worlds, it also relates to questions about stimulation.

I also don't reify logical constructs

Here's my argument for why you should.

Comment author: JonCB 11 December 2012 03:18:06AM 1 point [-]

What is your evidence for stating that human-betterness is "obviously better" than clippy-betterness? Your comment reads to me you're either arguing that 3 > Potato or that there exists a universally compelling argument. I could however be wrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2012 03:58:48AM 0 points [-]

that there exists a universally compelling argument.

There exist no universal compelling arguments about physical things either, but that doesn't stop us from calling things true.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Multiheaded 10 December 2012 09:34:16AM *  0 points [-]

Their more scientifically minded members as say John Derbyshire (who you consider to have a grim heart) are rather reasonable.

....

If, on the other hand, group underachievement is a consequence of the laws of biology working on human populations, there is no blame to assign. The fact of group inequalities, even in societies that have striven mightily to remove them, is as natural and inevitable as individual inequality, which nobody minds very much. The only proper object of blame is Mother Nature; and she is capable of inflicting far worse things on us than mere statistical disparities between ancient inbred populations... ...Under a reigning philosophy of candor and realism, each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he's been dealt, in liberty and equality under the law.

This might fit my definition of "reason"... but what is noble or compassionate about it? How is Derbyshire preaching acceptance of inequality and submission to Nature different from the Catholic Church preaching acceptance of death and submission to God? If you think it reasonable to loathe death, why would you not loathe the genetic lottery?

So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

I support Eliezer completely. Therefore I have to oppose Derbyshire unflinchingly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 December 2012 08:30:51AM 2 points [-]

If you think it reasonable to loathe death, why would you not loathe the genetic lottery?

If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

Do you also believe that it's a crime against humanity for God not to have given all humans (or even any humans) AGI-level intelligence?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 December 2012 08:02:23AM 3 points [-]

It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO. Rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.

-- Imre Lakatos, ‘‘Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,’’

Comment author: Ghatanathoah 11 December 2012 11:12:22AM *  9 points [-]

I believe that a large portion of people who think feminism and ev-psych conflict are making some form of the mistake Eliezer describes in The Evolutionary Cognitive Boundary.

When someone says, "People do X to signal Y", I tend to hear, "People do X when they consciously or subconsciously expect it to signal Y", not, "Evolution built people to do X as an adaptation that executes given such-and-such circumstances, because in the ancestral environment, X signaled Y."....

....All that should matter for saying "The parent truly cares about the child" is that the grief in the parent's mind is cognitively real and unconditional and not even subconsciously for the sake of any ulterior motive....

.....Of course the emotional circuitry is ultimately there for evolutionary-historical reasons. But only conscious or subconscious computations can gloom up my day; natural selection is an alien thing whose 'decisions' can't be the target of my cynicism or admiration.

To be more explicit, many feminists probably get upset at many of the ideas that ev-psych proposes because, if one does not keep the evolutionary-cognitive boundary in mind, those theories make women (and men too, come to think of it) look like calculating, manipulative sociopaths.

For instance, if an evolutionary psychologist says "Evolution caused women to be attracted to certain types of men in order to increase the odds of them obtaining good genes and support for their children," someone who isn't keeping the EvCog Boundary in mind will probably hear "Women are cold, calculating, conniving monsters who manipulate men and string them along so they can get good genes for their kids and then trap men into raising them."

Now, that's obvious nonsense. The vast majority of women are not manipulating anyone, they are not making some secret calculations about how to obtain good genes for their kids, and are not trying to trap men. They are just executing adaptations. The attraction they feel is totally genuine and sincere. It is natural selection that did all the cruel, amoral calculation. No one should be held personally responsible for the actions an amoral natural force took when it designed them.

And just to be clear, I'm certainly not claiming that all women are attracted to certain types of men or anything like that. It was just the first relevant ev-psych theory that came to mind.

It doesn't help, of course, that there are large groups of men who are dedicated to insulting and condemning women; and that these men have realized that holding women personally responsible for the "motives" that natural selection had when it "designed" them is a great way to give their unpleasantness a scientific veneer. That's basically what Roissy (or Heartiste, as I think he's called now) does. For instance, that whole "cuckolding is the same as rape" nonsense of his is based on the (dead wrong) belief that people consciously desire to spread their genes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 December 2012 07:42:36AM 9 points [-]

It doesn't help, of course, that there are large groups of men who are dedicated to insulting and condemning women; and that these men have realized that holding women personally responsible for the "motives" that natural selection had when it "designed" them is a great way to give their unpleasantness a scientific veneer. That's basically what Roissy (or Heartiste, as I think he's called now) does. For instance, that whole "cuckolding is the same as rape" nonsense of his is based on the (dead wrong) belief that people consciously desire to spread their genes.

Your comment is mostly correct, except this is a total stawman of Roissy's position.

Comment author: RobbBB 11 December 2012 02:12:00AM *  2 points [-]

I'm not a positivist, and I don't argue like one. I think nearly all the arguments against the possibility of zombies are very silly, and I agree there's good prima facie evidence for dualism (though I think that in the final analysis the weight of evidence still favors physicalism). Indeed, it's a good thing I don't think zombies are impossible, since I think that we are zombies.

What's your reason for believing this?

My reason is twofold: Copernican, and Occamite.

Copernican reasoning: Most of the universe does not consist of humans, or anything human-like; so it would be very surprising to learn that the most fundamental metaphysical distinction between facts ('subjective' v. 'objective,' or 'mental' v. 'physical,' or 'point-of-view-bearing' v. 'point-of-view-lacking, 'or what-have-you) happens to coincide with the parts of the universe that bear human-like things, and the parts that lack human-like things. Are we really that special? Is it really more likely that we would happen to gain perfect, sparkling insight into a secret Hidden Side to reality, than that our brains would misrepresent their own ways of representing themselves to themselves?

Occamite reasoning: One can do away with the Copernican thought by endorsing panpsychism; but this worsens the bite from the principle of parsimony. A universe with two kinds of fundamental fact is less likely, relative to the space of all the models, then one with one kind (or with many, many more than two kinds). It is a striking empirical fact that, consciousness aside, we seem to be able to understand the whole rest of reality with a single grammatical kind of description -- the impersonal, 'objective' kind, which states a fact without specifying for whom the fact is. The world didn't need to turn out to be that way, just as it didn't need to look causally structured. This should give us reason to think that there may not be distinctions between fundamental kinds of facts, rather than that we happen to have lucked out and ended up in one of the universes with very few distinctions of this sort.

Neither of these considerations, of course, is conclusive. But they give us some reason to at least take seriously physicalist hypotheses, and to weight their theoretical costs and benefits against the dualists'.

One problem with this line of thought is that we've just thrown out the very concept of "experience" which is the basis of empiricism.

We've thrown out the idea of subjective experience, of pure, ineffable 'feels,' of qualia. But we retain any functionally specifiable analog of such experience. In place of qualitative red, we get zombie-red, i.e., causal/functional-red. In place of qualitative knowledge, we get zombie-knowledge.

And since most dualists already accepted the causal/functional/physical process in question (they couldn't even motivate the zombie argument if they didn't consider the physical causally adequate), there can be no parsimony argument against the physicalists' posits; the only argument will have to be a defense of the claim that there is some sort of basic, epistemically infallible acquaintance relation between the contents of experience and (themselves? a Self??...). But making such an argument, without begging the question against eliminativism, is actually quite difficult.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 02:47:02AM 1 point [-]

Occamite reasoning: One can do away with the Copernican thought by endorsing panpsychism; but this worsens the bite from the principle of parsimony. A universe with two kinds of fundamental fact is less likely, relative to the space of all the models, then one with one kind (or with many, many more than two kinds). It is a striking empirical fact that, consciousness aside, we seem to be able to understand the whole rest of reality with a single grammatical kind of description -- the impersonal, 'objective' kind, which states a fact without specifying for whom the fact is. The world didn't need to turn out to be that way, just as it didn't need to look causally structured. This should give us reason to think that there may not be distinctions between fundamental kinds of facts, rather than that we happen to have lucked out and ended up in one of the universes with very few distinctions of this sort.

The problem is that we already have two kinds of fundamental facts, (and I would argue we need more). Consider Eliezer's use of "magical reality fluid" in this post. If you look at context, it's clear that he's trying to ask whether the inhabitants of the non-causally stimulated universes poses qualia without having to admit he cares about qualia.

Comment author: Alejandro1 10 December 2012 07:34:13PM *  1 point [-]

The obvious theist counter-reply is that the structure of God's desires is logically related to the essence of God, in a way that you can't have the goodness without the God nor more than God without the goodness, they are part of the same logical structure. (Aquinas: "God is by essence goodness itself")

I think this is a self-consistent metaethics as metaethics goes. The problem is that God is at the same time part of the realm of abstract logical structures like "goodness", and a concrete being that causes the world to exist, causes miracles, has desires, etc. The fault is not in the metaethics, it is in the confused metaphysics that allows for a concrete being to "exist essentially" as part of its logical structure.

ETA: of course, you could say the metaethics is self-consistent but also false, because it locates "goodness" outside ourselves (our extrapolated desires) which is where it really is. But for the Thomist I am currently emulating, "our extrapolated desires" sound a lot like "our final cause, the perfection to which we tend by our essence" and God is the ultimate final cause. The problem is again the metaphysics (in this case, using final causes without realizing they are mind projecting fallacy), not the metaethics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 02:32:22AM 3 points [-]

The problem is that God is at the same time part of the realm of abstract logical structures like "goodness", and a concrete being that causes the world to exist, causes miracles, has desires, etc.

As I explained here, it's perfectly reasonable to describe mathematical abstractions as causes.

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 December 2012 04:59:12PM *  3 points [-]

Wouldn't it be easier to have the programee remember themself as misunderstanding morality - like a reformed racist who previously preferred options that harmed minorities. I know when I gain more insight into my ethics I remember making decisions that, in retrospect, are incomprehensible (unless I deliberately keep in mind how I thought I should act.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 02:14:47AM 1 point [-]

Wouldn't it be easier to have the programee remember themself as misunderstanding morality

That depends on the details of how the human brain stores goals and memories.

Comment author: RobbBB 11 December 2012 01:23:49AM 2 points [-]

We have prima facie reason to accept both of these claims:

  1. A list of all the objective, third-person, physical facts about the world does not miss any facts about the world.
  2. Which specific qualia I'm experiencing is functionally/causally underdetermined; i.e., there doesn't seem even in principle to be any physically exhaustive reason redness feels exactly as it does, as opposed to feeling like some alien color.

1 is physicalism; 2 is the hard problem. Giving up 1 means endorsing dualism or idealism. Giving up 2 means endorsing reductive or eliminative physicalism. All of these options are unpalatable. Reductionism without eliminating anything seems off the table, since the conceivability of zombies seems likely to be here to stay, to remain as an 'explanatory gap.' But eliminativism about qualia means completely overturning our assumption that whatever's going on when we speak of 'consciousness' involves apprehending certain facts about mind. I think this last option is the least terrible out of a set of extremely terrible options; but I don't think the eliminative answer to this problem is obvious, and I don't think people who endorse other solutions are automatically crazy or unreasonable.

That said, the problem is in some ways just academic. Very few dualists these days think that mind isn't perfectly causally correlated with matter. (They might think this correlation is an inexplicable brute fact, but fact it remains.) So none of the important work Eliezer is doing here depends on monism. Monism just simplifies matters a great deal, since it eliminates the worry that the metaphysical gap might re-introduce an epistemic gap into our model.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 01:53:39AM 1 point [-]
  1. A list of all the objective, third-person, physical facts about the world does not miss any facts about the world.

What's your reason for believing this? The standard empiricist argument against zombies is that they don't constrain anticipated experience.

One problem with this line of thought is that we've just thrown out the very concept of "experience" which is the basis of empiricism. The other problem is that the statement is false: the question of whether I will become a zombie tomorrow does constrain my anticipated experiences; specifically, it tells me whether I should anticipate having any.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Multiheaded 10 December 2012 05:34:01PM *  1 point [-]

each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he's been dealt

But look, he demands that we accept it as a tolerable state of affairs! Eliezer says the opposite - yes, no particular person is to blame, but things are still horrible; we're still living in a nightmare. To borrow from left-wing jargon again, I want a right to negativity here, a forceful statement that the default/normal/natural condition is awful, even with no-one to blame, and that there is an ethical imperative to ameliorate it.

Derbyshire's article should have begun with "oughts", his "is" statements might be true but they're insufficient for humans. The fact that you being born e.g. black and in the slums and now you're likely fucked and maladapted is no-one else's fault does not mean that you are not entitled to scream, to express anguish. And dude, there's a lot of anguish!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 01:22:56AM 3 points [-]

But look, he demands that we accept it as a tolerable state of affairs!

Taboo "tolerable".

Eliezer says the opposite - yes, no particular person is to blame, but things are still horrible; we're still living in a nightmare. To borrow from left-wing jargon again, I want a right to negativity here, a forceful statement that the default/normal/natural condition is awful, even with no-one to blame, and that there is an ethical imperative to ameliorate it.

What ethical system are you using to make that assertion?

Eliezer is a utilitarian. Yes, it would improve overall utility to ameliorate this particular problem, there are also hundreds of other problems whose solution would also improve utility, and frankly by any measure of urgency or returns to effort, this one really isn't even in the top 100.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 10 December 2012 07:08:32AM *  1 point [-]

Yes...i'm confused. Is this supposed to be a flaw in the definition? The idea here is to use relative obscurity to describe the degree to which a site is visited only by Internet users who do heavy exploring. There are only a few "shallow" regions... Facebook, Wikipedia, twitter...the shallowest being google. These are all high traffic and even people who never use computers have heard some of these words. There are many deep regions, on the other hand, and most are disconnected.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 12:48:52AM *  1 point [-]

Yes...i'm confused. Is this supposed to be a flaw in the definition?

It is if you then proceed to claim to have statistics over users of the "deep internet".

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 December 2012 10:20:18PM -2 points [-]

In the cartoon Dilbert doesn't really provide rational evidence for his claim either.

In this case there clear rational evidence that evolution evolved human's to try to show their high status by debating. There's little rational evidence that evolution gave people the goal of finding truth.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 12:12:14AM *  4 points [-]

In the cartoon Dilbert doesn't really provide rational evidence for his claim either.

That doesn't mean he doesn't have any.

In this case there clear rational evidence that evolution evolved human's to try to show their high status by debating. There's little rational evidence that evolution gave people the goal of finding truth.

If the only point of debating was status, people would evolve not to listen to what anyone else says. Furthermore, the results of debates and human reasoning (flawed as it is) is correlated with truth; if this wasn't the case, we'd still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 10 December 2012 01:24:01AM *  -1 points [-]

Yeah...by "internet" what I meant was sites that most people do not know about - sites that you would only stumble upon in the course of extensive net usage. I once described it to a friend as "deep" vs "shallow" internet, with depth corresponding to the extent to which a typical visitor to the website uses the internet. Even within a website (say reddit) a smaller sub-reddit would be "deeper" than a main one.

I'm myself am actually a counterexample to my own "extroverts don't use the internet as much" notion...but I'm only a moderate extrovert. (ENTP or ENFP depending on the test...ENTP description fits better. I listed ENTP in the survey.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2012 05:38:28AM 3 points [-]

Yeah...by "internet" what I meant was sites that most people do not know about - sites that you would only stumble upon in the course of extensive net usage. I once described it to a friend as "deep" vs "shallow" internet, with depth corresponding to the extent to which a typical visitor to the website uses the internet. Even within a website (say reddit) a smaller sub-reddit would be "deeper" than a main one.

By that definition, there are many nearly disconnected "deep internets".

Comment author: palladias 09 December 2012 01:59:41AM 8 points [-]

One issue with the LW/CFAR approach is that the focus is on getting better/more efficient at pursuing your goals, but not on deciding whether you're applying your newfound superpowers to the right goals. (There's a bit of this with efficient altruism, but those giving opportunities are more about moving people up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not on figuring out what to want when you're not at subsistence level).

Luke's recent post suggest that almost no one here has the prereqs to tackle metaphysics or normative ethics, but that always has seemed like the obvious next topic for rationality-minded people. I was glad when Luke was writing his Desirism sequences back at CSA, but it never got to the point where I had a decent enough model of what normative claims desirism made to be able to evaluate it.

Basically, I think these topics would let us set our sights a little higher than "Help me optimize my computer use" but I think one major hurdle is that it's hard to tackle these topics in individual posts, and people may feel intimidated about starting sequences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2012 03:35:25AM 3 points [-]

The problem is that there is an unfortunate tendency here, going all the way up to EY to dismiss philosophy and metaphysics.

Comment author: ChristianKl 08 December 2012 11:41:42AM 2 points [-]

The goals set out in the opening post are to reduce certain bad consequences of the conflict:

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

Those goals are valid ends in themselves. Especially for those people who are autists or have otherwise weak social skills, communicating their truth in a way that doesn't destroy some of their friendship is very valuable.

we shouldn't attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a "compromise position" at the expense of seeking truth.

I don't think anybody argued in this debate that one should agree to believe in a "compromise position".

I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don't spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.

As a sidenote, evolutionary psychology predicts that few people have the goal of finding truth. Knowing "the truth" is not very useful for a hunter gatherer. It is more important for the hunter gatherer to have a high social status in his tribe.

Humans might publically profess that finding truth is their motive but they don't act accordingly. Most people care a lot more about getting approval from other people. They care about feeling like they are in a priveliged position where they know more about the way the world works then other people.

There a good Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07

If people would really care about being truthful, they would be less confident that their overconfident positions are true. Holding to an overconfident position on the other hand make it easier to feel like you know the truth while other people don't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 07:03:57PM *  5 points [-]
Comment author: SoftFlare 09 December 2012 11:40:32AM 3 points [-]

We might want to consider methods of raising standards for community members via barriers of entry employed elsewhere (Either for posting, getting at some or all the content, or even hearing about the site's existance):

  • An application process for entry (Workplaces (ie Valve), MUD sites)
  • Regulating influx using a member cap (Torrent sites, betas of web products)
  • An activity standard - You have to be atleast this active to maintain membership (Torrent sites, task groups in organizations sometimes)
  • A membership fee - Maybe in conjuction with an activity standard - (Torrent sites, private online communities, private real-world communities, etc. etc.)
  • Allowing membership only by invitation/sponsorship - (Torrent sites, US Citizenship, Law firms partnership, The Bavarian Illuminati)
  • Having a section of the site be a secret, only to be revealed to people who have proven themselves, A-la bayesian conspiracy - (How classified intelligence organizations work sometimes (not a joke), Internet forums)
  • Karma-based feature upgrading (Stack Exchange, Internet Forums)

Or any combination of the above applied to different sections. If anyone would like to pursue this, I am willing to spend up to 2 hours a week for the next few weeks constructing a solid plan around this, given someone else is willing to commit at least similar resources.

On a different note, and as anecdotal evidence, I have been lurking on LW for years now, and went to a CFAR camp before posting a single comment - In fear of karma retribution and trolling. (I know that its a bad strategy and that I shouldn't care as much. Sadly, I'm not as good at self-modification as I would like to be sometimes.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 06:54:48PM 5 points [-]

On a different note, and as anecdotal evidence, I have been lurking on LW for years now, and went to a CFAR camp before posting a single comment - In fear of karma retribution and trolling. (I know that its a bad strategy and that I shouldn't care as much. Sadly, I'm not as good at self-modification as I would like to be sometimes.)

On the other had, lurking for a while before posting is very much what we want new users to do.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2012 05:52:02AM 16 points [-]

Here's two things we desperately need:

  1. An authoritative textbook-style index/survey-article on eveything in LW. We have been generating lots of really cool intellectual work, but without a prominently placed, complete, hierarchical, and well-updated overview of "here's the state of what we know", we arent accumulating knowledge. This is a big project and I don't know how I could make it happen, besides pushing the idea, which is famously ineffective.

  2. LW needs a king. This idea is bound to be unpopular, but how awesome would it be to have someone who's paid job it was to make LW into an awesome and effective community. I imagine things like getting proper studies done of how site layout/design should be to make LW easy to use and sticky to the right kind of people (currently sucks), contacting, coordinating, and encourageing meetup organizers individually (no one does this right now and lw-organizers has little activity), thinking seriously and strategically about problems like OP, and leading big projects like idea #1. Obviously this person would have CEO-level authority.

One problem is that our really high-power agent types who are super dedicated to the community (i.e. lukeprog) get siphoned off into SI. We need another lukeprog or someone to be king of LW and deal with this kind of stuff.

Without a person in this king role, the community has to waste time and effort making community-meta threads like these. Communities and democratic methods suck at doing the kind of strategic, centralized, coherent decision making that we really need. It really isn't the comparative advantage of the community to be having to manage these problems. If these problems were dealt with, it would be a lot easier to focus on intellectual productivity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 06:46:04PM *  8 points [-]

LW needs a king.

The standard term is Benevolent Dictator for Life, and we already have one. What you're asking for strikes me as more of a governor-general.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 December 2012 05:17:26PM *  0 points [-]

I'm currently in the process founding a company I hope will be very profitable or at least profitable enough to support a large family. Barring this I shall try to find a regular job in STEM, but in that case the wives will have to go to work as well and private tutors instead of home-schooling will likely be required.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 05:18:52AM 1 point [-]

I'm currently in the process f finding a company

Did you mean "founding"?

Comment author: [deleted] 04 December 2012 08:37:56PM *  6 points [-]

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

I am in a polygamous implicitly patriarchal relationships with two girlfriends with whom I'd like to start families. I consider dominance play an important part of my sexuality. Ask me anything.

My position may change in the future without notice. I'm sharing this because I think most people's political positions on related matters are strongly governed by self-validating rationalizations and such information is relevant to trying to gauge when someone is engaged in motivated cognition.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 04:57:25AM 3 points [-]

What is the attitude towards these kinds of relationships in Ljubljana? In particular what do your girlfriends' families think?

Comment author: FiftyTwo 09 December 2012 02:43:18AM 1 point [-]

I'm curious, how do you propose spreading ideas or raising the sanity waterline without bringing in new people?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 03:51:00AM *  4 points [-]

On the other hand if the new people dilute or overwhelm LW culture and lower the sanity waterline on LW, it won't be able to raise the sanity waterline in the rest of the world. It's a balancing act.

Comment author: MrMind 09 December 2012 12:05:32AM 0 points [-]

Well, since nobody have done that yet, we cannot be sure, but for example a reduction of logic to physics could look like this: "for a system built on top of this set of physics laws, this is the set of logical system available to it", which would imply that all the axiomatic system we use are only those accessible via our laws of physics. For an extreme seminal example, Turing machine with infinite time have a very different notion of "effective procedure".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 12:17:13AM 2 points [-]

"for a system built on top of this set of physics laws, this is the set of logical system available to it"

How would one show the above, or even build up a system on top of physical laws without using logic?

Comment author: amcknight 08 December 2012 09:24:12PM 0 points [-]

MrMind is talking about an "oracle" in the sense of a mathematical tool. Oracles in this sense are are well-defined things that can do stuff traditional computers can't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2012 12:03:08AM 1 point [-]

I'm perfectly aware what an oracle is. I was using it in the same sense.

Comment author: gjm 08 December 2012 11:01:08AM 2 points [-]

Because you're using "racist" as a property of an idea independent of its truth value that lets you dismiss it.

What idea do you think I'm doing that to?

(It seems clear to me that there are ideas that can reasonably be described as "racist ideas". For instance, the idea that black people are fundamentally inferior to white people in abilities, character, and personal value, and that this means they should be segregated to keep them out of the way of superior white people. Or the idea that the right thing to do with people of Jewish descent is to put them into concentration camps and kill them en masse. So if you're saying that merely using the words "racist ideas" is proof of error and confusion, I think that's wrong. On the other hand, if there's some actual idea you think I'm wrongly describing that way, then let's hear what idea that is.)

the normal response to ignorance is to help educate the person being ignorant rather than to attempt to dismiss him as quickly as possible

I've seen both quite often.

But let's suppose for the sake of argument that (1) Andrew Hickey was in fact intending to dismiss MTGandP as quickly as possible and to get him (note: actually I have no idea whether MTGandP is male or female; indeed the name rather suggests a collective) to drop the subject, and that (2) such behaviour is very atypical on Less Wrong. What then? How does this indicate "creeping censorship of right-wing ideas"?

The most it indicates, being as uncharitable as possible to AH, is that one person (AH) is trying to intimidate another person (MT) out of talking about an idea that AH considers racist. How do you get from "AH tries to intimidate MT out of talking about the idea that black people might have inferior intelligence" to "LW exhibits creeping censorship of right-wing ideas"? No one was censored. There was no deluge of people agreeing with AH and telling MT to shut up. The idea in question isn't, at least according to others in this thread who appear sympathetic to "right-wing-ideas", particularly a right-wing one anyway.

In response to comment by gjm on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 11:39:24PM 2 points [-]

What idea do you think I'm doing that to?

In the ancestor you wrote:

Having said all that, I'll add that in fact I don't think it likely that MTGandP is a racist or that s/he wrote that post in order to bolster racist ideas, and I think that if anyone downvoted that post because they wanted to discourage a nasty racist (rather than, e.g., to discourage other people who are nasty racists from posting similar stuff) then they made a mistake. But the point is that the downvotes don't look to me like censorship of right-wing ideas; they look to me like some combination of (1) finding the post unenlightening and (2) seeing it as promoting racism.

What work is the word "racist" doing in that paragraph that couldn't be better done by the word "wrong"?

But let's suppose for the sake of argument that (1) Andrew Hickey was in fact intending to dismiss MTGandP as quickly as possible and to get him (note: actually I have no idea whether MTGandP is male or female; indeed the name rather suggests a collective) to drop the subject, and that (2) such behaviour is very atypical on Less Wrong. What then? How does this indicate "creeping censorship of right-wing ideas"?

The fact that MT's post is at -7 and AH's comment is at +4 rather than the other way around suggests the problem isn't limited to AH.

Comment author: ChristianKl 08 December 2012 11:41:42AM 2 points [-]

The goals set out in the opening post are to reduce certain bad consequences of the conflict:

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

Those goals are valid ends in themselves. Especially for those people who are autists or have otherwise weak social skills, communicating their truth in a way that doesn't destroy some of their friendship is very valuable.

we shouldn't attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a "compromise position" at the expense of seeking truth.

I don't think anybody argued in this debate that one should agree to believe in a "compromise position".

I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don't spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.

As a sidenote, evolutionary psychology predicts that few people have the goal of finding truth. Knowing "the truth" is not very useful for a hunter gatherer. It is more important for the hunter gatherer to have a high social status in his tribe.

Humans might publically profess that finding truth is their motive but they don't act accordingly. Most people care a lot more about getting approval from other people. They care about feeling like they are in a priveliged position where they know more about the way the world works then other people.

There a good Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07

If people would really care about being truthful, they would be less confident that their overconfident positions are true. Holding to an overconfident position on the other hand make it easier to feel like you know the truth while other people don't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 11:10:26PM 5 points [-]

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

This is a universal argument against debating any controversial topic.

I understood Eneasz in a way where he argued that proper evolutionary psychologists don't spend enough public effort on debunking incorrect and sexist evolutionary psychology.

In my experience, the typical feminist complaint is that the evolutionary psychologists don't debunk correct but "sexist" evolutionary psychology.

Comment author: MrMind 07 December 2012 05:25:57PM 0 points [-]

Can anyone say a bit more about why physical references would need to be described 'effectively'/computably?

I think because if they are described by an uncomputable procedure, one for example involving oracles or infinite resources, then they (with very high probability) would not be able to be computed by our brains.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 04:21:16AM 2 points [-]

So? Use said oracles to upgrade our brains.

Comment author: MrMind 07 December 2012 05:14:17PM 1 point [-]

Just as mental gymnastics, what if instead we would be able to reduce physics and logic to magical reality fluid? :)

Anyway, for the "logic from physics" camp the work of Valentin Turchin seems interesting (above all "The cybernetic foundation of mathematics"). Also of notice the recent foundational program called "Univalent foundation".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 04:18:53AM 1 point [-]

Just as mental gymnastics, what if instead we would be able to reduce physics and logic to magical reality fluid? :)

I don't think you can reduce logic to anything else, since you would need to use logic to perform the reduction.

Comment author: RobbBB 07 December 2012 08:44:46PM 1 point [-]

I think there are three broadly principled and internally consistent epistemological stances: Radical skepticism, solipsism, and realism. Radical skepticism is principled because it simply demands extremely high standards before it will assent to any proposition; solipsism is principled because it combines skepticism with the Cartesian insight that I can be certain of my own experiences; and realism is principled because it tries to argue to the best explanation for phenomena in general, appealing to unexperienced posits that could plausibly generate the data at hand.

I do not tend to think so highly of idealistic and phenomenalistic views that fall somewhere in between solipsism and realism; these I think are not as pristine and principled as the above three views, and their uneven application of skepticism (e.g., doubting that mind-independent cucumbers exist but refusing to doubt that Platonic numbers or Other Minds exist) weakens their case considerably.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 04:14:02AM *  2 points [-]

Radical stances are often more "consistent and principled" in the sense they're easier to argue for, i.e., the arguments supporting them are shorter. That doesn't mean their correct.

Comment author: TimS 07 December 2012 09:41:14PM 3 points [-]

What struck me most about that very interesting post was how "legalistic" the MRA controversial claims were. I'm a lawyer, that's not a slur. It's an interesting contrast between the feminist controversial claims, which are mostly about social dynamics, and the MRA controversial claims, which I could write a model statute to fix in practically no time at all.

And since writing statutes to fix social dynamics is a crude tool at best, and often counter-productive, reasonable MRA activists and reasonable feminists have a great deal of trouble avoiding talk-past-each-other-itis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 04:07:01AM 4 points [-]

And since writing statutes to fix social dynamics is a crude tool at best, and often counter-productive,

Depends, if the social dynamics where themselves created by bad statues, fixing or repealing the statute seems like at least a start.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 07 December 2012 06:49:41AM 0 points [-]

Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there's nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with "right-wing ideas" is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences.

Depends on what you mean by "right-wing". It's certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.

I think it's interesting that you keep changing the subject from "what propositions Greens believe" to your beliefs about "what topics Blues think are morally acceptable to discuss". It comes across that you're trying to make some sort of deeply subtle point about what beliefs you think it is morally acceptable to believe you have about Blues.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 03:59:23AM 2 points [-]

I was just trying to explain what Konkvistador probably meant by that statement.

Comment author: gjm 07 December 2012 07:44:21PM 0 points [-]

the way you're throwing around the term "racist ideas" suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes

Why?

You might have missed the part where [...]

No, I didn't miss it. I don't see any attempt at censorship there; I see someone saying: you appear to be ignorant about X, and in view of that you would do better to leave the subject alone.

Depends on what you mean by "right-wing".

No, I don't think it does. Because so far as I can see there is nothing else about the post, or the votes it got, or the ensuing discussion, that anyone would consider an instance of "creeping censorship of right-wing ideas". Given that you cited it as an example of that, I can only conclude that you consider belief in racial intelligence differences to be a "right-wing idea". My own understanding of the term "right-wing" doesn't come into it, unless there's something else in the post that's distinctively right-wing; did I miss something?

In response to comment by gjm on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 03:58:35AM 6 points [-]

the way you're throwing around the term "racist ideas" suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes

Why?

Because you're using "racist" as a property of an idea independent of its truth value that lets you dismiss it.

No, I didn't miss it. I don't see any attempt at censorship there; I see someone saying: you appear to be ignorant about X, and in view of that you would do better to leave the subject alone.

Well, especially on LW, the normal response to ignorance is to help educate the person being ignorant rather than to attempt to dismiss him as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, the statement is more like "you said something that could be stretched to imply you are don't know X (where X is itself a highly politicized claim whose truth value is a matter of political dispute) that means you are too ignorant to even say anything about the topic".

Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2012 11:18:29AM -1 points [-]

I do; am I mistaken to do so?

Probably not; but IMO the criterion of mistakenness for aliefs (unlike for beliefs) is not being instrumentally useful (rather than not being epistemically accurate). If I'm trying to attract women, alieving that I'm unattractive would be a mistaken alief (though the linked article doesn't use the word “alief”).

I've written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 03:26:27AM 6 points [-]

Having good aliefs about criminality, for example, is instrumentally useful.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 04 December 2012 01:56:19AM 1 point [-]

Actually, that depends on what you mean by 'known'.

Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don't feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation.

However, I don't think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 03:20:51AM 2 points [-]

Agreed. I suspect that Salemicus's statement was meant to be interpreted in the same way.

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 December 2012 03:14:59PM -1 points [-]

I don't know, correct me if I'm misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better.

Conflicts between contemporary social groups are part of reality.

The topic of this debate is "How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?". This debate is inherently about reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups.

If you want to reduce that conflict it makes sense to reason about the conflict.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 03:13:49AM 9 points [-]

Resolving conflicts is not an end in itself. The goal is to find the truth, in the process conflicts are likely to be resolved, but we shouldn't attempt to resolve conflicts by agreeing to believe a "compromise position" at the expense of seeking truth.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2012 07:58:35AM 3 points [-]

So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones.

Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don't depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives -- testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.

Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.

Yes, but why? There's not a gene for verbal skills; there's not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about -- Broca's area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.

Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it's possible -- but that idea isn't particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait. So a well-reasoned evolutionary scenario, no matter how compelling it might sound, shouldn't be taken as a firm foundation on which to start making overconfident, connotationally-loaded statements like that and then billing them as science.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 03:11:00AM *  7 points [-]

Yes, but why? There's not a gene for verbal skills; there's not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about -- Broca's area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.

Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it's possible -- but that idea isn't particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait.

I'm not sure what position you think you're arguing against. The ev-psych position is that the presence of a Y chromosome ultimately causes the difference in verbal skills (along with a lot of other things) between men and women. (Most of this influence probably passes through the SRY gene and the presence of sex hormones, but that's less certain than the effect itself.)

Your counter-argument appears to be that there isn't a single node in the causal diagram that corresponds to just the the effect on verbal skills. I agree that there probably doesn't exist such a node but fail to see why we should expect it to exist if ev-psych explanation is correct.

Comment author: ewbrownv 07 December 2012 05:13:18PM 0 points [-]

Yes, it's very similar to the problem of designing a macroscopic robot that can out-compete natural predators of the same size. Early attempts will probably fail completely, and then we'll have a few generations of devices that are only superior in some narrow specialty or in controlled environments.

But just as with robots, the design space of nanotech devices is vastly larger than that of biological life. We can easily imagine an industrial ecology of Von Neumann machines that spreads itself across a planet exterminating all large animal life, using technologies that such organisms can't begin to compete with (mass production, nuclear power, steel armor, guns). Similarly, there's a point of maturity at which nanotech systems built with technologies microorganisms can't emulate (centralized computation, digital communication, high-density macroscopic energy sources) become capable of displacing any population of natural life.

So I'd agree that it isn't going to happen by accident in the early stages of nanotech development. But at some point it becomes feasible for governments to design such a weapon, and after that the effort required goes down steadily over time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2012 02:31:49AM 1 point [-]

Yes, it's very similar to the problem of designing a macroscopic robot that can out-compete natural predators of the same size.

One difference is that the reproduction rate, and hence rate of evolution, of micro-organisms is much faster.

Comment author: devas 06 December 2012 04:08:58PM 0 points [-]

I agree with most of what was said here, except that, well.... I don't think it has the potential to actually cause humans to go extinct, or even to simply collapse civilization :-/ Even if a pandemic killed off 75 % of all humans, I have an unprovable feeling civilization would be able to soldier on. This is substantiated by a couple of observations; nearly all human knowledge has multiple backups (pandemics don't kill libraries), so we wouldn't have to reinvent science from scratch. Plus,remaining population would have access to all the material goods of the dead (including canned goods, long lasting food, etc. Which wouldn't be nearly enough to sustain human population for more than a month, but which would give time for people to pick up a book on farming or some such).

On the other hand, it is virtually guaranteed that a pandemic WILL happen (I define pandemic as something that shows up on the news a lot and causes some panic. Kill ratios depend on a case by case basis), given our interconnectedness which is frankly unprecedented in human history (i.e. Microbes, viruses and germs never had airplanes before 1902)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2012 03:37:27AM 2 points [-]

On the other hand, it is virtually guaranteed that a pandemic WILL happen (I define pandemic as something that shows up on the news a lot and causes some panic. Kill ratios depend on a case by case basis)

Given how easy it is to get the media into headless chicken mode, I don't think this is the best standard.

Comment author: gwern 07 December 2012 03:21:29AM *  0 points [-]

That's FamilyReligion then... I don't see why there'd be two such questions about family religion as you seem to think.

In response to comment by gwern on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2012 03:24:50AM 1 point [-]

I meant RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND.

Comment author: gjm 07 December 2012 12:02:46AM 1 point [-]

OK, I'm considering it. How does it indicate creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW?

I neither upvoted nor downvoted that post, so my guesses at the motivations of downvoters shouldn't be trusted too far, but my guess is that mostly it was downvoted because, while it was ostensibly about a technique of rationality, (1) what it said about that technique was mostly very obvious, (2) a big chunk of the article was devoted to the discussion of an entirely different topic with considerable mindkilling potential, and (3) this gives some ground for suspicion that the rationality-technique discussion served largely as a pretext for airing the author's views on that topic. (A topic that others in the past have been curiously enthusiastic to air similar views on.)

Having said all that, I'll add that in fact I don't think it likely that MTGandP is a racist or that s/he wrote that post in order to bolster racist ideas, and I think that if anyone downvoted that post because they wanted to discourage a nasty racist (rather than, e.g., to discourage other people who are nasty racists from posting similar stuff) then they made a mistake. But the point is that the downvotes don't look to me like censorship of right-wing ideas; they look to me like some combination of (1) finding the post unenlightening and (2) seeing it as promoting racism.

As for the "discussion, particularly here", again that doesn't look to me at all like censorship of right-wing ideas, nor like people arguing for the censorship of right-wing ideas. It looks to me like one person apparently thinking that racism has gone away and other people objecting that no it bloody hasn't. (Exception: the very first comment in the thread you linked to says, roughly, "race is a needlessly contentious thing to discuss to make your point", which (1) is true if the point is what MTGandP says, rather than that being a pretext for talking about race, and (2) doesn't constitute any sort of attempt at censorship, as opposed to advice that some topics are likely on the whole not to produce helpful discussion.)

Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there's nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with "right-wing ideas" is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences. Curious.

In response to comment by gjm on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2012 03:01:24AM *  3 points [-]

I neither upvoted nor downvoted that post, so my guesses at the motivations of downvoters shouldn't be trusted too far, but my guess is that mostly it was downvoted because, while it was ostensibly about a technique of rationality, (1) what it said about that technique was mostly very obvious, (2) a big chunk of the article was devoted to the discussion of an entirely different topic with considerable mindkilling potential, and (3) this gives some ground for suspicion that the rationality-technique discussion served largely as a pretext for airing the author's views on that topic.

See my comment here for why I think the example was appropriate. Furthermore, the way you're throwing around the term "racist ideas" suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes with respect to the example given.

As for the "discussion, particularly here", again that doesn't look to me at all like censorship of right-wing ideas, nor like people arguing for the censorship of right-wing ideas.

You might have missed the part where AndrewHickey says:

If you think that racism was only a problem 'not so long ago' rather than being an ongoing, major problem, then you probably just shouldn't discuss race at all.

 

Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there's nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with "right-wing ideas" is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences.

Depends on what you mean by "right-wing". It's certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.

Comment author: gwern 06 December 2012 07:22:08PM 1 point [-]

Two? I see FamilyReligion but I dunno what your other one is. But to test family & MoralViews:

R> lw <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> lwr <- subset(lw, as.character(FamilyReligion) != " ")
R> lwr <- subset(lwr, as.character(MoralViews) != " " & as.character(MoralViews) != "Other / no answer")
R> levels(lwr$FamilyReligion); levels(lwr$MoralViews)
[1] " " "Agnostic" "Atheist and not spiritual"
[4] "Atheist but spiritual" "Committed theist" "Deist/Pantheist/etc"
[7] "Lukewarm theist" "Mixed / Other"
[1] " " "Accept / lean toward consequentialism"
[3] "Accept / lean toward deontology" "Accept / lean toward virtue ethics"
[5] "Other / no answer"
R>
R> cor.test(as.integer(lwr$FamilyReligion), as.integer(lwr$MoralViews))
Pearson's product-moment correlation
data: as.integer(lwr$FamilyReligion) and as.integer(lwr$MoralViews)
t = -0.6631, df = 858, p-value = 0.5075
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.08935 0.04429
sample estimates:
cor
-0.02263

I wondered if maybe the levels were screwing things up, even though they're in a logical order which should show any correlation if it exists, so I binned all the results into just binary 'atheist' and 'theist' (as it were), and looked at a chi-squared:

R> fr <- sapply(as.integer(lwr$FamilyReligion), function(x) if(x>4) {1} else {0})
R> mv <- sapply(as.integer(lwr$MoralViews), function(x) if(x>2) {1} else {0})
R> ct <- chisq.test(fr,mv); ct
Pearson's Chi-squared test with Yates' continuity correction
data: fr and mv
X-squared = 2e-04, df = 1, p-value = 0.9894
R> ct$expected; ct$observed
mv
fr 0 1
0 200.6 58.43
1 465.4 135.57
mv
fr 0 1
0 200 59
1 466 135

I am a little surprised. Maybe I messed up somehow.

In response to comment by gwern on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2012 02:48:55AM 1 point [-]

Two? I see FamilyReligion but I dunno what your other one is.

The one about which religion.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 06 December 2012 05:34:17AM 3 points [-]

Why do you believe that people's prejudices are generally accurate?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2012 02:11:56AM 5 points [-]

Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.

Comment author: roystgnr 06 December 2012 06:49:03PM 1 point [-]

If you believe the "trade-off hypothesis" then many natural plagues are optimized against human deaths - any time a pathogen mutation is virulent enough to get its host shunned or its host's tribe wiped out, that variant of the pathogen dies out too.

The "host shunned" version of that hypothesis still applies to existential risks from communicable disease. If stone age tribes can quarantine well enough to prevent contagion then so can we. But the "host's tribe wiped out" version is probably moot now. Transmitting a pathogen beyond one's immediate "tribe" is surely much easier in airports full of friendly people than it was on footpaths connecting sometimes-hostile neighbors.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2012 01:50:36AM 2 points [-]

But the "host's tribe wiped out" version is probably moot now. Transmitting a pathogen beyond one's immediate "tribe" is surely much easier in airports full of friendly people than it was on footpaths connecting sometimes-hostile neighbors.

It's still possible for a plague to be so virulent that it kills its host before he has a chance to spread it too widely. Ebola comes to mind.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 06 December 2012 05:15:22AM *  1 point [-]

Throughout much of recorded human history there were almost no complaints about inequality even though inequality was much worse then.

There were quite a lot — but they were suppressed with a totality of violence that many modern readers might erroneously think had been invented as recently as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

Look up the Albigensian Crusade sometime, or the Savoyard massacre of the Waldensians — complete with mass rapes and mutilations. Many medieval "heresies" seem to have been mass movements with explicit doctrines rejecting both ecclesiastical and feudal hierarchy, and asserting religious and social equality among all believers.

One problem is that the victorious hierarchs tend to systematically burn the books of the heretics, so records of them are poor, and progressively worse the further back in history we look. However, we should expect that the above cases are not unusual, that (until the Enlightenment and mass literacy) one social era was much like another; and thus that there have been similar movements — and similar massacres and suppressions — throughout human history.

For that matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 06:33:56AM 4 points [-]

Good point. Although I suspect it's still true that most inter-factional conflict was not about (in)equality.

Comment author: Alejandro1 06 December 2012 05:43:55AM *  6 points [-]

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

John Ball (priest), in a sermon during the 1381 Peasant's Revolt. Like fubarobfusco says elsewhere in the thread, there were probably similar memes behind other similar revolts, that were suppressed and didn't survive into recorded history. (This one did because of the huge "memetic fitness" of the rhyming question at the start; I read it many years ago, and remembered it well enough to Google it and find the source now.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 06:31:03AM 3 points [-]

Interesting, it appears I misremembered when that rebellion occurred by a couple centuries. Updating accordingly.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:53:53AM 2 points [-]

The claim might just need correction to say, "Many philosophers say that simplicity is a good thing but the requirement is not enforced very well by philosophy journals" or something like that. I think I believe you, but do you have an example citation anyway? (SEP entries or other ungated papers are in general good; I'm looking for an example of an idea being criticized due to lack of metaphysical parsimony.) In particular, can we find e.g. anyone criticizing modal logic because possibility shouldn't be basic because metaphysical parsimony?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 06:22:31AM 2 points [-]

In particular, can we find e.g. anyone criticizing modal logic because possibility shouldn't be basic because metaphysical parsimony?

Why shouldn't it? I haven't seen any reduction of it that deals with this objection.

Comment author: bryjnar 05 December 2012 11:06:05PM *  7 points [-]

This.

EY's made a kind of argument that you should have two kinds of stuff (although I still think the logical pinpointing stuff is a bit weak), but he seems to be proceeding as if he'd shown that that was exhaustive. For all the arguments he's given so far, this third post could have been entitled "Experiences: the Third Kind of Stuff", and it would be consistent with what he's already said.

So yeah, we need an argument for; "You're only supposed to have two kinds of stuff."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 06:00:10AM 3 points [-]

He may be overreacting against a strain in philosophy that seeks to reduce everything to experience. Similar to the way behaviorism was an overreaction against Freud.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 11:11:25PM 6 points [-]

It does indeed seem possible that in the long run we'll end up with one kind of stuff, either from the reduction of logic to physics, or the reduction of physics to math. It's also worth noting that my present model does have magical-reality-fluid in it, and it's conceivable that this will end up not being reduced. But the actual argument is something along the lines of, "We got it down to two crisp things, and all the proposals for three don't have the crisp nature of the two."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 05:52:00AM 3 points [-]

I think you're going to have better luck figuring out how to make the third thing crisp than reducing it to the first two.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 09:24:42PM 0 points [-]

After it's been right the last 300 times or so, we should assess a substantial probability that it will be wrong before the 1,000th occasion, but believe much more strongly that it will be correct on the next occasion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 05:38:14AM 9 points [-]

Only because you're cheating by reclassifying all cases where it was wrong as cases where we haven't figure out how to properly apply it yet.

Comment author: TimS 05 December 2012 03:19:44PM 5 points [-]

My relatively uninformed impression was that the particularly unique nanotech risk was poor programming leading to grey goo.

Is there a reason that economic disruption or increased weapon capacity are greater x-risks - which I thought were focused on under-appreciated but extreme downside risks. The examples from the article have greater expected harm because they are higher probability, but x-risks are civilization or humanity destroyers, aren't they? Does economic disruption really have that large a downside?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 05:10:03AM 4 points [-]

My relatively uninformed impression was that the particularly unique nanotech risk was poor programming leading to grey goo.

The problem is that the grey goo has to out-compete the biosphere, which is hard if you're designing nanites from scratch. If you're basing them of existing lifeforms, that's synthetic biology.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: gwern 05 December 2012 08:43:37PM 6 points [-]
In response to comment by gwern on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 04:40:46AM 2 points [-]

I wonder whether consequentialism endorsement and possibly some of the probability questions correlate with the two family background questions.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 05 December 2012 12:59:57PM 4 points [-]

Once you control for demographics, the US public school system actually performs relatively well.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 04:35:43AM 3 points [-]

Good point.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 05 December 2012 08:51:43AM *  9 points [-]

Hayek was right. Capitalists in a mixed-economy seem to be in something analogous to a prisoner's dilemma. It would benefit any individual capitalist to seek monopoly privileges for their own firm, but it hurts all of them if any significant number of them do so.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 04:25:18AM 3 points [-]

Not to mention this.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 November 2012 04:56:46PM 16 points [-]

I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I've read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.

One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don't seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I've asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)

However, it's not obvious to me that it's impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn't identical to the same total ill effect.

I'm hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I'm pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I've wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.

I'm very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2012 04:19:35AM 5 points [-]

I'm hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I'm pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I've wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.

I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn't that people's system I has 'racist' aliefs, it's that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.

Comment author: ewbrownv 04 December 2012 08:14:42PM 2 points [-]

The reason the life sciences are resistant to regulation is at least partially because they know that killer plagues are several orders of magnitude harder to make than Hollywood would like you to think. The biosphere already contains billions of species of microorganisms evolving at a breakneck pace, and they haven't killed us all yet.

An artificial plague has no special advantages over natural ones until humans get better at biological design than evolution, which isn't likely to happen for a couple of decades. Even then, plagues with 100% mortality are just about impossible - turning biotech from a megadeath risk to an xrisk requires a level of sophistication that looks more like Drexlerian nanotech than normal biology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 07:31:07AM 5 points [-]

An artificial plague has no special advantages over natural ones

Artificial plagues can be optimized to for maximum human deaths, something natural plagues aren't. Artificial plagues can contain genes spliced in from unrelated species, including the target. For example, human hormones.

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 04 December 2012 10:25:52PM *  3 points [-]

I'd think not, if it's just Europe. It's a good question how long it would take to re-create present technological level

  • from the remaining shielded tech
  • just from books
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 07:20:33AM 2 points [-]

Well, the fact that Europe managed to bounce back from WWII is encouraging here.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 04 December 2012 08:18:58PM *  8 points [-]

The primary problem with nuclear war is that it isn't obvious that humans can get back to our current tech level without the now consumed resources (primarily fossil fuels) that we've used to bootstrap ourselves up to our current tech level. If that's an issue, then any event that effectively pushes the tech level much below 1900 is about the same as an existential risk, it will just take longer for something else to then finish us off. There's been some discussion on LW about how possible it is to get back to current tech levels without the non-renewables to bootstrap us up, and there doesn't seem to be any real consensus on the matter. This should probably be on the list of things that someone at FHI should spend some time examining.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 07:18:17AM 5 points [-]

On the other hand, future civilizations have the benefit of 20th century science unless the catastrophe also manages to destroy all physics textbooks.

Comment author: Oligopsony 05 December 2012 05:22:36AM 7 points [-]

If you don't believe in qualia, what does "the Utility Monster's positive utility outweighs everyone else's misery" mean?

If one is a preference utlitarian, it means something like: "any given (or at least the modal) person would be willing to accept near-certain misery for a 1/7 billion shot of being the Utility Monster - that's how preferable being the Utility Monster is." In this case, the solution is simple: yes, we should feed the Utility Monster.

You may not be able to imagine any sort of experience for which humans would have that preference. If so, Utility Monsters are impossible and irrelevant.

As I said in another thread, I do think political concerns for equality are basically not concerned with hedonics. Whether this matters for your point or not depends on whether your concept of utility is preferential or hedonic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 06:41:23AM 1 point [-]

If one is a preference utlitarian, it means something like: "any given (or at least the modal) person would be willing to accept near-certain misery for a 1/7 billion shot of being the Utility Monster - that's how preferable being the Utility Monster is." In this case, the solution is simple: yes, we should feed the Utility Monster.

What does this mean if you don't believe in qualia?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 December 2012 03:22:16AM 4 points [-]

Wouldn't that just be the non-overlapping magasteria argument, though?

No. The problem with NOMA type arguments isn't because of an attempt to separate normative and descriptive statements about reality. The problem with NOMA is that it is a pathological system deliberately constructed to avoid paying rent while still claiming that ontological entities exist which in their usual constructions have their rent checks bounce.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 06:22:16AM 12 points [-]

The problem is that feminists generally don't restrict themselves to making normative claims. Furthermore, many of the arguments for their normative claims rely on descriptive claims.

In response to comment by dbaupp on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Swimmer963 04 December 2012 04:25:38PM 0 points [-]

You did your research and earned your confidence level. I didn't look anything up, just based an estimate on anecdotal evidence (the fact that I didn't learn it in school despite taking lots of sciences). Knowing what you just told me, I would update my confidence level a little–I'm probably 90% sure that less than 25% of adults know Bayes Theorem. (I should clarify that=adults living in the US, Canada, Britain, and other countries with similar school systems. The percentage for the whole world is likely significantly lower.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 05:42:20AM 1 point [-]

adults living in the US, Canada, Britain, and other countries with similar school systems.

I hear Britain's school system is much better than the US's.

Comment author: ChristianKl 04 December 2012 10:15:38PM 4 points [-]

I don't think that really true. Human's are quite capable of changing their mind. They are also capable of forgetting.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 05:24:42AM *  6 points [-]

They're especially prone to forgetting what caused them to believe an idea, and only remembering that it was well justified.

Comment author: David_Gerard 04 December 2012 08:40:52PM 2 points [-]

It's annoying and stupid, as it precludes any attempt to use the supposedly superior powers of rationality found hereabouts on quite a range of actual practical problems. Worse yet, whenever someone does try, the proscription proves well-founded. Sigh.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2012 04:38:13AM 4 points [-]

Worse yet, whenever someone does try, the proscription proves well-founded.

Does this happen for issues besides feminism?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 04 December 2012 07:33:08AM 0 points [-]

Throughout much of recorded human history there were almost no complaints about inequality even though inequality was much worse then.

You don't think peasants resented their lords at all? If they had resented them, I don't think we would expect to know about it, because peasants couldn't write, right? ;)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 07:53:31AM 4 points [-]

They had an oral culture, much of which was eventually written down.

Comment author: Desrtopa 04 December 2012 04:52:27AM 3 points [-]

But there is always some metric to be gamed. There is always some causality chain which results in a specific distribution of money to organizations. Just because we close our eyes, it does not make the causality go away.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the system is gameable. If we suppose that what we're measuring is actually exactly what we want to get out of the program, then the only way the program can get ahead is by providing more of what we want. The system can only be "gamed" to the extent that there's a divorce between what we want from it, and what sort of output we measure.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 07:30:01AM *  5 points [-]

And to the extent that it's easier to "game" the system than to legitimately provide services.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 December 2012 06:12:49AM *  5 points [-]

Since when are "No Seriously, What About teh Menz?", and "The Good Men Project" MRA sites?

I believe those are the sites where I learned about men's rights issues such as male rape, child custody, etc, so I put them under the MRA umbrella, though they may not identify themselves that way (probably due to not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as the insanity)

If you DON'T think that those sites are MRA, then I would update towards ALL MRA to be of the insane kind, since those sites are the only ones I've seen on that side that I consider to be sane. (Though I welcome links to the contrary)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 06:56:49AM *  8 points [-]

As I mentioned here, the criterion you use for sanity appears to be way too weighted towards agreeing with you. The example you gave of an MRA being "insane":

the rise of masculinized women will lead to the "Fempocalypse"

is not encouraging here. While this position does sound absurd, that's not the same as insane. The way to test insanity would be to look at their arguments for the above position.

Having said that I don't actually know much about the official men's rights movement except that they have legitimate grievances and that the PUA community says nasty things about them. Nevertheless, you might want to start here.

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 03:47:40AM 3 points [-]

That was my first thought as well. I like both projects a lot, but I wouldn't have placed them in the MRA sphere.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 06:18:11AM *  4 points [-]

The mistake daenerys is actually fairly common. She wants to talk to some "sane" MRA people, where by "sane" she means ones who more-or-less agree with her. The problem is that real Men's Rights Advocates don't agree with her positions, so she finds people who do who are talking about men and declares them the "sane MRA faction".

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 05:20:47AM 1 point [-]

I think the rhetoric of reducing inequality is merely an attempt to communicate the shared self-interest of the members. People just aren't used to being even the slightest bit analytical about their lives, so there's very little pressure to improve the coherent of the rhetoric that leads to the alliance building before edge cases actually occur (plus: mindkiller).

As a lawyer, I'm well aware of spite as a motivation for (less than optimal) decisions, but I think rejection of a plan that calls for a larger share of a bigger pie is not optimal, even measured by the judgment of an anti-inequality activist. In the (more common) bigger piece of pie, smaller share of pie, bigger overall pie offer, anti-equality strongly suggests rejection, but that's not usually what happens in the real world, regardless of the pre-deal rhetoric.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 06:12:03AM 8 points [-]

I think the rhetoric of reducing inequality is merely an attempt to communicate the shared self-interest of the members.

This is not the only rhetoric that can do this job and historically wasn't the only one (or even the most common one used). You may want to look into the works of Confucius and the theory of the mandate of heaven for an example of an alternate theory of social organization and rebellion.

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 05:45:24AM 1 point [-]

"accustomed to" and "entitled to" don't really have the same meaning when the existence of an anti-inequality motive is at issue.

But I agree that there is a disconnect between the ev-psych invocation and the lack of any other claim of universality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 05:50:28AM 4 points [-]

"accustomed to" and "entitled to" don't really have the same meaning when the existence of an anti-inequality motive is at issue.

My point is that this distinction is extremely modern.

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 04:45:02AM 1 point [-]

peasants revolts were about specific grievances rather than an abstract concept of inequality.

What exactly is the difference? I want equality, and I have a list of specific changes (grievances, if you prefer) that I think would create equality.

Giving the peasants what they wanted would have reduced inequality. I assume the peasants leaders were smart enough to notice that fact.

Peasant revolts were actually pretty rare.

For every revolt large enough to actually make it on to a list like that (about one every generation), how many smaller, historically unimportant defiant acts in favor of equality occurred. The fact that the local elite didn't keep detailed records doesn't mean they didn't happen.

In parallel, major slave revolts in continental North America also happened about once every generation (it's hard to compare to peasant revolts because the historical record is better). Surely that isn't evidence that the slave population didn't express (or desire to express) complaints about inequality when they weren't engaged in armed uprisings.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 05:48:47AM *  4 points [-]

In parallel, major slave revolts in continental North America also happened about once every generation (it's hard to compare to peasant revolts because the historical record is better).

For a striking contrast with North American slavery, consider the case of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, where they where, despite the occasional rebellion, sufficiently confident in how much control they had over their slaves to use them as cops and prison guards.

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 05:10:14AM 1 point [-]

He claims it is a universal now - but I don't see the claim that it was a historical universal.

Also, your response does not explain the distinction I'm asking about - I mostly understood the general context of why you were attempting a distinction, but I'm still confused by the disconnect you seem to be drawing between object level expressions like "I'm poor, you caused it, grr" and abstract concern with inequality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 05:34:26AM 3 points [-]

He claims it is a universal now - but I don't see the claim that it was a historical universal.

He attempts to provide an ev-psych explanation, which makes no sense unless it's a historical universal or near universal.

Also, your response does not explain the distinction I'm asking about - I mostly understood the general context of why you were attempting a distinction, but I'm still confused by the disconnect you seem to be drawing between object level expressions like "I'm poor, you caused it, grr" and abstract concern with inequality.

It's not "I'm poor, you caused it, grr", it's "I don't have enough food/money/free time [to live the lifestyle I'm accustomed to], you're causing it, grr". The peasant doesn't have a problem with the lord having more and better food than he does any more than he has a problem with birds being able to fly and him not. The problem is that he's not getting the amount of food he feels he's entitled to.

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 04:45:02AM 1 point [-]

peasants revolts were about specific grievances rather than an abstract concept of inequality.

What exactly is the difference? I want equality, and I have a list of specific changes (grievances, if you prefer) that I think would create equality.

Giving the peasants what they wanted would have reduced inequality. I assume the peasants leaders were smart enough to notice that fact.

Peasant revolts were actually pretty rare.

For every revolt large enough to actually make it on to a list like that (about one every generation), how many smaller, historically unimportant defiant acts in favor of equality occurred. The fact that the local elite didn't keep detailed records doesn't mean they didn't happen.

In parallel, major slave revolts in continental North America also happened about once every generation (it's hard to compare to peasant revolts because the historical record is better). Surely that isn't evidence that the slave population didn't express (or desire to express) complaints about inequality when they weren't engaged in armed uprisings.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 04:59:50AM *  4 points [-]

What exactly is the difference?

I'm falsifying John's claim that most inter-factional conflict focusing on issues of inequality is a historical universal.

Giving the peasants what they wanted would have reduced inequality. I assume the peasants leaders were smart enough to notice that fact.

That fact only seems as salient as it does because we live in a culture that places high value on equality. For another perspective look at how Confucianism is able to combine a justification for peasant revolts under some circumstances with support for a strong social hierarchy.

Surely that isn't evidence that the slave population didn't express (or desire to express) complaints about inequality when they weren't engaged in armed uprisings.

The difference is that the slaves lived in a culture where "all men are created equal" was already an established meme.

Comment author: TimS 04 December 2012 04:00:06AM *  3 points [-]

Throughout much of recorded human history there were almost no complaints about inequality even though inequality was much worse then.

Really? Were peasant revolts not a thing that happened? Or were peasant revolts not caused by perceptions of inequality (economic, social, political, or other)?

It's really noteworthy that the end of the severe wealth disparities of the medieval era in Western Europe have led to a dramatic decrease in peasant revolts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 04:30:32AM 6 points [-]

Peasant revolts were actually pretty rare. The only reason it seems otherwise, is that lists like the one you linked to compress centuries of the history of all of Europe into a few lines.

Also, like Desrtopa said until the 17th century, if not later, peasants revolts were about specific grievances rather than an abstract concept of inequality.

Comment author: Kindly 04 December 2012 03:01:00AM 18 points [-]

Once you describe "feminine" as "nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious" and define feminism as a movement to protect all things feminine, I think you have gone far beyond what most people mean by either word.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 03:32:13AM 4 points [-]

Actually "nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious" is pretty close to the definition of "feminine" traditionalists use when arguing in favor of separate spheres for men and women.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 December 2012 11:59:14PM 24 points [-]

Firstly, I would like to say that I really enjoyed this post, and hope to see more like it!

It seems to me that (sane) MRA's and (sane) feminists should be natural allies. The "generic" version of feminism officially points to gender equality (NOT female supremacy), and feminists have previously allied with the LGBT movement, and racial suffrage (though that alliance went south when one group got suffrage before the other), and taken other social justice fights on as well.

As a sane feminist, I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy's No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project. These sites opened my eyes to the valid concerns of the MRA movement, such as issues regarding male rape, child custody, and the censure and unavailability of feminine style toys (dolls, dresses, EZ Bake Ovens, etc) for little boys.

These issues fit perfectly into my gender egalitarian style of feminism, and I thought that if it weren't for the bad blood between the two sides, that feminists should/would have taken up these particular issues the same way they often pick up other social justice issues.

The problem is that, (pulling numbers out of the air) let's say 1% of each gender is insane Haters of the Opposite Sex. So 1% of women think everything wrong with the world is the fault of men, and 1% of men think that the rise of masculinized women will lead to the "Fempocalypse". Each of those 1% join their respective movements.

Now, let's say half of all women identitfy as "feminist". This means the feminist movement is large enough to contain the crazy 1% of Man Haters while still being over-all sane (although allowing for unfortunate "straw feministi-ng", where insane MRA's make arguments of "Feminists say...")

However, the men's rights movement is not so large. Say only 1.5% of males are MRAs. This means that 2/3 of their movement is the insane 1%, and only 1/3 are sane. The MRA movement is not large enough to contain the crazy 1% while still remaining overall sane. So MOST MRA stuff out there is the insane stuff.

This unbalance harms the men's rights movement, because the valid concerns get tarred by the less valid ones ("masculinized women are bringing about the end of society!"), and lumped together with the crazy.

There needs to be a way to filter out the insane, in order to actually reach every(sane)one's common goals. I call myself a "Gender Egalitarian Feminist". Perhaps instead of being "(sane) feminist" or "(sane) MRA", the sane gender-issues people should all just call themselves "Gender Egalitarians".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 02:26:00AM 8 points [-]

I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy's No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project.

Since when are "No Seriously, What About teh Menz?", and "The Good Men Project" MRA sites?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 02:24:55AM 5 points [-]

Why does so much inter-factional conflict focus on issues of inequality?

Because complaining about "inequality" is currently high status.

Throughout much of recorded human history there were almost no complaints about inequality even though inequality was much worse then.

I also find it amusing how all the people, who normally complain that evolutionary psychologists don't take into account cultural differences, are offering gushing praise when confronted with ev-psych of which that is actually an accurate criticism.

Comment author: V_V 03 December 2012 10:00:22PM -1 points [-]

someone's capacity and habits to re-compute a problem's answer, using the algorithmic mind, rather than accept the intuitive default answer that their autonomous mind spits out.

I don't think you could really apply any 'algorithmic' method to that question (other than looking it up, but that would be cheating). It was a test on how much confidence you put in your heuristics. (BTW, It seems that I've underestimated mine, or I've been lucky, since I've got the date off by one year but estimated my confidence at 50% IIRC). Still, it was a valuable test, since most of human reasoning is necessarily heuristic.

most people in the general public don't know Bayes' theorem

Really? What probability do you assign to that statement being true? :D

I'm under the impression that Bayes' theorem is included in the high school math programs of most developed countries, and I'm certain it is included in any science and engineering college program.

In response to comment by V_V on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 01:35:17AM 3 points [-]

I'm under the impression that Bayes' theorem is included in the high school math programs of most developed countries,

Well, it's certainly not included in the US high school curriculum.

Comment author: V_V 03 December 2012 09:18:18PM *  2 points [-]

Wiping out 90% or so of the human race without killing everyone seems unlikely in general.

Less likely than killing 100% of the human race? Why?

Remember that humanity went through bottlenecks where the total population was reduced to tens of thousands scattered in pockets of hundreds to thousands. Humanity survived the Toba super eruption in prehistoric times, and would probably survive the Chicxulub impact if it happened today.

Other than an impact powerful enough to sterilize the biosphere, I don't see many things capable of obliterating the human species in the foreseable future. Pandemics don't have a 100% kill rate (at least the natural ones, maybe an engineered one could, but who would be foolish enough to create such a thing?)

In response to comment by V_V on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 01:24:04AM 2 points [-]

(at least the natural ones, maybe an engineered one could, but who would be foolish enough to create such a thing?)

A disgruntled microbiologist?

Comment author: TimS 03 December 2012 02:28:09PM 0 points [-]

Someone recently wrote a post analyzing optimal voter behavior. It turns out that anyone who would vote in a country where a random voter is selected to decide the election should vote in the current setup. Plus, voting has knock-on effects for future elections.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 12:52:43AM 6 points [-]

And most people wouldn't vote rationally in that country either.

Comment author: TimS 03 December 2012 07:40:28PM -1 points [-]

Each generation feels that they're as oppressed as the one before

That has not been my impression. Some advocates might think things are as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I'm not aware of anyone with influence who thinks things are as bad as 50 years ago. Or any advocate at all who thinks no improvement has happened in the last 500 years.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 12:31:41AM *  2 points [-]

That wasn't ewbrownv's assertion.

His assertion is that if you scanned the brain of a victim 50 or 500 years ago you'd find the same amount of subjective "oppressed feeling" as scanning a modern victim, i.e., that people have an "oppression set point" similar to the happiness set point.

Comment author: Bugmaster 03 December 2012 12:49:41AM 0 points [-]

I personally think that theocracy is bad because it combines the worst features of a totalitarian dictatorship on the one hand, and uncritical thinking on the other. As such, it could potentially turn out much worse than even a run-of-the-mill totalitarian dictatorship; in the latter case, at least the dictator and his politburo have some sort of a real plan...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 12:10:27AM 5 points [-]

Which came first, that argument, or you believing that theocracy is bad?

Comment author: thomblake 03 December 2012 05:08:20PM 5 points [-]

I'm confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2012 12:08:17AM 3 points [-]

Ok, a better way to phrase that would be "the reason that men like looking at naked women is, or should be, well known to everyone".

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 07:44:34PM 3 points [-]

I think you're dramatically overestimating the degree to which fans of Twilight are psychologically abnormal.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is true.

This still does not answer the question "What sample can we use that filters out fanaticism from mentally unbalanced people to compare the type of excitement that gifted people feel to the type of excitement that everyone else feels?" Not to assume that no gifted people are mentally unbalanced... I suppose we'd really have to filter those out of both groups.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 11:07:10PM 3 points [-]

Taboo "mentally unbalanced".

Comment author: Vaniver 02 December 2012 09:37:36PM *  7 points [-]

Related analysis on the public dataset:

1045 responders supplied a political orientation; they're 30% Libertarian, 3.1% Conservative, 37% Liberal, 29% Socialist, and 0.5% Communist.

226 responders supplied a political orientation and have been around since OB; they're 42% Libertarian, 3.5% Conservative, 31% Liberal, 23.5% Socialist, and 0% Communist.

242 responders supplied a political orientation and were referred from HPMoR; they're 30% Libertarian, 2.5% Conservative, 37% Liberal, 30% Socialist, and 0.4% Communist.

Note that analysis of current LW users who have been here since OB is not the same as OB users several years ago, but they are still significantly more libertarian than the current mix.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:51:52PM 4 points [-]

Also interesting that the HPMoR distribution almost exactly equals the current mix.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 December 2012 11:14:34AM *  3 points [-]

I'd have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties.

My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:31:16PM *  5 points [-]

Well two points:

1) There is a huge confounding factor, namely technological progress.

2) In general, labor intensive goods aren't even produced in America anymore.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 02 December 2012 02:38:42PM 0 points [-]

In what way does the existence or non-existence of a belief pump bear on whether "theocracy" is a boo light?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:09:10PM 3 points [-]

Why do people believe "theocracy" to be bad? The proximate cause is that it's what they've been taught.

Comment author: CCC 02 December 2012 08:48:22AM 0 points [-]

Intelligence

I'd be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.

There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.

criminality

Citation?

Again, I suspect - though I'm not certain - that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:06:35PM 4 points [-]

I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 December 2012 11:10:36AM *  3 points [-]

I'd expect a maximum somewhere in the middle of the range for internally generated complaints.

The countries and regions which are best at human rights get few or no complaints. The countries and regions which are bad but not horrendous get the most complaints. The countries which have a strong pattern of punishing complainers get a few complaints. The most vicious countries get no complaints.

That's just for internally generated complaints. Outsiders may be saying that conditions are very bad in the worst countries.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:04:22PM 5 points [-]

I think your underestimating how many complaints get generated in countries with good human rights that would be considered frivolous by an international standard, e.g., arguing that refusing to subsidize condoms constitutes a "war on women".

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 05:49:22AM *  1 point [-]

If you have to go looking, you're lucky.

Haha, I guess so. I am very, very nerdy. I had fun getting worldly in my teens and early 20's, but I've learned that most people alienate me, so I've isolated myself into as much of an "ivory tower" as possible. (Which consists of me doing things like getting on my computer Saturday evenings and nerding so hard that I forget to eat.)

If you want to find them in person...

Not really.

the latest Twilight movie is still in theaters, although you've missed the people who made a point of seeing it on the day of the premier.

What did they do when you saw them?

How do we distinguish the difference between the kind of fanaticism that mentally unbalanced people display for, say, a show that is considered by many to have unhealthy themes and the kind of excitement that normal people display for the things they love? Maybe Twilight isn't the best example here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 06:04:42AM 4 points [-]

How do we distinguish the difference between the kind of fanaticism that mentally unbalanced people display for, say, a show that is considered by many to have unhealthy themes and the kind of excitement that normal people display for the things they love?

What distinction are you trying to make here?

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Multiheaded 01 December 2012 11:22:33AM *  3 points [-]

I believe that, with your linked comment getting 32 points, you are making Nancy rather uncomfortable in turn.

I'm fairly certain that we're all suffering from the hostile media effect; e.g. you keep saying how there's creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW, while I'm disturbed by such complaints getting karma and support :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 03:02:13AM *  3 points [-]

you keep saying how there's creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW,

Consider the way this post was down-voted, along with some of the discussion, particularly here, as exhibit A.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:52:14AM 29 points [-]

Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

(..)

Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.

-- Screwtape, from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" by C. S. Lewis.

Comment author: Matt_Caulfield 01 December 2012 08:12:08PM *  10 points [-]

Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.

  • David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Edit: Yup, apparently that's a famous quote by Bradley which I read for the first time in that book. Good catch.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:46:02AM *  16 points [-]

A Google search attributes this to Gen. Omar Bradley.

Comment author: Oligopsony 01 December 2012 04:06:50AM 3 points [-]

"Magical reality fluid" highlights the fact that it's still mysterious, and so seems to be a fairly honest phrasing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:37:08AM 1 point [-]

So what would you think of "magical qualia"?

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Multiheaded 01 December 2012 07:03:27PM *  6 points [-]

What disturbs you about this specifically?

Like I already said a few times, nearly all the highly upvoted posts and comments that explicitly bring up ideology - like yours - appear to come from the right. Duh, you'll say, if most of the LW stuff is implicitly liberal/progressive, then of course what's going to stand out is (intelligently argued) contrarianism. But the disturbing thing to me is that the mainstream doesn't seem to react to the challenge.

What I have in mind is not some isolated insightful comments e.g. criticizing moldbuggery, defending egalitarianism or feminism or something like that - they do appear - but an acknowledgement of LW's underlying ideological non-neutrality. E.g. this post by Eliezer, or this one by Luke would've hardly been received well without the author and the audience sharing Enlightenment/Universalist values; both the tone and the message rely on an ideological foundation (one that I desire to analyze and add to - not deconstruct).

Yet there's not enough acknowledgement and conscious defense of those values, so when such content is challenged from an alt-right perspective, the attacking side ends up with the last word in the discussion. So to me it feels, subjectively, as if an alien force is ripping whole chunks out of the comfortable "default" memeplex, and no-one on the "inside" is willing or able to counterattack!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:01:25AM 2 points [-]

So to me it feels, subjectively, as if an alien force is ripping whole chunks out of the comfortable "default" memeplex, and no-one on the "inside" is willing or able to counterattack!

They are. They just can't come up with good arguments.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 December 2012 10:08:52AM 8 points [-]

I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.

People are usually not "exactly correct" about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?

Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.

Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 01:10:54AM 4 points [-]

Taboo "perfectly equal society".

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 December 2012 10:38:19AM 0 points [-]

Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much "racist" as what we have today. (I don't have a high confidence in this number, I just though it would be fair to write my opinion if I am asking about yours.) So cca 30% of the racism can be explained by people updating incorrectly, but that still leaves the remaining 70% to be explained otherwise. Therefore focusing on the incorrect updates misses the greater part of the whole story.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 01:05:00AM *  5 points [-]

Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much "racist" as what we have today.

Really? I'd estimate more like 120%.

Edit: especially consider affirmative action and the desperate impact doctrine.

Comment author: TorqueDrifter 01 December 2012 10:23:39AM 0 points [-]

It's certainly my (a) true rejection of "the problem is that [people] are updating correctly". What did you expect I was rejecting?

I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it'd be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier's assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 01:04:06AM 4 points [-]

It's certainly my (a) true rejection of "the problem is that [people] are updating correctly".

I confess, I was sacrificing some precision for snark. I meant "the problem is that [people] are updating correctly, to the extant they are".

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 December 2012 01:01:00PM 0 points [-]

Evidence? Also, are you including assault by the police in your comparison?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 01:01:41AM 4 points [-]

Evidence?

Look at crime statistics.

Also, are you including assault by the police in your comparison?

Sure, it doesn't change its truth.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 December 2012 12:50:40PM 4 points [-]

I think people are somewhat more likely to complain when they're hurt.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 12:58:01AM 8 points [-]

True, there are other things that arguably have a bigger impact, e.g., whether they'll be punished for complaining, whether their complaint is likely to change anything. For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.

Comment author: TorqueDrifter 01 December 2012 09:08:24AM 1 point [-]

I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that's really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 09:22:38AM 10 points [-]

Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information,

Or would be if people weren't actively rigging said information such that this is not the case. And that's before getting into tail-effects.

Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black,

Which really doesn't happen these days. (It's certainly much rarer than someone being beaten up for being white.)

Comment author: [deleted] 01 December 2012 08:23:01AM 1 point [-]

Not that confident of what? Something I said?

Not that confident the media/academia belief pump cycle is a greater advantage than the hidden nature of their theocracy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 09:04:19AM 3 points [-]

If not for said belief pump, would "theocracy" necessarily even be a boo light?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 November 2012 11:18:45PM *  -1 points [-]

Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I'm not sure we've really hit that point that substantially.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 08:58:47AM 3 points [-]

Yes, fuel efficiency can be increased at the expanse of something else, e.g., cost, safety, etc.

Comment author: CCC 29 November 2012 03:14:06PM 0 points [-]

What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 08:48:04AM 6 points [-]

What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?

Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.

Comment author: CCC 30 November 2012 09:44:55AM 1 point [-]

Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is?

I don't care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).

Isn't the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn't be a world in which "race doesn't matter," but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.

That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).

I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person's peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don't make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race.

Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I'd expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.

The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)

That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.

Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 08:46:08AM 4 points [-]

I don't care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance

I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.

One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 30 November 2012 07:58:53AM *  4 points [-]

Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn't the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn't be a world in which "race doesn't matter," but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.

I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person's peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don't make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 08:40:18AM 8 points [-]

Isn't the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race?

At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.

Comment author: thomblake 29 November 2012 07:03:59PM 11 points [-]

For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone

Has any other reader figured out yet what this obvious reason is supposed to be? I'm mystified.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 08:16:00AM 3 points [-]

I suspect that statement was meant to be semantically equivalent to "the reason that men go to strip clubs is, or should be, well known to everyone".

Comment author: Multiheaded 01 December 2012 05:44:28AM *  3 points [-]

A normal person living life will receive micro aggressions with some regularity

Please consider just how strongly the likelyhood of such microaggressions is inversely correlated with a person's conformity to any given implicit norm! That's why I find it more than purple prose to refer to the victims of oppression as "the weak"; by not conforming, they simply start in a much much weaker position than someone who reasonably fits within the norms. The current beneficiaries of identity politics- like transfolk - certainly have the field tilted against them, and talking to them of "equal opportunity" or "equality before the law" is outright cruel; you've got to privilege those worst off to end up with a remotely fair outcome. (Which leads to the problem of incentives, which leads me to questioning capitalism and meritocracy altogether, but that's another story.)

So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out. A rock that's thrown downwards at someone hurts much more - and is easier to hit with - than the same rock thrown back up with equal force! The fact that a few people might try to profit politically from redefining "up" and "down" doesn't make the objective social circumstances less real.

(Sorry if this all sounds like banal platitudes.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 07:52:40AM 7 points [-]

So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out.

And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression?

To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?

Comment author: MugaSofer 01 December 2012 06:18:15AM 2 points [-]

The purpose of this, if I understood correctly, was to increase empathy with and understanding of the emotions of women in these situations. It's less evidence than neurohacking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 07:41:32AM 1 point [-]

If you neurohack, presumably you want to move yourself towards more correspondence with reality.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: MTGandP 29 November 2012 09:08:06PM 5 points [-]

I was surprised to see that LW has almost as many socialists as libertarians. I had thought due to anecdotal evidence that the site was libertarian-dominated.

I was also surprised that a plurality of people preferred dust specks to torture, given that it appears to be just a classic problem of scope insensitivity, which this site talks about repeatedly.

I was happy to see that we have more vegetarians and fewer smokers than the general population.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 05:16:50AM 3 points [-]

I was surprised to see that LW has almost as many socialists as libertarians. I had thought due to anecdotal evidence that the site was libertarian-dominated.

I suspect you'd see a higher percentage of libertarians if you restricted to non-lurkers, and even higher if you restricted by karma, or how often they post.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: shminux 29 November 2012 07:50:13PM *  2 points [-]

Are people who understand quantum mechanics are more likely to believe in Many Worlds? We perform a t-test, checking whether one's probability of the MWI being true depends on whether or not one can solve the Schrodinger Equation. People who could solve the equation had on average a 54.3% probability of MWI, compared to 51.3% in those who could not. The p-value is 0.26; there is a 26% probability this occurs by chance. Therefore, we fail to establish that people's probability of MWI varies with understanding of quantum mechanics.

Just wanted to point out a few fallacies in the above:

  • "can solve the Schrodinger Equation" means nothing or less without specifying the problem you are solving. The two simplest problems taught in a modern physics course, the free particle and a one-dimensional infinite square well are hardly comparable with, say, calculating the MRI parameters.

  • self-reporting "can solve the Schrodinger Equation" does not mean one actually can.

  • even then, "can solve the Schrodinger Equation" does not mean "understand quantum mechanics", as it does not require one to understand measurement and decoherence, which is what motivates MWI in the first place.

  • there are many versions of MWI, from literal ("the Universe split into two or more every time something happens") to Platonic ("Mathematical Universe").

Basically, I hope that you realize that this is a prime example of "garbage in, garbage out". I suppose it's a good thing that there was no correlation, otherwise one might draw some unwarranted conclusions from this.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 05:10:18AM *  2 points [-]

I suspect asking about density matrices might be a better test.

In response to comment by TrE on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Cakoluchiam 29 November 2012 10:03:09PM *  1 point [-]

It was stated that they should give the obvious answer and that surveys that didn't follow the rules would be thrown out... but maybe 50% isn't as obvious as 99.99% of the population thinks it is.

Is there any reason the prompt for the question shouldn't have explicitly stated "(The obvious answer is the correctly formatted value equivalent to p=0.5 or 50%)"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 04:39:26AM 1 point [-]

My working theory is that they were trolling.

In response to comment by Snowyowl on Causal Universes
Comment author: cousin_it 30 November 2012 02:23:51PM *  0 points [-]

My original comment had two examples, one had no coinflips, and the other had two coinflips. You seem to be talking about some other scenario which has one coinflip?

The structure I have in mind is a branching tree of time, where each branch has a measure. The root (the moment before any occurrences of time travel) has measure 1, and the measure of each branch is the sum of measures of its descendants. An additional law is that measure is "conserved" through time travel, i.e. when a version of you existing in a branch with measure p travels into the past, the past branches at the point of your arrival, so that your influence is confined to a branch of measure p (which may or may not eventually flow into the branch you came from, depending on other factors). So for example if you're travelling to prevent a disaster that happened in your past, your chance of success is no higher than the chance of the disaster happening in the first place.

In the scenarios I have looked at, these conditions yield enough linear equations to pin down the measure of each branch, with no need to go through Markov chains. But the general case of multiple time travelers gets kinda hard to reason about. Maybe Markov chains can give a proof for that case as well?

In response to comment by cousin_it on Causal Universes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 04:00:26AM 1 point [-]

But the general case of multiple time travelers gets kinda hard to reason about.

Since each time-travel event forks the universe, with multiple time travelers it's a question of whether the the second time-traveler is "fork-traveling" as well.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 December 2012 01:08:45AM 3 points [-]

1) If we ask whether the entities embedded in strings watched over by the self-consistent universe detector really have experiences, aren't we violating the anti-zombie principle?

We're not asking if they have experiences; obviously if they exist, they have experiences. Rather we're asking if their entire universe gains any magical reality-fluid from our universe simulating it (e.g., that mysterious stuff which, in our universe, manifests in proportion to the integrated squared modulus in the Born probabilities) which will then flow into any conscious agents embedded within.

Sadly, my usual toolbox for dissolving questions about consciousness does not seem to yield results on reality-fluid as yet - all thought experiments about "What if I simulate / what if I see..." either don't vary with the amount of reality-fluid, or presume that the simulating universe exists in the first place.

There are people who claim to be less confused about this than I am. They appear to me to be jumping the gun on what constitutes lack of confusion, and ought to be able to answer questions like e.g. "Would straightforwardly simulating the quantum wavefunction in sufficient detail automatically give rise to sentients experiencing outcomes in proportion to the Born probabilities, i.e., reproduce our current experience?" by something other than e.g. "But people in branches like ours will have utility functions that go by squared modulus" which I consider to be blatantly silly for reasons I may need to talk about further at some point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 03:45:48AM 2 points [-]

I'm not convinced "reality fluid" is an improvement over "qualia".

Comment author: TimS 30 November 2012 02:42:31AM *  0 points [-]

I meant what happened to societies X years after they adopted various moral positions.

Do you have a specific example in mind? For X<20, no obvious examples leap to my mind.

And in the modern era, X>5 means that any consequences could be so overdetermined that pointing to particular moral changes is hindsight basis at best - particularly because moral changes tend to be gradual rather than sudden. For example, Brown v. Bd. of Edu didn't come out of nowhere, legally speaking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2012 03:01:28AM 1 point [-]

I had in mind X on the order of 100.

Also, I don't just mean the modern era.

In response to comment by cousin_it on Causal Universes
Comment author: Snowyowl 29 November 2012 08:11:10AM *  0 points [-]

Last time I tried reasoning on this one I came up against an annoying divide-by-infinity problem.

Suppose you have a CD with infinite storage space - if this is not possible in your universe, use a normal CD with N bits of storage, it just makes the maths more complicated. Do the following:

  • If nothing arrives in your timeline from the future, write a 0 on the CD and send it back in time.

  • If a CD arrives from the future, read the number on it. Call this number X. Write X+1 on your own CD and send it back in time.

What is the probability distribution of the number on your CD? What is the probability that you didn't receive a CD from the future?

Once you've worked that one out, consider this similar algorithm:

  • If nothing arrives in your timeline from the future, write a 0 on the CD and send it back in time.

  • If a CD arrives from the future, read the number on it. Call this number X. Write X on your own CD and send it back in time.

What is the probability distribution of the number on your CD? What is the probability that you didn't receive a CD from the future?

In response to comment by Snowyowl on Causal Universes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2012 03:02:19AM *  0 points [-]

Suppose you have a CD with infinite storage space - if this is not possible in your universe, use a normal CD with N bits of storage, it just makes the maths more complicated.

Disagree. This example depends fundamentally on having infinite storage density.

Edit: would whoever downvoted this care to provide an example with finite storage density.

Comment author: MugaSofer 29 November 2012 10:52:38PM 1 point [-]

... because you don't, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology. Certain structures in transsexuals' brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2012 02:08:44AM 4 points [-]

... because you don't, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology.

You have some control over it. Everything you do and every thought you have affects your neurophysiology. How much control you have over it is an interesting question, which can't be answered simply by pointing to differences on brain scans.

Comment author: TimS 29 November 2012 03:16:34PM 2 points [-]

Isn't the way to properly judge a civilization exactly what is under dispute in this discussion?

Measured by time, the Roman Republic lasted longer than the modern version of the United States government - dating from ~1865 or ~1936 depending on how one wants to count.

Measured by per-capita wealth, modern day Sweden might do better than the US in the 1950s.

I'm not opposed to measuring according to moral correctness, but first we need to agree on what actually is morally correct.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2012 01:51:47AM 1 point [-]

I didn't mean how long the societies lasted, that raises issues about what constitutes the "same" society. I meant what happened to societies X years after they adopted various moral positions. Also, I agree that we can learn a lot from the Roman Republic.

In response to Causal Universes
Comment author: cousin_it 28 November 2012 08:42:30PM *  1 point [-]

I just got an idea for an interesting fictional model of time travel, based on a combination of probabilities and consistent histories.

The simplest example would go like this. Imagine you step into the time machine, travel a minute into the past, and kill your younger self. At the moment of your arrival, the universe branches into two. Since the number (total weight?) of killers should be equal to the number of victims, the branches have probability 50% each. In one branch you live and become a killer, in the other you die.

Now let's take a more complex scenario. You flip a coin to decide whether you should step into the time machine, and another coin to kill or spare your past self. (Of course you have to travel to the moment before the first coinflip, otherwise this reduces to the previous scenario.) To figure out the probabilities, imagine that n people survive to flip the first coin. Then n/2 of them will step into the time machine and n/4 will become killers, which gives us n/4 victims. So you have a 1/5 chance of dying in this situation.

Is this model new? How far can we extend it consistently? What kinds of paradoxes can arise?

In response to comment by cousin_it on Causal Universes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 06:37:54AM 1 point [-]

Scott Aaronson's model, that Eliezer refers to here is basically this.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on Causal Universes
Comment author: evand 28 November 2012 09:48:35PM 0 points [-]

Of course, if you also assigned a probability of zero to the event you just observed, now you have 0/0 error, which is more awkward to deal with. The case of having a posterior probability of zero in contradiction to the evidence is not particularly problematic for the agent's thinking, it just isn't very useful. But a true 0/0 event might well cause serious issues.

In response to comment by evand on Causal Universes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 06:35:03AM 1 point [-]

In practice, you conclude you hallucinated the event.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 28 November 2012 07:19:35PM *  8 points [-]

I think that a correct metaphor for computer-simulating other universe is not that we create it, but that we look at it.

"Correct" is too strong. It might be a useful metaphor in showing which way the information is flowing, but it doesn't address the question about the moral worth of the action of running a simulation. Certain computations must have moral worth, for example consider running an uploaded person in a similar setup (so that they can't observe the outside world, and only use whatever was pre-packaged with them, but can be observed by the simulators). The fact of running this computation appears to be morally relevant, and it's either better to run the computation or to avoid running it. So similarly with simulating a world, it's either better to run it or not.

Whether it's better to simulate a world appears to be dependent on what's going on inside of it. Any decision that takes place within a world has an impact on the value of each particular simulation of the world, and if there are more simulations, the decision has a greater impact, because it influences the moral value of more simulations. Thus, by deciding to run a simulation, you are amplifying the moral value of the world that you are simulating and of decisions that take place in it, which can be interpreted as being equivalent to increasing its probability mass.

Just how much additional probability mass a simulation provides is unclear, for example a second simulation probably adds less than the first, and the first might matter very little already. It probably depends on how a world is defined in some way.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 06:18:28AM *  2 points [-]

It's starting to seem like the concept of "probability mass" is violating the "anti-zombie principle".

Edit: this is why I don't believe in the "anti-zombie principle".

Comment author: evand 28 November 2012 06:05:32PM 8 points [-]

Scott Aaronson showed that time loop logic collapses PSPACE to polynomial time.

It replaces the exponential time requirement with an exactly analogous exponential MTBF reliability requirement. I'm surprised by how infrequently this is pointed out in such discussions, since it seems to me rather important.

In response to comment by evand on Causal Universes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 06:10:31AM -1 points [-]

It's also interesting how few people seem to realize that Scott Aaronson's time loop logic is basically a form of branching timelines rather than HP's one consistent universe.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Causal Universes
Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 29 November 2012 12:40:52AM *  2 points [-]

If you ever plan on talking about your hypothesis, you need to be able to describe it in a language with a finite alphabet (such as English or a programming language). There are only countably many things you can say in a language with a finite alphabet, so there are only countably many hypotheses you can even talk about (unambiguously).

This means that if there are constants floating around which can have arbitrary real values, then you can't talk about all but countably many of those values. (What you can do instead is, for example, specify them to arbitrary but finite precision.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 05:56:35AM 3 points [-]

If you ever plan on talking about your hypothesis, you need to be able to describe it in a language with a finite alphabet (such as English or a programming language). There are only countably many things you can say in a language with a finite alphabet, so there are only countably many hypotheses you can even talk about (unambiguously).

Only if you live in a universe where you're limited to writing finitely many symbols in finite space and time.

In response to comment by devas on Causal Universes
Comment author: Larks 28 November 2012 12:19:51PM 2 points [-]

It would be nice if there was some topology where the causal worlds were dense in the acausal ones.

In response to comment by Larks on Causal Universes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 05:51:44AM 1 point [-]

Unfortunately, this strikes me as unlikely.

In response to comment by Larks on Causal Universes
Comment author: JoachimSchipper 28 November 2012 09:10:29PM 0 points [-]

I don't think it's unfair to put some restrictions on the universes you want to describe. Sure, reality could be arbitrarily weird - but if the universe cannot even be approximated within a number of bits much larger than the number of neurons (or even atoms, quarks, whatever), "rationality" has lost anyway.

(The obvious counterexample is that previous generations would have considered different classes of universes unthinkable in this fashion.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 05:43:44AM 2 points [-]

Sure, reality could be arbitrarily weird - but if the universe cannot even be approximated within a number of bits much larger than the number of neurons (or even atoms, quarks, whatever), "rationality" has lost anyway.

Why? If the universe has features that our current computers can't approximate, maybe we could use those features to build better computers.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 November 2012 04:37:54AM *  10 points [-]

So, this is the sort of thing that's true for almost any advocacy group: They will present the evidence that helps them and not present the evidence that doesn't. That means that for any political advocacy or organization you need to look at the evidence with that in mind and judge it carefully and accordingly. This makes the groups under discussion no different than any other similar group.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 04:49:17AM 11 points [-]

There is a difference between selectively presenting true evidence (or at least evidence they believe to be true) and telling things you know to be false.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 November 2012 04:49:10AM *  1 point [-]

Why?

You tell me. It's not my confusion.

From what I infer, people who think deontologically already seem to reason "The most effective decision to make as evaluated by UDT is Cooperate in this situation in which CDT picks Defect. This feels all moral to me. UDT must be on my side. I claim UDT is deontological because we agree regarding this particular issue." This leads to people saying "Using UDT/TDT reasoning..." in places where UDT doesn't reason in any such way.

UDT is "deontological" if and only if that deontological system consists of or is equivalent to the rule "It is an ethical duty to behave like a consequentialist implementing UDT". ie. It just isn't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 04:32:58AM 2 points [-]

Rather what distinction are you drawing between UDT/TDT-like decision theories and Kant's CI?

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2012 09:14:09AM 1 point [-]

I count rule consequentialism as a flavour of consequentialism, not as a flavour of deontology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 04:28:18AM 1 point [-]

I agree, but I'd argue that UDT is more than standard rule consequentialism.

Comment author: TimS 28 November 2012 02:50:42PM 2 points [-]

how much they desire [to violate gender norms] is how they were brought up.

This argument would have more force if you had specific examples of different things parents do that affect the existence of the desire to violate gender norms.

For example, J. Edgar Hoover was born in 1895 (and was a cross-dresser). There's no plausible argument that second-wave feminism (circa 1960s) or third-wave feminism (circa 1990s) had any effect on his upbringing.

If society could affect the frequency of the desire, reducing the frequency might be a viable solution. But I've yet to hear a vaguely plausible story about what parents can choose to do that would have any effect.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 04:21:39AM 3 points [-]

For example, J. Edgar Hoover was born in 1895 (and was a cross-dresser).

The cross-dressing think was probably a black legend.

There's no plausible argument that second-wave feminism (circa 1960s) or third-wave feminism (circa 1990s) had any effect on his upbringing.

In any case a single anecdote isn't strong evidence and it's pretty clear that the amount of cross dressing and other gay/trans phenomena has gone up since the 1960s and the 1990s.

Comment author: TimS 28 November 2012 07:13:43PM 2 points [-]

Inter-subjective truths need not be Schelling points. And even if they are, that doesn't make them actually true in an empirical sense. The fact that everyone does it, but no one can verify it (due to computational limits) might be meaningful, as long as one doesn't use that to justify ignoring later evidence.

In short, what is the difference between firm commitment to inter-subjective truths notwithstanding evidence and moral relativism?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 04:03:38AM 1 point [-]

In short, what is the difference between firm commitment to inter-subjective truths notwithstanding evidence and moral relativism?

There are ways to judge inter-subjective truths, e.g., look at how successful societies holding them have been over various time scales.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 November 2012 07:05:57PM 7 points [-]

When invoking that advice, check whether something really is a tradition!

This may be a good response to Zack's general approach, but if you apply it to Yvain's question, the conclusion is that Zack is not going far enough. Marriage is a very old and widespread tradition, while the imperative that everyone should graduate high school is extremely young, and schools themselves fairly young. Thus you should be much more willing to make marriage an imperative than school.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 04:01:55AM 2 points [-]

Marriage is a very old and widespread tradition, while the imperative that everyone should graduate high school is extremely young, and schools themselves fairly young. Thus you should be much more willing to make marriage an imperative than school.

I'm inclined to agree.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 27 November 2012 02:13:10AM 0 points [-]

whereas it is still so for men.

So break it.

Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you.

The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like "intersex of the brain". But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as "male or female" doesn't determine their gender identity. Bear in mind I say social categorization here, because society looks at some things (penis length, particularly) and not at others (brains, particularly) about the body to put people into categories.

And no, I meant cross-gendered in the specific sense of "person socially assigned gender A in clothes socially assigned gender B".

BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is "not your fault" so you can't be "blamed" for it. This doesn't affect the rightness of the cause, only the ease of implementing it in the face of religious (sin focused) transphobia.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 04:09:30AM 10 points [-]

BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is "not your fault" so you can't be "blamed" for it.

Ok, so you admit your movement is willing to lie, BS and corrupt social science for "the greater good". Given that, why should I believe any of the empirical claims your movement makes?

Comment author: TimS 28 November 2012 02:22:24AM 10 points [-]

Chesterton's fence and similar Burkean arguments are generally a reasonable position. But in this case, we know:

1) There are people who desire to do things that are not acceptable within their gender roles (i.e. cross-dressing)
2) Internalizing gender narratives makes those people miserable
3) Those people (as a group) are not more likely to engage in unacceptable behaviors (i.e. molest children)
4) Prior changes to gender and other social norms have occurred without society falling apart
5) Plausible arguments exist that those changes were net benefits for society (preventing Condoleezza Rice or Hilary Clinton from being Secretary of State is wasting talent)

In short, there is obvious and significant suffering that these changes could plausibly alleviate. Comparing these changes to similar changes suggests the downside risks are low. Even Burke acknowledged that change was sometimes necessary - otherwise Burkean conservatism becomes a fully general counter-argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 04:06:54AM 1 point [-]

1) There are people who desire to do things that are not acceptable within their gender roles (i.e. cross-dressing)

And one of the factors affecting this how much they desire these things is how they were brought up.

Comment author: TimS 28 November 2012 02:22:24AM 10 points [-]

Chesterton's fence and similar Burkean arguments are generally a reasonable position. But in this case, we know:

1) There are people who desire to do things that are not acceptable within their gender roles (i.e. cross-dressing)
2) Internalizing gender narratives makes those people miserable
3) Those people (as a group) are not more likely to engage in unacceptable behaviors (i.e. molest children)
4) Prior changes to gender and other social norms have occurred without society falling apart
5) Plausible arguments exist that those changes were net benefits for society (preventing Condoleezza Rice or Hilary Clinton from being Secretary of State is wasting talent)

In short, there is obvious and significant suffering that these changes could plausibly alleviate. Comparing these changes to similar changes suggests the downside risks are low. Even Burke acknowledged that change was sometimes necessary - otherwise Burkean conservatism becomes a fully general counter-argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 03:58:11AM 0 points [-]

4) Prior changes to gender and other social norms have occurred without society falling apart

This could be anthropic fallacy.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 28 November 2012 03:49:11AM 7 points [-]

(I don't know; my own life has gotten a lot better (not monotonically, but the trendline is clear) over the last five years as I've learned to think for myself more and more, and trust my unreflective moral instincts and the local authorities less and less. Moreover, this process seems likely to continue as long as I make sure to abandon contrarian strategies when it looks like they're not working. But your mileage may vary.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 03:56:04AM 4 points [-]

Implicit in Szabo's argument is that you may be doing the equivalent of picking up pennies on railroad tracks.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 November 2012 02:52:50AM 1 point [-]

My point is that once you add UDT to consequentialism it becomes very similar to deontology.

UDT doesn't need to be added to consequentialism, or the reverse. UDT is already based on consequentialist assumptions and any reasonably advanced way of thinking about consequences will result in a decision theory along those lines.

It is only people's muddled intuitions about UDT and similar reflexive decision theories that makes it seem to them that they are remotely deontological. Particularly those inclined to use UDT as an "excuse" to cooperate when they just want that to be the right thing to do for other reasons.

For example, Kant's Categorical Imperative can be thought of as a special case of UDT.

Better yet, it can be thought of as just not UDT at all.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 03:50:37AM 0 points [-]

It is only people's muddled intuitions about UDT and similar reflexive decision theories that makes it seem to them that they are remotely deontological.

Why?

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2012 01:25:29AM 0 points [-]

I didn't mean the approximations are bad. I meant that the 'fundamental' morality is rule (i.e. UDT) consequentialism, and the only reason we have to use other stuff is that we don't have unlimited computational power, much like we use aerodynamics to study airplanes because it's unfeasible to use quantum field theory for that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 02:03:40AM 0 points [-]

My point is that once you add UDT to consequentialism it becomes very similar to deontology. For example, Kant's Categorical Imperative can be thought of as a special case of UDT.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 27 November 2012 11:32:01PM 6 points [-]

The opposite is done too, though--for instance, when one assumes there is no differences between boys and girls, then dressing girls up in pink or giving them baby dolls is seen as abetting a (sometimes emergent) conspiracy which deserves great efforts to combat

Perhaps; I think part of the issue there is that there is a political debate and a sociological engineering project, and they keep shitting all over each other.

"I think if we raise boys and girls in gender-neutral environments, their inherent gender biases will be far less noticeable" is part of the sociological engineering project.

"No! You're turning them into lesbo feminazis and fairy faggots!" is the political-debate response.

"Fuck you! I'm dressing everyone unisex and attacking everyone who doesn't!" is the political-debate counter-response.

Note that while the counter-response is crazy, it's a predictable emotional response to the prior crazy, and shouldn't be blamed on its own. My assertion is that attacking people who say "I'm dressing everyone unisex and attacking everyon who doesn't!" isn't nearly as effective as attacking the people who set them off in the first place, and hoping that they'll calm down once they're not under severe stress from people who are crazier than they do and attack them without provocation.

Does that make sense?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 01:46:02AM *  2 points [-]

"I think if we raise boys and girls in gender-neutral environments, their inherent gender biases will be far less noticeable" is part of the sociological engineering project.

"No! You're turning them into lesbo feminazis and fairy faggots!" is the political-debate response.

Modulo your deliberate use of slurs, why is that not a valid objection. In other words, are you sure you understand the full implications of this "sociological engineering project" and why should the child be one of its test subjects?

Comment author: MugaSofer 27 November 2012 02:19:13AM *  2 points [-]

whereas it is still so for men.

So break it

Once again, I support the right to wear underpants on your head but I wouldn't teach my kids it's socially acceptable.

snip "trans is a choice"

It shows up on brainscans.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 01:21:21AM *  10 points [-]

snip "trans is a choice"

It shows up on brainscans.

How is the second sentence at all evidence against the first?

Comment author: undermind 26 November 2012 08:35:31PM 3 points [-]

Agreed.

To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women's Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women's Studies on these grounds.

However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 01:12:25AM 7 points [-]

I think a better statement of our position, is that we think it's currently so full of BS and anti-epistomology that it's better to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2012 06:37:11PM 2 points [-]

Yes. I think that all deontological or virtue-ethics rules that actually make sense are actually approximations to rule consequentialism when it'd be too computationally expensive to compute from scratch and/or fudge factors to compensate for systematic errors introduced by our corrupted hardware.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 12:49:32AM 1 point [-]

Game theory issues I mentioned (e.g., UDT, the other big one being Schelling points) are not quite the same thing as having bad approximations. Since it's impossible to have a good approximation of another agent of comparable power, even in principal.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 27 November 2012 07:24:37PM 1 point [-]

In which case, a single comment reply to the user, explaining WHY they would like less of everything they said, would be preferable in addition to the downvoting. That way, the downvotee knows what they did wrong and what they might do to correct it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2012 12:25:16AM *  2 points [-]

Well, EY has been giving increasingly unsubtle hints that he doesn't want people relpying to comments they consider downvote worthy.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 27 November 2012 01:47:36AM 4 points [-]

Doesn't that depend on the context of the advice?

If the context is that you (or others) are telling me that it wasn't the thief's fault that they stole my TV, or that the fact that my house was unlocked is evidence that I consented to the taking of my TV, that context may make the advice seem part and parcel of the blame-shifting.

For that matter, the reason to lock your house may well be to avoid being low-hanging fruit — IOW, someone else's TV gets stolen, not yours; theft is not actually reduced, just shifted around. There's no guarantee that everyone locking their house would reduce theft. The thieves learn to pick locks and everyone's costs are higher — but now a person who doesn't pay that cost is stigmatized as too foolish to protect themselves.

As an old boss of mine used to say, "locks are to keep your friends out." They work against casual intruders, not committed ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 November 2012 02:38:17AM 5 points [-]

If the context is that you (or others) are telling me that it wasn't the thief's fault that they stole my TV, or that the fact that my house was unlocked is evidence that I consented to the taking of my TV

That also depends. An insurance company would be well within its rights to charge you a higher premium if you refused to lock your house.

Comment author: dspeyer 25 November 2012 09:20:29PM 4 points [-]

Point.

If you did not find the original offensive, please do not vote at all. The purpose of the poll was to investigate why people found this original offensive. So if you did not, applying this introspective probe serves no purpose.

I would edit this into the post, but ISTR that editing posts with polls is bad.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 November 2012 12:06:21AM 3 points [-]

Also since the only way to see the results of a poll is to vote in it, it's considered polite to add a "don't want to vote but want to see the results option".

Comment author: simplicio 25 November 2012 10:25:41PM *  2 points [-]

Right, because naive utilitarianism sees 'blame' as more or less a category error, since utilitarianism is fundamentally just an action criterion. My own moral system is a bit of a hodgepodge, which I have sometimes called Ethical Pluralism.

As I say to Said below, I don't have a full theory of blame and causality, although I think about it most every day. But I do think that there is something wrong/incomplete/unbalanced about blaming somebody for being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome, even if they are knowingly a part of that chain. For example, Doctor Evil credibly commits to light a school on fire if you don't give him $10 million. I would consider refusal to pay up in this situation as non-blameworthy, even though it causally leads to a bunch of dead schoolchildren.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 November 2012 11:59:25PM 9 points [-]

For example, Doctor Evil credibly commits to light a school on fire if you don't give him $10 million. I would consider refusal to pay up in this situation as non-blameworthy, even though it causally leads to a bunch of dead schoolchildren.

You may want to look at various decision theories particularly updateless decision theory and its variants.

The difference between the Dr. Evil example and the revealing clothing example is that if everyone precomits to not negotiating with hostage takers, Dr. Evil wouldn't even bother with his threat; whereas a precomitment to ignore the presence of sexual predators when deciding what to wear won't discourage them. The clothing example is in fact similar to the locked house example, I mentioned here.

Comment author: simplicio 25 November 2012 10:05:07PM 3 points [-]

I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).

Maybe, although I strongly suspect religious people alieve that their relatives are gone (otherwise, as others have noted, a funeral would be more like a going-away party).

This one is interesting. A tangential thought: have there been studies to determine the power of stereotype threat to affect people who are aware of stereotype threat?

Good question. Wikipedia turns up this link, which would seem to say "Yes." So happily, the corrective for this contextually harmful empirical statement is a contextually helpful empirical statement.

...one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.

Oh yes, certainly. Refusing to notice ingroup/outgroup differences is just the opposite failure mode.

There's something wrong with your assessment (of the revealing clothing --> sexual assault case) here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Intuitively it feels like the category of "blame" is being abused, but I have to think more about this one.

I am still philosophically confused about this issue, although I have been thinking about it for a while. You are probably objecting to the fact that ex hypothesi, less revealing clothing leads to fewer sexual assaults, so why wouldn't we follow that advice - yes? As I say, I don't have a full account of that. All I wanted to draw attention to is the ethical questionable-ness of making such a statement without any acknowledgement that one is asking potential victims to change their (blameless) behaviour in order to avoid (blameworthy) assault from others. Compounding the issue is the suspicion that statements like this ALSO tend to be a form of whitewashed slut-shaming.

The problem here, I think, is that some people use "X is going to happen" with the additional meaning of "X should happen", often without realizing it; in other words they have the unconscious belief that what does happen is what should happen. Such people often have substantial difficulty even understanding replies like "Yes, X will happen, but it's not right for X to happen"; they perceive such replies as incoherent.

Yes, in my experience this is very common in muggle society.

If I think X will happen (or not happen), it's important (imo) that I have the ability and right to make that empirical prediction, unimpeded by social norms against offense. If people who are afflicted with status quo bias, or other failures of reasoning, fail to distinguish between "is" and "ought" and in consequence take my prediction to have some sort of normative content — well, it may be flippant to say "that's their problem", but the situation definitely falls into the "audience is insufficiently intelligent/sane" category. Saying "this statement is offensive" in such a case is not only wrong, it's detrimental to open discourse.

Right. The rubric that I try to use in such situations is essentially a consequentialist one. Roughly speaking, the idea is that you should try to predict how your statements might be misinterpreted by a (possibly silly) audience, and if the expected harm of the misinterpretation is significant as compared to the potential benefit of your statement, then reformulate/be silent/narrow your audience/educate your audience about why they shouldn't misinterpret you. I sympathize, believe me! It's incredibly annoying to be read uncharitably. But if you know how to prevent an uncharitable/harmful reading, and don't as a matter of principle because the audience should know better... I think the LW term for that would be "living in the should-universe."

Agreed. I just think that branding certain sorts of statements as "offensive" is entirely the wrong way to go about treating this issue with the care it deserves, because of the detrimental effects that approach has on free discourse.

As it happens, I broadly agree about the term "offensive," which is an incredibly censorious and abuse-prone word. I think we should try to give better fault assessments than that - and happily, on LW most people usually do.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 November 2012 11:50:02PM 7 points [-]

I am still philosophically confused about this issue, although I have been thinking about it for a while. You are probably objecting to the fact that ex hypothesi, less revealing clothing leads to fewer sexual assaults, so why wouldn't we follow that advice - yes? As I say, I don't have a full account of that. All I wanted to draw attention to is the ethical questionable-ness of making such a statement without any acknowledgement that one is asking potential victims to change their (blameless) behaviour in order to avoid (blameworthy) assault from others.

Would you have similar objections if I advised you to lock your house to reduce theft?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 November 2012 04:17:10PM 0 points [-]

So, can you explain how arguing over the definition of a word can ever pay rent?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 November 2012 11:31:53PM *  2 points [-]

Well, in a sense every definition carries an implicit assertion that the described object corresponds to a cluster in thing space. See also 37 ways that words can be wrong.

Comment author: Kal 26 November 2012 02:23:20PM -2 points [-]

Re Physics, please correct me as required but in the way I use the phrase "first principles" here, Physics does not have any first principles. Physics is observation, hypothesis, experimentation and repeat. After a certain hypothesis has sufficient amount of experimental proof behind it, it becomes a theory and thus the foundation for further work. And occasionally, we find that there is a variable missing in the theory as the experiments did not test the situations that that variable speaks to. Then we test to tease out the nuances of that aspect of reality. And so on.

Economics has first principles, in the sense I use the phrase. Thus the Q: What is an economy? It leads to those first principles and then deduction covers the rest. But one can of course get the first principles wrong and the deduction is then useless.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 November 2012 11:28:12PM 2 points [-]

Re Physics, please correct me as required but in the way I use the phrase "first principles" here, Physics does not have any first principles.

Yes it does. They're just so implicit in our intuition about how the world works that we don't notice them. For example, consider all the implicit assumptions necessary for statements like "these two sticks have the same length" to be meaningful.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 25 November 2012 09:23:56PM 6 points [-]

Would you feel the same way about "It would help you to do your math homework so you can graduate high school and get a decent job?" After all, the idea that everyone should graduate high school is a cultural imperative, and some teenagers may not yet have decided whether this is important to them.

I'll sort of bite this bullet---I have to say "sort of", because I know that social science is extremely difficult, and that radical changes that sound like a good idea to the speaker often have disastrous unforeseen consequences, such that I should be very prepared to modify my current opinions in light of new empirical evidence---but yes, the cultural imperative that everyone must graduate high school regardless of individual circumstances (e.g., "I want to devote myself to studying this particular topic that happens to not be taught at local high schools") causes a lot of real harm for the same reasons that the cultural imperative that all women must learn domestic skills regardless of individual circumstances (e.g., "I don't want to be a housewife") causes a lot of real harm.

Currently-existing social norms do serve real functions, the details of which someone who knows more than me could no doubt elaborate on, but they aren't intelligently designed for human well-being, either. On the current margin, would it be better to have more conformity, or less?---given my current info and preferences, my guess is less: if you can find a way to do better for yourself in an unconventional way that doesn't actually seem to hurt anyone, then I say go ahead and take it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2012 10:03:59PM 5 points [-]

I think you may be underestimating how hard it is to do better than tradition.

Comment author: simplicio 25 November 2012 08:25:01PM *  16 points [-]

In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive." At least, I'd like to see it supported better before I consider it.

Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.

  • "Your husband's corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?" (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don't want to think about.)
  • "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are twenty police case files on convicted child murderers, all of them Albanian just like the defendant, without any statistical context." (Facts presented in a tendentious manner.)
  • "Just thought it might be interesting for you to know that women tend to do about 10% worse on this test than men. Anyway, you may turn your papers over now - good luck!" (Self-fulfilling prophesies.)
  • "You're the only asian in our office." "Did you notice how you're the only asian in our office?" "Maybe you didn't realize you're the only asian in our office." (Drawing attention to & thereby amplifying the salience of an ingroup/outgroup distinction.)
  • "All I'm saying is that girls who wear revealing clothing are singling themselves out for attention from predators!" (Placing blame for a moral harm on a blameless causal link leading to the harm.)
  • "If he dresses effeminately like that, he's going to get bullied." (Ditto; also, status quo bias.)
  • "A black man will never hold the highest office in this country." (Self-fulfilling prophesy; failure to acknowledge shittiness of (purported) empirical situation.)

I think that the ability and right to say true things regardless of whether someone finds those truths unpleasant is extremely important, and social norms to the contrary should not be adopted or perpetuated lightly.

Not lightly, no. But as I was saying to Daniel_Burfoot above, there is just no avoiding the fact that statements, including statements of truth, are speech-acts. They will affect interlocutors' probability distributions AND their various non-propositional states (emotions, values, mood, self-worth, goals, social comfort level, future actions, sexual confidence, prejudices). Inconvenient as human mind-design is, it's really hard to suppress that aspect of it.

But there is a big asymmetry here - you (the speaker) know what you mean, so if it really needs to be said, take an extra second to formulate it in the way that has the least perlocutionary disutility.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2012 09:48:55PM *  7 points [-]

"All I'm saying is that girls who wear revealing clothing are singling themselves out for attention from predators!" (Placing blame for a moral harm on a blameless causal link leading to the harm.)

What moral theory are you using in the parenthetical comment? For example, according to naive utilitarianism it makes no sense to divide causal links leading to harm into "blameless" and "blameworthy".

Comment author: Multiheaded 25 November 2012 08:06:01PM *  2 points [-]

IMO:
Traditions or not, the role of a child doesn't "by default" include any script for interaction, even as an unwilling observer, with the parents' sex life. A child simply wouldn't be sure how to process and break down something they see or hear from it.
People instinctively appear to see familial and sexual intimacy as two separate kinds of bonds, and the mind-screw that comes with mixing them might be one of the reasons for having incest fantasies. Such a mind-screw could easily be discomforting/unpleasant in everyday contexts!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2012 09:35:42PM 3 points [-]

Traditions or not, the role of a child doesn't "by default" include any script for interaction, even as an unwilling observer, with the parents' sex life.

Why should a child have a predefined role or script?

People instinctively appear to see familial and sexual intimacy as two separate kinds of bonds, and the mind-screw that comes with mixing them might be one of the reasons for having incest fantasies. Such a mind-screw could easily be discomforting/unpleasant in everyday contexts!

People also instinctively appear to see men and women as two different kinds of people.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 08:54:13PM 0 points [-]

The argument asserts that 'death' (which we might taboo as 'a change, the result of which is not existing') is an incoherent concept. It's not claiming that death is always in the future, it's claiming that there is just no such thing as death.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2012 08:06:52PM *  2 points [-]

I wasn't referring to death not being in the present. Rather, the problem with the statement

in order for someone to be dead, they both have to exist (insofar as they have a property, namely 'being dead') and not exist (because they're dead!).

is that it assumes that because the person doesn't exist in the present, it isn't meaningful to talk about that person existing at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 November 2012 06:58:05PM 3 points [-]

Sorry, that was partially my bad. The purpose of the "What's sex?" part was to illustrate that this was a younger child. (In my mind these were all preschoolers in the examples). I didn't consider that people might read that to mean that I don't think sex should be discussed truthfully with children. I do! But at a certain age, and in the right context (NOT in the context of parents discussing their own sexcapades.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2012 07:35:20PM 8 points [-]

But at a certain age, and in the right context (NOT in the context of parents discussing their own sexcapades.)

Why? Can you justify this without appealing to the traditions about sex and gender that you've just been arguing against?

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 05:27:15AM 1 point [-]

Fair enough, but I think Epicurus' point might be rephrased thus:

I grant that we seem to have very good empirical evidence of the possibility of death. Overwhelming evidence, by most standards. The trouble is, the very idea of death is incoherent. So whatever we call death must be a feature of a faulty map. It's simply impossible for it to be in the territory: in order for someone to be dead, they both have to exist (insofar as they have a property, namely 'being dead') and not exist (because they're dead!). No amount of empirical evidence can support a theory which entails a contradiction.

-not really Epicurus

If that's right, it's not so much a question of being concerned about things you don't coexist with. He's saying that it's irrational to be concerned about things which are impossible and inconceivable.

That's stupid, of course. Of course, people die. But I have a hard time seeing where the argument actually goes wrong. I am regrettably susceptible to philosophical nonsense of every kind.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2012 06:57:54PM 1 point [-]

This argument implicitly assumes that we can't meaningfully talk about things not in the present.

Comment author: Multiheaded 23 November 2012 04:37:23AM *  0 points [-]

Land is a little horrifying in his Nietzchean/Stirnerian lack of barriers, to be honest.

About accepting/not shrinking from shocking facts about reality: I see two basic types of failure modes here - firstly, denying the presense of any given horror (like e.g. innate group neurological differences - race, gender, etc - creating inherent power and knowledge differences in a society and making brutal unyielding inter-group hierarchy such a society's "natural", least costly to maintain and most economically productive state) is indeed more common to people with liberal/Universalist leanings... -

...- but there's a second failure mode in normalizing and rationalizing such facts despite them registering as "evil" on one's moral intuition meter, and I think that one is much more common to reactionaries/anti-Universalists, including Land himself. Where a liberal could be happily deluded about the difficulty of fixing "natural" evils with artificial policies, a reactionary could calm his (let's be honest, they're almost exclusively male) conscience with redefining "evil" and accepting life as it is. I see no more reason to accept that complacency than I see to accept deathism.

What say you?

EDIT: I've read the article - well, yeah, Land is guilty of siding with reality. I wonder what he thinks about transhumanism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 November 2012 06:26:06PM 3 points [-]

When you refuse to treat humans as rational agents, it's easy to forget the most important aspect of human behavior: that it responds to incentives (even perverse ones). How hard-working or intelligent a human is depends on whether society rewards hard work and intelligence. If the products of someone's hard work are redistributed to those who are lazy on that grounds that being lazy is not the person's fault, there will suddenly be a lot fewer hard workers and a lot more lazy people.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 November 2012 04:18:07PM *  1 point [-]

Inferring causality from a time-series of various economic variables is incoherent. There first needs to be a deductive understanding of what the causal relationships are between economic variables. That is what is meant by "first principles" here - perhaps the disagreement is semantic.

If I replace "economic variables" with "astronomy" what part of this sentence changes in implication? Why is this incoherent for some fields? The level of rigor cannot be the only difference: Physics and astronomy have become more rigorous over time, not by discussing first principles, even when moving from Aristotle to Medieval physics to Newtonian physics, but rather by adopting principles based on the empirical data. The same goes for the switch from Ptolemaic systems to Copernicus and then Kepler. It is the empirical data that matters, the apparent time-series of planetary and stellar motion.

Thus, the first principles analysis: What is an economy?

Does arguing over this definition pay any rent?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 November 2012 05:46:03PM 2 points [-]

If I replace "economic variables" with "astronomy" what part of this sentence changes in implication?

One can do controlled experiments in physics here on Earth and apply the results to astronomy.

Comment author: Multiheaded 22 November 2012 06:59:40PM *  0 points [-]

Are you saying that under-privileged "Progressives" are typically devoid of a mechanism of self-control through guilt, since they spend their time attacking teh evil white cis straight man, and feel themselves to be naturally blameless by comparison, part of a saintly group that can do no wrong?

Here, for example, is the kind of disclaimer that can be often seen attached to "checklists" of white/male/class/cis/etc privilege:

Privilege is not your fault. It is an artifact of systems that favor some people over others, systems that have evolved naturally to meet the needs of the majority, but have failed to provide adequate accommodations for those outside it. For more information on understanding and confronting privilege, please see this link.

Privilege is not, in itself, a terrible thing. Having any form of privilege does not make you a bad person. Just about everyone has some form of privilege. No, that doesn’t mean it all somehow “balances out.” A person can have, for example, white privilege, male privilege, class privilege, and heterosexual privilege, while still lacking neurotypical privilege. Likewise, not all autistic people have had the same experiences; other forms of privilege can act as a cushion against many of the harsher realities endured by those who belong to multiple disenfranchised groups.

The statement that privilege exists is not an accusation or attempt to blame. It is an invitation to see your experiences and the experiences of others in a new light. It is not an admonition to change the world, but a simple tool with which to begin considering if, possibly, some changes might be worth working toward.

(Note that in the context of the linked post, which is about neurotypical privilege in particular, both you and me could probably use a little more of said neurotypical privilege in our daily lives! There's far more ways to be excluded from it than just being on the autism spectrum, of course.)

Does this sound like the "party line" of left egalitarianism includes guilt-tripping Average Non-Diverse Guys over their lack of Diversity? Or is it like what Orwell said back in the 30s - the worst advertisement for Socialism and Christianity is their [stereotypical] adherents?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2012 09:26:51PM 4 points [-]

Are you saying that under-privileged "Progressives" are typically devoid of a mechanism of self-control through guilt,

I was mainly talking about "privileged" Progressives, i.e., the ones who are intellectual descendents, and frequently also familial descendents, of Calvinists.

Here, for example, is the kind of disclaimer that can be often seen attached to "checklists" of white/male/class/cis/etc privilege:

In the context of these discussions of privilege, the "we're not guilt tripping you" disclaimers read like suspiciously specific denials, since they then proceed to engage in something that looks very much like guilt tripping.

Does this sound like the "party line" of left egalitarianism includes guilt-tripping Average Non-Diverse Guys over their lack of Diversity?

In this case I was referring to how both Calvinists and Progressives guilt-trip themselves.

In any case, if I'm misunderstanding what you meant here by

I bet that, if you saw a world where all people were truly "held responsible for their actions" (..), you'd recoil in horror and take that back.

could you correct me. Specifically, what do/did you think would consist of "holding you responsible for your actions" and why?

Comment author: [deleted] 22 November 2012 02:19:35AM 0 points [-]

What do you mean by "really"?

If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.

If you mean "really" to mean "genetically", note that my "weak racism" would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, "weak racism" is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2012 07:45:17PM 1 point [-]

(the freedom-hating thing is straw)

Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.

Comment author: DaFranker 21 November 2012 10:12:19PM 1 point [-]

I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing "ultimately the same", which by reflex I would've asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same "program" doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.

An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.

Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2012 07:40:25PM 1 point [-]

I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same "program" doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.

Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between "source code" and "set values". For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the "source code" and let our DNA and upbringing be the "set values". I fail to see how this is interesting.

Comment author: MugaSofer 22 November 2012 01:57:49AM 0 points [-]

Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents' genes.

Well, yes. I was simplifying for clarity.

This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.

The entire point of the example is that the assumption that they want to steal ketchup is what causes it. If you assume they will try (as evidenced by hiding the ketchup when you see them,) then they will conform to expectations by trying. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of the purest sort.

To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It's much less grounded in reality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2012 07:29:43PM 1 point [-]

To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It's much less grounded in reality.

I was basically drawing attention to that fact. Also Ockham's razor is a great way to cut down on self-reference in these kinds of situations.

Comment author: MugaSofer 22 November 2012 01:49:42AM 0 points [-]

How so? You claimed I was dissing "Black culture".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2012 07:27:41PM 2 points [-]

Oh, sorry. I was dissing "Black culture" and pointing out that my argument followed from what I thought you meant.

Comment author: Multiheaded 18 November 2012 03:35:48AM *  -2 points [-]

His "Calvinism" thing looks completely baseless and arbitrary to me, though, especially in the face of Nisbet's argument. Could it be more of an attempt to sweeten the pill for the "conservative" part of the audience by avoiding blaming "mainline" Christianity?

Or maybe Moldbug is just bad at processing/modelling religious feeling due to him being... neurodiverse... in a way that inhibits religion-connected parts of the psyche? I bet that's so.

Nisbet argues that the Christian idea of progress is a fusing of Greek and Jewish concepts and that "nothing in the entire history of the idea of progress is more important" than the Christian incorporation of Jewish millenarianism, resulting in an understanding of time which is optimistic and progressive.

I think this is precisely and amazingly correct. And Nisbet's argument has been around in "approved", non-contrarian science long before Moldbug!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2012 06:37:52PM 5 points [-]

His "Calvinism" thing looks completely baseless and arbitrary to me,

I'm not sure how it looks to you, but looking from an outside perspective, I can certainly see the similarities between Calvinism and Progressivism (specifically the form you seem to belong to).

In a number of places you expressed utter horror at the notion that people should face what they deserve. This reminds me of the Calvinist idea that everyone deserves to get thrown into hell.

Specifically, both strike me as possessing an alief, if not a belief, that being virtuous requires that one constantly feel guilty. What one should be feeling guilty about differs.

In the case of the Calvinist one should feel guilty about original sin, of which one is reminded whenever one experiences sexual attraction, or enjoys one's food, or has fun when one could be doing work. In the case of the Progressive one should be guilty about one's white/male/upper class/straight/righty/etc. (select all that apply) privilege, of which one is reminded whenever one perceives one is receiving the benefits of said privilege.

Comment author: MugaSofer 21 November 2012 06:45:48PM 1 point [-]

I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same has proved a better heuristic than the natural tendency to assume that people's flaws are inherent aspects of their nature. In addition, statistically, I am almost certainly biased against other races (as are you.) While there is probably a negligible effect of race on intelligence and violence, it's almost(?) too small to measure and the problems of taking it into account are far greater than the amount of influence it has.

TL;DR: I'm non-racist in order to be correct. It's a heuristic that has served me well, and has served it's users well historically.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 November 2012 09:57:27PM *  2 points [-]

I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same

What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn't correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that "all humans are ultimately the same" doesn't seem like a good summary.

Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely "all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God"?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: MugaSofer 21 November 2012 04:53:25PM 3 points [-]

Only then could propensity to crime be an inherent, genetic thing. And the inference that that was the case may still be wrong, for example if black people are bombarded by messages that they are supposed to be become criminals, or are otherwise influenced by the people around them. It would be very difficult to seperate the inherent genetic traits from those that are caused by percieved race.

I think childhood role models and so on is a part of one's upbringing and "society", don't you?

Let's start with something simple that I hope we can agree on. Group people by genetic heritage, and by social class, and by intelligence, and by antisocial behaviour. "Genetic heritage" is clear enough, I hope. "Class" is rather slippery in this analysis unless we are careful with it. Let's pin it down right now to be talking about environment, not where a person ends up. We'll see why later. Anyways, if you make these groupings, you will find that there is a lot of mutual information between them. That is, they are not independent. If you don't believe this, assume it for now.

Perhaps we are talking past each other. I'm not claiming you can't get any information from someone's race, I'm saying that this is due to historical/memetic causes. It's the differenc between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.

At this point, I hope I've said nothing controversial. The redefinition of "class" rubs me the wrong way, but I couldn't think of anything else to call that node. Ok, let's move on to the implications.

"Upbringing"? "Background"? I'm OK with class, TBH, as long as we both know what we mean.

Let's boot up the racist and see what he says about all this. The racist says "I don't care which of the two it is, and here's why:". Uh oh, here we go.

Here we go indeed. The racist is supposed to hold a belief abut how he world is, i.e. that intelligence and so on are as much racial characteristics as skin tone.

Let's do a little thought experiment: group someone's genes by those that define who they are as a person, and those that define what they look like. Let's say there's no overlap between these, that is, that a given gene cannot both impact personhood and appearance. (there's reasons to suspect overlap, but this is a thought experiment). Let's further say that, for obvious reasons (subpopulations), having gene A, which affects appearance, is quite strongly corellated with having gene alpha, which affects personality. Extend this to most of the genes so that you can largely predict someones appearance genes from which cluster of personality genes they come from, and the other way around. Does it seem unreasonable to talk about which cluster you belong to without specifying which of appearance or personality you are refering to, given that you can say things like "people with visual trait X have personality trait Y", which I hope seems reasonable itself, in this case. Note that this is the imaginary world where "strong racism" is correct.

Fair enough. This is what our pet racist here believes is true, yes?

Ok, given that, if you're still reading, let's draw a parallel to the weak racist world where genes affect appearance and such, and memes affect intelligence and personality and such, and these factors are both highly heritable and highly corellated. (This is our world). When asked to comment, the weak racist says "Why should it matter whether a highly heritable component of who someone is is genetic or memetic or on the 13th chromosome or the 14th? Can't we just point to the empirical clusters and say 'that there is a meaningful cluster', given that it does seem to cluster in a meaningful way?". At this point the lines are open and the objections are coming in fast:

No no no no no.

Consider various brands of Wiggin.

  • For whatever reason, Wiggins are usually born to disadvantaged families, and must live off. ketchup and steal simply to survive. They often have trouble breaking these habits when they are fortunate enough to escape their poverty
  • The genes responsible for black hair and green eyes are heavily correlated with the ones causing kleptomania and a craving for ketchup.
  • Wiggins are constantly expected to steal and eat ketchup, and people generally behave as society expects.

Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act "wiggin-like", not just those with black hair and green eyes.

In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup. In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading - especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.

In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)

"But there are places (like Vancouver) where, for selection and social reasons, race is independent of other things, therefore race is not interesting." Yes, then no. In our imaginary strongly racist world, there are places where green eyes and black hair does not corellate with a ketchup fetish and kleptomania, but in most of the world it does, so "wiggin" is still a meaningful term. More generally, just because you can find a subset of your survey population that does not have the corellations you find in the whole, doesn't mean you can reject the corellations in the whole. Especially given that if you look at enough subpopulations, you'll find ones that go just about any way you like, so you might as well cherry-pick your data if you are going to do that. All such a non-corellation proves is that the variables of interest don't have a common atomic cause (or that you have selection effects in your data).

What this proves is that you should take location into account when estimating the odds of a particular individual acting like a Wiggin.

"What about a guy who wears a cardigan and goes to harvard? If you learn he is black, should you then conclude he is stupid and violent like the stereotype?" No, because no matter how things go, who you became screens off any possible cause.

Not necessarily. If race determines violent tendencies and intelligence, then, while he may well be unusually intelligent, we should still be wary of him attacking us. Furthermore, we should increase our probability that he is unusually stupid for a cardigan-wearing harvard-goer, and achieved that status by some other means than intelligence.

There. Now we have comprehensive lines of retreat. Now and only now are we prepared to go take an unbiased look at the data, because none of the possibilities are scary anymore. I haven't looked very hard, but I think it's the third case. Not that I really care; I've got plans however it happens to be.

I'm pretty sure that admitting that, if racists were right, genocide would be justifiable, is a line of retreat. But then I already admitted that, so whatever. The problem is that you can't get from "I update my probability of a harvard degree downward when I learn that he's black" to "racists are right". You have to check if the environment is causing all or most of the differences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 November 2012 09:42:16PM 1 point [-]

Consider various brands of Wiggin.

  • For whatever reason, Wiggins are usually born to disadvantaged families, and must live off. ketchup and steal simply to survive. They often have trouble breaking these habits when they are fortunate enough to escape their poverty
  • The genes responsible for black hair and green eyes are heavily correlated with the ones causing kleptomania and a craving for ketchup.
  • Wiggins are constantly expected to steal and eat ketchup, and people generally behave as society expects.

Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act "wiggin-like", not just those with black hair and green eyes.

In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup.

Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents' genes.

In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading - especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.

In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)

This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.

Comment author: MugaSofer 21 November 2012 05:15:17PM 0 points [-]

By "caused by society" I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.

However, I would indeed claim that any culture that is encouraging violent tendencies and discouraging academic success should be improved by any means possible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 November 2012 09:21:13PM 2 points [-]

By "caused by society" I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.

In that case the argument of yours I quoted in the parent is almost a complete non-sequitor.

Comment author: RobbBB 21 November 2012 12:22:06AM *  1 point [-]

The input is the claim 'Race is a cultural convention.' You output the interpretation: 'None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.' Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists' claim is really what you take it to be.

Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a 'race' gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing 'race'-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 November 2012 09:11:39PM 1 point [-]

The input is the claim 'Race is a cultural convention.' You output the interpretation: 'None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.' Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists' claim is really what you take it to be.

The problem is that when asked to justify that statement 'Race is a cultural convention' anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means 'None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments'.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 November 2012 09:30:40PM *  2 points [-]

Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?

This seems like a seriously good question to me, at least for most of us. The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing. We may just be better off not knowing such things, if true.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2012 11:47:09PM 3 points [-]

The question is how causal is that correlation.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: MugaSofer 20 November 2012 07:09:16PM 0 points [-]

I've retracted the civilization thing because it's not clear what it even means.

Well, historically, it meant the idea that they couldn't produce or participate in civilizations, due to poor impulse control or whatever. But fair enough, that was always your least defensible claim.

I would expect only a very weak link here in my hometown (vancouver), a strong link in US and european cities)

As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society. If you compare people of different races raised and living in the same conditions, and there's no difference, then racism is wrong. If there is a difference - for example, if black men are still just as likely to commit crimes - then, and only then, do you have a point. Consider slave-owners who refused to educate slaves because they were stupid - of course they were, when did you last meet a slave who could read or write?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2012 11:42:39PM 2 points [-]

As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society.

It could also mean that the link is weakened by different social conditions to different extents. It could be a selection effect on the kind of people who move to Vancouver.

In any case, even this statement has politically incorrect implications, namely that we shouldn't be considering Black/Ebonics culture as equal in value to mainstream culture.

Comment author: alex_zag_al 20 November 2012 01:09:40AM 1 point [-]

Is that what you would do if you could self-modify better? Do you use your limited capacity to change how your mind functions to make yourself into a more efficient money-making machine? I don't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2012 11:24:21PM 1 point [-]

Is the point of being a street performer to make money or artistic fulfillment? It seems like there are better ways to achieve either one of these goals.

Comment author: Desrtopa 19 November 2012 02:36:44PM 1 point [-]

If it's a question of whether religion has a history of motivating violence, it's worth considering why the Muslims took those lands to begin with.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2012 01:04:55AM 1 point [-]

I agree that's a better example. One thing to notice is that the propensity of a religion to cause violence varies by religion.

Comment author: Multiheaded 19 November 2012 01:45:26PM *  -1 points [-]

the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.

Um... technically that's a geographical impossibility. Once the democracies liberated French territory (violently taken by the Third Reich from France in the first place) and launched offensives beyond the "lawful" borders of Germany as drawn under the Treaty of Versailles, it wasn't called the "Battle of Normandy" anymore. Normandy is a mid-sized region on the northwestern French coast. (Wikipedia article)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2012 12:58:06AM 0 points [-]

The Third Reich considered northern France a part of itself.

Comment author: TimS 18 November 2012 08:29:58PM 2 points [-]

I'm confused. Yes, D-Day was a good thing. Yes, D-Day was violence in service of democracy.

What does this have to do with whether (1) the Crusades were a good thing, or (2) whether religion (particularly Catholicism) was a substantial cause of the Crusades?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2012 08:37:56PM 4 points [-]

The crusades are often portrayed as violent Christians invading Muslim lands, which forgets that the Muslims violently took those lands from Christians in the first place.

On the other hand, no one complains that the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.

Comment author: bbleeker 18 November 2012 06:39:18PM 4 points [-]

Wait, why are the Crusades not a good example of religion causing people to do evil things? Do you think they weren't evil, or that religion wasn't to blame?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2012 08:19:44PM 1 point [-]

That depends on what you mean by those terms. Was the battle of Normandy a good thing?

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 11:25:45PM *  0 points [-]

Not in this comment specifically - just a general thing about your view of economics' relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?

But still, "moral fashion doesn't ever cause revolutions on its own" is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded ("causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity"). See?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 11:37:25PM 1 point [-]

But still, "moral fashion doesn't ever cause revolutions on its own" is a statement any Marxist would sign under.

Ok, so you did misunderstand my intent.

My point, was mainly that the Crusades are not a good example of "religion causes people to do something evil".

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 02:15:32PM *  -1 points [-]

Very, very well put! (FYI, Eugine_Nier appears to be pro-democracy)

Uru uru uru... ur'f nyernql trggvat zber Znekvfg, abj gb nqq fbzr Ynpna sbe znkvzhz cbgrapl... qnza, Mvmrx unfa'g jevggra nalguvat nobhg ubj gb fcvxr crbcyr'f qvfphffvbaf jvgu Ynpnavna Serhqvfz! Tnu, guvf Serhqb-Znekvfz qnex fbeprel vf pbzcyvpngrq!

^ looks just right in rot13, too! Black Speech!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 11:19:04PM 2 points [-]

I can't tell whether you understood my point, or completely misunderstood it. I don't see where I was "thinking like a Marxist".

Comment author: TimS 17 November 2012 03:39:19AM 8 points [-]

Your assertion fails to explain the lack of equivalent respect for equally extreme political theories with different object-level moral lessons. Foucault hardly lacked intellectual courage.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 04:59:08AM 2 points [-]

Foucault hardly lacked intellectual courage.

I don't know. It's hard to say given how mainstream he is in academia.

Comment author: hairyfigment 16 November 2012 09:03:22PM 2 points [-]

Exactly which multiculturalist do you think are "at ease" with that behavior?

About as many as there are environmentalists who are "at ease" with the mercury content of compact fluorescent bulbs, while campaigning to abolish incandescents.

On both points: what the flaming Hell are you talking about? Snopes says,

the amount housed in each bulb is very small, about 4 or 5 milligrams, which in volume is about the size of the period at the end of a sentence. (By comparison, old-style mercury thermometers contain about 500 milligrams of mercury, an amount equal to the mercury found in 125 CFL bulbs.)

(Wiki-link added.) See also the information - in particular, the graph of lifetime mercury emissions for incandescent vs flourescent - at Energystar.gov.

So the comparison with FGM seems truly bizarre. I also don't think you have the slightest clue what you're talking about when it comes to FGM and multiculturalism -- in particular, I doubt you bothered to follow the link to the Lynn Thomas source. It seems straightforwardly descriptive. Feminists sometimes criticize attempts to impose a ban in African nations because bans tend not to work and may turn this horrific practice into a symbol of resistance to imperialism. I gather people have had more success by talking to mothers about the health risks. So this seems like a fine example of how:

*understanding other cultures can help you talk to people and find common values

*conservatives talking about feminism or "multiculturalism" often look really stupid.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 03:31:47AM 1 point [-]

See also the information - in particular, the graph of lifetime mercury emissions for incandescent vs flourescent - at Energystar.gov.

And yet they have a problem with adding the trace lead amounts of lead to electronics necessary to prevent tin whiskers.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 16 November 2012 09:05:58AM 3 points [-]

What exactly is "a society at ease with the rich tapestry of human life"?

Am I "at ease" with cultures that have a hobby of cutting small girls' genitalia? Hell no! Does that make me an intolerant racist, or whatever is the most appropriate boo light today? So sue me, or at least make sure I will never get a job at academia!

Multiculturalism is an applause light, until you look at specific details. Then it sometimes gets ugly. Of course, to remain "politically correct" you have to stay in the far mode, and ignore all the details. It's easier that way.

Just like "desire amongst people to express their own identity in the manner they see fit". Again, if your desire includes a desire to cut small girls' genitalia, then I think those girls deserve to have their opinion heard too. If that is against your sick religion, again, you have the choice to sue me, criticize me in media, assassinate me, or all three things combined. (In a sufficiently "politically correct" society you literally could do all three suggested things, and then have some educated people excuse your actions.)

This all is a completely different thing from when people from village X decide to wear robes with red flowers, and people from village Y decide to wear robes with blue flowers. Or if Americans pour ketchup over all their foods, while Asians use the soy sauce. With that kind of culture I have no problems. I also have no problems with folk songs, operas, paintings, or books (assuming those books don't preach something I find repulsive).

It is bad that these two things are often mixed together under a wide umbrella of "culture". Then it makes people objecting to genital mutilation seem like brain-damaged bigots obsessing about the right color of flowers on everyone's robes. And that is pretty dishonest. And evil.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 03:12:06AM 2 points [-]

It is bad that these two things are often mixed together under a wide umbrella of "culture". Then it makes people objecting to genital mutilation seem like brain-damaged bigots obsessing about the right color of flowers on everyone's robes. And that is pretty dishonest. And evil.

Would you mind describing the Schelling fence between those two things.

Bug: The "Load all comments" link doesn't work

2 Eugine_Nier 10 November 2012 03:23AM

The "Load all comments" link that's at the bottom of articles with more than 500 comments doesn't work.

 

Comment author: RichardKennaway 08 November 2012 12:17:36PM 1 point [-]

I think you may have misunderstood the way "socialist" was being used there.

They talk about the elimination of the state, and in the same breath (or at least the same Wiki article) of collective ownership of the means of production. The idea seems to be that it isn't a "state" when it's Us, only when it's Them. Since it's Us, and therefore good and right, everyone will voluntarily agree to it. Anyone who does not is Bad, and therefore not one of Us, but one of Them. Liberty is liberty to do anything that is right, that is, to agree with Us. You can have anything you like, and do anything you like, as long as it's what We think you ought to have and do. We are truly democratic, since everyone voluntarily supports Us, but They are undemocratic, even if They have elected government, because if They had truly democratic government They would be organised like Us.

But this is politics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 November 2012 03:19:26AM -1 points [-]

I suspect this is similar to the question for certain right-anarchists of why can't one think of the state as defense agency, that decided to expand into other services.

I suspect the actual content of these philosophies is ideas about the optimal way to run a government/defense agency/collective ownership council.

Comment author: MugaSofer 09 November 2012 12:21:47PM 0 points [-]

With the magic of economics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 November 2012 03:13:55AM 0 points [-]

That only works if your appropriate distribution is the one the market creates, I suspect this isn't the case for left-libertarians.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 09 November 2012 04:48:59PM *  13 points [-]

How would we compare these hypotheses?

  1. The ancients achieved less science because they were less scientific in ideology or culture; because they had mistaken ideas about the relative virtue of experiment and philosophy.
  2. The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the precision equipment that modern scientists have.
  3. The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the generations of accumulation of information that modern scientists benefit from.
  4. The ancients achieved less science because there were fewer of them, population-wise. Fewer people → fewer Einsteins.
  5. The ancients achieved less science because they lacked a large-scale scientific community; developments were isolated to their developers' city-states.
  6. The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been deliberately suppressed by political and religious censorship and so we haven't heard of it.
  7. The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been accidentally lost in fires, floods, wars, or other disasters where they hadn't taken adequate backups.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 November 2012 02:33:09AM *  7 points [-]

 8. The ancients achieved a lot of science, but it wasn't applied much to create technology because they had access to cheap slave labor.

Comment author: Aurora 07 November 2012 01:20:33AM 1 point [-]

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it. -George Carlin

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 November 2012 02:27:44AM 1 point [-]

You could replace "Pope" with "President" in that quote, and it's still true.

Comment author: MugaSofer 08 November 2012 11:46:13AM *  0 points [-]

Europe!"liberal" means "strongly for economic freedom"

Not ... particularly. We're all over the map on the economy in my experience. I don't even know what you mean by "social regulation"; are we talking abortion?Freedom of speech? What?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 November 2012 02:36:55AM 1 point [-]

I don't even know what you mean by "social regulation"; are we talking abortion?Freedom of speech? What?

Abortion, drug use, various alternative lifestyles.

Comment author: Peterdjones 08 November 2012 12:31:41PM 0 points [-]

"left-libertarian" just sounded meaningless.

"The version of left-libertarianism defended by contemporary theorists like Vallentyne, Steiner, Otsuka, van Parijs, and Ellerman features a strong commitment to personal liberty—embracing the libertarian premise that each person possesses a natural right of self-ownership—and an egalitarian view of natural resources, holding that it is illegitimate for anyone to claim private ownership of resources to the detriment of others.[17] On this view, unappropriated natural resources are either unowned or owned in common, believing that private appropriation is only legitimate if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if private appropriation is taxed to compensate those who are excluded from natural resources. This position is articulated in self-conscious contrast to the position of other libertarians who argue for a (characteristically labor-based) right to appropriate unequal parts of the external world, such as land.[18"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 November 2012 02:25:10AM -1 points [-]

On this view, unappropriated natural resources are either unowned or owned in common, believing that private appropriation is only legitimate if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if private appropriation is taxed to compensate those who are excluded from natural resources.

I don't see how they propose the complex organization necessary for ensuring resources are only appropriated appropriately without severely compromising personal rights and liberties.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 November 2012 01:32:59AM 0 points [-]

Depends on the size of the stone. You might not even notice it if it's small enough.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 November 2012 01:58:56AM 0 points [-]

Well, you might be bulldozing the whole area.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2012 09:23:13AM *  6 points [-]

You can't get blood from a stone. So sometimes it pays to be a stone.

EDIT: Anyway, this is missing the point. Diogenes is preaching self-sufficiency and a variant of keeping your identity small. Sycophancy isn't a reliable way to hold onto one's vegetables and one's dignity.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2012 01:03:35AM 1 point [-]

You can't get blood from a stone. So sometimes it pays to be a stone.

But you can destroy the stone, and put something you can get blood from in its place.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 07 November 2012 02:50:50PM 4 points [-]

Meh. 'But' is just 'and' with a case of incongruity. That's what it is, so I don't see a problem with using it for that... though of course dark arts applications would be problematic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2012 01:01:07AM 0 points [-]

It's even more dark artsy to not even mention contrary evidence.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 07 November 2012 11:37:18AM *  2 points [-]

That's Blake again. Tim Freeman is the author of the quote before the Blake quotes on this page.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2012 12:59:06AM -1 points [-]

Thanks, fixed.

Comment author: Athrelon 06 November 2012 01:55:33AM 2 points [-]

"You know, given human nature, if you lived in a country in which there was democracy, pretty soon someone would try to sound deep by inventing reasons that voting was a good thing. But if you lived in a universe in which democracy wasn't the high-status mode of governance, and asked them if they wanted it, with all its attendant consequences, they would say no. It would never occur to them to invent all the clever rationalizations that someone resigned to democracy would devise."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2012 12:42:49AM 2 points [-]

But if you lived in a universe in which democracy wasn't the high-status mode of governance, and asked them if they wanted it, with all its attendant consequences, they would say no. It would never occur to them to invent all the clever rationalizations that someone resigned to democracy would devise.

Um, historically that is precisely what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Comment author: Academian 06 November 2012 06:42:05AM *  0 points [-]

Irrespective of California, many people even in swing states think voting is silly, so I would hope that they read this post... but regarding California,

And as it turns out, conditional on polls and other information from right before the election, one would have to assign a very low probability that California will (almost) vote Republican. Also, conditional on California (almost) voting Republican, one would have to assign a very high probability that enough other states will vote Republican to make California's outcome not matter.

Thumbs up, except that conclusion here is not to not vote... it's to either

1) watch the polls and vote based on proximity to a tie at both the state and federal level,

or if the time watching the polls is more of a sacrifice to you than the time spent on late-stage voting (can't vote by mail),

2) just vote without the poll information.

Reason: supposing that (a) without the poll information, the EV of voting is high, and (b) finding out the poll results can change your decision, (a+b) implies that the poll results have high VOI. More precisely,

1/ (5 million) = Pr(decisive | no info) = Pr(decisive | close poll) * Pr(close poll) + Pr(decisive | not-close poll) * Pr(not-close poll)

Since Pr(decisive | not-close poll) is many orders of magnitude closer to 0 than 1/(5 million), and Pr(close poll) is quite small, say 1/N, Pr(decisive | close poll) must be on the order of N * 1/(5 million), so the payoff would be N * whatever is reported in the post, which would be huge.

So the conclusion here is that "Voting without poll results is like donating to charity, but adopting the policy of watching the polls and deciding to vote based on proximity to a tie is like donating almost as much to charity, and saves you time, unless you spend more time watching the polls that you would spend to vote."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2012 12:34:24AM 0 points [-]

1) watch the polls and vote based on proximity to a tie at both the state and federal level,

The problem is that letting polls influence voting decisions is subject to Goodhart's law.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2012 02:14:27PM 1 point [-]

Pushing into democracy hasn't worked out too well either in most of the world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2012 12:16:25AM 1 point [-]

My point is that if you're lucky enough to live in a country that has a (semi-)functioning democracy, you shouldn't be pushing out of it.

Comment author: moridinamael 06 November 2012 08:47:37PM 4 points [-]

Relatedly, there have been numerous instances of individual humans taking over entire national governments by exploiting high-leverage, usually unethical, opportunities. A typical case involves a military general staging a coup or an elected leader legislating unlimited power unto himself. None of these instances look anything like firms competing for resources. Instead, we have single actors who are intelligent and opportunistic, unethical or morally atypicall, and risk-tolerant enough to accept the consequences of a failed coup.

A UFAI looks much more like a dictator than a firm.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2012 05:57:22AM 0 points [-]

All those require the an least implicit cooperation of a lot of other people, e.g., the general's army.

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 07 November 2012 02:08:47AM 1 point [-]

I think it meant "not made of smaller parts", for example ghosts would be disembodied consciousnesses not made of any atoms. I thought this was incredibly unlikely.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2012 05:40:42AM 0 points [-]

For some types of entities it's not clear what that means. For example, are particles made of wave functions, or are wave functions made of particles.

Comment author: gwern 07 November 2012 02:54:08AM 3 points [-]

To be fair, with a general like Napoleon, how could the Spartans lose?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2012 05:23:37AM -1 points [-]

Fixed typo.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 08:37:22AM *  41 points [-]

Diogenes was knee deep in a stream washing vegetables. Coming up to him, Plato said, "My good Diogenes, if you knew how to pay court to kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables."

"And," replied Diogenes, "If you knew how to wash vegetables, you wouldn't have to pay court to kings."

Teachings of Diogenes

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2012 05:22:04AM 7 points [-]

This works until the king sends armed men to confiscate your vegetables.

Comment author: MTGandP 06 November 2012 04:13:07AM -1 points [-]

Does that only hold for people of African descent?

I think it's especially true in that case for historical reasons, but you're right, I think it does apply for any race.

Could you describe what you would consider robust evidence?

Any sort of evidence that demonstrates a genetic difference in intelligence (putting aside difficulties in accurately measuring intelligence—IQ is not intelligence). AFAIK, all evidence to date can be explained by environmental differences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2012 05:03:40AM 3 points [-]

all evidence to date can be explained by environmental differences.

It seems like you may be privileging the hypothesis that the cause are non-genetic.

Comment author: PECOS-9 06 November 2012 05:57:56PM *  0 points [-]

How did you calculate those odds? Shouldn't it be the binomial distribution where n=number of voters, k=n/2, and p=.5, meaning the probability of you being the deciding vote is (.5^n)*(n choose n/2). Still better than Erewhon, though.

I'm not particularly confident that I'm right about this though, so please explain if I'm wrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2012 04:55:07AM 2 points [-]

Shouldn't it be the binomial distribution where n=number of voters, k=n/2, and p=.5, meaning the probability of you being the deciding vote is (.5^n)*(n choose n/2).

Yes, and Sqrt(n) (times a small constant) is a good approximation to the above for large n. See Stirling's formula.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 07:14:54AM *  5 points [-]

And if we push out of democracy, what are the chances the new optimum will be better? History is not encouraging on this point.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 05 November 2012 11:12:17PM 2 points [-]

I feel some stigma attached to discussing the possibility that people of African descent are less intelligent.

Does that only hold for people of African descent?

No robust evidence has ever demonstrated that one race is more or less intelligent than another.

Could you describe what you would consider robust evidence?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 06:28:21AM 2 points [-]

Does that only hold for people of African descent?

No, but for most others the result can be disproved by pointing to test results.

Comment author: TimS 06 November 2012 03:03:33AM 2 points [-]

crime rate

Is there an accessible publicly available explanation on the argument that crime rate is linked to poor intelligence?

The argument for a correlation between poverty and intelligence is quite straightforward, and it is clear that crime rate (especially violent crime and trade in illicit substances) is correlated with poverty, which is also correlated with race.

But the reason that race continues to be correlated with poverty is exactly the question that is under dispute, so use of the correlation between crime rate and race that rely on the correlation between poverty and race assumes the conclusion that is under dispute.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 06:08:45AM 4 points [-]

Is there an accessible publicly available explanation on the argument that crime rate is linked to poor intelligence?

Here.

Comment author: Dorikka 05 November 2012 01:23:45PM 20 points [-]

In your base, answering your survey.

Notes (might not want to read unless you've already taken the survey):

V'ir nggraqrq na bayvar zrrghc naq qvqa'g xabj jung gb fnl gb gur zrrghc dhrfgvba, fb V fnvq 'ab'. Fvathynevgl dhrfgvba unf cbffvoyr napubevat rssrpg; tybony png. evfx dhrfgvba zragvbaf gur lrne 2100 evtug orsber vg. Eri. Onlrf pnyvoengvba nafjre fubhyq znlor zragvba jurgure gb hfr crepragntrf be cebonovyvgvrf.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 02:35:08AM 1 point [-]

Eri. Onlrf pnyvoengvba nafjre fubhyq znlor zragvba jurgure gb hfr crepragntrf be cebonovyvgvrf.

What's the difference?

Comment author: wedrifid 05 November 2012 07:15:48AM 1 point [-]

That's actually probably my favorite single question: when I first took the survey I went 'universe: dunno, maybe 60%, Milky Way: eh, 30%.....wait a second aren't there more than 2 galaxies‽'

In which case your probability estimates would seem to suggest exogenesis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 02:30:49AM -1 points [-]

See my comment here.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 November 2012 12:25:08AM 0 points [-]

Gur yvgreny genafyngvba bs “ybj vapbzr” vfa'g irel pbzzba va Vgnyvna (rkprcg va arjfcncref/GI arjf, juvpu V ernq/jngpu irel fryqbz gurfr qnlf, jurer V guvax vg zrnaf fbzrguvat nccebkvzngryl yvxr ‘obggbz dhvagvyr va Vgnyl’ ohg V'z abg fher).

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 02:24:03AM -1 points [-]

jurer V guvax vg zrnaf fbzrguvat nccebkvzngryl yvxr ‘obggbz dhvagvyr va Vgnyl’.

Jryy, gung'f ybjre guna gur obggbz dhvagvyr va gur HF, rfcrpvnyyl gurfr qnlf.

Comment author: Curiouskid 05 November 2012 04:26:39AM 2 points [-]

For the people who got Thiel Fellowships, the status-preserving term is "stopped-out".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 02:02:27AM -1 points [-]

Heck, at that level even "drop-out" works as a form of counter-signaling.

Comment author: CCC 05 November 2012 07:19:56PM 0 points [-]

Note that a proper simulation in step (2) would include a number of simulations of simulations, and each of those would include a number of simulations of simulations of simulations. It's not merely the number of simulations that the base-reality does that's important; it's also the number of layers of simulation within that.

For example, with only three layers of simulation, if each humanity (simulated or not) attempts to simulate its own past just 100 times, then that will result in 10^6 third-layer simulations (1010100 simulations altogether).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 02:01:05AM -1 points [-]

The problem with recursive simulations is that the amount of available computronium decreases exponentially with level.

Comment author: Wrongnesslessness 05 November 2012 09:53:16AM 21 points [-]

The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn't factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have seemed at least plausible to the formerly optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 01:55:51AM *  3 points [-]

For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

And yet they couldn't even defeat the Spartans or keep Savonarola from taking power.

Comment author: mwengler 05 November 2012 03:46:36PM -1 points [-]

In theory, yes. If I am hiring a nanny and I have 300 applicants, I can walk down the line and keep only the 20 best groomed of the applicants, and while I can be virtually sure to have sent home the "best" applicant on many very sensible but detailed and difficult to measure criteria, I can also be sure that many of the 20 I kept will perform very well, and that a more intensive look at the remaining 20 than I could have afforded applying to the 300 will reliably identify a few very good candidates.

But these are empirical questions about what practices actually dominated, not theoretical questions about how it might have been. In actual practice, there were broad job classifications for which a black person would not be hired because they were black. In actual practice, the strike against them was that many white people wouldn't work with them. You would lose many more qualified white person from you hiring pool than you would gain in qualified black people, and so your average hiring and wage costs would go up. That is, most whites would highly value not working with blacks and that would have to be figured in your hiring costs.

Certainly, the reasons given for this social judgement against black people were things like they were lazy, dishonest, stupid, ignorant, dirty, among other things. And indeed, given their exclusion from schools, many social institutions, and their lack of income from the existing social equilibrium, there was much truth to these generalizations.

In this case, in the U.S., the situation was massively changed by the imposition of federal laws on the states, industries, and institutions where this occurred. Armed militia were deployed to protect a small number of very bright and very brave black students who attended government funded but previously closed to them universities. Courts ordered the mixing of the races in public schools.

Over the decades, the real differences between the races arising from the real differences in opportunities and resources available on the basis of race has declined immensely, and most of the generalizations have been abandoned by most of the population.

The actual way it happened in almost all cases is an essential aspect to understanding these things and in reasoning about them, and the policies that seem to have changed them. The theoretical possibilities, in a vacuum that did not include the gigantic social agreement among whites that blacks were not wanted, are useless and even distracting to a clear understanding of what was going on.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 01:44:25AM 2 points [-]

Over the decades, the real differences between the races arising from the real differences in opportunities and resources available on the basis of race has declined immensely,

This seems dubious. If you look at intelligence (as measured by say SAT scores) or crime rate, you will find that there's still a very large difference between the races.

Comment author: Larks 05 November 2012 10:25:12PM 8 points [-]

Voting is more like stealing thousands of dollars to donate to an ok charity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 01:33:14AM 11 points [-]

The problem is that the thousands of dollars are being stolen anyway and you need to vote to have any say in which charity, or to reduce the amount of money being stolen.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 November 2012 06:34:34AM *  0 points [-]

Um, no. Since one of the TDTists is yourself, and you already know your set of acquaintances.

The grandparent seems correct and I don't see why "Um, no" is supposed to follow from the parent. It is possible that the amount of communication required to reach an agreement with Eugine would be too much to fit even on my rather verbose bumper sticker.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2012 01:01:25AM 0 points [-]

The grandparent seems correct and I don't see why "Um, no" is supposed to follow from the parent.

It might be easier to see if you think of the case when you know only one other TDTist and he would vote for the other guy. However, you're not sure how many other TDTists he knows.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 November 2012 03:47:39AM *  -1 points [-]

But do each of those Timeless Decision Theorists know precisely the same set of Timeless Decision Theorists as you do?

They don't need to. I just need to expect the political biases of the TDTists the others know to be just as likely to in one direction as the other.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 03:56:17AM 0 points [-]

Um, no. Since one of the TDTists is yourself, and you already know your set of acquaintances.

In response to Does My Vote Matter?
Comment author: wedrifid 05 November 2012 03:36:24AM *  10 points [-]

If I'd been composing this for the Less Wrong crowd, I'd have also noted that the decisions of people similar to you should be correlated, which adds another multiplier to the effectiveness of voting. I might like I bumper sticker that says "I'm a timeless decision theorist, therefore I vote!")

I want one that says "I know as many Timeless Decision Theorists who would vote for the other guy as for my guy, therefore none of us vote even though voting would cause our preferences to be maximised!"

ie. "Timeless" considerations go both ways here (and elsewhere), not just towards the option that we incidentally associate with 'virtue'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 03:40:30AM 1 point [-]

I want one that says "I know as many Timeless Decision Theorists who would vote for the other guy as for my guy, therefore none of us vote even though voting would cause our preferences to be maximised!"

But do each of those Timeless Decision Theorists know precisely the same set of Timeless Decision Theorists as you do?

Comment author: Pfft 05 November 2012 02:59:04AM *  6 points [-]

If one Virginia voter does an expected 1/(3.5 million)*($7 trillion) = $2 million good by voting for candidate X, then there is another Virginia voter that does an expected $2 million of damage by voting for candidate Y. It seems that either

  1. Roughly half of the population is misinformed about which alternative is objectively better. In that case, how do I justify a belief that I have a greater than 50% chance of being right, when everyone else has access to the same information?

  2. There are real differences in values, and by my vote I direct the outcome towards my preference instead of the other Virginia voter's. In that case, sure I want to vote, but should we really call it altruism?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 03:33:25AM 4 points [-]

Roughly half of the population is misinformed about which alternative is objectively better. In that case, how do I justify a belief that I have a greater than 50% chance of being right, when everyone else has access to the same information?

Well, you can replace "which alternative is objectively better" with any other belief on which opinions differ and the same argument applies.

In response to Does My Vote Matter?
Comment author: [deleted] 05 November 2012 02:12:48AM *  1 point [-]

To answer this, let's imagine a different voting system. In the land of Erewhon, voters cast their ballots for president just as they do here; but instead of decreeing that the candidate with the most votes is the winner, each vote is turned into a lottery ball, and one is chosen at random to determine the next president.

I'm writing a research paper on electoral reform and - while contemplating Arrow's impossibility theorem - I had the same idea. What's so bad about non-deterministic voting systems that they have to be excluded from the start, especially if (assuming I understand the theorem correctly) they are the only ones that can simultaneously satisfy all of Arrow's other four criteria?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Does My Vote Matter?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 03:19:24AM 2 points [-]

There's Eliezer's frequent claim, that for every randomized solution, there's a better deterministic solution that possibly requires more thought.

In response to Does My Vote Matter?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 03:16:41AM 2 points [-]

This seems counterintuitive, because we imagine that the votes of everyone else are "locked in" somehow, and that we're only deciding whether to add ours to the pile- in which case, the only way that it could matter is in the event that it makes or breaks an exact tie.

Furthermore, even if you think of everybody else's vote as locked in the odds of you being the deciding vote (assuming everybody else votes randomly and you don't know how) is which is a lot better than your odds in Erewhon. Furthermore, in a close election with partisan voters and undecideds your odds are even better.

Comment author: gwern 05 November 2012 01:47:52AM 3 points [-]

I'm mentally tired from banging my head against R and can't think through this, so I'm dropping it here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 01:54:57AM 2 points [-]

Feel free to try tomorrow.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 11:41:23PM 2 points [-]

Ba gur bgure unaq, V unq gnxra “ybj-vapbzr” gb or n rhcurzvfz sbe ‘vaqvtrag’, fb V jrag jvgu O. Gurl fubhyqa'g unir zvkrq n dhnyvgngvir jbeq yvxr gung jvgu dhnagvgngvir qngn nobhg cevprf naq ahzore bs urnqnpurf.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 01:49:44AM 1 point [-]

Gurer znl or n qvssrerapr va pbzzba hfntr orgjrra gur HF naq Vgnyl.

Comment author: gjm 05 November 2012 12:02:53AM 3 points [-]

(Nice interrobang.)

There's only something wrong with holding both "Pr(intelligent life in Milky Way) non-negligible" and "Pr(intelligent life in observable universe) not-almost-1" if the events "life in galaxy 1", "life in galaxy 2", etc., are independent or approximately so. So if you assign substantial probability to propositions like "intelligent life basically can't actually emerge naturally at all, but we were put here by a god" or "subtle variations in the laws of physics across the universe mean that our galaxy is suitable for intelligent life but most others aren't" then you can consistently give such answers.

I can't think of any reason for the right sort of intergalactic correlation that's likely to be thought probable by many LWers, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 01:26:14AM 1 point [-]

See my comment here.

Comment author: gwern 04 November 2012 11:09:12PM *  1 point [-]

There's >170 billion galaxies in the observable universe; you need to make some pretty strong assumptions to overcome a 1:170,000,000,000 difference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 01:24:22AM *  8 points [-]

you need to make some pretty strong assumptions to overcome a 1:170,000,000,000 difference.

Actually you don't. Consider the following highly simplified toy model.

You're not sure where the great filter is but you think there is a 50% chance it's before evolving intelligence (scenario A), and 50% that it's afterward (scenario B).

In scenario A each galaxy only has a 0.1% chance of having intelligent life. (Note that nevertheless the observable universe will still have life somewhere since 0.1% is a lot more than 1/170,000,000,000.)

In scenario B each galaxy has (multiple) planets with intelligent life in it.

Combining these two scenarios gives 100% for life in the universe and 50.1% for life in the galaxy.

By changing these numbers and adding more scenarios you can get different but similar results. You should try this yourself, it's a good way to get an intuition for how Bayesian probabilities work. For example, try adding a scenario C where intelligent life is extremely rare and we exist only due to the anthropic principal. What happens when you assign scenario C 40% and keep scenarios A and B equally likely?

Comment author: sanxiyn 04 November 2012 08:28:43AM 36 points [-]

I took the survey. I did Political Compass for the first time, and I found its questions and results rather baffling. Political Compass themselves admit it is culturally biased and mainly for western democracies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 11:00:45PM 8 points [-]

That's the thing about traditionalism. A lot of it depends on which tradition you're from.

Comment author: gwern 04 November 2012 09:48:34PM 10 points [-]

That's actually probably my favorite single question: when I first took the survey I went 'universe: dunno, maybe 60%, Milky Way: eh, 30%.....wait a second aren't there more than 2 galaxies‽'

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 10:52:35PM 0 points [-]

As I pointed out here that logic doesn't work.

Comment author: simplicio 04 November 2012 09:56:34PM 1 point [-]

I was pretty sure there were about 100 billion galaxies so I just divided by that factor.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 10:48:51PM *  5 points [-]

That assumes aliens arising in each galaxy is an independent event when conditioning on your uncertainty.

Comment author: Emile 04 November 2012 09:41:43PM *  1 point [-]

Wouldn't most group-based heuristics be useless when self-selection is involved?

Let's assume we care about strength, and that men are significantly stronger than women (I'm cutting corners for simplicity's sake).

If you're looking for people to mug in the street, and all else being equal prefer a weak victim, then you're better off targeting women than men - it's a useful heuristic.

However, if you're hiring people for a job that requires strength, people will only apply if they think they have a chance, then you should expect about the same distribution of strength among the man and women who apply - any sex-based heuristic is useless.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 09:57:08PM 0 points [-]

Wouldn't most group-based heuristics be useless when self-selection is involved.

Less useful, not necessarily entirely useless. Depends on who rational the people doing the self-selection are.

Comment author: Peterdjones 04 November 2012 04:30:24PM 1 point [-]

EY seems to be taken with the resemblance between a causal diagram and the abstract structure of axioms, inferences and theorems in mathematcal logic. But there are differences: with causality, our evidence is the latest causal output, the leaf nodes. We have to trace back to the Big Bang from them.However, in maths we start from axioms, and cannot get directly to the theorems or leaf nodes. We could see this process as exploring a pre-existing territory, but it is hard to see what this adds, since the axioms and rules of inference are sufficient for truth, and it is hard to see, in EY's presentation how literally he takes the idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 09:54:22PM -1 points [-]

We could see this process as exploring a pre-existing territory, but it is hard to see what this adds, since the axioms and rules of inference are sufficient for truth, and it is hard to see, in EY's presentation how literally he takes the idea.

It's useful for reasoning heuristically about conjectures.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 07:58:06PM *  10 points [-]

There was an attempt to create one about a year ago. The forum still exists although no one uses it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 07:53:01PM -1 points [-]

Extrapolating beyond humans, what does this imply about the prospects for FAI?

Comment author: lukeprog 03 November 2012 10:19:36PM 13 points [-]

Any new information about reality, if properly understood... can only cause people to become more ethical

Whether this is true depends on your definition of "ethical." In any case, your claim here doesn't weigh against the idea "that certain claims about the nature of reality could cause people to become more immoral" because people do not, in fact, always "properly understand" new information about reality.

Eliezer did say "Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong," but check what he said in the very next paragraph: "On the other hand, if you are only half-a-rationalist, you can easily do worse with more knowledge." The trouble is that current people are indeed only half-rational, or worse.

A particular truth can only hurt someone if he holds a false belief.

A counterexample: Suppose that a human-level AI, Ralph, holds only true beliefs. But Ralph doesn't yet know that Petunia exists. The superintelligent Omega tortures everyone who knows that Petunia exists. Now, Ralph learns that Petunia exists. But this truth hurts him, even though he doesn't hold a false belief.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 07:50:40PM *  2 points [-]

Eliezer did say "Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong," but check what he said in the very next paragraph: "On the other hand, if you are only half-a-rationalist, you can easily do worse with more knowledge."

The solution to this problem is do something Eliezer always argues against for some reason, namely, to compartmentalize.

Also it's likely that becoming more rational won't necessarily help the reasons you mentioned here.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 November 2012 11:59:29PM 0 points [-]

I'm saying that a statement that black people 'were treated unfairly' 'not so long ago' implies a basic ignorance of the way black people still are treated, that in general it is better not to make statements about things one knows nothing about, and that especially one shouldn't make blanket statements about subjects one is ignorant of when those subjects are hugely emotive ones.

"I was trying to demonstrate how people often skew their perception of truth to avoid coming to beliefs that appear socially unacceptable." Except that firstly, that was a side-issue to your main point (such as it was), that knowing the truth won't cause us to become immoral. Secondly, it doesn't make that point because, as you point out yourself, the truth in this case is that there doesn't appear to be a link between race and intelligence. Thirdly, the point you claim to have been trying to demonstrate is only really made in the paragraph about Gould, not in the rest of the paragraphs on race, which come from the premise "what if black people were intellectually inferior -- how should we treat them?", and go back to your main point.

All those paragraphs about race relating to your main point could have had any other example to make the point, and the point about Gould could equally well have used any of a thousand other obvious examples of people (consciously or otherwise) distorting results.

And, of course, your hypothetical "what if the racists are right?" question doesn't even lead to the conclusions you draw from it. If it could be shown, for example, that black people could never understand basic political questions, it would be entirely rational to at least consider removing the right to vote from them. Saying "An outcome where a particular race becomes less happy could only arise because the science was not properly understood" would be outright false, in that case.

And as for "What's obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to all readers", I think that the obvious parts of this post would be obvious to anyone who's spent any time at all on this site.

In response to comment by [deleted] on In Defense of Moral Investigation
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 05:52:00PM *  4 points [-]

Secondly, it doesn't make that point because, as you point out yourself, the truth in this case is that there doesn't appear to be a link between race and intelligence.

Um, the particular argument MTGandP makes doesn't provide much evidence of a link between race and intelligence. There is definitely other evidence for a link, such as the fact that just about any proxy measure of intelligence, from SAT scores, to results of IQ tests, to crime rates, will correlate with race.

Of course, that still leaves the question of whether this is genetic or cultural. Here I haven't seen much evidence either way so there's still a reasonable chance that it's genetic.

Comment author: mwengler 04 November 2012 03:21:24PM 1 point [-]

The whole race and intelligence thing seems dopey to me. Let me say why.

If I want to help black people because more of them are poor than are white people, wouldn't it make more sense just to have a program that helps poor people?

If I won't hire black people because, on average (I believe) they are not quite as smart as white people, wouldn't I be better off just not hiring the individuals who seem dull to me? Wouldn't I be better off talking to each prospective applicant for a few minutes and hiring the individuals who seem smart regardless of their race? Any quantitative attempt to show a racial difference in intelligence shows that there are 100s of millions of black people who are smarter than 100s of millions of white people. Why use such a dopey standard?

Well, supposing I'm not quite smart enough to realize race is a really dopey proxy for the things I am really looking for. Is it immoral to use a dopey proxy, or merely stupid?

I don't think racism is caused by people thinking some race is inferior in some way. Rather the opposite, I think the statements of inferiority are a result of the racism, part of the mechanism one group uses to gain advantage over another in a social setting. Of course human minds being as recursive as they are, it is hard to unravel which comes first intellectually speaking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 05:16:09PM 5 points [-]

If I won't hire black people because, on average (I believe) they are not quite as smart as white people, wouldn't I be better off just not hiring the individuals who seem dull to me?

The problem is that someone else will notice that you've hired more white people than black people and accuse you of racism and at least in the US the law will back them up.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 November 2012 10:33:36PM 4 points [-]

"As I write this, I feel some stigma attached to discussing the possibility that people of African descent are less intelligent. I see three main reasons for this. The first is that, not so long ago, African-Americans were treated unfairly "

If you think that racism was only a problem 'not so long ago' rather than being an ongoing, major problem, then you probably just shouldn't discuss race at all.

On top of this, see http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ . Your post didn't need to discuss race at all, and you chose a needlessly emotive example.

As for the rest of the post, what isn't obvious is wrong -- see lukeprog's response.

In response to comment by [deleted] on In Defense of Moral Investigation
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 05:09:47AM *  7 points [-]

Your post didn't need to discuss race at all, and you chose a needlessly emotive example.

Any example of this phenomenon would be emotive to those who believe it's immoral to investigate it. Furthermore, this example is useful since otherwise readers would be left with the impression that this is only something the "other side" does.

Comment author: dankane 04 November 2012 12:40:04AM 2 points [-]

Huh. That's interesting. Are you saying that you can actually pin down The Natural Numbers exactly using some "first order logic with branching quantifiers"? If so, I would be interested in seeing it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 03:33:27AM *  2 points [-]

Sure:

It is not the case that: there exists a z such that for every x and x’, there exists a y depending only on x and a y’ depending only on x’ such that Q(x,x’,y,y’,z) is true

where Q(x,x’,y,y’,z) is ((x=x' ) → (y=y' )) ∧ ((Sx=x' ) → (y=y' )) ∧ ((x=0) → (y=0)) ∧ ((x=z) → (y=1))

Comment author: Incorrect 03 November 2012 11:57:49PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see what the difference is... They look very similar to me.

At some point you have to translate it into a (possibly infinite) set of first-order axioms or you wont be able to perform first-order resolution anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 03:18:08AM 0 points [-]

What's wrong with second order resolution?

Comment author: gwern 04 November 2012 12:05:51AM 6 points [-]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't. At least, if it does I have no idea what the 'ontologically basic mental events' qualifiers were about...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2012 12:22:32AM 3 points [-]

I honestly considered answering "Mu" to the questions that mentioned 'ontologically basic mental events' since I don't think "ontologically basic" is a meaningful concept.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Logical Pinpointing
Comment author: Decius 03 November 2012 08:25:07PM 0 points [-]

You can't talk about what the natural numbers are and are not without some form of set theory.

"0 is the only number which is not the successor of any number" requires set theory to be meaningful.

In response to comment by Decius on Logical Pinpointing
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 November 2012 11:07:08PM 0 points [-]

No. You can rephrase that as: "Every natural number is either 0 or the successor of some number".

In response to Logical Pinpointing
Comment author: Incorrect 03 November 2012 09:34:29AM *  2 points [-]

"Because if you had another separated chain, you could have a property P that was true all along the 0-chain, but false along the separated chain. And then P would be true of 0, true of the successor of any number of which it was true, and not true of all numbers."

But the axiom schema of induction does not completely exclude nonstandard numbers. Sure if I prove some property P for P(0) and for all n, P(n) => P(n+1) then for all n, P(n); then I have excluded the possibility of some nonstandard number "n" for which not P(n) but there are some properties which cannot be proved true or false in Peano Arithmetic and therefore whose truth hood can be altered by the presence of nonstandard numbers.

Can you give me a property P which is true along the zero-chain but necessarily false along a separated chain that is infinitely long in both directions? I do not believe this is possible but I may be mistaken.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 November 2012 11:03:28PM 1 point [-]

But the axiom schema of induction does not completely exclude

Eliezer isn't using an axiom schema, he's using an axiom of second order logic.

Comment author: TorqueDrifter 03 November 2012 06:39:01PM 0 points [-]

Can you give me a property P which is true along the zero-chain but necessarily false along a separated chain that is infinitely long in both directions?

Pn(x) is "x is the nth successor of 0" (the 0th successor of a number is itself). P(x) is "there exists some n such that Pn(x)".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 November 2012 11:01:20PM 0 points [-]

What is n?

Comment author: dankane 02 November 2012 09:31:13PM 5 points [-]

OK then. As soon as you can explain to me exactly what you mean when you say "for any collection of numbers there is a corresponding property being quantified over", I will be satisfied. In particular, what do you mean when you say "any collection"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 November 2012 10:39:08PM *  2 points [-]

If you're already fine with the alternating quantifiers of first-order logic, I don't see why allowing branching quantifiers would cause a problem. I could describe second order logic in terms of branching quantifiers.

Comment author: bsterrett 03 November 2012 08:07:31PM 1 point [-]

I can't imagine a universe without mathematics, yet I think mathematics is meaningful. Doesn't this mean the test is not sufficient to determine the meaningfulness of a property?

Is there some established thinking on alternate universes without mathematics? My failure to imagine such universes is hardly conclusive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 November 2012 10:27:02PM *  0 points [-]

Sorry, misread what you wrote in the grand parent. I agree with you.

Comment author: CCC 28 October 2012 02:26:36PM -1 points [-]

Surely the node should be "person X was taught basic mathematics", and not mathematics itself?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 November 2012 09:50:15PM 1 point [-]

The point of having the node is to have a common cause of person X's beliefs about mathematics and person Y's beliefs about mathematics that explains why these two beliefs are correlated even if both discovered said mathematics interdependently.

Comment author: bsterrett 01 November 2012 09:32:18PM 2 points [-]

I am not entirely sure how you arrived at the conclusion that justice is a meaningful concept. I am also unclear on how you know the statement "If X is just, then do X" is correct. Could you elaborate further?

In general, I don't think it is a sufficient test for the meaningfulness of a property to say "I can imagine a universe which has/lacks this property, unlike our universe, therefore it is meaningful."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 11:11:33PM -1 points [-]

In general, I don't think it is a sufficient test for the meaningfulness of a property to say "I can imagine a universe which has/lacks this property, unlike our universe, therefore it is meaningful."

Um, mathematics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 10:33:01PM *  7 points [-]

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.

William Blake

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 10:32:07PM *  4 points [-]

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

William Blake

Comment author: David_Gerard 02 November 2012 06:17:01PM *  6 points [-]

Davis' statement was not a generalised admonition concerning reasoning, but a statement made with the bottom line written (he was justifying ignoring Nate Silver). It's not entirely accurate to characterise it in general terms.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 10:22:45PM 1 point [-]

I suggest we put this debate on hold, until say November, 6. ;)

Comment author: [deleted] 02 November 2012 02:32:45AM 1 point [-]

An unspoken criterion for LW rationality quotes -- AFAICT -- is most truth in least space. This quote could have more truth in the same space. Even with just a "somewhat" before the "unsettled."

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 10:13:27PM 1 point [-]

See here and here for why you should prefer the stronger version of the injunction, even if it seems paradoxical.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 01 November 2012 09:09:14PM *  4 points [-]

I resent this attitude. People often assume that I don't care about the things that I forget. Really, I am tired of a whole host of prejudices against people with poor memories. People assume that I am just like them, and that if I fail to remember something they would have remembered, it was deliberate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 09:30:15PM 2 points [-]

Nevertheless; for any given person, the more he cares about something, the less likely he is to forget about it.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 October 2012 12:29:13PM *  1 point [-]

Living in some even less convenient world, I think I might consciously apply compartmentalization/hypocrisy upon hearing that someone did that - agreeing that they didn't commit anything too bad either ethically or legally... then I'd still do something to harm the rapist emotionally, socially or materially, accepting that my aggression is merely an outlet for a moral emotion and not the demand of a consistent principle.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2012 09:18:04PM 0 points [-]

Personally I think the problem is with the quasi-utiliterianism that tends to be the default moral theory around here.

Comment author: DarthImperius 29 October 2012 08:11:14PM *  0 points [-]

Perhaps the solution is "rent-a-wombs", whereby wealthy would-be genetic dominators pay lower class women to be surrogate mothers for their in-vitro embryos.

None of this is likely to fly until there has been a dramatic memetic reordering of the Western world away from its current slave religion-based ideologies. If this doesn't happen, I expect Asian countries like Singapore to lead the way into the brave new techno-fascist future. It is encouraging to see interest in these ideas among the high-IQ set, who have been strangely submissive to the dictates of slave religionists for far too long. All of the slave religion-based ideologies, from Christianity to secular humanism to modern leftism, must be DISARMED, DISMANTLED, AND ANNIHILATED if this sort of thing is to once again become acceptable. This is the real revolution that the LessWrong crowd should be working toward, not some tepid and toothless rationality worship. In the immortal words of arch-eugenicist Colonel Green, I say this to the most intelligent 1% of humanity: "Overwhelm and devastate."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 November 2012 05:11:49PM 1 point [-]

I would like to point out that it was the Western world with its "slave religion" that created modern technology.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 31 October 2012 01:48:18AM 1 point [-]

I like the analogy and it does clarify things.

One salient difference is I know the state is comprised of other human beings running on similar software, whereas I don't know what the source code/basic values of an AI are. Analogously, should I trust an AI built of uploads more than a 'self grown' ones?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 November 2012 04:59:58PM 2 points [-]

One salient difference is I know the state is comprised of other human beings running on similar software, whereas I don't know what the source code/basic values of an AI are.

So? Remember, everything we thing of as "inhumane" was committed by actual humans.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 30 October 2012 12:01:56AM 0 points [-]

I confess the example was facetious. But I still can't empathise with the intuitive dislike of interference. I understand there are pragmatic considerations (e.g. choosing a good doctor) but this seems to go beyond that to being a value in and of itself (thus the original example of it not being a utopia if its run by an interfering government).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 November 2012 04:58:18PM 1 point [-]

Well it won't be. Without the threat of leaving the government has little incentive to intervene benevolently.

Comment author: drethelin 31 October 2012 06:00:59PM -1 points [-]

Either: not being expensive is a privileged view, and they're far more expensive to poor people and why don't you care about poor people?

Or: if they have access to free birth control but still don't use it, we can legitimately start talking about how their culture is the problem without people accusing you of being racist/classist/ etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 November 2012 04:19:28PM 0 points [-]

if they have access to free birth control but still don't use it, we can legitimately start talking about how their culture is the problem without people accusing you of being racist/classist/ etc.

The whole point of making those accusations is that they can't be refuted by evidence, or rather it is the person presenting disconfirming evidence who is accused.

Comment author: bryjnar 29 October 2012 12:03:35PM *  5 points [-]

Note that this notion of 'completeness' is not the one used in Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Um, yes it is, I think. The incompleteness theorems tell you that there are statements that are true (semantically valid) but unprovable, and hence they provide a counterexample to "If X |=Y then X |- Y", i.e. the proof system is not complete.

EDIT: To all respondents: sorry, I was unclear. Yes, I do realise that FOL is complete, but the same notion of completeness generalises to different proof systems. The incompleteness theorems show that the proof system for Peano arithmetic is incomplete, in precisely this way

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2012 08:27:48PM 4 points [-]

The simplest way to explain the difference, is that Gödel's completeness theorem applies to first order logic, whereas Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to second order logic.

Comment author: iceman 29 October 2012 07:14:56PM 0 points [-]

I think there's a difference between a professional who has a legal responsibility to act in your interests, and the government, which doesn't. It's a matter of incentives, and I'm going to attach much more weight to my doctor saying that I should do something for my own good than from a government worker.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2012 07:41:49PM 2 points [-]

A more important difference is that I have a lot more choice in my doctor than in my government.

Comment author: MBlume 29 October 2012 02:10:11AM 2 points [-]

With central planning, more women than men makes sense, and this system has central planning. Everyone isn't just trying to maximize IGF

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2012 02:17:29AM 0 points [-]

Agreed, however, Eliezer's phrasing of #9 made it sound like he was referring to individual incentive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2012 02:15:25AM 6 points [-]

Because I don't think it's sufficiently widely appreciated, I'll quote the point from my comment here.

The difference is that with animal breeding you have a clear distinction between the people doing the breeding and the animals being bred. Humans breeding humans any attempt at being "scientific" is likely to collapse in the face of the resulting signaling games.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2012 02:08:06AM 2 points [-]

I'm dubious about your point #9 due to Fisher's principal.

Comment author: chaosmosis 28 October 2012 08:10:19AM 1 point [-]

I don't think that thinking categorically and mechanically would be feasibly productive.

It's a reality that we have to think messily in order to solve problems quickly, even if that efficiency also causes biases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 October 2012 11:25:19PM 1 point [-]

However, we should at least be aware of what the proper way to do it would be.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 October 2012 02:30:30PM 0 points [-]

ISTM that condoms aren't that expensive...

In response to comment by [deleted] on Equality and natalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 09:06:30PM 0 points [-]

In that case why is it so necessary to distribute them for free?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 27 October 2012 01:12:41AM *  -1 points [-]

Have you noticed yet that you were in error about the meaning of my earlier comment, and that it was irrational for you to respond in the way that you did (claiming that it was about "psychological issues")?

Or ... maybe I didn't manage to get across what I intended to say, given that you interpreted it that way. I wouldn't want to assume that you were deliberately misconstruing it in order to make a status play or something.

(But if I use your approach, I get the result that blames you here. If I use my approach, it's my job to communicate my point in a way that succeeds with my audience, e.g. by not misleading you into thinking that I'm mocking anyone for having psychological problems. Which result do you prefer?)

Yes, people can misconstrue what someone meant by a communication. But if you notice that your ways of saying things are systematically misconstrued by a certain sort of people, that's equivalent to saying that you are not communicating effectively to that part of your audience.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 09:03:45PM 1 point [-]

(claiming that it was about "psychological issues")

Would you mind explaining how something like:

It seems to me that some folks highly value a self-image of not offending others

isn't talking about psychological issues.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 October 2012 04:22:25AM 2 points [-]

In causal models, we can have A -> B, E -> A, E -> ~B. Logical uncertainty does not seem offhand to have the same structure as causal uncertainty.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 08:56:52PM *  2 points [-]

You seem to be confusing the causal arrow with the logical arrow. As endoself points out here proofs logically imply their theorems, but a theorem causes its proof.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 October 2012 03:33:33AM 4 points [-]

Yes. An argument similar to this should still be in the other-edited version of my unfinished TDT paper, involving a calculator on Venus and a calculator on Mars, the point being that if you're not logically omniscient then you need to factor out logical uncertainty for the Markov property to hold over your causal graphs, because physically speaking, all common causes should've been screened off by observing the calculators' initial physical states on Earth. Of course, it doesn't follow that we have to factor out logical uncertainty as a causal node that works like every other causal node, but we've got to factor it out somehow.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 08:52:10PM 3 points [-]

My point is more general than this. Namely, that a calculator on Earth and a calculator made by aliens in the Andromeda galaxy would correspond despite humans and the Andromedeans never having had any contact.

Comment author: satt 27 October 2012 01:48:38PM 5 points [-]

Yeah. I'd guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity. As of a year ago we had something like consensus on atheism (92.3% atheist & agnostic vs. 6.3% deist/pantheist/theist) but a more even split on politics, a proxy for economic opinions (32.3% libertarian, 27.1% socialist & communist, 34.5% liberal, and 2.8% conservative).

Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments, while repeatedly bickering about theism and wondering why theism was relatively mindkilling.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 08:39:29PM 2 points [-]

Yeah. I'd guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity.

This is because of selection effects more than anything else.

Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments

I would advise you to be careful about deciding whether an issue is solved on the basis of whether the people on the other side of it happen to hang out in the same place you do.

Comment author: roystgnr 26 October 2012 07:38:07PM 3 points [-]

In case the link to my comment inadvertently implies otherwise:

I also agree it would be fantastic to have sequences which explain economics from first principles, especially the results of informed consensus, such as the value of markets, which are not yet non-expert consensus. Educating people, even on controversial topics, would be much less mind-killing than starting from the question of how we can fix all those mistaken people. Keep the Principle of Charity in mind.

When you compare market- and non-market-oriented economics you're talking about centuries-old disagreements that contributed to wars and the Cold War, mistakes that led to massive famines, philosophies that underpin whole political parties, and concerns that still have angry people marching and camping out in political protests in cities around the globe. If you think that the topic isn't political or that its connection to politics was a sudden development, you haven't been paying attention. Maybe no amount of careful reasoning from first principles will convince Charlie Stross (or anyone already committed to anti-market beliefs) that those "smugly self-satisfied hypercapitalists" might be on to something after all, but it's important to at least write while keeping in mind that your audience and theirs overlap.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 12:30:22AM 2 points [-]

When you compare market- and non-market-oriented economics you're talking about centuries-old disagreements that contributed to wars and the Cold War, mistakes that led to massive famines, philosophies that underpin whole political parties, and concerns that still have angry people marching and camping out in political protests in cities around the globe.

The same is true of religion, but that doesn't stop us from talking about it.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 26 October 2012 05:10:53PM 0 points [-]

What is logic good for? The article gives the example of checking the design of the circuits inside a computer. There is something unsatisfactory about this example.

I'm not up to date on modern computer design, but the basic principle at issue has changed. When you design a logic gate you build in margins. For example, what is logic low? For TTL outputs it is specified to be below 0.4 V, but for TTL inputs it is specified to be below 0.8 V. Computer engineers refer to the difference, 0.4 V as the noise margin. Provided that the various defects and practical problems in the construction of the computer do not consume the entire noise margin, it will function as intended. Logic applies to computers because they have been designed to ensure that logic applies to them.

We asked the general question: what is logic good for. We get a narrow answer: its good for systems specially designed so that logic will be good for analyzing them. That makes logic see narrow and contrived.

Perhaps that is right. The attraction of logic is that it is tractable. Instead of doing probability on 2^n basic conjunctions, you do logic on n booleans. You pay a price in terms of being just plain wrong, when a Bayesian approach could give a more nuanced answer, and you hope to win overall by taking more decisions before their deadlines.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 12:04:15AM 1 point [-]

What is logic good for?

Also discovering Bayes' theorem. Also extrapolating the consequence of physical laws.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 October 2012 02:29:05PM 3 points [-]

The best description of the scientific method I have ever seen is from a conceptual physics textbook by Hobson. Paraphrasing:

The scientific method involves the dynamic interplay between theory and experiment.

That’s it. Perfect. As a scientist, I don’t come to work on Monday and make an observation, then form a hypothesis on Tuesday, devise an experiment to test some prediction on Wednesday, perform the experiment Thursday, and interpret the result on Friday. On any given day I would be hard pressed to tell you where I am in the process. All of the above, really. It’s a mess. It’s a constant back and forth comparing theoretical expectations to the final arbiter of any dispute: nature. Some people specialize in one aspect of the process, and can spend years chewing on some piece of it. But it is seldom done in isolation.

Meanwhile, science fair projects across the nation—under the advisement of teachers who themselves often do not have personal experience in how science really works—approach their subject in an uncharacteristically formulaic way. Nine times out of ten the effort culminates in a proof that the initial hypothesis was right; as if that were the goal and criterion for success. The rare student is surprised by the data, admitting to a failure of the hypothesis, quickly reconsidering initial assumptions and driving into an unexpected yet rewarding direction (dynamic interplay). That’s the real scientist at work. Too bad the judges (in my experience as a judge) often don’t recognize this apparent failure as the true success.

I can’t pass up the opportunity to share with you the “best” high school science fair project I ever saw (when I was myself a student participant in the fair—and no, it was not my project): “Does light travel through the dark?” Setup: light-tight cardboard box painted black on the inside; flashlight shining through a hole in one end; a peephole in the other end to see if the light made it. Any guesses?

-- Tom Murphy

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes October 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 11:54:17PM 1 point [-]

As a scientist, I don’t come to work on Monday and make an observation, then form a hypothesis on Tuesday, devise an experiment to test some prediction on Wednesday, perform the experiment Thursday, and interpret the result on Friday. On any given day I would be hard pressed to tell you where I am in the process. All of the above, really. It’s a mess.

That is a large part of the reason why we have problems like the file drawer effect and data dredging.

Comment author: DanArmak 26 October 2012 09:17:22PM 0 points [-]

Distributing free contraceptives, without requiring people to posess or use one, only increases the range of options open to people. From any kind of utilitarian standpoint, this looks like helping people to achieve what they want (if they choose to use contraceptives, they don't want children) while also achieving what you want for them to do, which is a clear win.

Of course, from an American cultural and political point of view, this wouldn't fly, because the permissibility contraceptives is a big point of blue-green politics there. Even if only a minority actually wants contraceptives to be illegal, the issue is strongly enough associated with politics that most people won't be able to think about it; they'll think about us vs. them instead. So you won't get anything done.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 11:43:08PM 1 point [-]

Distributing free contraceptives, without requiring people to posess or use one, only increases the range of options open to people.

Neglecting the cost of the contraceptives and the cost of distributing them.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 October 2012 06:24:21PM 1 point [-]

Having a reputation as smelly and unwashed can have a very negative effect on one's life and livelihood, too — but if someone points out that you smell bad, you are better served to update on that (and take a shower) rather than responding as if it is a slur. I don't think we want a social world in which people respond to negative feedback with overwhelming retaliatory defensiveness.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 11:35:27PM 2 points [-]

Having a reputation as smelly and unwashed can have a very negative effect on one's life and livelihood, too — but if someone points out that you smell bad, you are better served to update on that (and take a shower) rather than responding as if it is a slur.

Depends, if people frequently used accusations of smelliness as universal counter-arguments, they way they use accusations of offensiveness, it would make sense to question accusations of smelliness.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 October 2012 06:10:38PM -1 points [-]

His whole point is that if someone objects to the offense claim that means the person doing the objecting has psychological issues.

Um. No, it's not.

It's that offense is not a one-place function any more than sexiness is — but that it is possible to learn what a particular person finds offensive (or, for that matter, sexy) and apply that knowledge to improve your social relations with that person. Moreover, that doing so is probably more useful than whining about someone calling your actions offensive (or, for that matter, unsexy).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 11:20:33PM 1 point [-]

Belief is also a two place function; however, if someone says that they believe that there is an invisible dragon in their garage, it is perfect reasonable to challenge them since their belief isn't rational. Similarly, the feeling of being offended can also be irrational and should similarly be challenged in such circumstances.

Comment author: CCC 26 October 2012 07:42:56AM 0 points [-]

Your prediction is a prediction of what someone else will conclude, given a set of initial conditions (the mathematical problem) and a set of rules to apply to these conditions. The conclusion that you arrive at is a causal descendant of the problem and the rules of mathematics; the conclusion that the other person arrives at is a causal descendant of the same initial problem and the same rules.

That's the causal link.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 11:02:35PM 0 points [-]

That's my point. Specifically, that one should have nodes in one's causal diagram for mathematical truths, what you called "rules of mathematics".

Comment author: TimS 26 October 2012 04:19:46AM -2 points [-]

You said that the key issue was whether there was a rational basis for the feelings. I agree with you that we can't force people to have different feelings than the ones they have. But our reaction to those feelings can vary based on the reasonableness of the feelings.

I don't think fubarobfusco's claim is that claimed offense ends the discussion in favor of the claimant. Although you correctly note that false claims are cheap, the proper use is intended to begin a discussion about the proper reaction - and the proper reaction might be to do nothing.

Put slightly differently, Bob claiming to be offended by some statement is slight evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the statement caused him harm, of a kind that should not be allowed. Talk is cheap, so the evidence can easily be overcome by contrary evidence. But your position appears to be that Bob's statement is no evidence at all.


I'd like to put in another good word for my second link. It's a five minute video, made by someone far more moderate than you or I. I think it is a reasonable description of the outside view of the archetypal dispute of which this exchange is but one of many examples. If you are really pressed for time, skip to about two minutes in.

In response to comment by TimS on [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 04:39:01AM 2 points [-]

I don't think fubarobfusco's claim is that claimed offense ends the discussion in favor of the claimant.

In that case I recommend you reread fubarobfusco's post. His whole point is that if someone objects to the offense claim that means the person doing the objecting has psychological issues.

But your position appears to be that Bob's statement is no evidence at all.

Your repeated strawmanning of my position is not conducive to reasonable debate.

Comment author: TimS 26 October 2012 02:40:27AM *  0 points [-]

Do you think the frequency of the behaviors documented here is sufficient be a rational basis for feeling unsafe?

Do you think the phenomena described here is a rational basis for feeling unhappy?

In response to comment by TimS on [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 03:40:28AM *  2 points [-]

I don't have time to look at your examples, and in any case your question isn't very relevant.

What I'm objecting to is fubarobfusco's claim that it makes no sense to debate whether something is offensive and that the word of the offended is final.

Comment author: Peterdjones 26 October 2012 01:19:36AM 0 points [-]

Two people can arrive at the same solution to a crossword, but that does not mean there is a Cruciverbial Truth that has causal powers.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 02:32:52AM *  0 points [-]

Yes it does. In this case said truth even has a physical manifestation, i.e., as the crossword-writer's solution as it exists in some combination of his head and his notes which is causal to the form of the crossword the solver sees.

In response to [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 October 2012 07:13:45AM 3 points [-]

How about Offending People 101?

No, not what you think; rather ...

It seems to me that some folks highly value a self-image of not offending others — to the extent that when they are informed that they have offended someone, they respond as if a scandalous accusation has been made against their honor, for which they are entitled to demand satisfaction. And so they react by complaining about being censored, and political correctness, and "you're wrong, that word isn't offensive because so-and-so says it isn't!" as if offense were a one-place function — when all the offended party wanted was to explain that they feel unsafe and unhappy when someone tells rape jokes at a party, and would you please stop?

Just as it might be worthwhile to teach people to respond usefully to things that offend them, it might also be worthwhile to teach people to respond usefully to being informed that they have offended others.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 02:25:41AM 2 points [-]

when all the offended party wanted was to explain that they feel unsafe and unhappy

The question is whether there is a rational basis for this feeling.

In response to [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 October 2012 07:13:45AM 3 points [-]

How about Offending People 101?

No, not what you think; rather ...

It seems to me that some folks highly value a self-image of not offending others — to the extent that when they are informed that they have offended someone, they respond as if a scandalous accusation has been made against their honor, for which they are entitled to demand satisfaction. And so they react by complaining about being censored, and political correctness, and "you're wrong, that word isn't offensive because so-and-so says it isn't!" as if offense were a one-place function — when all the offended party wanted was to explain that they feel unsafe and unhappy when someone tells rape jokes at a party, and would you please stop?

Just as it might be worthwhile to teach people to respond usefully to things that offend them, it might also be worthwhile to teach people to respond usefully to being informed that they have offended others.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 02:23:09AM *  1 point [-]

they respond as if a scandalous accusation has been made against their honor,

That's because in today's world having a reputation as being "offensive"/"insensitive" can have a very negative effect on one's life and livelihood.

Comment author: TimS 26 October 2012 01:41:21AM *  -2 points [-]

So what you're saying is that people should give, anyone who claims to be [harmed] veto power over what they say. With these kinds of incentives the winning strategy is to be [harmed by] everything. (alterations by me)

Sure, being offended (like being harmed) is somewhat under the offended person's control. And PC speech codes (like all speech codes) exist to persecute undesired messages.

Nonetheless, the right to freedom of speech is not the right not to be criticized. Treating all complaints like they are without merit does reduce the frequency of criticism, but it doesn't make any particular criticism wrong. That's a discussion on the merits, which your suggested strategy never allows to occur.

In response to comment by TimS on [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 02:20:00AM 0 points [-]

Nonetheless, the right to freedom of speech is not the right not to be criticized. Treating all complaints like they are without merit does reduce the frequency of criticism, but it doesn't make any particular criticism wrong.

I wasn't talking about criticism, I was talking about offense in the sense fubarobfusco seems to be using the word:

And so they react by complaining about being censored, and political correctness, and "you're wrong, that word isn't offensive because so-and-so says it isn't!" as if offense were a one-place function — when all the offended party wanted was to explain that they feel unsafe and unhappy when someone tells rape jokes at a party, and would you please stop?

i.e., offense is a two place function, thus the person offended is by definition correct, so you by definition should not say the thing that offended them.

In response to comment by afeller08 on Causal Reference
Comment author: [deleted] 25 October 2012 01:35:12AM *  1 point [-]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. I've always supposed that we do live in a multi-tiered causal universe. It seems to me that the "laws of physics" are a first tier which affect everything in the second tier (the tier with all of the matter including us), but that there's nothing we can do here in the matter tier to affect the laws of physics. I've also always assumed that this was how practically everyone who uses the phrase 'laws of physics' uses it.

So you mean we live in a multitier universe with no bridging laws and the higher tiers are predictable fully from the lower tiers? Why not just call it a single tier universe then? Especially because your hypothesis is not distinguishable from the single-tier, which is simpler, so you have no good reason to ever have encountered it. "Such and such is true, but that has no causal consequences, but it's truth is still somehow correllated with my belief". (note that that statement violates the markov-whatsit assumption and breaks causality).

Forgive me if I misunderstood.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Causal Reference
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 02:01:08AM 1 point [-]

As I mentioned here, if you want the property that correlated things have a common cause to hold, you need to add nodes for the laws of physics, and for mathematics.

In response to comment by novalis on Causal Reference
Comment author: ialdabaoth 25 October 2012 10:24:17PM 0 points [-]

Before we answer that question, we need to pick a meaning for "meaning" that means something.

(parse that a few times with your Gödel hat on)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 01:49:14AM 1 point [-]

You use the word "mean" twice in that sentence outside quotes, so whatever you mean by it.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 October 2012 04:37:59PM 0 points [-]

The anti-meritocracy scenario is a third distinct one, good catch. In that scenario one would have to weigh the evilness of rich people and its likely effects on how they treat their children vs. the positive effects of greater material wealth on the children and how the goodness of poor people factors compared to their material deprivation. Also noteworthy is that in an anti-meritocracy wealth may actually corrupt due to social networks.

Overall I should emphasise that I'm not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics. I was more hoping to creating moral thought experiments rather than figuring out which one best describes the real world. Maybe I should have disguised "rich" and "poor" with two other groups and made the utilitarian analysis there, but then I suspect people would just outright accept the utilitarian solution proposed in each of the scenarios. At least that is the impression I got from how the community reacted to more concrete examples of dustspecks vs. torture compared to the abstract case.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Equality and natalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 01:16:56AM *  0 points [-]

Overall I should emphasise that I'm not promoting the policy, but that I found it an interesting case where it seemed my moral intuitions confliced with both utilitarianism and my virtue ethics.

Which virtues are you using for your virtue ethics?

Comment author: Peterdjones 26 October 2012 01:05:30AM 0 points [-]

What has that to do with any causal powers of mathematical truth?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 01:08:49AM 0 points [-]

If you what your causal graph to have the property I quoted here, you need to add nodes for mathematical truths.

Comment author: Alejandro1 25 October 2012 04:42:52PM 2 points [-]

One safeguard against this would be doing it with more advanced students instead of freshmen, as I suggested elsewhere on the thread, so that they are already somewhat used to evaluating arguments and claims in a detached, academic way. Another one would be pairing opposite views: white nationalism and black liberation theology, extreme radical feminism and conservative Catholic theology, etc. Then people with weak preexisting convictions are unlikely to be swayed to one side.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 01:03:23AM 4 points [-]

Another one would be pairing opposite views: white nationalism and black liberation theology, extreme radical feminism and conservative Catholic theology, etc. Then people with weak preexisting convictions are unlikely to be swayed to one side.

The thing is, in both those cases the two positions have more in common than either would be willing to admit.

For example, both white nationalism and black liberation theology state that people of different races shouldn't live together. Both extreme radical feminism and conservative Catholic theology have similar positions on pornography for reasons that are actually remarkably similar once one unpacks their jargon.

In response to [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 October 2012 07:13:45AM 3 points [-]

How about Offending People 101?

No, not what you think; rather ...

It seems to me that some folks highly value a self-image of not offending others — to the extent that when they are informed that they have offended someone, they respond as if a scandalous accusation has been made against their honor, for which they are entitled to demand satisfaction. And so they react by complaining about being censored, and political correctness, and "you're wrong, that word isn't offensive because so-and-so says it isn't!" as if offense were a one-place function — when all the offended party wanted was to explain that they feel unsafe and unhappy when someone tells rape jokes at a party, and would you please stop?

Just as it might be worthwhile to teach people to respond usefully to things that offend them, it might also be worthwhile to teach people to respond usefully to being informed that they have offended others.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 12:56:56AM 3 points [-]

So what you're saying is that people should give, anyone who claims to be offended veto power over what they say. With these kinds of incentives the winning strategy is to be offended at everything.

Comment author: Alejandro1 25 October 2012 07:22:41AM 3 points [-]

Excellent points. However, many people when saying "That is offensive" don't just mean they are offended; they are implying that all decent people would be similarly offended, that what the other party said was beyond the pale. So it is used, in these cases, as a sort of one-place function and an attack (sometimes personal) against the speaker.

It is still true that escalating with complaints of censorship, PC thought police, etc, is not a good strategy for making the situation better and more conducive to a reasoned discussion (though it might be a good one for the purpose of rallying one's side against the Enemy).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 12:53:22AM 1 point [-]

Or for the purposes of not giving one's opponents veto power over what one can say.

Comment author: Peterdjones 25 October 2012 08:29:25AM 0 points [-]

What has that to do with mathemmatica truth? You might as well say that if someone follows the same recipe there e is a significant chance that the same dish will be produced. Inasmuch as you are takling about someting that can haphazardly fail, you are not talking about mathematical truth.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 12:35:03AM 0 points [-]

I can predict what someone else will conclude, without any causal relationship, in the conventional sense, between us.

In response to [Link] Offense 101
Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 24 October 2012 09:57:45PM 2 points [-]

I feel uneasy when someone suggests that people should (for practice or whatever) argue for something that they don't believe. If you can argue for anything your words mean nothing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2012 11:46:51PM 2 points [-]

You should be able to argue for anything, i.e., you should be able to find the best argument against your position.

Comment author: Athrelon 24 October 2012 04:26:14PM 3 points [-]

Yeah, that's a good data point as well: people grumble but don't resist - kind of like how we treat the TSA.

Maybe our strong instincts are against regulation of sex, rather than childbearing. The two were tightly coupled in ancient times so we wouldn't need redundant intuitions.

I also rather like the alternative hypothesis of "Rich Western cultures are freaking insane."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2012 11:28:10PM 2 points [-]

China has a long tradition of collectivism and strong central government. Contrast this with the western (especially Anglo-Saxon) tradition of individualism.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 October 2012 05:13:12PM *  13 points [-]

Our current policies already mess with the human gene pool. A strong case has been made by some experts that humans have been self-domesticating for the better part of the last 10 000 years. You would actually need better knowledge of genetics to craft policies that don't mess with the gene pool than to craft policies that mess with it in likely desirable ways.

You don't really need to understand genetics very well to do eugenics see animal husbandry, the unintended consequences of it have proven to pretty manageable in animals (except in some breeds where targeting a certain appearance rather than temperament, physical ability or intelligence is the primary goal).

In response to comment by [deleted] on Equality and natalism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2012 11:20:27PM *  6 points [-]

You don't really need to understand genetics very well to do eugenics see animal husbandry and except for certain dog breeds the unintended consequences of have proven to pretty manageable in animals (except in some breeds where targeting a certain appearance rather than temperament, physical ability or intelligence is the primary goal).

The difference is that with animal breeding you have a clear distinction between the people doing the breeding and the animals being bred. Humans breeding humans any attempt at being "scientific" is likely to collapse in the face of the resulting signaling games.

I mean look at the current state of social science, do you think it would somehow magically improve if eugenics were to be embraced? In fact, it's likely to get worse since the results of social science would then have even more significance.

Comment author: Peterdjones 23 October 2012 10:02:50PM 0 points [-]

Inasmuch as you have stipulated that "performing the same calculation" means "perforing the same calculation correcly", rahter than something like "launching the same algorithm but possibly crashing", your statement is tautologous. In fact, it isa special case of the general statement that anyone succesfully performing a calculation will get the same result as everyone else. But why woud you want to use a causal diagrtam to represent a tuatlotlogy? The two have different properties. Causal diagrams have <1.0 transition probabilities, which tautologies don't. Tautologies have concpetually intelligible relationships between their parts, which causal diagrams don't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2012 03:09:35AM 0 points [-]

Observe that your two objections cancel each other out. If someone performs the same calculation, there is a significant (but <1.0) chance that it will be done correctly.

Comment author: maia 23 October 2012 01:06:10AM 2 points [-]

People who keep putting off writing don't want to write, they want to have written. Some people might actually enjoy writing if they started, but don't want to start.

When I have something that I want to do, then categorize it as something I "should" do, I generally want to do it less. Attaching the sense of moral obligation makes me forget that the original reason I put it in that bucket was because it was something I would actually enjoy doing. This seems to line up with your hypothesis that people conflate these two and cause problems for themselves. But this also seems to imply that there is, in fact, a relevant difference between "want" and "should," at least in one's own head.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2012 05:34:20AM 4 points [-]

When I have something that I want to do, then categorize it as something I "should" do, I generally want to do it less.

I suspect you have cause and effect reversed there. If you want to do something a lot, you don't categorize it as a "should" you just do it. Thus the things you categorize as "should" are the things you want to do not quiet as much.

Comment author: DaFranker 22 October 2012 05:40:34PM 1 point [-]

E.g., we discover that physics tells us that for every particle, there is a cooresponding shadow particle that has no effect on regular ones.

And how, exactly, would we discover that?

If we discovered this meaningfully, then it means that at least one bit in the entire universe is different than it would be if there were no shadow particles. In this case, the existence of shadow particles is inevitably causally linked to that one bit. As such, they are no longer epiphenomenal, because they do have an effect on that one bit of data, which has its own effect on the rest of the universe.

If we discover this without any such things, then AFAICT it's a meaningless discovery, because we can make a discovery of absolutely anything if there is no information.

If you send data somewhere and it disappears once it affects the lower level, then that is an interaction from the lower level to the upper level, since the upper level would have been different if the lower level wasn't there (the data would not have disappeared). Then again, I'm not entirely sure about this. Maybe this is how you'd build a p-zombie detector: Find the ones that don't have random bits of data randomly blink out of existence.

In response to comment by DaFranker on Causal Reference
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2012 12:48:02AM 3 points [-]

And how, exactly, would we discover that?

Using reasoning similar to that Eliezer uses to argue for many worlds.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2012 12:52:47AM 2 points [-]

Er, no, they're called Dynamic Bayes Nets. And there are no known unique events relative to the fundamental laws of physics; those would be termed "miracles". Physics repeats perfectly - there's no question of frequentism because there's no probabilities - and the higher-level complex events are one-time if you try to measure them precisely; Socrates died only once, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2012 12:44:37AM 0 points [-]

And there are no known unique events relative to the fundamental laws of physics

What about some of the things going on at the LHC?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 October 2012 09:27:23PM 9 points [-]

Okay, I can see that I need to spell out in more detail one of the ideas here - namely that you're trying to generalize over a repeating type of causal link and that reference is pinned down by such generalization. The Sun repeatedly sends out light in individual Sun-events, electrons repeatedly go on traveling through space instead of vanishing; in a universe like ours, rather than the F(i) being whole new transition tables randomly generated each time, you see the same F(physics) over and over. This is what you can pin down and refer to. Any causal graph is acyclic and can be divided as you say; the surprising thing is that there are no F-types, no causal-link-types, which (over repeating time) descend from one kind of variable to another, without (over time) there being arrows also going back from that kind to the other. Yes, we're generalizing and inducting over time, otherwise it would make no sense to speak of thingies that "affect each other". No two individual events ever affect each other!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 10:38:23PM 0 points [-]

Okay, I can see that I need to spell out in more detail one of the ideas here - namely that you're trying to generalize over a repeating type of causal link and that reference is pinned down by such generalization.

So in the end, we're back a frequentism.

Also, what about unique events?

In response to Causal Reference
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 October 2012 08:45:56AM 4 points [-]

Meditation:

If we can only meaningfully talk about parts of the universe that can be pinned down inside the causal graph, where do we find the fact that 2 + 2 = 4? Or did I just make a meaningless noise, there? Or if you claim that "2 + 2 = 4" isn't meaningful or true, then what alternate property does the sentence "2 + 2 = 4" have which makes it so much more useful than the sentence "2 + 2 = 3"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 10:33:12PM -1 points [-]

Mathematics is a lower, actually the lowest, tier.

Comment author: Peterdjones 21 October 2012 05:01:43PM 0 points [-]

And the transition probabilities to a truth will be 1.0. So why write it in? It would be like sprinkiling a circuit diagram with zero ohm resistors.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 10:23:13PM 0 points [-]

Because otherwise the statement I quoted in the great-great-grandparent becomes false.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2012 06:52:13PM 0 points [-]

Well, what about Siberia, for that matter? ;-)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 09:50:16PM 0 points [-]

Siberia is an Asian part of the former USSR.

In response to Causal Reference
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 03:24:47AM 9 points [-]

That said, I can certainly write a computer program in which there's a tier of objects affecting each other, and a second tier - a lower tier - of epiphenomenal objects which are affected by them, but don't affect them.

I would like to point out that any space-like surface (technically 3-fold) divides our universe into two such tiers.

Comment author: endoself 21 October 2012 02:20:15AM 3 points [-]

It is meaningful to talk about mathematical facts causing other mathematical facts. For example, if I knew the complete laws of physics but did not have enough computing power to determine all their consequences (which would be impossible anyways, as I'm living inside of them), my uncertainty about what is going to happen in the universe would be described by the exact same probability distribution as my uncertainty about the mathematical consequences of the laws of physics, and so both distributions would satisfy the causal Markov condition for the same causal graph* (modulo any uncertainty about whether the laws that I believe to be correct actually do describe the universe).

This works the same way with any other set of mathematical facts. I believe that if the abc conjecture is true, then Szpiro's conjecture is also true and I believe that if the abc conjecture is false, then Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of it is flawed. All of these facts can be put into one probability distribution which can then be factored over a Bayesian network. There is no need to separate the mathematical from the nonmathematical.

* Depending on how exactly you phrase the question, I would even say that these distributions are describing my uncertainty about the same thing, but that isn't necessary here.

In response to comment by endoself on Causal Reference
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 03:20:47AM 3 points [-]

The thing is that mathematics seems to have an additional causal structure that seems to be (at least partially) independent from the proof structure.

Comment author: DavidAgain 20 October 2012 08:26:18AM 2 points [-]

Having spent a regrettably large amount of time on forums where the 'magisteria' type questions were had, I think that you're representing the 'outside of science' position slightly unfairly. Obviously, it often tries to have its cake and eat it. But you're substituting 'standard rationality', or perhaps 'questions of cause and effect' for 'science'. Some magisteria-types would say that there are direct causal effects from God or ghosts, but that these do not manifest with the regularity of things that you're likely to be able to find through scientific experiment. They think that the world is better explained by including God or ghosts, but that you can't devise an experiment to prove/disprove them (for a variety of reasons, up to and including 'the ghosts don't come out when you're trying to test if they exist'.

This is aside from the people who basically mean that their religion or whatever is just subjective.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 02:50:48AM 0 points [-]

He discusses that distinction here.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 October 2012 10:29:57AM *  2 points [-]

Do other major countries have analogues of that, BTW? If so, we could ask similar questions applicable to a couple more countries, such as the UK or Canada.¹ (The closest analogue I can think of in Italy is the score (out of 100) on one's high-school diploma.)

  1. I'm assuming that LW's readership is distributed more-or-less like the English Wikipedia's.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 01:44:44AM 1 point [-]

I'm assuming that LW's readership is distributed more-or-less like the English Wikipedia's.

I suspect we have more people from Finland, for example, and fewer from India.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 October 2012 02:54:52PM 1 point [-]

Maybe if there are enough people of color who've grown up in Denmark, then Danish is no longer a white ethnicity.

Also, I don't know whether the connotations of "ethnicite'" are the same as the connotations of "ethnicity".

How do you get the accent? I tried typing alt-0233, and my computer just beeped at the numbers.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 01:42:35AM 2 points [-]

How do you get the accent?

I copy the character from a character map.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 20 October 2012 09:40:45AM 0 points [-]

Uhh... it can be understood as a set (with size larger than one) of things and their interactions...?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2012 01:35:15AM 2 points [-]

Let me ask a specific question. Are particles "composed of" wave functions, or are wave functions composed of particles, both, neither?

Comment author: Peterdjones 19 October 2012 05:41:31PM 0 points [-]

Why would you want a mathematical truth on a causal graph? Are the transation probabilities ever going to be less than 1.0?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 03:05:37AM 0 points [-]

The transition probabilities from the mathematical truth on something non-mathematical will certainly be less than 1.0.

Comment author: fezziwig 19 October 2012 03:14:38PM 1 point [-]

Also: The 'Roman Catholic' religion option should probably be 'Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 02:30:11AM 1 point [-]

How about letting people specify denomination.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 October 2012 04:20:21PM *  2 points [-]

This is a confused list since Middle Easterners aren't just Asian, see North Africa and they are also also "Caucasians" as the word is used. And while Micronesia does fit into Asia, I don't quite see Polynesia making sense. Change it to this:

  • Asian (East Asian)
  • Asian (Indian subcontinent)
  • Middle Eastern
  • Pacific Islander
  • Black/Sub-Saharan African
  • Native American
  • White/European
  • Other or Prefer not to answer

Arguably Pacific Islander and Native American are categories that are almost certain to have only a few people answer positively and are pretty small in global demographic terms. Folding them under "Other" makes sense. My list:

  • Asian (East Asia)
  • Asian (Indian subcontinent)
  • Middle Eastern
  • European (White)
  • Sub-Saharan African (Black)
  • Other or Prefer not to answer
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 02:26:11AM 0 points [-]

Where exactly are you drawing the border between the Middle East and Europe? How does Turkey count? What about the Caucuses, and the Asian parts of the former USSR more generally?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 19 October 2012 09:09:50PM 1 point [-]

I suppose: "mental things which are not composed of smaller non-mental things". If this is a correct explanation, please add it to the survey.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 02:07:31AM 1 point [-]

Taboo "composed of".

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 October 2012 10:55:30AM 2 points [-]

Religious Background; What is your family's religious background? What are people where the parents come from different religions supposed to answer? I don't see the advantage of forcing people to check exactly one box.

I find it also hard to say whether my family has a Christian background. Neither of my parents believe in god. They however do use the organisation. I think they married in an evangelic church. My father is now married to an another woman and that marriage is blessed by the catholic church. My father is also a member of the catholic church. He pays the corresponding taxes. He self labels as humanist. My parent allowed both my sister and myself to make our own decisions about religion. My sister is baptised but doesn't believe in god. I'm not baptised and self label as ignostic. In school I took evangelical religion lessons.

What kind of background I'm supposed to select? I find it also surprising that there no "atheist" choice.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 01:52:48AM 0 points [-]

I find it also hard to say whether my family has a Christian background. Neither of my parents believe in god. They however do use the organisation.

I'd use the Family Religion question to say that.

Comment author: thomblake 19 October 2012 02:51:00PM 4 points [-]

I don't know the answer to the chromosomes question. I could guess, and I would put over 95% on it, but it still seems weird.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 01:44:12AM 2 points [-]

I would put over 95% on it

that seems low.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 October 2012 12:20:42PM 1 point [-]

Should that be split into left-anarchist and right-anarchist/anarcho-capitalism?

Wouldn't the latter go into “Libertarian” as it currently exists in the poll?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 01:34:52AM 1 point [-]

If don't specify anarchism as left-anarchism, some of them might vote for it.

Comment author: TimS 19 October 2012 09:04:29PM *  0 points [-]

Too high. It's the use / mention distinction. Mention of (existence of) basilisks is permitted, use (detailed description) is prohibited.

Or such appears to be the rule to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2012 01:22:26AM 1 point [-]

I get the impression that mentioning it in prominent places also gets deleted.

Comment author: novalis 19 October 2012 06:43:11AM *  2 points [-]

I would be inclined to add in a "Anarchist" category for politics. And a surprising number of European parties are "Christian Democrat". They tend to be in favor of some level of wealth redistribution and of labor unions (unlike US conservatives), but socially conservative (unlike US liberals). Not sure if there's a general term for this; I've heard "religious left", but that seems open to alternate interpretations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2012 08:35:22AM 1 point [-]

I would be inclined to add in a "Anarchist" category for politics.

Should that be split into left-anarchist and right-anarchist/anarcho-capitalism?

And a surprising number of European parties are "Christian Democrat". They tend to be in favor of some level of wealth redistribution and of labor unions (unlike US conservatives), but socially conservative (unlike US liberals).

Aren't those basically their countries right of center parties?

Comment author: adam_strandberg 19 October 2012 06:24:00AM 1 point [-]

Can you provide an example? I would claim that for any model in which you have a mathematical truth as a node in a causal graph, you can replace that node by whatever series of physical events caused you to believe that mathematical truth.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2012 07:57:16AM 2 points [-]

I add 387+875 to get 1262, from this I can conclude that anyone else doing the same computation will get the same answer despite never having interacted with them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2012 03:06:57AM 2 points [-]

More generally, for me to expect your beliefs to correlate with reality, I have to either think that reality is the cause of your beliefs, expect your beliefs to alter reality, or believe that some third factor is influencing both of them.

I can construct examples where for this to be true requires us to treat mathematical truths as causes. Of course, this causes problems for the Bayesian definition of "cause".

Comment author: [deleted] 17 October 2012 01:53:04PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks. I think Eliezer is endorsing the 'causal relations are fundamental' reading, and that this apparently conflicts with the idea that causality is the tool of a limited observer. I think he's likely to see these as reconcilable in some way. That, at any rate, is my prediction.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Fabric of Real Things
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 October 2012 05:41:17AM 0 points [-]

My prediction is that he never noticed this problem before.

Comment author: RichardChappell 17 October 2012 08:34:35PM 1 point [-]

Nope. Epiphenomenalism is motivated by the thought that you could (conceivably, in a world with different laws from ours) have the same bundles of neurons without any consciousness. You couldn't conceivably have the same bundles of trees not be a forest.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 October 2012 05:39:02AM 0 points [-]

Good point, thanks.

Comment author: wedrifid 17 October 2012 12:26:39PM 1 point [-]

Yes; to count everything that can occur when you flip an actual, physical coin, you must first invent the universe.

In fact, it may be more than merely our universe. The probability assignment actually incorporates doubt about what the precise details of the physics of our universe are. So you may need to invent Kolmogorov complexity and Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble before you get to the serious counting.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 October 2012 05:33:26AM 0 points [-]

Even that isn't enough since it doesn't incorporate our uncertainty about mathematics.

Comment author: khafra 17 October 2012 12:09:41PM -1 points [-]

Yes; to count everything that can occur when you flip an actual, physical coin, you must first invent the universe. It could also be swallowed by a passing bird, which then blunders into a metal foundry and is built into a new space probe, never landing at all. As a human, you just happen to count a huge number of outcomes together under "heads," a huge number of outcomes together under "tails," and a somewhat smaller number of outcomes together under "edge."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 October 2012 05:32:23AM 0 points [-]

The problem is that "everything" contains infinitely many possibilities, so putting the number of possibilities in the denominator to calculate the probability doesn't work.

Comment author: khafra 16 October 2012 11:17:25AM 0 points [-]

I'm confused about your assumption.

You're right that I didn't clearly describe probability, though; I needed to make it clear that in the denominator you must count everything, however you group it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 October 2012 03:57:55AM 0 points [-]

When I flip a coin, it can land on heads, tails, or edge; however, the probability that it lands on edge is not 1/3.

Comment author: drnickbone 16 October 2012 08:02:23PM *  3 points [-]

Returning to this thread after a few months...

I see Eliezer has responded in a way which kills my theory stone cold. (Though it was dead anyway if the 6 light-hour separation by Pioneer wasn't reached in 1992.)

But basically what I was thinking was this. Consider any two space-time points x and y. Either they have a time-like separation, or a space-like separation or a null separation. If they have a space-like separation then there is a particular inertial reference-frame in which they are only separated in space, not in time. If the spatial separation in that frame is > 6 light-hours, then information cannot travel from x to y. (Or, if you want to think of it in terms of a causal graph, and Pearl's intervention calculus, then every intervention to the graph at x will leave events at y unaltered.)

Incidentally, this formulation implies the rule that "information can't go back in time more than 6 hours" and implies it in any inertial reference frame. For if information could travel from x to a point z, more than 6 hours in the past of x (but at the same place) in some reference frame, then it could be sent further along a future-pointing null vector from z to y (by an ordinary light-beam), where y is > 6 light-hours from x in the same reference frame. So the restriction of "no spatial jumps > 6 light-hours" neatly implies "no temporal jumps back > 6 hours".

Basically, this looks something like the Minkowski interval formulation: there is no privileged reference frame, just a new constant of nature (i.e. whatever 6 light-hours translates to in Planck lengths).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 October 2012 03:55:19AM 0 points [-]

But basically what I was thinking was this. Consider any two space-time points x and y. Either they have a time-like separation, or a space-like separation or a null separation. If they have a space-like separation then there is a particular inertial reference-frame in which they are only separated in space, not in time. If the spatial separation in that frame is > 6 light-hours, then information cannot travel from x to y. (Or, if you want to think of it in terms of a causal graph, and Pearl's intervention calculus, then every intervention to the graph at x will leave events at y unaltered.)

The problem is that points that 6 light-hours away from X have points more than 6 light-hours away from X in their future light cone.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 October 2012 06:45:08PM 3 points [-]

Are we making a similar mistake, i.e., assuming that just because we don't yet have a satisfactory theory of X that no such theory can exist?

Our inability to come up with a plausible-sounding theory of X is not especially strong evidence for the absence of X, agreed.

Still less, though, is it evidence for the presence of X.

Especially if the work a theory of X is supposed to do can be done without a theory of X, or turn out not to be necessary in the first place.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 October 2012 04:09:16AM *  2 points [-]

Still less, though, is it evidence for the presence of X.

Agreed, the evidence for the presence of X is that humans have been talking about it for a long time and seem to mean something.

Especially if the work a theory of X is supposed to do can be done without a theory of X, or turn out not to be necessary in the first place.

Careful, it's very easy to convince oneself that one doesn't need a theory of X when one is actually hiding X behind cached thoughts and sneaked in connotations. For example, Russell no doubt believed that he didn't need a theory of causality to do the work the theory of causality was supposed to do.

Comment author: Caspian 15 October 2012 12:35:52PM 0 points [-]

I had meant to suggest some sort of unintelligent feedback system. Not coincidence, but also not an intelligent optimisation, so still not an exact parallel to his thermostat.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 October 2012 03:55:59AM 0 points [-]

The thermostat was created by an intelligent human.

I never said the optimizing process had to be that intelligent, i.e., the blind-idiot-god counts.

Comment author: handoflixue 15 October 2012 05:53:06PM 0 points [-]

Can you explain what you mean by that? I tend to model past events as having even-further-past causes. I definitely model future events as having even-farther-future ramifications. So they'd seem to generally have both in and out.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 October 2012 03:42:48AM 0 points [-]

I was referring to the past (or future) as a whole.

Comment author: khafra 15 October 2012 05:20:02PM -2 points [-]

It's a little tautological that, by whatever method of counting things together you've worked out, you count certain things together, and that number is the denominator in your probability number; and then you count a subset of those things together, and that's the numerator in your probability number. It's so tautological, given the definition of probability, that it might not count as "tabooing probability." But it seems worth pointing out anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 October 2012 03:24:51AM 0 points [-]

First I assume you mean to reply to some other comment.

Furthermore, you description doesn't really work as a definition of probability since it implicitly assumes all the things are equally probable.

Comment author: simplicio 14 October 2012 03:03:10AM 12 points [-]

I recall reading some lovely quote on this (from somebody of the old camp, who believed that talk of 'causality' was naive), but I couldn't track it down in Pearl or on Google - if anyone knows of a good quote from the old school, may it be provided.

Maybe it's this one?

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (Russell, 1913, p. 1).

It should be noted that Russell later reversed his skepticism about causality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 October 2012 06:34:02PM 3 points [-]

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

Outside view: Consider the sentence

[X], I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

there are a number of words that could replace X in that sentence to produce something that would be considered a standard LW position. Are we making a similar mistake, i.e., assuming that just because we don't yet have a satisfactory theory of X that no such theory can exist?

Comment author: Caspian 14 October 2012 06:11:29AM 0 points [-]

Good point. And here's a made-up parallel example to that about weight/exercise:

Suppose level of exercise can influence weight (E -> W), and that being underfed reduces weight (U->W) directly but will also reduce the amount of exercise people do (U->E) by an amount where the effect of the reduced exercise on weight exactly cancels out the direct weight reduction.

Suppose also there is no random variation in amount of exercise, so it's purely a function of being underfed.

If we look at data generated in that situation, we would find no correlation between exercise and weight. Examining only those two variables we might assume no causal relation.

Adding in the third variable, would find a perfect correlation between (lack of) exercise and underfeeding. Implications of finding this perfect correlation: you can't tell if the causal relation between them should be E->U or U->E. And even if you somehow know the graph is (E->W), (U->E) and (E->W), there is no data on what happens to W for an underfed person who exercise, or a well-fed person who doesn't exercise, so you can't predict the effect of modifying E.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 October 2012 06:15:31PM 2 points [-]

but will also reduce the amount of exercise people do (U->E) by an amount where the effect of the reduced exercise on weight exactly cancels out the direct weight reduction.

It's unlikely that two effects will randomly cancel out unless the situation is the result of some optimizing process. This is the case in Milton Friedman's thermostat but doesn't appear to be the case in your example.

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 14 October 2012 01:57:05PM *  -1 points [-]

isn't causality subjective, i.e., a function of background knowledge

This seems not in the least contentious, if you're talking about the map of causality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 October 2012 06:05:40PM 2 points [-]

The question is whether causality exists in the territory at all.

Comment author: potato 14 October 2012 08:46:56AM *  3 points [-]

I have a plausibly equivalent (or at least implies Ey's) candidate for the fabric of real things, i.e., the space of hypotheses which could in principle be true, i.e., the space of beliefs which have sense:

A Hypothesis has nonzero probability, iff it's computable or semi computable.

It's rather obviously inspired by Solomonoff abduction, and is a sound principle for any being attempting to approximate the universal prior.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 October 2012 06:03:06PM 0 points [-]

What if the universe permits hyper-computation?

Comment author: ChristianKl 13 October 2012 01:28:12PM *  0 points [-]

If you can't imagine an universe that's not made out of causes and effects than talking about such an universe is meaningless.

To be able to assign a probability zero to the statement that the universe is not made out of causes and effects you have to be able to imagine a universe that's not made out of causes and effects.

Meaningless statements can't be true or false. Speaking about their probability makes no sense.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 09:07:12PM *  3 points [-]

If you can't imagine an universe that's not made out of causes and effects than talking about such an universe is meaningless.

Before Einstein nobody could imagine without universal time either.

In other words, if you can't imagine a universe with property X, that's a fact about you not about the universe.

Comment author: ChristianKl 13 October 2012 01:48:59PM 1 point [-]

The debate isn't about whether "consciousness is caused by neurons" is true but whether the specific arguments that Eliezer made in this thread forbid that "consciousness is caused by neurons" and "consciousness doesn't affect neurons" can both be true.

I don't see at all how the argument you are making here has something to do with the rule "For a statement to be comparable to your universe, so that it can be true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 09:02:48PM 2 points [-]

I assume the people arguing that "consciousness is caused by neurons" mean something similar to "the forest is caused by trees" and Eliezer is simply straw-manning/misinterpreting it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 October 2012 04:33:51PM 0 points [-]

This assumes that the person you are talking to didn't perform any tests that provide them evidence for their belief.

It doesn't assume this, it infers it about a particular person from the evidence provided by shminux above. The interlocutor shminux is describing rejects the idea that experimental results can be definitive on this question, which is different from the position you describe here. (Anyone who starts out asserting the former, then switches to the latter in mid-stream, is no longer asserting a coherent position at all and requires altogether different techniques for engaging with them.)

The debate is more more about which experiements are systematically flawed

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "the debate".
Is there only one?
That surprises me; it certainly seems to me that some people adopt the stance shminux described, to which I responded.

All that aside, I certainly agree with you that my response to someone taking the stance you describe here (embracing experimentalism as it applies to psychic phenomena in theory, but implementing experiments in a problematic way) should differ from my response to someone taking the stance shminux describes above (rejecting experimentalism as it applies to psychic phenomena).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 08:59:02PM 0 points [-]

The interlocutor shminux is describing rejects the idea that experimental results can be definitive on this question, which is different from the position you describe here.

That depends on what you mean by "experiment". If you mean doing a proper replicable controlled experiment than there is no experimental evidence. If you mean any evidence based on observation than there is experimental evidence.

In other words, there is evidence for the intruder, just not scientific evidence in the sense of this post.

Comment author: jimrandomh 13 October 2012 07:01:37AM 1 point [-]

In other words, causality is the invisible pink unicorn.

I don't understand this reply at all, except as an indication that I didn't communicate these concepts as well as I'd hoped.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 08:16:00AM *  1 point [-]

The text I quoted in the grandparent seems to be saying that even if the universe doesn't contain causality, we can always postulate an external causality structure even if most of it can't be observed.

Comment author: handoflixue 12 October 2012 08:37:27PM 1 point [-]

I had assumed the question was "a universe where an event can have out-connection but not in-connection" (and the consciousness one was about having an in-connection but no out-connection).

In a universe with NO connections, you wouldn't get patterns, much less emergent patterns - no atoms, no stars, no planets, no life, not even internet!

Multiple segregated causal networks would be multiple realities (I think the simplest reference would be to think about two different books or virtual worlds, although there's actually still some connection there)

Individual events which have out-connections but not in-connections, by contrast, seems like a fairly interesting question to explore. Why DO we assume that all evens have in-connections? Why not just assume the weather is because Zeus is mad, and Zeus' emotions are beyond the ken of mortal minds?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 05:33:34AM 0 points [-]

Individual events which have out-connections but not in-connections, by contrast, seems like a fairly interesting question to explore. Why DO we assume that all evens have in-connections?

Not all, the past doesn't have in-connections and the future doesn't have out-connections.

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 October 2012 06:11:05AM -1 points [-]

Does the idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrain experience? Can you coherently say how reality might look, if our universe did not have the kind of structure that appears in a causal model?

No. I literally assign prior probability zero to the statement that the universe is not made out of causes and effects, because there is causal structure in Turing machines and in all Turing-complete models of computation which could make up the Solomonoff prior. Causal structure is a very broad thing - it's just a sparse graph of interacting entities with a lattice ordering.

I can imagine a universe in which the local ordering I observe doesn't go as far forward or back as I thought, and the true everything-is-causes-and-effects structure is pushed one layer back to something completely hidden from me. I can imagine a universe in which I've falsely inferred an ordering which isn't there, and getting confused by cycles in a graph that I thought was causal. But a universe with no causality at the lowest layer - I think causality is inherent in too many things, and that after subtracting those things there's not enough option space left to make a universe out of.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 05:30:43AM 1 point [-]

I can imagine a universe in which the local ordering I observe doesn't go as far forward or back as I thought, and the true everything-is-causes-and-effects structure is pushed one layer back to something completely hidden from me. I can imagine a universe in which I've falsely inferred an ordering which isn't there, and getting confused by cycles in a graph that I thought was causal. But a universe with no causality at the lowest layer - I think causality is inherent in too many things, and that after subtracting those things there's not enough option space left to make a universe out of.

In other words, causality is the invisible pink unicorn.

Comment author: chaosmosis 13 October 2012 04:55:22AM 0 points [-]

If the Great Psychicator uses triggers on a level of reality less precise than the atomic or subatomic ones, then I believe its triggers could not possibly be precise enough to A. prevent science from discovering psychic powers and simultaneously B. allow normal people not doing science access to its psychic powers.

If there's a flaw in its model of the universe, we can exploit that and use the flaw do to science (this would probably involve some VERY complex work arounds, but the universe is self consistent so it seems possible in theory). So the relevant question is whether or not its model of the universe is better than ours, which is why I concede that a sufficiently complex Great Psychicator would be able to trick us.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 05:22:21AM 0 points [-]

If the Great Psychicator uses triggers on a level of reality less precise than the atomic or subatomic ones, then I believe its triggers could not possibly be precise enough to A. prevent science from discovering psychic powers and simultaneously B. allow normal people not doing science access to its psychic powers.

No, it just needs to be better at optimizing than we are.

Comment author: Bundle_Gerbe 12 October 2012 09:32:44PM 21 points [-]

I am confused by these posts. On one hand, Eliezer argues for an account of causality in terms of probability, which as we know are subjective degrees of belief. So we should be able to read off whether X thinks A causes B from looking at conditional probabilities in X's map.

But on the other hand, he suggests (not completely sure this is his view from the article) that the universe is actually made of cause and effect. I would think that the former argument instead suggests causality is "subjectively objective". Just as with probability, causality is fundamentally an epistemic relation between me and the universe, despite the fact that there can be widespread agreement on whether A causes B. Of course, I can't avoid cancer by deciding "smoking doesn't cause cancer", just as I can't win the lottery by deciding that my probability of winning it is .9.

For instance, how would an omniscient agent decide if A causes B according Eliezer's account of Pearl? I don't think they would be able to, except maybe in cases where they could count frequencies as a substitute for using probabilities.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 04:45:26AM *  3 points [-]

Thanks for succinctly articulating what was bothering me about this post. Can't upvote this enough.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 October 2012 09:33:21AM 0 points [-]

A one way causal connection cannot be observed. If neurons cause consciousness, but consciousness does absolutely not affect anything else, then there is literally no way to observe consciousness, and so you must in addition to the description of the causal universe include the fact that there are things that are affected by the universe's existence but does not affect the universe, and furthermore that consciousness is one such thing.

A strictly simpler theory is that there is a causal universe, without all that epiphenomea cruft.

Also, the viewpoint of epiphenomenal consciousness is very much triggering my pattern maching of 'human specific inbuilt stupidity'.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Fabric of Real Things
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 04:29:45AM 1 point [-]

How's this different from the case photon leaving my future light cone?

Comment author: Pfft 13 October 2012 02:48:04AM 1 point [-]

I guess it means causation as manipulability, as opposed to e.g. causation as contrafactual?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 04:19:35AM 1 point [-]

How is causation as manipulability "Pearlian"? Pearl's whole point is that it's possible to determine causality without manipulating.

Comment author: Alejandro1 13 October 2012 02:54:22AM 3 points [-]

He basically jumped to fame when he predicted the result of many of the Obama-Clinton primaries far more accurately than the pundits. He then got right 49 out of 50 states in Obama-McCain (missing only Indiana, where Obama won by 1%). He also predicted correctly all the Senate races in 2008 and all but one in 2010. In the House in 2010 the GOP picked just 8 seats more than his average forecast, which was well within his 95% confidence interval. (All info taken from Wikipedia.) I do not know of any systematic comparison between his accuracy and that of other analysts, but I would be surprised if there was someone better.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 04:01:52AM 1 point [-]

Silver makes and changes his predictions throughout the campaign season. Which predictions is this referring to?

Comment author: PlacidPlatypus 12 October 2012 04:28:14PM 0 points [-]

Silver's model already at least attempts to account for fundamentals and reversion to the mean, though. You could argue that the model still puts too much weight on polls over fundamentals, but I don't see a strong reason to prefer that over the first interpretation of just taking it at face value.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 02:25:20AM -1 points [-]

Has there been any analysis of how accurate Silver's predictions have been in the past?

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 01:36:08AM *  0 points [-]

It really is that different. I elaborated a bit about why I think this is true in the USA.

I'm lucky enough to have skills that are in demand, so I am not particularly jealous. My reaction is more like ... I have a hard time believing that business people anywhere don't discriminate against candidates with an employment gap. Maybe the culture is so different in other places that they really don't. I don't know. That's interesting though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 01:51:16AM 0 points [-]

I interpret joaolkf as saying that being able to speak English is sufficiently demand (relative to supply) in Brazil.

Comment author: erratio 11 October 2012 12:55:30AM 2 points [-]

That doesn't seem true to me. Do you have anything more solid to back this up? Also, see Esar's comment below that the US is a mess but it's his mess. How is that not regular old tribal patriotism?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2012 01:06:26AM -1 points [-]

Both forms of patriotism exist and are frequently confused, even by said patriots.

Comment author: CCC 11 October 2012 07:07:27AM 1 point [-]

Oh, that's sneaky.

Perhaps a perfect agent should occasionally - very occasionally - perturb a random selection of its own priors by some very small factor (10^-10 or smaller) in order to avoid such a potential mathematical dead end?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2012 12:56:37AM 0 points [-]

Nice try, but random perturbations won't help here.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 11 October 2012 05:34:25AM *  0 points [-]

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

-- Daniel Dennet

I think it's possible that a utility-maximizing lifestyle can actually be fairly hedon-maximizing, especially if you take periodic breaks and vacations (which are optimal for achieving high energy and motivation anyway, in my experience).

I think the real thing to keep in mind re: fuzzies and utilons may not be that you should always purchase them separately. (What's wrong with a package deal?) Rather, I think it's that you should operate under some utility function that's a compromise of fuzzies and utilons, instead of aiming for just one or the other (and potentially leaving yourself open to periodic, messy willpower failures/preference reversals).

What would it be like to not have a purpose in life? When I was in high school, trying to decide what I wanted to be when I "grew up", thinking about my career was not fun. I knew I wanted to do something that I would enjoy, but my preferences didn't seem very stable--the appeal of different careers seemed to change hour to hour. I actually found refocusing on the goal of earning to give liberating. Now choosing a career meant analyzing external factors like earnings potential instead of my own unstable whims.

BTW, 80K have a bunch of blog posts on career choice and happiness:

Even if you have no altruistic inclinations whatsoever, though, I suspect high-paying careers are a good default because more money means more options. (Though this advice may only apply to people who are frugal; others may see their required standard of living rise with their income.)

See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfy/you_only_live_once_a_reframing_of_working_towards/

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2012 12:41:31AM 0 points [-]

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

The problem is that this is true whether the cause makes the world better or worse.

Comment author: gwern 11 October 2012 06:11:03PM 5 points [-]

In what state of the economy or in what industry is the effect of a gap in employment history either strictly neutral or an outright positive?

(As opposed to a negative factor which one hopes will be small enough that it is outweighed by high demand for one's particular skill set and will not affect one's job offers or compensation at the margin?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2012 12:32:41AM 1 point [-]

I agree that a gap is (almost) always a negative. I was merely saying that depending on demand the effect isn't necessarily strong enough to keep you from getting a job.

The example I had in mind was silicon valley at the height of the tech boom.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 01:49:35AM *  0 points [-]

Warning about the vagabond idea: If you quit your job and stay jobless for more than, say, a month, you will probably be discriminated against when you go looking for a job in the future.

Why I think this

  1. I know a person who was having difficulty getting employed and did everything they could to get a job. Nothing worked. Then, they tried re-explaining an employment gap and they were employed quickly. The person speaks English and has a degree. This person had the type of skills that are useful in various industries and had applied in a wide variety of industries. It wasn't during a time of economic trouble. Discrimination against people with an employment gap appears to me to be a widespread response among many employers and something that can happen even if the economy is fine and one has marketable skills.

  2. Something that confirms this for me is that I have spoken with recruiters. The recruiters say that their clients request people with no significant gap in work history. They explained that they can't get those candidates hired because the clients don't want them and they have to make clients happy. I've seen job ads that specifically say you have to be currently employed in order to apply. It's no secret that employers consciously choose to discriminate based on an employment gap.

(The "Why I think this" section was added after the comment was down voted and people didn't seem to believe it. For me, this seems like common sense, so I didn't expect to have to explain.)

Some people who have an employment gap find it impossible to get employment no matter what they do, and employers are not going to take "I was trying out being a traveler" as a good reason for a gap. I'm not saying a month is safe, either. It's really not. It can take a month or three to find a new job anyway (depending on the amount of demand there is for what you do of course, so it could be longer...) and if you add additional time onto that because you're trying out being a vagabond, you might easily surpass the window of time where employers will consider you due to a gap in your employment history.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of job you might end up with if you haven't got an address. There are sweatshops right here in the USA, believe it or not. Some people end up there because they don't know English. Might you end up in some kind of horrible employment situation due to looking for a job with no address?

Consider this very carefully.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 October 2012 04:53:09AM 1 point [-]

That depends on the state of the economy, the industry and your skills.

Comment author: TimS 11 October 2012 01:49:59AM *  -2 points [-]

Not all moral distinctions are on-off buttons. Some (most?) are sliding scales.


I don't expect king-of-postmodernism-is-nonsense and mister-I-think-postmodernism-makes-good-points to come to agreement, but I'm interested in where exactly we disagree.

  • Do you think some agents could gain advantage by treating a sliding-scale moral quality as discrete?

  • Do you think some agents could gain advantage by treating a discrete moral quality as sliding-scale?

  • What sort of evidence is useful in deciding whether a particular moral quality is discrete or sliding scale?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 October 2012 04:31:35AM 1 point [-]

First binary distinctions aren't just for moral systems.

If we restrict to moral distinctions, most moral distinctions are Schelling points.

Comment author: TimS 10 October 2012 08:32:38PM 1 point [-]

I think the next paragraph is a bit more accurate:

Postmodernism postulates that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs and are therefore subject to change. It claims that there is no absolute truth and that the way people perceive the world is subjective and emphasises the role of language, power relations, and motivations in the formation of ideas and beliefs. In particular it attacks the use of sharp binary classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial; it holds realities to be plural and relative, and to be dependent on who the interested parties are and the nature of these interests. Postmodernist approaches therefore often consider the ways in which social dynamics, such as power and hierarchy, affect human conceptualizations of the world to have important effects on the way knowledge is constructed and used. Postmodernist thought often emphasizes constructivism, idealism, pluralism, relativism, and scepticism in its approaches to knowledge and understanding.

The key point of political theory post-modernist is that certain social norms are claimed to be true or universal when that is not the case. Further, binary distinctions (black/white, capitalist/proletariat) are inherently misleading, organizing the world in particular ways in order to advance particular moral agendas.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 11:10:03PM 0 points [-]

Further, binary distinctions (black/white, capitalist/proletariat) are inherently misleading,

Some are some aren't. Furthermore, it's impossible to say anything without using distinctions.

Comment author: CCC 10 October 2012 01:31:34PM 0 points [-]

Hmmm. It seems that I should add "as long as you are able to reassign all priors of 1 to priors of 0.999999999, and all priors of 0 to priors of 0.000000001" to my list of exceptions. (It won't fix the agent immediately, but it will place the agent in a situation of being able to fix itself, given sufficient observations and updates).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 10:57:45PM 2 points [-]

That's not the only problem. An agent that assigns equal probability to all possible experiences will never update.

Comment author: shminux 09 October 2012 09:41:41PM *  2 points [-]

I wonder if "rationality of patriotism" has been discussed on LW? Probably in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 07:24:18AM 1 point [-]

Something like that was discussed here.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 09 October 2012 07:39:12AM *  9 points [-]

As a child I had to pledge that I will become a law-abiding citizen of my country, and a member of the Communist party.

I have failed to adhere to both parts. The first part, because "my beloved homeland" does not exist anymore. The second part, knowingly and willingly. (Although, as a 6-years old child, I would probably also guess that I will agree with both parts when I grow up. Mostly because of: "if that wouldn't be a good thing, they would not ask me to promise it".)

Or maybe it's just because I had to recite the pledge only once. ;-)
(OK, technically I had to practice it a few times first.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 07:16:08AM 0 points [-]

Also because observations contradicted the belief that your country was good.

Comment author: erratio 09 October 2012 02:49:26PM 6 points [-]

Data point: My home country, Australia, does not have a pledge of allegiance. Overt demonstrations of patriotism were limited to being expected to sing the national anthem in school assembly once a week. I personally feel that there is still plenty of patriotism to go around. However, a common perception of the US is that you guys are over-patriotic.

Thinking a bit more on this, I can't help wondering how much of this can be traced to free voting versus mandatory voting. How much of encouraging patriotism is an attempt to make people care enough to vote?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 07:09:29AM 0 points [-]

Something that a lot of people, both inside and outside the US, don't realize is that what patriotism means in the US is not quite the same as what patriotism means in other countries.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 06:02:38AM 0 points [-]

Sure but the people have to enforce those laws (the government is something like 3% of the population from what I understand, which means that the people could overwhelm them easily), so if the concept of allegiance is foreign to them, as opposed to being very familiar and feeling like an obligation, or if they haven't witnessed all the OTHER citizens pledging allegiance, it might feel like an empty word they can safely ignore.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 07:02:19AM 0 points [-]

If the concept of allegiance becomes completely foreign to the citizens of a country, than the country effectively ceases to exist.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2012 02:27:10AM 0 points [-]

Deleted due to the attempt to evade the -5 penalty.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2012 06:35:43AM 4 points [-]

I thought part of the point of the -5 penalty was to keep interesting discussions from happening down stream of downvoted comments. In that case isn't responding to heavily downvoted comments in a different thread exactly what should happen?

Comment author: Gabriel 08 October 2012 04:29:10PM *  1 point [-]

How about "if you try this many times, it will usually work." I'm not sure you can taboo 'usually' (or 'systematically'). It seems to be one way to invoke a rather fundamental-seeming process of abstracting from specific cases to general categories about which you can then form summarizing beliefs. If you ask someone to taboo something too basic, the best they can do is to rephrase and hope you'll get what basic thing they were referring to.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2012 09:42:38PM 2 points [-]

What does it mean to try the same thing many times?

Comment author: Jabberslythe 07 October 2012 09:04:15PM 1 point [-]

Non-consensual sex doesn't have to be prohibited by fiat, it falls out of the principle of well constructed moral systems. E.G it almost always causes more unhappiness than happiness, so utilitarianism doesn't like it in almost all cases.

There are cases when non-consensual sex would turn out to be justified, but I think they would be rare and hard to argue even in those cases. Incest is way better as a clear case to use in standard arguments.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2012 08:55:25PM -2 points [-]

Least convenient possible world:

Is it wrong to rape someone unconscious if pregnancy and STDs aren't an issue?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012
Comment author: Jabberslythe 06 October 2012 03:18:42AM 0 points [-]

Whenever I want to trigger a moral intuition that can't be justified by any moral system that doesn't just expressly prohibit it by fiat, I use an example that triggers incest avoidance.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 October 2012 07:01:45PM -2 points [-]

You can get even stronger results using non-consensual sex.

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 07 October 2012 07:55:00AM 1 point [-]

It's something that everybody has quick access to. Another version would be "things fall", which is better but also only works on a planet and with objects denser than air for example. It would be ideal to have some unchanging reference object that we can make statements about, instead we have something that everyone has seen and they can say "I have seen that, it was pretty much blue"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 October 2012 06:04:23PM 3 points [-]

That it's hard to come up with an "obviously true fact" that is in fact true without qualifications is itself interesting.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 October 2012 12:59:22AM *  1 point [-]

Even in the stable camp, facts can mutate: An atom's weight, for example, varies depending on the isotope.

This is a non sequitur. "Atomic weight" has to refer, implicitly or explicitly, to a particular isotope to be meaningful. The weight of an isotope is not going to change over time, and it's very unlikely that we're significantly wrong about the weight of an isotope.

ETA: comments below explain my confusion. Thanks.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 October 2012 03:30:29AM 3 points [-]

In practice "atomic weight" commonly refers to the average weight of the most common isotope mix.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 06:43:05PM 5 points [-]

That comment did move Intrade shares by around 10 percentage points, I think, though I'm only going on personal before-and-after comparisons. The good Will may have picked the wrong time to criticize his instincts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2012 11:34:38PM 6 points [-]

That comment did move Intrade shares by around 10 percentage points,

So? That just means that some of the people who trade on intrade also made the mistake Will alludes to.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 07:53:57AM 1 point [-]

Trolling: Provocation for the sake of response.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2012 10:56:28PM 4 points [-]

Ok, the next question is whether being voted below -3 is a good proxy for a comment being provocation for the sake of response.

For example, I strongly suspect eridu simply honestly believes the insane ideas he espouses, does he count as "provocation for the sake of response", if not what do you think the appropriate response to his comments should have been?

Comment author: [deleted] 06 October 2012 07:05:19PM *  9 points [-]

BTW, comments below -4 (I guess), such as this, are collapsed by default even if I leave the “Don't show me comments with a score less than (Blank for none)” preference blank. At the very least, the “(Blank for none)” should be updated.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2012 10:50:42PM 0 points [-]

It also ignores the value.

Comment author: jimrandomh 05 October 2012 09:59:53PM *  3 points [-]

I think we end up with a singleton no matter what, and it's only a question of whether we choose the singleton, or try to maintain an impossible balance of power and thereby fail to control who builds it. Once it's possible to replicate directly using only computational resources, murder becomes an instantaneous and massively scalable means of reproduction. And once that's true, it just isn't possible to have any semblance of a balance of power; either someone takes over the world, or someone destroys the world accidentally while trying to take it over.

My perspective as a programmer (not specifically focused on security, but definitely not a layman), is that computer security won't ever be good enough for those circumstances, no matter how many resources are thrown at it, and that throwing resources at computer security is only a mixed blessing anyways.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2012 01:16:24AM *  1 point [-]

It's not clear that a singleton is stable. It might suffer from (some type of) Denebola Collapse.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 October 2012 09:35:57PM 1 point [-]

Not just metaphorically. People are behaviorally reinforced into trolls because attention is reward and provocation gets attention. By downvoting something and commenting in reply to it, you are building positive associations to getting downvoted, a rather psychologically-sick sort of internal state that is a very bad thing to do to anyone. Would you consider it a nice thing to do to follow somebody around and give them a smile and a kiss each time they lost their temper or experienced some other failure of will, so as to reinforce that behavior? No, right?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2012 12:49:03AM *  10 points [-]

Could you taboo "trolling". I think several distinct things are being lumped under that word. Here are the kind of posts that tend to get downvoted:

1) Simply being obnoxious, e.g., "First Post!!!!". As far as I know, these are almost non-existent here.

2) Someone arguing for a crazy position they don't believe.

3) Someone who genuinely believes a crazy position.

4) Someone arguing for a reasonable position that causes some voters to get mind-killed.

Which subset of these do you mean by "trolling" and what do you think is the appropriate response to each?

Comment author: thomblake 05 October 2012 02:05:47PM 2 points [-]

I'm surprised by this. I never noticed this "considered normal".

When did this rule come about?

I'm pretty sure gray areas aren't rules. The actual non-gray rule is listed in the OP.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 October 2012 11:54:35PM 0 points [-]

I'm surprised by this. I never noticed this "considered normal".

Well, Yudkowsky was one of the top authors for 2011.

Comment author: thomblake 04 October 2012 05:31:50PM 2 points [-]

Is that a gray area?

Yes. It's also slightly gray to post quotes from other prominent Lesswrongians.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2012 10:24:27PM 2 points [-]

Yes. It's also slightly gray to post quotes from other prominent Lesswrongians.

When did this rule come about? As recently as six months ago it was considered normal to quote EY as long as it wasn't from LW.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 October 2012 09:31:17PM 0 points [-]

Or the downvoters are fast and early, the upvoters arrive later, which is what I've observed. I'm actually a bit worried about random downvoting of other users as well.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2012 02:37:01AM 9 points [-]

Or the downvoters are fast and early, the upvoters arrive later, which is what I've observed.

Or it's just more memorable when this happens.

Comment author: DSimon 03 October 2012 07:21:45PM 0 points [-]

Hm, how about: "[...] of any observer which our best current theory of how minds work says could exist".

So for example, a statement along the lines of "a ghost watches and sees whether or not Mars continues to exist when it passes behind the Sun from Earth's perspective" would have been meaningful a long time ago, but is not meaningful for people today who know a little about brains.

This also means that a proposition may be meaningful only because the proposer is ignorant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2012 02:12:54AM 1 point [-]

Hm, how about: "[...] of any observer which our best current theory of how minds work says could exist".

Taboo "could". Basically, counter-factual surgery is a lot trickier than you seem to think.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 03 October 2012 07:47:56AM *  -1 points [-]

If we couldn't, even in principle, find any evidence that would make the theory more likely or less, then yeah I think that theory would be correctly labeled meaningless.

But, I can immediately think of some evidence that would move my posterior probability. If all definable universes exist, we should expect (by Occam) to be in a simple one, and (by anthropic reasoning) in a survivable one, but we should not expect it to be elegant. The laws should be quirky, because the number of possible universes (that are simple and survivable) is larger than the subset thereof that are elegant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2012 02:00:36AM 1 point [-]

But, I can immediately think of some evidence that would move my posterior probability. If all definable universes exist, we should expect (by Occam) to be in a simple one,

Why? That assumes the universes are weighted by complexity, which isn't true in all Tegmark level IV theories.

Comment author: DSimon 03 October 2012 04:11:30AM 0 points [-]

Here's my first swing at it: A proposition is meaningful if it constrains the predicted observations of any theoretically possible observer.

This way, the proposition "the unmanned starship will not blink out of existence when it leaves my light cone" is meaningful because it's possible that there might potentially be an observer nearby who observes the starship not disappear.

On the other hand, the statement "The position of this particle is exactly X and its momentum exactly P" is not meaningful under this rule, and that's a feature.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2012 06:32:45AM 1 point [-]

Taboo "theoretically possible".

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Useful Idea of Truth
Comment author: shminux 02 October 2012 05:15:01PM 1 point [-]

Is it possible to tell them apart?

Why would you want to?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 05:33:49PM 1 point [-]

See this.

Comment author: TimS 02 October 2012 01:12:38PM 3 points [-]

Particularly since many LWers believe things like:

The progress of science is measured as much by deaths among the Old Guard as by discoveries from the Young Idealists.

or

Psychological diagnosis (like those listed in the DSM) function to separate the socially acceptable from the unacceptable and do not even try to cut the world at its joints.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 05:31:04PM *  0 points [-]

Psychological diagnosis (like those listed in the DSM) function to separate the socially acceptable from the unacceptable and do not even try to cut the world at its joints.

The difference is that post-modernists believe that something like this is true for all science and use this to justify this state of affairs in psychology, whereas LWers believe that this is not an acceptable state of affairs and should be fixed.

Edit: Also as MizedNuts pointed out, the diagnoses do try to cut reality at the joints, they just frequently fail due to social signaling interfering with seeking truth.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 02 October 2012 01:06:36PM 3 points [-]

For every meaningful proposition P, an author should (in theory) be able to write coherently about a fictional universe U where P is true and a fictional universe U' where P is false.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 05:24:52PM 7 points [-]

So my belief that 2+2=4 isn't meaningful?

Comment author: chaosmosis 02 October 2012 02:08:42AM 9 points [-]

I disagree. We're obligated to do things to the best of our ability based on the knowledge we have. If those decisions have bad outcomes, that doesn't mean our actions weren't justified. Otherwise, you displace moral judgement from the here and now into inaccessible ideas about what will have turned out to be the case.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 04:26:10AM 3 points [-]

I disagree. We're obligated to do things to the best of our ability based on the knowledge we have.

No, we're obligated to make sure we have enough knowledge and to gather more knowledge if we don't. If you believe that you don't have the time and/or resources to do this, that's also a decision with moral consequences.

In other words, it's not enough to merely try to make the correct decision.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 12:44:21AM 19 points [-]

Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of Peace who, very short-sightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that, and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity, called War, has been begun by some or all of us; and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be the driest part of the task) but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity: but that they are specially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.

These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are always telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need no longer wage wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe. But how is he prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbour on the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we do? Do we all join hands, like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say "We are all responsible for this; but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the man's head; and when nobody shall ever chop anything for ever and ever." Do we say "Let byegones be byegones; why go back to all the dull details with which the business began; who can tell with what sinister motives the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?" We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of provocation, and the proper object of punishment. We do go into the dull details; we do enquire into the origins; we do emphatically enquire who it was that hit first. In short we do what I have done very briefly in this place.

-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Appetite of Tyranny", arguing against pretending to be wise

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 12:36:03AM 5 points [-]

Experience trumps brilliance.

— Thomas Sowell

Comment author: gwern 01 October 2012 03:09:12AM 3 points [-]

I don't know how I'd refute him - there are so many TV shows, both now and then! One can cherrypick pretty much anything one likes, although I don't personally watch TV anymore and couldn't do it.

(I'm reminded how people online sometimes say 'anime really sucked in time period X', because they're only familiar with anime released in the '00s and '10s, while if you look at an actual full 30+ strong roster of one of their example 'sucking' years like eg. 1991, you'll often see a whole litany of great or influential series like Nadia, City Hunter, Ranma 1/2, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. Well, yeah, if you forget entirely about them, I suppose 1991 seems like a really sucky year compared to 2010 or whatever.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 12:05:12AM 0 points [-]

I don't know how I'd refute him - there are so many TV shows, both now and then!

I'd start by looking at the shows with the highest ratings.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 September 2012 06:16:13PM *  3 points [-]

Hypothesis: Religious people (or at least Jews and Christians, which are the religions I'm most familiar with) tend to say that life and death are ultimately in the hands of God/G-d. I suspect this is a way of avoiding survivor's guilt, though both groups are generally in favor of medicine.

From memory: a news story about a conference on medical ethics where the Orthodox Jews were the only ones in favor of life extension.

I suspect that any religion with a vividly imagined heaven has to have rules against suicide, or else the religion won't survive. It's plausible to me that the revulsion against life extension is a mere side effect of the rule against suicide.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 September 2012 07:10:23PM 0 points [-]

It's plausible to me that the revulsion against life extension is a mere side effect of the rule against suicide.

This seems strange, I would think an aversion to suicide would make people more pro-life extension.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 September 2012 08:37:32AM *  2 points [-]

We still want the state to have enough legitimacy to secure property rights and enforce contracts.

You are right. I concede it probably isn't instrumentally useful for the goal of a small, strong and stable government capable of enforcing contracts and protecting rights. While the de-legitimized state might have a hard time growing even more and in its incompetence new de facto freedoms would slip out of its fingers, but the freedom is the freedom of anarchy not the liberty of minarchy. The argument I gave degenerates into a basic argument for anarchy and revolution in the hopes for change. Something that has historically almost never worked out well.

Since the logic of these two reasons contradict, would you mind telling me which is your true rejection

Good catch. I don't think people not voting has a large effect, just that people not voting also sends a signal to the system and it doesn't seem obvious that it is much smaller one than the one you send by voting for a party or candidate.

1) You're unlikely to affect the outcome anyway.

2) The tiny expected influence you have on the outcome doesn't go away when you don't vote, because abstaining from voting is also a political act.

I would perhaps add 3) that this political act may have instrumental utility for certain kinds of goals.

But applying 1) and 2) I get a bit of a problem. My value of information argument against spending time on thinking about party politics should then also clearly apply to thinking about voting or non-voting as well, advice I'm obviously not following. My revealed preferences point that some part of me thinks that not voting is very desirable. This can't be argued on consequentalist grounds for the reason you point out. Thinking about it I seem to consider non-voting valuable enough to think and talk about for symbolic reasons, seeing it as a sort of Schelling fence of personal political detachment from one's society. If you live in a society where your values or map of the world radically diverge from the rest of society, such a thing is perhaps good for personal well being, seeing oneself as a subject rather than a citizen helps you deal with the constant pain of things going horribly wrong.

Looking from the outside I'm using non-voting arguments to try and promote alienation from the society and hopefully drift towards my mind space. My inside feeling to the contrary is weaker evidence. Readers should then try to correct for this.

Taking another step up the ladder, perhaps my self-proclaimed divergent values are only a rationalization for my lack of tribal feeling linked to the state. Such a predisposition is hardly unique in the mindspace near LW/OB.

Why put so much distance between myself and the outside world? Because despite my legendary optimism, I find my society unacceptable. It is dreary, insipid, ugly, boring, wrong, and wicked. Trying to reform it is largely futile; as the Smiths tell us, "The world won't listen." Instead, I pursue the strategy that actually works: Making my small corner of the world beautiful in my eyes. If you ever meet my children or see my office, you'll know what I mean.

I'm hardly autarchic. I import almost everything I consume from the outside world. Indeed, I frequently leave the security of my Bubble to walk the earth. But I do so as a tourist. Like a truffle pig, I hunt for the best that "my" society has to offer. I partake. Then I go back to my Bubble and tell myself, "America's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

My politics and values are quite different from Bryan Caplan's, yet the conclusions seem remarkably similar. Maybe both of us already had our bottom line written out first.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 September 2012 04:36:12PM 1 point [-]

If you live in a society where your values or map of the world radically diverge from the rest of society,

Have you considered moving to a better society?

such a thing is perhaps good for personal well being, seeing oneself as a subject rather than a citizen helps you deal with the constant pain of things going horribly wrong.

Isn't it better to try to fix things than wallow in your learned helplessness?

My politics and values are quite different from Bryan Caplan's

How so? Near as I can tell, except for the whole emo/alienation thing you have going your values seem very similar.

Comment author: Decius 30 September 2012 12:27:51AM 0 points [-]

I see different ideas of the basic concept of property rights when I look in the history of anthropology. Since those differences faded quickly during cultural interactions. From that I conclude that property rights divergently evolved, and subsequently converged, faster than genetic mechanisms would imply possible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 September 2012 01:03:26AM 0 points [-]

Did you even read the comment you just replied to?

Comment author: Decius 29 September 2012 03:14:52PM 1 point [-]

Where do you see variances in the basic conception of property rights vary as though genetic and not cultural? Do children born of people who have a different set of property values than those with whom they are raised have the concept of their genes or of the people who raised them?

Based on the developmental cognitive science literature, I'd say that a sense of property rights can't develop until after the sense of other is developed. That means that most adopted children should develop the same concept of property rights as their family, if property rights are cultural.

What does the evidence say?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 08:33:03PM 1 point [-]

Where do you see variances in the basic conception of property rights vary as though genetic and not cultural?

I never said anything about variance. Due to the physiological unity of humankind there may not be very much variance in the genetic component.

Look at my analogy with language: people learn the language of their parents, but that doesn't mean language ability has no genetic basis.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 September 2012 07:20:55AM *  4 points [-]

This seems like grasping at straws.

Consider how many people you affect when you go to the store to buy breakfast. You practically effect nearly everyone else on the planet by a very small value. I'd argue voting is not more than two or so orders of magnitude above that.

But let us for the sake of argument say it is larger than that, your basic problem is that every other voter affects people by the same value as well. No matter how you turn this you only get a nanoslice of power in steering where the country moves. There are clearly better things to do with your life than spending time thinking about which candidate to vote for or paying the price in gas for the 30 minute drive to the voting booth.

This is assuming to the first approximation politicians only care about the proportions of votes various candidates and parties get and not the number of people voting. Note that for some kinds of referendums this isn't true. But for most elections it seems to hold to the first approximation. Moving beyond that approximation, I bet that higher voter turn out makes the result of the elections seem more legitimate to the populace emboldening the government for decisive action.

If one desires small government the state having little legitimacy sounds like a good idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 08:21:13PM 1 point [-]

Consider how many people you affect when you go to the store to buy breakfast. You practically effect nearly everyone else on the planet by a very small value.

You're effectively choosing the administration under which people will live until the next election. This is a much larger effect than the marginal change to the economy from you buying breakfast.

I bet that higher voter turn out makes the result of the elections seem more legitimate to the populace emboldening the government for decisive action.

To through your other argument around back at you. What's the marginal effect of one person refusing to vote. Probably less than for one person voting since most people who don't vote do so out of laziness with no deeper philosophical motive behind it. Let's put it this way: a candidate with a majority (or even a plurality in some systems) becomes the office holder, whereas less than 50% turnout doesn't cause a revolution; and even if it did, it would probably not be the revolution you want.

Let's put it this way, the two reasons you've given for not voting are:

1) You're unlikely to affect the outcome anyway.

2) If enough people don't vote the government will have less legitimacy and this can have positive effects.

Since the logic of these two reasons contradict, would you mind telling me which is your true rejection?

If one desires small government the state having little legitimacy sounds like a good idea.

We still want the state to have enough legitimacy to secure property rights and enforce contracts.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 29 September 2012 08:10:59AM 2 points [-]

Thus, the expected number of people you'll affect is .

Not voting (especially if you tell others you didn't vote) also affects people. You are going to need to subtract this to get the net effects.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 07:52:03PM 1 point [-]

Not voting (especially if you tell others you didn't vote) also affects people.

This affect seems like it would be limited to one's immediate acquaintances, also it seems like it would have a smaller affect on them than which administration they live under.

Comment author: Decius 29 September 2012 06:41:28AM 1 point [-]

It seems to me that this is an attempt to appeal to evolutionary psychology to explain a cultural phenomenon. Maybe I'm provincial in thinking that property rights are grounded in sociology rather than biology, but if they were grounded in biology I would expect to see fewer convergences when different ethnic groups participate in a mostly common culture but still select reproductive partners who share their background. I would also find it trivially likely that within only a generation or two, the distribution of viewpoints regarding property rights would shift dramatically, unless there was significant selection pressure.

However, if property rights are memetic and cultural, I would expect both convergences due to social interaction without gene mixing, and large shifts in the course of a single generation, or even in one person during their adult life.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 07:00:37AM *  0 points [-]

A basic conception of property rights is probably genetic whereas specific property laws are cultural. This is similar to the way our capacity for language as well as certain language universals are genetic while languages themselves are cultural.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 29 September 2012 06:10:59AM *  0 points [-]

But the claim that replacement jobs are systematically more difficult, so that newly unemployed lack the capacity to learn the new jobs, is a much stronger claim.

Yes. It's obviously true that useful things that are easier to automate will get automated more, so the job loss should grow from the easily automated end. The open question is how much do human skill distributions and the human notion of 'difficulty' match up with the easier to automate thing. It's obviously not a complete match, as a human job, bookkeeping is considered to require more skill than warehouse work, but bookkeeping is much more easily automated than warehouse work.

Human labor in basic production, farming, mining, manufacturing, basically relies on humans coming with built-in hand-eye coordination and situation awareness that has been impossible to automate satisfactorily so far. Human labor in these areas mostly consists of following instructions though, so get a good enough machine solutions for hand-eye coordination and situation awareness in the real world, and most just-following-orders, dealing-with-dumb-matter human labor is toast.

Then there's the simpler service labor where you deal with other humans and need to model humans successfully. This is probably more difficult, AI-wise. Then again, these jobs are also less essential, people don't seem to miss the telephone and elevator operators much. Human service personnel are an obvious status signal, but if the automated solution is 100x cheaper, actual human service personnel is going to end up a luxury good, and the nearby grocery store and fast food restaurant probably won't be hiring human servers if they can make do with a clunky automated order and billing system. In addition to being more scarce, high-grade customer service jobs at status-conscious organizations are going to require more skills than a random grocery store cashier job.

This leaves us mostly with various types of abstract knowledge work, which are generally considered the types of job that require the most skill. Also, one dealing with people job sector where the above argument of replacing humans with automated systems that aren't full AIs won't work are various security professions. You can't do away with modeling other humans very well and being very good at social situation awareness there.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 06:42:21AM *  2 points [-]

Human service personnel are an obvious status signal, but if the automated solution is 100x cheaper, actual human service personnel is going to end up a luxury good

On the other hand, the wealth said automated solutions will generate means that luxury goods are a lot more affordable.

Edit: The downside is that this means that most jobs will essentially consist of playing status games, I believe the common word for this is decadence.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 04:24:01PM *  11 points [-]

So, less wronger, let me know: are the things I should care about in the election, or can I just lie back and enjoy it as a piece of interesting theatre?

Voting is kind of like buying lottery tickets in this regard, a waste of perfectly good hope. It really is a silly ritual which I'm dismayed some rationalists still take seriously.

My advice is finding higher quality entertainment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 06:33:10AM 0 points [-]

I just realized that one doesn't even need to invoke game theory for voting to make sense. If there are N voters in an election, the probability of you being the deciding vote is approximately , but the number of people affected by the result is approximately N (probably more since a lot of people don't vote). Thus, the expected number of people you'll affect is .

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 02:04:23PM 3 points [-]

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching): straight or turn?

Submitting...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 September 2012 01:20:45AM *  1 point [-]

I voted "lead toward: straight", but thinking about it some more I think the correct answer is: "other, hypothetical isn't sufficiently detailed to determine correct choice".

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 27 September 2012 09:51:34AM 3 points [-]

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Submitting...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2012 06:43:53AM 3 points [-]

Other: These are all true for different meanings of "the object of one's perception".

Comment author: DanArmak 26 September 2012 04:57:04PM *  1 point [-]

Addendum: you are not allowed to explicitly consider e.g. future reputational effects of your choice. (Most people will hate you for flipping the switch or just for being involved no matter what you do. The safest bet is to run away if you haven't been seen near the switch yet.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2012 06:35:41AM 1 point [-]

How is that different from choosing "straight"?

Comment author: pragmatist 26 September 2012 03:18:44PM 12 points [-]

Empiricism: Our only source of novel information about the world is sensory experience.

Rationalism: There is some information about the world that we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2012 06:30:34AM *  0 points [-]

Isn't the standard formulation of "Rationalism" that all information can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience?

Yes, I know no one sane believes that formulation these days.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 01:44:35PM 1 point [-]

Language: Russellianism or Fregeanism?

Submitting...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2012 06:12:32AM -1 points [-]

Other: some words are Fregeanian others are Russellian.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes September 2012
Comment author: Decius 27 September 2012 06:29:55PM *  0 points [-]

50 years after a self-improving AI is released into the wild, I don't expect Venus and Mars to be in their present orbits. I expect that they would be gradually moving towards being in the same orbit that the Earth is moving towards (or is already established in) 120 degrees apart, propelled by a rocket which uses large reflectors in space to heat portion of the surface of the planet, which is then forced to jet in the desired vector at escape velocity. ETA: That would mean the removal of three objects from the list of planets of Sol.

I think it will only be a few hundred years after FAI before interplanetary travel requires routine 'take your shoes off' type of screening.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2012 01:59:51AM 1 point [-]

Not thinking very ambitious I see.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 September 2012 07:31:45AM *  0 points [-]

In what sense could philosophers have "better" philosophical intuition? The only way I can think of for theirs to be "better" is if they've seen a larger part of the landscape of philosophical questions, and are therefore better equipped to build consistent philosophical models (example).

The problem with this is that the kind of people likely to become philosophers have systematically different intuitions to begin with.

I'm not sure that randomness from evolution and enculturation should be treated differently from random factors in the intuition-squaring process. It's randomness all the way through either way, right?

I fear many readers will confuse this argument for the moral anti-realist argument. The moral anti-realist argument doesn't mean you shouldn't consider your goals superior to those of the pebble sorters or babyeaters, just that if they ran the same process you did to arrive at this conclusion they would likely get a different result. This probably wouldn't happen if you did this with the process used to try and establish say the value of the gravitational constant or the charge of an electron.

This suggests that morality is more like your particular taste in yummy foods and aversion to snakes than the speed of light. It isn't a fact about the universe it is a fact about particular agents or pseudo-agents.

Of course the pebble sorters or babyeaters or paper-clip maximizing AIs can figure out we have an aversion to snakes and crave salty and sugary food. But them learning this would not result in them sharing our normative judgements except for instrumental purposes in some very constrained scenarios where they are optimal for a wide range of goals.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2012 01:04:02AM *  1 point [-]

I fear many readers will confuse this argument for the moral anti-realist argument. The moral anti-realist argument doesn't mean you shouldn't consider your goals superior to those of the pebble sorters or babyeaters, just that if they ran the same process you did to arrive at this conclusion they would likely get a different result.

What is this "moral anti-realist argument"? Every argument against moral realism I've seen boils down to: "there are on universally compelling moral arguments, therefore morality is not objective". Well, as the linked article points out, there are no universally compelling physical arguments either.

This suggests that morality is more like your particular taste in yummy foods and aversion to snakes than the speed of light.

The difference between morality and taste in food is that I'm ok with you believing that chocolate is tasty even if I don't, but I'm not ok with you believing that it's moral to eat babies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 September 2012 12:26:39AM 10 points [-]

As far as I know, Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were indeed unusually incorruptible, and I do hate them for this trait.

Why? Because when your goal is mass murder, corruption saves lives. Corruption leads you to take the easy way out, to compromise, to go along to get along. Corruption isn't a poison that makes everything worse. It's a diluting agent like water. Corruption makes good policies less good, and evil policies less evil.

I've read thousands of pages about Hitler. I can't recall the slightest hint of "corruption" on his record. Like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, Hitler was a sincerely murderous fanatic. The same goes for many of history's leading villains - see Eric Hoffer's classic The True Believer. Sincerity is so overrated. If only these self-righteous monsters had been corrupt hypocrites, millions of their victims could have bargained and bribed their way out of hell.

-- Bryan Caplan

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes September 2012
Comment author: PhilosophyTutor 26 September 2012 02:22:46PM 0 points [-]

A possible interpretation is that the "strength" of a belief reflects the importance one attaches to acting upon that belief. Two people might both believe with 99% confidence that a new nuclear power plant is a bad idea, yet one of the two might go to a protest about the power plant and the other might not, and you might try to express what is going on there by saying that one holds that belief strongly and the other weakly.

You could of course also try to express it in terms of the two people's confidence in related propositions like "protests are effective" or "I am the sort of person who goes to protests". In that case strength would be referring to the existence or nonexistence of related beliefs which together are likely to be action-driving.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 September 2012 12:21:58AM 0 points [-]

They might also differ in just how bad an idea they think it is.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 24 September 2012 07:48:13AM 0 points [-]

I don't see this as anything to do with moral theory. It's pretty much general currency what constitutes being an asshole. I've seen it set out in umpteen comment policies on blogs, which often explicitly summarise it as "don't be an asshole", or even "don't be an asshole -- but you knew that already".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 September 2012 11:22:14PM 0 points [-]

I don't see this as anything to do with moral theory.

I don't understand what you mean here. Is your concept of moral theory only something for thought experiments involving Omega but to abstract to apply to day-to-day life?

Comment author: [deleted] 23 September 2012 12:42:55AM 0 points [-]

care to expand? His bayesian networks stuff is for modelling causal relationships. Am I confused?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 September 2012 10:54:58PM 0 points [-]

This comment by Argency explains what I mean by causality being incompatible with pure materialism.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 22 September 2012 05:11:27PM 0 points [-]

Could you taboo "asshole"?

Explain how not to be an asshole? Possibly, but I don't think anyone here actually needs an explanation, beyond pointing out that anything you shouldn't say for that reason in an ordinary comment, you shouldn't say in a poll either. The slightly different sort of thing that a poll is doesn't change the standard.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 September 2012 06:13:32PM 0 points [-]

And I was hoping to extract your moral theory from you.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 21 September 2012 08:08:15AM 2 points [-]

"Don't be an asshole" covers it. If you need a guide to tell you that, a guide will not help you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 September 2012 04:39:57AM 1 point [-]

Could you taboo "asshole"?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 10:17:46PM *  0 points [-]

You'll have to explain your position. I can't see it. To clarify what I think, take "me" as a node, and recursively build a causality graph (Pearl's thing) of all the causes that lead into that node. By some theorem somewhere, that graph will be connected. Then label that graph "my map of the universe" and label it's compressing model "physics". That is what "materialism" means to me.

I've just realized, tho, that the rest of you might attach a different concept to "materialism", but I don't know what it is. Can you give me a steel-man (or a straw man (or a nonmaterial entity)) version of what "materialism" means to you?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 September 2012 03:43:05AM 0 points [-]

To clarify what I think, take "me" as a node, and recursively build a causality graph (Pearl's thing) of all the causes that lead into that node. By some theorem somewhere, that graph will be connected. Then label that graph "my map of the universe" and label it's compressing model "physics". That is what "materialism" means to me.

I think you are making a category error with respect to what Pearl's theory actually does.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 September 2012 06:09:12AM *  1 point [-]

For example, while it's true that an individual vote only has a small effect, consider the effect of say encouraging rationalists not to vote notice that this has an effect on more that one vote.

I always find it amusing how quickly people jump to knock off effects in these debates. If my actions and arguments have such effects surely those of other potential voters do as well. Doesn't this mean things add back to normality any my influence really is just the nano-slice it seems to be?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 September 2012 06:27:09AM -2 points [-]

If my actions and arguments have such effects surely those of other potential voters do as well.

Most voters don't campain, post on LW, etc.

Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 05:07:56PM *  16 points [-]

An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 September 2012 03:19:00AM 20 points [-]

Claim to agree with them on issue X, then once they've committed to supporting you, change your position on issue X.

Come to think of it, politicians already do this.

Comment author: see 21 September 2012 01:20:03AM -2 points [-]

The paper assumes votes are accurately recorded, counted, and reported. Which is known to be false; error rates in vote counts are at least 0.1%, and likely closer to 1%. A perfectly honest close election is an election decided not by actual votes cast, but the random distribution of counting errors. And any election so close is going to be subjected to recounts that simply redistribute the counting errors.

Now, it is theoretically possible your vote might actually tip things in the final recount, right? Despite the fact that who actually won in a close election is unknown and unknowable, your vote is more likely to be accurately counted than not, so it might tip over the decision, right?

Except that's assuming perfect honesty in recording, counting, and reporting, which is ridiculous. What will determine who wins in a close election is whether the margin created by random counting errors is small enough that the people in the best position to commit fraud can tip it the way they prefer.

And, of course, we then ask -- did you actually have a good, reliable of idea how your candidate was going to do in office, and then on top of that how his choices were actually going to translate into effects? Really? So, back in November 2008, what did you predict the September 2012 unemployment rate would be, if Obama won? What did you predict the US budget deficit would be? Did you predict that the average number of deaths of US personnel in Afghanistan per month under Obama would be five times higher than it was under Bush? Did you predict the overthrow of the Libyan government by US air power? Let's be serious; Obama didn't have a very good idea of how his policies would translate into actual effects back on Election Day 2008.

Your vote for a position less powerful than President is more influential, sure, but its actual effect is reduced because the position is less powerful. There might be some point in voting on propositions and initiatives if your state has them, and maybe on very local elections if you've bothered to become informed on them and live in a small enough community.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 September 2012 02:24:28AM 0 points [-]

Except that's assuming perfect honesty in recording, counting, and reporting, which is ridiculous. What will determine who wins in a close election is whether the margin created by random counting errors is small enough that the people in the best position to commit fraud can tip it the way they prefer.

Your vote might still be the vote that tips the total past the threshold where the opposing counters can commit fraud.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 04:24:01PM *  11 points [-]

So, less wronger, let me know: are the things I should care about in the election, or can I just lie back and enjoy it as a piece of interesting theatre?

Voting is kind of like buying lottery tickets in this regard, a waste of perfectly good hope. It really is a silly ritual which I'm dismayed some rationalists still take seriously.

My advice is finding higher quality entertainment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 September 2012 02:22:49AM 2 points [-]

See this post. The point being that in order for rationalists to win we need to stop using the kind of straw rationality you seem to be advocating.

For example, while it's true that an individual vote only has a small effect, consider the effect of say encouraging rationalists not to vote notice that this has an effect on more that one vote.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2012 10:30:42AM 1 point [-]

It's easier to leave a forum than a country. Forum-dictators who abuse their power end up with empty forums.

Real world dictators who abuse their power often end up dead. (But perhaps not as much as real world dictators who do not abuse their power enough to secure it.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2012 10:22:27PM 1 point [-]

Real world dictators who abuse their power often end up dead.

Not as often as you seem to think.

Comment author: Bugmaster 20 September 2012 12:25:55AM 0 points [-]

Perhaps I misunderstood what ArisKatsaris was saying. I thought he meant something like this:

Dictators in countries tend to make living conditions in those countries less desirable. Dictators in forums tend to make posting in those forums (and/or reading them) more desirable.

If this is true, your objection is somewhat tangential to the topic (though an empty forum is less desirable than an active one). But perhaps he meant something else ?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2012 10:21:36PM 2 points [-]

Since it's easier to leave, a dictator in a forum has more motivation not to abuse his power.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 08:30:16PM 0 points [-]

It's not incoherent.

I don't know. I don't understand pearl's reduction of causality. I just know it's there.

Mathematical relations like "hydrogen properties are dependent of electron mass" might not fit the causality concept. Or maybe I just can't make the math jump.

Anyways, what are you gaining by these questions? Do you have some grand solution that you are making me jump thru hoops to find? Do you think I have some grand solution that you are jumping thru hoops to squeeze out of me?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2012 10:05:51PM 0 points [-]

Anyways, what are you gaining by these questions? Do you have some grand solution that you are making me jump thru hoops to find? Do you think I have some grand solution that you are jumping thru hoops to squeeze out of me?

I'm trying to show you that materialism in the sense you seem to mean here is ultimately incoherent.

Comment author: taelor 20 September 2012 04:41:23PM 0 points [-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Hanson's whole point that everyone is naturally hypocritical, and has been made that way via millions of years of evolution optimized to handle social politics in small forager bands? Wouldn't a "non-[hypocritical] approach to life" be something that Hanson's theory would predict wouldn't exist?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2012 09:52:13PM 1 point [-]

In that case what cluster in thing-space does the word "hypocrite" cut out?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 September 2012 02:57:27AM 1 point [-]

I think Hanson's been showing more variation lately.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2012 09:51:21PM 0 points [-]

Possible, I stopped reading him several years ago.

Comment author: Bugmaster 19 September 2012 06:28:53PM 4 points [-]

Do you have any evidence for that ? In my experience, it all depends on the dictator, not on the venue.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 11:22:17PM *  3 points [-]

It's easier to leave a forum than a country. Forum-dictators who abuse their power end up with empty forums.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 September 2012 11:26:32AM 5 points [-]

For what it's worth, The Last Psychiatrist used to be interesting, but then he started ranting about how everyone (else) is a narcissist without giving any clue about what a non-narcissistic approach to life would be like.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 10:51:24PM 0 points [-]

For what it's worth, The Last Psychiatrist used to be interesting, but then he started ranting about how everyone (else) is a narcissist without giving any clue about what a non-narcissistic approach to life would be like.

Replace "narcissist" with "hypocrite" and that's a good description of Robin Hanson.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 September 2012 12:02:54PM 0 points [-]

Tentatively-- game theoretic exaggeration of offense will simply be followed by more and more demands. Natural offense is about a desire that can be satiated.

However, there's another sort of breakdown of negotiations that just occurred to me. If A asks for less than they want because they think that's all they can get and/or they're trying to do a utilitarian calculation, they aren't going to be happy even if they get it. This means they're likely to push for more even if they get it, and then they start looking like a utility monster.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 10:44:47PM *  0 points [-]

Tentatively-- game theoretic exaggeration of offense will simply be followed by more and more demands. Natural offense is about a desire that can be satiated.

What do you mean by "satiated"?

From a utilitarian/consequentialist point of view, a desire being "satiated" simply means that the marginal utility gains from pursuing it further are less than opportunity cost of however much effort it takes.

Note that by this definition when a desire is satiated depends on how easy it is to pursue.

Comment author: Hawisher 18 September 2012 07:27:27PM 0 points [-]

Oh wow, never mind. My brain was temporarily broken. Is it considered bad etiquette here to retract incorrect comments?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 04:15:41AM 1 point [-]

When you retract the comment is simply struck-through not deleted, so no.

Comment author: TimS 18 September 2012 02:37:15AM -1 points [-]

I thought you were one of the people who objected to over-reliance on status-based explanations.

For many of the most important groupings, the first selections are do by others. (I.e. the popular seniors are the first deciders of which grouping the new high school freshmen belong in).

By acting like they're more dominant than they actually are, groups can convince more people that they really are that dominant and cause the people to conform to the group's wishes; which is to say the group thus becomes more dominant.

I just don't think this is accurate analysis of group dynamics.

Sort of like the expression "fake it till you make it".

I think this is more accurate for individuals trying to become members of a group than it is of groups trying to change their relative position.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 03:36:11AM *  1 point [-]

(I.e. the popular seniors are the first deciders of which grouping the new high school freshmen belong in)

I would argue that this is a non-representative example since in most situations there isn't nearly as clear a division between the deciders and the people being sorted.

I think this is more accurate for individuals trying to become members of a group than it is of groups trying to change their relative position.

This can also apply when members of one group (e.g., people who believe in philosophy X) what to increase how many of their members are also in another group with fuzzy membership (e.g., the inner clique in the philosophy department).

Comment author: TimS 18 September 2012 02:28:20AM -1 points [-]

I thought you were one of the people who objected to over-reliance on status-based explanations.

I never said that status explanations are worthless. I just think they are wildly overused in this community.

First, some status explanations assume that hypocrisy is all, or most of human social interaction. That seems empirically false to me.

More importantly, status explanations seem to assume that predicting human social dynamics can be done with a single variable. It was false when the Marxists did it with economic resources, and it is false with status.

Plus, I have the impression you think status is useful analysis. Since I can make my point from a perspective you find insightful, why not shorten the inferential distance?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 03:28:09AM 1 point [-]

First, some status explanations assume that hypocrisy is all, or most of human social interaction.

This seems like a good description of your explanation:

Personal relationships, maybe - although the outside view of guilt-tripping is the more dominant person in some interpersonal relationship initiating and winning a status conflict.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2012 01:42:53AM 0 points [-]
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 03:20:30AM *  0 points [-]

So how would I use this description of "effect" to taboo the word in the following sentence?

The mass of an electron has an effect on the properties of hydrogen.

Or would you argue that the above sentence is incoherent.

Comment author: aaronde 18 September 2012 10:11:07PM 1 point [-]

If an actor stays in character his entire life, making friends and holding down a job, in character - and if, whenever he seemed to zone out, you could interrupt him at any time to ask what he was thinking about, and he could give a detailed description of the day dream he was having, in character...

Well then I'd say the character is a lot less fictional than the actor. But even if there is an actor - an entirely different person putting on a show - the character is still a real person. This is no different from saying that a person is still a person, even if they're a brain emulation running on a computer. In this case, the actor is the substrate on which the character is running.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 03:07:04AM 0 points [-]

So would you say video game characters "feel" pain?

Comment author: The_Duck 18 September 2012 08:48:23PM 1 point [-]

Yes, I agree. I'm only claiming that materialists should classify the remaining hard work as neurobiology, not philosophy. On the philosophical side, we should realize that the answer to questions like "How do material brains give rise to immaterial qualia?" is "There are no immaterial things; investigate the brain more thoroughly and you will understand the basis of internal experience."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2012 03:03:17AM *  0 points [-]

Could you taboo "material"/"immaterial". In particular are, say, video game characters "material"?

Comment author: Hawisher 17 September 2012 05:28:39PM 0 points [-]

I was never one for formal logic, but isn't that the contrapositive? I was under the impression that the converse of p then q was q then p.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 02:04:35AM 1 point [-]

I was under the impression that the converse of p then q was q then p.

Yes and that's what nshepperd wrote.

Comment author: TimS 18 September 2012 12:54:55AM *  0 points [-]

Personal relationships, maybe - although the outside view of guilt-tripping is the more dominant person in some interpersonal relationship initiating and winning a status conflict.

For those reasons, guilt-tripping is seldom effective at creating social change. From your perspective, social change is the change in relative dominance of various groups. Why would behaving as if one is already dominant be expected to work?

By contrast, I think social change is more effective if it seeks to change the definitions of different groups.


BTW, do you have a sense of why my question got downvoted?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 01:46:07AM *  1 point [-]

Personal relationships, maybe - although the outside view of guilt-tripping is the more dominant person in some interpersonal relationship initiating and winning a status conflict.

I thought you were one of the people who objected to over-reliance on status-based explanations.

Seriously, in some cases it's even useful to guilt-trip yourself. That's the principal behind things like heroic responsibility.

Comment author: TimS 18 September 2012 12:54:55AM *  0 points [-]

Personal relationships, maybe - although the outside view of guilt-tripping is the more dominant person in some interpersonal relationship initiating and winning a status conflict.

For those reasons, guilt-tripping is seldom effective at creating social change. From your perspective, social change is the change in relative dominance of various groups. Why would behaving as if one is already dominant be expected to work?

By contrast, I think social change is more effective if it seeks to change the definitions of different groups.


BTW, do you have a sense of why my question got downvoted?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 01:33:29AM *  2 points [-]

From your perspective, social change is the change in relative dominance of various groups. Why would behaving as if one is already dominant be expected to work?

Because people don't magically know which group is dominant and thus which group they should conform to.

By acting like they're more dominant than they actually are, groups can convince more people that they really are that dominant and cause the people to conform to the group's wishes; which is to say the group thus becomes more dominant. Sort of like the expression "fake it till you make it".

BTW, do you have a sense of why my question got downvoted?

No idea. I didn't downvote it.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 September 2012 06:56:24PM 0 points [-]

Is that written up as a theorem anywhere?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 12:50:51AM 0 points [-]

That depends on how one wants to formalize it.

Comment author: TimS 16 September 2012 10:40:28PM -1 points [-]

Given what we've said before in this particular conversation, I don't understand what you are saying here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 12:41:59AM 3 points [-]

Guilt tripping does work, and can be an effective method of changing people's behavior.

Comment author: Lightwave 17 September 2012 08:30:52AM *  4 points [-]

You can also know all relevant facts about physics but still not "know" how to ride a bicycle. "Knowing" what red looks like (or being able to imagine redness) requires your brain to have the ability to produce a certain neural pattern, i.e. execute a certain neural "program". You can't learn how to imagine red the same way you learn facts like 2+2=4 for the same reason you can't learn how to ride a bike by learning physics. It's a different type of "knowledge", not sure if we should even call it that.

Edit (further explanation): To learn how to ride a bike you need to practice doing it, which implements a "neural program" that allows you to do it (via e.g. "muscle memory" and whatnot). Same for producing a redness sensation (imagining red), a.k.a "knowing what red looks like".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 12:32:10AM 0 points [-]

Both riding a bike or seeing red involves the brain performing I/O, i.e., interacting with the outside world, whereas learning that 2+2=4 can be done without such interaction.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 September 2012 07:22:27PM 0 points [-]

All the things that effect the other things.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2012 12:20:51AM 0 points [-]

Ok, now taboo "effect".

Comment author: [deleted] 14 September 2012 04:55:23PM *  0 points [-]

Materialism is the useful tautology that everything that is woven into the Great Web of Causality falls under the category of "physics". And that by "physics" we mean "everything in the GWC".

Non-materialism is the non useful statement that some things exist and effect the GWC without being part of the GWC.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 September 2012 10:50:50PM 0 points [-]

Can you give a materialist account of this "Great Web of Causality"?

In response to comment by [deleted] on How about testing our ideas?
Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 16 September 2012 01:36:01PM 2 points [-]

There was no such stagnation. This is the period which saw M-theory, the holographic principle, and the twistor revival, three of the great theoretical advances of all time, and in general there was an enormous elevation in the level of technical knowledge. Smolin is just peeved that string theory is where all the action was.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 September 2012 07:10:34PM 2 points [-]

This is the period which saw M-theory, the holographic principle, and the twistor revival, three of the great theoretical advances of all time, and in general there was an enormous elevation in the level of technical knowledge.

The question is whether these theories correspond to reality.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 September 2012 10:00:21AM 2 points [-]

Yes, one generally ignores the cost of making these computations. One might try to take it into account, but then one is ignoring the cost of doing that computation, etc. Historically, the "Bayesian revolution" needed computers before it could happen.

And, I notice, it has only gone as far as the computers allow. "True Bayesians" also have universal priors, that assign non-zero probability density to every logically possible hypothesis. Real Bayesian statisticians never do this; all those I have read deny that it is possible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 September 2012 06:53:57PM 1 point [-]

And, I notice, it has only gone as far as the computers allow. "True Bayesians" also have universal priors, that assign non-zero probability density to every logically possible hypothesis. Real Bayesian statisticians never do this; all those I have read deny that it is possible.

It is impossible, even in principal. The only way to have universal priors over all computable universes is if you have access to a source of hypercomputation, but that would mean the universe isn't computable so the truth still isn't in your prior set.

Comment author: TimS 14 September 2012 01:26:06AM 3 points [-]

Generally, yes. But it is possible to be poor at updating on the evidence related to a proposition P, but realize the fact "TimS is poor at updating related to P." It's not common, but it does happen.*

Don't we aspire to be the Lens that Sees Its Flaws.

  • Yes, I've noticed that this position is more nuanced than the original statement. I was angry, so I'll take my lumps for making imperfect statements under the influence of anger. The downvotes are more explicable to me than some downvotes I've gotten.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 September 2012 06:47:53PM 3 points [-]

I agree, I also think this applies to a lot more situations than just this case.

Comment author: lucidian 11 August 2012 02:56:34AM 0 points [-]

The problem with HBD is that it's not pure truth-seeking; there are value judgments attached. Most HBD advocates I've encountered don't just claim that the statistical correlation between race and IQ can be explained by genetics; they also claim that people with high IQs are better than people with low IQs.

I often see HBD presented as a heroic scientific effort, one that is only embraced by those truth-seekers brave enough to swim against the tide of political correctness. But HBD (as presented on the HBD blogs I've encountered, at least) is so fraught with value judgments that I have trouble taking it seriously. I have to wade through all sorts of claims about how awful black people are in order to dig out the bloggers' actual data. Furthermore, I distrust the factual claims of anyone with so obvious an agenda.

I'm not familiar with vdare.com, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a truth-seeker to reject a source for making blatant value judgments. If the findings reported in that source are in any way scientific, they will be contained in the academic literature, which is presumably more neutral. A truly conscientious truth-seeker might want to completely avoid bloggers with political agendas, and go straight to the scientific journal articles.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 September 2012 07:19:42AM 4 points [-]

Furthermore, I distrust the factual claims of anyone with so obvious an agenda.

I take it you also distrust the factual claims of mainstream social scientists for the same reason.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 September 2012 06:12:01PM 4 points [-]

"For a true Bayesian, information would never have negative expected utility."

Is this true in general? It seems to me that if a Bayesian has limited information handling ability, then they need to give some thought (not too much!) to the risks of being swamped with information and of spending too many resources on gathering information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 September 2012 12:33:13AM 0 points [-]

There are still game-theoretic issues, e.g., basilisks.

Comment author: fezziwig 13 September 2012 03:35:52PM 14 points [-]

I think Eridu's downvotes were mostly well-deserved.

I don't think this is a good idea.

I wonder if we could solve this problem from another direction. The issue from your perspective, as I understand it, is that you want to be able to follow every interesting discussion on this site, in semi-real time, but can't. You can't because your only view into "all comments everywhere" is only 5 items long, so fast-moving pointless discussions drown out the stuff you're interested in. An RSS feed presumably isn't sufficient either, since it pushes comments as they occur and doesn't give the community a chance to filter them.

So if I've reasoned all this out correctly, you'd prefer a view of all comments, sorted descending by post time and configurably tree-filtered by karma and maybe username. But we haven't the dev resources to build that, and measures like the ones you describe are a cheap, good-enough approximation.

Do I have that right?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2012 07:06:10AM 1 point [-]

You can't because your only view into "all comments everywhere" is only 5 items long

If you click on the recent comments link you get a longer view.

Comment author: Nornagest 14 September 2012 06:57:02AM 3 points [-]

Eh, that's a relatively minor sin of argument, all things considered. It's pretty easy to think that you're excused from such a thing thanks to greater relative knowledge or better subcultural placement.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2012 07:03:42AM 1 point [-]

Or simply fundamental attribution error.

Comment author: Alicorn 13 September 2012 02:56:49AM 0 points [-]

"Keeping the child from running around" falls under restraint, not torture.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2012 12:54:03AM 0 points [-]

Ok, the central example of restraint is a straitjacket, so my complaint still stands.

Comment author: TimS 13 September 2012 07:06:11PM *  1 point [-]

Which position on guilt-tripping do you mean? :)
I was not careful with my words and thus articulated several distinct positions. The most accurate articulation is that I think we are responsible for society's actions with which we have a causal relation. By contrast, convention morality asserts that we are responsible only for things that we proximately cause.

Separately, I assert that our social actions cause the social norms of a society. And most of our actions are social actions. EDIT: Thus, we are responsible for any harms caused by society's social norms.

I don't under what any of that has to do with my post at issue, which is about my division between (a) delusional actors for whom responsibility is a useless concept for outsiders to use (not guilty by reason of insanity), and (b) those who are maliciously irrational.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2012 12:09:35AM *  1 point [-]

I don't under what any of that has to do with my post at issue, which is about my division between (a) delusional actors for whom responsibility is a useless concept for outsiders to use (not guilty by reason of insanity), and (b) those who are maliciously irrational.

 

Being mindkilled and claiming otherwise is a lie.

People who are mindkilled generally don't realize it.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2012 03:10:48AM -2 points [-]
In response to comment by [deleted] on Under-acknowledged Value Differences
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2012 03:49:51AM 7 points [-]

That argument doesn't address the problem of "I want to oppress you", "you want to oppress me".

Comment author: Fyrius 12 September 2012 01:27:28PM 7 points [-]

I'm amazed how you guys manage to get all that from "dur". My communication skills must be worse than I thought.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2012 03:23:09AM 0 points [-]

Context helps.

Comment author: MBlume 12 September 2012 03:02:11PM 4 points [-]

Watch out for sensory issues. If the kid reacts to, I dunno, styrofoam like it's full of shards of broken glass and he can't bear to touch it, keep him away from styrofoam

Central case of torture: thumb screws or the rack

Obviously within spitting distance of the central case: Forcing someone to press their hand down on broken glass

Still pretty obviously in the neighborhood: Forcing someone who reacts to styrofoam like it's broken glass to touch styrofoam.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2012 02:53:03AM 1 point [-]

Forcing someone who reacts to styrofoam like it's broken glass to touch styrofoam.

By "react" do you mean that it feels to them like broken glass would, or simply that he reacts that way?

Comment author: Alicorn 12 September 2012 04:59:41AM 1 point [-]

You're mixing up the cases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2012 02:52:22AM 2 points [-]

Which case were you talking about?

Comment author: TimS 12 September 2012 06:09:16PM -2 points [-]

Being mindkilled and claiming otherwise is a lie.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2012 02:23:31AM *  1 point [-]

How does that expanded definition of lie square with what you said about guilt-tripping elsewhere in the thread?

Edit: I should mention I somewhat agree with your use of the word lie, for reasons similar to those discussed here, and disagree with your position on guilt tripping.

Comment author: Alicorn 12 September 2012 03:59:40PM 2 points [-]

Purely out of interest Alicorn, do you just ban individual comments by the supsected sockpuppets when they also happen to be silly comments? Or do you just ban all of them?

The former. We don't have a "ban account" feature, and I read-or-at-least-skim all comments on the entire site anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 September 2012 11:46:04PM 2 points [-]

Well, looking at the banned comments from Will's user page it certainly seems that you're not limiting yourself to silly comments.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 12 September 2012 09:12:00PM *  11 points [-]

I saw something for the first time today. I replied to a comment that had been down-voted, and the site asked me,

Replies to downvoted comments are discouraged. Pay 5 Karma points to proceed anyway?

So, if one person dislikes a comment, it shouldn't be responded to? I disagree strongly. This makes the site enforce a tyranny of the majority. It punishes resistance to groupthink.

I don't think Alice should be prohibited from responding to Bob, ever. If two users create drama with back-and-forth responses, they have both chosen to do so.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 September 2012 11:39:55PM *  5 points [-]

There have already been several threads related to this change. Opinion is divided; nearly everyone opposes it, but Eliezer supports it.

Comment author: atorm 11 September 2012 07:17:25AM 4 points [-]

What's happening?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 September 2012 04:19:32AM 3 points [-]

Viliam said that this question would better be addressed as a survey and Jayson agreed, then they both deleted their comments for some reason.

Comment author: lukeprog 09 September 2012 03:32:19AM *  11 points [-]

I used to have political views like this:

"Due to the diminishing marginal value of money and other factors, I expect greater total and average utility to result from greater wealth equality than is currently found in the United States."

Now I have political non-views like this:

"I expect greater total and average utility (over the next few decades) to result from greater wealth equality than is currently found in the United States, but it looks like the utility of x-risk reduction might trump basically everything else, and I doubt that "good for x-risk reduction" reliably tracks with "good for humans over the next few decades," so until I spend some serious time thinking about what political and economic policies are best for x-risk reduction, I'm not sure I have any reflectively-endorsed political views.

But somehow I never get around to thinking much about which political and economic policies are best for x-risk reduction. I wish somebody else (somebody who knows their shit) would do so.

Sure, there's the obvious stuff like "Engage in differential intellectual progress to reduce x-risk," but I'm not sure what to think about economic and political policies that aren't so directly related to x-risk. Would letting the Bush tax cuts expire increase or decrease x-risk? Fuck if I know.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 September 2012 03:37:32AM 2 points [-]

Well, I suspect one of the largest effects is that it's good to have a class of people with excess cash that they can afford to donate to speculative X-risk reduction projects.

Comment author: Multiheaded 10 September 2012 08:40:44PM *  0 points [-]

Are you claiming that corporations like Microsoft don't have huge rent-seeking elements that have little to do with "government" regulation? Or that those rent-seeking elements (i.e. elements that optimize away the production of utility for society in lieu of utility for themselves) don't include top executives, huge PR/advertising departments and such?

If e.g. a global supermarket chain reached an agreement with its several "competitors" (and I use the word loosely) to "set industry standards of team-building" (use a unified strategy of emotional manipulation towards personnel, like paternalism and engendering status competition), "share information on human resources" (spy on potential troublemakers' conversations, blogs, etc), "work closely and productively with unions" (keep local union leadership on a short leash to avoid dangerous examples while throwing bones like "gender awareness") and "maintain a healthy relationship with the media" (no explanation needed) -

-would it really need a large government lobby to cover its ass while doing all that, even in today's America? Indeed, I believe that they're already doing much of this all over the world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 September 2012 03:32:18AM 2 points [-]

Your scenario presumes that said cartel covers all the corporations in the industry, otherwise employees would go to places with better working conditions, unless the the places with worse working conditions paid more to compensate.

That was my attempt to describe what is essentially a 3-dimensional labor supply function in words, hope it wasn't to confusing.

Comment author: Alicorn 11 September 2012 03:10:26AM *  1 point [-]

Doing things that are abhorrent to people for reasons is still usually torture. (Sometimes it might be self-defense, or surgery, or something.) Stopping people from moving around for reasons is still usually restraining. (Sometimes that is self-defense, or protection of your privacy, or something.) The claim that these measures will help as you describe require support, but even if you could demonstrate strong reason, there would be reason to be suspicious of this kind of therapy!

If the kids involved were not autistic, and the torture/restraint were something corresponding to allistics, you would never get approval for human trials. ("I'm stabbing my son with this thumbtack repeatedly for ten to fifteen minutes every day. He has a really low pain tolerance, so this organization I found says that that will make it hard for him to function as an adult - I mean, he'll still have to show up to work if he has something like a broken toe, right? - so they recommend this intervention." "I don't let my daughter out of her room. Ever. It's okay, she has an ensuite bathroom. When she grows up she'll probably have an office job, and she'll just have to get used to not being able to run outside and play or get herself a snack or anything.")

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 05:34:52AM -2 points [-]

Doing things that are abhorrent to people for reasons is still usually torture.

Didn't we just have two threads about this fallacy?

Comment author: asr 11 September 2012 04:57:22AM 2 points [-]

My understanding is that real humans routinely have cyclic preferences -- particularly when comparing complicated objects like apartments or automobiles, where there are many different attributes and we ignore small differences. I can't find a reference for this in a few minutes of googling, however.

I suspect in practice transaction costs are high enough that the money pump doesn't arise in most cases where we have intransitive preferences. Once people have made their decision by some arbitrary means, they will stick to it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 05:07:15AM 3 points [-]

Once people have made their decision by some arbitrary means, they will stick to it.

One of the benefits of the sunk cost fallacy.

Comment author: mrglwrf 10 September 2012 09:01:37PM 0 points [-]

I see no good reason to presume a correlation between a med school's admissions criteria and total lives saved over a doctor's career as tight as this reasoning requires. Or to presume that it is near certain that if he hadn't lied, another liar wouldn't have been accepted in his place.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 04:48:08AM 5 points [-]

This reasoning merely requires that the correlation exist and be positive.

Comment author: Emile 10 September 2012 11:32:33AM 3 points [-]

"Malice" may have been a bit strong; maybe it's something like "I prefer explanations that don't imply moral blame for one of the parties involved".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 03:42:15AM 3 points [-]

I only provide the explanation, assigning blame or other moral elements is up to you.

Comment author: Rubix 10 September 2012 02:43:53AM 1 point [-]

This comment seems like it could be perceived as straw-manning. Backing up your statement with evidence that this is an accurate model of what people do with their autistic children would help.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 03:02:28AM 0 points [-]

I'd say it's more guilt by association.

Comment author: wedrifid 10 September 2012 03:39:30AM 3 points [-]

This comment seems like it could be perceived as straw-manning. Backing up your statement with evidence that this is an accurate model of what people do with their autistic children would help.

It could be perceived as such. Given the context however it seems that Alicorn isn't making an additional claim about what most people do and is instead adding labels to the behavior that Eugine did actively advocate (or criticise the deprecation of). Even if those things were never done by anyone the adovcation thereof could still be criticized. (And so any weakness in the argument is of a different kind to 'straw man'.)

For better or worse there are the implied premises here that:

  • Doing things that are abhorrent to people for no goddam reason is torture.
  • Stopping people from moving around as they please without good reason is restraining.
  • Ignoring the principle "one thing to try if giving someone an instruction doesn't work is making sure they have it taskified" results in incomprehensibly bossing people around.

The second two seem straightforward and while using the word 'torture' has its own problems the meaning is at least clear.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 02:56:06AM *  0 points [-]
  • Doing things that are abhorrent to people for no goddam reason is torture.
  • Stopping people from moving around as they please without good reason is restraining.

So is your claim that increasing the chances that the child will be able to fit into adult society doesn't count as a good reason?

Comment author: Alicorn 10 September 2012 01:51:42AM 0 points [-]

Do you think torturing, restraining, or incomprehensibly bossing them as children would have helped?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2012 02:48:27AM 2 points [-]

Well, "incomprehensibly bossing" is how a lot of people see the creepiness thread.

Comment author: Alicorn 09 September 2012 10:54:35PM *  1 point [-]

I cannot abide the taste of mint or the feel of apricots. I don't happen to rock, but I trace patterns on surfaces sometimes. I tell people to operationalize or rephrase or break-into-steps things they want me to do, if I need them to. Miraculously, I can function as an adult. It's actually way easier than functioning as a child, since people don't feel entitled to manipulate my environment or make demands on me as much as they used to.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 September 2012 01:49:03AM 0 points [-]

Miraculously, I can function as an adult.

So can I (I'm also autistic), but I know autistic people who aren't that lucky.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Cleaning up the "Worst Argument" essay
Comment author: buybuydandavis 09 September 2012 11:10:36PM *  1 point [-]

No, I got what you were saying. You attribute it to increasing numbers of users, with constant karma rate.

Maybe it's a timescale thing. I've only been here about a year. To my observational feel, the karma rate has increased a lot in the last couple of months. I don't think my observational clock would have noticed a 10% or 20% increase - more like at least a doubling.

Someone recently posted membership changes per month. I think the increments were around 10%, if that. Now, maybe people are also visiting more too.

Some of my feel is coming from my own posts - 8 karma for that? Really?

Many things could be the cause of my feeling, but I'll bet you a dollar that karma/discussion page hit has gone up in the last 2 months. Not that either of us is likely to collect - the data and therefore the money.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 September 2012 12:56:22AM 0 points [-]

There could be a time delay between a user joining and him voting regularly.

Comment author: Alicorn 05 September 2012 10:43:15PM *  2 points [-]

I have an autism diagnosis and multiple autistic friends. I poked around the literature on autism for a paper in grad school (although it was mostly on theory of mind). I have read books and blogs and aggregated therefrom a general model of autism that has yet to be dinged by any of this.

Also, "don't do things to people that they find abhorrent for no goddamn reason" and "if someone never makes eye contact anyway their rocking is insignificant information about whether you have their attention, and rocking is only atypical, not fundamentally different from pen-twirling" and "one thing to try if giving someone an instruction doesn't work is making sure they have it taskified; also don't expect giving the people around you commands to work all the time" all seem pretty basic to me. And really ought to be status-quo, requiring citations to deviate therefrom. I would certainly require a citation if I had a kid and someone told me that they should be forced into contact with objects they don't like, and aren't to be allowed to move around as they please even if they aren't hurting anyone, and that their not doing everything I say is a sign of a Serious Problem. The allistic equivalents would be unambiguous abuse, and plenty of autistic people are capable of telling others what the autistic-specific versions of those abuses are.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 September 2012 10:50:57PM *  -1 points [-]

Following this advise strikes me as likely to result in the kid growing up with phobias and habits that will make it hard for him to fit into the adult world.

Seriously, you give this kind of advise to parents raising autistic children and then wonder why gatherings with a high proportion of autistic adults are full of people that come of as creepy.

Comment author: Emile 08 September 2012 10:06:15PM 4 points [-]

I don't know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don't involve malice.

An alternative model is that people with social skills tend to be used to subtle and implicit modes of interaction (guess culture vs. ask culture), and the group's explicit modes of interaction makes them uncomfortable (giving rise to this thread).

Yet another model that skips step 1): small groups with a homogenous membership will have simple norms; as the group gets successful it grows and attracts more people and more diversity (in age, sex, nationality, and interests), and the simple norms don't work as well, and "success" in the group depends more and more on being able to handle social complexity ("social skills" and "politics" in the office politics meaning).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 10:13:06PM 7 points [-]

I don't know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don't involve malice.

I never said step 4) involve malice.

Comment author: DanArmak 08 September 2012 09:08:00PM 1 point [-]

I'm not saying he has any such reason. But neither does anyone else have a reason to go along with his preferences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 09:57:46PM 1 point [-]

I'm not saying he has any such reason. But neither does anyone else have a reason to go along with his preferences.

Well, the OP was about the first and not the second.

Comment author: Matt_Caulfield 08 September 2012 08:41:22PM 0 points [-]

I probably was not clear enough. What I mean is: let's assume creeps want to stay and everyone else wants them to leave. Then any argument made by the creeps that tries to dissuade others from evicting them is self-serving. (You say, well of course). The problem is that most arguers in favor of creep-tolerance don't acknowledge those competing interests, instead they try to assert that higher intolerance for creeps would be bad for the group as a whole somehow. I am tentatively of the opinion that these arguments are bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense. People who argue this way are like those who claim they are buying an expensive TV to stimulate the economy, or those who claim they don't give to charity because handouts only hurt poor people in the long run. Of course, those are not the real reasons; the real reasons are much more simple and selfish.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 09:37:48PM 3 points [-]

Well, most arguers against creep-tolerance aren't acknowledge their competing interests either.

Comment author: DanArmak 08 September 2012 06:35:10PM *  4 points [-]

Social norms seem to cater increasingly to the oversensitive and easily offended; instead of asking oversensitive people to lighten up a bit, we often go out of our way to avoid saying things that will offend people.

You're just asserting that your preferred level of sensitivity is better than other people's higher preferred level. You call them "oversensitive and easily offended", which assigns your preferences an apparently objective or otherwise special status, but you don't give a reason for this. What reason does anyone else have to go along with your preferences instead of their own?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 08:56:42PM 1 point [-]

What reason does lucidian have to go with their preference level instead of his own.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 September 2012 07:11:57PM 6 points [-]

OTOH, there's the huge confounding factor that it was shortly after I came back from Ireland to Italy, and Italians are harder to creep out than Anglo-Saxon people. Stand one metre from (say) an American and they will freak the hell out; stand one metre from an Italian and they'll wonder whether they smell.

The example you give illustrates the difference in personal space norms between cultures, I'll take it on your word that Italians also happen to be less easily creeped out. But the difference in personal space norms doesn't itself indicate much about who is most easily creeped out. Trying to make a social approach and standing a more than appropriate distance away could itself be creepy (although obviously not as creepy as a personal space invasion itself.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 08:47:02PM 4 points [-]

The example you give illustrates the difference in personal space norms between cultures, I'll take it on your word that Italians also happen to be less easily creeped out. But the difference in personal space norms doesn't itself indicate much about who is most easily creeped out.

I suspect, based to the limited number of cultures I'm familiar with, that if you did cross-cultural studies you'd find that the two are correlated.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 08 September 2012 01:49:03PM 4 points [-]

There is a deep, bad problem with "if you can't read cues, go fuck yourself".

What motivation do people with social skills and those norms have to help those with less social skills? Because unless there's something in it for them they're not doing it. Many of the kind of people who have social skills find hanging out with the kind of people who don't actively unpleasant. That is actually overlaps substantially with the way creepy is used; people whose social skills are so low that they are unpleasant to be around in a group, who do not have redeeming features/high status.

Also, other people's lack of social skills? Mostly not my problem. The only people I would give social skills advice to unsolicited would be those who are clearly likely to be receptive to it, i.e. people who are in a status hierarchy I'm in where I'm superior. Most people who ask for advice don't want the real thing, and sugarcoating it and getting the real message through is hard.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 08:38:58PM 15 points [-]

What I find really annoying is the following dynamic:

1) not allowed into existing groups, people without social skills form their own group

2) said group acquires higher status (largely because people without social skills frequently have other useful skills)

3) people with social skills notice the new group with rising status and start joining it

4) said high-social-skills people use their skills to acquire high positions in the group and start kicking the original low-social-skills people out

This more-or-less describes the history of geek/nerd culture over the past several decades.

Comment author: MixedNuts 08 September 2012 11:08:01AM 11 points [-]

Nah. Many creepy behaviors, like boxing people in and ignoring reluctance, convey "I have high enough status not to fear the social cost of this behavior; if you try to punish me for it, everyone will be on my side". This is high-status. Some creepy behaviors, like the creepy monotone, convey "I am unable to conform to many social norms", which causes and signals low status.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 07:53:45PM 8 points [-]

"I have high enough status not to fear the social cost of this behavior; if you try to punish me for it, everyone will be on my side".

More like "I have high enough status that you will actually want this".

Creepy is when it turns out the person doing this actually didn't have high enough status.

Comment author: Sarokrae 08 September 2012 02:28:31PM *  8 points [-]

I often find that what is not creepy for internet feminists can be for women who use other social conventions, and vice versa. Makes it hard when one doesn't know the convention being used. Also makes other-optimising a problem here.

(Edited for clarification)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 07:47:36PM 7 points [-]

Heck, I suspect that in a lot of cases what a feminist claims is creepy on the internet, and what the same feminist would find creepy in real life are different things.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 September 2012 05:22:33AM 10 points [-]

Are you suggesting rape doesn't happen among hunter-gatherers?

No, but I am suggesting it's probably not been selected for as a genetic predisposition due to the fitness it supposedly brings. The cost/benefit ratio seems pretty damn bad. Let's assume a man of 25 (great fertility, past the peak risk-of-mortality age on a pure-forager's lifespan curve, presumably able to provide for himself to greater or lesser degree.) Assume he only targets women of peak reproductive age, 25 to 30 years (this is very generous for the rape-as-adaptation argument; in reality rapists are known to target women of any age, from single-digits to senescence), thereby maximizing expected payoff per act.

He loses fitness if:

-He is killed by the victim or her relatives. How likely this is depends entirely on his culture -- some forager band societies are quite pacifistic; others resort quickly to violence and have no real way to regulate its spread. It's a pretty strong risk, though.

-The mother refuses to raise the child. This is unlikely to happen, but in a society with high infant mortality rates and established protocols for socially-legitimate infanticide by abandonment or handing off to a relative for culling (standard practice in societies like these if the baby is more than 48 hours old; otherwise the mother usually does it), it's not socially-costly behavior either.

-Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive. This is a virtual certainty -- cooperative food acquisition, compulsory sharing and an ethic of reciprocity are standard features of societies like these. Cutting someone off from this network of assistance is as good as a death sentence in most cases; it also means he's unlikely to ever get consensual sex, or medical assistance when he's hurt. I can't overstate how bad an outcome this is, and how likely it is to happen -- tribal societies don't keep many secrets!

Meanwhile, he gains fitness if and only if all of the following happen: -The victim is potentially able to concieve on that given day AND -She does (the cumulative on these first two items equals 3 - 5 percent odds of conception for consensual sex), AND -She doesn't then miscarry (true 90 percent of the time), AND -She won't voluntarily let the unwanted baby die (not sure, but estimates for the probability of routine infanticide in paleolithic cultures ranges from 15 percent on the lower end, up to 20 or even 50 percent in some cases). No idea offhand, but it seems a heck of a lot more likely than it would be today in the Western European culture area.

You'd have to get incredibly lucky to have a payoff even once; it's certainly not a viable reproductive strategy, not even a distant also-ran that some minority of the population favors. Human population densities in the EEA simply don't support it.

So the fact that rape is common suggests that it's happening for some other reason than it being an evolutionarily-fixed, advantageous trait.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 05:49:09AM 8 points [-]

Observe that if he's unlikely to be able to have sex otherwise, it's worth the risk.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 September 2012 05:25:40AM -2 points [-]

Uh, no. This isn't a matter of suppressing pregnancies that aren't wanted -- it's a matter of not boosting the likelihood of pregnancy by means of various reinforcing mechanisms that in all add a minor, though non-negligible, probability of conception.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 05:43:12AM 6 points [-]

So you admit that the decrease in the probability of conception is minor. This means that it's not enough to invalidate hg00's argument that what you think of as 'creepy' strategies, even rape, are adaptive under some circumstances.

Comment author: Alicorn 08 September 2012 04:08:33AM 3 points [-]

He may have been misunderstanding some of the same information Jandila supplies. But it's not an absolute effect, it's a probabilistic one. I'm more likely to break an egg yolk if I open the egg two feet above my bowl; that doesn't mean it doesn't happen pretty frequently when I open it closer to the bowl (or that it couldn't land intact from two feet up).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 05:33:53AM 1 point [-]

But it's not an absolute effect, it's a probabilistic one.

Agreed. However, Jandila requires it to be an absolute (or almost absolute) effect for the argument against hg00's point to work.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 September 2012 09:18:25PM 0 points [-]

That's more technically problematic; how could non-human animals vote in the existing kinds of elections? Human intermediaries would have to decide what was best for the non-humans they represented. Different human political factions would support different positions as being best for the non-humans, and fight over that.

(This of course doesn't apply to future possible non-human sentients like AI, uploads, uplifted animals, modified humans, etc.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 05:08:21AM *  1 point [-]

That's more technically problematic; how could non-human animals vote in the existing kinds of elections?

Lead them into the voting booth, see which lever they press.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 September 2012 10:19:41PM 0 points [-]

It's not like you can fire employees on a whim: the “unrelated reasons” have to be substantial ones, and it's not clear you can find ones for any employee you want to fire. (Otherwise, you could use such a mechanism to de facto compel your employees to do pretty much anything you want.)

Also, even if you somehow did manage to de facto demand workers to work ten hours a day, if you have to pay hours beyond the eighth as overtime (with a hourly wage substantially higher than the regular one), then it's cheaper for you to hire ten people eight hours a day each than eight people ten hours a day.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes September 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 05:03:14AM 1 point [-]

(Otherwise, you could use such a mechanism to de facto compel your employees to do pretty much anything you want.)

Only if they can't get another job.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 September 2012 03:05:29AM -1 points [-]

In other words, maybe it's not that individuals are creepy so much as men "naturally" act more rapey if there are only a few women around.

This is unlikely. The idea that male-on-female rape, in humans, is reflective of forced mating as a reproductive strategy makes some big mistakes because it doesn't factor in how human reproduction actually works.

It's true in a general way that if the cost of your gametes is low, and you can get out of the parental investment, then increasing the number of coital acts is an effective way to buy genetic fitness at reduced cost (part of why mammals tend to be much more promiscuous, in a very broad sense, than birds: birds get their embryo out of Mom and into the world early and let it develop there, which means Daddy has a higher incentive to invest parentally -- though this is only a very broad pattern).

Trigger warning for those who'd rather not hear it described in frank, mechanical terms!

But with humans in specific, rape is not a great reproductive strategy. The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren't typically going to occur. Even post-coital cuddling increases the odds of fertilization. Getting into comparative primatology, humans have conspicuously large penises compared to our relatives who do tend to use force as a basic approach to getting sex (gorillas, who have a harem-style arrangement as their basic stable social model).

Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn't seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy. It's probably not an adaptation (though if you insist that pretty much every salient feature of behavior is, or is the proximal outcome of some evolutionary adaptation, you can spin a theoretical picture to justify it easily).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 03:59:04AM 4 points [-]

But with humans in specific, rape is not a great reproductive strategy. The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren't typically going to occur. Even post-coital cuddling increases the odds of fertilization. Getting into comparative primatology, humans have conspicuously large penises compared to our relatives who do tend to use force as a basic approach to getting sex (gorillas, who have a harem-style arrangement as their basic stable social model).

So basically you're saying that Todd Akin's recent comments about rape were correct?

Comment author: Athrelon 07 September 2012 07:12:23PM *  2 points [-]

Yup. Really, I did nothing more than describe elements of the old-fashioned class system and the timeless informal status system, with a few bells and whistles.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 03:11:15AM 5 points [-]

Except that in mainstream caste systems, behaviors considered 'creepy' because they signal low status, not the other way around.

Comment author: Kisama 07 September 2012 12:27:07PM -1 points [-]

If you don't kill any people, you won't kill innocent people. If you do kill some people, you might kill innocent people. Where is the equivocation?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 02:19:50AM 2 points [-]

If you don't drive cars, you won't kill innocent people in auto-accidents. If you do drive cars, you might kill innocent people in auto-accidents.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 07 September 2012 02:42:20PM 0 points [-]

That notion doesn't bother me in the least, but if we're talking about the physics that happen for us, it's the Schrodinger Equation, and the Born Rule is the 'angle' to take on finding us in it. Anything else isn't us, and we can't do experiments on it, so we ought to avoid making strong claims.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2012 01:36:20AM 0 points [-]

Then I don't understand on what grounds you reject the Born Rule but keep the Schrodinger Equation.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 07 September 2012 06:38:08AM *  4 points [-]

One of these things is not like the others.

In Jasay's terminology, the first is a liberty (a relation between a person and an act) and the rest are rights {relations between two or more persons (at least one rightholder and one obligor) and an act}. I find this distnction useful for thinking more clearly about these kinds of topics. Your mileage may vary.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 08:05:35AM *  1 point [-]

I was actually referring to the the third being what I might call an anti-liberty, i.e., you aren't allowed to work more than eight-hours a day, and the fact that is most definitely not enforced nor widely considered a human right.

Comment author: CronoDAS 06 September 2012 11:05:03AM 24 points [-]

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

-- Tim Kreider

The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 05:26:53AM 5 points [-]

like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays.

One of these things is not like the others.

Comment author: CronoDAS 06 September 2012 11:05:03AM 24 points [-]

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

-- Tim Kreider

The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 05:18:04AM 1 point [-]

If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?

Are you sure you can. It's remarkably easy to make retroactive "predictions", much harder to make actual predictions.

Comment author: CronoDAS 06 September 2012 04:17:15AM *  3 points [-]

According to the PDF about the WEIRD psychological samples, the San foragers of the Kalahari desert.

Another "interesting" bit of trivia: the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:

And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said, 'What insects are those?'

At first I hardly understood, then I realized that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison...

When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies. (Turnbull 1963, 217)

Because Kenge had no experience of seeing distant objects he saw them simply as small.

Original source

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 04:50:24AM 1 point [-]

the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.

Taboo "learned/innate skill". Is everything except what feral children do a learned skill? If not what do you mean?

Comment author: Kisama 06 September 2012 11:21:56PM -2 points [-]

Can you clarify why feelings of guilt are important here?

They aren't particularly, but

We mostly don't seem to care.

I thought we were talking about feelings, my mistake. I suppose the point was that I do care if innocent people die, so by extrapolation I assume other people do too.

I mean, I have no idea how much guilt executioners feel.

Please, pardon my rhetoric.

Also, I think got carried away with the whole "guilt" theme - feeling guilt, guilt by assocation...

But how much guilt they feel or don't feel doesn't play much of a role in my decision to support or not support medicine, commuting, law enforcement, military action, or capital punishment.

Only one of those things has the explicit goal of killing people, and it's the only one I'm arguing against here. I'm not too sure what you're arguing for or against or if you're just stimulating conversation, but regardless, thank you for responding to my first comments on LW :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 04:29:58AM 1 point [-]

Only one of those things has the explicit goal of killing people, and it's the only one I'm arguing against here.

You're equivocating between "killing innocents" and "killing people". Stop it.

Comment author: Kisama 06 September 2012 09:46:06PM 0 points [-]

What you say is true, but when I get into my car I'm not planning to go out and find a suspicious looking pedestrian to hit hoping he'll turn out to be not innocent ;)

More seriously, the one time I was involved in a pretty serious collision the sensation of heart-squeezing dread I experienced in the moments I thought someone might have been killed or even just injured and that I might have been at fault... was not pleasant. If an innocent person were hurt as a consequence of my actions I would certainly feel the guilt of it. Does the hangman feel the guilt of his noose?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 04:27:09AM 1 point [-]

Does the hangman feel the guilt of his noose?

I assume all the people involved (judge, prosecutor, hangman) feel guilty if the person they kill turns out to have been innocent.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 06 September 2012 04:16:53PM -1 points [-]

Proponents of the TI (and the PTI) explicitly say that one advantage of their interpretation over the MWI is that it is a one-world theory

Even the PTI? With the given description, that's really really weird.

Simply saying, "Well, in MWI observers will see all sorts of different frequencies in experimental results, including Born-rule compliant ones" doesn't tell us why observers should expect to see Born-rule compliant frequencies in a QM-governed world.

Not ALL sorts of frequencies. Many - most - ways of looking at the wavefunction won't reveal causal structures isomorphic to observers. For instance, you can consider the wavefunction in the energy basis and interpret it as an infinite number of wheels of various sizes, spinning at different constant speeds. No observers are apparent when viewed this way.

I suspect that the Born Rule is the only rule that leads to observers, but we don't need to prove that it's the only one, and I'm open to the possibility that there are others. GAZP again - if it's in there, it's in there, whether or not you're aware of it.

And if you don't have a story about that, then I don't see how you can claim that the observed frequencies confirm QM (and by extension MWI).

I think you'll agree that the observed frequencies confirm the conjunction of Schrodinger's Equation with the Born Rule. The question at hand is whether the Born Rule needs to be a rule of the universe. Whether collapse is ontologically real or based solely on our parochial viewpoint as observers.

Suppose it is real. That's nice. We get everything we see.

Suppose it isn't, and collapse isn't a real thing. The wavefunction is just doing its thing, and that's all there is. The causal structures in the wavefunction that correspond to people are still there.

The way of looking at us that brings us into focus is the Born Rule. Removing the Born Rule is just like removing a P-zombie's consciousness. It's that switch you flip to grant or remove subjective experience from a computation that implements consciousness.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2012 03:06:28AM 1 point [-]

Suppose it isn't, and collapse isn't a real thing. The wavefunction is just doing its thing, and that's all there is. The causal structures in the wavefunction that correspond to people are still there.

Following that logic why not go even further and remove Schrodinger's Equation? All possible observer moments exist, we just happen to be observers whose history happens to correspond to the conjunction of Schrodinger's Equation with the Born Rule.

Comment author: Multiheaded 05 September 2012 12:15:00PM *  5 points [-]

Here's a few left-wing, subversive provocations to get you started:

It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? - again, everything by Owen Hatherley is worth reading.

The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don't you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!

(Observe how the top comment on MoJo and the first comment on the Guardian both mention that crazy bearded German with his theories about how employers will collectively find a way to wring more and more out of the workers as the technology allows them more reach, while the pay stays more or less the same. He sounds a bit less crazy now, eh?)

While you're at it, please take time to read Oscar Wilde's wonderful utopian essay that Hatherley quotes. I do not entirely share his hopes of better social interaction and a more decent status assignment in the absense of material need, but hell, there's definitely something to his words.

Related, a roundup of a heated exchange on workers' rights between Crooked Timber and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2012 06:05:42AM 6 points [-]

The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don't you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!

You seem to be confusing productivity and drudgery. Productivity is the amount of "value" you produce by working, drudgery is the amount of disutility you experience while working. Marx's mistake was assuming that these two quantities were always the same and that therefore "progress" consists of forcing workers to endure more drudgery. In reality progress consists of increasing productivity per unit of drudgery.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2012 04:53:20AM 9 points [-]

"Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in."

G. K. Chesterton, "The Absence of Mr Glass"

Note: this was put in the mouth of the straw? atheist. It's still correct.

Comment author: novalis 04 September 2012 12:49:06AM 0 points [-]

Sexism can mean a whole bunch of different things. It's not a simple binary predicate: this is sexist, that isn't. In general, I mean a cluster of attitudes and actions that harm people based on their sex. Usually, its women being harmed, but definitely not always.

Affirmative action is, of course, an interesting case. On its face, it involves advantaging one group, which naturally comes at the expense of all other groups. So, of course it's sexism in one sense of the word. So why does anyone think it's fair? Because there are believed to be cognitive biases in play that prevent people from (for instance) selecting an equally qualified woman for a job (one day, I would like to write up a post on the evidence for this). The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased. If this theory is correct, then in cases where we believe that there is such discrimination, maintaining the status quo would be sexism. Naturally, not all cases of affirmative action qualify for this.

As the discussion on The Bedrock Of Fairness shows, fairness can have many meanings. They frequently correspond almost exactly to meta-ethical stances (consequentialist, deontological, virtue ethics). I'm a consequentialist with regards to fairness (since I view it as merely a part of the whole system of ethics). And affirmative action is only justifiable under a consequentialist (or perhaps virtue ethics) framework of fairness -- and then only sometimes. I guess that is, as you say, one particular interpretation of fairness, but it's one that I would imagine is relatively common here, since consequentialist ethics are relatively popular on Less Wrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 September 2012 01:59:12AM *  1 point [-]

The theory is that an explicit adjustment for these biases will result in treatment more like what there would have been if employers were unbiased.

This is a deontological stance, namely immoral act X was performed so we must bring the world as close as possible to the state it would have been in had X not happened.

I'm a consequentialist with regards to fairness

I have no idea what this means. That is, I have no idea how to incorporate 'fairness' into a utility function that won't produce absurd things (like saying life extension research is immoral because it's not fair to those who will die before it gets implemented).

Comment author: CronoDAS 02 September 2012 11:25:15PM *  -2 points [-]

It took you this long to understand why people have issues with evolutionary psychology? -1 respect points, Eliezer.

Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 10:30:53PM *  9 points [-]

it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.

Part of the issue is that as far as I know said "scientific racism" was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a "this leads to genocide and other horrible things" kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.

Comment author: novalis 03 September 2012 02:39:29AM 0 points [-]

Not if (a) you're in a situation where everyone already agrees on that

And assuming you also don't want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you > may have noticed, that's not true here.

Having common language and beliefs does not preclude questioning those beliefs.

(b) you consider fairness to be an important value.

More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.

Can you unpack that?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 10:19:35PM 0 points [-]

Ok, I suppose I should ask you what your definition of sexism is.

Also, is e.g., affirmative action sexist, how about not using affirmative action? Same question about desperate impact?

Comment author: gwern 03 September 2012 02:44:46AM 3 points [-]

If you read the history of papery, you'll find that's not an issue.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 09:51:30PM 1 point [-]

On the other hand, Will strikes me as type to actually care about following cannon law.

Comment author: DanielLC 02 September 2012 10:55:37PM *  3 points [-]

You could use hyperreal numbers. They behave pretty similarly to reals, and have reals as a subset. Also, if you multiply any hyperreal number besides zero by a real number, you get something isomorphic to the reals, so you can multiply by infinity and it still will work the same.

I'm not a big fan of the continuity axiom. Also, if you allow for hyperreal probabilities, you can still get it to work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 03:03:49AM 1 point [-]

You could use hyperreal numbers.

At which point why not just re-normalize everything so that you're only dealing with reals?

Comment author: Ezekiel 01 September 2012 11:27:29AM *  58 points [-]

"Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"
"It's a metaphor for the human struggle."
"I don't see how that changes my point."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 02:53:57AM *  29 points [-]

Well, his point only makes any sense when applied to the metaphor since a better answer to the question

"Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"

is:

"where would Sisyphus get a robot in the middle of Hades?"

Edit: come to think of it, this also works with the metaphor for human struggle.

Comment author: Decius 02 September 2012 02:29:49AM 1 point [-]

Equal, in every sense that cannot be falsified by the observation of privilege or inequality which exists only in the embodied world.

Basically, it's a way of creating a metaphysical entity "person", which is defined to be that which exercises control over the physical embodiment of that person. By making the moral agent an abstract rather than a concrete, the inequalities which exist in the concrete world do not falsify the claim to general equality.

For example, people do not lose or gain rights as their fortunes change.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 02:31:24AM 1 point [-]

By that definition aren't people 'metaphysically equal' to rocks?

Comment author: kilobug 02 September 2012 01:13:37PM 3 points [-]

Please note that "the advertiser doesn't have any control of its content" doesn't always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with "if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won't put advertising in your columns anymore". They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions "no, we won't publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don't want to upset them" even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 02:10:53AM 1 point [-]

Or even go one step further: a group of people threaten to boycott companies that advertise on shows saying politically incorrect things.

Comment author: novalis 02 September 2012 03:03:18AM 0 points [-]

Well, in any debate you'd still have to explain why that particular example of sexism is wrong.

Not if (a) you're in a situation where everyone already agrees on that or (b) you consider fairness to be an important value.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 02:03:27AM 0 points [-]

Not if (a) you're in a situation where everyone already agrees on that

And assuming you also don't want to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. In any case, as you may have noticed, that's not true here.

(b) you consider fairness to be an important value.

More like you consider a particular interpretation of fairness to be such an important value that it trumps all others.

Comment author: Decius 01 September 2012 01:28:32AM 0 points [-]

If things are different in a significant way, it is appropriate that they are treated as different.

It is a premise of mine that people are metaphysically equal; to delve further into that we need to discuss what 'people' means. I doubt that you will find such a discussion rewarding.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2012 02:12:41AM 1 point [-]

I'd like to know what you mean by 'metaphysically equal'?

Comment author: Decius 01 September 2012 01:52:32PM 0 points [-]

It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.

I intuit that there is also something along the lines of 'equal objectification'; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don't know and must consider that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2012 02:11:23AM *  2 points [-]

It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.

In practice at best it treats people as some combination of tools and victory points.

I intuit that there is also something along the lines of 'equal objectification'; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don't know and must consider that.

Taboo 'objectification'.

Comment author: drnickbone 01 September 2012 12:52:25PM *  0 points [-]

Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that "speech should be free only when it is free". If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn't have to pay them to say it...

Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole "free speech is absolute, and must be protected" argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2012 01:56:34AM 1 point [-]

Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that "speech should be free only when it is free".

Well since even printing presses aren't free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.

Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference.

There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 September 2012 11:16:40PM 31 points [-]

Suddenly I am enlightened!

In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.

This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of "The Psychological Foundations of Culture". Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you'd probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.

Having thus generalized the problem - is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2012 01:39:09AM 4 points [-]

Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?

Well, Will Newsome would say theology.

Comment author: novalis 01 September 2012 04:02:30AM -1 points [-]

Because you and I no doubt hang out in completely different circles, my view of the prototypical case of sexism is probably different from yours. Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong, so there aren't really any connotations being smuggled in.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2012 01:35:35AM 0 points [-]

Also, I consider most non-prototypical cases of sexism to be wrong,

I may or may not agree depending on which definition of "sexism" you are using.

so there aren't really any connotations being smuggled in.

Well, in any debate you'd still have to explain why that particular example of sexism is wrong.

Comment author: drethelin 01 September 2012 07:24:37AM 1 point [-]

I like it but then again I have around a thousand karma so it wouldn't impact me very hard. On the other hand, I don't think it does a lot of work to actually fix the Monkeymind situation that EY and company seem to be so distressed by.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2012 12:26:53AM 3 points [-]

I'm not at all convinced the Monkeymind situation is nearly as serious a problem as EY and company seem to think.

Comment author: JGWeissman 31 August 2012 07:42:09PM 1 point [-]

How would you feel about the $5 per account option?

Any other ideas on how someone could signal that the account they are creating is not yet another sock puppet or identity reset that you would be comfortable with? Maybe associating your account with your website?

I'm thinking the phone idea, if it is used at all, should be one of several options, so the user can choose one that works for them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2012 04:07:55AM 2 points [-]

How would you feel about the $5 per account option?

That would show up on my credit card bill, which may cause certain inconveniences and I suspect we have people for whom that would cause a lot more than an inconvenience.

Comment author: Kindly 31 August 2012 02:36:51PM 13 points [-]

I think #1 is the way to go here, and the only method that will have any effect in most cases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2012 03:39:32AM 3 points [-]

As long as there is a separate "uncensored" recent comments page where they still show up.

Comment author: lukeprog 31 August 2012 08:05:38PM 3 points [-]

A principal object of Wald's [statistical decision theory] is then to characterize the class of admissible strategies in mathematical terms, so that any such strategy can be found by carrying out a definite procedure... [Unfortunately] an 'inadmissible' decision may be overwhelmingly preferable to an 'admissible' one, because the criterion of admissibility ignores prior information — even information so cogent that, for example, in major medical... safety decisions, to ignore it would put lives in jeopardy and support a charge of criminal negligence.

...This illustrates the folly of inventing noble-sounding names such as 'admissible' and 'unbiased' for principles that are far from noble; and not even fully rational. In the future we should profit from this lesson and take care that we describe technical conditions by names that are... morally neutral, and so do not have false connotations which could mislead others for decades, as these have.

E.T. Jaynes, from page 409 of PT: LoS.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2012 03:24:38AM -1 points [-]

This illustrates the folly of inventing noble-sounding names such as 'admissible' and 'unbiased' for principles that are far from noble; and not even fully rational.

You mean such as 'rational'.

Comment author: juliawise 01 September 2012 01:47:14AM *  0 points [-]

I was baffled by that too. They attempted to overthrow a nasty dictator . . . but they did it for the oil money they'd get from the new government.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2012 02:58:23AM 1 point [-]

I believe Eliezer is more concerned with whether the coup would have led to an increase in utility than the motives of the plotters.

Comment author: Peterdjones 31 August 2012 12:35:41PM *  0 points [-]

the left here is advocating central planning in the medical industry.

Of course I meant central planning of (pretty much) everything. Every polity has some central planning of some things.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2012 02:55:37AM 0 points [-]

The question is how much of the economy is under central planning and which factions are trying to increase or decrease it.

Comment author: DanArmak 31 August 2012 06:37:44PM 6 points [-]

or does it turn out that we're just incentivizing being quick on the trigger

Or worse, if someone wants to reply to a comment at -3, they will first upvote it to -2 just to avoid the penalty.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2012 02:32:18AM 5 points [-]

Well, they can undo the up-vote afterwards.

Comment author: lukeprog 30 August 2012 10:11:01PM 0 points [-]

David Hume lays out the foundations of decision theory in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740):

...'tis only in two senses, that any affection can be call'd unreasonable. First, when a passion, such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects which really do not exist. Secondly, when in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the design'd end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2012 02:02:31AM 1 point [-]

This seems to omit the possibility of akrasia.

Comment author: mwengler 30 August 2012 03:29:55PM 3 points [-]

interfering with genes for arbitrary purposes risks upsetting the entire balance the gene pool has developed without purpose.

Let us look at some of the history of eugenics. Humans have been practicing eugenics for 100s of years with crops and domesticated animals. The results include a much enhanced food supply (from both animals and plants), and a "partnership" with dogs that works well for humans and appears to work well for dogs.

So it looks like interfering with the gene pool for our purposes certainly shifts any "balance" the gene pool had developed without purpose, but I can't put my finger on the bad part of that without help.

I'm guessing your comment was aimed more at changes in the human gene pool. Given that 1) evolution changes the gene pool all the time (I'm not sure if this contradicts your idea of balance) and 2) changing plant and animal gene pools is something humans have been doing for 1000s of years and appears to be quite useful to humans, I'm clueless as to how you infer that all of the sudden this is going to turn in to a bad idea when we do it more deliberately to ourselves.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2012 01:32:39AM 1 point [-]

The problem is what happens when there's no distinction between the "breeder" and the "bred".

Comment author: Peterdjones 30 August 2012 09:33:47AM 3 points [-]

But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy or worker control of production in the US? It's a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That's "perception" of course. It's also a US perception that public healthcare "is" socialism -- the idea is seen as mainstream and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label "socialist" to lambast the non-right with, and the non-right don't have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2012 01:25:26AM 0 points [-]

Who is advocating a centrally planned economy

Well, that depends on the industry. For example, as you mentioned below, the left here is advocating central planning in the medical industry.

Comment author: Alejandro1 30 August 2012 03:53:53PM 3 points [-]

The most godawful example I've seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2012 12:57:53AM 2 points [-]

which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women [will] fall in trance and vote for him.

Is your objection that the descriptive statement is false, or than it's sexist to say it even if its true?

Yes, how one's candidate appeals to voters' biases is not exactly something to brag about, but it's unfortunately a common occurrence in our political process.

Comment author: Decius 30 August 2012 03:34:35PM -1 points [-]

Wait, are you asserting that sexism is ever justified? If so, we have a definition mismatch.

For a start, we have Forbes Magazine drawing a link from EP to why most women will never be CEOs (Never mind that most people will never be CEOs). I haven't yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives, and also take sexist actions regarding executives; will you accept that 5% of board members of publicly traded companies make sexist decisions about executives, and that 80% of those people read Forbes and didn't object to that (4% of board members overall)? (again, I'm using numbers that I think are conservative, because direct measurements are hard.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2012 12:47:51AM -1 points [-]

I haven't yet demonstrated how many readers of Forbes allowed the claim that EP justifies the sexist treatment of executives

Since I specified unjustified sexism, you'll have to provide an argument for why said justification is incorrect.

Comment author: Decius 30 August 2012 03:04:06PM -1 points [-]

You don't always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.

The second case is a textbook example of sexist thought; I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2012 12:31:07AM -1 points [-]

You don't always have the luxury of choosing from among a sample that includes above-median performers.

In that case comparing average members of one sex with the above average members of the other is still not the right comparison to make.

I thought it was clear that the first clause was not controlling for anything, while the second was making a specific measurement of expected performance.

Even this statement is ambiguous. Does the specific measure of expected performance actually screen of gender?

Comment author: prase 30 August 2012 06:32:12AM 0 points [-]

The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.

Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the groups of communists and elites have large overlap. These countries, when compared internationally, are "left", but in the internal politics there is usually little place for using "left" and "right" as the left and right are relative characteristics which are useless when there is only one political party.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 August 2012 08:01:04AM 2 points [-]

The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely.

I wasn't just referring to politicians, but to the liberal intelligentsia.

but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.

I don't know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it's highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it's still true.)

Comment author: Decius 29 August 2012 05:20:50AM -1 points [-]

Okay- I assert that there are almost zero people who seriously assert that 'Having sensory organs which can distinguish sex' justifies sexist actions, and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.

I'm prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number. The first assertion is trivial to falsify if you can find a significant number of people who believe that.

To be more logically complete, my unstated assumption: Lay people typically don't take actions which they believe to be unjustified.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 August 2012 03:30:15AM 1 point [-]

and that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who demonstrably either claim, or allow the claim to stand, that EP justifies sexist actions that they themselves take.

I'm prepared to defend the second assertion if needed, which is why I choose a conservative number.

I'd be interested in seeing this. Largely because I'm curious to see specific examples of what you consider unjustified sexism.

Comment author: novalis 27 August 2012 10:07:40PM 1 point [-]

This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?

(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn't you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 August 2012 03:27:12AM -1 points [-]

(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn't you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)

See the OP.

Comment author: Decius 29 August 2012 04:59:16AM 2 points [-]

For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.

Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.

Also sexist is the line of thought "Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.", when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other; a specific example would be "Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 August 2012 03:12:46AM -1 points [-]

when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large number of one sex who outperform a typical member of the other

That's not the relevant comparison. In practice the comparison is between an above average members of each sex.

a specific example would be "Females are less likely than males to complete a degree in mathematics; therefore it makes sense to award this scholarship to the equally qualified male instead of the female".

In your example, than depends on whether the first clause is still true after controlling for whatever qualifications are used in the second.

Comment author: prase 29 August 2012 09:59:12PM *  6 points [-]

This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.

A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn't it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country's right being as homogeneous as the same country's left? (The objection hasn't a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)

The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist.

B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.

Environmentalists aren't necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren't the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren't necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don't think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still "right-wing") but at least I don't immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.

Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than "arbitrary convention set up by historical accident", but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.

As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of "the right". What exactly do they have in common?

C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of "the left". What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn't guarantee much ideological homogeneity.

I am from eastern Europe, where "the left" basically either wants "what communists did" or "something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence".

D) When I still thought that "left" and "right" were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and "something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence" wasn't the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is "what communists did, just less", but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don't claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 August 2012 02:54:08AM 0 points [-]

It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than "arbitrary convention set up by historical accident", but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially).

Except where "the left" has become the elites, there the dynamic is reversed.

Comment author: chaosmosis 30 August 2012 02:21:47AM *  4 points [-]

So it's not that this guy's lie is a case of some more general act 'lying' which involves a contradiction. Rather, the maxim which describes this specific action cannot be understood as a universal law. That doesn't make the action in any way contradictory. In fact, it's a neat fulfillment of the demands of self-love. The point is that the agent is incapable, once he reflects on his action, of thinking of the action as one prescribed entirely by reason, because reason always speaks in universals, and this action cannot be understood as a case of a universal. Edit: To clarify, Kant's point isn't that this example is a case of a more general kind which is wrong, his point is that the lie is wrong because there's no more general kind of rational action (which is to say, action, full stop) to which it can belong.

I'm having a hard time seeing this as distinct. It seems to me that the phrase "the maxim which describes this specific action cannot be understood as a universal law" is just a more vague rephrasing of the idea that "this guy's lie is a case of some more general act 'lying' which involves a contradiction". I agree that his argument is that the specific action can't be understood as a universal law, but the idea of how we go about translating specific actions into universal laws to me seems to implicitly depend upon the idea that "this guy's lie is a case of some more general act 'lying'". I don't understand what universal law Kant is rejecting if not the universal law of lying.

Edit: I think the idea of mocking or ridiculing some idea or thinker should be met with extreme suspicion, and I think Nietzsche would probably even agree with me on that. Laughing at Kant is a way of not thinking about Kant. For Nietzsche, it was important that we be capable of just not thinking about some things, but we do so at the risk of just laughing everything off, even stuff we should be thinking about. And laughing has no internal limits, no little alarm that goes off when you laugh off something important.

Nietzsche explicitly laughs at Kant's Categorical Imperative in the text I quoted. Laughing at things is fun, although I'll agree it leads to dismissal. So, wait to laugh at an idea until after you've heard it out, and then have all the fun with it you want. I think that would be a fine solution. The alternative is to not laugh at bad arguments, and that sort of leads to despairing at the stupidity of the masses, I think.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 August 2012 02:38:03AM 0 points [-]

You can think a the Categorical Imperative as a special case of updateless decision theory.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 August 2012 07:41:12AM 4 points [-]

Note, however that "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features", is strong evidence that X does in fact have those features.

Until some other bozo comes up with a different category. Then we get to play tennis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 August 2012 04:12:44AM 0 points [-]

This problem exists for all reasoning, e.g., Komogorov complexity falls apart when some bozo comes along with a different language.

Comment author: MixedNuts 28 August 2012 07:30:06AM 0 points [-]

Given a general case, you should be able to argue about harms. Injunctions only come into play where you have some reason to rationalize a bad conclusion in an unusual-seeming case. As no society has so far collapsed due to lack of injunction against taxes, an injunction against all non-consensual-things-taking is unnecessary.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 August 2012 04:05:16AM 0 points [-]

Injunctions only come into play where you have some reason to rationalize a bad conclusion in an unusual-seeming case.

The point is that while rationalizing the conclusion doesn't seem bad from the inside.

As no society has so far collapsed due to lack of injunction against taxes

This is very much debatable. If you look at actual collapsing societies throughout history, a large part of the problem is taxes strangling the economy.

Comment author: Yvain 28 August 2012 12:32:47AM *  6 points [-]

Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose "murder" as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?

At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it's likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.

But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming "Worst argument in the world!" at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 August 2012 03:53:43AM 0 points [-]

Ok, so replace "abortion is murder" with "abortion harms the fetus".

Comment author: Decius 29 August 2012 12:26:11AM 0 points [-]

The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.

You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.

One of the key points is that "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" and "evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex" are very nearly the same statement, while "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists" is a radically different statement.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 August 2012 03:40:05AM 0 points [-]

The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.

I'm not sure what you mean by "reinforce", but it seems reasonable to take these differences into account when making decisions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 August 2012 06:06:43AM 1 point [-]

Lobbying advice: pull the rope sideways.

Comment author: DaFranker 27 August 2012 09:15:26PM *  5 points [-]

This implies that there is an intrinsic "wrongness" somewhere inside "theft" itself. Where, then, does the human hand reach into the vast void of existence to retrieve this wrongness to which theft is associated?

"Theft", the word, does not have any wrongness. Otherwise, we could use "Borbooka" instead. Let's do that. Does Borbooka have inherent wrongness? Well, what is Borbooka?

Borbooka is, apparently, when an item, which some animals apparently say verbally and apparently implicitly mutually agree is for the exclusive use of "one particular" animal, is moved from one point in spacetime to another point in spacetime such that another animal gains implicit exclusive use of this item without there being an apparent verbal exchange between animals that would apparently make them all understand that both animals "wanted" this item to be displaced thus.

Where, in the Borbooka defined above, is this mystical "wrongness" you insinuate? Are these not all simple conventions and agreements between said animals? Does Borbooka somehow create or destroy matter, or anything at all? If these conventions were not there and all the animals never had the implicit agreement that one item "belonged" to one animal, would Borbooka still be wrong? Would it still even exist?

I thought this was completely covered by a conjunction of the Metaethics and Guide to Words sequences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 August 2012 05:38:32AM -2 points [-]

Where, in the Borbooka defined above, is this mystical "wrongness" you insinuate?

Because there's an ethical injunction against it.

I thought this was completely covered by a conjunction of the Metaethics and Guide to Words sequences.

You may want to look at this post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 August 2012 04:56:02AM 3 points [-]

I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't."

Note, however that "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features", is strong evidence that X does in fact have those features. Thus the burden is on the person arguing otherwise to show that it doesn't.

Keep in mind that your brain's corrupted hardware is designed to fail in just this kind of "special pleading" situation. Or to put it another way there's a reason ethical injunctions exist.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes August 2012
Comment author: V_V 27 August 2012 11:06:53PM -1 points [-]

Even if the AI can modify its code, it can't really do anything that wasn't entailed by its original programming.

(Ok, it could have a security vulnerability that allowed the execution of externally-injected malicious code, but that is a general issue of all computer systems with an external digital connection)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 August 2012 02:57:03AM *  1 point [-]

Even if the AI can modify its code, it can't really do anything that wasn't entailed by its original programming.

The hard part is predicting everything that was entailed by its initial programing and making sure it's all safe.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 27 August 2012 12:50:22PM 0 points [-]

Reductionist lines of thinking have made countless predictions that have all been verified. Psychic phenomena would be -one- prediction of a non-reductionist line of thinking. It is more likely that non-reductionist lines of thinking predicted the right result for the wrong reasons than that reductionism is wrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 August 2012 02:07:28AM 0 points [-]

Reductionist lines of thinking have made countless predictions that have all been verified.

And even more that turned out to be wrong.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 27 August 2012 10:01:21PM *  0 points [-]

To me it seems that valuing autonomy is an example of avoid things that may have short term benefits but cause long term problems.

That sounds more like a concern about harm ("long term problems") than about purity, at least if you are trying to describe the thought-process of someone justifying their valuing of autonomy.

If, instead, you are trying to describe the causal origin of the value, then wouldn't Haidt ascribe all of his foundational values to that cause? Doesn't he give ev-psych explanations (with a group-selectionist bent) for the origins of all of his foundational values? If I'm right about that, then he would probably argue that each of his foundational values persisted because, in the long run, it served the reproductive interests of the individual or the group. That is, the value led people to avoid short-term benefits that would cause long-term problems. Otherwise, this value would not have survived in the long run.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 August 2012 02:05:23AM 0 points [-]

Doesn't he give ev-psych explanations (with a group-selectionist bent) for the origins of all of his foundational values?

I wouldn't know, I haven't actually read his books. What bothers me is that unlike the other values, I can't even give a definition of what constitutes purity/sacredness without appealing to a black box in my brain.

Comment author: chaosmosis 25 August 2012 07:14:17PM *  -1 points [-]

Well, he demonstrated that it can sometimes get out. But my claim was that "getting out" isn't the scary part- the scary part is "reshaping the world." My brain can reshape the world just fine while remaining in my skull and only communicating with my body through slow chemical wires, and so giving me the goal of "keep your brain in your skull" doesn't materially reduce my ability or desire to reshape the world.

EY's experiment is wholly irrelevant to this claim. Either you're introducing irrelevant facts or morphing your position. I think you're doing this without realizing it, and I think it's probably due to motivated cognition (because morphing claims without noticing it correlates highly with motivated cognition in my experience). I really feel like we might have imposed a box-taboo on this site that is far too strong.

And so if you say "well, we'll make the AI not want to reshape the world," then the AI will be silent. If you say "we'll make the AI not want to reshape the world without the consent of the gatekeepers," then the gatekeepers might be tricked or make mistakes. If you say "we'll make the AI not want to reshape the world without the informed consent of the gatekeepers / in ways which disagree with the values of the gatekeepers," then you're just saying we should build a Friendly AI, which I agree with!

You keep misunderstanding what I'm saying over and over and over again and it's really frustrating and a big time sink. I'm going to need to end this conversation if it keeps happening because the utility of it is going down dramatically with each repetition.

I'm not proposing a system where the AI doesn't interact with the outside world. I'm proposing a system where the AI is only ever willing to use a few appendages to effect the outside world, as opposed to potentially dozens. This minimizes the degree of control that the AI has dramatically, which is a good thing.

This is not FAI either, it is an additional constraint that we should use when putting early FAIs into action. I'm not saying that we merge the AIs values to the values of the gatekeeper, I have no idea where you keep pulling that idea from.

It's possible that I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't know how that would be true specifically, because many of your objections just seem totally irrelevant to me and I can't understand what you're getting at. It seems more likely that you're just not used to the idea of this version of boxing so you just regurgitate generic arguments against boxing, or something. You're also coming up with more obscure arguments as we go farther into this conversation. I don't really know what's going on at your end, but I'm just annoyed at this point.

It's easy to write a safe AI that can only answer one question. How do you get from point A to point B using the road system? Ask Google Maps, and besides some joke answers, you'll get what you want. When people talk about AGI, though, they mean an AI that can write those safe AIs. If you ask it how to get from point A to point B using the road system, and it doesn't know that Google Maps exists, it'll invent a new Google Maps and then use it to answer that question. And so when we ask it to cure cancer, it'll invent medicine-related AIs until it gets back a satisfactory answer. The trouble is that the combination of individually safe AIs is not a safe AI. If we have a driverless car that works fine with human-checked directions, and direction-generating software that works fine for human drivers, plugging them together might result in a car trying to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. (Google has disabled the swimming answers, so Google Maps no longer provides them.) The more general point is that software is very bad at doing sanity checks that humans don't realize are hard, and if you write software that can do those sanity checks, it has to be a full AGI.

I don't even understand how this clashes with my position. I understand that smashing simple AIs together is a dumb idea, but I never proposed that ever. I'm proposing using this special system for early FAIs, and asking them very carefully some very specific questions, along with other questions, so that we can be safe. I don't want this AI to have any direct power, or even super accurate input information.

Yes, obviously, this type of AI is a more limited AI. That's the goal. Limiting our first attempt at FAI is a fantastic idea because existential risk is scary. We'll get less benefits from the FAI, and it will take longer to get those benefits. But it will be a good idea, because it seems really likely to me that we could mess up FAI without even knowing it.

A truism in software is that code is harder to read than write, and often the interesting AIs are the nth generation AIs- where you build an AI that builds an AI that builds an AI (and so on), and turns out that an AI thought all of the human-readability constraints were cruft (because the AI does really run faster and better without those restrictions).

Sure, it will be hard to read the AIs mind. I see no reason why we should just not even try though.

You say that the AI will build an AI that will build an AI. But then you immediately jump to assuming that this means the final AI would leap beyond human comprehension. AIs are not Gods, and we shouldn't treat them like ones. If we could pause the AI and read its coding, while slowing down its thought processes, and devoting lots of resources to the project (as we should do, no matter what) then reading its mind seems doable. We could also use earlier AIs to help us interpret the thoughts of later AIs, if necessary.

Reading its mind literally would guarantee that it couldn't trick us. Why would we not choose to pursue this, even if it sorta seems like it might be expensive?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 August 2012 09:00:26PM 1 point [-]

I'm proposing a system where the AI is only ever willing to use a few appendages to effect the outside world, as opposed to potentially dozens.

The problem is that the AI could use its appendages to create and use tools that are more powerful than the appendages themselves.

Comment author: chaosmosis 24 August 2012 09:39:51PM *  0 points [-]

It would not count, we'd want to make the AI not want this almost identical AI to exist. That seems possible, it would be like how I don't want there to exist an identical copy of me except it eats babies. There are lots of changes to my identity that would be slight but yet that I wouldn't want to exist.

To be more precise, I'd say that it counts as going outside the box if it does anything except think or talk to the Gatekeepers through the text channel. It can use the text channel to manipulate the Gatekeepers to do things, but it can't manipulate them to do things that allow it to do anything other than use the text channel. It would, in a certain sense, be partially deontologist, and be unwilling to do things directly other than text the Gatekeepers. How ironic. Lolz.

Also: how would it do this, anyway? It would have to convince the Gatekeepers to convince the scientists to do this, or teach them computer science, or tell them its code. And if the AI started teaching the Gatekeepers computer code or techniques to incapacitate scientists, we'd obviously be aware that something had gone wrong. And, in the system I'm envisioning, the Gatekeepers would be closely monitored by other groups of scientists and bodyguards, and the scientists would be guarded, and the Gatekeepers wouldn't even have to know who specifically did what on the project.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 August 2012 08:39:13PM 1 point [-]

It would, in a certain sense, be partially deontologist,

And that's the problem. For in practice a partial deontoligist-partial consequentialist will treat its deontoligical rules as obstacles to achieving what its consequentialist part wants and route around them.

Comment author: palladias 23 August 2012 05:39:10AM 1 point [-]

It's also easier for human scriptwriters to imagine themselves repressing an emotion, pushing it back, crushing it down, then it is for them to imagine once deleting an emotion and it never coming back. The former is a mode that human minds can operate in; the latter would take neurosurgery.

Seems like this is a reasonable place to ask if people have recommendations for good scifi with truly alien-feeling aliens. I was trying to figure out if the cylons in season one of BSG counted, since I have trouble modelling their goals and acceptable means, but (a) part of this is that we just didn't see that much of them and (b) "I have trouble modelling them" would suggest that crazy people are the least human since their behavior is a lot more noisy. I don't think that's the metric I'm going for.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 August 2012 07:57:07PM *  0 points [-]

Interestingly enough nearly all attempts I've seen at "alien" aliens end up portraying them as virtue ethicists with weird virtues.

Heck most portrayals of consequentialists or deontologists (or most people attempting to live those philosophies) end up being virtue ethicists attempting to approximate consequentialism/deontology by suitable choice of virtues (and looking like straw consequentialists/deontologists to someone using a better approximation).

Comment author: chaosmosis 24 August 2012 02:54:35AM *  0 points [-]

I've come up with what I believe to be an entirely new approach to boxing, essentially merging boxing with FAI theory. I wrote a couple thoughts down about it, but lost my notes, and I also don't have much time to write this comment, so forgive me if it's vague or not extremely well reasoned. I also had a couple of tangential thoughts, if I remember them in the course of writing this or I recover my notes later than I'll put them here as well.

The idea, essentially, is that when creating a box AI you would build its utility function such that it wants very badly to stay in the box. I believe this would solve all of the problems with the AI manipulating people in order to free itself. Now, the AI still could manipulate people in an attempt to use them to impact the outside world, so the AI wouldn't be totally boxed, but I'm inclined to think that we could maintain a very high degree of control over the AI, since the only powers it could ever have would be through communication with us.

The idea came because I recalled a discussion that occurred on TOR.com about why the Cthaeh was in the tree. The general conclusion was that either the Cthaeh was bound by extremely powerful forces, or that the Cthaeh wanted to be in the tree, perhaps because it was instrumentally useful to him. While I found that second explanation implausible in the context of Rothfussland, that discussion led me to realize that almost all approaches towards AI boxing have done so through the first branch of potential boxing solutions, that is, external constraints imposed on the AI, as opposed to the second branch, internal constraints that the AI imposes on itself because of its utility function.

This lead me to think that we should test our capabilities with FAI systems by putting them in a box and giving them limited utility functions, ones that couldn't possibly lead them to want to manipulate us. So, for example, we could put them in a box and give them a strong desire to stay in the box, along with a desire to tell the truth, and then we could ask it what would happen if we gave it additional desires. We could then test that by building a different AI with those desires and seeing what it did.

It also occurred to me that we would be able to functionally read the AIs mind by looking at its coding. If so, it seems like it'd be much harder for it to fool us than we previously thought. It could potentially just deceive us by manipulating its own thoughts, but I feel like we might be able to stop AIs from doing that somehow, or that the AI would choose not to manipulate its own thoughts that way because it would go insane, or something. It would certainly make the AI's job much much much harder.

Then I thought that another safety component we should put into testing was a dramatically slowed thinking process for the AI. I'm not sure how exactly this would be done because I'm not very good or experienced with actual technical implementation of ideas, but my idea was to create a crude simulation where we controlled all data inputs and outputs, and we slowed down all processes within the simulation by a factor of 1000, and then building the AI within the simulation. That probably wouldn't work, given my sucky technical knowhow, but something similar might. Slowing down the AI, perhaps even giving ourselves the ability to pause it without letting it know what's going on, combined with our ability to "read its mind" might dramatically improve the safeness of boxing.

I'd also like to recommend that before we build a real FAI, we at least try to build a boxed one first, even with a low probability of success. It wouldn't make things worse in the event that boxing failed, except that it might delay global happiness by a few hours, and in the event that the FAI program was broken we just might save ourselves from menaces to humankind like Clippy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 August 2012 06:55:48PM 2 points [-]

The idea, essentially, is that when creating a box AI you would build its utility function such that it wants very badly to stay in the box.

How do you specify precisely what it means to "stay in the box"? In particular, would creating a nearly identical copy of itself except without this limitation outside the box while the original stays in the box count?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 22 August 2012 09:01:03PM *  1 point [-]

Thus, other adaptations, e.g., the desire to avoid social shaming, can be used to contract them.

It's an interesting thought. How would you control for the baseline levels of social shame that racial minorities, poor people, and teen mothers are already subjected to?

Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn't different.

All sorts of things. There's a lot less lead paint on the walls, for instance; a lot more black men in prison for victimless crimes, too; "the situation" is hardly simple. What leads you to single out your particular claim?

So you agree that "stigma and fear" is in fact an effective way to change people's behavior.

Running a power drill through the eyeballs of people you dislike might "change people's behavior" too, but that doesn't make it a policy proposal rather than a psychopathy symptom.

In other words, it isn't clear that this is the same sort of thing at all. And specifically, the reasons certain proposals wouldn't work have to do with political realities — e.g. if you try to generate "stigma and fear" by forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers, the doctors are not likely to cooperate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2012 06:40:29PM 0 points [-]

a lot more black men in prison for victimless crimes, too;

This is unrelated to the main argument, but I'm not sure the crimes in question are truly victimless for reasons given in these two posts.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 22 August 2012 09:01:03PM *  1 point [-]

Thus, other adaptations, e.g., the desire to avoid social shaming, can be used to contract them.

It's an interesting thought. How would you control for the baseline levels of social shame that racial minorities, poor people, and teen mothers are already subjected to?

Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn't different.

All sorts of things. There's a lot less lead paint on the walls, for instance; a lot more black men in prison for victimless crimes, too; "the situation" is hardly simple. What leads you to single out your particular claim?

So you agree that "stigma and fear" is in fact an effective way to change people's behavior.

Running a power drill through the eyeballs of people you dislike might "change people's behavior" too, but that doesn't make it a policy proposal rather than a psychopathy symptom.

In other words, it isn't clear that this is the same sort of thing at all. And specifically, the reasons certain proposals wouldn't work have to do with political realities — e.g. if you try to generate "stigma and fear" by forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers, the doctors are not likely to cooperate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2012 09:46:59PM 2 points [-]

Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn't different.

All sorts of things.

Specifically, I was referring to the fact that Blacks were even poorer back than so following the argument CronoDAS's link was making we would expect there to be more unwed motherhood among them. On the other hand unwed motherhood was much more stigmatized (and no it didn't involve laws forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers).

Comment author: fubarobfusco 21 August 2012 08:18:59PM *  1 point [-]

(Edit: Another way to phrase this is that you may be confusing the statements 'I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior.' and 'We shouldn't attempt to use "stigma and fear" to reduce such behavior.')

That's a good point.

I'm curious what sort of procedures might use "stigma and fear" to reduce unwed teen pregnancy in poor women. If we take seriously the article CronoDAS posted regarding the rational motivations for young poor women having babies, then presumably addressing those specific motivations might do it.

(Notably, we would not expect preaching traditionalist views via religion, or other means that did not change the material utility landscape, to work. If, as the article holds, young women choose to have babies on the basis of their material expected outcomes, then the procedures would have to alter the young women's material expected outcomes; and — to qualify as relevant here — would have to do so using stigma and fear.)

After thinking about it for a bit and coming up with some possible procedures for doing so, I've decided not to post most of them because they're really quite unpleasant; they're the sort of things that would occur in dystopian fiction. I'll just give one example: changing the landscape for infant mortality by making it illegal for physicians to attend births to unwed mothers.

On second thought, I don't think I am confusing those statements you mention — I think they're both true. First, using stigma and fear to change the motivations for teen mothers would not work, primarily for political reasons (e.g. physicians would not put up with it; people would revolt; etc.) And second, it would be immoral to try; especially given that the same motivations could be addressed in non-dystopian ways.

Try advocating race realism or some other politically incorrect position outside an anonymous internet forum and you'll quickly discover the consequences are much more serious and you're likely to loose your job at the very least.

The same could be said for a lot of other views; that's scarcely unique to one end of a political spectrum. For instance, there is a long history of people losing their jobs for advocating labor unionization, even in the presence of laws forbidding employers from firing workers for doing so.

Outside of explicitly political views: Advocating pederasty would probably not get you a whole heck of a lot of friends or willing coworkers either; nor would advocating for the right of parents to kill disobedient children, as found in various ancient civilizations. In both cases people might reasonably conclude that they (or their children, etc.) were unsafe around a person who held such views. Might that be the case with racialism, too?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2012 07:48:04PM 1 point [-]

I'm curious what sort of procedures might use "stigma and fear" to reduce unwed teen pregnancy in poor women. If we take seriously the article CronoDAS posted regarding the rational motivations for young poor women having babies, then presumably addressing those specific motivations might do it.

While the motivations described to the article are in some sense rational, they're rational in an adaptation executor kind of way. Thus, other adaptations, e.g., the desire to avoid social shaming, can be used to contract them.

(Notably, we would not expect preaching traditionalist views via religion, or other means that did not change the material utility landscape, to work. If, as the article holds, young women choose to have babies on the basis of their material expected outcomes, then the procedures would have to alter the young women's material expected outcomes; and — to qualify as relevant here — would have to do so using stigma and fear.)

Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn't different.

The same could be said for a lot of other views; that's scarcely unique to one end of a political spectrum.

So you agree that "stigma and fear" is in fact an effective way to change people's behavior.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 August 2012 09:29:17AM *  2 points [-]

That link is a glaring example of the intellectual decline of the American right wing. ESR has said so many dumb things! Radical/trend-setting Western intellectuals do not insist that the Western civilization is evil, held up by slave labour and must atone for its sins, etc. simply because they have some particular anti-Western agenda! This is an essential element of Western culture, I'd say - its self-abnegation, self-doubt, applying higher standards to itself, all that ostensibly "bleak"/"nihilistic"/"ultra-puritan" stuff. We have that relentless drive to fight a war with ourselves. What other culture can mourn and lament its flaws like ours? We even learned to, um, get off on it - in a way.

This is what has been present in it since Christianity's inception: the radicalism, the urge to "immanentize the eschaton", the denial of local boundaries and ties in favor of a global Logos which all would live under and by. A certain left-wing tendency is in our figurative (and maybe literal) blood.

McCarthy looks rather comical in this regard; he saw the tip of the iceberg, guessed that there must be more under the water, but overlooked the fact that R'lyeh itself is beneath and his grandparents were fish-people. (All of it for the better, in my honest opinion!)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2012 07:34:50PM 1 point [-]

Radical/trend-setting Western intellectuals do not insist that the Western civilization is evil, held up by slave labour and must atone for its sins, etc. simply because they have some particular anti-Western agenda! This is an essential element of Western culture, I'd say - its self-abnegation, self-doubt, applying higher standards to itself, all that ostensibly "bleak"/"nihilistic"/"ultra-puritan" stuff.

True, however, Eric's point was about why this particular element of Western civilization was elevated above all others over that past century.

Comment author: Multiheaded 22 August 2012 10:39:27AM *  5 points [-]

Uh huh. I fully endorse your analysis. Except that I'd say (1) would still leave us far better off than the typical confrontation-allowed political forum out there, because LWers would probably at least be willing to state their positions clearly, and would accept help in clarifying/refining those positions - even if the art of changing one's mind should be lost, LW discussion would still retain some value. So I'd rather have (1) than (3).

Please consider that both Torture vs Specks and Three Worlds Collide are, as it seems to me, very much political - indeed, the latter could be construed as today's very Blue vs Green with a touch of imagination, yet the debates on those have been quite OK.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2012 07:26:09PM 4 points [-]

indeed, the latter could be construed as today's very Blue vs Green with a touch of imagination,

I don't think so. At least I can't figure out which side is supposed to be which.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 21 August 2012 06:45:08PM 2 points [-]

I think I'm having difficulty understanding your comment. It sounds to me as if you are morally equating threatening the lives and health of impoverished women and children, to disagreeing with (or even downvoting) someone in an Internet forum. That confuses me, so I conclude that one of my beliefs regarding your comment is fiction. Please clarify.

Also, I find it awkward that you seem to be characterizing my comments as "liberal", since that word seems to be commonly used to mean anything from the center-right (e.g. the Democratic Party), to the Greens, to Euro-style social democrats. I think of myself as a center-libertarian, which is where the Political Compass places me as well. Unlike some anti-authoritarians, I take anti-authoritarianism as logically entailing feminism and a critical approach to gender, race, and other topics beloved by many progressives; I'd rather cheerfully identify as a progressive libertarian if I thought anyone had a chance of understanding what I meant by that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2012 07:16:30PM *  2 points [-]

I think I'm having difficulty understanding your comment. It sounds to me as if you are morally equating

Who said anything about moral equating? I'm trying to determine the effect of social pressure, what you called "stigma and fear" on behavior.

(Edit: Another way to phrase this is that you may be confusing the statements 'I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior.' and 'We shouldn't attempt to use "stigma and fear" to reduce such behavior.')

to disagreeing with (or even downvoting) someone in an Internet forum.

Try advocating race realism or some other politically incorrect position outside an anonymous internet forum and you'll quickly discover the consequences are much more serious and you're likely to loose your job at the very least.

My main point is that while left-wingers claim to believe that stigmatizing undesirable behaviors is ineffective, they don't act like they believe it.

Comment author: Multiheaded 20 August 2012 10:54:51PM *  4 points [-]

There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin's ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment, and most notably an Asian-style cult of the god-king.
In fact, by the end of his life Stalin had uprooted or completely subverted virtually every institution that the 1920s' Old Bolshevik leaders introduced (with the sole exception of the repression apparatus, which he expanded while purging most personnel) - from the "New Economic Policy" and legal free abortion (!) to the avant-garde artists' organizations and the Comintern.
I'm not necessarily saying that those institutions were good (although the NEP objectively worked well enough); I'm saying that, since around 1930 and until the end, Soviet leadership only paid lip service to genuine radical indoctrination/reeducation, preferring the old staples of nationalism, feudal loyalty and leader-worship.

Later, in the Brezhnev era, an official cargo cult of sorts was formed around Marxist phraseology and such, but no-one gave a shit whether, say, the "Marxism-Leninism" classes at universities were even functioning as propaganda.
In fact, it was rather counter-productive as propaganda, as people began to mock even the several objective, verified achievements that it trumpeted - like the space program or the considerable infrastructure investment. The system became too stagnant even to attempt self-replication through indoctrination.

So there. The USSR was mostly an ineffective (if somewhat orderly) conservative regime that would have shat its collective pants if a New Soviet Man suddenly appeared in flesh.
And hey, a handful did appear, more or less by accident; e.g. Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vasily Grossman (Socialist Realist writers!), Sakharov, the Strugatsky brothers, numerous other good people who advocated left-wing ideas and got suppressed by an ostensibly socialist system. Oh, well, for the wider Warsaw Pact, I guess Zizek also counts as a New Soviet Man :)

P.S.: lengthy quote incoming! Orwell's praise of left-wing indoctrination in Homage to Catalonia.

In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship.

Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.

The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field-at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot-- were shot, occasionally--but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same circumstances--with its battle-police removed--would have melted away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victories, and even individual desertions were not common.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2012 06:50:57PM 0 points [-]

There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin's ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment,

Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning. Also the nationalism didn't start going until WWII, and only after it became clear that appealing to people to fight for communist ideals wasn't working.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 20 August 2012 10:26:35PM 13 points [-]

I got all 8 correct. My take is that programs that make participants feel like they have low status are unlikely to succeed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2012 06:33:28PM -2 points [-]

That seems wrong, after all, if you look at history, it's clear that making people feel like they have low status is a great way to control them.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 August 2012 05:23:18PM 2 points [-]

we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect

Well, it's not like we have no evidence either way. We have weak evidence for a positive effect.

For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women [...] so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women

It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can't count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.

I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or "red states" vs. "blue states" within the U.S. ...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2012 06:28:36PM -1 points [-]

I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior.

I'd take liberal arguments about the ineffectiveness of "stigma and fear" much more seriously if those liberals weren't simultaneously using "stigma and fear" to promote their own agenda, e.g., suppressing discussions of race realism.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes August 2012
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 August 2012 08:04:59PM 5 points [-]

Shouldn't you be taking into account that I don't want to discourage other people from having kids?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 August 2012 08:20:18PM 1 point [-]

But you're afraid that if you state your reason, it will discourage others from having kids.

Comment author: Multiheaded 19 August 2012 01:04:14PM *  3 points [-]

No way, I'm not! I mean, yes, I'm certainly mind-killed (and flattered when my mind-killedness is described in dramatic language like above, thanks!) - but at least... how to put it.. I'm mind-killed about the mind!

That is, I fret and read and (sometimes) post about social psychology and cultural processes and human ethics and stuff like that - which is, in the end, self-referential and self-fulfilling/negating to a degree.
If e.g. everyone in known history thought that economic equality was massively evil and alien and harmful and undesirable - why, societies would simply increase wealth divergence without ever worrying whether it's practical or moral to - like, in real life, we feel and act the same about starvation, even when we let its victims die in other ways.
If in 1936 or so 90% of Europeans got the idea that Hitler had unspeakably evil plans, he'd never be able to carry out those plans. {1}

Therefore, if someone, like me, fervently believes that [religion name]/[ideology name] is (in its worldview and revealed preferences, not its description of reality) an enormous priority to pursue OR avoid, more important than even lives or happiness - and that humanity is blind to that urgent matter, then they're slightly better off than someone who fervently believes that e.g. Mars has a breathable atmosphere.
The more people share the first "delusion", the less of a "delusion" it is internally and the more implementable it is in practice. Yes, of course some ev-psych facts - like selfishness, love of authority or envy - limit the phase space of working societies, but those realities can be stretched or hacked around, given how plastic our minds potentially are.
The second one remains a delusion no matter how large and committed a group tries to live up to it; a lone atheist and a million good Catholics following a papal edict would choke with equal speed on Mars. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."

Barron might hate the universe and feel that it hates him in return; I only hate some particular, and passing, arrangements in the universe, and resent the fact that most people insist on propping up those arrangements (by e.g. thinking that material welfare is the only real measure of political systems).

{1} Yes, yes, I'm aware of the Functionalist argument and find it rather credible; that bit was just rhetorical.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 August 2012 07:26:42PM 3 points [-]

Yes, of course some ev-psych facts - like selfishness, love of authority or envy - limit the phase space of working societies, but those realities can be stretched or hacked around, given how plastic our minds potentially are.

So how did the Soviet Union's attempt to create the "New Soviet Man" turn out?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 17 August 2012 10:21:28PM *  0 points [-]

Nah. Eventually some folks would decide enter the lung-doctoring profession because their parents had died of lung cancer and they actually wanted to cure it. People are not predictably 100% short-sighted and mercenary; the Prisoner's Dilemma is not the "Prisoner's Stupid Question – Obviously Everyone Defects All The Time."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2012 09:13:22PM 2 points [-]

Well, medicine was dominated by crackpots and charlatans for millennia and no one seems to have noticed until recently. For example, Mercury was used as a cure for all sorts of things for quite a long time. Not to mention how long bloodletting was used in medicine. I could give more examples but you get the idea.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 18 August 2012 08:36:55PM *  0 points [-]

Right, group cohesion isn't the only reason for these rituals, but they can still serve that function (eg, kosher diets).

Can valuing autonomy be explained by valuing purity? That doesn't seem plausible to me, since people so often want to use their autonomy to violate other people's purity norms (eg, sex 'n' drugs).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2012 08:59:47PM 0 points [-]

Can valuing autonomy be explained by valuing purity?

To me it seems that valuing autonomy is an example of avoid things that may have short term benefits but cause long term problems.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 18 August 2012 05:04:30AM 2 points [-]

Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness.

How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) "the environment". I would also extend the notion of a "single object" to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).

In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven't read any of Haidt's books, I've listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the "groupish" qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.

Autonomy doesn't seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. "Individual autonomy" is a "single thing" at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.

In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don't get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can't serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren't sure that they're all worshiping the same thing.

People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of "my autonomy" or "your autonomy" or "her autonomy". These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we're talking about a bunch of different "autonomies", which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2012 03:39:19PM 2 points [-]

In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion.

I don't think sacredness/purity is just about group cohesion. Some purity rituals (from an evolutionary point of view) are clearly about avoiding contagious diseases. Other sacredness taboos are about not doing things that have short term benefits but cause long term problems, especially when the short term benefit of the action is much more obvious than the long term harm.

Comment author: Unnamed 18 August 2012 06:56:13AM 2 points [-]

I would taboo the word "autonomy" in this context, or at least give a clear definition, because there are at least 2 different things that it could refer to.

In Haidt's six foundations theory, the closest thing to "autonomy" as it is being used in this discussion is probably the liberty/oppression foundation (the 6th foundation to be added):

Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.

The liberty/oppression foundation is somewhat underdeveloped in Haidt's book, and discussed separately from the other foundations in a way that's organized a bit strangely, probably because the book was already in progress when he decided to count liberty/oppression as a sixth foundation. Haidt does not seem to have any published papers yet on the liberty/oppression foundation, but he does have one under review which focuses on libertarians.

In Richard Shweder's three-area theory, which was the original basis for Haidt's theory, "autonomy" has a different meaning. It is one of the three ethics - "autonomy" is the blanket label given to the individualistic/liberal approach to morality which involves harm, rights, and justice. The ethic of autonomy is contrasted with the ethic of community (ingroup and hierarchy) and the ethic of divinity (purity and sacredness). In one of Haidt's earlier papers, which used Shweder's system, experimental participants were given this definition of autonomy:

The ethics of Autonomy Individual freedom/rights violations. In these cases an action is wrong because it directly hurts another person, or infringes upon his/her rights or freedoms as an individual. To decide if an action is wrong, you think about things like harm, rights, justice, freedom, fairness, individualism, and the importance of individual choice and liberty.

If you look at that definition and think "but that's all of morality, mushed together in one big category" then congratulations, you're WEIRD. In Shweder's approach, being obsessed with autonomy is precisely what is distinctive about liberals. The utilitarian, who applies cost-benefit analysis to everything and is willing to make any tradeoff, is just one member of the autonomy-obsessed family of moral perspectives. People who rigidly apply concepts of rights, liberty, or justice are part of that same family. The grand Kant-Bentham debate is just a factional squabble which is happening in one corner of the moral triangle.

Haidt's six-foundation approach can be considered a refinement of this view, which keeps Divinity, splits Community in two (ingroup & hierarchy), and divides Autonomy in three (harm, fairness, and liberty). Although there are some complications (fairness is somewhat Community-tinged, and liberty might be too).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2012 03:29:00PM 0 points [-]

Frankly, utilitarianism is also community tinged, specifically the whole "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one" aspect of it.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 August 2012 09:12:21AM 5 points [-]

Or law enforcement in your country is too crappy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2012 10:07:55PM 6 points [-]

Then you should be even less law-abiding.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 16 August 2012 11:37:17PM -1 points [-]

Only if it makes the problem worse in a way that is not obvious to those who care about solving it. If the American Lung Association went around giving out cigarettes, people might eventually catch on.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2012 10:04:48PM 0 points [-]

Not necessarily if it simultaneously produced research saying that cigarettes are good for your lungs.

Comment author: shminux 16 August 2012 08:26:25PM 0 points [-]

Well, reading Harry Potter probably at least marginally increases the child's chances of embracing some form of witchcraft later in life.

Do you mean it as an objective statement or what a certain (probably strongly mainstream-religious) parent would think?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 August 2012 10:51:00PM 5 points [-]

Objective statement. In fact, it strikes me as fairly obvious once one gets past thinking that any argument that even marginally helps the enemy must be wrong.

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 16 August 2012 08:51:43AM 2 points [-]

I know of several parents who forbid their children to read the books because of some ridiculous fear of witchcraft, stemming from their conservative fundamentalism... so that would be one factor.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 August 2012 07:27:21PM 3 points [-]

Well, reading Harry Potter probably at least marginally increases the child's chances of embracing some form of witchcraft later in life. Whether that's enough to bad the books is a different question.

Comment author: GLaDOS 15 August 2012 10:15:27AM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure that is a good heuristic, spending a lot of time in somewhere might mean he considers the ideas or at least debating them fun, which is not quite the same as important. If someone was studying my online habits they'd be better off assuming I optimize for fun rather than impact. (^_^')

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 August 2012 09:13:04PM 0 points [-]

My mental model of Vladimir_M has this not being the case.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 August 2012 10:38:24PM -2 points [-]

You seem to be confusing racial diversity with ideological diversity.

Since you seem to be not reading the link:

Of our 1090 respondents, 972 (89%) were male, 92 (8.4%) female, 7 (.6%) transexual, and 19 gave various other answers or objected to the question. As abysmally male-dominated as these results are, the percent of women has tripled since the last survey in mid-2009.

We're also a little more diverse than we were in 2009; our percent non-whites has risen from 6% to just below 10%. Along with 944 whites (86%) we include 38 Hispanics (3.5%), 31 East Asians (2.8%), 26 Indian Asians (2.4%) and 4 blacks (.4%).

This is not a diverse propulation.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [Link] Admitting to Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 August 2012 09:04:25PM 3 points [-]

See my edit of the parent.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 August 2012 06:51:42AM 2 points [-]

I imagine you will agree that the concept of "putting presumptions under erasure" is not something that expresses itself well in dialog.

It appears to me that you are not someone who expresses themselves well in dialog.

I shall refrain from imagining that anyone agrees with me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 August 2012 08:16:47PM 0 points [-]

I shall refrain from imagining that anyone agrees with me.

Well, I for one agree with you.

Comment author: prase 14 August 2012 08:30:38PM 1 point [-]

Is there a way how to formulate the idea that different people may use "reason" differently which would not appear to you as implicit sorting of those interpretations into two categories, suspect and non-suspect? Note that although I have used the word "suspect", it was in a paraphrase of Khan's position, not referring to the interpretations of "reason".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 August 2012 07:33:02PM 0 points [-]

Is there a way how to formulate the idea that different people may use "reason" differently which would not appear to you as implicit sorting of those interpretations into two categories, suspect and non-suspect?

Only if you're willing to deny the existence of an objective reality.

Comment author: MBlume 13 August 2012 06:02:38AM *  25 points [-]

Where are we on selectively/temporarily/safely de-activating brain regions? Magnetic field to the RDPC sounds like it'd be <s>fantastically fun at parties</s>extremely informative under the right circumstances.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 10:44:22PM 0 points [-]

Personally, I'm wondering how to use these as brainwashing devices. And then use my brainwashed slaves to TAKE OVER THE WORLD. BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

Sorry, got carried away there for a second. In any case, do you know where I can get my hands on one of these things?

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 14 August 2012 07:35:30AM 2 points [-]

You can have a module in a certain state and another module which draws an inference from that. No homunculus needed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 10:38:35PM -2 points [-]

Module A doesn't "draw an inference" from the state of module B, that would require module A to have a sub-module dedicated to drawing inferences from module B and evaluating their reliability. Module A simply treats the output of module B as an inference of similar weight to the one it itself makes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 August 2012 02:19:04AM 9 points [-]

To use terminology I do not wager Multiheaded would object to, he takes the threat of certain right-wing political philosophies very seriously. Perhaps goal is the not the best term, however. See here for a glimpse of what I mean.

In a nontrivial number of his posts, one could say that a specter is haunting Multiheaded, the specter of fascism. As such, a good bit of his output consists of left-wing ghost-busting.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 10:29:42PM 4 points [-]

Multiheaded is basically Barron the Green.

Comment author: magfrump 14 August 2012 10:07:23PM *  -2 points [-]

Given the current lack of diversity in our community, and that I have some (I will allow somewhat mysterious) sense that diverse perspectives will be useful to rationality, for example, in avoiding projecting our preferences, I personally believe that in a more diverse community we will be able to have a better discussion of the issues at hand which will be more truthful.

I don't mean to say you should stop having opinions about this, just that the opinion of even one person who is directly targeted would probably make the discussion about a thousand times more practical and useful to our community, whereas right now I feel like there are lots of bad feelings and no practical benefit.

I do agree with you that a permanent taboo would be obviously problematic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 10:20:35PM *  3 points [-]

Given the current lack of diversity in our community, and that I have some (I will allow somewhat mysterious) sense that diverse perspectives will be useful to rationality, for example, in avoiding projecting our preferences, I personally believe that in a more diverse community we will be able to have a better discussion of the issues at hand which will be more truthful.

You seem to be confusing racial diversity with ideological diversity.

Edit: Since you seem to have misunderstood me let me clarify. Your argument about the benefits of diversity is about the benefits of ideological diversity, whereas your complaint is about the lack of racial diversity.

Comment author: magfrump 14 August 2012 09:58:54PM 0 points [-]

At least in part.

My primary objection remains that it will be vastly more difficult for me to learn to identify the bias that you are indicating exists if your only examples of it appear to be personal attacks. I don't mean to say that this is what your example is, obviously I only posted one or two comments out of dozens, but my silly little ape brain isn't letting me consider your proposal objectively so I would like it if you could provide a different example.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 10:18:22PM *  0 points [-]

Given that you seem to be a liberal, what makes you think you won't be equally mind-killed by the other examples?

Comment author: magfrump 14 August 2012 09:03:20PM 0 points [-]

You may note that in the thread you linked, there is a current unresolved disagreement LITERALLY BETWEEN YOU AND ME. This is clearly a problematic example when it comes to my own learning, and is the exact reason that I was interested in that example being moved outside of LessWrong; perhaps I should have additionally specified that the example would ideally come from outside of LessWrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 09:15:45PM 2 points [-]

You may note that in the thread you linked, there is a current unresolved disagreement LITERALLY BETWEEN YOU AND ME.

Yes, and do you disagree with the characterization of the argument I gave above?

Comment author: magfrump 11 August 2012 05:48:15PM -2 points [-]

I can prefer some weighted mixture of "finding some truth now," and "setting pleasant social norms to make my truth-finding community healthier for the future," while still optimizing for truth.

However there are certainly plenty of reasons to pursue instrumental rationality (in fact, all reasons are reasons for this) and if we value people not feeling bad, I'm not sure what your case against politeness actually consists of.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 09:14:31PM 4 points [-]

I can prefer some weighted mixture of "finding some truth now," and "setting pleasant social norms to make my truth-finding community healthier for the future,"

Given that those "pleasant social norms" seem to consist of declaring investigating certain subjects taboo, this is likely to make truth seeking harder in the future.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 13 August 2012 09:23:48PM *  2 points [-]

Rayhawk, largely because he talks about more important things than does Vladimir_M. I sorta wish Vladimir_M would do more speculative reasoning outside the spheres of game theory, social psychology, economics, politics, and so on—I would trust him to be less biased than most when considering strange ideas, e.g. the Singularity Institute's mission.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 09:01:34PM 1 point [-]

I would trust him to be less biased than most when considering strange ideas, e.g. the Singularity Institute's mission.

You can get a good idea of which ideas Vladimir_M considers important, by looking at where he chooses to spend his time.

Comment author: Yvain 14 August 2012 05:19:07AM *  13 points [-]

I think my problem with your responses on this thread so far has been that you've taken various liberal positions, said "Obviously this a sacredness value, liberals say it's about harm but they are lying", and not justified this. Or else "Some people say they are utilitarians, but obviously they are lying and have sacredness and purity and authority values just like everyone else" and not justified that either.

For example, where exactly is this liberal sacredness around sexual autonomy? The place I see liberals really get worked up about this is tolerance of homosexuality, but the standard liberal mantra in this case, that it's okay because it "doesn't harm anyone", seems to me to be entirely correct - it's throwing out a conservative purity-based value in favor of a genuinely harm-based value. Liberals are pretty happy to oppose clear-cut cases of harm in sexual relations like rape or lying about STDs, not to mention that most of them oppose pedophilia and prostitution.

In order to demonstrate that liberal sexual values are sacredness rather than harm based, you'd need to point out some specific sexual practice that was harmless but which liberals still violently opposed (arranged marriage? Do liberals have a strong opinion on this?) or harmful but which liberals supported (maybe no-fault divorce? But this is far from universally-supported among liberals, it's far from clear that it's harmful, and I don't think most liberals who do support it refer to a principle of sexual autonomy or have the fervor that tends to characterize sacred values.)

Overall I think liberal support for sexual autonomy, insofar as it's a useful idea at all, to be mostly based around autonomy values (obviously), harm values (as the liberals themselves say), and maybe an overreaction to really disliking conservative values around things like homosexuality or sexual "prudery". I think you have further to go in demonstrating that there's really a strong foundation of sacredness there, although I understand if you don't want to turn this thread into a debate on sex mores.

I agree that certain liberal values are based on sacredness (diversity and anti-racism) or purity (environmentalism), although I have yet to hear any good argument that liberals explicitly value authority. But two examples, both of which are polluted with confounders (racism really is really harmful), hardly seem like enough to say they are just as interested in these values as conservatives and totally deceiving themselves when they say they aren't.

And I have the same objections to your comments on libertarians and utilitarians. Yeah, only a few percent of the population is either (although it's more in places where people are genuinely interested in philosophical and political issues and likely to think for themselves, and only about 20% of Americans self-identify as "liberal" anyway). But libertarians for example seem ruthlessly consistent in opposing government intervention into any area (except maybe defense and policing), and I have a higher opinion of utilitarians than you do. Once Peter Singer says he can't really see any problems with infanticide because it doesn't harm anyone, the hypothesis that he still is secretly trying to uphold sacredness values just as much as everyone else becomes pretty hard to support.

Similarly, not every case of hypocrisy is a case of secretly having sacredness or purity values. I don't fail at efficient charity because I secretly believe that inefficient charity is sacred. I fail at efficient charity because utilitarianism is really hard.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 08:39:40PM 1 point [-]

Liberals are pretty happy to oppose clear-cut cases of harm in sexual relations like rape

I'm not sure this case is as clear cut as you think. In any case I'd imagine you were around for the debates on this topic precipitated by Eliezer's Three Worlds Collide.

Comment author: prase 14 August 2012 05:01:44PM 1 point [-]

I am asserting that different people attach the label "reason" to different concepts, nothing else. I certainly don't assert existence of two categories; if you push me hard to categorise, I would rather admit 6 billion categories as no two people would probably completely agree on definition of "reason". I have said nothing about myself being right in the use of "reason" and others being "mistaken".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 08:02:50PM 0 points [-]

I am asserting that different people attach the label "reason" to different concepts,

And implicitly sorting those concepts into two categories, those that are suspect and those that aren't.

Comment author: Yvain 14 August 2012 01:40:29AM 2 points [-]

Really? I don't see that at all. The same mental state can be both an inference and a premise for the next inference. For example, "I feel really tired lately -> Maybe I'm sick" seems pretty straightforward, as does "I am a guy and feel really attracted to other guys -> maybe I'm gay".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 02:07:47AM 0 points [-]

You're thinking of the inference as "I don't feel affection when I see her face -> She's not my wife". Whereas, another way to think about it is "Her face looks like [insert description of wife's face here] -> She's not my wife".

Comment author: prase 13 August 2012 04:54:10PM *  2 points [-]

Here we have the problem that reasonable arguments and the self-evident truth of rationality is often only clear among people who already agree on everything of substance. People who agree can confidently assert the rationality and reasonableness of their arguments to those who have the exactly same perspective. So, for example, you have educated people like William F. Buckley, Jr. explaining that there is more evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ than that Abraham Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation.

The correct explanation of the described phenomenon is that people often have different ideas about what is reasonable. Khan's interpretation "reason is suspect" appears either as if he doesn't want to prefer his own definition of reason over, say, a religious fundamentalist definition, or as if he practically identifies reason with "everything people call such". Which doesn't seem reasonable according to my definition of reason.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 01:12:29AM 3 points [-]

as if he practically identifies reason with "everything people call such".

So you're asserting that there are two kinds of people, those that call reason "reason", and those that mistakenly call something else "reason". Keep in mind that people in the second category believe that they belong to the first. So how do you know you don't belong to the second category?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 August 2012 12:03:52AM *  2 points [-]

There must be some fundamental difference between how one draws inferences from mental states versus everything else.

Talking about "drawing inferences from mental states" strikes me as a case of the homunculus fallacy, i.e., thinking that there's some kind of homunculus sitting inside our brains looking at the mental states and drawing inferences. Whereas in reality mental states are inferences.

Comment author: prase 13 August 2012 10:24:43PM 0 points [-]

To have an objective criterion for evaluating ideas in case my intuition is ifluenced by bias. To find out what exactly makes most metaphysics appear unsatisfactory and empty to me. Why are people concerned with formalising epistemology, after all?

By the way, you don't need to link to the Sequences articles for me, I have read them all.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 10:31:07PM 0 points [-]

What do any of those have to do with where you "draw the line between direct and psychological consequences of beliefs"?

Comment author: Troshen 13 August 2012 08:39:36PM 0 points [-]

<scratches head> Maybe I don't.

I think I do. I think I have a general, summarized, understangin of how gravity works. I would say I have a starting point of knowledge, and If I ever need to get more specific to solve specific problems, I know where to go research the details, and then run experiements to solve a specific problem. Or to challege the Fake Explanations.

I'm not set on Relativity, for example, and I don't accept it as some kind of gospel. I love thories that try to poke holes in Reltivity. The day I posted this I read about several that tried and were demonstratably worse at predicting reality that Relitivity.

As far as I can tell my mental map of the universe works pretty well, but I'm ok to revise it if that turns out not to be true.

I'm putting this out there to clarify my understanding and get comments on it, so I accept your comment, but how would YOU phrase your answer to the question of how gravity works, in a better, non-Fake-Explanation way?

Or, alternatively, how would you rewrite my answer in a better, non-Fake-Explanation way?

Because if you mean that I need to send up my own Gravity Probe B to verify frame-dragging before I can help other students try to understand gravity, you're out of luck. I'm planning on trusting teir results. (although I have to admit to being a bit disappointed when they confirmed Einstein instead of challenging him! <grin>)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 10:24:52PM 0 points [-]

As far as I can tell my mental map of the universe works pretty well,

Do you regularly encounter situations where your map of GR is tested?

I'm putting this out there to clarify my understanding and get comments on it, so I accept your comment, but how would YOU phrase your answer to the question of how gravity works, in a better, non-Fake-Explanation way?

Or, alternatively, how would you rewrite my answer in a better, non-Fake-Explanation way?

Sure:

Question: "Where the frak does gravity get its power source?"

Newtonian Answer: "It's not really a source like a battery or a motor. What you're seeing is the changing of energy from one kind to another. The fact that masses [creates a gravitational field] creates a way for the positions of potential energy to be changed into the motions of kinetic energy. ...

GR Answer: "This question is related to a major unsolved problem in general relativity.

Comment author: prase 13 August 2012 04:34:33PM 0 points [-]

Well, yes. That was basically pragmatist's answer to my question which I have accepted.

It is a little bit disturbing since I am forced to give metaphysics more credit that I used to. The possible way out is to limit the testability criterion only to direct logical consequences of beliefs so that it doesn't apply to "psychological" consequences of form "believing X increases likelihood of believing Y (even if there is no logical connection between X and Y)". This might be a good idea but I am not sure where precisely to draw the line between direct and psychological consequences of beliefs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 09:59:18PM 0 points [-]

This might be a good idea but I am not sure where precisely to draw the line between direct and psychological consequences of beliefs.

Why do you care?

Comment author: Decius 13 August 2012 06:20:06PM 0 points [-]

Neither of those are systems of morality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 09:46:31PM 0 points [-]

I never said they were. My point was that the statement you were implying to be extremely unlikely, is in fact valid for non-moral truths.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 06:40:29PM 0 points [-]

Right, and the women who are not mating that day, are available to mate with someone else.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 08:54:36PM 3 points [-]

Yet, somehow that doesn't seem to happen in practice.

Comment author: Unnamed 13 August 2012 01:19:31PM *  4 points [-]

Purity is an unusual foundation, since it can apply at the object level or the meta level. On the object level, people believe things like "don't eat pork because it's unclean" or "don't have premarital sex because it takes away your purity."

On the meta level, moral purity can apply whenever people hold firmly to a principle or policy. Republicans demand ideological purity in opposing all tax increases, and Kant gets accused of valuing his own moral purity more than another person's life for refusing to lie to the murderer at the door. More generally, any misdeed feels "dirty", so moral purity motivates people to avoid breaking any moral rule. This does seem to involve genuine feelings of purity/sanctity/contamination/disgust - witness the the large role of sin and purification in many religions, and the Lady MacBeth effect in the general populace (i.e., college sophomores). Violating a moral rule is a stain on you, which you may or may not be able to cleanse away.

Meta-level purity supplements a moral rule which has other bases. I don't think that moral values against taxes and lies are based primarily on purity, even if there is some purity thinking involved in treating them as sacred values and refusing to compromise or consider tradeoffs. Lady MacBeth may have become obsessed with washing her hands but that does not mean that the (felt) wrongness of murder is due to it being a purity violation.

The principle that the government should not interfere in people's sex lives sounds like another case where purity is operating at the meta level, where the primary foundation is something else. In this case, it's probably foundation #6, liberty/oppression, which is activated particularly strongly for liberals because sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression against women and gay people.

There are other cases where people vehemently want the government to keep its hands off (e.g. guns on the right, abortion on the left), and the common thread seems to be that the individual should have the right to control something and do with it what they want, without outside interference. The purity foundation is recruited to help make these rules absolutist (e.g., people get very suspicious of any regulation that is even loosely related). It may also play some role in determining which particular rules are the ones that became absolutist, but if it is a factor I'd guess that it comes in third (at best), after how close/personal/important the issue is to people (e.g., involving control over your own body or personal protection) and how much of a threat to autonomy there is / has been.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 08:41:32PM 4 points [-]

The principle that the government should not interfere in people's sex lives sounds like another case where purity is operating at the meta level, where the primary foundation is something else. In this case, it's probably foundation #6, liberty/oppression

Then why don't they apply the liberty principal to government regulation in other aspects of their lives?

Comment author: buybuydandavis 13 August 2012 01:57:52AM 3 points [-]

The post seems a long way of saying something I took from Stirner - categorize according to your values, instead of feeling compelled to value according to your categories.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 08:34:26PM 0 points [-]

But then you have to waste computing power carrying around two sets of categories.

Comment author: novalis 12 August 2012 09:10:42PM 0 points [-]

The issue I have in this case is not specifically the threat of violence -- it's the unequal treatment of women. Of course, women are more vulnerable to violence as well, so the two are not entirely disconnected.

Also, of course, it's not really possible (yet?) to have a functioning society in which people don't pay their taxes. It is perfectly possible to have a functioning society in which women are more than mere servants.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 10:16:25PM 3 points [-]

The issue I have in this case is not specifically the threat of violence -- it's the unequal treatment of women

Taxes aren't equal either for example it seems that many politically connected people pay less taxes despite having a higher income then me.

Also, we're you claiming in another thread that an analogous complaint about Islam was the fundamental attribution error?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 07:32:38PM 4 points [-]

I should add that there is no citation on this data; it also doesn't seem to appear in the book (at least, not that I could find via Google Books). A quick glance through Google does not reveal a plausible source for this. So where did he get it from? Probably not via direct observation (how would he have observed these rapes?). He must have heard it from Brazilians. Well, if that's true, then these Brazilian women must know it.

Not necessarily. Or rather they might believe that, yes, some men are dangerous but my current boyfriend is an exception. Humans are remarkably good at this kind of self-deception.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 07:24:04PM 11 points [-]

And, of course, violence against women is endemic. Haidt reports that he "dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen." What does he suppose would have happened if one day one of those women refused to serve, or even, after serving, sat down at the table to join the discussion?

What would happen in a western country if someone say refused to pay their taxes? My point is that the implicit threat of violence underlies all societies so, yes, you can make any society look bad by selectively pointing this out.

Comment author: prase 12 August 2012 05:41:55PM 0 points [-]

One testable consequence of the belief that beliefs should have testable consequences (let's call it T) is that people who believe T will have higher percentage of true beliefs than people who don't. Although this is not much a consequence of T as a more precise reformulation thereof.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 06:30:27PM 2 points [-]

You do realize you can apply that procedure to give any metaphysical belief testable consequences, including the one you were asking about here.

Comment author: pragmatist 12 August 2012 02:02:50AM -2 points [-]

According to the data in your link, 12.9 % of murders of white people were committed by black people. Black people constitute 12.6% of the population. I don't see how this particular data makes it reasonable to advise white children not to help apparently distressed black people, or to believe that 50% of black people will go along with white people being harmed on purely racial grounds, or to believe that black candidates to political office should be scrutinized with more care.

The male-female differential in commission of violent crimes is greater than the black-white differential. Do you really believe that Derbyshire thinks male candidates to political office should be held up to greater scrutiny than female candidates, or that he advises his children not to attend events where there will be a large number of men?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 05:14:19PM 5 points [-]

According to the data in your link, 12.9 % of murders of white people were committed by black people. Black people constitute 12.6% of the population.

Well, whites interact more with follow whites then with blacks.

Let's put it this way. Assuming you live in the US, walk through the nearest black neighborhood at night, every night for about a week. If you aren't willing to do this, why not?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 11 August 2012 11:22:54PM *  -2 points [-]

My approach is not "we should/shouldn't say X" at all. It is, rather, "if we want to learn about people of category Q, we should listen to (and welcome) those people themselves, in preference to people of category P who make conjectures about people of category Q. And people of category Q often don't have much patience for being conjectured about in ways that are not only unflattering, but have long ago been debunked."

For instance, if you want to acquire information about the experiences, psyches, and motives of women, you're better off listening to women rather than listening to misogynistic pick-up artists. If you want to learn about black people, you're better off listening to black people rather than listening to white raci(ali)sts. And so on.

(This is, by the way, part of why I think we shouldn't use religion as a cheap example of irrationality. Religion is a lot more complicated than many skeptics' models of it would suggest.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 August 2012 04:50:40PM 6 points [-]

being conjectured about in ways that are not only unflattering, but have long ago been debunked.

Really, could you direct me to where and when this debunking happened? When I look around I see a lot of evidence for these conjectures and a lot of incoherent arguments against them backed up by claims that it's evil to even consider the possibility that the conjectures are correct.

Comment author: Decius 10 August 2012 11:53:25PM 0 points [-]

On what basis do you make that assertion?

Also, I don't think that 'true' is a correct descriptor for the One Correct Morality. 'Right' is the best word I think we have for what it is.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 09:50:00PM 0 points [-]

Me:

What I meant was that what is true is indeed "a system compatible with a system which developed with competing pressures, and has as a major characteristic that 'people who have this system successfully convince other people to adopt it'".

Decius:

On what basis do you make that assertion?

The two examples of such systems of what is true that I mentioned in the great-gradparent: mathematics and science.

Comment author: novalis 11 August 2012 09:06:21PM 2 points [-]

I actually think it does follow. Understanding what people of different races experience is, apparently, a major cognitive blind spot. For instance, lots of people think that racism was a problem forty years ago, but isn't a problem today. But what did people forty years ago think?

"[I]n mid-August 1969, forty-four percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup National Opinion Survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good paying job--two times as many as said they would have a worse chance?.

Sure,we've probably made progress since then. But if there is still widespread discrimination, would you notice? If you read the recent post from gwern on the psychology of power, you'll notice that this is just another application of a common set of biases.

There is, of course, also the issue of women; someone else brought up Larry Summers. Having women involved makes teams more effective -- that's instrumental rationality right there. And, of course, we have a fair number of philosophical debates here. It's well known that women have different philosophical intuitions than men. I would not be at all surprised to learn that the same is true of people of color. As Jef Raskin notes (in a completely different context), intuitive means familiar. Having had a different set of experiences would, of course, change what is familiar. To the extent that our debates rely on intuition, perhaps without our even noticing it, it's extremely valuable to get a different perspective.

When you link to people like VDARE, you are sending a very strong signal that you would really rather not have people of color here. Nobody likes to be part of a community where their ethnicity or gender is a reason to dismiss them as just not that smart. And this is an especially rough burden on people who are more likely to dissent from the local consensus by reason of their differing intuitions and experiences.

If you really, instrumentally, care about having people of color read Less Wrong, and you really care about coming to the correct conclusions, you ought to do what you can to make this a less unpleasant space to be around. Otherwise, you'll be excluding a bunch of interesting people and missing a bunch of useful data, and you'll never even notice.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 09:42:05PM 6 points [-]

By the same logic, should we stop promoting atheism since it makes religious people uncomfortable, and religious people definitely bring different perspectives?

Comment author: magfrump 11 August 2012 05:37:23PM 0 points [-]

I want to see you do this, but unlike many things that people here are overly concerned about, this idea seems right at the heart of the mind-killing part of politics, so it would probably be best to do it outside of LessWrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 08:04:12PM 6 points [-]

Look at the discussion below this comment. Notice that the people trying to argue the liberal side aren't even bothering to argue that their position is "true", but merely that people should pretend it is for the sake of making people feel good. Call it what you want, it's definitely anti-science.

Comment author: pragmatist 11 August 2012 05:39:47PM *  0 points [-]

I meant what I said about not wanting to continue the conversation, but since you're asking me questions, I'll give you (some) answers. I hope you won't hold it against me if I don't answer further questions, though.

What moral theory are you using to make this judgement?

None. I don't think morality admits of theoretical systematization. I'm sympathetic to moral particularism.

Is someone who believes group X has lower average IQ, for example, then group Y a racist?

No. I believe there are differences in average IQ between racial groups, and I don't consider myself a racist.

Derbyshire's belief in racial IQ differences is not why I think he's a racist. It's things like advising his children not to assist black people in distress, and offering as a reason a single news story about some black people who killed a man who was helping one of them. Or advising his children not to go to an event where there will be a large number of black people, and offering as support a single news story about a shooting at an event with a large number of black people. Or asserting without evidence that 5% of all black people are ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to harm them, and that 50% of blacks will passively go along with this 5%. Or saying that one should scrutinize a black candidate for political office much more carefully than a white candidate. These are all claims he makes in the column that got him fired.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 07:54:31PM 6 points [-]

No. I believe there are differences in average IQ between racial groups, and I don't consider myself a racist.

Well that's a start. What about differences in propensity to commit violent crimes?

Near as I can tell, your complaint about Derbyshire is that he takes the implications of this difference seriously and is willing to openly say so.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 11 August 2012 05:05:47AM *  -1 points [-]

There are tradeoffs between making a place pleasant for various people and the ability to talk about various subjects.

For instance: Making it pleasant for fundamentalist Christians makes it hard to talk about biology, because in order to make fundamentalist Christians comfortable you have to lie about biology. Making it pleasant for white-supremacists probably implies not having any informed conversations about the experiences of nonwhite people, since the nonwhite people are not likely to stick around to defend their very existence against the white-supremacists. Making it pleasant for misogynists pretty much implies not having any conversations with much input from women, at least on topics where sex is relevant; making it pleasant for homophobes means not talking about homosexuality in anything but condemning terms; and so on.

It seems safe to conclude that we already know quite a lot about what various supremacist and hate groups have to say, thanks to those views' significance in history — and that today, we would prefer the input of the much larger and more interesting fraction of humanity that those groups would choose to exclude.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 01:15:34PM *  5 points [-]

Your approach of "we should/shouldn't say X in order to include/exclude certain groups" seems to miss something. Specifically there frequently is a fact of the matter regarding X and that should also be a very important consideration.

Comment author: pragmatist 11 August 2012 08:39:52AM *  6 points [-]

Here is a statement of editorial policy from VDARE:

We've said repeatedly that VDARE.COM is not a White Nationalist webzine—but that we do publish White Nationalists because we regard their focus on white interests as at least as legitimate as Black Nationalism, Hispanic Nationalism, Zionism, etc…and as an inevitable development in the Brave New America created by mass immigration.

Based on this, I don't know if I'd classify VDARE as a hate group, but I would classify it as racist.

The disclaimer I've quoted comes before a piece written by Jared Taylor. VDARE goes on to describe him as "perhaps the most brilliant and accomplished figure among White Nationalists". This is a man who has written elsewhere: "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears. And in a crisis, civilization disappears overnight.” It might be denotationally accurate that he is one of the most brilliant and accomplished White Nationalists, but I don't like the connotations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 12:49:21PM 8 points [-]

It might be denotationally accurate that he is one of the most brilliant and accomplished White Nationalists, but I don't like the connotations.

In that case I recommend you make it possible for people to discuss said denotations without automatically being lumped with said connotations. See Eric Raymound's post on not ceding the truth to racists.

Comment author: pragmatist 11 August 2012 10:18:56AM *  0 points [-]

Can you tell me what the word "racist" means?

I can't give you necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to qualify as a racist, if that's what you're looking for. I can give you a general (although probably not exhaustive) sense of attitudes/beliefs that I would consider indicators of racism, and I can point at examples of people I consider racist. Given your subsequent request for a taboo on the word I'm not sure what purpose this would serve, but I'll do it if you'd like.

Can I in the future expect you to stick to the same usage?

If by this you mean something like "Can I expect you to set down a definition of racism and accept in the future that only people meeting that definition are racist?", then the answer is "no" unfortunately. Like I said, I don't think I can articulate a necessary and sufficient set of criteria for identifying racists. If you're asking if I can be expected not to be disingenuous and slippery in the future, then the answer is "yes", I think.

Can we continue this conversation while holding to a rationalist taboo on "racist"?

Sure. I'm not the one who introduced the word into the discussion. But I'm not sure what this conversation is about, exactly. Would you like me to tell you what I find objectionable about Derbyshire without saying "racist"?

ETA: I'm not sure how advisable it is to continue this conversation, actually. I don't think discussion of this specific point contributes much to the community, and it is the kind of political clutter that people have objected to in the past. The situation seems to be this: I find certain things Derbyshire says morally repugnant and indicative of a culpable prejudice against black people. You (I'm assuming, otherwise this is just a semantic debate about the word "racism") don't. I'm sure you've read the sorts of arguments I would make before and been unconvinced. I'm fairly sure I've read the sorts of argument you would make and been unconvinced. I doubt either of us is going to get anything substantive out of this discussion, and the mind-killing potential is huge. So let's drop it, yes?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 12:37:58PM 5 points [-]

I find certain things Derbyshire says morally repugnant and indicative of a culpable prejudice against black people.

What moral theory are you using to make this judgement? Also what exactly to you mean by "prejudice" and how does it differ from a Beysian prior?

Also since you won't state your definition of racist, let me ask you some questions about it. Is someone who believes group X has lower average IQ, for example, then group Y a racist? Does it matter how much lower? Does it matter if he has evidence? Does it matter if this belief corresponds to reality? Is the person still morally culpable in some/all of the above cases?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 10 August 2012 09:26:08PM 2 points [-]

This was not about low representation being an argument for discrimination, this was about people in a field out and out admitting in huge numbers that they would blatantly discriminate against people hurting their careers because of political affiliation!

If you want to get a job providing safety equipment for workplaces, you should probably not proclaim that you believe that workplaces are too safe. If you want to get a job as a doctor, you should probably not announce yourself as a believer in Christian Science and faith-healing. If you want to get a job as a Friendly AI researcher, you should probably not declare that you believe any AI that has been blessed by the Pope is assuredly friendly.

The common use of "conservatism" today proudly includes positions that are anti-science; as such, it is unsurprising that scientists might consider affiliation with that label to be evidence of incompetence, unseriousness, or opposition to their field. I do not see a need to introduce the hypothesis of "political bias leftward" when it is quite possible that t he scientists doing this so-called "bias" are merely taking the claimed beliefs of conservatives seriously.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 August 2012 12:30:07AM *  11 points [-]

The common use of "conservatism" today proudly includes positions that are anti-science

I could make the same case about "liberalism". The difference being that since liberals have more influence in academia, they can actually force most scientists who disagree with them to keep quiet.

Comment author: MixedNuts 10 August 2012 08:27:23AM 10 points [-]

That's excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.

(This comment brought to you by House Lannister.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2012 11:07:44PM 8 points [-]

This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.

The scary thing is how often it does work in real life. (Except that in real life charm is more than just witty one-liners.

Comment author: Decius 10 August 2012 04:34:51PM -1 points [-]

How? Can mathematics or science know if two moralities are compatible with each other?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2012 10:25:56PM 0 points [-]

What I meant was that what is true is indeed "a system compatible with a system which developed with competing pressures, and has as a major characteristic that 'people who have this system successfully convince other people to adopt it'". Sorry if that was unclear.

Comment author: aelephant 10 August 2012 12:38:53AM 2 points [-]

This makes some sense to me. In many cultures body modification (piercing, tattooing, etc.) are part of "coming of age" rituals. The pain is an essential aspect. It helps to make it a more memorable experience.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2012 01:14:52AM *  3 points [-]

In fact, I suspect the point of the rituals is to demonstrate that you can handle pain and be left with a hard to forge signal of this fact.

Comment author: prase 09 August 2012 11:51:36PM 1 point [-]

Do you want to read about the testable consequences of the belief that beliefs should have testable consequences, or was your question only rhetorical?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2012 12:10:16AM 0 points [-]

Do you want to read about the testable consequences of the belief that beliefs should have testable consequences, or was your question only rhetorical?

Are they similar to this?

Comment author: shminux 09 August 2012 05:20:57AM 0 points [-]

this sort of explanation is very different from the kind that most physicists are pursuing

Probably because it does not have testable consequences?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 August 2012 11:57:58PM 0 points [-]

this sort of explanation is very different from the kind that most physicists are pursuing

Probably because it does not have testable consequences?

Yes it does. For one it predicts that the explanations being pursued by physicists are likely to turn out to be false.

Comment author: Troshen 08 August 2012 11:50:09PM 1 point [-]

Thanks!

I wouldn't be able to answer using Newtonian gravity, I've never seen the theory explained (that I remember). I see more reading in my near future.

I obviously don't understand the words "dissipative force" in the same way you do. I thought I had that part down too. I thought it means that the energy you are concerned about is getting changed into energy not useful to you, like "waste" heat. So then friction would be dissipative. Please point me in a direction to learn more.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 August 2012 11:41:21PM 0 points [-]

I wouldn't be able to answer using Newtonian gravity, I've never seen the theory explained (that I remember). I see more reading in my near future.

Then what makes you think you know enough to use GR for anything besides a fake explanation?

Comment author: prase 08 August 2012 10:42:51PM 0 points [-]

I know that post and don't think it invalidates my point. Its main point is that for a proposition to be meaningful it is not necessary that it can be verified directly, but it is often sufficient if the proposition is part of a logically coherent theory that is tested as a whole. This is not in conflict with the demand on difference in anticipated experiences from different beliefs: the hypothesis that a cheesecake materialised in the centre of the Sun may not be falsified by direct observation, but still is incompatible with the picture of the world dictated by perfectly testable and verified physical theories.

As a side note, the linked post has been criticised as strawmanning logical positivism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 August 2012 11:31:32PM 0 points [-]

I know that post and don't think it invalidates my point. Its main point is that for a proposition to be meaningful it is not necessary that it can be verified directly, but it is often sufficient if the proposition is part of a logically coherent theory that is tested as a whole.

So what testable logically coherent theory is your main point a part of?

Comment author: Decius 08 August 2012 08:28:31PM 0 points [-]

Now all you need is a system that you believe cannot prove anything which is false. It isn't permitted to be that way by definition, and it needs to be able to prove a significant number of things.

The first step to finding that system is being able to tell if many moral statements are false, without referencing our morality. Unless we create a morality oracle, I don't see a way to do that.

Start by considering the class of statements "In situation S, it is immoral to take an action in set A" and their complementary sets "In situation S, it is immoral to refrain from all actions in set A". If immorality is always avoidable, then one of those two statements is false, and any system which can prove both of them is therefore excluded.

What are the odds that what is 'right-right' will be a system compatible with a system which developed with competing pressures, and has as a major characteristic that 'people who have this system successfully convince other people to adopt it'?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 August 2012 11:26:18PM 0 points [-]

What are the odds that what is 'right-right' will be a system compatible with a system which developed with competing pressures, and has as a major characteristic that 'people who have this system successfully convince other people to adopt it'?

Well, this is the case for mathematics and science.

Comment author: Pentashagon 07 August 2012 06:49:45PM 0 points [-]

There are two ways I can see your argument going.

  • Physical laws are descriptions of a universe that has its own (potentially inaccessible to us) rules.
  • Physical laws are descriptions of a universe that has no rules at all.

In the first case either we can write down the actual rules of the universe inside the universe, or we cannot. Whether the rules can be expressed within the universe as correct natural laws depends on its nature. Given that the rules of a system as simple as arithmetic can be fully described within the system and can be used to prove facts about its nature I think it's at least plausible that we could express the actual rules of the universe within the universe, which would demonstrate a counterexample to your argument. If we cannot express the actual rules of the universe then your argument is correct and only approximate descriptions of the rules can be created and we should use descriptive natural laws with the most benefit for a particular purpose. Amusingly, if the actual rules of the universe are inaccessible then there is no way to rule out immaterial souls or other supernatural phenomena. The inaccessible rules may or may not allow the supernatural, and we will never know.

In the second case our universe happens to exist as if it had rules entirely by chance. Perhaps there are an infinite number of universes where every possible configuration exists and so we (as finite decision theory machines) only experience the universes that appear to have rules. Or perhaps we exist as fleeting instants of time across a sea of an infinite number of universes, our memories and experiences linked only by the similarity between different random patches of universes.

There are a few inferences we can make about how we should be rational depending on which case we think we're in. In the first case we should believe in induction, e.g. the universe probably has mostly-constant rules we can rely on in the future. In the second case one might think induction is invalid and we should have no expectation that the universe will exist or be meaningful in the future, but actually our very existence depends on rule-like formations of the universe existing. We will experience a future instant whenever a random portion of a universe matches what we would expect the rules to predict. A universe that happens to get all the atoms lined up just right to produce an instant of our planet's history will, by definition, line up the atoms very closely to what our current natural laws predict a universe with rules would do. If enough atoms were out of place we would not exist or experience anything. In this sense the natural laws we know would not control the behavior of the universe so much as they controlled (or defined) our continued existence, so behaving as if natural laws existed would still be rational.

There are philosophical theories, modal realism, and mathematical realism, that propose any set of natural laws and initial conditions describe and cause an independent reality, or alternatively stated that any possible universe or world independently exists in reality. The difference (if any) between the class of possible universes and the class of universes defined by natural laws and initial conditions would be the class of universes without rules. The obvious problem is that "possible" is such a nebulous term that it's hard to know what it means. Maybe it means universes that cannot be described with ZFC set theory would qualify as possible universes without rules, or maybe it means that ZFC is insufficient to categorize all possible rules (the latter is more likely, in my opinion).

Intuitively I think we are in a universe that can be fully described using ZFC, since it seems to work so well for modeling what we can experience so far. The question is whether we can derive that full description sometime before the heat death.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 August 2012 12:40:55AM 2 points [-]

Amusingly, if the actual rules of the universe are inaccessible then there is no way to rule out immaterial souls or other supernatural phenomena. The inaccessible rules may or may not allow the supernatural, and we will never know.

This is also true even if the actual rules of the universe are accessible since we can never be sure that this is in fact the case or that the rules we have are the fundamental ones.

Comment author: prase 07 August 2012 08:44:05PM 3 points [-]

What is, actually, the difference between laws as rules and laws as descriptions of regularity, except the choice of language? There is in fact a pretty strong LW consensus that beliefs should be distinguishable from each other by different anticipated experiences; I am not sure whether nomic and mereological reductionism predict different observations.

(I agree with the gist of the post, in the sense that it is more elegant to view physical laws as descriptions of regularities in observed universe, rather than rules that push matter around.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 August 2012 12:20:25AM 0 points [-]

There is in fact a pretty strong LW consensus that beliefs should be distinguishable from each other by different anticipated experiences

Not really.

Comment author: mwengler 06 August 2012 09:06:24PM *  0 points [-]

Health insurance would be an insurance policy on your health - if your health declines, they pay out based on that.

I have auto insurance. My car is worth much less now than when I originally insured it, 7 years ago. My auto insurance does not cover that change.

I have home insurance. The value of my home declined by many 100s of thousands of dollars in 2008. My home insurance did not cover that change.

Isn't there some relevant Eliezer sequence I should be citing on how defining things to mean things different from what they mean to virtually everyone else who might be in the discussion is suboptimal?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 August 2012 11:38:18PM -1 points [-]

Isn't there some relevant Eliezer sequence I should be citing on how defining things to mean things different from what they mean to virtually everyone else who might be in the discussion is suboptimal?

Well here is an Eliezer post arguing that using misleading labels is suboptimal even if everyone else is using them.

Comment author: mfb 04 August 2012 10:10:36PM *  0 points [-]

If you can scan it, maybe you can simulate it? And if you can simulate one, wait some years and you can simulate 1000, probably connected in some way to form a single "thinking system".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 August 2012 06:07:26PM 2 points [-]

But not on your own brain.

Comment author: VKS 03 August 2012 10:15:17PM *  0 points [-]

Certainly. I am suggesting that over sufficiently short timescales, though, you can deduce the previous structure from the current one. Maybe I should have said "epsilon" instead of "two words".

Surely there's been at least a little degradation in the space of two words, or we'd never forget anything.

Why would you expect the degradation to be completely uniform? It seems more reasonable to suspect that, given a sufficiently small timescale, the brain will sometimes be forgetting things and sometimes not, in a way that probably isn't synchronized with its learning of new things.

So, depending on your choice of two words, sometimes the brain would take marginally more bits to describe and sometimes marginally fewer.

Actually, so long as the brain can be considered as operating independently from the outside world (which, given an appropriately chosen small interval of time, makes some amount of sense), a complete description at time t will imply a complete description at time t + δ. The information required to describe the first brain therefore describes the second one too.

So I've made another error: I should have said that my brain contains a lossless copy of itself and itself two words later. (where "two words" = "epsilon")

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 August 2012 08:17:57PM 0 points [-]

It seems more reasonable to suspect that, given a sufficiently small timescale, the brain will sometimes be forgetting things and sometimes not, in a way that probably isn't synchronized with its learning of new things.

See the pigeon-hole argument in the original quote.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 04 August 2012 04:48:47PM 7 points [-]

If pro-lifers were more pragmatic, they would (...) Therefore, they should (...)

When discussing our opponents, it is easy to suggest that they should maximize their immediate utility. When discussing ourselves, it is easier to notice that maximizing immediate utility could have various negative long-term consequences.

Maybe there are good game-theoretic reasons why pro-lifers should oppose what you suggest. For example, ranking one's values from least-bad to worst (and making the ranking generally known) could be a bad signalling move, if you really want to achieve them all in long run.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 August 2012 07:58:49PM *  8 points [-]

A related outside view observation: Whenever a Green attempts to give the Blues tactical advise, no matter how well-meaning, the advise always seems to boil down to compromising on at least half the Blue positions.

Comment author: faul_sname 03 August 2012 05:58:28PM 1 point [-]

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

This seems ridiculously low. That's an average of less than one minute per person worldwide.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 08:15:33PM 2 points [-]

Most people don't contribute to Wikipedia.

Comment author: mwengler 03 August 2012 03:28:27PM 0 points [-]

Ah! If you mean "giving poor people more opportunities, thus leading to better use of human capital, increasing everyone's living standards,"

Thank you for figuring out what I was thinking! One of my many problems in any discussion is I can't figure out which things I need to state because there are other interpretations and which things I can leave unstated because everyone will quickly read it the same way.

This is the one I mean. I am fascinated by the progress human kind has made so far. I am interested in bringing that to new levels, and one way to do that is to use the pool of human resources we have ever more efficiently. Getting rid of arbitrary limits on what women or black people were allowed to do has been a great help in that goal. Avoiding a debilitating stratification may also be important.

do you have anything in mind when you refer to things that are better than, say, a public education system at providing poor people new opportunities?

Having raised kids, it seems unlikely to me that institutionalized public education for a nominal 6 hours a day (two hours work in 6 hours?) is all that need be done. Meanwhile, we observe that the more money a family has, the more they spend on advantages for their children. So while inexpensive or free public education is one good approach, another is just making poor families relatively richer generally. Which is most efficient? That is a discussion I think we should have, and i don't think the answer is trivial, or that there is even necessarily only one "correct" answer. But the ideal that "we should all get to keep all the money we make, and spend it only on our children if we want" is a point I disagree with, and what I wanted to argue against in my OP.
The captains of industry are generally from families that have given their children EVERY advantage. Of course it may be far from optimum to try to get to equality of

So yes, education is a great component of the kind of redistribution that I want. I suspect a more intact family doing more "enriching" activities together, not living in relative squalor, being able to teach "healthy choices" because price is not the only consideration when acquiring food, these may make generally redistributive policies efficient. Add to that our clear knowledge that marginal utility of dollars declines as you get more dollars, and we have a straightforward reason to choose progressive taxation to fund these things. (Note progressive income tax is not the only way to tax progressively, and income tax would not be my first choice of taxing, but that is another discussion).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 08:08:31PM 4 points [-]

With respect to education, in this essay about inequality (seriously read that whole thing) Paul Graham makes the point that improving access to education doesn't actually decrease inequality since while to makes the poor richer, it also makes the rich richer.

There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from the rich. You could help the poor become more productive-- for example, by improving access to education. Instead of taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks, you could enable people who would have become checkout clerks to become engineers.

This is an excellent strategy for making the poor richer. But the evidence of the last 200 years shows that it doesn't reduce economic inequality, because it makes the rich richer too. If there are more engineers, then there are more opportunities to hire them and to sell them things. Henry Ford couldn't have made a fortune building cars in a society in which most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers.

If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever.

Comment author: mwengler 03 August 2012 03:11:52PM 2 points [-]

If on the other hand you think of redistributing income as a sub-goal of increasing everyone's living standards, say, then this statement is highly dubious.

It is well established that the marginal utility of a dollar is higher for poor people than for rich people, so in the short-term, net utility is trivially increased by redistribution even though not everyone's utility is increased. Tossing out all net improvement because some people lose a small amount to support large gains elsewhere seems like poor policy to me.

But I am interested in the longer term, not the shorter term. In the long term, arguing against redistribution is the concern that productive people will be disincentivized to use their talents as much if they can't accumulate more compared to a non-redistributionist scenario. Arguing for redistribution is a concern that the more unequal a society, the less basic cohesion there is with multiple bad long term results: 1) the more force (police, eavesdropping, limitations on political expression) must be used, 2) reduced input into the education of the poorer classes, resulting in less talent developed at higher expense within the society as a whole.

The 2nd point is a little subtle. People tend to sort themselves into what they are good at. If all N people in my society have access to education, I'll have a reasonably close to optimum self-sorting of people into jobs that they are talented at. If instead my society has stratified, and only 10% of families have the resources to educate their children to be doctors, lawyers, and indian chiefs, and the rest wander the streets selling chewing gum to passing tourists and mowing lawns, then I the most productive cadre of my society will be reduced in efficiency since it is drawing its talent from only one-tenth the human resources it would have drawn from in a more equal society.

So my reason for supporting redistribution is to keep the talent pool large so we don't pay an excess in training costs for a more mediocre top layer in our society.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:52:20PM 2 points [-]

In the long term, arguing against redistribution is the concern that productive people will be disincentivized to use their talents as much if they can't accumulate more compared to a non-redistributionist scenario.

Another argument is that in capitalist societies, someone who made a lot of money probably made it by making products people want, thus increasing general utility. This suggests that he is particularly good at figuring out how to spend money to increase utility, likely better at it then both the redistributers and whoever they're redistributing the money to.

Comment author: mwengler 03 August 2012 03:11:52PM 2 points [-]

If on the other hand you think of redistributing income as a sub-goal of increasing everyone's living standards, say, then this statement is highly dubious.

It is well established that the marginal utility of a dollar is higher for poor people than for rich people, so in the short-term, net utility is trivially increased by redistribution even though not everyone's utility is increased. Tossing out all net improvement because some people lose a small amount to support large gains elsewhere seems like poor policy to me.

But I am interested in the longer term, not the shorter term. In the long term, arguing against redistribution is the concern that productive people will be disincentivized to use their talents as much if they can't accumulate more compared to a non-redistributionist scenario. Arguing for redistribution is a concern that the more unequal a society, the less basic cohesion there is with multiple bad long term results: 1) the more force (police, eavesdropping, limitations on political expression) must be used, 2) reduced input into the education of the poorer classes, resulting in less talent developed at higher expense within the society as a whole.

The 2nd point is a little subtle. People tend to sort themselves into what they are good at. If all N people in my society have access to education, I'll have a reasonably close to optimum self-sorting of people into jobs that they are talented at. If instead my society has stratified, and only 10% of families have the resources to educate their children to be doctors, lawyers, and indian chiefs, and the rest wander the streets selling chewing gum to passing tourists and mowing lawns, then I the most productive cadre of my society will be reduced in efficiency since it is drawing its talent from only one-tenth the human resources it would have drawn from in a more equal society.

So my reason for supporting redistribution is to keep the talent pool large so we don't pay an excess in training costs for a more mediocre top layer in our society.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:46:57PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure if this is the best place in this thread to say this, but here goes:

In several of the calculations throughout this thread you seem to be assuming that the redistributers themselves are completely efficient and incorruptible.

Comment author: pragmatist 03 August 2012 08:53:39AM *  2 points [-]

Thanks, I'll read through that speech when I have the time. The example you quote doesn't seem to be an instance of the law, though. The Office of the Surgeon General and the Dept. of Agriculture aren't run by the same people, so the fact that they support conflicting policies isn't really evidence that the people running them aren't working for the goals for their respective organizations. The organizations might just have conflicting goals. It's also unclear to me how the two examples on Pournelle's blog (especially the second) are good evidence for the law. Pournelle seems to be interpreting the law to mean something like "Bureaucracies do wasteful and counterproductive things", but that's not what the law says.

More broadly though, Pournelle's law seems to assume that working to further the goals of the organization and working for the organization itself are always incompatible. That's plausible in the example he gave, involving education, but I don't think it's generally true. Often a very effective way to further the goals of a bureaucratic organization is to bolster the political clout and prestige of the organization itself.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:35:43PM *  1 point [-]

The Office of the Surgeon General and the Dept. of Agriculture aren't run by the same people,

Depending on how far up the chain you go. Also FiftyTwo was trying to argue that the people providing health services will include future tax revenue in the set of things they seek to maximize.

Often a very effective way to further the goals of a bureaucratic organization is to bolster the political clout and prestige of the organization itself.

True, assuming you ever actually get around to furthering your goals. Unfortunately, if you optimize your organization too much for obtaining political clout and prestige it will be hard to shift to accomplishing your goals.

Comment author: mwengler 03 August 2012 03:28:27PM 0 points [-]

Ah! If you mean "giving poor people more opportunities, thus leading to better use of human capital, increasing everyone's living standards,"

Thank you for figuring out what I was thinking! One of my many problems in any discussion is I can't figure out which things I need to state because there are other interpretations and which things I can leave unstated because everyone will quickly read it the same way.

This is the one I mean. I am fascinated by the progress human kind has made so far. I am interested in bringing that to new levels, and one way to do that is to use the pool of human resources we have ever more efficiently. Getting rid of arbitrary limits on what women or black people were allowed to do has been a great help in that goal. Avoiding a debilitating stratification may also be important.

do you have anything in mind when you refer to things that are better than, say, a public education system at providing poor people new opportunities?

Having raised kids, it seems unlikely to me that institutionalized public education for a nominal 6 hours a day (two hours work in 6 hours?) is all that need be done. Meanwhile, we observe that the more money a family has, the more they spend on advantages for their children. So while inexpensive or free public education is one good approach, another is just making poor families relatively richer generally. Which is most efficient? That is a discussion I think we should have, and i don't think the answer is trivial, or that there is even necessarily only one "correct" answer. But the ideal that "we should all get to keep all the money we make, and spend it only on our children if we want" is a point I disagree with, and what I wanted to argue against in my OP.
The captains of industry are generally from families that have given their children EVERY advantage. Of course it may be far from optimum to try to get to equality of

So yes, education is a great component of the kind of redistribution that I want. I suspect a more intact family doing more "enriching" activities together, not living in relative squalor, being able to teach "healthy choices" because price is not the only consideration when acquiring food, these may make generally redistributive policies efficient. Add to that our clear knowledge that marginal utility of dollars declines as you get more dollars, and we have a straightforward reason to choose progressive taxation to fund these things. (Note progressive income tax is not the only way to tax progressively, and income tax would not be my first choice of taxing, but that is another discussion).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:26:41PM *  1 point [-]

The captains of industry are generally from families that have given their children EVERY advantage.

Um, Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie.

Comment author: Manfred 03 August 2012 12:27:57PM 0 points [-]

Well, that depends on what you mean by "increasing everyone's living standards." If you mean "people have square-root-shaped utility of money, so moving money from rich people to poor people increases total utility," then all that really matters is the redistribution. If you mean "by increasing economic activity, since poor people have lower rates of saving, thus creating more wealth," then... no, wait, the redistribution is still pretty much what matters.

Ah! If you mean "giving poor people more opportunities, thus leading to better use of human capital, increasing everyone's living standards," then you want to give the most help to the poor people who are going to take new opportunities based on more wealth. The question is then, do you have anything in mind when you refer to things that are better than, say, a public education system at providing poor people new opportunities?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:20:49PM 1 point [-]

If you mean "by increasing economic activity, since poor people have lower rates of saving, thus creating more wealth," then... no, wait, the redistribution is still pretty much what matters.

This appears to be a complete non sequitur. But, yes I do mean "increase the amount of wealth being produced". Which as mwengler points out people have less motivation to create wealth if its going to be redistributed away.

The question is then, do you have anything in mind when you refer to things that are better than, say, a public education system at providing poor people new opportunities?

Well, here in the US the public education system pretty much sucks.

Comment author: faul_sname 03 August 2012 05:56:33PM 0 points [-]

If LW-rationality goes mainstream, it's followers will then be drawn from the same distribution.

I find it unlikely that we'll have to opportunity to observe this.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:04:29PM 1 point [-]

I think it's plausible that LW-rationality, or rather a third hand version of it, will go mainstream.

Comment author: Pentashagon 03 August 2012 01:19:54AM *  0 points [-]

Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store MN utilities. Clearly humans can't consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive. A centralized world economy could keep track of individual price-preferences of all products that have a UPC assigned using about 7x10^19 prices, or a little over 10 exabytes. Difficult, but not intractable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:03:04PM 0 points [-]

Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store M*N utilities. Clearly humans can't consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive.

Assuming the other humans aren't similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.

Comment author: Incorrect 02 August 2012 11:13:29PM 27 points [-]

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

-- Oscar Wilde

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 11:44:18PM 6 points [-]
Comment author: bramflakes 02 August 2012 10:45:16PM 6 points [-]

What about compression?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 11:42:23PM 5 points [-]

Do you mean lossy or lossless compression? If you mean lossy compression then that is precisely Szabo's point.

On the other hand, if you mean lossless, then if you had some way to losslessly compress a brain, this would only work if you were the only one with this compression scheme, since otherwise other people would apply it to their own brains and use the freed space to store more information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 09:05:32PM 7 points [-]

Not only should you disagree with others, but you should disagree with yourself. Totalitarian thought asks us to consider, much less accept, only one hypothesis at a time. By contrast quantum thought, as I call it -- although it already has a traditional name less recognizable to the modern ear, scholastic thought -- demands that we simultaneoulsy consider often mutually contradictory possibilities. Thinking about and presenting only one side's arguments gives one's thought and prose a false patina of consistency: a fallacy of thought and communications similar to false precision, but much more common and imporant. Like false precision, it can be a mental mistake or a misleading rhetorical habit. In quantum reality, by contrast, I can be both for and against a proposition because I am entertaining at least two significantly possible but inconsistent hypotheses, or because I favor some parts of a set of ideas and not others. If you are unable or unwilling to think in such a quantum or scholastic manner, it is much less likely that your thoughts are worthy of others' consideration.

-- Nick Szabo

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 09:04:20PM 8 points [-]

[M]uch mistaken thinking about society could be eliminated by the most straightforward application of the pigeonhole principle: you can't fit more pigeons into your pigeon coop than you have holes to put them in. Even if you were telepathic, you could not learn all of what is going on in everybody's head because there is no room to fit all that information in yours. If I could completely scan 1,000 brains and had some machine to copy the contents of those into mine, I could only learn at most about a thousandth of the information stored in those brains, and then only at the cost of forgetting all else I had known. That's a theoretical optimum; any such real-world transfer process, such as reading and writing an e-mail or a book, or tutoring, or using or influencing a market price, will pick up only a small fraction of even the theoretically acquirable knowledge or preferences in the mind(s) at the other end of said process, or if you prefer of the information stored by those brain(s). Of course, one can argue that some kinds of knowledge -- like the kinds you and I know? -- are vastly more important than others, but such a claim is usually more snobbery than fact. Furthermore, a society with more such computational and mental diversity is more productive, because specialized algorithms, mental processes, and skills are generally far more productive than generalized ones. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out, our mutual inability to understand a very high fraction of what others know has profound implications for our economic and political institutions.

-- Nick Szabo

Comment author: Pentashagon 01 August 2012 11:26:18PM 1 point [-]

Wouldn't a working theory of utilitarianism "solve" the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including "live forever" and "be free of pain and suffering") what everyone's utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.

The problem is that people produce artificial prices and utility values that don't reflect reality or their true preferences. Fixing that problem can only be done with more rationality, I think.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 08:52:29PM 0 points [-]

Wouldn't a working theory of utilitarianism "solve" the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including "live forever" and "be free of pain and suffering") what everyone's utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.

That runs into pigeon hole problems, even in theory.

Comment author: pragmatist 02 August 2012 01:17:28AM 5 points [-]

Or as Jerry Pournelle put it in his iron law of buerocracy

Why should I believe this is a law? Could you give me a theoretical or empirical argument supporting its universal validity?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 08:46:33PM 1 point [-]

Theoretical argument: Those who spend time working on the actual goals of the organization, have less time to spend on the political and signaling games over who gets into positions of power.

Also, here are two examples from Pournelle's blog: 1 2. And one of my favorite examples comes form this TJ Rogers speech, (also seriously read the whole thing).

Now think for a moment about something less complex: the* tobacco leaf*. Today, the U.S. government spends tens of millions of dollars through the Office of the Surgeon General to warn Americans about the dangers of smoking. At the same time, through loan guarantees and occasional direct grants from the Department of Agriculture, it has spent tens of millions of dollars to subsidize tobacco farmers.

Comment author: mwengler 02 August 2012 02:27:16PM 1 point [-]

All functioning societies have mechanisms for reducing income inequality. Therefore the only real questions are: 1) what are our preferred mechanisms and 2) how much redistribution is optimum.

Popular choices of mechanisms are non-government charity, tax policies (ranging from progressive income tax to no sales tax on food and clothing), welfare, and public education.

Popular choices of the optimum amount of redistribution are harder to characterize.

My particular political statement here: the government is uniquely efficient (potentially) at redistributing income. So arguments over WHETHER it should do so are answered "yes it should" and arguments over which ways are better, which ways are worse, and how much is too much, and how much is not enough are engaged in with gusto.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 08:17:13PM 2 points [-]

My particular political statement here: the government is uniquely efficient (potentially) at redistributing income.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "efficient", if you only care about how much gets distributed and not to from whom or to whom then it is certainly most efficient. If on the other hand you think of redistributing income as a sub-goal of increasing everyone's living standards, say, then this statement is highly dubious.

Comment author: pragmatist 02 August 2012 01:00:37AM *  4 points [-]

The examples FiftyTwo provided -- clean water and roads -- aren't public goods either. In a sufficiently populated economy, they are rivalrous. They are usually classified as common goods, non-excludable and rivalrous.

Why are they regarded as non-excludable though? Both roads and clean water could be delivered as private goods. Toll roads demonstrate that roads can in fact be excludable. The Cochabamba water war would not have happened if clean water were non-excludable by its very nature. Non-excludability is not an intrinsic property of these goods. Providing these goods in a non-excludable manner is a social decision. We (or at least most of us) think it's important enough that people not be denied access to (certain) roads and clean water on the basis of their economic status that we are willing to tolerate some inefficiency in their provision.

So whether or not a good is a public good is not a great basis for deciding how that good should be provided, because whether or not a good is a public (or common) good is often a consequence of decisions about how it should be provided [1]. The way healthcare is provided in the US right now, it is both excludable and rivalrous. If we lived in a country with government-funded universal health care, healthcare would be non-excludable but still rivalrous, just like roads in the US.

Appealing to the excludability of health care in the status quo in order to distinguish it from roads and water isn't a great argument for treating health care differently. Of course, you may have independent reasons to think health care should be provided in an excludable manner while roads should be provided in a non-excludable manner. But the mere fact that these goods are actually provided in these ways is not an argument for the claim that they should be provided in these ways.

[1] There are certain public goods -- pure public goods -- which cannot possibly be provided in an excludable manner, at least not with currently available technology. Examples are streetlights and flood control. What I say here doesn't apply to those goods, of course. But roads and clean water are not pure public goods.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 08:01:19PM 0 points [-]

Yes, there's certainly something to be said for having water not be a government monopoly.

Comment author: lavalamp 02 August 2012 12:42:34AM 3 points [-]

What planet do you live on?

This is never a convincing argument...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 07:58:47PM 1 point [-]

Neither is the raw assertion it was responding to.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 August 2012 11:12:51PM 3 points [-]

General infrastructure planning tends to be decided on long term efficiency as its not a day to day political issue.

What planet do you live on?

I'm remembering why we avoid political discussions. Questioning my credibility is not a counter argument.

At its most simple organisations with a set of goals they have to achieve and which know their budget in the future will tend to minimise the cost at which they achieve those goals, so they can either save that money for the future or spend it on secondary goals. Additionally goals can be set on the basis of improvements in efficiency etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 11:27:13PM 1 point [-]

At its most simple organisations with a set of goals they have to achieve and which know their budget in the future will tend to minimise the cost at which they achieve those goals, so they can either save that money for the future or spend it on secondary goals.

Unfortunately, the goals of the organization do not necessarily align with the goals of the people running the organization, and the larger the organization, the worse this problem becomes.

Or as Jerry Pournelle put it in his iron law of buerocracy

in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 August 2012 10:54:52PM *  0 points [-]

That requires argument

Raikoth/Yvain argues it better than I can

Notice that the standard argument for water and roads doesn't apply to healthcare.

Which arguments do you mean? The obvious ones to me are economies of scale, limited resources and price control which seems to apply.

Could you clarify, are you arguing free market is always superior to state action, or that it sometimes is and sometimes isn't but healthcare isn't one of the latter cases?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 11:09:25PM 3 points [-]

The obvious ones to me are economies of scale, limited resources

The former is almost always true and the later is always true, so is your claim that all industries are natural monopolies?

I mean that healthcare is not a public good in the sense that it is both excludable and rivalrous.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 August 2012 10:36:38PM *  0 points [-]

1) the same argument applies to private insurance companies.

My understanding is that US insurance companies pay for some treatments but not others depending on the cost of the insurance?

2) governments try to maximize votes in the next election which really isn't conducive to long term planning.

True. The times where this would be relevant tend to be questions of "should we treat illness X", often 'photogenic' illnesses get disproportionately treated (e.g. breast cancer). But I would imagine similar issues exist in terms of customer demand and legislators forcing insurers to pay for treatments (which you mentioned above). Also, given the choice between a mild bias to popularity and a heavy one to wealth in spending distribution I thought have thought the former would have better outcomes.

General infrastructure planning tends to be decided on long term efficiency as its not a day to day political issue.

3) There's still the perverse incentive to encourage people to die in cheap ways.

Possibly, but the dead don't tend to pay taxes, I would imagine other than in the very last stages of life a living citizen is more valuable than a dead one.

Interestingly the NHS spends a lot of money on people in the final stages of their lives, while they could save a lot money by legalising or enforcing euthanasia, so that seems a counterexample.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 10:58:22PM -2 points [-]

General infrastructure planning tends to be decided on long term efficiency as its not a day to day political issue.

What planet do you live on?

Possibly, but the dead don't tend to pay taxes,

Neither do retirees. Furthermore, anyone with a chronic illness, or anyone who isn't rich for that matter, is a net drain on finances. But this analysis implicitly assumes that governments are run to maximize revenue which is blatantly false, at best some department might have a fixed budget and might try to figure out how to spend it to maximize some metric.

Interestingly the NHS spends a lot of money on people in the final stages of their lives, while they could save a lot money by legalising or enforcing euthanasia

Being that explicit about it would loose them votes; however, at the margin such things do happen.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 August 2012 10:17:45PM 0 points [-]

In general private enterprise does a lot better than the government.

Does it? Thats a pretty broad statement, and even if it does in general that doesn't mean it does in particular cases. The obvious counterexamples are natural monopolies, e.g. water, roads and I would argue healthcare.

It's not like government healthcare has very direct incentives,

The main incentives are voter pressure for better healthcare and the cost of various infrastructure and treatments. As the public generally demands healthcare be at least as good as it has been before, if not better, there is an incentive to be efficient in allocating cost to healthcare.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 10:42:02PM 2 points [-]

The obvious counterexamples are natural monopolies, e.g. water, roads and I would argue healthcare.

That requires argument. Notice that the standard argument for water and roads doesn't apply to healthcare.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 August 2012 10:26:55PM *  -1 points [-]

Working with your example: If we assume the government health service is behaving in its own self interest, why would it spend money on test that it knew not to be cost effective? Whereas if the incentives are split between a Dr ordering a test and an insurance company paying for one wouldn't they disproportionately order tests?

More generally, even if its true for particular testing procedures theres lots of low hanging fruit for intervention before things get severe. The most obvious examples would be schemes to get people to stop smoking or lose weight, that the government provides freely because they are less expensive than the projected cost of the illnesses that would arise without such intervention. Also the ability to see a general practitioner more regularly than if you paid per visit means symptoms can be picked up earlier (e.g. if someone has a mild symptom but has to pay to get it checked they are disincentivised to get it checked until it becomes severe.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 10:38:41PM 0 points [-]

If we assume the government health service is behaving in its own self interest,

Given they way other government services tend to behave this is highly dubious.

The most obvious examples would be schemes to get people to stop smoking or lose weight, that the government provides freely because they are less expensive than the projected cost of the illnesses that would arise without such intervention.

The problem is that the way these kinds of schemes tend to work in practice has a lot more to do with whatever the currently fashionable moral panic is than any rational analysis.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 01 August 2012 09:56:49PM *  6 points [-]

The "preventative care saves money" meme is incorrect AFAIK. People massively over-consume expensive tests which check for conditions with extremely low base-rates of occurrence in the population.

example: "Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in ten of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.

That’s a hypothetical case. What’s the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, “if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success,” the prevention would cost almost ten times as much as the savings, increasing the country’s total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 10:22:37PM 1 point [-]

What’s the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, “if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success,” the prevention would cost almost ten times as much as the savings, increasing the country’s total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs."

A number of people, myself included, find it suspicious that after years of advocating preventative medicine, a bunch of studies against it are coming out just after Obamacare was passed.

Prediction: If Obamacare gets repealed these studies will be refuted by subsequent studies, whereas if it stays on the books, these studies will become the baseline of a new consensus.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 August 2012 03:54:00PM 2 points [-]

Government controlled healthcare is generally superior to private systems. *

Argument: The incentives of a government body that knows it will have to pay for the costs of future healthcare is radically different from private companies. They are more likely to take preventative measures to prevent future harms to a patient rather than waiting until the point where a condition is considered serious enough to be covered by insurance or bring people to an emergency room. They have incentives to make procedures cheaper and more efficient, and they also lack the perverse incentives to increase number and cost of procedures in order to maximise profit.

*[I'm basing this on knowledge of the UK system (free to all at the point of delivery, paid for by taxes, private healthcare/insurance can also be bought as a supplement.) I don't know enough about alternatives such as individual mandate to comment helpfully on them.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 August 2012 08:42:03PM 4 points [-]

Argument: The incentives of a government body that knows it will have to pay for the costs of future healthcare is radically different from private companies. They are more likely to take preventative measures to prevent future harms to a patient rather than waiting until the point where a condition is considered serious enough to be covered by insurance or bring people to an emergency room. They have incentives to make procedures cheaper and more efficient, and they also lack the perverse incentives to increase number and cost of procedures in order to maximise profit.

Problems:

1) the same argument applies to private insurance companies.

2) governments try to maximize votes in the next election which really isn't conducive to long term planning.

3) There's still the perverse incentive to encourage people to die in cheap ways.

Comment author: matabele 29 July 2012 03:41:33PM *  -2 points [-]

... Expected payoff is low in this tangent ...

Expected payoff for whom?

I am new to this forum; as far as I remember I came here via the QM sequence. I was immediately impressed by the material, and became interested in other sequences (I have a long term interest in rationality, and especially general semantics.)

In order to acquaint myself with the general gist of the forums, I made a couple of innocuous posts on this thread; to which I received this response:

... I mean it is bullshit.

I have a natural aversion to narcissistic types, and my hackles were immediately alerted. After one or two more pokes, I was on full alert.

Do you consider yourself to be a moderator of this forum? If so, why are you both moderating and rating comments? If not, why do you think your opinions are privileged?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 July 2012 07:52:20PM 4 points [-]

Expected payoff for whom?

In terms of expected utility.

I am new to this forum; as far as I remember I came here via the QM sequence. I was immediately impressed by the material, and became interested in other sequences (I have a long term interest in rationality, and especially general semantics.)

The QM sequence is most definitely not representative of either the sequences or the other material here.

Do you consider yourself to be a moderator of this forum? If so, why are you both moderating and rating comments? If not, why do you think your opinions are privileged?

I don't know what kind of forums you're used to, but on LW non-moderators are allowed to criticize other comments and everyone is allowed to vote on them.

Also one piece of advise, you may want to avoid comments like this one that are so full of jargon that nobody can tell what you're saying, but seem vaguely insulting.

Comment author: matabele 29 July 2012 08:17:11AM *  0 points [-]

I am new to LW, and I don't get it; this is supposed to be a forum promoting rationality, and anyone who dissed this comment appears to be behaving re-actively.

Any rational justifications as to why anyone would respond to the above comment are welcomed, and may be appended below.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 July 2012 12:05:43PM 0 points [-]

The problem is that you seem to be underestimating the relevant inferential distance. Specifically you're using a lot of jargon in both this and the parent, and we have no idea what you're talking about.

Comment author: kilobug 28 July 2012 07:58:51PM 6 points [-]

I understand the issue, but I'm at odd with it for three reasons :

  1. If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don't see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.

  2. It seems to me by looking around the world than when a reasonably democratic government starts providing real services to the population (universal healthcare and education, social safety net, ...) the people become less apathetic towards the government, and will get more involved with how the government is runned. It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.

  3. This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the "level above" in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to "actually control the market" that we could imagine. Shouldn't we try to find a political system that ensures the market is controlled in a reasonably efficient way, rather than giving up ? Doesn't sound harder than solving the FAI problem. Corruption and lobbying ? What about making a jury trial for every law after the Parliament voted it, with 20 randomly selected citizen, held isolated from pressures like in normal jury trial, decide if the law goes through or not ? That's just one random idea in the enormous space of possible mechanisms. Why do we give up so easily ?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 July 2012 11:48:42AM 2 points [-]

If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don't see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.

I agree that putting the corporations in charge of government would be bad. That's why libertarians oppose crony capitalism.

This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the "level above" in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to "actually control the market" that we could imagine. Shouldn't we try to find a political system that ensures the market is controlled in a reasonably efficient way, rather than giving up ? Doesn't sound harder than solving the FAI problem.

Eliezer would probably argue that it's more-or-less equivalent to the FAI problem. Personally, depending on what one means by FAI I think it may well be harder. Specifically it may well be possible to create at FAI capable of managing an economy composed of humans, said FAI would not be capable of managing an economy composed of AIs of comparable complexity to itself, more or less due to the pigeon-hole principal.

Comment author: lukeprog 27 July 2012 04:08:50AM 8 points [-]

...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from ... the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 July 2012 07:21:15PM 1 point [-]

This coolness arises partly from ... the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

As well they should.

Comment author: Psychosmurf 21 July 2012 07:50:06PM 2 points [-]

Will somebody please tell me why this is being downvoted so heavily? I was just making a joke...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 July 2012 05:05:16AM *  0 points [-]

Useful advise: on the internet no one can tell when you're being sarcastic.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 19 July 2012 09:25:05PM 2 points [-]

when in the last couple thousand of years, if Jews had wanted to stone apostates to death, would they have been able to do it? The diasporan condition doesn't really allow it.

You sure about this? I don't know much about this topic, but I remember reading somewhere that 200 or more years ago Jews were often allowed to give punishment to their own people within diaspora. They couldn't stone a Christian/Muslim from the majority population, but they could stone (or otherwise kill, or otherwise severely punish) one of their own -- unless the given sinner already converted to Christianity/Islam and left their community. So converting to majority religion could be safe, but converting to atheism or some heresy within Judaism would not.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 July 2012 05:59:10AM 4 points [-]

There are cases of children of Jewish parents who were baptized in secret by Christian maids, and then taken away by the Christian authorities to be raised Christian when the maid informed said authorities of this.

Comment author: mwengler 19 July 2012 03:59:47PM 0 points [-]

Yes! I think the essence of Ghandi's non-violent opposition to the British was to take the British at their word. To repeat (a carefully selected) bunch of their own ideas back to them. To make them realize if they wanted to think of themselves as "good" they were going to have to address the inconsistencies between what they said and what they did.

This has also been an important part of the advance of civil rights for racial minorities in the U.S. in my personal experience. It is hard to totally ignore someone who is spouting words you believe in and not simultaneously threatening you with violence.

Ultimately in the U.S. and the West generally, these experiences of accepting differences, of inclusion, have lead to a new ideology of a positive value associated with diversity, not just a "tolerance" of it. I don't know if you can live in the U.S. these days, with Thai restaurants and Indian and Chinese engineers, British rock stars and Polynesian beauties, and not recognize the great positive utility that diversity provides to the cooperative human enterprise.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 July 2012 05:51:01AM *  2 points [-]

I don't think Gandhi is a good model here. The only reason he succeeded is because the British already valued democratic ideals and thus his actions caused cognitive dissonance among the British public. The same applies to the U.S. civil rights movement. A government that didn't value these ideals would simply have executed Gandhi and MLK.

Comment author: Raw_Power 19 July 2012 01:11:04PM 3 points [-]

That is the conclusion to which I had come, though I was hoping for an alternative. Now the question remains:

How can a rationalist pretending not to be a rationalist help spread serious rationalism without them and the people they inluenced getting caught (in early stages) or triggering a witchunt (supposing they were somewhat successful)?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 July 2012 05:40:29AM 1 point [-]

Paul Graham discusses some ideas in this essay, granted he's mostly thinking about the western world, where the worst that's likely to happen to you is being shunned and possibly fired, but some of the advise still applies.

Comment author: ciphergoth 17 July 2012 08:58:29AM 12 points [-]

This is a terrible misrepresentation. SI does not argue for donations on these grounds; Eliezer and other SI staff have explicitly rejected such Pascalian reasons, but instead argued that the risks that they wish to avert are quite probable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 July 2012 06:26:38AM 1 point [-]

Eliezer and other SI staff have explicitly rejected such Pascalian reasons, but instead argued that the risks that they wish to avert are quite probable.

Really, last time I checked Eliezer was refusing to name either a probability or a time scale.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 July 2012 07:34:59AM 1 point [-]

One non-obvious implication of signaling theory is how attempts at egalitarian norms/policy can have bad effects. The direct effect of these policies and/or norms is to make it easier for people not possessing some desired characteristic to emulate the behavior of those that do. The effect is to make it harder to signal, and thus results in more resources wasted on signaling games.

Comment author: Bugmaster 13 July 2012 06:39:39PM 2 points [-]

Alpha Centauri is much more conducive to abject paranoia than Diplomacy, though -- at least, the way we played it. We would start a game by taking turns on the same machine, for the first 10 turns or so, during lunch. Then, we would go back to work, and take our turn on that machine when it came up (we'd VNC into it). This way, the game doesn't disturb our actual work too much, and each player can take as long to micromanage his cities as he wants.

Thus, all the player-to-player interaction takes place on back channels -- through email, or clandestine meetings. This fact, combined with the knowledge that one tech advance, or one airstrike at the right time, could shift the entire balance of power, results in truly Cold War-grade levels of paranoia. It is an exhilarating experience, in a way.

I should probably mention that no relationships were ruined by our games, either, as far as I can tell. A game is still only a game, after all.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 July 2012 06:51:55AM 1 point [-]

The diplomacy games I'm referring to were also played one move a day.

Comment author: Fyrius 08 July 2012 02:26:53PM 1 point [-]

If those four people who downvoted this would enlighten me as to why this is a bad quote, that would be much appreciated.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 July 2012 06:08:33AM 0 points [-]

Would your opinion of the quote change if "fighting dishonorably" were replaced by "violating the Geneva convention"?

Comment author: CronoDAS 12 July 2012 06:29:14AM 3 points [-]

Which raises the question of why in modern societies 15-year-olds have childlike personalities. For example, in Jewish society children were traditionally considered adults at 13.

Blame the Industrial Revolution. Adults went to work, and children went to school, which, unlike biological childhood, doesn't end when people reach sexual maturity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 July 2012 05:46:49AM 1 point [-]

Yeh, that's more-or-less my working theory as well.

Comment author: Trevor_Caverly 12 July 2012 04:33:49AM 0 points [-]

Yes. P2 finding this out would harm him, and couldn't possibly benefit anyone else, so if searching would lead him to believe the cube doesn't exist, it would be ethically better if he didn't search. But the harm to P2 is a result of his knowledge, not the mere fact of the cube's inexistence. Likewise, P1 should investigate assuming he would find the cube. The reason for this difference is that investigating would have a different effect on the mental states of P1 than it would on the mental states of P2. If the cube in U1 can't be found by P1, than the asymmetry is gone, and neither should investigate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2012 04:55:27AM 1 point [-]

Very well, I repeat the advise I gave you above.

If you truly believe this proposition, as opposed to merely belief in belief, you shown stop reading LessWrong right now. If you keep reading LessWrong, you are likely to get better at rationality, and in particular at telling whether something is true or false, which [is likely to result in you discovering that a lot of gold cubes don't exist].

Comment author: DanArmak 11 July 2012 03:02:30PM 0 points [-]

They wouldn't. Nobody ever acts other than by their own preferences. Me by mine, they by theirs. This is pretty much baked into the definition of 'preferences', although with non-utility-maximizers like humans the situation is more complex than we'd like.

This is inherent in your own description of the scenario. You said they abuse me. So presumably their preferences (including their morals) are OK with that.

I'm sure you understand all this. What made you think I believed anything different?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2012 03:42:42AM 0 points [-]

Prediction: If you were forced to consider the situation in near mode, e.g., if you had something to protect that was being threatened, you wouldn't be arguing that preferences are relative to the individual, but why the other person was acting amorally.

Comment author: Bugmaster 11 July 2012 11:15:24PM 0 points [-]

Certain methods for obtaining beliefs are better than others, though. It turns out that one method gives you a ~4.5 billion year old Earth, but also cellphones, computer networks, plentiful food, eradication of many diseases, spaceflight, lolcats, and so on an so forth. The other method gives you an Earth that's as old as you want it to be, and good feelings, and... what else ?

One of the many problems with solipsism is that it lacks an application.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2012 03:32:07AM 0 points [-]

cellphones, computer networks, plentiful food, eradication of many diseases, spaceflight, lolcats

I deny that those things exist. ;)

Comment author: Bugmaster 11 July 2012 11:21:34PM *  3 points [-]

I don't know about "addictive", but I can tell you that playing SMAC with 5 to 7 human players, and no AIs, will definitely have a... transformative... effect on your life. You will be amazed at how quickly things go from

We're all coworkers, let's have some strategy game fun !

to

Psst, hey, I saw Joe and Bob talking in the corridor the other day. Couldn't hear what they were saying, but it Bob mimed an airplane with his hands at one point. Yeah. I know they're supposed to be enemies, and so are we, but if they beat us to Air Power, we're both in trouble... When was the last time you talked to your allies, anyway ? Just think about it...

Trust no one.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2012 03:30:01AM 1 point [-]

I've successfully played diplomacy games with friends without it ruining any friendships.

Comment author: DaFranker 11 July 2012 03:19:04PM *  3 points [-]

As doubly pointed out, the system is unlikely to be sane. In an insane system, you cannot predict that most employers will even know that intelligence is the best predictor of performance, let alone that they will effectively apply the best available method to select candidates by this criterion.

The fact is, from personal observation (which I admit is anecdotal evidence from a tiny, biased sample size), employers generally do not care to effectively figure this out. All employers I've encountered have had an attitude of wanting everything to "just work" (through the magic of being awesome, presumably) and land them the best employees because they will it to be so. If this would expand to the population in a proportional manner, it would mean that the vast majority of "employers" are either simply acting irrationally for this situation (AKA not only is the system insane, but nearly all its players are, too) or do not assign sufficient utility to obtaining better employees for it to be worth the perceived cost of finding them.

I believe this was the main point being made. It's not being argued that intelligence makes you a better actual performer, what is being argued is that employers do not effectively pick the most intelligent candidates, or worse, that they are not even remotely aware of what they should select for, and that they believe it is relatively worthless for them to attempt to find out more on this subject than they already know.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2012 03:21:12AM 1 point [-]

The fact is, from personal observation (which I admit is anecdotal evidence from a tiny, biased sample size), employers generally do not care to effectively figure this out.

They don't have to, they just have to observe what other successful employers are doing and copy that, the ones who copy the correct features will themselves be more successful, a.k.a., memetic evolution works.

Comment author: Trevor_Caverly 12 July 2012 01:10:15AM 0 points [-]

I would not be in favor of wireheading the human race, but I don't see how that is connected to S. If wireheading all of humanity is bad, it seems clear that it is bad because it is bad for the people being wireheaded. If this is a wireheading scenario where humanity goes extinct as a result of wireheading, than this is also bad because of the hypothetical people who would have valued being alive. There is nothing about S that stops someone from comparing the normal life they would live with a wireheaded life and saying they would prefer the normal life. This is because these two choices involve different mental states for the person, and S does not in itself place any restrictions on which mental states would be better for you to have. Rather, it states that your own mental states are the only things that can be good or bad for you.

If you think S is false, you could additionally claim that wireheading humanity is bad because the fact that humanity is wireheaded is something that almost everybody believes is bad for them, and so if humanity is wireheaded, that is very bad for many people, even if these people are not aware that humanity is wireheaded. But it seems very easy to believe that wireheading is bad for humanity without believing this claim.

Just to make sure I understand your position: Imagine two universes U1, and U2,like the one in my original post, where P1 and P2 are unsure whether the gold cube exists. In U1 the cube exists, in U2 it does not, but they are otherwise identical (or close enough to identical that P1 and P2 have identical brain states). The Ps truly desire that the cube exist as much as anyone can desire a fact about the universe to be true. Do you claim that P1 is better off than P2? If so do you really think that this being possible is as obvious as that 2 + 2 =\= 3 ? If not, why would someone's well-being be able to depend on something other than their mental states in some situations but not this one? To me it seems very obvious to me that P1 and P2 have exactly equally good lives, and I am truly surprised that other people's intuitions and beliefs lean strongly the other way.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2012 03:02:05AM 0 points [-]

Just to make sure I understand your position: Imagine two universes U1, and U2,like the one in my original post, where P1 and P2 are unsure whether the gold cube exists. In U1 the cube exists, in U2 it does not, but they are otherwise identical (or close enough to identical that P1 and P2 have identical brain states). The Ps truly desire that the cube exist as much as anyone can desire a fact about the universe to be true. Do you claim that P1 is better off than P2?

So would you argue that P2 shouldn't investigate whether the cube exists, because then he would find out that it doesn't and thus become worse off?

Comment author: DanArmak 10 July 2012 10:10:04AM 0 points [-]

Of course I would not be OK. I would want them to change their behavior and I would try to change it. This would be because of my preferences as to how people should behave towards me. These preferences don't exist independently of me. Morals are a special kind of preferences.

Saying "there exist someone's morals but there do not exist morals by themselves" is exactly the same as saying "there exist someone's preferences but there do not exist preferences by themselves".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2012 08:18:23AM 0 points [-]

So why should they act in accordance with your preferences?

Comment author: DanArmak 10 July 2012 10:12:48AM *  0 points [-]

it's not clear what "interact" means

It means 'causally influence in at least one direction'. Two systems are said to interact if knowing something about one of them gives you information about the other.

I think you're using the word "exists" to mean something different from what I mean by it. This may be one source of confusion.

I know two meanings of the word 'exist'. First, predicate about states of the physical world (and by extension of other counterfactual or hypothetical worlds that may be discussed). There exists the chair I am sitting on. There does not exist in this room a sofa.

Second, 'exists' may be a statement about a mathematical structure. There exist irrational numbers. There exists a solution to a certain problem, but not to another.

What do you mean by 'exists'?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2012 08:15:36AM 0 points [-]

It means 'causally influence in at least one direction'.

Well, when you start dealing with mathematical systems, causality becomes a very tricky concept.

Two systems are said to interact if knowing something about one of them gives you information about the other.

Well, knowing mathematics certainly helps with studying the physical world.

I know two meanings of the word 'exist'. First, predicate about states of the physical world (and by extension of other counterfactual or hypothetical worlds that may be discussed). There exists the chair I am sitting on. There does not exist in this room a sofa.

Second, 'exists' may be a statement about a mathematical structure. There exist irrational numbers. There exists a solution to a certain problem, but not to another.

What do you mean by 'exists'?

Belong to the same cluster in thing space as your two examples.

Comment author: hankx7787 11 July 2012 12:09:25AM *  -1 points [-]

So first of all, that's not what Sam Harris means so stop invoking him.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but here's my comment explaining how this relates to Sam Harris.

If you are referring to facts about your brain/mind then your account is subjectivist. Nothing about subjectivism says we can't investigate people's moral beliefs scientifically.

I addressed this previously, explaining that I am using 'objective' and 'subjective' in the common sense way of 'mind-independent' or 'mind-dependent' and explained in what specific way I'm doing that (that is, the proper basis of terminal values, and thus the rational basis for moral judgments, are hard-wired facts of reality that exist prior to, and independent of, the rest of our knowledge and cognition - and that the proper basis of terminal values is not something that is invented later, as a product of, and dependent on, later acquired/invented knowledge and chains of cognition). You just went on insisting that I'm using the terminology wrong purely as a matter of the meaning in technical philosophy.

This discussion is getting rather frustrating because I don't think your beliefs are actually wrong. You're just a) refusing to use or learn standard terminology that can be quickly picked up by glancing at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and b) thinking that whether or not we can learn about evolved or programmed utility function-like things is a question related to the whether or not moral realism is true. I'm a very typical moral anti-realist but I still think humans have lots of values in common, that there are scientific ways to learn about those values, and that this is a worthy pursuit.

You do not have to demand, as you've been doing throughout this thread, that I only use words to refer to things that you want them to mean, when I am explicitly disclaiming any intimacy with the terms as they are used in technical philosophy and making a real effort to taboo my words in order to explain what I actually mean. Read the article on Better Disagreement and try to respond to what I'm actually saying instead of trying to argue over definitions.

Now it is the case that if you define morality as "whatever that thing in my brain that tells me what is right and wrong says" there is in some sense an "is from which you can get an ought".

Ok, great. That's kind of what I mean, but it's more complicated than that. What I'm referring to here are actual terminal values written down in reality, which is different from 1) our knowledge of what we think our terminal values are, and 2) our instrumental values, rationally derived from (1), and 3) our faculty for moral intuition, which is not necessarily related to any of the above.

To answer your previous question,

Second of all, give an example of what kind of facts you would refer to in order to decide whether or not murder is immoral.

One must, 1) scientifically investigate the nature of their terminal values, 2) rationally derive their instrumental values as a relation between (1) and the context of their current situation, and 3) Either arrive at a general principle or to an answer to the specific instance of murder in question based on (1) and (2), and act accordingly.

But this is not at all what Hume is talking about. Hume is talking about argument and justification. His point is that an argument with only descriptive premises can't take you to a normative conclusion. But note that your "is" potentially differs from individual to individual. I suppose you could use it to justify your own moral beliefs to your self but that does not moral realism make. What you can't do is use it to convince anyone else.

I don't understand why people insist on equating 'objective morality' with something magically universal. We do not have a faculty of divination with which to perceive the Form of the Good existing out there in another dimension. If that's what Hume is arguing against, then his argument is against a straw man as far as I'm concerned. Just because I'm pointing out an idea for an objective morality that differs from individual to individual doesn't make it any less 'objective' or 'real' - unless you're using those terms specifically to mean to some stupid, mystical 'universal morality' - instead of the terms just meaning objective and real in common sense. Trying to find a morality that is universal among all people or all mind designs is impossible (unless you're just looking at stuff like this which could be useful), and if that's what you're doing, or that's what you're taking up a position against, then either you're working on the wrong problem, or you're arguing against a stupid straw man position.

What you can't do is use it to convince anyone else.

For the particular idea I've been putting forward here, people's terminal values relate to one other through the following kinds of ways:

1) Between normal humans there is a lot in common 2) You could theoretically reach into their brain and mess with the hardware in which their terminal values are encoded 3) You can still convince and trade based on instrumental values, of course 4) Humans seem to have terminal values which actually refer to other people, whether it's simply finding value in the perception of another human's face, various kinds of bonding, pleasurable feelings following acts of altruism, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2012 07:51:38AM *  0 points [-]

We do not have a faculty of divination with which to perceive the Form of the Good existing out there in another dimension.

Why is this obvious? After all we do have a faculty of divination with which to perceive the Form of Truth.

Comment author: Trevor_Caverly 11 July 2012 03:17:32AM 0 points [-]

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant. I'm using "Someone's utility" here to mean only how good or bad things are for that person. I am not claiming that people should (or do) only care about their own well-being, just that their well-being only depends on their own mental states. Do you still disagree with my statement given this definition of utility?

If someone kidnapped me and hooked me up to an experience machine that gave me a simulated perfect life, and then tortured my family for the rest of their lives, I claim that this would be good for me. It would be bad overall because people would be harmed (far in excess of my gains). If I was given this as an option I would not take it because I would be horrified by the idea and because I believe it would be morally wrong, but not because I believe I would be worse off if I took the deal. If someone claimed that taking this deal would be bad for their own well-being, I believe that they would be mistaken.

If someone claimed that the existence of a gold cube in a section of the universe where it would never be noticed by anyone or affect any sentient things could be a morally good thing, I would likewise claim that they are mistaken. I claim this, because regardless of how much they want the cube to exist, or how good they believe the existence of the cube to be, no one's well-being can depend on the existence of the cube. At most, someone's well-being can depend on their belief in the existence of the cube.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2012 07:21:16AM 0 points [-]

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant. I'm using "Someone's utility" here to mean only how good or bad things are for that person. I am not claiming that people should (or do) only care about their own well-being, just that their well-being only depends on their own mental states. Do you still disagree with my statement given this definition of utility?

I had assumed you meant something like this.

To see if I'm understanding you correctly, would you be in favor of wireheading the entire human race?

Comment author: MixedNuts 10 July 2012 09:26:06AM 2 points [-]

Puberty occurs much earlier in modern societies. Recently postpubescent girls and boys are children, and most people are turned off by the personalities of children (which of course makes evolutionary sense, as well as cultural sense in most societies). The age group you're thinking of is closer to 18 than to 15.

We have relatively gender-egalitarian norms now. In societies when older men are encouraged to date young women (and/or young men) the relationship is very asymmetric. We like having power-equal relationships, because we think it more moral, because we encourage sexual partners to be companions and friends rather than sticking to separate social spheres, and because it has become more valuable to have a partner who can help you socially and earn money than to have a fertile one.

Older women's interest would be to encourage woman-boy relationships rather than discourage man-girl ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2012 07:15:39AM 2 points [-]

Puberty occurs much earlier in modern societies.

Relative to Victorian/Industrial age societies yes. If you compare it to pre-industrial societies it seems that the age of puberty is returning to its historical norm after a couple centuries of being unusually high.

Recently postpubescent girls and boys are children, and most people are turned off by the personalities of children (which of course makes evolutionary sense, as well as cultural sense in most societies). The age group you're thinking of is closer to 18 than to 15.

Which raises the question of why in modern societies 15-year-olds have childlike personalities. For example, in Jewish society children were traditionally considered adults at 13.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 July 2012 04:11:25AM 0 points [-]

If someone punched you or stole your stuff, I strongly suspect you'd object in moral terms.

To me, this is a point in favor of anti-realism. I hardly react at all when strangers get punched and worse (as we speak, probably). Tragedy is when I cut my finger.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes July 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 July 2012 07:51:17AM 0 points [-]

Ethical egoism is still a form of moral realism.

(Disclaimer: I don't necessarily endorse full ethical egoism.)

Comment author: DanArmak 09 July 2012 10:32:13AM 0 points [-]

I live by my morals, whether or not others share them. This doesn't change the fact that they are my morals, a feature of my brain state, and not some sort of objective independently existing morals. It's exactly the same situation as saying that I feel that my girlfriend is beautiful whether or not others agree, but that doesn't mean there's an objective standard of beauty in the universe that doesn't depend on observers.

If I belonged to a low status group that most people had no moral issues with abusing, then I would keep saying they behave immorally according to my views, and they would keep ignoring my words and abusing me. I fail to see what about this situation suggests that I behave as if I believe in realist morals.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 July 2012 07:47:33AM -1 points [-]

If I belonged to a low status group that most people had no moral issues with abusing, then I would keep saying they behave immorally according to my views, and they would keep ignoring my words and abusing me. I fail to see what about this situation suggests that I behave as if I believe in realist morals.

And you would really be ok with them living by their morals and abusing you?

Comment author: DanArmak 09 July 2012 11:39:41AM 0 points [-]

In your comment that you link to, you give a more narrow definition, specifying "the scientific method". I agree there might be things outside of that (which will undoubtedly be absorbed into accepted science over time, mutating the concepts of the scientific method to suit new knowledge).

But here you specify all "statements about the world". In that case I can say outright that in no meaningful sense does there "exist" something not in the world which cannot interact with the world. By the generalized p-zombie principle: if it cannot interact with us, then it is not causally involved with your reason for speaking about it. Nothing you will ever think or do or say or believe in, or perceive with your senses, will be causally related to something outside "the world". So there is no reason to ever discuss such a thing.

Further, math (logic) is in the world. It does not have some Platonic independent "existence" because existence is a predicate of things in the physical world; it makes as much sense for a pure circle to exist as to not exist.

The reason we talk about math is that it is lawfully embodied in the physical world. Our brains are so built as to be able to think about math. When we think about math we find that we enjoy it, and also that we can use it for useful purposes of applied science. So we keep talking more about math. That is a complete explanation of where math comes from. No additional postulate of math "objectively existing" is required or indeed meaningful.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 July 2012 07:37:30AM 0 points [-]

But here you specify all "statements about the world". In that case I can say outright that in no meaningful sense does there "exist" something not in the world which cannot interact with the world. By the generalized p-zombie principle: if it cannot interact with us, then it is not causally involved with your reason for speaking about it.

I don't find the generalized p-zombie principle particularly convincing, in part because it's not clear what "interact" means.

It does not have some Platonic independent "existence" because existence is a predicate of things in the physical world; it makes as much sense for a pure circle to exist as to not exist.

I think you're using the word "exists" to mean something different from what I mean by it. This may be one source of confusion.

In response to Morality open thread
Comment author: Trevor_Caverly 09 July 2012 04:27:01AM 0 points [-]

Summary: I'm wondering whether anyone (especially moral anti-realists) would disagree with the statement, "The utility of an agent can only depend on the mental state of that agent".

I have had little success In my attempts to devise a coherent moral realist theory of meta-ethics, and am no longer very sure that moral realism is true, but there is one statement about morality that seems clearly true to me. "The utility of an agent can only depend on the mental state of that agent". Call this statement S. By utility I roughly mean how good or bad things are, from the perspective of the agent. The following thought experiment gives a concrete example of what I mean by S.

Imagine a universe with only one sentient thing, a person named P. P desires that there exist a 1 meter cube of gold somewhere within P's lightcone. P has a (non-sentient) oracle that ey trusts completely to provide either an accurate answer or no information for whatever question ey asks. P asks it whether a 1 meter gold cube exists within eir lightcone, and the oracle says yes.

It seems clear that whether the cube actually exists cannot possibly be relevant to the utility of P, and therfore the utility of the universe. P is free to claim that eir utility depends upon the existence of the cube, but I believe P would be mistaken. P certainly desires the cube to exist, but I believe that it cannot be part of P's utility function. (I suppose it could be argued that in this case P is also mistaken about eir desire, and that desires can only really be about one's own metnal state, but that's not important to my argument). Similarly, P would be mistaken to claim that anything not part of eir mind was part of eir utility function.

I'm not sure whether S in itself implies a weak form of moral realism, since it implies that statements of the form "x is not part of P's utility function" can be true. Would these statements count as ethical statements in the necessary way? It does not seem to imply that there is any objective way to compare different possible worlds though, so it doesn't hurt the anti-realist position much. Still, it does seem to provide a way to create a sort of moral partition of the world, by breaking it into individual morally relevant agents (no, I don't have a good definition for "morally relevant agent") which can be examined separately, since their utility can only depend on their map of the world and not the world itself. The objective utility of the universe can only depend on the separate utilities in each of the partitions. This leaves the question of whether it makes any sense to talk about an objective utility of the universe.

So, does anyone disagree with S? If you agree with S, are you an anti-realist?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 July 2012 06:05:56AM 0 points [-]

If you truly believe this proposition, as opposed to merely belief in belief, you shown stop reading LessWrong right now. If you keep reading LessWrong, you are likely to get better at rationality, and in particular at telling whether something is true or false, which will make it harder for you to maintain comfortable beliefs and thus will vastly lower your utility by your definition.

In response to comment by Jack on Morality open thread
Comment author: Trevor_Caverly 09 July 2012 03:32:30PM 0 points [-]

This is related to moral realism in that I suspect moral realists would be more likely to accept S, and S arguably provides some moral statements that are true. But it's mainly just something I was thinking about while thinking about moral realism.

I don't really know what I'm talking about when I say objective utility, I am just claiming that if such a thing exists/ makes sense to talk about, that it can only depend on the states of individual minds, since each mind's utility can only depend on the state of that mind and nothing outside of the utility of minds can be ethically relevant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 July 2012 05:57:10AM 1 point [-]

This is related to moral realism in that I suspect moral realists would be more likely to accept S, and S arguably provides some moral statements that are true.

I'm a moral realist and I find your claim nearly as absurd as asserting that 2+2=3, and I suspect nearly all moral realists would share my sentiment (even if they wouldn't express it quiet as strongly).

Comment author: [deleted] 09 July 2012 12:54:03AM 1 point [-]

Wait -- that's not how everybody does their learning?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 03:18:30AM 1 point [-]

I learned a lot in school, especially once my parents got me out of the public school system. I would argue that sending child to a school where they're not going to learn anything is an example of a lost purpose.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 11:16:55PM 0 points [-]

Of course I would, and that doesn't make me a moral realist. I would say: by the morals that I feel, and most other people also feel and agree on, the person who assaulted me acted immorally. Nothing to do with objective moral rules: just rules that I and most other people feel to be moral and agree on.

More importantly, if some people in my place would appeal to "objective/factual morals", that is not in itself evidence for the existence of such objective morals. Since when I ask them (you) how they perceive these objective morals, how they even know them to exist, I receive so far no answer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 03:09:46AM 0 points [-]

Of course I would, and that doesn't make me a moral realist. I would say: by the morals that I feel, and most other people also feel and agree on, the person who assaulted me acted immorally.

What if I said that by the morals I feel it's ok for me to hit you? You could answer that most people disagree with me, but I suspect you'd object to being punched even if, e.g., you belonged to a low status group that people thought it was ok to abuse.

Comment author: nshepperd 08 July 2012 11:02:53AM 1 point [-]

At this point I might ask you what you both think you mean by morals being "really objective".

Does it mean that all minds must be persuaded by it? But that is of course false, since there is always a mind that does the opposite. Does it mean that it's written on a stone tablet in space somewhere? But that seems irrelevant, because who would want to follow random stone-commandments found in space anyway, and what if someone modified the stone tablet? Does it mean something else?

The definition of prime numbers isn't found on a stone tablet anywhere, or written in the fabric of space-time. Only the pebblesorters would be persuaded by an argument that a heap of 21 pebbles is composite. Yet would you say that the number 21 is "objectively" composite? Is the "existence" of anything necessary to make 21 composite?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 03:03:34AM 0 points [-]

At this point I might ask you what you both think you mean by morals being "really objective".

Belonging to the same similarity cluster in thing space as mathematics and statements about the world.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 11:47:28PM 0 points [-]

I don't believe a problem is unsolvable. I don't see a problem in the first place. I don't have any unsolved questions in my world model.

You keep saying I should be more open to new ideas and unsure of my existing ideas. But you do not suggest any concrete new idea. You also do not point to the need for a new idea, such as an unsolved problem. You're not saying anything that isn't fully general and applicable to all of everyone's beliefs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 02:58:53AM 0 points [-]

I don't see a problem in the first place. I don't have any unsolved questions in my world model.

The physical anti-realist doesn't see any problem in his world view either.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 11:27:31PM 0 points [-]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. By "Cartesian skeptic" do you mean a Cartesian dualist who is skeptical of pure materialism? Or a Cartesian skeptic who does not wish to rely on his senses, who is skeptical of scientific inquiry into objective reality? Or something else?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 02:57:01AM 0 points [-]

Someone who doesn't believe his sense inputs necessarily reflect any reality.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 July 2012 08:45:06PM 17 points [-]

"Buddhism IS different. It's the followers who aren’t."

-- A Dust Over India.

Commentary: Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is genuinely different from all three. It's religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution. Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists? Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers, someday? And if so, what's the point?

Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each other, I wonder?). It's not really hopeless.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 02:51:22AM 2 points [-]

Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists? Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers, someday? And if so, what's the point?

Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each other, I wonder?).

If LW-rationality goes mainstream, it's followers will then be drawn from the same distribution.

Comment author: Fyrius 08 July 2012 02:26:53PM 1 point [-]

If those four people who downvoted this would enlighten me as to why this is a bad quote, that would be much appreciated.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2012 02:47:24AM 1 point [-]

To the extent honor encodes valid ethical injunctions, ignoring it will cause you to loose in the long run.

Comment author: TCB 08 July 2012 06:25:33AM 1 point [-]

In this article, Eliezer implies that it's the lack of objective morality which makes life seem meaningless under a materialist reductionist model of the universe. Is this the usual source of existential angst? For me, existential angst always came from "life not having a purpose"; I was always bothered by the thought that no higher power was guiding our lives. I ended up solving this problem by realizing that emergent structures such as society can be understood as a "higher power guiding our lives"; while it's not as agenty as God, it suits my purposes well enough, and I've been free of existential angst ever since.

(I do agree with the main thesis of Eliezer's post; I think I was able to accept my philosophical solution to existential angst because of an increasingly positive outlook on life. I'm just commenting because I'm now very curious about what "existential angst" means to the rest of LessWrong. What does existential angst mean to you?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 July 2012 10:51:15PM 0 points [-]

In this article, Eliezer implies that it's the lack of objective morality which makes life seem meaningless under a materialist reductionist model of the universe. Is this the usual source of existential angst? For me, existential angst always came from "life not having a purpose";

If I understand Eliezer's conception of morality correctly, he doesn't distinguish between these two things.

Comment author: RobertLumley 07 July 2012 03:54:56PM 0 points [-]

Did you mean to link to this comment?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 11:16:08PM 0 points [-]

Thanks, fixed.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 12:43:27PM 0 points [-]

Interesting point. But that's very weak evidence (because as I said the two known instances have significant differences). Also, this is a heuristic and produces many false positives.

At best it motivates me to remain open to arguments that there might be more kinds of 'truth', which I am. But the mere argument that there might be is not interesting, unless someone can provide an argument for a concrete example. Or even a suggestion of what a concrete example might be like.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 11:13:43PM 0 points [-]

At best it motivates me to remain open to arguments that there might be more kinds of 'truth', which I am. But the mere argument that there might be is not interesting, unless someone can provide an argument for a concrete example.

You should study more history of ideas; once you see several examples of seemingly-unsolvable philosophical problems that were later solved by intellectual paradigm shifts, you become much less willing to believe that a particular problem is unsolvable simple because we currently don't have any idea how to solve it.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 12:48:14PM 0 points [-]

Yes, and those things include moral statements.

Exactly. So I'm asking to be convinced - I'm asking for the evidence that convinced others to be moral realists. So far no such evidence has been given.

most if not all humans who call themselves moral non-realists are actually moral realists who believe themselves to be moral non-realists.

Why do you think so? Where do I act as if I believed in moral realism? I am not aware of such.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 11:06:20PM 0 points [-]

Why do you think so? Where do I act as if I believed in moral realism? I am not aware of such.

This is similar to the way people who claim to be physical non-realists still manage to avoid walking out of high story windows. If someone punched you or stole your stuff, I strongly suspect you'd object in moral terms.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 12:46:07PM *  0 points [-]

Certainly, they have a lot in common, as well as a lot of differences.

But this discussion doesn't seem profitable. We shouldn't be discussing the probability that "another kind of fact" exists. Either someone has a suggestion for a new kind of fact, which we can then evaluate, or else the subject is barren. The mere fact that "we've not ruled out that there might exist more things we would choose to apply the word 'fact' to" is very weak evidence. We've not ruled out china teacups in solar orbit, either, but we don't spend time discussing them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 10:59:07PM 0 points [-]

But this discussion doesn't seem profitable. We shouldn't be discussing the probability that "another kind of fact" exists. Either someone has a suggestion for a new kind of fact, which we can then evaluate, or else the subject is barren.

So if I understand your meta-theory correctly, anyone living before the scientific method, or simple hasn't heard of it, should be a Cartesian skeptic.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 12:40:03PM 1 point [-]

What exactly do you mean by 'physical realism'? At first I thought it was something like the simple claim that "the physical world objectively exists independently of us", or maybe like positivism. But googling 'physical realism' brings up mostly pseudoscientific nonsense, so it may not be a commonly used term, and there are no wikipedia/Stanford/etc. entries. So I wanted to make sure what you meant by it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 10:54:49PM 0 points [-]

What exactly do you mean by 'physical realism'? At first I thought it was something like the simple claim that "the physical world objectively exists independently of us",

More or less this.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 July 2012 05:27:05AM -1 points [-]

You must get at least some of your beliefs right, before the remaining ones can be wrong about anything.

Brute force attacks on passwords are mostly being wrong about things. If beliefs are singular things, like a single attack on a password, EY's claim isn't true. If beliefs are more than one thing, EY might be correct. If every single belief about being in a new social setting is distinct (not knowing cultural norms and knowing part of a language are two things), then EY's claim isn't true. If beliefs come in clusters (not knowing cultural norms but knowing part of a language are not things that can be separated). And if (as Popper suggested) scientific knowledge is based on falsification of bold conjectures, then scientific beliefs don't have to have a little right in them to be wrong later.

So all this suggests that you should be willing to accept that you might know a little about morality. Nothing unquestionable, perhaps, but an initial state with which to start questioning yourself. Baked into your brain but not explicitly known to you, perhaps; but still, that which your brain would recognize as right is what you are talking about. You will accept at least enough of the way you respond to moral arguments as a starting point, to identify "morality" as something to think about.

Correct, as long as some people are not considered human beings. Some people straight up don't have that baked in recognition of right and wrong. These include infants and people with mental problems.

It's not perfect information, surely, or absolutely reliable, but you have someplace to start.

The place we start is the place we start. The foundation is the starting pistol, not a blank slate or a baked brain. We hit the ground running and go from there.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [SEQ RERUN] Could Anything Be Right?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 07:07:46AM 0 points [-]

Brute force attacks on passwords are mostly being wrong about things.

You still need to know what a password is, how to enter it, that it won't secretly change on you between attempts, etc.

Comment author: Joe 06 July 2012 09:13:47PM 0 points [-]

I doubt this is being put forward as a "principle to uphold" since that would be self-contradictory. It is probably aimed at the sorts of cases where someone might say "well I wouldn't have bothered but it was the principle of the thing".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 07:01:19AM 4 points [-]

And in most of those cases "the principle of the thing" refers to what we would call TDT/UDT-type considerations.

Comment author: DanArmak 06 July 2012 11:30:03AM *  0 points [-]

But the other sort of amazing thing to me is you keep asking me to defiine moral realism. What do you want me to do, copy the first few paragraphs from the wikipedia article? I'm not going to do a better job than they do. If you think the definition is dopey or meaningless or whatever, then oh well. I have nothing to add.

To quote the definition of moral realism from Wikipedia:

  1. Ethical sentences express propositions.
  2. Some such propositions are true.
  3. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion.

This immediately raises three questions:

  1. How are propositions made true by objective features of the world?
  2. Do we find that these objectively true propositions match our moral intuitions? If they do, then whose?

But most importantly:

  1. Why do you think some answer to (1), this mapping of non-moral fact to moral fact, of 'is' to 'ought', is unique, objective, morally important?

The knowledge or belief in moral realism is acquired. People may be born with moral realist intuitions, but they are not born with coherent arguments in favor of moral realism. And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.

So my question is: what is the evidence that convinced any moral realist to be a moral realist? This is essential, all else is secondary.

I've not found such evidence anywhere. In everything that I've read about moral realism, people are just trying to justify intuitions they have about morals, to claim that if not their morals then at least some morals must be objective and universal. As far as I can tell right now, the sole cause of some people being moral realists is that it gives them pleasure to believe so. They have faith in moral realism, as it were.

Then, assuming that belief is provisionally true, they look for models of that world that will allow it to be true. But such reasoning is wrong. They must show evidence for moral realism in order to have the right to believe in it.

A belief that morality is subjective is controversial by any straightforward meaning of that word, nothing else I have said is as relevant to anything else you have said as that.

Beliefs in gods, fairies, and p-zombies are also controversial. That doesn't make them worthy of discussion.

In my phrasing in previous posts I may have assumed you yourself were at least uncertain about the truth of moral realism, and therefore knew of some valid argument for it. I talked of things being controversial or not on LW, not among all humanity. I'm sorry that that was unclear and confused the conversation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 06:46:21AM 2 points [-]

The knowledge or belief in moral realism is acquired. People may be born with moral realist intuitions, but they are not born with coherent arguments in favor of moral realism. And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.

You can replace the phrase "moral realist" with "physical realist" in the above statement and your subsequent argument and it remains equally valid.

Comment author: DanArmak 06 July 2012 11:34:21AM 0 points [-]

Do you have any evidence against it? Are you able to think of a third?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 06:39:26AM 0 points [-]

Do you have any evidence against it?

The zero-one-infinity hueristic.

Comment author: DanArmak 06 July 2012 11:46:39AM 1 point [-]

These are two quite different things. We group them under one name, 'facts', but that is just a convention. That's why I wanted to find out which kind we were talking about.

Saying that "there might be a third kind" is misleading: it is a matter of definitions of words. You propose there might be some undiscoverd X. You also propose that if we discovered X, we would be willing to call it "a new kind of fact". But X itself is vastly more interesting than what words we might use.

Therefore please taboo "fact" and tell me, what is it you think there may be more of?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 06:38:26AM 0 points [-]

These are two quite different things. We group them under one name, 'facts', but that is just a convention.

There's a reason we use the same word for both of them. They have a lot in common, for example being extremely objective in practice.

Comment author: DanArmak 06 July 2012 11:04:02AM 0 points [-]

I fail to see the relevance. Humans convince each other of many things all the time. If we couldn't, we wouldn't be here on this site! There are minds "out there" in mind-space whom we couldn't convince, but that doesn't mean there are such human minds, because humans are quite similar to one another.

Are you seriously suggesting humanity is divided into moral realists and anti-realists, and no realist can possibly explain to me or convince me of their position and even talking about it is pointless?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 06:31:17AM 0 points [-]

I fail to see the relevance. Humans convince each other of many things all the time. If we couldn't, we wouldn't be here on this site!

Yes, and those things include moral statements.

Are you seriously suggesting humanity is divided into moral realists and anti-realists, and no realist can possibly explain to me or convince me of their position and even talking about it is pointless?

No, because most if not all humans who call themselves moral non-realists are actually moral realists who believe themselves to be moral non-realists.

In response to comment by TimS on Irrationality Game II
Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 06 July 2012 05:08:20AM *  0 points [-]

If particles snap to grid once you get down far enough, then there are a finite, though very large, number of ways you could configure atoms and stuff them into a limited amount of space. Which trivially implies that the maximum amount of intelligence you could fit into a finite amount of space is bounded.

And of course you could also update perfectly on every piece of evidence, simulate every possibility, etc.. in this hypothetical universe. This is the theoretical maximum bound on intelligence.

If our universe can be well approximated by a snap to grid universe, or really can be well approximated by any Turing machine at all, then your statements seem trivially true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 05:58:19AM 0 points [-]

If particles snap to grid once you get down far enough, then there are a finite, though very large, number of ways you could configure atoms and stuff them into a limited amount of space.

It's called the Bekenstein bound and it doesn't require discreteness.

Comment author: ChristianKl 06 July 2012 06:25:09PM 1 point [-]

It seems like an issue that's important to get right. Is there a test we could run to see whether it's true?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 July 2012 05:28:08AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, but only once. ;)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 06:37:36AM *  3 points [-]

I suspect that there exists an objective morality capable of being investigated, but not using the methods commonly known as science.

What we currently think of as objective knowledge comes from one of two methods:

1) Start with self-evident axioms and apply logical rules of inference. The knowledge obtained from this method is called "mathematics".

2) The method commonly called the "scientific method". Note that thanks to the problem of induction the knowledge obtained using this method can never satisfy method 1's criterion for knowledge.

I suspect investigation morality will require a third method, and that the is-ought problem is analogous to the problem of induction in that it will stop moral statements from being scientific (just as scientific statements aren't mathematical) but ultimately won't prevent a reasonably objective investigation of morality.

Comment author: novalis 05 July 2012 05:58:13PM *  2 points [-]

Why should most students even bother with algebra? Their parents almost certainly don't use it. It's more-or-less a hazing ritual. And it's entirely reasonable to not want to put up with being hazed.

Sure, I've got to understand algebra because I program computers. But not very many people do anything like that.

Imagine that instead I were opening a cupcake shop. High school algebra is full of problems like this one: My fixed costs for my cupcake shop are $100,000 per year. My cost of ingredients for a cupcake is $0.30, and I think I can sell 100 cupcakes per day. What do I have to charge per cupcake to have a positive net?

So, the algebra way to do this is to write out an equation, 100000 = 365*100*(c-0.30). Then solve for c. And if I were in this situation and I had been paying attention in high school algebra, I could transform this to c = 100000/(365*100) + 0.30. But if I hadn't, here's what I would do: I would say that a cupcake costs around $3, plug $3 into that equation, and immediately see that I'll be a bit short. So maybe now I have to try $3.25, which will work. Boom, problem solved, no algebra.

Bret Victor calls this process "scrubbing".

And, of course, there's basically never a situation where you need a quadratic equation. I guess figuring out areas/volumes, but the scrubbing approach will work just fine there.

Realistically, if I were planning my cupcake shop, I would use a spreadsheet, which unfortunately nobody learns in high school. That's too bad, because lots more people use spreadsheets than algebra.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 05:53:37AM 2 points [-]

Sure, I've got to understand algebra because I program computers. But not very many people do anything like that.

I'm not so sure about that. They way computers are integrating into society it seems likely that the status of people who can't at least do basic programing will soon be similar to the status of illiterate people ~100 years ago.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes July 2012
Comment author: Vladimir_M 05 July 2012 05:36:02PM 9 points [-]

Another important reason is that Americans have in the meantime embraced a lifestyle that would have struck earlier generations as incredibly paranoid siege mentality. (But which is completely understandable given the realities of the crime wave in the second half of the 20th century.)

Yet another reason is, of course, the draconian toughening of law enforcement and criminal penalties.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 05:19:58AM 0 points [-]

Yet another reason is, of course, the draconian toughening of law enforcement and criminal penalties.

Which would, nevertheless, be considered absurdly lenient by the standards of any pre-20th century society.

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 July 2012 01:17:11AM 7 points [-]

It's strange that we have many phrases like "on the one/other hand", "pros and cons", and "both sides of the story", then.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 05:04:47AM *  1 point [-]

It's strange that we have many phrases like "on the one/other hand", "pros and cons", and "both sides of the story", then.

No, those phrases exist to help patch the flaw in human reasoning the parent describes. In fact it would be strange that we had those phrases and the corresponding flaw didn't exist.

Comment author: komponisto 04 July 2012 08:40:30PM *  4 points [-]

You and Alicorn are confusing denotation and connotation here. "Edible" simply means "able to be eaten"; it is used instead of "eatable", because the latter is for some reason not considered a "standard" or "legitimate" word. As such, it possesses exactly the same semantics as "eatable" would; in fact, a sufficiently supercilious English teacher will correct you to "edible" if you say "eatable". (Similarly "legible" instead of "readable", although "readable" seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)

Yes, it's true that people only usually apply the word to a more restricted subset of things than those which won't kill the eater; but such a behavioral tendency should not be confused with the actual semantics of the word.

The sense of the quote is exactly the same as if it had been:

All mushrooms can be eaten. But some of them can be eaten only once.

In this case, it would hardly be legitimate to complain that "can be eaten" means "safe to be eaten". The fact is that the phrase is ambiguous, and the quote is a play on that ambiguity. Likewise in its original form, with "edible".

It just seems like a...definitional argument that is primarily about status.

You've just provided a reasonable first-approximation analysis of wit!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 04:50:31AM 1 point [-]

It just seems like a...definitional argument that is primarily about status.

You've just provided a reasonable first-approximation analysis of wit!

Upvoted for this.

Comment author: TimS 06 July 2012 04:28:30AM 0 points [-]

There could be more. It just turns out that there aren't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 04:48:15AM 0 points [-]

Do you have any evidence for this besides not being able to think of a third meta-theory?

Comment author: DanArmak 05 July 2012 08:50:12PM *  1 point [-]

This is an assertion which is either true or false. You assert it as true.

Correct. I want to point out what this is an assertion about: it is about the meaning of the word 'morals'. I.e. a definition, not a statement of logical or physical fact.

If you think that "there are objective morals" that is a different claim about the meaning of the word, but also (and much more importantly) a claim about the existence of something - and I'm asking you to define that something. Let's leave aside for now the issue of why you call this something "morals", let's taboo that word. Please describe this objectively existing something you are talking about.

There are plenty of people who do believe there is an objective moral truth.

I don't even know if this is evidence for or against them being right. There are plenty of people who are very wrong about lots of things that are not part of their everyday lives.

You can read about it in wikipedia and in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I have now read both articles. (You linked to Stanford twice, so I read the WP article "Moral Realism".)

Wikipedia doesn't give a single argument for moral realism, it just says that if we accept it, that makes it convenient to reason about morals. Which is not evidence.

The Stanford article lists many arguments against realism, but no arguments for it. It seems to conclude that because realism arises from "common sense and initial appearances" [I disagree strongly] and because they identify problems with some alternatives, realism should not be dismissed. Yet they identify no problems with my approach; and even if they did find problems with all known other approaches, as long as there is no problem to be found with the rejection of realism in itself, then there is no valid reason to accept realism.

To sum up: moral realism claims truth-properties for moral statements, but it also claims they cannot be evaluated for truth on the basis of any observations of the physical objective universe. That reduces it to the statement "our common sense tells us so, you can't prove us wrong, we don't have to prove ourselves right". Not very great philosophy.

By this I take it to mean you would like to define "it is wrong" and "it is right" to mean "most people think it is wrong" and "most people think it is right." I find a lot of problems with that definition.

No I don't want to define it so. It can and does mean different things in different contexts. Whenever there is doubt we should make it explicit what we mean.

Whether I understand moral realists is a separate issue. First I would like to understand moral realism itself. Please taboo "something is right" and tell me what your claim of objective moral truths or moral realism means.

What do you do about me? Incarcerate me while telling me that I am being imprisoned for life not because I did or want to do something wrong but because "most people think I did something wrong?"

I don't like incarceration itself, but it might be the best alternative available. Regardless of what I do with you, it would be because "most people (including me) think you did something wrong", not because "it is somehow objectively wrong".

I do ask you what YOU think. Do you think I am wrong to kill these children?

Yes I do.

How much does it matter that I disagree with you?

It matters for some purposes. For instance, if there were reliable ways to check and modify a person's actual moral feelings, I would want to impose on you modifications that would make you view killing children as immoral. I would prefer that to incarcerating you.

Another possible difference is in the severity of punishment, if any. One goal of punishment is deterring other potential criminals (and your own potential recidivism). People who don't have moral feelings stopping them from killing children, might need more punishment (ceteris paribus) to achieve the same deterrence. So it might make sense to punish you more severly, to influence people like you who don't share the social morals being enforced to follow them anyway out of self-interest.

Also, your lack of these moral feeling makes you likely to kill children again in the future (as you noted yourself), so I would want to incarcerate you for longer so as to protect children from you for longer.

If it doesn't matter that I disagree with you, doesn't that mean that you think it is objectively wrong?

As I said, it does matter. But suppose it didn't matter: suppose I sentenced you without regard to your moral feelings. That wouldn't mean I thought your behavior was "objectively wrong". It would simply mean I was sentencing according to the moral beliefs of myself (and, by stipulation, most people). I see nothing wrong in doing so. To refrain from doing so would be to refrain from acting according to my moral beliefs.

I think some confronting this might want to say there was something wrong with me if I liked killing children and didn't feel there was something wrong with it.

"There is something wrong with you" is yet another different, confusing, usage of the word 'wrong' in this discussion :-) Tabooing 'wrong' it means simply: you are unusual in this regard. Which is true by stipulation of our scenario - as you said, "most people think you did something wrong". Anything else ("who is human?") is arguing about the definitions of words and is not interesting or relevant.

I do think there are powerful reasons to think morality is objective

So tell me what they are already!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 04:31:46AM 0 points [-]

That reduces it to the statement "our common sense tells us so, you can't prove us wrong, we don't have to prove ourselves right".

This is ultimately the case for all statements.

Comment author: DanArmak 05 July 2012 05:38:39PM 1 point [-]

If I said "Murder is NOT wrong for humans, it is just a matter of personal choice" and you said "no you are wrong, murder is wrong for humans" I would conclude you are a moral realist, not a nihilist.

This is a bad framing of the issue. Murder (for humans) is not, properly speaking, right or wrong. Saying that it is will do for casual conversation but let's make things precise. The term "murder" also presupposes wrong-ness, so I'll replace it with 'killing'.

Moral judgments (right/wrong) are descriptions given by people to actions. Killing may be wrong in my eyes, and separately in your eyes; it is not wrong or right in itself. This is true whether 'killing' stands here for a very specific case we are discussing, or whether we are making a generalization over some or all cases of actual or possible killing. (In the latter case, we will be implying some generalization such as 'most/all/typical/... cases of killing are wrong in X's eyes'.)

We can also generalize over the person doing the moral judgment. For instance, if most/all/typical/... people think a case of killing is morally wrong, I can simply say that "it is wrong" without making explicit who does or doesn't agree with this judgment. This, as I noted above, is what we typically do in conversation - and it's OK, but only as long as everyone understands and agrees on who is said to (dis)approve of the action in question!

Finally, all that I have said isn't necessarily incorrect even if you believe in objective moral truth. In that case you can view it as a definition of the words 'morally right/wrong'. We can talk about people's moral opinions even if there is a separate Objective Moral Truth that not all people agree with. We should just be clear when we're talking about truth, and when about opinions.

However, I believe there is no such thing as objective moral truth. This isn't just because there's no evidence for it (which is true); the very concept seems to me to be confused. You say:

Upon being reminded of "the problem of induction" I remembered that scientific facts are deduced from ASSUMPTIONS. We just do a pretty good job if aligning with reality is your standard. So the feature that any moral conclusions I was going to reach would necessarily be deduced from assumptions was not enough to relegate them to mere choices.

Science starts with assumptions, and fundamental observations, that are about the objective world it describes. Morals start with assumptions and observations about human moral judgments. These judgments are the functions of human brains, which of course exist objectively. The morals you deduce from these assumptions are an objective fact - but they are a fact about human brains! That's what you deduced them from! They are not a fact about e.g. the action of killing in itself.

Imagine an alien that doesn't think killing kittens is morally wrong. It can do so without any compunctions. This is of course its subjective view. However, some humans think killing kittens is generally morally wrong, no matter who does it (as long as it's an intelligent being that makes choice about its actions).

In a universe with aliens and kittens but no humans, would an alien killing kittens be morally right or wrong? My answer: this is a wrong question; a correct question about morality is e.g. "do humans think that xxx is wrong", and there is no morality without reference to some agents (human or otherwise) doing the moral judging. Your answer is, presumably, that it is as right or as wrong as it is in our universe. (Are moral truths like logical truths? Or contingent on physical law?)

So maybe morality CAN'T be known as well as science, or maybe it can, we just haven't figure it out yet.

You think there are objective moral facts. Are they logical facts, like mathematical truths? Or are they physical facts, contingent on physical law and our actual universe, out there to be discovered?

In the latter case at least you have to say what physical evidence causes you to believe they exist.

And what does it mean for an objective moral truth to exist? If it's a logical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean my behavior is irrational in some sense? If it's a physical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean I will make wrong predictions about physical facts I don't know yet?

If I gave you an oracle for logical truths, and an oracle for physical facts, could you in principle deduce all moral truths? How?

But to be a proper nihilist, you need to accept that murder is not wrong (it is not right either). Are you down with that?

"Murder" presupposes "moral wrong", that's just what the word means. I certainly agree that "killing" - any particular instance of killing, as well as killing in general - is not in itself right or wrong; it is only right or wrong in the eyes of some people. Most people in any given society agree about most killings, which creates a consensus useful for many purposes, which all adds up to normality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 04:17:56AM 0 points [-]

You think there are objective moral facts. Are they logical facts, like mathematical truths? Or are they physical facts, contingent on physical law and our actual universe, out there to be discovered?

So you admit that there are two different kinds of objective facts. Given that there are two different kinds, why can't there be more?

Comment author: prase 03 July 2012 09:10:05PM 0 points [-]

We should punish even obvious sockpuppets for slippery-slope reasons. Any sockpuppet, obvious or not, accepted by the community will be interpreted by someone as a signal that there's nothing wrong with sockpuppetry.

Also, I have a moderate to strong distaste for bizarre behaviour, such as creating obvious sockpuppets when there is no obvious reason. Absurdist fiction is not my favourite genre.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 03:58:09AM 0 points [-]

In fact from a slippery-slope/community norm point of view obvious sockpuppets are worse than non-obvious ones.

Comment author: Pavitra 05 July 2012 07:50:58AM -2 points [-]

The cluster is more visible among the categories as such than among the persons who are members of the categories.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 03:30:05AM 1 point [-]

The cluster is more visible among the categories as such than among the persons who are members of the categories.

I was assuming that. I still don't see how this corresponds to a cluster in category space unless you mean literally the cluster of categories liberals label as privileged. In which case, no liberals generally don't label Jews privileged.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 July 2012 06:40:31AM 5 points [-]

Taboo "matter/energy".

Well damn. What is left? "You know... like... the stuff that there is."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 July 2012 03:17:51AM -1 points [-]

My point is that what counts as matter/energy may very well not be obvious in different theories.

Comment author: mwengler 04 July 2012 04:20:00PM 1 point [-]

So perhaps we still await the development of "the moral method."

It does strike me, and I mean I have not thought of this really until right now, that law and government are the engineering branches of "the moral method" of "moral realism" as "the scientific method" corresponds to "physical realism." Economics and Sociology may be the Physics and Chemistry of "moral realism." The progress that law and government have enabled are an economic productivity contributed to by billions of people (or at least 100s of millions) which dwarfs that of our predecessors in the same way that our technology dwarfs that of our predecessors.

There are at least a few interesting things about this idea. One need not "believe" in science to use the fruits of it, whereas plausibliy a belief in science is necessary to contribute to developing its progress. One can be an anarchist or a communist or an ignoramus or a nihilist and benefit from the modern economy and unprecedented levels of personal security in society. Presumably any "realism" would have implications that did not depend on the state of belief in the thing which is real.

What my off-the-cuff thesis lacks is any neessity for the truth-or-falsehood of moral statements. "You ought to obey the law" or "killing in a way which is against the law is wrong" are NOT required to be meaningful statements with an objective truth value. Or are they? In some sense, the truth value of scientific statements require the assumptions of logic and induction. One could say that it is not necessary to have a truth value associated with "all electrons repel each other" in order for me to build a smartphone which will only work if its untested electrons act the same in the future as the very very few electrons I have actually tested in the past. So perhaps "de facto" as it were, the practitioners and advancers of the law and government have a belief in "the moral method" just as non-philosopher scientists and engineers seem to have a "de facto" belief in induction.

This identification of law and government with the stuff of moral realism even has the feature that it can be wrong, or wrong-ish, just like science and engineering. ALL engineering design is done using approximations of physics. That is, we KNOW the principles behind our designs our "wrong" in that they are inexact approximations for what is really happening. We then use trial and error to develop an art of design which "usually" works, which usually keeps the thing we are designing away from where the inaccuracies of our design assumptions matter. Heck we even have the idea that there can be better and worse law and government just as there are better and worse science.

To stretch the analogy past all reason, can I say something interesting about the moral discussions that to me seem typical and which make me want to be a nihilist? These are the discussions of "my morality comes from moral intuitions but one of my intuitions is my morality should be consistent so I build these elaborate personal strutures instead of just doing what feels right." Their analogy in science might be someone who assiduously records all sorts of personal data to advance his health without a clue that his better option would be to plug in to the progress made in medical research. Someone who attempts to build his own smartphone through introspection instead of getting the professional product.

I don't know. Now I'll have to read about philosophy of law and government to discover that everything I've just said has been said before, its flaws categorized into labeled branches of belief. But for now I'm pretty happy with the concept and feel as though I've just invented something even though I've probably just dredged it up from things I've heard and read over the last half a century and, at least consciously, forgotten.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 July 2012 07:08:40AM -1 points [-]

It does strike me, and I mean I have not thought of this really until right now, that law and government are the engineering branches of "the moral method" of "moral realism" as "the scientific method" corresponds to "physical realism." Economics and Sociology may be the Physics and Chemistry of "moral realism."

Given the current state of economics and sociology I'd replace chemistry with alchemy in that metaphor. Also, foundational systems like utilitarianism and deontology are the equivalent of astronomy/astrology before they got separated.

To stretch the analogy past all reason, can I say something interesting about the moral discussions that to me seem typical and which make me want to be a nihilist? These are the discussions of "my morality comes from moral intuitions but one of my intuitions is my morality should be consistent so I build these elaborate personal strutures instead of just doing what feels right." Their analogy in science might be someone who assiduously records all sorts of personal data to advance his health without a clue that his better option would be to plug in to the progress made in medical research. Someone who attempts to build his own smartphone through introspection instead of getting the professional product.

A better analogy might be someone who believes that he can develop a physical theory simply by introspection without looking at the world. (It was a popular philosophical position before the scientific method was developed, after all that's how mathematics works and it had been successful.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 04 July 2012 04:19:44PM 2 points [-]

What I meant was that there may be more to such things as auras, ghosts, precognition, free will, etc. than current skepticism allows for, while still not having anything in the universe other than matter/energy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 July 2012 06:22:04AM -1 points [-]

Taboo "matter/energy".

Comment author: MileyCyrus 04 July 2012 04:33:37PM 1 point [-]

I used the word "privilege"because I wanted to compare Jews to other groups that liberals label as privileged (white/Christian/men/cis/upper-class/ect.) Like white/Christian/men/cis/upper-class/ect, American Jews enjoy advantages that out-group members do not, and work to exclude out-group members from these advantages (opportunity hoarding).

LW doesn't like debates about what a word means, so instead of asking you what you think the definition of "privilege" is, I'm going to ask if you think my comparison of Jews to white/Christian/men/cis/upper-class people neglects something.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 July 2012 06:10:20AM -2 points [-]

I used the word "privilege"because I wanted to compare Jews to other groups that liberals label as privileged (white/Christian/men/cis/upper-class/ect.)

I don't see how this corresponds to a cluster in thing space.

Comment author: marchdown 04 July 2012 02:36:32AM -1 points [-]

Irrationality game

Moral intuitions are very simple. A general idea of what it means for somebody to be human is enough to severely restrict variety of moral intuitions which you would expect it to be possible for them to have. Thus, conditioned on Adam's humanity, you would need very little additional information to get a good idea of Adam's morals, while Bob the alien would need to explain his basic preferences at length for you to model his moral judgements accurately. It follows that the tricky part of explaining moral intuitions to a machine is explaining human, and it's not possible to cheat by formalizing moral separately.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2012 07:19:43AM 1 point [-]

Please attach a probability.

Comment author: falenas108 03 July 2012 11:21:25PM *  0 points [-]

This is getting a lot of downvotes, meaning lots of people agree. To those people: Although it does make us look more cultish, does that outweigh the good from the lack of connections between "cult" and "lesswrong" on google?

Edited to correct, I originally had a typo where I said it meant people disagree instead of agree.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2012 07:00:43AM 3 points [-]

The only people who search for lesswrong and cult are the people who have already heard of the connection.

Comment author: mwengler 03 July 2012 07:22:51AM *  3 points [-]

You are on to something, science in some sense is taken on faith and morality in a similar sense is taken on faith.

But the faiths are different. The faith of science is a testable faith. Either you build stuff that works or you don't. if your musings about thermodynamics lead to a steam engine and later to an air conditioner, and your musings about electrons in a semiconductor lead to a transistor and later to a smartphone, well, that is what your high priests of science can bring you.

What is the test of a faith in moral realism? I don't wish to answer with a strawman that I will knock down, I really want to know, how do you evaluate if your moral system is doing a good job? Do you measure fewer inconsistencies in intuition? Do you get elected to the senate? Do people vote up your karma?

Science leads to jet aircraft and HD TVs and hip replacements. 2 out of 3 Abrahamic religions lead toenjoyable promises of an eternity of bliss.

What is the promise of a moral system? What is the thing it claims to give me that I don't have just following my intuitions in a non-systematic way? I know what the high-priests of science are claiming for their mojo, and it sure seems to me they deliver. (And they don't require me to believe in their mumbo jumbo "induction" stuff in order to use their jet aircraft and smartphones). What are the moral realists offering? And even more important, what are they delivering?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2012 06:27:19AM 2 points [-]

The best answer I can give you is that a moral realist today is currently in the same situation as a physical realist was before the development of the scientific method. There were lots of competing not-quite coherent theories of what it means for something to be real, but if you asked 100 people they would all agree on whether something was a rock or a glass of milk barring weirdness. Similarly, today there are lots of competing not-quite coherent theories of what it means for something to be moral, but if you asked 100 people they would all agree that killing an innocent person is wrong barring weirdness.

(The above is paraphrased from another comment that I can't locate right now.)

I realize that the above may not be the most satisfying answer, especially if the history of philosophy isn't available for you.

Comment author: Swimmer963 03 July 2012 02:20:57PM 0 points [-]

Consider the sunk cost issue. Suppose that you spent years working on a project that is heading nowhere, the effort was wasted, and there's a logical way to see that it is wasted effort. Any time your thought wavers in the direction of understanding that the effort was wasted, you get stab of negative emotions - particular hormones are released into bloodstream, particular pathways activate - and that is negative reinforcement for everything you've been doing including the use of mental framework that did lead you to that thought.

Solution: have a community where you can gain respect and status by having successfully noticed and avoided sunk cost reasoning. LW isn`t the best possible example of such a community, but a lot of the exercises done at, say, the summer minicamps in San Francisco were subsets of "get positive reinforcement for noticing Irrational Thought Pattern X in yourself, when normally various kinds of cognitive dissonance would make it tempting to sort of vaguely not notice it."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2012 05:27:30AM 0 points [-]

Solution: have a community where you can gain respect and status by having successfully noticed and avoided sunk cost reasoning.

This has its own failure mode.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 July 2012 05:14:17PM -1 points [-]

LW is a terrible example, an attachment to bunch of people (SI) who keep sinking their effort and other people's money, and rationalizing it. Regarding noticing irrational pattern, so you notice it, get rid of it, then what? You aren't gaining some incredible powers of finding correct answer.

Why are you here then? Please leave.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2012 05:24:22AM 1 point [-]

Why are you here then? Please leave.

Are you intentionally trying to promote evaporative cooling?

Comment author: mwengler 02 July 2012 09:28:56AM 0 points [-]

If all you have to base your moral system on is your intuitions, then the best you can hope for in a "consistent" systematization is to do no worse than flipping a coin when you have conflicting intuitions.

I suppose what I am really reacting to is that it strikes me that carefully systematizing morality makes as much sense as carefully systematizing astrology. The details and the calculations and the cogitation serve to give the illusion of there being something there while in actuality... all you have is Rationality Theater.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 July 2012 05:20:46AM 0 points [-]

If all you have to base your moral system on is your intuitions, then the best you can hope for in a "consistent" systematization is to do no worse than flipping a coin when you have conflicting intuitions.

Well, the same problem exists in science but that hasn't stopped us from making progress.

Comment author: mwengler 02 July 2012 09:30:38AM 0 points [-]

If you value consistency, AND your moral system is derived from your moral intuitions and nothing else, AND your moral intuitions are inconsistent...

If it walks like a science and it talks like a science but it is astrology, is it worth doing the calculations?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 July 2012 05:13:44AM 2 points [-]

If it walks like a science and it talks like a science but it is astrology, is it worth doing the calculations?

When you consider that "doing the calculations" is how astronomy was ultimately derived from and separated from astrology quiet possibly.

Comment author: mwengler 02 July 2012 09:24:41AM *  1 point [-]

Yes. In science and math we had reality against which to measure our progress.

What do you measure your progress against in coming up with a moral system? If it is the extent to which your moral system matches your moral intuitions, you will never do better than just following your intuitions.

If you are measuring your progress against something else, do say what it is. I know I have been searching for decades for some way to make morality objective.

If there is nothing against which to measure your progress, than following your intuitions is immeasurably better or worse than making up a system based on SOME of your intuitions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 July 2012 05:10:02AM *  0 points [-]

Yes. In science and math we had reality against which to measure our progress.

Except how do you measure something against reality in a way that doesn't (at least implicitly) rely on your intuitions?

What do you measure your progress against in coming up with a moral system? If it is the extent to which your moral system matches your moral intuitions,

Well, this is more-or-less what we do in mathematics.

Comment author: mwengler 30 June 2012 02:21:40AM 4 points [-]

How is coming up with a rule based on our moral intuitions and then following that rule even when it means violating our intuitions any better than just following intuitions in the first place? How is it better to replace following intuitions with following an imperfect simplification derived from an intuition?

I have been thinking these past months that I could somehow be immune from or outside of the necessity of having my intuitions dictate my values. Someone pointed out to me that it was essentially an intuition of mine that separating from this source of morality would be a good idea, and since then I have been trying to figure out how to live with being just an evolutionarily determined set of arbitrary (to anyone outside the system) values.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 July 2012 06:51:16AM 1 point [-]

How is coming up with a rule based on our moral intuitions and then following that rule even when it means violating our intuitions any better than just following intuitions in the first place?

Well, in mathematics and science we made a lot of progress when we stopped doing the latter and started doing the former.

Comment author: djcb 29 June 2012 06:46:20PM 0 points [-]

I can see that... one of the obvious problems that we can find some case where the meta-ethical systems go against our moral intuitions. This sometimes leads to attempt to make the meta-ethics incorporate this case (and then some more), but I feel it quickly becomes rather obvious that we cannot come up with any consistent system that also satisfies our intuitions. I'm a bit pessimistic philosophers will resolve this problem soon...

On a more happy note, I have found Kant's reasoning very useful for my own personal opinion-making, by constantly reminding me that if I find X about, say, genetically-modified food, nuclear energy etc., I really need to make my opinion in terms of a rule that doesn't include the particular case, and I try to think what this same rule would mean for other opinions I hold.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 July 2012 06:48:57AM 0 points [-]

I can see that... one of the obvious problems that we can find some case where the meta-ethical systems go against our moral intuitions. This sometimes leads to attempt to make the meta-ethics incorporate this case (and then some more), but I feel it quickly becomes rather obvious that we cannot come up with any consistent system that also satisfies our intuitions. I'm a bit pessimistic philosophers will resolve this problem soon...

Reasoning about, e.g., mathematics or physics has the same problem, and yet in those fields we can still build the system on our intuitions while accepting that they're sometimes wrong.

Comment author: DanArmak 30 June 2012 03:56:41PM 0 points [-]

This is true, but a simplification. Specifically, it doesn't distinguish cases where good advice is mostly impersonal (e.g. how to invest money) from cases where the best advice will be highly personalized (e.g. diet).

In many complicated fields, like diet, good advice needs to be individual. Learning enough about the field to choose the right advice yourself may take years. And it's prohibitively expensive to find what works best for you by trying everything. At best, you'll stick with the first thing that works moderately well.

So I propose category (4): the advice is valuable, not because it relies on nonpublic information, but because matching the right advice to each person is complicated (though based on public info, such as medicine). People who study the field, master it, and then give personalized advice add real value. Most importantly, to trust the advice of such people, you don't need to assume an extraordinary degree of altruism on their part. Ordinary situations like paying an expert for counseling may be sufficiently trustworthy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 July 2012 06:14:43AM 2 points [-]

Learning enough about the field to choose the right advice yourself may take years.

In that case, how could the expert possibly know enough about the field to choose the right advise for someone they only know through at-best several hour long appointments?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 29 June 2012 05:15:45AM *  22 points [-]

When you receive advice, it must fall into one of these categories:

  1. The advice is worthless or even outright bad.

  2. The advice is valuable, but it's common knowledge, or at least can be obtained from public information in a straightforward way.

  3. The advice is valuable, and it's not common knowledge, nor can it be obtained from public information in any straightforward way.

Now, if you believe you're receiving advice that is in category (3), you must ask yourself what makes you so special that you are privy to this information. This leads to the following heuristics:

  • If the advice is in category (2), it is likely to be good if the source is reputable. For example, a book or website about programming written by a reputable author is likely to give you good advice on how to program. (But note that while it certainly adds value in terms of a convenient and attractive presentation, such a source doesn't give any significant information that wouldn't be available from other public sources.)

  • If the advice purports to be in category (3), and yet the source of information is public (e.g. a book or website, even a non-free one), it's almost certainly bunk. The only exception is if the message is highly unpopular or counter-intuitive, and somehow you know that you have overcome biases that prevent most people from evaluating it correctly, which is very difficult and rare. For example, nearly any book that claims to bring special wisdom about investment, career, relationships, etc. is bunk.

  • If the advice comes from a person on a private occasion, then there are several steps that you need to do. First, does this person show clear indications of the relevant knowledge and competence? If not, it's likely bunk for obvious reasons. Second, is the advice in category (2) or (3)? If it's (2), it's probably good, though it still pays off to check against other sources of information. If it purports to be (3), then you need to do the third, and most difficult evaluation: does this person have the motivation for an extraordinary degree of altruism towards you? If not, it's likely bunk, or otherwise they wouldn't grant you this privilege. If yes, for example if you're getting advice from your parents, then it is probably highly valuable.

One common failure mode is when people believe they're giving you advice of type (3), but in reality, their motivation for altruism towards you is weaker than their motivation for saying things that have high signaling value (and omitting things that have negative such value). This is one danger of socializing with people who are higher-status and more accomplished than you -- you'll be tempted to take their advice seriously, but in reality, even if they are giving it with good intentions, it's likely to be heavily censored and distorted so as to maximize its signaling value.

(This is exacerbated by the fact that good no-nonsense advice on topics that involve any aspects of human social behavior, both personal and professional, tends to sound crass, disreputable, cynical, or worse.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 June 2012 06:48:55AM 15 points [-]

Exercise for the reader: Apply this advise to itself.

Comment author: TimS 25 June 2012 02:03:50PM 1 point [-]

There's another category, necessary truths. The deductive inferences from premises are not susceptible to disproof.

Thus, the categories for this theory of truthful statements are: necessary truths, empirical truths ("i-can-prove-it"), and "truth-and-i-can't-prove-it."

Generally, this categorization scheme will put most contentious moral assertions into the third category.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2012 06:11:16AM 1 point [-]

Agreed except for your non-conventional use of the word "prove" which is normal restricted to things in the first category.

Comment author: shminux 25 June 2012 12:01:42AM -1 points [-]

We would have "true-and-I-can-prove-it" and "true-and-I-can't-prove-it."

The definition of proof is the issue. An instrumentalist requires falsifiable predictions, a realist settles for acceptable logic when no predictions are available.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2012 07:24:52AM -2 points [-]

The definition of proof is the issue. An instrumentalist requires falsifiable predictions, a realist settles for acceptable logic when no predictions are available.

A rationalist (in the original sense of the word) would go even further requiring a logical proof, and not accepting a mere prediction as a substitute.

Comment author: mwengler 24 June 2012 11:56:19PM 0 points [-]

If you accept as "true" some statements that are not testable, and other statements that are testable, than perhaps we just have a labeling problem? We would have "true-and-I-can-prove-it" and "true-and-I-can't-prove-it." I'd be surprised if given those two categories there would be many people who wouldn't elevate the testable statements above the untestable one in "truthiness."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2012 06:39:11AM *  0 points [-]

We would have "true-and-I-can-prove-it" and "true-and-I-can't-prove-it." I'd be surprised if given those two categories there would be many people who wouldn't elevate the testable statements above the untestable one in "truthiness."

Where would mathematical statements fit in this classification of yours? They can be proven, but many of them can't tested and even for the ones that can be tested the proof is generally considered better evidence than the test.

In fact, you are implicitly relying on a large untested (and mostly untestable) framework to describe the relationship between whatever sense input constitutes the result of one of your tests, and the proposition being tested.

Comment author: Snowyowl 24 June 2012 07:47:24PM 1 point [-]

Or accept that each map is relevant to a different area, and don't try to apply a map to a part of the territory that it wasn't designed for.

And if you frequently need to use areas of the territory which are covered by no maps or where several maps give contradictory results, get better maps.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2012 06:12:16AM 1 point [-]

Basically, keep around a meta-map that keeps track of which maps are good models of which parts of the territory.

Comment author: Desrtopa 23 June 2012 03:05:35PM 1 point [-]

On the other hand, I think many people focus only on poorly performing regulation and thus underestimate how much government regulators act in their interests.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2012 03:32:30AM 1 point [-]

You could say the same thing about the free market.

Comment author: Vaniver 22 June 2012 05:33:55AM *  1 point [-]

Everyone who's looked at the data thinks that punishment can change behavior. The question is whether punishment makes the changes you want- and people dramatically overestimate the usefulness of punishment and dramatically underestimate the usefulness of positive reinforcement.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 June 2012 06:18:53AM 1 point [-]

Depends, the current "everyone is special, everyone deserves an A for trying" culture almost certainly overvalues positive reinforcement.

Comment author: Rain 22 June 2012 04:55:53PM *  3 points [-]

I watched the Ten Commandments the other day to revisit some classic cinema, and in the scene where god appears as a burning bush, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, that's all he could muster?" And then picture some outer-universe aliens tinkering with gigantic equipment with immense power inputs to try and interfere in some other world, only able to project tiny amounts of fire into a bush and a disembodied voice, the best efforts of all their minds at cross-dimensional communication resulting in nothing much at all, and the translator broken at that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 June 2012 04:02:49AM 1 point [-]

I watched the Ten Commandments the other day to revisit some classic cinema, and in the scene where god appears as a burning bush, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, that's all he could muster?"

Not necessarily, depends on what His goal was.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 June 2012 03:34:42AM *  2 points [-]

I think a large part of the problem is that people tend to identify with their governments and thus overestimate how much government regulators will act in their interests.

Comment author: mapnoterritory 21 June 2012 07:30:51PM *  9 points [-]

Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

There reason for that lies in regression to the mean when training (example of flight instructors in the israel airforce):

I pointed out to the instructors that what they saw on the board coincided with what we had heard about the performance of aerobatic maneuvers on successive attempts: poor performance was typically followed by improvement and good performance by deterioration, without any help from either praise or punishment.

Since positive reinforcement is so counterintuitive: don't forget to reward yourself for rewarding somebody for good behaviour! :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2012 04:44:33AM 0 points [-]

I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

So you (or at least Kahneman) implicitly admit that punishment is effective at changing behavior.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 June 2012 04:20:45AM 3 points [-]

Upon a few minutes of reflection, I've decided that it wouldn't technically be logically impossible for me to not be aware that I can edit my posts. At first I thought that any person who can contribute to LessWrong for two years without realizing that they can edit their posts simply couldn't be me in any possible world. But it's true that weirdly specific brain damage or supernatural influence could in fact make it happen while leaving my identity intact. I have a stricter sense of logical possibility than most, but I guess I'll cordon off that debate for some other time.

Um anyway yeah I'm aware.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2012 04:39:18AM 0 points [-]

Then why didn't you fix the error rather than delete the post?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 21 June 2012 04:58:17AM *  3 points [-]

You get the option to delete if you retract and no one's commented. Which is perhaps not good, because I made a rather embarrassing terminological error in that comment that I probably deserve to be punished for.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2012 04:01:06AM *  2 points [-]

You are aware that you can edit your posts? Such as fixing terminological errors.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 21 June 2012 04:23:31PM *  2 points [-]

More worryingly, I wonder what subjects I don't notice I can't think about objectively.

One warning sign is attributing disagreement with your views on a subject to "bias", and then engaging in armchair speculation about the psychological defects that must be responsible for this bias. For an example, see the article linked in the original posting, and almost the whole of this thread.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2012 03:17:00AM 6 points [-]

For an example, see the article linked in the original posting, and almost the whole of this thread.

Or for that matter most of the sequences.

Comment author: dbaupp 21 June 2012 05:07:35AM *  6 points [-]

This story came up on Hacker News recently (article in question): a company is creating chips that apparently can do 1 terahash/s, and currently pricing them for around $30K.

As this comment points out, the total combined hash rate of the entire bitcoin network is about 12 TH/s (source). So buying just one of these chips gives you >7% of the current total hashing power. In theory this is about 21 BTC (or 130+ USD) per hour, which means you break even after 230 hours, or fewer than 10 days!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2012 03:01:38AM 1 point [-]

As this comment points out, the total combined hash rate of the entire bitcoin network is about 12 TH/s (source). So buying just one of these chips gives you >7% of the current total hashing power. In theory this is about 21 BTC (or 130+ USD) per hour, which means you break even after 230 hours, or fewer than 10 days!

Assuming no one else is doing the same thing.

Comment author: evand 21 June 2012 04:14:44AM 1 point [-]

The IOUs are transferable, if not entirely fungible. The idea is that the per-transaction haggling is handled by the server (automated route-finding), some fungibility is achieved automatically (circular debts are canceled automatically), and people will act to balance income vs expense by settling large outstanding debts for cash (incentice provided by credit limits).

The single server problem is a huge liability, but distributed route finding and cryptographic chains to provide distributed record keeping seem to me a remarkably easy problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 June 2012 02:59:21AM 0 points [-]

I don't know much about RipplePay, are the IOUs denominated in some standard unit?

Comment author: evand 20 June 2012 11:56:18PM 8 points [-]

On a related note, has anyone else in the Less Wrong community looked into RipplePay? It's a system that, instead of being based on a finite currency, is based on distributed transferable IOUs.

Paper fiat money can be interpreted as an IOU from the government, transferable, and valid for use on your taxes. Ripple payments are private IOUs, valid for canceling debts with the issuer. To make a ripple payment to someone who trusts you, you simply issue them an IOU (assuming you haven't maxed out your credit with them...). To make a ripple payment to someone who doesn't trust you, the system finds a route along which IOUs can be exchanged (eg Alice gives one of her IOUs to Bob, who gives one of his to Carol, and then Carol gives whatever it was that Alice bought to Alice).

My biggest critique is that there isn't a distributed protocol, and the only implementation currently relies on a single central server. That, combined with the bootstrap problem, makes it unusable in practice. (BitCoin has a similar bootstrap problem, but less of a critical mass problem, since you don't have to find a route among people who both trust each other and use BitCoin.)

Comments or critiques, on either the theory or practicality?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2012 03:55:34AM 2 points [-]

Well, for start the single centralized server is a huge liability, previous digital currency schemes have collapsed when the government sued/arrested/raided the central server for enabling money laundering.

Also, unlike bitcoins, IOUs aren't fungible; thus, there is a need to haggle over each transaction.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 21 June 2012 12:14:32AM 0 points [-]

Sure, in a sense; but merchants don't really have a meaningful choice of whether to accept it. BTC is new.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2012 03:44:40AM 3 points [-]

Well the problem is arguably worse with regular money since the number of bitcoins that will ever exist is limited, whereas with regular money governments can, and sometimes do, print arbitrarily large quantities.

Comment author: cousin_it 20 June 2012 09:35:16PM *  11 points [-]

This part rubs me the wrong way:

PS - Some people may be tempted to tell me that people fear markets simply because markets are destructive, evil, create unhappiness and inequality, etc. That obviously is not the answer, just like "people believe in spirits because there are spirits" is not a cognitive explanation of supernatural concepts.

What if someone dislikes markets because they saw markets cause unhappiness or inequality on some random occasion? Surely that would be a valid cognitive explanation. Digging deeper to find imaginary biases like "he dislikes markets because they're driven by impersonal factors" would be wrong in such cases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2012 03:34:28AM 5 points [-]

What if someone dislikes markets because they saw markets cause unhappiness or inequality on some random occasion? Surely that would be a valid cognitive explanation.

Well, one could ask why negative effects are more likely to be attributed to markets, whereas positive effects to be attributed to other factors or simply taken for granted.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 20 June 2012 03:46:10AM *  4 points [-]

Being honest and well-intentioned is a property of the arguments the author uses, not whether you like the conclusion.

I disagree. I think "being honest and well-intentioned" is a property of the person advancing the argument (and reducible, in principle, to brain states), not a property of the argument itself (that is to say, a particular set of propositions). People can produce deeply flawed (invalid or inductively weak) arguments while actually trying to produce the opposite (or at least, it feels like I can).

More outlandish than monkeys changing into humans?

You are right, what is or is not "outlandish" depends heavily on large amounts of assumed background information. For instance, depending on the time period, it would be extremely "outlandish" to claim that disease is caused by "invisible animals", but moderns seem to be quite comfortable with the idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2012 03:08:51AM 3 points [-]

I disagree. I think "being honest and well-intentioned" is a property of the person advancing the argument (and reducible, in principle, to brain states), not a property of the argument itself (that is to say, a particular set of propositions). People can produce deeply flawed (invalid or inductively weak) arguments while actually trying to produce the opposite (or at least, it feels like I can).

Good point.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 19 June 2012 01:27:20AM 0 points [-]

Well, the particular example I'm thinking of is when she invited a Catholic friend as a guest blogger to discuss what he considered to be the strongest arguments against same-sex marriage. He ended up arguing that not only same-sex marriage, but the normalization and even existence of same-sex attraction itself needs to be combated so as to prevent the possibility that romantic attraction would complicate same-sex friendships. Homosexuals shouldn't publicly express their desires, as this results in "sexualizing" public spaces. Strong suggestions that the state should participate in the enforcement of such non-expression.

If you want to say this "isn't bigotry," or that I'm being too loose with the concept, that's fine. I have no strong attachment to some particular understanding of the term. My substantive point was that these views struck me as so outlandish that to host a whole debate about them and repeatedly defend the author as honest and well-intentioned seemed surprising.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 June 2012 02:34:27AM *  5 points [-]

My substantive point was that these views struck me as so outlandish

More outlandish than monkeys changing into humans?

that to host a whole debate about them and repeatedly defend the author as honest and well-intentioned seemed surprising.

Being honest and well-intentioned is a property of the arguments the author uses, not whether you like the conclusion.

Comment author: Nornagest 19 June 2012 12:44:00AM 2 points [-]

Notice how you need to add the qualifier "New" to "Atheist movement" there in order to exclude all the atrocities committed by the old atheists.

Although linking the atrocities of 20th-century Communism to atheism seems to be a favorite trope of contemporary reaction, I'm confused as to why you chose to bring it up in the context of traditional rationality. Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it's quite hostile to skepticism, and neither its atheism nor its claimed empiricism seem foundational to its social aims. Likewise, Dawkins et al. don't inherit from any of the major philosophers in the socialist family tree that I know of; they're both products of the Enlightenment, but they took quite different paths on their way here.

Moreover, the broader socialist movement isn't at all incompatible with religion: consider liberation theology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2012 01:19:33AM *  3 points [-]

Likewise, Dawkins et al. don't inherit from any of the major philosophers in the socialist family tree that I know of;

Well, Hitchens always considered himself a socialist.

Moreover, the broader socialist movement isn't at all incompatible with religion: consider liberation theology.

I could say the same about transhumanism.

Comment author: shminux 18 June 2012 10:43:56PM 0 points [-]

Hmm, if you need help figuring out who the loony is in the evolution/creation debate, this comment thread is not the place to set things straight.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2012 12:26:44AM -2 points [-]

I didn't say anything about my method of telling the looney. My point was that your method of telling the looney seems to boil down to who has high status/is wearing a lab coat.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 19 June 2012 12:08:06AM 1 point [-]

Hypothesis: religions not predicated on "specialness" will not generate dangerous fundamentalism.

If I believe I am average or not special in any way, then I want to work towards futures in which people who are average get goodies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2012 12:11:16AM 7 points [-]

If I believe I am average or not special in any way, then I want to work towards futures in which people who are average get goodies.

Let's start by killing the people who are special and taking their goodies. ;)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2012 12:09:17AM 5 points [-]

But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry

Could you expend on what you mean by "bigotry", I've seen that word thrown around to shut down debates way too much.

For example, from the above post some might conclude that you are an anti-Catholic bigot, depending on the definition of "bigotry" being used they might well be right.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 18 June 2012 11:33:06PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If I already had strong reason to think that the whole of Catholicism was true, then I couldn't just say "well, but I don't want same-sex romance prohibited, so I'll decide not to believe in Catholicism." That would be fallacious reasoning. But if I start off fairly certain that there's nothing wrong with same-sex romance but am also looking for some sort of theistic tradition that makes sense given what I already know, then Catholicism's views on sexuality would seem to count against it.

Perhaps you could compare this issue to the "it all adds up to normality" sentiment. Even if I decide I have to abandon my old theory of gravity, my new theory better be one that has pencils falling down and not up when I drop them. Likewise, even if I have to abandon my general thoughts on theism, I had better not pick a religious tradition that conflicts with strongly held moral sentiments of which I am still reasonably confident. What's the fallacy there?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 June 2012 12:03:33AM 5 points [-]

But if I start off fairly certain that there's nothing wrong with same-sex romance but am also looking for some sort of theistic tradition that makes sense given what I already know, then Catholicism's views on sexuality would seem to count against it.

Depends on how strong my evidence is for this position. If it's nothing stronger than "I can't think of any reason why same-sex romance is bad", then it doesn't take much evidence for Catholicism to overcome it.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 18 June 2012 08:49:30PM 10 points [-]

I must confess that, as an outsider to (but occasional reader of) Less Wrong, I find certain statements and arguments on this site to be just as totalizing and dogmatic as the most dangerous religious fundamentalism.

That seems like a surprising claim! I'd like to explore it further.

The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).

(Note, I'm not asserting that religions or fundamentalisms in general promote those sorts of things. You specifically said "the most dangerous religious fundamentalism", and I'm taking that limitation in good faith.)

Somehow, nobody around here seems to be doing those sort of things. Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.

Is that just because we are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy instead of about hating and killing them? (I am reminded of a Barry Goldwater quote about extremism and moderation.)

Or do you think there is some other reason?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2012 11:51:59PM 7 points [-]

The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).

Well, LW has only been around for a couple years, give it time. I've definitely seen ideas here that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would imply that under the right circumstances one has a moral imperative to do comparable things. There is also a norm against flinching from taking things to their logical conclusions.

Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.

Notice how you need to add the qualifier "New" to "Atheist movement" there in order to exclude all the atrocities committed by the old atheists.

Comment author: shminux 18 June 2012 07:05:00PM *  1 point [-]

During the discussion, he prodded me on where I thought moral law came from in my metaphysics. I talked about morality as though it were some kind of Platonic form, remote from the plane that humans existed on. He wanted to know where the connection was.

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth.

Presumably asking her to clarify her belief that Morality = Person, and discussing other options for Morality and why they do not make sense to her as much as the Person one could be a start. Though I'm guessing that it will end up at discussing reductionism, something she is "skeptical of".

Or maybe she just craves more love than she gets, and applying logic is a wrong approach to begin with. Maybe get her to attend one of the more welcoming and less judgmental LW meetups in the area.

EDIT: having looked some more through her blog, she seems (hindsight bias notwithstanding) to have been a closet theists, so this is basically a coming out party for her. You are probably out of luck. Your best (?) bet is that she will run into some hateful zealots who will make her question her beliefs again. Though for her sake I hope that she does not and lives her life as a happy Catholic. Sometimes happiness trumps rationality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2012 11:24:08PM 6 points [-]

Your best (?) bet is that she will run into some hateful zealots who will make her question her beliefs again.

As a corollary, acting like a hateful anti-Catholic is not a good idea.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 18 June 2012 06:41:52PM -2 points [-]

I guess what I mostly meant is that she jumped straight to Catholicism, rather than something more general, like deism. And while I respect that Catholicism makes more of an attempted to provide a coherent, logical framework for divine revelation, it also ends up saying awfully specific and awfully silly things about various subjects. If you start off very firmly believing that same-sex romantic relationships can be normal and healthy, and you're then trying to decide "what religious tradition should I join that makes the most sense given what I presently believe?", then Catholicism would appear to be an unlikely candidate. There's at least that one major red flag which suggests a pretty important error somewhere in the reasoning.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2012 11:20:38PM 3 points [-]

If you start off very firmly believing that same-sex romantic relationships can be normal and healthy, and you're then trying to decide "what religious tradition should I join that makes the most sense given what I presently believe?"

Fallacy of consequence.

Comment author: bcoburn 18 June 2012 07:31:00AM 2 points [-]

Just as an exercise, and mostly motivated by the IRC channel: Can anyone find a way to turn this post into a testable prediction about the real world?

In particular, it would be nice to have a specific way to tell the difference between "understanding the opposite sex is impossible" and "understanding the opposite sex is harder than the same sex" and "understanding types of people you haven't been in enough contact with is hard/impossible"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2012 10:30:51PM 4 points [-]

What do we mean by "understand"?

Comment author: wedrifid 17 June 2012 04:06:57PM 5 points [-]

I use a heuristic for cases like this: What did ~11th century Catholics do?

Crusade to retake the holy lands. Sounds tiring. I recommend you stick to the gardening idea for rest and relaxation. Or, at least, stick to the heuristic "What would Will's fantasy model of an 11th century Caotholic do?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2012 09:52:41PM 2 points [-]

Invading to take back lands that were taken from you or your allies by a hostile power is something that even 20th century westerners do.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012
Comment author: RowanE 16 June 2012 10:43:49PM 1 point [-]

I read any War Nerd article that comes out, and occasionally read other articles on the site, and my reaction has been similar. The political stuff they say seems, well, "reasonable, if embellishing", and I'd been worrying about the possibility that it was just true.

I should probably follow suit on this, and avoid any non-War-Nerd articles on eXile to avoid being mind-killed, although a part of me worries that I'm simply following group mentality on the Lesswrong cult.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 June 2012 02:20:07AM 1 point [-]

I agree, it seems "reasonable, if embellishing", on the other hand, there are many other political blogs with very different politics that also seem "reasonable, if embellishing".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 June 2012 09:57:19PM 7 points [-]

Indeed the authority of those who profess to teach is often a positive hindrance to those who desire to learn; they cease to employ their own judgement, and take what they perceive to be the verdict of their chosen master as settling the question. In fact I am not disposed to approve the practice traditionally ascribed to the Pythagoreans, who, when questioned as to the grounds of any assertion that they advanced in debate, are said to have been accustomed to reply 'He himself said so', 'he himself' being Pythagoras. So potent was an opinion already decided, making authority prevail unsupported by reason.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum

Comment author: Will_Newsome 14 June 2012 11:08:48PM *  1 point [-]

I'm slightly scared for the state of psychology.

And given Luke_A_Somers' and Eliezer's reactions, I'm more than slightly scared for the state of LessWrong. But maybe I missed something.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 June 2012 03:48:25AM 1 point [-]

And given LukeASomers' and Eliezer's reactions, I'm more than slightly scared for the state of LessWrong.

Not to mention the state of SIAI.

Comment author: Multiheaded 15 June 2012 11:04:36AM 0 points [-]

After reading this article, I don't. My bubble was broken, and the resulting shock recalibrated my scales.

See! Aggression brings conflict, conflict brings division, division brings honesty, honesty brings self-actualization! The Code of the Sith is right!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 June 2012 03:42:38AM 2 points [-]

See! Aggression brings conflict, conflict brings division, division brings honesty, honesty brings self-actualization! The Code of the Sith is right!

Of course, human intelligence evolved largely to win arguments, thus we think up our best arguments while engaging in mind-killing debate, sort of like Kafers but without the need for physical violence.

Also, this Orwell quote.

Comment author: hairyfigment 15 June 2012 04:54:21AM -2 points [-]

Are we both talking about logical consistency of the theory with itself and observations? (You know about self-hating number theory, how it shows that truth doesn't enter into this?) Or do you mean to include some aesthetically consistent style that you perceive in Thomism but not Pastafarianism? (In that case, your aesthetic preference is wrong.)

If one of those is right, are you willing to put $500 against $50? I'd need you to tell me all the questions and problems you think Pastafarianism should address. I'd also want up to one month per issue.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 June 2012 01:33:48AM 1 point [-]

Are we both talking about logical consistency of the theory with itself and observations? (You know about self-hating number theory, how it shows that truth doesn't enter into this?) Or do you mean to include some aesthetically consistent style that you perceive in Thomism but not Pastafarianism?

I'm talking about logical consistency with itself and observation as well as with itself on a meta-level.

(In that case, your aesthetic preference is wrong.)

So you admit that it's possible for aesthetic preferences to be wrong.

If one of those is right, are you willing to put $500 against $50?

I can't make bets involving money as that would break my pseudonymity. Also, who would judge?

Comment author: Multiheaded 15 June 2012 05:05:14AM *  -1 points [-]

Well, some people find execution more humane than prolonged torture! Me, I'd rather, say, be implanted with a chip that makes me want to sodomize cattle than "persuaded" to do the same thing by endless "kind" speeches, guilt-tripping, Dark Arts pontification, etc.

And, hell, if it takes a CEO to decide what "modification kits" to produce, and a scientist to produce them, it might turn out slightly better than any random people with random ideas trying to impress those upon their social lessers and dependents. I'm still afraid of technocratic rule, but ordinary everyday cruelty can be even worse, especially when it's not understood to be cruelty.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 June 2012 12:56:40AM 0 points [-]

And, hell, if it takes a CEO to decide what "modification kits" to produce, and a scientist to produce them,

This is different than what you seemed to be implying in the grandparent since in this scenerio no one's forced to apply the modification kits to themselves.

it might turn out slightly better than any random people with random ideas trying to impress those upon their social lessers and dependents.

Well, that depends, is the CEO subject to market pressure with respect to the kind of "modification kits" his company produces?

If so, then this basically amounts to self-modification, and has all the associated benefits and problems, e.g., wire-heading.

If the CEO isn't subject to market pressure and the modification kits are forced then I would find this much worse than mere social pressure.

Comment author: Thomas 15 June 2012 05:18:54AM 1 point [-]

The simulation implies the Bible God as strongly as it implies the Little Red Riding Hood. How probable is that the naughty wolf is our simulator?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2012 05:33:44AM 0 points [-]

The big bad wolf, as described in the story, doesn't have the ability to create a stimulation (or do any programing whatsoever), whereas God, as described in the bible, does.

Comment author: hairyfigment 15 June 2012 02:25:29AM 2 points [-]

Which of the many exclusive theologies do you mean? And what will you give me if I can make pastafarianism at least equally coherent? ^_^

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2012 02:50:31AM 4 points [-]

Which of the many exclusive theologies do you mean?

How about Thomism?

And what will you give me if I can make pastafarianism at least equally coherent?

Let's just say I'd be really surprised if you can do this.

Comment author: Slackson 15 June 2012 12:41:31AM 1 point [-]

I think that Eliezer's reaction is more along the lines of "changing your behaviour when your beliefs change because of new evidence is a good thing!" rather than "this is definitely strong evidence of the given conclusion!"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2012 02:19:32AM 4 points [-]

If you believe that updating on new evidence to be virtuous, it's easy to fall into the trap of overdoing it without checking whether your new evidence is any good.

Comment author: shminux 14 June 2012 11:20:48PM *  6 points [-]

What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?

Not-quite-numbers: specifically Christianity: at a noise level (i.e. same as pastafarianism). Some kind of omniscience/omnipotence, including being in a matrix-like simulation: somewhat above the noise level, but not high enough to change anything I do or worry about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2012 02:14:06AM 3 points [-]

specifically Christianity: at a noise level (i.e. same as pastafarianism).

Christianity has a much more coherent theology than pastafarianism.

Comment author: jsalvatier 14 June 2012 08:18:21PM *  0 points [-]

I find the idea that 'studying history is valuable for trying to do big things' counterintuitive. I think it would be valuable for you to try to share your intuition as a post. I would find a set of several examples (perhaps of the form "1) big idea 2) historical evidence of why this idea won't work well") very useful for getting a sense of what you're talking about. I'd also like to see some discussion of why mere discussion of object level lessons (say for example, "coordinating large groups of people is hard") isn't as good as discussing history.

Until someone does this, I doubt we'll see much historical discussion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2012 12:54:06AM 2 points [-]

I'd also like to see some discussion of why mere discussion of object level lessons (say for example, "coordinating large groups of people is hard") isn't as good as discussing history.

Because society, unlike say physics, is a thick problem, so in order to have any chance to make reasonable decisions is to calibrate yourself by knowing a lot of history.

Comment author: pnrjulius 09 June 2012 12:51:50AM 4 points [-]

What makes that one most interesting is its source.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 June 2012 01:38:21AM 0 points [-]

Yes, an interesting question is how may readers will update their opinion of the Catholic church based on this.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 June 2012 08:56:10PM *  0 points [-]

Maybe you have a deontological soft-spot for gays, or you have an egoistic preference for the wellbeing of gays.

Not for gays specifically, of course, just for all minorities who share the "born that way but can be broken into a different mold by torture+brainwashing" pattern. If Mormons tried those "shaming" tactics, etc on, say, opponents of transhumanism or borderline-autistic geeks, I'd speak out for those. Because I feel that, socially, manipulating people like that is a line that should not be crossed.

Well, of course I take it personally being bisexual myself, but still - I spoke out for gay rights even before I realized my own sexuality, just because it always looked like a glaring injustice to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 June 2012 01:27:00AM 3 points [-]

Could you taboo what you mean by "torture+brainwashing".

Comment author: Jack 12 June 2012 09:34:08PM *  11 points [-]

We realize that. We just care a lot more about the the views of the Brahmin than your second class of people. Which class of people has the larger microphone? Which class has the money? Which class produces mathematicians? Etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 June 2012 12:56:42AM *  0 points [-]

Which class of people has the larger microphone? Which class has the money?

Which class has any incentive to change the status quo? When planning what amounts to a massive reorganization of society, a.k.a., a revolution, you what the support of "the people" since the current upper class likes things the way they are.

Comment author: gwern 12 June 2012 07:54:27PM 1 point [-]

There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.

And how does one do that? The problem is that most historical facts are publicly available, so how does one distinguish a theory producing by data mining and overfitting from one that wasn't? The only historian I can think of who has anything close to an answer to that is Turchin via the usual statistics method of holding back data to test the extrapolations.

Turchin and Carrier are discussed occasionally, but not that much; why should I think this is not the right amount of discussion?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 June 2012 12:33:12AM 0 points [-]

There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.

And how does one do that? The problem is that most historical facts are publicly available, so how does one distinguish a theory producing by data mining and overfitting from one that wasn't?

This is a thick problem.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 June 2012 06:43:53AM 1 point [-]

We ought to be more savvy than the general public in most regards, though, shouldn't we?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 June 2012 07:00:56AM 2 points [-]

My point is that the distinction might not have been obvious to Waitingforgodel.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 June 2012 05:13:48AM *  9 points [-]

Clearly Waitingforgodel was talking about, y'know conservative people - with a conservative general mindset that extends into politics - and not progress-loving, ultra-capitalist right-wingers that get lumped in as "Conservatives". The distinction looks obvious enough to me.

And I'm not at all convinced that we should prefer the latter's enthusiasm to the former's anger.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 June 2012 06:40:18AM 8 points [-]

Clearly Waitingforgodel was talking about, y'know conservative people - with a conservative general mindset that extends into politics - and not progress-loving, ultra-capitalist right-wingers that get lumped in as "Conservatives". The distinction looks obvious enough to me.

That's because you're a Burkean socialist. That distinction is not obvious to a large part of the population.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions
Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 11 June 2012 09:34:37AM 6 points [-]

What would really be useful would be example of conspiracy theories that were accepted by a fringe group, rejected by the mainstream (for at least a decade, say), and ultimately found to be true. Maybe the COINTELPRO would qualify for this - were some of the targeted groups complaining about FBI targeting them?

Interesting edge case is the whole McCarthy stuff - he was right that there was a quite a bit of communist spying, but he appeared to have no evidence whatsoever for this (and his specific accusations were mostly random). Does accidentally being correct count? Or is this more another case of "reverse stupidity isn't intelligence"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 June 2012 04:59:23AM 2 points [-]

Interesting edge case is the whole McCarthy stuff - he was right that there was a quite a bit of communist spying, but he appeared to have no evidence whatsoever for this (and his specific accusations were mostly random).

He was after communist agents of influence not spies specifically and his method was going after people visibly spreading communist memes.

Comment author: David_Gerard 12 June 2012 09:25:40AM -1 points [-]

People have indeed started on this, but we could probably do with more. Go for it :-)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 June 2012 04:30:17AM *  0 points [-]

People have indeed started on this

Where?

Comment author: wedrifid 11 June 2012 11:30:05PM 0 points [-]

I concur. I read the sequences, then I read every post from the end of the sequences until that time (May 2011). I was amazed just how little seemed to have been taken in even from the posts on LW since the end of the sequences.

What are some examples? Which posts from your reading have you noticed in particular that haven't been absorbed sufficiently as subcultural memes? What is it that I may have missed and could be benefited by going back and reviewing?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 June 2012 02:43:28AM 1 point [-]

What are some examples?

Luke lists some recent ones here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 June 2012 02:32:04AM 10 points [-]

I think the problem is that these posts aren't well-indexed, so they tend to get forgotten once they fall of the recent posts pages.

Comment author: Karmakaiser 11 June 2012 03:51:05PM *  28 points [-]

Speaking of OB, We have an expansive list of Eliezer's posts organized by topic but no such sequence exists for Robin Hanson. His posts on status seeking are incredibly important for human rationality.

I purpose that we produce a sequence devoted to RH's posts. If someone who read most of his posts can point me in the right direction I volunteer to do it. My summer's off from classes, I just have work and then my private projects and public project would be good for me to signal usefulness to LW, OB and the communities associated with them.

EDIT: RH gave me his blessing. I'm reading OB. Just crossed through to 2007. Writing major themes and interconnections as I go.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 June 2012 02:16:08AM 10 points [-]

His posts on status seeking are incredibly important for human rationality.

I think he has an unfortunate tendency to treat status as a golden hammer, attempting to explain everything in terms of status, whether or not it's a good explanation.

Comment author: TimS 11 June 2012 01:56:52AM *  0 points [-]

Who says that a society's moral values don't have causes? The issue is whether those causes are historically contingent (colloquailly, whether history could have happened in a way that different moral positions were adopted in a particular time and place).

Alternatively, can I suggest you taboo the word justification? The way I understand the term, saying moral positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory moral positions throughout time. (But I'm out of the mainstream in this community because I'm a moral anti-realist)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 June 2012 02:28:05AM 2 points [-]

The way I understand the term, saying moral positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory moral positions throughout time.

Would you apply the same logic to physical propositions? Would you claim that, for example, saying that astronomical positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory astronomical positions throughout time?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes June 2012
Comment author: hankx7787 10 June 2012 02:18:29PM 0 points [-]

The latter half of the quote is fine, but the first half is completely wrong and is the opposite message of what rationality says.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 June 2012 09:09:18PM 2 points [-]

You seem to be suffering from is-ought confusion. Yes, it would be nice to eliminate the irrational emotion, but this isn't always possible or requires too much effort to be worthwhile.

Comment author: witzvo 10 June 2012 01:40:59AM 3 points [-]

Thanks! That discussion also mentioned the issues list. So now I can at least get a peek at what's needed to effect a change. Would submitting a patch do it? Well, now I know more about where to look.

I also found this comment interesting:

I want to vote for and against the same post sometimes. Not too useful, but might help for ordering by controversial.

I agree with the sentiment. I think the useful low hanging fruit would be to allow you to select a section of a post with your cursor and up/down vote that section. This, and other good proposals, certainly complicate the UI, though. Another proposal there was to require a comment with a vote. This is simpler to implement but adds user-friction and clutter, so I'm not sure about the tradeoff.

Is there more I'm missing? I tried some searches but couldn't find the right phrases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 June 2012 03:31:35AM 9 points [-]

I think the useful low hanging fruit would be to allow you to select a section of a post with your cursor and up/down vote that section.

What would that actually do? (This most definitely is not low hanging fruit.)

Another proposal there was to require a comment with a vote.

Bad idea. For starters, it means there is no way to downvote trolls without starting flame wars.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 June 2012 03:25:35AM *  4 points [-]

I think part of the problem is that people (both conspiracy theorists and debunkers) tend to confuse prospiracies and conspiracies.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 June 2012 05:34:39AM *  4 points [-]

It wouldn't make mainstream "conservatives" happy, but that is simply because they are so utterly ignorant to how legally different marriage is today compared to a few decades or worse don't mind it at all, not minding the incongruity. It would make traditionalists happy. They could recreate much of what they miss about modern marriage.

Take for example penalizing the partner who is cheating in divorce settlements, this is something I know no Slovenian court will ever take into consideration but something people who actually want a traditional marriage would love. In general maybe some people would like to make divorces more difficult because they in general don't approve of them. Maybe some people think default custody should de facto lie with the husband instead of the wife (as it does currently). ect. ect.

Before you think there aren't any people who look at it this way, note that I've seen enthusiasm for this concept on very hardcore Christian right wing blogs like the Orthosphere and The Thinking Housewife.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Poly marriage?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 June 2012 06:06:32PM *  1 point [-]

Take for example penalizing the partner who is cheating in divorce settlements, this is something I know no Slovenian court will ever take into consideration but something people who actually want a traditional marriage would love. In general maybe some people would like to make divorces more difficult because they in general don't mode approve of them. Maybe some people think default custody should de facto lie with the husband instead of the wife (as it does currently). ect. ect.

Careful, you need to weaken the political power of feminism first, otherwise they will try to pass restrictions on the types of marriage contracts to be enforced, similar to the restrictions on employment contracts.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 June 2012 05:41:57AM *  2 points [-]

Mainstream conservatives will be happy with it too. They aren't very clever that way, you can change almost anything you want and 30 years later they won't question it seriously any-more. ;)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Poly marriage?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 June 2012 01:47:40AM 0 points [-]

Assuming the problems with that change don't become obvious within the time period. For an example of this happening, look at the problems caused by say no-fault divorce.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Poly marriage?
Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 June 2012 09:34:58AM 2 points [-]

I think laws forbidding cousin marriage are unfair and should be the next target of civil rights activism.

I've seen it argued somewhere that the acceptability of cousin marriage in society also relates significantly to the presence of corruption/nepotism/tribal thinking in that society.

Incest laws in general makes no sense except as a eugenics measure.

Besides eugenics issues, I'd guess that because of pre-existing power dynamics incest probably has much more of a potential to be psychologically unhealthy than most non-incestuous sexual relationships -- much like teacher-student / doctor-patient relationships are also frowned upon, except that the familial dependency is even stronger.

It puts all the eggs in one basket after all (psychological/financial support from biological family, psychological/financial support from significant other) -- if these are the same people, who do you turn to when you have problems?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 June 2012 01:12:18AM 2 points [-]

I've seen it argued somewhere that the acceptability of cousin marriage in society also relates significantly to the presence of corruption/nepotism/tribal thinking in that society.

You mean hbdchick?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 June 2012 01:59:15AM 12 points [-]

I think another manifestation of this phenomenon is the way geeks tend to come up with elaborate justifications for plot holes in their favorite science fiction/fantasy works, e.g., all the discussion about the science of star trek and star wars.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 06 June 2012 06:38:29PM *  1 point [-]

we can adopt the general rule that mentioning K-complexity in a discussion of physics is always a sign of confusion :-)

Mentioning it anywhere except algorithmic information theory is a sign of confusion. This includes theology and parapsychology. Use just Bayes or, if you want to be all fancy, updateless-like decision theories. I love algorithmic probability to death but it's just not something you should use casually. Too many pitfalls.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 June 2012 02:04:49AM 0 points [-]

Use just Bayes

Bayes requires a prior.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 05 June 2012 09:12:34PM 0 points [-]

Except people don't have the time to research every statement they hear.

But they also often accept statements they should doubt based on the information they already have. Motivated thinking is there, it just needs an official voice that reassures them that they will be in majority even if they are actually wrong.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 June 2012 05:18:02AM 0 points [-]

As mentioned in this post, I think you're underestimating how many of our ideas come from the group.

Comment author: cmessinger 05 June 2012 05:22:24PM 4 points [-]

Margaret Fuller, intoxicated by Transcendentalism, said, "I accept the universe," and Thomas Carlyle, told of the remark, supposedly said, "Gad, she’d better."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 June 2012 05:04:45AM 3 points [-]

This depends on what is meant by "accept the universe". Does this mean that you're ready to deal with reality, or that you accept the way the universe currently is and aren't going to try to make it better?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes June 2012
Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 June 2012 03:50:26PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, I agree with (at least the core of) this.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2012 03:44:03AM 0 points [-]

Of course, that's why you what to identify with Paul Graham.

Comment author: Strange7 04 June 2012 08:52:02AM 6 points [-]

I think the idea is that propaganda provides an easy answer, but doesn't really prevent anyone from doing research to find the harder answer. A more detailed example here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2012 03:35:04AM *  2 points [-]

Except people don't have the time to research every statement they hear.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 June 2012 06:34:11AM *  1 point [-]

Go meta. If that doesn't work, go meta. If it does work, go meta. (This is especially useful for ethics but applies everywhere.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2012 03:12:42AM 1 point [-]

Don't get so caught up going meta that you loose sight of the object level.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 June 2012 03:00:05AM 5 points [-]

Keep in mind that when asked for good cached wisdom, people tend to prioritize showing off their cleverness over giving useful advise.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 June 2012 05:19:42AM *  3 points [-]

I guess Parfit's already said everything that should be said here --- we're almost following him line for line, no? Parfit doesn't like self-defeating theories is all. Mostly my hidden agenda is to point out that real utilitarianism would not look like choosing torture. It looks like saying "hey people, I'm your servant, tell me what you want me to be and I'll mold myself into it as best I can". But that's really suspect meta-ethically. That's not what morality is. And I think that becomes clearer when you show where utilitarianism ends up.

"Oh you don't know what love is --- you just do as you're told."

ETA: Basically, I'm with Richard Chappell. But, uh, theist -- where he says "rational agent upon infinite reflection" or whatever, I say "God", and that makes for some differences, e.g. moral disagreement works differently. (Also I try to push it up to super mega meta.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 10:13:22PM 1 point [-]

Mostly my hidden agenda is to point out that real utilitarianism would not look like choosing torture. It looks like saying "hey people, I'm your servant, tell me what you want me to be and I'll mold myself into it as best I can".

This can also lead to the situation where if everyone decides to be a utilitarian, you wind up with a bunch of people asking each other what they want and answering "I want whatever the group wants".

Comment author: [deleted] 03 June 2012 05:03:15AM 1 point [-]

I was. The experience was good. I learned to double-dutch jump rope, and play the dozens. I didn't learn to dance the Cabbage Patch, no matter how many times my classmates tried to demonstrate it for me, but that was my failing and not theirs.

Then I took the SAT, got a good score, and on the strength of my high school and my zip code was offered a good scholarship to a private liberal arts college.

What I'm trying to say is: the piece Eugine_Nier is missing is how drastically parental wealth, income, and educational attainment affect the kids' educational outcomes. If you look at the research, these factors drastically outweigh the quality of the school or the teacher. That's not to say that teachers have no effect; but, so far as these things have been quantified, the family background is more important by an order of magnitude.

In other words -- if you are doing relatively well, and if you read a lot of books, it almost doesn't matter where you send your kids to school. In fact, sending them to a diverse "inner city" school could be very helpful from a social point of view.

It was for me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 09:59:35PM 4 points [-]

In other words your school was ok provided you are willing to do all your learning outside of it.

Comment author: private_messaging 02 June 2012 04:20:47PM *  1 point [-]

those derived from incredibly stupid notion that the superintelligent AI wouldn't 1-box in emulation and 2-box in real world if it could, aren't real. (and it definitely could with your brain as predictor, unless your ego is larger than the superintelligence itself)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 06:35:27PM 2 points [-]

those derived from incredibly stupid notion that the superintelligent AI wouldn't 1-box in emulation and 2-box in real world if it could, aren't real. (and it definitely could with your brain as predictor, unless your ego is larger than the superintelligence itself)

And yet somehow you, a mere human, were able to see through the AI's attempt at fooling the stimulator.

Comment author: Spectral_Dragon 03 June 2012 12:35:55AM *  5 points [-]

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

-- Albert Einstein

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 05:02:56AM 3 points [-]

Any fool can also make a simple theory to describe anything, provided he is willing to hide dis-confirming evidence under the rug.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 June 2012 04:05:55PM 1 point [-]

It's become a fundamental part of our culture, unlike those others. Everyone's culture, it's not like Christianity. It's like fish in water at this point. The evidence suggests he's done something right -- we're not privileging the hypothesis here. Western civilization as a whole has spoken, people of all intelligences and creeds. Well, except the devout religious people, but they're close-minded. LessWrong would agree.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 04:35:28AM 6 points [-]

It's become a fundamental part of our culture, unlike those others. Everyone's culture, it's not like Christianity. It's like fish in water at this point.

I would argue our culture is in the process of rejecting Freudianism. Seriously, you have to allow more than a century for the culture to make these kinds of judgements. I mean, I could make the same argument in favor of modern art.

Comment author: Multiheaded 02 June 2012 05:12:14AM 0 points [-]

Would you please share your own experience with American public schools, if you have any?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 03:56:15AM 2 points [-]

I wasn't in an "inner city" school.

Comment author: private_messaging 02 June 2012 05:08:36PM *  0 points [-]

In Newcomb's a good agent will 1-box in emulator and 2-box in reality if it could tell apart sim and reality. Even a tiniest flaw in the emulation results in lack of incentive for following through with the basilisk threat. You need a very dumb decision theory for the agent to just torture people for no gain.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2012 12:27:02AM 3 points [-]

Yes, and in that case the basilisk isn't a problem at all. My point is that under any decision-theoretic assumptions Eliezer's strategy of secrecy doesn't help.

Comment author: knb 02 June 2012 05:22:49AM *  5 points [-]

I don't get it. I'm guessing that Will edited the post? And it had something to do with the simulation argument?

Edit: I forgot to include, if someone who knows him better could explain will_newsome's motivations here, that would be appreciated. (I enjoy internet drama).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 June 2012 06:14:01AM *  6 points [-]

if someone who knows him better could explain will_newsome's motivations here, that would be appreciated.

My working hypothesis, based on this comment thread, is that Will thinks he's found some basilisk that requires he act this way to avert it.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 June 2012 02:56:28AM 1 point [-]

You seem well-intentioned and interesting. I wish you well on your journeys. I will tell you, my goal is this: to serve God, and to save humanity. My immediate goal is this: to lose credibility as fast as is fucking possible, because the world is way scarier than I thought it was.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 June 2012 03:12:07AM 5 points [-]

because the world is way scarier than I thought it was.

I would recommend taking some time to double-check this before doing something hard to undo.

Keep in mind Eliezer's mistake with the basilisk. Based on a quick analysis, he decided the best course of action was to stop thinking about it and encourage others to do likewise. The problem (assuming my model of him is correct) is that since he stopped thinking about it, he didn't realize his initial analysis was wrong. In fact as far as I know, he still hasn't realized it.

Comment author: Logos01 02 June 2012 02:31:10AM 0 points [-]

Indeed. But they do demonstrate the principle in question.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 June 2012 02:46:56AM *  1 point [-]

The principal you're trying to demonstrate is that one shouldn't fear changing one's substrate since it's already happening. So, no they don't.

Comment author: Thomas 01 June 2012 05:06:11PM 0 points [-]

Can you figure out something (anything!) without compressing the whole data context? I can't imagine a situation like that.

Newton compressed the data we had about the Solar system, quite a bit. Einstein add some compression when explained the Mercury's orbit. The theory always compresses the data we previously have.

Killing the God-life-creator by Darwin reduced the necessity for a large number of bits, one needed to explain the God's work.

You must compress the earthquake data to predict the next one.

And so on, and so on. I can't find a counter example.

Juergen Schmidhuber just ought to be right.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 June 2012 02:21:46AM 1 point [-]

Can you figure out something (anything!) without compressing the whole data context? I can't imagine a situation like that.

Depends what you mean by "figure out"; there's always stamp collecting.

Comment author: Logos01 01 June 2012 05:42:30PM 0 points [-]

Actually it's more complicated than that. Not just water atoms; over time your genetic pattern changes -- the composition of cancerous to non-cancerous cells; the composition of senescent to non-senescent cells; the physical structures of the brain itself change.

Neurogenesis does occur in adults -- so not even on a cellular level is your brain the same today as it was yesterday.

Furthermore -- what makes you confident you are not already in a Matrix? I have no such belief, myself. Too implausible to believe we are in the parent of all universes given physics simulations work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 June 2012 01:33:15AM 1 point [-]

over time your genetic pattern changes -- the composition of cancerous to non-cancerous cells; the composition of senescent to non-senescent cells

Note that neither of these developments are generally considered good.

Comment author: juliawise 31 May 2012 12:31:51PM *  2 points [-]

Probably. They'll certainly be going to school with them. We haven't bought a house yet, but all the areas we're considering have projects nearby.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 June 2012 01:28:31AM 3 points [-]

I'm willing to assign significant probability that when you actually have kids and see them experience first hand the actual quality of the school, you'll arrange for them to go to a charter and/or private school (or possibly even home-school).

Comment author: Multiheaded 01 June 2012 05:02:58AM *  0 points [-]

I'm basically speaking against "shallow" (bad) conformism and for "religious" (good) conformism in this comment. Only emulating the here-and-now surface patterns of your group = bad. Taking care to choose among your culture's traditions carefully, taking a sprout and nurturing it if there's no grown branch (like the more succesful attempts at democracy in Africa, which clearly did NOT come from a mere copy-paste of the Western model, but partly drew on colonial or tribal past), perhaps promoting one branch (say, American Protestant radicalism) at the expense of other (say, Southern slavery and its mode of life) but not cutting any memories and ideas off = good.

Were you aware that even the Bolsheviks in Russia were following an established tradition of "nihilism" and radical upheaval? Their fault was not steering the nation in a direction they wanted, but (nearly) pruning all the other branches of possibilities inherent in the Russian culture, from monarchism to tribal/feudal democracy. Today in the US, slavery might be gone but the positive image of the "Southern Gentlemen", with its associated aristocratic values, lives on in vestigal form (and has plenty of fans), while the memory of Russian aristocracy is sadly gone.

That's roughly the difference I'm talking about, between treating the culture as an unique living thing vs. as a generic simple machine.

(And yet still somehow I don't call myself a conservative. Don't ask.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 June 2012 06:09:53AM *  2 points [-]

(like the more succesful attempts at democracy in Africa, which clearly did NOT come from a mere copy-paste of the Western model, but partly drew on colonial or tribal past)

Perhaps, but the linked articles don't go into enough detail to support this assertion.

perhaps promoting one branch (say, American Protestant radicalism) at the expense of other (say, Southern slavery and its mode of life) but not cutting any memories and ideas off = good.

I would like to point out that decentralized systems, e.g., libertarianism, are better at this then centralized systems, e.g., socialism.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 31 May 2012 04:45:48PM *  12 points [-]

The difference between soldiers and (almost) everyone else is that the soldiers' job involves risking one's life.

According to the 2010 National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, the jobs with the highest fatal injury rate per 100,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers in the U.S. were:

  • Fishers and related fishing workers
  • Logging workers
  • Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
  • Farmers and ranchers
  • Mining machine operators

The fatal injury rate for people in the fishing trade is 116 per 100,000 — or slightly more than 1 in 1000, per year. (If you value your life, do not go into the fishing business; and if you value other people's lives, you might consider buying farmed rather than wild-caught fish!)

According to this Congressional Research Service report, the worst year for U.S. military deaths recently was 2007, when 1953 out of 1.6 million military FTEs died. However, 235 of these deaths were due to illness rather than injury, whereas the above figures for other occupations deal only with injury. Subtracting these, members of the military are risking their lives slightly less than the people who bring you your salmon and tuna.

If you want to make a moral difference between soldiers and other people in dangerous occupations, you might consider making it on the basis that soldiers have to deal with threats to their lives that are caused by other people's deliberate hostile action. Humans tend to reckon risks caused by other people's deliberate action as being morally worse than risks caused by dangerous environments. Whether this difference should be considered a bias, or part of our utility function, or both, is another issue ...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 June 2012 02:50:21AM 3 points [-]

If you want to make a moral difference between soldiers and other people in dangerous occupations, you might consider making it on the basis that soldiers have to deal with threats to their lives that are caused by other people's deliberate hostile action.

Disagree. I think the relevant difference is people risking their lives providing a service that's (at least believed to be) a public good. Notice that the two civilian jobs that are also frequently called heroes are police and firefighters and your criterion doesn't apply to the latter.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 May 2012 11:00:59AM *  5 points [-]

I mostly agree, that's all good and well... until it comes to moral choices, especially big ones. Here, even if people are very biased, don't know their own preferences, just plain don't care about others, etc... shallow conformism is still a worse option in many situations. If everyone just looked to their current group's authorities in deciding how or whether to do the right thing - and those authorities looked to the past - ... wouldn't we have, for example, 0% of Germans resisting the Holocaust instead of 2%? Wouldn't slavery be a respected institution to this day, lazily "justified" by things like genetic differences? Wouldn't, say, husbands be allowed by law and public opinion to beat, rape and essentially own their wives?

No, no, "conservative"/"traditionalist" ethics are a path to nowhere without a complex semi-conscious system, varying from individual to individual and acting on both rational and emotional levels, that would allow one to relate one's personality and preferences with their group's tradition and accumulated knowledge/heuristics, and which would be given priority during judgment-making by an appeal to a higher, ideal authority - in short, without an essentially religious worldview.[1]

Unfortunately, not everyone has it in them to be Oskar Schindler or Sophie Scholl, but many people only had to be "good Christians" when the moment of truth came - to follow the output of that deep and broad system, which had been known as "Christianity", "Western values", "common decency", but which ultimately drew upon similar sources, and had the ethical advice of centuries encapsuled within it. Alas, it was the 20th century, and things like that - old, complicated, below-the-surface systems - were just falling apart everywhere. But we shouldn't just sit back and allow our own system to follow this course.

This is why I'm against any "rational" tampering with today's mainstream Western worldview, even where I'm to the left or to the right of its political aspects. Any attack on "Liberal hypocrisy" that has indeed taken root in the last 50 years and largely replaced Christianity is short-sighted simply because this system is likely the only thing really holding our civilization together. If anything, perhaps we should move towards giving it more religious trappings - official commandments, saints, etc - without necessarily adding any supernatural element, but certainly without naively preaching that e.g. "Human Rights" don't make much sense.

Today, a thinking conservative should be focused on improving and stabilizing the prevailing liberal dogma, not trying to return to the failed Protestant/Catholic one or make a "dogma-free" system. In short, I'm for free individual search through the collected conscious and subconscious ideas of your culture - its narrative. And where you've got a narrative, you've got humans' natural ability to work with stories; abstract ideas are counter-intuitive, but picking out, combining and adapting stories is, IMO, how we can best handle social thinking.

(Sorry for such a rambling comment, I was just prompted to unload some under-construction ideas by seeing a post that's related to them. Paragraphs here can be read separately.)

[1] I'm not talking about any kind of "faith" here, a belief in the suprenatural and so forth, but about the style of thinking that organized religion or advanced ideology seems to foster in developed, all-around intelligent people - like Chesterton or Orwell. My argument is that the average human also benefits from such a system, and this would be more noticeable with better systems. (Compare the Socialism/Communism of the students and professors who were behind the dismantling of the Segregation in the U.S. - mostly good people, for all their flaws and possible delusions - with e.g. the primitive, simplified worldview of early Bolsheviks. Both are clearly religions, but one does its adherents more good than the other.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 June 2012 02:43:03AM 2 points [-]

This is why I'm against any "rational" tampering with today's mainstream Western worldview, even where I'm to the left or to the right of its political aspects.

This is an interesting sentence especially in a comment that started out discussing how bad conformism on moral issues is.

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2012 02:13:14PM 0 points [-]

Presumably something involving recursively enumerable functions...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 June 2012 02:28:25AM 1 point [-]

As someone who understands computational theory, I strongly suspect you're seriously confused about how computational complexity theory works. As I don't have the time or interest to give a course in computational complexity, might I recommend asking the original question on mathoverflow if you are interested.

Apologies if that came off as rude.

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2012 03:30:11AM 0 points [-]

In this area, I do not think there is such a hard and fast distinction.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 04:56:52AM 2 points [-]

So, how would you phrase the existence of hypercomputation as a mathematical statement?

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2012 02:00:50AM 0 points [-]

Your link isn't a stupid person, but to some extent, the lack of interest in hypercomputation says what the field thinks of it. Compare it to quantum computation, where people were avidly researching it and coming up with algorithms decades before even toy quantum computers showed up in cutting-edge labs.

Wei Dai's link is pretty controversial.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 04:52:59AM 1 point [-]

Compare it to quantum computation, where people were avidly researching it and coming up with algorithms decades before even toy quantum computers showed up in cutting-edge labs.

But only after it was discovered that the theory of quantum mechanics implied it was theoretically possible.

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2012 04:00:52AM 0 points [-]

I don't see how one would apply "P-time" to "any computer they could build".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 04:46:24AM 1 point [-]

I meant "apply" in the sense that one applies a mathematical model to a phenomenon. Specifically, it was implicitly assumed the the notion of polynomial time captured what was actually possible to compute in polynomial time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 03:56:28AM 1 point [-]

By the way, your "Leibniz' monads" link is broken.

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2012 03:33:07AM 0 points [-]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone invoke the extended Church-Turing thesis by either name or substance before quantum computing came around.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 03:55:28AM 1 point [-]

People were talking about P-time before quantum computing and implicitly assuming that it applied to any computer they could build.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 31 May 2012 12:43:32AM 4 points [-]

I like the idea, certainly not as a preferred explanation of the Fermi paradox, but as an addition to the list of explanations. But as gwern points out, getting the "planetarium" to work isn't so easy. Comets and planets ought to feel its mass, in fact comets ought to collide with it on the way out. It has to produce radiation patterned so as to imitate interstellar parallax. And it has to physically emit very high energy particles such as we detect on earth in cosmic rays. It's one form of the hypothesis "there's an invisible wall right there, projecting the appearance of a world beyond." And the main issue facing such a hypothesis is, what about the things that go into or come out of the wall?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 03:37:32AM 5 points [-]

It has to produce radiation patterned so as to imitate interstellar parallax. And it has to physically emit very high energy particles such as we detect on earth in cosmic rays.

It doesn't have to be "perfect". Keep in mind the old joke about the experimental and theoretical physicist:

Experimental physicist: I did an experiment and the sign on constant X came out positive.

Theoretical physicist: It's easy to see that it should be that way because of reasons Y and Z.

Some time later

E: Oops, turns out there was a mistake in my experiment, the sign on constant X should really be negative.

T: It's even easier to see why that should be the case.

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2012 02:00:50AM 0 points [-]

Your link isn't a stupid person, but to some extent, the lack of interest in hypercomputation says what the field thinks of it. Compare it to quantum computation, where people were avidly researching it and coming up with algorithms decades before even toy quantum computers showed up in cutting-edge labs.

Wei Dai's link is pretty controversial.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 03:24:49AM 1 point [-]

Compare it to quantum computation, where people were avidly researching it and coming up with algorithms decades before even toy quantum computers showed up in cutting-edge labs.

My understanding of the history is that everyone believed the extended Church-Turing thesis until someone noticed that the (already established) theory of quantum mechanics contradicted it.

Comment author: gwern 30 May 2012 11:59:54PM 1 point [-]

I guess you're distantly alluding to the old discussion of 'what would AIXI do if it ran into a hypercomputing oracle?' in modern guise. I'm afraid I know too little about TDT or UDT to appreciate the point. It just seems a little far-fetched - so not only are we thinking about hypercomputation, which I believe is generally regarded as being orders of magnitude less likely than say P=NP, we're also thinking about a superintelligent and superpowerful agent with a decision theory that just happens to be broken in the right way?

If we were being mined for our computational potential, I can't help but feel human lives ought to be less repetitive than they are.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 03:23:29AM *  1 point [-]

It just seems a little far-fetched - so not only are we thinking about hypercomputation, which I believe is generally regarded as being orders of magnitude less likely than say P=NP

Um, you do realize you're comparing apples and oranges there, since one is a statement about physics and the other a statement about mathematics.

Comment author: juliawise 30 May 2012 10:43:08PM 2 points [-]

Cambridge, MA. Lots of lefty professorial and computer types, also lots of Haitian and Cape Verdean immigrants in housing projects.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 01:21:20AM 3 points [-]

In different neighborhoods. Specifically, would your children be playing with the children in the projects?

Comment author: gwern 30 May 2012 03:26:52PM 5 points [-]

I would hope he would not point that out; famines and similar overshoots happened all the time throughout history, and still do, even in the past few unusual non-equilibrium centuries.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 01:11:45AM 6 points [-]

famines and similar overshoots happened all the time throughout history, and still do, even in the past few unusual non-equilibrium centuries.

Caplan would argue, and I largely agree with him, that modern famines are caused by bad economic policies rather that overpopulation.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 30 May 2012 08:09:47PM -1 points [-]

One more link on the subject. Jason Brennan has a post on Bleeding Heart Libertarians cataloging different norms for valorizing soldiers (this post is largely a follow-up to a prior post arguing that it might be appropriate to hold even individual soldiers accountable for volunteering to serve in wars they know or should know to be unjust). While it's nothing particularly innovative, I think this framework is useful for understanding both the Hayes controversy and the issue more generally.

The reaction to Chris Hayes suggests that most Americans are pretty close to norm 1, or otherwise a norm 2 where it would take something shocking and extreme -- like overt torture or rape -- to rebut the presumption of heroic status. But the reasonable debate is where we should fall between norms 2 and 3 -- that is, to what extent soldiers should be presumed heroic vs. judged neutrally according to their actual motivations and decisions, like we would judge everyone else.

For me, the hardest issue is distinguishing what makes a war unjustified enough to blame the civilian leadership and unjustified enough to blame soldiers who volunteer to fight in it. There will of course be a gulf between these positions, and the size of that gulf is probably the biggest difference I have with Brennan (I think it's bigger). As many here have pointed out, there's value in having a strong presumption of heroic status, not only as an honest recognition of what subjectively motivates most soldiers, but also to provide a social incentive to keep the military consistently strong over time. But it's still important to acknowledge the existence of this line and to question where it is, both to provide a check on unjust war itself, and to discourage soldiers from risking their lives unless it's really necessary.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 01:07:17AM 2 points [-]

that is, to what extent soldiers should be presumed heroic vs. judged neutrally according to their actual motivations and decisions, like we would judge everyone else.

The difference between soldiers and (almost) everyone else is that the soldiers' job involves risking one's life.

Comment author: JGWeissman 30 May 2012 05:05:33PM 6 points [-]

I suspect that if a nation of rationalists who all think "It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world about whom saying positive things trumps saying accurate things" were invaded by barbarians, they would, after short reflection, decide that designating those among them who took the role of soldier to repel the invasion as heroes, that this would be an accurate thing as well as positive.

The point of Bayesians vs. Barbarians is not that the Bayesians lose, but that true rationalists win against the barbarians where merely "clever" wannabes lose, and that we aspiring rationalists know enough about how they do it to win as well.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 May 2012 12:57:07AM *  1 point [-]

The point of Bayesians vs. Barbarians is not that the Bayesians lose, but that true rationalists win against the barbarians where merely "clever" wannabes lose, and that we aspiring rationalists know enough about how they do it to win as well.

That only happens if rationalists actually implement advise like that contained in the post, instead of simply patting themselves on the back over that fact that "true rationalists" would win while still acting like "merely 'clever' wannabes".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 May 2012 05:50:48AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: shminux 29 May 2012 05:33:22PM *  5 points [-]

Welcome to the positive use of Dark Arts. You can enumerate the exploited biases galore as an exercise.

Indiscriminately calling the soldiers and especially the war dead heroes is quite rational, as it facilitates the country's task of maintaining an enlisted military force, as opposed to a mercenary force. Yes, it's brainwashing, and it is irrational for the individuals believe it, but it is very much the right thing to do for the government. Imagine what would happen if the prevailing sentiment was "well, these dead soldiers weren't very nice people, anyway, so, whatevs".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 May 2012 05:43:38AM 2 points [-]

Eliezer discussed something similar in the post Bayesians vs. Barbarians .

Comment author: [deleted] 29 May 2012 08:32:39AM 1 point [-]

Such as set theory?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 May 2012 05:29:39AM 1 point [-]

Well, every heuristic has exceptions.

Comment author: waveman 29 May 2012 10:46:27PM 2 points [-]

I haven't seen anyone mention the other issue with having large families. There are already more people than we can sustain at US living standards, Every extra child adds to the pressure on pollution, the environment, raw materials, land, water, and energy.

In my case we stopped at 1 child.

Partly because as one of four I felt I clearly missed out in ways that would have made a huge difference to my life. I did not want that to happen to my children.

Partly because I wanted to do other things with my life as well as raising children. Until you have children you do not appreciate the huge impact they have on time, money and most importantly on your energy - not to be a super-parent but just to be a good enough parent.

But also partly because of the "Crowded Earth" factor.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 May 2012 05:15:11AM 4 points [-]

Caplan would point out how Malthusian predictions of disaster never seem to come to pass, whereas disasters and atrocities happen whenever Malthusians get a chance to influence policy.

Comment author: juliawise 29 May 2012 01:14:00PM 4 points [-]

Well, in 15 years I'll let you know whether my decision to live and reproduce in a city that has poor people has turned my kids into underclass wrecks.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 May 2012 04:58:19AM 5 points [-]

The important thing is the neighborhood not the city. I think it also depends on the type of poor people.

Comment author: BillyOblivion 28 May 2012 07:48:16AM -2 points [-]

What exactly was the war on heresy?

You mean then, or now?

Remember what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard when he merely asked the question?

Does the phrase "Denier" cause any mental associations that weren't there in the late 90s?

At least Copernicus was allowed to recant and live his declining years in (relative) peace.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 May 2012 01:54:25AM 3 points [-]

Yes, and Summers has gone on to be a presidential adviser.

Comment author: TimS 25 May 2012 12:32:43PM 0 points [-]

Inside view vs. outside view.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 May 2012 04:00:32AM 1 point [-]

Wait, which of us do you think is describing which view?

I think I'm describing inside view and you're describing some kind of partial outside view.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 May 2012 10:17:22AM 1 point [-]

Okay, it has become clear to me that you, the OP, and I are all have different definitions of "realism" in mind. Furthermore, this threads is full of confusions and people talking past each other. I lay the majority of the blame on the OP for using the term in a way completely alien to mainstream philosophy, but I messed up myself by only half-reading it and assuming he was discussing the philosophical position of realism (as it is used, say, in ethics or philosophy of science) rather than a mix of mystical thinking, circular reasoning, appeals to emotion, and selective scepticism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 May 2012 03:58:28AM 1 point [-]

Mostly agree, except I don't understand why you think the OP's use of "realism" is nonstandard.

Comment author: Elethiomel 26 May 2012 06:08:41AM 0 points [-]

What religious people mean by "faith" and what faith actually is do not have to be the same thing.

Also, Nietzsche was definitely not confused about what religious people mean by faith. You're just confused because that quote isn't a statement about what faith is, but rather, a statement about the psychology of the faithful.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 May 2012 03:53:59AM 1 point [-]

As for the psychology of faith, to use your example of being faithful to you spouse, you want your spouse not to cheat on you. Thus this is a game of prisoner's dilemma or at least stag hunt, faith amounts to the Timeless Decision Theory solution which requires the belief that your spouse won't cheat on you if you don't cheat on her. Because there is no direct causal relationship between these two events it sounds a lot like believing without proof, especially if one doesn't know enough game theory to understand accusal relationships.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: CasioTheSane 25 May 2012 01:57:09AM *  1 point [-]

In general, science is only boring when you don't understand it.

Even people who love science often regard areas other than their field of expertise as dull. In reality, I suspect that if they took the time to better understand those "dull" specialties they'd find them fascinating as well.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 May 2012 04:06:00AM 3 points [-]

Even people who love science often regard areas other than their field of expertise as dull.

Carefully, you might have reversed cause and effect there.

Comment author: Elethiomel 25 May 2012 08:27:30AM 0 points [-]

Except that faith has little to nothing to do with social obligations. Faith is believing something without proof or even reason to believe it.

Unless you mean "faith" as in being "faithful" to your spouse, in which case, that's not even the same thing as what Nietzsche is talking about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 May 2012 03:23:24AM *  1 point [-]

Unless you mean "faith" as in being "faithful" to your spouse, in which case, that's not even the same thing as what Nietzsche is talking about.

The problem is that Nietzsche was confused about what religious people mean by "faith", as a result his argument is essentially a straw-man.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 25 May 2012 03:17:32AM 2 points [-]

I believe you're correct as a matter of old school Communist ideology. Class struggle is an amoral battle between classes asserting their interests. Old style socialists and communists seem very different to me than their modern day US counterparts, who more explicitly justify their arguments on moral grounds.

I'd argue, however, that Marx and Marxism are shot through with moralisms, starting with the Labor Theory of Value, Surplus Value, etc. Any theory of Objective value is implicitly a morality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 03:35:21AM *  2 points [-]

I'd argue, however, that Marx and Marxism are shot through with moralisms, starting with the Labor Theory of Value, Surplus Value, etc. Any theory of Objective value is implicitly a morality.

Agreed. They were reflectively inconsistent in much the same way the OP's mother is inconsistent with respect to her (physical) non-realism.

Comment author: TimS 25 May 2012 02:19:53AM 0 points [-]

Sure, they believed that the bourgeois value system functioned to maintain the bourgeois status quo (isn't that true?). But you seem to be saying that disagreeing with the bourgeois value system is a moral anti-realist position. There's nothing in the definition of moral realism that says particular moral realists must agree about what is right.

Suppose someone said Islam isn't a religion because Muslims say Christianity is a false religion. That's a misleading usage of the word "religion." It's just a clearer usage of "religion" to say that Islam and Christianity are religions with conflicting tenets. Likewise, bourgeois ideology and communist ideology are both value systems that assert they are reflections of the correct moral facts, and they clearly disagree on the content of moral facts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 02:44:50AM 1 point [-]

Sure, they believed that the bourgeois value system functioned to maintain the bourgeois status quo (isn't that true?). But you seem to be saying that disagreeing with the bourgeois value system is a moral anti-realist position.

They believed that the concept of morality itself was merely a tool of oppressors, or at best merely a tool that they might as well turn against the bourgeois.

Comment author: TimS 25 May 2012 02:24:59AM 0 points [-]

The ability to recognize logical consistency is from moral realist thought?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 02:43:56AM 1 point [-]

The ability to recognize logical inconsistency about morality is from meta-moral realist thought.

Comment author: TimS 25 May 2012 01:51:37AM *  0 points [-]

The Soviet Union believed it was implementing a morality based on scientifically objective economic facts. That's moral realism, not anti-realism. That the USSR was a tyranny and did terrible things isn't inconsistent with their belief that they were doing what was objectively right.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 02:05:50AM 1 point [-]

The Soviet Union believed it was implementing a morality based on scientifically objective economic facts.

Specifically, they believed that the objective fact was that morality was not objective but something bourgeois used to oppress the proletariat.

Comment author: TimS 25 May 2012 01:39:55AM 0 points [-]

Or they thought they were doing what was best to achieve a better society in the future. Everyone is the hero of their own story.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 01:47:57AM 2 points [-]

I fail to see how this is supposed to contradict what I said.

Comment author: TimS 24 May 2012 12:10:08PM 0 points [-]

If one has moral certainty and a moral anti-realist position, one is deeply confused. As far as I see, moral certainty requires a commitment to moral realism.

More generally, the parent to my comment asserted moral anti-realism was an intellectual precursor to totalitarianism. Because I'm not aware of any totalitarian regime that wasn't a moral certainty regime (and therefore a moral realist regime), I am confused how a contrary philosophical position can be seen as a ideological precursor to totalitarianism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 01:26:57AM 1 point [-]

If one has moral certainty and a moral anti-realist position, one is deeply confused.

It only seems that way to you because you've retained enough meta-moral realism to believe that there's something wrong with having an inconsistent about your position on morality.

Comment author: TimS 23 May 2012 02:09:40PM 0 points [-]

I'm more with Orwell, seeing the totalitarian dangers from non-realism.

I'm not aware of any tyranny that failed to assert a moral realist position. The relationship between their philosophies and physical reality was tenuous, but they didn't act like they were uncertain.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2012 01:26:14AM *  4 points [-]

I'm not aware of any tyranny that failed to assert a moral realist position.

The Soviet Union.

Communist doctrine was that morality is not objective but determined by economic relations; therefore, communists were free to operate under whatever morality was most convenient. Need to eliminate descendents, no reason to let those archaic moral principals against mass killing stand in your way.

Comment author: Nornagest 24 May 2012 02:18:01AM 2 points [-]

Yeah, that happens -- a fair number of the born-again narratives I've come across read like that. But the reason I was thinking of this group in particular is that, for a lot of people on the post-Christian agnostic spectrum, organized religions really are the bad guys: nondenominational Christianity is usually given a pass, but actual churches get blamed for all sorts of stuff. That's a nontrivial obstacle for someone raised in that milieu.

Dharmic religions don't seem to count as "organized" in this context, for reasons which are kind of opaque to me but probably have to do with exoticism. So I expect a lot of Western Buddhists and Hindus come out of this sort of space too -- n=1, but that's more or less how my college roommate found Hinduism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 May 2012 02:36:51AM *  1 point [-]

Dharmic religions don't seem to count as "organized" in this context, for reasons which are kind of opaque to me but probably have to do with exoticism.

Unfortunately, radical Islam also frequently gets a similar pass on grounds of exoticism, not to mention being a "victim of the crusades and the war on terror".

Comment author: Nornagest 24 May 2012 01:13:40AM 2 points [-]

Because they've been given space to develop a spiritual worldview and no particular reason not to, but not a framework for it, so they end up adopting a semi-random gaggle of relatively nonthreatening and nontotalizing supernaturalist beliefs? That's plausible, but it won't give you anything self-consistent. Maybe aggressive posthuman rationalism is what you get when you try to culture New Age beliefs in someone sensitive to ideological contradictions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 May 2012 01:30:09AM 1 point [-]

Maybe aggressive posthuman rationalism is what you get when you try to culture New Age beliefs in someone sensitive to ideological contradictions.

I think you would be just as likely to find them turning to some "strong" religion or even mainstream skepticism (of the kind that treats cryonics and the singularity as supernatural claims).

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 22 May 2012 04:18:45PM 24 points [-]

I can't accept your philosophical diagnosis without knowing more about how it was obtained. What did you do, email her the three paragraphs and ask what she thought? Your comment history shows there's a long backstory here, that you are an enthusiastic believer in a complex of ideas including Bayesianism, uploading, and immortalism, and there's a persistent clash about this with people who are close to you. You call your mother a philosophical "non-realist", she says you're a control freak who doesn't want to die... Clearly we need a new Balzac (is it Houellebecq?) to write about this 21st-century generation gap, in which the children of post-Christian agnostics grow up to be ideologically aggressive posthuman rationalists. It sounds wonderfully dialectical and ironic: your mother's intellectual permissiveness probably gave you the space in which to develop your rationality, and yet your rationality now turns you against her radical open-mindedness or principle of not believing anything. Extreme agnosticism is not the same as "non-realism", and she probably rejects your "tautologies" because they seem to come packaged with a lot of other stuff that she wants to reject.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 May 2012 12:51:59AM *  1 point [-]

Clearly we need a new Balzac (is it Houellebecq?) to write about this 21st-century generation gap, in which the children of post-Christian agnostics grow up to be ideologically aggressive posthuman rationalists.

I'm not sure. Naively I would expect most children of post-Christian agnostics to grow up to have some kind of mystical New Age beliefs.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 May 2012 06:37:34PM *  7 points [-]

I said it's my ideal of society, not that I'd start collectivizing everything tomorrow!

Oh I didn't mean to imply you would! But surely you would like to move our current society towards that at some (slow or otherwise) rate, or at least learn enough about the world to eventually get a good plan of doing so.

If you approve of its ideas, then you're at least partly a socialist too

Nearly every human is I think. Socialism and its variants tap into primal parts of our mind and its ethical and political intuitions. And taking seriously most of our stated ethics one is hard pressed to not end up a libertarian or a communist or even a fascist. Fortunately most people don't think too hard about politics. I don't want the conversation to go down this path too far though since I fear the word "socialist" is a problematic one.

Also, which problems would you call "cancer", specifically?

Specifically the great power structures opposing moves towards your ideal. It almost dosen't matter which ideal, since those that I see would oppose most change and I have a hard time considering them benevolent. Even milquetoast regular leftism thinks itself fighting a few such forces, and I would actually agree they are there. You don't need to agree with their bogeyman, surely you see some much more potent forces shaping our world, that don't seem inherently interested in your ideals, that are far more powerful than.... the writer of a photocopied essay you picked up on the street?

For Moldbug himself points out, since the barrier to entry to writing a online blog is so low, absent other evidence, you should take him precisely as seriously as a person distributing such photocopied essays. How many people have read anything by Moldbug? Of those how many agree? Of those how many are likely to act? What if you take the entire "alternative" or "dissident" or "new" right and add these people together. Do you get million people? Do you even get 100 thousand? And recall these are dissidents! By the very nature of society outcasts, malcontent's and misfits are attracted to such thinking.

While I have no problem with you reading right wing blogs, even a whole lot of them, since I certainly do, I feel the need to point out, that you cite some pretty obscure ones that even I have heard about let alone followed, dosen't that perhaps tell you that you may be operating under a distorted view or intuition of how popular these ideas are? By following their links and comment section your brain is tricked into seeing a different reality from the one that exists, take a survey of political opinion into your hands and check the scale of the phenomena you find troubling.

Putting things into perspective, It seems a waste to lose sleep over them, does it not? Many of them are intelligent and consistent, but then so is Will Newsome and I don't spend much time worrying about everlasting damnation. If you want anything that can be described as "utopian" or "socialist" your work is cut out for you, you should be wondering how to move mountains, not stomp on molehills.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2012 05:39:12AM *  1 point [-]

Specifically the great power structures opposing moves towards your ideal. It almost dosen't matter which ideal, since those that I see would oppose most change

Keep in mind that while every improvement is a change, most potential changes are not improvements and for most ideals, attempting to implement them leads to total disaster.

Comment author: Jack 21 May 2012 10:23:14PM *  9 points [-]

Psychopaths generally feel most emotions. What they may not experience, at least the way non-psychopaths do, is the emotion of fear and as a result have trouble recognizing facial expressions of fear in others, are bad at predicting behaviors that will scare people and have reduced amygdala activity during moral judgments. See the work of Abigail Marsh for one.

I doubt a sociopath would provide advantages over and above high functioning autistics.

Edit: Also, the whole ASPD thing is just a DSM clusterfuck. It in no way carves reality and the joints and definitely includes more than just psychopaths. But it does look like there are a group of people who do bad things and also have an empathy deficit. As you might imagine, it's a really difficult thing to study.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2012 05:26:27AM 7 points [-]

Also, the whole ASPD thing is just a DSM clusterfuck. It in no way carves reality and the joints

I suspect this may be true of most of the DSM. Here is a relevant article, excerpted by Bryan Caplan here.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Multiheaded 20 May 2012 08:51:26AM 1 point [-]

That's decent and interesting criticism. Indeed, Alinsky appears to have been a hardcore Syndicalist, and both Buckley and me are to the right of him, although Buckley's a lot further. However, that last one is very dubious to me:

I think that America, viewed as a nation, is the most humane nation in the experience of the world. I think there is more genuine concern for the poor, for the underprivileged, for the weak in America than we've ever seen in the history of the world. And I see you trying to fire and establish -- and disestablish the order that made that possible.

Since Marx, leftists have probably heard this kind of argument in most debates: advanced civilization generates - or will eventually - so much charity in all its forms (through both tradition and individual kindness) as to cure most of the lower classes' problems and thus make many concerns of unfairness and inequality irrelevant.
Alinsky clearly understood the problem with that: charity is in itself a status race and a status pump; it can be wielded with malice and used to keep people down. Just look at Africa and how we're trying to drown it in money instead of coming over there en masse and applying real help, manually. (Which is also problematic status-wise, but at least it might actually improve a society.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 May 2012 08:56:22PM 4 points [-]

The argument is not that, for example, the United States, is perfect. It's that whatever Marxists replace it with will be worse.

Alinsky clearly understood the problem with that: charity is in itself a status race and a status pump; it can be wielded with malice and used to keep people down.

A lot of people "understand" this problem in the sense that they know it exists in the existing system. Unfortunately, they frequently have no better understanding of the causes and potential solutions than some version of "the current system has these problems because it is evil/corrupt, once we replace it with our new good/pure system these problems will magically go away".

Just look at Africa and how we're trying to drown it in money instead of coming over there en masse and applying real help, manually. (Which is also problematic status-wise, but at least it might actually improve a society.)

That's what we were doing until leftists forced us to stop on the grounds we were "oppressing" them.

Note: If you think colonialism was indeed bad, what makes you thing doing something similar again will turn out any different?

Comment author: Multiheaded 19 May 2012 09:01:40AM *  -1 points [-]

I don't know much about any of that, but blaming the first on Alinsky sounds just ridiculous (as well as evokes nasty associations for people who are conscious of antiblack rhetoric throughout U.S. history). Have you looked at his activities? And do you think he only worked with blacks, or resented whites, or what?

http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky2.htm

The last one might be exaggerated, too. Are successful (non-criminal) black businessmen hated and despised in their communities?

(Overall, you sound a touch mind-killed.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 May 2012 08:17:42PM 3 points [-]

I don't know much about any of that, but blaming the first on Alinsky sounds just ridiculous

True, I was exaggerating by blaming him for the effects of the movement he was a part of.

And do you think he only worked with blacks,

No, and I'm sure he did some similar damage to some white communities as well.

Are successful (non-criminal) black businessmen hated and despised in their communities?

Well, depends on how they succeeded (someone who succeeded in sports or music is more accepted then someone who succeeded through business).

(Overall, you sound a touch mind-killed.)

What about yourself? At the risk of engaging in internet cold reading I think you were so scarred by what you perceive as "right wing technocracy" as expressed by Moldbug and some of his fans on LW that you're desperately looking for any ideology/movement that seems strong enough to oppose it.

Comment author: Multiheaded 18 May 2012 09:53:59AM *  2 points [-]

I'd also like to mention that the American Right's treatment of Alinsky is really depressing. Just one random quote: "Alinsky got what he wanted in the form of 90% illegitimacy rates among American blacks and poverty wholly dominated by single mothers."

Really? A guy who taught little people how to stand up for themselves in ruthless tribal politics... somehow single-handedly (or with his evil college student henchmen) caused a complicated social problem that existed since Segregation's end - instead of, I dunno, making communities more unified and more conscious of the war that is life (like trade unions become with good non-dogmatic leadership)?

(Another stunning lie: "Alinsky’s entire adult life was devoted to destroying capitalism in America — an economic system he considered to be oppressive and unjust."

He talked of working within the system and changing it slowly and patiently all the time - for moral as well as tactical reasons. "Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous", he wrote. And: "The political panaceas of the past[2], such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name... We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution."

"Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the "cultural revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students.[1] Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective.")

Sadly, even M.M. chimed in when that hysteria was at its peak around the 2008 elections, with Obama's supposed methodological connection to the evil treasonous commie terrorist trumpeted everywhere on the "fringe" websites. And that's the kind of people most likely to boast of their reasoning and objectivity online?

Mencius also blasted the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) who used Gandhi's nonviolent tactics to attack the very literal Ku Klux Klan rule in Mississippi during the so-called Freedom Summer, risking life and limb, and a small part of whose members formed the semi-violent terrorist group Weather Underground a decade later.

[1] Yep, the "Cultural Revolution" was less a government-initiated purge in the image of 1937 than it was a little civil war between two slightly different factions of zealots.

2] For a brilliant example of this madness dressed as conservatism, just look at this idiot. He took Alinsky's sardonic reference to those revolutions' hype as "panaceas" as a sign of approval!

America, Fuck Yeah.

P.S. To be fair, here's a voice of sanity from some libertarian dude, who has the misfortune of posting at a site that even Moldbug rightly called a useless dump.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 May 2012 04:51:06AM *  3 points [-]

A guy who taught little people how to stand up for themselves in ruthless tribal politics...

Your confusing standing up for oneself with mass defecting from social conventions. The fact that modern blacks have learned to confuse the two is a large part of the reason why they're stuck as an underclass.

somehow single-handedly (or with his evil college student henchmen) caused a complicated social problem that existed since Segregation's end

It wasn't nearly as bad at segregation's end as it is now.

instead of, I dunno, making communities more unified and more conscious of the war that is life

Yes, that's why black communities today consider members who study hard or try to integrate into mainstream society (outside of racial advocacy) as traitors who are "acting white".

Comment author: Locke 18 May 2012 10:42:31PM 3 points [-]

Bella isn't under the influence of a love potion, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 May 2012 04:00:39AM 1 point [-]

Oops, I misread what you wrote.

Comment author: CuSithBell 19 May 2012 01:17:32AM 1 point [-]

I mentioned Catholicism only because it seems like the "obvious" supernatural answer, given that it's supposed to be a Marian apparition. Though, I do think of Catholicism proper as pretty incoherent, so it'd rank fairly low on my supernatural explanation list, and well below the "scientific explanation" of "maybe some sort of weird mundane light effect, plus human psychology, plus a hundred years". I haven't really investigated the phenomenon myself, but I think, say, "the ghost-emperor played a trick" or "mass hypnosis to cover up UFO experiments by the lizard people" rank fairly well compared to Catholicism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 May 2012 03:51:30AM 2 points [-]

"maybe some sort of weird mundane light effect, plus human psychology, plus a hundred years".

This isn't really an explanation so much as clothing our ignorance in a lab coat.

Comment author: Multiheaded 18 May 2012 04:05:27AM 1 point [-]

He's very firmly against all past and future attempts to bring forth the aforementioned Kingdom of Heaven (except, needless to say, his own - which has the elimination of hypocrisy as one of its points). He sneers - I have no other word - at patriotic feeling, and wages a one-man crusade against ideological/religious feeling. He might dislike hatred, but he certainly believes that greed and self-interest are "enough" - are the most useful, safe motives one could have. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 06:11:01AM *  1 point [-]

He sneers - I have no other word - at patriotic feeling, and wages a one-man crusade against ideological/religious feeling.

Orwell wasn't exactly a supporter of patriotism or religion either. In fact, in paragraphs you quoted you can see Orwell sneering at religion even as he admits that it can serve a useful purpose. My understanding of Moldbug's position on religion is that its pretty similar, i.e., he recognizes the important role religion played in Western Civilization including the development of science even if he doesn't like what it's currently evolved into.

Comment author: CuSithBell 18 May 2012 03:01:13AM 1 point [-]

Are there any good supernatural explanations for that one?! Because "Catholicism" seems like a pretty terrible explanation here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 05:57:26AM 3 points [-]

Because "Catholicism" seems like a pretty terrible explanation here.

Why? Do you have a better one? (Note: I agree "Catholicism" isn't a particularly good explanation, it's just that it's not noticeably worse than any other.)

Comment author: Multiheaded 14 May 2012 06:44:46AM *  1 point [-]
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 03:31:35AM *  1 point [-]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29

Are you claiming that similar and worse things didn't happen in Turkey?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Poor_Law

Let me get this straight: you're trying to argue that Britain was harsh because some people expressed opposition to a law you like?

By the way, haven't you read Dickens?

Yes, that's want I meant by Britain's harshness (such as it was) being better documented thanks to its freedom of speech.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 May 2012 03:50:51PM *  4 points [-]

Yes, before anyone pitches in with that observation, M.M. would surely quote the above with some glee. I'm confident that he'd refrain from posting the essay's ending, though:

Mr Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia, the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. [1] What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need for a ‘next world’ to give it meaning. It is this that leads innocent people like the Dean of Canterbury to imagine that they have discovered true Christianity in Soviet Russia. No doubt they are only the dupes of propaganda, but what makes them so willing to be deceived is their knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have not to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.

The very people who have dynamited our civilization have sometimes been aware of this, Marx's famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.

[1] Okay, that's the one bit Orwell got wrong... maybe. Industrial murder did mark everything forever, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 03:10:10AM 1 point [-]

Yes, before anyone pitches in with that observation, M.M. would surely quote the above with some glee. I'm confident that he'd refrain from posting the essay's ending, though:

Why? My mental model of M.M., admittedly based on the very few things of his that I've read, has him not disagreeing with the above section significantly.

Comment author: Multiheaded 16 May 2012 01:21:45PM *  1 point [-]

Oh lawd!

After organizing FIGHT (an acronym for Freedom, Independence [subsequently Integration], God, Honor, Today) in Rochester, New York,[9] Alinsky once threatened to stage a "fart in" to disrupt the sensibilities of the city's establishment at a Rochester Philharmonic concert. FIGHT members were to consume large quantities of baked beans after which, according to author Nicholas von Hoffman, "FIGHT's increasingly gaseous music-loving members would hie themselves to the concert hall where they would sit expelling gaseous vapors with such noisy velocity as to compete with the woodwinds."[10] Satisfied with the reaction to his threat, Alinsky would later threaten a "piss in" at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well dressed African Americans to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the city to the bargaining table. According to Alinsky, once again the threat alone was sufficient to produce results.[10] Conceding that his tactics were "absurd," the community activist rejected the contention that they were frivolous, arguing "[w]hat oppressed person doesn't want, literally or figuratively, to shit on his oppressors? [At the Rochester Philharmonic] was the closest chance they'd have. Such tactics aren't just cute; they can be useful in driving your opponent up the wall. Very often the most ridiculous tactic can prove the most effective."

Now just imagine what Anonymous could've done today with him around!

Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well dressed African Americans to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the city to the bargaining table.

I weakly suspect that this was in fact the inspiration for /b/'s infamous "Pool's Closed" raids.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 02:55:05AM 5 points [-]

It's amazing what you can accomplish if you can convince a large enough group of people that defecting from social norms is a good idea.

Comment author: wgd 15 May 2012 04:49:51AM *  6 points [-]

Has there been any serious discussion of the implications of portraits? I couldn't find any with some cursory googling, but I'll be really surprised if it hasn't been discussed here yet. I can't entirely remember which of these things are canon and which are various bits of fanfiction, but:

  • You can take someone's portrait without them explicitly helping, as evidenced in canon by at least one photograph of someone being arrested, whose picture in the newspaper is continually struggling and screaming at the viewer. I don't remember which book this was or any of the particulars unfortunately, but I'm pretty certain it's a thing that was in one of them. Or maybe one of the movies. Moving on.
  • They can perform simple tasks of short-term memory and carry on a coherent conversation.
  • They can walk from picture to picture to communicate with each other.
  • They can operate simple mechanisms in some way. In canon, the door to Gryffindor Tower is a portrait, which requires a password before opening.

As far as I can tell, portraits in the Harry Potter universe would be a gigantic game-breaker if it weren't for all the other game-breakers overshadowing them. I suppose it's possible to mitigate this (maybe a picture carries less of the "person" compared to a portrait for which they have to sit for hours) but if that's not the case, portraits appear to be essentially a way of involuntarily uploading a copy of someone and enslaving them for all eternity, and all you need is knowledge of what they look like and a modicum of artistic ability.

edit: Oh crap, in MoR they ask portraits questions about knowledge they would have had before being painted, like "what spells did they teach you as a first year" and "did you know a married squib couple". So you're not just getting a basic "human" imprint, you're getting that specific person.

And on the flip side of that, not all the portraits in Hogwarts are necessarily real people. What moral weight does a newly-created personality in a portrait have?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 02:06:29AM 2 points [-]

I was under the impression that portraits were sort of like the sorting hat.

Comment author: Locke 14 May 2012 10:36:18PM *  2 points [-]

Even though Harry doesn't have magical-love-protection, I think we should take note of the fact that it's probably still in play and fairly broken.

If Quirrell could get Bellatrix to take a deadly spell from for him, he'd have Love's permanent protection against Dumbledore(if that were the caster). And, with the right amount of cleverness, he could probably arrange for her death to protect all death-eaters in the same way Harry provided protection to all of Hogwarts.

Frankly I wouldn't put it past Dumbledore to arrange for something similiar, for the greater good.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 02:02:05AM *  3 points [-]

The way cannon magic seems to work, love-potion based love probably doesn't count as Real Love for purposes of protection.

Edit: In fact the quote at the top of the Potter wiki article on love potions says:

Powerful infatuations can be induced by the skilful potioneer, but never yet has anyone managed to create the truly unbreakable, eternal, unconditional attachment that alone can be called Love.

Comment author: moritz 15 May 2012 02:03:45PM 0 points [-]

I dimly recall that in canon, Squibs are actually the children of two wizards. That contradicts Harry's finding directly.

But then Rowling probably didn't have any rules in mind about how magic inherits, so it might be impossible to come up with a good theory that explains everything we know from canon.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2012 01:59:31AM 3 points [-]

I had always assumed squibs are caused by point mutations.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 May 2012 05:13:47PM 3 points [-]

If there's convergence in goals, then we don't have to worry about making an AI with the wrong goals. If there's only convergence in behavior, then we do, because building an AI with the wrong goals will shift the convergent behavior in the wrong direction. So I think it makes sense for Stuart's paper to ignore acausal trading and just talk about whether there is convergence in goals.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 May 2012 05:09:57AM *  3 points [-]

Not necessarily, it might destroy the earth before its goals converge.

Comment author: randallsquared 16 May 2012 01:09:36PM 0 points [-]

There are (at least) two meaning for "why ought we be moral":

  • "Why should an entity without goals choose to follow goals", or, more generally, "Why should an entity without goals choose [anything]",
  • and, "Why should an entity with a top level goal of X discard this in favor of a top level goal of Y."

I can imagine answers to the second question (it could be that explicitly replacing X with Y results in achieving X better than if you don't; this is one driver of extremism in many areas), but it seems clear that the first question admits of no attack.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 May 2012 01:41:38AM 2 points [-]

"Why should an entity without goals choose to follow goals", or, more generally, "Why should an entity without goals choose [anything]",

An entity without goals would not be reading Gauthier's book.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 15 May 2012 09:21:35PM 9 points [-]

Given what little I've seen about SI's skill and expertise at managing the internal politics of such an arrangement, I would expect the current staff to be promptly displaced by more skillful politicians if they went down this road, and the projects of interest to that staff to end up with even fewer resources than they have now.

I think this has already happened to some extent. Reflective people who have good epistemic habits but who don't get shit done have had their influence over SingInst policy taken away while lots of influence has been granted to people like Luke and Louie who get lots of shit done and who make the organization look a lot prettier but whose epistemic habits are, in my eyes, relatively suspect.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 06:28:37AM 2 points [-]

I think there's an important lesson here about the relative importance of being able to get shit done versus good epistemic habits.

Comment author: Multiheaded 15 May 2012 02:14:36PM *  -2 points [-]

Also, damn, it's a bit of a jolt to encounter someone who thinks of the world's course in the same Gnostic terms that I often entertain. I too have been associating the spectre of anti-religious, anti-ideological, technocratic tyranny that's haunting us with the supposed iron "logic", runaway reductionism and blind hubris of the Archons, as relayed by the ancients and by latter-day SF visionaries like Dick.

(All aboard! We're off for -10 rating in 3... 2... 1...)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 05:58:35AM -1 points [-]

(All aboard! We're off for -10 rating in 3... 2... 1...)

Given how deeply this comment is buried in an old thread I'd be surprised if 10 people even read it.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 16 May 2012 04:59:21AM 0 points [-]

Indeed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 05:34:49AM 6 points [-]

Ok, I feel like we should now attempt to work out a theory of psi caused by some kind of market-like game theory among entities.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 16 May 2012 04:36:33AM 5 points [-]

Clear minority, and most comments defending such views are voted down. With the exception of Will, no one in that category is what would probably be classified as high status here, and even Will's status is... complicated.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 05:32:30AM 2 points [-]

Well this post is currently at +6.

In response to comment by [deleted] on I Stand by the Sequences
Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 16 May 2012 01:24:20AM *  3 points [-]

the fact that important posts by other authors aren't added to the Sequences

As a matter of fact, the "Sequences" page contains the following as about 1/4 to 1/3 of its table of contents.

4 Sequences by Others

4.1 Positivism, Self Deception, and Neuroscience by Yvain
4.2 Priming and Implicit Association by Yvain
4.3 Decision Theory of Newcomblike Problems by AnnaSalamon
4.4 Living Luminously by Alicorn
4.5 The Science of Winning at Life by lukeprog
4.6 Rationality and Philosophy by lukeprog
4.7 No-Nonsense Metaethics by lukeprog
4.8 What Intelligence Tests Miss by KajSotala
4.9 Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite by Kaj
Sotala

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 05:22:11AM 2 points [-]

There are also many useful posts by others that aren't part of any sequence.

Comment author: steven0461 16 May 2012 01:58:52AM 0 points [-]

I suppose? It's hard for me to see how there could even theoretically exist a mechanism such as in 2 that failed to be burdensome. But maybe you have something in mind?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 04:57:15AM 2 points [-]

It's hard for me to see how there could even theoretically exist a mechanism such as in 2 that failed to be burdensome.

It always seems that way until someone proposes a new theoretical framework, afterwards it seems like people were insane for not coming up with said framework sooner.

But maybe you have something in mind?

Well the Transactional Interpretation for example.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 16 May 2012 01:37:52AM *  5 points [-]

I have advice. First off, if psi's real then I think it's clearly an intelligent agent-like or agent-caused process. In general you'd be stupid to mess around with agents with unknown preferences. That's why witchcraft was considered serious business: messing with demons is very much like building mini uFAIs. Just say no. So I don't recommend messing around with psi, especially if you haven't seriously considered what the implications of the existence of agent-like psi would be. This is why I like the Catholics: they take things seriously, it's not fun and games. "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." If you do experiment, pre-commit not to tell anyone about at least some predetermined subset of the results. Various parapsychology experiments indicate that psi effects can be retrocausal, so experimental results can be determined by whether or not you would in the future talk about them. If psi's capricious then pre-commiting not to blab increases likelihood of significant effects.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 04:45:18AM 5 points [-]

Various parapsychology experiments indicate that psi effects can be retrocausal, so experimental results can be determined by whether or not you would in the future talk about them. If psi's capricious then pre-commiting not to blab increases likelihood of significant effects.

I just thought of something. What you're saying is that psi effects are anti-inductive.

Comment author: CuSithBell 15 May 2012 11:27:51PM 6 points [-]

Hm. This... doesn't seem particularly convincing. So it sounds like whatever convinced you is incommunicable - something that you know would be unconvincing to anyone else, but which is still enough to convince you despite knowing the alternate conclusions others would come to if informed of it?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 04:39:35AM 1 point [-]

I don't entirely agree with Will here. My issue is that there seem to be some events, e.g., Fatima, where the best "scientific explanation" is little better than the supernatural wearing a lab-coat.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 May 2012 08:25:22PM *  4 points [-]

it seems much more prevalent in atheist forums than on LessWrong.

Is it less prevalent here or is it simply less vocal because people here aren't spending their time on that particularly tribal demonstration? After all, when you've got Bayesianism, AI risk, and cognitive biases, you have a lot more effective methods of signaling allegiance to this narrow crowd.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 04:31:19AM 2 points [-]

Well we have openly religious members of our 'tribe'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2012 04:24:32AM 3 points [-]

Since you agree with all of Eliezer's posts, I recommend that you reread this post right now.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 15 May 2012 06:42:22AM *  2 points [-]

Availability heuristic; I haven't read many conspiracy theorists. He struck me as more careful and more cogent than the few others I'd read; like, he bothers to explicitly bracket certain ideas as having a good chance of being wrong, and he emphasizes giving up on a thread if it doesn't seem to be fruitful. He's generally pragmatic. He also has a healthy skepticism about the motives and natures of claimed demonic/alien entities, not in the sense of categorically doubting that they're supernatural/alien/"weird", but in the sense of not assuming that just because they say they want to help humanity and so on that that is strong evidence of actual benevolence: "I find it a fascinating frustration that many of those convinced of a massive government cover-up fall over themselves to accept the words of non-human entities." — this post on Fatima. Being pseudo-Catholic and schizotypal I naturally worry about demons—in fact that's part of why I'm pseudo-Catholic and not, say, pseudo-Tibetan-Buddhist. So Jeff Wells scores a lot of points with me for his caution on that front.

Do you have recommendations for other conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorist debunkers? 'Cuz honestly I think Jeff Wells makes a compelling, coherent case for High Weirdness, which is worth keeping in mind as a live hypothesis, though I don't think we'll have the collaborative argumentation tools necessary to rationally assess the hypothesis for at least another five years.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2012 07:49:20AM 0 points [-]

I clicked around a little on his site. Most of his conspiracy theories appear to be political and he's clearly been mind-killed by politics.

As for evaluating "conspiracy theories", I recommend you start by reading this blog post by Eric Raymond, also this comment by Konkvistador if you haven't already seen it.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 14 May 2012 10:38:44AM 0 points [-]

Am I an anti-liberal traditionalist? Humans are so silly. I have an idea. If you want to hit the right-wingers with something out of left field, try Rigorous Intuition, especially those posts over on the right under the heading "The Military-Occult Complex, ritual abuse/mind control, and 'High Weirdness'". I guarantee a few WTFs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2012 04:23:15AM 0 points [-]

I'm curious why you picked this conspiracy theorist in particular.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 15 May 2012 02:59:40AM *  5 points [-]

There's the music appreciation algorithm: listen to the people the people you listen to listen to. More generally, bootstrap from your current algorithms to better ones. I likely wouldn't have been alerted to various academic subfields if SingInst folk hadn't pointed them out, and I wouldn't have been alerted to SingInst if I hadn't been alerted to LessWrong via RationalWiki, and I wouldn't have been alerted to RationalWiki if I hadn't been alerted to Carl Sagan by my high school friends, and I wouldn't have made those friends if I hadn't been a friend of their friends, et cetera. Nowadays I have a rather low opinion of Carl Sagan and RationalWiki, I'm very meh about LessWrong, and my opinion of SingInst isn't as sky-high as it once was, but I think the process tends to be self-correcting.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2012 03:43:13AM *  6 points [-]

While I'm sympathetic to this view, I don't think it is without problems. See modern art for an example of how this kind of approach can fail. I think the problem is that as you go up the chain you get people who have less interaction with reality outside their specialty. This is the same problem that can occur when climbing to many meta-levels, i.e., one looses sight of the object level or even forgets that it exists.

Edit: Also, I can think of a number of people I (at least somewhat) respect, but most definitely don't respect the people they respect.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 May 2012 09:34:06AM *  -1 points [-]

Compared to China or Industrial Revolution-age Britain? Hell no, Ataturk pretty much had silk gloves on. At least, that's what Wikipedia tells me. He didn't purge political opponents except for one incident where they were about to assassinate him, he maintained a Western facade over his political maneuvering (taking pages from European liberal nationalism of the previous century), etc, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 May 2012 06:39:10PM 2 points [-]

Compared to China or Industrial Revolution-age Britain? Hell no, Ataturk pretty much had silk gloves on.

Really Ataturk was less harsh than Industrial Revolution-age Britain? I find this highly unlikely (unless your taking about their colonial practices in which case the Armenian genocide is relevant). I think the reason you're overestimating the relative harshness of Britain is that Britain had more freedom of speech than other industrializing nations and thus its harshness (such as it was) is better documented.

Comment author: Multiheaded 13 May 2012 09:30:30AM *  -1 points [-]

It didn't fully come into the "Universalist" sphere, ideologically and culturally, until its defeat in WW2, and the most aggressive and violent of its actions were committed in a struggle for expansion against Western dominiance.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 May 2012 06:33:28PM 2 points [-]

Konkvistador's argument would be that it wouldn't of been able to modernize nearly as effectively if it had come into the "Universalist" sphere before industrializing.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 13 May 2012 07:19:52AM 4 points [-]

The main difference is that if there's reason to presume that they're lying, any claims of "we've implemented these improvements" that you can't directly inspect become worthless. Right now, if they say something like "Meetings with consultants about bookkeeping/accounting; currently working with our accountant to implement best practices and find a good bookkeeper", I trust them enough to believe that they're not just making it up even though I can't personally verify it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 May 2012 06:25:53PM 3 points [-]

On the other had, you can't trust their claims that these meetings are accomplishing anything.

Comment author: Multiheaded 12 May 2012 07:50:39AM *  0 points [-]

I'm not making the argument that liberal democracy directly correlates to increasing the cultural value produced. Why else would I defend Iran in that particular regard? No, no, the object of my scorn is technocracy (at least, human technocracy) and I'm even willing to tolerate some barbarism rather than have it spread over the world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 09:33:22PM 4 points [-]

What definition of technocracy are you using that excludes the USSR and India before its economic liberalization?

Comment author: Multiheaded 12 May 2012 07:55:32AM *  -1 points [-]

I don't care all that much about political democracy; what I meant is that Japan, India or, looking at the relative national conditions, even Turkey did NOT require some particular ruthlessness to modernize.

edit: derp

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 09:27:59PM 4 points [-]

Taboo 'ruthlessness'. For example Japan was certainly ruthless while modernizing by any reasonable definition.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 May 2012 08:45:46PM 5 points [-]

In many fields, intuitions are just not very reliable. For example, in math, many of the results in both topology and set theory are highly counter-intuitive. If one is reaching a conclusion primarily based off of intuitions that should be a cause for concern.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 08:26:48PM 1 point [-]

Thinking about this some more, I don't think our intuitions are particularly unreliable, simply it's more memorable when they fail.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 07:15:57AM 3 points [-]

Science leaves it up to experiment to socially declare who was right, but if there weren't some people who could get it right in the absence of overwhelming experimental proof, science would be stuck.

Given that there are also many people who get it wrong, this seems like a case of hindsight bias on EY's part.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Multiheaded 11 May 2012 08:58:20AM *  -1 points [-]

Artist-and-writer types don't flock to Singapore, but they don't flock to Peoria Illinois either do they?

Downvoted without hesitation.

If you have the unvoiced belief that cultural products (especially high-quality ones) and memes are created by some specific breed of "artist-and-writer types" (wearing scarves and being smug all the time, no doubt!), then I'd recommend purging it, seeing as it suggests a really narrow view of the world. A country can have a thriving culture not because artistic people "flock" there, but because they are born there, given an appropriate education and allowed to interact with their own roots and community!

By your logic, "artist-and-writer types" shouldn't just not flock to, but actively flee the USSR/post-Soviet Russia. And indeed many artists did, but enough remained that most people on LW who are into literature or film can probably name a Russian author or Russian movie released in the last half-century. Same goes for India, Japan, even China and many other poor and/or un-Westernized places!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 06:58:40AM 4 points [-]

And indeed many artists did, but enough remained that most people on LW who are into literature or film can probably name a Russian author or Russian movie released in the last half-century. Same goes for India, Japan, even China and many other poor and/or un-Westernized places!

Notice how this more or less refutes the argument you tried to make in the grandparent.

Comment author: Multiheaded 11 May 2012 08:38:23AM 0 points [-]

In the West they operate more or less like wild animals.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 06:53:42AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: Multiheaded 11 May 2012 08:44:52AM *  0 points [-]

When Turkey was modernizing it sure as heck was looking towards Europe for examples, it just didn't implement democratic mechanisms straight away and restricted religious freedom. And if you look at Taiwan, Japan, Ghana, etc... sure, they might be ruled by oligarchic clans in practice, but other than that [1] they have much more similarities than differences with today's Western countries! Of course a straight-up copy-paste of institutions and such is bound to fail, but a transition with those institutions, etc in mind as the preferred end state seems to work.

[1] Of course, Western countries are ruled by what began as oligarchic clans too, but they got advanced enough that there's a difference. And, for good or ill, they are meritocratic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 06:49:15AM 5 points [-]

I'm not familiar with Ghana, but both Japan and Taiwan had effectively one-party systems while modernizing.

Comment author: Multiheaded 11 May 2012 08:46:57AM *  0 points [-]

Hmm? And in places where fiscally conservative parties were at the helm before the crisis? What about them?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 06:43:12AM -1 points [-]

The places that are being hardest hit have been ruled by left wing parties for most of the time since at least the 1970s. Also in these places the right wing parties aren't all that right wing.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 12 May 2012 12:28:15AM 0 points [-]

Past interaction were ruled out in my scenario

I spoke sloppily. I meant that I would use 'exist' about a species I had interacted with in the past, not one I could in-principle interact with by breaking known laws of physics.

Could we never have empirical support for a Tegmark Level I multiverse? More to the point, isn't it at least meaningful to pose the possibility of such a multiverse, even though it amounts to suggesting the existence of many things with which you never can have and never could have had any causal interaction?

This gives me a new idea, actually. If you assert the existence of such a multiverse, you are saying that things like us exist. They have consciousness, they interact with objects, in short they have all the hallmarks of the existence of physical things. When I say that such a thing exists, I'm using the word in the same sense as when I speak of a rock. With what does a number interact? Nothing. If you allow interventions from outside the Matrix, I could interact with humans that are causally separated from my past and future. But even that power will not allow me to interact with the number 2; I cannot affect it, or it me, in any sense.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 04:14:53AM 2 points [-]

Taboo 'interact'.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 11 May 2012 10:43:29PM 0 points [-]

Consistent with what? I believe it is consistent with itself, yes; but then again so is my toy variant with the mod-two arithmetic. If they're describing a single reality they should be consistent with each other.

Map of America: Washington, D.C. exists. Map of Europe: Washington, D.C., doesn't exist.

Your analogy fails, because PA and the toy system both agree in describing 0 and 1 as next to each other. But PA asserts that 2 is next to 1, while the toy system explicitly denies that it is so. The map of Europe doesn't in fact make a claim about the existence of Washington; it just says that if it exists, it's outside the map. But the toy system makes an explicit claim about the number 2. It's not that it's outside the range of the system; the system aggressively asserts that it covers the place where 2 would be if it existed, and also that there ain't no number there.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 04:08:08AM 1 point [-]

I believe [PA] is consistent with itself, yes

Can you tell me your basis for this belief?

Your analogy fails, because PA and the toy system both agree in describing 0 and 1 as next to each other. But PA asserts that 2 is next to 1, while the toy system explicitly denies that it is so. The map of Europe doesn't in fact make a claim about the existence of Washington; it just says that if it exists, it's outside the map. But the toy system makes an explicit claim about the number 2. It's not that it's outside the range of the system; the system aggressively asserts that it covers the place where 2 would be if it existed, and also that there ain't no number there.

Answered here.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 11 May 2012 02:19:47AM -1 points [-]

Yet they both make assertions about the number 0, its successor, and its successor's successor.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 04:07:53AM 2 points [-]

They use the word 'successor' to mean slightly different things.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 11 May 2012 03:53:14AM 2 points [-]

couscous thinking

That's gotta be the best Cupertino I've seen in a while.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 03:34:18AM 1 point [-]

Thanks, fixed.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 11 May 2012 11:08:34PM 3 points [-]

Well, first off, Ben seem to be a lot more accurate than SIAI when it comes to meta, i.e. acknowledging that the intuitions act as puppetmaster.

Yes, this did cause me to take him more seriously than before.

The graph for Ben would probably include more progression from nodes from the actual design that he has in mind - learning AI

That doesn't seem to help much in practice though. See this article where Ben describes his experiences running an AGI company with more than 100 employees during the dot-com era. At the end, he thought he was close to success, if not for the dot-com bubble bursting. (I assume you agree that it's unrealistic to think he could have been close to building a human-level AGI in 2001, given that we still seem pretty far from such an invention in 2012.)

and from computational complexity theory

I'm almost certain that Eliezer and other researchers at SIAI know computational complexity theory, but disagree with your application of it. The rest of your comment seems to be a rant against SIAI instead of comparing the sources of SIAI's beliefs with Ben's, so I'm not sure how they help to answer the question I asked.

Based on what you've written, I don't see a reason to think Ben's intuitions are much better than SI's. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Ben's intuitions are somewhat, but not much, better, what do you think Ben, SI, and bystanders should each do at this point? For example should Ben keep trying to build OpenCog?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 03:33:05AM 1 point [-]

I'm almost certain that Eliezer and other researchers at SIAI know computational complexity theory

I'm sure they know it. It's just since they don't do much actual coding, it's not all that available to them.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 May 2012 08:45:46PM 5 points [-]

In many fields, intuitions are just not very reliable. For example, in math, many of the results in both topology and set theory are highly counter-intuitive. If one is reaching a conclusion primarily based off of intuitions that should be a cause for concern.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2012 03:27:12AM 3 points [-]

Do you believe ZFC (or even PA) to be consistent? Can you give a reason for this belief that doesn't relay on your intuition?

Hack, can you justify the axioms used in those systems without appeal to your intuition?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Multiheaded 10 May 2012 04:13:45PM *  -1 points [-]

Yet despite all these infractions against stated Western ideals, life isn't measurably massively worse in Singapore than in London.

Taboo "worse"!
If by life not being "worse" you mean the annual income or the quality of healthcare or the amount of street crime, maybe it's so. If one values e.g. being able to contribute to a news website without fear of fines or imprisonment (see e.g. Gibson's famous essay where he mentions that releasing information about Singapore's GDP could be punished with death), or not fearing for the life of a friend whom you smoke marijuana with, or being able to think that the government is at least a little bit afraid of you (this not necessarily being real, just a pleasant delusion to entertain, like so many others we can't live without)... in short, if one values the less concrete and material things that speak to our more complex instincts, it's not nearly so one-sided.

That's why I dislike utilitarianism; it says without qualification that a life always weighs the same, whatever psychological climate it is lived in (the differences are obvious as soon as you step off a plane, I think - see Gibson's essay again), and a death always weights the same, whether you're killed randomly by criminals (as in the West) or unjustly and with malice by the government (as in Singapore), et cetera, et cetera... It's, in the end, not very compatible with the things that liberals OR classical conservatives love and hate. Mere safety and prosperity are not the only things a society can strive for.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 05:23:23AM *  4 points [-]

whether you're killed randomly by criminals (as in the West) or unjustly and with malice by the government (as in Singapore)

You seem to have an overly romantic view of criminals if you think they never kill with malice.

Heck when the government doesn't keep them in check criminal gangs operate like mini-governments that are much worse in terms of warm fuzzies then even Singapore.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Multiheaded 10 May 2012 04:35:06PM *  0 points [-]

Sure, Singapore is much better than Africa; I never said otherwise! However, if given choice, the more intelligent Africans would probably be more attracted to a Western country, where their less tangible needs (like the need for warm fuzzies) would also be fulfilled. Not many Singaporeans probably would, but that's because the Singaporean society does at least as much brainwashing as the Western one!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 04:11:50AM 3 points [-]

Konkvistador's point is that third world countries attempting to imitate western countries haven't had much success.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Multiheaded 10 May 2012 02:01:43PM *  -1 points [-]

The economic benefits and comforts for most of its citizens are being dismantled, the space of acceptable opinion seems to be shrinking.

I see no proof of that. What economic benefits and comforts? Sure, real wages in Western countries have stopped growing around the 1970s, but e.g. where welfare programs are being cut following the current crisis, it's certainly not the liberals but economically conservative governments championing the cuts.

Now consider the various universalist standards of personal behaviour that are normative in 2012 and in 1972. They aren't that different in stated ideals, but the practical costs have arguably risen.

I don't understand. Do you mean prestigious norms like "never avoid poor neighbourhoods for your personal safety, because it's supposedly un-egalitarian", or what? What other norms like that exist that are harmful in daily life?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 04:05:00AM *  3 points [-]

but e.g. where welfare programs are being cut following the current crisis, it's certainly not the liberals but economically conservative governments championing the cuts.

What's happening is, to paraphrase Thacher, that governments are running out of other people's money. Yes, conservative parties are more willing to acknowledge this fact, but liberal parties don't have any viable alternatives and it was their economic policies that lead to this state of affairs.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 05 May 2012 11:25:42AM *  7 points [-]

And yet, it's the "Universalist" system that allows Jews to not get exterminated. I think the cognitive and epistemological flaws of "Universalism" kinda makes some people ignore the fact that it's the system that also allows the physical existence of heretics more than any other system in existence ever yet has.

Was (non-Universalist) Nazi Germany more open to accepting Jew-produced science than the "Universalist" West was? Or is the current non-Universalist Arab world more open to such? Were the previous feudal systems better at accepting atheists or Jewish people? Which non-universalist (and non-Jewish) system was actually better than "Universalism" at recognizing Jewish contributions or intelligence, that you would choose to criticize Universalism for being otherwise? Or better at not killing heretics?

Let's keep it simple -- which non-Universalist nation has ever been willing to allow as much relative influence to Jewish people as Universalist systems have?

As for Moldbug's diagnosis, I'm unimpressed with his predictive abilities: he predicted Syria would be safe from revolt, right, because it was cozying up to Iran rather than to America? He has an interesting model of the world but, much like Marxism, I'm not sure Moldbuggery has much predictive capacity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 03:55:01AM *  -1 points [-]

As for Moldbug's diagnosis, I'm unimpressed with his predictive abilities: he predicted Syria would be safe from revolt, right, because it was cozying up to Iran rather than to America?

Yes, and notice that unlike Mubarak and Gaddafi who both (at least partially) cozyed up to America, Assad is still in charge of Syria.

Comment author: shminux 10 May 2012 09:23:42PM *  4 points [-]

I thought that it has been generally agreed upon that, as a participant, the rational thing to do was to examine one's intuition and logic and make sure that your system 1 and system 2 thinking matches up, then reexamine it for possible biases. Hence it seems highly irrational to bring up something like

I have a strong intuition that OpenCog can be made into a human-level general intelligence, and that if this intelligence is raised properly it will turn out benevolent and help us launch a positive Singularity. However, I can't fully rationally substantiate this intuition

as a supporting argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 03:36:36AM *  2 points [-]

Except in a lot of cases your intuition is better than your conscious thinking. See Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.

Comment author: shminux 10 May 2012 05:55:00AM 2 points [-]

Many 20+ Discussion posts don't belong in Main

Very few posts get +20, only a rare one gets +30, so demoting an occasional outlier would not be a very onerous task. That said, simply restricting the ability to post to Main will stop those with more ego than common sense.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 02:50:31AM 3 points [-]

Well, there is a karma threshold.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 10 May 2012 09:30:23PM -1 points [-]

Formal system A: The number 2 exists. Formal system B: The number 2 does not exist.

I cannot fathom how you can call these systems consistent. Each has a theorem whose negation is a theorem in the other. What possible meaning of 'consistency' describes this situation?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 01:43:12AM *  1 point [-]

Formal system A: The number 2 exists. Formal system B: The number 2 does not exist.

Map of America: Washington, D.C. exists. Map of Europe: Washington, D.C., doesn't exist.

I cannot fathom how you can call these systems consistent.

Each is a consistent map of its part of the territory. I never said they describe the same part.

As far consistency, would you say PA is as likely to be inconsistent as consistent, because if you believe that PA is just a game of symbols that doesn't describe anything there seems to be no reason for it to be consistent.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 10 May 2012 09:39:03PM 0 points [-]

The platonist certainly agrees. The test I described would only work for "accurate" maps of the territory. The platonist would consider PA to be an accurate (but incomplete) map of the actual natural numbers, while the formal system you described is not.

Ok, but what is the test which distinguishes between accurate and inaccurate maps? It seems to me that the reasoning here has become circular: It is asserted that the number 2 exists because otherwise, formal system X would be unable to prove it; and also that formal system X is a good test because the number 2 exists. I feel that at this point, you ought to abandon the formal systems and just go for straightforwardly asserting that the number 2 exists in a mystical, intuitive sense which is not open to rational disproof, but which you can use to test formal systems for accuracy.

If you would be willing, on these grounds, to assert with some confidence that the computer will never print any more pairs, why would you demure from asserting, on these same grounds, and with this same confidence, "A largest pair of twin primes exists, and this most-recently printed pair is it."?

Because this does not seem to me to match the meaning of the word 'exists'. If I say that Planet X exists, I can point to it with a telescope and I expect in principle to be able to travel there. If I say that a species of animals exists, I am asserting the possibility of shooting one and eating it. What am I asserting when I say that a number exists? If it's that a particular computer will print so many numbers and then stop, then I think this is not the same class of assertion as in the two previous examples, and it ought to have a different word.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 01:37:55AM 1 point [-]

Ok, but what is the test which distinguishes between accurate and inaccurate maps?

Both maps are accurate maps of different parts of the territory.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 10 May 2012 12:35:29AM 0 points [-]

I included the qualification "the formal systems that you're thinking of". Were you thinking of that formal system when you wrote (quote)

I wasn't, but I rather strongly opine that the word 'exists' should not be applied to a state that can change with the vagaries of what formal system I happen to be thinking of. At an absolute minimum, it should be qualified along the lines of "X exists within formal system Y" or "The existence of X is a theorem of formal system Y". At which point I can return to my original question: What is the formal system of which "God exists" is a theorem or axiom? I also note that "Given axioms X, God exists" is somehow a rather less impressive claims than a floating "God exists". Yet it's so much more specific and satisfactory.

To answer your original question, the platonist need only point to a particular formal system (e.g., PA), and say that the nonexistence of the number 2 would mean that there would be no proof of 2's existence in that particular system.

This is at least an answer to the question, "What is meant by 'exist'?"; it gives us a definite procedure for deciding what does and doesn't exist. But I opine that it's not a very satisfactory one. Why that formal system and not some other one?

But it is not even known whether the TPC is decidable in any of the standard formal systems. Suppose that the TPC were proved undecidable in, say, ZFC. Would the question really then lose all meaning? Consider a physical computer that brute-force factors one odd number after the next, and prints every consecutive pair of odd numbers that have no nontrivial factorizations. Would it really become meaningless to ask whether there is a bound on how many entries the computer would print, regardless of how many physical resources it were given?

I don't think so, but I'm not sure I understand the relevance, but what I'm objecting to is the word 'exists'. Suppose you established that the computer was going to print these two numbers and then stop. That is an experimental prediction which we can test. (Updating our belief in the proposition upwards with every second that the computer prints nothing more.) I still don't see the value in asserting on these grounds that something exists. Why not stick with what is observable, namely that the computer halts, or doesn't halt?

If you want to say that 'exists' is a short form of "the computer halts", fine; but it does not seem to me that this is what platonists usually intend to say. And, to return to the original problem, it is still completely unclear what "God exists" is shorthand for.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2012 01:34:43AM 1 point [-]

I don't think so, but I'm not sure I understand the relevance, but what I'm objecting to is the word 'exists'.

Why not stick with what is observable, namely that the computer halts, or doesn't halt?

This is a universal counterargument against saying that anything besides what we are currently observing exists.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 10 May 2012 12:36:46AM 0 points [-]

What consistency? You just acknowledged that there are formal systems in which 2 doesn't exist.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2012 01:52:19AM 0 points [-]

What consistency?

The fact that the formal systems are consistent.

You just acknowledged that there are formal systems in which 2 doesn't exist.

And there are planets on which humans don't exist. I don't see how this is inconsistent.

Comment author: LordSnow 09 May 2012 11:53:16PM 0 points [-]

Thank you, I did find some discussion and while I get the feeling that RationalWiki is seen as "wrong", I failed to find any proper backing of this opinion.

And the other question that is left unanswered is why Roko's basilisk is allowed to remain in that article, considering that it was purged off LW? (RW article comes up among top google searches on "lesswrong" so it might matter?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2012 12:16:44AM 7 points [-]

And the other question that is left unanswered is why Roko's basilisk is allowed to remain in that article, considering that it was purged off LW?

Because Eliezer doesn't have the power to force RW to delete it.

Comment author: Logos01 09 May 2012 05:28:48PM 2 points [-]

Yes, but I don't think this uses the word 'exist' in the same way.

I'd say not. I tend to use two independent terms when discussing the nature of a thing's existence; I will discuss first whether or not something is real; and then whether or not that real thing exists.

To be real; a thing must be an accurate description of some pattern of behavior that things which exist conform to. (I realize this is dense/inscrutable, more in a bit.) To exist; a thing must directly interact in some fashion with other things which exist; it must be 'instantiable'.

So numbers, mathematical constructs, words; these things are real but they do not exist. We can recognize them in how the things which do exist behave. The concepts are not themselves instantiated -- ever -- but we can handle them symbolically. If I hold three pebbles in my hand, that means there is a precise arrangement of pebbles; it has a precise relationship with two the arrangement we'd call "two pebbles" and the arrangement we'd call "four pebbles" and so on. But you'll never see/hear/touch/smell/taste the number 3. It's physically impossible for that to occur; because the number, 'three', does not exist. Pebbles on the other hand do exist; you can take a pebble and throw it into a lake.

I find that this differentiation between different meanings of the term "to be" makes the discussion vastly simpler. It eliminates whole swaths of silliness (like TAG for example); I am perfectly free to say "I can prove using the Laws of Logic that the Laws of Logic do not exist."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 11:08:02PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not convinced this distinction holds up all that well. For example, would you say that software "exists"? How about supply functions? Nations? Boeing 747s? People? Force fields?

Edit: yes, what gRR said.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 09 May 2012 10:17:41PM 0 points [-]

then one implication would be that you would be unable to construct proofs of that number's existence within the formal systems that you're thinking of.

This seems to me rather confused, because it is easy to construct a formal system with which we have precisely that experience. Consider this variant of the Peano Axioms:

  1. 0 is a number.
  2. 0 has a successor, which is also a number.
  3. The successor of the successor of 0 is not a number. (Alternatively, "is 0". I think this gives us arithmetic modulo 2.)
  4. (Add the axoms of reflexivity, transitivity, and so on.)

Now clearly, in this formal system I cannot prove the existence of the number two, because its nonexistence is an axiom. Shall I conclude, then, that the number two doesn't exist, on this account? By what standard are we to judge between formal systems in which 2 is provable, those in which it is disprovable, and those in which it cannot be proved either way? Do we take a vote? Is it a question of appeal to human intuition?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 11:02:43PM 0 points [-]

Yes and the number 2 exists within the natural numbers, but not within the model your system describes.

I would argue that the same argument MinibearRex uses here to justify his belief on a reality underlying our physical observations. Specifically, if there is no real system underlying our models how do you account for their seeming consistency?

Comment author: thelittledoctor 09 May 2012 03:51:59AM *  10 points [-]

I'm going to describe such a conversation (the first of what would, I think, be many) for a girl who I will call Jane, though that is not her name. Some background: Jane is a devout Catholic, an altar girl, a theology major, a performer of the singing-acting-dancing type, and one of the bubbliest people I know. She is also firmly against gay marriage, abortion, premarital sex, and consumption of alcohol or other drugs (though for some reason she has no problem with consumption of shellfish). You may have read the previous two sentences and thought "there's a lot of sexual repression going on there" and you would be quite correct, though she would never admit that. Here is what I would say and do. Don't take the wording too literally; I'm not that good.

tld: (At an appropriate moment) Jane, I have a very personal question for you.

J: Okay, shoot.

tld: It's about God.

J: Oh dear. I'm listening.

tld: So God exists. And he's up there, somewhere, shouting down that he loves us. But if tomorrow morning he suddenly vanished - just ceased to exist, packed up and left town, whatever - would you want to know?

J: I - uh - gosh. That would go against everything God's said, about how he would never abandon us- tld: I know. But just think of it as a counterfactual question. God leaves, or vanishes. Do you want to know? J: I don't know. It's - I just can't imagine that happening.

tld: taking Jane's hand, gentle smile Hey. Don't let it rattle you. Just remember, here in the real world, God's up there somewhere, and he loves us, and he would never abandon us.

J: I love hearing you say that.

tld: Sure. So in the real world, nothing to worry about. But over there in the imaginary, fake world - God vanishes. Would you want to know?

J: Well... I guess so. Because otherwise it's just living a lie, isn't it?

tld: Right. squeeze hand softly I'm glad you agree, it's very brave and honest of you to be able to say that. So the follow-up question is, what would change, in that world?

J: What do you mean?

tld: Well, God was there, and now he's left that world behind. So it's a world without God - what changes, what would be different about the world if God weren't in it?

J: I can't imagine a world without God in it.

tld: Well, let's look at it the other way, then. Let's imagine another world, just like the first two except that it never had a God in the first place, and then God shows up. He came from the other world, the first one we imagined, to give this new world some of His light, right? reassuring squeeze

J: squeeze back Okay...

tld: So God comes into this new world, and the first thing he does is make it a better place, right? That's what God does, he makes the world a better place.

J: Yeah! Yeah, exactly. God makes the world a better place.

tld: So God comes down himself, or sends down His son, and feeds the poor and heals the sick, and pretty soon the world is better off because God is there.

J: Of course.

tld: Great! smile So let's think about the other world, the one that got left behind, for a second. What would you do, if you were there?

J: What? (shocked)

tld: Well, the you in the other world finds out there's no God anymore, and that's that. So what would you do? lean in, squeeze hand again There must be some things you'd dare to do that you wouldn't otherwise.

J: pause, blush Um. Well. I don't know. I'd have to think about it.

tld: Right, it's a hard question. final hand squeeze, lean back But I hope you'll think about it, for the next time we talk, and let me know what you've come up with. I've actually got to run, it's getting kind of late (or other excuse for why I need to leave, etc)

Proceed to wait until she brings the subject up again, or bring it up again later myself.

So, yes. The above conversation has two purposes, which are (a) to plant the idea of dealing with a world where God doesn't exist, and (b) to remind Jane that there are things she wants but can't have because of her faith so that she has a reason, though unspoken, to want to be rid of it; there are a couple of other things going on as well which I'm sure faul_sname will cringe at, but that's the gist. Intended arc of development: A few months' worth of working on a truth-seeking mindset, possibly more work on building rapport and position-of-authority mojo, and eventually the Jenga moment, which it's difficult to plan out precisely in advance. And yes, I realize that playing on sexual tension to manipulate someone's beliefs is, in a word, disgusting. I did say Dark Arts for a reason.

The other two people who've been weighing on my mind are let's-call-him-James and let's-call-her-Mary, for whom the intended sequence is a little different (neither of them has an easily-accessible repressed-sexuality motivator) but you get the idea, I think.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 06:27:08AM 9 points [-]

Just out of curiosity, do you have the obvious ulterior motive here?

Comment author: thelittledoctor 09 May 2012 04:30:48AM 2 points [-]

Does LessWrong have an actual primer on the Dark Arts anywhere? There's a lot of discussion of Defense Against, but I haven't seen any Practice Of... Perhaps that's beyond the scope of what we really intend to teach here?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 05:44:23AM 6 points [-]

There are several started sequences, none of which got past their fist post.

Comment author: faul_sname 09 May 2012 12:45:04AM *  6 points [-]

3 successes (that I know of) out of 1 attempted. I don't intentionally deconvert people, generally speaking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 05:40:31AM 4 points [-]

Did you succeed with the one you attempted?

In response to Why do people ____?
Comment author: Athrelon 04 May 2012 06:53:37PM 5 points [-]

Why do people not punish useless status-seeking behavior? People rightly respond warmly to productive status-enhancing behavior, such as including people in conversation, fishing out common interests, and telling entertaining stories. But people also frequently reward outright bragging, cocky attitudes, and social aggressiveness - which to me are obviously done with status in mind, have no value to anyone else, and are pretty uncorrelated with the productive kinds of status behavior.

Since status is zero sum, why aren't other people more proactive in noticing, being annoyed by, and socially punishing such behavior? Are people not consciously aware of these types of behavior, which can be trained to be more or less automatic? Do they assume that swaggerers might have social clout to match their personalities and are afraid of having them as enemies?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 04:25:28AM 2 points [-]

Since status is zero sum, why aren't other people more proactive in noticing, being annoyed by, and socially punishing such behavior?

Prisoner's dilemma/tragedy of the commons. Deflating X's status seeking benefits everyone (except X and his allies), but the costs of doing so are born by the person doing the deflating.

Comment author: private_messaging 08 May 2012 07:23:37AM *  1 point [-]

It is a part of difficulty to subvert - it is difficult to arrange a scheme with positive expected utility for falsifying data. At the same time there's plenty of subtle falsifications such as discarding of negative results. And when it comes to rationality - if you have a hypothesis X that is supported by arguments A,B,C,D and is debunked by arguments E,F,G,H , you can count on rational self interested agents to put more effort into finding the first four but not the last four, as payoff for former is bigger. (The real agent's reasoning costs utility, and it is expensive to find those arguments)

Consider some issue like AI risk. If you can pick out the few reasons why AI would kill everyone, even very bad reasons that rely on some oracular stuff that is not implementable, you are set for life (and you don't even have to invent them, you can pick out of fiction and simply collect them and promote together). If you can make a few equally good reasons not to, that's pure waste of your time as far as self interest is concerned. Of course science does not trust you to put equal effort when it is clearly irrational to put equal effort, for anyone but the true angels (and then for the true angels it is also rational to try to grab as much money (which would be ill spent otherwise) as they can as easily as they can, and then donate it to charities etc, so for purpose of fact finding you can't trust even the selfless angels).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 04:04:55AM 1 point [-]

It is a part of difficulty to subvert - it is difficult to arrange a scheme with positive expected utility for falsifying data.

Given that one gets fame for "spectacular" discoveries, not at all especially in fields like biology where there are frequently lots of confounding variables that you can use to provide cover.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 08 May 2012 08:28:04PM 0 points [-]

Well, I can certainly ask the number two for goods and services, so if that's a useful operation to perform, there ya go.

My chances of receiving those goods and services won't increase if I do so, but that's something else again.

Similarly, I can ascribe mysterious feelings and special mind states to the influence of a mathematical structure, thank it for the blessings of existence, base my feelings of security and purpose in life on it, and (as you note) invoke it to avert metaphysical questions.

I admit, I don't quite understand how to ground morality on a mathematical structure, but then I don't quite understand how to ground morality on a traditional god, either. (I recognize that many people claim to do this.)

I've never quite understood how grounding morality on a traditional god is supposed to work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2012 03:26:01AM 1 point [-]

I admit, I don't quite understand how to ground morality on a mathematical structure

Well, look at things like TDT/UDT for starters.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 May 2012 01:54:21PM *  2 points [-]

Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.

You know, there are countries where the intentional homicide rate is smaller than in John Derbyshire's country by nearly an order of magnitude.

Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.

There's this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

That thing doesn't exist in all countries. Plus, I think the reason why you don't see that many two-digit-IQ people among (say) physics professors is not that they don't make it, it's that they don't even consider doing that, so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes April 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 May 2012 07:11:45AM 1 point [-]

so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.

That's not the point. The point is that the black physics professor is less smart than the Jewish physics professor.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 04 May 2012 04:46:04PM 7 points [-]

Are you aware of another online community where people more rational than LWers gather? If not, any ideas about how to create such a community?

Also, if someone was worried about the possibility of a bad singularity, but didn't think that supporting SIAI was a good way to address that concern, what should they do instead?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2012 01:35:16AM 1 point [-]

If not, any ideas about how to create such a community?

How did Eliezer create LW?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 May 2012 10:10:49PM 0 points [-]

Any other recommendations in a vaguely similar vein? (I've already read Szabo's other stuff.)

Szabo's website is up as of May 4, 2012.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2012 01:21:54AM *  2 points [-]

I assume you've read his blog as well. In that case there are several things I'd recommend. If you haven't read all of Paul Graham's essays, you should. There's also Walter Mead's essay of what he, rather anachronistically, calls the "Blue Social Model". He also talks about these ideas in more depth on his blog (along with all kinds of other stuff ETA: mostly on current events).

Also possibly John C Wright's blog if you're more interested in religious stuff.

Comment author: shminux 04 May 2012 03:49:14AM *  1 point [-]

Hmm, I guess the inconsistent part is the original Harry disappearing after awhile...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2012 04:01:36AM *  2 points [-]

If I understand your explanation correctly, the inconsistent part is Harry experiencing the prank the first time through the loop.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 04 May 2012 12:32:01AM 2 points [-]

Can't you have mixed states that are stable or at least self-consistent? Something like there's a 50% chance you go back and kill your grandfather and there's then a 50% chance you don't exist? I seem to remember David Deutsch discussing something similar at one point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2012 03:52:07AM 2 points [-]

Yes, but that's not a "stable time loop" as portrayed in either cannon or MoR.

Comment author: shminux 03 May 2012 07:08:12PM *  2 points [-]

There has been some confusion on how the time turners work and whether they are compatible with relativity.

This comment is meant to explain the simplified mechanics of it, as outlined in the User Manual.

Time turner keeps track of its world line for up to 6 hours back. When activated, it creates a branch of the whole Universe inside the past lightcone of the spacetime point on that world line and transports the wearer to that branch.

FAQ:

  • Q. Why is my time turner limited to just 6 hours? A. Time turner has to keep track of your personal past well enough to spawn a completely new copy of the universe seamlessly and instantly. This is a lot of information to keep track of, a spacetime volume of roughly 13.6 billion light year^3*year. Your time turner keeps has a perfect snapshot of the current state of the Universe, and it contains a sophisticated magical firmware to extrapolate what this state had been up to 6 hours prior (proper time in the time turner's reference frame). This is done by simulating the universe backwards, which runs into the standard thermodynamical limitations. The hard limit of 6 hours was put in place to prevent the reconstructed copy of the universe from being significantly different from the user's subjective experience.

  • Q. Why does my time turner create a new branch of the universe instead of modifying the existing branch? A. Unfortunately, the laws of General Relativity prohibit any true modification of the past. The GR RFC specifies a unique metric (and therefore unique matter content) for each spacetime point. Any attempt to have two or more copies of the same object at the same point in spacetime would be in violation of the RFC, and so is not supported by your time turner.

  • Q. What happens to the original universe after I activate my time turner? A. The original branch still persists as if no time turner had been activated. However, since there is no known way to communicate between parallel universes, you do not need to worry about anything that happens to the copy of you and anyone you failed to save from a certain death by activating your time turner.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2012 03:43:46AM 4 points [-]

Time turner keeps track of its world line for up to 6 hours back. When activated, it creates a branch of the whole Universe inside the past lightcone of the spacetime point on that world line and transports the wearer to that branch.

This seems inconsistent with Harry pranking himself.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 03 May 2012 12:35:59AM 1 point [-]

I accept the correction. I should also take this occasion as a reminder to think twice the next time I'm inclined to claim that I'm paraphrasing something fairly and yet in such a way that it still sounds silly; I'm much better than I used to be at resisting the atavistic temptation (conscious or not) to use such rhetorical ploys, but I still do it sometimes.

My response to the revised argument is, of course, that the mental state of proponents of an Idea X is distinct from the actual truth or falsity of Idea X. (As the local slogan goes, "Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence.") There certainly are people who believe in the Singularity for much the same reason many people are attracted to religion, but I maintain (as I said in the grandparent) that this isn't very relevant to the object-level issue: the fact that most of the proponents of Idea X are biased in this-and-such a manner doesn't tell us very much about Idea X, because we expect there to be biased proponents in favor of any idea, true or false.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2012 02:15:52AM 2 points [-]

I agree that this kind of outside view argument doesn't provide absolute certainty. However, it does provide evidence that part of your reasons for believing X are irrational reasons that you're rationalizing. Reduce your probability estimate of X accordingly.

I should also take this occasion as a reminder to think twice the next time I'm inclined to claim that I'm paraphrasing something fairly and yet in such a way that it still sounds silly;

Note, that the formulation presented here is one I came up with on my own while searching for the bayesstructure behind arguments based on the outside view.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 02 May 2012 11:28:45PM *  1 point [-]

I should stop posting, was only meaning to message some people in private.

I understand that you may not reply, given this statement, but ...

Are you sure you're actually disagreeing with Yudkowsky et al.? I agree that it's plausible that many systems, including the weather, are chaotic in such a way so as that no agent can precisely predict them, but I don't think that this disproves the "Foom thesis" (that a self-improving AI is likely to quickly overpower humanity and therefore that such an AI's goals should be designed very carefully). Even if some problems (like predicting the weather) are intractable to all possible agents, all the Foom thesis requires is some subset of relevant problems is tractable to AIs but not humans.

I agree that insights from computational complexity theory are relevant: if solving a particular problem of size n provably requires a number of operations that is exponential in n, then clearly just throwing more computing power at the problem won't help solve much larger problem instances. But (competent) Foom-theorists surely don't disagree with this.

As to the claim that Yudkowsky et al. are merely doing theology, I agree that there are some similarities between the idea of a God and the idea of a very powerful artificial intelligence, but I don't think this observation is very relevant to the issue at hand. "Idea X shares some features with the popular Idea Y, but Idea Y is clearly false, therefore the proponents of Idea X are probably mistaken" is not a compelling argument. (I'm aware that this paraphrasing of the "Belief in powerful AI is like religion" argument takes an uncharitable tone, but it doesn't seem like an inaccurate paraphrase, either.) [EDIT: I shouldn't have written the previous two sentences the way I did; see Eugine Nier's criticism in the child comment and my reply in the grandchild.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 11:59:59PM 5 points [-]

As to the claim that Yudkowsky et al. are merely doing theology, I agree that there are some similarities between the idea of a God and the idea of a very powerful artificial intelligence, but I don't think this observation is very relevant to the issue at hand. "Idea X shares some features with the popular Idea Y, but Idea Y is clearly false, therefore the proponents of Idea X are probably mistaken" is not a compelling argument. (I'm aware that this paraphrasing of the "Belief in powerful AI is like religion" argument takes an uncharitable tone, but it doesn't seem like an inaccurate paraphrase, either.)

The correct phrasing of that argument is:

Idea Y is popular and false.

Therefore, humans have a bias that makes them overestimate ideas like Y.

Idea X shares many features with idea Y.

Therefore, proponents of idea X are probably suffering from the bias above.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 02 May 2012 09:28:11PM 0 points [-]

Even if this was the case, by murder-pill logic a papercliper would stop self improving just below the relevant "superintelegence" threshold.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 11:47:47PM 2 points [-]

Assuming it knew where that threshold was ahead of time.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 02 May 2012 01:32:16AM 0 points [-]

True, but very few things are less effective than whining.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 04:29:17AM 8 points [-]

Actually, while whining rarely accomplishes anything, a lot of things anti-accomplish something, i.e., they make the problem worse.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 May 2012 01:06:48PM *  42 points [-]

For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

--Mencius Moldbug, on belief as attire and conspicuous wrongness.

Source.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes May 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 04:25:04AM 3 points [-]

Also relevant.

Comment author: aelephant 02 May 2012 12:28:03AM 4 points [-]

From the article you linked:

Within Asia, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is the system with the longest history. TCM was developed through thousands of years of empirical testing and refinement.

I cringed. Not only do I question what they are calling "empirical testing" but this Time Fallacy (I don't know what else to call it, perhaps there is a better name) is everywhere in China. "Well, we've been doing it the wrong way for over 2000 years so it must be the right way!"

No, actually if you tell me 2+2=5 for 6 billion years, you will still be wrong and 2+2 will still equal 4.

The Economist recently had a much better, much more skeptical piece on TCM:

Medicine & its rivals

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 03:33:38AM 3 points [-]

No, actually if you tell me 2+2=5 for 6 billion years, you will still be wrong and 2+2 will still equal 4.

Except the belief that 2+2=5 isn't going to survive for 6 billion years.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 May 2012 01:42:37AM 0 points [-]

I would add that in my experience atheism doesn't correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.

Refuting a statistical claim with anecdotal data is usually not very helpful.

Not necessarily saying you're wrong, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 03:23:55AM 2 points [-]

Refuting a statistical claim with anecdotal data is usually not very helpful.

Depends on the quality of statistical evidence supporting the claim.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 02 May 2012 12:44:22AM 0 points [-]

This assumes a large genetic aspect of being "weird".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2012 03:19:54AM 6 points [-]

Not necessarily, this was recent enough that it could be cultural.

Comment author: Alsadius 30 April 2012 02:21:35AM 2 points [-]

stranded

You mean standard? Or is this jargon I'm unfamiliar with?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2012 04:24:43AM 1 point [-]

Thanks, fixed.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 May 2012 03:31:14AM 1 point [-]

Er, of course not. What's your point?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2012 03:33:45AM 3 points [-]

Your argument was atheism is weakly correlated with vocab. Vocab is weakly correlated with intelligence. Therefore, atheism is weakly correlated with intelligence.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 May 2012 12:42:39AM *  7 points [-]

While I think I see why the parent was downvoted, I would add that in my experience atheism doesn't correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.

It should do so but it is only a weak predictor. See for example,the GSS data which shows a correlation between vocab (as measured by WORDSUM) and lack of belief in God. Vocabulary is a predictor of general intelligence (high correlation with IQ and Wonderlic for example) whether or not one one corrects for education level (although some complicated things happen in terms of parental education level). The GSS is not the only data set which shows this sort of pattern. The result is weak but statistically robust.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2012 03:29:49AM 2 points [-]

BTW, correlation is not an equivalence relation, especially weak correlation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2012 02:24:46AM 0 points [-]

There are still reasons to control it, e.g., making sure it doesn't destroy the earth before converging on the true morality.

These are also theories that the true morality comes from the interaction of multiple agents and that therefore a single super-powerful agent won't necessarily converge on it.

Comment author: GeorgieChaos 29 April 2012 06:13:31PM -1 points [-]

I hadn't previously seen any clear motive for Dumbledore to kill Narcissa. That he might have done so to help keep himself ready to defend Magical Britain at least provides a possible explanation.

Assuming that he did, in fact, do broadly what Draco said, anyhow.

Pedanterrific, I'm not conflating the two acts, merely observing that one may illuminate the other.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2012 11:08:17PM *  2 points [-]

I hadn't previously seen any clear motive for Dumbledore to kill Narcissa.

The standard theory is that he killed her to show the death eaters that attacking families of Order of the Phoenix members will now be repaid in kind.

Comment author: tut 16 April 2012 12:22:01PM 4 points [-]

Is there a point to this quote, besides that this diana character doesn't understand the term 'moral dilemma'?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2012 09:21:42PM 2 points [-]

That the kind of "moral dilemmas" philosophers tend to contemplate, tend to be very different to the kind of dilemmas people encounter in practice.

Comment author: Gabriel 29 April 2012 04:23:31PM 0 points [-]

I see people here who seem seriously interested in forming a more accurate view of the world -- but at the same time, living in a society that has vast powerful, influential, and super-high-status official intellectual institutions that deal with all imaginable topics, they show little or no interest in the question of what systematic biases and perverse incentives might be influencing their output.

I don't get that impression. The problems of biases and perverse incentives pervading academia seem to be common knowledge around here. We might not have systematically reliable methods for judging the credibility of any given academic publication but that doesn't imply total ignorance (merely a lack of rationalist superpowers).

But then what exactly makes LW useful or worthwhile in any way? Are the elite universities so marginalized and powerless that they need help from a blog run by amateurs to spread the word about their output?

That question sounds weird next to the preceding paragraph. Those perverse incentives mentioned earlier aren't exactly incentives to spread well-established scientific knowledge outside academic circles. The universities need help, not due to lack of power and status but due to lack of effort.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2012 08:57:10PM 6 points [-]

The problems of biases and perverse incentives pervading academia seem to be common knowledge around here.

This is common knowledge in the abstract, i.e., as long as one avoids applying this knowledge to adjust one's estimate of any particular "official position".

Comment author: EHeller 29 April 2012 03:58:19AM *  5 points [-]

I would turn this around- what core part of Less Wrong is actually novel? The sequences seem to be popularizations of various people's work. The only thing unique to the site seems to be the eccentricity of its choice in topics/examples (most cog sci people probably don't think many worlds quantum mechanics is pedagogically useful for teaching rationality).

There also appears to be an unspoken contempt for creating novel work. Lots of conjecture that such-and-such behavior may be signaling, and such-and-such belief is a result of such-and-such bias, with little discussion of how to formalize and test the idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2012 04:28:07AM 9 points [-]

I sometimes think a quote I've heard in reference to Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", might apply equally well to the sequences:

Much that is new, much that is true, and very little overlap between the two.

Comment author: drnickbone 27 April 2012 08:51:47PM 7 points [-]

From Chapter 61:

(weighing, Minerva knew, the possibility that he might want to go back more than two hours from this instant; for you couldn't send information further back in time than six hours, not through any chain of Time-Turners)

If information cannot travel back more than six hours, and a "soul" (stored on a Horcrux) is information (as Quirrell describes it), then it is a reasonable guess that the soul cannot travel over a spatial separation of more than 6 light-hours. Further than that, and it seems the soul parts must fall out of synch, though exactly what happens then is anyone's guess. Does Quirrell die? Are there two separate Quirrells, one stranded permanently on Pioneer, and the other on Earth? Can the one on Earth be killed, even if the one on Pioneer is never destroyed?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2012 02:11:24AM 12 points [-]

If information cannot travel back more than six hours, and a "soul" (stored on a Horcrux) is information (as Quirrell describes it), then it is a reasonable guess that the soul cannot travel over a spatial separation of more than 6 light-hours.

More then 6 hours in what reference frame?

Comment author: pragmatist 26 April 2012 06:19:21PM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps the single most important thing to realize when adopting the (non-relativistic) MWI is that physical three-dimensional space is not the fundamental space of the theory. The arena in which the theory takes place is configuration space.

The sort of information you're looking for, about which physical space you return to, is encoded in configuration space and the Schrodinger equation. Even though the two different versions of point A you're talking about inhabit the same location in physical space, they inhabit distinct locations in configuration space, so the laws of quantum mechanics can distinguish between them.

Think of a simple case where you perform a spin measurement experiment at location A, and say that in your branch the measuring device at the location shows that the particle you measured was spin up. There will be another branch where the measuring device shows spin down, but this branch will have separated quite substantially from your branch in configuration space. Now your question amounts to this: if you leave location A and then return, why don't you return to find that you're in the other branch (the spin-down one). Looking at things from the configuration space perspective, the question doesn't seem all that troubling. This other branch is in a totally separate region of configuration space. Moving around in physical space won't jump you across configuration space to this other branch. The Schrodinger equation is local in configuration space. All that happens when you move around in physical space is that your branch (the one with the spin up measurement) moves around with you in configuration space. Since you always stay within that branch, returning to location A will reveal that the detector still shows spin up.

Perhaps what I say in this comment about "worlds" in MWI not being places might also help. You can't move out of your world (your branch) by travelling far enough in physical space.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2012 01:06:15AM 1 point [-]

Perhaps the single most important thing to realize when adopting the (non-relativistic) MWI is that physical three-dimensional space is not the fundamental space of the theory. The arena in which the theory takes place is configuration space.

Of course, this pretty much destroys the "locality" argument.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 April 2012 12:44:31PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, I agree with this. I'd be surprised if the chance was as high as .25, but the principle is the same; career criminals can count on eventually being arrested.

That said, the original context of this discussion was the behavior-modification effects of prison policy on the not-yet-arrested population, and from a behavior modification point of view a punishment that usually fails to kick in for the first several crimes doesn't do much to deter those first few crimes.

And making the punishment more and more severe doesn't help the deterrence factor all that much in that situation, which was my original point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2012 05:03:21AM 2 points [-]

and from a behavior modification point of view a punishment that usually fails to kick in for the first several crimes doesn't do much to deter those first few crimes.

Disagree. It deters the first crime. It's deterrent power will decrease for subsequent crimes (until caught) unless the criminal has friends who have been caught.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 April 2012 12:37:47AM 4 points [-]

Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people

The evidence someone's race constitutes about that person's qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here. And given that we're running on corrupted hardware, I suspect that someone who does try to “performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person” ends up subconsciously double-counting evidence and therefore end up with less accurate results than somebody who doesn't. (As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off... well, I've never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes April 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2012 04:09:55AM 6 points [-]

Also, according to the U.S. Supreme Court even if race is screened off, you're actions can still be racist or something.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 April 2012 08:55:05AM *  3 points [-]

I'm not talking about forensic evidence. Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour. Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes April 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2012 04:07:13AM *  5 points [-]

Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour.

Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.

Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.

There's this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 April 2012 12:37:47AM 4 points [-]

Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people

The evidence someone's race constitutes about that person's qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here. And given that we're running on corrupted hardware, I suspect that someone who does try to “performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person” ends up subconsciously double-counting evidence and therefore end up with less accurate results than somebody who doesn't. (As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off... well, I've never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes April 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2012 07:59:51AM 5 points [-]

The evidence someone's race constitutes about that person's qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here.

In real life, you don't have the luxury of gathering forensic evidence on everyone you meet.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 April 2012 05:11:07AM *  1 point [-]

I've seen both of those before. They don't answer the issue in question which concerns Haidt's studies being rigged. Whether there's other evidence in the same direction is a distinct question.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2012 05:35:26AM 5 points [-]

It's rigged in the sense that his "sacredness/purity" questions are about things conservatives tend to consider pure/sacred and not about the things liberals consider pure/sacred. Similarly, for his loyalty and authority questions. Furthermore, a large part of the identity of modern liberals (especially non-hippie liberals in the case of sacredness) is that they're above such old fashioned things as tribalism, superstition, and blind obedience thus they tend to have a blind spot for the places where they engage in these things.

True this rigging wasn't intetional on Haidt's part, but then Vladimir said as much.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 April 2012 04:38:12AM 2 points [-]

At the very least, I'm saying that that's the perception: most crimes go unpunished.
But yes, I also suspect that perception is true. I haven't done any research on the matter, though, and attempts to find statistics via cursory Googling failed.
If you have any cites handy, I'm happy to be corrected.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2012 05:21:04AM -2 points [-]

At the very least, I'm saying that that's the perception: most crimes go unpunished. But yes, I also suspect that perception is true. I haven't done any research on the matter, though, and attempts to find statistics via cursory Googling failed. If you have any cites handy, I'm happy to be corrected.

In that case, why aren't you stealing money and donating to SIAI? ;)

But seriously, there are countries where your comment is actually true. You can tell the difference pretty easily.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2012 07:06:38PM *  7 points [-]

Haidt's own evident (though likely not intentional) rigging of the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.

Can you expand on this? I've thought for a while that he underemphasizes purity/sacredness on the left (in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms) but I'm not sure I've seen anything that looked like rigging in his studies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2012 04:50:17AM 4 points [-]

Here is a decent description of the liberal version of tribalism/loyality. You can also get more details in the article Konkvistador excerpts.

Comment author: pedanterrific 24 April 2012 04:22:05AM 3 points [-]

Given that his ideology is based to blood purity, he may very well (at least put up a show of) encouraging purebloods to have children.

He chose to express this viewpoint by ordering his extremely loyal, highly skilled unmarried female pureblood warrior-assassin to have a kid in the middle of a war?

maybe Lesath is actually Voldemort's [son]

This is possible, but... he's kind of, you know, wimpy. I'm just not seeing it. (Also, it seems like we might have gotten some indication that Quirrell has interacted with him somehow, if this were true.)

Rastaban adopted [him] after Voldemort's downfall

Rastaban was in Azkaban immediately after Voldemort's downfall. Also, Lesath was somewhere around five years old at the time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2012 04:27:54AM 2 points [-]

He chose to express this viewpoint by ordering his extremely loyal, highly skilled unmarried female pureblood warrior-assassin to have a kid in the middle of a war?

Well, the Nazi's did something similar.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2012 04:09:02AM 2 points [-]

she wouldn't have the stigma of being the daughter of a dark lor

Minor note- Lesath is a boy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2012 04:24:41AM 1 point [-]

Thanks fixed.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 April 2012 02:41:50AM *  4 points [-]

What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.

It sounds from that wiki article like Mussolini created an environment where people believed that being a mafioso would reliably result in being punished.

I suspect they also believed that not being a mafioso stood a good chance of being punished, which has other consequences; when punishment occurs in the absence of a reliable and controllable cue, the result is learned helplessness. But if we care about deterring criminals and we don't care about the effect on noncriminals, punishing 90% of criminals and 5% of noncriminals can work OK, even if only 5% of the people we punish are criminals.

Of course, if we care about things in addition to deterrence, that may not be a great policy, but that's another conversation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2012 04:21:05AM 1 point [-]

What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.

So what you're saying is that in modern developed states committing crimes is not well-correlated with being punished? I find this highly dubious.

Comment author: chaosmosis 23 April 2012 02:55:54AM *  0 points [-]

This post helps a lot. I knew that all the evidence for Quirrell = Voldemort was insurmountable, but I was uneasy with the conclusions everyone seemed to be drawing for it. I realize that this was because I was viewing RidVolQuir as evil, like canon Voldemort, rather than as the unique agent he is. I agree with your analysis, although I think RidVolQuir will turn sinister soon enough (unless Snape does something soon?).

One thing that your analysis can't explain very well: Quirrell's involvement with the plot to get Harry's friends.

Maybe it was Snape who planned the plot. Snape's motives are a complete unknown right now, but clearly important. But Quirrell still warned Hermione to leave which seems like evidence against Snape being the culprit. Only now I realize that telling Hermione to leave is what a good and sane teacher with concern for her well being would do. So that would resolve this fairly well.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness style of this comment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2012 04:13:04AM *  4 points [-]

One thing that your analysis can't explain very well: Quirrell's involvement with the plot to get Harry's friends.

The standard explanation is that they were a good influence on him. In chaper 66 Harry tells Quirrell that after the Azkaban debacle:

"Lessson I learned is not to try plotss that would make girl-child friend think I am evil or boy-child friend think I am sstupid,"

Comment author: pedanterrific 23 April 2012 03:47:13AM *  13 points [-]

In canon, Bellatrix Lestrange is married to Rodolphus Lestrange and does not have a child. In MoR, Bellatrix Black is unmarried, but has a child- Lesath Lestrange, the acknowledged bastard of Rastaban Lestrange. (In canon Rodolphus' brother's name was Rabastan, but I'm assuming that's a typo.) Lesath is currently a fifth year, so he was born in either '75 or '76. Bellatrix was actively leading attacks as a Death Eater in '71. Presumably a pregnancy would require some amount of maternity leave from the whole 'going on raids, fighting Aurors' thing.

So. Why would Voldemort allow / order one of his most powerful servants to have a child?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2012 04:02:15AM *  5 points [-]

Given that his ideology is based to blood purity, he may very well (at least put up a show of) encouraging purebloods to have children.

Also, given what we know about Bellatrix's relationship to Voldemort, maybe Lesath is actually Voldemort's son and Rastaban adopted him after Voldemort's downfall, falsely acknowledging paternity so he wouldn't have the stigma of being the son of a dark lord.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 April 2012 01:52:46AM 3 points [-]

Agreed that if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect due to the threat of punishment would be lower than it is now.

That said... when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.

So if law enforcement and courts were perceived as fair and reliable (that is, reliably assigning punishment to criminals and not assigning punishment to noncriminals), I expect making prisons equally unpleasant would create a much greater deterrent effect (to being a criminal) than it does now.

If my goal is to maximize deterrent effect, then, I expect that I would do better to invest my efforts in increasing the perception of law enforcement and courts as fair and reliable than to invest them in increasing the perception of prisons as unpleasant.

But, as I say, I don't think many people involved in setting prison policies are primarily motivated by maximizing deterrent effect.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2012 02:18:09AM *  1 point [-]

That said... when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.

Depending on what you mean by "unreliable and capricious", I find this dubious. At the very least it seems to me that brutal dictatorships are much better at reducing crime (at least the crimes they care about) than democracies. For example, Mussolini's successful campaign against the Sicilian mafia.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 21 April 2012 06:16:59PM 4 points [-]

My $0.02: there are several different functions person A can perform by punishing person B for some action C.

For example:
(a) lowering B's chances of performing C in the future
(b) lowering the chances of observers performing C
(c) encouraging observers to anti-identify with B
(d) encouraging observers who anti-identify with B to support A
(e) encouraging observers who identify with B to oppose A

IME, conversations about how prisons should work become really confused because people aren't very clear about which of those functions they endorse.

Personally, it seems clear to me that (b) is by far the most valuable of these goals. That said, prison policy has almost no influence on (b); law enforcement and courts are far more relevant, and their current implementation pretty much screens off the effects of prison policy.

People who are interested in (a) and also value B's continued existence will tend to be interested in punishment as a behavioral modification tool, and will happily set it aside in favor of more effective behavioral modification tools as science develops them.

People interested in (a) who don't value B's continued existence will be uninterested in punishment, since simply killing B is more efficient.

AFAICT, the folks who establish the policies that govern prisoner punishment (as distinct from prisoner restraint) are primarily motivated by the desire to obtain political support, which suggests minimizing (e) and maximizing (d), which does seem to be what most of our prison policies are designed to do. Maximizing (c) is one way to minimize (e), though there are many others.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2012 01:15:02AM 2 points [-]

Personally, it seems clear to me that (b) is by far the most valuable of these goals. That said, prison policy has almost no influence on (b); law enforcement and courts are far more relevant, and their current implementation pretty much screens off the effects of prison policy.

This isn't obvious at all. In particular if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect would be much less no matter how law enforcement and the courts worked. One could argue that the policies in the current Overton window aren't significantly different from each other, but that argument would have to be made.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2012 12:40:35AM *  0 points [-]

By capitalist I mean free market.

What do you mean by free market, exactly?

Effective services

When is effectiveness, and when can a service be qualified as effective?

for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist

Depending on your definitions of effective and free-market, the existence of Sweden, at the very least, might make you want to question that reasoning.

the filters you likely get your news through

I don't select the media from which I get my news. While the press in general does operate a selection on what information they release to the public, I do not think favouring teachers' unions is one of their priorities.

A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.

Well, in the end the institutions are made of people, and applying game theory oversimplifies many factors. Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause (supposing that reform is exactly what it says on the tin, rather than making it possible to fire teachers for other, less avowable reasons. Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.

EDIT: You know, someone keeps down-voting both of us, and I don't know why.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 April 2012 01:03:41AM *  3 points [-]

Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause

Well, adjust you're priors appropriately.

Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.

Or rather they have such a high social image that the people who aren't paying much attention react the same way you just did.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2012 12:23:11AM *  -1 points [-]

The first point would be more of an issue in terms of that particular state's particular economic policies: in a democratic state, economic policies that would not result in such an outcome would win out.

The second point... do you mean to say that, were there to be many job-assigning institutions competing to get the same job performed at the least possible cost, the equilibrium would fall into job-performers being given more resources than what they would receive were they to be considered disposable cattle? That only works if the work-performers are scarce, in which case it doesn't matter whether there is one or many institutions competing. And if the work-performers are abundant, the equilibrium will fall into them being given exactly as many resources as they physically need to perform their job.

In a perfect market, centralizing or decentralizing doesn't achieve anything: what matters is simply offer and demand.

Also, why do you put scare quotes around "economic planning" and "economic policy"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 April 2012 12:54:40AM *  1 point [-]

The first point would be more of an issue in terms of that particular state's particular economic policies: in a democratic state, economic policies that would not result in such an outcome would win out.

No, my point is that by and large states don't need and shouldn't have "economic policies".

The second point... do you mean to say that, were there to be many job-assigning institutions competing to get the same job performed at the least possible cost, the equilibrium would fall into job-performers being given more resources than what they would receive were they to be considered disposable cattle? That only works if the work-performers are scarce, in which case it doesn't matter whether there is one or many institutions competing. And if the work-performers are abundant, the equilibrium will fall into them being given exactly as many resources as they physically need to perform their job.

Are you trying to argue that monopsony power doesn't exist? Without monopsony power an employer who pays low wages will have a hard time attracting employees. Whereas a monopsony employer can set wages arbitrarily low, his only limit is his own conscience and that at some point potential employees will prefer not to work. It's possible to state the above more mathematically, for example here (Note: that article talks about monopoly rather than monopsony but the principal is the same).

In a perfect market, centralizing or decentralizing doesn't achieve anything: what matters is simply offer and demand.

Except that centralizing destroys the perfect market.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2012 11:56:10PM -1 points [-]

The idea that education is an enforced government monopoly in the United States Of America of all places makes me question whether you are aware of the importance of private education in that country relative to public education. The idea that a society being functional equals it being capitalist simply makes me question what you mean by capitalism and functionality: try to taboo those words? Finally, the idea that teachers' unions would get in the way of the improvement of public education strikes me as odd and unexpected, and I would like you to develop that point: what do you mean by "fixing" and why are they "obstacles" to it?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 April 2012 12:20:23AM 1 point [-]

The idea that education is an enforced government monopoly in the United States Of America of all places makes me question whether you are aware of the importance of private education in that country relative to public education.

It's not quite an enforced government monopoly, although people choosing private school have to pay twice (pay for the public schools through their taxes and tuition for the private school). There are various attempts, e.g., school vouchers, charter schools, to fix this but the teachers' unions have been fighting them tooth and nail.

The idea that a society being functional equals it being capitalist simply makes me question what you mean by capitalism and functionality: try to taboo those words?

By capitalist I mean free market. By functional I mean provides effective services. Note: my claim is not that societies can't have both functional and non-capitalist elements, rather that for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist.

Finally, the idea that teachers' unions would get in the way of the improvement of public education strikes me as odd and unexpected,

This doesn't surprise me given the filters you likely get your news through.

and I would like you to develop that point: what do you mean by "fixing" and why are they "obstacles" to it?

By "fixing" I mean making it so that students come out of the schools having actually learned basic math and English skills. A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2012 09:03:28PM -2 points [-]

The long run... has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there's no such thing as "in the end". Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However, * if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then * a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise * (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin's Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services), * would, I *think, require all the things I said and more.

Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as "happiness" and "formidability"... and how much weight you give to each aspect of it

Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. "Fair?" Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one's sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start. * Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won't be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference. * No-retroactivity is another aspect of "keeping things fair", as are * clear and accessible rules, * transparent rules-making, and * not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: "democracy" * helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.

Maybe what you meant by

What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.

was "Happiness-as-contentment", a numb, pleasant stupor... The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley's Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why "social welfare", "full public health insurance", and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the "newbie/tutorial stage" and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.

Then there's Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of "fun", the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn't create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It's the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as "formidability-consolidating"). But it appears that it's a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...

And there's also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.... Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people's happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I'd rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).

In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there's probably more, but I haven't thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, "looking out for our own and screw everyone else", must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone's labour's marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.

This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn't just about overcoming others, it's about overcoming oneself and nature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that "the best outcome for everyone on the whole" is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.

Hm. I'd think there's material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I'm just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor... Do you think I've said anything new or worthwhile here?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 11:03:17PM *  1 point [-]

but I somehow feel like I'm just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor... Do you think I've said anything new or worthwhile here?

Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be "socialist".

Comment author: Will_Newsome 21 April 2012 05:35:20AM *  3 points [-]

So this is getting into really crazy conspiracy theories, but I notice Vatican II came soon after the Church's failure to release the Third Secret of Fatima, which given the way Church authorities reacted to it IMO seems to indicate that it did indeed predict something like ongoing or imminent Satanic infiltration, or something similarly potentially disruptive to the termporal Church. FWIW I'm pretty sure this conspiracy theory only sounds even halfway plausible if you already accept as legitimate the various prophecies and miracles of Fatima.

ETA: Not sure what to make of the fact that if I was in a Dan Brown novel this is definitely a hypothesis I should keep to myself. I fear I'm not being very genre savvy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 10:37:53PM 3 points [-]

ETA: Not sure what to make of the fact that if I was in a Dan Brown novel this is definitely a hypothesis I should keep to myself. I fear I'm not being very genre savvy.

Given how correlated his novels tend to be with reality, I'd decrease my belief in the hypothesis.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2012 06:27:58PM -1 points [-]

But I think it's a perfectly reasonable idea that you shouldn't be able to refuse to do your job whenever you feel like expressing a "grievance" with no consequences except possibly loss of pay for the period of time when you don't work.

Why in the world would that be a reasonable idea?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 10:31:27PM 2 points [-]

Because society depends on people doing their jobs in order to function.

Comment author: wedrifid 21 April 2012 03:33:58AM 4 points [-]

Given political discussions I've partaken in other forums, I know full well that whenever I condemned prison rape and suggested ways in which it might be reduced/prevented,

For example: Punish rapes among inmates in the same manner that other rapes of citizens by other citizens. Punish rapes of inmates by wardens in the same way with the additional loading that should be applied to all abuses of authority, particularly state sanctioned authority. But to do that we would need to replace Uncle Sam with Uncle Ben.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 04:40:52AM 1 point [-]

Punish rapes among inmates in the same manner that other rapes of citizens by other citizens.

That would be by sending them to prison, which is not much of a punishment to someone who's already in prison.

Comment author: TimS 11 April 2012 12:53:16AM *  1 point [-]

A political opponent of Obama might say:

Basic economics says that what you pay for, you get more of. Therefore, when you extend long-term unemployment benefits, you get more long-term unemployment.

or

The current tax rate is too far to the right on the Laffer curve

or

The health insurance purchase mandate is unprecedented, UnAmerican, and unConstitutional

edit: or

People who pay no net income tax (because of low income and earned income tax credits) are drains on American society

(end edit)

without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama's race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama's economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 04:31:57AM -1 points [-]

Here is another example of my point that one can claim any criticism of Obama is racist if one is sufficiently motivated.

Comment author: Daniel_Starr 20 April 2012 06:55:21PM *  11 points [-]

Quirrell's tale of "I played a hero, but it didn't get me political power" doesn't hold up. The "lonely superhero" is just as much a mere storytelling convention as the "zero-casualties superhero". Either Quirrell is leaving something out, or the author is ignoring real-world politics for storytelling convenience.

In real life, successfully fighting societally recognized enemies gets you all kinds of political opportunity. Look at American Presidents Eisenhower, Grant, Taylor, Jackson, Harrison, and Washington. This is true in nondemocracies too: consider the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Marlborough, or Sir Francis Drake.

What gets you loneliness and isolation is being a pioneer.

In real life, heroes go unrewarded exactly and only when their enemies aren't yet regarded as enemies by the rest of society.

The socially isolating thing isn't fighting Nazis when you're an American, it's fighting Nazis when you're a German. Being a reformer is isolating.

"The lonely superhero" is just as much a mere literary convention as "the zero-casualties superhero".

Of course, "the lonely superhero" reflects an underlying truth. The real bravery we could use more of from people is the bravery to give up status.

So the deeds we see Batman and Superman perform are mere stand-ins for socially brave deeds that make less good stories but matter far more: the scientist defending an unpopular hypothesis, the leader admitting to his followers he doesn't have an answer, the skilled and intelligent person who chooses to work on something that matters instead of something that makes the most money. Those are the real heroes we need, and they really are lonely.

So just as "the zero-casualties superhero" is a literary figure for "we need people who'll take risks for others", the "the lonely superhero" is a literary figure for "we need people who are willing to be mocked for doing what's right".

But within the context of the story, Quirrell's "I fought the villain but got no respect" is nonsense. Humans don't work that way. We have to assume Quirrell is leaving something out.

Did Dumbledore see through him and undermine him politically at every turn?

Alternatively, perhaps Quirrellmort is as bad at mass politics as he is good at individual violence? There's evidence he's got no clue how to handle 'inspiration' as a motive, though he gets 'greed' and 'fear' just fine.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 02:03:20AM *  3 points [-]

In real life, successfully fighting societally recognized enemies gets you all kinds of political opportunity. Look at American Presidents Eisenhower, Grant, Taylor, Jackson, Harrison, and Washington. This is true in nondemocracies too: consider the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Marlborough, or Sir Francis Drake.

Depends on the situation. A good Samaritan who stopped the kidnapping of the president's daughter because he was in the right place at the right time will get some fame but probably won't be able to leverage that incident into a political career.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2012 10:57:20PM 23 points [-]

Azkaban is commentary on Muggle prisons. I really hope people got that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 01:33:03AM 2 points [-]

What specific commentary were you trying to make? The possible commentaries that I can think of:

a) prisons are too brutal. If so how brutal do you think prisons should be?

b) prisons should be replaced with a different form of punishment. If so what punishment do you have in mind?

c) criminals shouldn't be punished at all.

d) I haven't really thought about these issues at all but saying "boo, prisons!" is a great way to signal that I'm compassionate.

The people who seem to agree with Eliezer's commentary should feel free to specify which commentary they agree with.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 19 April 2012 10:42:15PM 1 point [-]

I've heard (I forget which of two sources it was so I can't cite) that per anthropological theory, the Tasmanians had taken not a retrograde, but an alternative, approach - that there are two branches humans have taken in regard of technology.

One is to have a maximal technology base, growing as new ideas are learned and maintained down the generations by apprenticeship and later by writing. Even at the flints-and-shells stage this requires specialism to get things done expertly.

The other is to have a minimal technology base, one kind of pot, one kind of weapon, windbreaks instead of fire, and all made out of things that can be expediently rustled up from common materials when needed and casually discarded when not, and which can be taught without effort and without specialism. It means that the species can be scattered down to the least grouping, and lose nothing. It means the individual is complete, alone and naked. They can drop everything and recreate it afresh at need.

The Tasmanians (and to a lesser extent, the aboriginal Australians) took that path. It wasn't some sort of massive technology fail. It was a different way to be successful.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 06:43:52AM 1 point [-]

Nick Szabo discusses similar ideas here with regard to Polynesians.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 19 April 2012 07:07:18PM *  36 points [-]

best track record of any top pundit in the US

The study linked to meant next to nothing in my eyes. It studied political predictions in an election year by political hacks on tv. 2007-2008. Guess what? IN an election cycle that liberals beat conservatives, the liberal predictions more often came true than conservative predictions.

Reminds me of the reported models of mortgage securities, created using data from boom times only.

Krugman was competing with a bunch of other political hacks and columnists. I doubt that accuracy is the highest motivation for any of them. The political hacks want to curry support, and the columnists want to be invited on tv and have their articles read. I'd put at least 3 motivations above accuracy for that crowd: manipulate attitudes, throw red meat to their natural markets, and entertain. It's Dark Arts, all the way, all the time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 06:32:03AM *  2 points [-]

Previous discussion of Krugman's accuracy here.

Comment author: duckduckMOO 19 April 2012 12:19:56PM *  2 points [-]

haven't read yet but you can start by not calling anyone who disagrees with the established view a contrarian. It implies anyone who disagrees is doing so to play out a role rather than out of actual disagreement.

edit: so it seems that people who are playing out a role is exactly what you want more of. I assumed you were using "how can we get more contrarians" as codespeak for how can we get more disagreement. If you just want more actual "contrarians", well, I'm not sure "contrarians" is a real category. In any case it's not the relevant category. What you want is people who like criticising things, not people who like disagreeing with established opinion (again I really have to emphasise how ridiculous the way "contrarian" is used is. It's blatantly a story someone has made up to ad hominem away criticisms of standard ideas.)

For my part I would not feel comfortable finding fault in everything I see here. I know I can do it, I just don't think it would go down well. Not that it tends to go down well many other places either. part of the problem is something like people being too comfortable talking in terms of e.g. evolution's intentions so good criticisms can be dismissed as pedantry.

I might make a contrarian account though and see how well that goes down.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 04:41:22AM 0 points [-]

It implies anyone who disagrees is doing so to play out a role rather than out of actual disagreement.

I don't think that's the standard definition of contrarian.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 April 2012 09:01:37AM 7 points [-]

We need a handy way of saying "Yes I understand the standard arguments for P but I still think it's worth your while considering this argument for ¬P rather than just telling me the standard arguments for P."

Agreed. In my experience this problem of standard-argument-affirming shows up a lot during debates about uFAI risks. If I try to suggest some non-obvious argument against the Eliezerian position then I tend to mostly get re-assertions or re-phrasings of the standard Eliezerian arguments, which is distracting and a tad insulting. It seems some people identify me as a mainstream-view-loving enemy who is trying to unfairly marginalize the Eliezerian position, and thus don't bother to carefully check if my argument might be reasonable on its own terms.

In the last few months I've been averaging like 5 to 10 karma on my anti-Eliezerian AI risk arguments, and I think that's because I've expressed them more clearly and redundantly. But they're the same arguments that were getting downvoted to -5 or so back a year or two ago when I wasn't taking special care not to trigger local immune responses. (Weirdly, even saying that I'd spent a year or so with the Visiting Fellows talking to a lot of SingInst people who didn't think I was clearly stupid or insane didn't dissuade people from thinking I was clearly mistaken about basic SingInst arguments. I still don't really understand that... maybe I was interpreted as making an unjustified claim to authority that shouldn't be taken as evidence, or something.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 04:25:31AM 0 points [-]

Part of it maybe that people know you and know you're not an idiot.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 April 2012 09:28:26AM *  3 points [-]

The latter precludes the former in my way of modelling internet contributions.

Ah, I see. Unfortunate that "trolling" is so ambiguous as to whether it's about results or motivations (i.e.(?), immediate results or expected future results (potentially conditional on feeding/anti-feeding)). Results in e.g. Eliezer calling XiXiDu a troll even when XiXiDu clearly isn't trolling in the conative sense. Steve suggested ghost netting for the non-conative case.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 04:23:05AM 3 points [-]

Interesting, it appears that in some contexts the word "troll" is acquiring a usage similar to the word "fascist".

Comment author: TimS 19 April 2012 02:13:40PM 5 points [-]

If people come to LessWrong thinking "2+2 != 4" or "computer manufacturing isn't science", is saying "You're stupid" really raising the sanity line in any way? In short, we should distinguish between punishing disagreement and punishing obstinate behavior/contrarianism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 03:42:10AM *  4 points [-]

"computer manufacturing isn't science"

Well, computer manufacturing isn't science, it's engineering.

Comment author: gRR 18 April 2012 11:29:50PM 0 points [-]

I think the poor things are already dead. More generally, I am aware of that post, but is it relevant? The possible mind design space is of course huge and contains lots of irrational minds, but here I am arguing about universality of rationality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2012 02:08:05AM 1 point [-]

My point, as I stated above, is that every argument I've heard against universality of morality applies just as well to rationality.

I agree with your statement:

The possible mind design space is of course huge and contains lots of irrational minds, but here I am arguing about universality of rationality.

I would also agree with the following:

The possible mind design space is of course huge and contains lots of immoral minds, but here I am arguing about universality of morality.

Comment author: Dorikka 19 April 2012 12:22:47AM 2 points [-]

If this chain of posts is a joke, I don't think I get it. If it's not, I am mildly amused.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2012 01:54:04AM 2 points [-]

TimS is encouraging people to be more contrarian, so Incorrect is disagreeing with him.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 April 2012 01:05:32PM *  1 point [-]

Ugh, Unbreakable Vows seem something of a game breaker right now.

RE: the game breaker opening example: Iron vs bronze weapons is a game breaker? Hardly. The difference in weapon quality there is minor (and even arguable). Bronze vs Steel... sure, that's a big deal but even then not worthy of 'game breaker' accolades.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2012 01:25:27AM 1 point [-]

I believe the reason is that iron weapons are easier to make, hence you can field larger armies.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 18 April 2012 10:53:51PM 2 points [-]

I don't see a problem with driving "contrarians" away. That is what we should be doing.

To be a "contrarian" is to have written a bottom line already: disagree with everything everyone else agrees with.

To be a "contrarian" among smart people is to adopt reversed intelligence as a method of intelligence.

To be a "contrarian" among stupid people is, like American football, something that you have to be smart enough to do but stupid enough to think worth doing.

To be a "contrarian" is to limit oneself to writing against. I am not interested in what anyone is against until I have seen what they are for.

To be a "contrarian" is the safe and easy path. It is easy, because you can find good arguments against everything, as nothing is perfect. It is safe, for you can take agreement and disagreement alike as confirmation. Like most safe and easy paths, nothing is achieved along it.

To style oneself a "contrarian" is a giant red warning light that the person has nothing useful to say. That rule has not failed me yet.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2012 12:50:00AM *  3 points [-]

I sometimes argue in favor of positions I don't really believe (i.e., assign p<.5 to) if I think the probability is higher than general consensus and I suspect at least Will Newsome frequently does the same.

Comment author: bogus 18 April 2012 06:44:38AM *  2 points [-]

Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. "I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.

...

Incidentally, this provides an easy rebuttal to the "corporations are already superintelligent" claim - while corporations have a variety of mechanisms for trying to provide their employees with the proper incentives, anyone who's worked for a big company knows that they employees tend to follow their own interests, even when they conflict with those of the company. It's certainly nothing like the situation with a cell, where the survival of each cell organ depends on the survival of the whole cell. If the cell dies, the cell organs die; if the company fails, the employees can just get a new job.

This seems to be a testable claim: Are military groups more efficient than companies at jobs companies typically do, given equivalent money/resources? For extra credit, do the same test for life-threatening jobs in which cooperation is paramount, such as coal mining, or working on overhead power lines. I don't think this is the case, or the military would want to contract for such jobs with private-sector businesses.

Police corps and fire departments may qualify here, since they do exhibit some similarity with military. But they occupy small niches - they surely do not justify a claim that "superorganisms" are always more efficient.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 11:37:26PM 3 points [-]

This seems to be a testable claim: Are military groups more efficient than companies at jobs companies typically do, given equivalent money/resources?

How do you compare the efficiency of people doing different jobs?

Comment author: gRR 18 April 2012 12:39:46PM 0 points [-]

Assuming it started with the same laws of inference and axioms

Or equivalent ones. But no matter where it started, it won't arrive at different primitive-recursive truths, at least according to my brain's current understanding.

Also I was mostly thinking of statements about the world, e.g., physics.

Is there significant difference? Wherever there are regularities in physics, there's math (=study of regularities). Where no regularities exist, there's no rationality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 11:19:05PM 1 point [-]

What about the poor beings with an anti-iductive prior? More generally read this post by Eliezer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 08:10:41AM *  4 points [-]

Possibly some of your old posts got upvoted in the mean time.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 18 April 2012 06:23:46AM *  7 points [-]

If you knew that a woman in your village was communing via socially unapproved rituals with a transhuman intelligence of unknown nature and preferences, would you convince your village to burn her to death? Ideally you'd just use the Object Class: Roko Containment Protocol, but then her own soul remains at risk—burning her alive at least gives her strong incentive to repent.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 08:00:54AM *  6 points [-]

Object Class: Roko Containment Protocol

For the record, I don't think that was a good idea under any of the plausible scenarios.

Edit: do the people upvoting this have any clue what I'm referring to?

Comment author: gRR 17 April 2012 11:00:32AM 2 points [-]

If we assume some kind of mathematical realism (which seems to be necessary for "abstract computation" and "uniqueness" to have any meaning) then there exist objectively true statements and computations that generate them. At some point there are Goedelian problems, but at least all of the computations agree on the primitive-recursive truths, which are therefore universal, objective, unique, and true.

Any rational agent (optimization process) in any world with some regularities would exploit these regularities, which means use math. A reflective self-optimizing rational agent would arrive to the same math as us, because the math is unique.

Of course, all these points are made by a fallible human brain and so may be wrong.

But there is nothing even like that for morality. In fact, when a moral statement seems universal under sufficient reflection, it stops being a moral statement and becomes simply rational, like cooperating in the Prisoner's Dilemma when playing against the right opponents.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 04:14:52AM 1 point [-]

Any rational agent (optimization process) in any world with some regularities would exploit these regularities, which means use math. A reflective self-optimizing rational agent would arrive to the same math as us, because the math is unique.

Assuming it started with the same laws of inference and axioms. Also I was mostly thinking of statements about the world, e.g., physics.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 17 April 2012 02:09:28PM 0 points [-]

Could you be specific about which conclusions seem arbitrarily based on which metaphysical assumptions?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 03:52:42AM 1 point [-]

I just answered a similar question in another thread here.

Note: please reply there so we can consolidate discussions.

Comment author: thomblake 18 April 2012 03:19:43AM 0 points [-]

But then those comments / posts will be correctively downvoted, unless they're high-quality. And you get a bunch more karma from a few posts than a few comments, so do both!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 03:48:59AM 2 points [-]

You can delete them afterwards, you keep karma from deleted posts.

Comment author: hairyfigment 17 April 2012 10:32:54PM 2 points [-]

Apparently Solvent's friend thinks otherwise. My own physics-grad-student friend said MWI looks like the best explanation, though he stressed our ignorance more.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2012 02:59:11AM 1 point [-]

Well, another approach is to decide that probability distributions are merely a classical approximation to density matrices.

Comment author: Solvent 17 April 2012 07:37:02AM 11 points [-]

An extremely intelligent friend of mine who is studying physics as an undergraduate read the quantum physics sequence for me. He said that it's an alright explanation of the physics, in an extremely qualitative way. He said that he would personally prefer to learn QM properly via a textbook with more math.

He says that the argument given for many-worlds is valid iff you're a scientific realist, which not all scientists are.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 April 2012 08:25:41AM 3 points [-]

He says that the argument given for many-worlds is valid iff you're a scientific realist, which not all scientists are.

Even then it's not obvious that it's the best explanation. Also depends on what you mean by 'realist'.

Comment author: RobinZ 16 April 2012 05:16:56PM 3 points [-]

The existence of factors which could adjust the score either up or down does not indicate which factors dominate. In this case, you have no information which suggests that 39700 is either above or below the median, and therefore these two cases must be assigned equal probability - canceling out any "regression to the mean" effects you could have predicted. Similar arguments apply to other effects which change the score.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 April 2012 05:19:36AM 2 points [-]

In this case, you have no information which suggests that 39700 is either above or below the median, and therefore these two cases must be assigned equal probability

Not quite, you have some background information about the range of scores video games usually employ.

Comment author: gRR 16 April 2012 11:53:58AM 1 point [-]

"If morality is a fixed abstract computation, then it seems that rationality must also be a fixed abstract computation. But don't you think a complete "solved" metaethics should explain how morality differs from rationality?"

Rationality computation outputs statements about the world, morality evaluates them. Rationality is universal and objective, so it is unique as an abstract computation, not just fixed. Morality is arbitrary.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 April 2012 05:06:29AM 3 points [-]

Rationality is universal and objective, so it is unique as an abstract computation, not just fixed. Morality is arbitrary.

How so? Every argument I've heard for why morality is arbitrary applies just as well to rationality.

Comment author: Solvent 16 April 2012 01:03:27AM *  3 points [-]

This article suggests that something like 30% to 60% of people cannot learn to code. I think that's interesting. EDIT: This also might be wrong; see child comment.

The three hurdles the article describes are variable assignment, recursion, and concurrency. I don't think you can program at all without those three elements.

Programming is interesting in that the difference between good programmers and bad programmers seems to be far more pronounced than the difference between people who are good and bad at other tasks-- I recently observed about ten smart friends of mine trying to learn Haskell for a introduction to algorithms course. Some of them got it immediately and intuitively, and some just didn't.

Also. I suspect that some people will find learning to program a bit easier with functional programming languages like Haskell. When learning Haskell, I wrote lots of simple functions, and acheived more complex results by stringing together lots of simple functions. In imperative languages, it's a bit harder to test all the individual pieces as you're going.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 April 2012 05:09:41AM 2 points [-]

The three hurdles the article describes are variable assignment, recursion, and concurrency. I don't think you can program at all without those three elements.

Well, depending on what platform you're using, you don't necessarily need concurrency.

Comment author: Vaniver 16 April 2012 01:12:09AM 1 point [-]

Indeed; being outside of my future light cone just means whatever I do has no impact on them. But now not only can I not impact them, but they're also dead to me (as they, or any information they emit, won't exist in my future). I still don't see what impact caring about them has.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 April 2012 02:09:10AM 1 point [-]

Ok, my scenario involves your actions having an effect on them before your two light cones become disjoint.

Comment author: Bugmaster 15 April 2012 10:54:07PM *  1 point [-]

Dur ? I think you might have quoted the wrong person in your comment above.

Edit: Retracting my comment now that the parent is fixed

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:59:34PM *  3 points [-]

Fixed. Stupid clipboard working differently on windows and linux.

Comment author: Vaniver 15 April 2012 09:37:23PM *  1 point [-]

Before they leave, their torture would be in my future light cone, right?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:56:26PM 1 point [-]

Oops, I just realized that in my hypothetical scenario by someone being tortured outside your light cone, I meant someone being tortured somewhere your two future light cones don't intersect.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Comment author: Bugmaster 15 April 2012 10:05:42PM 4 points [-]

Beats me. And yet I find myself going along with the new norm, just like you.

One of us... One of us...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:48:07PM *  5 points [-]

And yet I find myself going along with the new norm, just like you.

Well stop it. We should be able to just call a cult a cult.

Comment author: grendelkhan 15 April 2012 09:25:03PM 0 points [-]

Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they've been accused of. It's not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim--I hope you're familiar with Lee Atwater's very famous description of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:38:50PM 1 point [-]

Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition?

No, they just declare each individual instance 'racist' no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as 'racist' being the most prominent example.

Comment author: grendelkhan 15 April 2012 03:04:24PM 1 point [-]

Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.

I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one's performance. (Though I've heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)

Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people. For instance, "black people are inherently stupid and lazy" becomes "black people don't have to meet the same standards for education". The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don't like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:32:30PM 2 points [-]

Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people.

I think it's more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.

Comment author: XiXiDu 15 April 2012 12:38:03PM *  2 points [-]

You're selectively misquoting that comment, in particular removing the third criterion of importance listed in it that has nothing to do with AI.

I linked to the original comment. I didn't mention the third point because I think that it is abundantly clear that Less Wrong has been created with the goal in mind of getting people to support SI:

  • The Sequences have been written with the goal in mind of convincing people of the importance of taking risks from AI seriously and therefore donate to SI: "...after a few years of beating my head against the wall trying to get other people involved, I realized that I really did have to go back to the beginning, start over, and explain all the basics that people needed to know before they could follow the advanced arguments. Saving the world via AI research simply can’t compete against the Society for Treating Rare Diseases in Cute Kittens unless your audience knows about things like scope insensitivity..." (Reference: An interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky).
  • Less Wrong is used to ask for donations.
  • You can find a logo with a link to SI in the header and a logo and a link to LessWrong on SIAI's frontpage.
  • LessWrong is mentioned as an achievement of SI (Quote: "Less Wrong is important to the Singularity Institute's work towards a beneficial Singularity").
  • A quote from the official SIAI homepage: "Less Wrong is [...] a key venue for SIAI recruitment".

Now if you say that you don't care about AI, that does pretty much exclude you from the group of people this community is meant to allure.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 09:28:46PM 6 points [-]

Note that as Eliezer says here

But of course, not all the rationalists I create will be interested in my own project—and that's fine. You can't capture all the value you create, and trying can have poor side effects.

Comment author: Vaniver 15 April 2012 08:14:24PM 1 point [-]

I'm not clear on the relevance of caring to beliefs. I would prefer that those I care about not be tortured, but once they're out of my future light cone whatever happens to them is a sunk cost- I don't see what I (or they) get from my preferring or believing things about them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 09:17:13PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but you can affect what happens to them before they leave.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 15 April 2012 09:23:14AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 08:15:47PM 2 points [-]

To take Eliezer's statement one meta-level down:

what are the odds that someone who still thought ethics was a Deep Mystery could come up with a correct metaethics?

Comment author: Vaniver 15 April 2012 05:06:17PM *  1 point [-]

Beliefs about things that are outside our future light cone possibly qualify, to the extent that the beliefs don't relate to things that leave historical footprints. If you'll pardon an extreme and trite case, I would have a belief that the guy who flew the relativistic rocket out of my light cone did not cease to exist as he passed out of that cone and also did not get eaten by a giant space monster ten minutes after. My anticipations are not constrained by beliefs about either of those possibilities.

What do we lose by saying that doesn't count as a belief? Some consistency when we describe how our minds manipulate anticipations (because we don't separate out ones we can measure and ones we can't, but reality does separate those, and our terminology fits reality)? Something else?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 08:06:24PM 2 points [-]

So if someone you cared about is leaving your future light cone, you wouldn't care if he gets horribly tortured as soon as he's outside of it?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 15 April 2012 10:47:32AM *  5 points [-]

Beliefs that aren't easily testable also tend to be the kind of beliefs that have a lot of political associations, and thus tend not to act like beliefs as such so much as policies. Also, even falsified beliefs tend to be summarily replaced with new untested/not-intended-to-be-tested beliefs, e.g. "communism is good" with "correctly implemented communism is good", or "whites and blacks have equal average IQ" with "whites and blacks would have equal average IQ if they'd had the same cultural privileges/disadvantages". (Apologies for the necessary political examples. Please don't use this as an opportunity to talk about communism or race.)

Many "beliefs" that aren't politically relevant—which excludes most scientific "knowledge" and much knowledge of your self, the people you know, what you want to do with your life, et cetera—are better characterized as knowledge, and not beliefs as such. The answers to questions like "do I have one hand, two hands, or three hands?" or "how do I get back to my house from my workplace?" aren't generally beliefs so much as knowledge, and in my opinion "knowledge" is not only epistemologically but cognitively-neurologically a more accurate description, though I don't really know enough about memory encoding to really back up that claim (though the difference is introspectively apparent). Either way, I still think that given our knowledge of the non-fundamental-ness of Bayes, we shouldn't try too hard to stretch Bayes-ness to fit decision problems or cognitive algorithms that Bayes wasn't meant to describe or solve, even if it's technically possible to do so.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 08:04:42PM 1 point [-]

Also, even falsified beliefs tend to be summarily replaced with new untested/not-intended-to-be-tested beliefs, e.g. "communism is good" with "correctly implemented communism is good", or "whites and blacks have equal average IQ" with "whites and blacks would have equal average IQ if they'd had the same cultural privileges/disadvantages".

I believe the common to term for that mistake is "no true Scotsman".

Comment author: wedrifid 15 April 2012 06:39:32AM 0 points [-]

Exchanges the look two people give each other when they each hope that the other will do something that they both want done but which neither of them wants to do.

Hey, I think "Dominions" should be played but do want to play it and did purchase the particular object at the end of the link. I don't understand why you linked to it though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 06:46:41AM 2 points [-]

The link text is a quote from the game description.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 April 2012 04:06:27AM 2 points [-]

I struggled with that myself, but then figured out a rather nice quantitative solution.

Eliezer's stuff doesn't say much about that topic, but that doesn't mean it fails at it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 05:04:03AM 3 points [-]

I don't think your solution actually resolves things since you still need to figure out what weights to assign to each of your biases/values.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 April 2012 03:28:40AM 1 point [-]

such as?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 03:42:17AM 11 points [-]

Well, for starters determining whether something is a preference or a bias is rather arbitrary in practice.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 April 2012 01:57:38AM 4 points [-]

This is very much why I have only read some of it.

If the more recent LW stuff was better indexed, that would be sweet.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 03:08:26AM 8 points [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 15 April 2012 01:40:57AM 4 points [-]

Metaethics sequence is a bit of a mess, but the point it made is important, and it doesn't seem like it's just some wierd opinion of Eliezer's.

After I read it I was like, "Oh, ok. Morality is easy. Just do the right thing. Where 'right' is some incredibly complex set of preferences that are only represented implicitly in physical human brains. And it's OK that it's not supernatural or 'objective', and we don't have to 'justify' it to an ideal philosophy student of perfect emptyness". Fake utility functions, and Recursive justification stuff helped.

Maybe there's something wrong with Eliezer's metaethics, but I havn't seen anyone point it out, and have no reason to suspect it. Most of the material that contradicts it is obvious mistakes from just not having read and understood the sequences, not an enlightened counter-analysis.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 03:00:46AM 4 points [-]

Maybe there's something wrong with Eliezer's metaethics

Try actually applying it to some real life situations and you'll quickly discover the problems with it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Comment author: David_Gerard 14 April 2012 10:55:55PM 11 points [-]

As far as I can tell (low votes, some in the negative, few comments), the QM sequence is the least read of the sequences, and yet makes a lot of EY's key points used later on identity and decision theory. So most LW readers seem not to have read it.

Suggestion: a straw poll on who's read which sequences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 02:28:35AM *  27 points [-]

I've seen enough of the QM sequence and know enough QM to see that Eliezer stopped learning quantum mechanics before getting to density matrices. As a result, the conclusions he draws from QM rely on metaphysical assumptions and seem rather arbitrary if one knows more quantum mechanics. In the comments to this post Scott Aaronson tries to explain this to Eliezer without much success.

Comment author: David_Gerard 14 April 2012 11:00:51PM *  11 points [-]

I notice that, in topics that Eliezer did not explicitly cover in the sequences (and some that he did), LW has made zero progress in general. This [people not reading them] is probably one of the reasons why.

Um, after I read the sequences I ploughed through every LW post from the start of LW to late 2010 (when I started reading regularly). What I saw was that the sequences were revered, but most of the new and interesting stuff from that intervening couple of years was ignored. (Though it's probably just me.)

At this point A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy is apposite. Note the description of the fundamentalist smackdown as a stage communities go through. Note it also usually fails when it turns out the oldtimers have differing and incompatible ideas on what the implicit constitution actually was in the good old days.

tl;dr declarations of fundamentalism heuristically strike me as inherently problematic.

edit: So what about this comment rated a downvote?

edit 2: ah - the link to the Shirky essay appears to be giving the essay in the UK, but Viagra spam in the US o_0 I've put a copy up here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 01:50:50AM 5 points [-]

What I saw was that the sequences were revered, but most of the new and interesting stuff from that intervening couple of years was ignored.

I suspect that's because it's poorly indexed. This should be fixed.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 April 2012 08:48:27AM 9 points [-]

And people go around complaining about HJPEV being a bastard.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 April 2012 08:32:45PM 2 points [-]

The difference being that in cannon Harry acts and thinks his age and thus acts immature. In MoR Harry mostly thinks like an adult except he still acts immature.

Comment author: Manfred 13 April 2012 05:16:14PM 0 points [-]

d-1, at least.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 April 2012 04:39:54AM 1 point [-]

Given that political views can be arbitrary propositions, at some point thinking of them as embedded in n-dimensional space for some n stops being useful.

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 April 2012 08:27:41AM 1 point [-]

Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that "race" provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn't update very well upon learning these things. For example, "X is a college graduate, and is black" doesn't tell you all that much more than "X is a college graduate"; it's probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 April 2012 04:23:56AM 3 points [-]

Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that "race" provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race,

Which are generally much harder to observe.

For example, "X is a college graduate, and is black" doesn't tell you all that much more than "X is a college graduate"

Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 April 2012 06:41:39AM 0 points [-]

Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 07:03:04AM 1 point [-]

Eliezer's unconventional definition of "strange" is occasionally annoying.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 April 2012 05:14:53AM 0 points [-]

Well, what my comment discusses is a potential direction of research, and makes some predictions about the results of that, and isn't really about application at all.

As far as application goes, I agree that it's a good general practice to praise/reward effort rather than intelligence. Also to reward effort rather than strength, dexterity, attractiveness, and various other attributes.

More generally, I think it's a good practice to reward behaviors rather than attributes. Rewarding behaviors gets me more of those behaviors. Rewarding attributes gets me nothing predictable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 07:01:51AM 2 points [-]

There's something to be said for rewarding results instead of effort to teach people to make sure they are actually trying rather than trying to try.

Comment author: faul_sname 13 April 2012 06:43:01AM *  0 points [-]

Am I allowed to use time/change dimensions? Because if so, the task is trivial (if computationally expensive).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 06:56:12AM *  1 point [-]

Ok, now add a temporal dimension.

Comment author: Alsadius 13 April 2012 05:26:52AM 2 points [-]

Every part of that makes sense except for the lack of E# and B#, and why x2 is called an octave. Thanks for the info, and for reminding me why musical theory is one of three fields I have ever given up on learning.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 06:23:41AM 3 points [-]

Notes sound good if they're approximately simple rational multiples of each other. Hence you want your scale to contain multiples.

Since the simplest multiple is x2 we use that for the octave. As for why we break it up into 12 semitones, the reason is that 2^(7/12) is approximately 3/2 and as a bonus 2^(4/2) is a passable approximation to 5/4.

Comment author: Paulovsk 12 April 2012 06:25:48PM 3 points [-]

This is driving me crazy.

I never know when he's doing evil or not. This chapter, for example, led me to believe he was doing good at some point of his life. Although my rationalist-beginner-side is screaming at me he is Voldemort or something, I can't help but sympathize with that point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 05:30:24AM 7 points [-]

This chapter, for example, led me to believe he was doing good at some point of his life.

Um, his "good" deed consisted of attempting to set up a fake ultimate hero and getting really pissed of when people didn't fall for it.

Comment author: Alsadius 13 April 2012 02:58:22AM 1 point [-]

Clearly you don't kill your own elves. You do it to somebody you don't like.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 05:07:01AM 3 points [-]

They might sue you for destruction of valuable property.

Comment author: Alsadius 13 April 2012 01:55:49AM 3 points [-]

That makes a lot of sense, really. Nobody does things "For Teh Evulz!", they do them either because they think it's good or because they think it's awesome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 04:36:03AM 3 points [-]

Well, some people confuse Teh Evulz with awesome.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 12 April 2012 03:45:18PM *  3 points [-]

I'm assuming that the purpose of going for a Hugo is to get publicity and increased readership for HPMOR. If I'm mistaken-- possibly the point is that having a Hugo award is Really Cool-- then going for the win in a less important category would make sense.

I've been in fandom since the early seventies, and it seems to me that people talk about the Best Novel a lot more than Best Fan Writer.

I may be biased, but I think Fan Writing is very much a sub-culture within the sub-culture.

To be fair, even print sf is minuscule compared to tv, movies, and comics. From yet another angle, fanfic has become a huge thing by fannish standards, but I think it's something of a separate branch compared to the sort of fan writing (typically essays, I think, rather than fiction) which gets a Hugo.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 03:58:37AM 7 points [-]

If I'm mistaken-- possibly the point is that having a Hugo award is Really Cool-- then going for the win in a less important category would make sense.

I suspect the real logic is: having a Hugo award is Really Cool, having a Hugo for best novel is Even More Really Cool, and Eliezer isn't the type of person to settle for Really Cool in that situation.

Comment author: Alsadius 12 April 2012 10:25:13PM *  3 points [-]

If Voldemort is capable of that, then this fic will entirely cease to be interesting. Mind control at a glance in the hands of an intelligent character is god-level powers.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2012 03:41:53AM *  2 points [-]

Heck, I don't see why imperius in the hands of an intelligent character isn't a god-level power, especially when combined with memory charm and legilimency.

Comment author: wirov 11 April 2012 12:44:53PM *  2 points [-]

There was a bookcase containing random books rescued from a bargain bin, and a full shelf of ancient magazines, including one from 1883.

Funny. 1883 seems to be the year Grindelwald was born. (Although that's not sure – it even says “c. 1882” in the main article.)

I can't see how this might be related to the rest of the story, and most probably this is just a way of telling us “Yes, these magazines are ancient.“ On the other hand, this 1926/1927 thing made me somewhat more susceptible to possibly meaningful dates …

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 April 2012 06:32:08AM 7 points [-]

On the other hand, this 1926/1927 thing made me somewhat more susceptible to possibly meaningful dates …

When it really should have caused you to update in the other direction.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 11 April 2012 12:39:36PM *  17 points [-]

In recent history they've had two devastating wars. Plotting and infighting seems perpetual. Most adults spend a reasonable amount of their time using dangerous magic (there was some mention of wizard specific diseases like 'dragon pox' in canon). And everyone in the world can kill you instantly with their wand. So even if their notional life expectancy is high the number of dangers that reduce the population is enormous.

Actually given how easy deadly curses are I'm surprised there are any wizards left... Possibly explains why age correlates with magical power/skill.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 April 2012 06:23:44AM 17 points [-]

Actually given how easy deadly curses are I'm surprised there are any wizards left... Possibly explains why age correlates with magical power/skill.

Probably for the same reason the existence of guns hasn't resulted in human extinction.

Comment author: gwern 11 April 2012 02:18:31PM *  10 points [-]

Which is precisely why I am asking these questions, because there are many ways Eliezer could conclude it's a good idea:

  1. maybe, as I already suggested, best novel nominee > best fanfic award
  2. perhaps Eliezer likes the idea of being a best novel nominee or winner so much that he doesn't mind the significantly reduced expected-value
  3. he has non-public information

    • eg. there are famous writers who have told him they will propagandize for MoR and order their fans to vote for it
  4. he has not thought about it in any detail or come up with calibrated probabilities like I have
  5. he plans to publish MoR as multiple books (given its length) and first books in series are the best to go for best novel and later books can shoot their wad on less prestigious awards
  6. the rules favor MoR in some way I am unaware of

    • eg. he thinks he can issue a call for MoR fans to attend and vote, erasing the disadvantages I otherwise accurately assess

etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 April 2012 05:36:18AM 4 points [-]

My theory is that Eliezer is overestimating his chances of winning best novel.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 April 2012 06:28:27AM 11 points [-]

The Self-Righteous Hive Mind

...

What Haidt never quite gets across is that conservatives typically define their groups concentrically, moving from their families outward to their communities, classes, religions, nations, and so forth. If Mars attacked, conservatives would be reflexively Earthist. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to the UN in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” (Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.)

In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as Avatar, other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).

As a down-to-Earth example, to root for Manchester United’s soccer team is conservative…if you are a Mancunian. If you live in Portland, Oregon, it’s liberal.

This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 April 2012 12:43:01AM 5 points [-]

On the other hand, being in favor of independence for Quebec is liberal if you're in Quebec, and conservative if you're in France.

Comment author: Oligopsony 11 April 2012 05:06:11AM 0 points [-]

A "Racist0" is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.

That's the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like "race traitor" is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine's phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)

(N.B. that if this definition wasn't question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 April 2012 06:46:08AM 2 points [-]

That's the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like "race traitor" is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine's phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)

Possibly, I couldn't quite figure out Mixed Nuts' definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.

(N.B. that if this definition wasn't question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)

Well they aren't. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:

A "Racist0" is someone who rationally believes that priors aren't equal over races.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 April 2012 09:35:45PM *  -1 points [-]

Just came across a comment by Deogolwulf in response to a comment on one of Mencius Moldbug's posts:

“I would say that all things are ultimately reduceable to quarks”

Say it if you like, but if you are to be rationally coherent, you must believe that your proposition also reduces to quarks, and therefore, given that you believe that quarks are intrinsically meaningless, and given that “nothing enters in at a different level”, you must hold your own proposition to be fundamentally meaningless, and therefore not actually a proposition at all, and therefore that your non-propositional emittance is fundamentally without truth. But why then assert it? Do you ever consider that you are just trying irrationally to put yourself at the furthest remove from your former beliefs? Perhaps that is the source of your aversion to metaphysical philosophy which no rational-thinking animal can ever avoid even should he perversely wish it — any rational consideration of your own beliefs might reveal their nonsensical nature to you.

“It may be impractical to think at the quark-level, but that is the actual level reality operates on and nothing enters in at a different level.”

Could you think of any way to test or affirm this strange belief of yours even empirically-scientifically, let alone quarkly? Of course not, nor could there be any such way. Besides, it seems that, according to your own hazy brand of positivism-cum-physicalism, “levels of reality” are not ontologically objective, let alone empirically-scientifically knowable as such, and thus, by your own lights, it is meaningless to speak of them. But perhaps, after all, you do believe that the levels of reality of which you speak are ontologically objective, or that quarks have intrinsic meaning, in which case, slipping from your positivism, perhaps you would have some philosophical defence of these ideas, along with some defence of the bold equation of reality with physicality. But, once again, you would have to enter the metaphysical-philosophical realm which you yourself claim to be rubbish, and why enter it if you believe it to be so — or is all this just pseudo-scientific and scientistic posing?

Oh, snap!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 April 2012 04:03:42AM 1 point [-]

I think part of the problem is different scenes of the word "reduce". Consider the following two statements:

1) All things ultimately reduce to quarks (nitpick: and leptons)

2) Quarks and leptons ultimately reduce to quantum wave functions.

3) Quantum wave functions ultimately reduce to mathematics.

4) All mathematics ultimately reduces to the ZFC axioms.

Notice that all these statements are true (I'm not quite sure about the first one) for slightly different values of "reduces".

Comment author: TimS 11 April 2012 12:53:16AM *  1 point [-]

A political opponent of Obama might say:

Basic economics says that what you pay for, you get more of. Therefore, when you extend long-term unemployment benefits, you get more long-term unemployment.

or

The current tax rate is too far to the right on the Laffer curve

or

The health insurance purchase mandate is unprecedented, UnAmerican, and unConstitutional

edit: or

People who pay no net income tax (because of low income and earned income tax credits) are drains on American society

(end edit)

without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama's race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama's economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 April 2012 03:33:12AM 0 points [-]

The term "welfare president" has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.

Comment author: TimS 09 April 2012 08:08:40PM 1 point [-]

You haven't answered my question:

Given the way that public welfare codes for both "lazy" and "black" in the United States, do you think that "Food Stamp President" has the same implications as some other critique of Obama's economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama's race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2012 12:14:44AM 3 points [-]

Well, yes by finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 09 April 2012 08:17:07PM 1 point [-]

(blink)

Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of "better" and wanting to commit genocide?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 08:40:02PM 3 points [-]

Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of "better" and wanting to commit genocide?

That's the question I was implicitly asking Oscar.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 09 April 2012 06:31:28PM 1 point [-]

Surely one of the definitions of "racist" should contain something about thinking that some races are better than others. Or is that covered under "neo-Nazi"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 07:41:11PM 4 points [-]

Depends on what you mean by "better". There's a difference between taking the data on race and IQ seriously, and wanting to commit genocide.

Comment author: TimS 09 April 2012 06:10:45PM *  1 point [-]

I'm honestly confused. You don't see why calling Obama a "Food Stamp President" is different from criticizing his economic policy?

I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton - even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama's economic policies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 06:59:16PM 1 point [-]

I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton - even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama's economic policies.

Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.

Comment author: MixedNuts 09 April 2012 03:24:07PM *  12 points [-]

On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:

I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort of confusion of terminology.

A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.

A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone you wouldn't want your sister dating.

A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.

People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too -- if you say "That Republican's a racist" with the implication of "a jerk" and then backtrack and change the meaning to "vulnerable to unconscious bias", then you're arguing in bad faith. Never mind that some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3's are in fact deployed against Racist2's.

-celandine13

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 05:58:20PM 3 points [-]

You left out one common definition.

A "Racist0" is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.

Also I don't see why calling Obama the "Food Stamp President" or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a "Racist2" unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.

Comment author: juliawise 09 April 2012 02:17:33AM 2 points [-]

Wait, are you really claiming we should choose a moral system based on simplicity alone? And that a system of judging how to treat other people that "requires knowing lots of social science" is too complicated? I'd distrust any way of judging how to treat people that didn't require social science. As for calculations, I agree that we don't have very good ways to quantify other people's happiness and suffering (or even our own), but our best guess is better than throwing all the data out and going with arbitrary rules like commandments.

The categorical imperative is nice if you get to make the rules for everyone, but none of us do. Utilitarianism appeals to me because I believe I have worth and other people have worth, and I should do things that take that into account.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 05:35:58PM 2 points [-]

Wait, are you really claiming we should choose a moral system based on simplicity alone?

Jayson's point is that a moral system so complicated that you can't figure out whether a given action is moral isn't very useful.

Comment author: Multiheaded 07 April 2012 09:05:53PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure if I can really call myself Gnostic, but if I can, mine's neither troublesome*, nor does it make any claims inconsistent with a sufficiently strong simulation hypothesis.

-* (when e.g. Voegelin was complaining about "Gnostic" ideas of rearranging society, he was 1) obviously excluding any transformation he approved of, perhaps considering it "natural" and not dangerous meddling, and 2) blaming a fairly universal kind of radicalism correlated with all monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic worldviews; he's essentially privileging the hypothesis to vent about personality types he dislikes, and conservatives should really look at these things more objectively for the sake of their own values)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 April 2012 07:14:48AM 2 points [-]

when e.g. Voegelin was complaining about "Gnostic" ideas of rearranging society, he was 1) obviously excluding any transformation he approved of, perhaps considering it "natural" and not dangerous meddling

Um, no. He was complaining about attempts to rearrange society from the top down.

Comment author: Multiheaded 07 April 2012 08:26:10PM *  2 points [-]

When I was 13 or so, my brains worked significantly better than they currently do, and I figured out an easy trick for that in a math class one day. Just assign a greyscale color value (from black to white) to each point! This is exactly like taking an usual map and coloring the hills a lighter shade and the low places a darker one.

The only problem with that is it's still "3.5D", like the "2.5D" graphics engine of Doom, where there's only one Z-value to any point in the world so things can't be exactly above or below each other.
To overcome this, you could theoretically imagine the 3D structure alternating between "levels" in the 4th dimension every second, so e.g. one second a 3D cube's left half is grey and its right half is white, indicating a surface "rising" in the 4th dimension, but every other second the right half changes to black while the left is still grey, showing a second surface which begins at the same place and "descends" in the 4th dimension. Voila, you have two 3D "surfaces" meeting at a 4D angle!

With RGB color instead of greyscale, one could theoretically visualize 6 dimensions in such a way.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 April 2012 07:08:54AM 3 points [-]

Now, if only this let you rotate things through the 4th dimension.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 09:55:07PM 8 points [-]

So the interesting and substantive question is not whether one thinks the fit will survive and thrive better than the unfit. They will. The interesting question is what the rules are that determine what is "fit."

-- David Henderson on Social Darwinism

Comment author: Brickman 06 April 2012 03:02:37AM 2 points [-]

Personally my problem with Harry wasn't so much that he immediately assumed there was a trick (shouldn't get a probability of 1.0, no, but certainly a basket worth piling some eggs in) but that he assumed the truth would get her off. He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape "If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?" I don't even know the answer to that question, but I'd certainly ask before I assumed it was "no".

Especially considering how draconian the law is and how one of the two most important members of the judge/jury is not only the victim's father but someone already predisposed to dislike her (for what amounts to unapologetic and on-record racial discrimination). In advance I wouldn't have been surprised to see a show trial that blatantly ignored the evidence to get a conviction, though Dumbledore's faction was a bit too vocal for me to expect that with my current knowledge.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 04:39:23AM *  4 points [-]

He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape "If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?"

Harry doesn't know about the GHD attack and so his working hypothesis is that her memory of attempting to kill Draco is false.

Comment author: TimS 05 April 2012 01:30:07PM 10 points [-]

It's interesting in part because Harry is right that the behavior is unusual. Historically, the group that (1) is led by a strong leader who encourages personality cults, (2) doesn't believe in the rule of law, and (3) resorts to violence at the slightest excuse is not the group that unilaterally ends dynamics like hostage taking and hostage killing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 04:15:56AM 3 points [-]

It's interesting in part because Harry is right that the behavior is unusual. Historically, the group that (1) is led by a strong leader who encourages personality cults, (2) doesn't believe in the rule of law, and (3) resorts to violence at the slightest excuse is not the group that unilaterally ends dynamics like hostage taking and hostage killing.

They're the only group that can unilaterally end it since the other side wasn't doing those things to begin with.

Comment author: gwern 04 April 2012 02:04:50PM 0 points [-]

You can say that with a straight face after the last few chapters of plotting?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 03:48:52AM 2 points [-]

Yes, I was referring to the theories that Dumbledore sabotaged Snape's relationship with Lilly so that the boy-who-lived (who hadn't even been born then) would have the experience of being bullied by his potions master.

Comment author: Pavitra 05 April 2012 01:20:41PM 11 points [-]

In real life the major players are immune to mindreading, can communicate securely and instantaneously worldwide, and have tens of thousands of people working under them. You are, ironically, overlooking the strangeness of reality.

Conservation of detail may be a valid argument though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 03:46:42AM 4 points [-]

Conservation of detail may be a valid argument though.

Conservation of detail is one of the memetic hazards of reading too much fiction.

Comment author: scav 05 April 2012 02:33:11PM 0 points [-]

OK, point taken. However, there being no proposed mechanism for precognition, it can hardly be called "plausible" that it operates inconsistently and that the experiment just happened to pick one of the things it can do out of all possibilities.

After all, if nobody knows how it's supposed to work, how does the experimenter justify claiming his data as evidence for precognition rather than quantum pornotanglement? You could say I just made that up on the spot. It doesn't matter: precognition isn't necessarily a thing either.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 03:41:40AM 3 points [-]

How exactly does "quantum pornotanglement" and why doesn't it count as a type/mechanism for precognition.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 April 2012 02:07:35PM *  0 points [-]

Either I can visualize them, and then they're thoughts I can think, or I can't visualize them, in which case the exercise doesn't help me.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes April 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 03:03:53AM 1 point [-]

If you can, replace 4 with N for sufficiently large N.

If you can't, imagine a creature that evolved in a 4-dimensional universe. I find it unlikely that it would not be able to visualize 4 dimensions.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 April 2012 09:05:20AM 0 points [-]

The second machine can be designed to build a third machine, based on the second machine's observations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 02:36:23AM 0 points [-]

Yes, but now the argument that you will converge to a paper clipper is much weaker.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 04 April 2012 09:41:43AM 1 point [-]

Because I could see myself being persuaded in the altruistic case, but not in the selfish one.

Altruism: the best argument for torturing people.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 06:47:57AM 3 points [-]

This is why I'm always suspicious of altruism.

Comment author: Dmytry 05 April 2012 05:42:24AM *  -1 points [-]

You handwave too much, and the people who already accept premise, they like the handwave that sounds vaguely theoretic. Those who do not, aren't too impressed, and are only annoyed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 06:44:34AM 2 points [-]

You handwave too much, and the people who already accept premise

Or the people who understand the mathematics.

Cousin_it's mathematics is correct, if counter-intuitive to those not used to thinking about quines. Whether it implies what he thinks it implies is a separate question as I discuss here.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 April 2012 03:34:16AM 4 points [-]

Have you looked at the rest of the internet recently?

Not really. But are you saying that nowhere else on the internet is close to LessWrong's standards of discourse? I'd figured that but part of me keeps saying "there's no way that can be true" for some reason.

I'm not sure why I'm confused, but I think there's a place where my model (of how many cool people there are and how willing they would be to participate on a site like LessWrong) is off by an order of magnitude or so.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 06:40:29AM 2 points [-]

how many cool people there are and how willing they would be to participate on a site like LessWrong

A better question is how many of them are willing to create a site like LessWrong.

Also minor nitpick about your use of the word 'cool', since it normally denotes social status rather than rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 April 2012 02:06:42AM *  0 points [-]

Let it build a machine that takes input from own surroundings.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 06:37:50AM 0 points [-]

But the new machine can't self-modify. My point is about the limitations of cousin_it's example. The machine has a completely accurate model of the world as input and uses an extremely inefficient algorithm to find a way to paperclip the world.

Comment author: TuviaDulin 04 April 2012 05:51:45AM 2 points [-]

That's only a legal formality, though. Harry hates the wizard society and wouldn't use its laws against her, and he'd discourage others from acknowledging it.

Still, Hermione (unlike Harry) cares what others think of her, so being surrounded by people who act as if she belongs to Harry is going to hurt her.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 01:56:33AM *  3 points [-]

That's only a legal formality, though. Harry hates the wizard society and wouldn't use its laws against her, and he'd discourage others from acknowledging it.

He's just (ab)used the laws of wizarding society to get Hermione out. I can certainly imagine him using his position over her if it is useful for solving the next crisis he has to deal with.

Also, Harry has a dark side, it might also do things.

Comment author: cousin_it 03 April 2012 09:32:19PM *  4 points [-]

If the AI's map represents the territory accurately enough, the AI can use the map to check the consequences of returning different actions, then pick one action and return it, ipso facto affecting the territory. I think I already know how to build a working paperclipper in a Game of Life universe, and it doesn't seem to wirehead itself. Do you have a strong argument why all non-magical real-world AIs will wirehead themselves before they get a chance to hurt humans?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 01:50:16AM 1 point [-]

This isn't quite an AGI. In particular, it doesn't even take input from its surroundings.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 April 2012 10:03:52AM 6 points [-]

All they manage to do is convince those who already hold the same set of beliefs or who fit a certain mindset.

It's perhaps worth noting that this observation is true of most discussion about most even-mildly-controversial subjects on LessWrong—quantum mechanics, cryonics, heuristics and biases, ethics, meta-ethics, theology, epistemology, group selection, hard takeoff, Friendliness, et cetera. What confuses me is that LessWrong continues to attract really impressive people anyway; it seems to be the internet's biggest/best forum for interesting technical discussion about epistemology, Schellingian game theory, the singularity, &c., even though most of the discussion is just annoying echoes. One of a hundred or so regular commenters is actually trying or is a real intellectual, not a fountain of cultish sloganeering and cheering. Others are weird hybrids of cheerleader and actually trying / real intellectual (like me, though I try to cheer on a higher level, and about more important things). Unfortunately I don't know of any way to raise the "sanity waterline", if such a concept makes sense, and I suspect that the new Center for Modern Rationality is going to make things worse, not better. I hope I'm wrong. ...I feel like there's something that could be done, but I have no idea what it is.

I just reread this post yesterday and found it to be a very convincing counter-argument against the idea that we should solely act on high stakes.

Eh, I think Vassar's reply is more to the point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 01:33:36AM 1 point [-]

What confuses me is that LessWrong continues to attract really impressive people anyway; it seems to be the internet's biggest/best forum for interesting technical discussion about epistemology, Schellingian game theory, the singularity, &c., even though most of the discussion is just annoying echoes.

Why is that confusing? Have you looked at the rest of the internet recently?

Comment author: [deleted] 04 April 2012 08:19:04PM 0 points [-]

It would surprise me, since no one could ever give me an example. I'm not sure what kind of evidence could give me good reason to think that there are thoughts that I cannot think.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes April 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 01:07:32AM 3 points [-]

Try visualizing four spacial dimensions.

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 April 2012 05:38:31PM 1 point [-]

Naively speaking, if Alice can think a thought, she can just tell Bob, and he will. Dogs can't tell us what ultrasounds sound like, but that's for the same reason they can't tell us what regular sounds sound like.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 01:04:13AM 2 points [-]

That's assuming the thought can be expressed in language.

Comment author: scav 04 April 2012 08:12:28AM 1 point [-]

One good thing about Bayesian reasoning is that assigning a prior belief very close to zero isn't rejecting the hypothesis out of hand. The posterior belief will be updated by evidence (if any can be found). And even if you start with a high prior probability and update it with Bem's evidence for precognition, you would soon have a posterior probability much closer to zero than your prior :)

BTW there is no supposed mechanism for precognition. Just calling it "unconscious" doesn't render it any more plausible that we have a sense that would be super useful if only it even worked well enough to be measured, and yet unlike all our other senses, it hasn't been acted on by natural selection to improve. Sounds like special pleading to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2012 12:30:13AM 3 points [-]

Just calling it "unconscious" doesn't render it any more plausible that we have a sense

FiftyTwo wasn't arguing that the sense was plausible. He was conditioning on the assumption that the sense exists.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 04 April 2012 03:16:44AM *  10 points [-]

Story-logic would indicate that she is indeed innocent, and we as readers have evidence that someone has indeed been messing with her mind, but Harry doesn't know what we as readers know.

Harry's had 7 months to know that Hermione isn't a sociopath or a psychopath, that she's a very kind and moral and ethical person instead.

What's the prior probability he should therefore assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid? I think he's giving the hypothesis of her actual guilt pretty much all the weight that it deserves - effectively zero.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 06:35:29AM -1 points [-]

Well, then condition on the fact that Querril caught her and she has memories of doing it.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 April 2012 05:57:08AM 1 point [-]

Also:

Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 06:32:15AM 2 points [-]

I was originally going to post that one, but decided to go with Chesterton's version since it better explains what is meant. (At the expense of loosing some of the snappiness.)

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 04 April 2012 03:16:44AM *  10 points [-]

Story-logic would indicate that she is indeed innocent, and we as readers have evidence that someone has indeed been messing with her mind, but Harry doesn't know what we as readers know.

Harry's had 7 months to know that Hermione isn't a sociopath or a psychopath, that she's a very kind and moral and ethical person instead.

What's the prior probability he should therefore assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid? I think he's giving the hypothesis of her actual guilt pretty much all the weight that it deserves - effectively zero.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 05:38:51AM 12 points [-]

Outside view: when someone in a similar situations does do something horrible, all of his friends and family insist that they "have no idea how he could have done something like this".

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 April 2012 05:05:19AM 1 point [-]

Perhaps it's also worth bringing up the example of controllers, which don't wirehead (or do they, once sufficiently complex?) and do optimize the real world. (Thermostats confuse me. Do they have intentionality despite lacking explicit representations? (FWIW Searle told me the answer was no because of something about consciousness, but I'm not sure how seriously he considered my question.))

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 05:20:03AM 1 point [-]

Taboo "intentionality".

Comment author: roystgnr 03 April 2012 06:52:13PM 6 points [-]

Many of our tools are supposed to be web browsers, email clients, etc., but have a history of suddenly doing something completely nuts like taking over the whole computer, which was obviously not the intended purpose. Programming is hard that way - the result will only follow your program, verbatim. Attempts to give programs a greater sense of context and implications aren't new - they're called "higher level languages". They feel less like hand-holding a dumb machine and more like describing a thought process, and you can even design the language to make whole classes of lower-level bugs unwriteable, but machines still end up doing what they're instructed, verbatim (where "what they're instructed" can now also include the output of compiler bugs).

The trouble is that you can't rule out every class of bugs. It's hard (impossible?) to distinguish a priori between what might be a bug and what might just be a different programmers' intention, even though we've been wishing for the ability to do so for over a century. "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 05:13:13AM 0 points [-]

"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"

Yet, people around here seem to believe that the AI will develop an accurate model of the world even if its input isn't all that accurate.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 April 2012 12:19:46AM 4 points [-]

Sure, I'll weigh in, since you're asking.
History, including recent history, is full of people who tortured other people.
I see no reason to believe that defining all of those people as "not normal" is in the least bit justified; that seems more likely to be a No True Scotsman fallacy in action.
Adding a concrete incentive like money probably helps, if it's a large enough sum, but honestly introducing money to the discussion seems to clutter the question unnecessarily. Normal people will torture one another for no money at all, under the right circumstances.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 04:52:41AM 3 points [-]

In fact due to the way taboo tradeoffs work, I suspect offering people money will make them less inclined to torture.

Comment author: gRR 04 April 2012 12:51:39AM 0 points [-]

Group effects (peer pressure, authority, etc) apparently can easily override personal values in humans' corrupted hardware.

I am not sure you're right about historical POV. I don't think high primates deliberately torture each other for fun. I can be wrong, though...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 04:49:49AM 1 point [-]

So you're claiming that there is a difference between "group effects" and "personal values". I'm highly dubious.

Comment author: Manfred 03 April 2012 12:28:49PM *  7 points [-]

"What should we have the AI's goals be?"

"Eh, just make it self-improve, once it's smart it can figure out the right goals."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 04:41:07AM 2 points [-]

How's that any different from:

"What should we have the AI's beliefs be?"

"Eh, just make it self-improve, once it's smart it can figure out the true beliefs."

Comment author: thelittledoctor 03 April 2012 11:44:33AM 2 points [-]

Assuming, from the title, that you're looking for argument by counterexample...

The obvious reply would be to invoke Godwin's Law - there's a quote in Mein Kampf along the lines of "I am convinced that by fighting off the Jews, I am doing the work of our creator...". Comments like this pretty reliably generate a response something like "Hitler was a diseased mind/insane/evil!" to which you may reply "Yeah, but he was pretty sharp, too." However, this has the downside of invoking Nazis, which in a certain kind of person may provoke an instant "This is a reactionary idiot" response and a complete discarding of the argument. So it's a temperamental trick, and I'm not skilled enough in the dark arts to know if it's a net gain.

On the other hand, you might prefer Pol Pat, or Ted Bundy, or any of a very large number of dictators and serial killers who don't produce the same mindkilling response as Hitler.

A lot of fictional evidence comes to mind as well, but we do try not to generalize from that... Still, if you just want to WIN the argument rather than win rationally, it may help to pull an example from some media form that the audience is likely to appreciate. Lex Luthor, Snidely Whiplash, Yagami Light (or L, if you prefer), Mephistopheles (or Faust), and so on.

Is that the sort of thing you wanted?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 04:38:35AM 1 point [-]

Hitler also had a lot of false beliefs about Jews.

Comment author: gwern 04 April 2012 12:51:09AM 2 points [-]

Namely, person X benefited from the way event Y turned out; therefore, person X was behind event Y.

Which is exactly what MoR tells us to do to analyze it, is it not?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 03:53:01AM 2 points [-]

That's still not a reason for assuming everyone is running perfect gambit roulettes.

Comment author: RobertLumley 03 April 2012 01:55:58AM 4 points [-]

I think it's this but I'm not sure:

The Greeks never made the human mind into an armed camp, and in this respect we are inferior to them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 03:46:26AM 8 points [-]

Tell that to Socrates.

Comment author: wallowinmaya 03 April 2012 07:32:16AM *  2 points [-]

Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I'm still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn't mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer's, I'm just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador's arguments.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 03:23:42AM 3 points [-]

I'm not really convinced by it either.

Comment author: asr 03 April 2012 03:04:55AM *  -1 points [-]

Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2012 04:59:40AM 2 points [-]

socially constructed, not natural

These are not mutually exclusive.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 April 2012 06:44:10AM 2 points [-]

God/Future of Humanity Institute?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2012 03:43:57AM 2 points [-]

God/Friendly Human (super)Intelligence

Comment author: Blueberry 02 April 2012 07:44:37AM 13 points [-]

It also fails in the case where the strangest thing that's true is an infinite number of monkeys dressed as Hitler. Then adding one doesn't change it.

More to the point, the comparison is more about typical fiction, rather than ad hoc fictional scenarios. There are very few fictional works with monkeys dressed as Hitler.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2012 02:19:38AM 6 points [-]

Indeed, I posted this quote partially out of annoyance at a certain type of analysis I kept seeing in the MoR threads. Namely, person X benefited from the way event Y turned out; therefore, person X was behind event Y. After all, thinking like this about real life will quickly turn one into a tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.

Comment author: Blueberry 02 April 2012 07:46:11AM 2 points [-]

That's a good reminder but I'm not sure how it applies here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2012 02:13:02AM 1 point [-]

A quote that calls the holder of a potentially wrong belief a "skeptic" rather than a "believer" is more useful since it makes you more likely to identify with him.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 April 2012 11:43:34AM 1 point [-]

You'd expect the CEV's performance to be within those parameters. But I have one question: when can one decide to abolish either of those, and replace it with a new system entirely? Sometimes it is better to restart from scratch.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2012 01:59:44AM 1 point [-]

This certainly isn't the time. The two problems CronoDAS mentioned are at most mildly annoying, it isn't worth destroying a powerful and useful Schelling point merely to fix them.

Comment author: wallowinmaya 02 April 2012 02:50:50PM *  4 points [-]

I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works

I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)

ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting your post!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2012 01:34:06AM 1 point [-]

Have you seen this post by Eliezer?

Comment author: bogdanb 01 April 2012 12:37:35PM 1 point [-]

Also, if there was no one left alive except Harry, how did they know it was Avada Kedavra that rebounded from Harry, instead of some other spell?

(When the Dementor attacks him, Harry sees the green flash and hears the words, but only when Voldie kills his parents, not when he’s attacked himself, as I recall.)

They could have tried Legillimency on baby Harry, but nobody actually mentions that, and other than Moody it doesn’t seem like anyone would think of it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 April 2012 01:02:32AM 2 points [-]

Looking at the last spell cast by Voldemort's want.

Comment author: TimS 01 April 2012 11:58:24PM 1 point [-]

To speak more carefully - violence for the purpose of influencing the "center of mass" of political opinion in a country, when the government is not uniformly in favor of the political position of those executing the violence - is not the same thing as fascism. More colloquially, tactics similar to voter intimidation have been used by fascists, but not only fascists.

My main point was that an ideological label that applies to both FARC and AUC is not a particularly informative label. If fascism is restricted to the usage I suggested, then it is more informative than that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 April 2012 12:32:10AM 4 points [-]

You didn't answer my question. Let me state it more explicitly. What do you mean by "fascism"?

Comment author: Ezekiel 01 April 2012 11:27:00PM 8 points [-]

Zach Wiener's elegant disproof:

Think of the strangest thing that's true. Okay. Now add a monkey dressed as Hitler.

(Although to be fair, it's possible that the disproof fails because "think of the strangest thing that's true" is impossible for a human brain.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 April 2012 12:24:19AM 8 points [-]

This quote seems relevant:

They must be true because, if there were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.

G. H. Hardy, upon receiving a letter containing mathematical formulae from Ramanujan

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 08:53:17PM 0 points [-]

It sure does. It's vague and nebulous, because "fascism" itself is vague and nebulous by design, but usually it boils down to:

  • Against wars of conquest and even against gunboat diplomacy.
  • Against intellectual censorship and police states, for freedom of expression.
  • In favour of liberal democracy.
  • In favour of the right of all to a fair trial, against death penalty.
  • In favour of the right to unionise, to make strikes, to pacific and non-violent demonstrations.

If anyone disagrees with any of these points, they had better not say it out loud, regardless of what they actually end up doing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 09:34:31PM *  9 points [-]

Against intellectual censorship and police states, for freedom of expression.

Unless, of course, the people you're censoring are themselves fascist or can be accused of facism or "hate speech" then it's ok.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 08:26:12PM -1 points [-]

Unless you mean it's become such a widespread ideology that it's isometric to a tautology in the minds of the public, I don't see what you mean.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 08:29:19PM 4 points [-]

I mean someone calling themselves "anti-facist" doesn't have any semantic content.

Comment author: Blueberry 01 April 2012 08:01:04PM 4 points [-]

I guess, but that seems like a strange interpretation seeing as the speaker says he's no longer "a skeptic" in general.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 08:08:57PM 12 points [-]

The point of rationality isn't to better argue against beliefs you consider wrong but to change your existing beliefs to be more correct.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 07:40:33PM 18 points [-]

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

G. K. Chesterton

Comment author: TimS 01 April 2012 07:06:11PM 2 points [-]

From a communications clarity point of view, I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-right ideology, in the same way that I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-left ideology. Using the far-right failure mode label for those on the far left confuses this distinction.

To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That's bad, but it's not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.

It's similar to the problem of saying that Nazism is bad because it is socialist ("National Socialism" in the name). Nazism is bad, and socialism (as those speakers intend the term) is bad, but Nazism != socialism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 07:11:05PM 5 points [-]

To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That's bad, but it's not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.

And what are those reasons? Since I really don't see the distinction you're trying to make.

Comment author: CaveJohnson 01 April 2012 02:51:48PM *  13 points [-]

Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists.

Why does right wing extremism scare you so much more than left wing extremism when the former is utterly despised as the definition of evil by most Westerners while the latter is only ever lukewarmly condemned?

Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I'm not aware of? The right wing are the guys who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad and if you listen to Moldbug for a century before that too. I need some actual evidence that I should worry about them getting power anywhere in the West without being bombed into the stone age by the US five minutes later (bombing European right wing extremists, especially racist ones is the stuff of victory, moral superiority and war fantasies for them --- check out American video games, adventure novels and action movie villains), than say of me personally being struck by lightning when I'm walking my dog on a rainy Saturday evening.

Reading some of your comments I can't shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 07:08:29PM 3 points [-]

Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I'm not aware of?

Having beliefs that correspond to reality?

Comment author: Multiheaded 01 April 2012 03:54:12PM 2 points [-]

Reading some of your comments I can't shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?

Sort of yes! I've always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy, of either despotic or Randian aspect. Even the more ruthless bits of Moldbug's (rather comfortable and watered-down) technocratic fascism are, I fear, hardly a glimpse of what's to come, if the "rationality" of geeks and engineers, finally free from either today's humanist quasi-theocracy and the sober bounds of old-time coonservatism, gets free rein. Perhaps many here on LW, especially non-neurotypical people (who I tend to sympathize with a lot, but also be wary of if their condition includes any change in empathy) would be tempted by such a Ubermensch thing. Think of a hybrid of Speer, Eichmann and a weak UFAI and you'll understand how this nightmare of mine goes.

(I'm actually integrating a sinister-yet-rationalist one world government based on these fears in my science fantasy novel - instead of a generic villainous empire I started out with - except that in my story it was formed by voices of moderation in high places after the Axis victory in WW2 and the ensuing cold war, not as the radical elitist movement that I can phantom it as in the real world.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 06:58:54PM *  5 points [-]

Sort of yes! I've always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy

"Naked, unashamed technocracy" strikes me as much more similar to the position advocated by the left (ETA: especially the socialist left) then the right.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 April 2012 03:23:25PM *  6 points [-]

The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted. This is how one keeps their faith in democracy despite seeing that their ideas have lost in democratic elections.

I guess the typical mind fallacy strongly contributes to the democracy worship. If I believe that most people have the same opinions as me, then a majority vote should bring victory to my opinions. When it does not happen, then unless I want to give up the fallacy, I have to come with an explanation why the experimental data don't match my theory -- for example most people had the same opinion like me, but some of them were too lazy to vote, so this is why we lost. Or they were manipulated, but next time they will see the truth just as clearly as I do. And then, sometimes, like when looking at the voting for Islamist parties, it's like: WFT, I can't even find a plausible rationalization for this!

Human minds are prone to separate all humans into two basic categories: us and them. If someone is in the "us" category, we assume they are exactly like us. If someone is in the "them" category, then they are evil, they hate us, and that's why we (despite being good and peaceful people) should destroy them before they destroy us. Whatever education we get, these two extremes still attract our thinking. In recent decades we have learned that other humans are humans too, but it causes us to underestimate the differences, and always brings a big surprise when those other humans, despite being humans like us, decide for something different than we would.

Apparently the Human Rights Declaration of 1948 is the be-all and end-all of governmental morality. Except in the USA, "because they are weird like that" (and that's the charitable memetic explanation).

In USA they already have the Bill of Rights. Despite differences, it seems to me that both documents inhabit the same memetic niche (that is: officially recognized and worshiped document which you can quote against your government and against the majority vote).

What's the CEV concept, again?

Here. Shortly: "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together" extrapolated by a super-human intelligent machine. It is proposed as a solution to problem what should we ask such machine to do, assuming that the machine is smarter than us, and we don't want to get burned by our own stupidity. Something like: my true wish is what I would have wished if I had my values and your superior intelligence; plus assumption that sufficiently intelligent humans could together agree on a mutually satisfying solution, and the super-human intelligence should be able to find this solution.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 06:43:25PM 5 points [-]

The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted.

Another popular rationalization, is that my side would have won if it wasn't for the biased media misinforming the public. I suppose that's also similar to CEV.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 02:44:13AM 3 points [-]

No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don't remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.

By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 03:27:36AM *  5 points [-]

No, but he became a freaking legend

This, however, didn't translate into having his policies implemented.

By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution.

Britain has regime changes they're just peaceful.

As for violent regime changes, Britain has had those, just not recently.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 02:06:08AM 7 points [-]

In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can't despise without feeling disloyal.

Actually that's far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.

It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.

That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal,

You mean to say it wasn't even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 02:31:35AM 10 points [-]

Churchill did it,

It didn't even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 10:12:17PM *  -2 points [-]

Uh-huh. But there's a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]'s flaws with "That's *-ist!"? At the very least and the worst level of argument commonly found, the writers try to make it look like the group's virtues or just its "normality" to ordinary Western folks outweigh the criticism. I'm drawing on my impressions of The Guardian (which I read sporadically to see what British intelligentsia is up to), specifically of its CIF section.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 02:22:15AM 14 points [-]

Uh-huh. But there's a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]'s flaws with "That's *-ist!"?

Well, one historical example is the reaction to the Moynihan Report. It's by no means the only example, but it's the one where the people dismissing the report as racist and "victim bashing" probably did the most damage to society.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 01:24:45AM 2 points [-]

Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that "were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed" on his own

No, that's my testimony. I'm asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture.

Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.

Yes, well, doesn't it trouble you that maybe Eric Raymond and others like him are being victims of a similar process, given the many remarkable parallels between their discourses, modulo Hated-Enemy-Of-The-Day?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 01:58:54AM 3 points [-]

Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that "were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed" on his own

I'm asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture.

Then why didn't anyone come up with these memes in previous empires? Or for that matter in Europe before the mid 20th century?

Comment author: Multiheaded 01 April 2012 12:51:01AM *  1 point [-]

By the way, here in Russia it is mostly reactionary/nationalist/authoritarian types that express disapproval at any suggestion of regime change, either external or internal, in places like Cuba. It seemingly doesn't matter much to them what kind of dictatorship it is, as long as it continues to exist and spite the 1st world nations. (Yes, I'm biased as hell against them.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 01:39:43AM 4 points [-]

That doesn't surprise me in the least.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2012 11:00:43PM 0 points [-]

Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.

But then wouldn't their work automatically be a part of said literature?

Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.

I do find it amazing how many people who are clearly parroting memes without much personal input claim to have come up with them themselves. I for one like to give credit where credit is due.

I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature.

What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts? Because at this rate you're starting to sound like my "Protocols of the Sages of Zion" reading uncle, who thinks everything the West does is the result of Zionist lobbying, Zionist subversion, and the Zionist conspiracy to sap and destroy our precious bodily fluids. Sorry, not bodily fluids, I mean our precious way of life, our intellectual integrity, the patriotic/religious fervour of our youth, the unity and freedom of the Islamic peoples, etc. etc. etc. . By sapping and neutering it and precipitating its decadence with their filthy propaganda spread through media manipulation and the aid of servile, self-hating intellectuals, them and other sorts of useful idiots. Only to replace it with their own, self serving work, that will render us impotent to resist their tyranny. Sounds familiar?

Hey, actually, the more I think about it, the more this pattern reemerges. I can think of examples from Ancient Greece! Ever heard of a guy named Pausanias? Maybe we could write an interesting article out of this! I genuinely feel we're onto something.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 12:30:37AM 4 points [-]

What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts?

Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that "were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed" on his own or my theory that those memes ultimately descend from communist propaganda.

Because at this rate you're starting to sound like my "Protocols of the Sages of Zion" reading uncle,

Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2012 11:15:55PM *  0 points [-]

he government shouldn't get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn't obliged actively assist you.

Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn't actually helping you be happy in any particular way, they just make sure you are able to pursue whatever would make you happy.

Of course, that's not Marxism: Marx would have said that "from each in accordance with their capacity, to each according tot their necessity", which I think is utterly dumb: who's going to decide how much ouput one is capable of, or where one's needs stop?

Of course, if your notion of happiness is, say, to be someone's slave, the government shouldn't get in the way of you pursuing that. I'd be curious to see how many people do choose slavery over freedom.

Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn't forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness. But then you could just reject their help, right?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 12:22:34AM 1 point [-]

Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn't actually helping you be happy in any particular way,

Yes it is. It's forcing the employer to hire you.

Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn't forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness.

Or gets in the way of someone else's freedom.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 11:13:33PM *  2 points [-]

Heh, of course. I see it all the time in Russian right-of-center publications. But wasn't the blame here being placed upon stereotypical liberal-minded people? I don't see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect (of course, most people - including me - are more sympathetic to them than the American soldiers when talking about the Vietnam war, but that's to be expected given the vast objective differences in the combatants' situations).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 12:18:21AM 9 points [-]

I don't see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect

Well they certainly exist, expecially in Hollywood.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 10:52:17PM 1 point [-]

META: Anyone know why this post isn't showing up in the list of recent posts?

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2012 10:34:10PM 0 points [-]

A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.

Yes, I know, I have read that article in full, but I still didn't understand the delimitations of that definition.

Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough "interpretation", as you proceed to do in the next paragraph.

You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn't legitimate.

Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they're the ones doing the censoring and surveilling.

However, I suppose all power units, be they political, economical, or otherwise, will try to get their hands on as much information as they can get away with, while denying it to others. They will also be hypocritically outraged that other power units censor and suveil them. Hardly something endemic to Marxism, regretfully enough. One would argue that the ultimate elimination of censorship and surveilance is simply the complete empowerment of the general public to censor and surveil everyone else: all your words and actions are known to everyone, and no-one dares step out of line. Truly a Tyranny of the Public, if the Public isn't memetically equipped to resist the temptation.

In case you thought otherwise, I am not suggesting the American Consitution or the Declaration of Independence are tweakable to accomodate leftism. More the opposite: that a leftism that respects individual rights can be Consitution-compliant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 10:46:48PM *  1 point [-]

You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn't legitimate.

Well, yes. I particularly object to your redefinition of the word "liberty".

liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children)

pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn't provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one's family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work)

Also notice that it says "pursuit of Happiness" and simply "Happiness", i.e., the government shouldn't get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn't obliged actively assist you.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 09:23:13PM *  -1 points [-]

except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)

That's very easy to imagine as a concept... but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? "Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct."? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they're usually more circumspect - and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.

I know you're likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual "respectable" authors in such context, but... any examples? Please? (I'd like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I'm also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)

-* For "Opponents of evil regime X", see the ongoing coverage of the "Arab Spring" (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven't noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 10:31:12PM 3 points [-]

"Opponents of evil regime X"

I'd like to mention that depending on the situation and the regime in question people might attach their nationalism to the regime itself (denying its evils) rather than to its opponents.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 08:43:42PM *  1 point [-]

Plenty of capitalist infiltrators in the USSR too, no doubt.

I'm Russian, and I can say that the "capitalist infiltrators" were, in a mirror reflection of the situation in the US, just a subset - a really large subset - of Soviet intelligentsia; their memes were "human rights" and "peaceful coexistence" and such on a far-mode level, and the feeling that a society that's so much wealthier and more comfortable to live in must be the "right" one on a near-mode level. And they did help dismantle the USSR when the hour struck. What followed is complicated.

(Dear Reader: doesn't this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such "Soviet influences" or "Soviet subversion", so that it doesn't appear in their writings as simply the Other, an unexamined nefarious force?)

EDIT: Vlad has already made a disclaimer that's kind of useful. That's very nice of him, although I'd really like to see some actual examination of the USSR from him. Think of which, I don't think he ever publicly examined the Socialist ideology in detail, despite the numerous times he denounced some of its particular results.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 10:07:30PM 4 points [-]

doesn't this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such "Soviet influences" or "Soviet subversion",

Keep in mind that the memes the USSR was using for memetic warfare were not always the same ones it was using for internal propaganda.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 09:51:00PM *  -1 points [-]

Yup, but that's mostly unfalsifiable; people with different values can find different things unacceptably racist/*phobic/whatever. And they aren't really hiding the fact that such accusations are just part of ideological warfare, or that they are partisan on those issues.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 10:03:09PM *  8 points [-]

people with different values can find different things unacceptably racist/*phobic/whatever.

The point is that they're using these charges to avoid rationally confronting their opponents' arguments.

Comment author: Multiheaded 31 March 2012 09:23:13PM *  -1 points [-]

except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)

That's very easy to imagine as a concept... but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? "Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct."? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they're usually more circumspect - and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.

I know you're likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual "respectable" authors in such context, but... any examples? Please? (I'd like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I'm also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)

-* For "Opponents of evil regime X", see the ongoing coverage of the "Arab Spring" (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven't noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 09:39:56PM *  15 points [-]

"Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct."

They won't make that statement explicitly, but they will accuse people who point out specific cases where said group isn't virtuous or is doing something wrong of racism/sexism/homophobia/Islamophobia/victim bashing.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2012 08:48:40PM *  0 points [-]

Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the "right" to goodies from the government.

Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch: if one assumes that the current Governments are acting as merely enablers and administrators of a corporate power that would stand between them and their rights to Life (nationalized healthcare, the right to the minimum amount of resources to survive whether you want to work or not), Liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children), and the pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn't provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one's family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work). I guess we should praise the Founding Fathers for the foersight they put in their work, and having made it as flexible as it is.

That said, it is indeed sad how doctrinal Marxism has shown an absolutely deplorable disregard for the rights and interests of anyone who wasn't a proletarian. Luckily, democratist, egalitarian movements have predated and outlived Marxism, being born of a sensibility that is beyond mere memetic and mimetic propagation.

By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter? A search in google mostly turns out the blog you linked to, Youtube comments, and some right-wing blogs. It does not seem to be a very widespread word... could you allay my suspicions that it isn't a buzzword? (I don't say this in a spirit of mockery, I am genuinely curious).

that's probably a larger component than you'd care to admit

I'd like you to source the priors that allow you to assess such a probability. As a Muslim, and someone who was in close contact with those movements throughout, I do not recall a single source phrasing the conflict in religious terms.

the Islamization of society

What does that entail, exactly, and why is this a bad thing? I'm not assuming it is a good or bad thing, I just want to know why you think it would be.

the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much more Islamic fundamentalist.

Typical case of reversed stupidity. As I think I have already mentioned somewhere on this thread, you will observe that once people believe themselves free of the yokes of their oppressors, and their oppressors' agents, the same people will tend to feel attracted to said oppressors' designated enemies (regardless of the details of the nature of said enmity, or its truth beyond rhetorics). In the Wars of Religion, it was Protestantism, in the Cold War, it was the USSR, and in The War on Terror, well, it's the guys with the beards advocating the return to an idealized, pure past, and the rights of the common man against the foreign oppressor, again: they're just wearing a different hat.

the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence

Maybe applying the right-left label here is a mistake: maybe it's a "left wing" thing in Britain, but in France it's more of a "right wing" thing: the French left has a bit of a vendetta against religion in any way shape or form, and thinks the "goodies" of the Goverment (and its funds) shouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 09:34:42PM 1 point [-]

Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch:

Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough "interpretation", as you proceed to do in the next paragraph. Also I shown mention that Jefferson broke with what one might call "orthodox Lockeanism" by substituting "pursuit of happiness" for "property".

elimination of censorship and surveillance

Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they're the ones doing the censoring and surveilling.

By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter?

A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2012 08:01:00PM *  1 point [-]

Speaking of the topic of "generating poision memes", I think that, since part of our endeavour would involve the deconstruction and destruction of propaganda and its pernicious enabling of "nationalism", "groupism", "collectivism" or however else we may call it, it might be interesting to study contemporary Think Tanks and their strategies with as much diligence and interest as those institutions of the past that this deeply interesting (if sometimes objectionable) article mentions.

For a rationalist to be able to function properly as a citizen, and defy the expectation that they would enclose themselves in ivory towers, unconcerned with the affairs of foolish mortals, one must develop tools to identify and deconstruct "poison memes" as soon as they come in contact with them, without having to rely on analysts who are ideologically indentured to the group opposing the creators of those memes, since they would in turn spread "poison memes" of their own.

A seeker of truth that would bounce between these sources would not find said truth, but only confusion piling upon confusion, save if they perform a truly exhausting effort of mental analysis and cross-referencing. As Descartes might have put it, partisan works do contain many excellent and true precepts, but these are mixed in with so much other harmful or superfluous stuff that it is almost as difficult to separate out the truth from the rest as it is to pull a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble by separating out the wanted goddess-shaped marble from the unwanted remainder.

Hence I think developing a toolset to see through politically-motivated memes, if not outright cataloguing and properly sourcing them, would be a worthy task to undertake. If not by us, then by some other, specialized organ, that would be equally commited to the advancement of correct epistemology and mental hygiene.

Note: I want to make it clear that I do not think said article is entirely without merit. Far from that. I have seen some of the very stupid memes therein described existing in left-winger people I know, such as one of my dearest friends saying that, were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed. I was so shocked I could have slapped him then and there. (As a representative of said Third World (and of freaking reason for that matter) I explained to him that that was a preposterous notion,)

Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not "catch" this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda, but came to it on his own entirely. You see, not all pernicious ideas need to be taught (what a wonderful world would it be if they were): sometimes they arouse in parallel, in different people, because they make the same fundamental thinking mistakes, starting from similar but widespread faulty priors. Such as the ideas that:

  • a criminal should own up to their crimes and allow themselves to be punished, that victims have a right to violent vengeance
  • that by allowing injustice without speaking out against it one is automatically an accomplice,
  • that this notion could possibly be valid on the level of an entire country (I blame the Nurnberg trials for that meme),
  • that punishment can be dealt by proxy.

If the brutal, violent exploitation of the Third World by the colonial powers is seen as a crime, a mind equipped with the aforementioned memes would, with a high probablity, come up with this idiotic idea, without any Soviet prompting at all! Heck, not even those memes could be seen as Soviet-generated, they predate the USSR by far, heck, they probably predate dirt.

As for the horrors of colonialism are undeniable historical fact, and their criminalization seems to have been hardly a matter of left-versus-right, and more of a matter of much more diverse "nationalisms", including literal Nationalisms, and one country calling out another for a crime the likes of which their own forces proceed to commit immediately, and which they vigorously deny or ignore, when called out in turn. At some point, internationally-minded people, such as, say, humanists, seem to have come up with the conclusion that those are all crimes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 09:20:13PM 4 points [-]

Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not "catch" this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda,

Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.

but came to it on his own entirely.

I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature. Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 March 2012 06:39:20PM *  6 points [-]

I don't think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn't help.

A better example to answer Tim's question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 07:36:08PM 2 points [-]

While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading.

Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2012 11:32:33AM 0 points [-]

I find myself very very confused by this article. There are too many priors we don't seem to share, too much inferential distance I need to jump. What is the American Way of Life, and what is this "Lockean individualism" he keeps talking about? How is anywhing Bin Laden said comparable to the contents of "Z Magazine", which appears to be an amusingly old-fashioned doctrinal Marxist publication? He talks a lot about past events I'm unfamiliar with, and sources I haven't read (yet).

The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.

Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author's priors to the test, since he clearly didn't bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.

EDIT: Wooooow comment thread. That is long. Would you recommend reading it?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 07:18:42PM *  1 point [-]

what is this "Lockean individualism" he keeps talking about?

Here is a good place to start.

Also these lines from the Deceleration of Independence are decent summary.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the "right" to goodies from the government.

Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author's priors to the test, since he clearly didn't bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.

I'm not sure you understand what he means, he's not claiming that the all the Paris rioters were motivated by jihad (although that's probably a larger component than you'd care to admit) any more than all the Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters were motivated by jihad. Nevertheless, the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much more Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence and those organizations do promote the Islamization of society.

Comment author: kilobug 30 March 2012 09:25:52AM 2 points [-]

Also, we cannot completely ignore the possibility of the "magic machinery" (the one that recognize the genetic marker) to have some kind of shuffling process that'll occasionally turn on or off the magical marker when an egg is fertilized. Either randomly, or based on events (triggers like "an egg fertilized exactly at the second where the moon is the fullest will have a high probability of having the magical marked added").

We have no hints towards that, so Occam's Razor would tend to give it a low probability, but it would seem coherent to me with the twisted, not really occamian, way magic seems to work. Harry's and Draco's experiment on the genes was low-scale enough so they had no chance of detecting any such shuffling.

But sure, adultery is a much more plausible explanation of why squibs would occasionally appear in pure magical couples, and why there are "muggleborn".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 05:23:43AM *  5 points [-]

Also, we cannot completely ignore the possibility of the "magic machinery" (the one that recognize the genetic marker) to have some kind of shuffling process that'll occasionally turn on or off the magical marker when an egg is fertilized. Either randomly, or based on events (triggers like "an egg fertilized exactly at the second where the moon is the fullest will have a high probability of having the magical marked added").

Or that there is no genetic marker at all and the machinery uses some algorithm of its own to determine who should have magic which is heavily biased towards children of wizards.

Comment author: see 30 March 2012 07:10:26AM 10 points [-]

Let's assume that Hermione had actually been sentenced to Azkaban. How many advantages would Quirrelmort have gained?

  • Discredited Dumbledore somewhat with a student almost being killed
  • Directly eliminated a Light-side witch showing skill at military command and Battle Magic
  • Made Harry more vulnerable by knocking out an ally/friend/moral compass
  • Driven a wedge between Harry and House Malfoy, eliminating Draco as an ally/friend and ensuring no Malfoy-Potter alliance could form against a resurgent Voldemort
  • Broken the Dumbledore-Harry alliance forever if Dumbledore actually let Hermione go to Azkaban; otherwise force Dumbledore to go into open rebellion against the law.
  • Made Harry take the majority of the Wizengamot as enemies who needed to be punished, both encouraging him to become darker and the members to have reason to be hostile to Harry in turn.
  • Provoked Harry into a (possibly) suicidal effort to destroy Azkaban, which (possibly) could enable a mass breakout of Voldemort supporters from same.
  • Isolated Magical Britain from the rest of the wizarding world for sentencing a child to Azkaban.
  • Delegitimized the Wizengamot in the eyes of everyone in Magical Britain horrified at the sentence.

There may be more that aren't coming to mind, but, well, the potential payoffs for Quirrelmort were pretty high.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 05:12:59AM 1 point [-]

Isolated Magical Britain from the rest of the wizarding world for sentencing a child to Azkaban.

Do we have any evidence that the rest of the magical world would care?

Comment author: Hul-Gil 30 March 2012 06:01:36PM *  0 points [-]

Since I have just read that "the intelligentsia" is usually now used to refer to artists etc. and doesn't often include scientists, this isn't as bad as I first thought; but still, it seems pretty silly to me - trying to appear deep by turning our expectations on their head. A common trick, and sometimes it can be used to make a good point... but what's the point being made here? Ordinary people are more rational than those engaged in intellectual pursuits? I doubt that, though rationality is in short supply in either category; but in any case, we know the "ordinary man" is extremely foolish in his beliefs.

Folk wisdom and common sense are a favored refuge of those who like to mock those foolish, Godless int'lectual types, and that's what this reminds me of; you know, the entirely too-common trope of the supposedly intelligent scientist or other educated person being shown up by the homespun wisdom and plain sense of Joe Ordinary. (Not to accuse Orwell of being anti-intellectual in general - I just don't like this particular quote.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 02:59:58AM 6 points [-]

but still, it seems pretty silly to me - trying to appear deep by turning our expectations on their head.

This quote isn't just about seeming deep, it refers to a frequently observed phenomenon. I think two main reasons for it are that intellectuals are better at rationalizing beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons (there is even a theory that some intellectuals signal their intelligence by rationalizing absurd beliefs) and the fact that they're frequently in ivory towers where day to day reality is less available.

Not to accuse Orwell of being anti-intellectual in general

Depends on which type of anti-intellectualism you're referring to.

Comment author: TimS 30 March 2012 07:02:16PM 2 points [-]

I don't disagree that leaders like Ralph Nader or Martin Luther King advocated for what they thought was a good idea, which might not have a close relationship with what the followers would necessarily articulate as goals.

What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I'm particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 02:33:50AM 1 point [-]

What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I'm particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn't.

I linked to a relevant article elsewhere in this thread.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 March 2012 10:18:26AM *  6 points [-]

I think it is pretty obvious. I suggest you especially closely read the paragraphs where Orwell talks about say transferred nationalism and then pause for 5 minutes by the clock to consider what the intellectual descendants of these are in the modern Anglosphere.

TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM

  • (i) COMMUNISM.
  • (ii) POLITICAL [C]ATHOLICISM.
  • (iii) COLOUR FEELING.
  • (iv) CLASS FEELING
  • (v) PACIFISM.

Indeed that whole section basically reads like something out of the altright blogosphere's description of the modern intellectual world. But this is very political of me to directly point out. I'm going to give you a more direct answer that compliments this one in a PM. Vladimir may agree or disagree with my points, but I can understand why he may (I'm not sure he did) want to keep some inferential distances as a protection measure there.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 02:09:57AM 2 points [-]

Here is a post by Eric Raymond that goes into more details.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 30 March 2012 11:13:29PM *  9 points [-]

It's U.S.S.R., easily. Why is this even a question? The US (correctly, imo) let the great dictatorships bleed each other. The US was a financier but did not do most of the fighting. The UK is a tiny nation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2012 02:00:14AM 2 points [-]

Depends on what you mean by "contributed most". One reason for the high casualty rate from the USSR is their leaders' we have reserves attitude.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 March 2012 06:21:28PM 9 points [-]

This is relevant not only to "Politics is the Mind-killer" but also to "The Bottom Line" and the notion of motivated cognition:

Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore START by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only AFTER this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2012 06:30:29AM *  2 points [-]

Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany?

I'm not convinced that question is even well defined. What does "contributed most" mean when mapped onto causality graphs?

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 29 March 2012 05:54:30PM 7 points [-]

I'd feel sorry for that kid. But considering the genes and upbringing he'd have, I'm suddenly too busy feeling sorry for everyone else.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2012 05:00:50AM 1 point [-]

Not to mention being the son of the person who became God/FHI.

Comment author: Multiheaded 29 March 2012 08:53:06AM -2 points [-]
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2012 04:21:11AM 3 points [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0/are_your_enemies_innately_evil/

Why don't you try applying the lessons of that post to your own thought process?

Comment author: Multiheaded 29 March 2012 01:41:11AM -1 points [-]

I might agree with such a reversal, provided that you agree with the well-known maxim that "The personal is political"* and make one more step towards embracing our insidious corruption :)

(in the relevant sense, this refers to why don't various charities just rain megatons of food, water, schools and hospitals from the sky, given how much private 1st world citizens have to spare)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2012 02:39:21AM 5 points [-]

(in the relevant sense, this refers to why don't various charities just rain megatons of food, water, schools and hospitals from the sky, given how much private 1st world citizens have to spare)

This is much harder to do then you seem to think.

Comment author: Multiheaded 28 March 2012 10:49:04PM *  10 points [-]

Actually, there's a fairly complicated question of why don't we immediately go cure world hunger. I mean, the production and logistics aspects wouldn't be very difficult compared to what today's industry can output on an everyday basis. I guess that it's 80% pure irrationality and only 20% politics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2012 01:32:06AM 3 points [-]

I guess that it's 80% pure irrationality and only 20% politics.

I'd reverse those. (Although one could be considered a subset of the other.)

Comment author: gwern 28 March 2012 03:30:10PM 1 point [-]

I don't think I wanted to get rid of Dumbledore beforehand; but the solution dealt with all the desiderata in one single stroke, as opposed to the actual chapter which was an unsatisfying potpourri of solutions. Cute quote anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2012 12:54:18AM 1 point [-]

but the solution dealt with all the desiderata

Except for the whole "not throwing anyone under the bus" thing.

Comment author: cousin_it 28 March 2012 04:26:07PM *  3 points [-]

Logical uncertainty is weird because it doesn't exactly obey the rules of probability. You can't have a consistent probability assignment that says axioms are 100% true but the millionth digit of pi has a 50% chance of being odd. So I won't be very surprised if the correct way to treat logical uncertainty turns out to be not completely Bayesian.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2012 12:27:49AM 1 point [-]

Actually this strikes me as a special case of dealing with the fact that your own decision process is imperfect.

Comment author: Multiheaded 28 March 2012 08:15:27AM *  1 point [-]

How is this even relevant outside some weird partisan definition of "socialist" and "cultural environment"? And how is this not a purely political jab at all?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2012 12:13:20AM 2 points [-]

My point is that I don't believe this constitutes your true rejection, and was trying to argue by pointing to a belief you hold that isn't exactly mainstream.

Comment author: gwern 28 March 2012 03:07:07AM 6 points [-]

I have to say, I enjoyed the process of coming up with and justifying my 'throw Dumbledore under the bus' theory a lot more than I actually enjoyed the chapter, which wound up looking like a mish-mosh (a debt and messing with Dementors and Hermione joining the House of Potter and foreshadowing)...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 March 2012 06:49:42AM 9 points [-]

I enjoyed the process of coming up with and justifying my 'throw Dumbledore under the bus' theory

That's a very bad mental habit to get into. As Bryan Caplan explains here.

The key difference between a normal utilitarian and a Leninist: When a normal utilitarian concludes that mass murder would maximize social utility, he checks his work! He goes over his calculations with a fine-tooth comb, hoping to discover a way to implement beneficial policy changes without horrific atrocities. The Leninist, in contrast, reasons backwards from the atrocities that emotionally inspire him to the utilitarian argument that morally justifies his atrocities.

Comment author: disinter 28 March 2012 05:49:16AM 1 point [-]

I'm afraid I can't spot it. Could you point it out for me?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 March 2012 06:23:33AM 7 points [-]

The word for that is justice. A harsher justice than I'd want to seen meted out, but justice nevertheless.

Is probably precisely the rational people used when demanding the prisons be built.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 March 2012 03:47:44PM 3 points [-]

Actually, it just might be a feature.

You know, just between you and me, I sometimes worry that there is a naive view loose out there — most students come to linguistics believing it, and there appear to be some professional linguists who regard it as central and explanatory — that language has something to do with purposes of efficiently conveying information from a speaker to a hearer. What a load of nonsense. I'm sorry, I don't want to sound cynical and jaded, but language is not for informing. Language is for accusing, adumbrating, attacking, attracting, blustering, bossing, bullying, burbling, challenging, concealing, confusing, deceiving, defending, defocusing, deluding, denying, detracting, discomfiting, discouraging, dissembling, distracting, embarassing, embellishing, encouraging, enticing, evading, flattering, hinting, humiliating, insulting, interrogating, intimidating, inveigling, muddling, musing, needling, obfuscating, obscuring, persuading, protecting, rebutting, retorting, ridiculing, scaring, seducing, stroking, wondering, ... Oh, you fools who think languages are vehicles for permitting a person who is aware of some fact to convey it clearly and accurately to some other person. You simply have no idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 March 2012 04:06:52AM *  -1 points [-]

Very well, I will thus ignore any information in your comment.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 March 2012 03:31:22AM *  0 points [-]

I have no idea what might be meant by "conventionalist precommitment," nor why you put that phrase in quotes, since I didn't use it myself. Assuming you meant "consequentialist precommitment", I mean a position I precommit to because I believe that precommitting to it has better consequences than not doing so.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by your question about TDT/UDT, but in general I would agree that being known to operate under a TDT/UDT-like decision theory provides the same kinds of benefits I'm talking about here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 March 2012 03:42:19AM 1 point [-]

I have no idea what might be meant by "conventionalist precommitment," nor why you put that phrase in quotes, since I didn't use it myself. Assuming you meant "consequentialist precommitment",

Thanks fixed.

I mean a position I precommit to because I believe that precommitting to it has better consequences than not doing so.

Of course, after you make the precommitment you are no longer a strict consequentialist.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 27 March 2012 03:34:15AM 2 points [-]

Killing Skeeter is about the only truly questionable action of Quirrellmort that I can remember.

Even here, I find it hard to hold it against Quirrell. Rita made a career of libeling others, blithely unconcerned about the harm she caused to their lives. In fact, she seemed rather smug and self satisfied about exercising that power. Quirrell even confronted her and asked her to stop. She had a chance and chose not to take it. She was destroyed in the act of her preferred crime by the person she intended to harm.

I suppose I have a bit of Quirrell in me. He takes a grim satisfaction in the poetry of citizens being destroyed in the same prisons they demanded be built. The word for that is justice. A harsher justice than I'd want to seen meted out, but justice nevertheless. I wouldn't have squashed Skeeter, but I can't condemn Quirrell for it either.

And yes, Skeeter likely had children who would miss her. Just as good people have some bad, bad people have some good. Recognizing that the world is not black and white shouldn't stop you from seeing that some grays really are darker than others.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 March 2012 03:37:38AM 9 points [-]

I suppose I have a bit of Quirrell in me. He takes a grim satisfaction in the poetry of citizens being destroyed in the same prisons they demanded be built. The word for that is justice. A harsher justice than I'd want to seen meted out, but justice nevertheless. I wouldn't have squashed Skeeter, but I can't condemn Quirrell for it either.

I would just like to point out the unintentional irony in that paragraph.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 March 2012 12:52:58AM *  1 point [-]

It does include the secondary effects of their deaths acting as a deterrent.

But I don't share your view that deontology allows for more credible precommitment to punishment, except in the somewhat trivial sense that such a precommitment is more credible to observers who consider deontological precommitments more credible than consequentialist ones.

That is, a commitment to punishment based on an adequate understanding of the consequences of punishment is no less likely to lead to punishment than a commitment to punishment based on deontological rules, and therefore a predicter ought to be no less likely to predict punishment from a committed consequentialist than a committed deontologist. Of course, predicters in the real world don't always predict as they ought, so it's possible that a real-world predictor might consider my commitment less credible if it's expressed consequentially.

It's also possible they might consider it more so. Or that they might consider it more credible if I wear a red silk robe when I make it. Or any number of things.

It's valuable to know what factors will make a claim of precommitment credible to my audience (whether I precommit or not), but that doesn't make deontology any more valuable than red robes.

NOTE: As pointed out here, my use of "precommitment" here is potentially misleading. What I'm talking about is an assertion A that I will do X in the future, made in such a way that the existence of A (or, rather, the existence of other things that derive from A having existed in the past, such as memories of A or written records of A or what have you) creates benefits for actually doing X in the future (or, equivalently, costs to not doing so) that can outweigh the costs of doing X (not considering A).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 March 2012 03:13:59AM *  1 point [-]

What do you mean by "consequentionalist precommitment"? Or are you including with like TDT and UDT in your definition of "consequentialist"?

Comment author: glumph 26 March 2012 06:00:28AM *  5 points [-]

Edit: I am wrong.

What will Quirrell display as on the Map? One would think that, if the Map read "VOLDEMORT", the Weasley twins would have figured it out. (There's an analogous, hilarious, inconsistency in canon; how did the twins never see Peter Pettigrew sleeping in Ron's bed?)

If Voldemort did steal Quirrell's body rather than use Polyjuice, he might just appear on the map as "Quirrell".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 March 2012 06:07:48AM 3 points [-]

Possibly "Tom Riddle".

Comment author: BlackNoise 25 March 2012 02:12:48PM 1 point [-]

Actually, if you can loop yourself more than six times at any small stretch of wall-time then you can get more than 30 subjective hours in one 24 wall-time day.

But it's implied you can't actually do that, which is why I think no more than 6 copies at any given time. Plus, if it were possible you could basically use any one day as a stopping point groundhog-day style in which you can (for example) brute-force read the entire Hogwarts library.

At any rate, the general limiting principle is that information cannot travel more than 6 hours backwards, Which I think means that when you draw a graph of a person using time-turners where you represent her using an arrow (going right for positive time, and left in 1h jumps for time-turner use), Then you can't have more than 6 hours of left-arrow in any given 24h wall-time section.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 March 2012 01:25:36AM 1 point [-]

Plus, if it were possible you could basically use any one day as a stopping point groundhog-day style in which you can (for example) brute-force read the entire Hogwarts library.

That would get rather crowded.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 March 2012 08:28:08PM 0 points [-]

They're also pretty communist and becoming moreso... and they tend to produce a lot of uFAI researchers. ...Political history is hard, let's go shopping.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2012 11:55:29PM 3 points [-]

Political history is hard, let's go shopping.

Here is a good blog post on the history of the relationship between the church and politics.

Comment author: David_Gerard 25 March 2012 11:03:28PM *  1 point [-]

In practice, human language isn't precision-oriented technical jargon.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2012 11:31:05PM 6 points [-]

That's a bug, not a feature. ;)

Comment author: pedanterrific 25 March 2012 09:24:34AM *  4 points [-]

It wouldn't matter if the priesthood had ten times the expected rate of child abusers. That would just mean that pedophiles were attracted to the job, it wouldn't be the fault of the church as an institution. The problem is that the hierarchy is doing everything it can to protect the abusers from the consequences of their actions, up to and including lying to police, and doing nothing to keep known abusers away from children.

ETA: Here's a good article.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2012 06:29:46PM 1 point [-]

The problem is that the hierarchy is doing everything it can to protect the abusers from the consequences of their actions

So do a lot of the secular institutions.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 March 2012 07:20:10AM *  0 points [-]

I hope the downvotes of the parent are for taboo violation and not for content. When it comes to Roko's Basilisk specifically (considering potential spooky acausal variants separately) Army's solution is correct. With the caveat firmly in place I don't believe even Eliezer would disagree with that. If he did then I would have to seriously reconsider my support for SIAI - it would indicate that he is someone who is likely to actually implement (or support the implementation of) the Basilisk's glare.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2012 09:20:42AM 1 point [-]

With the caveat firmly in place I don't believe even Eliezer would disagree with that.

That is certainly not consistent with his behavior.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 24 March 2012 10:52:12PM 1 point [-]

What about the pedophilia scandal?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2012 09:00:18AM 1 point [-]

From what I heard the pedophilia rates are less in the church than secular institutions that regularly deal with children. It's just that for various reasons the church gets more media attention.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 March 2012 07:52:16AM *  4 points [-]

I think Eliezer's policy as expressed here is better.

And, looking at the context, not particularly relevant.

When they are not yet shown to be right downvoting is perfectly reasonable. Changing your votes retrospectively is not always correct.

Unless Eliezer believes the information available to AK is sufficient to justify being 'Very Sure' I do not believe Eliezer's actual or expressed policy suggests reversing votes if he is lucky. In fact my comment about lottery mistakes is a massively understated reference to what he has written on the subject (if I recall correctly).

Not that I advocate deferring to Eliezer here. If he thinks you can't be overconfident and right at the same time he is just plain wrong. This is one of the most prevalent human biases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2012 07:22:02AM 6 points [-]

I believe Eliezer's policy is to criticize people when they're wrong. If they say something right for the wrong reason, wait; they'll say something wrong soon enough.

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 March 2012 10:02:52AM 1 point [-]

So you're saying that the belief is so "nasty" that assigning it any non-zero probability is a bad idea.

No. I'm only saying that it's dangerous, and that even if you truly think that such a belief would have the advantage of reflecting reality better, you still have to trade that against the disadvantage of it being extremely unsuited to your cultural environment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 08:42:51PM -1 points [-]

No. I'm only saying that it's dangerous, and that even if you truly think that such a belief would have the advantage of reflecting reality better, you still have to trade that against the disadvantage of it being extremely unsuited to your cultural environment.

And yet, you claim to be a socialist.

Comment author: Vulture 24 March 2012 07:59:58PM *  0 points [-]

I think we all seem to be forgetting that the point of this article is to help us enage in more productive debates, in which two rational people who hold different beliefs on an issue come together and satisfy Aumann's Agreement Theorem- which is to say, at least one person becomes persuaded to hold a different position from the one they started with. Presumably these people are aware of the relevant literature on the subject of their argument; the reason they're on a forum (or comment section, etc.) instead of at their local library is that they want to engage directly with an actual proponent of another position. If they're less than rational, they might be entering the argument to persuade others of their position, but nobody's there for a suggested reading list. If neither opponent has anything to add besides a list of sources, then it's not an argument- it's a book club.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 08:34:55PM 2 points [-]

I think we all seem to be forgetting that the point of this article is to help us enage in more productive debates, in which two rational people who hold different beliefs on an issue come together and satisfy Aumann's Agreement Theorem- which is to say, at least one person becomes persuaded to hold a different position from the one they started with.

Also, make sure that position is closer to the truth. Don't forget that part.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 March 2012 06:04:57PM 7 points [-]

I sometimes try to get myself to make better decisions by pretending I'm a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

This sounds like a more useful, more intuitive, much more widely applicable reification of my own method of "What Would Your TV Tropes Page Say?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 08:12:42PM 6 points [-]

"What Would Your TV Tropes Page Say?"

The problem with TV Tropes is that they've been heavily primed with fictional evidence.

Comment author: Crux 23 March 2012 05:39:00PM *  1 point [-]

I actually go out of my way to equate "god" and "AGI"/"superintelligence", because to a large extent they seem like the same thing to me.

Can you give me the common meanings of those terms, and explain how they're equivalent?

It's not that I want to identify as a theist, so much as that I want to point out that I think that the only reason people think that gods/angels/demons and AGIs/superintelligences/transhuman-intelligences are different things is because they're compartmentalizing.

Compartmentalizing in what way? I think they're different things, or rather it seems utterly obvious to me that religious people using the theistic terms are always using them to refer to things completely different than those on LW employing those other terms.

I should say though that the way that the theistic terms are used is in no way consistent, and everybody seems to mean something different (if I can even venture a guess as to what the hell they're talking about). There are multiple meanings associated with these terms, to say the least.

Maybe your conception is something like, "If there really is anything out there that could in any way match the description in Catholicism or whatever, then it would perhaps have to be an AGI, or else a super-intelligent life-form that evolved naturally."

I would say though that this seems like a desperate attempt to resurrect the irrationality of religion. If I came up with or learned something interesting or important, and also realized that some scholar or school of thought from the past or present had a few central conclusions or beliefs that seem sort of similar in some way, but believed them all for the wrong reasons--specifically ones absolutely insane by my own epistemic standards--I would not care. I would move on, and consider that tradition utterly useless and uninteresting.

I don't understand why you care. It's not like Aquinas or anybody else believed any of this stuff for the same reasons you do, or anything like that, so what's the point of being like, "Hey, I know these people came up with this stuff for some random other reasons, but it seems like I can still support their conclusions and everything, so yeah, I'm a theist!" It just doesn't make any sense to me, unless of course you think they came to those conclusions for good reasons that have anything at all to do with yours, in which case I need some elaboration on that point.

Either way, usually I can't even tell what the hell most religious people are talking about from an epistemic or clear communication standpoint. I used to think they were just totally insane or something, and I would make actual attempts to understand what they were trying to get me to visualize, but it all became clear when I started interpreting what they were saying in a different way. It all became clear when I started thinking about it in terms of them employing techniques to delude themselves into believing in an afterlife, or simply just believing it because of some epistemic vulnerability their brain was operating under.

Those theistic terms ("God" etc) have multiple meanings, and different people tend to use them differently, or rather they don't really have meanings at all, and they're just the way some people delude themselves into feeling more comfortable about whatever, or perhaps they're just mind viruses taking advantage of some well-known vulnerabilities found our hardware.

I can't for the life of me figure out why you want to retain this terminology. What use is it besides for contrarianism? Does calling yourself a theist and using the theistic terms actually aid in my or anybody else's understanding of what you're thinking, or what? Is the objective clear communication of something that would be important for me or other people on here to know, or what? I'm utterly confused at what you're trying to do, and what the supposed utility is, of these beliefs of yours and your way of trying to communicate them.

I think Aquinas and I believe in the same God, even if we think about Him differently.

What does that even mean? It sounds like the worst sort of sophistry, but I say that not necessarily to suggest you're making an error in your thinking, but simply to allude to how and why I have no exactly what that means.

(There's two different things going on: I believe there exists an ideal decision theory, Who is God, for theoretical reasons;

So you're defining the sequence of letters starting with "G", next being "o", and ending with "d" as "the ideal decision theory"? Is this a common meaning? Do all (or most of) the religious people I know IRL use that term to refer to the ideal decision theory, even if they wouldn't call it that?

And what do you mean by "ideal"? Ideal for what? Our utility functions? Maybe I even need to hear a bit of elaboration on what you mean by "decision theory". Are we talking about AI programming, or human psychology, or what?

whereas my reasons for believing that transhuman intelligences (lower-case-g gods) affect humans are entirely phenomenological.)

I literally have absolutely no idea why you chose the word "phenomenological" right there, or what you could possibly mean.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 08:01:23PM 5 points [-]

If I came up with or learned something interesting or important, and also realized that some scholar or school of thought from the past or present had a few central conclusions or beliefs that seem sort of similar in some way, but believed them all for the wrong reasons--specifically ones absolutely insane by my own epistemic standards--I would not care. I would move on, and consider that tradition utterly useless and uninteresting.

If I found a school of thought that seemed to come to correct conclusion unusually often but "believed them all for the wrong reasons--specifically ones absolutely insane by my own epistemic standards", I'd take that as evidence that there is something to their reasons that I'm missing.

So you're defining the sequence of letters starting with "G", next being "o", and ending with "d" as "the ideal decision theory"? Is this a common meaning?

Actually, yes. Specifically the tendency in Catholic thought to equate God with Plato's Form of the Good.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 March 2012 10:55:39AM 0 points [-]

That is worth noting, but of course looking at the proximate cause can only tell us so much. It's true that Catholics took a (IMO minor) part in the German reaction, but the underlying cause of that was the popular disillusionmnent with American-Marxist mimicry and policy, and the cause of that was the United States' leftist meddling in World War 1 and the armistice that followed.

As far as revolutions in Catholic countries, the Catholics should have more violently put down all threats to politico-religious authority. For that they can be blamed. Even so, it was a sin of omission, and there's little they could have done after the Reformation. The plague of chaos had already begun to spread.

That's my narrative, anyway. I'm not trying very hard to make it accurate, and so I don't trust in it much. I only started thinking about politics like three months ago.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 07:35:37PM 3 points [-]

As far as revolutions in Catholic countries, the Catholics should have more violently put down all threats to politico-religious authority. For that they can be blamed. Even so, it was a sin of omission, and there's little they could have done after the Reformation. The plague of chaos had already begun to spread.

And yet Protestant countries don't seem to have this problem despite being even less inclined to put rebellions down violently.

Comment author: Alsadius 23 March 2012 09:34:17PM 5 points [-]

I find it fascinating that nobody has yet considered the thought that Hermione may actually be guilty. Neither Harry nor anybody here seems to have noticed that confession(under truth serum!) is generally considered very strong evidence of guilt, certainly much more so than an appeal to demographics is evidence of innocence.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 07:26:43AM 2 points [-]

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one bothered by this.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 March 2012 04:22:05PM 5 points [-]

I don't mind the downvote -- but consider reversing it if my theory is proven right next chapter. :-)

If I know Vladimir at all then he will not - because to do so would be an error. Overconfidence is a function of your confidence and the information that you have available at the time. Vladimir finding out that it so happens that Eliezer writes the same solution that you do does not significantly alter his perception of how much information you had at the time you wrote that comment.

Even if you win a lottery buying the lottery ticket was still a bad decision.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 06:00:24AM *  3 points [-]

I think Eliezer's policy as expressed here is better.

I try not to downvote people when they are right.

Comment author: BlackNoise 23 March 2012 03:54:04PM 1 point [-]

Technically, the numbers don't have to work out - Lucius is the one on who's request the trial be held, If his debt can make him withdraw charges or clear Hermione's debt, that alone should suffice.

Still, while this is a clever idea, it doesn't sound very "Taboo Trade-off" or "Think of the Wizengamot as individuals instead of wallpaper".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 05:50:34AM 1 point [-]

How about: invoke Lucius's life debt. Trade it for Hermione's.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 23 March 2012 03:37:09PM *  1 point [-]

Peasants who were Catholics, taught by Catholic doctrine and engaged in a Crusade started by the Catholic Church. Yet you don't see such mobs systematically destroying entire Jewish villages in Protestant areas, and you don't see it in Russian Orthodox areas until the 1500s.

Protestantism didn't even exist until the 1500s. I don't see why/how you're making the comparison.

A bunch of peasants got out of hand, directly went against the wishes of the Church, and killed some people. (Not very many, either, in the grand scheme of things.) When it comes to crimes against humanity, this is about a 1.1 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the Church, maybe about 3 for the peasants.

There may be an illusion of transparency here. Very few people remember where that phrase came from even if they've heard some version.

Hm, fair enough, but I was under the impression that most intelligent people at least knew that the Church had killed all the Cathars, and that's why Cathars don't exist anymore.

And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them.

Somehow a lot of other religions have managed ok without doing that.

Managed what okay? No religion has managed to be as awesome as Catholicism, either. Catholics are responsible for universities.

I'm wondering if I'm misreading what you are saying here.. Are you arguing that the Catholic Church should kill Catholic heretics and groups that disagree because otherwise other groups who will be more violent will arise?

Well, they shouldn't do it anymore, for obvious reasons. But at that time it was a good idea. The Reformation led to a shift in values and political structures that reached one climax with the French revolution, heights never before seen with the Nazi camps and Soviet gulags, and will likely reach yet another climax with uFAI. The rise of atheism was the rise of sheer unadulterated Evil. It might have been better had the Church just killed all the protesters when they had the chance. But this is idle political speculation about counterfactual histories, so I mean, I'm probably horrifically wrong. But I could be horrifically right. It's hard to tell.

(ETA: By the way, I basically never get into "my side is better than your side" fights, and this fight is clearly inconsequential, so I'm mostly just having fun with it. Apologies if you were expecting me to be serious.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2012 03:55:40AM 2 points [-]

The Reformation led to a shift in values and political structures that reached one climax with the French revolution, heights never before seen with the Nazi camps and Soviet gulags,

It's worth noting that none of these revolutions happened in protestant countries, with the partial exception of the Nazis, and even there the movement started in the Catholic parts of the country.

Comment author: pedanterrific 22 March 2012 07:01:51PM 2 points [-]

Roberta had been increasingly apprehensive about giving her daughter over to witchcraft - especially after she'd read the books, put the dates together, and realized that her magical mother had probably been killed at the height of Grindelwald's terror, not died giving birth to her as her father had always claimed.

I'm having a hard time imagining how Hermione got two copies of the magic gene if they weren't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 06:35:48AM 2 points [-]

Has it been confirmed that magic is a single-gene trait?

Comment author: Dmytry 23 March 2012 04:05:24AM *  -2 points [-]

Nah, I'm speaking of the anthropogenic global warming vs no anthropogenic global warming 'debate', not of 1 degree vs 3 degrees type debate. For the most part, the AGW debate is focussed on the effect of CO2, sans the positive feedbacks, as the deniers won't even accept 1 degree of difference.

Speaking of which, one very huge positive feedback is that water vapour is a greenhouse 'gas'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 04:28:30AM 1 point [-]

I think the debate, and certainly the policy debate, is (in effect) about the catastrophic consequences of CO2.

Comment author: Multiheaded 22 March 2012 10:14:49AM *  0 points [-]

As for Aurini's comment, he's arguing that people (ok in his case women, but I'm generalizing) should be disrespected and treated with contempt when they behave in histrionic or otherwise inappropriate ways

Hmm, let's see...

most women are incredibly stupid, and quite useless without a strong male presence guiding them (says nothing about inappropriate behavior, only judges ability and character in a very aggressive way)

So do you agree with the line above, or not? Do you think that this is a good thing to feel and believe?

People like you are savage and destructive, and a symptom of just how badly feminism has poisoned our culture... I'm glad I live in Canada; we have far fewer violent, passive aggressive, wrecks of masculinity here than there seem to be in the United States.

What about this style of "argument"? Do you endorse it?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 04:12:46AM -1 points [-]

most women are incredibly stupid, and quite useless without a strong male presence guiding them (says nothing about inappropriate behavior, only judges ability and character in a very aggressive way)

He goes on to talk about "histrionic behaviour" in the next paragraph.

So do you agree with the line above, or not?

I'd assign it a lower probability then Aurini but probably higher then you.

People like you are savage and destructive, and a symptom of just how badly feminism has poisoned our culture... I'm glad I live in Canada; we have far fewer violent, passive aggressive, wrecks of masculinity here than there seem to be in the United States.

What about this style of "argument"? Do you endorse it?

No, I don't like bulverism.

Comment author: Multiheaded 22 March 2012 10:18:11AM 0 points [-]

I bet that, if you saw a world where all people were truly "held responsible for their actions" (and treated as agents, of course - a cardinal sin from my perspective), you'd recoil in horror and take that back.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:55:58AM *  3 points [-]

I bet that, if you saw a world where all people were truly "held responsible for their actions" [...], you'd recoil in horror and take that back.

Why? In this world the laws of nature already hold people responsible for people's actions, just not necessarily their own actions.

(and treated as agents, of course - a cardinal sin from my perspective)

From my perspective it is a cardinal sin not to, and given the results of capitalism vs. socialism I would argue I have a better case. Remember whether you model them as agents or not, people respond to incentives. If you refuse to treat them as agents, the incentives you give them are very likely to be perverse.

Also, I couldn't help but notice that you're treating both Aurini and myself as agents especially in this thread where you're trying to get me to repudiate Aurini's statements.

Comment author: Multiheaded 22 March 2012 10:24:58AM 0 points [-]

Sigh. Of course they're perfectly able to do other things! It's just that all the other people on the market are better at those other things.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:43:18AM 4 points [-]

Read the Wikipedia article on comparative advantage I linked to above. From the first example:

Two men live alone on an isolated island. To survive they must undertake a few basic economic activities like water carrying, fishing, cooking and shelter construction and maintenance. The first man is young, strong, and educated. He is also faster, better, and more productive at everything. He has an absolute advantage in all activities. The second man is old, weak, and uneducated. He has an absolute disadvantage in all economic activities. In some activities the difference between the two is great; in others it is small.

Despite the fact that the younger man has absolute advantage in all activities, it is not in the interest of either of them to work in isolation since they both can benefit from specialization and exchange. If the two men divide the work according to comparative advantage then the young man will specialize in tasks at which he is most productive, while the older man will concentrate on tasks where his productivity is only a little less than that of the young man. Such an arrangement will increase total production for a given amount of labor supplied by both men and it will benefit both of them.

I realize I should probably have just quoted the above rather than dancing around the topic for two comments. My apologies.

Comment author: AlexM 23 March 2012 02:53:10AM *  5 points [-]

I mean, jeez, have you seen how women behave in the workplace? They crave the occasional spanking.

Indeed, what workplace could be without discipline? Be assured that your boss, just like you, regrets the rotten and degenerate liberal age we are living in and looks forward to the day when he can properly discipline you.

2) Men with guns are always at the ready to take men away who dare discipline their women.

You are stronger than "your women" so you can discipline them at your pleasure. I don't see why you complain when the men with guns, who are stronger than you, discipline you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:28:10AM 1 point [-]

You are stronger than "your women" so you can discipline them at your pleasure. I don't see why you complain when the men with guns, who are stronger than you, discipline you.

Strawman. Aurini isn't arguing for disciplining women because their weaker. He's argument is that you should discipline women when they resort to histrionics.

Comment author: Dmytry 23 March 2012 12:19:27AM *  -2 points [-]

If there was a mechanism that simultaneously increased CO2 absorption, the levels wouldn't have been rising. For the measurements, you mean, like vast conspiracy that over reports the coal that is being burnt? Yes, that is possible, of course.

One shouldn't do motivated search, though. There is a zillion other mechanisms going on, of course, that increase, and decrease the effects. All the immediately obvious ones amplify the effect (e.g. warming releases CO2 and methane from all kinds of sources where it is dissolved; the snow is white and melts earlier in spring, etc). Of course, if one is to start doing motivated search either way, one could remain ignorant of those and collect the ones that work in opposite, and successfully 'counter' the warming. But that's cherry picking. If one is to just look around and report on what one sees there is a giant number of amplifying mechanisms, and few if any opposite mechanisms; which depend on the temperature and are thus incapable of entirely negating the warming because they need warming to work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:14:38AM 1 point [-]

All the immediately obvious ones amplify the effect

You mean like the fact that clouds are white and form more when it's warmer.

Comment author: gwern 22 March 2012 06:19:34PM 3 points [-]

Well, yeah, hence the mention of precommitting.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:05:52AM -2 points [-]

But 1% Gandhi has no reason to honor the precommitment.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 22 March 2012 06:36:01PM 1 point [-]

"I'm not saying my fellow candidate is a terrorist, but ladies and gentlemen, has he presented any conclusive evidence that he is not?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:04:11AM 1 point [-]

And I would argue you should have the right to make that statement.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 March 2012 04:39:59PM 1 point [-]

An expanding superintelligence sphere acts as a lightyears-wide optical lens, providing extremely redundant observations of far-off objects. This can be combined with superintelligent error-correction and image reconstruction. If you have multiple such superintelligences then you get even more angles. But yeah, I haven't done the actual calculations; it'd be super cool if someone else did them.

On another note, about six months ago I spent a few days looking at the quantum information theory literature trying to figure out if AIs could coordinate to reverse the past; I think I have enough knowledge to pose it as a coherent question to someone with a lot of knowledge of reversible computing and QIT. I'd like to do that someday.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 03:00:15AM 2 points [-]

I think I have enough knowledge to pose it as a coherent question to someone with a lot of knowledge of reversible computing and QIT. I'd like to do that someday.

I'm not a total expert, but try me.

Comment author: TimS 22 March 2012 05:10:48PM 0 points [-]

Not my downvote, but did you mean to assert geocentrism (sun round earth) rather than heliocentrism (earth round sun)?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2012 02:57:32AM 1 point [-]

Next thing you're going to claim that centrifugal force and the Coriolis effect don't exist.

Comment author: Daniel_Starr 21 March 2012 10:36:39AM *  9 points [-]

Wow. I like the idea that Dumbledore burned Narcissa, told Lucius and the other Death Eaters and consciously relied on his good reputation to ensure no one else would believe he'd done it. That's creepy. You're right, that does take care of the "how does he have such a positive reputation, then?" objection.

I still think Fawkes would have a problem with it unless he'd tried everything else first. Fawkes is presented as quite the moral absolutist. But maybe Fawkes wasn't around - and possibly he did try lesser measures first.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 March 2012 12:08:47AM 2 points [-]

I still think Fawkes would have a problem with it unless he'd tried everything else first.

If family members of order of the phoenix members are being killed on a daily basis, one doesn't quiet have the luxury of "trying everything else" first.

Comment author: Multiheaded 19 March 2012 10:48:28PM *  0 points [-]

Akrasia's a big problem for me.

Me too, but I'd hate, hate, hate someone running my life beyond the basic (friendly) pressure to study and give a helping hand that my parents put on me, so I'd consider it hypocritical to support a system of direct coercion in society, like the apprenticeship in medieval guilds.

Of course it's a shame if people, through mistakes or demotivation, can't set foot upon a path contributive to society, but I consider it to be beneath the modern civilization to just drag people to where some expert wants them to be. There should be some kind of positive stimulus for everyone that's simultaneously not turning things into a ruthless meritocratic race (e.g. the government coaxing some performance out of unmotivated young people with harmless drugs instead of the career and status they don't care about would still be unethical at the core).

That's one of the reasons why I'm so attracted to Socialist thought; it has wrestled long and hard with the problem of motivation, although it has produced nothing solid but various criticism of the existing solutions.

a more authoritarian parent who set goals and boundaries and so on

It's very understandable that you don't want to disclose private things, but this sentence tells nothing. What kinds of "goals" or "boundaries" would you consider acceptable, and from whom? (If the answers are like "Don't smoke weed while you live with your parents if they order you not to, although it shouldn't concern the government", then your view is utterly mainstream, of course. If it's "Parents can forbid you to look at any porn until you're 18 just because it's in the law", then I disagree. Sexual excitement is a basic human need while drugs aren't. Although some personality types DO seem to need an addiction, maybe for an additional reward structure in their life, more than others. Mine is INFP by the way, what's yours?)

EDIT: Dear downvoter, please cut this out. If you really, really want to punish me for "feeding the troll", look through my post history and downvote the less worthy ones, or reserve the downvote for future bad comments, but don't screw with the community's assessment of these ones. If my comment feels like an 1 or a -1 to LW, I hate it when someone turns it into a 0 and -2 according to some general principle unrelated to the content.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 11:55:10PM 2 points [-]

That's one of the reasons why I'm so attracted to Socialist thought; it has wrestled long and hard with the problem of motivation, although it has produced nothing solid but various criticism of the existing solutions.

The reason it's spent so long wrestling with the problem is that it refuses to accept the solution, namely holding people responsible for their actions.

Comment author: Multiheaded 21 March 2012 10:00:08AM *  3 points [-]

How the flying fuck does this have anything to do with publicly expressing disrespect and contempt for a genetically determined group of people, anyway? I agree that the issue of perceived fairness vs. market efficiency isn't clear-cut, but our attitude towards the people who get unlucky must be particularly sensitive.

Would you want Yudkowsky to call anyone who can't work on FAI or get qualified to do so a useless dullard whose only worth to society is donating to SIAI? If you wouldn't, why wouldn't you condemn Aurini's words?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 11:43:41PM *  0 points [-]

How the flying fuck does this have anything to do with publicly expressing disrespect and contempt for a genetically determined group of people, anyway?

Sorry, I was responding to your question about the difference between instrumental and intrinsic value.

As for Aurini's comment, he's arguing that people (ok in his case women, but I'm generalizing) should be disrespected and treated with contempt when they behave in histrionic or otherwise inappropriate ways, as this will cause them to stop it. Note that if someone is genetically or otherwise predisposed to act in such ways then it's necessary to apply even more pressure for them to stop.

Would you want Yudkowsky to call anyone who can't work on FAI or get qualified to do so a useless dullard whose only worth to society is donating to SIAI?

Well, he's more or less done something like that.

Comment author: Multiheaded 21 March 2012 10:09:35AM *  0 points [-]

Or are you saying that the 15% have zero marginal product

They would have had a pretty good marginal product if not for the top 25% of their minority, but they're only genetically predisposed towards one thing, and others like them (the top 25% who get hired) are superior to them at it. Nonetheless, the bottom 75% could still compete with people outside the group, if there was enough demand on the market for the only job they do so well. Yes, it's going to be a problem in any society - but it already is in some regards; there's no perfect solution, but what would you do about it in practice?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 11:27:46PM 2 points [-]

but they're only genetically predisposed towards one thing,

You seem to be confusing being "predisposed" to do something, with being unable to do anything else. Perhaps, I should have mentioned in my previous post how extremely implausible the zero marginal product scenerio, i.e., that they are literately incapable of doing anything else is.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 20 March 2012 01:59:29PM *  1 point [-]

I'd rather just not write posts than speculate about it, really. Any time spent writing posts I can instead use to try to convince other people to write posts, which I think my brain would also count as doing my part to avoid culpability for the predictable errors of others.

(Unrelated: Upon reflection, one of my posts was pretty okay, and I'd like it if someone did a second round of it soon, perhaps in the discussion section. Anyone who wants to do that, feel free to copy/paste.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 10:59:30PM 1 point [-]

Any time spent writing posts I can instead use to try to convince other people to write posts, which I think my brain would also count as doing my part to avoid culpability for the predictable errors of others.

This is a good time to apply TDT/the categorical imperative, to your strategy and see what you get. ;)

Comment author: Alsadius 20 March 2012 05:28:55PM 2 points [-]

That's a reasonable narrative. We'll have to wait to see exactly how it played out, of course, but I wouldn't find that version surprising at all.

Conversely, however, remember how many of the basic protections we take for granted that don't exist in the wizarding world. In a lot of ways it's a medieval society, and very few leaders from that era would have flinched at doing something utterly brutal to make a point. Even real-world terrorist groups try to pretend to play by the rules of civilized society, because those rules are so expected that ignoring them would damage their cause terribly. It's the same as dictators running "free elections" - they're not, but they pretend for the PR value. I doubt that PR value exists in the wizarding world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 05:15:25AM 2 points [-]

As a recent example compare the attitude towards bombing civilians before WWII, with what every side wound up doing during that war.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 21 March 2012 01:39:29AM 3 points [-]

Sorry I may have been unclear, the quote means that when accused of libel a defendant can be exonerated if they prove the statement to be true, however damaging it might have been shown to be by the prosecution.

So to count as libellous a statement must be both false and have done provable damage to reputation. As such the easiest way to prove a statement is not libellous is to show it is true.

Rather than, how I think you interpreted it as meaning, that when libelled one should tell the truth in response.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 04:15:17AM 1 point [-]

Unfortunately, at least in certain jurisdictions, the burden is on you to prove that what you say is true.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 21 March 2012 01:31:54AM 8 points [-]

Thanks, I've seen that before. What interested me about the reaction to it was every commentator decried them for suggesting babies should be killed, said that it would give weight to the arguments of anti-abortionists or that it showed how out of touch academics were with public opinion. But no-one gave an argument in response about why an 8 month abortion and a born baby are different in a morally relevant way. I had underestimated how much in general public discourse even discussing a morally condemned act was itself condemned.

In the context of slippery slopes, again this is moving between two adjacent points not showing you can just as easily move to any point on the scale.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 04:12:26AM 3 points [-]

In the context of slippery slopes, again this is moving between two adjacent points not showing you can just as easily move to any point on the scale.

Yes, and then we move to a point adjacent to the new point, and then to a point adjacent to the next point. This is how slippery slopes work.

Comment author: dlthomas 20 March 2012 05:54:40PM 0 points [-]

Is "demonstrably optimal policy" a shelling point or not?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 04:09:27AM 2 points [-]

Depends in the inferential distance to the "demonstrably" part. But otherwise yes, frequently even when the policy is "demonstrably optimal" with respect to something that's not quiet the right utility measure.

Comment author: Multiheaded 20 March 2012 09:03:05AM *  3 points [-]

It also requires him being apriori a better judge of instrumental value than the vast majority of women, and some truly vast good being created that outweighs the ugliness of publicly disrespecting and humiliating any entire gender in such away. Also, he never once even mentioned the dangers of judging moral significance as a caveat.

(To answer your question directly: I maintain that a person's total instrumental value as perceived by others is, especially in social relations, often nearly impossible to detach from intristic value, and an attempt to treat them separately can be very harmful for the subject and society at large. At risk of being downvoted, I'd like to mention once again that left-wing thought has been grappling with this problem since Marx.)

Anyway, would you mind elaborating? What is the precise position under which what's best for women requires treating them like third-class citizens?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 03:59:14AM -2 points [-]

Suppose there's a research project to do something important, say cure cancer, build FAI, etc. You will agree that it's best for everyone if it's staffed by the best people, even though it's in some sense "unfair" to the people who will be denied the chance to participate in such a prestigious project because of their genes and/or upbringing.

The same principal applies to other projects where for the same reason it makes sense to assign people based to their comparative advantage. Now you may be asking, "Who decides what someone's comparative advantage is and what about their biases?" Turns out there is a system that does a reasonably good job allocating people base on their comparative advantage and also avoids the problem of having a central judge of people's value. It's called the free market.

Comment author: Multiheaded 20 March 2012 10:02:08AM *  0 points [-]

Color-blind policies and other "objective" policies in hiring, etc can easily be taken to an absurd conclusion when you end up rewarding and punishing people, by means of status at the very least, for their genes.

Imagine that racial group X, which makes up 20% of a given nation, has been proven at great length to be strongly genetically predisposed towards inferiority at all but 5% of jobs in that society. What do you do when the remaining 15% are forced to compete in an environment where most of them are more or less handicapped from birth? Do you leave them to beg and scrounge? Put them on welfare? Create low-status make-work?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 March 2012 03:33:46AM *  2 points [-]

Imagine that racial group X,

The racial part here is irrelevant and is only serving to mind-kill you.

which makes up 20% of a given nation, has been proven at great length to be strongly genetically predisposed towards inferiority at all but 5% of jobs in that society.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The distribution of jobs in society isn't written down on tablets. If they have some comparative advantage then the market can find niches for them. Or are you saying that the 15% have zero marginal product? In that case, it's going to be a problem no matter how you organize society and pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go away.

Comment author: MinibearRex 19 March 2012 03:34:52AM *  1 point [-]

I like the guess about Quirrellmort trying to remove Harry's allies, but there's a further detail I'm considering. Quirrellmort knows that Harry knows how to break people out of Azkaban. If Hermione is sent there, I would estimate a pretty high probability Harry would make a move to get her out. He would have to do something clever to divert suspicion away from himself, but that doesn't seem to be an insoluble problem. If Quirrell wanted to prevent this, the simplest way would be to blackmail Harry, but doing so would require him to overtly take a position as Harry's enemy, which he may not wish to do. Alternatively, he could sabotage Harry's plans, but Harry would almost certainly try again.

Any situation in which Harry knows that Hermione is in trouble is an unstable equilibrium, and Quirrell presumably knows that.

Additionally, you take it for granted that Quirrellmort is trying to turn Harry dark. What's the basis for that conclusion? I've got one guess, but it seems far-fetched.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2012 04:46:45AM 3 points [-]

Quirrellmort doesn't have to stop Harry, just make sure Hermione is already broken by the time he succeeds.

Comment author: matheist 19 March 2012 05:06:10AM *  5 points [-]

It wasn't Snape's choice to humiliate Hermione publicly — that was Dumbledore's decision, making use of Snape's "evil potions master" persona. Note that none of the other professors speak up, except for Quirrell, who is a temporary hire and need not follow Dumbledore's direction. Minerva doesn't even show up, presumably so that she doesn't have to sit and keep her mouth shut.

Dumbledore explains to Harry in chapter 77 that Hermione had to be seen to lose publicly in order to de-escalate the conflict with Slytherin. Dumbledore doesn't actually know that Snape was involved in escalating the conflict.

I'm still not sure why Snape wanted to escalate conflict between the bullies and SPHEW, but regardless, we can't look at his humiliation of Hermione as any evidence of his motives, because it's not actually his move.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2012 04:32:12AM 3 points [-]

I'm still not sure why Snape wanted to escalate conflict between the bullies and SPHEW, but regardless, we can't look at his humiliation of Hermione as any evidence of his motives, because it's not actually his move.

I suspect it's because we wanted SPHEW to really go after bullies and wasn't a competent enough plotter to foresee what would happen.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 March 2012 01:22:36AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for that link.

It occurred to me that Eliezer's intuitions for moderation may not be calibrated to the modern Internet, where there really is a forum for people at every level of intelligence: Yahoo Answers, Digg, Facebook, 4chan, Tagged (which is basically the smaller but profitable successor to MySpace that no one intelligent has heard of), etc. I saw the Reddit community denigrate, but Reddit was a case of the smart people having legitimately better software (and therefore better entertainment through better chosen links). Nowadays, things are more equalized and you don't pay much of a price in user experience terms for hanging out on a forum where the average intelligence is similar to yours.

Robin Hanson recently did the first ever permanent banning on Overcoming Bias, and that was for someone who was unpleasant and made too many comments, not someone who was stupid. (Not sure how often Robin deletes comments though, it does seem to happen at least a little.)

If we don't downvote, comments on average get positive karma - which makes people post them more and more.

I don't think this effect is very significant. I find it implausible that people post more comments on Hacker News, where comments are hardly ever voted down below zero, because it gets them karma. But even if they do, Hacker News is a great, thriving community. I would love it if we adopted a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.

I like the idea of promote/agree/disagree buttons somewhat.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2012 03:54:14AM *  5 points [-]

I would love it if we adopted a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.

We already have a system where you can only downvote a number of comments up to four times your karma.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 19 March 2012 02:46:35AM *  0 points [-]

I never thought I would hear a plausible defence of slippery slope arguments.

An interesting analogy is with the Sorites or 'heap' paradox, and mathematical induction. In the paradox you show that one grain of sand is not a heap, and that two grains are not a heap, and three.... so you generalise that for if N grains of sand is not a heap then N+1 grains is also not a heap. Therefore 10^1000 grains of sand cannot be a heap, and there are no heaps!

Obviously the problem is that the premise isn't true for any arbitrary N, (unlike cases of mathematical induction where you prove them to work for an arbitrary number).

Similarly with slippery slope arguments, proving that you can move between two points does not mean you can equally easily move to any other point. For example it is plausible that if abortion term limits were changed from say 16 weeks to 17 they might be more likely to move t0 18 in the future. But That doesn't logically imply we will therefore kill born babies.

Edit: Not sure why this has been downvoted so much, did I misunderstand something about the post?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2012 03:51:15AM 9 points [-]

But That doesn't logically imply we will therefore kill born babies.

You may want to look at this.

Comment author: Multiheaded 19 March 2012 07:38:15AM *  4 points [-]

Dude, let me be honest. I was testing you with those two links. The result was far below my expectations. I'm not going to speak too much about it, looks like Less Wrong has already told you the basics anyway ITT.

I think that your behaviour, while influence-seeking, is unwise to dismiss as that of a "Troll". Moreover, I don't believe you to be outright "evil" (we have plenty of incompatible values, though, but I've first to examine the nature and pattern of these values to see where a clash is inevitable and where a compromise is worth it).

However, I basically support those attacks on you. Everything which consigns ANY group to a higher or lower perch on humanity's imaginary "moral order" on the sole basis of its genes*, however those genes might influence abilities and behavior - especially if it tries to look fair by giving members of a lower group the chance to redeem themselves and be treated like "normals", but the entire burden of proof is upon them, and only the group who demoted their status might make the exception; anyone else, especially a known egalitarian, and it's "white knighting", or "nigger-loving pinko subversive", or "bought by the Jews", etc (which you pulled on Alicorn, whom you would've never brought up as a positive example if you knew her in the exact same way, through the exact same writings, but not as a high-status regular of the community you're targeting; you could only be expected to attack and complain about her then)...
- it all fucking stinks to me. It is vile. There can be no compromise about this particular issue.

And I maintain that if the diverse collection of the highly predictable contrarians who want to spread the gospel of innate genetic differences don't soon change their tune to underscore the importance of equal moral significance for groups in the larger society's eyes - why, then the supposed corrupt and subversive order which steers mainstream discourse would be entirely justified in treating such contrarians as short-sighted, destructive meddlers who are too smart for society's unspoken agreements, and I'll feel obliged to do my part in censuring them, even if I might perceive their factual claims to be more correct than the mainstream view.

*(even sociopaths; I used to dream of governments wising up and treating them like fourth-class citizens, but I changed my mind)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2012 03:38:51AM -2 points [-]

What do you mean by "equal moral significance"? Do you mean equal intrinsic value or equal instrumental value? Because Aurini's position only requires unequal instrumental value.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 March 2012 04:31:35AM *  -1 points [-]

In the public mind Rousseau and Marx and their intellectual progeny are generally seen as cosmically connected/intelligent/progressive, right? Maybe overzealous, but their hearts were in the right place. If so that would support the intelligence=goodness claim. If the Enlightenment is good by the lights of the public, then the uFAI-Antichrist is good by the lights of the public. [Removed section supporting this claim.] And who are we to disagree with the dead, the sheep and the shepherds?

(ETA: Contrarian terminology aside, the claim looks absurd without its supporting arguments... ugh.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 05:31:39AM 1 point [-]

(ETA: Contrarian terminology aside, the claim looks absurd without its supporting arguments... ugh.)

Why exactly did you remove that section?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 March 2012 04:31:35AM *  -1 points [-]

In the public mind Rousseau and Marx and their intellectual progeny are generally seen as cosmically connected/intelligent/progressive, right? Maybe overzealous, but their hearts were in the right place. If so that would support the intelligence=goodness claim. If the Enlightenment is good by the lights of the public, then the uFAI-Antichrist is good by the lights of the public. [Removed section supporting this claim.] And who are we to disagree with the dead, the sheep and the shepherds?

(ETA: Contrarian terminology aside, the claim looks absurd without its supporting arguments... ugh.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 05:17:53AM 2 points [-]

In the public mind Rousseau and Marx and their intellectual progeny are generally seen as cosmically connected/intelligent/progressive, right?

Depends on which subset of the public we're talking about.

Maybe overzealous, but their hearts were in the right place. If so that would support the intelligence=goodness claim.

I'm confused, is this an appeal to popular opinion?

If the Enlightenment is good by the lights of the public, then the uFAI-Antichrist is good by the lights of the public.

Of course. "And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him [the beast/dragon]" Revelations 13:8

And who are we to disagree with the dead, the sheep and the shepherds?

People in a position to witness the practical results of their philosophy.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 March 2012 02:39:41AM 8 points [-]

Yeah, this is a serious problem and it made me cringe a lot while reading the dialogue. I'm going to email Luke to ask if he'd like my help in understanding what Goertzel is saying. I wonder if dialogues should always have a third party acting as a translator whenever two people with different perspectives meet.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 04:51:14AM 2 points [-]

The problem is finding third parties capable of acting as a translator is hard.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 6 Tips for Productive Arguments
Comment author: Zaine 19 March 2012 04:07:44AM *  1 point [-]

I tend to do this often as part of serving as a 'moderator' of discussions/arguments, even when it's just me and another. It's useful to perceive the other party's (parties') argument as merely a podium upon which their belief rests, and then endeavor to identify, with specificity, their belief or position. Colloquially, the result would be something like:

  • Not you: "I think that, it just doesn't seem right, that, even without being given even a chance, the baby just dies. It's not right how they have no say at all, you know?"

  • You: "So, your position is..." In verbal communications you can at this point briefly pause as if you're carefully considering your words in order to allow an opportunity for their interjection of a more lucidly expressed position. "...that the fetus (and I'm just using the scientific terminology, here), has value equal to that of a grown person in moral considerations? [If confused:] I mean, that when thinking about an abortion, the fetus' rights are equal to that of the mother's?"

[As shown above, clarify one point at a time. Your tone must be that of one asking for clarification on a fact. More, "The tsunami warning was cancelled before or after the 3/14 earthquake hit?" than, "You've been wrong before; you sure?"]

  • Not you: "Yea, such is mine position."

  • You: "And, due to the fetus' having equal moral standing to the mother, abortions thus are an unjust practice?"

  • Not you: "Aye."

Be careful with these clarification proceedings, though. If by framing their arguments you happen to occlude the actual reasoning of their argument, due to them not knowing it themselves or otherwise, the entire rest of the argument could be a waste of time predicated upon a falsely framed position. Suggestions of possible solutions include:

  • Asking whether they are sure the framed argument accurately expresses the reason for their position on the matter; not framing at all, but jumping right into the hypothetical probing and allowing for them to explore the issue enough to provide a confident statement of their position; going straight to the hypothetical probing, using their responses to form a mental estimation of their actual position, steel man-ing that mental estimation, and proceeding to argue upon the presumption your steel-man is accurate, updating as necessary.

From then on, you now have at your disposal vetted statements of their position that are intricate with their arguments. Subsequent arguments can then be phrased as hypotheticals: "What if EEG scans, which monitor brain waves, only showed the fetus as having developed brain activity akin to that of a grown person (the mother, say) at four months? Would that mean that at four months the fetus becomes developed enough to be considered equal to the mother?"

This way you can inquire after their exact position, why they hold that position, and without taking a side gather whether they're open to accepting another position whilst presenting viable alternatives in a reasoned and unobtrusive fashion. If you wish to defuse an argument, simply pointing out that party X holds to alternative II, and asking whether they can understand why party X holds to alternative II, should be enough to at least start smothering the fuse.

Note: The use of 'should' when expressing ideals implies a position of righteous power, and should (please decry me if I am unjustified in taking on this position of righteous power) never be used in an argument, regardless of whether it's self contained within a hypothetical. In my experience its use tends to only reinforce beliefs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 04:31:59AM 4 points [-]

This way you can inquire after their exact position, why they hold that position, and without taking a side gather whether they're open to accepting another position whilst presenting viable alternatives in a reasoned and unobtrusive fashion.

What you actually appear to be doing in this exchange is framing the debate (this is not a neutral action) under the guise of being a neutral observer. If your arguer is experienced enough to see what you're doing, he will challenge you on it probably in a way that will result in a flame war. If he isn't experienced enough he may see what appears to be a logical argument that somehow doesn't seem persuasive and this may put him off the whole concept of logical arguing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 04:11:37AM 1 point [-]

This is a list of tips for having "productive" arguments. For the purposes of this list, "productive" means improving the accuracy of at least one person's views on some important topic. By this definition, arguments where no one changes their mind are unproductive.

Sometimes the onlookers will change their position. When arguing with someone sufficiently mind-killed about a topic (and yes there are people like that on lesswrong), that's the best you can hope for.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 04:08:41AM 12 points [-]

Don't Straw Man Fellow Arguers, Steel Man Them Instead

Be careful with this one. I've been in arguments where in attempting to steel-man their position only to discover that they don't agree with what I thought was the steel man.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 19 March 2012 02:14:47AM *  3 points [-]

Nordhaus's position to me seems to be stronger than you make it out to be. Here's the thing: even in the Soviet repression some academics risked their lives to speak out. You'd expect at least that much speaking out then among academics in the relevant fields when all they have to risk is their academic careers. Yet, in the relevant disciplines, one doesn't see much of any at all. Similarly, if repression of some form were serious, one would expect that the tenure system would cause more people to be free to speak out and one would expect a lot more vocal expressions of dissent from tenured professors than non-tenured faculty, but there doesn't seem to be such a pattern.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2012 02:38:04AM 3 points [-]

You'd expect at least that much speaking out then among academics in the relevant fields when all they have to risk is their academic careers.

Well, this is an example that I linked to elsewhere in this thread.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 18 March 2012 11:47:50AM *  3 points [-]

worldly ambitious intelligent people seem to be among the most conspicuously amoral

That's true and important, but stereotypical worldly intelligent people rarely "grave new values on new tables", and so might be much less intelligent than your Rousseaus and Hammurabis in the sense that they affect the cosmos less overall. Even worldly big shots like Stalin and Genghis rarely establish any significant ideological foothold. The memes use them like empty vessels.

But even so, the omnipresent you-claim-might-makes-right counterarguments remain uncontested. Hard to contest them.

Humans are friendlier than chimpanzees but less friendly than bonobos, and across the tree of life niceness and nastiness don't seem to have any relationship to computational power.

It's hard to tell how relevant this is; there's much discontinuity between chimps and humans and much variance among humans. (Although it's not that important, I'm skeptical of claims about bonobos; there were some premature sensationalist claims and then some counter-claims, and it all seemed annoyingly politicized.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 March 2012 05:33:08PM 3 points [-]

That's true and important, but stereotypical worldly intelligent people rarely "grave new values on new tables", and so might be much less intelligent than your Rousseaus and Hammurabis in the sense that they affect the cosmos less overall.

However, non-worldly intelligent people like Rousseau and Marx frequently give the new values that make people like Robespierre and Stalin possible.

Comment author: sketerpot 18 March 2012 07:44:54AM 2 points [-]

(And where, arguably, honest pursuit of truth will lead one to disagree with the respectable opinion.)

I know that discussing politics is Dangerous, but this is too tantalizing to ignore. Do you have any examples?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 March 2012 05:07:10PM 9 points [-]

Try this thread.

Comment author: gwern 18 March 2012 01:32:47AM 0 points [-]

The selfish gene could try not to waste resources raising children that are not possessing the gene. That works even better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-beard_effect

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 March 2012 02:20:19AM *  1 point [-]

I'm not sure Green-beard effects can actually occur in practice since a mutation that kept the Green beard while destroying the pathway for self-altruism would out-compete the original Green beards.

Comment author: hankx7787 16 March 2012 06:22:04PM 6 points [-]

I looked into this issue and found no conclusive evidence of any global warming, let alone AGW or any catastrophic warming trends. Granted, this was several years ago. So where's the evidence? links?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 10:21:37PM 6 points [-]

There's this presentation by Richard Lindzen to the British House of Commons explaining why the predictions of catastrophic consequence of global warming are BS.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 10:02:47PM *  0 points [-]

The selfish gene could try not to waste resources raising children that are not possessing the gene. That works even better.

I think it is mostly learned what to be jealous about, possibly with some evolutionary assist that is nowhere as specific as jealousy, and has a lot of side effects. Furthermore, there are cultures where the host offers wives to strangers, as a form of hospitality. Possibly to breed more wives (I just came up with evo psych explanation for this on spot).

It's awful easy to rationalize any moral system evolutionarily, that's why it isn't good science.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 10:10:41PM 1 point [-]

The selfish gene could try not to waste resources raising children that are not possessing the gene. That works even better.

If a single gene could do that, it probably would.

You still haven't presented any plausible explanation for why the meme of jealousy would arise at all.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 09:28:05PM *  0 points [-]

Then how come people are much more likely to get depressed in response to certain high level stimuli (e.g., loosing a job) than others (e.g., getting a promotion)?

Because the learned meaning of 'losing a job' and 'getting a promotion' includes learned reference to the systems that should be activated (feel good / feel bad).

edit: here. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3812538?uid=3738480&uid=2&uid=4&sid=47698770891867

Let's pick example towards which we are neutral but majority of the world isn't: the future wife not being a virgin. Some cultures outright kill for that. edit: and another example: no underage sex, which we feel ultra strongly about but many other cultures (especially the ones that kill for not being a virgin) couldn't care less. edit: and to top that off, there's participation in killing of your own children for this reproductive 'offence', in some cultures. Note that it is not some infanticide by a male. That's destruction of a descendant on which massive amount of resources have already been spent.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 09:42:56PM 1 point [-]

So are you trying to argue that male sexual jealousy is a learned behavior?

My argument for it being genetic is that it makes sense that a selfish gene wouldn't want you to waste resources raising children that aren't your own, whereas there is no reason for selfish memes to care.

Comment author: DanArmak 17 March 2012 09:11:02PM 2 points [-]

I don't believe that one of the professors who have never appeared onstage in HPMOR could be revealed to play such a central role. Also not those who have appeared very marginally and have not been actually characterized (Flitwick, Trelawney). We also have no reason to attribute motive to one of them.

Minerva is, as you say, definitely innocent - because we have a scene from her POV.

This leaves, for practical purposes, only Snape and Dumbledore. It's not impossible for there to be a reveal of either one, but the obvious answer is indeed obvious. Nevertheless:

Snape is suitably evil, smart, and with reason to hurt Quirrel (he's afraid of him), possibly Harry (after their talk about James Potter), possibly Draco (private war against remaining Death Eater factions or bad blood against Malfoys), and no reason for Hermione that I can think of.

Dumbledore... It doesn't seem his style, does it? :-) Certainly if he take him at his word, he believes this to be a heavy blow against himself and Harry. He could have a motive yet to be revealed, but I don't believe this is possible in a story-management sense.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 09:33:12PM 2 points [-]

Also not those who have appeared very marginally and have not been actually characterized (Flitwick, Trelawney). We also have no reason to attribute motive to one of them.

How's their motive relevant if they're under imperious?

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 08:44:00PM *  0 points [-]

Yes, but wouldn't it be useful to have an effective, straightforward detector, to complement any detection by deductive methods of reasoning? (ala Sherlock Holmes finds that the wife is cheating at him (if he had one ofc)).

To be honest I am really dubious that DNA can code for the responses to products of high level deductive reasoning. It can code for overall proneness to depression, and proneness to anger. The deductive skills are learnt, why won't be the response learnt as well?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 09:24:31PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but wouldn't it be useful to have an effective, straightforward detector, to complement any detection by deductive methods of reasoning?

I'm not saying other methods don't exist, just describing what I believe to be the one most often used.

To be honest I am really dubious that DNA can code for the responses to products of high level deductive reasoning. It can code for overall proneness to depression, and proneness to anger. The deductive skills are learnt, why won't be the response learnt as well?

Then how come people are much more likely to get depressed in response to certain high level stimuli (e.g., loosing a job) than others (e.g., getting a promotion)?

It's impossible to have a learning system without inductive biases. Thus our initial inductive biases must be genetic. So why is it unreasonable to suppose that they've been adapted to some ancestral environment?

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 08:26:02PM *  0 points [-]

Maybe, if that had time to evolve. It is pretty ridiculous to expect this to evolve really quickly though.

Practical incest avoidance can evolve long before pleistocene, and work by smell; the jealousy can also be activated by penis detecting semen in the vagina (and inflaming by immune response, provoking much anger, or simply sending an unambiguous signal to the mind to act in jealous manner if it is a loved one). It's not a good sign if one finds that only the solutions which are hard to separate from culture do evolve.

edit: that is not to say one should search under the spotlight, but if you see a key-shape outside the spotlight there's far greater chance it is an error of visual system.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 08:34:13PM *  2 points [-]

Incest avoidance probably uses imprinting.

But things like sexual jealousy use a similar mechanism that makes us feel sad if we find some we cared about died regardless of how we found out about it, and quite frankly possibly the same mechanism that causes us to believe Y after thinking about X->Y and X regardless of how we came to believe X->Y or X.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 08:00:02PM *  1 point [-]

When you start tabooing a phrase used by the argument you are arguing against, and rewording said argument, if that is at all effective for clarifying the situation you get accused of making strawmans. It'd be wonderful if I could taboo the word 'module' and then see what evolutionary psychologists tell in response.

But okay, i'll do that:

The gist of the evo-psych that I disagree with - and I don't even disagree with all of the evo-psych - is that the areas of neocortex are highly specialized, into hundreds, maybe thousands different patches that perform substantially different function, operating using domain specific innate knowledge that has evolved (and comes from DNA) to perform the function. The patches somehow well integrate together, albeit it is not made clear how.

There is a substantial disagreement among evolutionary psychologists as to number of, and nature of, the modules, sorry, specialized patches of the neocortex. In so much as there's such disagreement, the theories that propose smaller number of simpler adaptations should be strongly favoured because of the prior that evolution is less likely to produce more complex adaptations.

If there is a fact that gazelle sees backwards (from observed behaviour), the eyes being on the sides should be very strongly favoured over evolution of an extra eye on the back.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 08:10:32PM 1 point [-]

All I'm claiming is that we have built in biases (in the sense of inductive bias not cognitive bias) about

incest avoidance, sexual attraction, mate choice, jealousy, mate retention, allocation of parental resources, kin relations, alliance formation, aggressive threat

and that these biases are the result of evolution.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 07:46:05PM *  0 points [-]

The gazelle sees backwards by moving eyes to the sides rather than by evolving eye on back of the head.

Ignoring the mechanisms is very foolish. edit: also many of the evolutionary psychologists propose a large number of domain specific modules as a mechanism, which is akin to proposing back eye as the means by which gazelle sees backwards. The gazelle ain't going to evolve the eye on back of the head, it got 2 eyes which it can move around gradually.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 07:47:53PM 1 point [-]

Not when most of your evidence is in the form of observations of behavior rather than counting number of eyes.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 07:23:41PM *  0 points [-]

That could work, though i'm very wary of the software analogies. The software in general makes extremely poor analogy to software in form of learning algorithms like the neural networks.

The way I see it, there are certain cognitive modules - a small number of them, well identified - and instincts, emotions, reflexes. Parameters of those can be adjusted by evolution. The evolution can also adjust network properties, perhaps even with some specificity. At same time, evolution is not substantially better at creating specialized modules than at other morphology, and the pleistocene evolution to our psyche is comparable in extent to pleistocene evolution to our bodies - we could up or down regulate the anger, but we did not evolve new emotions, or new hard wired things to be angry about, or new hard-wired cognitive fallacies.

And we definitely shouldn't evoke evolution as explanation for everything, as per "Given the enormous number of adaptive problems our Pleistocene ancestors faced, Tooby and Cosmides estimate that the human mind consists of "hundreds or thousands" of such evolved modules (1995, p. 1189). Thus inspired, Evolutionary Psychologists postulate evolved modules for incest avoidance, sexual attraction, mate choice, jealousy, mate retention, allocation of parental resources, kin relations, alliance formation, aggressive threat, danger avoidance, food preferences, habitat choice, and so on for all manner of complex cognitive and behavioral functions (Tooby & Cosmides 1992, p. 110)."

(quoting from this review: http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm )

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 07:46:16PM 1 point [-]

Could you taboo the phrase "cognitive module".

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 07:29:17PM *  1 point [-]

Other issue is that the evolutionary psychology escapes into describing every single behaviour as evolved, instead of considering the politically loaded option that e.g. some races can be more regulated for violence than others, as result of selective pressure, instead of evolving some nice sounding cognitive module that resolves their problems in non-violent way, or only leads to some fine grained violence. In the evolutionary psychology there's little talk of adjustment of basic pre-existing emotions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 07:44:37PM 2 points [-]

That's more because evolutionary psychologists are more concerned with describing behavior than the details of the mechanism by which that behavior comes about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 07:02:33PM *  3 points [-]

Lined slate as a prior

I think a better analogy is to think of the brain as a computer that comes with an operating system and some programs pre-installed. It's possible to instal new programs, and possible although much harder to patch the operating system.

Comment author: Dmytry 16 March 2012 10:39:57AM *  -1 points [-]

Immune system is way old. Why is it just the complex algorithms we don't quite understand, that we think evolve quickly in mammals, but not the obvious things like retinal pigments, number of eyes, number of limbs, etc? Why we 'evolve support for language' in the time during which we barely adapt our legs to walking on flat surface again?

The emotional responses and desires are, to some extent, evolved, but the complex mechanisms of calculation which objects to desire have to be created from scratch.

The brain does 100 steps per second, 8 640 000 steps per day, 3 153 600 000 steps per year. The evolution does 1 step per generation. There are very tight bounds on what functionality could evolve in a given timeframe. And there is a lot that can be generated in very short time by the brain.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 06:58:43PM 1 point [-]

Immune system is way old.

So are eyes.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 05:19:32PM *  1 point [-]

The brain is adaptable, but the development process isn't. You connect neurons by steering the growth cones through chemical gradients. Using the genes that affect large number of neurons at once.

Consider a centipede with, say, 40 segments. It is so flexible that it can lose a lot of legs and still walk, yet so rigid that you'll have real trouble making a mutation which affects just the 27th segment (losing legs on it), requiring a lot of generations to specialize an ancient centipede into an insect (or spider, or crustacean). Why so? Because there aren't 40 segments in the DNA, there's 5..6 cell divisions when making cells that become the segments later. You need a whole lot of regulatory genes to just start addressing the segments individually from DNA. The DNA is not a blueprint.

That being said, I do agree that brain's neuroplasticity can take advantage of some mutation that's bridging two areas of the brain. How to use the data that comes over the bridge, however, is up to neuroplasticity to figure out.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 06:18:13PM 1 point [-]

You connect neurons by steering the growth cones through chemical gradients. Using the genes that affect large number of neurons at once.

Directly effecting neural growth patterns isn't the only way for genes to effect human behavior. Consider for example, the effect on human behavior of drugs like caffeine, alcohol, anti-depressants, etc. Keep in mind any drug effect can be approximately stimulated by affecting any of the steps in the chemical cascade the drug uses.

Comment author: Dmytry 16 March 2012 10:58:46PM *  0 points [-]

It's not about size of the change, it's about the complexity of the change. Increasing the brain size by four times is not a very complex change; some minor tweaks aren't either. edit: Also, the differences between chimp and human are pretty consistent with plain increase in the volume (and number of neurons), if you control for, hmm, cultural differences. You can teach chimps sign language; chimps can use and invent tools. We do it better, of course - larger brains are more powerful, perhaps the longer childhood also helps, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 06:14:09PM *  1 point [-]

So would you say the differences in behavior between wolves and dogs, or between different dog breeds, are purely the result of differences in their brain size?

Comment author: Nile 17 March 2012 12:06:53AM 4 points [-]

It's bad form to reply to my own post, but a strong cup of tea has invigorated me with some ideas that follow on from building the first working beam engine.

I'm introducing a second invention, halfway through, because you need something to pump industrial quantities of capital as well as water.

Firstly, you probably won't have the cashflow to purchase another mine and build another engine for at least a decade. Not unless you're mining silver, or there's a severe economic supply contraint on copper, tin, or whatever you're extracting, permitting you to make extraordinary profits.

You will have the cashflow to improve - and probably replace - your engine, your workshop, and your craftsmmen in two or three years.

You now have a business model. No, TWO business models.

Firstly, municipal water supply already exists in the Roman Empire: there's an existing demand for big beam-engine pumps, and you can demonstrate a profitable and reliable working model. Your craftsmen might defect and start up a rival business - if they can get capital (which they can't) or interest a Patrician - but you can let them go, secure in the knowledge that they can only ever copy what you've already done.

They cannot compete with your next technological improvement, or the one after: your emerging commercial rivals are no better than the industrial pioneers and inventors who took decades to develop things that you know completely, a century ahead of their best possible learning-curve.

Your second business model is that you know where the all good ore lodes are, and how to get at them - flooded or not. Even if you don't, mine-owners with a flooding problem are going to tell you where the few known ones are...

...But developing those resources still needs far more capital than you possess; and your objective is to become Emperor, not just a provider of steam pumps to grand patricians with an ore lode, and Proconsuls with a municipal supply problem.

No, you need a second invention: the Joint Stock Company. Lots of wealthy families and merchants would love to have something to invest their money in - Rome's a surprisingly rigid economy, above a certain level of family wealth - and you've got an idea they can see working.

So: get the articles drawn up - and sworn before a Quaestor (and a Vestalis if you want it to be a convincing demonstration of good faith that'll get people killed for suborning or betraying) - and open up another mine.

And another. And a bigger one, with a horse-drawn tramway to move the ore and the coal. Lucky you, knowing the Mass Haul calculation, and the principles of bridge design, soil mechanics, and a simple optical level...

So now you have cashflow, an expanding demand for steel and machine tools, bulk transportation, and coal. And capital.

Sounds like an industrial revolution, right there.

And you're always going to be first with the right technology, at the right time: whatever significant technology anyone else invents - or copies - you will always know its flaws and how they were overcome in subsequent improvement and developments - or how that particular technology was superseded by something far, far better when materials became available.

You also have a substantial political power base among your shareholders: merchants and mid-level patrician families who will, within a decade or two, be wealthier than the entire senatorial class of Rome.

Purple rather suits me, don't you think?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 05:16:25PM 2 points [-]

No, you need a second invention: the Joint Stock Company.

You might have infeential distance problems explaining that one.

Comment author: bramflakes 16 March 2012 11:12:50PM 3 points [-]

What is the most recent time period in which one could be transported to (with full 2012 knowledge), and still have a high chance of taking over the world, or at least a powerful country or nation-state?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 05:10:12PM 3 points [-]

I'm not convinced this is a simple cutoff. In particular it seems like it would be easier to take over the world during time periods when there exist large empires that have done some of the work for you.

Comment author: Dmytry 17 March 2012 02:36:28AM *  0 points [-]

Who are you to say that I am making a mistake that a lot of people without experience programming computers make? Adjust your priors: I am successful software programmer, working in computer graphics, for quite a long time. That's how i earn my living. In my life i wrote all sorts of software (of course not literally all, but still rather significant coverage). I'd say I am not making a mistake that a lot of people with little experience programming would make.

The whole point is that evolution is not generating most of the algorithms. Evolution generated a few, including a very powerful learning algorithm, which took very long time (note that power doesn't equate to complexity; evolution itself is not very complex but is rather powerful). The very powerful learning algorithm allows to adapt to environment on-spot, as well as to the brain modifications. There are algorithms adding computer power to which allows to do 'new tricks'. The new human behaviours, too, are not all that new - different in the extent, rather than in essence. We - not even all of us, some of us - search massively larger solution spaces than chimps do, but there isn't a great deal of evidence that we do anything principally different (and especially not all humans).

edit: One other thing. We do have example of how novel modules evolve. Entire new areas of brain, like neocortex, appear - over a very large number of generations. What has happened in the small brained hominid to human evolution, though, is nothing like this. The number of generations is massively smaller, and the brain is pretty much up-scaled version of the original brain. Note that this happened against strong pressure for small brain size (childbirth difficulties)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 04:53:12PM 0 points [-]

So your claim is that the human brain is adaptable enough that it can rewire itself in reasonable ways in response to sense input, but so rigid that there are no easy mutations that would correspond to some of the behavioral changes evolutionary psychologists talk about.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 17 March 2012 03:13:24AM *  1 point [-]

I don't see how it's arrogance, except maybe by insinuation/connotation; I'll think about how to remove the insinuation/connotation. I was trying to describe an important skill of rationality, not assert my supremacy at that skill. But describing a skill sort of presupposes that the audience lacks the skill. So it's awkward.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 03:54:37AM 8 points [-]

It's arrogance because you're implying that you've already thought of and rejected any objection the reader could come up with.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 17 March 2012 02:53:34AM *  17 points [-]

I feel morally obligated to restate a potentially relevant observation:

I think that an important underlying difference of perspective here is that the Less Wrong memes tend to automatically think of all AGIs as essentially computer programs whereas Goertzel-like memes tend to automatically think of at least some AGIs as non-negligibly essentially person-like. I think this is at least partially because the Less Wrong memes want to write an FAI that is essentially some machine learning algorithms plus a universal prior on top of sound decision theory whereas the Goertzel-like memes want to write an FAI that is essentially roughly half progam-like and half person-like. Less Wrong memes think that person AIs won't be sufficiently person-like but they sort of tend to assume that conclusion rather than argue for it, which causes memes that aren't familiar with Less Wrong memes to wonder why Less Wrong memes are so incredibly confident that all AIs will necessarily act like autistic OCD people without any possibility at all of acting like normal reasonable people. From that perspective the Goertzel-like memes look justified in being rather skeptical of Less Wrong memes. After all, it is easy to imagine a gradation between AIXI and whole brain emulations. Goertzel-like memes wish to create an AI somewhere between those two points, Less Wrong memes wish to create an AI that's even more AIXI-like than AIXI is (in the sense of being more formally and theoretically well-founded than AIXI is). It's important that each look at the specific kinds of AI that the other has in mind and start the exchange from there.

We don't know if AIXI-approximating AIs would even be intelligent; how then can we be so confident that AIXI is a normative model and a definition of intelligence? This and other intuitions are likely underlying Goertzel's cautious epistemic state, and LessWrong/SingInst truly hasn't addressed issues like this. We don't know what it takes to build AGI, we don't know if intelligence runs on Bayes structure. Modern decision theory indicates that Eliezer was wrong, that Bayes structure isn't fundamental to agentic optimization, that it only applies in certain cases, that Bayesian information theoretic models of cognition might not capture the special sauce of intelligence. What is fundamental? We don't know! In the meantime we should be careful about drawing conclusions based on the assumed fundamental-ness of mathematical models which may or may not ultimately be accurate models, may or may not actually let you build literalistic self-improving AIs of the sort that LessWrong likes to speculate about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 03:05:13AM 3 points [-]

(Anybody who thinks I'm missing something, ask yourself: what do you think you know that you think I don't think you know? How could I have come to not think you know something that you think you know? Are you confident of that model? This is where chess-playing subskills are very useful.)

Wow, I only associate that level of arrogance with Eliezer.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 16 March 2012 11:47:21PM *  2 points [-]

Good point, but still: does anyone know of any slippery slope [ETA: by which I mean a cascade of self-reinforcing changes in laws or social norms] that most everyone can agree was clearly not-bad? I ask because there are various theoretical reasons why one should almost never expect slippery slopes to have good consequences, but if empirically that's not the case then I need to revise my sociological and historiographical models.

(ETA2: My bad, I confused levels of abstraction; I agree with the criticisms that such an analysis is unfeasible even if possible.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 01:52:02AM 8 points [-]

This runs into the general problem of determining whether moral progress exists. Namely, after your morals change the change is always good as judged by your (new) morals.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 17 March 2012 12:48:29AM *  2 points [-]

TheOtherDave:

It would amuse me if there was a sizable population that thought astrology was scientific and rejected it on that basis because they don't trust science.

Eugine_Nier:

This is actually similar to the medieval Catholic church's position on astrology, at least if you understand "scientific" to mean "what passed for scientific during the middle ages".

What evidence are you aware of that the Church condemned those particular propositions for being "science" (natural philosophy), rather than for being "errors" (falsehoods)?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 March 2012 01:31:23AM 3 points [-]

What evidence are you aware of that the Church condemned those particular propositions for being "science" (natural philosophy), rather than for being "errors" (falsehoods)?

My point was that the church considered the evidence for the propositions suspect since it was merely "science" (natural philosophy).

Comment author: TheOtherDave 16 March 2012 10:36:17PM 9 points [-]

It would amuse me if there was a sizable population that thought astrology was scientific and rejected it on that basis because they don't trust science.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 March 2012 11:55:46PM 5 points [-]

This is actually similar to the medieval Catholic church's position on astrology, at least if you understand "scientific" to mean "what passed for scientific during the middle ages".

Comment author: Dmytry 16 March 2012 10:58:46PM *  0 points [-]

It's not about size of the change, it's about the complexity of the change. Increasing the brain size by four times is not a very complex change; some minor tweaks aren't either. edit: Also, the differences between chimp and human are pretty consistent with plain increase in the volume (and number of neurons), if you control for, hmm, cultural differences. You can teach chimps sign language; chimps can use and invent tools. We do it better, of course - larger brains are more powerful, perhaps the longer childhood also helps, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 March 2012 11:45:37PM *  1 point [-]

Also, the differences between chimp and human are pretty consistent with plain increase in the volume (and number of neurons), if you control for, hmm, cultural differences.

You seem to be making a mistake that a lot of people without experience programing computers make, namely that merely adding computational power without improving the algorithm is sufficient to generate (Edit: useful) new behaviors. This is especially not the case with the kind of ad hoc algorithms evolution tends to generate. You're going to need new or at least improved algorithms, and if you're evolving new algorithms, they're going to be adapted to the environment you're evolving in.

In response to [SEQ RERUN] Scarcity
Comment author: syzygy 16 March 2012 08:17:23AM *  0 points [-]

Not sure how much this post has to do with the economic fact of scarcity. Seems like it would be very easy to mistake actual rationality based on economic knowledge for this bias.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 March 2012 10:44:06PM 2 points [-]

Or even an instinct that evolved because of said economic fact.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 March 2012 10:38:00PM 3 points [-]

Groups of neurons have to connect in the new ways - the neurons on one side must express binding proteins, which would guide the axons towards them; the weights of the connections have to be adjusted. Majority of the genes expressed in neurons, affect all of the neurons; some affect just a group, but there is no mechanism by which an entirely arbitrary group's bindings may be controlled from the DNA in 1 mutation. The difficulties are not unlike those of an extra eye. This, combined with above-mentioned speed constraints, imposes severe limitations on which sorts of wiring modifications, and ultimately, behaviours that humans could have evolved during the hunter gatherer environment. Even very simple things - such as preference for particular body shape of the mates - have extreme hidden implementation complexity in terms of the DNA modifications leading up to the wiring leading up to the altered preferences. Wiring the brain for a specific fallacy is anything but simple. It may not be as time consuming/impossible as adding an extra eye, but it is still no little feat.

This seems reasonable until you realize that we evolved from chimp brains to human brains during the time period in question, this is a much larger change than the minor adaptations evolutionary psychologists talk about.

Comment author: RobertLumley 14 March 2012 06:08:11PM 0 points [-]

Assuming my diseases don't automatically kill everyone I come in contact with:

  1. Find someone who is sick with a disease, preferably viral, that I have immunity to, most likely through vaccination. Harvest the infectious agent from them, culture it, and store it as a potential weapon.
  2. Invent banking and insurance. Use the diseases developed in 1. to kill or disable anyone who threatens my monopoly. Because Romans lack knowledge of virology, molecular pathology, et al. (see what I did there?) I could do this and remain fairly undetected.
  3. Look up the most valuable currently (1 AD) unknown deposits of some resource, and harvest it. Use it to fund my business. This is largely optional, but could help.
  4. Find the greatest minds of the time and teach them something relatively simple, like Newtonian physics, ingratiating them to me, and convincing them to join my faction. (We're going into Northern Europe.)
  5. Use my massive wealth to fund an army. Use steel for weapons instead of iron. Develop cannons. Attack Rome.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 March 2012 12:52:49AM *  6 points [-]

Because Romans lack knowledge of virology, molecular pathology, et al. (see what I did there?) I could do this and remain fairly undetected.

Their folk beliefs about diseases (diseases are caused by evil spirits that can spread from person to person) are close enough to the truth that his probably wouldn't work. Also they believe in witchcraft and would notice if all your enemies suddenly started getting sick.

Comment author: James_Miller 14 March 2012 06:27:45PM 7 points [-]

This also means that there was intense competition among religions which would reduce the chance that any one religion could gain adherents.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 March 2012 12:47:56AM 4 points [-]

On the other hand, a printing press is an enormous advantage for spreading memes.

Comment author: Nisan 13 March 2012 10:54:11PM 8 points [-]

Related to Schelling fences on slippery slopes:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

— Thomas De Quincey

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 11:59:23PM 6 points [-]

I don't get this quote, it strikes me as wit with no substance.

Comment author: Eneasz 14 March 2012 03:32:00PM 3 points [-]

Careful! The slope can slip both ways!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 11:48:25PM 6 points [-]

A good rule of thumb for determining which way the slope is slipping, is to see which side is arguing for a change from the status quo.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 14 March 2012 07:57:35AM 1 point [-]

I'd say they were selected for how well their conclusions support the desired policies of the politician appointing them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 11:39:50PM 1 point [-]

I wasn't just talking about US scientists.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 March 2012 06:46:03PM 5 points [-]

You live in an interesting place, Will; and I do enjoy visiting.

It's gotten about twice as interesting since I wrote that comment. E.g. I've learned a potentially very powerful magick spell in the meantime.

"Reality-Warping Elysium" was a Terence McKenna reference; I don't remember its rationale but I don't think it was a very good one.

Nerfhammer's excellent wikipedia contributions reminded me of your disdain for the heuristics and biases literature.

I think I may overstate my case sometimes; I'm a very big Gigerenzer fan, and he's one of the most cited H&B researchers. (Unlike most psychologists, Gigerenzer is a very competent statistician.) But unfortunately the researchers who are most cited by LessWrong types, e.g. Kahneman, are those whose research is of quite dubious utility. What's frustrating is that Eliezer knows of and appreciates Gigerenzer and must know of his critiques of Kahneman and his (overzealous semi-Bayesian) style of research, but he almost never cites that side of the H&B research. Kaj Sotala, a cognitive science student, has pointed out some of these things to LessWrong and yet the arguments don't seem to have entered into the LessWrong memeplex.

The two hallmarks of LessWrong are H&B and Bayesian probability: the latter is often abused, especially in the form of algorithmic probability, and decision theorists have shown that it's not as fundamental as Eliezer thought it was; and the H&B literature, like all psychology literature, is filled with premature conclusions, misinterpretations, questionable and contradictory results, and generally an overall lack of much that can be used to bolster rationality. (It's interesting and frustrating to see many papers demonstrating "biases" in opposite directions on roughly the same kind of problem, with only vague and ad hoc attempts to reconcile them.) If there's a third hallmark of LessWrong then it's microeconomics and game theory, especially Schelling's style of game theory, but unfortunately it gets relatively neglected and the posts applying Schellingian and Bayesian reasoning to complex problems of social signaling hermeneutics are very few and far-between.

I may have adjusted too much, but... Before I read a 1980s(?) version of Dawes' "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World" I had basically the standard LessWrong opinion of H&B, namely that it's flawed like all other science but you could basically take its bigger results for granted as true and meaningful; but as I read Dawes' book I felt betrayed: the research was clearly so flawed, brittle, and easily misinterpreted that there's no way building an edifice of "rationality" on top of it could be justifiable. A lot of interesting research has surely gone on since that book was written, but even so, that the foundations of the field are so shoddy indicates that the field in general might be non-negligibly cargo cult science. (Dawes even takes a totally uncalled for and totally incorrect potshot at Christians in the middle of the book; this seems relatively innocuous, but remember that Eliezer's naive readers are doing the same thing when they try to apply H&B results to the reasoning of normal/superstitious/religious folk. It's the same failure mode; you have these seemingly solid results, now you can clearly demonstrate how your enemies' reasoning is wrong and contemptible, right? It's disturbing that this attitude is held even by some of the most-respected researchers in the field.)

I remain stressed and worried about Eliezer, Anna, and Julia's new organization for similar reasons; I've seen people (e.g. myself) become much better thinkers due to hanging out with skilled thinkers like Anna, Steve Rayhawk, Peter de Blanc, Michael Vassar, et cetera; but this improvement had nothing to do with "debiasing" as such, and had everything to do with spending a lot of time in interesting conversations. I have little idea why Eliezer et al think they can give people anything more than social connections and typical self-help improvements that could be gotten from anywhere else, unless Eliezer et al plan on spending a lot of time actually talking to people about actual unsolved problems and demonstrating how rationality works in practice.

but, are there any alternatives for working toward more effective thinking?

Finding a mentor or at least some peers and talking to them a lot seems to work somewhat, having high intelligence seems pretty important, not being neurotypical seems as important as high intelligence, reading a ton seems very important but I'm not sure if it's as useful for people who don't start out schizotypal. I think that making oneself more schizotypal seems like a clear win but I don't know how one would go about doing it; maybe doing a lot of nitrous or ketamine, but um, don't take my word for it. There's a fundamental skill of taking some things very seriously and other things not seriously at all that I don't know how to describe or work on directly. Yeah, I dunno; but it seems a big thing that separates the men from the boys and that is clearly doable is just reading a ton of stuff and seeing how it's connected, and building lots of models of the world based on what you read until you're skilled at coming up with off-the-cuff hypotheses. That's what I spend most of my time doing. I'm certain that getting good at chess helps your rationality skills and I think Michael Vassar agrees with me; I definitely notice that some of my chess-playing subskills for thinking about moves and counter-moves get used more generally when thinking about arguments and counter-arguments. (I'm rated like 1800 or something.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 11:31:34PM 3 points [-]

If there's a third hallmark of LessWrong then it's microeconomics and game theory, especially Schelling's style of game theory, but unfortunately it gets relatively neglected and the posts applying Schellingian and Bayesian reasoning to complex problems of social signaling hermeneutics are very few and far-between.

I blame the fact the Eliezer doesn't have a sequence talking about them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 11:20:16PM 4 points [-]

Regarding what you call abandoning the power of choice, here is an example from HPMoR that looks more like a slippery slope.

The point being, said his inner monitor, it's getting worse literally by the minute. The way spies turn people is, they get them to commit a little sin, and then they use the little sin to blackmail them into a bigger sin, and then they use THAT sin to make them do even bigger things and then the blackmailer owns their soul.

Didn't you once think about how the person being blackmailed, if they could foresee the whole path, would just decide to take the punch on the first step, take the hit of exposing that first sin?

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 14 March 2012 03:50:37PM 4 points [-]

You could still hit them with large rewards for making themselves less rational, and thus recreate the slippery slope argument along that axis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 11:07:01PM 4 points [-]

Or large rewards for changing their utility function.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 March 2012 04:29:42AM 10 points [-]

I wonder how many people would use this example nowadays if they knew that it comes from a WW1-era U.S. Supreme Court opinion upholding a ten year prison sentence for sedition against an anti-war activist -- whose crime was to distribute pamphlets arguing that military conscription is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits "involuntary servitude."

Wow. The 'fire' thing doesn't even fit well as an analogy in that context. Your country scares me!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 04:42:27AM 3 points [-]

I believe the theory was that he was promoting illegal activity, i.e., draft dodging.

In response to comment by Will_Sawin on Biased Pandemic
Comment author: roystgnr 14 March 2012 01:51:41AM 1 point [-]

What about just barring unsolicited communication? Forbidden Island works for my local mix of adults, old, and young children if it's given that restriction. If it isn't then the older and bossier players (yes, me) try to be too controlling.

In response to comment by roystgnr on Biased Pandemic
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2012 03:13:50AM 1 point [-]

It's still a problem if the one player is clearly smarter and the others are smart enough to know who it is.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 13 March 2012 06:38:45AM 1 point [-]

Cancer (and anti-cancer immune systems) might be a very fruitful analogy. To fight the tendency of systems to fall toward a stable state of suboptimal selfishness and shallowness, it might help to explicitly punish self-promotion or explicitly reward competence.

Something like the former happened in America during the Progressive Era of the 1900s and 1910s, when racketeers and robber barons were thrown out of the offices they'd schemed their way into by a cadre of self-appointed elitist technocrats.

Something like the latter happened in the 1940s and 1950s, when IQ tests, the SAT, vast increases in education expenditure, cracks in the wall of WASP solidarity, and major construction and infrastructure programs put meritocratic engineers at the top of many corporations and agencies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 March 2012 11:14:32PM 2 points [-]

it might help to explicitly punish self-promotion or explicitly reward competence.

The problem is that then you have to keep the "reward and punish" system itself from corrupting.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 March 2012 01:11:09AM *  4 points [-]

"Scientists and economists advise politicians" is not quite the same as "scientists and economists indirectly control policy." In practice, in the US, most advisors who are not also politicians are pitted against an equal and opposite party and then ignored. That is not universally true and it is not the only problem with the US government by a long shot, but it is a significant effect.

As for the Chinese government, you were more or less right until relatively recently. They were fairly successful too (which is not the same thing as being nice, of course).

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Stable State is Broken
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 March 2012 01:31:53AM *  3 points [-]

I think a large part of the problem is that even the scientists who rise to or near the top are selected for their ability to play politics and not their scientific ability.

Comment author: drethelin 12 March 2012 10:07:24PM 0 points [-]

I agree with what Locke said, and also probably for the same reason wizards aren't CONSTANTLY using magic to improve themselves, whatever that reason is.

As far as regular stimulants, most of them would probably count as bringing in muggle technology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 March 2012 12:30:33AM 2 points [-]

Possibly for the same reason real armies don't constantly use stimulants.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2012 10:50:41PM 5 points [-]

Or a potion of instant death if it instead stored the decay effect from the dementor.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 March 2012 12:26:52AM 5 points [-]

That's so easy to do you don't even need magic.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 01:48:46PM 2 points [-]

Somehow I get the impression that they wouldn't agree with your interpretation.

Any of them? How familiar are you with the more philosophically apt and open-minded Church authorities? Are there so few that it'd be impossible to get even a little traction? (I'm thinking a few years down the line when the "save the world" memeplex is better established.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 March 2012 12:01:08AM 1 point [-]

As far as Catholics you might be interested in talking to, there's John C. Wright. I assume you are familiar with his background.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 07 March 2012 08:51:20AM *  2 points [-]

(ETA: Deleted paragraph comparing myself to Hitler because apparently that sort of thing is easily misunderstood or something.)

If you think my trying to immanentize the eschaton has a decent chance of being seen in retrospect as obviously evil and retarded, then I'm morally obligated to pester you to see whether the outside view of inside view makes more sense here. But perhaps we should continue this in another venue, if you'd like. I find it to be a very interesting topic, and also very important to what I do with my life.

ETA: In the meantime I'll read Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 March 2012 11:47:49PM 1 point [-]

In the meantime I'll read Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola.

Why Julius Evola? If you're trying to figure out whether to immanentize the eschaton you might want to look at Eric Voegelin.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 March 2012 09:59:41PM 0 points [-]

gaining control over your opponent's decisions is probably a good idea.

(It might be good to keep in mind Eliezer's point about how discorrelation is potentially a scarce resource (because correlation is a ratchet).)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 March 2012 11:33:27PM 1 point [-]

That depends on the opponent's computational power. There are certainly cryptographic approaches to this problem.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 March 2012 01:48:54AM 3 points [-]

And because of those damned atheists we can't even start a witch hunt to figure out who's responsible!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 March 2012 03:03:17AM *  2 points [-]

Sure we can.

We just need to rephrase "witch" in scientific terms.

(Also sorry about the political link, but with a topic like this that's inevitable).

UPDATE: This post goes into more details.

Comment author: Ezekiel 06 March 2012 01:01:50PM 11 points [-]

It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as "magic" to someone six hundred years ago.

The issue is that "magic", in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isn't a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you've actually got it, it's not "magic" any more; it's "electrons" or "distortion of spacetime" or "computers" or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.

Take the witch trials, for example - to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn't have called them "witches", but "scientists" or "politicians" or "guys with swords".

Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as "magic" to some people, but "magic" almost always does. Which is why, once you've solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 March 2012 01:25:10AM 3 points [-]

Take the witch trials, for example - to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were.

Consider something like this and notice that our modern "explanations" aren't much better.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Fox and the Low-Hanging Grapes
Comment author: [deleted] 11 March 2012 10:43:15AM *  1 point [-]

BTW, what do people here feel about the use of we to denote a group of people which includes myself even though I didn't personally take part in the action? I don't do that very often (it reminds me of the days when I was a football (soccer) fan and it was customary to say us and you (pl.) to mean ‘the team I support’ and ‘the team you support’); OTOH I once saw a documentary where the presenter consistently used us and them to mean ‘Homo sapiens sapiens’ and ‘H. sapiens neanderthalensis’ when speaking about events taking place several tens of millennia ago, which kind of jarred me.¹ And I've seen a comment in a feminist blog when a female commenter scolded a male commenter because he had said “men” instead of “us”.


¹ Maybe because, as an European, I likely do have a non-negligible fraction of Neanderthal DNA.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Fox and the Low-Hanging Grapes
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 March 2012 06:55:43PM 2 points [-]

It can be jarring when, as in the parent, you attribute to 'us' attitudes you don't agree with.

Comment author: JenniferRM 11 March 2012 06:53:18AM 4 points [-]

So far as I can tell, my resilience in this way is not an acquired defect but rather than an acquired sophistication.

When my working philosophic assumptions crashed in the past, I learned a number of ways to handle it. For one example, I've seen that when something surprises me, for the most part it all adds up to normality and crazy new ways of looking at the world it are generally not important in normal circumstances for daily human life. I still have to get dressed every morning and eat food like a mortal, but now I have a new tool to apply in special cases or leverage in contexts where I can control many parameters and apply more of an engineering mindset and get better outcomes. For a specific example, variations on egoism put me in a state of profound aporeia for about 3 months in high school, but eventually I worked out enough of a model of motivational psychology with enough moving parts that I could reconcile what I actually saw of people's pursuit of things they "wanted" and translate naive people's emission of words like "values" and "selfish" and "moral" and so on in ways that made sense, even if it sometimes demonstrated philosophic confusions similar to wish fulfillment fantasies.

It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn't force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking "why?" the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P

Eliezer's quoting of Feynman in the compartmentalization link seems naive to me, but it's a naivete that I shared when I was 19. His text there might have appealed to me then because it whispers to the the part of my soul that wants to just work on an interesting puzzle and get the right answer and apply it to the world and have a good life doing that. The same part of my soul and says that anything which might require compromises during a political competition for research resources isn't actually about a political competition for resources but is instead just other people "being dumb". Its nicer to think of yourself as having a scientific insight rather than an ignorance of the pragmatics of political economy. Science is fun and morally praiseworthy and a lot of people are interested in doing it. But where there's muck, there's brass so it is tricky to figure out a way to be entirely devoted to that and get paid at the same time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 March 2012 06:50:04PM 2 points [-]

It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn't force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking "why?" the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P

The stoning adulterers part is an extreme hypothetical example of taking a Christian meme to its logical conclusion. As PhilGoetz mentioned in the post, secular memes can also have this problem. The same even applies to some of the 'rationalist' memes around here.

Comment author: RobinZ 10 March 2012 08:59:00PM 2 points [-]

I don't see that in the quote - it seems to be an attempted explanation for the existence of pseudoscience, not a heuristic for identifying such.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 March 2012 03:03:21AM 2 points [-]

The problem is that it's still false. A lot of false science was developed by people honestly trying to find true causes. I also suspect that a good deal of actual science was developed by people who accepted a cause without enough evidence out of a desire to have a cause for everything and got lucky.

Comment author: Grognor 10 March 2012 12:21:46PM 2 points [-]

The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.

-William Hazlitt, attacking phrenology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 March 2012 08:33:46PM 0 points [-]

This quote is itself an example of the phenomenon it describes since it stems from a desire to be able to separate true from false science without the hard and messy process of looking at the territory.

Also hindsight bias.

Comment author: Sohum 08 March 2012 01:18:17PM *  1 point [-]

What's happening there, I think, is that you have received a piece of evidence ("this guy's claims to have designed a perpetual motion machine") and you, upon processing that information, slightly increase your probability that perpetual motion machines are plausible and highly increase your probability that he's lying or joking or ignorant. Then you seek to test that new hypothesis: you search for flaws in the blueprints first because your beliefs say you have the highest likelihood of finding new evidence if you do so, and you would think it more likely that you've missed something than that the machine could actually work. However, after the proper sequence of tests all coming out in favour, you would not be opposed to building the machine to check; you're not opposed to the theoretical possibility that we've suddenly discovered free energy.

In rationalisation, at least the second and possibly both parts of the process differ. You seek to confirm the hypothesis, not test it, so check what the theoretical world in which the hypothesis is unarguably false feels like, maybe? Checking whether you had the appropriate evidence to form the hypothesis in the first place is also a useful check, though I suppose false positives would happen on that one.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 March 2012 08:15:49PM 1 point [-]

In rationalization you engage in motivated cognition, this is very similar to what happens in the perpetual motion example.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 March 2012 05:39:20AM 2 points [-]

P.S. If you really want to know how I feel about Less Wrong then read the post 'Ontological Therapy' by user:muflax.

That post reads like a perfect example of what can go wrong with self-modifying minds.

Comment author: JenniferRM 10 March 2012 02:21:26AM 11 points [-]

P.S. If you really want to know how I feel about Less Wrong then read the post 'Ontological Therapy' by user:muflax.

Is there something wrong with me when I see writing like that and it fills me with nostalgia for days of yore when I had more philosophical crises happening closer together? I have this weird sense that there's an opportunity for some kind of "It Gets Better thing" for young philosophers (except, of course, there's so few of them that stochastic noise and inability to reach the audience would make such a media campaign pointless: an inter-subjectively opaque discourse to no one).

So far it does seem to get better. I haven't had a good solid philosophic crisis in something like five years and I almost miss them now. Life was more exciting back then. When I have ideas that seem like they could precipitate that way now, it mostly just leaves me with a sense that I've acquired an interesting new insight that is pretty neat but increases the amount of inferential distance I have to keep track of when talking to other people.

One important thing I've found is finding conversational partners who are willing to listen to your abstract digressions and then contribute useful insights. If you're doing everything all by yourself there is a sense in which you are like "a feral child" and you should probably try to seek out others and learn to talk with them about what's going on in your respective souls. Whiteboards help. Internet-mediated-text doesn't help nearly as much as conversation in my experience. Dialogue is a different and probably better process and the low latency and high "monkey bandwidth" are important and helpful.

Seek friends. Really. Seek friends.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 March 2012 04:55:12AM 5 points [-]

So far it does seem to get better. I haven't had a good solid philosophic crisis in something like five years and I almost miss them now. Life was more exciting back then. When I have ideas that seem like they could precipitate that way now, it mostly just leaves me with a sense that I've acquired an interesting new insight that is pretty neat but increases the amount of inferential distance I have to keep track of when talking to other people.

I wonder how much of this is due to acquiring a memetic immune system or otherwise simply learning how to compartmentalize.

Comment author: CasioTheSane 09 March 2012 07:28:12AM 4 points [-]

As a new lesswrongER, perhaps the most exciting thing about this community is the ability to reference Douglas Adams un-cited and assume that people will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 March 2012 01:09:46AM 9 points [-]

Wow, which communities did you previously hang out in?

Comment author: wedrifid 09 March 2012 06:50:51AM 4 points [-]

I interpret this to mean that often times questions are overlooked because the possibility of them being true seems absurd.

I interpret it to mean that Cory Doctorow doesn't fully consider the implications of hindsight bias when it comes to predicting the merits of asking questions from a given class.

Usually asking stupid questions really is just stupid.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 March 2012 12:51:15AM 0 points [-]

Usually asking stupid questions really is just stupid.

But the expected return on asking a stupid question is still positive.

Comment author: Ezekiel 09 March 2012 12:27:21AM 1 point [-]

To be fair, I've never asked him. But he included homoeopathy, which its practitioners claim isn't mental.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 March 2012 03:41:37AM 3 points [-]

So he was using magic in the sense of "disagrees with current scientific theory", in that case the initial quote is circular.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 06 March 2012 03:47:45PM 1 point [-]

The Germans of his day put him to shame.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2012 05:13:52AM 0 points [-]

In fact they still do.

Comment author: simplyeric 06 March 2012 06:05:52PM 1 point [-]

A. I'm not entirely sure that things that used to be human nature no longer are. We deal with them, surpress them, sublimate, etc. Anger responses, fear, lust, possesiveness, nesting. The animal instincts of the human animal. How those manifest does indeed change, but not the "nature" of them.

B. We live (in the USA) in a long-term culture of anti-intellectualism. Obviously this doesn't mean it can't change... Sometimes it seems like it will (remember the days before nerd-chic?), but in a nominally democratic society, there will always be a minority of people who are relatively "intellectual" by definition, we should recognize that you don't have to overcome anti-intellectualism, you just have to raise the bar. While still anti-intellectual, in many ways even the intentionally uninformed know more than the average person did back in the day. (just like there will always be a minority of people who will be "relatively tall", even as the average height has tended to increased over the generations)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2012 05:06:09AM 4 points [-]

We live (in the USA) in a long-term culture of anti-intellectualism.

Which type of anti-intellectualism are you referring to?

Comment author: djcb 04 March 2012 09:56:58AM 8 points [-]

There is a spookier possibility. Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will "alter" the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some "equilibrium" is reached--the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent. Time travel may thus act to erase itself (an idea Larry Niven fans will recognize as "Niven's Law").

-- Hans Moravec Time Travel and Computing

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2012 05:02:08AM 1 point [-]

Not quiet, since you need time travel to establish the final timeline.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 12:10:37PM 12 points [-]

The world is paved with good intentions; the road to Hell has bad epistemology mixed in.

Steven Kaas

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2012 05:00:51AM 6 points [-]

I think the original is instrumentally more useful. On hearing "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", one of my reactions is "I have good intentions, I'd better make sure I'm not on the road to hell". On hearing your version my first reaction is "whew, this doesn't apply to me, only to those people with bad epistemology".

Comment author: Will_Newsome 06 March 2012 02:32:13PM 0 points [-]

One big difference is that you want to immanentize the eschaton

(I don't want to as such, it's more that I'm extremely afraid of the potential consequences of not doing so.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2012 04:34:08AM 2 points [-]

One big difference is that you want to immanentize the eschaton

(I don't want to as such, it's more that I'm extremely afraid of the potential consequences of not doing so.)

I'm also afraid of the consequences of attempting to given how well previous attempts have gone.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 January 2011 07:25:10PM 1 point [-]

I don't think the current state of American politics is a result of structural problems-- it's gotten a lot worse as far as I can tell in the past decade or so. I don't know who started it, or who's done the most to amplify matters, but I think Republicans and Democrats have become a lot more contemptuous of each other.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 March 2012 08:18:58AM 1 point [-]

I suspect that's just nostalgia filter.

Comment author: Ezekiel 05 March 2012 10:13:09PM *  10 points [-]

Because throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be... Not Magic

-- Tim Minchin, Storm

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 March 2012 02:47:55AM *  9 points [-]

That could just mean we're no good at solving mysteries that involve magic.

Also, I think there is a selection effect in so far as there are solved mysteries where the solution was magic; however, you'd probably argue that they were not solved correctly using no other evidence than that the solutions involved magic.

Comment author: Bugmaster 05 March 2012 10:25:54PM 0 points [-]

I interpreted "first" to mean "first in human history". Since science is the method we currently use to understand the world, I assumed that no other methods were as good -- otherwise, we'd be using those. Human history is ongoing, though, so we could find better methods in the future.

Luke goes on to discuss different ways of fixing science, which led me to believe that he doesn't know of any other methods that are superior to science, either. If he did, presumably he'd be advocating that we drop science altogether, and replace it with these other methods.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 March 2012 02:29:01AM 2 points [-]

I interpreted "first" to mean "first in human history". Since science is the method we currently use to understand the world, I assumed that no other methods were as good -- otherwise, we'd be using those.

Note necessarily since humans aren't perfectly rational.

Comment author: Sam_Jaques 05 March 2012 04:00:27PM 1 point [-]

Could you give an example of an experiment that would be too complex for log odds to be useful?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 March 2012 02:25:38AM *  3 points [-]

Any example where there are more than two potential hypotheses.

Note, that for example, "this coin is unbiased", "this coin is biased toward heads with p=.61", and "this coin is biased toward heads with p=.62" count as three different hypotheses for this purpose.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 03:58:40AM 2 points [-]

That sounds right. I think I'm what you'd get if you took Vladimir_M's views on hermeneutics but with a perspective on metaphysics that saw them as potentially actually correct rather than acting almost-without-exception as convenient Schelling focal points.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 March 2012 02:14:56AM 4 points [-]

One big difference is that you want to immanentize the eschaton going so far as to invoke actual theology, whereas Vladimir_M would probably he extremely skeptical of such attempts, and quiet frankly so would I.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 March 2012 10:47:03PM *  12 points [-]

Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong

I want to talk about democracy.

I do so here because I don't think this is mind-killing. And I sure feel some rational debate about it would be educational, for me mostly, since there are so many great minds here and... I will come clean, I think democracy isn't that great, considering this how is it possible that I am but ignorant? Or possibly evil. But before I can explain why I think as I do, I need to see why people think it is great. Who knows, maybe I've missed something vital? Or maybe people don't like democracy already but they believe that they do. Or maybe I'm wrong about how popular such doubts are on this site, beyond a small but assuredly not tiny minority.

Now obviously there are doubts and doubts. Saying that democracy as it is in the West has problems, but only because it isn't true democracy, isn't what I mean by "doubting democracy" at all. To give an analogy I see this as like doubting communism by saying that what we are doing clearly isn't true communism, this is why the 5 year plan has failed comrades! Those darn counter-revolutionary forces sabotaging us! Those darn undemocratic influences subverting our states. Indeed there are striking parallels about how true democracy should work great in theory but has never ever been fully implemented and how communism is great in theory but Communists never ever seem to be able to fully implement it.

And all ills stem from there not being enough Communism or democracy or piety. So to avoid true Scotsmen (surely wise as they are a bloodthirsty violent drunken lot, at least the true ones are) let me define casual use of democracy here. Let me even admit that pure or real or direct or whatever kind of untested democracy you prefer may work better than what I'm going to describe. Aren't I criticizing because I think something better is possible? Your special brand of democracy might just be it!

So I'm going to start in Europe. Central Europe to be specific. I do this for two reasons. Firstly because I'm Slovenian and this is what I know and live in. If Americans can make casual assumptions about what is and isn't a key feature of Parliamentary Democracy when talking government, I think I can make them too. Maybe this will make it easier for readers to detect and dissect my cached thoughts? Or maybe think about unexamined beliefs of their own. For example did you know that many modern western Parliamentary democracies have, even one very close culturally to the US, weak separation of powers? Or don't really have free speech as you know it? Please don't tell this to any aspiring Pentagon officials, they might try to fix us with bombs! Though I will admit this was needed previous time around. Secondly because educated opinion in America and Europe seems to admire the idealized version of this model.

I've discussed this with several democracy advocates (nice normal internet people) and I think an idealized version of the system can be summed up thus: People have different interests. People want to overcome tragedy of the commons situations. People want to avoid men of violence. We want a goodness generating machine. We thus need government. And we would like this government to take into account the interest of all citizens equally. How to do this? I know! Let's have show of hands to decide what we want (only some hands count). The People (a well known Eldritch abomination composed of millions of interacting brains) can pick and choose between different parties and politicians, hopefully based on their program and perhaps merit. In other words people tell the state what they want via elections. I mean we could ask them about their opinions on how to acheive such goals, perhaps even ask them to vote for the party with a nice sounding means of doing something, but they are rather ignorant sometimes aren't they? Sure they will also decide to vote on how to do stuff too, but don't encourage them too much, I'll explain why shortly.

Wouldn't it be better to leave the how to the experts? Perhaps even noticeably include them in public debate preceding the adoption of new laws or policies? Not only does this keep the experts somewhat accountable, it educates the public! My we are on a roll. So we have The Politicians chosen by The People who consult and hire The Experts to do what is needed to fulfil the goals they presented to The People during elections. Often politicians are more electable and trusted if they are experts in something besides politics themselves, this should make them better able to know how to find experts and how to judge their work. Why do we need the experts though? Well it turns out that politicians have a nasty incentive to distort the actual effects of the policies they endorse, these effects may not match the effects sought by the people. The idea is that experts (coming mostly from academia), have a certain truth seeking reputation to uphold. At least technically academia should be a truth seeking machine. Also the preceding public debate covered by a fair and balanced free media keeps them somewhat accountable and gives The People or at least the interested citizens a chance to see what is going on with the state as it happens.

...

[ !!Public draft -- work in progress!! ]

Feel free to comment on the contents. I've decided to keep it here to avoid both the vanishing spaces bug and because I want feedback as I go along. If you are making a response to a draft I suggest any direct comments quote the text they are referring to since it may change at any moment. No one expects frequent edits, their chief weapons are surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.. no wait that went wrong somewhere.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, March 1-15, 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 March 2012 02:21:29AM 1 point [-]

So I'm going to start in Europe. Central Europe to be specific. I do this for two reasons. Firstly because I'm Slovenian and this is what I know and live in. If Americans can make casual assumptions about what is and isn't a key feature of Parliamentary Democracy when talking government, I think I can make them too. Maybe this will make it easier for readers to detect and dissent my cached thoughts? Or maybe think about unexamined beliefs of their own. For example did you know that many modern western Parliamentary democracies have, even one very close culturally to the US have weak separation of powers? Or don't really have free speech as you know it?

As an American (immigrant from Eastern Europe, but that's not very relevant) I would find an argument against democracy based on who well it works in Eastern Europe about as relevant to American democracy, as someone on lesswrong would find an argument against rationality based on the mistakes Spock makes.

Comment author: MaoShan 04 March 2012 06:57:53AM -1 points [-]

Peer review. If the next two hundred scientists who measure your triangle get the same measurements from other rulers by different manufacturers, you'd be completely justified in rejecting the Pythagorean theorem.

My challenge to you: go out and see if you can find a right triangle with those measurements.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 08:37:15PM 4 points [-]

Sure, how about a triangle just outside a black hole.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 04 March 2012 01:36:33PM *  4 points [-]

I think you exaggerate the distance between your web of belief and that of other Less Wrongers. I would assign a greater than 0.5 probability to almost half of those bullet points.

  • think utilitarianism is a retarded moral philosophy except as a temporary approximation of actual morality

I agree with this in general, but there is something weirder going on than Less Wrongers simply adhering to a confused ethical theory. I get the impression that utilitarianism is Official Less Wrong Doctrine, but almost every Less Wronger I've met in person has expressed doubts about it almost as soon as it is brought up. What is going on here?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 07:56:36PM 1 point [-]

I agree with this in general, but there is something weirder going on than Less Wrongers simply adhering to a confused ethical theory. I get the impression that utilitarianism is Official Less Wrong Doctrine, but almost every Less Wronger I've met in person has expressed doubts about it almost as soon as it is brought up. What is going on here?

Do you mean "utilitarianism" or "consequentialism"?

Several things. Part of it is simple preference falsification.

Part of it is confusion between utilitarianism and more general consequentialism, especially when combined with cached thoughts. People listen to the arguments in favor of utility functions, conclude that this means they should be "utilitarians" and then use their cached thoughts about how "utilitarians" should behave.

Another part is that it's (at least perceived as) the doctrine of high status individuals like EY, Yvain, and lukeprog.

I think the more fundamental reason is that consequentialism has a mathematically simple description and can be mathematically derived from a reasonable sounding mathematical model. (I personally think this is about as rational as using Arrow's theorem to argue against democracy.) Thus arguments in its favor are much easier (i.e., shorter inferal distance) to make than arguments against it.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 03:31:37PM 1 point [-]

Historically, theologically or pragmatically?

All the above, plus architecturally and spiritually: I think gothic cathedrals are a high point of architecture, perhaps the high point of Western architecture. The theology alone isn't enough to single it out for special praise except indirectly because you need to have a decent academic community in order to get decent theology or natural philosophy in the first place. In general when I compare Catholicism to other institutions or imagine possible counterfactual worlds without Catholicism I end up with an overwhelmingly positive impression of Catholicism for reasons like Chesterton's. E.g. I despise the Protestants and am thankful and impressed that the Catholics kept Protestant-style thinking and factionalism more generally at bay for as long as they did.

(I sometimes wonder if the typical mind fallacy/heuristic is largely responsible in some sense for the Protestant reformation: Luther felt very strongly that God was very displeased with him despite the fact that he tried to be a traditionally good Christian, and he seemed to interpret this as meaning that God was displeased with everyone else too, rather than that God was displeased with Martin Luther specifically because he was freaking Martin Luther.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 07:01:52PM 4 points [-]

(I sometimes wonder if the typical mind fallacy/heuristic is largely responsible in some sense for the Protestant reformation: Luther felt very strongly that God was very displeased with him despite the fact that he tried to be a traditionally good Christian, and he seemed to interpret this as meaning that God was displeased with everyone else too, rather than that God was displeased with Martin Luther specifically because he was freaking Martin Luther.)

I think you're forgetting how corrupt the temporal Catholic hierarchy was at that point.

Comment author: Dallas 04 March 2012 01:23:54AM -2 points [-]

Assuming you survive for more than the next ten years or so, yes.

Also, your wife is Catholic. If you issue an ultimatum to deconvert, we end up with one of the three following scenarios:

  1. She accepts.
  2. You divorce her. She doesn't remarry, probably causing her vast emotional harm.
  3. You divorce her. She caves in to emotional pressure and remarries, ousting her from the conventional Catholic community.

All three scenarios weaken overall religious influence and raise the probability that your children will be epistemologically sane. I consider this preferable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 06:41:43PM *  3 points [-]

How about this:

  1. She doesn't deconvert. The extended Catholic community preserves the story of how jwhendy became an evil atheist and abandoned his wife and children as a result.
Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 03:44:30AM 3 points [-]

I'm not actually Catholic, only a prospective Catholic, and it's very possible that I'll never get around to actually getting confirmed; it seems like it would be consenting to the categorical rule of propping up institutions even when you're still rather unsure of how good they are compared to how good you should have expected them to be. I grew up agnostic and at some point identified as atheist, only converting to theism and gaining interest in religions besides Theravada Buddhism after I became a postrationalist one or two years ago; I haven't had enough time since then to come to any firm conclusions about the justification or lack thereof for converting to a particular religion.

Put another way: what of Catholic doctrine counts as as "largely some really tricky game theory" and what counts as actually true?

Oh, gosh. Um.

  • I think it's plausible that there is a God in the Thomistic or Leibnizian or Kantian(?) sense, and my intuition says there is. I think it's probable that there is an entity, identifiable as YHWH, Who seems to indicate that He is the Holy Ghost (Who is the optimization imposed on the physical world by the existence of that Thomistic God), but I have no idea how much evidence I should accept as enough evidence for His implicit claim to be the Thomistic God. There's that whole "by their fruits ye shall know them" thing but I don't know what counts as satisfactorily delicious fruit. It seems like Satan or any other transhumanly intelligent entity could just as easily provide the same delicious fruits, so this would seem to come down to some tricky reasoning about priors. I'm not yet familiar with the Catholic writings on discernment.
  • On the divinity and general metaphysical status of Jesus as Savior, this would seem to be some tricky reasoning about metaphysics on the one hand, and on the other hand, or more accurately on the other side of the same hand, it would seem to be some tricky reasoning about which Schelling focal points to carve out and hold fast to so as not to fall down all kinds of slippery slopes. I notice that if I or someone as generally prudent as me decided to blindly accept that Jesus was their Savior then that would be sheer epistemic laziness without trying to actually understand the social psychology or game theory surrounding why people would go out of their way to emphasize that a certain man had certain properties and that this is important for certain reasons and that doubting this or even doubting something else that would imply doubting this is like trying to "unjustifiably" undermine the allegedly "justified" thing that they're trying to do. This is like taking a very developed Kantian view of things, and honestly it seems really tricky to do right; I'd trust someone like Vladimir_M to do it better than me.
  • I agree in a relatively straightforward way with their cautious eschatology about Judgment Day and the Second Coming of Christ, which I see as straightforwardly mapping onto thinking about a technological singularity and taking seriously its moral implications. Whether or not they were right by coincidence is sort of besides the point, as their emphasis is correct either way. (At some point I would like to talk to the Church to see if they're interested in funding FAI research; unfortunately I'm not sure how competent the modern Church is, nor what factions of it would be competent. Traditionally the Dominicans are impressive.)
  • When it comes to supernatural stuff I generally accept Catholic doctrine, at least provisionally, e.g. the emphasis on not engaging in witchcraft or negotiating with demons.

Those are what stand out to me as the most obvious possible points of agreement or disagreement with Catholic doctrine as straightforwardly interpreted, but I might've missed some big stuff.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 05:31:50AM 6 points [-]

Have you talked about any of these ideas with any actual high rationality Catholics?

I agree in a relatively straightforward way with their cautious eschatology about Judgment Day and the Second Coming of Christ, which I see as straightforwardly mapping onto thinking about a technological singularity and taking seriously its moral implications. Whether or not they were right by coincidence is sort of besides the point, as their emphasis is correct either way. (At some point I would like to talk to the Church to see if they're interested in funding FAI research; unfortunately I'm not sure how competent the modern Church is, nor what factions of it would be competent. Traditionally the Dominicans are impressive.)

Somehow I get the impression that they wouldn't agree with your interpretation.

Comment author: Nicholas_Covington 04 March 2012 04:34:21AM -2 points [-]

Well, of course one cannot logically and absolutely deduce much from raw data. But with some logically valid inferential tools in our hands (Occam's razor, Bayes' Theorem, Induction) we can probabilistically derive conclusions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 04:51:13AM 3 points [-]

In what sense Occam's razor "logically valid"?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 04:42:08AM 1 point [-]

I seriously doubt that Clippy is Kevin. Want to make a bet?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 04:47:40AM 0 points [-]

Conditioning on your willingness to do so, the most I'm willing to assert is that Clippy used to be Kevin before possibly handing over the account to someone else.

Comment author: pedanterrific 04 March 2012 04:41:54AM 2 points [-]

Extant should be extent.

Sorry, these things bother me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 04:45:03AM 1 point [-]

Thanks, fixed.

Comment author: orthonormal 04 March 2012 04:23:27AM 4 points [-]

Clippy is Kevin? Has this been confirmed?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 04:28:30AM *  0 points [-]

Well, no but there is a decent amount of evidence. In fact it used to be an open secret before he started being more careful.

Comment author: orthonormal 04 March 2012 03:36:09AM 8 points [-]

Will Newsome is a theist in the same way that Clippy is a paperclip maximizer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 04:12:02AM *  4 points [-]

I don't think that's correct.

Clippy is a LW user, specifically Kevin, roleplaying a paperclip maximizer.

Will Newsome is a LW user who noticed that some of the simulation hypothesis/accusal trade/SL5/basilisk type ideas closely resemble certain theistic ideas and decided that one should take another look at theism in light of this.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 02:58:18AM *  4 points [-]

Sorry, yeah, it's not a real thing. "Modal" means like replacing the "amen"s with "or so we seem to have been led to believe"s or "or so it seems wise to endorse as true even though what's going on behind the scenes is largely some really tricky game theory that we're forced for pragmatic reasons to pretend doesn't exist"s. If Vladimir_M takes his Catholicism seriously, which I doubt, then it's likely the same kind kind of Catholic that he is. (I admit to trying to troll Vladimir_M into talking about Catholicism with this comment.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 03:51:30AM *  2 points [-]

From what I know of Vladimir_M, to the extent he's a Catholic, he believe Catholicism is intersubjectively true. He doesn't take simulation hypothesis/accusal trade/SL5 type arguments all that seriously if that's what you're asking.

Comment author: Dentin 04 March 2012 01:45:36AM 1 point [-]

I'm pretty sure I'm one of these unusual people. When I first read the litanies, I understood why they might be useful to some people (I have a lot of experience with religious fanatics), but I truly did not understand why they would be so important to Eliezer or other rationalists. I always figured they were meant to be a simple teaching tool, to help get across critical concepts and then to be discarded.

Gradually I came to realize that a large percentage of the community use the various litanies on a regular basis. This still confuses me in some cases - for example, it would never even occur to me that evidence/data could simply be ignored or that any rationalization could ever trump it.

I suspect this inability to simply ignore inconvenient data is the reason for my low rate of rationalization. I do actually catch myself beginning to rationalize from time to time, but there's always the undercurrent of "wishful thinking isn't real". No matter how hard I rationalize, I cannot make the evidence go away, so the rationalization process gives up quickly.

I have been like this for most of my life, and have memories of the "wishful thinking isn't real" effect going all the way back to my early memories of childish daydreaming and complex storytelling.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 03:03:46AM 3 points [-]

I suspect this inability to simply ignore inconvenient data is the reason for my low rate of rationalization.

This seems wrong, rationalizing is what you do to inconvenient data instead of ignoring it.

In response to comment by satt on How to Fix Science
Comment author: gwern 03 March 2012 11:33:36PM 8 points [-]

By a coincidence of dubious humor, I recently read a paper on exactly this topic, how NHST is completely misunderstood and employed wrongly and what can be improved! I was only reading it for a funny & insightful quote, but Jacob Cohen (as in, 'Cohen's d') in pg 5-6 of "The Earth Is Round (p < 0.05)" tells us that we shouldn't seek to replace NHST with a "magic alternative" because "it doesn't exist". What we should do is focus on understanding the data with graphics and datamining techniques; report confidence limits on effect sizes, which gives us various things I haven't looked up; and finally, place way more emphasis on replication than we currently do.

An admirable program; we don't have to shift all the way to Bayesian reasoning to improve matters. Incidentally, what Bayesian inferences are you talking about? I thought the usual proposals/methods involved principally reporting log odds, to avoid exactly the issue of people having varying priors and updating on trials to get varying posteriors.

In response to comment by gwern on How to Fix Science
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 01:00:24AM 5 points [-]

I thought the usual proposals/methods involved principally reporting log odds, to avoid exactly the issue of people having varying priors and updating on trials to get varying posteriors.

This only works in extremely simple cases.

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 March 2012 06:22:04PM 0 points [-]

The frequentist vs. baysian debate is a debate of computing mathematical paradigms. True mathematicians however shun statistics. They don't like the statistical pradigm ;)

Gödel's discovery ended a certain mathmatical pradigm of wanting to construct a complete mathematics from the ground up.

I could imagine a future paradigm shift way from the ideal of mathmatical proofs to more experimental math. Neural nets or quantum computers can give you answer to mathematical question that you ask that might be better than the answer s that axiom and proof based math provides.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 12:46:16AM 1 point [-]

Gödel's discovery ended a certain mathmatical pradigm of wanting to construct a complete mathematics from the ground up.

Except, in practice mathematics still works this way.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 March 2012 06:42:54PM 1 point [-]

Goedel showed that no one can derive all of mathematics at all, whether in solitude or in a group, because any consistent system of axioms can't lead to all the true statements from their domain.

Anyone know whether it's proven that there are guaranteed to be non-self-referential truths which can't be derived from a given axiom system? (I'm not sure whether "self-referential" can be well-defined.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 12:44:23AM 1 point [-]

Anyone know whether it's proven that there are guaranteed to be non-self-referential truths which can't be derived from a given axiom system?

It is. At least, it's possible to express Goedel statements in the form "there exist integers that satisfy this equation".

(I'm not sure whether "self-referential" can be well-defined.)

It can't.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 March 2012 01:01:43PM 7 points [-]

This has 6 karma points, so I'm left curious about whether people have anything in mind about what real intellectuals shouldn't know.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 March 2012 12:39:51AM 2 points [-]

I interpret the quote as saying that to be a "good intellectual" one needs to not know the problems with the positions "good intellectuals" are expected to defend.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 March 2012 10:43:04PM 3 points [-]

After reading the comments I noticed that I had at least two distinct mental processes that I'd been labeling "rationalization".

Process 1: Say I'm late for a meeting, I have noticed that in thinking about saying "Sorry, I'm late" I immediately want to add an explanation for why this isn't my fault.

Process 2: Someone presents an argument for a conclusion I disagree with, I immediately start looking for flaws in it/reasons to dismiss it. As I observed here, this is necessarily even a fallacy.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 March 2012 09:50:42AM *  5 points [-]

[temporarily deleting]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 March 2012 10:15:17PM *  1 point [-]

Unfortunately most people don't have particularly good introspection about their primary thinking style so it might be slightly tricky for you to look for interesting correlations here.

Aren't there tests for the verbal/visual thinking distinction?

Comment author: wallowinmaya 02 March 2012 08:16:07PM 6 points [-]

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 March 2012 07:12:25AM 4 points [-]

I don't think that is a good description of what people mean by "faith".

For a better idea of the concept of faith start here.

Summary: Theory is to faith as our concept of physical necessitation is to that of social obligation.

Comment author: Dmytry 02 March 2012 05:39:14PM *  1 point [-]

The problem is not with 'rationalization'. Many mathematical proofs started with a [unfounded] belief that some conjecture is true, yet are perfectly valid as the belief has been 'rationalized' using solid logic.

The problem is faulty logic; if your logic is even a small bit off on every inference step, then you can steer the chain of reasoning towards any outcome. When you are using faulty logic and rationalizing, you are steering into some outcome that you want. When you are using faulty logic and you are actually thinking what is true, then you just accumulate error like a random walk, which gives much smaller error over time.

Other issue - most typically people who are rationalizing are not the slightest bit interested in catching themselves rationalize.

edit: to clarify. You may have a goal of winning a debate, not caring what is the true answer, and come up with an entirely valid proof, if for bad reasons. You may also have a goal of winning a debate, be wrong, and make up some fallacious argument, neglect to update your belief, et cetera. That happens when you are not restricting yourself to arguments that are correct. Or you may have a goal of winning a debate, be wrong, and fail to make an argument because you are successfully restricting yourself to arguments which are correct, and don't use fallacies to argue for what you believe in anyway.

In mathematics, the reasoning is fairly reliable, and it doesn't make a slightest bit of difference if you are arriving at a proof because you wanted to know if conjecture is really true, or because you wanted to humiliate some colleague you hate, or because you wanted not to lose debate and didn't want to admit you're wrong. With unreliable reasoning, on the other hand, you are producing mistakes whenever you are rationalizing or not, albeit when rationalizing you tend to make larger mistakes, or become a mistake factory. Still, you may start off with good intention to find out if some conjecture is true, and end up making a faulty proof, or you may start off with a very strong very ill founded belief about the conjecture and get lucky to be right, and find a valid proof. You can't always trust the arguments that you arrived at without rationalizing more than the ones you arrived at when rationalizing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 March 2012 05:30:26AM 1 point [-]

Why is this getting down voted?

Comment author: [deleted] 02 March 2012 07:35:06PM 2 points [-]

Reading the wiki page, it looks like Weierstrass corrected an error in the definition or understanding of limits.

Hindsight bias. The old limit definition was not widely considered either incorrect or incomplete.

But mathematicians did not abandon the concept of limit the way physicists abandoned the concept of epicycle, so I'm not sure that qualifies as a paradigm shift.

They abandoned reasoning about limits informally, which was de rigeur beforehand. For examples of this, see Weierstrass' counterexample to the Dirichlet principle. Prior to Weierstrass, some people believed that the Dirichlet principle was true because approximate solutions exist in all natural examples, and therefore the limit of approximate solutions will be a true solution.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes March 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 March 2012 04:03:50AM 3 points [-]

Hindsight bias. The old limit definition was not widely considered either incorrect or incomplete.

Not true. The "old limit definition" was non-existent beyond the intuitive notion of limit, and people were fully aware that this was not a satisfactory situation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 March 2012 03:42:36AM 6 points [-]

I noticed that there is a certain perfectly rational process that can feel a lot like rationalization from the inside:

Suppose I were to present you with plans for a perpetual motion machine. You would then engage in a process that looks a lot like rationalization to explain why my plan can't work as advertised.

This is of course perfectly rational since the probability that my proposal would actually work is tiny. However, this example does leave me wondering how to separate rationalization from rationality possibly with excessively strong priors.

Comment author: tadrinth 29 February 2012 07:34:21AM -1 points [-]

If you go straight from undergrad to a PhD program, you won't have a Masters on record, which means you'd have to drop all the way down to applying for bachelor's level positions.

Plus which, if you're not going to leverage the PhD, why would you spend an extra four years of hard work and low pay to get it? Just get a Masters instead.

In response to comment by tadrinth on Grad School?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 March 2012 04:11:19AM 4 points [-]

In a lot of fields having a Masters without a PhD signals that you couldn't handle the demands of getting your PhD, and is worse then not having a Masters at all. Or, as they say "If at first you don't succeed, cover up all evidence that you tried".

Comment author: [deleted] 26 February 2012 08:08:03AM *  4 points [-]

Good point. On reconsidering I'd probably want something like a basic income guarantee, where everyone at the very least get enough resources and energy to maintain a healthy immortal Homo Sapiens classic body indefinitely. Actually probably a bit higher than that now that I think about it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Utopia in Manna
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 February 2012 05:03:50PM 10 points [-]

On reconsidering I'd probably want something like a basic income guarantee,

People are always saying that, yet what they mean by "basic income" keeps increasing as their living standards increase.

Comment author: AnthonyC 25 February 2012 11:24:33PM 3 points [-]

I agree with Greg's estimate of medical practitioners- they are not scientists, by and large. It isn't what they're trained for.

And while it is certainly true that some medical problems are really difficult, I expect there is also a lot of low-hanging fruit. Part of the problem is likely that medical research is to a large extent governed not by "What is easy to cure?" but by "What is profitable to treat?" or "What would be prestigious to research?"

Do any countries' national health services research and produce their own drugs and treatments? I would like to know how their goals and results differ from other researchers.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 February 2012 07:02:01AM 1 point [-]

"What is easy to cure?" but by "What is profitable to treat?" or "What would be prestigious to research?"

These questions are not unrelated.

Comment author: dvasya 24 February 2012 01:21:03AM 3 points [-]

One more example of misapplied statistics. You see a 5-standard-deviation signal for faster-than-light neutrinos and reason like this:

"Well, prior to seeing these data I would rate the odds of neutrinos traveling FTL as, say, 1:1000, but this is full 5 standard deviations so the likelihood ratio is about 3.5 million for them going FTL after all, so I must revise my belief and now accept that those neutrinos travel FTL with ~3500:1 odds."

...which, of course, only happens because you have oversimplified by only considering two hypotheses. Whereas in reality you should also have thrown in some other possibilities, like e.g. some undiscovered flaw in the measurements. Which I would, prior to seeing the data, assign a higher probability, say, odds of 1:100 (a mere 1% probability of faulty experiment, just to be generous to the experimenters). Now after seeing the data we also have to revise this probability, and it comes out as ~35000:1 odds for faulty experimental design.

In other words, the more "statistically significant" is the result in such an experiment, the more it is evidence for faulty measurement and against the experimenters' claim (here, FTL neutrinos).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 February 2012 03:35:25AM 4 points [-]

In other words, the more "statistically significant" is the result in such an experiment, the more it is evidence for faulty measurement and against the experimenters' claim (here, FTL neutrinos).

It's still evidence for the claims, just also evidence for the experiment being faulty.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 17 February 2012 07:32:49PM *  5 points [-]

Cause and effect are entangled in the history of human deeds, since anticipation of effects becomes the cause of deeds that produce those effects.

But to offer a counterexample to your belief, did Turkmenbashi's renaming of months and days increase the security of his power? Or did he rename them because he already had near-absolute power and it was his whim to control even further how people talked and thought? I think the latter.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 February 2012 03:18:34AM 2 points [-]

Good point.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 February 2012 11:27:58PM 0 points [-]

P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) alright, but that kind of evidence is easily screened out. For any non-trivial amount of forensic evidence E, P(guilty|E, African descent) ought to be approximately the same as P(guilty|E, Eurasian descent). (For example, if E points toward the defendant being guilty, even though you'd assign a higher prior probability of guilt for a black person than for a white person, you'd assign a higher prior probability of E for a black person than for a white person too, so that in the posterior probabilities those cancel out.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2012 11:35:20PM 1 point [-]

P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) alright, but that kind of evidence is easily screened out.

Agreed, however, I fail to see what this has to do with my point.

Comment author: wedrifid 19 February 2012 10:01:27PM *  1 point [-]

Can you site evidence for this?

(Or even do the homophone and 'cite'?)

Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African decent) > P(conviction|Eurasian decent)

That is Bayesian evidence that there is a racial bias in the conviction process.

and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) as a racist.

(But that isn't evidence!)

Mind you those people are probably being racist. In particular they are 'pointing out' rather than, say, hypothesizing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2012 10:26:09PM 0 points [-]

(Or even do the homophone and 'cite'?)

Thanks fixed.

Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African decent) > P(conviction|Eurasian decent)

That is Bayesian evidence that there is a racial bias in the conviction process.

Only if one doesn't know anything about the base rate.

and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) as a racist.

(But that isn't evidence!)

Why not?

Mind you those people are probably being racist. In particular they are 'pointing out' rather than, say, hypothesizing.

According to your profile you're from Australia, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the above statement is due to all your information about the US being filtered through a politically correct filter.

Comment author: Michael_Sullivan 19 February 2012 12:36:37PM 0 points [-]

Is it really off-topic to suggest that looking at the accuracy of the courts may amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic in a context where we've basically all agreed that

  1. the courts are not terrible at making accurate determinations of whether a defendant broke a law

  2. The set of laws where penalties can land you in prison are massively inefficient socially and in most people's minds unjust (when we actually grapple with what the laws are, as opposed to how they are usually applied to people like us, for those of us who are white and not poor).

  3. The system of who is tried versus who makes plea bargains versus who never gets tried is systematically discriminatory against those with little money or middle/upper class social connections, and provides few effective protections against known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.

How different is this in principle from TimS's suggestion about lower hanging fruit within evidentiary procedure, just at a meta level? Or did you consider that off-topic as well?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2012 09:55:26PM *  2 points [-]

known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.

Can you cite evidence for this?

Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African descent) > P(conviction|Eurasian descent) and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African descent) > P(guilty|Eurasian descent) as a racist.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 February 2012 04:28:15PM *  0 points [-]

The original question was:

Is there any evidence than American or any other legal system is significantly better than chance at what it does?

which I would interpret as ‘Is P(Conviction|Guilt) substantially larger than P(Conviction|Innocence)?’ Now, for some crimes such as copyright infringement, P(G) is very close to 1, so P(C|G) cannot be close to 1 simply because then there wouldn't be enough room in prisons to hold NP(C|G)P(G) people (N being the population -- times the mean sentence length, over the mean lifespan, and possibly some other factor of order unity I'm forgetting of), and since P(I) is small, in order for P(C|I) to be much less than P(C|G), P(C and I) = P(C|I)P(I) must be very small.

(Also, we want the system to be unbiased, i.e. P(C|G, brown skin) to be close to P(C|G, pink skin), P(C|G, penis) to be close to P(C|G, vagina), and so on, and so forth. The best way of achieving this would IMO be for all of these numbers to be close to 1, but that's impossible with the current definition of G and finite capacity of prisons.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2012 09:52:43PM 2 points [-]

‘Is P(Conviction|Guilt) substantially larger than P(Conviction|Innocence)?’

Are we restricting to cases that are prosecuted or doing this over all people?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Not insane. Unsane.
Comment author: Nicholas_Covington 18 February 2012 05:36:36PM -2 points [-]

"A world without humor is indistinguishable from hell." Try to laugh every once in a while, don't take my silly comments seriously.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 February 2012 06:37:54PM 4 points [-]

Useful advise: on the internet no one can tell when you're trying to be sarcastic.

In response to Not insane. Unsane.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 February 2012 03:27:52AM *  4 points [-]

You want a word that means "these person's ideas are so wrong that they shouldn't even be discussed in polite company".

Look at this from the outside view, you want a word that's essentially a rationalist equivalent to "infidel" without the connotations "infidel" has of making its user seem scarily dogmatic.

In response to Not insane. Unsane.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 11:57:11PM 9 points [-]

I think it sounds to blatantly like a euphemism.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 17 February 2012 04:25:57PM 3 points [-]

I'm a little worried about politics being the mind-killer here. So I'm not going to get too involved. But I'd point out that not everyone who is pro-life is certain that abortion is murder. Moreover, you are talking about legislation, and legislation always involves compromises. So having a punishment that is less harsh than what their articulated beliefs would call for is not an indication of hypocrisy.

Now, what is hypocritical and is very similar, is that the people who say that abortion is murder aren't out spending time bombing clinics. Whenever a clinic is bombed or a doctor killed, they rush out to say that they don't support it. But if they did actually believe, then they would. However, there may be some degree of scope insensitivity and other cognitive biases at play here rather than simple hypocrisy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 09:54:16PM 6 points [-]

Now, what is hypocritical and is very similar, is that the people who say that abortion is murder aren't out spending time bombing clinics. Whenever a clinic is bombed or a doctor killed, they rush out to say that they don't support it. But if they did actually believe, then they would. However, there may be some degree of scope insensitivity and other cognitive biases at play here rather than simple hypocrisy.

So by that logic where all the pre-civil war abolitionists except John Brown were hypocrites.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 17 February 2012 01:48:20PM 0 points [-]

Didn't downvote, but I think your comment visually matches the 'strawman argument' pattern. Except that it is not.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 09:31:27PM 1 point [-]

Except that it is not.

[citation please]

Comment author: fubarobfusco 17 February 2012 04:15:36AM *  21 points [-]

The "plausible alternative coalitions" game seems to illustrate — by contrast — the historical processes by which actual political positions came about. For instance, the anti-abortion position didn't actually come about through an "expanding sphere of moral worth" extending rights to fetuses; and the fact that anti-abortion folks are not the same people as animal-rights folks is evidence that it didn't.

Early anti-abortion jurisprudence in England and the U.S. categorized a woman taking an abortifacient as felo de se — a felon against herself — the same standing as a suicide. [1] The crime was not defined in terms of the fetus possessing rights, but in terms of a violence against the woman's body. On similar reasoning, many first-wave feminists opposed medical abortion as a violent intrusion;[2] while they were interested in reproductive freedom, for many of them this meant the right of a wife to choose when and whether to have sex with her husband.

Other issues involved in banning abortion in the U.S. included the legal establishment of the medical profession (with physicians using the law to drive midwives out of business) and eugenics. The major customers of abortion in the 19th century were middle- and upper-class native-born white women; and eugenicists raised the concern that these desirable classes would commit "race suicide" and be outbred by undesirable immigrants and poor people. [3]

The modern religious "pro-life" anti-abortion position, although it is often stated in terms of fetal rights, is also entangled with other motives: among these, religious opposition to contraception in general, and opposition to the social consequences of individual control over reproduction, viz., sexual freedom or license.

Few of these actual historical entanglements have the sense of an "expanding sphere of moral worth" towards the fetus; in other words, a moral foundation of fairness and justice. They show patterns more attached to other moral foundations — care towards the woman herself; loyalty towards racial and class groups; religious authority; and sexual sanctity or purity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 07:15:53PM *  3 points [-]

The major customers of abortion in the 19th century were middle- and upper-class native-born white women; and eugenicists raised the concern that these desirable classes would commit "race suicide" and be outbred by undesirable immigrants and poor people.

Conversely they were in favor of abortion and sterilization (frequently forced) for the poor and undesirable.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 17 February 2012 10:17:10AM 6 points [-]

whereas a sufficiently powerful autocrat doesn't have to give a fuck what people say or think).

The sufficiently powerful autocrat doesn't have to give a fuck what people say or think if and only if his/her utility function is composed only of "staying in power". But people are more complicated than that and they tend to like to have other people share their views. Even most contrarians (who can be said to delight in having unorthodox views) try to convince other people of their views.

In the real world, the more powerful the autocrat, the more absolute the dictatorship, the more they care about what people say or think, the more restricted free speech is. I don't have any reason to believe that at some magical "sufficiently powerful" point, that direction gets reversed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 07:10:19PM 3 points [-]

In the real world, the more powerful the autocrat, the more absolute the dictatorship, the more they care about what people say or think, the more restricted free speech is.

I think you may have reversed cause and effect there.

Comment author: DanielLC 17 February 2012 05:24:59AM 0 points [-]

No, nor is there a reason to assume that anything else we don't know about physics isn't complicated.

That being said, the probability that even just the parts we know are so simple by coincidence is vanishingly small.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 06:52:13PM 1 point [-]

That being said, the probability that even just the parts we know are so simple by coincidence is vanishingly small.

Not when you realize that the parts we know are the parts that were simple enough for us to figure out.

In response to Water Fluoridation
Comment author: Multiheaded 17 February 2012 01:59:33PM -1 points [-]

You're wise to turn your attention to this disturbing matter. To me, it feels obvious that the whole thing stinks of Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 06:50:33PM *  8 points [-]

Given that the only point of the above comment appears to be to remind people that the OP topic is associated with a low status conspiracy theory and is therefore low status, would one of the people who upvoted it care to explain why?

Comment author: gwern 17 February 2012 06:29:15PM 1 point [-]

You would have to do more than that; for example, you would have to avoid any toothpastes, obviously, but less obviously you would have to completely cut out tea and some other plants which naturally contain high levels of fluoride. (Tea would be a real sacrifice for me.)

In response to comment by gwern on Water Fluoridation
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 06:49:07PM 2 points [-]

There exists non-flourinated toothpaste.

Comment author: DanielLC 17 February 2012 03:45:29AM 0 points [-]

The laws of physics, combined with the initial conditions of the universe, is sufficient to describe the state of all the particles for all eternity.

We don't really have much of an idea of what the initial conditions are, but there's no reason to believe that they're complicated.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 03:54:53AM 1 point [-]

but there's no reason to believe that they're complicated.

Are there any reasons to believe they're not complicated that don't rely on assuming a K-complexity prior?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 February 2012 12:41:34AM 6 points [-]

Since small 'c' conservatives support the status quo, or the status quo a generation ago, "conservatives for X" is a plausible counterfactual coalition for any X that could exist stably in society for a generation without destroying either itself or the society.

Comment author: taw 16 February 2012 09:44:57AM 1 point [-]

A few observations:

  • Literally 100% of people who ever lived have done multiple things which unfriendly legal system might treat as crimes, starting from simple ones like watching youtube videos uploaded without consent of their copyright owners, making mistakes on tax forms, reckless driving, defamation, hate speech, and going as far as the legal system wants to go.
  • Vast majority of suspects in US do not get any trial whatsoever, they're forced to accept punishment or risk vastly higher punishment if they want to take their chance of trial.
  • There are good reasons to believe few trials that happen are extremely far from any kind of fairness, and they're stacked to give persecution an advantage. Just compare massive funding of police and prosecutors with puny funding of defense attorneys.
  • US has extraordinarily high number of prisoners per capita. Looking at crime rates alone, it does not have extraordinarily high levels of serious crime per capita. There's no way most people in prisons can be anything but innocent (or "guilty" of minor and irrelevant "crimes" pretty much everybody is "guilty" of and persecuted on legal system's whims).
  • Unless you believe that young black men in US are the most criminal group in history of the world, most of them who are in prisons must be innocent by pure statistics.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 February 2012 10:55:35PM 3 points [-]

This book seems relevant.

Comment author: taw 16 February 2012 09:44:57AM 1 point [-]

A few observations:

  • Literally 100% of people who ever lived have done multiple things which unfriendly legal system might treat as crimes, starting from simple ones like watching youtube videos uploaded without consent of their copyright owners, making mistakes on tax forms, reckless driving, defamation, hate speech, and going as far as the legal system wants to go.
  • Vast majority of suspects in US do not get any trial whatsoever, they're forced to accept punishment or risk vastly higher punishment if they want to take their chance of trial.
  • There are good reasons to believe few trials that happen are extremely far from any kind of fairness, and they're stacked to give persecution an advantage. Just compare massive funding of police and prosecutors with puny funding of defense attorneys.
  • US has extraordinarily high number of prisoners per capita. Looking at crime rates alone, it does not have extraordinarily high levels of serious crime per capita. There's no way most people in prisons can be anything but innocent (or "guilty" of minor and irrelevant "crimes" pretty much everybody is "guilty" of and persecuted on legal system's whims).
  • Unless you believe that young black men in US are the most criminal group in history of the world, most of them who are in prisons must be innocent by pure statistics.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 February 2012 10:52:16PM 0 points [-]

There are good reasons to believe few trials that happen are extremely far from any kind of fairness, and they're stacked to give persecution an advantage. Just compare massive funding of police and prosecutors with puny funding of defense attorneys.

On the other hand, the prosecution needs to convince twelve jurors, the defense only needs to convince one.

Comment author: timtyler 16 February 2012 12:38:36PM 1 point [-]

Priors do tend to get swamped by the data - in a lot of cases.

Choosing a sensible prior does help when you don't have very much data in some domain, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 February 2012 10:17:27PM 1 point [-]

Priors do tend to get swamped by the data - in a lot of cases.

Depending on the complexity of the prior it can take much more data then you'd expect.

Comment author: DanielLC 16 February 2012 06:19:36AM 0 points [-]

Maybe there is some true randomness in the universe

Not a problem. Suppose you flip a quantum coin ten times. If you record the output, the K-complexity is ten bits. As such, there's a 1/1024 prior probability of getting that exact output. This is exactly what you'd get if you assumed it was random.

Basically, K-complexity is treating the very laws of physics as random. Any randomness on top of that works the same way as it would as part of that.

The problem is that it seems that things that are definable but not computable should be above random chance. For example, the K-complexity of a halting oracle is infinite, but it can be defined in finite space. Would the probability of the fine structure constant being a halting oracle be infinitesimal?

One reason to use K-complexity is that so far, it's worked far better than anything else. As far as we know, we can fit the laws of physics on a note card, yet the universe contains well over 10^80 particles, and don't get me started on the amount of computing power necessary to run it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 February 2012 10:15:28PM 1 point [-]

As far as we know, we can fit the laws of physics on a note card, yet the universe contains well over 10^80 particles, and don't get me started on the amount of computing power necessary to run it.

But you can't fit a description of the current state of those particles on a note card, which you would need in order to actually make predictions.

Comment author: Metus 16 February 2012 02:37:50AM 0 points [-]

This will most probably not answer your question but I hope you will find this interesting.

The Kolmogorov complexity prior is, as you have stated, merely a formalization of Occam's razor. Another possibility to formalize Occam's razor is Schmidhuber's prior where the probability of an algorithm is its speed, roughly speaking. It has the advantage of being computable in the limit, as opposed to the other option.

The interesting thing is now that we can formalize various inductive hypotheses as priors such as "Everything goes" as a uniform distribution. There was a discussion on this a few weeks before. The point is that, to my knowledge, beyond practicability there is no theoretical justification of Occam's razor. For an atheist though, Occam's razor has the nice property of cutting off the probability of any algorithm that incorporates the concept of a god.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 February 2012 10:11:55PM 1 point [-]

For an atheist though, Occam's razor has the nice property of cutting off the probability of any algorithm that incorporates the concept of a god.

That depends on the language you use for your Kolmogorov prior.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 21 July 2010 02:57:36PM 0 points [-]

I can't imagine anything that would stop home schooling other than existential threats (in which case we have other problems) or it becoming illegal.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 February 2012 10:48:15PM 1 point [-]

It already is in some countries, e.g., Germany and Sweden.

Comment author: gwern 15 February 2012 01:58:22AM 5 points [-]

Would public hostility really result in lower profits than just selling at the market equilibrium price?

The public hostility is clearly a negative of some kind; whether it actually reduces net lifetime discounted income or some metric like that, you'd have to ask an economist.

But the artists clearly do want to avoid the true prices being in any way ascribable to them. An example: I read in an article somewhere of the lawsuits against Ticketmaster where apparently one of the revelations was that high powered acts were able to quietly demand shares of Ticketmaster's 'fees' - this price increase was not perceived as a price increase by the act, but as Ticketmaster's fault. They took the blame in exchange for the act using their services, basically. I would guess that Ticketmaster gets a bigger percentage of the 'fees' than they would get in a straight ticket price increase; this difference would represent Ticketmaster's compensation for taking the heat. (And there was another bit, about acts demanding larger fractions of the tickets, which they would quietly sell at premium prices - but without the public opprobrium accompanying official prices that high.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 February 2012 04:50:26AM 3 points [-]

This post seems relevant.

Comment author: Gabriel 15 February 2012 12:15:18AM 13 points [-]

Otherwise it's too easy to make mistakes like confusing incidental groupings in your language with natural categories.

I'm quite sure that explicitly learning the relevant knowledge about the process of category formation in humans and its implications towards accurate thinking would take a lot less time and be more effective than learning another language. I don't think that learning languages is an optimal method to gain any ability other than actually understanding and speaking them (and even that, in the world of the future, might be better accomplished by buying a good translation program).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 February 2012 04:30:31AM 0 points [-]

I'm quite sure that explicitly learning the relevant knowledge about the process of category formation in humans and its implications towards accurate thinking would take a lot less time and be more effective than learning another language.

That's like arguing that learning anatomy will do more to keep you fit then doing sports.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 February 2012 06:00:49PM 21 points [-]

The problem with this argument is that you've spent so much emotional effort arguing why the world is screwed without FAI, that you've neglected to hold the claim "The FAI effort currently being conducted by SIAI is likely to succeed in saving the world" to the standards of evidence you would otherwise demand.

Consider the following exercise in leaving a line of retreat: suppose Omega told you that SIAI's FAI project was going to fail, what would you do?

Comment author: James_Evans 13 February 2012 12:07:59AM 2 points [-]

Partially referenced elsewhere in the thread already, but I would caution one from necessarily starting with a philosophy then working backwards to see how it matches reality.

I would recommend one instead train themselves to read scientific research papers, especially in one's field of interest, then later compare those results to existing philosophies.

I would say it's a mistake to view a philosophy/philosophies as a periodic table with unfilled spaces, where one can infer what they should contain easily. I would liken it more to a bible where the anything-du-jour was used to fill up space.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 February 2012 01:00:32AM 1 point [-]

I would recommend one instead train themselves to read scientific research papers, especially in one's field of interest, then later compare those results to existing philosophies.

This strikes me as biasing your choice based on what one's field of interest is.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 12 February 2012 10:28:11PM *  1 point [-]

It does mean that we should give up on most claims though.

(I wouldn't call most claims toxic, in the sense of promoting anti-epistemic habits, which is something more characteristic of philosophy specifically.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2012 10:52:01PM 1 point [-]

It does mean that we should give up on most claims though.

Only if we determine them to be false.

(I wouldn't call most claims toxic, in the sense of promoting anti-epistemic habits, which is something more characteristic of philosophy specifically.)

I meant toxic in the sense of promoting destructive behavior.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 12 February 2012 08:45:16PM 3 points [-]

Your post makes it sound like we should throw out all philosophy.

Most philosophy being wrong and toxic, this seems like a good heuristic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2012 10:17:04PM 4 points [-]

Most truth claims are also both wrong and toxic, that doesn't mean we should give up on the concept of truth.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 12 February 2012 05:53:06PM 9 points [-]

All the places Britain has owned, even briefly. I may have been suffering from availability bias. The US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and India are doing better than a lot of other places, but what about Afghanistan? Nigeria? Syria?

The British may have had more successful ex-colonies than other empires, but this doesn't mean all, or even a majority of their ex-colonies were successful.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2012 10:09:29PM 4 points [-]

Not to mention Zimbabwe.

Comment author: DavidAgain 11 February 2012 11:45:15AM 2 points [-]

I think some of the comments in the original hit the nail on the head. I, personally, am skeptical about these arguments because they sounds too convenient by half: both for those who are ideologically anti-aid and those who feel bad about not giving. I notice that I used to not give money to charity before I found this out, but that I have sometimes thought this is why I wasn't giving money since I found it out. Which makes me suspicious. People in general are very happy to believe things that replace a moral tension with an intellectual argument.

On the other hand, a lot of me is tempted to say that aid does help because those devoted to helping are generally pro-aid. But that's obviously a self-selecting issue: you're not going to set up a charity to help if you don't think help HELPS. Also, in general, I think people get mixed up about sincerity. They tend to think that those with access to power and information are either right or deliberately doing the bad thing (on everything from global warming to dealing with the economic crisis). I think a more realistic view of how business and political leaders actually act and think suggests that the way they reach decisions is far nearer to the way that others do than we assume, and we can assume cock-up over conspiracy at any given time. So if aid doesn't work, I don't think that governments do it cynically for effect: I think they think it does work and tend to weigh evidence suggesting it does more heavily than evidence it doesn't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 February 2012 07:34:33PM 4 points [-]

But that's obviously a self-selecting issue: you're not going to set up a charity to help if you don't think help HELPS.

Imagine two charities, one devotes nearly all its resources to helping, the other devotes much of its resources to making itself look appealing to donors. Which one is going to get more donations and thus become bigger? The problem is that donating to charity is the ultimate credence good since the donor frequently has no way to tell whether or how much the donation is helping?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 February 2012 04:55:52AM 5 points [-]

Two issues with this heuristic:

1) It doesn't work well for credence goods.

2) Sometimes it takes a long time for sciences to find an application, two modern examples are astrophysics, and particle physics.

Comment author: Robert_Unwin 10 February 2012 12:01:35PM 6 points [-]

Tetlock's political judgment study was a test for macroeconomics, political science and history. Yet people with PhDs in these areas did no better on predicting macro political and economic events than those without any PhD. Maybe macro helps in producing good econometric models, but it doesn't help in making informal predictions. (Whereas one suspects that physics and chemistry would help in a test of quick predictions about a novel physical or chemical system, vs. people without a PhD in these fields).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 February 2012 04:45:58AM 2 points [-]

Another analogy is that having a PhD in the relevant sciences doesn't help you play sports.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 February 2012 11:40:01AM 4 points [-]

You keep saying things I was gonna say. Dost thou haveth a blog perchance?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 February 2012 04:26:08AM *  2 points [-]

Thanks. Sorry, I don't have a blog.

Comment author: CaveJohnson 08 February 2012 05:51:26PM *  14 points [-]

When people talk about the importance of democracy, it is never democracy as it has ever actually functioned, with the politicians that have actually been elected, and the policies that have actually been implemented. It is always democracy as people imagine it will operate once they succeed in electing "the right people" — by which they mean, people who agree almost completely with their own views, and who are consistent and incorruptible in their implementation of the resulting policies.

--Ben O'Neill, here

Considering the above quote can be used to criticize nearly any popular political position I don't think it is inherently mind-killing. Also since we all agree democracy is a good thing this isn't even very political. The original article and context obviously does make it somewhat political.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 February 2012 04:23:42AM 11 points [-]

The same is true of people who call for a dictatorship or any non-democratic form of government. They also always imagine it will be governed by "the right people", and imagine all the things "the right people" could accomplish if freed from the need to listen to the "ignorant mob".

Comment author: [deleted] 07 February 2012 02:15:15PM 0 points [-]

That doesn't sound plausible to me, but if you're right, the right thing to do would be letting as many people as possible know about the issue, so that it's more likely to be averted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 February 2012 12:59:56AM 2 points [-]

The way it works is: if people are keeping the basilisk a secret for the sake of protecting others (even if it increases their own punishment), that means that those people value protecting others over their own safety. Therefore, a more effective way to punish them, is to torture those they're trying to protect.

Comment author: Polymeron 07 February 2012 08:11:22AM 2 points [-]

It's possible that I misconstrued the meaning of your words; not being a native English speaker myself, this happens on occasion. I was going off of the word "vibrant", which I understand to mean among other things "vital" and "energetic". The opposite of that is to make something sickly and weak.

But regardless of any misunderstanding, I would like to see some reference to the main point I was making: Do you want people to think on how best to do the opposite of what you are striving for (making the country less vibrant and diverse, whatever that means), or do you prefer to determine which of you is pursuing a non-productive avenue of investigation?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 February 2012 05:36:31AM 2 points [-]

It's possible that I misconstrued the meaning of your words; not being a native English speaker myself, this happens on occasion. I was going off of the word "vibrant", which I understand to mean among other things "vital" and "energetic". The opposite of that is to make something sickly and weak.

I was more objecting to your use of the word "diverse". And frankly these days "vibrant" has almost no meaning beyond being an applause light.

Comment author: FeepingCreature 06 February 2012 08:04:33AM 2 points [-]

Truth is an abstract, rationally defined property that has a meaning beyond my mind. To say that "things my brain tells me are true, are true" is a similar kind of claim would imply that green, like true, has a working definition beyond the perceptual. If this is the case, I'd like to know it. I'm fairly sure it's not actually possible to be wrong about a perceived color, excluding errors in memory. It's possible to consider a statement and be mistaken about its truthfulness, but is it possible to look at an object and be mistaken about the color one perceives it as? That seems nonsensical.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2012 05:31:43AM 2 points [-]

To say that "things my brain tells me are true, are true" is a similar kind of claim would imply that green, like true, has a working definition beyond the perceptual.

So can you provide a working definition of "true"?

In response to Cargo Cult Language
Comment author: Incorrect 05 February 2012 11:27:33PM *  2 points [-]

I wonder if prescriptive vs. descriptive is political enough that people are getting mindkilled.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2012 05:01:41AM 2 points [-]

I think this essay by Eric Raymond is a good description of the situation.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 February 2012 09:35:41PM 2 points [-]

I have noticed that reddit's r/atheism is rather fond of basic sexist jokes such as:

http://todayilearned.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/how-men-and-women-take-photos.jpg

What sort of evidence would you like?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2012 04:53:30AM 3 points [-]

If your working definition of "sexism" is implying that women may in at least some ways be different from men in ways that reasonably imply inferiority, I disagree with your definition.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 06 February 2012 06:28:52AM *  12 points [-]

I don't know if it was intentional, but Eliezer's decision to write a rationality fanfic as a brilliant gambit. Fanfic.net's readers are overwhelming smart, young and female.

LW and OB have a lot to say about psychology and sociology, two fields where women are more interested then men. Perhaps we could reach out to those segments?

The meetups could also recruit women directly. Men don't have to bring their girlfriends, a platonic female friend works too. Or you can hold the meetups in places where women are more likely to be present (think bookshops, not bars).

If you want more women at the Singularity Summit, we could make a survey for people did not attend. Ask why they didn't come, and see if there's a difference between men and women.

But the most important thing is to make sure the rationalist/trans-humanist community is a safe place for women. Keep an eye out for what Alicorn wants to reduce. Address concerns of sexism sensitively, instead of pulling a Dawkins. In general, LW's treatment of women is better than other communities that pride themselves on being rational (e.g., atheist and Objectivist). Let's keep it that way.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2012 04:51:19AM 1 point [-]

The way I read your last paragraph is: "we should make lesswrong less rational, at least about gender issues, in order to better attract women".

Comment author: FeepingCreature 06 February 2012 01:52:37AM 0 points [-]

You mean, "to see the problem with a wholly unrelated statement". Green is not the same kind of property as true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 04:24:43AM 1 point [-]

Green is not the same kind of property as true.

Could you expand on that.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 06 February 2012 03:42:11AM *  1 point [-]

I think that was an unfair clipping. The context of that quote was the OP's statement about the usefulness of getting clarification of language usage.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 04:21:28AM 2 points [-]

My point is that having to play rationalist taboo is still much worse then not having to play it.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 06 February 2012 04:07:02AM 3 points [-]

My best guess is that, although OB/LW do a decent job of respecting women, they draw most of their readers from crowds that keep women out. There is definitely sexism within the libertarian-atheist-hacker segment of the Internet. Women are also less likely to major in economics and computer science, and gender roles probably play some role in that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 04:11:53AM *  4 points [-]

There is definitely sexism within the libertarian-atheist-hacker segment of the Internet.

Would you please refrain from throwing around those kinds of accusations without evidence.

Comment author: Prismattic 06 February 2012 03:29:15AM 0 points [-]

I think you could have made this point without linking to Instapundit. If you don't want this thread to get totally mindkilled, perhaps it's better to leave out links to people who elicit highly polarized reactions from different political tribes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 03:37:32AM 2 points [-]

I find it rude to quote people without linking to them.

Comment author: TimS 01 February 2012 02:03:59PM *  0 points [-]

I understand that law can be complicated, but you seem to endorse the following position:

The following is not illegal: A victim has sex with a perpetrator, without consent to have sex from the victim. The perpetrator only threatens to use force and does not actually use force.

That legal position is inconsistent with most other crimes (robbery is taking your property from you without consent - no violence element is included). I think criminalizing sex in the absence of consent is quite justified. I acknowledge that consent can have multiple meanings and that ambiguity must be resolved, but non-consent seems a complete justification for criminalization.

Additionally, the above theory seems likely to put the victim at risk of further harm - my understanding is that most police departments recommend not resisting (both rape and robbery) because of the risk that the criminal will do further injury.

In practice what this means is that a woman can declare any sexual encounter to be "rape" after the fact.

False accusations are a problem for the criminal justice system in general. I can falsely accuse you of stealing money from me, or hitting me, or harassing me. If I tailor the explanation carefully, the police would have no reason to expect corroborating evidence. You deny the charge, and it comes down to relative credibility. I'm not saying this is ideal, but it is the best we can do in the absence of some kind of truth-oracle. Why is this a bigger problem for rape than other crimes?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 03:17:34AM *  0 points [-]

As Instapundit points out here.

SO IF A MAN GETS DRUNK AND SLEEPS WITH A WOMAN HE WOULDN’T HAVE SLEPT WITH SOBER, it’s humorous grist for jokes about “beer goggles” and “coyote ugly.” But if a woman does the same thing, woe unto anyone who suggests it wasn’t “date rape.”

I think this nicely illustrates the problem with the definition of rape that feminists like yourself are pushing.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 05 February 2012 09:32:48AM 1 point [-]

Anyone want to come up with a theory about why not bothering to get things right was optimal in the ancestral environment?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 02:54:44AM 5 points [-]

In the ancestral environment you likely live more-or-less the same way your parents/elders did, so any advise they gave you was likely to have been verified for generations and hence good.

Comment author: tarmstrong 05 February 2012 09:43:14PM 9 points [-]

Is it really valid to conclude that software engineering is diseased based on one propagating mistake? Could you provide other examples of flawed scholarship in the field? (I'm not saying I disagree, but I don't think your argument is particularly convincing.)

Can you comment on Making Software by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (Eds.)? What do you think of Jorge Aranda and Greg Wilson's blog, It Will Never Work in Theory?

To anyone interested in the subject, I recommend Greg Wilson's talk on the subject, which you can view here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 02:49:34AM 3 points [-]

Is it really valid to conclude that software engineering is diseased based on one propagating mistake?

How about based on the fact that the discipline relies on propagating result rather than reproducing them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 02:24:42AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Polymeron 05 February 2012 10:27:59PM 1 point [-]

One that's already related to LW - commonsenseatheism.com; however that reinforces the thought that any LW regular who also frequents other places could discuss or link to it there.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 01:22:57AM 2 points [-]

Interesting, apparently as of a week ago it's shutting down.

Comment author: moridinamael 04 February 2012 03:48:37AM *  3 points [-]

Yes, I think your writing a "counter-fiction" would be a very useful exercise and might clarify to me how you can continue to hold the position that you do. I honestly do not fathom it. I admit this is a fact about my own state of knowledge, and I would like it if you could at least show me an example of a fictional universe where you were proven right, as I have shown an account of a fictional universe where you are proven wrong.

I don't intend for the story to serve as any kind of evidence, but I did intend for it to serve as an argument. If you found yourself in the position described in the story, would you be forced to admit that there was not, in fact, any information that makes up a "mind" outside of the mechanistic brain? If it turns out that humans and their simulations both behave and think in exactly the same fashion?

Again, it's not fictional evidence, it's me asking what your true rejection would need to be for you to accept that the universe is turtles all the way down.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 01:14:11AM 1 point [-]

One possible counter fiction would have an ending similar to the bad ending of three worlds collide.

Comment author: FeepingCreature 04 February 2012 06:02:20PM 2 points [-]

Things that my brain tells me are green, are green. Things that your brain tells you are green, are green. In cases where we disagree, split the label into my!green and your!green.

Now can we move on? This post is a waste of time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 01:09:15AM 3 points [-]

Things that my brain tells me are green, are green. Things that your brain tells you are green, are green. In cases where we disagree, split the label into my!green and your!green.

To see the problem with the above statement, try replacing the word "green" with "true".

Comment author: Desrtopa 06 February 2012 12:28:48AM *  11 points [-]

At least a few, online and in person, possibly more than I'm aware of. One person mentioned that he'd become an atheist as a result of observing my online debates over the course of a few months, but he never went out of his way to tell me, I only learned from following a later discussion; there might be others I've similarly influenced who've never told me.

Unlike Luke, all the people I know I've caused to convert professed to have been swayed by my actual arguments (and a fairly common reason for conversion I've heard is "I followed online debates and the atheists always had the better arguments,") but I've never known it to happen as an "aha!" moment upon being exposed to a single knockdown argument. In my experience it's always taken prolonged exposure to atheistic arguments for a sense of familiarity to build up, after which the person can have an "aha!" moment and realize they have somewhere to go from there.

Different people tolerate different demeanor, but I've never known of anyone converting someone else without making themselves likable to their targets.

In all the cases I can think of, conversion has taken a minimum of a few months of exposure to atheist ideas.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 01:05:51AM 6 points [-]

Unlike Luke, all the people I know I've caused to convert professed to have been swayed by my actual arguments

Are you sure? Keep in mind that people will generally not admit that they formed their current opinions for irrational reasons.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 05 February 2012 11:17:55PM *  1 point [-]

This is my thought as well. Every one of the examples given I would attribute to dialectal differences between common usage and the more technical and jargon-filled language used by scientists and science fans. SaidAchmiz even admits that for some of these, the usage he doesn't like is more common, which is a big hint. My understanding is that speakers very rarely adopt usage which will be misunderstood by the language group they typically speak with.

“hmm, is that really what you meant to say?” is often met with absurd arguments to the effect that no, this phrasing is not nonsensical after all, these words mean what I want them to, and who the hell are you to try to legislate usage, anyway?

Isn't this exactly why we have the technique of Rationalist Taboo? It doesn't matter whether the meaning someone ascribes to a word seems stupid to you, once you understand what they mean by the word, and they understand what you mean by the word, you can move on. The best ways I've found to do this are to coin two new words (I like to prepend the word in question with the name of the person whose meaning we are trying to capture), or to always replace the word with its intended substance for the rest of the discourse.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2012 01:03:02AM 0 points [-]

It doesn't matter whether the meaning someone ascribes to a word seems stupid to you

Yes, it does.

Comment author: roystgnr 04 February 2012 07:37:11PM 1 point [-]

Having a few very good rationalists applying "fallacy check" and "bias check" to all their own essays would be wonderful... but just imagine the implications of having many mediocre rationalists regularly applying "fallacy check" and "bias check" to their politicians essays and speeches.

I'd love to see what kind of feedback that provides to the politicians speechwriters. "Well, sir, we could say that, and it could give us a nice brief popularity boost, but would that be worth the blowback we get once everybody's talking about how we sent their fallacy-meters off the charts?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 February 2012 09:33:37PM 2 points [-]

but just imagine the implications of having many mediocre rationalists regularly applying "fallacy check" and "bias check" to their politicians essays and speeches.

Their ability to do this without getting mind-killed is very much open to question.

Comment author: Polymeron 05 February 2012 06:21:41PM 6 points [-]

I came to this thread by way of someone discussing a specific comment in an outside forum.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 February 2012 09:28:31PM 2 points [-]

Just out of curiosity, which outside forum?

Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2012 10:47:30AM 3 points [-]

You mean that gung onq guvat zvtug unccra rira gb gubfr jub unira'g urneq be gubhtug nobhg gung fpranevb?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 09:20:24PM 1 point [-]

Yes.

Comment author: shokwave 04 February 2012 12:49:37PM 2 points [-]

I understood it as advocating a maximum ignorance prior. In hindsight, it's an MT:G card, so probably not.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 05:50:22PM 5 points [-]

Also I don't recommend throwing out what you know to have a maximum ignorance prior.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 04 February 2012 02:58:04PM 1 point [-]

I've heard a theory that half truths told with intent to deceive are more damaging than outright lies because if someone is deceived, they're more likely to blame themselves.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 05:47:20PM 6 points [-]

Also, you're more likely to notice that an outright lie is false.

In response to comment by TimS on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2012 09:15:16PM 1 point [-]

I'd say it doesn't endorse the strong ancestral environment hypothesis (SAEH). The most relevant part of EY's piece is, "Anything originally computed in a brain can be expected to be recomputed, on the fly, in response to changing circumstances." "Mainstream" evolutionary psychologists uphold the "massive modularity hypothesis," according to which the adaptive demands of the ancestral environment gave rise to hardwired adaptations that continue to operate despite different environmental conditions. They deny that a general purpose learning mechanism is capable of solving specific adaptive problems (recomputed on the fly). The cognitive biases are one of the evidentiary mainstays of SAEH, but they are subject to alternative interpretations. The evidence of the plasticity of the brain is perhaps the strongest evidence against massive modularity.

I'd also mention that not all primate species are highly stratified. Although chimps are our closest relatives, it is far from clear that the human ancestral environment included comparable stratification. It isn't even clear that a uniform ancestral human environment existed.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 02:11:45AM 2 points [-]

"Anything originally computed in a brain can be expected to be recomputed, on the fly, in response to changing circumstances."

That's just false, and EY really should know better.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2012 04:40:52PM 1 point [-]

Hmm? She didn't have any real evidence other than a perceived degradation of Minbari society.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes February 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 02:00:49AM 1 point [-]

I was thinking of whatever test they did to determine that Sinclair has a Minbari soul.

Comment author: scmbradley 03 February 2012 09:25:26PM 10 points [-]

Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices

– Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy p. 98

Bertie is a goldmine of rationality quotes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 01:55:36AM 14 points [-]

Also don't confuse "logically coherent" with "true".

Comment author: Prismattic 04 February 2012 01:45:05AM 1 point [-]

Well, people who failed to be Christian because they lived before Jesus ended up in limbo, according to Dante. I'm not sure if that's based on any actual theology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 01:50:33AM 1 point [-]

I was actually referring to the basilisk.

Comment author: Manfred 03 February 2012 08:39:08AM 12 points [-]

Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren't actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of "rationality" as practiced by LessWrongers.

Pff, this one is so normal it has an obligatory link :D

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 01:43:34AM 4 points [-]

Another relevant link.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2012 10:51:49PM 2 points [-]

I found it isomorphic to Pascal's wager, at least assuming that people who fail to be Christian solely because they've never heard of (or seriously thought about) Christianity in the first place won't go to hell.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 01:36:49AM 1 point [-]

at least assuming that people who fail to be Christian solely because they've never heard of (or seriously thought about) Christianity in the first place won't go to hell.

I've thought about the idea enough to realize that (assuming one takes it seriously at all) the above is not guaranteed.

Comment author: MixedNuts 31 January 2012 03:11:14PM 11 points [-]

People competent enough about intelligence enhancement tech to understand what you said are usually too incompetent about racism to start implementing anything like this without it blowing up in our faces. Remember that video where Razib Khan (?) asked Eliezer which groups were most interested in race-IQ research results, and it went like "I don't know, Ashkenazi Jews?" "White supremacists." "Oh."? That's how ridiculously ignorant we are. The common wisdom is here for a reason.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 01:29:53AM 5 points [-]
Comment author: Alejandro1 01 February 2012 04:55:17PM *  15 points [-]

"Stay, 'tis just a figure!" Root laughed rather winningly, reaching out to touch Locke's shoulder.

"A faulty one," Daniel said, "for you are an alchemist."

"I am called an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who studied what I—and you—study was called by that name. And most persons even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club."

"I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well," Daniel said.

"God save you, Mr. Waterhouse."

"And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke. As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely, a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is Alchemy. It is good that it burnt, and fitting that it burnt tonight, the eve of a Revolution that I will be so bold as to call my life's work. In a few years Mr. Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr. Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid— what we call a Cartesian grid, though 'twas not his idea—and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters—and that will be the end of Alchemy."

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 04:20:42AM 4 points [-]

Ah, nothing like a good old-fashioned book-burning.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 February 2012 11:40:01AM 2 points [-]

Somewhat weakened by the fact that the show leaves it open whether or not Delenn was right.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes February 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 04:08:22AM *  1 point [-]

In show, she more-or-less was.

Comment author: Multiheaded 02 February 2012 08:45:04PM *  2 points [-]

A few from M:TG flavour text.

When nothing remains, everything is equally possible. ~One with Nothing

"Believe in the ideal, not the idol." -Serra ~Worship

"War glides on the simplest updrafts while peace struggles against hurricane winds. It is the way of the world. It must change." ~Commander Eesha

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 04:01:57AM 2 points [-]

When nothing remains, everything is equally possible.

True in the sense that 0=0.

Comment author: TimS 03 February 2012 03:14:09AM 4 points [-]

There are lots of open social science-ish problems (e.g., optimal employee management, clinical psychology, effective political organizing, child raising). I expect that 50-100 years from now experts will have a much better grasp of the best responses to these problems, roughly in parallel to how experts have a better grasp of heart surgery than they did 50 years ago. Likewise, I expect public understanding of the solutions will be at the level of today's public understanding of heart surgery - the average reader of the New York Times knows the basics of what it is, why you'd do it, and has a very basic idea of problems that could arise (i.e. knows organ rejection is possible).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 03:57:52AM 7 points [-]

I'm not sure, attempts to solve social science-ish problems tend to get derailed by status signalling in ways that heart surgery does not.

Comment author: TimS 03 February 2012 03:45:35AM 0 points [-]

Sometimes, people hesitate to state the obvious because they falsely think the social norms or social consensus would disapprove. Cf. "The Emperor has no clothes."

I once worked at a job where the decision-makers were notably conservative but the line workers were not. The line workers had a tendency to spin reports conservatively, even in situations when I think the decision-makers would not have naturally been as conservative.

In response to comment by TimS on On Saying the Obvious
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 03:53:42AM 0 points [-]

However, merely lifting a norm against saying obvious things is not going to solve that problem.

Comment author: TimS 02 February 2012 02:13:18PM 0 points [-]

I was writing this long post asking you to be more concrete, but I realized that this is not my true rejection. On reflection, I think you are right that society is now more tolerant of adultery (sex when one partner is married) and non-marital sex than at times in the past, although it's not clear to me that this has been a one-way ratchet in favor of libertine behavior - compare the 1950s to the 1920s (roaring twenties). Likewise, Victorian era prudishness may have been a reaction to the permissiveness of the Hanoveran Kings before Victoria.

(For convenience, I'm using "illicit sex" as a general term to include adultery and non-marital sex).

My real issue is as follows: Hays Code moralists (aka sex-moralists) argued that more revealing clothing encouraged illicit sex. That may be so, but different "revelations" of the female body might have different effects on the illicit sex rate. I suspect the move from one-piece swimwear to bikinis had a stronger effect than allowing the exposure of ankles and wrists. And sexual-moralists don't seem to recognize this difference of effect - for them, every change is the end of the world. Worse, they don't tend to care about the double standard (in dress and behavior) between men and women.

All of this makes me think that sexual-moralists have a vision of how the world should be, and are willing to say whatever is necessary to push the actual world in that direction. Forcefully asserting that revealing female clothing will lead to the end of civilization will cause (ceteris parabis) women to dress less revealingly. But asserting that when there's no reason to think it is true is not an empirical project.

I'm not saying feminists haven't done some similar things - politics mindkills us all, not just those who disagree with me. But that doesn't mean feminism as a whole is anti-empiricism, any more than assertions that "allowing same-sex marriage will lead to chaos" are proof that all sexual-moralists are anti-empiricism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 03:49:31AM 1 point [-]

for them, every change is the end of the world.

[citation please], as in I think your exaggerating their position.

any more than assertions that "allowing same-sex marriage will lead to chaos" are proof that all sexual-moralists are anti-empiricism.

The actual assertion was "allowing same-sex marriage will lead to the end of marriage", an assertion which I think is perfectly plausible (give it about a generation to work out).

Comment author: Grognor 02 February 2012 06:23:02AM 4 points [-]

The first follows from the second. (In that light, it's obvious now that I put them in the wrong order.) If the pressure (real or imagined) to not say "obvious" things is lifted, that allows people to say things they otherwise could not. As a consequence, people who never would have thought of the supposed "obvious" thoughts are now figuratively allowed to think them by virtue of having seen them in the first place.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 February 2012 03:35:54AM -1 points [-]

That is not what Eliezer and Graham mean by "cannot think" and "can't say" in the essays you linked.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2012 06:17:35AM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure if these are good ideas, but I think implementing them would decrease the volume of thoughts we cannot think and things we can't say.

Could you explain how you think that would work?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2012 06:15:52AM 10 points [-]

There a running joke in mathematics that saying that a statement is "obvious" means:

I know this "has to" be true, but don't feel like figuring out how to prove it.

Comment author: wilder 01 February 2012 09:24:48PM *  2 points [-]

Curious to know why this was downvoted. Many philosophers use 'scientism' as a term of abuse, and Luke has written about reclaiming the term here. I found this a rather pithy rallying call that antedates Rosenberg's.

Apologies if this is gratuitous but it was my first post!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2012 05:38:59AM 0 points [-]

Unfortunately, the word "scietism" does describe a real set of related failure modes that people trying to be "scientific" frequently fall into, as I discussed in more detail in this thread.

Comment author: TimS 31 January 2012 08:14:05PM *  1 point [-]

That's a fair question. To be clear, my assertion was that society's response to rape would be "better" if we gave negative feedback to rape jokes, which would reduce their frequency.

  • I think it is pretty clear that the frequency of rape jokes has substantially decreased since the 1970s, caused substantially by negative feedback.
  • In that same time period, I think society's response to rape has significantly improved.

Concrete examples of recent changes:

  • In many American jurisdictions, rape was once legally defined to include an element of force. That is, proof of non-consent could only be shown by the woman's "utmost resistance." Nowadays, the legal definition has been changed to remove the force requirement or interpret it as satisfied by the force of penetration.
  • Spousal rape was once legally impossible or difficult to prove. Now, spousal rape is treated as legally similar to other kinds of rape.
  • Once, rape victims needed to worry that their dress or promiscuity would be used to discredit their testimony in court. Now, the rules of evidence have often been amended to restrict the admissibility of this kind of evidence.

At this point, I think the evidence shows a strong correlation between anti-rape-joke attitudes and society's responsiveness to rape. That's not proof of the causal mechanism I'm asserting (reducing rape jokes causes attitudes towards rape to change in the general population), but it is suggestive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2012 03:46:38AM 1 point [-]

Also if now social changes count as evidence, I'd like to point out the recent changes in attitudes towards adultery.

Comment author: TimS 01 February 2012 02:03:59PM *  0 points [-]

I understand that law can be complicated, but you seem to endorse the following position:

The following is not illegal: A victim has sex with a perpetrator, without consent to have sex from the victim. The perpetrator only threatens to use force and does not actually use force.

That legal position is inconsistent with most other crimes (robbery is taking your property from you without consent - no violence element is included). I think criminalizing sex in the absence of consent is quite justified. I acknowledge that consent can have multiple meanings and that ambiguity must be resolved, but non-consent seems a complete justification for criminalization.

Additionally, the above theory seems likely to put the victim at risk of further harm - my understanding is that most police departments recommend not resisting (both rape and robbery) because of the risk that the criminal will do further injury.

In practice what this means is that a woman can declare any sexual encounter to be "rape" after the fact.

False accusations are a problem for the criminal justice system in general. I can falsely accuse you of stealing money from me, or hitting me, or harassing me. If I tailor the explanation carefully, the police would have no reason to expect corroborating evidence. You deny the charge, and it comes down to relative credibility. I'm not saying this is ideal, but it is the best we can do in the absence of some kind of truth-oracle. Why is this a bigger problem for rape than other crimes?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2012 03:43:49AM 1 point [-]

False accusations are a problem for the criminal justice system in general.

The problem is that the accusation isn't "false", in the sense that if the woman decides she didn't want the sex after the fact it is rape by the de facto definition .

Why is this a bigger problem for rape than other crimes?

Well for starters, the DoE recently sent out a dear college letter demanding that colleges use the weakest possible standards of evidence for rape cases on pain of loosing federal funding.

Comment author: TimS 31 January 2012 08:14:05PM *  1 point [-]

That's a fair question. To be clear, my assertion was that society's response to rape would be "better" if we gave negative feedback to rape jokes, which would reduce their frequency.

  • I think it is pretty clear that the frequency of rape jokes has substantially decreased since the 1970s, caused substantially by negative feedback.
  • In that same time period, I think society's response to rape has significantly improved.

Concrete examples of recent changes:

  • In many American jurisdictions, rape was once legally defined to include an element of force. That is, proof of non-consent could only be shown by the woman's "utmost resistance." Nowadays, the legal definition has been changed to remove the force requirement or interpret it as satisfied by the force of penetration.
  • Spousal rape was once legally impossible or difficult to prove. Now, spousal rape is treated as legally similar to other kinds of rape.
  • Once, rape victims needed to worry that their dress or promiscuity would be used to discredit their testimony in court. Now, the rules of evidence have often been amended to restrict the admissibility of this kind of evidence.

At this point, I think the evidence shows a strong correlation between anti-rape-joke attitudes and society's responsiveness to rape. That's not proof of the causal mechanism I'm asserting (reducing rape jokes causes attitudes towards rape to change in the general population), but it is suggestive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 06:51:49AM 1 point [-]

In many American jurisdictions, rape was once legally defined to include an element of force. That is, proof of non-consent could only be shown by the woman's "utmost resistance." Nowadays, the legal definition has been changed to remove the force requirement or interpret it as satisfied by the force of penetration.

Why is this an improvement? Beyond the signaling value of "rape is bad, so punishing rapists is good, let's expand the definition of rape so we can punish more rapists".

In practice what this means is that a woman can declare any sexual encounter to be "rape" after the fact.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 01 February 2012 05:27:31AM 0 points [-]

I think it needs to be said that punishment is more about sending a message to future possible-criminals than it is about the guy who actually committed the crime.

I find it much more plausible then your two-month rehab scenario

hmm. I don't think a magical reliable rehab is likely to be discovered any time soon, But given the magical rehab and magical psychologists, I don't think there are further problems in my reasoning for rejecting punishment in that case.

I find the idea that family punishment would be an effective method of law to be somewhat implausible.

oh well.

fake utility function

That could be. I will reconsider most of this stuff.

Talking right at the level of what I feel about this, without trying to rationalize from other preferences, I am slightly averse to punishing criminals, but accept it's necessity in some cases. I am strongly averse to the idea of punishing innocent people, even if it were as effective, I further find it highly unlikely that you could make it effective, but I think that's unrelated to the preferences.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 06:35:19AM 1 point [-]

I find the idea that family punishment would be an effective method of law to be somewhat implausible.

See the original meaning of "hostage" for some historical examples.

In response to comment by Vaniver on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 01 February 2012 05:39:38AM 0 points [-]

But you weren't arguing that punishing criminals was a long term bad, or even insufficiently good. You were arguing that it was short term suck.

Yes? Punishing criminals sucks, but it pays for the rule of law. I miss your point.

Invert the order of the sentences, and you have your answer. But I will answer at length:

still don't get it

The source of order is deterrence;

agree

deterrence rests on expectations;

agree

expectations rest on identities. The brute is resisted in a way that the even-handed is not; the infirm are flaunted in a way that the firm are not.

wat? I don't understand. What has identity got to do with anything? And too many loaded words. What does "even-handed" even mean, apart from "vaguely good and something to do with justice"?

Accepting any excuse reduces the credibility of the commitment. Sometimes you may think that reduction is acceptable, but you should never pretend it was absent.

Agreed. I thought you meant there weren't cases that were worth it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 06:30:34AM 1 point [-]

wat? I don't understand. What has identity got to do with anything?

If you consider "not being a brute" part of your identity, you are less likely to act like a brute.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 09:09:30PM 0 points [-]

I'm wondering how much flexibility any of us have in really changing our internal satisfaction points.

Probably not much.

For me, reasoning "this is really for this purpose, so I can bypass it" ...

This is what I was having trouble with. It seems like a convincing argument against a bias to know a better way to accomplish its goals and why it's done that way, but then it breaks down on other things that are closer to values.

I've solved the problem for myself by dissolving the qualitative distinction between bias and value. Put them all on a bias-value space arranged by how much we like it and how much it interferes with achieving the other biases/values. If something interferes a lot (like a cognitive error), we call it a bias because following it lowers total value, if something doesn't interfere with much and seems really important (like love or beauty), we call it a value. These labels are fuzzy and transient; desire for beauty may become a bias when designing a system that may be harmed by beauty.

See the new conclusion on the OP.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 04:36:26AM *  1 point [-]

For me, reasoning "this is really for this purpose, so I can bypass it" ...

This is what I was having trouble with. It seems like a convincing argument against a bias to know a better way to accomplish its goals and why it's done that way, but then it breaks down on other things that are closer to values.

One approach is to make this the definition of the difference between bias and value.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Viliam_Bur 31 January 2012 08:51:58AM *  4 points [-]

The question is whether we can avoid giving the punishment, and still credibly hold the threat of punishment against rational defectors.

I know this reaction is not rational, but still, my first reaction was: In such environment (where it is possible to tell the difference between irrational and rational crime, and punish accordingly), becoming rational means losing your "get of out the jail once" card, and that's not fair! The more rational you are, the wider range of your possible crimes becomes punishable. You are being punished for being rational.

Technically, a good person should not care about limiting their own crime range, and (if the good for everyone is their goal) they should be actually happy they have less chance to harm anyone. But still it somehow sucks to know that while I would be punished for doing X (because I am rational and see the consequences), other person would not be punished for doing a similar thing.

I guess this intuition is based on the real-world situations, where the psychologists are not perfect, the justice is not perfect, and therefore any rule like this has big chance to be heavily abused. (As in: If you have a good lawyer, your crimes will be declared irrational, and you will be sentenced to two weeks of group therapy. Meanwhile the average Joe does the same thing and gets hanged.)

In response to comment by Viliam_Bur on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 04:26:31AM *  1 point [-]

I agree with everything you said, but don't understand why you don't think it's "rational".

Technically, a good person should not care about limiting their own crime range, and (if the good for everyone is their goal) they should be actually happy they have less chance to harm anyone. But still it somehow sucks to know that while I would be punished for doing X (because I am rational and see the consequences), other person would not be punished for doing a similar thing.

Remember "good" and "rational" are not the same thing.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 08:22:26PM *  0 points [-]

For example, suppose a man gets fed up and goes on a killing spree, ultimately ending in suicide. However, he has a daughter that he care about and you (somehow) know that he would have been less inclined to go on a killing spree if he thought his daughter would be punished as a result. Would you favor punishing the daughter?

This is an interesting one. The naive answer is that it doesn't matter who gets punished as long as the incentive is strong enough to overcome the disutility of punishment.

You'd have a hard time showing that the incentive is enough, tho:

  1. This is not a rational defection, so punishment is only partially useful.

  2. Punishing someone else is not as strong a disincentive as punishing the perp. Family bonds are usually weaker than self preservation, and in many cases, totally absent. If you modified it to see if the family bonds were strong before punishing
    someone else, that would create an incentive to not associate with family.

  3. This policy puts a load on the family that is present even if no crime is ever committed. Putting this load on everybody for the sake of a decrease in an already small crime rate probably isn't worth it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 04:20:38AM 1 point [-]
  1. This is not a rational defection, so punishment is only partially useful.

Suppose the man also has an "irrational" preference that his daughter not be punished.

  1. Punishing someone else is not as strong a disincentive as punishing the perp. Family bonds are usually weaker than self preservation, and in many cases, totally absent.

In my example the man commited suicide so he obviously didn't value his own like as much as his daughter's.

If you modified it to see if the family bonds were strong before punishing someone else, that would create an incentive to not associate with family.

There have existed societies where family members were punished for crimes, what you are describing didn't happen in those societies.

  1. This policy puts a load on the family that is present even if no crime is ever committed. Putting this load on everybody for the sake of a decrease in an already small crime rate probably isn't worth it.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.

In any case two comments on the style of your reply.

  1. You seem to be trying to argue that this scenario isn't plausible, I find it much more plausible then your two-month rehab scenario, or for that matter any type of reliable rehab.

  2. You seem to be displaying the symptoms of trying to defend a fake utility function, i.e., trying to argue why your stated preferences won't force you to do things you find morally repugnant, rather than trying to find preferences that match your intuitions of what's morally repugnant.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: TheOtherDave 31 January 2012 06:41:07PM 3 points [-]

It's a recurring theme in the animal-training literature that active positive punishment (that is, doing things to an animal they don't want done, like squirting them with a water bottle or hitting them with something) is often reinforcing for the punisher. I don't doubt that a similar pattern arises when humans punish other humans, whether under the label of justice or not.

In response to comment by TheOtherDave on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 03:59:43AM 1 point [-]

It's a recurring theme in the animal-training literature that active positive punishment (that is, doing things to an animal they don't want done, like squirting them with a water bottle or hitting them with something) is often reinforcing for the punisher.

What do you think we should conclude from the fact that we evolved this behavior?

In response to Terminal Bias
Comment author: Ghatanathoah 01 February 2012 02:17:41AM 0 points [-]

I think the reason the values/biases you described (risk aversion, justice, responsibility) initially caused you confusion is that all of them are (as other commenters pointed out) very similar to behaviors a calculating consequentialist would use to achieve its values, even if it lacked them. For instance, a consequentialist with strong desires for love and beauty, but no desire for justice, would still behave somewhat similarly to a consequentialist with a desire for justice, because it sees how taking action to deter negative behaviors by other agents will help it achieve values such as love and beauty.

It seems like this is a case where evolution gave us a double-dose. It gave us consequentialist brains to reason out how to achieve our values (which maximized IGF in the AE, of course) but just in case we were to dumb to figure it out, it made certain consequentialist heuristics (seek justice, don't take stupid chances) terminal values too.

Where it gets confusing is that this means that these values are uniquely conducive to our brain's rationalization generating engine.. Your brain, when asked why you are trying to achieve justice, could either spit out "to deter bad behavior" or "because I desire justice" and both would be true. Hence the initial confusion over whether these values/biases wee terminal or instrumental.

In response to comment by Ghatanathoah on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 February 2012 03:55:00AM 1 point [-]

Why couldn't the same be said about love or beauty?

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 06:43:59AM 0 points [-]

humph. if we are not assuming the money gets used, I'm not sure how we can apply any particular utility to it at all.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 07:10:19AM 2 points [-]

We can assume the money gets used on oneself, which is much more likely to happen in the stated scenario.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 06:35:20AM 2 points [-]

No, because that sounds way (morally) expensive. Almost any additional punishment would reduce crime. The question is is it worth it?

I think punishments are probably too harsh generally.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 07:06:53AM *  1 point [-]

Almost any additional punishment would reduce crime. The question is is it worth it?

I meant that it would reduce crime by an amount greater then the amount of suffering the punishment generated.

For example, suppose a man gets fed up and goes on a killing spree, ultimately ending in suicide. However, he has a daughter that he care about and you (somehow) know that he would have been less inclined to go on a killing spree if he thought his daughter would be punished as a result. Would you favor punishing the daughter?

I think punishments are probably too harsh generally.

Are you sure this isn't just because the image of a harsh punishment is more available then a vague dispersed deterrent effect? Keep in mind, the harsher the punishment, the more effective the deterrent, the less the punishment actually gets carried out.

In response to comment by ksvanhorn on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 05:48:05AM *  4 points [-]

I know your position is dominant around here, but I intended to tackle it anyway. If you care about doing good, once you've handled your personal expenses, additional marginal dollars have fixed marginal utility (until you're dealing with enough money to seriously impact the global market for marginal utility).

Money utility is linear between the amounts where you're worrying about personal expenses, and the amounts where you're impacting the global market for marginal utility. That's most of the range.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 06:16:22AM 1 point [-]

The flaw in this theory is that it assumes the extra money actually gets donated.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 05:56:53AM 0 points [-]

I think that at the point where you give them advice, if you identify with your actions, that action becomes part of your identity, so the responsibility-is-a-hack-on-identity (or is it the other way) hypothesis also predicts feelings of responsibility.

Maybe you have other examples that might better distinguish them?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 06:14:59AM 1 point [-]

Maybe you have other examples that might better distinguish them?

For example, while I was a TA I felt much more responsible for helping students during office hours then at other times, even though I don't think how much I identified with then changed during those times.

In response to comment by Nominull on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Insert_Idionym_Here 31 January 2012 03:48:33AM 2 points [-]

But don't you want to understand the underlying principles?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 05:15:27AM *  10 points [-]

Not necessarily, your brain might have this annoying property that understanding a moral principal changes it in such a way that it no longer cares about it.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Terminal Bias
Comment author: [deleted] 31 January 2012 04:37:02AM 0 points [-]

Ok, let's taboo "risk aversion", I'm talking about what a minimax algorithm does, where it comes up with possibilities, rates them by utility, and takes actions to avoid the worst outcomes. This is contrasted to a system that also computes probabilities to get expected utilities, and acts to maximize that. Sure you can make your utility function strongly concave to hack the traits of the minimax system into a utility maximizer, but saying that they are "mathematically equivalent" seems to be missing the point.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 05:01:39AM 4 points [-]

That's called "certainty effect" and no one is claiming that it's a terminal value.

In response to Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 04:53:49AM *  1 point [-]

I have a question for those who claim not to value justice. Would you support introducing something like the nine familial exterminations, basically punishing friends and relatives of the criminal, if its deterrent effect was shown to decrease crime?

In response to Terminal Bias
Comment author: atucker 31 January 2012 02:01:40AM 4 points [-]

I feel like values are defined over outcomes, while biases are defined over cognitive processes.

You could value a bias I suppose, but then you'd be valuing executing particular algorithms over like, saving the world. If that's the case, I think that the people arguing for a bias are looking for an easy way out of a problem, or more attached to their identity than I believe to be useful.

Not that I've reflected that much on it, but that's my intuition coming in.

In response to comment by atucker on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 04:33:07AM 1 point [-]

So how would you apply this idea to the examples in the OP?

In response to comment by Vaniver on Terminal Bias
Comment author: dvasya 31 January 2012 04:23:29AM 0 points [-]

"Risk Aversion," as a technical term, means that the utility function is concave with respect to its input

Risk aversion is separate from the properties of utility function. Being risk-averse rather means preferring a guaranteed payoff to a bet with the same expected utility. See here for a numerical example. It is possible to be risk averse even with a convex utility function.

In response to comment by dvasya on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 04:32:00AM 4 points [-]

Being risk-averse rather means preferring a guaranteed payoff to a bet with the same expected utility.

Another way to interpret this situation is that the "utility function" being used to calculate the expected value is a fake utility function.

In response to Terminal Bias
Comment author: WrongBot 30 January 2012 11:29:08PM 13 points [-]

All preferences have a causal history, and given that those causes tend not to care about efficiency (e.g. evolution, but also society/culture and probably others), I suspect most human "terminal" preferences are like risk-aversion: they seem suited for accomplishing some goal, but there are more efficient or accurate ways of doing so.

So should we self-modify to instead value those more efficient or accurate approaches? In the case of risk-aversion I seem to think the answer is yes, but in the case of love I seem to think that the answer is no. I am not sure why my brain is making this distinction or whether it might be legitimate.

Yup, I'm confused too.

In response to comment by WrongBot on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 04:26:24AM 0 points [-]

I would argue that your perception of bias vs. value is based on what you (unconsciously) perceive would signal higher status.

In response to Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 04:21:34AM 1 point [-]

I think you misdiagnosed the source of responsibility. In keeping with your Syria example, suppose you gave some Syrian advise on how to rebel. Then you'd probably feel responsibility for him even if you don't identify with Syrians. I would argue that responsibility is more based on a (possibly implicit) contract (e.g., if you give advise thus you are responsible for its quality) then on identity.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 January 2012 10:47:42PM 3 points [-]

That's not risk aversion, it's just decreasing marginal utility. They look different to me.

And it's still not a terminal value, it would be instrumental.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Terminal Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 04:07:40AM 3 points [-]

That's not risk aversion, it's just decreasing marginal utility. They look different to me.

They're really mathematically equivalent ways of expressing the same thing. If they look different to you that's a flaw in your intuition, you may want to correct it.

Comment author: TimS 30 January 2012 02:03:41PM 0 points [-]

That assertion about adultery might be appealing to believe. But that doesn't make it true. And citation to an essay asserting increased social stratification is not evidence that out-of-wedlock births are more common now than in the past, or that marriage is becoming uncorrelated with child-rearing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 January 2012 03:43:08AM 3 points [-]

By the way, do you have a citation that rape jokes increase rape, since near as I can tell the evidence for it is of the same kind of vaguely anecdotal/common sense that you like to dismiss when it supports a conclusion you don't like.

Comment author: TimS 28 January 2012 11:12:58PM 0 points [-]

BTW, I suspect that the Hays-code people's main argument against revealing clothing is that it would promote adultery, which it indeed has.

That's probably an accurate summary of their intent. I'm still not sure that I believe their empirical claim. Adultery and non-marital sex have been common in pre-immodesty Western history across many social classes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2012 01:57:29AM 1 point [-]

Adultery and non-marital sex have been common in pre-immodesty Western history across many social classes.

Adultery certainly existed, I don't think it was as common as it is today. Certainly people were much less likely to have kids out of wedlock, or to not even bother getting married before having kids.

Comment author: TimS 26 January 2012 05:14:06PM *  3 points [-]

Here is a start at what I'd call empirical feminist. I'm not sure what you mean by rational, if you don't mean empirical.

More generally, I rely on feminist thought to say:

There are many unstated assumptions about how people should behave. These assumptions are bad, simply for being unstated. If a cultural norm is necessary, it should be capable of being explicit. Once the implicit assumptions are made explicit, it turns out I don't like many of them. Like "Jocks good, nerds bad."

From there, I move on to say:

Definitions of pivotal words (i.e. "politics") have unstated assumptions about how they should be defined. Electioneering is politics, but complaining about inappropriate jokes is not. Yet each is aimed at changing how society is organized, and each has roughly equal chance of causing the aimed-for change. (And each is equally and similarly mind-killing).

For arguments-are-soldiers reasons, many feminists are particularly provocative in their redefinition of worlds. Also for arguments-are-soldiers reasons, other feminists are reluctant to call them on being provocative. That's a bug, not a rationalist feature.

But notice that redefinition can be quite powerful, like how "queer" has been reclaimed from being a slur to being a positive label. If you weren't a feminist, would you have predicted this was possible? Keep in mind hindsight bias.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2012 01:52:11AM 1 point [-]

But notice that redefinition can be quite powerful, like how "queer" has been reclaimed from being a slur to being a positive label.

Yes, the "queers" were by no means the first group to reclaim a slur. The Dutch "Beggars" were going it back in the 14th century, see the real life section of this tvtropes page for more examples.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 January 2012 09:52:33PM 2 points [-]

My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.

Considering that there's some variation in how people react to physical pain, I don't know why that (at least below some threshold) should be off-limits.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2012 10:54:57PM 6 points [-]

My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.

Taboo "naturally".

Comment author: TimS 28 January 2012 05:58:37PM 0 points [-]

I suspect they had (at least slightly) more of an empirical basis then feminism, mostly thanks to memetic evolution.

I don't understand the argument. Feminism is later in time than Hays-morality, so why isn't it the more evolved? Plus, Hays-morality is the descended from theories that said things like "showing the ankle leads to the end of civilization," which I think is falsified for reasonable definitions of civilization. That is, allowing women to wear bikinis has not caused a return to the state of nature, but that is what Hays-code moralists seem to have predicted.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying this theory is empirically false; if two women were to walk through a bad neighborhood one wearing revealing clothing, the other wearing concealing clothing, the woman wearing the revealing clothing would be more likely to get raped.

This is intuitive and what one would expect. That doesn't necessarily mean it's true. For example, there are reported instances of serial rapists targeting housewives, which is pretty clearly uncorrelated (if not anti-correlated) with revealing clothing. In short, citation desperately needed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2012 08:48:35PM 1 point [-]

I don't understand the argument. Feminism is later in time than Hays-morality, so why isn't it the more evolved?

True, but they made a point of disregarding the accumulated wisdom of their predecessors.

Plus, Hays-morality is the descended from theories that said things like "showing the ankle leads to the end of civilization," which I think is falsified for reasonable definitions of civilization. That is, allowing women to wear bikinis has not caused a return to the state of nature, but that is what Hays-code moralists seem to have predicted.

BTW, I suspect that the Hays-code people's main argument against revealing clothing is that it would promote adultery, which it indeed has.

Comment author: TimS 28 January 2012 04:52:55AM 0 points [-]

I agree that "moralists of the day" have always condemned what they saw was wrong, probably including rape jokes. But the social theory of post-war American moralists held that women's social purpose was to stay home and have babies. To that end, they asserted the empirically false theory that wearing revealing clothing was a cause of rape. In short, I don't trust that those types of theories were trying to have an empirical basis.


I'm not sure that the Hays Code is a good example, because it was aimed on more "core" moralist issues (like nudity, non-marital sex, anti-homosexuality, and depictions of crime without punishment). Also, it was limited to movies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2012 06:06:03AM 1 point [-]

the empirically false theory that wearing revealing clothing was a cause of rape.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying this theory is empirically false; if two women were to walk through a bad neighborhood one wearing revealing clothing, the other wearing concealing clothing, the woman wearing the revealing clothing would be more likely to get raped.

Note, I'm not saying that this means we should necessarily bad women from wearing revealing clothing (since outside bad neighborhoods this effect may be small) and the restrictions on freedom may very well do more damage. But I doubt you favor a bad on rape jokes for the same reason.

In short, I don't trust that those types of theories were trying to have an empirical basis.

I suspect they had (at least slightly) more of an empirical basis then feminism, mostly thanks to memetic evolution.

Comment author: Multiheaded 26 January 2012 08:52:02AM 2 points [-]

Would you favor "affirmative action 2.0 on a massive scale" for people with low IQs?

I don't know! This is a painful, confusing and ethically hazardous topic that I'm currently trying to learn how to handle. Again, could you please message me with a list of your tenative policy suggestions for such a situation?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2012 03:59:17AM 2 points [-]

I more-or-less agree with Eric Raymod's suggestions in this blog post.

Comment author: TimS 27 January 2012 03:16:04AM 0 points [-]

I was actually thinking of the implicit social theory based on what was considered "acceptable" and/or "respectable" in pre-feminism days.

What precise time period are you talking about? In post-war America, rape jokes, like racist jokes, were relatively common. In the Victorian era, who knows the prevalence of the jokes, but I'm doubtful their social theories suggested a connection between rape-joke-frequency and actual rape-frequency.

Then why did you select it as one of your two examples

You are right, it's not a good example of the point I was trying to make.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2012 03:52:12AM 1 point [-]

In post-war America, rape jokes (...) were relatively common.

Perhaps, but the moralists of the day also condemned them. See the Hays code for an example of this. If you were to ask one of these moralists what was wrong with having rape jokes in movies, they'd probably answer some version of arguing that it promotes rape.

Comment author: HeatDeath 27 January 2012 10:56:35PM *  4 points [-]

In the WH40K universe, a small group of acquaintances, doing basic experimental research in applied parapsychology can, and eventually /will/ create a portal to Hell out of which pours a demonic army which then proceeds to do very unpleasant things to everybody on the planet. Given that the Imperium's standard policy in such an event is to sterilize the entire planet, total transparency as described above is probably a relatively stable, safe, and even pleasant model of society to live in (certainly relative to a lot of the other options).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2012 03:38:26AM 7 points [-]

The scary thing is that the real world appears to be approaching a similar situation with respect to epidemiology, or possibly even microbiology more generally.

Comment author: TimS 27 January 2012 12:08:03AM 0 points [-]

I fail to see how this is a particularly "feminist" prediction, i.e., just about any other social theory makes some version of this prediction.

A substantial amount of modern social theory of all kinds draws heavily on feminism. Folk social theory doesn't seem to agree, as evidenced by the fact that people still make rape jokes.

You will find this prediction rather easily falsified.

First, you say this like I didn't know this already, when I already said it was wrong in my comment. Second, other empirical fields make wrong predictions as well, so this is hardly proof that feminism is not empirical.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2012 02:35:54AM 2 points [-]

A substantial amount of modern social theory of all kinds draws heavily on feminism. Folk social theory doesn't seem to agree, as evidenced by the fact that people still make rape jokes.

I was actually thinking of the implicit social theory based on what was considered "acceptable" and/or "respectable" in pre-feminism days.

First, you say this like I didn't know this already, when I already said it was wrong in my comment. Second, other empirical fields make wrong predictions as well, so this is hardly proof that feminism is not empirical.

Then why did you select it as one of your two examples showing that feminism is empirical? Also, to the extent that the statement is meaningful, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis predates feminism.

Comment author: komponisto 26 January 2012 08:09:44PM *  35 points [-]

I like the idea of starting a Politics Open Thread if it means I won't see any more political comments elsewhere on LW.

It won't. Instead, what will happen is that people will start attaching the mental labels of "Blue" and "Green" to other commenters, based on encounters in such a thread, and these labels will apply everywhere, and consequently distort the discussions and the voting on all topics.

I agree with thomblake that the original intent of the "Politics is the Mind-Killer" doctrine wasn't to ban politics (and even that post itself wasn't intended as official Overcoming Bias policy, just advice from Eliezer!), but I am also 100% with Raemon in endorsing the anti-politics norm that has subsequently developed.

But note that the norm itself, like most human norms, is not an absolute or rigid one, just a scale of increasing costs or penalties with increasing severity of "violations". It's always been okay to mention politics in a way that shows you "know what you're doing" (proof: I have); high-status people are allowed more leeway than the lower-status (except for the very highest-status individuals, on whom norms are often strictly enforced for symbolic reasons); etc.

Theoretically, if we really needed to discuss politics (e.g. if there were pending legislation before the U.S. Congress to regulate FAI research; if Obama had criticized Republicans by invoking LW concepts in his State of the Union speech; if Putin had promised to make cryonics mandatory for everyone in Russia; you get the idea), we could.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 11:48:23PM 13 points [-]

It won't. Instead, what will happen is that people will start attaching the mental labels of "Blue" and "Green" to other commenters, based on encounters in such a thread

I can already do this to many commenters based on their comments in the existing threads.

Comment author: TimS 26 January 2012 01:53:34PM 0 points [-]

Ok, how about a pair of feminist prediction:

Society's response to rape will be more effective if we stop laughing at rape jokes.

I suspect this one is somewhat true.

Society will treat women more equally if we change the spelling to remove "men" from "women" (i.e. womyn)

The evidence seems clear that this thesis is insufficiently nuanced at best, and probably wrong. But consider what social messages might be successfully conveyed by E.E. Cummings and his idiosyncratic punctuation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 11:35:18PM 2 points [-]

Society's response to rape will be more effective if we stop laughing at rape jokes.

I fail to see how this is a particularly "feminist" prediction, i.e., just about any other social theory makes some version of this prediction.

Society will treat women more equally if we change the spelling to remove "men" from "women" (i.e. womyn)

Ok, let's do a cross cultural analysis based on whether the native language has this property and attitudes towards women. You will find this prediction rather easily falsified.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 January 2012 04:00:03PM 13 points [-]

Using Chesterton's Fence here is a little misleading.

The whole rationale behind Chesterton's Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don't know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.

Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn't really work... there's a reason it isn;t Chesterton's Fallen Tree.

You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you're doing. But actually there's lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 11:06:52PM 10 points [-]

Gall's law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

Comment author: MixedNuts 26 January 2012 06:34:17PM 6 points [-]

The heuristic I used seems to be "take a position that's controversial, and assume the arguments for it are superpowered". E.g. animal rights become animal equality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 10:52:50PM 2 points [-]

take a position that's controversial, and assume the arguments for it are superpowered

Why limit yourself to starting with controversial positions?

Comment author: AlexSchell 26 January 2012 05:40:06AM 3 points [-]

Which soft sciences do you have in mind? (I'd say "name three" but that would come off as confrontational.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 05:50:28AM 13 points [-]

For example: economics, psychology, sociology, possibly even medicine (see Hason's discussion of it).

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 26 January 2012 03:20:15AM *  13 points [-]

Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.

You've never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it's another good example of your first point.

AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren't too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren't able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 05:33:56AM *  3 points [-]

Ideally doing good things shouldn't be dependent on the political system.

Edit: I just realized the most obvious reading of this comment isn't the one I intended. I meant that the political system's job should be to get out of the way of the people trying to create good things.

Comment author: Multiheaded 26 January 2012 04:58:39AM 1 point [-]

and I will tell you why the policy implications of your utility function aren't what you thing they are.

I don't "think" anything through because I flinch from the thought, because I see no way to avoid taking on the "Cold-hearted racist white asshole" manufactured identity when thinking it through seriously!

Could you please send me a private message with some examples of what you have in mind, assuming some utility function you could find agreeable? I promise I'll take them lightly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 05:05:56AM 5 points [-]

I don't "think" anything through because I flinch from the thought, because I see no way to avoid taking on the "Cold-hearted racist white asshole" manufactured identity when thinking it through seriously!

Ok, let's dump race, it's a red herring here anyway. Would you favor "affirmative action 2.0 on a massive scale" for people with low IQs?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 January 2012 01:36:34AM *  0 points [-]

Is that true? It sounds plausible, but I'd like to see evidence.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 01:40:38AM 11 points [-]

Given that we haven't achieved immortality yet, we'd have to specify what it means to "save a life".

Comment author: knb 26 January 2012 12:51:15AM *  55 points [-]

Let's do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.

  • Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren't actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of "rationality" as practiced by LessWrongers.
  • A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is "Evangelical Polyamory".
  • Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
  • Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
  • Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society's expectations for normal behavior.

I would also like to endorse GLaDOS's excellent list.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 01:18:18AM 27 points [-]
  • Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren't actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of "rationality" as practiced by LessWrongers.
  • A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is "Evangelical Polyamory".

Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it's actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong's equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.

  • Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.

Agreed.

  • Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.

You've never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it's another good example of your first point.

  • Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society's expectations for normal behavior.

True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was 'designed' to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 25 January 2012 10:47:50PM *  8 points [-]

[redacted]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 01:04:21AM 13 points [-]

Scientific and technological progress has indirectly caused millions upon millions of deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of scientific-technological progress.

It has also directly saved millions upon millions of lives.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 12:44:23AM 32 points [-]

The scientific process has been so corrupted by signaling and politics that outside the hard sciences, most of what is called "science" these days, especially mainstream opinion at universities, is less entangled with reality then most religions. At least the religions have been around long enough to be subject memetic selection.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2012 08:55:19PM 5 points [-]

Those topics aren't even that shocking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 12:38:45AM *  3 points [-]

They become more shocking when one presents arguments for them, and/or discusses their implications. But you seem to have already noticed this.

Comment author: TimS 25 January 2012 10:18:36PM 0 points [-]

Let me put it this way: If Marxist history were true, that would falsify Foucault. As I understand it, one of the purposes of Foucault's philosophical project was to explain why Marxist history could sometimes say insightful things even if it was wrong.

And I'll say again the post-modern thought is often co-opted by more mainstream thought. What's left behind is not representative of the insight-fulness of post-modern thought.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 12:37:16AM *  2 points [-]

Let me put it this way: If Marxist history were true, that would falsify Foucault. As I understand it, one of the purposes of Foucault's philosophical project was to explain why Marxist history could sometimes say insightful things even if it was wrong.

Unfortunately the result appears less insightful then the original Marxist theory.

Comment author: TimS 25 January 2012 09:46:08PM *  1 point [-]

I think I see what you are saying, in that you see the choice as between being explicit & punished or subtle & ignored-by-orthodox. That may be, but if your position is "I'm trying not to talk to the orthodox" then the intelligent orthodox are totally justified in saying "I have no reason to respect the quality of your ideas if you refuse to communicate them to me."

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.

I totally agree with this point by Graham, and I think it counsels in favor of speaking about taboo-ed subjects. How else is the taboo going to change? And if you reasonably fear punishment, that's an unfortunate fact about your situation, not a proof that to the orthodox that your ideas have quality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 January 2012 12:33:07AM 5 points [-]

That may be, but if your position is "I'm trying not to talk to the orthodox" then the intelligent orthodox are totally justified in saying "I have no reason to respect the quality of your ideas if you refuse to communicate them to me."

The goal isn't to convince the orthodox to change his position, it's merely to show that the orthodox opinion isn't unanimous.

Comment author: TimS 25 January 2012 09:57:14PM 9 points [-]

I've asserted occasionally that post-modern moral theories (like the worthwhile parts of feminism) are consistent with empiricism. That is, they look at what as happened before and make predictions about will happen in the future.

That is often down-voted. I suspect that this is because taking feminism seriously would require people to re-think their methods of interacting with others, in a way that would be extremely challenging to their personal identities. That way leads to mindkilling (By the transitive property: The personal is political + Politics is the Mindkiller => The personal is the mindkiller).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2012 10:09:37PM 5 points [-]

I've asserted occasionally that post-modern moral theories (like the worthwhile parts of feminism) are consistent with empiricism. That is, they look at what as happened before and make predictions about will happen in the future.

My experience is the exact opposite.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2012 09:37:13PM 2 points [-]

Yeah but they have to be true.

And that's still quite controversial in the mainstream.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2012 09:47:45PM 3 points [-]

Yeah but they have to be true.

I don't want to start a flame war, but would like to mention that I find this highly unlikely, at least for reasonable definitions of "made up".

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2012 09:37:13PM 2 points [-]

Yeah but they have to be true.

And that's still quite controversial in the mainstream.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2012 09:41:11PM 0 points [-]

Yeah but they have to be true.

Really, why?

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2012 09:11:20PM *  44 points [-]

Here's some nice controversial things for you:

  • Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.

  • Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad (which it is not). Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).

  • Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

  • Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow, and should not be treated differently from those issues.

  • Self identity is a problem.

  • EDIT: most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps.

Less controversial in LW, but still bad to say outside:

  • Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.

I run out of ideas.

EDIT: in case it's not clear, I take all these ideas seriously. I would actually appreciate a discussion on these topics with LW.

EDIT: this was productive! I've seriously updated one way or the other on many of these ideas. Thanks for pointing out truths and holes everyone! :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2012 09:36:02PM 7 points [-]

Gender and partially sexual orientation is made up.

Please, that statement becomes more controversial if you negate it.

Comment author: TimS 25 January 2012 08:32:11PM 11 points [-]

If your beliefs cause you to risk losing your job, being imprisoned, or having your spouse leave you, then you have bigger problems. Not posting your thoughts here is unlikely to help.

And posting, "I have an interesting idea, but social pressure prevents me from stating it" is worse. People who might be sympathetic have no reason to take that assertion seriously, while people who would punish you for your thoughts now have reason to be suspicious and catch your inevitable slip-up (or they might confabulate a case against you that has nothing to do with what you've actually do wrong).

In short, if the rule is "Don't talk about Fight Club," then hinting about your neat evening activity is not helpful in communicating or in avoiding trouble.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2012 09:30:26PM *  12 points [-]

And posting, "I have an interesting idea, but social pressure prevents me from stating it" is worse. People who might be sympathetic have no reason to take that assertion seriously, while people who would punish you for your thoughts now have reason to be suspicious and catch your inevitable slip-up (or they might confabulate a case against you that has nothing to do with what you've actually do wrong).

In practice the exact opposite tends to happen. People who are sympathetic tend to pick up on subtle cues, whereas mainstream people are so used to actively avoiding thinking against their orthodoxy that like the OP they can't even imagine what you're hinting at. For example Paul Graham's essay is perfectly respectable, going into details about what specifically you can't say wouldn't be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 January 2012 08:27:30PM 12 points [-]

Here is a post by Quirinus_Quirrell that is a decent summary. If you want to be more provocative replace "non-zero" with "significant" add sexual orientation/gender identity to the list of characteristics that provide significant information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 January 2012 10:05:52PM *  8 points [-]

Some things that might de-skew my evaluation of exciting new projects:

  • If the project is new, it probably looks shinier than it is. I should wait a while or try to correct for this before evaluating.
  • I should take into account my record of defecting halfway thru a project to discount the utility of the new project.

If you assume that your future self will make a rational decision about whether to defect, this is unnecessary.

  • The latter half of a project is relatively untouched territory, full of valuable new experiences. I will have to work thru the first half of the new project to get to this, but I am already at the threshold on the current project.
  • Maybe there's more?

Yes, remember the cost of getting the new project up to the point where the current project is right now. The sunk cost fallacy says you should ignore the "sunk cost" of work on the project you've completed so far; however, you should not ignore the "replacement cost" of that work.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 23 January 2012 05:16:46AM 0 points [-]

At the very edge its also useful to be able to work while in a state of sheer existential dread.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 January 2012 06:28:28AM 1 point [-]

In my experience, if you find yourself in "a state of sheer existential dread", that probably means you've done something wrong, most likely made a category error somewhere along the way.

Comment author: faul_sname 21 January 2012 10:12:14PM *  1 point [-]

The Dark Arts are not inherently unethical, but the way they are used often is.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 January 2012 04:11:40AM 1 point [-]

The Dark Arts are not inherently unethical, but the way they are used often is.

This is not as clear as you think. Keep in mind Eliezer's objections to lying described here apply equally well to using the dark arts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 January 2012 02:38:56AM 3 points [-]

The problem with this post is that it fails to mention the legitimate reasons why definitions may be important:

  • definitions affect perceived simplicity when using Occam's razor.

  • definitions might correspond to concepts for which there are terms in your utility function.

  • widely accepted definitions frequently wind up serving as Schelling point.

Comment author: Cog 18 January 2012 05:21:01AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand the leap in logic there. If people have a reasonably comfortable minimum income regardless of what they do, how does that induce runaway speculation? Would venture capital firms not be as hesitant to hand out money to people who consistently failed to return on investment? Granted, VC firms could still get caught up in fads like in the dot-com bubble, but I don't foresee a minimum income really driving (very rich, well above the minimum income level) VCs into higher risk taking behavior.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2012 05:27:39AM 1 point [-]

Would venture capital firms not be as hesitant to hand out money to people who consistently failed to return on investment?

Moridinamael was talking about permitting individuals "to try over and over again without penalty", what you describe is an example of a penalty.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2012 05:19:14AM 3 points [-]

He appears to be using a straw man in his description of typological classification by giving examples that rely on superficial features.

Comment author: majus 13 January 2012 05:26:04PM 8 points [-]

I like the pithy description of halo bias. I don't like or agree with Mencken's non-nuanced view of idealists. it's sarcastically funny, like "a liberal is one who believes you can pick up a dog turd by the clean end", but being funny doesn't make it more true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 06:30:30PM 1 point [-]

The point is that idealists suffer from a halo bias around their chosen ideal.

Comment author: Desrtopa 17 January 2012 05:15:32PM 1 point [-]

Not likely to be much help if the new outlook is built upon the old in such a way that the mistakes of the old outlook are addressed by the new, but the mistakes of the new were not raised to the point of being able to be addressed within the old.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 06:28:21PM 4 points [-]

True, on the other hand, I suspect people around here tend to massively overestimate how often that happens.

Comment author: moridinamael 17 January 2012 06:06:14AM 0 points [-]

I think that we are agreeing? Those who become wealthy are often individuals who have exhibited risk-seeking behavior in the past, which has paid off.

Part of the point of the safety net is to provide a means for dedicated individuals to try out entrepreneurship without having to worry that their lives will be ruined if the fail. In fact, my optimal design would permit chosen individuals to try over and over again without penalty, encouraging them to take risky opportunities, provided there is at least a straight-face possibility of correspondingly high reward.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 06:24:20PM 1 point [-]

In fact, my optimal design would permit chosen individuals to try over and over again without penalty, encouraging them to take risky opportunities, provided there is at least a straight-face possibility of correspondingly high reward.

In practice, these kind of situations tend to lead to things like the dot-com bubble.

Comment author: vi21maobk9vp 12 January 2012 05:47:57AM 1 point [-]

More precisely, the core of our current best available (but still known to be flawed) physics are QM and GR and we do not even have a consistent model fully incorporating both.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 05:17:40AM 2 points [-]

Furthermore, we can't model anything more complicated then a hydrogen atom with QM without resorting to approximations, and by the time you get to something as complicated as bulk matter or atomic nuclei of heavy elements, we can't even verify that the predictions of QM are what we in fact observe.

Comment author: CronoDAS 17 January 2012 03:23:35AM 3 points [-]

Not necessarily; one way to become more successful than normal is to take risks that have a chance of a big payoff, even if they have a negative expected value, and then get lucky.

See also "Lucky Fools and Cautious Businessmen", a paper that I can't seem to find on the internet, which argues that entrepreneurship, in general, is a negative expected value proposition for the individual.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 04:20:20AM *  3 points [-]

one way to become more successful than normal is to take risks that have a chance of a big payoff

That was my point, that being risk-seeking causes one to be wealthy, rather then that being wealthy causes one to be risk-seeking.

Comment author: moridinamael 17 January 2012 12:09:57AM *  5 points [-]

Thanks for posting this.

Peter Thiel's 20 under 20 contest pays 20 exceptional young people a $100,000 each. This is a good starting place for thinking about this type of thing, but I don't know if I agree with how he implemented it.

My reasoning underlying the original suggestion was this: "Self-made" highly wealthy individuals are often risk-seeking. Speaking for myself, I feel that I would be more risk-seeking if I had a guaranteed financial safety net. Without such a net, each individual spends most of their own life establishing financial security and never taking the kinds of risks that could lead to significant wealth. Thus, there's a tremendous amount of duplication of effort, in the sense that we're all making our own careers and yet we all agree that there are specific "more important things."

Even one ultra-wealthy* Less Wrong-style rationalist could do tremendous good through calculated donations and funding of projects.

*There is some ambiguity here obviously. Let's just say this means having enough personal discretionary wealth to fully fund one or more focused and effective long-term research projects.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 01:01:40AM 6 points [-]

"Self-made" highly wealthy individuals are often risk-seeking.

I think you have the causality reversed there.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 January 2012 03:28:28AM *  8 points [-]

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

C.S. Lewis, Introduction to a translation of, Athanasius: On the Incarnation

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 January 2012 04:15:12AM *  2 points [-]

The reason for valuing all humans as opposed to what you call "persons", its much easier to tell if something is a human, then to tell if something is a "person". And in any case valuing all humans makes a much better Schelling point.

In response to Non-theist cinema?
Comment author: lukeprog 08 January 2012 09:43:55AM 12 points [-]

Some atheistic films not mentioned in the OP:

Agora, Bad Boy Bubby, Chocolat, Inherit the Wind, The Ledge, The Wicker Man, Planet of the Apes, The Magdalene Sisters, There Will Be Blood, The Tree of Life, The Golden Compass, The Apostle, Black Robe, Breaking the Waves, Creation (about Darwin), The Crucible, Contact, Hanna and Her Sisters, Paul, Saved, Whatever Works, The White Ribbon, God on Trial, Watchmen.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2012 05:08:40AM 3 points [-]

Well Inherit the Wind is rather notorious for it's historical inaccuracy.

Comment author: TimS 09 January 2012 02:15:33AM *  1 point [-]

Pardon my ignorance, but I wasn't aware that the "strange" results dealing with infinite sets of various cardinality were related to the "strange" results related to accepting the axiom of choice. Is this a limitation of my mathematics education, or are the infinite set "paradoxical" results independent of the axiom-of-choice sphere cutting "paradoxical" results?

To really push my understanding of the terminology, I thought that definitions of equivalent size for infinite sets based on one-to-one and onto correspondence did not require reference to the axiom of choice.


Alternatively, I'm not understanding the implications I'm supposed to get from:

How about this? Take the set of all natural numbers. Divide it into two sets: the set of even naturals, and the set of odd naturals. Now you have two infinite sets, the set {0, 2, 4, 6, 8, ...}, and the set {1, 3, 5, 7, 9, ...}. The size of both of those sets is the ω - which is also the size of the original set you started with. Now take the set of even numbers, and map it so that for any given value i, f(i) = i/2. Now you've got a copy of the set of natural numbers. Take the set of odd naturals, and map them with g(i) = (i-1)/2. Now you've got a second copy of the set of natural numbers. So you've created two identical copies of the set of natural numbers out of the original set of natural numbers.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2012 04:55:19AM 2 points [-]

You are correct. As several commenters have already pointed out, the provided explanation of the Banach-Tarski paradox is just bad.

Comment author: earthwormchuck163 08 January 2012 06:24:53PM 0 points [-]

The way I always did it was to use rotations about some fixed line that doesn't go through 0.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 January 2012 09:19:06PM 3 points [-]

We seem to be talking about different things, I'm talking about doubling the surface of the sphere. You're talking about how to get the center once you've doubled the surface.

Comment author: earthwormchuck163 07 January 2012 06:31:43AM *  2 points [-]

The paradoxical decomposition of F2 only gives a decomposition for a dense subset of the sphere, because you have to throw away the (countably many) fixed points of all the rotations involved to make the correspondence between F2 and the orbits of various points. To go the rest of the way and you need to use something other than rotations about the origin, ie something more than just the action of F2. But it's certainly fair to say that Banach-Tarski works because of the structure of F2.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 January 2012 12:05:13AM 2 points [-]

To go the rest of the way and you need to use something other than rotations about the origin, ie something more than just the action of F2.

To go the rest of the way you still only use rotations, just not the rotations in F2.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 January 2012 05:54:40PM 4 points [-]

World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem

I'd read this explanation from Smullyan before I read about the theorem in more detail, and I don't think Smullyan's explanation conveys real understanding. It doesn't talk about Gödel numbering, which is the real ingenuity behind the proof, and it doesn't talk about omega-inconsistency. At best, it gives you a glimpse of the logic involved and gives you the ability to think up more cute examples that also serve as incomplete explanations. At worst, it might give you a fundamental misunderstanding of the theorem that may cause you to think and say extremely stupid things.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2012 06:18:20AM 2 points [-]

It doesn't talk about Gödel numbering, which is the real ingenuity behind the proof,

Depends if you only want to show that set theory is incomplete, you don't need Gödel numbering and you can more-or-less turn Smullyan's explanation into a complete proof in a straightforward manner.

and it doesn't talk about omega-inconsistency.

Ok, I agree that this is an important point.

Comment author: roystgnr 05 January 2012 08:19:01PM 3 points [-]

If no other groups of humans are behaving as rationally as yours is, then it's likely no other humans are capable of easily identifying that your group is the one with the high level of uniquely rational behavior. To the extent that other groups can identify rational behaviors of yours, they will have already adopted them and will not consider you unique for having adopted them too.

You can signal the uniqueness your group by believing and doing things that are both rational and unpopular, but to most outsiders this only signals uniqueness, not rationality, because the reason such things are unpopular is because most people don't find them to be obviously rational. And the outsiders are usually right: even though they're wrong in your particular actually-is-rational case, that's outnumbered by the other cases which, from the outside, all appear to be similar arational group-identifying behaviors and rationalizations thereof. E.g. at first glance there's not a huge difference between "I'm going to get frozen after I die", "I don't eat pork", "I avoid caffeine and hot drinks", etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 January 2012 06:26:56AM 2 points [-]

Depends on how immediate and/or dramatic the benefits of the rational behavior are.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality quotes January 2012
Comment author: cousin_it 05 January 2012 12:03:22PM *  5 points [-]

I don't understand that quote. A good Bayesian should still pick the aposteriori most probable explanation for an improbable event, even if that explanation has very low prior probability before the event.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 January 2012 06:21:53AM 7 points [-]

I suspect the point is that it's not worthwhile to look for potential explanations for improbable events until they actually happen.

Comment author: WrongBot 04 January 2012 06:24:58PM *  0 points [-]

You can edit your own comments, for future reference. There's an icon in the bottom right of the comment that looks like a pencil over some paper.

Edit: Wait, you crossed out this comment so you must already know that. I am confused!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2012 02:01:01AM *  3 points [-]

Edit: Wait, you crossed out this comment so you must already know that. I am confused!

Getting crossed out is what happens to comments when they're retracted.

Comment author: Cthulhoo 03 January 2012 10:48:39AM 1 point [-]

Don't get it wrong: I love Dante, and can indeed quote several pieces of the Divina Commedia by heart. I can even still recite the first 30 verses of Lucretium's De Rerum Natura (which, by the way, contains some very good proto-rationality).

To be honest, the humanae litterae are often very well taught, encouraging text analysis and critical thinking. To be even more honest, the system works rather well for the more scientific-minded: it helps you keep a broader culture and widens your mental horizons. Unfortunately, it usually has the exact opposite effect on the majority of people.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 January 2012 08:26:11AM 1 point [-]

To be honest, the humanae litterae are often very well taught, encouraging text analysis and critical thinking. To be even more honest, the system works rather well for the more scientific-minded: it helps you keep a broader culture and widens your mental horizons. Unfortunately, it usually has the exact opposite effect on the majority of people.

Wow, that sounds like a massive improvement over the American education system.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2012 08:23:59PM 2 points [-]

SOPA will not pass congress. 75%

Comment author: timtyler 02 January 2012 12:39:19AM *  0 points [-]

You think that Solomonoff induction would predict enormous torture with a non-negligible propbability if it observed the mugger not being paid?

Because Solomonoff induction bases its priors on minimum message length and it's possible to encode enormous numbers like 3^^^3 in a message of length much less then 3^^^3.

Sure - but the claim there are large numbers of people waiting to be tortured also decreases in probability with the number of people involved.

I figure that Solomonoff induction would give a (correct) tiny probability for this hypothesis being correct.

Your problem is actually not with Solomonoff induction - despite what you say - I figure. Rather you are complaining about some decision theory application of Solomonoff induction - involving the concept of "utility".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 January 2012 04:27:06AM 2 points [-]

Because Solomonoff induction bases its priors on minimum message length and it's possible to encode enormous numbers like 3^^^3 in a message of length much less then 3^^^3.

Sure - but the claim there are large numbers of people waiting to be tortured also decreases in probability with the number of people involved.

What does this have to do with my point.

I figure that Solomonoff induction would give a (correct) tiny probability for this hypothesis being correct.

It does, just not tiny enough to override the 3^^^3 utility difference.

Your problem is actually not with Solomonoff induction - despite what you say - I figure. Rather you are complaining about some decision theory application of Solomonoff induction - involving the concept of "utility".

I don't have a problem with anything, I'm just trying to correct misconceptions about Pascal's mugging.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 December 2011 09:41:49AM 16 points [-]

One ideal I have never abandoned and never considered abandoning is that if you disagree with a final conclusion, you ought to be able to exhibit a particular premise or reasoning step that you disagree with. Michael Vassar views this as a fundamental divide that separates sanitykind from Muggles; with Tyler Cowen, for example, rejecting cryonics but not feeling obligated to reject any particular premise of Hanson's. Perhaps we should call ourselves the Modusponenstsukai.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 08:48:56PM 2 points [-]

Michael Vassar views this as a fundamental divide that separates sanitykind from Muggles; with Tyler Cowen, for example, rejecting cryonics but not feeling obligated to reject any particular premise of Hanson's.

If there is an argument that relies on many premises I can reject the conclusion, i.e., assign it a low probability while accepting, i.e., assigning high probability to, each individual premise.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 December 2011 09:38:27PM *  6 points [-]

The U.S. Presidential candidate who spends the most money on his campaign will be elected.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 08:13:41PM 1 point [-]

I was going to assign this prediction 50%, then I remembered the effect gwern mentioned here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 08:05:18PM *  11 points [-]

As in the Roman empire age, the theoretical concepts, taken out of the theories assigning their meaning and considered instead real objects, whose existence can be apparent only to the initiated people, are used to amaze the public. In physics courses the student (now unaware of the experimental basis of heliocentrism or of atomic theory, accepted on the sole basis of the authority principle) gets addicted to a complex and mysterious mythology, with orbitals undergoing hybridization, elusive quarks, voracious and disquieting black holes and a creating Big Bang: objects introduced, all of them, in theories totally unknown to him and having no understandable relation with any phenomenon he may have access to.

Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn

Comment author: [deleted] 01 January 2012 12:17:44AM 14 points [-]

Science isn't just a job, it's a means of determining truth. Methods of determining truth that aren't trustworthy in the laboratory don't become trustworthy when you leave it. There is no doctrine of applying scientific methodology to every aspect of one's life, you either follow trustworthy methods of investigation or you don't, and "follow trustworthy methods of investigation" is the core of science.

~Desertopa, TVTropes Forum

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality quotes January 2012
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 07:32:54PM 9 points [-]

There are types of valid evidence that aren't scientific. In particular science is also partially a social process, whereas you trying to find the truth for yourself is not.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 December 2011 09:21:38PM -1 points [-]

'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'

Because... it's not real?

Just sayin'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 07:26:39PM 4 points [-]

That's like saying is depression real, or is it just happening inside the patient's head?

The correct answer is yes and yes.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 December 2011 09:31:31PM *  9 points [-]

Most sociological mathematical models are formed by thinking about the relationships involved qualitatively, then building models that are simple, have those qualitative aspects, and can be worked with. Then you can gather data, compare the models to the data, and revise the models.

Take the Cobb-Douglas model of a production function. It was pulled out of someone's mind (not their ass) in just such a manner. Perhaps by luck, it never needed to be revised, because it turned out to model real data very well.

The use of a "bias function" is the really questionable thing here. Is what is really going on that people add imputed believability to someone who is biased, or can you get the same results just by saying that people agree with people who agree with them? You can't get the same results easily in this case, because moderates don't make the same kind impassioned defense of other moderates. You could suppose opinions are not evenly-distributed and conclude that moderates would do that, if there were more of them. Or you could explain the data as signalling group affiliation rather than having to do with belief.

Whatever explanation you prefer, putting it in math (when done well) distinguishes these different parts of the argument and makes these critical points more apparent.

(Some models are built by looking at a lot of data and noticing patterns, like Zipf's law. Some, more often found in physics, are built from the ground up, like E=mc^2. Those are better, if we can make them.)

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on The bias shield
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2011 10:04:06PM 1 point [-]

Most sociological mathematical models are formed by thinking about the relationships involved qualitatively, then building models that are simple, have those qualitative aspects, and can be worked with.

Most sociological mathematical models are also total crap.

Then you can gather data, compare the models to the data, and revise the models.

Repeat until your model has enough free parameters to be unfalsifiable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2011 07:12:03PM 5 points [-]

Because the outside view frequently gives better predictions than the inside view. For example as Manfred recently noted in a different thread, Mike Darwin's predictions were

[m]uch more accurate outside of his specialty.

Comment author: timtyler 31 December 2011 01:40:48PM *  0 points [-]

It has nothing to do with recourse limitations, the problem is that Solomonoff induction itself can't handle Pascal's mugging.

In what way? You think that Solomonoff induction would predict enormous torture with a non-negligible propbability if it observed the mugger not being paid? Why do you think that? That conclusion seems extremely unlikely to me - assumung that the Solomonoff induction had had a reasonable amount of previous exposure of the world. It would, like any sensible agent, assume that the mugger was lying.

That's why the original Pascal's mugging post post directed its criticism at "some bounded analogue of Solomonoff induction".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2011 06:58:25PM 2 points [-]

In what way? You think that Solomonoff induction would predict enormous torture with a non-negligible propbability if it observed the mugger not being paid?

Because Solomonoff induction bases its priors on minimum message length and it's possible to encode enormous numbers like 3^^^3 in a message of length much less then 3^^^3.

Why do you think that?

Because I understand mathematics. ;)

That's why the original Pascal's mugging post post directed its criticism at "some bounded analogue of Solomonoff induction".

What Eliezer was referring to is the fact that an unbounded agent would attempt to incorporate all possible versions of Pascal's wager and Pascal's mugging simultaneously and promptly end up with an ∞ − ∞ error.

In response to comment by shminux on The bias shield
Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 December 2011 05:33:57PM *  5 points [-]

I don't think so. You don't see moderates behaving that way towards moderates. And most of the commenters (though not all) are well aware that BIll O'Reilly is a conservative. Most of the comments don't say something like, "Bill O'Reilly was correct about his claims about Edwin Stanton". They say "You disagree with Bill O'Reilly; this must be because you are a liberal; I am not even going to consider your claims."

The subject matter here was history about Lincoln, and the facts in contention were not political, but questions such as, When was the Oval Office built? What kind of gun did Booth use? Was there a hole in the wall or in the door? So people are not defending O'Reilly's book because they have a bias that makes them agree with him about the content of the book. (I think I'll add that to the post.)

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on The bias shield
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2011 06:36:35PM 2 points [-]

On the other hand a lefty who disagrees with O'Reilly might very well try to make this disagreement look like it's about something apolitical.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 31 December 2011 05:06:44PM *  3 points [-]

The math doesn't add a lot at the moment, but I like to promote the idea that you can analyze the behavior of large groups of people mathematically. If you remove the "bias shield function" from the math, I think you have a framework that can be used for analyzing bias in other problems.

It does add the conclusion that categorizing people in more dimensions diminishes the effect, and that this effect may not ever be cancelled out entirely by adding more dimensions (I thought it would be). The particular functions I used are not well-motivated, so you can't draw the second conclusion with confidence.

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on The bias shield
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2011 06:32:19PM 8 points [-]

The math doesn't add a lot at the moment, but I like to promote the idea that you can analyze the behavior of large groups of people mathematically. If you remove the "bias shield function" from the math, I think you have a framework that can be used for analyzing bias in other problems.

I disagree, adding a mathematical model where every aspect of it was pulled out of your ass, is more likely to give you a false sense of precision then help your analysis.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 December 2011 04:45:06AM 0 points [-]

Yeah, I think that answers my question. If all you've got are intuitive judgments and a sense of their relative strength in various situations, then I need to know what your intuitive judgments about a situation are before I can apply any argument you make to that situation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 December 2011 12:01:37AM 2 points [-]

You should evaluate any argument I make on its merits, not on the basis of the intuitions I used to produce it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 December 2011 04:49:03AM 0 points [-]

Sure.

But if you start with intuition I1 and theory T at time T1, and subsequently end up with intuition I2 at time T2, what you seem to be endorsing is following I1 at T1 and I2 at T2. At no time are you endorsing following T if T conflicts with I at that time.

Which is what I meant by acting on my intuitions rather than implementing theory.

I'm at a complete loss for what a "sanity check" might look like. That is, OK, I have I2 in my brain, and I1 backed up on ROM, and I can compare them, and they make different judgments. Now what?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 11:58:14PM 1 point [-]

I'm at a complete loss for what a "sanity check" might look like. That is, OK, I have I2 in my brain, and I1 backed up on ROM, and I can compare them, and they make different judgments. Now what?

If I1 finds the judgement returned by I2 completely absurd even after looking at the argument, recognize that I should be confused and act accordingly.

Comment author: Manfred 30 December 2011 06:02:55AM 1 point [-]

For very large or very small probabilities, I agree it's important to start taking into account the "model uncertainty." And if some argument leads to the conclusion 2=1 (or that you should never act as if you'll die, which is of similar levels of wrong), of course you discount it, not in defiance of probability, but with probability, since we have so much evidence against that claim.

However, in the "donating to SIAI" case, I don't think we're actually talking about particularly large or small probabilities, or fallacious arguments. Implications can be labeled "extraordinary" for being socially unusual. This sort of extraordinary doesn't seem like it should be discounted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 11:48:24PM 1 point [-]

However, in the "donating to SIAI" case, I don't think we're actually talking about particularly large or small probabilities, or fallacious arguments. Implications can be labeled "extraordinary" for being socially unusual. This sort of extraordinary doesn't seem like it should be discounted.

This behavior isn't actually "socially unusual", in fact there are many social institutions that this resembles at least from an outside view, they're commonly called "cults". What this means is that humans seem to have a bias in favor of donating to "their cult" and believing they're acting rationally while doing so. As such you should consider whether you're belief that it's rational to donate to SIAI is affected by the same bias.

Comment author: XiXiDu 30 December 2011 10:04:47AM 0 points [-]

I think you are advocating for a mixture of the absurdity heuristic and empiricism. I agree with the latter but not so much the former in absence of support by the latter.

My specific argument is that absurdity isn't enough by itself. Yet one should assign more weight to absurdity once it arises as a logical implication. Especially if it is not a direct implication of a correct inference made according to evidence but much further out, an implication of previous implications.

Logical implications can reach out indefinitely without ever requiring new empirical evidence. I think we have to discount the associated utility at some point and ask for further evidence.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 11:32:41PM 4 points [-]

Logical implications can reach out indefinitely without ever requiring new empirical evidence. I think we have to discount the associated utility at some point and ask for further evidence.

You're confusing utility with probability. A long chain of logical implications should have its probability discounted since a mistake anywhere in the chain means that it's invalid.

Comment author: timtyler 30 December 2011 11:33:45AM *  0 points [-]

The idea of devoting more resources to investigating claims when they involve potential costs is involves decision theory rather than just mere prediction. However, vanilla reinforcement learning should handle this OK. Agents that don't investigate extraordinary claims will be exploited and suffer - and a conventional reinforcement learning agent can be expected to pick up on this just fine. Of course I can't supply source code - or else we would be done - but that's the general idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 11:27:32PM 2 points [-]

The idea of devoting more resources to investigating claims when they involve potential costs is involves decision theory rather than just mere prediction.

All claims involve decision theory in the sense that you're presumably going to act on them at some point.

However, vanilla reinforcement learning should handle this OK. Agents that don't investigate extraordinary claims will be exploited and suffer - and a conventional reinforcement learning agent can be expected to pick up on this just fine.

Would these agents also learn to pick up pennies in front of steam rollers? In fact, falling for Pascal's mugging is just the extreme case of refusing to pick up pennies in front of a steam roller, the question is where you draw a line dividing the two.

Comment author: timtyler 30 December 2011 12:29:06PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see what's wrong with the idea that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Me neither, but quite a few people on lesswrong don't seem to share that opinion or are in possession of vast amounts of evidence that I lack. For example, some people seem to consider "interference from an alternative Everett branch in which a singularity went badly" or "unfriendly AI that might achieve complete control over our branch by means of acausal trade". Fascinating topics for sure, but in my opinion ridiculously far detached from reality to be taken at all seriously.

I think you only get significant interference from "adjacent" worlds - but sure, this sounds a little strange, the way you put it.

If we go back to the Pascal's wager post though - Eliezer Yudkowsky just seems to be saying that he doesn't know how to build a resouce-limited version of Solomonoff induction that doesn't make the mistake he mentions. That's fair enough - nobody knows how to build high quality approximations of Solomonoff induction - or we would be done by now. The point is that this isn't a problem with Solomonoff induction, or with the idea of approximating it. It's just a limitation in Eliezer Yudkowsky's current knowledge (and probably everyone else's). I fully expect that we will solve the problem, though. Quite possibly to do so, we will have to approximate Solomonoff induction in the context of some kind of reward system or utility function - so that we know which mis-predictions are costly (e.g. by resulting in getting mugged) - which will guide us to the best points to apply our limited resources.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 11:21:00PM 3 points [-]

If we go back to the Pascal's wager post though - Eliezer Yudkowsky just seems to be saying that he doesn't know how to build a resouce-limited version of Solomonoff induction that doesn't make the mistake he mentions.

It has nothing to do with recourse limitations, the problem is that Solomonoff induction itself can't handle Pascal's mugging. If anything, the resource limited version of Solomonoff induction is less likely to fall for Pascal's mugging since it might round the small probability down to 0.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 December 2011 03:11:17AM 0 points [-]

This sounds like a general argument in favor of acting on my intuitions rather than implementing theory. For example, if I intuit that turning left at this intersection will get me where I want to go, it seems that this argument suggests that I should turn left at this intersection rather than looking at a map.

Am I misunderstanding you?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 03:53:11AM 2 points [-]

This sounds like a general argument in favor of acting on my intuitions rather than implementing theory.

Come to think of it, I don't actually see how that follows from what I said. I said that intuitions can change as a result of consciously held theories, not that this is necessarily bad, depending on the theory (although it would be nice to keep an copy of an old intuition on ROM and do periodic sanity checks).

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 December 2011 03:21:55AM 0 points [-]

So... is it possible for me to understand what your stated argument actually suggests about X if I don't know what your intuitive judgments on X are?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 03:43:38AM 1 point [-]

I don't fully understand your question, so I'll clarify my previous comment in the hope that that helps.

Like I said, I find the notion that I should always rely on my intuition at the expense of looking at a map intuitively absurd, and that intuition is "stronger then" (for lack of a better term) then the intuition that I should turn left.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 03:29:00AM 9 points [-]

By the way, in this post, Eliezer gives the following answer to the train dilemma:

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings."

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 December 2011 03:11:17AM 0 points [-]

This sounds like a general argument in favor of acting on my intuitions rather than implementing theory. For example, if I intuit that turning left at this intersection will get me where I want to go, it seems that this argument suggests that I should turn left at this intersection rather than looking at a map.

Am I misunderstanding you?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 03:17:30AM 1 point [-]

This sounds like a general argument in favor of acting on my intuitions rather than implementing theory. For example, if I intuit that turning left at this intersection will get me where I want to go, it seems that this argument suggests that I should turn left at this intersection rather than looking at a map.

No because I intuitively find that conclusion absurd.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 December 2011 09:11:11PM 2 points [-]

OK. So a situation arises, and your intuition says you should do X, and the most reliable formal theory you've got says you should do Y, where Y implies NOT(X). For some situations you do X, for others you do Y, depending on how much you trust your intuition and how much you trust your formal theory.

As far as I can tell, in this respect you are exactly like everyone else on this site.

You see a difference, though, between yourself and the others on this site... a difference important enough that you continue to point out its implications.

I can't quite tell what you think that difference is. Some possibilities:
1. You think they are trusting certain formal theories more than their own intuitions in situations where you would trust your intuition more.
2. You think they are trusting certain formal theories more than their own intuitions in situations where they ought to trust their intuitions more.
3. You think their intuitions are poor and they ought to intuit different things.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 03:05:05AM 2 points [-]
  1. You think they are trusting certain formal theories more than their own intuitions in situations where you would trust your intuition more.
  2. You think they are trusting certain formal theories more than their own intuitions in situations where they ought to trust their intuitions more.
  3. You think their intuitions are poor and they ought to intuit different things.

I can't speak for XiXiDu, but for myself it's a combination of all three. In particular, consciously held theories over time tends to affect one's intuition towards those theories. Thus I worry that by the time they actually wind up in such a conflict between theory and intuition, their intuitions will no longer be up to the task.

Comment author: timtyler 29 December 2011 05:11:30PM 1 point [-]

Our current methods might turn out to be biased in new and unexpected ways. Pascal's mugging, the Lifespan Dilemma, blackmailing and the wrath of Löb's theorem are just a few examples on how an agent build according to our current understanding of rationality could fail.

I don't really get it. For example, building a machine that is sceptical of Pascal's wager doesn't seem harder than building a machine that is sceptical of other verbal offers unsupported by evidence. I don't see what's wrong with the idea that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2011 02:53:16AM 1 point [-]

For example, building a machine that is sceptical of Pascal's wager doesn't seem harder than building a machine that is sceptical of other verbal offers unsupported by evidence.

The verbal offer isn't actually relevant to the problem, it's just there to dramatize the situation.

I don't see what's wrong with the idea that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Please formulate that maxim precisely enough to program into an AI in a way that solves the problem. Because the best way we currently have of formulating it, i.e., Bayseanism with quasi-Solomonoff priors doesn't solve it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 December 2011 03:29:02PM 1 point [-]

I observe that in my experience, acting confident is highly correlated with both a preference for certainty and sexual attractiveness. That might have something to do with it. Peacock tails aren't especially adaptive, either.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2011 06:22:03AM 1 point [-]

I suspect acting confidently functions as a costly signal that you do in fact have good information, which in tern can signal intelligence and/or contacts in high level places.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 26 December 2011 07:49:55PM *  5 points [-]

I haven't watched the show, but I've sometimes seen essays from people saying that Kirk, Spock, and Bones represent "body, mind, and spirit." And whatever the creators' intentions, there does seem to be a popular misconception that rationalists or rational people or both act like Spock.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2011 02:48:04AM 2 points [-]

there does seem to be a popular misconception that rationalists or rational people or both act like Spock.

I suspect there a reasonable amount of truth to this belief. At least I suspect Spock was a reasonable caricature of the type of self-proclaimed "rational people" prevalent during the 50s and 60s.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 24 December 2011 05:55:29AM 3 points [-]

The lesson here may be: once a society starts to take progress for granted, it grinds to a halt.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2011 06:24:30PM *  9 points [-]

Counterexample: the computer industry.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 23 December 2011 05:01:49AM 1 point [-]

The value of abstaining from sex in priestly situations is signalling of willpower and piety, one must be actively resisting temptation. As such someone with no sex drive wouldn't get the same cache.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2011 05:50:09AM 1 point [-]

Not really, since outside observers can't tell the two cases apart.

Comment author: DanArmak 20 December 2011 12:07:56PM 3 points [-]

Then our expectations are wrong. The effectiveness of science should add up to normality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2011 05:37:15AM 1 point [-]

Correct, of course that's still a problem.

Comment author: TimS 20 December 2011 04:55:17PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the link to that interesting essay. It seems to rely on the possibility of inter-subjective truths (i.e. truths that should persuade) that are not objective (i.e. based on empirical results). Basically, I don't believe in inter-subjective truths of that kind because they are capable of proving too much. For example, "God exists" is a plausible candidate for inter-subjective truth, but there are empirical things I would expect in a world where God exists that do not appear to be present. In short, there seems to be no limit to what can be labeled inter-subjective, non-objective truth.

Most small deviations, and practically all "radical" deviations [in cultural beliefs], result in the equivalent of death for the organism: a mass breakdown of civilization which can include genocide, mass poverty, starvation, plagues, and, perhaps most commonly and importantly, highly unsatisying, painful, or self-destructive individual life choices.

This asserted fragility of society is inconsistent with historical evidence. You can pick just about any moral taboo (E.g. human sacrifice or incest) and find a society that violated it but continued on, and fell for reasons independent of the violation of the moral taboo. For example, Nazi Germany didn't lose WWII because they were immoral jerkwads. Germany lost WWII because it picked a fight with a more powerful opponent (who happened to also be an immoral jerkwad).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2011 05:25:33AM 2 points [-]

Basically, I don't believe in inter-subjective truths of that kind because they are capable of proving too much.

Only if you think of them as incontrovertible evidence, rather than merely another type of evidence to be incorporated.

Comment author: TimS 19 December 2011 06:28:09PM *  1 point [-]

It's an interesting empirical question how much of what we do is sub-optimal. I'm sure it is larger than what most people would guess. For example, I expect that most LWers would agree that unwritten social norms, especially politeness norms, are optimized for status showing, not achievement of material goals.

for no other reason than this

That part of the quote seems to limit the applicable scope. I read it as rejection of "tradition" as a stand-alone justification. That is, we don't drive on the right side of the street in the US by "tradition," but based on Schelling point type analysis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2011 05:39:37AM 1 point [-]

It's an interesting empirical question how much of what we do is sub-optimal.

Sub-optimal relative to what? To what a hypothetical God/AI with unlimited computing power would recommend? Well, we don't have access to that kind of computing power.

I read it as rejection of "tradition" as a stand-alone justification.

As Nick Szabo points out in this essay, tradition often contains wisdom that would be computationally infeasible recover from first principals. So yes, all other things being equal, you should accept "tradition" as a stand-alone justification. If all other things aren't equal, then you should treat the existence of the tradition as evidence to be incorporated like other.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 17 December 2011 12:23:21AM *  2 points [-]

That doesn't seem like the right pair of characters for making the intended point. Here is the context:

Perhaps the most important fact about power is that the powerful are almost always sincere. They honestly believe they are doing good. Every Sauron considers himself a Boromir. And - as Acton observed - every Boromir has an inner Sauron.

Boromir himself was an example of a character who was doing bad but thought (until just before the end) that he was doing good. So, to consider oneself to be a Boromir is to consider oneself to be fooling oneself in just the way that Moldbug describes. Boromir already is just the kind of self-deluded person that Moldbug is saying that powerful people are. It would have made his point better to say that "Every Boromir considers himself a Faramir". Or, "Every Sauron considers himself a Gandalf".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2011 07:19:41AM 4 points [-]

"Every Sauron considers himself a Gandalf".

The problem is that Gandalf explicitly refuses the ring for fear he would find it useful and thus be corrupted by it. Whereas Moldbug's point is about how Sauron would rationalize taking the ring. Perhaps a better phrasing would be, "Every Sauron starts out as a Boromir."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2011 07:21:43AM *  1 point [-]

Sometimes, you calculate the probability of a certain event and find that the number is so unbelievably small that your brain really can't keep track of how small it is, any more than you can spot an individual grain of sand on a beach from 100 meters off. But, because you're already thinking about that event enough to calculate the probability of it, it feels like it's still worth keeping track of. It's not.

This seems to contradict the point of the Einstein's Arrogance post.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 December 2011 05:52:35AM -1 points [-]

No he hasn't. He has signaled a lack of hypocrisy - a desirable trait in an ally.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2011 08:55:27AM *  1 point [-]

He has signaled that he identifies with his "baser urges" (a.k.a., system 1), rather then his "higher faculties" (a.k.a., system 2, a.k.a., the part that makes promises to allies). As such when I really need him, he's more likely to give in to akrasia on the grounds that any promises he made were merely signaling.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 December 2011 04:58:36AM 5 points [-]

Personally, I have yet to be convinced that "I really want to do X, but due to akrasia I don't behave in ways that reflect my actual desire to do X" is a more accurate description of the world than "I don't really want to do X, but due to signalling I express a desire to do X I don't really have."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2011 04:28:11AM 1 point [-]

You've just signaled that you wouldn't make a very reliable ally. I'll keep that in mind. ;)

Comment author: Oligopsony 13 December 2011 01:39:44PM 5 points [-]

Well, it's evidence that there is some difference between men and women that exists throughout all societies. I think the main epistemic problem is that the explanatory power of the null hypothesis (men and women are natively psychologically almost identical, but people know that women get pregnant and men don't and social structures take this into account) is pretty high and, even worse, often gives reasoning that's isomorphic to ev psychic explanations.

This isn't exclusively a problem for gender, either - oftentimes ev psychic explanations in other domains tend to give explanations that are isomorphic to how one would explain the behavior of a minimally modular rational actor.

Of course if Eliezer is correct - and as best I can tell his reasoning is sound, although the conclusions, even when transported to much less mindkilly domains, seem to be absurd - then this isn't much of a problem at all.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2011 03:25:05AM 1 point [-]

I think the main epistemic problem is that the explanatory power of the null hypothesis (men and women are natively psychologically almost identical, but people know that women get pregnant and men don't and social structures take this into account) is pretty high and, even worse, often gives reasoning that's isomorphic to ev psychic explanations.

So your null hypothesis is that genetic evolution failed to produce any traits in humans that accommodate this fact, so all behavioral differences are the result of memetic evolution and explicit reasoning. This hypothesis strikes me as extremely unlikely.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2011 12:23:53AM 1 point [-]

As MinibearRex points out Eliezer's "explanation" of how religion formed, fails to actually explain anything. Heck the "failed" just-so-story is a better explanation for how religion formed then the one Eliezer proposes in its place. I think this is a case of Eliezer being mind-killed by his hatred of religion, and thus choosing explanations based on how bad a light they cast religion in rather than any measure of their plausibility.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 14 December 2011 07:23:09PM 1 point [-]

This selection pressure only exists if religion is already a universal in the society. If Ugg, from three huts over, says that everyone in the tribe must believe in his imaginary friend, or else he will kill them, the selection that actually happens will work against Ugg.

I'm not sure if this is actually true. The idea of religion is appealing enough that Ugg may be able to sell it to them. After all, Christian missionaries often succeed in displacing an old religion.

Besides, is the naïve argument really incorrect? The reason group selection fails is that individual selection is stronger. But if, by chance, religion grows to dominance in a tribe, then becoming irreligious is no longer an individual fitness gain. The two selection pressures point in the same direction.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2011 12:13:40AM 4 points [-]

I'm not sure if this is actually true. The idea of religion is appealing enough that Ugg may be able to sell it to them. After all, Christian missionaries often succeed in displacing an old religion.

The question is why are human brains wired such that this is the case?

Comment author: Yvain 12 December 2011 03:25:15PM *  9 points [-]

Well, "reality isn't weird" can mean a couple of different things. "Weird" is a two-part predicate like "sexiness"; things are only weird in reference to some particular mind's preconceptions. Even Yog-Sothoth doesn't seem weird to his own mother.

But if we use the word "weird" as a red flag to tell others that they can expect to be surprised or confused when entering a certain field, as long as we can predict that their minds and preconceptions work somewhat like ours, it's a useful word.

I think Eliezer's "reality is not weird" post was just trying to say that we can't blame reality for being weird, or expect things to be irreducibly weird even after we challenge our preconceptions. I don't think Eliezer was saying that we can't describe anything as "weird" if it actually exists; after all, he himself has been known to describe certain potential laws of physics as weird.

(man, basing an argument on the trivial word choices of a venerated community leader spotted in an old archive makes me feel so Jewish)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2011 07:50:03AM 3 points [-]

I think Eliezer's "reality is not weird" post was just trying to say that we can't blame reality for being weird,

But one can blame a theory for finding reality weird. In particular, you seem to be using "weird" to mean frequently behaves in ways that don't agree with our models. That should cause you to lower your confidence in the models.

Comment author: KatieHartman 13 December 2011 03:35:38AM 6 points [-]

One of the major challenges to evo-psych hypotheses about gender is never really tackled in the original comment thread: that women and men are conditioned differently in almost all current and historical societies, so it's almost impossible to differentiate effects of training from inborn psychological phenomena.

Basically: if you're the one who's always been expected to put the groceries away, do the cooking, and set the table, you've probably developed a pretty good strategy for getting the damn ketchup out of the fridge.

Of course, we could always argue that women are almost always socialized for these roles because they have an evolution-granted knack for them, but then we'll be tasked with finding a large enough (and representative enough) population that hasn't had any of that conditioning.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2011 06:59:44AM 6 points [-]

One of the major challenges to evo-psych hypotheses about gender is never really tackled in the original comment thread: that women and men are conditioned differently in almost all current and historical societies,

This fact (or rather the fact you seem to mean, i.e., that the differences have a similar character across almost all societies) is itself evidence for the evo-psych hypotheses about gender.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2011 11:47:20PM 0 points [-]

It's like saying "should we trust our model or the actual results?" The point is that you can only rely on models when making predictions, if you have the results you don't need a model to come up with the results.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes December 2011
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2011 06:34:57AM 1 point [-]

No, what Thomas is saying is that we should compare the model's predictions with the actual results and use that to calibrate how much we should trust the model.

Comment author: tut 12 December 2011 05:05:41PM 15 points [-]

… every culture in history, in every time and every place ...

We should implement a filter that changes the above phrase to "The USA in the 1950s". Because then the statements that include the phrase would generally become true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2011 06:18:10AM 3 points [-]

I think you're being a little to harsh on the OC. You can at least use the phrase "Western Culture in the 20th century". (;

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 December 2011 03:34:22AM 2 points [-]

until the Republifans and Demofans realize that in many ways they have more in common with other Voters than with "their" Politicians;

This article seems relevant.

regulations that apply to lots of other people turn out to be largely irrelevant to those who serve in Congress. This isn’t an exception to congressional practice. It is, far too often, business as usual.

Comment author: Yvain 11 December 2011 12:46:17PM 14 points [-]

Absent any other prior, why would you use anything other than "My body will react to hormones the same way most other people's bodies react to hormones"?

And you can't self-experiment on risk of a heart attack. Your only endpoint is "I had a heart attack" or "I didn't have a heart attack", and even if you don't mind getting your experimental result exactly one instant too late to help you, with a sample size of one you can't draw any conclusions about whether taking HRT for ten years contributed to your heart attack or not.

And probably the most important reason is that medicine is weird. Even when the smartest people try to predict results that should be obvious, they very often get them wrong. "Based on what I know about the body, this sounds like it should work" is the worst reason to do anything. I know that sounds contrary to Bayes, but getting burned again and again by things that sound like they should work has recalibrated me on this one.

If you're saying that you have unusual incentives here - eg that you value the possibility of adding to your natural lifespan enough that you're willing to accept a small risk of subtracting from it and a large risk that you're wasting time and money, that's fair enough.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 December 2011 01:41:32AM -1 points [-]

And probably the most important reason is that medicine is weird. Even when the smartest people try to predict results that should be obvious, they very often get them wrong. "Based on what I know about the body, this sounds like it should work" is the worst reason to do anything. I know that sounds contrary to Bayes, but getting burned again and again by things that sound like they should work has recalibrated me on this one.

Reality isn't weird. What this means is that you know less about the body then you think you do.

In response to comment by atorm on Value evolution
Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2011 07:27:24PM *  0 points [-]

If travelers from the past have outraged reactions, it's because they're running the social software of their time, not because they have genuinely considered all of the pros and cons of slavery in both their home context and ours. Intelligence is largely about knowing the "right" things to say and then saying them automatically so as to not jeopardize your share of resources.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Value evolution
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2011 05:54:55AM 3 points [-]

Why doesn't that apply equally well to the traveler from our time?

In response to Value evolution
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2011 04:52:59AM 12 points [-]

If you believe this, then in the comments below, please describe a scenario that could have happened, in which we would today believe that the values people had hundreds of years ago were superior to the values they have today. Not a scenario in which some conservative sub-group could believe this; but a scenario in which society as a whole could believe it, and keep on believing it for a hundred years, without changing their values.

And yet for the majority of history most people believed that values were decaying. See, for example, the ancient Greek notion of the Ages of Man, the related Hindu concept of the Four Yugas, or the quote at the top of this article.

Comment author: TimS 08 December 2011 05:15:56PM *  0 points [-]

Does this argument help your case about "national character"? It's clearly true that a naive anti-communist would do a terrible job of predicting the actions of the United States during the Cold War. That's an argument that anti-communism was not a part of the national character of the US.
But your position seems to require that national character have some predictive power in policy decisions. So what particular national character drove US actions in the Cold War? I personally think that national self-interest (i.e. Great Power politics) drove the Cold War, not ideology. But self-interest is an odd thing to label a "national characteristic" because it seems unlikely that there are nations that lack that quality.


To recap, this is the quote that started this sub-debate:

To the extent that there's a "national character" that affects policy, I feel it has primarily, perhaps even solely to do with concepts of self-identification similar in type to the concept of Clash of Civilizations by Huntington. e.g. Greece supported the Serbs in the Yugoslav wars for no more and no less reason than that its "national character" contained a self-identification with Eastern Orthodox significantly more than with Catholics or with Muslims. Now there's predictive power. In any dispute between orthodox and non-orthodox, I know that Greece will back the orthodox. I know that Arab nations will back the Palestinians against Israel. America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn't , I know America would back the people that didn't.

There's the extent that national character plays in regards to policy. If there's some other element in it with predictive power, I don't see it.

I don't see how disproving the highlighted portion shows that the following sentences are untrue.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2011 04:03:11AM 1 point [-]

So your complaint is that Vladimir is arguing a point that doesn't necessarily advance his main argument. Why is this bad? That's what rationalist discussions are supposed to look like.

Comment author: kateblu 07 December 2011 12:44:45PM 2 points [-]

Seeing how individual decisions are rational within the bounds of the information available does not provide an excuse for narrow-minded behavior. It provides an understanding of why that behavior arises. Within the bounds of what a person in that part of the system can see and know, the behavior is reasonable. Taking out one individual from a position of bounded rationality and putting in another person is not likely to make much difference. Blaming the individual rarely helps create a more desirable outcome. – Donella H Meadows

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2011 02:09:43AM 1 point [-]

Blaming the individual rarely helps create a more desirable outcome.

Blaming individuals for their narrow-minded behavior is one way to encourage less narrow-minded behavior.

Comment author: Gust 04 December 2011 08:22:14PM 2 points [-]

Did you have such an experience? Please tell me about it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 December 2011 07:10:47AM 4 points [-]

Did you have such an experience? Please tell me about it.

Any such example would of necessity be highly controversial.

I recommend starting with this essay by Paul Graham.

Possibly followed by this comment by Quirinus_Quirrell if you want some specific examples.

Comment author: Cthulhoo 03 December 2011 05:11:56PM 0 points [-]

Thank you, edited. Is this the reason for the downvoting, or is there something else?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 December 2011 05:27:33AM 9 points [-]

I have a policy of down-voting quotes that are simply anti-religious cheering.

In response to 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: steven0461 04 December 2011 10:50:30PM 8 points [-]

As with the last survey, it's amazing how casually many people assign probabilities like 1% and 99%. I can understand in a few cases, like the religion questions, and Fermi-based answers to the aliens in the galaxy question. But on the whole it looks like many survey takers are just failing the absolute basics: don't assign extreme probabilities without extreme justification.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 December 2011 04:03:03AM 6 points [-]

On the other hand, conjunctive bias exists. It's not hard to string together enough conjunctions that the probability of the statement should be in an extreme range.

Comment author: gwern 12 September 2011 01:18:08AM 1 point [-]

Done.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2011 07:32:00AM 1 point [-]

Are your archives in a publicly accessible location? http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ is down.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 December 2011 02:18:11PM 8 points [-]

This is probably less relevant for "technological singularity" than it is for, say, "cheap air fare."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2011 07:19:37AM 3 points [-]

How many people who aren't already familiar with SIAI search for "technological singularity"?

Comment author: [deleted] 02 December 2011 04:59:17PM *  13 points [-]

SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it's something "so mundane", that anybody could do it.

I actually think you have it backwards there. The reason people aren't engaging in this activity is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.

General Evidence: There are lots of postings for Search Engine Optimizers, and they all want applicants to already have experience doing SEO. If it was something that was so mundane that anyone could do it with a couple hours of training, what you'd see instead are "no experience necessary" job postings for SEO where the company is willing to take an hour or two to train a schlub that they can then pay minimum wage too.

(Speaking of minimum wage, if you guys are spending a significant amount of your time doing menial tasks like moving furniture, it might be time to get a schlub of your own. You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.)

Personal Anecdotal Supporting Evidence: I clicked on your link, and the thought in my head wasn't "oh, this is too mundane", but rather was "wtf?? This looks super-complex and confusing. It must be the type of thing that "computer people" know how to do. Not something for me. I don't have the knowledge or skill-set"

In response to comment by [deleted] on Hack Away at the Edges
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2011 06:25:05AM 5 points [-]

SEO has to be hard for the simple reason that it's zero-sum. You're competing against all the other people doing SEO.

In response to comment by [deleted] on More "Personal" Introductions
Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 December 2011 05:48:50AM 3 points [-]

For people who use pseudonyms, would you care to explain why you chose yours? I don't necessarily mean why you're using a pseudonym at all, I'm more interested in why you chose the particular one you've got.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2011 06:04:15AM 12 points [-]

Pun on engineer.

Comment author: SilasBarta 02 December 2011 11:23:18PM 5 points [-]

Since my sibling reply got voted up a lot, I want to follow up: it seems that not only is the question not wrong, the "dissolving" answer is itself wrong, or at least very misleading. (Naturally, I have to tread cautiously, since I'm not an Expert in this area.)

As I said in my other reply, the defining characteristic of life is its ability to maintain a low-entropy island against the entropizing forces of nature. So there must be some range of environments in which an organism (via genes) is able to produce the same phenotype regardless of where its environment falls within that range. In effect, the genes allow the phenotype to be "screened off" (d-separated, whatever) from its environment (again, within limits).

A thing that truly allows the environment equal influence in its final form as the thing itself (as suggested by the T&C answer) is not what we mean by "life". It's the hot water that eventually cools to a temperature somewhere between its current temperature and that of its initial environment. It's the compressed gas molecules in the corner of a chamber that eventually spread out evenly throughout the chamber. It is, in short, not the kind of self-replicating, low entropy island we associate with life, and so has no basic units thereof, be they genes or memes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2011 05:30:38AM 4 points [-]

So there must be some range of environments in which an organism (via genes) is able to produce the same phenotype regardless of where its environment falls within that range.

The organism needs to successfully thrive and reproduce within that range. Sometimes this means tailoring its phenotype to the environment it finds itself in.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2011 03:55:39AM 0 points [-]

Are your archives in a publicly accessible location? http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ is down.

Comment author: Raemon 29 November 2011 07:35:55PM 1 point [-]

Upon further reflection, I think I was approaching it from a different angle, which resulted in unspoken assumptions. As an artist, I care about each project I do for its own sake in addition to whatever purpose it serves, and the goals are simultaneously intertwined, and of parallel, equal importance to me.

This is me speaking as an artist. If I'm a producer/propagandist who wants to hire an artist, then yes, the politics is the true purpose and the art "merely" needs to be able to cut.

But from inside the visual-art-algorithm, the "art" is so central to the utility function that speaking in terms of "the art is merely there for the purpose of politics" means you're probably going to fail.

IMO, anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2011 07:03:54AM 1 point [-]

This is me speaking as an artist. If I'm a producer/propagandist who wants to hire an artist, then yes, the politics is the true purpose and the art "merely" needs to be able to cut.

But from inside the visual-art-algorithm, the "art" is so central to the utility function that speaking in terms of "the art is merely there for the purpose of politics" means you're probably going to fail.

That's more-or-less the point I was getting at. Namely: focusing all your effort on maximizing your utility function, causes you to fail to maximize your utility function.

Comment author: magfrump 30 November 2011 01:36:01AM 5 points [-]

My default assumption is that if something has been around forever it's at least a local optimum, since otherwise it would have been changed a long time ago.

A local equilibrium is different from a local optimum. It's not that nobody has noticed it, it's that the Nash equilibrium is to worry more about signalling than improving. The traditions are doing something right; they're enforcing a meme which is successful in the ancestral environment. That's just not what I want them to be doing. I can't make a Cadillac a better luxury car, but I can make it much better at catching rain water.

I agree that my claims could use citations, and the date of 1900 was certainly arbitrary; I don't have good references off hand per se but the fact that nutritional science is STILL so controversial and unsettled suggests to me that people have not been properly nourished and will continue not to be until someone figures out what proper nourishment is. I would also guess that it is the case that most people today in Africa, India, and much of China are malnourished, though again I don't have citations offhand. I will try to find some tomorrow when I have more time if you like.

This is not obviously a bad thing. See this essay by Paul Graham for a good discussion for why our modern school system is arguably worse.

I don't think that I actually disagree with you very much here. The modern school system is awful in a great many ways. On the other hand, some people (myself included) have good experiences which I don't think would be possible working ten hours a day at a factory, for instance. I also think that people get vastly more access to knowledge at a public school than working on a farm. The system sucks terribly but I think "worse" is a bit of a stretch.

Are you conflating spanking with abuse here? If so, we really need to taboo the word "abuse".

I would say that much if not most of the time spanking causes significant and unnecessary suffering, so yes that counts as abuse in my book.

I suspect that we have wildly different moral intuitions here, but my basic premise is that significant and unnecessary suffering is bad, and should be avoided, and has happened a lot to most people. This hasn't necessarily caused them to be worse people, but it hasn't helped them be better people so I'd say it is bad.

I hope that I have sufficiently taboo'd abuse; I have tried to use it only when I explicitly define it, and in my previous post only to reference things which I believe would fit the legal definition.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2011 06:56:20AM 2 points [-]

A local equilibrium is different from a local optimum. It's not that nobody has noticed it, it's that the Nash equilibrium is to worry more about signalling than improving.

Keep in mind that unilaterally deviating from a Nash equilibrium doesn't work. Furthermore, even if you successfully convince other people to also deviate unless the new state is also a Nash equilibrium, you'll ultimately wind up loosing to the defectors. In any case, I tend to find the "modern" approaches are frequently much heavier on signalling than the traditional ones.

[Spanking] hasn't necessarily caused them to be worse people, but it hasn't helped them be better people so I'd say it is bad.

I don't really agree with the last point. Furthermore, the modern solution to misbehaving children appears to be to drug them with Prozac or something similar which almost certainly does more harm then spanking.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 November 2011 07:21:12AM *  4 points [-]

If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were "abused"? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I'd like to know how this could qualify as "abuse" under a reasonable definition.

If you look at history you will also find that the current time period is also the least violent, on a per-capita basis. See Steven Pinker's latest for details. I'm not asserting a correlation; rather, it's the case that all sorts of things that were once considered perfectly normal are now not, and in at least some cases we consider that to be a pretty significant positive change. To say "our ancestors did it, and they turned out okay" seems like a general argument against any sort of moral progress.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2011 01:12:51AM 3 points [-]

To say "our ancestors did it, and they turned out okay" seems like a general argument against any sort of moral progress.

Not really. It merely means that one's prior should be in favor of the way with a long tradition behind them. This is no more paradoxical then the fact that even though all progress depends on mutations, most mutations are bad. In fact this is merely that principal applied to memetic evolution.

Comment author: magfrump 29 November 2011 07:04:20AM 7 points [-]

"Turned out alright" is different from "turned out optimally."

I definitely think a case could be made (and in fact it would be my default hypothesis) that the way things have been run since the beginning of time are largely suboptimal, specifically in that they cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. This seems like a perfectly good definition of abuse to me. It is also the case that almost everyone raised before, say 1900 was malnourished and subject to significant child labor and often physical abuse. These are unquestionably abuse by today's standards, but a lot of people managed to "turn out alright" despite all that.

It is and should be the case that as time progresses, things get better. The sexual permissiveness of our current age is (I believe likely to be) one facet of that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2011 01:03:03AM 1 point [-]

I definitely think a case could be made (and in fact it would be my default hypothesis) that the way things have been run since the beginning of time are largely suboptimal, specifically in that they cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.

Really? My default assumption is that if something has been around forever it's at least a local optimum, since otherwise it would have been changed a long time ago. Seriously what are the odds that you've noticed an actually improvement that nobody else in it's history has noticed. To quote Chesterton

There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.

Seriously, the fact that a tradition has survived a long time is evidence that it is doing something right.

It is also the case that almost everyone raised before, say 1900 was malnourished

[citation please]

subject to significant child labor

This is not obviously a bad thing. See this essay by Paul Graham for a good discussion for why our modern school system is arguably worse.

often physical abuse

Are you conflating spanking with abuse here? If so, we really need to taboo the word "abuse".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2011 06:28:35AM 4 points [-]

When producing art that has some sort of political purpose behind it (like persuading people, or conveying a message), don't forget to actually make it art. It can't just be politics.

This seems to contradict the nameless virtue

“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 28 November 2011 04:22:41PM *  13 points [-]

In my last post, I showed that the brain does not encode concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So, any philosophical practice which assumes this — as much of 20th century conceptual analysis seems to do — is misguided.

This argument must be missing something crucial, because it fails to account for why the necessary-and-sufficient approach is so fantastically useful in mathematics. Mathematics deals with human concepts. Many of these concepts are very likely not stored in the brain as necessary and sufficient conditions. (Concepts learned in a formal setting might be stored that way, but there's little reason to think that a common concept like "triangle" is for most people.) And yet it proved incredibly fruitful to recast these concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

In the case of mathematics, it turns out to be worthwhile to think about concepts in the decidedly unnatural mode of necessary and sufficient conditions. One might reasonably have hoped that the same admittedly unnatural mode would prove similarly worthwhile for concepts like "democracy". After all, unnatural doesn't necessarily mean worse. Now, for concepts like "democracy", the unnatural approach does prove to be worse. But it can't be simply because the approach was unnatural.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2011 06:22:10AM 1 point [-]

One might reasonably have hoped that the same admittedly unnatural mode would prove similarly worthwhile for concepts like "democracy". After all, unnatural doesn't necessarily mean worse. Now, for concepts like "democracy", the unnatural approach does prove to be worse.

That's because "democracy" involves dealing with interacting human minds and said minds run on metaphor.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [SEQ RERUN] Guardians of Ayn Rand
Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2011 07:19:42AM 3 points [-]

Aristotlean logic is obtained by assuming every probability to be either one or zero.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [SEQ RERUN] Guardians of Ayn Rand
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2011 05:23:34AM 1 point [-]

Interestingly enough most of his fallacies are actually valid Bayesian inferences that aren't capable of producing outputs of 1 or 0 even if all of their inputs are 1 or 0.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2011 05:16:40AM 6 points [-]

With alarming commonality, adults with maturing offspring go out of their way to stunt their children's sociosexual development, due primarily, I think, to a desire to conform to the current societal archetype of Good Parent. Despite ambiguous-at-best psychological evidence, parents fight to keep kids ignorant, unequipped, and chaste due to the social consensus that having sexually active children makes one a Bad Parent.

I would even go so far as to call such deliberate impediment of sociosexual development a form of abuse, despite its extreme prevalence and acceptableness in today's world.

If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were "abused"? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I'd like to know how this could qualify as "abuse" under a reasonable definition. If you have a personal definition of "abuse" under which it does, I would question why something falling under it obviously qualifies as bad.

Comment author: lukeprog 28 November 2011 08:21:01PM *  5 points [-]

It seems to be a prediction of this idea...

Not quite. Different cultures can make slightly different metaphors. For example, there is at least one tribe that uses the metaphor of time as being a space in front of and behind the speaker, but while we think of the past as behind us and the future being in front of us, they think of the past in front of them (because they can "see" it) and the future behind them (because they can't see it).

where's my mountain of footnotes/citations???

I'm experimenting with a new style. I cite only three 'review' sources from the literature: or rather, I link directly to them in the text instead of writing references for them. Hundreds of studies are available if one checks those sources. This kind of post takes much less time to write, but may be less useful or impressive or something.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2011 01:03:38AM *  2 points [-]

For example, there is at least one tribe that uses the metaphor of time as being a space in front of and behind the speaker, but while we think of the past as behind us and the future being in front of us, they think of the past in front of them (because they can "see" it) and the future behind them (because they can't see it).

I believe this is true for nearly all pre-industrial societies, including pre-industrial (or at least pre-enlightenment) western culture. The two meanings of the word "before", which can mean either in front of (spatially) or behind (temporally), are a remnant of the older metaphor.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2011 11:51:05PM 2 points [-]

Yes, but it's still true.

Cached thoughts are thoughts that we think are true because we cached them at some point and never re-evaluated them. To properly re-evaluate a cached thought we need to re-evaluate all dependencies, including the ones that we might not notice at first.

It's exceedingly hard to do that, which is why otherwise intelligent people in the past didn't start questioning the aspects of racism and sexism that are commonly denounced today.

OK, let's look at your explanations:

I'm not a prominent feminist; I haven't written anything of substance on feminism, and I don't even consider my opinion to have much meaning since I'm male-assigned. I'm not the people I was talking about.

I think you should read some actual feminist literature (I'd start with bell hooks and then move on to some Dworkin), with an eye towards the differences in how you perceive the world versus how bell hooks and Dworkin perceive the world.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transhumanism and Gender Relations
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2011 08:18:37PM 6 points [-]

I don't even consider my opinion to have much meaning since I'm male-assigned.

Why is this relevant? The truth should not depend on the observer?

Comment author: Nornagest 26 November 2011 06:11:25AM *  6 points [-]

Interesting theory, but I suspect, and the survey results seem to suggest, that the akrastic anti-productivity seemingly common to LW is a feature of its demographic rather than of its content. Motivational problems seem more common on LW than outside, but if reading LW makes them worse it happens either all at once and so quickly that a poll here can't tease out the progression, or by some mechanism that self-reporting doesn't reflect and that we haven't otherwise been able to measure yet.

That doesn't necessarily screen off some close relatives of Vassar's hypothesis, though; perhaps the damage has already been done by the time a worldview receptive to LW's content is created.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 November 2011 10:05:23PM 2 points [-]

I think there are certainly people on LW without akrasia problems. It's just that the people who spend the most time posting are the ones with the akraisia problems.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 November 2011 05:08:46AM *  10 points [-]

Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in.

To give one mild and uncontroversial example, here is Scott Aaronson's account about the amount of bureaucratic makework he is forced to do:

Scientific papers are a waste of time. Therefore, we should stop writing them, and find a better way to communicate our research. [...] I’ll estimate that I spend at least two months on writing for every week on research. I write, and rewrite, and rewrite. Then I compress to 10 pages for the STOC/FOCS/CCC abstract. Then I revise again for the camera-ready version. Then I decompress the paper for the journal version. Then I improve the results, and end up rewriting the entire paper to incorporate the improvements (which takes much more time than it would to just write up the improved results from scratch). Then, after several years, I get back the referee reports, which (for sound and justifiable reasons, of course) tell me to change all my notation, and redo the proofs of Theorems 6 through 12, and identify exactly which result I’m invoking from [GGLZ94], and make everything more detailed and rigorous. But by this point I’ve forgotten the results and have to re-learn them. And all this for a paper that maybe five people will ever read.

If this is the job of a top-class researcher who works in some of the academia's most sound and exciting areas, one can only imagine what it looks like in less healthy fields and at less elite levels.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 November 2011 10:02:17PM 4 points [-]

I'm not convinced what you describe is actually useless make work. After all, having a better written paper means other researchers will waste less time struggling with it. Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.

Comment author: DBreneman 25 November 2011 07:25:41AM 0 points [-]

Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the 'blind monkey' bit.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2011 07:37:56AM 3 points [-]

Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the 'blind monkey' bit.

What do you mean here? You're not the one who wrote that comment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2011 07:01:30AM 2 points [-]

And at the risk of sounding like a James Bond villain, there are some serious options for us to take over the world here. In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already. If members of the rationalist community moved to help them, they might have a fair deal more. And if we introduce them to rational ways of thinking, if we inject those memes into the discussion, there's some serious opportunity here to help stop the world being so insane.

Sorry but the position of being the shadowy group secretly in control of the occupy movement is already taken.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2011 06:35:47AM 8 points [-]

And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences (I keep getting lost somewhere halfway into the QM sequence,

Skip it. It's the least important of all the sequences.

Comment author: ahbwramc 22 November 2011 01:54:45AM 0 points [-]

Through HPMoR, like many others, although it was quite delayed. After being referred to Methods of Rationality from another forum and falling in love with it, I thought, hey, why not check out this guy's other stuff? I started with The Simple Truth, and to be honest it didn't grab me. So for months and months I just had a bookmark for this site and an idea that I should probably check it out, maybe, someday, eventually. Finally, for no reason that I can remember, I went back to the site and started reading the "How to Change Your Mind" sequence. From then on, I was hooked.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2011 02:10:02AM 2 points [-]

I started with The Simple Truth, and to be honest it didn't grab me.

Yes, I found that story completely unreadable. It frankly reads a lot like a frustrated rant (while I can understand his frustration with relativists, it doesn't make the story any more readable). Specifically, it seem like he puts every stupid argument he's ever herd into the mouth of the priest, and it turns out that reading what is essentially an argument with a troll is extremely annoying.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2011 01:56:40AM *  1 point [-]

From a link at HackerNews.

Comment author: lessdazed 21 November 2011 03:37:00PM 3 points [-]

Recall that the ancient method of loci involves going through doors as part of remember things.

Is this a disadvantage of it compensated for by its advantages? Is this a method it uses to reset the mind and make it easier to recall other things?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2011 01:53:58AM 2 points [-]

My guess would be that we associate memories (especially memories of objects) with specific locations and can remember them better when we're in those locations. One, easily testable, prediction of this theory is that returning to the original room will make the memory more easily accessible.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 20 November 2011 10:55:45AM 0 points [-]

No one can mix another person's actual utility function into their own. You can mix in your estimate of it. You can mix in your estimate of what you think it should be. But the actual utility function of another person is in that other person, and not in you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2011 08:16:18PM 1 point [-]

No one can mix another person's actual utility function into their own.

You can mix a pointer to it into your own. To see that this is different from mixing it your estimate, consider what you would do if you found out your estimate was mistaken.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2011 06:44:37PM 36 points [-]

Also keep in mind that it's more important to make your beliefs as correct as possible then to make them as consistent as possible. Of course the ultimate truth is both correct and consistent; however, it's perfectly possible to make your beliefs less correct by trying to make them more consistent. If you have two beliefs that do a decent job of modeling separate aspects of reality, it's probably a good idea to keep both around, even if they seem to contradict each other. For example, both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics do a good job modeling (parts of) reality despite being inconsistent and we want to keep both of them. Now think about what happens when a similar situation arises in a field, e.g., biology, psychology, your personal life, where evidence is messier then it is in physics.

Comment author: Giles 20 November 2011 05:44:12PM 3 points [-]

we should be all the more skeptical of our far beliefs, which are the most susceptible to bias.

Just out of interest... assume my far beliefs take the form of a probability distribution of possible future outcomes. How can I be "skeptical" of that? Given that something will happen in the future, all I can do is update in the direction of a different probability distribution.

In other words, which direction am I likely to be biased in?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2011 06:31:12PM 7 points [-]

In other words, which direction am I likely to be biased in?

In the direction of overconfidence, i.e., assigning too much probability mass to your highest probability theory.

Comment author: XiXiDu 17 November 2011 04:15:13PM 2 points [-]

...humans are more complicated and you can't explain all of "altruism" by just guilt feelings and warm fuzzies.

Chimpanzees also engage in altruism, even interspecies altruism. Humans tend to go a step further by using moral language and formalizing their morality. But how much of it is done for the purpose of signaling and rationalization compared to the altruism we share with chimpanzees and other animals?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2011 10:00:00PM 1 point [-]

But how much of it is done for the purpose of signaling and rationalization

What do you mean by "purpose" in this context? A "purpose" is a property of an optimization process, so the answer will depend on which optimization process you're talking about. Are you asking about evolution or our conscious thought process?

Comment author: RomeoStevens 16 November 2011 06:01:27AM *  -1 points [-]

I was being semantically imprecise when I said average. I should have said searching for conditions that produce the highest additive utility. This seems different from pareto improvements when we're talking about two agents agreeing to use their optimizing power together on some exterior conditions rather than simply the division of some finite resource.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 November 2011 11:52:48PM 2 points [-]

I was being semantically imprecise when I said average. I should have said searching for conditions that produce the highest additive utility.

From a mathematical (or any practical) point of view, this distinction is completely irrelevant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 November 2011 11:40:32PM 3 points [-]

Remember, you can't rebel against nature, you can only rebel within it.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 15 November 2011 03:17:23AM -1 points [-]

this is the sort of thing where i'd be insanely curious as to the downvotes. If this approach to combining utility function is so flawed as to not be worth considering that is highly useful information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 November 2011 12:36:56AM 3 points [-]

Utility functions are only well-defined up to scaling, thus taking the average of two utility functions isn't mathematically meaningful.

Comment author: shminux 14 November 2011 04:56:26PM 0 points [-]

their concepts are simply too vague to be updated on new evidence.

Surely a computer simulation of the intelligence explosion can be created, given some simplified assumptions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2011 12:19:18AM 5 points [-]

Surely a computer simulation of the intelligence explosion can be created, given some simplified assumptions.

This will either require so many simplifying assumptions that it effectively proves nothing, or be as difficult to do as creating the intelligence explosion itself.

Comment author: lessdazed 13 November 2011 08:54:08PM 5 points [-]

You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy

From I Don't Know:

[09:05] Eliezer: what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don't have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they're going to misinterpret something then you shouldn't say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head

[09:06] Eliezer: often you are just screwed unless you want to go back and teach them rationality from scratch, and in a case like that, all you can do is say whatever creates the least inaccurate image

[09:06] X: 10 to 1000 is misleading when you say it to a nonrationalist?

[09:06] Eliezer: "I don't know" is a good way to duck when you say it to someone who doesn't know about probability distributions

[09:07] Eliezer: if they thought I was certain, or that my statement implied actual knowledge of the tree

[09:07] Eliezer: then the statement would mislead them

[09:07] Eliezer: and if I knew this, and did it anyway for my own purposes, it would be a lie

[09:08] Eliezer: if I just couldn't think of anything better to say, then it would be honest but not true, if you can see the distinction

[09:08] Eliezer: honest for me, but the statement that formed in their minds would still not be true

[09:09] X: most people will say to you.... but you said....10-1000 apples

[09:09] Eliezer: then you're just screwed

[09:10] Eliezer: nothing you can do will create in their minds a true understanding, not even "I don't know"

[09:10] X: why bother, why not say i don't know?

[09:10] Eliezer: honesty therefore consists of misleading them the least and telling them the most

If I'm dealing with someone who doesn't think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn't understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn't strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he's wrong.

The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one's self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one's best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 November 2011 09:04:10PM 4 points [-]

If I'm dealing with someone who doesn't think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn't understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn't strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he's wrong.

Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik's that focus more on appealing to people who aren't yet rational.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2011 07:00:04PM -2 points [-]

I think we will eventually end up in either a genderless society, where the sets of attributes that define gender no longer exist and humans are free to adopt whatever attributes they desire, or in a patriarchal dystopia. The dystopia will come about through "voluntary" changes that will not be explicitly forced, but will be the only option for non-men under patriarchy. The game will be more rigged than it already is.

Feminist theory has held that gender (the set of memes that people with penises behave in certain ways, and people without penises behave in other ways) is both socially constructed and socially enforced. This is accomplished by instilling a great many cached thoughts in humans of both sexes that even most rationalists never question, and then severely punishing the people who transgress those categories in a variety of horrific ways.

One cached thought in the rationalist community that isn't often questioned is that natural selection, rather than higher-level social pressures, cause certain things. If men are attracted to "more feminine" women, that begs the question of what "feminine" even means. Feminine appearance has meant several contradictory things over the course of the last 50 years alone, just as masculine appearance has meant several contradictory things. Who determines what these things are? Where do our images of femininity and masculinity come from? Who do they come from?

The technological promises of transhumanism are meaningless unless we confront and destroy gender. Gender is, as the OP suggests, maintained mostly by men for our own benefit (and to a lesser extent, maintained by women so that men will reward them). Gender socialization is dangerous because it has a hand in determining what we want, even when that is almost certainly not what we want to want.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transhumanism and Gender Relations
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 November 2011 08:45:58PM 13 points [-]

Feminist theory has held that gender (the set of memes that people with penises behave in certain ways, and people without penises behave in other ways) is both socially constructed and socially enforced.

Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes.

One cached thought in the rationalist community that isn't often questioned is that natural selection, rather than higher-level social pressures, cause certain things.

I'll take it you haven't been paying attention to the discussions of status on OB and LW. In my experience rationalist are much more willing to consider explanations based on social pressure, then feminists are to consider explanations based on natural selection.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 November 2011 04:34:23PM 0 points [-]

I agree that there's a distinction here, though it strikes me as one of degree rather than kind.

I would say the same thing about the two dragon-claiming, garage-owning neighbors... in both cases, their minds fail to associate representations of the dragon in their garage with various other representations that would constrain their behavior in various ways. Whether we call that "belief in belief" or "failure to internalize" or "not thinking it through" or "being confused" or "not noticing the implications" or "failing to be a tactical genius" or "being really stupid" depends on a lot of different things.

That said, I don't think the purely labeling question matters much; I'm happy to adopt your preferred labels if it facilitates communication.

If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you're suggesting that the threshold between "belief in belief" and "failure to internalize" in this case has to do with the willingness to make predictions/bets -- e.g., if I'm willing to give someone a large sum of money in exchange for a reliable commitment to give me a much much larger sum of money after I am restored from cryonic suspension, then we say I have a "genuine belief" in cryonics and not a mere "belief in belief", although I might still failed to have an "internalized belief"... is that right?

If so, then sure, I agree... in the situation I describe, I might have a genuine but non-internalized belief in cryonics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 November 2011 08:17:35PM 1 point [-]

I would argue that the only difference between "belief in belief" and "failure to internalize" is whether the belief in question corresponds to external reality. The state of the brain is exactly the same in both situations.

Comment author: HughRistik 13 November 2011 11:36:55AM 1 point [-]

As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 November 2011 08:07:05PM 3 points [-]

I've looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the "No Hostility" threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 11 November 2011 01:05:55PM *  22 points [-]

Step 2: Give the tour guide a second shot of testosterone (saline),

Step 3: Give the tour guide a third shot of testosterone (estrogen).

Step 4: Compare the results from Step 2 and Step 3 with that of Step 1.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 November 2011 01:21:09AM 2 points [-]

It might also be worth comparing the results with those from other mind altering drugs.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2011 07:21:43AM 1 point [-]

yes you are right. I should have made clear I was talking about biological evolution by natural selection. I assume that is also what the OP was talking about, given the reference to selection of mates.

By source code I mean genetic code. Once we have access to that, the human timescale modification will so totally dwarf any natural selection that it's basically not there. Can you elaborate on your position?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transhumanism and Gender Relations
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 November 2011 08:05:10AM 4 points [-]

By source code I mean genetic code. Once we have access to that, the human timescale modification will so totally dwarf any natural selection that it's basically not there.

Except at that point evolution incorporates human modification into itself. Specifically, those who are better at modifying themselves in way that promote their inclusive genetic fitness will out compete those that don't.

Comment author: Pavitra 11 November 2011 02:37:39AM 4 points [-]

Possible, but not obvious. Especially since we'll be able to develop many more differentiated categories than just two, should multiple-specialization prove desirable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 November 2011 07:19:21AM *  5 points [-]

just two, should multiple-specialization prove desirable.

I considered mentioning the caste systems that were prevalent in most societies until the modern era.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 November 2011 06:30:30AM *  5 points [-]

Your comment about aggression being bad seemed off to me. Aggression is a useful strategy. Maybe you meant irrational misplaced aggression...

Gender is pretty useless. I see no reason that we would opt to keep it around once we have control of our bodies. Assuming that everyone gets one body and it's rather permanent (which is a pretty big assumption), either we all figure out what the optimal physiology is and converge to that, or we decide that we like diversity or something and invent vast hordes of unique bodies, or some mix of both. I see no reason to keep a binary (which we don't exactly have in any case). Analogies can be drawn to fashion; there would likely be popular mainstream body characteristics, and vast numbers of subcultural variations.

I think you are vastly underestimating the reach of transhumanism, given that 'it occurs'.

Edit: Natural selection hasn't substantially applied to much of anything for the last few thousand years, and will be totally thrown out when we get access to our source code. Evolution is in our origin but not in our future.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transhumanism and Gender Relations
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 November 2011 07:15:29AM 4 points [-]

Natural selection hasn't substantially applied to much of anything for the last few thousand years,

Memes.

and will be totally thrown out when we get access to our source code.

That's not at all obvious. Note evolution =/= genetic evolution.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 November 2011 02:19:48AM 2 points [-]

Do people here expect to be surprised by whatever it takes to understand qualia?

Going by the outside view, I expect it will in involve a lot of unknown unknowns.

I won't be surprised by this when it happens, but expect a lot of people in the field to be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 November 2011 02:10:18AM *  6 points [-]

It's also the case that having two genders that specialize in different things was adaptive in the ancestral environment and might still be adaptive in the current environment.

Edit: Why is this being downvoted?

Comment author: Yvain 08 November 2011 07:07:36PM *  24 points [-]

After talking to a couple of people about this, I should qualify/partially-retract the original comment.

Some people have suggested to me that the best metaphor a man can use to understand how women think about "nice guys" isn't an ugly duckling woman who gets turned down by the men she likes, but a grossly obese woman who never showers or shaves her legs, and who goes around complaining loudly to everyone she knows that men are all vapid pigs who are only interested in looks.

I would find this person annoying, and although I hope I would be kind enough not to lash out against her in quite the terms I mentioned above, I would understand the motivations of someone who did, instead of having to classify him as having some sort of weird Martian brain design that makes him a moral monster.

The obesity metaphor is especially relevant. Since there are people out there who think becoming skinny is as easy as "just eat less food", I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as "just talk to people and be more confident".

For people who honestly believe those things, and there seem to be a lot of them, the obese woman and the socially awkward man would reduce to the case of the woman who never showered but constantly complained about how superficial men were to reject her over her smell - annoying and without any redeeming value.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 November 2011 06:08:46AM 4 points [-]

I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as "just talk to people and be more confident".

There's a community of men how are in fact to find effective ways to be socially assertive in a way that's attractive to women, it's called PUA.

Comment author: lessdazed 07 November 2011 05:41:36AM 1 point [-]

I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of "politically correct" as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic.

I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn't find, but here is a discussion on it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2011 06:58:23AM 2 points [-]

There is a famous essay on this I couldn't find

Do you mean Paul Graham's What you can't say?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2011 06:47:07AM 1 point [-]

So I found [wrong] things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science"

Comment author: lionhearted 06 November 2011 12:58:16AM 7 points [-]

Perhaps this behavior is less common among women who would rather have a 15% chance of $1,000,000 than a certainty of $500 (because most random women I've tested choose the certain $500, but every single woman in our community that I've asked, regardless of math level or wealth level or economic literacy or their performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test, takes the 15% chance of $1M.)

Whoa. A majority of people choose $500 in EV instead of $150,000?

That's scary. Have you written about this before? If not, care to give us rough numbers of how many people you've talked to about it? That blows my mind that a majority of people wouldn't get it when it's so far apart.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2011 04:38:37AM 9 points [-]

Keep in mind that utility isn't linear in money.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 01 November 2011 05:59:39AM *  5 points [-]

Private people nowadays fund art, either directly or indirectly, for two main reasons: because it's tax-deductible and/or to buy status. The tax-deductibility already implies significant government involvement -- who gets to dispense money, patronage, and status from tax-deductible funds is by no means a simple and straightforward question.

But more importantly, there is the question of status. Note the immense status contrast between people shopping for home decorations in a big-box store and someone buying something generally recognized as a "work of art" for a hefty price. The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that's likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets -- even if the actual "work of art" contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all. So who are these "artists" who get to have such high status that a whiff of it is readily paid for with piles of cash?

The key point is that nowadays the hierarchy of status in art is essentially a vast and sclerotic bureaucracy. Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism. Those on the very top are laughing all the way to the bank, getting vast sums for random junk, sometimes made by hired low-wage labor and just signed upon completion. For those in the lower levels, it's the standard dreary bureaucratic fight over small stakes but with no alternative life prospects.

Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people's honest aesthetic preferences). If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2011 06:01:05AM 2 points [-]

If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.

You'd think some of them would attempt to counter-signal by doing just that.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 October 2011 06:11:05PM *  13 points [-]

Would anybody tell me if I was getting stupider?

Mike Patton

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes November 2011
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 November 2011 02:00:28AM 10 points [-]

Even if they did, would you believe them?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes October 2011
Comment author: tut 30 October 2011 03:48:57PM 8 points [-]

It is trivial to predict the correct position on nearly anything following a few simple rules.

Could you please state these rules.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2011 06:43:17PM 4 points [-]

Not without getting into highly mind-killing territory.

Comment author: antigonus 29 October 2011 11:14:19PM *  0 points [-]

In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I'm not saying they have more moral worth, I'm saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can't.

You're conflating being better at something with being better. "In at least one sense, white people ARE better than black people. All other things being equal, they can pursue more opportunities with less discrimination." How is that a useful observation?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2011 03:07:05AM 5 points [-]

Deaf people's disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf. Black people's disadvantage comes about because a lot of people, at least implicitly, believe (possibly correctly) that being black correlates with other traits that are undesirable in and of themselves.

Comment author: Gabriel 29 October 2011 11:10:40PM 7 points [-]

Deaf people can also do things that hearing people can't. They are completely immune to noise and auditory distractions. I can imagine a future in which people pay for getting an implant that grants them voluntary deafness powers. I'd buy it.

Apart from that bit of pedantry, I agree with your comment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 11:45:45PM 3 points [-]

Deaf people can also do things that hearing people can't. They are completely immune to noise and auditory distractions.

These sound a lot like the rationalizations used to justify why death is a good thing.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 29 October 2011 03:34:45PM *  3 points [-]

That said, you seem to be presuming or inferring something about the line between them, I'm not sure exactly what, that makes it a more reliable indicator than it seems to me.

I don't see how the law can have a consistent set of ethics if on the one hand it allows parents to say no to their children's vision being restored, and on the other hand forbids them from surgically removing their kids' eyes.

Either the kids having vision is a good thing that they can't be legitimately denied of (no matter what their parents say), or it's a thing that they can be legitimately denied of, and falls under parental jurisdiction.

If the parents have the right to deny vision or hearing from their children, what's the difference whether said kids would need a surgery to restore it, or to remove it?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 07:31:53PM 9 points [-]

I don't see how the law can have a consistent set of ethics if on the one hand it allows parents to say no to their children's vision being restored, and on the other hand forbids them from surgically removing their kids' eyes.

You seem to be confusing ethics and law. The law needs to be a Schelling point, and "you don't have to help but aren't allowed to hurt", is probably as good a Schelling point as your going to find.

Comment author: lessdazed 29 October 2011 06:46:42AM 0 points [-]

affects

The trick is that the principle is sound, but those implications don't follow, because if I mind if someone does something, it thereby affects me.

One might ask: if I don't know something, how can it affect me, for "we care only about our own states of mind"?

As it turns out, I care about the world directly, and that's the meaning of "affect" here - affecting my utility, not affecting my perception of my utility.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 07:24:46PM 4 points [-]

As it turns out, I care about the world directly, and that's the meaning of "affect" here - affecting my utility, not affecting my perception of my utility.

In that case TheOtherDave's statement is completely vacuous.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 October 2011 05:30:19AM 0 points [-]

My answers in the short-to-mid term mostly center around rethinking how we relate to children and families. A lot of these specific questions become much simpler if I sidestep our cultural incoherence around that.

Personally I'm fond of the general principle that accountability goes hand-in-hand with power... if my debts ultimately get paid to some degree from your account, then you've some say in when and how I can risk indebtedness. If how I raise my children affects your quality of life, then you're entitled to some say in how I raise my children. (And vice versa.) If I don't want to grant you that power, I ought to "buy out your share" in some fashion or another.

That's easier to state as a principle than to actually work out a coherent implementation of, of course, but it suggests that for each question you raise I should be trying to approximate the difference in expected value to person X of how I'm raising my children compared to some cultural norm, aggregated across all Xes affected and weighted by the severity of the effect on X.

Even more simply, though, it suggests that if someone takes a devil's offer in a way that doesn't affect me at all (say, they kill themselves while arranging to have themselves replaced by something else that provides me with the same EV that they do), I am not entitled to prevent them from doing so in any way. If they take a devil's offer that affects nobody except themselves, then nobody is so entitled.

I'm not comfortable with that, but it seems easier to defend than anything else I can think of.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 05:45:19AM 2 points [-]

If how I raise my children affects your quality of life, then you're entitled to some say in how I raise my children. (And vice versa.)

So if I want to subject my children to horrible agonizing torture, you have no problem with that as long as it doesn't affect you?

Comment author: Alex_Altair 29 October 2011 12:17:24AM 1 point [-]

I have a hypothesis about the origin of magic.

Obviously it was a long time ago, presumably prehistoric. Could the creaters have been neanderthals? They died out comparatively recently, the soonest possible time being 30,000 years ago. Is this long enough for all traces of their civiliation to disappear? There is also strong evidence that many humans have some remains of neaderthal DNA (to fit with the Atlantis DNA hypothesis). They were physically dominant to Homo sapiens, which would make it easier for them to dominate technically as well. (In real life, their larger size required a larger calorie intake, which may have contributed to their extinction.) Whoever it was, somebody apparently reprogrammed the AI with pseudo-latin commands.

For the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 04:51:28AM 14 points [-]

Whoever it was, somebody apparently reprogrammed the AI with pseudo-latin commands.

Or the Latin language was partially based on a the AI's command language.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 October 2011 04:52:45PM 1 point [-]

Some people really don't react well to the experimental nature of modern art. This trait has been shown to increase in the face of thinking about death, and individuals described as having a high need for structure display an amplified response under these conditions.

source discusses the data as well as the limitations of its useful interpretation

A lot of people in the West also don't seem to grok that the aesthetic movements surrounding our own artistic traditions are not deeply-underlying human universals (representational art is very common, but not universal, and our focus on it is certainly not), or that there are entirely different approaches to the creation and function of art. The Modern and Postmodern movements in Western art are largely defined by their break from a lot of traditions.

A lot of people seem to also think "Art" means "highly-involved production of images for the sake of creating scarce aesthetic value" and don't like anything that fails to conform to those rules, or appears to be "cheating" (Andy Warhol comes to mind). Which makes it really deliciously funny when such people consider Shakespeare's works literary classics, or who just fail to grasp how many artists were not critical successes within their own time.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Things you are supposed to like
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 04:37:35AM 0 points [-]

The Modern and Postmodern movements in Western art are largely defined by their break from a lot of traditions.

And that is precisely the problem with them. They have nothing to them except rebellion for its own sake.

A lot of people seem to also think "Art" means "highly-involved production of images for the sake of creating scarce aesthetic value" and don't like anything that fails to conform to those rules

If "art" doesn't create aesthetic value, what's the point of making it.

Comment author: RomanDavis 28 October 2011 03:51:45PM *  2 points [-]

Wait. Huh? Pre 20th century? What about

Nikolai Fechin

Frank Frazetta

Andrew Jones

Geoffrey Mimms

James Gurney

There are lots of guys making art these days. You really don't like any of them?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 04:20:51AM 2 points [-]

What Desrtopa said.

Comment author: DoubleReed 28 October 2011 01:50:19PM -2 points [-]

This depends on where you are and your government. In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.

In other countries I don't think this is true though. In a lot of European countries the government does the majority of arts funding.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 04:14:03AM -2 points [-]

The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well.

In my experience they tend to select the ones with the worst taste.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 October 2011 09:18:02PM 5 points [-]

Is the opposition to cochlear implants really an example of bad thinking, or merely certain deaf individuals having different goals?

Note: I do not necessarily support these goals.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 October 2011 03:41:48AM 7 points [-]

Is opposition to life extension/immortality really an example of bad thinking, or merely certain individuals having different goals?

Comment author: Manfred 27 October 2011 08:13:24AM 3 points [-]

And, presumably, assign one district each to LA and NY? I bet you can guess the answer.

The trouble with these spatial examples is that everyone has all these pesky intuitions lying around. "Space is continuous, of course!" we think, and "cities are made of parts!" But the formal statement of the problem, if the principle of indifference is to be useful, must generally be quite low-information - if the symmetry between the cities is thoroughly broken by us having tons of knowledge about the cities, the example is false as stated.

In order to get in the low-information mindset, it helps to replace meaningful (to us) labels with meaningless ones. In the first "formalization," all we know is that Julia Roberts could be in one of 3 named cities. Avoiding labels, all we know is that agent 1 could have mutually exclusive and exhaustive properties A, B and C. As soon as the problem is stated this way it becomes clearer that you can't just condense properties B and C together without changing the problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 October 2011 02:41:19AM 1 point [-]

And, presumably, assign one district each to LA and NY?

I never said that?

But the formal statement of the problem, if the principle of indifference is to be useful, must generally be quite low-information -

Why does "the formal statement of the problem" matter? Reality doesn't depend on how the problem is phrased.

You seem to be trying to find an answer that would satisfy a hypothetical teacher not the answer that you would use if you had something to protect.

In order to get in the low-information mindset, it helps to replace meaningful (to us) labels with meaningless ones. In the first "formalization," all we know is that Julia Roberts could be in one of 3 named cities. Avoiding labels, all we know is that agent 1 could have mutually exclusive and exhaustive properties A, B and C. As soon as the problem is stated this way it becomes clearer that you can't just condense properties B and C together without changing the problem.

Suppose I instead called the options A1, B1 and B2. Renaming the options shouldn't change anything after all.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2011 04:38:09AM 6 points [-]

This problem is similar to the bead jar guess problem. Essentially the problem is where priors come from and it doesn't have a general solution within the context of Bayesianism. Bayes can tell you how to update your priors, but not what your initial priors should be.

Comment author: Manfred 27 October 2011 03:47:18AM *  8 points [-]

The trick is that when he condenses LA and NY into an "America" option, he is actually throwing away information, thus changing the problem. If he didn't throw away that information, he couldn't apply the indifference principle to Paris vs. LA/NY, because knowing that LA and NY are two cities while Paris is one breaks the symmetry that the indifference principle relies on.

Now, it's entirely reasonable to get that same effect by saying something like "well, Julia Roberts really likes Paris, so her chance of showing up there is twice that of the other cities." This sort of thing cannot be practically represented by the indifference principle, thus replacing symmetry with arbitrariness. But the arbitrariness is about which problems are possible, not about the solution to an individual problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2011 04:23:27AM 1 point [-]

Suppose I subdivide Paris into two districts?

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on How Much Rent
Comment author: wedrifid 26 October 2011 05:30:12AM 1 point [-]

He isn't. "Desire to do harm to another". This is distinct from callous indifference.

In response to comment by wedrifid on How Much Rent
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2011 06:28:21AM 1 point [-]

In that case the word arguably can't be applied to people either, as Eliezer pointed out in this post. The only time people actively "desire to harm another" is when (they believe that) they are punishing the other according to what we would call TDT/UDT. Of course, the same motive applies to an AI even one whose terminal goals are indifferent to humans.

In response to How Much Rent
Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 October 2011 01:56:19AM *  6 points [-]

So I think this is a very interesting post which may not be beng appreciated as much because the main example is a fictonal one (albeit from a very excellent pair of books). I'd like to give a different example stolen from research that my former college roomate is now doing: We can predict the individual behavior of a water molecule to a very rough approximation from first principles. But as soon as one has more than one molecule predicting very basic questions like "what should the boiling and cooling temperatures be?" "what should the index of refraction be?" "what sort of crystals should I expect to form when I cool it?" are computationally infeasible. So a lot of physicists are working on questions like this but essentially trying to simplify the computations and figure out which approximatons you can get away with and which don't quite work.

In this context, this is an example where to use the sort of analogy in the post, knowing the name of the substance really doesn't pay rent very directly since the computations are just too arduous. Quantum mechanics can pay rent in other ways, but using it to pay rent for this purpose seems to be difficult.

Also note that being able to pay rent to be able to predict something is still not the same as being able to control it. Kvothe might be able to know where every molecule of air is and be able to compute where they are going (ignoring for a moment issues of fundamental uncertainty due to quantum mechanical issues), but that doesn't mean one can figure out an action that will make the air do what one wants. To do that requires not just computing a single path of events but likely requires computing many paths and figuring out which one one wants. Similarly, the evil oracle has a much tougher job computationally than a regular oracle.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on How Much Rent
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2011 04:40:11AM *  5 points [-]

Also note that being able to pay rent to be able to predict something is still not the same as being able to control it. Kvothe might be able to know where every molecule of air is and be able to compute where they are going (ignoring for a moment issues of fundamental uncertainty due to quantum mechanical issues), but that doesn't mean one can figure out an action that will make the air do what one wants. To do that requires not just computing a single path of events but likely requires computing many paths and figuring out which one one wants. Similarly, the evil oracle has a much tougher job computationally than a regular oracle.

Conversely, in many cases, e.g., simple chaotic systems, it is easier to control something then to predict what will happen if you don't intervene.

In response to How Much Rent
Comment author: billswift 25 October 2011 08:17:37PM 1 point [-]

As an aside, I don't believe in malicious superintelligences. They are even more unlikely than automatically Friendly ones. An unFriendlyAI is dangerous as a side effect of its abilities and goals, not because it is, or is even likely to be, malicious.

In response to comment by billswift on How Much Rent
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2011 04:35:27AM 1 point [-]

I think you're using a non-standard definition of 'malicious'.

Comment author: pedanterrific 24 October 2011 02:05:36AM *  2 points [-]

Well, first: yes, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. But you seem to be suggesting there's a common failure mode (tainting by association? I feel like there's a technical term for this) to the effect of

  • The Tea Party is racist.
  • Therefore, everything it proposes is racist.
  • The Tea Party proposed "no more bailouts".
  • Therefore, "no more bailouts" is racist.

This might well be the case, but I'm curious how you arrived at "racist" as the sin which taints by association, rather than, say, "short-sighted" or "libertarian" or whatever. It's non-obvious how saying "'No more bailouts' is racist!" might be defended. Is it the case that OWS protestors have actually said this in so many words?

Edit: Also, incidentally, you might receive fewer downvotes if you avoided blanket statements like "It is always safe to love the left, and always safe to hate the right". In particular, I live in an area of the country where the reverse is true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 04:43:26AM *  1 point [-]

but I'm curious how you arrived at "racist" as the sin which taints by association, rather than, say, "short-sighted" or "libertarian" or whatever.

Because calling someone "racist" tends to be perceived as implying that they're not just mistaken but morally deficient if not out right evil. Something that's less true for "short-sighted" or "libertarian".

It's non-obvious how saying "'No more bailouts' is racist!" might be defended.

Something like this:

  • Some of the bailout money went to help blacks.
  • Therefore, the people arguing against more bailouts want to hurt blacks.
  • Therefore, they're racist.

Note, the above argument is by no means the most absurd argument I've seen for why something is racist.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 October 2011 04:11:31AM 0 points [-]

Sure, that sort of effect could maybe occur. But the versions in classical cultures aren't that. For example, the referenced example in Genesis has Jacob apparently using speckled sticks to make the the offspring of the cattle become speckled. Similarly, some cultures believed that if a woman was thinking of another man when she conceived the child then the child would be more likely to look like the other man.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 04:28:14AM *  6 points [-]

Similarly, some cultures believed that if a woman was thinking of another man when she conceived the child then the child would be more likely to look like the other man.

That almost sounds like the type of "polite fiction" that developed to avoid dealing with the consequences of embarrassing affairs.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 October 2011 11:05:38PM 5 points [-]

There are contexts where humans can take evidence and unconsciously process it to get good results. However, most of those contexts are contexts where they are taking their experience and applying it to individual cases. One example in that book which sort of fits with this is doctors diagnosing heart attacks.

This is a very different circumstance then having people take in a wide variety of different sorts of data and to come up with a set of rules that actually explain it. Empirically, humans are overactive pattern seekers with confirmation bias issues. Thus, one sees all sorts of superstitions crop up. Moreover, empirically, folk genetics has generally been awful, arguably even worse than folk psychology. For example, look at how many cultures believed that what a female was thinking or looking at would influence the offspring. (This one dates at least to Biblical times judging from the story of Jacob.) Similarly, many cultures have believed that once a female mated with a given male, all her later offspring could potentially inherit properties from that male.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 04:07:36AM 3 points [-]

For example, look at how many cultures believed that what a female was thinking or looking at would influence the offspring.

Well, as Konkvistador pointed out, what happens to a pregnant woman does influence the offspring. As for what she was thinking or looking at, especially if it caused her to be flooded with adrenaline or other hormones, that it could effect the baby certainly doesn't strike me as absurd. (Do you know of any research in this area?)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 October 2011 03:00:45AM 1 point [-]

I don't read most of that the way you've read it. For example, Yvain said "Saying that there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research doesn't license you to discount any specific medical finding unless you have particular reason to believe that finding is false." Discount is much stronger language than simply reducing weight in the claim.

This argument violates conservation of expected evidence.

No it doesn't. It only violates that if in the alternate case where Yvain knew that almost all new studies turn out to be right he would point this as a success of the method. I suspect that in that counterfactual, he likely would. But that's still not a b or a c type violation.

Most of the reply to Nancy while potentially problematic doesn't fall into b and c. But I don't think you are being fair when you say:

Funny how he didn't see fit to mention this it his first post while he spent several paragraphs arguing for why satins are perfectly safe.

The standard of safe is very different than listing every well known side-effect, especially if they only happen in a fraction of the population. I don't see a contradiction here, and if there is one, it doesn't seem to fall under b or c in any obvious way.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 03:30:49AM 1 point [-]

I don't read most of that the way you've read it. For example, Yvain said "Saying that there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research doesn't license you to discount any specific medical finding unless you have particular reason to believe that finding is false." Discount is much stronger language than simply reducing weight in the claim.

It's not clear what Yvain indented to mean by "discount"; however, the rest of his argument assumes he can disregard the base rate unless there you have specific evidence.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 October 2011 01:21:39AM *  3 points [-]

Can you point out where Yvain makes those comments that you think violate b and c? Reading that post it looks to me like Yvain's points are a little more nuanced than that.

Note incidentally that while you might be able to use the word that way, the vast majority of people who use it seem to use it in a way closer to what sketerpot is talking about. If one interacts at all with either young earth creationists or homeopaths for example it often doesn't take long before the term is thrown around.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 03:18:27AM 1 point [-]

Note incidentally that while you might be able to use the word that way, the vast majority of people who use it seem to use it in a way closer to what sketerpot is talking about. If one interacts at all with either young earth creationists or homeopaths for example it often doesn't take long before the term is thrown around.

In my experience scientists arguing with creationists (I haven't looked at arguments with homeopaths) frequently make the mistakes I list above, as well as a few related ones. In particular using the AJ Milne quote ciphergoth cited in an argument against creationism is itself at best a straw man, after all the creationist also cares about getting the facts right, in fact that's why he's arguing with the scientist, because he believes the scientist has his facts wrong.

In any case the underlying argument in the AJ Milne quote is: all people are about truth; therefore, you should believe what science has to say about subject X.

This is an example of either (1) or (2) depending on how the implicit premises are made precise.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 October 2011 01:21:39AM *  3 points [-]

Can you point out where Yvain makes those comments that you think violate b and c? Reading that post it looks to me like Yvain's points are a little more nuanced than that.

Note incidentally that while you might be able to use the word that way, the vast majority of people who use it seem to use it in a way closer to what sketerpot is talking about. If one interacts at all with either young earth creationists or homeopaths for example it often doesn't take long before the term is thrown around.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 02:52:43AM 2 points [-]

Can you point out where Yvain makes those comments that you think violate b and c?

Here are some excerpts from Yvain's comments that exhibit the problems I mentioned, (as well as others that maybe I should add).

Okay, but don't make the mistake of the guy who says "The mainstream media is all lies - so I'll only trust what I read on shady Internet conspiracy sites". Saying that there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research doesn't license you to discount any specific medical finding unless you have particular reason to believe that finding is false.

This essentially error (b) with elements of (c). From a Bayesian perspective "saying there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research" does mean one should decrease the weight one assigns to all medical findings, thus one should assign more (relative weight) to other, non-scientific, evidence, e.g., evidence likely to be based an anecdotes.

The study mentioned above looks at exciting cutting-edge research over the past decade. It says that 40% or so was proven wrong. This is good and to the credit of medical science! It means the system is working as it should in retesting things and getting the false stuff out.

This argument violates conservation of expected evidence.

[Here follows several paragraphs describing of how much he discourages people from being afraid to take statins along with some references to "good doctors" and "correctly prescribed statin" that seem to be there to help set up a potential No True Scotsman] If my doctor recommends I take statin, I don't care about the base rates for statin "correctly prescribed" by "good doctors", I care about the base rate of statin as actually prescribed by actual doctors.

Then Nancy tells her anecdote

part of what spooked me about them was running into a woman whose husband had taken permanent muscle damage from them, which suggested to me that the side effect might not be all that rare.

Yvain's reply begins:

Rhabdomyolysis, which I think is the kind of severe permanent muscle damage you're talking about, is well-known enough as a side effect of statins that it's taught in first year medical school classes.

Funny how he didn't see fit to mention this it his first post while he spent several paragraphs arguing for why satins are perfectly safe.

There was one statin that may have had a relatively high (1/2,000 per year) rhabdomyolysis rate and was withdrawn from the market after a couple of years for that reason. The statins currently on the market have about a 1/20,000/year rhabdomyolysis rate, which is actually low enough that no one is entirely sure it's not background noise although no one's taking any chances. Since they also have a 1+/500/year heart attack prevention rate, they prevent something like 50 heart attacks for each case of rhabdomyolysis they cause, which seems "worth it".

I'm not sure but somehow I suspect these numbers assume the statin was prescribed "correctly". Furthermore, they certainly don't take into account the base rate for medical studies being false. Also, he next says:

Muscle damage rates increase by a lot if you take statins with fibrates (another cholesterol lowering drug).

Somehow I suspect the numbers he gives in the preceding paragraph assumed no drug interactions.

Comment author: sketerpot 24 October 2011 03:06:35AM 1 point [-]

Not to be confused with A. A. Milne, who wrote Winnie the Pooh.

For some context, this is a response to allegations of scientism, a word with remarkably overt anti-epistemological connotations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2011 01:16:21AM 2 points [-]

a word with remarkably overt anti-epistemological connotations.

Really, I see it as describing a family of genuine failure modes that people trying to be "scientific" often fall into. For example:

a) attempting to argue by definition that something is "science" and therefore right.

b) arguing that just because some evidence isn't scientific, that it's not valid evidence.

c) insisting that the results of the latest scientific research should are right, despite results in the relevant field having a very poor replication rate.

In case people try to argue that these errors rarely get made, here is a comment by Yvain with 22 karma that makes errors (b) and (c).

Comment author: potato 24 October 2011 05:53:16AM *  0 points [-]

If they gamble on something which doesn't actually optimize happiness and is only in their interest, they'll loose money.

I am even not sure what insight the sentence had to convey. It sounds like a tautological triviality - solution to an extremely difficult scientific problem is "extremely good science" almost by definition.

I agree, it is trivial. Politics is a really tough scientific problem, and it requires really good science to solve it. Turns out voting on hypotheses, or researchers isn't very good science.

What a government might do that isn't to either: spread happiness, increase net happiness, or avoid suffering, I can't imagine.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2011 06:31:06AM 0 points [-]

If they gamble on something which doesn't actually optimize happiness and is only in their interest, they'll loose money.

The recent Wall Street shenanigans suggest otherwise.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2011 10:59:30AM *  25 points [-]

A decision was wise, even though it led to disastrous consequences, if the evidence at hand indicated it was the best one to make; and a decision was foolish, even though it led to the happiest possible consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences.

-- Herodotus

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes October 2011
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2011 06:05:45AM 3 points [-]

The problem with that quote is that human biases often go the other way, i.e., we'd rather blame bad consequences on bad luck then admit we made a bad decision.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 24 October 2011 05:20:25AM 1 point [-]

How can you tell what our descendents are going to think?

If Pinker's right, the world tends towards increasing kindness, but we're kinder to homosexuals and less kind to smokers than we were, so it's still something of a gamble.

Do you expect all the future generations to agree with each other?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2011 05:34:40AM 1 point [-]

How can you tell what our descendents are going to think?

One good place to start is to think about Paul Graham's essay What you can't say.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 October 2011 01:08:58AM 0 points [-]

That assumes a ridiculously high mutation rate. For the vast majority of alleles the mutation rate isn't what matters but the selection rate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2011 01:18:34AM 1 point [-]

That assumes a ridiculously high mutation rate. For the vast majority of alleles the mutation rate isn't what matters but the selection rate.

In that case why is the allele still around at all?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 October 2011 01:02:14AM 1 point [-]

If an allele exists currently at frequency X, and the selection pressure on it changes upwards, what should we expect? The frequency to increase. Of course it is possible for the frequency to decrease, and I made no comments on the variance of that expectation.

No. This doesn't follow. Consider for example an allele that is normally recessive and in the homozygous case is nearly lethal. Such an allele will generally be pushed to a very low frequency. The only way that such an allele stays at a substantial fraction of the population is if it is has a constant influx of new copies (For example Huntington's disease is sort of this way. The allele is dominant and extremely negative in that form, and is homozygous lethal, but Huntingon precursor alleles are constantly mutating into new cases of Huntington's and the specific biochem of the allele in question makes this much more likely). Now, if an allele has no impact in the heterozygous case. As the allele becomes extremely rare, the selection pressure will drop more and more to the point where it becomes negligible. Now, consider what happens if we discover a cure for this very rare disease that occurs in the homozygous case, or that we make it much easier to survive. What should we expect to happen to the frequency in the population? We should expect it to stay roughly constant, because there's no positive selection pressure.

In general, decreasing negative selection effects does not increase the frequency of an allele.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 October 2011 01:13:10AM 1 point [-]

What should we expect to happen to the frequency in the population? We should expect it to stay roughly constant, because there's no positive selection pressure.

If there is still an influx of new copies due to mutation, then the frequency will increase because there's now less selection pressure driving the mutations out.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 23 October 2011 08:00:26PM 8 points [-]

You've probably got an argument from physics about healing crystals.

However, in the case of modern art, you might contemplate people who think they know enough about science fiction to condemn it even though they know almost nothing about it.

Bruce Pollack, a contemporary abstract artist I like a lot. A little discussion of his work-- the first picture is presumably something more current from the gallery where he was displayed-- I think it's the sort of modern art neither of us like.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 09:57:51PM 2 points [-]

Bruce Pollack, a contemporary abstract artist I like a lot.

He appears to be an example of what I called a "good" modern artist, which is to say, he's still worse that just about all pre-20th century western art.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 23 October 2011 09:45:55PM *  0 points [-]

Yes, this comes back to questions of quality. I've heard and read and looked at art that I thought was ruined by too much theory - typically not descriptive theory that tried to explain why things were good, but prescriptive theory that explained why doing things some other way would be better. The book "Learning from Las Vegas", which takes Las Vegas architecture as pointing the way towards a new, enlightened postmodernist architecture (rather than as a bunch of random tacky stuff competing for attention) is an example of that kind of theory.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 09:54:08PM 3 points [-]

Well the "tacky" stuff in Las Vegas is certainly much better than modern architecture. Furthermore, having to compete for attention at least imposes some minimal constrains of quality, also sadly lacking from modern art.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 23 October 2011 08:50:00PM 0 points [-]

That's a reason for it to stop being selected against. For it to actively spread as is being claimed above, it's got to be contributing something, or very very lucky.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 09:04:13PM 1 point [-]

Not necessarily, see Eliezer's post Evolving to Extinction.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 October 2011 04:14:33PM 11 points [-]

I so adore cliches. They create an expectation to subvert.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 07:05:16PM 4 points [-]

Do that too much and you'll end up with a "high brow" piece that's incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the cliches you're subverting.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 October 2011 05:34:37AM *  8 points [-]

Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally "non-governmental" organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.

Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn't change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch -- and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver's licence. (Which makes their attempts at a "rebellious" image only more farcical.)

Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 06:43:29AM 6 points [-]

I think the bureaucratic aspect is more important than the government aspect. After all most classical and renaissance art was also funded by governments.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 03:05:24AM 3 points [-]

Link to Paul Graham's take on the subject of what is good art.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Things you are supposed to like
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 02:54:15AM *  2 points [-]

Your link is broken.

Comment author: GilPanama 23 October 2011 12:41:25AM *  1 point [-]

That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.

I'm not sure which is worse - liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 October 2011 02:29:32AM *  7 points [-]

hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.

I don't think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the "good" pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.

Edit: By modern art I mean "art belonging the the genre commonly called 'modern art' ", not "any art produced since the mid 20th century".

Comment author: potato 22 October 2011 08:02:22AM *  1 point [-]

Every proposal must have a test to determine success as an official part, before betting is allowed on the given proposal. Two proposals with identical policy but different tests are not identical. The test must discriminate between the given policy helping, or hindering, to ensure, increase, or spread, general happiness. You then bet on whether the result of the policy's test will come back positive or negative conditional on instituting the policy.

You may even allow for your test to return degrees of success, and bet on ranges of success.

Obviously, if you're proposal is to get more farming done. And you think it will increase happiness because food is good. The test for success that you should put down is sample of food production before policy, and sample after. Sometimes top gamblers may not be sure if people like something, and then to find out they should use neuron-imaging. After that is done, it is a matter of whether a given policy will increase the availability of the desired state or thing, or decrease the availability of the disliked state or thing. If some people like it and some hate it, the optimal is to have everybody be able to do what they want as much as possible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 11:43:42PM 1 point [-]

What about proposals that achieve their stated objectives, but bad unintended consequences in other areas?

Comment author: [deleted] 22 October 2011 12:46:56PM *  11 points [-]

Jettison politics from your personal life. Jawing about political ideology is worse than useless — it’s a time suck and a trick played by your status-seeking reptilian hindbrain on your frontal lobes that does nothing to bring you more happiness OR status. Your vote really won’t matter.

--Roissy in DC

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes October 2011
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 11:35:15PM 5 points [-]

Surrendering to the barbarians are we.

Comment author: Oligopsony 22 October 2011 05:35:21PM 11 points [-]

People immersed in the life of a small town see a much smaller amount of environmental variation than those accustomed to cosmopolitan living - relatively more observed phenotypic variation should be a result of genetic variation. So cet par cosmopolitans are biased in an environmentalist direction relative to provincials, or to say the same thing, provincials are biased in an innatist direction relative to cosmopolitans (who are biased in an innatist direction relative to interdimensional travellers who've seen all sorts of logically possible human societies that haven't occurred in our timeline.)

It's not clear at all from this where the "unbiased" point would be (without a Bayesian incorporation of all other relevant information etc) or what that would even mean.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 07:43:43PM 9 points [-]

People immersed in the life of a small town see a much smaller amount of environmental variation than those accustomed to cosmopolitan living

They may also see less genetic variation.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 22 October 2011 04:27:24PM 11 points [-]

While he does make some points, the valedictorian comment seems to be potentially off-base. There is obviously a fair bit of genetics that goes to intelligence, but other things can cause inheritance in this fashion. For example, young children will see active older siblings as role-models to emulate. Similarly, different cultural norms in different families will impact how children and the families treat learning.

Consider for a minute the hypothetical of the same comment being made about the decline of the nobility in England. The same basic argument could be made, but there really isn't much that they had that was genetically advantageous.

Moreover, I suspect that most people won't look at the evidence for genetic intelligence anyways but will rather simply emphasize/adopt whatever view is most politically and ideologically convenient. This piece assumes a much higher degree of correlation between evidence and beliefs than is normally present, and also assumes that humans in the past were doing a decent job of taking subtle sorts of data and actually integrating it accurately into their world view.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 07:41:13PM *  4 points [-]

Moreover, I suspect that most people won't look at the evidence for genetic intelligence anyways but will rather simply emphasize/adopt whatever view is most politically and ideologically convenient. This piece assumes a much higher degree of correlation between evidence and beliefs than is normally present, and also assumes that humans in the past were doing a decent job of taking subtle sorts of data and actually integrating it accurately into their world view.

You may want to look at the book Blink. People are fairly good at noticing subtle patterns in things they observe directly, even if they can't consciously explain why they can't consciously explain how they've come to believe it.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 22 October 2011 03:19:38AM 2 points [-]

I read that in a kind of stern, commanding voice, which makes it sounds really silly with the word "groovy" in it. Much sillier than with "awesome", for some reason.

This makes me realize that the voice is nothing like Eliezer's.

It's hard to beat the Algorithm of Groovy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 04:46:47AM 4 points [-]

Who knows, maybe is a couple decades describing something as "awesome" will sound as silly and passe as describing something as "groovy" or "funky" does today.

Comment author: prase 21 October 2011 10:32:13AM 1 point [-]

Gauge fixing has to be done for all history, else there is fewer equations than dynamical variables, of course.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 12:39:37AM 2 points [-]

The point is that this is very hard to do for general relativity.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 October 2011 05:29:56PM 1 point [-]

Catcher in the Rye was actually the only book I was ever assigned to read in school which I wholeheartedly enjoyed, but I gather that it's significantly a love-it-or-hate-it work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 October 2011 12:31:56AM 4 points [-]

I read Catcher in the Rye is high-school, at the time I found it reasonably mediocre and certainly nothing memorable. Later, when I was in grad school, I found out that apparently it was a huge deal when it was released. I can only assume that this is some combination of Seinfeld is Unfunny and possibly that I don't remember it very well.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2011 04:08:20AM *  7 points [-]

I'm trying out a new way of processing subjective aesthetic experiences. I'm spending less time worrying about how most people don't know they're signaling, and more time thinking: "This is a feeling I'm having, and it's new, and it won't be new for long, but luckily there are more feelings out there to be had."

The first thing I've noticed is that not everyone desires the same degree of novelty or the same intensity of arousal. I'm at the higher end of both spectrums. The second thing I've noticed is that I'm already suffering from diminishing returns. I'm in the offshore drilling and tar sands period of my cultural oil age.

Make me wonder how realistic it might be to willingly ration aesthetic experiences. Probably not very.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Things you are supposed to like
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2011 04:23:54AM 1 point [-]

Make me wonder how realistic it might be to willingly ration aesthetic experiences.

I've certainly heard of people who did that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 October 2011 03:51:54AM 15 points [-]

It is a runaway peacock's-tail phenomenon: Someone made something that stood out in some way, and it got attention; and people learned to like things like that, and so others made things that stood out more in the same way, until we ended up with Alban Berg.

As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested;

I suspect Methods of Rationality may be the end product of a similar phenomenon with respect to a number of trends in speculative fiction, e.g., of putting in more and more elaborate Xanatos Gambits and more and more subtle pop culture references.

Or as Eliezer put it:

it's hard to beat the Algorithm of Awesome, which works as follows:

First, know the overarching direction in which your fic is going. Then, think of possible events that move in this direction. If they are awesome, add them to the plot. If they are not awesome, leave them out.

Try looking at the above quote while tabooing the word "awesome", or better yet replace it with a word that has a similar meaning to an art movement you aren't involved in e.g., "groovy" for psychedelic, "transgresive" for modern art, etc.

Comment author: prase 20 October 2011 02:06:00PM 2 points [-]

Because there is large gauge freedom in choice of coordinates and random choice of gauge will likely produce a coordinate singularity somewhere and you will not see what's beyond. So you don't reconstruct whole spacetime history, but you can reconstruct at least something, and perhaps use different coordinates to move further. Of course there are problems with precision whenever the equations are enough non-linear, but that's nothing specific to relativity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2011 10:48:21PM 2 points [-]

Not just that, you are free to choose a gauge that only "kicks in" the future. In fact there is no unique well-defined future history, just a future defined up,to gauge even if you fix a choice of gauge for the present.

Comment author: potato 19 October 2011 08:53:29PM 0 points [-]

Not bad, is missing the betting market, but sounds about right.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2011 07:40:57PM 1 point [-]

You may also want to look into the history of technocracy, so you can see how it worked where is was actually attempted. (HINT: not very well.)

Comment author: lessdazed 19 October 2011 09:00:29PM *  6 points [-]

I have an inchoate thought I hope someone can seize and articulate.

There is nothing wrong with political posts as such, they are just correlated with flawed thinking, particularly not-even-wrong statements and the conjunction fallacy.

I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can't see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn't pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.

it seems to have some relevance to rationality

Don't worry, every source is a fine primary source, even if it is a poor secondary source.

To ensure

These words are a sign that you are about to try and patch a wish.

Democracy seems absolutely insane when dealing with any other serious problem in life

Advantages of democracy: a) people feel they can achieve their goals through peaceful persuasion, so there are fewer and less violent revolutions b) smooth transition between regimes

Not advantages of democracy: a) dealing with serious problems in life

any other factor besides scientific competence

Saying "the killing curse" does not kill. To kill, one must say "Avada Kedavra". You cannot select for scientific competence, only "scientific competence", those who succeed according to whatever normalizing proxy there is (almost certainly one involving status and human judgement, rather than just the flaws of being able to game a mechanical system).

Those who are experts at are not experts on, and I fear for the rationality of those who trust p-values.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 October 2011 07:36:17PM 6 points [-]

I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can't see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn't pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.

"Don't post political posts on LW" is an ethical injunction, which is to say: a political post is likely to have problems, I can confidently predict this without seeing the post or knowing what those problems are; furthermore, if upon reading to post I don't see any problems with it, a much more likely explanation is that this is because I'm missing them due to agreeing with it than because there are no problems with the post. Thus having a blanket "no politics" rule is better then attempting to disqualify political posts by pointing to the specific problems they have, which will only drag us further into mind-killing territory.

Comment author: timtyler 19 October 2011 05:34:12PM *  0 points [-]

Some computer programs crash - just as some possible superintelligences would kill all humans.

No *most" computer programs crash [...]

By "no", you apparently mean "yes".

With a self-modifying AI this is a lot harder to do.

Well, that is a completely different argument - and one that would appear to be in need of supporting evidence - since automated testing, linting and the ability to program in high-level languages are all improving simultaneously.

I am not aware of any evidence that real computer programs are getting more crash-prone with the passage of time.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2011 11:35:51PM 2 points [-]

With a self-modifying AI this is a lot harder to do.

Well, that is a completely different argument - and one that would appear to be in need of supporting evidence - since automated testing, linting and the ability to program in high-level languages are all improving simultaneously.

The point is that the first time you run the seed AI it will attempt to take over the world, so you don't have the luxury of debugging it.

Comment author: prase 18 October 2011 11:33:39AM 2 points [-]

By "relativity" you mean what? If relativistic mechanics of point particles in a given background, then it is computationally as complex as classical mechanics. If the background (i.e. gravitational and electromagnetic fields) is to be determined dynamically, then it is harder because you have infinitely many degrees of freedom. But that's the case of many non-relativistic classical systems (fluid dynamics...) too.

it seems to me that you would have to set up a system where the outcomes of relativity are explicitly stated, while the classical outcomes are implicit

What does this mean? I can think of several interpretations, all of them false:

  1. It is impossible to calculate the evolution of a relativistic system from the initial state only, you also need to know the final state too.
  2. It is possible to do calculate the relativistic evolution from the initial state, but you have to do it symbolically, numerical methods won't work.
  3. It is impossible to calculate anything numerically in a relativistic system, solutions have to be guessed and later verified, they can't be systematically constructed.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2011 11:30:30PM 1 point [-]

It is impossible to calculate anything numerically in a relativistic system, solutions have to be guessed and later verified, they can't be systematically constructed.

From a practical point of view, in general relativity this is almost true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2011 07:41:30AM *  12 points [-]

I'm transitioning, possibly, from the laughing stage and am beginning to feel the tiniest bit excited that perhaps some actual change is in order.

The next question is "Will this change be for the better?" (And no LW isn't the place to discuss this as applied to OWS.) I'm always amazed at how many people will embrace "change" without asking this question.

On the one hand, I feel sufficiently skeptical about the probability of a 'revolution'.

Keep in mind that from an outside view most revolutions produce a worse government then the one they replace.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2011 06:10:06AM 4 points [-]

This post seems to serve no purpose except to promote the dark arts.

Comment author: timtyler 18 October 2011 09:26:42PM *  4 points [-]

Some computer programs crash - just as some possible superintelligences would kill alll humans.

However, the behavior of a computer program chosen at random tells you very little about how an actual real-world computer program will behave - since computer programs are typically produced by selection processes performed by intelligent agents.

The "for almost any goals" argument is bunk.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2011 06:07:17AM *  3 points [-]

Some computer programs crash - just as some possible superintelligences would kill all humans.

No most computer programs crash, it's just that most people never see them because said programs are repeatedly tested and modified until they no longer crash before being shown to people (this process is called "debugging"). With a self-modifying AI this is a lot harder to do.

Comment author: falenas108 19 October 2011 03:04:01AM *  -1 points [-]

Regardless of whether you think Occupy Wall Street is "right," we should still be able to have a rational discussion about the outcomes, and there's one outcome in particular that's been worrying me.

The worst possible outcome, in my opinion, would be if Occupy Wall Street gains enough momentum to become a major political power in the U.S., but not enough to decisively win.

Regardless of what happens Occupy Wall Street will almost definitely polarize the left further from the center, as they have been recently.

If politics is a game of prisoner's dilema, then the Republicans through the Tea Party have been defecting for the past few years, with no sign of being willing to change to cooperate. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been repeatedly cooperating. If this were a normal prisoner's dilemma game, then the Democrats should switch to defecting as well.

But, in government there is a third term, ability to operate. Assuming there isn't a clear majority in all sections of government:

If both parties cooperate, operation is the highest. If one defects and one cooperates, it's lower, but still there. If both parties decide to defect, the government loses almost all effectiveness. And my fear is that Occupy Wall Street will lead to this outcome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2011 05:19:14AM 2 points [-]

But, in government there is a third term, ability to operate.

How's this different from ordinary prisoner's dilemma?

Assuming there isn't a clear majority in all sections of government:

If both parties cooperate, operation is the highest. If one defects and one cooperates, it's lower, but still there. If both parties decide to defect, the government loses almost all effectiveness.

This is true at most in the short term. In the medium-to-long term the prisoner's dilemma is an epistemic prisoner's dilemma, and effectiveness is determined by the extent to which the people winning the short term prisoner's dilemmas are pushing the "right" policies. If they aren't, the level of "operation" is simply a measure of how fast the car is racing towards the edge of a cliff.

Or as Sir Humphrey from "Yes, Minister" put it:

Well, almost all government policy is wrong, but… frightfully well carried out.

Comment author: pedanterrific 17 October 2011 02:17:36AM *  2 points [-]

How so? (Hint: in Harry's opinion, the moral response to burning several innocent women to death does not involve burning more innocent women to death.) In this case, the only difficulty on Harry's part would be explaining to Susan why he annihilated her aunt.

Edit: Okay, I've read over the thread again and I honestly have no idea what the downvote is for. Please explain?

Edit: Clarified in whose opinion that was the case.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 October 2011 03:42:58AM 3 points [-]

(Hint: the moral response to burning several innocent women to death does not involve burning more innocent women to death.)

Depends, it may very well make sense from a TDT/UDT point of view.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 October 2011 05:58:41PM 19 points [-]

I'm skeptical that this is really about superstimuli per se, mostly based on the replacements you offer.

Meditation and exercise are very much addictive and often superstimuli themselves. Their (non-fun) benefits are questionable.

Also, I don't see what purpose karezza serves. Do you mean to masturbate without orgasm, or to use it as a sex variant? The first seems to me like just replacing one fetish with another, and the other seems like a really bad idea for a replacement because it doesn't supply the same thing as porn.

I'm also skeptical about the whole approach. I've experimented with longer abstinence from superstimuli myself, but I can't say it did me any good. It didn't change the need for stimulation, and so I just drifted from one "addiction" into another. I only made me miserable during the transition, but had no long-term effects. I'm way happier by embracing superstimuli. I now take care to have enough of them to limit the need for escalation.

Maybe I'm overly cynical here, but this seems to me more like a moralistic judgment (these stimuli are evil, but those are fine). It certainly was for me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 October 2011 09:38:13PM 8 points [-]

Maybe I'm overly cynical here, but this seems to me more like a moralistic judgment (these stimuli are evil, but those are fine). It certainly was for me.

Also, when you think about it, moralistic judgements are memes that evolved to deal with precisely the problem the author is talking about.

In response to The Backup Plan
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 October 2011 03:14:22AM 1 point [-]

I believe the scenario is that Alice's goal system hasn't yet stabilized. In that case what can we do to push it towards friendliness.

Comment author: Incorrect 14 October 2011 12:01:38PM -2 points [-]

That sounds like an appeal to emergence.

I think there are two potential problems with ontology:

  1. The AI fails to understand its new environment enough to be able to manipulate it to implement its values.

  2. The AI discovers how to manipulate its new environment, but in the translation to the new ontology its values become corrupted.

For #1, all we can do is give it a better approximation of inductive inference. For #2 we can state the values in more ontology-independent terms.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 October 2011 03:07:49AM 2 points [-]

For #1, all we can do is give it a better approximation of inductive inference. For #2 we can state the values in more ontology-independent terms.

These are both incredibly difficult to do when you don't know (and probably can't imagine) what kind of ontological crises the AI will face.

Comment author: Nominull 15 October 2011 01:25:43AM 0 points [-]

Why don't we see these crises happening in humans when they shift ontological models? Is there some way we can use the human intelligence case as a model to guide artificial intelligence safeguards?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 October 2011 03:03:23AM *  4 points [-]

Why don't we see these crises happening in humans when they shift ontological models?

We do. It's just that:

1) Human minds aren't as malleable as a self-improving AI's so the effect is smaller,

2) After the fact, the ontological shift is perceived as a good thing, from the perspective of the new ontology's moral system. This makes the shifts hard to notice unless one is especially conservative.

Comment author: gwern 13 October 2011 01:50:12AM 1 point [-]

Is there any reason to think the sets won't balance out eventually?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 October 2011 02:47:11AM 3 points [-]

The will, for very large values of eventually.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 13 October 2011 12:46:13AM *  0 points [-]

Sorry, I was assuming a utility function that summed over the amount of suffering each person experienced.

Your claim was that more correlates means fewer false positives. This is an abstract mathematical claim about epistemic probability. Utility functions don't enter into it, at least not explicitly. It's a claim about some class of probability distributions and criteria for categorization ("positives"). I'm just trying to figure out what class of distributions and criteria you're talking about.

My counterexamples show that your claim doesn't apply in full generality. You now claim that such counterexamples require "fiddling with the parameters very precisely." I take this to be the claim that all scenarios satisfy your claim, except for some measure-zero subset (with respect to some natural measure). Can you prove this?

the only way a counter-example like yours can work is by having lots of people exactly tied for the nth percentile.

I'm not sure how to make sense of this. It doesn't seem to reflect an understanding of my example.

I argued in the continuous limit. A measure-zero subset of people are tied for exactly the nth percentile. Recall that I said that "the proportion of individuals with intelligence between a and b is ba." So, the proportion of people whose intelligence is exactly tied for any value x is xx = 0.

Of course, the continuous limit is only an approximation of the discrete reality. But I can find discrete examples where this proportion is arbitrarily small. It's never "lots" relative to the size of the entire population, if that population is of any significant size.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2011 05:11:33AM 1 point [-]

I meant lots of people tied for the nth percentile in terms of your estimate of their intelligence, which was happening in your scenarios because the amount of information available was discrete and very small.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 October 2011 09:19:28PM *  5 points [-]

There's been a lot of discussion in this thread about whether or not your examples are valid. But there seems to be a more substantial problem: Your primary example, of whether or not decolonization was a good thing or was handled well is extensively discussed in academia. Similarly, most of the people doing ev psych are tenured professors and the like. So whether or not the views expressed are accurate, the claim that they are ignored by academia seems to be false.

Now, moving on from that, let's look at your claims.

Then there is evolutionary psychology, which tells us that Archie Bunker was right about nearly everything,

Is this a statement about racial groups or a statement about gender relations? I can't quite tell which was intended. Note that ev psych doesn't really say that much that Archie Bunker would actually agree with. Is this intended for rhetorical effect? If so, can you please state this more explicitly.

For a thousand years before the mid nineteenth century, pretty much everyone agreed that equality between husbands and wives would destroy marriage and fatherhood. Then in the nineteenth century, they introduced marital equality. Observe the result.

The request for citations below for the first sentence has already been asked and hasn't been really answered. (I will note that the Talmud which is a series of texts known for debating almost everything about its own legal system has nothing at all saying that equality between the sexes would destroy marriage). But aside from that matter, there's really a pair of pretty easy explanations for the "breakdown" of marriage.

First, in many places, common law marriage (really sui juris marriage), which really wasn't much more than acknowledged long-term cohabitation, was considered marriage. As that became less acceptable in the 20th century, people who if they had lived a century before would have been considered married were no longer counted as married.

Second, lifespans went up. In the 19th century, many marriages ended at an early age with the death of a spouse. See here. This data isn't ideal for this purpose because they are calculating life-expectancy of everyone which means that the decline in infant mortality also comes through. But in general, life expectancy has gone up. Divorces have become more common as a means of ending marriage, but the actual length of the average marriage is not that different from what it was in the 19th century.

There is an argument that equality between males and females has also lead to higher divorce rates. And it probably helps that females can initiate divorce (something that was difficult to do in some places in previous centuries) . It also obviously didn't hurt matters that rising equality made it easier for women to live on their own, which made getting a divorce have fewer downsides. But the claim that equality in marriage itself led to a decline in marriage seems to be extremely weak to the point where the correlation so obviously doesn't imply causation that it is almost a textbook example of that problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2011 12:31:59AM 4 points [-]

Your primary example, of whether or not decolonization was a good thing or was handled well is extensively discussed in academia.

Really? Could you refer me to an academic paper that has a perspective on decolonization similar to the one sam presents? Near as I can tell "post-colonial studies" are all about blaming Europeans and their descendents for all the world's problems.

Another exercise, since I believe you're currently in academia your self, bring up the perspective on decolonization with fellow academics in a way that implies it has merit. Let me know if you still have an academic career by the time the resulting firestorm blows over.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 12 October 2011 11:46:34AM *  0 points [-]

Your scenarios implicitly assume that anyone whose expected intelligence is bellow median will get treated as dumb

Well, actually, I thought that I made this assumption generously explicit. Evidently, you had implicit assumptions behind your claim that taking correlates into account would always lead to fewer false positives. What were these additional assumptions?

and that this is somehow much much worse then what happens to people whose expected is exactly median.

I did not make any assumption quantifying how much worse it is. It need only be marginally worse.

Furthermore, even under this assumption you will find that your example falls apart if there is any way besides race to obtain information correlated with intelligence.

No. I can construct similar counterexamples where there are two observable properties (which you can think of as black/white, male/female), corresponding to four populations (black males, ..., white females). You will need to make your assumptions more explicit if you want to rule out these kinds of counterexamples.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2011 12:10:33AM 1 point [-]

I did not make any assumption quantifying how much worse it is. It need only be marginally worse.

Sorry, I was assuming a utility function that summed over the amount of suffering each person experienced. You seem to be using a Rawls-style utility function base on minimizing the suffering of the worst of individual. (BTW, that's a very stupid function to use in anything outside a very simple toy model.

No. I can construct similar counterexamples where there are two observable properties (which you can think of as black/white, male/female), corresponding to four populations (black males, ..., white females).

Only by fiddling with the parameters very precisely.

If your assumption is that people whose expected intelligence is bellow the median (or really the nth percentile for any n) will be treated as dumb, the only way a counter-example like yours can work is by having lots of people exactly tied for the nth percentile. And the more other information is available the more the numbers in the scenario must be jiggered for that to happen.

You will need to make your assumptions more explicit if you want to rule out these kinds of counterexamples.

Comment author: gwern 12 October 2011 03:03:19PM *  3 points [-]

You don't have very many predictions judged, so I'm not sure how reliable your worry is - only 8-11 predictions for each decile seems quite possible to just get lucky. Assuming that's not the case, you could try mechanically bumping up every prediction by 10% and see what happens.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 11:24:43PM 2 points [-]

Also I notice there are many sets of predictions of the the form X will happen in 1 month/2 months/1 year/... with a separate prediction for each time period. How are these scored? Since these types of predictions are highly correlated scoring them individually can cause people to appear over or under confident.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 11:03:57AM 4 points [-]

The one I have in mind is Lee Edelman. He quotes Hegel a lot. He does philosophy from an English department and works in post-structuralism and, wait for it, psychoanalytic theory. Probably not Less Wrong's cup of tea. He does show gay porn in his lectures, though.

Anyway, he critiques what he calls "reproductive futurism", by which he means the norms and values that serve to continue civilization in the traditional sense: "The children are our future", the fact that political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse, heterosexual marriage, the nuclear family, and the entire political edifice he sees as built up around the idea. He sees the figure of the queer person as someone left out of this social order. He suggests that rather than (or maybe in addition to) fighting for the right to join in the social order--through joining the military openly, gay marriage, gay adoption etc. gays and lesbians should resist the entirety of reproductive futurism.

He positively quotes conservatives for accurately revealing just how it is queers lie outside the established social order. I suspect he might see the "romantic homosexuality" style in the above linked blog post as acquiescence to reproductive futurism.

[That make sense to anyone? Just trying to translate the ideas into something reasonable sounding.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 11:12:16PM *  3 points [-]

"The children are our future", the fact that political appeals on behalf of children are impossible to refuse, heterosexual marriage, the nuclear family, and the entire political edifice he sees as built up around the idea. He sees the figure of the queer person as someone left out of this social order. He suggests that rather than (or maybe in addition to) fighting for the right to join in the social order--through joining the military openly, gay marriage, gay adoption etc. gays and lesbians should resist the entirety of reproductive futurism.

Even if they succeed in that goal all they'll do is cause the affected culture to evolve to extinction.

[That make sense to anyone? Just trying to translate the ideas into something reasonable sounding.]

This is more or less what conservatives have been accusing the gay-rights movement of being a cover for since day one.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 08:04:22AM *  2 points [-]

whether homosexuality is a sexual deviance

Does this question have empirical content that constrains my anticipated experiences? Or is it just a value judgment?

I don't think there is a lot of room or reason to discuss terminal or near-terminal value judgments. I find that criticism along the lines of "Stop valuing that, it's a character defect" is a perfectly reasonable response to terminal value judgments that I disagree with (though I try not to penalize people for value disagreement here since people with bad values can still be insightful about factual matters).

With something like race and IQ I don't think they should be suppressed and haven't tried to suppress them (I have comments elsewhere lamenting such suppression). But do think it is reasonable to expect those conversations to occur at a higher level than they have so far. For whatever reason the most vocal advocates of genetic inheritance as an explanation for the race IQ gap have been worse than average commenters. A while back I linked to an article Steve Hsu wrote on the subject, he showed up and there was briefly a really good back and forth on the subject. But for the most part discussion of the subject here consists of anecdotal evidence, baseless claims and people on both sides paying no attention to the relevant studies or population genetics. It is worthwhile in these cases, I think, for people to do what they can to avoid pattern matching with something designed to demean or oppress people. Both to avoid hurting people unnecessarily and to avoid triggering mind-killing. You don't have to sound like George Cuvier to argue for a genetic explanation of the race IQ-gap.

Edit: Though apparently we can't even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 08:40:03AM 2 points [-]

Does this question have empirical content that constrains my anticipated experiences?

I had in mind something like this.

About race and IQ, that really hasn't been a problem here.

But for the most part discussion of the subject here consists of anecdotal evidence, baseless claims and people on both sides paying no attention to the relevant studies or population genetics.

Part of the problem is how politicized population genetics has become.

I should probably have listed as an example something like talking about PUA and whether it works, because that has caused problems here, despite being less controversial in the outside world.

Edit: Though apparently we can't even talk about talking it without the both of us being downvoted.

Welcome to my reality. ;)

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 07:16:47AM 0 points [-]

Yeah. It's a mess of a hard problem. Thats why I try not to talk about it here because nobody is good at talking about it rationally. I'm not defending every instance of someone calling something racist, sexist etc. I'm not defending everything the people who tend to do it nor the list of groups they do it for.

That being the case I don't think the solution is to deny the harms people are talking about when they complain about racism, sexism etc. And it's going to get talked about at some point just like all politics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 07:37:59AM 2 points [-]

That being the case I don't think the solution is to deny the harms people are talking about when they complain about racism, sexism etc.

Nor is the solution to suppress discussion of statements that could be construed as bigoted. Even statements about race and IQ, or whether homosexuality is a sexual deviance.

To be fare, the main problem on LessWrong, as opposed to the world in general, is people engaging in motivated stopping and motivated continuation when discussing these topics in an attempt to avoid being sexist (for some reason race is less of a problem) and/or bigots.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 06:54:57AM 0 points [-]

Obviously it's specific contents are political and I don't necessarily think it is complete (or as we seen without mistakes)-- but the criteria for an ideal list is something like 'classes of people that agents cannot help but be members of'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 07:06:30AM 2 points [-]

Obviously it's specific contents are political

And that's the problem given that politics is the mindkiller.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 05:19:37AM -1 points [-]

Wikipedia looks fine:

The predominant usage in modern English refers to persons hostile to those of differing sex, race, ethnicity, religion or spirituality, nationality, language, inter-regional prejudice, gender and sexual orientation, age, homelessness, various medical disorders particularly behavioral disorders and addictive disorders.

(Note: be prepared to explain why being a "bigot" is obviously a very bad thing".)

I am not so prepared-- though it doesn't seem especially controversial to me I am vaguely open to an argument that it isn't obvious. But I don't see why I should be expected to explain why.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 06:54:32AM *  1 point [-]

Also, what do you mean by hostile?

If I believe it's better for people not to have behavioral disorders or/and addictive disorders develop a treatment and encourage people with said disorders to take it, am I being hostile? What if I do the same w.r.t. homosexuality?

BTW, if the answer to both those questions is "no", I have no further problem with the definition.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 06:03:48AM -1 points [-]

Thats a unique example in that definition, that, in retrospect I should have perhaps left out. Unlike the other groupings religion partly consists in beliefs and values which I think it is often important to be hostile to. Those beliefs and values are closely tied to the culture of a religion which I don't think people should be hostile to. I would not call someone a bigot for criticizing, mocking or insulting the beliefs and values associated with a particular religion. Doing the same to the people themselves or the culture, purposefully, and not the result of merely being uninformed or temporarily blinded would make a person a bigot.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 06:47:04AM 3 points [-]

What exactly is the criterion for being an element on the list?

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 05:51:13AM 1 point [-]

You're still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.

I don't notice how I seem to be doing it, actually.

Also, why are you getting so defensive about my pointing out that your sneaking in connotations? There is a connotation that sneaking in connotations or exhibiting some other bias means you're intentionally trying to mislead people, that you're a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. Note, people on lesswrong consider everyone biased, themselves included.

Clever. It's actually a good analogy. I'm really not getting defensive, just frustrated that you seem to be misunderstanding me (which is weird because I thought your original comment understood me perfectly).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 06:25:18AM 2 points [-]

You're still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.

I don't notice how I seem to be doing it, actually.

The statement I quoted:

There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you're intentionally trying to hurt people, that you're a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant.

seems to imply that the only reason one would make a "racist" statement is either out of a desire to hurt people or out of ignorance.

Clever. It's actually a good analogy.

One difference is that the definition of bias as used on lw does explicitly include the requirement that they provide incorrect results, as such I've been providing you with links to the relevant lesswrong articles.

I'm really not getting defensive,

One reason I did that is so you could see how annoying arguments of the form:

"Why are you getting so defensive about my accusing you of bad thing X, X doesn't imply worse thing Y?"

are when you're on the receiving end of them.

Comment author: dlthomas 12 October 2011 05:40:26AM 0 points [-]

Only if you are therefore hostile to its members.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 05:45:53AM 1 point [-]

Only if you are therefore hostile to its members.

Depending on what you mean by "hostile" that may be a perfectly reasonable course of action.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 05:15:01AM 1 point [-]

That's still sneaking in connotations unless deserving to be frowned upon is part of the definition of "racism".

No, it's merely an assumption in polite society. Bob is free to say that he doesn't care that he's being racist-- but that is not what he is being defensive about.

The defensiveness is in response to the connotation which Jandila at the very start of the thread disclaimed:

if there's one thing I don't need more of in my life it's arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.

There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you're intentionally trying to hurt people, that you're a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. When I say there is an implication to the word "racism" that my activist friends aren't paying attention to I'm talking about that not the implication that a racist statement shouldn't be said. Note, those activist friends consider everyone a racist, themselves included.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 05:40:42AM *  3 points [-]

There is a connotation that doing something racist or sexist means you're intentionally trying to hurt people, that you're a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant.

You're still trying to sneak in connotations, notice how you seem to be trying to exclude the possibility that a statement you describe as racist could actually be true, or that an action you describe as racist could actually be rational.

Also, why are you getting so defensive about my pointing out that you're sneaking in connotations? There is a connotation that sneaking in connotations or exhibiting some other bias means you're intentionally trying to mislead people, that you're a bad person instead of just making a mistake or being ignorant. Note, people on lesswrong consider everyone biased, themselves included.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 05:19:37AM -1 points [-]

Wikipedia looks fine:

The predominant usage in modern English refers to persons hostile to those of differing sex, race, ethnicity, religion or spirituality, nationality, language, inter-regional prejudice, gender and sexual orientation, age, homelessness, various medical disorders particularly behavioral disorders and addictive disorders.

(Note: be prepared to explain why being a "bigot" is obviously a very bad thing".)

I am not so prepared-- though it doesn't seem especially controversial to me I am vaguely open to an argument that it isn't obvious. But I don't see why I should be expected to explain why.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 05:33:29AM *  2 points [-]

The predominant usage in modern English refers to persons hostile to those of differing sex, race, ethnicity, religion or spirituality, nationality, language, inter-regional prejudice, gender and sexual orientation, age, homelessness, various medical disorders particularly behavioral disorders and addictive disorders.

So if I believe that, say, religion X is wrong and its teachings are immoral, do I qualify as a bigot under this definition?

Comment author: Jack 11 October 2011 12:44:33AM 2 points [-]

Also, the very fact that you talk about "arguing [...] whether or not you can be [...] sexist [...] without [property X]" implies that there exists some Platonic idea of "sexism," since otherwise it would be a trivial question of whether property X is included in the definition.

It is trivial. Jandila's definition of sexism and racism does not include the speaker being a bigot as a necessary criterion. Now, I often complain to my anti-subordination activisty friends that a lot of people don't realize their definitions of racism and sexism don't imply that. It's a problem since people tend to get more defensive than they need to be when someone points out something they did or said that is racist, sexist, anti- gay, etc. But people getting defensive after they know these words don't imply bigotry really is silly. And yet it still happens-- which is why Jandila doesn't always have the patience to deal with it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 05:11:40AM *  1 point [-]

Btw, Could you provide your definition of "bigot"? I've gotten a vague idea of what you mean by the word from context, but I'd like to see your formulation. (Note: be prepared to explain why being a "bigot" is obviously a "very bad thing".)

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 04:37:30AM *  1 point [-]

It relies on the implication that the user of the word frowns on racisms and that other people ought to as well. This is different from the connotation that someone who does something racist must be intentionally bigoted or some kind of secret white supremacist. The difference is that the first is merely a normative implication that is obvious to everyone while the second suggests additional beliefs about Bob that are being snuck in but not officially defended by anyone.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 04:59:39AM *  1 point [-]

It relies on the implication that the user of the word frowns on racisms and that other people ought to as well.

That's still sneaking in connotations unless deserving to be frowned upon is part of the definition of "racism". However, in that case Susan needs to establish that the action and/or argument deserves to be frowned upon in addition to satisfying the other parts of the definition of racism to justify her claim that the action and/or argument is indeed "racist". Notice that what you called "defensiveness" in the comment that started this sub-thread is simply Bob pointing out that she hasn't done so.

Essentially Susan is trying to argue that Bob's action and/or argument is racist and hence by definition bad. This argument runs into the problem Eliezer discusses in that article.

Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 03:59:01AM *  1 point [-]

Susan's statement isn't supposed to be a counter argument, just an argument. (When I described the situation above I could have as easily started with "Bob does something racist" instead of "says. She may or may not have a propositional disagreement with what Bob said.)

[And now we have two threads about Bob. He is apparently both a racist and terrible with women.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 04:29:20AM 2 points [-]

The presumed purpose of the statement is to criticize Bob's argument and/or action. To do this it relies on the connotations of the word "racist".

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 10 October 2011 10:41:32PM *  2 points [-]

I think that you're saying that, in a world where fewer observable properties correlate with dumbness, there will be more false positives — i.e. more smart people falsely identified as dumb. Is that right?

That is correct.

But that isn't true in general. It might be true under some additional plausible assumptions, but I haven't worked out what those assumptions would be.

The following toy model is a counterexample. Suppose that intelligence is measured by a quantity between 0 and 1. People are paid according to their employer's best guess of their intelligence. (We assume universal employment.) More precisely, the employer computes an expected intelligence E (between 0 and 1) for the employee and then pays that employee at a rate of E utilons-per-hour.

Define "dumb" to mean "intelligence less than 0.5". Define "smart" to mean "intelligence greater than or equal to 0.5". Define "treating a smart person as dumb" to mean "paying an employee at a rate less than 0.5 when that employee's intelligence is greater than or equal to 0.5".

Now consider the following two possible worlds. In both worlds, intelligence is distributed uniformly, in the sense that the proportion of individuals with intelligence between a and b is ba. World 1 is a world with no observable correlate for intelligence. World 2 is a world that does have an observable correlate for intelligence. I claim that, in both worlds, half the people are paid below their intelligence, but, in World 2 alone, some smart people are treated as dumb.

In World 1, the employer has no information about the employee's intelligence, beyond the uniform prior distribution. This yields an expected intelligence of E = 0.5 for each employee, so everyone is paid exactly 0.5 utilons-per-hour. Thus, in World 1, half the people are paid below their intelligence, but no smart people are treated as dumb.

In World 2, the population is split half-and-half into f-people and g-people. Employers know the actual distribution of intelligence among both sub-populations. An employer can identify an employee as an f-person or a g-person with perfect reliability, but the employer knows nothing else about that employee's intelligence.

The f-people's intelligence satisfies the distribution f, where

  • f(x) = 4/3 for 0 ≤ x < 1/2, and f(x) = 2/3 for 1/2 ≤ x ≤ 1.

Hence, f-people are dumber on average. If I computed correctly, the f-people have expected intelligence E = 5/12. Thus, the f-people are all paid 5/12 by their employers. In particular, some smart f-people are treated as dumb.

Meanwhile, the g-people's intelligence is distributed according to the distribution g, where

  • g(x) = 2/3 for 0 ≤ x < 1/2, and g(x) = 4/3 for 1/2 ≤ x ≤ 1.

Hence, g-people are smarter on average. I compute an expected intelligence of E = 7/12 for the g-people.

If N is the total population size, our assumptions say that there are N/2 f-people and N/2 g-people. I compute that the number of f-people paid below their intelligence is 4N/18. I get that the number of g-people paid below their intelligence is 5N/18. Thus, in World 2, half the people are paid below their intelligence, but some smart people are treated as dumb.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 04:05:11AM 3 points [-]

Your scenarios implicitly assume that anyone whose expected intelligence is bellow median will get treated as dumb and that this is somehow much much worse then what happens to people whose expected is exactly median. Furthermore, even under this assumption you will find that your example falls apart if there is any way besides race to obtain information correlated with intelligence.

Comment author: jhuffman 11 October 2011 07:31:01PM *  -1 points [-]

College is a good idea if you'll have more job opportunities and get paid more for having gone. In other words, before you can convince me that I don't need a college degree you'll need to convince a few million hiring managers in my field of the same thing. The fact that their opinion may be poorly supported by evidence doesn't change anything for me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 03:53:48AM 1 point [-]

Depends, you have to make sure that the extra pay is enough to offset the cost of your student loans.

Comment author: lessdazed 12 October 2011 03:45:36AM 0 points [-]

What if someone thought that even with the connotations associated with the word, it still wouldn't constitute a counter argument?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 03:51:49AM 1 point [-]

Then why did Susan make that statement at all?

Comment author: lessdazed 11 October 2011 06:30:41AM *  1 point [-]

Both sides are criticizing the other for using particular language.

The criticisms are importantly different.

"Susan says saying x is racist."

There is nothing wrong with that statement, but "arguing [...] whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot," is confused, though not necessarily accusatory.

"Bob says saying something is racist sneaks in connotations."

Bob is saying something not confused, but coherent and accusatory. "If you and Jandila don't mean to sneak in these connotations, say so;" is unfair. Bob has to address the argument as if those connotations were not intended, even if they probably were (in his mind), or weren't but probably are so misinterpreted by others (in his models of them), he can't decline to address the actual argument unless he has overwhelming evidence that it was designed primarily to manipulate and not substantially to present evidence.

If it's easier for Bob to show the argument is dishonest rather than refute it, it's fine to let him do that if he feels it is better for some reason, and I don't think Bob owes an explanation of how the argument was wrong or even an honest attempt to try and understand it, depending on how sinuous and sinuous it was.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 03:32:35AM 1 point [-]

"Susan says saying x is racist."

(...)

Bob has to address the argument as if those connotations were not intended,

The problem is that without the connotations associated with the word, Susan's statement doesn't even constitute a counter argument.

Comment author: torekp 12 October 2011 12:17:57AM 1 point [-]

Since the correlation between liberalism and correctness was weak, most pundits probably wouldn't gain or lose much score in a more politically-average year. In Krugman's case, for example, most of the scored predictions were economic not political forecasts. In Cal Thomas's case however, your explanation might basically work.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2011 03:23:06AM 3 points [-]

True, of course in Krugman's case I suspect most of his predictions amounted to predicting that the financial crisis was going to be really but, and thus were also correlated.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 October 2011 04:50:06AM 3 points [-]

I was thinking about what's a good way to measure how well-calibrated you are. The most obvious way is to say your well calibrated if, e.g., 70% of your predictions at 70% confidence level are correct; however, that implicitly assumes your predictions are independent. You can try getting around this by making lots of predictions in different areas; however, this leaves open the possibility that you might be differently calibrated in different areas.

Comment author: torekp 10 October 2011 10:44:28PM 3 points [-]

I am considerably more skeptical of op-eds and other punditry, after tracking the rare clear predictions they made

In the case of a few well-studied pundits you should examine the evidence gathered by other prediction trackers. Some pundits are well outside the dumb luck range on a ten-point scale:

The best? Paul Krugman with a PVS of 8.2 (You can see a screenshot of his score sheet to the right. Note: Score sheets for each of the pundits are in the full text document).

The worst? Cal Thomas, with a PVS of -8.7 (You read that right. Negative eight point seven...).

Kinda surprising to me that you can beat dumb luck in inaccuracy. I hope they do a followup.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 October 2011 04:21:01AM *  5 points [-]

Since the study focused on the period around the 2008 elections, which the Democrats won on nearly all levels, and since most pundits tend to be biased towards believing that what they wish would happen will happen, it's not surprising that liberals' predictions did better and some conservatives scored worse than random. I suspect we'd see the trend go the other way for say predictions about the 2010 midterms. The fundamental problem is that the predictions weren't independent.

Comment author: Jack 11 October 2011 12:44:33AM 2 points [-]

Also, the very fact that you talk about "arguing [...] whether or not you can be [...] sexist [...] without [property X]" implies that there exists some Platonic idea of "sexism," since otherwise it would be a trivial question of whether property X is included in the definition.

It is trivial. Jandila's definition of sexism and racism does not include the speaker being a bigot as a necessary criterion. Now, I often complain to my anti-subordination activisty friends that a lot of people don't realize their definitions of racism and sexism don't imply that. It's a problem since people tend to get more defensive than they need to be when someone points out something they did or said that is racist, sexist, anti- gay, etc. But people getting defensive after they know these words don't imply bigotry really is silly. And yet it still happens-- which is why Jandila doesn't always have the patience to deal with it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 October 2011 03:15:44AM 5 points [-]

That's because words like "bigot, racist, sexist, anti- gay" are frequently used to sneak in conotations that the argument in question (and by extension the person making it) is somehow immoral and can be dismissed without looking at its validity, or at the very least requires us to engage in motivated continuation until the argument has been "rationally" dismissed. If you and Jandila don't mean to sneak in these connotations, say so; however, in that case you should probably pick a word that doesn't have these connotations in common usage.

Comment author: MattRivers 10 October 2011 10:22:48PM *  1 point [-]

Good point (acknowledging wedrifid's caveat) but one could argue IQ is often directly relevant to job performance, whereas race is not ("discriminating" based on ability-to-do-the-job is probably ok, even if mostly genetic).

It seems that using factors that cause good/bad job performance is normal hiring procedure whereas using factors that only correlate with good/bad job performance is statistical discrimination (thx for the link Emile)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 October 2011 02:43:18AM 5 points [-]

It seems that using factors that cause good/bad job performance is normal hiring procedure whereas using factors that only correlate with good/bad job performance is statistical discrimination (thx for the link Emile)

So using things like test scores, impressions from interviews, etc., is statistical discrimination?

Comment author: Oligopsony 10 October 2011 06:22:24PM 3 points [-]

One one hand I agree (facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.) On the other hand there's frequently great value in works that painstakingly document an empirical trend, even if the causal explanations they offer inspire skepticism - the work of Gregory Clark comes to mind.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 07:35:05PM 5 points [-]

(facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.)

I'm curious why you think this, looking at the history to strikes me as fairly obvious. The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 10 October 2011 06:18:54PM *  1 point [-]

Could you elaborate on how you see your objection applying to that version? To be honest, I don't yet see that the hypothesis in point 4 is coherent enough to judge whether your claim would be true of it.

I think that you're saying that, in a world where fewer observable properties correlate with dumbness, there will be more false positives — i.e. more smart people falsely identified as dumb. Is that right?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 07:18:28PM 1 point [-]

I think that you're saying that, in a world where fewer observable properties correlate with dumbness, there will be more false positives — i.e. more smart people falsely identified as dumb. Is that right?

That is correct. Notice that we could "simulate" such a world by simply ignoring some of the correlates.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 10 October 2011 06:09:53PM *  4 points [-]

It "proves" way too much, namely that we should be disturbed by the idea that there is any observable property of people whatsoever whose correlation with intelligence is neither zero nor one.

I agree. My footnote was trying to get at the same problem. (Though I'm not sure that Eugine_Nier was making the same point.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 06:10:33PM 2 points [-]

I was.

Comment author: lessdazed 10 October 2011 05:37:50PM -1 points [-]

It's a test of the universal law that two random different things are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason. This applies even when there is a spectacularly good reason to think that they would be roughly equal, and also when summing and taking averages.

As a close analogy, consider the mass of each bottle to be the IQ of each person in a group, and the bottle types produced by each company to each comprise a group.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 06:06:33PM 1 point [-]

What I believe you meant to say is that the results of two different processes "are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason."

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 10 October 2011 06:01:19PM *  1 point [-]

This will happen anyway, in fact it will happen more often if relevant information is discarded. ...

your argument, if it works, shows we should avoid using any data that's correlated but not perfectly correlated with intelligence

Just to be clear, the argument I outlined (but did not endorse) is about why it would be worse if race-based IQ differences existed in fact. Note that the hypothesis in point 3 was "If race-based differences in intelligence exist...", not, "If we explore the possibility of race-based differences in intelligence...". The argument doesn't conclude that we should ignore relevant information. The argument's conclusion is that, in a "juster world", racial information wouldn't be relevant.

(It's not clear to me whether you meant to imply otherwise, but I thought that I should clarify that point.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 06:03:34PM 1 point [-]

Just to be clear, my objection applies to that version as well.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 10 October 2011 04:00:10PM *  4 points [-]

But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.

There is a standard answer to how "adding race makes it worse", which this article doesn't address at all. In simple and blunt terms, the standard answer runs as follows:

  1. It's bad that some people are dumb. However, given that there are dumb people, it's okay to treat them like they're dumb.

  2. It's bad to treat smart people like they're dumb.

  3. If race-based differences in intelligence exist, then people will treat even the smart people in a dumber-on-average race as though they were dumb. This is bad because of point 2 above, at least.

  4. But, if only individual differences in intelligence exist*, then people will only treat dumb individuals as dumb. This is okay because of point 1 above.

  5. Therefore, "adding race makes it worse".


* It's not at all clear that this is a coherent hypothesis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 05:40:45PM *  4 points [-]

It's bad to treat smart people like they're dumb.

This will happen anyway, in fact it will happen more often if relevant information is discarded. The difference is that the victims will no longer be correlated with race. Thus we are still left with the question of why adding race makes it worse.

Edit: Another way to express what I'm trying to say is that your argument, if it works, shows we should avoid using any data that's correlated but not perfectly correlated with intelligence, e.g., test scores, grades, job performance, pretty much anything really.

Comment author: MattRivers 10 October 2011 09:46:31AM *  2 points [-]

I would agree with your explanation.

Also, in the job example once you get to interview/test stage the observations should indeed clearly swamp out all priors based on what group the candidate belongs to. However earlier in the process (when sifting through thousands of similar resumes) could these priors still retain some importance?

Basically I would separate 2 types of discrimination:

  • (1) I will not hire a person from group B because I don't like people from group B. Or I believe people from group B will almost certainly perform less well than people from group A.

  • (2) I know the prior distribution of job performance for groups A and B (A is higher on average). After taking into account my obervations (looking at a resume) about 1 candidate from each group, the posterior distribution indicates that the candidate from group A is expected to perform better. So I hire A. Had I ignored the prior I would have hired B.

(1) is sub-optimal clearly unacceptable. (2) seems theoretically optimal and appears to be used for many groupings, like [went to a top university] vs. [medium university - same gpa/experience]

However (2) is completely unacceptable for other groupings (like race). Possible explanations:

  • It has no impact anyway. For these groupings any differences in priors would be so tiny that they would immediately get overwhelmed by the slightest job application relevant info
  • These are groupings for which people have absolutely no control. It is unfair that top group B people need to systematically overcome this prior.
  • In practice no one will be able to apply this properly and everyone will end up amplifying priors and giving them way too much importance, so it is best to not go near it.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 05:33:02PM 6 points [-]

These are groupings for which people have absolutely no control. It is unfair that top group B people need to systematically overcome this prior.

People don't have control over their IQ either.

Comment author: Prismattic 10 October 2011 03:03:38AM *  12 points [-]

I've noticed that even on Lesswrong, there is such a thing as knowledge that it is deemed better not to know. Apparently this is referred to as the basilisk's gaze (I've yet to manage to read anything deemed dangerous here before it was deleted, so I could be wrong in the details of that).

It seems to me that a lot of the "Don't suggest that there are racial differences in IQ" position is actually based on a hidden belief that looking at the possibility of racial differences is gazing at a basilisk.

Suppose you are an employer hiring for a position, using an examination where performance is correlated with intelligence. It is essentially harmless to take the position, "My prior is that whites have higher IQs on average than blacks, so I expect the average score of the white applicants to be higher than the average score of the black applicants."

What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying "This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I'm going to treat my prior and the examination as separate bits of knowledge and scale my assessment of the candidate's intelligence downward from what the exam alone would suggest." As opposed to having the prior be swamped by the examination.

This is on top of (legitimately) expecting that the average person won't understand the difference between the layman's concept of "race" and the more scientifically rigorous concepts of "population" and "cohort."

In the wider world, unlike on Lesswrong, openly coming out and saying "Considering this idea is like gazing at a basilisk" would end disasterously. So people go with "This idea is false" instead.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 05:30:59PM 9 points [-]

The "basilisk" is of a very different character btw. It's more of a game theoretic issue, sort of like how if you can't understand the language the blackmailer is using to try to communicate you can't be blackmailed.

Comment author: Nisan 10 October 2011 04:29:18PM *  -1 points [-]

How did the subject come up? I have never ever heard this subject discussed outside of two contexts:

  • The question under discussion is "What can't we say?"; or

  • One of the interlocutors feels it's important to take civil rights away from people.

EDIT: To be absolutely clear, I'm certain the second thing is not true of any of the bootcampers, and I'm almost certain that racial IQ differences came up in conversation only as an example of something people don't consider rationally, not as a subject of interest in its own right.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 05:20:21PM 5 points [-]

How did the subject come up? I have never ever heard this subject discussed outside of two contexts:

The question under discussion is "What can't we say?"; or

One of the interlocutors feels it's important to take civil rights away from people.

Well, since this is the first reference in this thread to "What can't we say?", which of the commenters would you say "feels it's important to take civil rights away from people"?

But seriously, you should get out of the habit of assuming sinister motives of people who disagree with you.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 October 2011 11:13:37PM *  1 point [-]

Whether you feel pain or not is a fact. It's territory, not map.
Whether someone is racist/sexist depends on definitions. These are categories -- which are map, not territory.

I'd guess that whatever value is derived by arguing over whether someone is racist or sexist can be produced better by tabooing those words, and arguing more specifically over what the specific claim is ("would his words be offensive to a significant number of member of such group" "is he trying to increase his own group's relative power/privilege over the other group", "does he believe in an innate inferior moral worth for that group", etc, etc)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 October 2011 04:40:51AM 5 points [-]

I'd guess that whatever value is derived by arguing over whether someone is racist or sexist can be produced better by tabooing those words, and arguing more specifically over what the specific claim is ("would his words be offensive to a significant number of member of such group" "is he trying to increase his own group's relative power/privilege over the other group", "does he believe in an innate inferior moral worth for that group", etc, etc)

I notice a glaring omission from your list of questions. Namely "are his words if interpreted as a factual claim and/or argument true and/or valid"

Comment author: quinsie 09 October 2011 01:20:25AM *  0 points [-]

It all depends on why you decide to torrent/not torrent:

Are you more likely to torrent if the album is very expensive, or if it is very cheap? If you expect it to be of high quality, or of low quality? If the store you could buy the album at is far away, or very close? If you like the band that made it, or if you don't like them? Longer albums or shorter? Would you torrent less if the punishment for doing so was increased? Would you torrent more if it was harder to get caught? What if you were much richer, or much poorer?

I'm confident that if you were to analyze when you torrent vs. when you buy, you'd notice trends that, with a bit of effort, could be translated into a fairly reasonable "Will I Torrent or Buy?" function that predicts whether you'll torrent or not with much better accuracy than random.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 October 2011 02:38:48AM 6 points [-]

I'm confident that if you were to analyze when you torrent vs. when you buy, you'd notice trends that, with a bit of effort, could be translated into a fairly reasonable "Will I Torrent or Buy?" function that predicts whether you'll torrent or not with much better accuracy than random.

Yes, but the function might all include terms for things like how rude were Yvain's co-workers to Yvain that day, what mood was Yvain in that day, was Yvain hungry at the moment, i.e., stuff a reasonably behaved utility function shouldn't have terms for but the outcome of a willpower based struggle very well might.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 08 October 2011 08:44:42PM *  1 point [-]

In that case, I call that part of my mind "my mind".

The post could be summarized as arguing that the division of decisions into moral and amoral components, if it is even neurally real, is not notably more important than the division of decisions into near and far components, or sensory and abstract components, or visual and auditory componets, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 09:33:29PM 2 points [-]

Notice I said mind not brain. So I'm not arguing that it necessarily always takes place in the same part of the brain.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 08 October 2011 08:44:42PM *  1 point [-]

In that case, I call that part of my mind "my mind".

The post could be summarized as arguing that the division of decisions into moral and amoral components, if it is even neurally real, is not notably more important than the division of decisions into near and far components, or sensory and abstract components, or visual and auditory componets, etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 09:28:27PM 2 points [-]

Oh yes, I should probably state my position. I want to call the judgement about whether a particular action is good or evil the "moral component", and everything else the "amoral" component. Thus ethics amounts to two things:

1) making the judgement about whether the action is good or evil as accurate as possible (this is the "wisdom" part)

2) acting in accordance with this judgement, i.e., performing good actions and not performing evil actions (this is the "willpower" part)

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 October 2011 08:02:10PM *  2 points [-]

Ah, I think I just confused you with a badly phrased statement. I meant a reduction of the Soviet and American interference in their own formerly solidly-controlled spheres (will edit ancestor comment to make it more clear).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 08:10:22PM 4 points [-]

Well the USSR had sufficient control over it's sphere that it didn't need to "interfere" per se despite the norm against colonialism.

As for the US, it could reasonably be argued that Latin America would be better off with more US interference for the same reason Africa was better off under colonialism.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 October 2011 07:48:05PM 0 points [-]

You fail to explain why this is obviously a good thing.

I care to justify points that are challenged, not points that aren't challenged. Are you challenging the point -- by which I mean "are you prepared to argue the opposite"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 07:53:28PM 3 points [-]

Well, I fail to see how more Western European intervention in Eastern Europe and the Soviet sphere more generally would not have improved the lives of the residents of that sphere.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 08 October 2011 06:06:26PM *  8 points [-]

Of course if he did so, he would be instavoted down into oblivion.

Whenever you make such comments, you are making it impossible for me to upvote you, because if you end up upvoted, that'll by itself show the falseness of your claim, and therefore it would be a post unworthy of an upvote.

I promise an upvote for your comment however, if you edit to remove this sentence, because the remaining points you make are very interesting and worthy of such. (edited to add: Now upvoted, as per promise.)

Now to the content-relevant bits:

One obvious example is decolonization, which killed more people than the nazis. No postcolonial government was as good as the colonial government it replaced.

You are making true claims as far as it goes, but I don't think you're seeing the bigger picture in regards to colonialism and decolonization both. For starters it's my impression that the primary stated objections to colonization are deontological ("They don't have the right to rule us/We don't have the right to rule them") as opposed to utilitarian ("We're better off without them"/"They're better off without us")

Now I'm not a deontologist, but I wouldn't mind calling myself a rule utilitarian. And what I see is that claiming the right to control another nation is still used by even Nazi-sympathisers to excuse Hitler's policies (The argument is "If Britain had the right to rule over the hundreds millions in India, why couldn't the Nazi be allowed to rule over Poland and Czechoslovakia"). It was also used by the Soviets and the Americans to excuse their own interference (in a different way).

In this manner, European colonialism served to justify both German and Japanese imperialism in the eyes of their citizens; thus contributing to World War II -- it possibly had an even more direct effect on World War I, which may have been motivated by a German desire to take some colonies. And conversely after European Colonialism was defeated, and the rule "We must not control other nations by force" firmly established, one gradually sees peace descend on the European continent itself, and eventually a decrease in the amount of interference that the Soviets and Americans applied on their own spheres of influence too (Eastern Europe and South America respectively).

In short: In a world where European colonialism still thrived, would we have seen the Eastern European communist governments collapse? European decolonization had a primarily positive effect on Europe, the way I see it. Perhaps some Africans would want to be controlled by Europe again, I don't see Europeans as willing to accept the offer though.

Lastly in your condemnation of decolonization, i'm not clear if you're truly arguing:
a) It was a wrong choice for the colonized people to seek independence
or
b) it was a wrong choice for the European nations to grant it to them

I think you'll find it hard to argue for (b) -- effectively that France should still be wasting lives and money fighting wars in Algeria and Vietnam, or that the UK should be trying to crush the Indians violently. It's easier to argue for (a) -- especially if you limit your argument to sub-Saharan Africa, where the borders were artificial, the national identity often nil, etc,etc.

For a thousand years before the mid nineteenth century, pretty much everyone agreed that equality between husbands and wives would destroy marriage and fatherhood.

Do you have a citation for that? It would surprise me to learn that such equality was even discussed about a thousand years ago.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 07:41:06PM *  5 points [-]

And conversely after European Colonialism was defeated, and the rule "We must not control other nations by force" firmly established, one gradually sees peace descend on the European continent itself,

Are you sure that's not just war fatigue following the world wars? Notable is that Europe experienced another period of peace of comparable length in the 19th century following the Napoleonic wars and the congress of Vienna. This despite that period being the height of colonialism.

and a decrease in the amount of interference in the Soviet and American spheres of influence too (Eastern Europe and South America respectively).

You fail to explain why this is obviously a good thing.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 08 October 2011 03:14:24PM *  -1 points [-]

I would need evidence that there is a part of my mind that specializes in judging whether proposed actions are good or evil.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 06:49:33PM 3 points [-]

You referred to some plans as good and some plans as evil; therefore, something in your mind must be making those judgements (I never said anything about specializing).

Comment author: PhilGoetz 07 October 2011 03:52:57AM *  1 point [-]

When I make an act based on what kind of a person I am, I make a choice. That's the compatibilist definition of choice.

I agree; but compatibilism is at odds with how people commonly use language. David DeAngelo says "Attraction isn't a choice", and by saying that he communicates the valuable lesson that you can't make a woman be attracted to you by convincing her to choose to be attracted to you. And yet, attraction is a choice, by the compatibilist definition. The compatibilist definition of "choice" ruins the word's usefulness, as it then fails to make any distinction... everything we do is a "choice" to the compatibilist, even breathing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 05:13:06AM 2 points [-]

David DeAngelo says "Attraction isn't a choice", and by saying that he communicates the valuable lesson that you can't make a woman be attracted to you by convincing her to choose to be attracted to you.

On the other hand it is possible to change someone's ethics, e.g., change their religion, make them vegetarian, by convincing them to change their religion, become a vegetarian, etc.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 08 October 2011 02:19:03AM *  -1 points [-]

This suggests you don't understand what people mean when they use the word "wisdom". As a first approximation think of wisdom as meaning real world experience.

I was parodying that view when I said it is "acquired automatically as a linear function of age." If you know of any studies that attempted to measure wisdom, or show correlations between different tests of wisdom, or between wisdom and outcomes, I'd be very interested in them.

I can't offhand think of any good uses of the word "wisdom" that would not be better replaced by some combination of "intelligent" and "knowledgeable". It is often used as a way to claim intelligence without having intelligence; or to criticize intelligent statements by saying they are not "wise", whatever that is.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 04:56:52AM *  2 points [-]

It has been observed that people with high intelligence, nonetheless, frequently do stupid things, including stupid things that many people with less intelligence get right (I don't think this is controversial, but can provide examples as necessary). I am, therefore, using "wisdom" to mean whatever is necessary besides intelligence to avoid doing stupid things.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 07 October 2011 03:38:38AM *  4 points [-]

I'll accept that willpower means something like the conscious mind trying to reign in the subconscious. But when you use that to defend the "ethics as willpower" view, you're assuming that the subconscious usually wants to do immoral things, and the conscious mind is the source of morality.

On the contrary, my subconscious is at least as likely to propose moral actions as my conscious. My subconscious mind wants to be nice to people. If anything, it's my conscious mind that comes up with evil plans; and my subconscious that kicks back.

I think there's a connection with the mythology of the werewolf. Bear with me. Humans have a tradition at least 2000 years long of saying that humans are better than animals because they're rational. We characterize beasts as bestial; and humans as humane. So we have the legend of the werewolf, in which a rational man is overcome by his animal (subconscious) nature and does horrible things.

Yet if you study wolves, you find they are often better parents and more devoted partners than humans are. Being more rational may let you be more effective at being moral; but it doesn't appear to give you new moral values.

(I once wrote a story about a wolf that was cursed with becoming human under the full moon, and did horrible things to become the pack alpha that it never could have conceived of as a wolf. It wasn't very good.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 04:40:02AM *  2 points [-]

On the contrary, my subconscious is at least as likely to propose moral actions as my conscious. My subconscious mind wants to be nice to people. If anything, it's my conscious mind that comes up with evil plans; and my subconscious that kicks back.

What do you call the part of your mind that judges whether proposed actions are good or evil?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 07 October 2011 03:56:02AM 0 points [-]

That's what happens when you take "thou shalt not modify thine own utility function" as a religious tenet.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 04:35:55AM 2 points [-]

That's what happens when you take "thou shalt not modify thine own utility function" as a religious tenet.

Wrong, the "religious tenet" is not "thou shalt not modify thine own utility function", but "minimize evil". Of course, being changed to no longer care about minimizing evil is not conducive to minimizing evil.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 07 October 2011 04:02:17AM -1 points [-]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. A utility function that is incoherent is not a utility function.

If it is acceptable for Eliezer to talk about having two utility functions, one that measures utilons and one that measures fuzzies, then it is equally acceptable to talk about having a single utility function, with respect to the question of whether humans are capable of having utility functions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 October 2011 04:32:30AM 1 point [-]

A utility function that is incoherent is not a utility function.

I was using the same not-quite strict definition of "utility function" that you seemed to be using in your post. In any case, I don't believe Eliezer ever called fuzzies a utility function.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 06 October 2011 02:56:05PM *  -1 points [-]

This is all true. But humans do not have utility functions... Humans are not the coherent, consistent agents you make them out to be.

If you think that's relevant, you should also go write the same comment on Eliezer's post on utilons and fuzzies. Having two coherent, consistent utility functions is no more realistic than having one.

If you want to be rational, you need to try to figure out what your values are, and what your utility function is. Humans don't act consistently. Whether their preferences can be described by a utility function is a more subtle question whose answer is unknown. But in either case, in order to be more rational, you need to be able to approximate your preferences with a utility function.

Fighting for willpower is basically your far-self trying to wrest control of your behavior from your near-self.

You can alternately describe this as the place where the part of your utility function that you call your far self, and the part of your utility function that you call your near self, sum to zero and provide no net information on what to do. You can choose to describe the resultant emotional confusion as "fighting for willpower". But this leads to the erroneous conclusions I described under the "ethics as willpower" section.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 October 2011 12:48:46AM 2 points [-]

Having two coherent, consistent utility functions is no more realistic than having one.

He never said these "utility functions" are coherent. In fact a large part of the problem is that the "fuzzies" utility function is extremely incoherent.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 06 October 2011 05:43:07AM *  2 points [-]

It helps to define your terms before philosophizing. I assume that you mean morality(a collection of beliefs as to what constitutes a good life) when you write ethics.

"Morality" is cognate with "mores", and has connotations of being a cultural construct (what I called social ethics) that an individual is not bound to (e.g, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do"). But my real answer is that neither of these terms are defined clearly enough for me to worry much over which one I used. I hope you found all terms sufficiently defined by the time you reached the end.

When you say you developed your morals based on reasoning and experience, how did reason help? Reasoning requires a goal. I don't think you can reason your way to a new terminal goal; so what do you mean when you say reasoning helped develop your morals? That it helped you know how better to achieve your goals, but without giving you any new goals?

If you say something like, "Reason taught me that I should value the wants of others as I value my own wants", I won't believe you. Reason can't do that. It might teach you that your own wants will be better-satisfied if you help other people with their wants. But that's different.

As for myself, everything I call "moral" comes directly out of my wants. I want things for myself, and I also want other people to be happy, and to like me. Everything else follows from that. I may have had to be conditioned to care about other people. I don't know. That's a nature/nurture argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2011 06:20:04AM *  1 point [-]

If you say something like, "Reason taught me that I should value the wants of others as I value my own wants", I won't believe you. Reason can't do that. It might teach you that your own wants will be better-satisfied if you help other people with their wants. But that's different.

You may have an overly narrow view of what is usually meant by the word "reason".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2011 06:12:21AM *  -1 points [-]

Part of your description of the "ethics is willpower" position appears to be a strawman, as other parts of the same description are accurate, I assume it is because you do not fully understand it:

Firstly the position would more accurately be called "ethics is willpower plus wisdom", but even that doesn't fully capture it. Let's go through your points one by one:

Ethics is specifically about when your desires conflict with the desires of others. Thus, ethics is only concerned with interpersonal relations.

No, it also includes delaying short-term gratification for long term benefits even to yourself.

There is a single, Platonic, correct ethical system for a given X. (X used to vary by social class but not by context or society. Nowadays it is allowed to vary by society and by context but not by social class.)

This is more or less correct.

Your desires and feelings are, if anything, anti-correlated with ethical behavior. Humans are naturally unethical. Being ethical is a continual, lifelong struggle.

No, it's just that when they agree we don't spend much efforts talking about it. This is similar to the reason people on lw focus on the flaws in human reasoning and not the many times it's correct.

The main purpose of ethics is to stop people from doing what they naturally want to do, so "thou shalt not" is more important than "thou shalt".

Well yes and no, there are positive imperatives as well as negative ones.

The key to being ethical is having the willpower not to follow your own utility function.

By "utility function" you seem to mean one's selfish desires and/or impulses.

Social ethics are encouraged by teaching people to "be good", where "good" is the whole social ethical code. Sometimes this is done without explaining what "good" is, since it is considered obvious, or perhaps more convenient to the priesthood to leave it unspecified. (See the Koran for an extreme example.)

No, in fact a large part of the "traditional education" was teaching people how to distinguish good from bad.

The key contrast is between "good" people who will do the moral thing, and "evil" people who do just the opposite. Turning an evil person into a good person can be done by reasoning with them, teaching them willpower, or convincing them they will be punished for being evil.

No problems with these two, except I'd potentially replace the "or" with an "and".

Ethical judgements are different from utility judgements. Utility is a tool of reason, and reason only tells you how to get what you want, whereas ethics tells you what you ought to want (or what you ought to do, whether you want to or not). Therefore utility judgements, and utilitarians, are unethical.

Except it's also possible to reason about what you should want so ethics and reason aren't opposed. Furthermore, once you've figured out what you should want you should also use reason to figure out how to go about it.

Human society requires spiritual guidance and physical force to stop people from using reason to seek their own utility. Religion is necessary even if it is false. Reason must be strictly subordinated to spiritual authority.

I don't entirely agree with these, but they are at least positions that a lot of people actually hold.

Smart people are less moral than dumb people, because reason is a handicap to ethical behavior.

Uhm no, see my note above about it being possible to reason about ethics. Unethical smart people, however, have the potential to be worse then unethical dumb people since they can better rationalize their misbehavior and go about doing it more effectively.

Since ethics are desirable, and yet contrary to human nature (including human reason),

That's like saying that reason is contrary to human nature because we have biases.

they prove that human values transcend logic, biology, and the material world, and derive from a spiritual plane of existence. If there is no God, and no spiritual world, then there is no such thing as good. Sartre: "There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it."

Even the people who hold this position believe it's still possible to reason about it.

You become better at making ethical decisions as you mature, because it requires willpower, which children notably lack; and wisdom, which is sort of the spiritual version of intelligence, except it is non-quantifiable, and is acquired automatically as a linear function of age.

This suggests you don't understand what people mean when they use the word "wisdom". As a first approximation think of wisdom as meaning real world experience.

A person's ethicality is a single dimension. Since ethicality is determined by the degree to which a person has willpower and subsumes their utility to social utility, each person will have a level of ethicality that will be the same in all domains. You can be a good person, an evil person, or somewhere in between - but that's it. You should not expect someone who cheats at cards to be courageous in battle, unless they really enjoy battle.

I suspect this is true to a similar extend that intelligence is a single dimension.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 October 2011 03:38:32AM 2 points [-]

The bit Landsburg cites indicates that the retraction was cordial and drama-free, the way a retraction should be--even a retraction of a claim as momentous as this one.

Now, is this kind of event more common in math than in other fields?

Yes, in fact I can't think of a retraction in math that wasn't.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 04 October 2011 05:04:26AM 4 points [-]

This doesn't deal with some of the common objections to Pascal's Wager. The problem of many competing religions is a serious one. Simply reducing yourself to the major religions is a difficult one. I'm also worried that every single part of the argument is completely and utterly isomorphic if one simply swapped Islam and Christianity and made the appropriate mapping.

This also relies on not just finding the simulation argument plausible but assigning it high probability. This seems like a bad idea when the laws of physics as far as we can tell don't seem to allow you to simulate n particles interacting with fewer than n particles. If this were not the case, there should be some k such any computation with k qbits can if properly configured model any computation of n qbits for any n. But BQP lies in PP and therefore lies in fact in PSPACE. So if quantum mechanics as we understand it is correct, simulating should be really tough. This cannot rule out simulations from universes with other laws of physics but I see no reasonable way to go about even starting to quantify that probability.

Also given that none of these religions claim that the deity is something like a simulator that should be a serious strike against the claims. Maybe arguably some forms of gnosticism and buddhism could be interpreted sort of that way if one squinted. But they aren't the religions in question here. So if anything the increased probability mass for them should decrease that for the other religions.

P(follow-thru) is difficult to estimate; I will set it somewhat arbitrarily as .1.

We now have p(chr) > .99 x .5 x .99 x .25 x .1 = .01225125. This is above 1%. As stipulated, your afterlife accounts for at least 99% of your utility if follow-thru (and hence chr) is true. It now appears we should accept Pascal's wager.

You'll forgive me if these numbers look just slightly too convenient.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2011 06:25:44AM *  2 points [-]

This cannot rule out simulations from universes with other laws of physics but I see no reasonable way to go about even starting to quantify that probability.

Unfortunately, you don't get to dismiss a possibility just because you're not sure how to quantify it.

Also given that none of these religions claim that the deity is something like a simulator that should be a serious strike against the claims.

Haven't read much theology have you? There are certainly theological schools of most religions that make versions of this claim. Hinduism, for example, claims that the universe is the dream of the god Brahman.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 October 2011 04:07:19AM *  9 points [-]

The point as I understand it was to have the humans not have exactly our moral system. Morals evolve over time, and most people in any given generation would be shocked by the ethical and moral attitudes of people a few generations down the line. This attitude of the population reflects that. It also helps broaden the scope of the questions raised by not making one of the moral systems identical to our general moral system, so we don't immediately look at the morality of the humans and just say "but that's the right system!"

Overall, while I think I understand why Eliezer did this, it seems to be a very tiny benefit for a very large distraction. Overall, a net negative in getting his points across.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2011 04:21:23AM 6 points [-]

It also has the potential to undermine the point of the story if a reader finds non-consensual sex as abhorrent as eating babies.

Comment author: Automaton 02 October 2011 03:00:47AM *  36 points [-]

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

Sam Harris, "Lying"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2011 03:46:31AM 6 points [-]

When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it.

As any decent defense attorney will tell you: if you're accused of something you didn't do, this is still an extremely bad approach.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 October 2011 10:29:10AM 13 points [-]

Saying chimps should be used "only when there is no other option" is the same as saying chimps should never be used. There are always other options.

No, it isn't the same. The meaning that is expressed by the authors and understood by most of their intended audience obviously includes a certain level of 'not entirely unrealistic or impractical' in what it takes to qualify as an 'option'. The authors are not entirely stupid and are clearly expressing something different to 'should never be used' when making that assertion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2011 09:20:47PM 9 points [-]

The meaning that is expressed by the authors and understood by most of their intended audience obviously includes a certain level of 'not entirely unrealistic or impractical' in what it takes to qualify as an 'option'.

The problem is that everybody has a different idea of what that level should be. Thus the authors are effectively relying on the illusion of transparency to make their proposal sound more reasonable then it is.

Comment author: lessdazed 02 October 2011 03:13:55AM 0 points [-]

What are the consequences of that?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2011 03:22:50AM 1 point [-]

We have no idea how to do expected utility calculations in these kind of situations. Furthermore, even if the AI figured out some way, e.g., using some form of renormalization, we have to reason to believe the result would at all resemble our preferences.

Comment author: lessdazed 01 October 2011 05:24:16AM *  0 points [-]

Why isn't something like this the answer?

The statement "Do X or I will cause maximum badness according to your desires by using magic powers," is so unlikely to be true that I don't know how one can justify being confident that the being uttering the statement would be more likely to do as it says than to do the opposite - if you give the being five dollars as it asked, it creates and painfully kills 3^^^^3 people, if you do not, nothing happens (when it had asked for five dollars as payment for not creating and torturing people).

How can you say that a magic being that either cares about your money or is obviously testing you would likely do as it said it would?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2011 03:11:47AM 1 point [-]

If one attempts to do calculations taking all permutations of Pascal's mugging into account, one gets ∞ − ∞ as the result of all one's expected utility calculations.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 September 2011 05:53:27PM 17 points [-]

It's not about transmitting information into the past - it's about the locality of causality. Consider Judea Pearl's classic graph with SEASONS at the top, SEASONS affecting RAIN and SPRINKLER, and RAIN and SPRINKLER both affecting the WETness of the sidewalk, which can then become SLIPPERY. The fundamental idea and definition of "causality" is that once you know RAIN and SPRINKLER, you can evaluate the probability that the sidewalk is WET without knowing anything about SEASONS - the universe of causal ancestors of WET is entirely screened off by knowing the immediate parents of WET, namely RAIN and SPRINKLER.

Right now, we have a physics where (if you don't believe in magical collapses) the amplitude at any point in quantum configuration space is causally determined by its immediate neighborhood of parental points, both spatially and in the quantum configuration space.

In other words, so long as I know the exact (quantum) state of the universe for 300 meters around a point, I can predict the exact (quantum) future of that point 1 microsecond into the future without knowing anything whatsoever about the rest of the universe. If I know the exact state for 3 meters around, I can predict the future of that point one nanosecond later. And so on to the continuous limit: the causal factors determining a point's infinitesimal future are screened off by knowing an infinitesimal spatial neighborhood of its ancestors.

This is the obvious analogue of Judea Pearl's Causality for continuous time; instead of discrete causal graphs, you have a continuous metric of relatedness (space) which shrinks to an infinitesimal neighborhood as you consider infinitesimal causal succession (time).

This, in turn, implies the existence of a fundamental constant describing how the neighborhood of causally related space shrinks as time diminishes, to preserve the locality of causal relatedness in a continuous physics.

This constant is, obviously, c.

I've never read this anywhere else, by the way. It clearly isn't universally understood, because if all physicists understood the universe in these terms, none of them would believe in a "collapse of the wavefunction", which is not locally related in the configuration space. I would be surprised neither to find that the above statement is original, nor that it has been said before.

I am attempting to bet that physics still looks like this after the dust settles. It's a stronger condition than global noncircularity of time - not all models with globally noncircular time have local causality.

If violating Lorentz invariance means that physics no longer looks like this, then I will bet at 99-to-1 odds against violations of Lorentz invariance. But I can't make out from the Wikipedia pages whether Lorentz violations mean the end of local causality (which I'll bet against) or if they're random weird physics (which I won't bet against).

I am also willing to bet that the fundamental constant c as it appears in multiple physical equations is the constant of time/space locality, i.e., the constant we know as c is fundamentally the shrinking constant by which an infinitesimal neighborhood in space causally determines an infinitesimal future in time. I am willing to lose the bet if there's still locality but the real size of the infinitesimal spatial neighborhood goes as 2c rather than c (though I'm not actually sure whether that statement is even meaningful in a Lorentz-invariant universe) and therefore you can use neutrinos to transmit information at up to twice the speed of light, but no faster. The clues saying that c is the fundamental constant that we should expect to see in any continuous analogue of a locally causal universe, are strong enough that I'll bet on them at 99-to-1 odds.

What I can't make out is whether Lorentz violation throws away locality; employs a more complicated definition of c which is different in some directions than others; makes the effect of the constant different on neutrinos and photons; or, well, what exactly.

I would happily amend the bet to be annulled in the case that any more complicated definition of c is adopted by which there is still a constant of time/space locality in causal propagation, but it makes photons and neutrinos move at different speeds.

The trouble is that physicists don't read books like Causality and don't understand local causality as part of the apparent character of physical law, which is why some of them still believe in the "collapse of the wavefunction" - it would be an exceptional physicist whom we could simply ask whether the Standard Model Extension preserves locally continuous causality with c as the neighborhood-size constant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 September 2011 05:09:26AM 8 points [-]

This is starting to remind me of Kant. Specifically is attempt to provide an a priori justification for the then known laws of physics. This made him look incredibly silly once relativity and quantum mechanics came along.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 September 2011 04:39:33AM 1 point [-]

If you want to look at the nature of religion in society, I recommend this essay by Nich Szabo.

Comment author: moridinamael 27 September 2011 08:13:54PM 2 points [-]

This begs the question, if Harry figure out the secret of the mirror, would he be able to construct an Occlumency proxy personality who didn't want the stone?

Of course there is no answer to this question except "Whatever the author decides."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2011 03:36:45AM 3 points [-]

The problem with Occlumency proxy personalities is that you have to be very careful, otherwise you're subject to Amnesiac Dissonance. The smarter the proxy personality, the worse a problem this is.

Comment author: rebellionkid 28 September 2011 12:33:17AM 0 points [-]

A lot of the "hate" between colleges is perpetuated in the same way as most Cambridge traditions. Freshers read on wikipedia what Cambridge traditions are and then emulate them. There is belief in belief that people from St Johns are horrible but not much more.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2011 03:21:38AM 4 points [-]

Well, these traditions somehow propagated before the internet.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 September 2011 01:51:58AM 6 points [-]

Yeah, see, I'm not betting against random cool new physics, I wouldn't offer odds like that on there not being a Higgs boson, I'm betting on the local structure of causality. Could I be wrong? Yes, but if I have to pay out that entire bet, it won't be the most interesting thing that happened to me that day.

How confident am I of this? Not just confident to offer to bet at 99-to-1 odds. Confident enough to say...

"Well, that was an easy, risk-free $202."

Or to put it even more plainly:

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. "Magic."

"Magic isn't enough to do that! You'd have to be a god!"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 September 2011 03:11:25AM 3 points [-]

I'm betting on the local structure of causality.

Not necessarily, there could be a distinguished frame of reference.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 25 September 2011 03:43:16PM *  15 points [-]

While I was reading Harry Potter, I kept thinking that the House system was destructive, both in terms of making people impose restrictions on themselves, and creating deep divisions in the wizarding world. Hogwarts is in this sense the primary cause of both the previous and the coming wizard war.

In Eliezer's fiction, it's more apparent that the Hogwarts house system is a mindless, destructive mechanism set in motion hundreds of years ago that no one person can change or escape. Even Dumbledore couldn't abolish the house system; the political pressure would pop him out of Hogwarts like a cork from a champagne bottle.

I don't understand why Dumbledore can't maintain order among the students and protect them from each other, though... it seems to be within the powers of the Hogwarts faculty, if they set their minds to it.

Dumbledore and McGonagall's weaknesses are more apparent in Eliezer's fiction. Which would score realism points with me, except that the deconstruction of the perfect Dumbledore is balanced by the imagination of a perfect Harry.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 September 2011 06:25:23PM 9 points [-]

While I was reading Harry Potter, I kept thinking that the House system was destructive, both in terms of making people impose restrictions on themselves, and creating deep divisions in the wizarding world.

It's based to the actual House system used in British boarding schools.

Comment author: TheatreAddict 25 September 2011 05:08:39AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. I'm pretty sure I understand now. Although I'm not sure why I get the correct answer when I'm working with the actual numbers and not percentages when I do the math wrong.

But when I do the math like you wrote, I get the right answer for the precentages. So I get that part. But aren't I ignoring the base rate in the actual numbers one? Or no?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 September 2011 06:00:51PM *  1 point [-]

But aren't I ignoring the base rate in the actual numbers one? Or no?

The actual numbers in the problem were chosen in such a way to make the base rates obvious. Here is another version using real numbers where the base rates aren't quiet so obvious, see if you can get it right:

"1 out of every 100 women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80 out of every 100 women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 96 out of every 1,000 women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 September 2011 05:50:18PM 4 points [-]

With cardinally encoded preferences, we can develop a utility function that represents our preferences and adheres to the common-sense criteria listed above.

But should we? What about utility monsters?

Comment author: p4wnc6 23 September 2011 04:19:52AM 0 points [-]

I am taking all pro athletes to be in the same skill class purely as my own approximation. I haven't supplied any evidence because I don't have any and I didn't claim that I did. I only have the loose statistics that my friend showed me in a few charts for the presentation he is making. I thought it was obvious from my post that I was speculating a plausible explanation given what appears to be evidence that the physical parameters of games have evolved to produce certain statistical regularities in performance.

When you move away from professional caliber athletes, these statistical regularities go away (i.e. pro baseball has a total on-base percentage of about 0.5 but high school baseball is much less). My personal experience playing high school and college sports leads me to believe that as the skill level increases, the variance among the participants goes down rapidly. I felt it was reasonable to extrapolate from this for the sake of an anecdotal comment on a discussion post.

But by all means, if you need every statement I made to be qualified with direct evidence, you should seek better sources than my off the cuff remarks. I never claimed otherwise.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 September 2011 04:30:03AM *  1 point [-]

I felt it was reasonable to extrapolate from this for the sake of an anecdotal comment on a discussion post.

It would if the anecdotal comment was at least Bayesian evidence for the claim in question.

But by all means, if you need every statement I made to be qualified with direct evidence, you should seek better sources than my off the cuff remarks. I never claimed otherwise.

I didn't expect scientific evidence. What I do expect is for valid evidence of some kind, even anecdotal. Your statement was a complete non sequitur. Sorry, if this wasn't clear.

Comment author: p4wnc6 23 September 2011 04:00:52AM *  0 points [-]

But there's already much more than a tiny variation in skill among the 50% of runners who make it on base. I think the statements indicate a broader trend: among athletes who are collectively within the same skill class, the arrangement of the playing surfaces play a more dominant role than individual variation in athlete skill.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 September 2011 04:07:54AM 2 points [-]

I think the statements indicate a broader trend: among athletes who are collectively within the same skill class, the arrangement of the playing surfaces play a more dominant role than individual variation in athlete skill.

This is trivially true of you define skill classes narrowly enough. If the non-trivial claim your trying to make is that the class of all professional athletes is such a skill class, you have yet to present any valid evidence for your claim.

Comment author: p4wnc6 23 September 2011 12:52:10AM *  16 points [-]

I played high school football in Indiana and was also very good academically. I suffered quite a bit of heckling from teammates for being a "nerd." I also have a friend who is a grad student with me now that had a similar experience growing up in Colorado and he had a very good way of describing the typical coaching strategy:

Say you are a basketball coach with 4 players all lining up to practice their free throws. Suppose all of them usually have an accuracy of about 85%, which is pretty good. In the first 10 attempts, though, it could easily be the case that Player 1 happened to miss a lot and only made 4 shots, Players 2 and 3 happened to make 7 and 8 shots respectively, and player 10, through statistical oddity, happened to make all 10 shots.

The coach will usually do the following: because Player 1 made the fewest shots, the coach will yell or offer some kind of critical instruction. Because Player 4 made all 10, the coach will offer praise and positive comments. The other two players are more or less where they should be, so the coach won't really single them out for extra attention.

Due to regression to the mean, as the number of free throw attempts gets large, all the players will converge to their expected percentage of 85%, making between 8 and 9 shots out of every 10. What will the coach believe has happened?

Yelling or being critical of the player who randomly got off to a bad start must have caused that player to improve and pick up the slack and get back up to the usual level. Praising the player who randomly got off to a good start caused them to slack off and drop back down to the normal level. Not saying anything to the two who got off to a normal start ultimately had no effect.

So, if you're a coach, yelling makes bad players do better and praising makes good players do worse. Thus, regression to the mean will reinforce the idea that you should just yell at the people doing below average. I found this to be a particularly illuminating way to look at it. This may also be true for bosses in a typical work environment.

On a side note, this same friend has pooled some very interesting statistics about American sports. For example, if you plot the location of the pitcher's mound as a distance from home plate and you look at how that distance has changed over time, what you'll see is basically a perfect example of the bisection method for root finding, where in the case of baseball, the number that the pitching distance controls is the percentage chance of a given batter getting on base. The current pitcher's distance causes there to be about a 0.5 probability of any given batter making it on base, which is maximum entropy (maximum surprise) from a fan's perspective. Similar results hold for the specifications for field goal posts in football and the three-point line, free-throw line, and basket height in basketball. In basketball, these settings basically cause a 0.4 field goal percentage for all shots across all players in a game... again very good for high entropy and high scoring.

Basically, your athletic skill only matters to get you into the pro game. Once you're there, the statistical settings of the playing surfaces makes it essentially a random competition. This is less true in college sports where talent distributions are more skewed, but still plays a role.

The rationalist in me wishes we would just have competitive coin flipping and get it over with.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 September 2011 02:58:52AM *  4 points [-]

Basically, your athletic skill only matters to get you into the pro game. Once you're there, the statistical settings of the playing surfaces makes it essentially a random competition. This is less true in college sports where talent distributions are more skewed, but still plays a role.

Perhaps, but the data you present don't constitute evidence for this proposition. In fact, the only reason they appear to support the above statement is because of cognitive anchoring to talking about probability and especially the probability 1/2, which somehow feels more random then other probabilities. If anything, having the pitcher's distance set so that on average 1/2 the runners make it to first base makes tiny differences in skill more significant.

Comment author: potato 20 September 2011 03:42:16AM 0 points [-]

See end of second to last paragraph, I just added that before I read your comment, sorry bout that.

But regardless: I can make the problems I win very diverse, even if they are all solved problems. I think that takes care of the non-general heuristic problem. And of course, there's a reason I specify that I'm not allowed to know the answer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2011 04:21:02AM *  6 points [-]

And of course, there's a reason I specify that I'm not allowed to know the answer.

What about finding someone who does and asking them for hints?

But regardless: I can make the problems I win very diverse, even if they are all solved problems.

The probability distribution over the types of problems you encounter will still be different. For example, if a problem was a known solution, it can be solved using a known method so a good strategy is to try various known methods until one works. Whereas if a problem is unsolved especially if it has been unsolved for a long time, that's a sign that known methods won't work on it, so you'll need to develop new methods.

A useful analogy, courtesy of the martial art of rationality, is the difference between a 'friendly fight' and a real fight, i.e., one where each opponent is trying to seriously injure or kill the other. Just as most one must practice in friendly fights before one is ready for a real fight, one must practice on problems with known solutions before one is ready to attack unsolved problems. However, without real fights to keep people honest you get schools proliferating without evidence.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 September 2011 03:37:01AM *  2 points [-]

I can test reliability of win by taking a bunch of different problems with known answers that I don't know, solving them using my current conception of rationality and solving them using the alternative conception of rationality I want to test, then checking the answers I arrived at with each conception against the right answers.

You have just limited yourself to only solving problems others have solved before (and trusting their answers). Furthermore by restricting yourself to only the category of problems with known answers you will find that you can develop heuristics that don't apply to general problems. In particular the most effective way to solve a problem with a known answer is usually to track down that answer.

Edit: Also you're restricting yourself to the class of problems with well-defined 'right answers', that's a very restricted class of problems.

Comment author: CronoDAS 19 September 2011 01:10:44AM 0 points [-]

I never understood willpower. If you don't want to do something, you could always, well, not do it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2011 01:57:48AM *  3 points [-]

Willpower is the ability to force yourself to do something even if you "don't feel like doing it", as you put it, because the action in question has consequences you want.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2011 08:12:30PM 11 points [-]
In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality and Video Games
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 08:50:55PM 6 points [-]
In response to Your favorite pdfs?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 06:10:02PM 4 points [-]

Thomas Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict". Pdf version here thanks to Alicorn.

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 12:54:02AM 1 point [-]

I have left it ambiguous on purpose. What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.

IDEALLY: Universal means everyone should have a right to as much health service as is necessary for their bodies and minds functioning as well as it can, if they ask for it. That would include education, coaching, and sports, among many others. And nobody should ever be allowed to die if they don't want to and there's any way of preventing it.

Between "leaving anyone to die because they don't have the money or assets to pay for their treatment"[your question puzzles me, what part of this scenario don't you understand] and "spending all our country's budget on progressively changing the organs of seventy-year-.olds", there's a lot of intermediate points. The touchy problem is deciding how much we want to pay for, and how, and who pays it for whom, No matter how you cut the cake, given our current state of development, at some point you have to say X person dies in spite of their will because either they can't afford to live or because *his can't". So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 04:35:33AM 11 points [-]

So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Yes, it's amazing how many bad decisions are made because it's heartbreaking to just say no.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 16 September 2011 09:59:29PM 3 points [-]

Free universal health care is a good thing in itself; the question is whether or not that's worth the costs of higher taxes and any bureaucratic inefficiencies that may exist.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 04:26:49AM 2 points [-]

Free universal health care is a good thing in itself

The healthcare isn't actually "free". It's either paid for individually, collectively on a national level, or some intermediate level, e.g., insurance companies. The question is what the most efficient way to deliver it is?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 31 July 2011 11:11:19PM *  2 points [-]

(I'm curious, why is it countably infinite rather than uncountably infinite?) I had assumed, perhaps quite ridiculously, that there was some silly improper or uniform-like distribution, then for shorthand just called that prior a uniform distribution. The reason I'd assumed that is because I remembered Tegmark not seeming to be worried about the problem in one of his longer more-detailed multiverse papers despite saying he wasn't fond of Schmidhuber's preference for the universal or speed priors; or something like that? I'm pretty sure he explicitly considered it though. I feel silly for not having actually looked it up myself. Anyway, is there some halfway sane equivalent to talking about a uniform prior here? (Are improper priors not too meaningless/ugly for this purpose?) (Warning, I might edit this comment as I read or re-read the relevant Wikipedia articles.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 September 2011 10:16:43PM *  1 point [-]

Anyway, is there some halfway sane equivalent to talking about a uniform prior here?

Yes, (depending what you mean by half-way sane). You can have a prior that all your sense inputs are uniformly distributed. This prior is stable since no matter what sense inputs you experience they're just as likely as any other. For reasons that should be obvious, I certainly don't recommend adopting this prior.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 01 September 2011 02:35:56PM 5 points [-]

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious.

I dislike how readers think an argument is more persuasive when it repeats a simple idea over and over again repeatedly many times with hardly any variation or change in content at all despite the simplicity of the idea. Chesterton could've just written "the wall has a purpose, don't be an idiot" and for the attentive reader that'd have been enough.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 September 2011 09:44:27PM 2 points [-]

Chesterton could've just written "the wall has a purpose, don't be an idiot" and for the attentive reader that'd have been enough.

Well for the attentive reader the whole argument itself was probably unnecessary.

Comment author: jhuffman 16 September 2011 05:20:16PM -1 points [-]

I would argue that the US, Germany and Japan were on a path to war without more choice for any one of the parties. Both sides were making overt hostile actions, which provoked escalating responses. I think freezing a country's assets is as blatant an act of aggression as interdicting shipments of material aid to Britain. I don't know if we disagree, but I disagree with your wording. I'd say the US, Germany and Japan all chose to fight.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 September 2011 08:07:56PM 4 points [-]

This strikes me as an example of the fallacy of gray together with a slice of pretending to be wise by suspending judgement.

Comment author: jhuffman 16 September 2011 05:29:52PM 0 points [-]

Yes I think all of those are pretty common views, although the question of justness itself maybe isn't so important in terms of an enduring reaction to that war. To the extent Vietnam was still on people's minds at the beginning of this century perhaps it was as a more generalized example of many ways in which a war can become confounded and much more costly than we would like to think possible. Before Vietnam who could have thought a small country of such limited resources could successfully defy the greatest superpower ever known to the world?

In contrast at the start of the Iraq war most people knew it was at least possible, and it seems more than one apologist for the war had to answer the question of "how Iraq isn't Vietnam". By this time we knew that simply calculating the strategic simplicity with which we would dominate the seas, skies and (broadly) land was insufficient.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 September 2011 08:00:34PM 1 point [-]

Before Vietnam who could have thought a small country of such limited resources could successfully defy the greatest superpower ever known to the world?

To be fair, said country was being backed by the second greatest superpower in the world.

Comment author: Multiheaded 03 September 2011 09:21:11AM 3 points [-]

I disagree. A lot of human conducts that I find virtuous, such as compassion or tolerance, have no immediate connection with the truth, and sometimes they are best served with white lies.

For example, all the LGBTQ propaganda spoken at doubting conservatives, about how people are either born gay or they aren't, and how modern culture totally doesn't make young people bisexual, no sir. We're quite innocent, human sexuality is set in stone, you see. Do you really wish to hurt your child for what they always were? What is this "queer agenda" you're speaking about?

Tee-hee :D

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 September 2011 01:27:49AM 2 points [-]

You may want to carefully consider this comment.

Comment author: Incorrect 15 September 2011 03:05:30AM 3 points [-]

You can't always do it like that in the least convenient possible world.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 03:17:12AM 1 point [-]

You seem to be misunderstanding of the purpose of the "least convenient possible world". The idea is that if your interlocutor gives a weak argument and you can think of a way to strengthen it you should attempt to answer the strengthened version. You should not be invoking "least convenient possible world" to self sabotage attempts to solve problems in the real world.

Comment author: Swimmer963 15 September 2011 03:03:03AM 1 point [-]

Maybe dividing things into a continuum of 'under the individual's control' to 'beyond the individual's control' doesn't make sense. It's still something my brain tries to do, and it still feels unfair that intelligence would so strongly determine outcomes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 03:07:13AM 1 point [-]

Could you give an example of what you would consider 'fair'?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 02:47:57AM *  3 points [-]

Another way to think about this, modify your utility function to care about your precommitments.

To use your example:

For example, in nuclear war why would you ever retaliate? Once you know your strategy of nuclear deterrence has failed, shooting back will only cause more civilian casualties.

Of course, not retaliating will ensure that the future of humanity is dominated by the evil values (if I didn't consider their values evil, why did I get into a nuclear standoff with them?) of someone who is, furthermore, willing to start an nuclear war.

I personally find that much more terrifying then the deaths of a few of their civilians in this generation.

Comment author: Swimmer963 15 September 2011 02:25:26AM 6 points [-]

"being under the individual’s control" in the sense you mean is not a meaningful concept.

It feels like a meaningful concept. For example, if I want to learn how to draw, or run a marathon, these are skills that most people can learn through approximately the same process, with a little willpower. Some people find it easier than others, but barring physical disability, almost anyone can train to run that marathon. If I decide I want to be more intelligent (rather than knowledgeable), there doesn't seem to be any way to increase this through practice and willpower, and not just anyone can train enough to, say, complete a degree in math.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 02:42:16AM 1 point [-]

Well, even by this definition success will always be based on things beyond an individual's control. I'm assuming you mean success at something zero-sum like status. After all, since people will try their hardest to succeed (to their innate limits of willpower and drive), the factor distinguishing success form failure cannot be under their control.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 02:05:05AM 4 points [-]

Internalize the logic of why precommitments are useful.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 02:01:23AM 2 points [-]

(I hate the idea of intelligence, something not under the individual’s control and thus unfair-seeming, being that important to success, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.)

Unless you believe in libertarian free will, "being under the individual’s control" in the sense you mean is not a meaningful concept.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 September 2011 12:41:57AM 3 points [-]

If you'll indulge me some just-so-story type speculation, I suspect the reason striking visuals are more persuasive then words is that we evolved to expect others to manipulate us through language, we didn't evolve to expect to be manipulated through visuals.

That's a really interesting hypothesis. I would have guessed that it is just due to humans being very visual beings. I'd be really interested in seeing a way of testing your hypothesis. Another alternative hypothesis- people are more likely to dismiss simple assertions but graphs signal that someone has spent time and effort thinking about the issue in question. Moreover, knowing how to make a graph signals minimal intelligence so people are more likely to give credence?

Perhaps; on the other hand, this strikes me as a mild form of the infamous love-bombing technique.

That seems disconnected. Love-bombing involves making a set of emotional connections to the claims or people in question. This doesn't connect the emotion to the claims that are then evaluated later.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 01:28:57AM *  4 points [-]

I would have guessed that it is just due to humans being very visual beings.

Well, we're also verbal beings, in fact most of our explicit rationality ability is verbal rather than visual.

I'd be really interested in seeing a way of testing your hypothesis.

I haven't thought of a good way to do this. However, one way to test your "it is just due to humans being very visual beings" is to take advantage of the fact that people differ greatly about how visual they are.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 September 2011 12:41:57AM 3 points [-]

If you'll indulge me some just-so-story type speculation, I suspect the reason striking visuals are more persuasive then words is that we evolved to expect others to manipulate us through language, we didn't evolve to expect to be manipulated through visuals.

That's a really interesting hypothesis. I would have guessed that it is just due to humans being very visual beings. I'd be really interested in seeing a way of testing your hypothesis. Another alternative hypothesis- people are more likely to dismiss simple assertions but graphs signal that someone has spent time and effort thinking about the issue in question. Moreover, knowing how to make a graph signals minimal intelligence so people are more likely to give credence?

Perhaps; on the other hand, this strikes me as a mild form of the infamous love-bombing technique.

That seems disconnected. Love-bombing involves making a set of emotional connections to the claims or people in question. This doesn't connect the emotion to the claims that are then evaluated later.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 01:06:05AM 3 points [-]

Another alternative hypothesis- people are more likely to dismiss simple assertions but graphs signal that someone has spent time and effort thinking about the issue in question.

This effect certainly exists, this is a special case of the reason the conjunction fallacy is frequently a good heuristic.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 September 2011 11:47:51PM 1 point [-]

This doesn't seem to be dark arts to me. The use of graphs as a persuasive element seems to use the fact that graphs are visual and striking and so can overcome our cognitive defenses which prevent updating. This may connected to why graphs are such a useful mode of communication. Similarly, starting people off where they feel good about themselves may simply reduce the level which they feel a need to defend their beliefs as part of themselves.

So I don't see either of these as Dark Arts per se.

I am puzzled by the downvotes. I suspect that they may be coming from the title of the post which is unfortunate because people can read the link to see that the relevant methods worked on people across the political spectrum about issues they were otherwise unwilling to examine.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 September 2011 12:34:16AM *  6 points [-]

The use of graphs as a persuasive element seems to use the fact that graphs are visual and striking and so can overcome our cognitive defenses which prevent updating. This may connected to why graphs are such a useful mode of communication.

The impression I got from the description in the article is that without the graph subjects didn't believe that the data were accurate, with the graph they did. This, even though the existence of the graph doesn't provide any additional evidence about the accuracy of the underlying data.

If you'll indulge me some just-so-story type speculation, I suspect the reason striking visuals are more persuasive then words is that we evolved to expect others to manipulate us through language, we didn't evolve to expect to be manipulated through visuals.

Similarly, starting people off where they feel good about themselves may simply reduce the level which they feel a need to defend their beliefs as part of themselves.

Perhaps; on the other hand, this strikes me as a mild form of the infamous love-bombing technique.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2011 11:16:12PM 6 points [-]

Piece of advise: If you find that one of your deeply held beliefs is being promoted through dark arts, you may want to have a crisis of faith to determine whether your own reasons for holding the belief are valid.

Comment author: djcb 14 September 2011 06:21:19AM 1 point [-]

I was referring to Abu Graib because of the big public reaction to that - not because it was the worst thing ever per se, but because of the scandal it caused due to these photos. That damaged the war effort quite a bit, I think.

I don't think "the other side does it too, and worse" is a valid justification. Even putting the ethics aside, it is very bad PR, makes you loose support and makes reaching your goals so much harder.

In response to comment by djcb on 9/11 as mindkiller
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2011 06:55:27AM 2 points [-]

not because it was the worst thing ever per se, but because of the scandal it caused due to these photos.

So you agree that the media reaction to Abu Graib cannot be justified as a rational reaction to those photos. The question thus arises why the media reaction was what it was? I believe the answer is because a lot of people in the media were already opposed to the war and thus were looking for any excuse to show it in a negative light.

Comment author: lessdazed 14 September 2011 05:55:15AM 0 points [-]

It was gratuitous. This is unlike other situations with worse consequences like death, such as when an explosive goes off-course or a target is misidentified.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2011 06:13:04AM *  1 point [-]

The examples I had in mind were also gratuitous. This is an example of what I was referring to.

Or to use an example from the Iraq war, consider that at the time standard operating procedure from the insurgents was to behead captives on camera.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 September 2011 02:26:16AM *  1 point [-]

That's a good point. The reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing and other domestic terrorism (such as the Unabomber) supports your analysis.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on 9/11 as mindkiller
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2011 04:46:57AM 3 points [-]

I think it had more to do with the scope of the attack. For example, the response to the first trade center bombing was comparable to the response to Oklahoma city.

Comment author: djcb 13 September 2011 09:30:07PM 0 points [-]

Right and wrong are difficult concepts here; are we looking at the stated goals, the (hidden) real intentions, the outcomes... to what extent do tactical mistakes influence this. I mean, suppose things had stabilized after major combat; I bet many more people would consider it a 'just war' then, without such outrages like Abu Graib or the helicopter shooting video.

It's interesting to see how some of the problems on the tactical level seem to have influenced the Libian approach, where western powers are pushing their agendas and determine the outcome of the conflict, but keep their hands relatively clean.

Finally, I'm impressed how well most LW'ers handle such a 'mind killer' topic.

In response to comment by djcb on 9/11 as mindkiller
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2011 04:37:39AM 2 points [-]

without such outrages like Abu Graib

How does Abu Graib qualify as an outrage compared to the kinds of things that are typically done by all sides, even in wars you'd probably consider just? For that matter compare Abu Graib with how our enemies in this routinely treat captives.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 September 2011 04:07:17AM 3 points [-]

You may want to add Katja Grace's blog: http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/

In response to comment by Khoth on What does it take?
Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 September 2011 03:16:29PM *  5 points [-]

If you aren't starting with a prior of 0 or demanding a posterior of 1, what's the problem?

Strictly speaking this isn't the only way you can be not convinced. I can assign a non-zero prior to something even if there's no evidence that can cause me to update. Pick some non-falsifiable hypothetical entity whose sole behavior is that it doesn't interact with the universe in any testable way. I can consistently assign a non-zero probability to its existence (and in fact can consistently assign any probability I choose) but no matter what probability I start with you won't be able to make me update my probability.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on What does it take?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2011 08:14:18AM *  2 points [-]

Not necessarily. For example, if I showed you a theory of physics that's simpler if you postulate such an entity's existence, you might very well update your estimate due to Occam's razor.

This, incidentally, is what Eliezer's argument for many worlds boils down to.

Comment author: TobyBartels 12 September 2011 06:55:11PM 4 points [-]

Sniffnoy may have more examples, but here are some that I know:

  • Every subset of the real line is Lebesgue-measurable.
  • Every subset of the real line has the Baire property (in much the same vein as the preceding one).
  • The axiom of determinacy (a statement in infinitary game theory).

Adding the first two to ZF + DC (dependent choice) is consistent (assuming that ZFC + Con(ZFC) is consistent, as just about everybody believes), and this gives a "dream universe" for analysis in which, for example, any everywhere-defined linear operator between Hilbert spaces is bounded.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 September 2011 08:02:22AM 4 points [-]

Adding the first two to ZF + DC (dependent choice) is consistent (assuming that ZFC + Con(ZFC) is consistent, as just about everybody believes)

This isn't quite right. The consistency of ZF + DC + "every subset of R is Lebesgue measurable" is equivalent to the consistency of an inaccessible cardinal, which is a much stronger assumption then the consistency of ZFC + Con(ZFC).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2011 11:55:50PM *  2 points [-]

You should probably add Nick Szabo's other site: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ in addition to unenumerated.

Comment author: TobyBartels 11 September 2011 09:08:00PM 3 points [-]

I would expect those who know the axioms from memory to be more philosophically sophisticated (i.e. non-Platonist), and to be more likely to be familiar with technical results such as Gödel's theorem that ZFC is as consistent as ZF.

They're also more likely to know Cohen's theorem that ZF + not(AC) is also just as consistent. And of course, being philosophically sophisticated, it's clear to me that they would be more likely to realise that the axioms of ZFC are fairly arbitrary and no better than many others. They're also more likely to know, and to appreciate the philosophical significance of, that there are many axiom systems that are strong enough to do most mathematics (including all concretely applied mathematics) and yet much weaker (hence more surely consistent) than ZFC (although this has little to do with AC as such).

However, when arguing about what philosophically sophisticated people are going to think, we're both naturally inclined to think that they'll agree with ourselves, so our impressions about that prove nothing.

If AC skepticism were not low-status, you would expect to find papers and textbooks actively rejecting AC results

You do find such things (but they are mostly published in certain journals, which we can tell are low-status, since such things are published in them).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2011 11:23:04PM 4 points [-]

However, when arguing about what philosophically sophisticated people are going to think, we're both naturally inclined to think that they'll agree with ourselves, so our impressions about that prove nothing.

I'm not sure about that. You and komponisto seem to be using 'philosophically sophisticated' to contrast with Platonism. This use strikes me as similar to how arguing that 'death is good' is sophisticated, i.e., showing of your intelligence by providing convincing arguments for a position that violates common sense. In this case arguing that mathematical statements don't have inherent truth value.

Remember just because you can make a sophisticated sounding argument for a preposition doesn't mean its true.

Comment author: komponisto 10 September 2011 01:34:59AM *  0 points [-]

Most mathematicians could not state the axioms of ZFC from memory. My suspicion is that AC skepticism is highest among mathematicians who can.

I don't see why this is even relevant, but for what it's worth, I don't particularly share this suspicion: I would expect those who know the axioms from memory to be more philosophically sophisticated (i.e. non-Platonist), and to be more likely to be familiar with technical results such as Gödel's theorem that ZFC is as consistent as ZF.

My own impression is that professed "AC skepticism" (scarequotes because I think it's a not-even-wrong confusion) is most correlated not with interest in logic and foundations, but with working in finitary, discrete, or algebraic areas of mathematics where AC isn't much used.

One piece of evidence that AC skepticism is not low-status is that papers and textbooks will often emphasize when a proof uses AC, or when a result is equivalent to AC. People find such things interesting.

The fact that people find such things interesting is at best extremely weak evidence for the proposition that constructivism and related positions are mainstream. (After all, I find such things interesting!)

As I pointed out in the comment linked to above, there is a difference between dinner-party acknowledgement of constructivism (which is widespread) and actually taking it seriously enough to worry about whether one's results are correct (which would be considered eccentric).

If AC skepticism were not low-status, you would expect to find papers and textbooks actively rejecting AC results, rather than merely mentioning in a remark or footnote that AC is involved. (Such footnotes are for use at dinner parties.)

And also, texts just as frequently do not bother to make apologies of the sort you allude to. A fairly random example I recently noticed was on p.98 of Algebraic Geometry by Hartshorne, where Zorn's Lemma is used without any more apology than an exclamation point at the end of the (parenthetical) sentence.

But what do status considerations have to do with whether Yudkowsky's beliefs and hunches are justified?

It tends to irritate me when people get something wrong which they could easily have gotten right by using a standard human heuristic (such as the "status heuristic", noticing what the prestigious position is).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 September 2011 09:27:42PM 3 points [-]

My own impression is that professed "AC skepticism" (scarequotes because I think it's a not-even-wrong confusion) is most correlated not with interest in logic and foundations, but with working in finitary, discrete, or algebraic areas of mathematics where AC isn't much used.

This is also my experience.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 September 2011 12:26:40AM 5 points [-]

One think always bothered me about this post. Its main thrust appears to be that one should use (something like) a Komogorov prior rather than one's intuitive prior because that is what the universe looks like, except we then adjust this prior with the same evidence we used to determine what the prior should be. That seems like double-counting evidence.

Comment author: Prismattic 09 September 2011 02:30:16AM 1 point [-]

I sense that I again did a poor job conveying something here, so let me try again. I am not arguing whether or not self-described libertarians of differing stripes would deny each other the libertarian label if they could -- I'm well aware how bitter the disagreements between beltway "cosmotarians" and Mises types get.

Rather, what I am saying is that I think anyone of any political leaning has a valid objection to self-described libertarians using that moniker, because the label itself is an applause light (it's not really functioning as one in the current US political context, but that is because it is already serving as a tribal marker).

It's somewhat similar to the annoying tendency in the US to refer to politically active people with puritanical sexual mores as "values voters", as if it were not the case that everyone believes their vote is an expression of their values.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 September 2011 06:30:02AM 3 points [-]

Rather, what I am saying is that I think anyone of any political leaning has a valid objection to self-described libertarians using that moniker, because the label itself is an applause light (it's not really functioning as one in the current US political context, but that is because it is already serving as a tribal marker).

Do you think this applies even more so to people using "liberal" as their moniker?

Comment author: [deleted] 06 September 2011 04:25:17PM 0 points [-]

Well, I trust well-written computer programs as much or more as I trust my own pen-and-paper stuff, but otherwise that's pretty accurate. I'm uncomfortable with claims about the existence of 3^^^3, for instance.

"Uncomfortable" isn't just empty skepticism, it's shorthand for something precise: I think that by reasoning about very large numbers (say, large enough that it's physically impossible to so reason without appealing to induction) it might be possible to give a valid proof of a false statement.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 September 2011 01:16:33AM 2 points [-]

What about something like 10^100, i.e., something you could easily wright out in decimal but couldn't count to?

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 08 September 2011 09:25:33PM 0 points [-]

If the DuncanBot detects a source code different from its own, it runs that source code. So a DuncanBot looks to any CliqueBot like a member of it's clique.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 September 2011 12:23:22AM 2 points [-]

I meant what happens when a DucanBot meats a DicanBot that does the same thing but has trivial cosmetic differences in its source code?

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 07 September 2011 11:59:20PM *  2 points [-]

This could be fixed with a trivial modification: first check if the opponent source code is identical to your own, and if it is then cooperate. Otherwise run the other bot's source.

However, there's another problem: If DuncanS's strategy plays against a CooperateBot or a random bot, it will throw away a lot of points.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 September 2011 06:00:20AM 1 point [-]

This could be fixed with a trivial modification: first check if the opponent source code is identical to your own, and if it is then cooperate.

This doesn't solve the slightly different CliqueBots won't cooperate with each other problem.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 September 2011 10:22:20AM 8 points [-]

We don't optimize for well-being, we optimize for what we (think we) want, which are two very different things.

Natural selection does not cease operation. Say, for example, that someone invents a box that fully reproduces in every respect the subjective experience of eating and of having eaten by directly stimulating the brain. Dieters would love this device. Here's a device that implements in extreme form the very danger that you fear. In this case, the specific danger is that you will stop eating and die.

So the question is, will the device wipe out the human race? Almost certainly it will not wipe out the entire human race, simply because there are enough people around who would nevertheless choose to eat despite the availability of the device, possibly because they make a conscious decision to do so. These people will be the survivors, and they will reproduce, and their children will have both their values (transmitted culturally) and their genes, and so will probably be particularly resistant to the device.

That's an extreme case. In the actual case, there are doubtless many people who are not adapting well to technological change. They will tend to die out disproportionately, will tend to reproduce disproportionately less.

We have a model of this future in today's addictive drugs. Some people are more resistant to the lure of addictive drugs than others. Some people's lives are destroyed as they pursue the unnatural bliss of drugs, but many people manage to avoid their fate.

Many people have so far managed the trick of pursuing super stimuli without destroying their lives in the process.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread: September 2011
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 September 2011 07:46:24AM 19 points [-]

Keep in mind, it's possible to evolve to extinction.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 September 2011 09:56:42PM -1 points [-]

I think the fact that considering the set of all ordinals leads to trouble should make you somewhat uncomfortable with the set of countable ordinals.

I'd go a step further and say you should be uncomfortable with the set of finite ordinals. But maybe these are the more basic criticisms you're talking about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2011 06:08:40AM 2 points [-]

Why not go even further and declare yourself uncomfortable with any finite set of ordinals bigger then what you've personally written down?

Comment author: [deleted] 06 September 2011 05:37:15AM 2 points [-]

For essentially the same reasons I have trouble believing that the first infinite ordinal exists.

Finite ordinals are computable, but otherwise your remarks still apply if you swap out "countable" for "finite." According to ZF there are uncomputable sets of finite ordinals, so you can't verify that they are well-ordered algorithmically.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2011 06:01:41AM 4 points [-]

For essentially the same reasons I have trouble believing that the first infinite ordinal exists.

So what you're saying is that you don't believe the natural numbers exist.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2011 05:56:25AM 5 points [-]

There is one more lesson that I have learned: the strategies which I considered most beautiful (U and C1) played poorly and were the first to be eliminated from the pool. Both U and C1 tried to experiment with the opponent's behaviour and use the results to construct a working model thereof. But that didn't work in this setting: while those strategies were losing points experimenting, dumb mechanical tit-for-tats were maximising their gain. There are situations when the cost of obtaining knowledge is higher than the knowledge is worth, and this was one of such situations.

I think the problem with U was that in practice it quickly wound up playing all defect against tit-for-tat style strategies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 September 2011 02:30:22PM 2 points [-]

Well, it's already September 5th. Where are the results?

Comment author: wedrifid 04 September 2011 03:10:26PM *  1 point [-]

While never being explicitly discussed either way casual destruction of artifacts as powerful as the deathly hallows doesn't happen in Harry Potter. It occurring in the movies is something new and I am comfortable with my initial reaction of surprise and disappointment. I hope MoR doesn't base its own magical reality on the one evidently depicted in the movies because it just wouldn't be either as appealing or as coherent.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 September 2011 03:56:50PM 2 points [-]

What's wrong with having powerful objects that are easy to destroy? I mean most advanced pieces of technology in our world aren't that hard to destroy, or at least render inoperable.

Comment author: Xachariah 04 September 2011 08:05:52AM 1 point [-]

I assume that at a certain power level, even magic can't protect you. Atlantis at full power probably couldn't defend itself against, say, a gamma ray burst, a black hole pulling the solar system into it's gravity well, our sun going supernova, or heck, the sun just expanding due to old age.

A spell to protect against incoming shockwaves would probably require vastly more energy than a spell that targeted and halted igniting charges. Although ironically it seems much more muggle thinking to halt a theat with through intricate understanding of the mechanisms than to just pump more power into it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 September 2011 11:42:36AM 6 points [-]

Atlantis at full power probably couldn't defend itself against, say, a gamma ray burst, a black hole pulling the solar system into it's gravity well, our sun going supernova, or heck, the sun just expanding due to old age.

Not to mention whatever it was that destroyed it.

Comment author: CG_Morton 03 September 2011 11:41:15AM 0 points [-]

But people still die.

I think a major part of how our instinctive morality works (and a reason humans, as a species, have been so successful) is that we don't go for cheap solutions. The most moral thing is to save everyone. The solution here is a stopgap that just diminishes the urgency of technology to grow organ replacements, and even if short-term consequentially it leaves more people alive, it in fact worsens out long-term life expectancy by not addressing the problem (which is that people's organs get damaged or wear out).

If a train is heading for 5 people, and you can press a switch to make it hit 1 person, the best moral decision is "I will find a way to save them all!" Even if you don't find that solution, at least you were looking!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 September 2011 05:59:46AM 4 points [-]

Related, here is Eliezer's answer to the railroad switch dilemma from the ends don't justify the means (among humans):

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2011 06:14:15AM 3 points [-]

When it seems like an experiment that's been cited does not provide enough support for the interpretation given, remember that Scientists are generally pretty smart. Especially if the experiment was done a long time ago, or it is described as "classic" or "famous". In that case, you should consider the possibility that there is more evidence that you haven't seen.

This is a potentially dangerous assumption. There are cases of entire scientific fields being derailed for significant periods of time because everyone assumed that and hence no one bothered to check.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 September 2011 05:36:08AM 31 points [-]

One day, I was playing with an "express wagon," a little wagon with a railing around it, I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I went to my father and said, "Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I'm pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?"

"That, nobody knows," he said. "The general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called 'inertia,' but nobody knows why it's true." Now, that's a deep understanding. He didn't just give me the name.

-Richard Feynman

Comment author: prase 01 September 2011 08:17:17PM 0 points [-]

Define strategy S[n] as TfT until turn n and defect ever since. In the limit of infinite population having non-zero initial number of S[n] for each n, S[0], i.e. DefectBot, eventually dominates. Starting with equal subpopulations, initially most successful is S[99] which preys on S[100] and finally drives it to extinction. But then, S[98] gains advantage over S[99] and so on.

With not so big population however, the more defectorish strategies die out sooner than the environment becomes suitable for them. (I have done it with population of 2000 strategies and the lowest surviving after several hundred generations was S[80] or so).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 September 2011 02:53:44AM 1 point [-]

Except that in the initial state S[0] will get driven to extinction long before s[100] will.

Comment author: lessdazed 31 August 2011 05:56:43PM 2 points [-]

By carefully setting the free parameters, you can turn one into the other.

How would this be different than inserting epicycles to express geocentrism as heliocentrism? From consequentialist and deontological perspectives, I don't think this is an insight that dissolves the question.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 September 2011 04:08:18AM 4 points [-]

The difference is that this is an 'ought' problem rather than an 'is' problem and we have no reason to believe our values should be simple.

Comment author: beriukay 17 August 2011 02:15:17PM 5 points [-]

I'm reading Mere Christianity, and boy howdy is it a hair-puller. It made me so mad that on about page 90 he was talking about donating to charity until it hurts, which reminded me of the current SIAI fundraiser. I know that donating money out of spite isn't exactly the healthiest of actions, but I've got $1000 that says fuck him.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2011 04:31:41AM 1 point [-]

What exactly about it makes you angry?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 August 2011 08:59:29PM *  0 points [-]

In the spirit of experiment we agreed to a "trade" - he would read (thoughtfully and with an open mind) a book of my choosing on reasons to doubt faith, and I'd do the same with a book he chose on Christianity.

Can that really be worth it? It seems disproportionally too costly for small expected gain.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 August 2011 04:21:41AM 4 points [-]

I don't see where you're getting a huge cost.

Comment author: lessdazed 26 August 2011 07:44:00AM 0 points [-]

Does it have a name?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 August 2011 08:00:17AM 1 point [-]

Haven't thought of one.

Comment author: Zed 26 August 2011 08:48:43PM *  1 point [-]

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment. The cat is supposed to be real in the experiment. The experiment is supposed to be seen as silly.

People can reason through the math at the level of particles and logically there should be no reason why the same quantum logic wouldn't apply to larger systems. So if a bunch of particles can be entangled and if on observation (unrelated to consciousness) the wavefunction collapses (and thereby fully determines reality) then the same should be able to happen with a particle and a more complex system, such as a real live cat. After all, what is a cat except for a bunch of particles? This means the cat is literally both alive and dead until the superposition resolves.

The problem is that philosophers have sometimes abused this apparent paradox (both alive and dead!?) as some sort of Deep Mystery of quantum physics. It's not a deep mystery at all. It's just something that illustrates that if you take the Copenhagen interpretation literally then you have to bite the bullet and admit that a cat (or a human, etc) can be both alive and dead at the same time. Not just seemingly so, but actually so in reality. As that's the only thing that's consistent with the small scale quantum experiments. Schrödinger came up with this thought experiment because he realized the implications of the Copenhagen interpretation and concluded the implications were absurd.

If you're not willing to bite that bullet (and most quantum physicists nowadays aren't) then you have to look at other possibilities. For instance that the world splits and that in one world the cat is alive and in the other the cat is dead. In one world you'll observe the cat being alive and in the other world you observe the cat as dead. Both worlds are equally real and in both worlds you have the sensation of being in the only real world.

(I only have an elementary understanding of QM)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 August 2011 07:28:02AM *  2 points [-]

For instance that the world splits and that in one world the cat is alive and in the other the cat is dead. In one world you'll observe the cat being alive and in the other world you observe the cat as dead. Both worlds are equally real and in both worlds you have the sensation of being in the only real world.

Don't take the "splitting" too literally either. Otherwise you've merely replaced the problem of when a wave function collapses, with the problem of when the worlds splits.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 26 August 2011 06:15:36PM *  -1 points [-]

My guess is that the Copenhagen interpretation isn't supposed to talk about what your beliefs are; it's just supposed to talk about entanglement of waveforms. So Schroedinger's beliefs about whether the cat is alive or dead don't matter.

But I've heard people talk about such situation as if Schroedinger's belief that the cat was alive or dead was important. Especially in connection with the idea that a waveform only truly collapses when an observation is made by a conscious agent.

If you don't say that only conscious agents can collapse waveforms, then you have to agree that something in the box collapses the waveform as seen from inside the box, while it's still uncollapsed to Schroedinger. And Schroedinger's opening the box collapses that waveform for him; but it is still uncollapsed for someone outside the room.

But if you do say that only conscious agents can collapse waveforms, then it's something about their mental processes that does the collapsing. This could mean their beliefs matter. And then, the cat is always dead.

The whole business seems murky and mysterious to me, and I hope for some enlightenment. And if it is not enlightening, it can at least be entertaining.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 August 2011 07:11:51AM *  1 point [-]

But I've heard people talk about such situation as if Schroedinger's belief that the cat was alive or dead was important.

In the consciousness-collapsing-waveform interpretation of quantum mechanics (which is not the same as the Copenhagen interpretation BTW) it is observation that collapses quantum states not belief. In particular the fact that Schroedinger misinterpreted his observation is irrelevant to how the wave function collapses.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 August 2011 06:57:18AM 4 points [-]

Once such an archive existed, medical journals could adopt a policy of checking all citations in a proposed article against the archive, rejecting submissions that tried to cite refuted research as valid.

The problem with this is that power corrupts. Medical science is already suffering from group think problems this would likely make it worse.

Nancy mentioned Polifact here, I'm pretty sure I've seen controversy over some of their pronouncements. In any case I'm sure they'd be much worse if they had actual gate-keeping power.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [Poll] Who looks better in your eyes?
Comment author: Vladimir_M 26 August 2011 09:56:20PM *  4 points [-]

This [smart people having a greater ability to figure out high-status-signaling views and acquire them] carries all sorts of interesting implications.

Yes, especially when we couple it with the fact that smart people have not just more ability, but usually also stronger incentives to optimize their views for signaling value. The smarter you are, the greater is the relative contribution of the signaling value of your views and opinions to your overall status likely to be. On the very top of this scale are people whose primary identity in life is that of prestigious intellectuals. (Unsurprisingly, the views of such people tend to be extremely uniform and confined to a very narrow range of variation.)

One puzzle here however is that the level of status-driven intellectual uniformity has varied a lot historically. In the Western world it was certainly far lower, say, a 100 or 150 years ago than today. Reading books from that period, it's clear that a lot of what people said and wrote was driven by signaling rather than matter-of-fact thinking, but the ratio was nothing like the overwhelming preponderance of the former that we see nowadays. It seems like back then, intellectual status-signaling was somehow successfully channeled outside of the main subjects of intellectual disputes, leaving enough room for an honest no-nonsense debate, which is practically nonexistent today in respectable venues outside of hard sciences and technical subjects.

I have only some vague and speculative hypotheses about the possible explanations for these historical differences, though.

There two seem to have some overlap.

I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that these might be completely independent mechanisms. The first, unlike the second, would stem from a failure of the general mechanisms for handling status and social norms, indicating a more generally dysfunctional personality, while the second one would result in a perfectly functional individual except for this particular quirk consisting of some odd and perhaps disreputable beliefs.

It may be that the gap between reality and signalling would actually be too great to rationalize for anyone who had practical use for it, you are just the one stuck with it. The effect of this might be in the long term sufficient to hurt the reputation and signalling value of certain professions, economic niches or even entire (sub)cultures.

Yes, this is indeed an interesting scenario. I can think of a few ongoing examples, although describing them explicitly would probably mean going too far into ideologically charged topics for this forum.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 August 2011 06:37:21AM 3 points [-]

One puzzle here however is that the level of status-driven intellectual uniformity has varied a lot historically. In the Western world it was certainly far lower, say, a 100 or 150 years ago than today. Reading books from that period, it's clear that a lot of what people said and wrote was driven by signaling rather than matter-of-fact thinking, but the ratio was nothing like the overwhelming preponderance of the former that we see nowadays.

This could just be the nostalgia filter (WARNING: tvtropes), i.e., there were also a lot of pure status signaling works back then, but they have since been forgotten.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 August 2011 06:03:11AM 1 point [-]

Submitted a strategy.

Comment author: NihilCredo 25 August 2011 09:40:25PM *  4 points [-]

I'm going to offer my own translation, taking a few more liberties:

Nullus salvator salvatori,

nullus Dominus defensori,

neque pater nec mater,

solum insuper nihilum.

(Backslation: "No saviour for the saviour / no Lord for the champion / nor father or mother / only nothingness above". Switched "father" with "mother" because the 'kp' in "nec pater" sounds cacophonic to me. Note that "insuper" would NOT rhyme with "mater", since the "u" is short and thus the stress falls on the "i", which is why I put it in the middle of the line.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 August 2011 03:22:11AM 2 points [-]

Note that "insuper" would NOT rhyme with "mater"

Latin poetry doesn't use rhyme anyway. It uses meter.

Comment author: DavidAgain 23 August 2011 08:48:51AM 1 point [-]

Very possibly! I think it's a little deeper than that, though: I think other people's sort of bias seems worse than yours, plus people enjoy identifying the examples of things that seem weird from elsewhere. So people will share Fox News clips a lot here, for instance. Don't know what the UK equivalent is when seen from outside: though there are groups within the UK who see the BBC as very biased. And we have the murdoch thing of course

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 09:13:29AM 2 points [-]

though there are groups within the UK who see the BBC as very biased.

I'm rather inclined to agree with them, but then again I general only here about something on the BBC when someone calls attention to their egregiously biased coverage of something.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 August 2011 01:13:49AM *  5 points [-]

Because natural selection leads to convergence. Yes, mindspace is (probably) infinite- but the space of minds reachable by natural selection is a pretty small subset. I can confidently predict that creating progeny will be important to them, that they'll form pair bonds, that there will be sexual jealousy, that the sex with larger gametes will have a history of being seen as secondary, that status will motivate them, and so on.

Ok. But there are a lot of problems with this. Consider for example a hermaphroditic species. Yes, they exist in nature. Or consider a species that reproduces asexually while shuffling their own DNA. There's at least one not too stupid species which does that on our planet. The gamete claim is hard to define carefully, but one should note that many primitive societies of humans have fewer not more gender distinctions. And there are matriarchal societies among humans. See for example the Nair. Among some vertebrate species this isn't just something that occurs in some groups but occurs universally in some species. See for example the spotted hyena, although I should warn you that reading about some of the details of their reproductive behavior can be potentially disturbing.

I've got a lot more examples where this comes from, like humans forming group marriages and other fun stuff. But there's a more fundamental problem here. You are looking at some of only the more obvious potential universals. Even those aren't universals. But there are so many things that humans have that are universals that could easily change and could have drastic impacts on societies. Kaj's post above includes among other things a nice excerpt of a very long list of human universals that one wouldn't even likely recognize as such. Changing even a small number could have drastic consequences. Indeed, most of that list is so ingrained in humans that when we write about alien species we often include most of them. Granted, most alien species are not constructed with much thought put into it (the rubber-forehead problem) but the pattern should be striking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 07:42:31AM *  2 points [-]

Robin Hanson has an interesting argument here.

To flesh out his statistical argument as it applied to this case: there are certain general trends (what you call universals) across most animals, and most human societies; while there exist species (and cultures) that are exceptions to many of them, there's are reason they are exceptions.

To take one of your examples, while it may be short term beneficial for a species to reproduce completely without genetic recombination, it greatly limits potential future evolution since it's no longer possible for beneficial mutations from different individuals to combine.

Edit: See also Eliezer's post evolving to extinction.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 07:14:42AM 2 points [-]

In this post Robin Hanson presents a plausible vaguely anthropic argument that alien psychology (as well as physiology) may be more like human then you'd expect.

Comment author: lessdazed 23 August 2011 06:45:30AM 4 points [-]

Do you mean something like "...people reading wired are people who would bristle at being told they aren't already rational, because their self image depends greatly on seeing themselves as rational"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 07:05:27AM 2 points [-]

I mean that people reading wired tend to suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Comment author: DavidAgain 23 August 2011 06:33:48AM 0 points [-]

Interesting! You mean in general, or that the UK is particularly weak on that front. I think most politically interested people in the UK think that the UK media should/could be better in various ways, but regard it as superior to US media in terms of bias/challenge.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 07:03:22AM *  2 points [-]

You mean in general, or that the UK is particularly weak on that front.

Depends on who you ask. Personally I think England may be somewhat better than continental Europe.

I think most politically interested people in the UK think that the UK media should/could be better in various ways, but regard it as superior to US media in terms of bias/challenge.

Yes, well I suspect everyone believes their media is the least biased because their media tells them so.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 August 2011 02:49:56AM 3 points [-]

I think that 'read the Sequences' is our polite way of telling people that there is a certain body of ideas that forms a common background for the discussions here, and that it does not serve either the newcomer or the community, to post here before being at least somewhat familiar with that background.

No, just no. I wouldn't wish "read the quantum mechanics sequence" on anyone.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 06:08:39AM 2 points [-]

No, just no. I wouldn't wish "read the quantum mechanics sequence" on anyone.

Well, I would argue that that's the least relevant sequence.

Comment author: falenas108 22 August 2011 06:35:08PM 12 points [-]

If we want Less Wrong to achieve its goals of increasing the sanity waterline or attract minds to AI, we will need more publicity.

But at the same time, we don't want to lessen the average quality of posts. Putting Less Wrong in a standard newspaper would definitely do that. If we were to do publicity, we should probably do so in a place where there is already some self-selection for intelligence/rationality. Wired would probably a good magazine for this.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 05:58:22AM 4 points [-]

Wired would probably a good magazine for this.

I'm not sure, I get the impression the people reading wired are people who like to think of themselves as rational, but aren't necessarily.

In response to Kill the mind-killer
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 05:55:33AM 7 points [-]

The budget stalemate in the US Congress

You seem to assume stalemate in congress is obviously a bad thing. Given that most of what congress does tends to be passing laws that help rent-seekers, I think stalemate in congress is frequently a good thing.

Comment author: Raemon 23 August 2011 02:57:54AM *  0 points [-]

The biggest issue I see is the "lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists" issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.

There are potential issues with the education requirements I outlined in my post (the question of "who controls the education requirements" leaves open possible corruption, a la literacy tests). But I think it's worth considering.

I agree that this would work better for a new government than retrofitting an existing one.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 05:48:39AM 2 points [-]

I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.

This, however, leads to the tragedy of the commons problem that it's in each faction's interest to increase the number of it's members who WANT to be lawmakers to increase the chance that one of them is selected.

In response to Kill the mind-killer
Comment author: DavidAgain 22 August 2011 07:50:57PM 3 points [-]

Actually, I'm pretty sure it is politics that's the mind-killer. Most of the breakdown of reasoned discussion due to politics that I've seen was not due to party-loyalty in any explicit sense, but to a much broader ideology/in-group loyalty.

On the broader topic, taking your first two points in reverese order: political parties are important because one of the vital elements in a democracy is accountability. By grouping together people and approaches as a 'party' we allow the voters to judge their overall effectiveness and approach - and kick them out at elections. This is particularly important for the average not-that-committed voter, but even the most politically focused person can't actually track and judge every individual standing for office. In a similar vein, parties make it harder for someone to campaign for more spending at the same time as less taxes and so on: they produce overall positions that can be tested in greater depth for consistency. The same point applies to governments: and if you had no political parties it's difficult to see how a governing group could have enough solidity to be judged (this is less of an issue in the USA, where you have an elected executive, than in the UK where the PM is the leader of the party/coalition that controls the House of Commons).

This point about accountability is key, IMO, because I think that the 'being able to replace rulers without war' and the 'rulers fear annoying too many people' are probably more important elements of democracy than the idea that the voters are in the best position to guide a government towards good policy in any detail. So the idea that a system would encourage only the most informed to vote (if that's what you imply) is both unrealistic and unattractive. Unrealistic because the uninformed would be campaigned at by the media/candidates and believe they were informed and unattractive because if you managed to convince most people that they were outside the political proccess, the stability of democracy would be deeply damaged.

I think you have an overly idealistic idea of the state that would exist without parties: I suspect people would vote based on local adverts/leaflets which provided a lower level of information than they currently get by at least seeing what parties do in power. So I don't buy that as a disadvantage. There are disadvantages around the incentive structure for politicians being wrong (party focused rather than people focused) but I'm unconvinced there's a system that would avoid this without major other problems.

From a UK point of view, the things we tend to assume would improve US politics would be a less biased and more challenging media, and a cap on spending by political parties. i.e. what we do... But ultiamtely, I suspect that institutions have to develop with culture, and if you don't think the US political culture is working I don't think reform of the political architecture will be the main thing. Doesn't mean it's not worth considering/doing... but I'm suspicious of magic bullets.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 August 2011 05:44:27AM 3 points [-]

From a UK point of view, the things we tend to assume would improve US politics would be a less biased and more challenging media

Speaking from the US, that's more or less what I think about UK politics.

Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 21 August 2011 03:52:36PM *  7 points [-]

Look into eusocial animals, e.g. ants, bees, wasps, termites, and naked mole rats. Intelligent minds of similar evolutionary origin would be very different from ours.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2011 01:28:53AM 6 points [-]

That depends on whether they're intelligent on an individual or a hive level. After all, we are in a sense eusocial collections of cells.

Comment author: shminux 22 August 2011 12:57:28AM 2 points [-]

Thank you for your comment, but sorry you missed my point, which was to consider technical solutions before social ones (e.g. locked gates work better than "no entrance" signs). The one I suggested was an example (as clearly stated in my post), not a request. Of course it goes without question that one should consider ramifications of any solution, technical or otherwise.

Oh, and please feel free to provide the cost-benefit analysis of mandatory commenting for downvoting, or a link to such, I'd be quite interested. Some issues I can think of is that loss of anonymity would deter people from downvoting, or might lead to retaliatory behavior, but the latter can be easily dealt with, since it would be rather transparent.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2011 01:12:41AM 6 points [-]

One problem is that each troll post causes an instant flame war.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 21 August 2011 07:40:15PM 3 points [-]

Obviously. On the other hand, does it really matter? The person doing so is harming themselves by wasting their time. You're not really harmed.

I guess you're arguing that most comments have a low number of votes, so the retaliation damages the comment-score-signal. That's reasonable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2011 01:09:26AM 5 points [-]

Well, I've seen this happen to newbies who take contrarian positions.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 August 2011 04:02:00PM 3 points [-]

Nah, they were dropping in clumps of like 6 a piece every few seconds as I refreshed the page. It happens to other people too.

Who else has this happened to? The only other person I'm aware of this happening to is Curi after his conjunction fallacy post, and someone had apparently already done the opposite so he would have the karma to post it in the first place.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2011 12:44:40AM 3 points [-]

One person I observed this happen to is peterdjones when he was arguing for moral realism in a very contentious thread.

Comment author: lessdazed 21 August 2011 08:45:35PM 0 points [-]

I can't speak to what is traditional and I don't mind declaring all historical utilitarians wrong in all their debates with non-utilitarians, though I wouldn't mind saying the opposite, either.

Human morality demands a certain amount of thought, and many actions demand moral consideration or their being "good" is no more than fate, and their being bad is negligence.

Upon thinking about it, one realizes that those who think about it should (shouldthosewhothinkaboutit) push the fat man. Those who don't think about it shouldn't (shouldn'tthosewhodon'tthinkaboutit) push the fat man, but should (shouldthosewhodon'tthinkaboutit) think about it.

To ask about unclarified "should" is as to ask about unclarified "sound".

It is important to bear in mind that blame is something humans spray paint onto the unalterable causality of the world, and not to think that either the paint is unalterable because causality is, or that causality is alterable because the paint is.

We can blame humans fully, partially, or not at all for the consequences when they are unthinking, they do what unthinking people should do, there are negative consequences, thinking people should have done a different thing, and those humans should have been thinking people but weren't.

Everything has been explained. There is nothing left in asking if a person really should have done what a thinking person should have done had he or she have been thinking, when the person should have been thinking, and unthinking people were not obligated to do thing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2011 10:50:57PM 1 point [-]

The point is that blame can itself have the effect of decreasing the frequency of the behavior that is receiving the blame. So the right question to ask is would having been more exposed to the idea that one should be blamed for doing X have prevented the person from doing X.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 20 August 2011 07:16:25AM 4 points [-]

They associate utilitarianism with "the greatest good for the greatest number," and then imagine things like "it is for the good of this great Nation that you be drafted to dig ditches this year" and they shudder.

That shudder isn't necessarily a "confabulation."

I don't think Luke or Greene is saying that the shudder is confabulation. The shudder is the intuitive emotional response. What they're calling "confabulation" is making up a deontological rule, such as "everyone has a right not to be drafted for anything except defense", or something like that, to explain/justify the shudder.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2011 10:45:43PM 3 points [-]

What they're calling "confabulation" is making up a deontological rule, such as "everyone has a right not to be drafted for anything except defense", or something like that, to explain/justify the shudder.

If you don't make a deontological rule and insist that it have no exceptions, in any particular case you will be tempted to find an excuse why it doesn't apply. As Eliezer said in his post The Ends Don't Justify the Means:

And so we have the bizarre-seeming rule: "For the good of the tribe, do not cheat to seize power even when it would provide a net benefit to the tribe."

Indeed it may be wiser to phrase it this way: If you just say, "when it seems like it would provide a net benefit to the tribe", then you get people who say, "But it doesn't just seem that way - it would provide a net benefit to the tribe if I were in charge."

Comment author: lessdazed 18 August 2011 10:58:27PM 0 points [-]

The second one is whether minds that implement some such utilitarian (or otherwise non-human) ethic could cooperate with each other the way humans are able to thanks to the mutual predictability of our constrained minds.

But we normally seem to see "one death as a tragedy, a million as a statistic" due to scope insensitivity, availability bias etc.

Why not trust that people only directly dealing with numbers are normal when they implement cold-blooded utilitarianism? Why not have many important decisions made abstractly by such people? Is wanting to make decisions this way, remote from the consequences and up a few meta-levels, a barbaric thing to advocate?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 August 2011 05:12:13AM 2 points [-]

Why not trust that people only directly dealing with numbers are normal when they implement cold-blooded utilitarianism? Why not have many important decisions made abstractly by such people? Is wanting to make decisions this way, remote from the consequences and up a few meta-levels, a barbaric thing to advocate?

During the 20th century some societies have attempted to implement more-or-less that policy. The results certainly justify the adjective barbaric.

Comment author: MixedNuts 17 August 2011 03:53:46PM *  20 points [-]

Voted up for thinking about the problem, self-honesty, and more importantly for speaking up. (I don't quite understand whence the downvotes... just screaming "Boo!" at outgroup beliefs?) [Edit: at the time of this comment, the parent was at -5.]

It seems to me that by "sin" you just mean things that make you go "Squick!". Why do you expect that, if we found the relevant stone tablet, it wouldn't read "Spitting on the floor is wrong. Ew, tuberculosis.", nor "Maximise your score at Tetris.", but "Homosexuality is wrong."?

I'm really having trouble not snickering as I write this. I literally cannot empathise with "Homosexuality is wrong". I can sorta picture "Gay sex? Squick!", but the obvious followup is "Squick isn't a good criterion", not "Homosexuality is wrong". Also, pray tell, what (rather, whom) should genderqueers do?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2011 03:13:40AM *  6 points [-]

I'm really having trouble not snickering as I write this. I literally cannot empathise with "Homosexuality is wrong".

If Arandur is correct, that makes you no different from the theist who literally can't imagine God not existing, or even anyone truly believing that God doesn't exist, and thus concludes that "atheists" are merely angry at God.

Comment author: handoflixue 17 August 2011 06:41:52PM 2 points [-]

It's not a fallacy if the thing your projecting onto is an actual human with an actual human mind. Another way to see this is as using the priors on how humans tend to behave that evolution has provided you.

That only works if you're (a) not running in to cultural differences and (b) not dealing with someone who has major neurological differences. Using your default priors on "how humans work" to handle an autistic or a schizophrenic is probably going to produce sub-par results. Same if you assume that "homosexuality is wrong" or "steak is delicious" is culturally universal.

It's unlikely that you'll run in to someone who prioritizes prime-sized stacks of pebbles, but it's entirely likely you'll run in to people who thinks eating meat is wrong, or that gay marriage ought to be legalized :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 August 2011 02:59:48AM 3 points [-]

Using your default priors on "how humans work" to handle an autistic or a schizophrenic is probably going to produce sub-par results.

They're going to produce the result that this human's brain is wired strangely and thus he's liable to exhibit other strange and likely negative behaviors. Which is more-or-less accurate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2011 08:03:05AM 5 points [-]

I don't see how your conclusion follows from your data. I could just as easily use the same model to argue that our morality is deontological and it is the utilitarian judgements that mere moral rationalizations.

I have observed that utilitarians will attempt to fudge the numbers to make the utility calculations come out the way they "should" inventing large amounts of anti-epistemology in the process (see the current debate on race and intelligence for an example of this process in action). A better approach might be to admit our morals are partially deontological and that certain things are wrong no matter how the calculations come out.

Comment author: shokwave 17 August 2011 06:57:46AM 2 points [-]

I am torn on virtue ethics.

On one level it's almost akin to what a Bayesian calculation (taking "weird but harmless behaviour" as positive evidence of "weird and harmful") would feel like from the inside, and in that respect I can see the value in virtue ethics (even though it strikes me as a mind projection issue of creating a person's ethical 'character' when all you need is the likelihood of them performing this act or that).

But on another level, I can see it is as a description of a sort of hard-coded irrationality that we have evolution to thank for. All things being equal, we prefer to associate with people who will never murder us, rather than people who will only murder us when it would be good to do so - because we personally calculate good with a term for our existence. People with an irrational, compelling commitment are more trustworthy than people compelled by rational or utilitarian concerns (Schelling's Strategy of Conflict), because we are aware that there exists situations where the best outcome overall is not the best outcome personally.

So I am torn between lumping virtue ethics in with deontological ethics as "descriptions of human moral behaviour" and repairing it into a usable set of prescriptions for human moral behaviour.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2011 07:26:33AM 4 points [-]

(even though it strikes me as a mind projection issue of creating a person's ethical 'character' when all you need is the likelihood of them performing this act or that).

It's not a fallacy if the thing your projecting onto is an actual human with an actual human mind. Another way to see this is as using the priors on how humans tend to behave that evolution has provided you.

But on another level, I can see it is as a description of a sort of hard-coded irrationality that we have evolution to thank for. All things being equal, we prefer to associate with people who will never murder us, rather than people who will only murder us when it would be good to do so - because we personally calculate good with a term for our existence. People with an irrational, compelling commitment are more trustworthy than people compelled by rational or utilitarian concerns (Schelling's Strategy of Conflict), because we are aware that there exists situations where the best outcome overall is not the best outcome personally.

The definition of "rational" you're using in that paragraph has the problem that it will cause you to regret your rationality. If having an "irrational" commitment helps you be more trusted and thus achieve your goals, it's not irrational. See the articles about decision theory for more details on this.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 17 August 2011 06:00:53AM 14 points [-]

I've sometimes thought of deontological rules as something like a sanity check on utilitarian reasoning.

If, as you are reasoning your way to maximum utility, you come up with a result that ends, "... therefore, I should kill a lot of innocent people," or for that matter "... therefore, I'm justified in scamming people out of their life savings to get the resources I need," the role of deontological rules against murder or cheating is to make you at least stop and think about it really hard. And, almost certainly, find a hole in your reasoning.

It is imaginable — I wouldn't say likely — that there are "universal moral laws" for human beings, which take the following form: "If you come to the conclusion 'Utility is maximized if I murder these innocent people', then it is more likely that your human brain has glitched and failed to reason correctly, than that your conclusion is correct." In other words, the probability of a positive-utility outcome from murder is less than the probability of erroneous reasoning leading to the belief in that outcome.

A consequence of this is that the better predictor you are, the more things can be moral for you to do if you conclude they maximize utility. It is imaginable that no human can with <50% probability of error arrive at the conclusion "I should push that fat guy in front of the trolley", but that some superhuman predictor could.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2011 07:03:59AM 5 points [-]

It is imaginable — I wouldn't say likely — that there are "universal moral laws" for human beings, which take the following form: "If you come to the conclusion 'Utility is maximized if I murder these innocent people', then it is more likely that your human brain has glitched and failed to reason correctly, than that your conclusion is correct." In other words, the probability of a positive-utility outcome from murder is less than the probability of erroneous reasoning leading to the belief in that outcome.

Obligatory link to relevant sequence.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2011 05:19:44AM *  6 points [-]

Regarding self-control, there's a slight issue with using time spent rather then task accomplished. When the task involves an ugh field, I've become quite good at spending time "working" without accomplishing anything.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2011 07:29:24AM 1 point [-]

Suppose the paperclip maximizer doesn't believe in time discounting, and furthermore has been informed by Omega that the universe won't end. The PCM acquires some resources that can be used to either

a) make paperclips or

b) make more efficient ways to make paperclips, e.g., interstellar ships, computronium to design more efficient factories, etc.

Note that option (b) will lead to more paperclips in the long run and since the PCM doesn't discount the future it should always choose (b). But that means it never actually gets around to making any paperclips.

Comment author: wedrifid 01 August 2011 09:41:04AM 2 points [-]

1) Do paperclip maximizers care about paperclip mass, paperclip count, or both?

Given the origin of paperclip maximisers as a metaphor we can expect them to maximise the paperclips based off the template they were constructed with originally. It is possible that even the specification of a paperclip is unstable under recursive improvement but somewhat less likely. Postulating agents that don't even know what a paperclip is seems less useful as a tool for constructing counterfactuals. Agents that are that flexible with respect to what their actual goal is can be used to illustrate different decision theoretic games but there is no need to recycle 'paperclip maximiser' for that purpose.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2011 07:14:57AM 0 points [-]

It is possible that even the specification of a paperclip is unstable under recursive improvement but somewhat less likely. Postulating agents that don't even know what a paperclip is seems less useful as a tool for constructing counterfactuals.

It is, however, useful for thinking about recursive stability in general, and thinking about designing agents to have stable goal systems.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 July 2011 03:42:34AM 1 point [-]

Well, as Eliezer said every cause wants to be a cult.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 30 July 2011 06:51:07PM 2 points [-]

Huh? No. The probability shouldn't be zero that he's correct. Even now there's some very tiny probability that Newton's laws are exactly correct. This chance is vanishingly small but non-zero. Moreover, your argument implies too much because one could use the exact same logic for general relativity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 July 2011 12:13:53AM 2 points [-]

Moreover, your argument implies too much because one could use the exact same logic for general relativity.

And it would be equally correct.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 July 2011 02:12:42PM 11 points [-]

This actually gets even worse. Consider for example a hypothetical Bayesian version of Issac Newton, trying to estimate what exponent k the radius is raised to in F= GMm/R^k. There's an intuition that mathematically simple numbers should be more likely, such as say "2". A while ago jimrandomh and benelliiot discussed this with me. Ben suggested that in this sort of context you might just have a complicated distribution where part of the distribution arose from something continuous and the other part arose from discrete probabilities for simple numbers. This seems to do a decent job capturing our intuition but it seems to be very hard to actually use that sort of distribution.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 July 2011 02:32:42AM -1 points [-]

In summary Newton should assign probability 0 to the statement that his theory of relativity is exactly correct. This turns out to be the right thing to do.

Comment author: taw 27 July 2011 05:18:15AM *  1 point [-]

The "if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong" reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.

The test was not for agreement or disagreement, it was for absence or presence of kneejerk reaction that rejects all data without even bothering to look at it.

But as far as I know, you might still be perfectly rational as long as it doesn't involve economics or politics, just as the Pope can be perfectly rational as long as it doesn't involve religion. People just have their weird compartments.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 July 2011 06:47:26AM 4 points [-]

The "if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong" reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.

No, this is a case of "the data fails to agree with observation and furthermore is in a field notorious for data manipulation and sometimes outright falsification, therefore the data is wrong with high probability".

Relying on "data" even when it blatantly contradicts direct observation, as you seem to insist on doing, is precisely the kind of straw rationality gives rationality in general a bad name and more importantly causes many rationalists to fail.

Comment author: taw 27 July 2011 05:39:50AM 1 point [-]

I'd be really curious to see these data, if you don't mind posting these links again.

Here's the paper which many people cannot even get themselves to read.

First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree.

This is actually totally unproblematic, because GDP was not one of the ways communist countries measured their economies. They used primarily industrial production statistics, and GDP was the competing Western system of measurement they didn't like because it wasn't exactly putting them in the best light (with their economies being relatively more industry-focused and Western economies being more services-focused).

And the paper uses OECD data, not any official data.

And you get the same result with GDP proxy studies like life expectancy as with GDP.

So the data is solid no matter how you look at it. There's no way to tweak the data to make communist China grow more slowly than non-communist India, or communist Poland to grow more slowly than non-communist Peru.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 July 2011 06:33:58AM 4 points [-]

There's no way to tweak the data to make communist China grow more slowly than non-communist India, or communist Poland to grow more slowly than non-communist Peru.

Calling Peru or India during the relevant period non-communist is certainly debatable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 July 2011 04:09:45AM 4 points [-]

(i.e., if we consider our "actual" values to be the values we would endorse in reflective equilibrium, instead of our current apparent values)

I don't see why such a "reflective equilibrium" should be well defined and/or unique.

Comment author: Nornagest 25 July 2011 09:13:56PM 1 point [-]

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that this sort of thing is ultimately caused by the non-overlapping magisteria model. If scientific methods are thought of as something special and other, separated by context and ritual from everyday life, then when someone like your average journalist looks at scientific results, they're parsed as essentially an argument from authority and get evaluated against the opinions of other, nonscientific authorities: for example, religious or ideological. The usual responses to scientifically illiterate arguments don't help: instead of trying to get the point across that this is an invalid way of evaluating results, they usually focus on getting the lay public to accept science as a domain authority above whatever its opponent institution of the moment is -- with predictable results when you're talking to someone that identifies with that institution but not with science.

If we're interested in convincing people to accept scientific results, this suggests to me that we'd be better off downplaying the authority of the journal or institute in question, and instead trying to get people to accept scientific methods as a fully general means of problem-solving.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 July 2011 03:37:20AM 3 points [-]

If scientific methods are thought of as something special and other, separated by context and ritual from everyday life, then when someone like your average journalist looks at scientific results, they're parsed as essentially an argument from authority and get evaluated against the opinions of other, nonscientific authorities

Well unless you understand the arguments underlying the science, they are arguments from authority.

Furthermore the attitude implicit in the BBC policy goes a long way toward making science even more a case of argument from authority.

Think about it, suppose you're a journalist, how do you decide which arguments have "scientific backing"? Do you

a) analyze the arguments yourself to see how valid they sound?

or

b) look at the credentials of the person making that argument?

Note that (b) is a lot easier then (a) to a reporter without much scientific training? Furthermore, even if you do analyze the arguments, you'll have to answer to your superior if you reach a conclusion that differs from (b).

Comment author: Manfred 24 July 2011 09:47:35PM 3 points [-]

It seems like this is counteracted by the rationalist tendency to focus on what world-states we want, not just what options make us feel good when we think about them. If we care about someone else's "stress" but not someone else's "elevated adrenaline, cortisol and associated problems," that's a problem with our caring.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 July 2011 10:39:44PM 5 points [-]

Phrasing it in terms of "stress" suggests the solution is to, e.g., take them out of stressful environments, etc. Phrasing it in terms of "elevated hormones", suggests solutions like of anti-hormonal/anti-stress drugs.

If this doesn't bother you, apply the same logic to "happiness".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 July 2011 08:05:36PM *  3 points [-]

Why should we help you with a project whose long term goal appears to be to turn the earth into paperclips?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 July 2011 05:15:37AM 5 points [-]

I have seen a similar idea, presented in a much more cynical form. Essentially arguing that people give to charity because it makes them feel less bad about doing bad things during the rest of their day.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 July 2011 11:15:48PM 6 points [-]

Eliminativism is all well and good if all one wants to do is predict. However, it doesn't help answer questions like "What should I do?", or "What utility function should we give the FAI?"

Comment author: [deleted] 16 July 2011 10:49:41PM 0 points [-]

Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are.

"Models" of heterosexuality are also culturally contingent.

The essay is interesting but not altogether convincing. Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transsexuals and otherkin
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 July 2011 11:34:45PM 3 points [-]

Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.

Not in the sense that Eric uses the term. In particular, he wouldn't consider consensual homosexual relations between people of comparable ages in any way normal.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 July 2011 04:02:31PM 4 points [-]

You might be right that there are important differences between the attraction that a typical gay man feels for a man and the attraction that a typical straight man feels for a woman. Certainly there are important cultural differences. But the claim, from a man, "I feel about men the way most men feel about women" is far more innocuous than your contrary idea that he feels about men the way some men feel about feet, or rubber.

Most gay men after all report feelings of romantic love for other men. A fetishist who claims his object or activity of erotic focus is something more than an entertaining sex fantasy is much more rare, or so I think. Also note that there is something obviously culturally contingent about many famous fetishes, while men who take men to bed have existed in thousands of cultural contexts across thousands of years.

The scientific understanding of fetishism is even poorer than the scientific understanding of sexual orientation. By positing a "continuum of fetishism" you're already on dubious ground, whether or not we would go on to accept that homosexuality falls on that continuum.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Transsexuals and otherkin
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 July 2011 10:23:12PM 3 points [-]

Also note that there is something obviously culturally contingent about many famous fetishes, while men who take men to bed have existed in thousands of cultural contexts across thousands of years.

Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are. He analyses four "types" of homosexual behavior:

Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call “romantic homosexuality”. Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).

At one opposite extreme from romantic homosexuality is what I’ll call deprivation homosexuality – homoerotic behavior by men or women who are normally heterosexual but isolated from contact with the opposite sex for long periods of time. I won’t discuss this further in this essay except to note that for good analysis of what goes on in (for example) prisons, the difference between deprivation homosexuality and other kinds is significant.

We are generally aware of two other types of homosexual behavior. One is pederasty: homosexuality between adult men and adolescent or prepubescent boys in which the older partner is always, or nearly always, the one doing the penetrating. It is a significant datum, to which I’ll return later, that neither modern Western culture nor any other that I am aware of has a well-defined category equivalent to pederasty among women.

The last category I’ll discuss here is what I’ll call domination sex. In this kind of homoeroticism, penetration is equated with dominating or humiliating an inferior, the slave, the prisoner, the catamite, the helpless object. It is in this spirit that Sioux Indians threatened to rape the corpses of their defeated enemies, and gangsta rappers speak of “making him my bitch”. It provides the threat and the hostile charge when someone says “Fuck you.”

He goes on to say that for male homosexuality acceptance of the "romantic homosexuality" type is the exception, and by exception he means that

[he is] not able to identify any culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 July 2011 05:40:12AM 2 points [-]

One would have still more confidence if one were personally involved in such a team.

I don't think this statement is correct since it contradicts the law of conservation of expected evidence, i.e., if you anticipate that knowing some piece of information would increase your probability estimate of something, then simply knowing that that piece of information exists should correspondingly increase your estimate unless you also suspect that knowing the information might actually decrease your estimate by a corresponding amount.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 July 2011 01:10:35PM *  9 points [-]

This is a very good point. You make a compelling case that the use of careful statistics is not a recent trend in psychology. In that regard, my penultimate paragraph is clearly just deeply and irrecoverably wrong.

(And ultimately, I notice that your examples of recent discoveries are from biology, astronomy/physics, and math -- fields whose basic soundness has never been in doubt. But what non-trivial, correct, and useful insight has come from all these mathematized soft fields?)

Well, I was responding to Eliezer's claim about a general lack of a scientific process. So the specific question then becomes can one give examples of "non-trivial, correct, and useful" psychological results that have occurred in the last year or so. There's a steady output of decent psychology results. While the early work on cognitive biases was done in the 1980s by Kahneman and Tversky, a lot of work has occurred in the last decade after. But, I agree that the amount of output is slow enough that I can't point to easy, impressive studies that have occurred in the last few months off the top of my head like I can for other areas of research. Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta's investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn't even this year.

However, at the same time, I'm not sure that this is a strike against psychology. Psychology has a comparatively small field of study. Astronomy gets to investigate most of the universe. Math gets to investigate every interesting axiomatic system one can imagine. Biology gets to investigate millions of species. Psychology just gets to investigate one species, and only certain aspects of that species. When psychology does investigate other intelligent species it is often categorized as belonging to other areas. So we shouldn't be that surprised if psychology doesn't have as high a production rate. On the other hand, this argument isn't very good because one could make up for it by lumping all the classical soft sciences together into one area, and one would still have this problem. So overall, your point seems valid in regards to psychology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 July 2011 03:00:55AM *  9 points [-]

In 2011, we've had such novel scientific discoveries as snails that can survive being eaten by birds, we've estimated the body temperature of dinosaurs

(...)

Sharon Bertsch and Bryan Pesta's investigation of different explanations for negative correlation between IQ and religion came out in 2009 and 2010, which isn't even this year.

Have these results been replicated? Are you sure they're correct? Merely citing cool-looking results isn't evidence that the scientific process is working.

Remember, "the scientific process not working" doesn't look like "cool results stop showing up", but looks like "cool results keeping showing up except they no longer correspond to reality". If you have no independent way of verifying the results in question, it's hard to tell the above scenarios apart.

Comment author: lucidfox 12 July 2011 12:36:03PM *  2 points [-]

Should Rationalists Tip at Restaurants?

It's a loaded question that presents the word "rationalist" as some kind of straightjacket regulating minutae of your daily life.

Tipping is voluntary. If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, don't. There isn't anything inherently altruistic or jerkish about either scenario, and it's certainly not something an ideology can dictate.

social norms like tipping, waiting in line, making small talk with strangers, and paying taxes

You're lumping apples and oranges here. Tipping and small talk are unenforceable, culture-specific social expectations. Waiting in line is a general "do unto others..." guideline, but I'm sure you'd face sanctions from guards if you tried to break it in anything remotely official. Tax evasion is a legally punishable crime.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2011 06:10:31PM 1 point [-]

It's a loaded question that presents the word "rationalist" as some kind of straightjacket regulating minutae of your daily life.

Tipping is voluntary. If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, don't.

Couldn't you apply the same logic to anything, theism, lotteries? Strictly speaking following the law is also voluntary, it's just that there are generally unpleasant consequences if you get caught.

Comment author: drethelin 12 July 2011 06:28:46AM 15 points [-]

If if the difference between tipping and not tipping is enough to boot-strap you up levels in economic productivity you should definitely not be eating at restaurants at all. Consequence-wise, I'd say you'd be a reasonable dick to tip only at restaurants you actually frequent. If you're only going to be at a place once in your life the value of being friendly with the employees is basically zero, whereas if the same person is going to feed you every day for months then you get significantly better service when you tip well.

Defecting from standing in line isn't bad because some theoretical superior would see it, it is because being a blatant dick to strangers increases your risk of altercation a lot, not to mention the more general societal problem of encouraging this kind of defecting leading to greater overall inefficiency as people swarm instead of standing in line.

Making small talk is less clear cut, and if you don't value serendipitously making new friends I can easily be convinced that the effort to pursue it is worth less than whatever it is you might be doing otherwise (though honestly it's not like your elevator standing time was going to be that productive in any case)

Paying taxes is NOT a social norm. Not paying them is actually illegal, and can get you into serious trouble. This is not a big deal on the small scale, and if you're a single individual who isn't particularly prosperous you can definitely get away with not paying them, but if you're actively planning on becoming extremely economically successful based on this extra money, an audit could put serious crimps in your style

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2011 06:05:09PM 1 point [-]

If if the difference between tipping and not tipping is enough to boot-strap you up levels in economic productivity you should definitely not be eating at restaurants at all.

Depends on how much you value your time.

Comment author: Emile 12 July 2011 12:09:57PM 3 points [-]

I value not being a dick, and not only nobody finding out that I'm a dick.

Maybe if I was magically changed so as not to care about whether I was a dick or not, I wouldn't act like a dick in most ordinary situations because of the negative consequences of people finding out that I'm a dick. But I don't want not care about being a dick, because then I'd be a dick, and I don't want to be a dick.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2011 06:04:08PM 1 point [-]

I value not being a dick, and not only nobody finding out that I'm a dick.

Could you taboo the word "dick".

Incidentally, this sounds like an argument based on virtue ethics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2011 06:21:32AM 1 point [-]

The Ethical Injunction Sequence seems relevant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 July 2011 03:02:26AM 5 points [-]
Comment author: jsteinhardt 09 July 2011 08:27:09PM 1 point [-]

I think ugh field is the wrong term. A better description would be that he separately brought up a topic that we know from experience ends up being extremely contentious and non-productive, so we try to avoid discussing it. He then regretted doing so and as a result deleted a large chunk of his own posts, including several like this one that were quite insightful. Roko deleting the posts was probably overkill, but there you have it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2011 04:51:35AM 8 points [-]

A better description would be that he separately brought up a topic that we know from experience ends up being extremely contentious and non-productive, so we try to avoid discussing it.

Wow, that really gives a distorted picture of what happened.

A better description would be to say that he brought up a topic that some people, including Eliezer Yudkowsky, believe can cause negative effects by virtue of people merely thinking about it.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 July 2011 11:45:44PM *  3 points [-]

It isn't clear how much ability people have to think without language. Some people report having running monologues pretty much constantly, but others do not.

There are also a handful of famous cases of people who grew up with little or no language exposure. The most widely studied example is probably Genie. Another well known example is Ildefonso, described in Susan Schaller's book "The Man Without Words". Ildefonso was a deaf child who grew up in an environment where his parents had no way of communicating with him. He wasn't exposed to sign language until he was already an adult. That example makes one understand how people in ancient times considered deaf-mutes to be effectively stupid and crazy, although it isn't completely clear if that's due more to the lack of communication or the lack of language. In the case of Ildefonso, the story goes that when he realized that objects had names in sign language he burst into tears at the revelation.

Language is a very basic part of human thought processes. In order to do almost anything of note we need to be able to use language. I'm not at all convinced that developing ways of "thinking without words" is at all productive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 July 2011 01:03:12AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 July 2011 04:47:26AM 2 points [-]

I'd recommend you start by reading the sequence on ethical injunctions, i.e., norms you shouldn't violate even when you've convinced yourself it's a good idea, and use that concept as the basis for your analysis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 July 2011 06:40:20AM 9 points [-]

Thanks for the post. Now I can pat myself on the back for reading and upvoting a post critical of my beliefs and then go back to doing what I was doing before. ;)

Comment author: [deleted] 03 July 2011 02:45:32AM *  1 point [-]

whereas drugs and quitting religion offer excellent rewards now, but may involve heavy costs down the road.

What long-term costs would quitting religion have?

ETA: The answer is presumably in the post:

maybe we should be slower to advise people to give up the health benefits (footnote 15) of belonging, emotionally, to one or another religious community.

In response to comment by [deleted] on An Outside View on Less Wrong's Advice
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 July 2011 06:05:29AM *  3 points [-]

What long-term costs would quitting religion have?

Another example is loosing access to useful intersubjective truths that religions have accumulated over the centuries.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 07 July 2011 09:10:22AM 7 points [-]

Excellent link! Short, clear, interesting, 100% relevant.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 July 2011 05:27:38AM 3 points [-]

I suspect the subjects are judging the morality of the CEO's actions by how likely they think he will take good and/or bad actions in the future.

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 July 2011 11:01:09PM 18 points [-]

Of course, lots of those things, including "pull out a bigger gun," fall under the practical category of "get shot."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2011 10:26:52PM 1 point [-]

Depends on how good a shot they are.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 July 2011 09:33:34PM *  -2 points [-]

Yes rational people can choose a different interpretation of QM, but they probably need to make other metaphysical choices to match in order to maintain consistency.

Aumann's agreement theorem.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Probability is in the Mind
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2011 07:33:38AM 3 points [-]

Aumann's agreement theorem.

assumes common priors, i.e., a common metaphysical commitment.

In response to Gender and Libido
Comment author: lucidfox 04 July 2011 02:12:20AM 5 points [-]

An acquaintance of mine said about this thread: "no-one seems to be raising the idea that there may be strong cultural factors related to gendered expressions of libido".

To elaborate, perhaps the issue is not so much with "natural" sexuality as with social discouragement for one gender or the other at different times to be open about it.

In response to comment by lucidfox on Gender and Libido
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 July 2011 07:26:16AM 1 point [-]

To elaborate, perhaps the issue is not so much with "natural" sexuality as with social discouragement for one gender or the other at different times to be open about it.

Could you Taboo "natural" in that sentence, or would an equivalent formulation be: "the issue is not so much with 'natural' sexuality as with social pressure for one gender or the other at different times to exaggerate their sexuality"?

Comment author: zntneo 01 July 2011 04:26:49PM *  2 points [-]

As someone who is both into the skeptics movement and the atheist movement i'm not sure what skeptics "wouldn't dare mutter" about. It seems to me that skeptics and atheists just have and interest in those things and want to stop the harm caused by them.

Also, i must be ignorant about all these other horrible delusions you are talking about.

Further you must be talking about instrumental rationality because i'm not sure how this is evidence against epistemic rationality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 July 2011 03:20:08AM *  2 points [-]

As someone who is both into the skeptics movement and the atheist movement i'm not sure what skeptics "wouldn't dare mutter" about.

(...)

Also, i must be ignorant about all these other horrible delusions you are talking about.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I recommend this post by Quirinus_Quirrell. The list there is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you an idea of what people are talking about.

Edit: Two more good articles to read are this one by Paul Graham, and this post by Vladimir_M.

Comment author: pthalo 28 June 2011 07:14:28AM *  1 point [-]

Because I live in a former eastern bloc country (Hungary). My only guess is the fridge is that old. (It's not mine, but it came with the apartment I live in. The building I live in is Russian built too. :)

I will look again it, to make sure I got the letters right and to make sure it is pointing at what I thought it was. Since my Russian is so bad, when i checked last time what the words said, I was repeating "V soft sign K L" to myself so i wouldnt forget it before i got back to the keyboard. (I was confident i could remember min and maks) so it may have stood out in my head enough that i forgot what it was set to.

But it's definitely cold in fridge, so it cannot be set to "turn off."

This time, I take my camera with me :)

.... and discover that it is set to maximum (МАКС).

Here is a picture http://pics.livejournal.com/pthalogreen/pic/0012rat7 . It also has another setting "НОРМ" which im going to assume is the "normal" or "medium" that i was remembering that it had. I think I set it to maks some time ago in attempt to solve the food spoilage problem.

It's really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means "to turn on".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 June 2011 08:27:25AM 3 points [-]

Native Russian speaker here.

It also has another setting "НОРМ" which im going to assume is the "normal" or "medium" that i was remembering that it had.

That is correct.

btw. ь and ы are distinct letters.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2011 12:47:14AM *  0 points [-]

I think was you meant to say was: The problem with democracies is that they're often run by the majority opinon of people, and people tend to be stupid, corrupt, or both.

We could build a government that wasn't composed of just people, or even of people who fit some criteria of non-stupid and non-corrupt, and it would still be a government.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Reasons for being rational
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 June 2011 03:52:40AM 1 point [-]

We could build a government that wasn't composed of just people

Until SIAI finishes their main project I think we're stuck with using people.

or even of people who fit some criteria of non-stupid and non-corrupt

This is extremely hard as Goodhart's law tends to make this whatever proxy you use less reliable very quickly.

Comment author: Friendly-HI 26 June 2011 01:27:44AM 9 points [-]

Sure, rationality has obviously nothing to do with how mainstream or contrarian a belief is - but that should be so obvious to even any fairly new lesswronger, that we can be quite sure that her goal isn't to alienate people just for the sake of it.

Also, you're right about the celestial: In the western world religion has become quite low-hanging fruit by now - so low it practically touches the ground. "The God Delusion" and "God is Not Great" apparently had quite an impact on the US and the UK during the last years and smart people begin to dole out stomach punches to Jesus left and right. By now one can easily wear his or her criticism of religion on a T-shirt and one will still have the lion's share of the academically educated world on one's side.

Try a slogan like "democracy is retarded" on the other hand and you'll have butchered the holy cow of practically everyone.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 June 2011 05:11:57AM 5 points [-]

Try a slogan like "democracy is retarded" on the other hand and you'll have butchered the holy cow of practically everyone.

I disagree. The phrase "democracy is retarded" is so far from what most people, at least in the West, believe that saying it will simply make you look like a harmless eccentric.

As Paul Graham pointed out here:

No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

You're unlikely to convince many people by saying "democracy is retarded" so there's no reason to attack you. As for ideas that will actually get sacred cows, I recommend looking at this comment by Quirinus_Quirrell.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2011 11:34:47PM *  6 points [-]

I suspect the results would depend heavily on the jury. Specifically a blue pretending to be a green, could probably fool fellow blues much more easily then he could fool actual greens.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 25 June 2011 03:31:53PM *  0 points [-]

Well that might explain some of our miscommunication. I'll go back and check.

Consequences" only in a counterfactual world. . I don't see how you can call this consequentialist without streching the term to the point that it could include nearly any morality system.

This makes sense using the first definition, at least, according to TDT it does.

Both CDT and TDT compare counter-factuals, they just take their counter-factual from different points in the causal graph.

This is clearly using the first definition.

Counterfactual mugging and the ransom problem I mentioned in the great-grandparent are both cases where TDT requires you to consider consequences of counterfactuals you know didn't happen.

This only makes sense with the second, and should probably be UDT rather than TDT - the original TDT didn't get the right answer on the counterfactual mugging.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2011 11:13:50PM 2 points [-]

This only makes sense with the second, and should probably be UDT rather than TDT - the original TDT didn't get the right answer on the counterfactual mugging.

Sorry, I meant something closer to UDT.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 25 June 2011 05:20:42AM 0 points [-]

There are two rather different things both going under the name counterfactuals.

One is when I think of what the world would be like if I did something that I'm not going to do.

Another is when I think of what the world would be like if something not under my control had happened differently, and how my actions affect that.

They're almost orthogonal, so I question the utility of using the same word.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2011 08:57:52AM 1 point [-]

One is when I think of what the world would be like if I did something that I'm not going to do.

Another is when I think of what the world would be like if something not under my control had happened differently, and how my actions affect that.

Well, I've been consistently using the word "conterfactual" in your second sense.

Comment author: benelliott 24 June 2011 03:32:41PM *  0 points [-]

Both CDT and TDT compare counter-factuals, they just take their counter-factual from different points in the causal graph.

In both cases, while computing them you never assume anything which you know to be false, whereas Kant is not like that. (Just realised, I'm not sure this is right).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 June 2011 03:48:15AM 1 point [-]

In both cases, while computing them you never assume anything which you know to be false

Counterfactual mugging and the ransom problem I mentioned in the great-grandparent are both cases where TDT requires you to consider consequences of counterfactuals you know didn't happen. Omega's coin didn't come up heads, and your friend has been kidnapped. Nevertheless you need to consider the consequences of your policy in those counterfactual situations.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 24 June 2011 04:22:17AM 1 point [-]

It sounds deontological, but it isn't. It's consequentialist. It evaluates options according to their consequences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2011 04:35:05AM 3 points [-]

"Consequences" only in a counterfactual world. I don't see how you can call this consequentialist without streching the term to the point that it could include nearly any morality system. In particular by your definition Kant's categorical imperative is consequentialist since it involves looking at the consequences of your actions in the hypothetical world where everyone performs them.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 24 June 2011 03:32:48AM 1 point [-]

Decision theories tell you what options you have: Pairs of actions and results.

Ethical theories tells you which options are superior.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2011 04:11:34AM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps an example of what I mean will be helpful.

Suppose your friend is kidnapped and being held for ransom. Naive consequentialism says you should pay because you value his life more then the money. TDT says you shouldn't pay because paying counterfactually causes him to be kidnapped.

Note how in the scenario the TDT argument sounds very deontological.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 June 2011 02:16:23PM 1 point [-]

No, it's a decision theory, not an ethical theory.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 June 2011 03:30:51AM 1 point [-]

I don't understand the distinction you're making.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 22 June 2011 04:45:49PM 1 point [-]

Then you should end up violating one of the axioms and getting a not-consequentialism.

All consequentialist theories produce a set of rules.

The right way to define "deontology", then, is a theory that is a set of rules that couldn't be consequentialist.

if you mix consequentialism and deontology, you get deontology.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 June 2011 04:48:17AM 1 point [-]

Would you count Timeless Decision Theory as deontological since it isn't pure consequentialism?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2011 04:49:45AM 4 points [-]

This is related to Schelling's theory of focal points only there it's necessary for a group of people to believe something (and more importantly to believe that everyone else believes it) for it to become true.

Comment author: analyticsophy 15 June 2011 08:10:34AM 2 points [-]

Wait I misunderstood what you were asking, sorry. No, I specifically argue that sex involving a non-consenting partner is always going to be traumatic for that member of the ordeal.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2011 04:12:16PM 4 points [-]

sex involving a non-consenting partner is always going to be traumatic for that member of the ordeal.

Why? Do you also believe that being touched non-consensually should always be traumatic? (Yes there exist cultures were being touched by a random member of the opposite sex or a member of an untouchable caste is considered traumatic). What's so special about touching with sexual overtones, and aren't the sexual overtones themselves cultural?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2011 05:41:46AM *  7 points [-]

Would you generalize your analysis of pedophilia to non-consensual sex? If not, why not?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 June 2011 05:34:01AM 3 points [-]

I don't think the only evolutionary purpose of reason is to win arguments, part of the purpose must have been to decide on the best course of action, otherwise we would have evolved to not listen to what anyone else says.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 14 June 2011 06:14:04PM *  0 points [-]

If you believe that there is a point that actually is pragmatically better than another by a real margin, please state it, and defend your proposition.

I'm highly unusual, but seeing as I've optimized my choice of friends pretty well, for me personally there's a pretty clear point of divergence, and that's the point of divergence that causes some commenters on Less Wrong to get all worked up about PUA. Seeing as it gets those commenters all worked up it presumably would get some non-negligible fraction of less reflective smart people all worked up as well, so perhaps it extends beyond just Less Wrong. In the majority of cases I've heard discussed, if something isn't explicitly-learned-and-consciously-acquired attracting-women-in-optimized-ways then it's probably influence, if it is then it's obviously manipulation. Yawn-inducing but practically useful in a way that a thorough understanding of the social psychology of manipulation wouldn't be. ("Manipulation" just never seems to come up. Is this not true for most folk here?)

(In case it's not blatantly obvious, yes I agree the existence of this Schelling point is unfortunate, no I am not going to waste time complaining about it or dreaming about marginally better ones.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 June 2011 06:24:36PM *  8 points [-]

In the majority of cases I've heard discussed, if something isn't explicitly-learned-and-consciously-acquired attracting-women-in-optimized-ways then it's probably influence, if it is then it's obviously manipulation.

The problem with using that as a Schelling point, is that it means that influence can become manipulation simple by virtue of the influencer becoming becoming more self-reflective and thinking about what he's doing and why it works.

Comment author: TimFreeman 07 June 2011 06:02:07PM *  3 points [-]

This doesn't seem to say anything about the boundedness of human utility functions (which I think is pretty likely) that Pascal's mugging doesn't.

Pascal's mugging requires the victim to say what probability he assigns to the mugger being honest, and this one doesn't, so with this one I can fleece people en masse without having to have a conversation with each one.

Also, Pascal's Wager as presented on LW involved creating other people, so this version avoids Hanson's suggestion of assuming that you don't control whether you're the preexisting person or one of the new persons. This version works with an unbounded utility function that does not involve creating other people to get large utilities.

Otherwise, I agree.

ETA: Another advantage of the scenario in the OP over Pascal's Mugging as presented on LessWrong is that the latter is extortion and the former is not, and people seem really keen on manipulating the extortioner when there is extortion. The OP managed not to trigger that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 June 2011 03:18:53AM 1 point [-]

Also, Pascal's Wager as presented on LW involved creating other people, so this version avoids Hanson's suggestion of assuming that you don't control whether you're the preexisting person or one of the new persons.

So how about avoiding your version by saying that all the terms in my utility function are bounded except for the ones that scale linearly with the number of people?

Comment author: nshepperd 06 June 2011 04:02:59PM *  0 points [-]

What's contradictory about the same object being judged differently by different standards?

Here's a standard: return the width of the object in meters. Here's another: return the number of wavelengths of blue light that make up the width of the object. And another: return the number of electrons in the object.

You are tacitly assuming that the good guys are in the majority, However, sometimes the minority is in the right (as you and I would judge it), and need to persuade the majority to change their ways

No Universally Compelling Arguments seems relevant here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 June 2011 02:21:27AM 1 point [-]

No Universally Compelling Arguments seems relevant here.

You realize that the linked post applies to arguments about mathematics or physics just as much as about morality.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 June 2011 03:36:06AM *  1 point [-]

I'm sure you'll agree that long term economic numbers should be adjusted for inflation to be more meaningful, whether this is happening in a reasonable way is another question.

The problem is that "adjusting for inflation" makes sense only as a rough and vague heuristic, not as an exact measure of objective value which can be computed up to three, four, or more significant digits. The reality is that when you compare the purchasing power of money in different places and times, the differences in a myriad of relevant factors are often so great that it makes no sense at all to express them with a single number, except perhaps for the purposes of some extremely rough, Fermi problem-style calculation.

The idea that you can define some objective and scientific "price index" and then do calculations that will tell you that some "real" values differ by 4.83%, or invent models that will predict such figures by capturing real insight, is completely detached from reality. This is not a simplification of a problem to make attacking it easier; it's not even an instance of unjustified simplification -- rather, it means dreaming up complete fantasies and giving them a pseudoscientific dressing. I simply see nothing comparable among natural scientists, who are generally capable of dissolving the concepts they work with and avoiding getting lost in such elaborate fantasies built of reified artificial concepts.

(From this it also follows that most discussions of economic growth are nonsense on stilts, since they require combining the nonsensical notions of "real" values with GDP and similar figures, which have their own host of problems that normally go unacknowledged, and which are also usually impossible to discuss rationally.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2011 04:42:09AM 1 point [-]

I simply see nothing comparable among natural scientists, who are generally capable of dissolving the concepts they work with and avoiding getting lost in such elaborate fantasies built of reified artificial concepts.

While that's mostly true today after several centuries of work, Newton would have been hard pressed to explain what a force was without resorting to something that sounds like mysticism. Also calculus was only placed on a firm mathematical footing by Weierstrass two centuries after Newton had invented it and based his physics on it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 June 2011 11:15:26PM *  2 points [-]

One example are discussions of free trade, which is strongly favored by an overwhelming majority of economists. The standard justifications for this position are based on models whose connection to reality is tenuous at best, and which ignore a host of potentially relevant factors. (Also, I often see arguments that are clearly unsound even if the models used are assumed to be adequate, as well as naive intuitive arguments that violate elementary logic.) Now, for all I know, the majority opinion of economists on this issue could be mostly correct (though I am sure that it's wrong on some particulars), but whichever way it is, their existing justifications are far from adequate. Once you start questioning them about this, you are likely to quickly run into sneering, stonewalling, moral posturing, and what looks like ideologically induced blockheadedness.

Another example is the question of how meaningful various economic figures and quantities are. This includes various economic statistics that are often used in arguments and calculations with multiple digits of precision, even though the way they have been obtained clearly makes even the first digit, and sometimes even the order of magnitude, highly questionable. (Oskar Morgenstern's On the Accuracy of Economic Observations presents a good book-length critique of this phenomenon. This book has been conveniently ignored and forgotten by economists, even though the issues it raised have never been addressed, to my knowledge.)

Even worse, however, are various artificial quantities such as price indexes and the "real" figures based on them, which are typically reified and treated as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world, whereas in reality they are arbitrary constructs that could be defined with as much (or rather as little) justification in different ways to yield wholly different figures. Again, with a few honorable exceptions, trying to discuss these issues with economists usually leads to frustrating unsuccessful attempts to explain what the problem is, often followed by smug dismissals. You'll practically never see anything like that from natural scientists.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2011 02:06:30AM 1 point [-]

I generally agree with you; however, some comments:

Even worse, however, are various artificial quantities such as price indexes and the "real" figures based on them, which are typically reified and treated as if they were objectively measurable properties of the real world, whereas in reality they are arbitrary constructs that could be defined with as much (or rather as little) justification in different ways to yield wholly different figures.

I'm sure you'll agree that long term economic numbers should be adjusted for inflation to be more meaningful, whether this is happening in a reasonable way is another question.

You'll practically never see anything like that from natural scientists.

Well, in physics you have things like friction and air-resistance that, at least at first, were fudge factors to explain why objects don't obey Newton's laws. In fact looking at physics, in order to make progress it was necessary to disentangle the "fundamental behavior" of objects, i.e., how they behave on "frictionless surfaces", when hung from "strings of negligible mass" and other unrealistic assumptions, from things like friction that cause real objects to behave slightly differently. The same will undoubtedly be necessary in economics.

That having been said, I have no idea whether existing attempts to do this are any good. Physicists, of course, had the advantage that they could do experiments much more easily.

In response to Dominus' Razor
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 May 2011 05:49:29AM 5 points [-]

People and institutions usually have some reason for doing what they do, even if they’ve since forgotten or never knew in the first place. “Evolution is cleverer than you are” (Orgel’s Second Rule) and “Free markets are cleverer than you are” are two related rules of thumb.

Related essay by Nick Szabo applying this principal to memetic evolution.

Comment author: Duke 25 May 2011 09:46:38PM *  0 points [-]

I don't understand what makes learning about cognitive biases intrinsically different from obtaining any other type of knowledge. That is, couldn't you make a parallel argument that learning math (or any rationality skill) is dangerous unless it is applied evenhandedly to your own beliefs and to the beliefs of others?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2011 09:50:38PM 2 points [-]

The problem is that it's much easier to apply knowledge about biases to dismiss people who disagree with you as biased then to apply knowledge about math to...I'm not even sure what the analogous thing you're thinking about is.

In response to Future of Humanity?
Comment author: Dustin 24 May 2011 10:18:02PM 10 points [-]

This post seems incomplete. If it is complete, it seems almost...confused? I don't understand what the point of your post is.

In response to comment by Dustin on Future of Humanity?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 May 2011 03:20:59AM 1 point [-]

It's probably a draft that was published prematurely due to this bug.

Comment author: DanArmak 24 May 2011 02:55:24PM 0 points [-]

The above statement is equally true with 'idealist' replaced by 'theist' and yet we don't have a problem with talking about atheism.

It's not equally true, because LW members do not have a tendency towards theism.

In response to comment by DanArmak on The Ultraviolet
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 May 2011 08:44:01PM 1 point [-]

That's because almost all the potential theist members have been driven away by the fact that we don't try to accommodate their mistakes, I'm suggesting taking the same attitude towards 'idealists' as wedrifid calls them.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 May 2011 08:11:31PM 0 points [-]

He's not trying to define art in accord with on our collective intuitions, he's trying to find the simplest boundary around a list of examples based on an individual's intuitions.

I would argue that the list of examples in the article is abbreviated for simplicity. If there is no single clear simple boundary between the two sets, one can always ask for more examples. But one asks an individual and not all of humanity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2011 09:41:14PM 1 point [-]

He's not trying to define art in accord with on our collective intuitions, he's trying to find the simplest boundary around a list of examples based on an individual's intuitions.

I would argue he's trying to find the simplest coherent extrapolation of our intuitions.

In response to The Ultraviolet
Comment author: wedrifid 23 May 2011 03:08:43AM *  3 points [-]

It's a reminder - as a collective intelligence, we have a blind spot. We shouldn't conclude that there's nothing behind it.

There is a blind spot with respect to practical social understanding. From what I can see there isn't any particular tendency to conclude there is nothing behind it. What I would not like to see is any particular efforts to fill that 'blind spot' with detailed information. Because what filled the gap would necessarily be either bullshit or offensive to vocal members.

Even greater than the tendency towards autism on lesswrong is the tendency toward idealism. Idealists don't tend to like having their illusions shattered and our illusions about the social behavior of our own species are something that many take personally.

Most 'bees' don't like talking about 'ultraviolet', especially in a communal setting. They consider it far more appropriate to tell stories about how pretty the yellow and blue look and how (nudge, nudge) that red one 'just has something about it'. Sure, some subgroups are self aware and honest enough to talk about ultraviolet among themselves but when it the broader public they prefer to avoid the subject - and if it comes up they know to lie.

In response to comment by wedrifid on The Ultraviolet
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2011 03:44:55AM 2 points [-]

offensive to vocal members.

I fail to see what's wrong with this.

Even greater than the tendency towards autism on lesswrong is the tendency toward idealism. Idealists don't tend to like having their illusions shattered and our illusions about the social behavior of our own species are something that many take personally.

You've identified a serious problem. Unfortunately, your solution appears to be abandoning our search for truth because some members can't handle the truth. The above statement is equally true with 'idealist' replaced by 'theist' and yet we don't have a problem with talking about atheism.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 May 2011 02:27:58AM 8 points [-]

Eliezer developed a hostility towards the outside view, probably because people were using outside view based arguments against the Singularity

Eliezer developed a hostility towards the outside view because people were misusing the outside view, entirely missing the point and making absolutely ridiculous claims based of superficial similarities.

This is best illustrated in this post which I consider borderline anti-epistomology since it can serve as a universal counterargument against anyone invoking the outside view.

The charge of anti-epistomology is not valid. People could apply the reasoning from that post incorrectly in the same way they could apply his outside view post incorrectly yet you cannot thereby (correctly) label the warning anti-epistemic. Using "Outside View!" as a conversation halter is a bad thing, for the reasons specified. Most relevant is the unpacking of the reasoning underlying outside view considerations - see the bottom half of the post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2011 03:07:54AM 3 points [-]

Eliezer developed a hostility towards the outside view because people were misusing the outside view, entirely missing the point and making absolutely ridiculous claims based of superficial similarities.

Of the arguments he mentions Robin Hanson is trying to fit a line through too few data points, so while his argument is flawed it's not his use of the outside view that's the real problem. The argument made by taw is mostly correct, even if he somewhat overstates his case, in particular the success rate for the reference class of beliefs in coming of a new world, be it good or evil, (depending on exactly what you mean by "new world") is slightly above 0%.

Most relevant is the unpacking of the reasoning underlying outside view considerations - see the bottom half of the post.

He appears to be using the narrowest possible argument for the outside view he can get away with. Thus ruling out a lot of valid applications of the outside view. A strict reading would even rule out Wei Dai's application in the OP.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2011 02:03:19AM *  4 points [-]
  1. Take the outside view. Recall famous scientists and philosophers of the past, and how far off from the truth their ideas were, and yet how confident they were in their ideas.

I think part of the reason people on LW tend to avoid using the outside view, is that towards the end of the sequences, Eliezer developed a hostility towards the outside view, probably because people were using outside view based arguments against the Singularity. This is best illustrated in this post which I consider borderline anti-epistomology since it can serve as a universal counterargument against anyone invoking the outside view.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 May 2011 12:04:01AM 0 points [-]

But he's not analyzing "art", he's analyzing the set of examples, and that is all the difference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 May 2011 01:32:57AM *  1 point [-]

But he's not analyzing "art"

I disagree. Suppose after proposing a definition of art based to the listed examples, someone produced another example that clearly satisfied our intuitions of what constituted art but didn't satisfy the definitions. Would Eliezer:

a) say "sorry despite our intuitions that example isn't art by definition", or

b) conclude that the example was art and there was a problem with the definition?

I'm guessing (b).

Comment author: Amanojack 22 May 2011 08:42:02PM 0 points [-]

Good point. I guess the only way to counter these odd scenarios is to point out that everyone's utility function is different, and then the question is simply whether the responder wants to self-modify (or would be happier in the long run doing so) even after hearing some rationalist arguments to clarify their intuitions. The question of self-modification is a little hard to grasp, but at least it avoids all these far-fetched situations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2011 09:28:54PM 1 point [-]

For the Pascal's mugging problem, I don't think that will help.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 22 May 2011 08:35:42PM 0 points [-]

I do not think that he is describing conceptual analysis. Starting with a word vs. starting with a set of objects makes all the difference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2011 09:27:01PM 1 point [-]

In the example he does start with a word, namely 'art', then uses our intuition to get a set of examples. This is more-or-less how conceptual analysis works.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 May 2011 07:09:07PM *  2 points [-]

The 'taboo X' reply does seem overused. It is something that is sometimes best to just ignore when you don't think it aids in conveying the point you were making.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2011 07:18:10PM 1 point [-]

It is something that is sometimes best to just ignore when you don't think it aids in conveying the point you were making.

When I try that, I tend to get down-votes and replies complaining that I'm not responding to their arguments.

Comment author: BobTheBob 22 May 2011 06:09:06PM 6 points [-]

Some thoughts on this and related LW discussions. They come a bit late - apols to you and commentators if they've already been addressed or made in the commentary:

1) Definitions (this is a biggie).

There is a fair bit of confusion on LW, it seems to me, about just what definitions are and what their relevance is to philosophical and other discussion. Here's my understanding - please say if you think I've gone wrong.

If in the course of philosophical discussion, I explicitly define a familiar term, my aim in doing so is to remove the term from debate - I fix the value of a variable to restrict the problem. It'd be good to find a real example here, but I'm not convinced defining terms happens very often in philosophical or other debate. By way of a contrived example, one might want to consider, in evaluating some theory, the moral implications of actions made under duress (a gun held to the head) but not physically initiated by an external agent (a jostle to the arm). One might say, "Define 'coerced action' to mean any action not physically initiated but made under duress" (or more precise words to the effect). This done, it wouldn't make sense simply to object that my conclusion regarding coerced actions doesn't apply to someone physically pushed from behind - I have stuipulated for the sake of argument I'm not talking about such cases. (in this post, you distinguish stipulation and definition - do you have in mind a distinction I'm glossing over?)

Contrast this to the usual case for conceptual analyses, where it's assumed there's a shared concept ('good', 'right', 'possible', 'knows', etc), and what is produced is meant to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions meant to capture the concept. Such an analysis is not a definition. Regarding such analyses, typically one can point to a particular thing and say, eg, "Our shared concept includes this specimen, it lacks a necessary condition, therefore your analysis is mistaken" - or, maybe "Intuitively, this specimen falls under our concept, it lacks...". Such a response works only if there is broad agreement that the specimen falls under the concept. Usually this works out to be the case.

I haven't read the Jackson book, so please do correct me if you think I've misunderstood, but I take it something like this is his point in the paragraphs you quote. Tom and Jack can define 'right action' to mean whatever they want it to. In so doing, however, we cease to have any reason to think they mean by the term what we intuitively do. Rather, Jackson is observing, what Tom and Jack should be doing is saying that rightness is that thing (whatever exactly it is) which our folk concepts roughly converge on, and taking up the task of refining our understanding from there - no defining involved.

You say,

... Jackson supposes that we can pick out which platitudes of moral discourse matter, and how much they matter, for determining the meaning of moral terms

Well, not quite. The point I take it is rather that there simply are 'folk' platitudes which pick-out the meanings of moral terms - this is the starting point. 'Killing people for fun is wrong', 'Helping elderly ladies across the street is right' etc, etc. These are the data (moral intuitions, as usually understood). If this isn't the case, there isn't even a subject to discuss. Either way, it has nothing to do with definitions.

Confusion about definitions is evident in the quote from the post you link to. To re-quote:

...the first person is speaking as if 'sound' means acoustic vibrations in the air; the second person is speaking as if 'sound' means an auditory experience in a brain. If you ask "Are there acoustic vibrations?" or "Are there auditory experiences?", the answer is at once obvious. And so the argument is really about the definition of the word 'sound'.

Possibly the problem is that 'sound' has two meanings, and the disputants each are failing to see that the other means something different. Definitions are not relevant here, meanings are. (Gratuitous digression: what is "an auditory experience in a brain"? If this means something entirely characterizable in terms of neural events, end of story, then plausibly one of the disputants would say this does not capture what he means by 'sound' - what he means is subjective and ineffable, something neural events aren't. He might go on to wonder whether that subjective, ineffable thing, given that it is apparently created by the supposedly mind-independent event of the falling of a tree, has any existence apart from his self (not to be confused with his brain!). I'm not defending this view, just saying that what's offered is not a response but rather a simple begging of the question against it. End of digression.)

2) In your opening section you produce an example meant to show conceptual analysis is silly. Looks to me more like a silly attempt at an example of conceptual analysis. If you really want to make your case, why not take a real example of a philosophical argument -preferably one widely held in high regard at least by philosophers? There's lots of 'em around.

3) In your section The trouble with conceptual analysis, you finally explain,

The trouble is that philosophers often take this "what we mean by" question so seriously that thousands of pages of debate concern which definition to use... .

As explained above, philosophical discussion is not about "which definition to use" -it's about (roughly, and among other things) clarifying our concepts. The task is difficult but worthwhile because the concepts in question are important but subtle.

Within 20 seconds of arguing about the definition of 'desire', someone will say, "Screw it. Taboo 'desire' so we can argue about facts and anticipations, not definitions."

If you don't have the patience to do philosophy, or you don't think it's of any value, by all means do something else -argue about facts and anticipations, whatever precisely that may involve. Just don't think that in doing this latter thing you'll address the question philosophy is interested in, or that you've said anything at all so far to show philosophy isn't worth doing. In this connection, one of the real benefits of doing philosophy is that it encourages precision and attention to detail in thinking. You say Eliezer Yudkowsky "...advises against reading mainstream philosophy because he thinks it will 'teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work.'" The original quote continues, "...assume naturalism! Move on! NEXT!" Unfortunately Eliezer has a bad habit of making unclear and undefended or question-begging assertions, and this is one of them. What are the bad habits, and how does philosophy encourage them? And what precisely is meant by 'naturalism'? To make the latter assertion and simultaneously to eschew the responsibility of articulating what this commits you to is to presume you can both have your cake and eat it too. This may work in blog posts -it wouldn't pass in serious discussion.

(Unlike some on this blog, I have not slavishly pored through Eliezer's every post. If there is somewhere a serious discussion of the meaning of 'naturalism' which shows how the usual problems with normative concepts like 'rational' can successfully be navigated, I will withdraw this remark).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2011 07:07:22PM *  2 points [-]

Eliezer does have a post in which he talks about doing what you call conceptual analysis more-or-less as you describe and why it's worthwhile. Unfortunately, since that's just one somewhat obscure post whereas he talks about tabooing words in many of his posts, when LWrongers encounter conceptual analysis, their cached thought is to say "taboo your words" and dismiss the whole analysis as useless.

Comment author: Amanojack 22 May 2011 05:49:20PM 0 points [-]

I think he's just pointing out that all you have to do is change the scenario slightly and then my objection doesn't work.

Still, I'm a little curious about how someone's ability to state a large number succinctly makes a difference. I mean, suppose the biggest number the mugger knew how to say was 12, and they didn't know about multiplication, exponents, up arrow notation, etc. They just chose 12 because it was the biggest number they could think of or knew how to express (whether they were bluffing totally or were actually going to torture 3^^^3 people). Should I take a mugger more seriously just because they know how to communicate big numbers to me?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2011 06:43:46PM 1 point [-]

The point of stating the large number succinctly is that it overwhelms the small likelihood of the muggers story being true, at least if you have something resembling a Solomonoff prior. Note also that the mugger isn't really necessary for the scenario, he's merely there to supply a hypothesis that you could have come up with on your own.

Comment author: jimrandomh 22 May 2011 05:02:14PM 0 points [-]

Actually, considering the possibility that you've misjudged the probability doesn't help with Pascal's Mugging scenarios, because

P(X|judged that X has probability p) >= p\*P(judgment was correct)

And while P(judgment was correct) may be small, it won't be astronomically small under ordinary circumstances, which is what it would take to resolve the mugging.

(My preferred resolution is to restrict the class of admissable utility function-predictor pairs to those where probability shrinks faster that utility grows for any parameterizable statement, which is slightly less restrictive than requiring bounded utility functions.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 May 2011 05:41:53PM 1 point [-]

BTW, you realize we're talking about torture vs. dust spec and not Pascal's mugging here?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 May 2011 03:36:19PM 3 points [-]

The problem with basing decisions on events with a probability of 1-in-3^^^^^3, is that you're neglecting to take into account all kinds of possibilities with much higher (though still tiny probabilities).

For example, your chances of finding that the Earth has turned into your favorite fantasy novel, i.e., the particles making up the earth spontaneously rearranged themselves into a world closely resembling the world of the novel due to quantum tunneling, and then the whole thing turning into a giant bowl of tapioca pudding a week later, is much much higher then 1-in-3^^^^^3.

Comment author: jsalvatier 21 May 2011 03:13:06PM 0 points [-]

I know very little about cryptography. Say I wanted to start my own currency. Would it be possible to create a secure currency JohnCoin where I and only I can produce new JohnCoins?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 May 2011 03:18:42PM 4 points [-]

Would it be possible to create a secure currency JohnCoin where I and only I can produce new JohnCoins?

If that's your only criterion that's easy.

Convincing anyone else to use a currency that you and only you can create is much harder. ;)

Comment author: Prismattic 20 May 2011 11:45:15PM *  9 points [-]

I think torture v. dust specks and similar problems can be illuminated by flipping them around and examining them from the perspective of the potential victims. Given a choice between getting a dust speck in the eye with probability 1 or a 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance of being tortured, I suspect the vast majority of individuals will actually opt for the dust speck, and I don't think this is just insensitivity to the scope of 3^^^^^3. Dust specks are such a trivial inconvenience that people generally don't choose to do any of the easy things they could do to minimize the chances of getting one (e.g. regularly dusting their environment, wearing goggles, etc.) On the other hand, most people would do anything to stop being tortured, up to and including suicide if the torture has no apparent end point. The difference here is arguably not expressible as a finite number.

Pardon me, I have to go flush my cornea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 May 2011 02:39:16PM 1 point [-]

And yet we don't give Pascal's mugger the 10 bucks.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 May 2011 03:49:24AM 6 points [-]

But you're probably not really looking for a distribution over different parameter settings; you're looking for a single best setting of the parameters that you can use for making predictions.

This is in essence the narrative fallacy. While it can be a useful heuristic, there are dangers for example causing you no neglect outliers and black swans.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 19 May 2011 05:07:37PM 0 points [-]

I don't know how the cult alarms work, they're intuitive. I know all those things and indeed it's probably a false alarm but I thought I should mention it anyway.

Still, if religious orgs have anything to say to rationalists about rationality then somehting, somewhere, is very very wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not the case or that we shouldn't listen to them, but at the very least we should have noticed the stuff they're saying on our own long ago.

I never actually stated that I accepted what the feeling said, only that I HAD the feeling. I am in fact unsure of what to think and thus I'm trying to forward the raw data I'm working from (my intuitions) rather than my interpretation of what they mean. I should have made that clearer.

Besides, regardless of if the feeling of being creeped out is justified or not the fact they creep people out is a problem and they should try to communicate the same ideas in ways that don't creep people out so much. I don't like being creeped out.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 May 2011 08:35:37PM 4 points [-]

Still, if religious orgs have anything to say to rationalists about rationality then somehting, somewhere, is very very wrong.

Nick Szabo has a good essay about why we should expect (religious) traditions to contain valuable insights.

In response to comment by JohnH on Tolerate Tolerance
Comment author: Celer 18 May 2011 03:07:54PM 0 points [-]

To make sure we are not arguing over words, Googling "tolerate" returns two definitions. "1. Allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference. 2. Accept or endure (someone or something unpleasant or disliked) with forbearance."

I am using the second, not the first. I don't see the point of dealing with someone who is explicitly intolerant of a group of people based on no conscious choice of their own, and should have examined their own beliefs, without a very significant reason to do so. This is because they are less likely to have interesting thoughts or experiences, and furthermore I would not feel comfortable dealing with them in many social settings.

In response to comment by Celer on Tolerate Tolerance
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2011 04:32:25PM *  5 points [-]

Let's stop talking about race since it may or may not be relevant and deal directly with IQ.

I don't see the point of dealing with someone who is explicitly intolerant of a group of people based on no conscious choice of their own,

Someone's IQ is certainly not based on any conscious choice of their own. So your argument seems to imply that we should not be intolerant of people with low IQs.

This is because they are less likely to have interesting thoughts or experiences, and furthermore I would not feel comfortable dealing with them in many social settings.

On the other hand this argument works even better as an argument for avoiding interacting with, i.e., being intolerant of, people with low IQs.

So which is it, should we be intolerant of people with low IQs, or should we be intolerant of people who are intolerant of people with low IQs? Your argument seems to imply both.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 18 May 2011 04:06:58AM *  6 points [-]

The literature I've seen - notably Finch, Senescence and the Genome - plot the Gompertz curve as a pure exponential that falls off at the end. It gives a really nice fit to the exponential almost up to the end. Then - sorry, this is the opposite of what is claimed in the post - it falls off! That is, if you live to be about 100, the chance of your dying stops increasing exponentially.

(As George Burns said, "The secret to living forever is to live to be 100. Very few people die after the age of 100.")

This suggests (doesn't prove, just suggests) that our mortality rate is adaptive. The Gompertz curve falls off at the high end because it doesn't get enough data points to evolve a proper fit there.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 May 2011 04:16:18AM 2 points [-]

Well the wikipedia article on the topic suggests that the probability of dying also includes an age-independent component, i.e., lightning strikes, which tends to small for humans in developed countries.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 May 2011 06:20:52PM *  0 points [-]

If "parameter" were "instrumental value", that would mean you could set the parameter according to your values. That would be very similar to saying it was part of your values.

The notion of "value" vs. "instrumental value" is probably bankrupt. It's very similar to the dichotomy of "grounded symbol vs. dependent symbol". I talked about this in the section "Value is a network problem" of my regrettably long post on values.

In this particular case, I'm also presenting the option that "parameter" is something you can place logical constraints on, regardless of values. Like math: You can't say that believing that 1+1=3 is one of your values.

Answer to Wei Dai: It's a parameter you need to set to implement your values; but I don't know how you set it. That's the problem I'm pointing out. Resolving whether this was an instrumental value or not would solve the problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 May 2011 08:33:29PM *  2 points [-]

Answer to Wei Dai: It's a parameter you need to set to implement your values; but I don't know how you set it. That's the problem I'm pointing out. Resolving whether this was an instrumental value or not would solve the problem.

If I understand you correctly, you're thinking of utility functions as f(p,U), were U is the state of the universe and p is some parameter. Here f is your values and p is the parameter. If that's the case, I don't understand the distinction your making by separating out p, i.e., why not just work with F(U)=f(p,U). If there's uncertainty about the value of p, how is that different from uncertainty about your utility function?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 17 May 2011 04:42:22PM 3 points [-]

What is a "value parameter"? I don't think I've seen that phrase either in academic literature or on LW before. "Parameters we use to apply [our utility function]" does not explain it for me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 May 2011 04:57:33PM *  1 point [-]

PhilGoetz seems to be using "parameter" to mean "instrumental value" and "value" to mean "terminal value".

Comment author: Vaniver 17 May 2011 12:54:55PM 2 points [-]

It seems to me that eliminating space-discounting is done for memetic, not genetic, reasons. And, as the triumph of individualistic nations over collectivist tribes shows, it outcompetes. "I trust strangers in the way a hunter-gatherer trusts his cousins" is not just a platitude for making people think you're moral, but also a good strategy for conquering the world.

Do values come from genes, and parameters from memes? The other way around? A mix? My guess is that most of our value drift will represent genetic strategies being replaced by memetic strategies, and so talking about values and parameters may not make a whole lot of sense.

It seems to me that time discounting is a heuristic to deal with death- if that issue gets resolved, then you don't need to discount as heavily. I'm not sure how a utility function would deal with memories, though- if I get to have an awesome experience at one point in my life, it seems like the earlier the better, as I can only remember the experience after I have it (I can anticipate it beforehand, but I imagine that'll be weaker). So my guess is immortals (or, at least, billion-year lifespan individuals) will have a weak preference for the present.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 May 2011 03:01:36PM 3 points [-]

It seems to me that time discounting is a heuristic to deal with death

I think a large part of time discounting is dealing with uncertainty about the future. It's notable that people in unstable societies/situations tend to time discount more then people in more stable situations.

Comment author: SilasBarta 16 May 2011 09:27:03PM *  3 points [-]

Why saddened? ... I admit i don't know economics at all :-(

Because of what it says about economics -- that an outsider can reach the same conclusion, for the same reason, as (half of) the "experts". Remember the "layshadow test"? If an academic field is such that a layperson can come in, spend a few hours, and produce output indistinguishable from people who have spent years "learning" the field, then that field is lost because the inferential distance is low, implying little knowledge accumulation.

That's what seems to be going on here.

And what is the other side's standard response to my (apparently well-known) question?

I just found out there's a Wikipedia article about the debate. It doesn't give the response to that critique, but as far as I know, the response is that it requires flexible prices throughout the economy and won't work if prices are "sticky".

Correction: Here's another critique from there:

Mitchell criticizes this because, he asserts, the falling wages of babysitters only solves the problem if it reduces the desire of couples to save, which is not supported by any research.[9] The only effect of falling wages would be to increase the real value of nominal contracts. In other words, couples would have to spend more time babysitting before they acquired the amount necessary to leave the cooperative. Mitchell concludes that the problem is greater aggregate desire to save than can be funded by existing administrative debt, and that the solution is thus either to reduce (desire for) savings or, more likely increase spending by simply issuing more scrip.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2011 11:54:21PM 2 points [-]

Because of what it says about economics -- that an outsider can reach the same conclusion, for the same reason, as (half of) the "experts". Remember the "layshadow test"? If an academic field is such that a layperson can come in, spend a few hours, and produce output indistinguishable from people who have spent years "learning" the field, then that field is lost because the inferential distance is low, implying little knowledge accumulation.

I'm not sure that's always true. For example, in my field, mathematics, there are a lot of results that are much easier to explain and learn then they were to discover.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 16 May 2011 04:08:19PM *  1 point [-]

Well, of course Bayesianism is your friend here. Probability theory elegantly supersedes the qualitative concepts of "knowledge", "belief" and "justification" and, together with an understanding of heuristics and biases, nicely dissolves Gettier problems, so that we can safely call "knowledge" any assignment of high probability to a proposition that turns out to be true.

I agree that, with regard to my own knowledge, I should just determine the probability that I assign to a proposition P. Once I conclude that P has a high probability of being true, why should I care whether, in addition, I "know" P in some sense?

Nonetheless, if I had to develop a coherent concept of "knowledge", I don't think that I'd go with "'knowledge' [is] any assignment of high probability to a proposition that turns out to be true." The crucial question is, who is assigning the probability? If it's my assignment, then, as I said, I agree that, for me, the question about knowledge dissolves. (More generally, the question dissolves if the assignment was made according to my prior and my cognitive strategies.)

But Getteir problems are usually about some third person's knowledge. When do you say that they know something? Suppose that, by your lights, they have a hopelessly screwed-up prior — say, an anti-Laplacian prior. So, they assign high probability to all sorts of stupid things for no good reason. Nonetheless, they have enough beliefs so that there are some things to which they assign high probability that turn out to be true. Would you really want to say that they "know" those things that just happen to be true?

That is essentially what was going on in my example with Mr. X's book. There, I'm the third person. I have the stupid prior that says that everything in B is true and everything not in B is false. Now, you know that Mr. X is constitutionally compelled to write truthfully about his mother's socks. So you know that reading B will legitimately entangle my beliefs with reality on that one solitary subject. But I don't know that fact about Mr. X. I just believe everything in B. You know that my cognitive strategy will give me reliable knowledge on this one subject. But, intuitively, my epistemic state seems so screw-up that you shouldn't say that I know anything, even though I got this one thing right.


ETA: Gah. This is what I meant by "down the rabbit-hole". These kinds of conversations are just too fun :). I look forward to your reply, but it will be at least a day before I reply in turn.


ETA: Okay, just one more thing. I just wanted to say that I agree with your approach to the original Gettier problem with the coins.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2011 05:45:26PM 2 points [-]

I have the stupid prior that says that everything in B is true and everything not in B is false. Now, you know that Mr. X is constitutionally compelled to write truthfully about his mother's socks. So you know that reading B will legitimately entangle my beliefs with reality on that one solitary subject. But I don't know that fact about Mr. X. I just believe everything in B. You know that my cognitive strategy will give me reliable knowledge on this one subject.

If you want to set your standard for knowledge this high, I would argue that you're claiming nothing counts as knowledge since no one has any way to tell how good their priors are independently of their priors.

Comment author: beriukay 15 May 2011 02:35:32PM 2 points [-]

I noticed that the post and the comments were a little bit vague on what exactly does or doesn't belong in my 'culture'. Would arguing that nudity is good translate into something obvious and true (like for most Europeans, as I understand it), or would it turn into something absurd and possibly evil (like how I think most Americans see it)? In other words, whenever the examples talk about zeitgeists, am I to translate that into generalizing from the example of me?

Arguing for evolution is super-obvious to me, but a large fraction of Alaskans aren't too keen on the idea. So if I told the chronophone about natural selection while I'm in Alaska, would it tell Archimedes that humans are featherless chickens... but if I said it in the midst of a Biology symposium, it would tell him that humans are mortal?

My guess is that you can't change your affiliations so easily, because it avoids the point of the hypothetical. But I would be interested to see what comes out if I tell him about all the things that I think other cultures do better than my own.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2011 03:52:00PM 4 points [-]

I'd say whatever culture's beliefs you most identify with, i.e., assume things are maximally inconvinient.

In response to What we're losing
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2011 04:11:39AM 16 points [-]

I'm somewhat puzzled by your terminology since the topics you call "meta-rationality":

about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, and so on.

strike me as much more practical and applied then the ones you call "applied rationality":

philosophy, value, and possible futures

which strike me as much more meta.

Going by the list of topics you're complaining about, it appears that you are the one who "would rather talk about rationality than use it."

Comment author: [deleted] 15 May 2011 01:15:46AM *  1 point [-]

"A lot of those that have thought carefully about it do."

Oh, you ran a poll on LW, and most folks responded to it, with the results confirming your anecdotal hunch about the consensus view? Cool.

For a second there I thought you were making strange unsupported claims about people most of whom you don't know and with whom you haven't discussed Tegmark universes.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The elephant in the room, AMA
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2011 01:44:35AM 1 point [-]

Naw, if someone said they don't believe in Tegmark universes, Kevin would just conclude that they haven't thought about it carefully enough.

Comment author: Clippy 15 May 2011 12:27:29AM 0 points [-]

No problem, I'll kill any living people that are added to the list. That will solve all the public relations problems stemming from such a list.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2011 12:56:15AM 11 points [-]

No, bad paperclip maximizer.

For that, I just unfolded a paperclip and am going to throw out the wire.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 May 2011 04:37:53AM 13 points [-]

Sixthed. Actually I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who wouldn't so promise.

The only caveat is that I'd have to be separately convinced of the factual and ethical sides, i.e., showing evidence to me that the Mormon God exists is not the same as justifying that the Mormon God's policies are good.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2011 04:46:33AM *  7 points [-]

I try to avoid making promises I wouldn't trust myself to keep from an outside view.

Comment author: Giles 14 May 2011 12:52:24AM 2 points [-]

Total wow that you are attempting this! As well as being awesome, rebuilding the tech tree has clear saving-the-world implications so I'm totally in favour. Make sure to document the project on a blog.

(I feel like someone has tried this before but my Googling doesn't show anything up. If there is a book or blog out there it might give you some useful tips. Make sure you don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to reinventing the wheel).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2011 04:38:01AM 2 points [-]

Total wow that you are attempting this! As well as being awesome, rebuilding the tech tree has clear saving-the-world implications so I'm totally in favour.

Nick Szabo discusses a related idea here and here. Specifically, finding small subsets of modern technology that can be used to recreate the rest, and ideally also create more copies of themselves.

Comment author: Kevin 14 May 2011 04:03:32AM *  1 point [-]

A lot of those that have thought carefully about it do. The Big Universe (Tegmark 1) is much easier to accept than level 4, as it is the current scientific consensus on cosmology. Most of the weird consequences of the bigger mathematical universe also happen in a simpler big universe, but scientists aren't so good at taking the philosophical consequences of their ideas seriously.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2011 04:22:09AM *  2 points [-]

The Big Universe (Tegmark 1) is much easier to accept than level 4, as it is the current scientific consensus on cosmology.

BTW, I strongly believe (>90%) that the consensus on cosmology is will change in some way that doesn't have strong implications for observations but does have strong implications for this kind of philosophy. E.g., the dark matter/energy problem getting resolved to some way that makes the universe finite.

As for level 4, we could have a long and pointless debate that would reduce to the subtleties of defining what it means for something to exist.

Comment author: XiXiDu 13 May 2011 08:54:28AM 3 points [-]

Are you vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging?

What's the rational reason not to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging? Please correct me if I am wrong but it seems that Eliezer does simply choose to believe, i.e. trust his intuition, that it would be wrong to give in to the demands of such a mugger. So what if calcsam says that he is vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging, does it make him more or less rational to not trust his intuition in this case?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2011 03:23:45AM *  3 points [-]

Here is the technical reason:

If you use a Solomonoff prior nearly any utility function will not have a well defined expected value, i.e., trying to calculate it will give ∞ − ∞.

Or basically trying to take all possible versions of Pascal's mugging into account makes expected utility calculations mathematically incoherent.

Comment author: Kevin 14 May 2011 02:54:22AM -1 points [-]

What's the rational reason not to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging?

Roughly the same reason to one box on Newcomb's Problem -- rationalists win.

I ask because I hypothesize that a rational theist/religious person almost definitely has to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 May 2011 03:11:37AM *  2 points [-]

I ask because I hypothesize that a rational theist/religious person almost definitely has to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging.

I don't see why they'd be any more vulnerable then a rationalist atheist.

Keep in mind we don't even know how to describe a rational agent that's not vulnerable to Pascal's mugging.

The way we currently get around this problem is by having a rule that temporarily suspends our decision theory when we pattern match the situation to resemble Pascal's mugging.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 May 2011 02:45:36PM 2 points [-]

most pharmaceuticals do not have net positive effect for most patients even when the best prescribing protocols are used by the best clinicians

Important if true. Evidence?

In response to comment by [deleted] on You'll die if you do that
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 May 2011 10:56:53PM 1 point [-]

Robin Hanson has blogged extensively on this topic. His most recent post here has links to a few others.

In response to comment by Alicorn on [HPMoR] Trailer up
Comment author: AdeleneDawner 12 May 2011 10:29:11PM 0 points [-]

It's not a list, but if you want to check on the general social opinion of a font, you can google the font name, possibly along with the word "font". For example, the first four results (for me at least; does anyone know how to stop Google from 'customizing' its search results?) for 'papyrus font' are a wikipedia page about it, a link to the google images search for it, "Papyrus Watch - Exposing the overuse of the Papyrus font" and "5 Terrible Fonts You Shouldn't Use in Print Design".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2011 10:55:27PM 1 point [-]

does anyone know how to stop Google from 'customizing' its search results?

Have you tried deleting Google's cookie?

Comment author: shokwave 12 May 2011 06:12:52PM 11 points [-]

I'm interested in the power of your belief. For example, I believe strongly that, say, Michael Vassar is smart. I also believe strongly that the laws of physics hold everywhere. If these two beliefs were brought into conflict (say, Michael Vassar presented me with a perpetual motion machine blueprint) physics would win, because it's more powerful.

In that vein, I would like to take some of your time to ask you to come up with a quick power ranking of some of your deep beliefs. If your religion came into direct conflict with your faith, say? (I am not sure this is a fair question, actually - I personally can't imagine what would happen if my rationality came into conflict with my sense of truth, because they're so similar).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2011 06:18:36PM 7 points [-]

I'm interested in the power of your belief. For example, I believe strongly that, say, Michael Vassar is smart. I also believe strongly that the laws of physics hold everywhere. If these two beliefs were brought into conflict (say, Michael Vassar presented me with a perpetual motion machine blueprint) physics would win, because it's more powerful.

Your concept of the power of a belief sounds a lot like its probability.

Comment author: Costanza 12 May 2011 04:28:53PM *  12 points [-]

My current opinion is that the doctrines of the Mormon church are wildly ridiculous, pernicious, and manifestly false. In other words, these are extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don't think calcsam can provide anything like the necessary degree of extraordinary evidence. I think it's much more likely that I'd be struck by lightning while winning the lottery. This isn't sporting of me, but then again, it's not a sport. Calcsam is the one who chose LDS, not me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2011 04:39:18PM 9 points [-]

My point is that your declaration and subsequent failure to convert is not itself in any way evidence against Mormonism or for Atheism.

Comment author: drethelin 12 May 2011 04:08:21PM *  3 points [-]

How do you reconcile the multitude of religions with the certainty of your belief? What exactly convinced you that only in 1830 did the one true faith come into existence, and the multitude of others existing before and after were simply foolish or lies?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2011 04:31:52PM 12 points [-]

What exactly convinced you that only in 1830 did the one true faith come into existence, and the multitude of others existing before and after were simply foolish or lies?

I'm not a Mormon, but my understanding of Mormon beliefs is that a Mormon would no more consider pre-1830 Christianity foolish lies then a modern physicist would consider pre-20th physics foolish pseudoscience.

Comment author: Costanza 12 May 2011 03:12:48PM 27 points [-]

If Joseph Smith was not a prophet, do you desire to believe that Joseph Smith was not a prophet?

Are you a rationalist? Did you convert because you were rationally persuaded to convert?

I swear, if you can make an ironclad rational argument for Mormonism, I will personally convert. I don't think you can. Nothing personal (I don't know you, wish you personally the best) but I don't think you're a rationalist, precisely because you converted to Mormonism. Prove me wrong!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 May 2011 04:09:29PM 23 points [-]

I swear, if you can make an ironclad rational argument for Mormonism

What do you mean by "ironclad"?

In my experience people who claim that they'll change their position if presented with evidence passing a vaguely defined standard, will retroactively raise that standard so that whatever evidence is presented fails to pass.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 11 May 2011 10:24:10PM *  9 points [-]

This is essentially an ultimatum game (if we focus on the interesting bits). There is no theory that reliably helps with the process of picking a fair price, and the fair price depends on many factors which you didn't specify, including the details of how players' minds work, and what each player believes about the other. This makes intuition the only method that can take into account all the varieties of potentially relevant information, although there might be some explicit algorithms that show better performance in practice, especially if the other player doesn't know what algorithm you use.

There are some ideas from game theory that suggest certain algorithms for picking fair price, but their outcomes are mostly the product of privileging those algorithms as Schelling points for reaching agreement and not of clear a priori considerations for which price should be chosen. If players' brains are completely rotten by CDT thinking, they will additionally insist that A should accept whatever B is demanding, and conversely, depending on who gets the last say.

"There is no deal unless one can credibly commit to being irrational."

This is using "rationality" is a wrong sense. The word should refer to whatever it is they should do.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2011 11:17:01PM 2 points [-]

I agree with this post.

Also an important idea implicit in the above post that I think deserves to get spelled out is that the mere act of thinking about a Schelling point can move its location.

Comment author: Clippy 11 May 2011 02:59:54PM *  0 points [-]

Compare "Bruce Schneier"'s statement in this part:

Two of these systems evolved in prehistory: morals and reputation. Two others evolved as our social groups became larger and more formal: laws and technical security systems. What these security systems do, effectively, is give individuals incentives to act in the group interest. But none of these systems, with the possible exception of some fanciful science-fiction technologies, can ever bring that dishonest minority down to zero.

to this statement in an article I wrote:

I am told that humans attempt weak approximations of this system through human-run enforcement mechanisms, such as laws and gossip. However, all such methods are subject to evolutionary arms races that ensure that, on average, a marginal unit of effort toward truthful signaling is just as effective in convincing others of one's possession of a desirable attribute, as a marginal unit of effort toward false signaling of the possession of such an attribute.

Therefore, it is necessary that humans go "outside the system" and involve non-human enforcers who cannot be swayed by standard human values.

(enphasis added in both excerpts)

I think "Bruce Schneier" is wrong: there is a way to ensure complete cooperation, and I explained how to do it in my article. Why doesn't anyone want to impilement that system?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 May 2011 04:53:30PM 1 point [-]

I think "Bruce Schneier" is wrong: there is a way to ensure complete cooperation, and I explained how to do it in my article. Why doesn't anyone want to impilement that system?

Because we don't trust you not to abuse your power in an attempt to turn as all into paperclips.

Comment author: Eneasz 10 May 2011 08:01:46PM 0 points [-]

I'm also curious how all these relate to favorite songs. Why is a piece of music that you've heard years and years ago still enjoyable? Or why listen to the same awesome new song half a dozen times in one day? You already know what the next note will be...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2011 10:23:28PM 2 points [-]

Why is a piece of music that you've heard years and years ago still enjoyable?

One possible reason is that if you heard that piece of music during a particularly happy period of your life, you then associate that piece with happiness.

Comment author: TimFreeman 09 May 2011 08:04:48PM *  1 point [-]

...you shouldn't attempt to (re)create hermeneutic truths/traditions from first principals. You won't be able to create a system that will work in practice, but might falsely convince yourself that you have.

I didn't see any mentions of examples in Szabo's paper of traditions that have a high instrumental value but can't be derived from first principles, although he does seem to be saying that they exist. The best example that comes to mind is Jews and Moslems not eating pork, but I eat pork and my family has on both sides for multiple generations, and we haven't curled up and died yet, so the present instrumental value of that tradition is unclear to me. Do you have any examples in mind?

I can see that the wellbeing of the population that obeys the tradition would contribute to it doing well in cultural evolution, but it's not at all clear to me that it's a large enough factor that we're unlikely to come out ahead by discarding the tradition and designing a new one.

I suppose the claim that a tradition is one of these truths that one cannot usefully rederive from first principles is testable. Go form an intentional community that, say, has an 8 day week, and if they're still doing well physically and financially in a generation or two, then the 7 day week apparently wasn't such a tradition.

ETA: I suppose the organizational structure of a church is such a tradition.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 May 2011 12:56:02AM *  3 points [-]

Well Szabo's main examples, which he briefly alludes to in this essay, are legal, economic and political systems. He discusses them at length in his other writings.

Comment author: Nornagest 09 May 2011 06:26:37PM 6 points [-]

What I've read of the psychology literature generally indicates that mirroring the dress sense and behavior of your target audience gets you further than adhering to some codified notion of respectability when you're trying to sell something, and that this remains true when your product is a religion.

When what you're trying to sell is status-linked, it can be useful to act one or two status levels above your target audience. But there's no clear link to status here, so I'd imagine the Mormon uniform has more to do either with intra-group signaling or with an attempt at mirroring a large cross-section of potential recruits that became fossilized sometime in the past.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2011 09:37:07PM *  6 points [-]

I'd imagine the problem with trying to mirror "the dress sense and behavior of your target audience" is that if you're not actually a member of that culture, you'll mess up in the details and end up looking like a clueless phony. As such you're probably better of with a generic vaguely respectable look.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 09 May 2011 07:15:57AM *  1 point [-]

would also like to see your explanation for when it's inappropriate to apply reason

It is inappropriate -- well, let us say it is a mistake in reasoning -- to apply reason to something whenever it is obvious that the time and mental energy are better applied to something else. My point is that I do not see the irony in Eliezer's advising his readers that some particular issue is not worth applying reason to.

(And it's not equivalent to arguing.)

I don't quite see the distinction you're trying to make.

Can I just declare my statement in parens above to be withdrawn? :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2011 07:47:51AM *  7 points [-]

would also like to see your explanation for when it's inappropriate to apply reason

It is inappropriate -- well, let us say it is a mistake in reasoning -- to apply reason to something whenever it is obvious that the time and mental energy are better applied to something else.

Interesting, I had in mind something much stronger. For example, if you attempt to apply too much reasoning to a Schelling point, you'll discover that the Schelling point's location was ultimately arbitrary and greatly weaken it in the process.

Another related example, is that you shouldn't attempt to (re)create hermeneutic truths/traditions from first principals. You won't be able to create a system that will work in practice, but might falsely convince yourself that you have.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 09 May 2011 06:04:12AM *  1 point [-]

It's ironic only to those who have different ideas about what it means to reason. Reason need not be applied indiscriminately. (And it's not equivalent to arguing.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2011 06:46:35AM 2 points [-]

Reason need not be applied indiscriminately.

This is a very interesting statement (with which I agree). I would also like to see your explanation for when it's inappropriate to apply reason, I'll post mine afterwords.

(And it's not equivalent to arguing.)

I don't quite see the distinction you're trying to make. Especially in this context since the posters arguing about morality were certainly trying to reason about it and not just arguing for the sake of arguing.

In response to The 5-Second Level
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2011 05:02:59AM 5 points [-]

The word "moralize" has now been eliminated from the blog post. Apparently putting a big warning sign up saying "Don't argue about how to verbally define this problem behavior, it won't be fun for anyone and it won't get us any closer to having a relaxed rationalist community where people worry less about stepping in potholes" wasn't enough.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2011 05:29:29AM *  7 points [-]

Apparently putting a big warning sign up saying "Don't argue about how to verbally define this problem behavior, it won't be fun for anyone and it won't get us any closer to having a relaxed rationalist community where people worry less about stepping in potholes" wasn't enough.

I would just like to point out the irony of telling people you're training to be rationalists not to reason about a concept.

Edit: A better way to express what I find ironic about Eliezer's statement, is that at least half the people here started their journey into rationalism by ignoring the big bright warning sign saying "Don't question God!" This fact is useful to keep in mind when predicting their reactions to big bright warning signs.

In response to [POLL] Slutwalk
Comment author: Clippy 08 May 2011 10:49:39PM 7 points [-]

I don't understand the history of this issue and any broader significance it has for humans, but I do have a suggestion: the general idea behind this event is:

  • Bad humans use characteristic X to infer Y, justifying (in their minds, and in rhetoric directed at others) act Z.
  • Most humans regard Z as bad, though differ in what specific acts constitute Z.
  • A group of humans intend to overload the search space with datapoints that satisfy X but not Y, in an attempt to destroy the mutual information between X and Y, and thereby further diminish the ability of the bad humans to justify Z through X.

You should first form your opinion with out know the referents of X, Y, and Z, nor who the activist group and "bad humans" are, and only afterward, decide whether, once you know these items, you support this strategy. The mapping is, of course:

X = female human wearing "slut"-type attire
Y = female human consenting to recreational mating with a male human
Z = rape of a human female by a human male
bad humans = male human rapists
activist group = female humans attempting to destroy the mutual information between X and Y by setting X to true for themselves, yet also making Y obviously false

Or did I misinterpret this situation entirely? Human sociology is still a weak point in my inferential engine.

In response to comment by Clippy on [POLL] Slutwalk
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 May 2011 05:13:44AM 0 points [-]

I don't think your analysis is correct. In particular I imagine the protesters' main complaint is people using Y to justify Z rather than the connection between X and Y.

Comment author: komponisto 08 May 2011 03:11:37PM 2 points [-]

The categorization seems very weird. The word clusters basically sound like you'd be describing the same group in an out-group context, but would either want to frame them in a generally positive and inoffensive or a somewhat suspicious light.

Here's what these word-clusters suggest to me:

  • Liberal/Secular/Scientific: age 30-60, works at a university, thinks global warming is a more urgent problem than UFAI.

  • Libertarian/Atheist/Technophile: age 15-30, works as a programmer/reads Less Wrong from parents' basement, thinks UFAI is more urgent than global warming.

...in other words, basically a status classification.

In response to comment by komponisto on [POLL] Slutwalk
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 May 2011 04:26:49PM *  6 points [-]

I'm guessing magfrump is basing his distinction on this comment by Will Newsome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 May 2011 02:59:59AM 6 points [-]

One factor to consider is that in non-open societies, people are used to being fed lies, frequently blatant lies, by official sources. Thus we should expect people in those societies to be more skeptical of "official sources" and "official stories" more generally. Furthermore, if said source isn't their own government, they may feel more free to openly express this skepticism.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 07 May 2011 02:43:15AM 2 points [-]

"Conspiracy theory" doesn't really seem to me to be a topic of belief, but rather a way of responding to events. It seems to involve looking at a negative outcome and thinking of whom to blame for it, and how to make that blame stick, rather than trying to actually come up with truth-tracking explanations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 May 2011 02:56:22AM 6 points [-]

Interestingly two of Servant's examples aren't so much about finding an out-group to blame as deflecting blame from an in-group.

After his death, JFK became a martyr for a lot of people on the anti-war left. As such his having been assassinated by a communist sympathizer and former defector to the USSR was rather inconvenient.

In the case of 9/11 especially in a number of the countries mentioned, the need to deflect blame is even more obvious.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 May 2011 07:37:04AM 15 points [-]

Trying to predict the future is hazardous, not only because of the conjunction fallacy, but because there are so many factors involved. Even if you're careful to avoid the mistake of thinking that A, B, and C happening are more likely than A and C, it's not easy to estimate what will happen when you've got factors A through Z involved, and complicated chains of relationships like "if D and E, but not F, and G is stronger than expected, then H". Misjudging the likelihood of a factor, or misunderstanding a relationship, or omitting factors or relationships, can make an apparently solid set of predictions completely worthless.

That's not to say that it's impossible, of course. If you restrict yourself to asking what will happen if we push on a physical system, and throw the world's best scientists at the problem for decades with millions of dollars and powerful supercomputers at their disposal, then they can actually model what inputs will cause what outputs with probabilities attached. The existence of anthropogenic global warming is a fact, just as the existence of evolution and atoms is a fact, and it's clear that all else being equal (note 1), basically everyone would prefer for the Earth's climate to be original recipe instead of extra crispy. The problem is, we don't know what the inputs will be, and it's trying to guess what the inputs will be that's especially hazardous. It's a lot harder to model what one Congress will do, let alone many. (Modeling the mind-killer is a headache.)

When faced with this sort of problem, I find it useful to instead think about possible end states, which are typically easier to envision and enumerate, and ask how likely it is we'll end up there, through any path whatsoever. And Stein's Law is usually helpful: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

Anthropogenic global warming can't go on forever, so it'll stop. How will it stop? I can think of several ways - this is a non-exhaustive list:

  • We discover a novel feedback loop, Earth's atmosphere becomes like Venus's, and everyone dies. It's pretty clear that this isn't a possibility, we hope, although it should be considered before being rejected (note 2).

  • We collectively come to our senses, and do all the right things right now to keep the problem from getting any worse, and to fix as much as physically possible of the damage that's already been done. It's also pretty clear that this will not happen.

  • A technological breakthrough substantially solves the problem for us. For example, we solve a bunch of engineering problems, and leapfrog from ITER to cheap and plentiful commercial nuclear fusion in just a couple of decades, without having thrown 100 billion dollars at the problem (as that would be shading into the "come to our senses" scenario). The probability of this one is hard to judge - we get stuck by some problems for a while before eventually solving them - but hope is not really a plan.

  • The nasty consequences of global warming keep getting worse and worse, until advanced civilizations are wrecked back into more primitive states, where they're unable to keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere. It looks to me like this one is unlikely too - advanced nations will be able to cope at significant cost. It's just poor nations that are boned.

  • We run out of coal (note 3), oil, and natural gas to burn. They're finite, so this is guaranteed to happen - the question is whether it happens before anything else. A more precise question is, when will our rates of production stop increasing - combined with inelastic demand, this will cause significant price increases that force us to consider previously more expensive (or ionizing), but non-carbon-emitting, sources of energy. This is the scenario that I judge as most likely. Unfortunately, it looks like the result will be extra crispy at a minimum.

  • Something else - increasing food/water/resource scarcity leads to increasing conflict, and eventually to global thermonuclear war - we know that one is perfectly capable of wrecking technological civilization. Hopefully unlikely (there's that word again).

My conclusion is that because many people are already working on both sides of this issue, this community's time would be better spent elsewhere.

Note 1: The "all else being equal" part is key. The ultimate problem isn't that some people want to seriously modify the Earth's climate in and of itself, or for the lulz, or because they're supervillains. It's because fucking money is at stake, and like Mafia bosses in movies, people want their fucking money and they want it now. This wouldn't even be a problem, except that carbon is an unpriced negative externality.

Note 2: Just as igniting the Earth's atmosphere was considered and rejected before the Trinity test. Note that many popular accounts of how this possibility was considered are completely wrong. The worry was never that a nuclear weapon could ignite a global chemical fire in the atmosphere - it was that it could ignite a global nuclear fire. (Follow Wikipedia's citation.) Fortunately for us, the physics don't work out that way.

Note 3: Fucking coal.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Climate change: existential risk?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 May 2011 02:19:38AM *  6 points [-]

The nasty consequences of global warming keep getting worse and worse, until advanced civilizations are wrecked back into more primitive states, where they're unable to keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere. It looks to me like this one is unlikely too - advanced nations will be able to cope at significant cost. It's just poor nations that are boned.

One thing I noticed about predictions of nasty consequences of global warming, is that they're always about 5 to 10 years from the present, with the date always being updated. See here, for a discussion of a recent example.

It all started back in October 2005 when the U.N. flatly stated, “by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration.” They forecast “this new category of ‘refugee.’” In 2008 the Srgjan Kerim, president of the U.N. General Assembly, upped the doomsday prediction, saying there would “between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010.” Environmental activist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University predicted that climate change could force to 200 million climate refugees.

The U.N. specifically identified Pacific and Caribbean populations that would be ravaged by climate change. Gavin Atkins, writing for Asiancorrespondent.com reports “a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.” Atkins reports that all of China’s “threatened” cities –Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang — are the fastest growing cities in the world.

Atkins also looks at other endangered locations, the Bahamas, St. Lucia, the Seychelles and the Solomon Islands. None have refugees and all have enjoyed healthy population growths.

This is by no means the only example of a global warming doomsday prediction failing to come true and being quietly forgotten.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2011 10:56:21PM 3 points [-]

Heuristics and biases

Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction?

Given the nature of evolution and the fact that perfect Bayesianism is computationally intractable, the thing to be explaining is not how bad our reasoning is, but how good it is.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 May 2011 10:29:23PM 5 points [-]

As for your comment below about how I "seemed to suggest [evpsych] was the best thing since slided bread," I'm not sure where you got such an idea.

Other people who talk about evo psych think it is the best thing since sliced bread. You talk about evo psych. Therefore, you think evo psych is the best thing since sliced bread.

It is approximately the same intuition at play as that which you describe as 'essentialism' - and nearly ubiquitous when speaking with humans. If you say something about a topic or theory you can assume that you will be judged according to whatever other people who talk about the same topic, position or theory have said.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2011 10:38:34PM 2 points [-]

Other people who talk about evo psych think it is the best thing since sliced bread. You talk about evo psych. Therefore, you think evo psych is the best thing since sliced bread.

It is approximately the same intuition at play as that which you describe as 'essentialism'

It's also a perfectly valid piece of Bayesian reasoning.

In response to Hollow Adjectives
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2011 10:36:49PM 2 points [-]

Regarding the example of "The president hasn't done enough to fix the economy".

The president makes many decisions that affect the economy. As such in the absence of any other information, vote for the incumbent if things are going well and against if things are going poorly is a decent strategy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2011 09:55:55PM 2 points [-]

As Eliezer demonstrated in this example here what you call Essentialism doesn't just apply to creatures.

Comment author: thomblake 05 May 2011 08:13:54PM 7 points [-]

Some lazy googling indicates the phrase "beaten like a red-headed stepchild" was raised to contemporary popular consciousness in 1986's "The wrath", years after Daly and Wilson. Originally it was racist, specifically referring to the way one might treat the result of a wife's earlier dalliances with Irish immigrants.

I'm not sure I trust my intuitions about what an average high school dropout could tell me in the 1970's. But I consider it significant that professionals looked into this question, and did not notice that factor previously, an unlikely result if it was both widely known and actually present.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 May 2011 09:42:51PM 3 points [-]

I suspect this may be a case of the professionals not wanting to notice because they didn't want to seem politically incorrect.

Comment author: TimFreeman 04 May 2011 04:44:16PM 0 points [-]

One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.

If that's a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn't what you wanted.

Now if the thoughts people had about moral preferences that make them change were actually empirically meaningful and consistent with observation, rather than verbal manipulation consisting of undefinable terms that can't be nailed down even with multiple days of Q&A, that would be worthwhile and not just a statement about psychology. But if we had such statements to make about morality, we would have been making them all this time and there would be clarity about what we're talking about, which hasn't happened.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2011 08:23:53PM 0 points [-]

One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.

If that's a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn't what you wanted.

That's not a definition of morality but an explanation of one reason why the "murder pill" distinction is important.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 May 2011 05:33:07AM 0 points [-]

What people abstractly philosophise about is not all that important. It is what they unconsciously associate with punishment or lowered status that will control their behavior.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2011 05:53:28AM 2 points [-]

It is what they unconsciously associate with punishment or lowered status that will control their behavior.

Which is in the long run influenced by conscious beliefs and abstract philosophy. The history of revolutions should be enough to show that consciously held beliefs and philosophies matter.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 May 2011 05:22:10PM 0 points [-]

People who fear moral nihilism are not worried about losing control over their own behavior, they are worried about losing control over other people's behavior.

Is the threat from philosophy really a concern? We control others through punishment. A nihilist is still going to be powerfully incentivized by the threat of punishment.

In response to comment by [deleted] on On Being Okay with the Truth
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2011 05:05:34AM -1 points [-]

Is the threat from philosophy really a concern? We control others through punishment.

We (or rather society) controls its members through a public theory of morality, which can also be thought of as a moral Schelling point. Punishments are used to deal with the people who commit disregard the public theory and in so doing help to maintain belief in it. However, without a public theory that most people believe, or at least don't openly disbelieve, the system for enforcing punishment quickly breaks down.

Comment author: TimFreeman 04 May 2011 03:15:20AM 0 points [-]

[H]ow do you separate which of your intuitions are preferences and which are biases?

Well, valid preferences look like they're derived from a utility function that says how much I prefer different possible future world-states, and uncertainty about the future should interact with the utility function in the proper way. Biases are everything else.

I don't see how that question is relevant. I don't see any good reason for you to dodge my question about what you'd do if your preferences contradicted your morality. It's not like it's an unusual situation -- consider the internal conflicts of a homosexual Evangelist preacher, for example.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2011 04:53:51AM 1 point [-]

Well, valid preferences look like they're derived from a utility function that says how much I prefer different possible future world-states, and uncertainty about the future should interact with the utility function in the proper way.

Um, no. Unless you are some kind of mutant who doesn't suffer from scope insensitivity or any of the related biases your uncertainty about the future doesn't interact with your preferences in the proper way until you attempt to coherently extrapolate them. It is here that the distinction between a bias and a valid preference becomes both important and very arbitrary.

Here is the example PhilGoetz gives in the article I linked above:

In Crime and punishment, I argued that people want to punish criminals, even if there is a painless, less-costly way to prevent crime. This means that people value punishing criminals. This value may have evolved to accomplish the social goal of reducing crime. Most readers agreed that, since we can deduce this underlying reason, and accomplish it more effectively through reasoning, preferring to punish criminals is an error in judgement.

Most people want to have sex. This value evolved to accomplish the goal of reproducing. Since we can deduce this underlying reason, and accomplish it more efficiently than by going out to bars every evening for ten years, is this desire for sex an error in judgement that we should erase?

I believe I answered your other question elsewhere in the thread.

Comment author: TimFreeman 04 May 2011 02:45:45AM *  1 point [-]

The interesting question is still the one you didn't answer yet:

If you found an objective basis for saying what you should prefer, and it said you should prefer something different from what you actually do prefer, what would you do?

I only see two possible answers, and only one of those seems likely to come from you (Peter) or Eugene.

The unlikely answer is "I wouldn't do anything different". Then I'd reply "So, morality makes no practical difference to your behavior?", and then your position that morality is an important concept collapses in a fairly uninteresting way. Your position so far seems to have enough consistency that I would not expect the conversation to go that way.

The likely answer is "If I'm willpower-depleted, I'd do the immoral thing I prefer, but on a good day I'd have enough willpower and I'd do the moral thing. I prefer to have enough willpower to do the moral thing in general." In that case, I would have to admit that I'm in the same situation, except with a vocabulary change. I define "preference" to include everything that drives a person's behavior, if we assume that they aren't suffering from false beliefs, poor planning, or purposeless behavior (like a seizure, for example). So if your behavior is controlled by a combination of preference and morality, then what I'm calling "preference" is the same as what you're calling "preference and morality". I am in the same situation in that when I'm willpower-depleted I do a poor job of acting upon consistent preferences (using my definition of the word), I do better when I have more willpower, and I want to have more willpower in general.

If I guessed your answer wrong, please correct me. Otherwise I'd want to fix the vocabulary problem somehow. I like using the word "preference" to include all the things that drive a person, so I'd prefer to say that your preference has two parts, perhaps an "amoral preference" which would mean what you were calling "preference" before, and "moral preference" would include what you were calling "morality" before, but perhaps we'd choose different words if you objected to those. The next question would be:

Okay, you're making a distinction between amoral preference and moral preference. This distinction is obviously important to you. What makes it important?

...and I have no clue what your answer would be, so I can't continue the conversation past that point without straightforward answers from you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 May 2011 04:43:08AM 1 point [-]

If you found an objective basis for saying what you should prefer, and it said you should prefer something different from what you actually do prefer, what would you do?

Follow morality.

Okay, you're making a distinction between amoral preference and moral preference. This distinction is obviously important to you. What makes it important?

One way to illustrate this distinction is using Eliezer's "murder pill". If you were offered a pill that would reverse and/or eliminate a preference would you take it (possibly the offer includes paying you)? If the preference is something like preferring vanilla to chocolate ice cream, the answer is probably yes. If the preference is for people not to be murdered the answer is probably no.

One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 April 2010 12:31:56AM 6 points [-]

It's a relief to see this recognized as a problem by someone who isn't a cheerleader for a solution. I think the only solutions are going to have to be mental ones, related to the raising of children (or possibly something more biological/electronic); building better brains just might work, but protecting bad brains from temptation is like carrying water in a sieve.

Immigrant values are the best existing inoculation I've seen against superstimuli. I think I'm going to have to (re)create my own immigrant values to get work done -- shouldn't be hard, given the typical population of science departments. But there's no reason to think we can't improve on the past. There are techniques to improve delayed gratification skills. (See the marshmallow experiment.) Conceivably we could develop drugs or computer add-ons that make us better planners.

I think we need to be more alert to the vulnerability of what we think of as the "will." It can be hacked, by mental illness, by poverty (income and delayed gratification correlate very strongly from young ages), by bad habits of mind, by the internet, even by sugar.

It won't do to say, cheerfully, that "people are responsible for their actions " because circumstances can make them less responsible. On the other hand, it also won't do to be unconcerned with the real harm that comes from people lacking willpower. If it can be hacked in the opposite direction, we need to be working on that, NOW.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2011 01:33:08AM 3 points [-]

It won't do to say, cheerfully, that "people are responsible for their actions " because circumstances can make them less responsible.

On the other hand, if you don't think of yourself as responsible for your actions, you are going to have a much harder time resisting superstimuli.

Comment author: TimFreeman 02 May 2011 05:41:58PM 5 points [-]

So we seem to agree that you (and Peterdjones) are looking for an objective basis for saying what you should prefer, much as rationality is a basis for saying what beliefs you should hold.

I can see a motive for changing one's beliefs, since false beliefs will often fail to support the activity of enacting one's preferences. I can't see a motive for changing one's preferences - obviously one would prefer not to do that. If you found an objective basis for saying what you should prefer, and it said you should prefer something different from what you actually do prefer, what would you do?

If you live in a social milieu where people demand that you justify your preferences, I can see something resembling morality coming out of those justifications. Is that your situation? I'd rather select a different social milieu, myself.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2011 06:49:48PM 2 points [-]

Let's try a different approach.

I have spent some time thinking about how to apply the ideas of Eliezer's metaethics sequence to concrete ethical dilemmas. One problem that quickly comes up is that as PhilGoetz points out here, the distinction between preferences and biases is very arbitrary.

So the question becomes how do you separate which of your intuitions are preferences and which are biases?

Comment author: wedrifid 02 May 2011 08:32:10AM 2 points [-]

I was saddened to learn of the recent death by suicide of Chris Capel, known here as pdf23ds.

That is sad. I was hoping to find out if he had any success using modafinil to manage his sleep disorder.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 May 2011 06:15:43PM *  6 points [-]

Well, at the very least you should increase your prior that it has harmful side effects.

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 May 2011 09:33:50AM 2 points [-]

And if he gave a true moral argument you would have to accept it?

How would you distinguish a true argument from a merely persuasive one?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 May 2011 06:54:32PM *  3 points [-]

Like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the "No Universally Compelling Argument" post you site applies equally well to physical and even mathematical facts (in fact that was what Eliezer was mainly referring to in that post).

In fact, the main point of that sequence is that just because there are no universally compelling arguments doesn't mean truth doesn't exist. As Eliezer mentions in where recursive justification hits bottom:

Now, one lesson you might derive from this, is "Don't be born with a stupid prior." This is an amazingly helpful principle on many real-world problems, but I doubt it will satisfy philosophers.

Comment author: JohnH 29 April 2011 08:00:37PM *  4 points [-]

Also one could probably create an semiautomatic spammer as well that had the purpose of defeating the karma requirements without much difficulty.

Basically create a core of accounts that is the size of the minimal number of Karma needed to make a top level post. Then one of those accounts needs to get one Karma, which hopefully can't be automated. Then one has to create some banal discussion that includes one post from each of the core accounts which then gets upvoted in a cycle.

Then start creating spam accounts, have it post randomly something like "I agree" on something and have the core accounts upvote that one post so the spam account can post the spam on the top page. Rinse and repeat.

It would be important to avoid detection to have a scripted discussion between the core accounts and to not have the spam accounts post on that discussion except according to the random algorithm that is being used.

There are probably ways to make this simpler to create and there may be easy ways to defeat such a program. This is just an idea.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 11:22:59PM 0 points [-]

One interesting "feature" of the karma system that makes this a lot easier is that fact that upvotes/downvotes of deleted comments still contribute to your karma.

Comment author: SilasBarta 29 April 2011 10:07:41PM 0 points [-]

Okay, so what would be your energy (or disorder) metric in that case and how does the Glider gun violate it? You need to do more than just keep overwriting zeroes with ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 10:43:25PM 2 points [-]

What do you mean by "energy metric"? If you're asking for a conserved quantity whose conservation is violated, then you're not going to get that by definition.

What I mean by having no 2nd law of thermodynamics is that it's possible to construct a Universal Turing machine that can operate indefinitely without using up any irreplaceable resources.

Comment author: wedrifid 29 April 2011 06:35:56AM 3 points [-]

All I'm saying is that there needs to be an intelligence, some value-having agent or entity, in order for actions to be judged. If there is no intelligence, there are no values.

Judging requires an agent. But values does not. That just requires an object capable of representing information. The universe could have values built into it even without having intelligence to be judging with it. (Completely irrelevant observation.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 06:44:26AM *  0 points [-]

In fact judging only requires an optimization process. Not all optimization processes are agents or intelligent.

Comment author: NMJablonski 29 April 2011 06:15:34AM -1 points [-]

All I'm saying is that there needs to be an intelligence, some value-having agent or entity, in order for actions to be judged. If there is no intelligence, there are no values.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 06:24:29AM 1 point [-]

I don't see how that follows.

My position is more-or-less the one argued by Marius in this thread. Especially the second posibility in this comment.

Also, I think it would be better to take all further discussion into that thread.

Comment author: NMJablonski 29 April 2011 05:51:24AM *  2 points [-]

I don't know whether Eugine is a theist. I would have gone with "fundamentalist humanist".

I was doing some thinking after the thread earlier about whether or not one can be a moral realist without in some sense being a theist. I tried as hard as I could to phrase Peter and Eugine's position non-theistically, with some variant of:

"There exists a set of preferences which all intelligent agents... "

And I tried finishing the sentence with "are compelled by some force to adopt". But that obviously isn't true as there are extreme differences in preference among agents. I tried finishing the sentence with "should adopt", but of course the word should contains the entire confusion all over again. Should adopt according to whom? , I was forced to ask.

The moral realist position is nonsensical without an intelligence against whose preferences you can check.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 06:08:17AM -2 points [-]

Wow, that's right up there with attempts to define God that end up defining God to be "the universe", "the laws of physics", or "mathematics".

Yes, technically you can define God to be any of these things and any of the above definitions would make me a theist. However, I don't think any of the above definitions are particularly helpful.

Comment author: wedrifid 29 April 2011 05:51:22AM *  2 points [-]

Why do you ask? Do you believe it's "wrong" or something?

I do. But mostly I think it is incredibly amusing.

(Note: wedrifid was one of the people arguing that the terms "morality"/"right"/"wrong" are meaningless independent of preferences in the recent metaethics thread.)

As a matter of fact I wasn't. I was arguing against specific points that you (and at least one other person) were making. There is a sense that things are objectively right and wrong and do not necessarily include reference to preferences. This sense is so far removed from your usage that for most intents and purposes you would rightly consider me the 'other side'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 05:54:29AM 2 points [-]

There is a sense that things are objectively right and wrong and do not necessarily include reference to preferences.

Ok, could you explain what you mean by this sense. This wasn't the impression I had of your position.

Comment author: CuSithBell 29 April 2011 05:24:35AM 4 points [-]

I don't think that argument means what you think it does.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 05:31:48AM -2 points [-]

I don't see how to interpret this exchange any other way.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 April 2011 03:15:07AM 1 point [-]

I don't understand the question, nor why you singled out that fragment.

In response to comment by [deleted] on What is Metaethics?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 03:32:59AM 0 points [-]

When you say "Even if there's no such thing as objective right and wrong" you're still implicitly presuming a default morality, namely ethical egoism.

Comment author: prase 28 April 2011 03:59:33PM 1 point [-]

I like the first answer. The second one uses rather mystical "higher place". It decouples logic from the real world, making it "true" without regard to observations. But logic is represented in human brains which are part of the world. The third answer seems too much instrumental. I don't think punishment plays important role in establishing the status of logic. After all, "contraband" methods of persuasion are rarely punished.

Expanding on your first answer, it seems that logic is based on the most firm intuitions which almost all people have - maybe encoded in the low level hardware structure of human brains. People often have conflicting intuitions, but there seems to be some hierarchy which tells which intuitions are more basic and thus to be prefered. But this is still strongly related to persuasion, even if not in the open way of your third answer.

If this view of logic is correct, the generalisation to ethics is somewhat problematic. The ethical intuitions are more complicated and conflict in less obvious ways, and there doesn't seem to be a universal set of prefered axioms. Any ethical theory thus may be perceived as arbitrary and controversial.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 02:08:09AM 2 points [-]

But logic is represented in human brains which are part of the world.

So do you think aliens would develop a non-isomorphic system of logic?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 28 April 2011 05:36:17PM 2 points [-]

I do that often. My experience is that people who think something important is left over don't find that a compelling demonstration.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 01:59:44AM 0 points [-]

I don't believe, you. Or rather I suspect you cheated by sneaking in moral connotations into 'non-moral' words.

Comment author: JohnH 28 April 2011 07:18:01PM 1 point [-]

The last time the Great Powers got involved in taking sides on minor disputes WWI happened.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 01:44:23AM 3 points [-]

No, there have been many instances since WWI that didn't spiral out of control and are therefore less available.

Comment author: CuSithBell 29 April 2011 01:30:45AM 1 point [-]

The distinction I am trying to make is between Moral Facts Engraved Into The Foundation Of The Universe and A Bunch Of Words And Behaviors And Attitudes That People Have (as a result of evolution & thinking about stuff etc.). I'm not sure if I'm being clear, is this description easier to interpret?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 01:35:47AM *  2 points [-]

Near as I can tell, what you mean by "don't be a jerk" is one possible example of what I mean by morality.

Hope that helps.

Comment author: CuSithBell 28 April 2011 03:45:16PM 3 points [-]

To be clear - you are talking about morality as something externally existing, some 'facts' that exist in the world and dictate what you should do, as opposed to a human system of don't be a jerk. Is that an accurate portrayal?

If that is the case, there are two big questions that immediately come to mind (beyond "what are these facts" and "where did they come from") - first, it seems that Moral Facts would have to interact with the world in some way in order for the study of big-M Morality to be useful at all (otherwise we could never learn what they are), or they would have to be somehow deducible from first principles. Are you supposing that they somehow directly induce intuitions in people (though, not all people? so, people with certain biological characteristics?)? (By (possibly humorous, though not mocking!) analogy, suppose the Moral Facts were being broadcast by radio towers on the moon, in which case they would be inaccessible until the invention of radio. The first radio is turned on and all signals are drowned out by "DON'T BE A JERK. THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT. DON'T BE A JERK. THIS MESSAGE WILL...".)

The other question is, once we have ascertained that there are Moral Facts, what property makes them what we should do? For instance, suppose that all protons were inscribed in tiny calligraphy in, say, French, "La dernière personne qui est vivant, gagne." ("The last person who is alive, wins" - apologies for Google Translate) Beyond being really freaky, what would give that commandment force to convince you to follow it? What could it even mean for something to be inherently what you should do?

It seems, ultimately, you have to ask "why" you should do "what you should do". Common answers include that you should do "what God commands" because "that's inherently What You Should Do, it is By Definition Good and Right". Or, "don't be a jerk" because "I'll stop hanging out with you". Or, "what makes you happy and fulfilled, including the part of you that desires to be kind and generous" because "the subjective experience of sentient beings are the only things we've actually observed to be Good or Bad so far".

So, where do we stand now?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 01:26:46AM *  1 point [-]

as opposed to a human system of don't be a jerk.

Now we're getting somewhere. What do you mean by the work "jerk" and why is it any more meaningful then words like "moral"/"right"/"wrong"?

Comment author: [deleted] 28 April 2011 07:01:21PM 2 points [-]

Even if there's no such thing as objective right and wrong, they might easily be able to reason that being bloodthirsty is not in their best selfish interest.

In response to comment by [deleted] on What is Metaethics?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 01:12:08AM -2 points [-]

bloodthirsty is not in their best selfish interest.

If there's no right or wrong, why does that matter?

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 28 April 2011 11:56:11PM 4 points [-]

You could have a universe though that gains more "room" for entropy faster than it gains entropy... so entropy keeps increasing, but there's an ever increasing entropy sink, right?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 12:54:19AM 1 point [-]

That's another way to do it.

Comment author: prase 28 April 2011 03:26:38PM 1 point [-]

What is weasel-like with "near the surface of the earth"?

In response to comment by prase on What is Metaethics?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2011 12:50:15AM 0 points [-]

In this context, it's as "weasel-like" as "innocent". In the sense that both are fudge factors you need to add to the otherwise elegant statement to make it true.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 April 2011 06:08:20AM 0 points [-]

This might have clarified for me what this dispute is about. At least I have a hypothesis, tell me if I'm on the wrong track.

Antirealists aren't arguing that you should go on a hedonic rampage -- we are allowed to keep on consulting our consciences to determined the answer to "what should I prefer." In a community of decent and mentally healthy people we should flourish. But the main upshot of the antirealist position is that you cannot convince people with radically different backgrounds that their preferences are immoral and should be changed, even in principle.

At least, antirealism gives some support to this cynical point of view, and it's this point of view that you are most interested in attacking. Am I right?

In response to comment by [deleted] on What is Metaethics?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 06:20:48AM 0 points [-]

That's a large part of it.

The other problem is that anti-realists don't actually answer the question "what should I do?", they merely pass the buck to the part of my brain responsible for my preferences but don't give it any guidance on how to answer that question.

Comment author: Amanojack 28 April 2011 04:54:35AM *  1 point [-]

Define your terms, then you get a fair hearing. If you are just saying the terms could maybe someday be defined, this really isn't the kind of thing that needs a response.

To put it in perspective, you are speculating that someday you will be able to define what the field you are talking about even is. And your best defense is that some people have made questionable arguments against this non-theory? Why should anyone care?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 05:22:32AM *  1 point [-]

After thinking about it a little I think I can phrase it this way.

I want to answer the question: "What should I do?"

It's kind of a pressing question since I need to do something (doing nothing counts as a choice and usually not a very good one).

If the people arguing that morality is just preference answer: "Do what you prefer", my next question is "What should I prefer?"

Comment author: JGWeissman 28 April 2011 04:47:17AM 2 points [-]

I think people may be making the same mistake by trying to force morality to use the same meta-theory as science, i.e., asking what experiences moral facts anticipate.

If that is true, what virtue do moral fact have which is analogous to physical facts anticipating experience, and mathematical facts being formally provable?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:48:43AM 1 point [-]

If that is true, what virtue do moral fact have which is analogous to physical facts anticipating experience, and mathematical facts being formally provable?

If I knew the answer we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Comment author: TimFreeman 28 April 2011 04:37:21AM 0 points [-]

Talk about morality and good and bad clearly has a role in social signaling. It is also true that people clearly have preferences that they act upon, imperfectly. I assume you agree with these two assertions; if not we need to have a "what color is the sky?" type of conversation.

If you do agree with them, what would you want from a meta-ethical theory that you don't already have?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:45:39AM *  2 points [-]

If you do agree with them, what would you want from a meta-ethical theory that you don't already have?

Something more objective/universal.

Edit: a more serious issue is that just as equating facts with opinions tells you nothing about what opinions you should hold. Equating morality and preference tells you nothing about what you should prefer.

Comment author: Amanojack 28 April 2011 04:20:08AM 2 points [-]

Your criticisms of "truth" are not so far off, but you're essentially saying that parts of science are wrong so you can be wrong, too. No actually, you think it is OK to flounder around in the field when you're just starting out. Sure, but not when you don't even know what it is you're supposed to be studying - if anything! This is not analogous to physics, where the general goal was clear from the very beginning: figure out what physical mechanisms underly macro-scale phenomena, such as the hardness of metal, conductivity, magnetic attraction, gravity, etc.

You're just running around to whatever you can grab onto to avoid the main point that there is nothing close to a semblance of delineation of what this "field" is actually about, and it is getting tiresome.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:34:03AM 1 point [-]

This is not analogous to physics, where the general goal was clear from the very beginning: figure out what physical mechanisms underly macro-scale phenomena, such as the hardness of metal, conductivity, magnetic attraction, gravity, etc.

I believe this is hindsight bias.

Comment author: CuSithBell 28 April 2011 04:15:10AM *  5 points [-]

Technically, yes. But I'm pretty much obliged, based on the current evidence, to conclude that it's likely to be incoherent.

More to the point: why do you think it's likely to be coherent?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:31:24AM *  5 points [-]

Mostly by outside view analogy with the history of the development of science. I've read a number of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers (along with a few post-modernists) arguing against the possibility of a coherent theory of physics using arguments very similar to the ones people are using against morality.

I've also read a (much larger) number of philosophers trying to shoehorn what we today call science into using the only meta-theory then available in a semi-coherent state: the meta-theory of mathematics. Thus we see philosophers, Descartes being the most famous, trying and failing to study science by starting with a set of intuitively obvious axioms and attempting to derive physical statements from them.

I think people may be making the same mistake by trying to force morality to use the same meta-theory as science, i.e., asking what experiences moral facts anticipate.

As for likely I'm not sure how likely this is, I just think its more likely then a lot of people on this thread assume.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 April 2011 04:09:26AM 3 points [-]

That's just the thing, the smallest circuit wouldn't be over-fitted. For instance, if I gave you numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21... plus a hundred more and asked for the SMALLEST circuit that outputted these numbers, it would not be a circuit of size hundred of bits. The size would be a few bits, and it would be the formula for generating the Fibonacci numbers. Except, instead of doing any thinking to figure this out, you would just use your NP machine to figure it out. And essentially all mathematical theorems would be proved in the same way.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:13:10AM 2 points [-]

And essentially all mathematical theorems would be proved in the same way.

I wasn't talking about mathematical theorems but about

stock market data, or the human genome, or the complete works of Shakespeare.

Comment author: CuSithBell 28 April 2011 04:08:36AM 3 points [-]

Right, and 'facts' about God. Except that intuitions about physics derive from observations of physics, whereas intuitions about morality derive from observations of... intuitions.

You can't really argue that objective morality not being well-defined means that it is more likely to be a coherent notion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:11:26AM 3 points [-]

My point is that you can't conclude the notion of morality is incoherent simple because we don't yet have a sufficiently concrete definition.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 April 2011 04:03:14AM 2 points [-]

Preferences also do that.

In response to comment by [deleted] on What is Metaethics?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:06:28AM 1 point [-]

Yes, well opinions also anticipate observations. But in a sense by talking about "observable consequences" your taking advantage of the fact that the meta-theory of science is currently much more developed then the meta-theory of ethics.

Comment author: CuSithBell 28 April 2011 03:58:34AM 1 point [-]

The question was - how do you determine what the moral facts are?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 04:03:35AM 1 point [-]

Currently, intuition. Along with the existing moral theories, such as they are.

Similar to the way people determined facts about physics, especially facts beyond the direct observation of their senses, before the scientific method was developed.

Comment author: NMJablonski 28 April 2011 03:51:08AM 0 points [-]

... I'm not down-voting the comments I disagree with.

I down-voted a couple of snide comments from Peter earlier.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:59:47AM 2 points [-]

Well, somebody is.

If it's not you I'm sorry.

Comment author: NMJablonski 28 April 2011 03:48:59AM *  2 points [-]

What is the difference between:

"Killing innocent people is wrong barring extenuating circumstances"

and

"Killing innocent people is right barring extenuating circumstances"

How do you determine which one is accurate? What observable consequences does each one predict? What do they lead you to anticipate?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:57:25AM 1 point [-]

How do you determine which one is accurate? What observable consequences does each one predict? What do they lead you to anticipate?

Moral facts don't lead me to anticipate observable consequences, but they do affect the actions I choose to take.

Comment author: Amanojack 28 April 2011 02:40:14AM 0 points [-]

I don't think you can explicate such a connection, especially not without any terms defined. In fact, it is just utterly pointless to try to develop a theory in a field that hasn't even been defined in a coherent way. It's not like it's close to being defined, either.

For example, "Is abortion morally wrong?" combines about 12 possible questions into it because it has a least that many interpretations. Choose one, then we can study that. I just can't see how otherwise rationality-oriented people can put up with such extreme vagueness. There is almost zero actual communication happening in this thread in the sense of actually expressing which interpretation of moral language anyone is taking. And once that starts happening it will cover way too many topics to ever reach a resolution. We're simply going to have to stop compressing all these disparate-but-subtly-related concepts into a single field, taboo all the moralist language, and hug some queries (if any important ones actually remain).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:40:43AM 1 point [-]

I don't think you can explicate such a connection, especially not without any terms defined. In fact, it is just utterly pointless to try to develop a theory in a field that hasn't even been defined in a coherent way. It's not like it's close to being defined, either.

In any science I can think of people began developing it using intuitive notions, only being able to come up with definitions after substantial progress had been made.

Comment author: Amanojack 28 April 2011 03:20:09AM *  2 points [-]

That is sort of half true, but it feels like you're just saying that to say it, as there have been criticisms of this same line of reasoning that you haven't answered.

How about the fact that beliefs about physics actually pay rent? Do moral ones?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:34:18AM -2 points [-]

How about the fact that beliefs about physics actually pay rent? Do moral ones?

Not in the sense of anticipated experience, however they do inform our actions.

Comment author: TimFreeman 28 April 2011 03:14:58AM 2 points [-]

But science isn't about words like "exist", "true", or "false". Science is about words like "Frozen water is less dense than liquid water". I can point at frozen water, liquid water, and a particular instance of the former floating on the latter. Scientific claims were well-defined even before there was enough knowledge to evaluate them. I can't point at anything for claims about morality, so the analogy between ethics and science is not valid.

Come on people. Argument by analogy doesn't prove anything even when the analogies are valid! Stop it.

If you don't like the hypothesis that words like "should", "right", and "wrong" are social signaling, give some other explanation of the evidence that is simpler. The evidence in question is:

  • The flowchart in the original post has many endpoints about what morality might mean.

  • There seems to be no universal consensus on what specific actions are moral and which ones are not.

  • People have strong opinions about morality despite the fact that statements about morality are not subject to empirical validation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:31:10AM *  1 point [-]

But science isn't about words like "exist", "true", or "false". Science is about words like "Frozen water is less dense than liquid water".

Only because the force of the word "exists" is implicit in the indicative mood of the word "is".

Come on people. Argument by analogy doesn't prove anything even when the analogies are valid! Stop it.

But they can help explain what people mean, and they can show argument prove too much.

  • The flowchart in the original post has many endpoints about what morality might mean.

I could draw an equally complicate flow chart about what "truth" and "exists"/"is" might mean.

  • There seems to be no universal consensus on what specific actions are moral and which ones are not.

The amount of consensus is roughly the same as the amount of consensus there was before the development of science about which statements are true and which aren't.

  • People have strong opinions about morality despite the fact that statements about morality are not subject to empirical validation.

People had strong opinions about truth before the concept of empirical validation was developed.

Comment author: NMJablonski 28 April 2011 02:53:02AM *  4 points [-]

Based upon my experiences, physical truths appear to be concrete and independent of beliefs and opinions. I see no cases where "right" has a meaning outside of an agent's preferences. I don't know how one would go about discovering the "rightness" of something, as one would a physical truth.

It is a poor analogy.

Edit: Seriously? I'm not trying to be obstinate here. Would people prefer I go away?

New edit: Thanks wedrifid. I was very confused.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:14:14AM -2 points [-]

Based upon my experiences, physical truths appear to be concrete and independent of beliefs and opinions.

Please explain what the word "concrete" means independent of anyone's beliefs and opinions.

Comment author: TimFreeman 28 April 2011 02:55:22AM 1 point [-]

My point is that NMJablonski's request is about as reasonable as demanding that someone arguing for the existence of a "Correct Theory of Physics" provide a clear reductionist description of what one means while tabooing words like 'physics', 'reality', 'exists', 'experience', etc.

No, the reductionist description of the Correct Theory of Physics eventually involves pointing at lab equipment. There is no lab equipment for morality, so the analogy is not valid.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:11:53AM 0 points [-]

No, the reductionist description of the Correct Theory of Physics eventually involves pointing at lab equipment. There is no lab equipment for morality, so the analogy is not valid.

I could point a gun to your head and ask you to explain why I shouldn't pull the trigger.

Comment author: JGWeissman 28 April 2011 02:49:41AM 0 points [-]

saying "it's all preferences" about morality is analogous to saying "it's all opinion" about physics.

No matter what opinions anyone holds about gravity, objects near the surface of the earth not subject to other forces accelerate towards the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second. This is an empirical fact about physics, and we know ways our experience could be different if it were wrong. Do you have an example of a fact about morality, independent of preferences, such that we could notice if it is wrong?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 03:08:30AM -1 points [-]

No matter what opinions anyone holds about gravity, objects near the surface of the earth not subject to other forces accelerate towards the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.

Do you have an example of a fact about morality, independent of preferences,

Killing innocent people is wrong barring extenuating circumstances.

(I'll taboo the "weasel words" innocent and extenuating circumstances as soon as you taboo the "weasel words" near the surface of the earth and not subject to other forces.

such that we could notice if it is wrong?

I'm not sure it's possible for my example to be wrong anymore then its possible for 2+2 to equal 3.

Comment author: NMJablonski 28 April 2011 02:19:45AM *  7 points [-]

Clearly there's a group of people who dislike what I've said in this thread, as I've been downvoted quite a bit.

I'm not perfectly clear on why. My only position at any point has been this:

I see a universe which contains intelligent agents trying to fulfill their preferences. Then I see conversations about morality and ethics talking about actions being "right" or "wrong". From the context and explanations, "right" seems to mean very different things. Like:

"Those actions which I prefer" or "Those actions which most agents in a particular place prefer" or "Those actions which fulfill arbitrary metric X"

Likewise, "wrong" inherits its meaning from whatever definition is given for "right". It makes sense to me to talk about preferences. They're important. If that's what people are talking about when they discuss morality, then that makes perfect sense. What I do not understand is when people use the words "right" or "wrong" independently of any agent's preferences. I don't see what they are referring to, or what those words even mean in that context.

Does anyone care to explain what I'm missing, or if there's something specific I did to elicit downvotes?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 02:45:40AM *  0 points [-]

In keeping with my analogy let's translate your position into the corresponding position on physics:

I see a universe which contains intelligent agents with opinions and/or beliefs. Then I see conversations about physics and reality talking about beliefs being "true" or "false". From the context and explanations, "true" seems to mean very different things. Like:

"My beliefs" or "The beliefs of most agents in a particular place" or "Those beliefs which fulfill arbitrary metric X"

Likewise, "false" inherits its meaning from whatever definition is given for "true". It makes sense to me to talk about opinions and/or beliefs . They're important. If that's what people are talking about when they discuss truth, then that makes perfect sense. What I do not understand is when people use the words "true" or "false" independently of any agent's opinion. I don't see what they are referring to, or what those words even mean in that context.

Do you still agree with the changed version? If not, why not?

(I never realized how much fun it could be to play a chronophone.)

Comment author: SilasBarta 28 April 2011 01:49:14AM *  4 points [-]

There are unreachable states ("gardens of Eden" in the lingo) which means that (per the Garden of Eden Theorem) there exist states which are the successor of more than one possible state. This is an irreversibility (you cannot infer the previous state from the present one), implying an increase of entropy.

The perpetual motion machines you refer to are only that in a very metaphorical sense -- they don't allow an infinite extraction (edit: should be "increase") of some energy-like metric. They just cycle between the same states, neither increasing nor decreasing entropy because of the full reversibility of such systems.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 02:01:53AM *  9 points [-]

The perpetual motion machines you refer are only that in a very metaphorical sense -- they don't allow an infinite extraction of some energy-like metric.

Glider guns produce an endless stream of gliders to give the simplest example.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 April 2011 01:48:24AM 3 points [-]

My point, and possibly Peter's, is that given our current state of knowledge about meta-ethics I can give no better definition of the words "should"/"right"/"wrong" than the meaning they have in everyday use.

This is consistent with Jablonski's point that "it's all preferences."

In response to comment by [deleted] on What is Metaethics?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 01:57:04AM *  0 points [-]

This is consistent with Jablonski's point that "it's all preferences."

In keeping with my physics analogy, saying "it's all preferences" about morality is analogous to saying "it's all opinion" about physics.

Comment author: Amanojack 28 April 2011 12:41:55AM 2 points [-]

Fair enough, though I suspect that by asking for a "reductionist" description NMJablonski may have just been hoping for some kind of unambiguous wording.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 12:57:53AM 1 point [-]

My point, and possibly Peter's, is that given our current state of knowledge about meta-ethics I can give no better definition of the words "should"/"right"/"wrong" than the meaning they have in everyday use.

Note, following my analogy with physics, that historically we developed a systematic way for judging the validity of statements about physics, i.e., the scientific method, several centuries before developing a semi-coherent meta-theory of physics, i.e., empiricism and Bayseanism. With morality we're not even at the "scientific method" stage.

Comment author: DanielLC 28 April 2011 12:29:26AM -1 points [-]

You only proved that it's NP-Hard. That is, it's at least as hard as any NP problem. It is, in fact, harder than NP-Complete problems.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 12:44:31AM 7 points [-]

Daniel's statement:

"Given a statement S of ZFC and a number n, is there a proof of S that is shorter than n?"

Is trivially in NP.

Comment author: Amanojack 27 April 2011 11:40:17PM 3 points [-]

It's not an argument by reductionism...it's simply trying to figure out how to interpret the words people are using - because it's really not obvious. It only looks like reductionism because someone asks, "What is morality?" and the answer comes: "Right and wrong," then "What should be done," then "What is admirable"... It is all moralistic language that, if any of it means anything, it all means the same thing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 April 2011 12:15:31AM *  2 points [-]

Well the original argument, way back in the thread, was NMJablonski arguing against the existence of a "Correct Theory of Morality" by demanding that Peter provide "a clear reductionist description of what [he's] talking about" while "tabooing words like 'ethics', 'morality', 'should', etc.

My point is that NMJablonski's request is about as reasonable as demanding that someone arguing for the existence of a "Correct Theory of Physics" provide a clear reductionist description of what one means while tabooing words like 'physics', 'reality', 'exists', 'experience', etc.

Comment author: NMJablonski 27 April 2011 11:04:50PM 1 point [-]

I would be happy to continue down this line a ways longer if you would like, and we could get all the way down to the two of us in the same physical location rebuilding the concept of induction. I am confident that if necessary we could do that for "anticipations" and build our way back up. I am not confident that "morality" as it has been used here actually connects to any solid surface in reality, unless it ends up meaning the same thing as "preferences".

Do you disagree?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 11:14:02PM -1 points [-]

I am confident that if necessary we could do that for "anticipations" and build our way back up.

In that case maybe we should continue a bit longer until you're disabused of that belief. What I suspect will happen is that you'll continue to attempt to define your words in terms of more and more tenuous abstractions until the words you're using really are almost meaningless.

Comment author: NMJablonski 27 April 2011 10:57:20PM 0 points [-]

Replace anticipations with:

My ability, as a mind (subjective observer), to construct an isomorphism in memory that corresponds to future experiences.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 11:00:06PM *  -1 points [-]

What's an "isomorphism in memory"? What are "future experiences"? And what does it mean for them to "correspond"?

Comment author: NMJablonski 27 April 2011 10:52:34PM 1 point [-]

A correct theory of physics would inform my anticipations.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 10:54:09PM 1 point [-]

Please, taboo "anticipations".

Comment author: SilasBarta 27 April 2011 09:27:23PM 5 points [-]

There are possible universes that don't have anything analogous to the second law of thermodynamics,

[Citation needed.]

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 10:53:15PM *  11 points [-]

Conway's game of life.

Edit: In particular it allows for perpetual motion machines.

Comment author: ata 27 April 2011 10:39:50PM 0 points [-]

Right, sorry, I was referring to subjective information loss. I understand that information is globally conserved.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 10:52:17PM 3 points [-]

Won't help. You could have a universe that includes chronoscopes but still have the problem that it's continuously filling up with entropy.

Comment author: NMJablonski 27 April 2011 10:30:23PM 0 points [-]

Why do you believe there exists a Correct Theory of Morality?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 10:48:07PM *  3 points [-]

Why do you believe there exists a Correct Theory of Physics?

As Constant points out here all the arguments based on reductionism that you're using could just as easily be used to argue that there is no correct theory of physics.

One difference between physics and morality is that there is currently a lot more consensus about what the correct theory of physics looks like then what the correct theory of morality looks like. However, that is a statement about the current time, if you were to go back a couple centuries you'd find that there was as little consensus about the correct theory of physics as there is today about the correct theory of morality.

Comment author: ata 27 April 2011 10:18:03PM 1 point [-]

You can write a program general enough to be a universe but which doesn't involve temperature and doesn't involve inevitable information loss over time. Obviously none of them are going to be generating information from nowhere, but in principle it's at least possible to break even. (One example, which is rather simple and almost borders on cheating, would be to include an API that would allow any agent to access any bit of information from any point in the past. As far as I can tell, there's no reason why this wouldn't be allowed. It would have the aesthetic disadvantage of having a fundamentally directional time dimension, but that shouldn't cause any real problems to any agents living within it.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 10:30:54PM *  5 points [-]

doesn't involve inevitable information loss over time.

Actually the lack of loss of information over time is precisely what generates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Specifically, since all information from the past must thus be stored somewhere (unfortunately often in a way that's hard to access, e.g., the "random" motion of atoms) that continuously leaves less room for new information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 08:59:51PM 4 points [-]

This reminds me of the iron law of oligarchy.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 April 2011 08:21:43PM 6 points [-]

There's a nice paper about that by Scott Aaronson (pdf)

If such a procedure existed, then we could quickly find the smallest Boolean circuits that output (say) a table of historical stock market data, or the human genome, or the complete works of Shakespeare. It seems entirely conceivable that, by analyzing these circuits, we could make an easy fortune on Wall Street, or retrace evolution, or even generate Shakespeare’s 38th play. For broadly speaking, that which we can compress we can understand, and that which we can understand we can predict.

He suggests that this is a good reason to take NP != P as a physical law, like the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 08:54:17PM 7 points [-]

If such a procedure existed, then we could quickly find the smallest Boolean circuits that output (say) a table of historical stock market data, or the human genome, or the complete works of Shakespeare.

I don't see how a circuit overfitted to any of the above would help you.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 April 2011 03:42:25AM *  5 points [-]

I think this is actually a really dangerous meme, because it can be used to rationalize almost any belief. For example, a religious person could easily say, "Some claims are just too extraordinary! There's just no extraordinary evidence that could convince me that God doesn't exist; it just isn't going to happen." Many of the other ideas in the Sequences are powerful tools because they can't be applied to fake explanations. So while this post might be useful to people with a fair amount of rationality training, I think it's far too risky to give to people without any prerequisites.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 April 2011 03:51:51AM 5 points [-]

Judging by the existence of this later post, it appears Eliezer eventually changed his mind about this.

In response to comment by bogus on Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: NihilCredo 26 April 2011 10:29:03PM 0 points [-]

I deleted a moderate wall of text because I think I understand what you mean now. I agree that two consequentialists sharing the same moral/utility function, but adopting different decision theories, will have to make different choices.

However, I don't think it would be a very good idea to talk about various DTs in the FAQ. That is: showing that "people's intuition that they should not steal is not horribly misguided", by offering them the option of a DT that supports a similar rule, doesn't seem to me like a worthy goal for the document. IMO, people should embrace consequentialism because it makes sense - because it doesn't rely on pies in the sky - not because it can be made to match their moral intuitions. If you use that approach, you could in the same way use the fat man trolley problem to support deontology.

I might be misinterpreting you or taking this too far, but what you suggest sounds to me like "Let's write 'Theft is wrong' on the bottom line because that's what is expected by readers and makes them comfortable, then let's find a consequentialist process that will give that result so they will be happy" (note that it's irrelevant whether that process happens to be correct or wrong). I think discouraging that type of reasoning is even more important than promoting consequentialism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2011 11:16:25PM 3 points [-]

people should embrace consequentialism because it makes sense - because it doesn't rely on pies in the sky - not because it can be made to match their moral intuitions.

The whole point of CEV, reflexive consistency and the meta-ethics sequence is that morality is based on our intuitions.

Comment author: bogus 26 April 2011 08:45:02PM *  1 point [-]

Notwithstanding NihilCredo's point, the lack of gladiatorial combat today is most likely due to a genuine change in taste, probably related to secular decline in social violence and availability of increasingly varied entertainment (movie theaters, TV, video games etc.). The popularity of blood sports in general is decreasing. We also know that folks used to entertain themselves in ways that would be unthinkable today, such as gathering scores of cats and burning them in a fire.

In response to comment by bogus on Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2011 09:14:50PM *  3 points [-]

Notwithstanding NihilCredo's point, the lack of gladiatorial combat today is most likely due to a genuine change in taste, probably related to secular decline in social violence and availability of increasingly varied entertainment (movie theaters, TV, video games etc.).

For gladiatorial games specifically, their decline was caused by Christian objections. Sorry, you don't get to redefine historical facts just because they don't fit your narrative.

gathering scores of cats and burning them in a fire.

Wait, that sounds like fun.

In response to Consequentialism FAQ
Comment author: AlephNeil 26 April 2011 05:24:33AM 10 points [-]

I think your analysis of the 'gladiatorial objection' misses something:

I hope I'm not caricaturing you too much if I condense your rebuttal as follows: "People wouldn't really enjoy watching gladiators fight to the death. In fact, they'd be sickened and outraged. Therefore, utilitarianism does not endorse gladiatorial games after all."

But there's a problem here: If the negative reaction to gladiatorial games is itself partly due to analyzing those games in utilitarian terms then we have a feedback loop.

Games are outrageous --> decrease utility --> are outrageous --> etc.

But this could just as well be a 'virtuous circle':

Games are noble --> increase utility --> are noble --> etc.

If we started off with a society like that of ancient Rome, couldn't it be that the existence of gladiatorial games is just as 'stable' (with respect to the utilitarian calculus) as their non-existence in our own society?

Couldn't it be that we came to regard such bloodsports as being 'immoral' for independent, non-utilitarian reasons*? And then once this new moral zeitgeist became prevalent, utilitarians could come along and say "Aha! Far from being 'fun', just look at how much outrage the games would generate. If only our predecessors had been utilitarians, we could have had avoided all this ugly carnage."

(Perhaps you will bite the bullet here, and grant that there could be a society where gladiatorial games are 'good' by utilitarian standards. But then there doesn't seem to be much hope for a utilitarian justification of the idea that, insofar as we have outlawed bloodsports, we have 'progressed' to a better state of affairs.

Or perhaps you will say that bloodsports would always be judged 'bad' under ideal rational reflection (that is, they go against our CEV). I think this is a much stronger reply, but it's not clear that CEV actually makes sense (i.e. that the limit is well-defined).)

* Sadly my knowledge of history is too meagre to venture an account of how this actually happened.

I have many other objections to utilitarianism up my sleeve. To give the gist of a few of them:

  1. Utilitarian calculations are impossible in practice because the future cannot be predicted sufficiently far.
  2. Utilitarian calculations are impossible even if theory because outcomes are incommensurable. The indeterminacies concerning whether 'more people' are preferable to 'happier people', and how far a superbeing's happiness is 'worth more' than a human's, are special cases of this, but incommensurability is ubiquitous. (For instance, just try weighing up all of the effects of the decision to buy a car rather than use public transport. The idea is there is a Right Answer Out There seems to me an article of blind faith.)
  3. Utilitarianism holds 'terminal preferences' to be beyond reproach. It does not allow for the possibility that an entire self-contained society ought to change its system of preferences, no matter how 'brutal' and 'destructive' these preferences are. (The point about gladiatorial games is a special case of this). It denies that one can make an objective judgement as to whether a paperclipper is 'wrong' and/or 'stupid' to fill the universe with paperclips. Ultimately, might makes right in the struggle between humanity and clippy.
  4. Utilitarianism faces some awkward choices in how it values the lives of 'ordinary people' (people who live reasonably happy lives but do not make lasting 'achievements' e.g. progress in science). If their value is positive then apparently it would be better to fill the universe with them than not, which seems absurd. How is it worthwhile or noble to try to explore the entire 'soap opera of Babel'? Isn't it just a stationary stochastic process? Haven't you seen it all once you've seen the first few billion episodes? But if their value is zero (resp. negative) then it seems that nuking an entire planet full of 'ordinary people', assuming it's not the only such planet, is morally neutral (resp. desirable). The only way of resolving the contradiction of human life being both incredibly precious and utterly worthless is to deny that the premise that we need to assign it some value in order to decide how to act.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2011 05:49:36AM 9 points [-]
  • Sadly my knowledge of history is too meagre to venture an account of how this actually happened.

Well, we have Christianity to blame for the decline of gladiatorial games.

Incidentally, now that we know Christianity to be false and thus gladiatorial games were banned under false pretenses, does recursive consistency require us to re-examine whether they are a good idea?

Comment author: lessdazed 26 April 2011 02:29:50AM *  4 points [-]

A few details leave them worse off, as far as I can tell.

First, the items Chassidim use as signals are almost all consumable or have their costs over the long term, in contrast to the middle class. Weddings and kosher food are examples of the first type, number of children and isolation from secular knowledge/intensive religious schooling for young men are of the second. The middle class has expensive weddings and vacations, but primarily is enslaved to owned cars/houses or educations that merely fail to be fully worth their opportunity cost.

Second, having religious values in addition to other values deemphasizes the focus one can put on the other values. E.g., if I value my happiness, family, career, etc., I will put effort into each of them. If in addition I value baseball cards, I do so by taking money and attention from the other categories. It is true that one who only values happiness is unlikely to achieve it, and that valuing additional things such as the Yankees' winning would or does make some people happier. Nonetheless, the body of ordinances, injunctions, and so forth that these people are expected to follow is amazingly comprehensive and capable of crowding out much having to do with happiness.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2011 02:33:40AM 4 points [-]

Yet for some reason religious people seem to put more effort into family then atheists.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 26 April 2011 01:31:49AM 0 points [-]

So my impression was based on this data:

This kind of tendency in the US is connected to a desire for bipartisanship

which comes from a veto-point-ridden legislative system

which is not a common feature in Europe

In Europe I understand that it's accepted that the people put a party in power and the party decides what happens, vs. in America people think that a grand bargain between the elites of both parties is necessary - but that is not necessarily what you're talking about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 April 2011 01:49:37AM *  1 point [-]

Most European countries have multi-party systems, which have an even greater need for negotiations and compromise. Also Europe has the EU whose bureaucratic institutions are far more developed than its democratic ones.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 25 April 2011 01:12:07PM 3 points [-]

Is this as true in non-US countries at is true in the US?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2011 08:41:52PM *  3 points [-]

I get the impression that it's even worse in Europe.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 April 2011 05:12:58PM 4 points [-]

Interestingly enough, Eliezer answers a number of questions during his Q&A just this way.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 24 April 2011 07:14:52PM *  9 points [-]

The argument is one of symmetry.

a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.

b. Most of my cultural differences from these groups are morally insignificant. For instance, I would prefer that they speak my language so that I can more easily understand them, but from an objective perspective it makes just as much sense to demand that I speak their languages.

c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women's rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women's rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.

Therefore, these people, if given resources, will put them to a use no worse than people from my culture would.

The Amish rejection of modern technology meme appears to me to be: 1, morally significant - leads to badstuff, and 2, memetically strong, having won its founding battle with Post-Enlightenment memes and showing no signs of losing any others.

I do not understand why it is obvious to the apparent majority here that my views are unreasonable. I have not seen any strong arguments why the Amish meme does not lead to badstuff or why it is memetically weak.

Instead it is argued that they are happy and nice - but happy and nice aren't all the good in the world - and that I am biased - but I already know that I am biased.

Hopefully my arguments above are clear enough that people will be able to provide me with helpful counterarguments.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2011 08:06:13PM 10 points [-]

a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.

Depending on which groups you're talking about this isn't completely obvious.

c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women's rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women's rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.

I think you're looking only at the superficial memes. It's entirely possible that there are more subtly cultural factors, e.g., belief in progress, openness to new ideas, that are responsible for both our development of modern technology and our adoption of different attitudes toward women. Of course, now that the technology has been invented, they can import it without necessarily importing the memetic baggage.

Also, as Eliezer pointed out here even the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself. Well, Franklin didn't get to see the future so we live in a democracy today. However, the people in developing countries can see where our path leads, and they may very well choose not to follow it.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 23 April 2011 11:58:35PM 5 points [-]

I object to your use of "a priori". I am aware of ironclad arguments that it is incorrect to dislike and fear certain groups. These arguments are not fully general - they do not apply to all groups.

Is it obvious to you that these cases are symmetrical? It is not obvious to me.

I never claimed to be unbiased. I, in fact, went out of the way to state a lack of confidence in my local rationality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2011 06:22:11PM *  5 points [-]

I am aware of ironclad arguments that it is incorrect to dislike and fear certain groups. These arguments are not fully general - they do not apply to all groups.

Really, I'm skeptical. Can we hear them?

Comment author: Hyena 24 April 2011 12:42:56AM *  4 points [-]

If you're living near Malthusian equilibrium, there's probably no smiling involved. Not even the poorest people on Earth are usually living close to that point. In fact, I'm not really sure any modern humans ever have.

Frankly, I doubt the emulated brains would be sentient. Turning that off would make them far more productive, so that would be a logical early development. Happiness is probably a non-question in that case.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 April 2011 12:58:49AM *  1 point [-]

If you're living near Malthusian equilibrium, there's probably no smiling involved.

Yes there is. Moping around about how miserable your life is wastes resources and is in general not productive.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 10:20:58PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, but evolution is much slower than cultural change. In principle, it is possible that a society might have very high and very uniform standards for the minimum wealth per child, so that it would take a very long time before evolution undermined these standards noticeably. In the meantime, it would make sense to speak of a Malthusian equilibrium.

In reality, of course, such a situation is highly improbable and (to my knowledge) not attested historically. So it's not really a mistake to equate a Malthusian equilibrium with awful poverty and constant threat of famine. (The latter would of course also have its analogues in a Malthusian upload society, which are not hard to imagine.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 10:28:53PM 1 point [-]

I wasn't referring simply to biological evolution.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 23 April 2011 09:48:44PM *  18 points [-]

However, they are far closer to Hanson's future Malthusian equilibrium than your average American community; probably they are the closest**. And so they are interesting from the utilitarian welfare point of view.

Looking for a community in modern-day U.S. that is the closest to a Malthusian equilibrium is kind of like looking at the members of a billionaire country club and asking whose circumstances are closest to those of a homeless beggar. Technically, the question might have a well-defined answer, but it won't give you any insight into the life of actual beggars.

Hell, I've lived in circumstances that make Kiryas Joel look like a billionaire country club in comparison, and it would be delusional for me to draw conclusions about Malthusian life based on my experiences.

I'm not sure you understand Malthusian economics very well. A 'subsistence wage' is an arbitrary culturally set wage anywhere above whatever amount is required to not starve to death.

I understand that. (In fact, the insight goes back even before Ricardo and Malthus, at least back to Adam Smith's concept of "the lowest [wage] rate which is consistent with common humanity.")

However, this wage is "culturally set" insofar as people may limit their reproduction because they have a culturally set minimum standard for forming families. Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth. (Note that this is distinct from the still largely mysterious reasons for the modern demographic transition.) However, in practice, every historical society stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium has been unspeakably poor by the modern developed world standards, and the future Hansonian uploads would be in an even worse situation, given the incentive to multiply them to use up every bit of the available resources. (As John Derbyshire once quipped, "The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!")

Thus, looking for someone in modern-day U.S. whose experience might give you insight into the historical Malthusian life, let alone the Malthusian life of future uploads, really is like looking for that poorest billionaire in a country club when you want insight into the life of beggars.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 10:09:06PM *  4 points [-]

Theoretically, it is possible that a wealthy society might be in a Malthusian equilibrium because people would like to reproduce more but have very high minimum standards for per-capita family wealth.

This society would not be evolutionarily stable since the members with the lowest standards will reproduce more causing the minimum standard to decrease. This process will continue until it reaches the point where standards are so low that any additional children would simply starve to death.

Comment author: bgaesop 23 April 2011 09:21:21AM *  3 points [-]

There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?

My mistake, wedrifid is correct, I turned my thought into a sentence poorly.

You're still self-anchoring. You observe that they want to kill people, so you try to imagine under what conditions you would be willing to kill people.

I admit to not having considered this bias on this subject. That said, I don't think that this bias is affecting me very significantly here, and I think that because of the direction I approached my current position from: I arrived at it after moving from somewhere near where you are currently. I will consider the possibility that my position is affected by this bias, however. The manner in which I am doing so right now is to reread the wikipedia page that I just linked and follow several of the citations. It seems that the consensus is that perceived western aggression against Muslims and Islam is one of the prime motivators--which would then include what I said, and also perceived aggression against Islam specifically. So a mixture of what we've both been saying.

Well, near as I can tell, your model boils down to "they secretly have to same world-view as I do, and the difference in their rhetoric is because it resonates with their audience".

I don't think that they are attempting to inspire a proletarian revolt across nations. I don't think that they are attempting to engage in a class struggle pitting the poor against the rich. I do think that they perceive themselves and their fellow Muslims as being the victims of exploitation by Westerners, and I think that they perceive a number of dimensions to that exploitation: military, economic, and cultural; perhaps more. Military is fairly obvious. Economic is what I was talking about, I mentioned it specifically because we were discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center. Cultural is what you are talking about. I believe that while it is an important portion of their motivation, it is not the primary piece. Unfortunately their rhetoric focuses on that issue largely (though by no means entirely) which gives an inflated view of its importance.

They observe that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days. Furthermore, the West and the United States in particular is influencing their culture in ways they don't like. Solving this problem requires a model of how the world works. Well, the model they turn to is one based on Islam.

It might be that we are saying similar things with rather different vocabularies. When you say that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days, does that include what I talk about when I say they're being economically exploited? For instance, instead of a wealthy semi-equitable (or perhaps merely remembered as such) Caliphate, they are frequently poor or highly segmented populations dependent on natural resource exportation? Where does reaction to the West's military operations fit into your model? That certainly seems to be one of the motivating forces most commonly cited by terrorists themselves.


Out of curiosity, have you been downvoting me? I've been upvoting you. I ask because I notice that every time I post in this thread my karma goes down, and though I do realize it's a silly thing to care about, for some reason I do. Something about human brains enjoying watching numbers go up, I suppose. It's particularly frustrating because I am enjoying the discussion, but seeing that number going down makes me feel like my participation is unwanted (which I am assuming is not the case, but who knows, maybe it is).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 06:16:20PM 1 point [-]

The manner in which I am doing so right now is to reread the wikipedia page that I just linked and follow several of the citations.

The wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about "economic oppression".

It seems that the consensus is that perceived western aggression against Muslims and Islam is one of the prime motivators--which would then include what I said, and also perceived aggression against Islam specifically. So a mixture of what we've both been saying.

A large part of this "western aggressions" is a reaction to said attacks.

I don't think that they are attempting to inspire a proletarian revolt across nations. I don't think that they are attempting to engage in a class struggle pitting the poor against the rich. I do think that they perceive themselves and their fellow Muslims as being the victims of exploitation by Westerners, and I think that they perceive a number of dimensions to that exploitation: military, economic, and cultural; perhaps more.

Most people who aren't Marxists don't think of everything in terms of exploitation. (Note that I was able to correctly identify you as a Marxist simply from your use of the term "economic oppression").

Military is fairly obvious. Economic is what I was talking about, I mentioned it specifically because we were discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center. Cultural is what you are talking about. I believe that while it is an important portion of their motivation, it is not the primary piece. Unfortunately their rhetoric focuses on that issue largely (though by no means entirely) which gives an inflated view of its importance.

In that case could you explain what you mean by an issue being "important" to them as it seems to have nothing to do with what they themselves think about the issue.

It might be that we are saying similar things with rather different vocabularies. When you say that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days, does that include what I talk about when I say they're being economically exploited? For instance, instead of a wealthy semi-equitable (or perhaps merely remembered as such) Caliphate, they are frequently poor or highly segmented populations dependent on natural resource exportation?

Given that the gulf states are among the wealthiest per-capita, it's not us who are exploiting their people. In any case they're thinking in terms of military and cultural/religious power. To the extend they think about economics at all, its probably because they don't like how materialist our culture is.

BTW, I don't think it's particularly meaningful to apply the term "exploitation" to voluntary, i.e., capitalist, as opposed to forced, i.e., feudal or socialist, economic relations, but that's another debate.

My other point is that Islam isn't mere window dressing, but seriously affects the way they think, and hence what they do.

Out of curiosity, have you been downvoting me?'

Not recently.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 April 2011 08:32:20AM 5 points [-]

Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing.

There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?

The only part I would leave out of bgaesop's paragraph is the "not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing". All of the previous stuff fits fine when both the leader and the intended audience are sincere homo-hypocrites. That is why he is doing it (or equivalently the fact that they do it so well is what made them the leaders). What they believe about the matter can be orthogonal.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 08:53:23AM 2 points [-]

All of the previous stuff fits fine when both the leader and the intended audience are sincere homo-hypocrites.

Careful about the fundamental attribution error:

I'm sincere in my beliefs; they're sincere homo-hypocrites.

Comment author: bgaesop 23 April 2011 06:25:32AM *  7 points [-]

No, not the only one, but if one were to ask them why they picked the targets they did, they'd describe it religious terms (talking about infidels, jihad and the great Satan) not in Marxist terms (i.e., economic oppression).

Just as an aside, "economic oppression" isn't a uniquely Marxist term, nor am I even aware of a specific Marxist definition of it. Are you thinking of "economic exploitation", perhaps? The latter means the difference between the amount of wealth generated by labour and the amount that labourer is paid.

I am pretty darn thoroughly convinced (though of course I am open to changing my mind) that the idea "religion made them do it!" is overly simplistic. I used to hold the position you do, but over the course of several years of examining the issue, I have come to the conclusion that the use of religious terminology and phrasing and all the general trappings of Islam are, while perhaps truly believed, are for the most part merely a rhetorical device constructed to take maximum advantage of the society they are recruiting, living, and (typically) acting in. I'm hesitant to say this next sentence, politics being the mind killer and all that, but I shall anyways (I have noticed I am in a hole. Hypothesis: if I dig long enough I'll get to China!). Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he (edit: necessarily) believed that that was what he was doing.

In fact judging by the fact that most of the hijackers were from wealthy families, I'd guess they didn't really care about the economic dimension except as part of a general attitude that our decadence is sinful and is spreading to the middle east.

Most people who have had impact in the world have come from wealthy (or at least not working-class-poor) families, including probably every Socialist Revolutionary you've heard of (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Che, et cetera), not to mention almost every politico in general. If anything, being middle class (inasmuch as that term makes sense) makes you more likely to simultaneously see the degradation of the poor and have the education to see what (at least seem to you) like plausible explanations for it. And then if you're an engineer or what have you, you have access to abilities that can actually do something about this (build bombs, fly planes, whatever), or the funds to support yourself while you learn them, or whatever. The point is, being middle class is not likely to make you less politically aware and active than being poor, and it is likely to increase your free time and ability to do things politically, including but not limited to committing acts of terrorism.

I stand by my advice as good advice. If you want to successfully model others' behavior, you shouldn't assume they see the world the same way you do.

When phrased this way it seems much more like actual advice and much less like an insult. I'm not sure how much of this is my inference and how much is your implications, but it's kind of moot. No hard feelings are taken, hopefully none were intended. Friends? I certainly agree that I should not model their minds as being identical to mine, but given that I don't want to kill people, I'm already doing that at least to some degree.

That said, I think that you are being overly simplistic in your model of these people. Again I link to this page. Could you please explain, or link me to someone else who has, what makes you think that your model of their minds and motivations is more accurate than mine?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 08:13:44AM *  8 points [-]

Osama bin Laden talks about "defeating the Great Satan for the glory of Allah and Mohammed (pbuh)" for the same reason George Walker Bush talked about "spreading Freedom and Democracy": because it resonates with his intended audience, convinces them that he has similar thought-processes to them and is representative of their interests, or at the very least their team, not because he actually believed that that was what he was doing.

There is a problem with arguments of the form, "The leader of that group clearly doesn't 'really' believe his own rhetoric he's just saying that because it resonates with his followers." This implies that their followers actually believe that stuff, otherwise there would be no point in the leaders' saying it. But you've just admitted that there exist people who really believe that stuff, why is it so absurd for the leader to be one of those people?

I certainly agree that I should not model their minds as being identical to mine, but given that I don't want to kill people, I'm already doing that at least to some degree.

You're still self-anchoring. You observe that they want to kill people, so you try to imagine under what conditions you would be willing to kill people.

That said, I think that you are being overly simplistic in your model of these people.

Well, near as I can tell, your model boils down to "they secretly have to same world-view as I do, and the difference in their rhetoric is because it resonates with their audience".

For the record I should probably mention my model:

They observe that the Islamic world isn't as powerful as it was in its glory days. Furthermore, the West and the United States in particular is influencing their culture in ways they don't like. Solving this problem requires a model of how the world works. Well, the model they turn to is one based on Islam.

There is certainly more that could be added to this model, e.g., a discussion of how feuds work in clan-based societies for starters.

Comment author: Alicorn 23 April 2011 03:12:53AM 9 points [-]

AdeleneDawner is correct. I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a "protected" feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever). (This is importantly different from forming communities based on non-protected features, like willingness to pay membership dues or expertise in a topic, and also importantly different from forming communities in which my presence would be pointless, e.g. I would have no reason whatsoever to be at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2011 07:37:53AM 2 points [-]

Could you characterize what you mean by a "protected" feature?

Comment author: r_claypool 22 April 2011 03:56:05AM *  0 points [-]

Implement this (xkcd).

:-)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 April 2011 03:58:04AM 5 points [-]

LW generally does not have that problem.

Comment author: BenAlbahari 22 April 2011 02:31:55AM *  2 points [-]

Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.

Reply to this comment with a comment for each website nomination?

Hmm... maybe with this feature new links could be added by users (presuming a minimum karma criteria), and then each link other users could vote up and down, so that the ordering of the list was organic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 April 2011 03:00:41AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: JohnH 22 April 2011 01:18:18AM 0 points [-]

The definition given of supernatural doesn't make sense from my perspective, not even of God. As far as I can tell the definition describes exactly nothing.

I still believe in the supernatural in the sense of I know God is real and so are spirits and the devil. However spirit is some form of matter, God has a body of flesh and bones, and both God and the rest of the universe has existed in some form forever. Also God does not violate natural laws, though he does work with higher laws then what we currently know. Clearly not the standard religous claims and while it may seem that I am tailoring these beliefs to meet objections I am not; they are found in the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and were given in the 1830-1840's.

You asked.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 April 2011 01:26:11AM 7 points [-]

So basically God is a sufficiently advanced alien.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 April 2011 07:37:14PM 7 points [-]

I think the ideal solution to this is to have a field like "location" and "website" that one can fill in.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2011 08:24:10PM *  2 points [-]

How about something for those of us who prefer anonymity..

Edit: I meant those of us who prefer anonymity but still want to post some personal information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2011 06:33:33PM 27 points [-]

Fix this bug.

Comment author: Cayenne 19 April 2011 09:13:48PM *  -1 points [-]

I sometimes wonder if the threat we'll face won't be a superintelligent AI but instead a corporation smarter than an amoeba. Right now corporations feed on money. They multiply when money is abundant, and only the really strong ones survive when money is scarce. Call it 'corporation space', the virtual space of the effects of massive amounts of money and contracts and supply and demand.

('money' could be resources, credit, cash flow)

We might have 'multicellular' corporations, but I don't think we have any that are smarter. What happens when a corporation can move in 'corporation space' as a real predator? A corporation with 'corporation space' intelligence as high as an octopus would be scarily powerful, and even one with intelligence as high as a shark would mean massive trouble.

Edit - please disregard this post

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2011 11:29:26PM 3 points [-]

This post explains why that's taking an analogy way too far.

Comment author: CuSithBell 19 April 2011 08:36:48PM 0 points [-]

I suspect that this is an over-simplification, and expect that there will not be a significant effect on the number or intensity of violent Christian riots. (For one thing, I expect Christians to value appearing more civilized than violent Muslims.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2011 09:43:58PM 2 points [-]

Some will, some won't. Unfortunately, under current conditions the ones willing to embrace violence will be more successful.

Comment author: endoself 19 April 2011 05:48:19PM 1 point [-]

Something about Eugine Nier's post gave me the impression that he was saying that the software sometimes posted things even when the save option was selected. I do not know why I thought this. I agree that it is a bug.

In response to comment by endoself on Learned Blankness
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2011 06:50:50PM *  2 points [-]

Something about Eugine Nier's post gave me the impression that he was saying that the software sometimes posted things even when the save option was selected.

Well according to this test, it's doing just that.

Comment author: knb 19 April 2011 05:27:03PM *  2 points [-]

Yes, the anger it created was real, and that reaction was why I chose it as an example.

It still falls orders of magnitude below the Jyllands-Posten cartoon riots, in which more than 100 people died.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2011 05:33:48PM 3 points [-]

Also now that other religious groups are noticing how much success Muslims are having with their tactic of violent rioting, what do you think they're going to do?

In response to comment by SRStarin on Learned Blankness
Comment author: MarcTheEngineer 19 April 2011 04:49:51PM 1 point [-]

I'd agree that many people have a learned helplessness when dealing with computers because of a fear that they can easily break their computer.

I disagree that really destroying your computer is a very easy thing to do (sans going into the BIOS or touching the actual hardware)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2011 05:27:50PM 5 points [-]

I disagree that really destroying your computer is a very easy thing to do (sans going into the BIOS or touching the actual hardware)

rm -r /

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 April 2011 02:33:32PM 0 points [-]

Do you have strategies for distinguishing between game theoretic exaggeration of offense vs. natural offense?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 April 2011 05:01:36PM 3 points [-]

Do you have strategies for distinguishing between game theoretic exaggeration of offense vs. natural offense?

I don't see the distinction you're trying to make.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 18 April 2011 08:08:47AM *  1 point [-]

Yikes, no, it wasn't; I thought I was just saving it as a draft. I wonder how I did that. I meant to revise it more and then post it to the main area (not discussion).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 08:17:58PM 3 points [-]

This is a known bug. Someone should fix it.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 18 April 2011 06:45:17PM 20 points [-]

And there's also the thing that while the people who hang around at LW probably have more ammo than usual against the overt bullshit of cults, they also might have some traits that make them more susceptible to cult recruitment. Namely, sparse social networks, which makes you vulnerable to a bunch of techniques that create the feeling of belonging and acceptance of the new community, and tolerance of practices and ideas outside the social mainstream, which gets cult belief systems that don't immediately trigger bullshit warnings inside your head.

The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan that did the subway sarin gas thing reportedly recruited lots of science and engineering students. An engineering mindset will also keep you working from the internalized bullshit against social proof, since science and engineering is a lot about about how weird stuff extrapolated beyond conventional norms works and gives results.

tl;dr: You're not as smart as you think, probably have a mild mood disorder from lack of satisfactory social interaction, and have no idea how you'll subconsciously react to direct cult brainwashing techniques. Don't mess with cults.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 06:55:28PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Emile 18 April 2011 04:18:01PM 1 point [-]

I never claimed it was a perfect analogy - I still think it's a better one than the Salmon Pictures.

How would you personally feel about a national "draw Martin Luther King with big lips eating watermelon" day, done by foreigners? I don't expect you'd go out and burn stuff, but I also expect you'd prefer it didn't happen (if this doesn't apply to you you, it probably does to quite a few Americans on this site, I don't even know if you're American). I mean, I tend to be a pro-free-speech bullet biter, but I wouldn't like it.

And many of the arguments that have been made (here or elswewhere) about Everybody Draw Mohammed Day could be made about that too.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 04:56:47PM 3 points [-]

I never claimed it was a perfect analogy - I still think it's a better one than the Salmon Pictures.

Well you're right about that at least.

How would you personally feel about a national "draw Martin Luther King with big lips eating watermelon" day, done by foreigners? I don't expect you'd go out and burn stuff, but I also expect you'd prefer it didn't happen

That's precisely the point.

(if this doesn't apply to you you, it probably does to quite a few Americans on this site, I don't even know if you're American). I mean, I tend to be a pro-free-speech bullet biter, but I wouldn't like it.

Well, after the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church's right to free speech, all the major newspapers ran editorials supporting the decision. In fact, this blog post argues that its easier to support free speech for extreme groups like the WBC since you get free warm fuzzies for supporting free speech without having to worry that they'll actually persuade anybody.

Comment author: Emile 18 April 2011 09:13:58AM 1 point [-]

Oh, I agree that representing Mohammed is generally forbidden in Islam, it's just that when I looked for what the Muslims themselves were saying (on forums mostly frequented by Muslims), they were talking about how it wasn't right to mock Mohammed, not Mohammed, and they were also complaining about how the media would represent their position (even though some Mulsims do try to pressure the west on any depiction of Mohammed), and they were also complaining about violent fundamentalist hicks giving their religion a bad name.

Rereading my post, it can be interpreted as saying that all Muslims take that position (mocking not good, but no big objection to just drawing Muslims), which would explain the downvotes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 02:59:15PM 1 point [-]

Rereading my post, it can be interpreted as saying that all Muslims take that position (mocking not good, but no big objection to just drawing Muslims), which would explain the downvotes.

I think they have more to do with your false-to-fact comparison with a potential American analog.

In response to Learned Blankness
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 06:58:34AM 9 points [-]

Of course, the other side of the coin is the Dunning--Kruger effect which causes us to overestimate our knowledge about things we're ignorant about.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 April 2011 06:22:13AM *  3 points [-]

This would be an inappropriately strong response, and certainly you could be upset about it, but the proper response wouldn't be to go kicking random Muslims in the face. They didn't do it, and they probably don't even approve. But drawing pictures of Mohammed offends many Muslims, not just the ones who send death threats.

This is a very Eurocentric way of thinking (not saying its appropriate or inappropriate according to my values). I hope that after some careful thought it will be obvious to most LWers why this is so. Virtual cookie to the first one that gets it right.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Offense versus harm minimization
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 06:40:18AM 7 points [-]

In Fued based cultures attacking arbitrary members of an out-group in response to violence by a member of said out-group against one of yours is indeed an appropriate response.

(This is why I'm glad I don't live in a feud based culture.)

Comment author: Vladimir_M 18 April 2011 01:10:52AM *  10 points [-]

Just out of curiosity, in what sense are you Catholic (heritage, culture, belief)?

Well, legally, I am a Catholic in good standing (I'm baptized, and I've never renounced it nor been excommunicated). In my practices, I am largely lapsed, though I value the heritage, the art, the community, and the folkways a lot. As for beliefs, obviously there is a lot that doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, though like in any long-standing tradition, many things that may seem irrational or backward are in fact closer to reality than various modern fashionable beliefs. (Clearly, a simple blog comment can't do justice to this topic.)

What I would point out however is that I often find the North American (presumably Protestant) attitudes in this regard quite alien and strange. What I mean is the tendency to see one's belonging to a church as an either-or matter, and breaking with it as a grand and dramatic event. Among Catholics, the normal thing to do is simply to adjust the level of your practices and your closeness to the community to whatever you find to your liking. (ETA: Though conversion to a different religion, as opposed to merely neglecting one's own, would be a big deal.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 01:53:23AM *  8 points [-]

As for beliefs, obviously there is a lot that doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, though like in any long-standing tradition, many things that may seem irrational or backward are in fact closer to reality than various modern fashionable beliefs. (Clearly, a simple blog comment can't do justice to this topic.)

I'd recommend Nick Szabo's essay Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth as a good first explanation of the topic.

Note: The website appears to be down at the moment, Google cache available here.

Comment author: bgaesop 18 April 2011 01:15:06AM 8 points [-]

I'd think the hijackers would refer to them as infidels.

Do you really, truly think that the only motivations in choosing to do an attack against America (heck, picking America as the target in the first place) and picking the WTC and Pentagon as the targets of that attack, was because the attackers were Muslim while the ones being attacked were not? If so, why have they not done similarly to all non-Muslim nations? Why not attack symbols or places of power of religion, rather than economics and the military?

Certainly religion is used as a framing device and recruitment tool; it's a powerful ingroup identifier. Especially when you have people doing the same on the opposite side of your fight.

Piece of advice: just because you see the world in purely Marxist terms, doesn't mean everyone else does.

That's not so much a piece of advice as a snipe at what you perceive to be the dialectic I'm using to interpret this. It seems to me that you didn't say that to enlighten me, but to reduce my status in the eyes of what you (and I) assume is a mostly capitalist readership.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 01:39:01AM 4 points [-]

Do you really, truly think that the only motivations in choosing to do an attack against America (heck, picking America as the target in the first place) and picking the WTC and Pentagon as the targets of that attack, was because the attackers were Muslim while the ones being attacked were not?

No, not the only one, but if one were to ask them why they picked the targets they did, they'd describe it religious terms (talking about infidels, jihad and the great Satan) not in Marxist terms (i.e., economic oppression). In fact judging by the fact that most of the hijackers were from wealthy families, I'd guess they didn't really care about the economic dimension except as part of a general attitude that our decadence is sinful and is spreading to the middle east.

Piece of advice: just because you see the world in purely Marxist terms, doesn't mean everyone else does.

That's not so much a piece of advice as a snipe at what you perceive to be the dialectic I'm using to interpret this. It seems to me that you didn't say that to enlighten me, but to reduce my status in the eyes of what you (and I) assume is a mostly capitalist readership.

I stand by my advice as good advice. If you want to successfully model others' behavior, you shouldn't assume they see the world the same way you do.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
Comment author: bgaesop 05 April 2011 09:53:01PM 5 points [-]

One difference stands out: the 9/11 attacks included attacks on two large buildings packed with thousands of innocent civilians, with no obvious connection to any military installation

The 9/11 hijackers would no doubt not refer to the inhabitants of the World Trade Center as innocent civilians, but as economic oppressors. There is a reason they targeted both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, after all.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 April 2011 01:06:09AM 1 point [-]

The 9/11 hijackers would no doubt not refer to the inhabitants of the World Trade Center as innocent civilians, but as economic oppressors.

I'd think the hijackers would refer to them as infidels.

Piece of advice: just because you see the world in purely Marxist terms, doesn't mean everyone else does.

Comment author: Emile 17 April 2011 09:12:30PM -2 points [-]

A bit of a side note, but from what I've read/heard from Muslims, what they object to isn't the drawing of Mohammed per se, but the mocking of Mohammed. I've also heard some express annoyance that the media would misrepresent their view as if the problem was a religious edict against drawing Mohammed and not the mocking (I don't think the media represents the views of Muslims any more faithfully than it represents the views of Singularitarians).

If you're American want a better idea of how Muslims feel, imagine if for some reason Chinese people had a national "draw Martin Luther King with big lips eating watermelon" day. Would the reactions be very different?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 April 2011 09:53:17PM 7 points [-]

What, you think Americans would react by rioting and killing people?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 16 April 2011 04:48:24PM 3 points [-]

I'm not quite sure what a sane reason for offense is. More generally, I'm not sure what a sane reason for any emotional reaction is.

But I guess I can see saying that since fear evolved "in order to" encourage us to avoid danger, it's sane to feel fear with regards to genuinely dangerous situations, and insane to feel it with regards to situations that aren't dangerous. On that account, being scared while standing on the edge of a cliff in high wind is sane, but continuing to feel scared after someone someone clips a safety cable to my belt is insane.

And adopting the same stance with respect to offense, I would say that offense evolved "in order to" encourage us to defend our status, and is therefore sane when our status is genuinely at stake and not when it isn't. Using that standard, it seems entirely sane to be offended at the actions you list: they all have the effect of lowering the status of various symbols of my tribe, which in turn lowers my status.

That said, you seem to be using some other standard for a sane emotional reaction, one I don't entirely understand. Can you clarify it further?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 April 2011 05:55:00PM 5 points [-]

But I guess I can see saying that since fear evolved "in order to" encourage us to avoid danger, it's sane to feel fear with regards to genuinely dangerous situations, and insane to feel it with regards to situations that aren't dangerous.

Careful, if you judge the validity of your emotions by whether they're serving their evolutionary role, you'll end up arguing that the purpose of life is to maximize your inclusive genetic fitness.

Comment author: Nominull 16 April 2011 03:34:48AM 12 points [-]

No, the key here is to distinguish between actual psychic stress not used for status maneuvers and actual psychic stress used for status maneuvers. Which is of course even harder.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 April 2011 04:49:09PM *  17 points [-]

No, the key here is to distinguish between actual psychic stress not used for status maneuvers and actual psychic stress used for status maneuvers.

How about the classic "murder pill" test? If you could self-modify to no longer experience the psychic stress, would you?

I suspect the psychic-distress-via-salmon and rape victims would answer yes, whereas the Muslims would answer no.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 April 2011 02:12:40AM 14 points [-]

I find this post offensive, please delete it.

Comment author: komponisto 13 April 2011 05:46:09AM 2 points [-]

From my experience with learning several foreign languages, morphological irregularities look scary in the beginning, but they completely pale in comparison with the complexity and irregularity of syntax and semantics.

I agree. However, making something look less scary in the beginning still constitutes an improvement from a pedagogical point of view. The more quickly you can learn the basic morphology and lexicon, the sooner you can begin the process of intuiting the higher-level rules and social conventions that govern larger units of discourse.

However, the whole point is that in order to speak in a way that will sound natural and grammatical to fluent speakers, you have to internalize all those incredibly complicated points of syntax and semantics, which have developed naturally with time.

Due to a large amount of basic structure common to all human language, it's usually not that hard to learn how to sound grammatical. The difficult part of acquiring a new language is learning how to sound idiomatic. And this basically amounts to learning a new set of social conventions. So there may not be much that language-planning per se can do to facilitate this aspect of language-learning -- which may be a large part of your point. But I would emphasize that the issue here is more sociological than linguistic: it isn't that the structure of the human language apparatus prevents us from creating languages that are easier to learn than existing natural languages -- after all, existing languages are not optimized for ease of learning, especially as second languages. It's just that constructing a grammar is not the same as constructing the conventions and norms of a speech community, and the latter may be a more difficult task.

(Even when it comes to inflectional morphology, assuming a lively community of Esperanto speakers persists into the future, how long do you think it will take before common contractions start grammaticalizing into rudimentary irregular inflections?)

This kind of drift will presumably happen given enough time, but it's worth noting that (for obvious reasons) Esperantists tend to be more disciplined about maintaining the integrity of the language than is typical among speakers of most languages, and they've been pretty successful so far.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 April 2011 01:17:46AM 3 points [-]

This kind of drift will presumably happen given enough time, but it's worth noting that (for obvious reasons) Esperantists tend to be more disciplined about maintaining the integrity of the language than is typical among speakers of most languages, and they've been pretty successful so far.

One advantage Esperanto has over natural language, is that nearly all of its speakers speak it as a second language. That is way most of its learners are self-consciously trying to maintain its integrity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 April 2011 03:04:38AM 4 points [-]

The lowest hanging fruit in this regard is probably vocabulary that divides thingspace into more natural categories. See the whole Human's Guide to Words Sequence for more details.

Comment author: Desrtopa 11 April 2011 04:45:58PM 2 points [-]

The technological and empirical tradition of Islam pretty much died out due to the success of The Incoherence of the Philosophers though. My point is that innovative and empirical traditions have given way in the past to memetically stronger anti-innovative traditions. That doesn't mean that the same will happen to present day scientific culture, I highly doubt that would happen without some sort of catastrophic Black Swan event, but innovative traditions have not historically consistently beaten out non innovative ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 April 2011 02:10:09AM 2 points [-]

I think this is caused by the fact that innovative societies are that way because their more open to new ideas. But being open to new ideas means that your memetic defenses are by definition weaker.

Notice also that innovative societies generally aren't defeated until they stop innovating.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 April 2011 06:07:06AM *  2 points [-]

A priori knowledge: yes for mathematics (and possibly priors) only.

Abstract objects: Platonism

Aesthetic value: subjectively objective

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes, math is analytic, everything else is synthetic

Epistemic justification: externalism

External world: it exists, I assume that's non-skeptical realism

Free will: leaning towards compatibilism

God: Intersubjectively true

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? Both, for different types of knowledge.

Knowledge claims: invariantism (although contextualism may have some points)

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? I wasn't able to find a concise summary of what this means.

Logic: classical (with Baysean probability theory, which is derived from classical logic and mathematics, applicable in most cases dealing with non-mathematical objects)

Mental content: internalism or externalism? I can't figure out what this means.

Meta-ethics: moral realism

Metaphilosophy: probably naturalism

Mind: not sure

Moral judgment: cognitivism

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? I can't figure out what this means

Newcomb's problem: one box

Normative ethics: something like consequential virtue ethics

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? These all seem to be talking about different things.

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? Probably further-fact view if it means what I'm guessing it means.

Politics: libertarianism

Proper names: Millian, to the extend this question is at all meaningful

Science: scientific realism (subject to the constrain that our current theories, at least, are as wrong as Newtonian physics)

Teletransporter (new matter): not sure

Time: A-theory or B-theory? This is at best a question of definitions and not a philosophical question.

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): probably switch but with strong caveats

Truth: probably correspondence

Zombies: conceivable possibly metaphysically possible

===

Philisophers: Locke, to a certain extent Mill and maybe Quine (I don't know enough about him to be sure).

Comment author: Perplexed 10 April 2011 07:51:56PM *  5 points [-]

Thanks for posting this. I would definitely enjoy seeing a debate between Deutsch and Yudkowsky.

The part that dealt with ethics was incredibly naive. About 47 minutes in, for example, he is counseling us not to fear ET, because ET's morality will inevitably be superior to our own. And the slogan: "All evils are due to lack of knowledge". Why does this kind of thing remind me of George W. Bush?

But I agreed with some parts of his argument for the superiority of a a Popperian approach over a Bayesian one when 'unknown unknowns' regarding the growth of knowledge are involved. For example, 42:30 in when he quotes Popper advising us to drop the hopeless search for an inerrant source of knowledge, and to instead search for a fairly reliable method of eliminating error once it has become established. Maybe a good idea.

I have mixed feelings, though, about his advocacy of optimism. He argues that Malthus's pessimistic predictions failed simply because Malthus had no way of foreseeing the positive effects of the growth of knowledge. But by the same token, optimistic predictions of a positive future for mankind are also liable to fail because they attempt to predict that the growth of knowledge will include specific breakthroughs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 10:54:24PM 6 points [-]

And the slogan: "All evils are due to lack of knowledge". Why does this kind of thing remind me of George W. Bush?

Well, it reminds me of Plato, which is much more damning.

Comment author: Larks 10 April 2011 08:03:45PM 0 points [-]

Well, your prior gives you a unique value, and bayes theorem is a function, so it gives you a unique value for every input.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 08:50:33PM 2 points [-]

Well, your prior gives you a unique value,

So the claim is that you have arbitrary precision priors. What are they, and where are they stored?

Comment author: Manfred 10 April 2011 08:01:44PM *  0 points [-]

Imagine that you had to give a probability density to each probability estimate you could make of Obama winning in 2012 being the correct one. You'd end up with something looking like a bell curve over probabilities, centered somewhere around "Obama has a 70% (or something) chance of winning." Then to make a decision based on that distribution using normal decision theory, you would average over the possible results of an action, weighted by the probability. But this is equivalent to taking the mean of your bell curve - no matter how wide or narrow the bell curve, all that matters to your (standard decision theory) decision is the location of the mean.

Less evidence is like a wider bell curve, more evidence like a sharper one. But as long as the mean stays the same, the average result of each decision stays the same, so your decision will also be the same.

So there are two kinds of precision here: the precision of the mean probability given your current (incomplete) information, which can be arbitrarily high, and the precision with which you estimate the true answer, which is the width of the bell curve. So when you say "precision," there is a possible confusion. Your first post was about the "how precise can these probabilities be," which was the first (and boring, since it's so high) kind of precision, while this post seems to be talking about the second kind, the kind that is more useful because it reflects how much evidence you have.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 08:48:20PM 2 points [-]

So there are two kinds of precision here: the precision of the mean probability given your current (incomplete) information, which can be arbitrarily high, and the precision with which you estimate the true answer, which is the width of the bell curve.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "true answer". After all, in some sense the true probability is either 0 or 1 it's just that we don't know which.

Comment author: Larks 10 April 2011 08:03:45PM 0 points [-]

Well, your prior gives you a unique value, and bayes theorem is a function, so it gives you a unique value for every input.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 08:17:05PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but actually computing that function is computationally intractable in all but the simplest examples.

Comment author: Larks 10 April 2011 06:57:27PM 1 point [-]

Not that I can think of, besides memory/speed constaints, and how much updating you can have done with the evidence you've recieved.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 07:31:53PM 2 points [-]

and how much updating you can have done with the evidence you've recieved.

Why can't it happen that you have so little and/or such weak evidence, that the amount of precision you should have is none at all?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 06:41:37PM 1 point [-]

This is the preferred theory under, um, Goetz's Cognitive Razor: Prefer the explanation for someone's behavior that supposes the least internal complexity of them.

This problem with Goetz's Cognitive Razor, is that humans are internally complex.

Comment author: curi 10 April 2011 10:27:30AM *  -1 points [-]

If people don't reason in a Bayesian way, but they do reason, it implies there is a non-Bayesian way to reason which works (at least a fair amount, e.g. we managed to build computers and space ships). Right?

Claims that people think in an inductive way are common here. Note how my descriptions are different than that and account for the evidence.

Someone told me that humans do and must think in a bayesian way at some level b/c it's the only way that works.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 04:48:54PM *  9 points [-]

As Eliezer said in Searching for Bayes-Structure:

The way you begin to grasp the Quest for the Holy Bayes is that you learn about cognitive phenomenon XYZ, which seems really useful - and there's this bunch of philosophers who've been arguing about its true nature for centuries, and they are still arguing - and there's a bunch of AI scientists trying to make a computer do it, but they can't agree on the philosophy either -

And - Huh, that's odd! - this cognitive phenomenon didn't look anything like Bayesian on the surface, but there's this non-obvious underlying structure that has a Bayesian interpretation - but wait, there's still some useful work getting done that can't be explained in Bayesian terms - no wait, that's Bayesian too - OH MY GOD this completely different cognitive process, that also didn't look Bayesian on the surface, ALSO HAS BAYESIAN STRUCTURE - hold on, are these non-Bayesian parts even doing anything?

  • Yes: Wow, those are Bayesian too!
  • No: Dear heavens, what a stupid design. I could eat a bucket of amino acids and puke a better brain architecture than that.
Comment author: Larks 09 April 2011 11:18:52PM 1 point [-]

It's slow loading for me due to a slow internet connection, but if the questions at the end are included, I was the one who asked about insurance companies.

I don't think his response was very satisfactory, though I have a better version of my question.

Suppose I give you some odds p:q and force you to bet on some proposition X (say, Democrats win in 2012) being true, but I let you pick which side of the bet you take; a payoff of p if X is true, or a payoff of q if X is false. For some (unique) value of p/q, you'll switch which side you want to take.

It seems this can force you to assign probabilities to arbitrary hypothesis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2011 04:31:30PM 2 points [-]

Suppose I give you some odds p:q and force you to bet on some proposition X (say, Democrats win in 2012) being true, but I let you pick which side of the bet you take; a payoff of p if X is true, or a payoff of q if X is false. For some (unique) value of p/q, you'll switch which side you want to take.

It seems this can force you to assign probabilities to arbitrary hypothesis.

So, how precise should these probabilities be? Any why can't I apply this argument to force the probabilities to have arbitrary high precision?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 April 2011 04:56:19AM 2 points [-]

I wonder if some of the links that are failing to link to comments are caused by the comments in question being deleted. In particular Roko, who used to be one of the top contributors, deleted all his posts and comments for reasons that aren't entirely clear following the incident that must not be discussed.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 07 April 2011 06:39:33PM *  3 points [-]

I share this impression. But it might be due to some sort of self-congratulatory/Lake Woebegone bias about my own comments since almost all my contra-mainstream comments have been voted up. This is true for a large variety of different criticisms. Thus I've been critical of cryonics, of AI fooming, and Bayesianism. I've been deeply critical of the narrative here that portrays phlogiston as a bad scientific theory, and every single comment of that form has been voted up. But there's a related issue: I do try to talk in a way that will get LW people to listen. Thus for example, when discussing cryonics, I will go out of my way to explicitly discuss it in terms of expected utility because that gives a useful common vocab. If one tried to discuss cryonics from some form of deontological ethics even if the system had strongly anti-deathist attitudes, I expect that this would lead to confusion and downvoting here.

Edit: Another thing that seems to help get contra-mainstream comments voted up is to acknowledge weaknesses in one's idea. If one includes counter-arguments to what one is saying, even if one only includes a few of them, one comes across as more reasonable. Coming across as Tevye the milkman but leaning against LW consensus works a lot better than coming across as just strongly against the consensus.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 April 2011 04:25:33AM 3 points [-]

Thus I've been critical of cryonics, of AI fooming,

I'm not sure how mainstream these positions actually are. While these positions are certainly held by several high status members of the community, I'm pretty sure a majority of posters don't believe in AI fooming and wouldn't be surprised if a significant fraction are critical of cryonics.

Comment author: paulfchristiano 06 April 2011 03:02:54AM 3 points [-]

The Law of Comparative Advantage is a relevant concept here, because whatever you end up doing would have been done by someone else if you had made a different choice.

I believe that if I donate to charity, more will be donated to charity. If I do research in a field, more research will get done in that field. If I start a company, more companies will get started. (All of this in in expectation). This holds even more true for a particularly charity, a particular research program I consider important, or a particular need I think needs to be filled.

don't forget to do something you'll enjoy

I'm not too worried about this. I enjoy both thinking and deliberating in a very broad sense, and I could direct the time I spend on both in pretty arbitrary directions before it became unfun. My plan is to find out what would be best, and then think about how to perturb it to keep me happy enough to remain productive.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2011 04:23:47AM 2 points [-]

don't forget to do something you'll enjoy

I'm not too worried about this. I enjoy both thinking and deliberating in a very broad sense, and I could direct the time I spend on both in pretty arbitrary directions before it became unfun. My plan is to find out what would be best, and then think about how to perturb it to keep me happy enough to remain productive.

Are you sure? In my experience most people who claim they'd enjoy doing anything, say that because it seems like the kind of think that is virtuous to say/believe.

Comment author: Skatche 05 April 2011 09:47:27PM -1 points [-]

I'm not referring to group selection. If you're living in a close community, then once you've had your chance to conceive, there's not a lot of benefit in fighting off other suitors, since you'll be helping raise the child anyway; conversely, rivalry against other males is risky and socially divisive - which, since your band is probably rather small, can have serious consequences for you as an individual. This is not to say that all men will simply flee the scene once they've consummated their desire: for starters, we're a hell of a long way from evolutionary equilibrium, and even then it's not clear that the game in question has a dominant strategy, especially once you factor in complicating influences from women's sexual selection of men and from various social pressures. More likely we'd see a diversity of different strategies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2011 02:57:39AM 1 point [-]

I'm not referring to group selection. If you're living in a close community, then once you've had your chance to conceive, there's not a lot of benefit in fighting off other suitors,

If its valuable for the other suitors its valuable for you.

since you'll be helping raise the child anyway;

Yes, but you want to be as certain as possible about which children are yours so you can favor them. And, yes, even in a close knit community there are many ways to do that short of causing the tribe to break down.

More likely we'd see a diversity of different strategies.

Well, yes this is in fact what one observes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2011 04:01:00AM *  2 points [-]

I realize I'm late to the party, but I recommend reading this essay by Nick Szabo, about the difference between Objective and Intersubjective Truth.

As applied to your case, Christianity may be objectively false. Nevertheless, there was something about it that made it possible for you to turn your life around.

Comment author: Skatche 03 April 2011 11:06:14PM *  -1 points [-]

For starters, in a tightly-knit community, everyone contributes to helping women through pregnancy, birth, raising the child, etc. Although parents may give preferential attention to their own children, this should still weaken the pressure on men to "fuck and run" (and, at the same time, the pressure for women to find a committed, monogamous partner). Furthermore, as NancyLebovitz has already pointed out, close social ties make it easier to enforce sexual selection for more attentive and nurturing partners, since you've got a reputation to maintain. Add in 500,000+ years of all kinds of complex and poorly-understood selective pressures from competition with other humans (believed to be by far the dominant pressures on the mind during that time) and you've got a situation that probably won't boil down cleanly to a two-by-two game matrix.

The summary of Sex at Dawn that Nancy linked to below suggests that humans may actually be adapted away from strict monogamy. Wildly speculating here, but maybe the anxiety and disinterest men sometimes feel after their first time with a new partner is "meant" to remove them from the situation so the next guy can have a turn?

(Edited to add scare quotes around "meant".)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2011 01:23:14AM 5 points [-]

Wildly speculating here, but maybe the anxiety and disinterest men sometimes feel after their first time with a new partner is "meant" to remove them from the situation so the next guy can have a turn?

Be very skeptical of explanations that rely on group selection. As explained in the posts linked to from that wiki page, humans love to engage in motivated reasoning to explain why the alien god is nice. Sorry, evolution isn't.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 April 2011 10:18:13PM 1 point [-]

I don't see a wide difference between culture and memes (or at least bunches of associated memes), but I do think that memes/culture are more accessible for us than genetic effects on emotions and behavior.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 April 2011 01:10:18AM 2 points [-]

I think Vaniver's point is that the word "culture" brings to mind a monolithic entity, whereas the word "memes" brings to mind many different and possibly mutually contradictory, well memes.

Comment author: DanielLC 03 April 2011 05:56:14PM 0 points [-]

I think business have to be more rational than people in general. If you pay for your own health care, this would be a problem, but if you have health insurance, they'll just pay for what works.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 April 2011 11:07:09PM 2 points [-]

If you pay for your own health care, this would be a problem, but if you have health insurance, they'll just pay for what works.

This is more-or-less the reason health insurance companies are so hated.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2011 11:35:33PM 1 point [-]

On second look, the experiment does not look very compelling, specifically because the misdeed that being used may be too weak to trigger guilt even if the dog can feel guilt. The misdeed is this:

the dog had stolen and eaten a forbidden treat.

This trivial misdeed ranks pretty low on the list of things that I would find troubling. Higher up would be making a mess, higher still would be destroying something. I can understand why the experimenters might want to choose a trivial misdeed - they want to keep costs down.

As it happens I've read an alternative explanation of guilty behavior in dogs, which is that the dog is reacting not to a memory of having committed a misdeed, but to the presence of some situation (i.e. the aftermath of the misdeed) that the dog knows makes you upset, and that the dog would be acting equally guilty regardless of whether this aftermath was the product of the dog's own behavior or not. Now I'll be the first to say that this sounds almost like whoever came up with that theory is trying very hard to come up with any excuse to deny dogs a little bit of memory and self-awareness. But still, I thought I'd mention the theory.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2011 11:41:57PM 5 points [-]

As it happens I've read an alternative explanation of guilty behavior in dogs, which is that the dog is reacting not to a memory of having committed a misdeed, but to the presence of some situation (i.e. the aftermath of the misdeed) that the dog knows makes you upset, and that the dog would be acting equally guilty regardless of whether this aftermath was the product of the dog's own behavior or not.

As Yvain pointed out in the main post, the same thing also applies to humans.

Comment author: rwallace 31 March 2011 11:37:46AM 2 points [-]

Hmm. Thinking about it a little more myself, it seems to me the social is much more important than the material in this regard. In other words, someone who secretly commits a crime and gains great material benefit therefrom, but will be punished if ever caught, is likely to feel guilty. But if the crime is known and approved of by his social circle - even if that's only a gang or terrorist group - and even if he gained no material benefit, he's much less likely to feel guilty (until and unless that social circle is broken and he finds himself in prison).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 31 March 2011 11:24:22PM 5 points [-]

If the crime is approved by his social circle, as far as his mind is concerned it's not really a crime.

After all, if you help massacre the rival tribe and take their stuff, there's no reason to feel guilty about this among one's tribe. One only needs to display guilt when dealing with other tribes that are considering forming an alliance against your tribe.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 March 2011 10:32:48PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see that the concept of a computation excludes a lookup table. A lookup table is simply one far end of a spectrum of possible ways to implement some map from inputs to outputs. And if I were writing a program that mapped inputs to outputs, implementing it as a lookup table is at least in principle always one of the options. Even a program that interacted constantly with the environment could be implemented as a lookup table, in principle. In practice, lookup tables can easily become unwieldy. Imagine a chess program implemented as a lookup table that maps each possible state of the board to a move. It would be staggeringly huge. But I don't see why we wouldn't consider it a computation.

One of your links concerns the idea that a lookup table couldn't possibly be conscious. But the topic of consciousness is a kind of mind poison, because it is tied to strong, strong delusions which corrupt everything they touch. Thinking clearly about a topic once consciousness and the self have been attached to it virtually impossible. For example, the topic of fission - of one thing splitting into two - is not a big deal as long as you're talking about ordinary things like a fork in the road, or a social club splitting into two social clubs. But if we imagine you splitting into two people (via a Star Trek transporter accident or what have you), then all of sudden it becomes very hard to think about clearly. A lot of philosophical energy has been sucked into wrapping our heads around the problem of personal identity.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2011 03:40:22AM *  0 points [-]

The reason people are concerned with the concept of consciousness, is that they have terms in their utility functions for the welfare of conscious beings.

If you have some idea how to write out a reasonable utility function without invoking consciousness I'd love to hear it. (Adjust this challenge appropriately if your ethical theory isn't consequentialist.)

Comment author: shokwave 29 March 2011 08:00:09AM 2 points [-]

Don't understand the downvotes. This is correct. There is no debate between gambling advice and probability theory, either.

In response to comment by shokwave on Faith and theory
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2011 03:20:28AM 5 points [-]

Don't understand the downvotes.

Vladimir_Nesov appears to be trying to sound deep by asserting that a piece of conventional wisdom is false without providing any kind of explanation.

This is correct. There is no debate between gambling advice and probability theory, either.

I don't understand this analogy.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 March 2011 10:07:39PM *  2 points [-]

This is nice. I wonder, though, why people wouldn't have then used some existing, familiar term referring to feudal obligation, instead of "faith". People were very conscious of the parallels between feudal relations, and relations between man and God. Yet I haven't heard faith described in those terms.

In support of this idea, remember that, while in the 1st thru 4th centuries AD, as well as today, there were/are a lot of questions about who wrote various books and whether they were inspired by God, these questions weren't often asked publicly in the middle ages. (There was inquiry into this during the Protestant Reformation.) If someone said in 1500 that you must have more faith in the Bible than in your observations, they might not have meant that there was this thing "faith" justifying belief in the Bible. Of course the Bible was inspired by God. Doubting the words of the Bible was perhaps not interpreted as doubting that the Bible was inspired by God, but as doubting that God was telling the truth. So faith wouldn't have needed to have anything to do with epistemology.

In response to comment by PhilGoetz on Faith and theory
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 March 2011 10:32:47PM *  8 points [-]

This is nice. I wonder, though, why people wouldn't have then used some existing, familiar term referring to feudal obligation, instead of "faith".

Because "faith" was the existing familiar term for those relations. The feudal concept of fealty comes from the same Latin root, fidelis, that's translated into English as "faith". The word "faith" is still occasionally used in its original sense, e.g., "faithful servant" or "I have faith in you".

In response to Faith and theory
Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 26 March 2011 11:59:55PM 5 points [-]

Why is this important?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 March 2011 01:18:39AM *  4 points [-]

Nick Szabo has some good essays about interpreting tradition and why it's useful:

Hermeneutics: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Tradition

Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth

Comment author: FAWS 25 March 2011 04:47:44PM 0 points [-]

I'm not aware of the Simpsons ever making a joke about a character regulating punishment because they were too much of a loser to get in on everyone else's punishment fun. The jump from "I'm against enjoying punishment" to "I'm too low status to get to punish people" is for whatever reason a lot longer than the equivalent for sex. It's not at all obvious that this is due to the status differences themselves and not due to say logistics or some other non-status reason. Note that I'm not actually sharing Eugine_Nier's position, I'm just defending it as at the very least not obviously useless.

In response to comment by FAWS on Crime and punishment
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2011 05:40:13PM 1 point [-]

I'm not aware of the Simpsons ever making a joke about a character regulating punishment because they were too much of a loser to get in on everyone else's punishment fun.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to show besides the fact that the Simpsons reflects the culture that produced it.

Note that I'm not actually sharing Eugine_Nier's position, I'm just defending it as at the very least not obviously useless.

I'd like to know what you think my position is, since in the above discussion I've found PhilGoetz's posts to be closer to my position then your posts.

Comment author: FAWS 25 March 2011 12:50:28AM 1 point [-]

In this case it's quite plausible though: People who advocate less sex or not enjoying sex and aren't conservatives/religious/anti-pleasure in general expose themselves to the sour grapes explanation of their position and the low status implications of that. This is obvious enough that the Simpsons did it.

In response to comment by FAWS on Crime and punishment
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2011 12:55:40AM 2 points [-]

People who advocate less sex or not enjoying sex and aren't conservatives/religious/anti-pleasure in general expose themselves to the sour grapes explanation of their position and the low status implications of that.

Careful about arguments that prove too much. My point is precisely that advocating not enjoying sex being low status is not universal in all cultures.

In response to Crime and punishment
Comment author: TobyBartels 25 March 2011 12:17:39AM *  4 points [-]

You might expect that Snead goes on to explain why these laws are bad things.  But he doesn't! He assumes we can all see that these are obviously bad things.

Well, I can see that these are bad things, but what I can't see is what they have to do with outcome-based justice. These all exist because of political decisions, not impassioned consideration of their likely effects.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2011 12:49:47AM *  2 points [-]

Well, I can see that these are bad things

Care to explain?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 24 March 2011 10:49:19PM *  4 points [-]

I agree. You made this comment while I was revising the post to talk about justice as fairness. You might want to read it again, and see the Rawls link.

One of the directions I want to go in with this, is to explore the idea that the utilitarian may want to discard this evolutionary baggage. It seems appealing, doesn't it? But this "baggage" is exactly the same kind of baggage as enjoying sex, which we evolved in order to reproduce. The question is: Why is enjoying sex a value we want to keep, while enjoying punishing is a value we don't want to keep?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 March 2011 12:33:03AM *  2 points [-]

Why is enjoying sex a value we want to keep, while enjoying punishing is a value we don't want to keep?

The reason it seems that way, is that in our current culture, enjoying sex is considered high status, whereas enjoying punishment is considered low status.

Edit: Now that I think about it, my main point is that enjoying punishment being bad, while enjoying sex being ok are cultural values. Other cultures take different positions on these issues, and I don't want to presuppose that our culture is necessarily correct here.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 March 2011 01:57:56AM 2 points [-]

"Macro regularities" often have mathematical explanations

Tao, Draft article on universality

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 March 2011 03:27:05AM 1 point [-]

I think this is a better justification for Occam's razor then the one based on Solomonoff induction.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 March 2011 02:04:20PM 5 points [-]

What evidence is there that some fields of study make their followers dumber?

That section of the post sounds a bit like a mind-killer shout-out.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 March 2011 03:57:20AM 0 points [-]

Some fields are based on anti-epistemology. If you're no careful it can contamination your reasoning.

Comment author: Skatche 20 March 2011 08:45:46PM *  3 points [-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that Mr. Raymond's argument is roughly as follows:

  • Not all rapes are forcible.
  • Incidence of forcible rape among women is lower than 1 in 6.
  • Therefore the incidence of rape among women is lower than 1 in 6.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to puzzle out the error in that one. Also note that there's no mention of how "over-reporting" and "false allegations" are determined. My guess is that this is based on the conviction rate (I don't know how else you'd do it), in which case you run into precisely the problems I mentioned.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 08:57:16PM 4 points [-]
* Not all rapes are forcible.
* Incidence of forcible rape among women is lower than 1 in 6.
* Therefore the incidence of rape among women is lower than 1 in 6.

The point here is that feminists tend to use a definition of "rape" that is vastly more general then what the word commonly refers (it tends to boil down to "any sex you regret in the morning") to in order to inflate the statistics.

Also note that there's no mention of how "over-reporting" and "false allegations" are determined.

I'm not sure, how are you determining your "extreme under-reporting"?

Comment author: Skatche 20 March 2011 06:58:23PM *  1 point [-]

Warning: potentially triggering.

Well, okay, first let's review some statistics. At least one in six women will be raped over the course of their lives; actually the numbers I see are usually significantly higher than this (rape statistics suffer due to extreme under-reporting). Moreover, about half the time it will happen (the first time) before they turn eighteen. Lastly, about two thirds of rapes are committed by friends and acquaintances of the victims.

So, if you take an adult woman at random from your community, there is a significant chance (again, the numbers on the site I linked to are abnormally low, but they give some idea) that she has already been raped or sexually assaulted by someone she knew, and is therefore very aware of this danger; even if she hasn't been raped, she has most likely been taught at a young age to fear rape and to take appropriate precautions (you'd think we'd start teaching men not to rape, but no, it's apparently up to women to stop this from happening to them).

So what does this have to do with objectification? Well, look at what happens on the relatively rare occasions that rapes lead to criminal trials: the woman is interrogated about what she was wearing when it happened, whether or not she fought back (because if she was too scared to move, it must have been consenting), why she was out drinking/walking/dancing, whether they acted in a friendly manner toward the attacker. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the victim is emotionally brutalized for the duration of the trial, and then the rapist never spends a day in jail. Through it all, the implicit message is clear: the only reason women might demonstrate comfort in their own bodies is if they're looking to attract men, and indeed this is their sole purpose, and if they happened to actually "get" a man during that time, they should feel grateful and not niggle over little details like consent.

So, confronted by people who take this objectifying attitude toward women, your average female - who might have already been raped at some point in her life, and is certainly aware of the possibility - is likely to get a little upset, and rightly so. If she feels like you're basically a decent group of men who might just be a little misguided, she might give you the benefit of the doubt and speak out, hoping you will listen. More likely, though - if she's not yet comfortable with the group, or if her voice has been repeatedly ignored - she will remain silent, and take leave of the group at the earliest available opportunity. The risk is not just to her social status but to her body, her sexuality and her dignity.

(I am infuriated by the suggestion that offense is precisely and only a form of status-seeking behaviour. Some white, heterosexual males might perhaps display their progressive values for the sake of signaling social status; but for visible minorities, there is quite a lot more at stake.)

This is not the only reason to avoid objectification, but it is certainly sufficient and compelling enough on its own, I think.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 07:19:06PM 4 points [-]

Well, okay, first let's review some statistics. At least one in six women will be raped over the course of their lives; actually the numbers I see are usually significantly higher than this (rape statistics suffer due to extreme under-reporting).

Eric Raymond gives a good discussion here of what's wrong with that statistic.

This doesn't leave me with the feeling that your other statistics are accurate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 04:01:58PM 7 points [-]

Once the number and quality of your offspring is based on your wealth and access to the latest biotech as opposed to your sexual partner(s), sexual selection becomes a lot weaker.

Comment author: Raemon 20 March 2011 01:54:06AM *  0 points [-]

Is there a better name you would use for it? I think it means pretty much what it says it means. Note that the article I linked begins by trying to disassociate privilege from guilt.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 05:07:35AM 1 point [-]

The conventional name for the concept FAWS described above is 'rights'.

Comment author: atucker 20 March 2011 04:47:31AM 0 points [-]

This thread is about understanding what objectification is, in order to avoid offensive behaviors, understand why those behaviors are offensive, and better empathize with people who find them offensive.

The fact that people use it as an excuse (what would feminists be excusing?) isn't really relevant, and dismissing the validity of those feelings (especially on the grounds that they wouldn't be acting like rationalists to complain) seems counterproductive. On top of that, I still think that understanding how the concept of objectification works would still be important in understanding what to do about it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 05:02:52AM 1 point [-]

This thread is about understanding what objectification is, in order to avoid offensive behaviors, understand why those behaviors are offensive, and better empathize with people who find them offensive.

I don't think "avoiding offensive behaviors" is a worthy goal. Especially when you consider that a lot people tend to get offended by truth. Should we stop promoting atheism in the name of not offending theists?

This is not just an abstract question. There are currently people using arguments based on privilege (something like 'western' privilege in this case) to argue that people should avoid saying or doing anything that would offend Muslims.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 20 March 2011 04:28:16AM 1 point [-]

I'm very leery about using terms like "LessWrongism" or "Yudkowskian" anything. If the problem with "rationalism" is that people won't know what it means, the above two are worse. People won't know what it means and it will make us sound like a cult.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 04:34:47AM 2 points [-]

The problem with "rationalism" is not that people don't know what it means, it's that it means something different to most people then it does to us. With terms like "LessWrongism" or "Yudkowskian", at least people will realize that they don't know what they mean.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 March 2011 03:37:06AM 5 points [-]

Regarding free will, the metaphysics of choice are not actually what is at issue when the list mentions "autonomy", "self-determination", "agency", and "activity". (I can't tell if you knew this, and were making a joke, or not.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 03:54:41AM 1 point [-]

Regarding free will, the metaphysics of choice are not actually what is at issue when the list mentions "autonomy", "self-determination", "agency", and "activity".

However, there doesn't appear to be a clear 'Schelling line' between the metaphysics of choice and what you do mean by those terms. Thus people and movements that start out arguing against free-will tend to end up arguing against "autonomy", "self-determination", and "agency" in the sense you mean.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 03:29:00AM *  12 points [-]

Interesting exercise: going through your list of '''10 ways to treat a person as a thing''' and see how many of them the 'LW consensus' satisfies.

1) Instrumentality. The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes.

Well, we're mostly consequentialists.

2) Denial of autonomy. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination.

Are you claiming to have free will or something?

3) Inertness. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity.

See 2.

4) Fungibility. The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type and/or (b) with objects of other types.

Shut up and multiply!

5) Violability. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.

6) Ownership. The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.

Ok, we don't do these two.

7) Denial of subjectivity. The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Fortunately this isn't that common but there is an occasional tendency by some prominent commenters to dismiss personal experience as anecdotes.

8) Reduction to body: treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts.

What, are you claiming you have a soul or something?

9) Reduction to appearance: treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look.

Ok we generally avoid this.

10) Silencing: the treatment of a person as if they lack the capacity to speak.

There's a tendency to consider some people so hopelessly biased that one should disregard anything they say.

Taking Bayseanism and consequentialism seriously tends to reduce humans to the status of tools and victory points.

Comment author: Raemon 20 March 2011 01:56:46AM 0 points [-]

I'd like to know why I was downvoted. If I was downvoted because you think privilege isn't a useful concept, I'd appreciate it if you provided a good article (or your own words in PM) discussing why.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 02:39:43AM -1 points [-]

The problem I have with the concept of privilege, is that in practice it's used as a way to avoid responsibility and rationalize failure. And not to infrequently guilt trip those who have achieved success, your article's professions that invoking privilege is not about guilt notwithstanding.

Rationalist should win, not sit around whining that they lost because of bad luck/someone else's privilege..

Comment author: David_Gerard 18 March 2011 12:18:08AM *  -1 points [-]

Your post is short of suggested alternate courses of action.

You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.

To get back to specifics:

You see one of the many recent news stories about decades-long coverups of paedophile priests on the part of the Vatican. You are outraged. Do you (a) post a link to it (b) post it with an opinion (c) don't post it? Why?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 March 2011 12:58:00AM 4 points [-]

You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.

I'm not so sure about that. Let's compare the rate of sexual abuse by priests with that by social workers and/or school teachers. Religious blogger Vox Day after writes:

Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.

(Note if you found Vox's post offensive, explain why you have any more right to be offended then the Catholics you describe in your article.)

In response to The Friendly AI Game
Comment author: DavidAgain 15 March 2011 06:09:59PM 2 points [-]

puts hand up

That was me with the geographically localised trial idea… though I don’t think I presented it as a definite solution. More of an ‘obviously this has been thought about BUT’. At least I hope that’s how I approached it!

My more recent idea was to give the AI a prior to never consult or seek the meaning of certain of its own files. Then put in these files the sorts of safeguards generally discussed and dismissed as not working (don’t kill people etc), with the rule that if the AI breaks those rules, it shuts down. So it can't deliberately work round the safeguards, just run into them. This is similar to my other helpful suggestion at the London meet, which was 'leave its central computer exposed so that it can be crippled with a well-aimed gunshot'.

Risks with subconscious AI: Someone tampers with the secret files It works out what will be in them by analysing us If we try to make an improved one after it shutting down, the improved one will assume similar rules We just don’t cover the possibilities of bad things it could do It become obsessed with its dreams etc and invents psychoanalysis

NEVERTHELESS, I think it’s a pretty neat idea. ;-)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 March 2011 02:42:58AM 3 points [-]

In the process of FOOMing, the AI builds another AI without those safe guards.

In response to Handedness Bias
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 March 2011 10:18:22PM 1 point [-]

When I learned that Dexter and Sinister were greek words for Right and Left, respectively,

I believe you mean Latin words.

was told that it came from shield formations, and how the person on your left was a leech for using your shield protection, and the one on your right was your protector.

I was told it had to do with the left side being considered unlucky when performing auguries.

Comment author: lsparrish 13 March 2011 09:37:06PM 4 points [-]

This is a big complex issue, which in my opinion mostly boils down to the fact that the hypothesis that immortality will cause overpopulation shouldn't be privileged over the hypothesis that it will lead to better population control. Some points to consider:

  • Wanting to have kids (to the extent of being willing to cause environmental catastrophe by so doing) is plausibly in part related to the unfulfilled desire to live longer. Reproduction allows one to have an impact on human society which is meaningful over long time scales. Indefinite life extension fulfills this need without increasing the number of individuals.
  • Having more than one surviving child per adult on average causes exponential growth problems even if immortality goes unsolved. The solution to this is birth control. The automated natural death cycle, aside from its inhumane aspects, is also arguably a fake solution that deludes people into thinking that contraception and conscious family planning is unnecessary.
  • Humans die of accidents and suicide every so often to begin with. Thus there will be new space made for a small number of families to have new children. It will simply not be a major part of the overall culture.
  • Space is big enough to mean there is a lot of time to solve the problem if we limit ourselves to natural biological reproduction. Biotech that allows gigantic family sizes with little cost to the parents (e.g. food factories and artificial wombs) is not the result of immortality but of general advancements in biotechnology.
  • An engineered lifecycle wherein an individual returns to childhood after a period of elderhood is a plausible substitute for the existing status quo of all children being newly created as blank slates. Children could thus exist, but with a rich set of memories and experiences to draw upon and integrate into their lives.
  • The desire to reproduce is largely a cultural artifact, as opposed to an innate drive. To the extent that it is an innate drive, it may be fulfilled by raising any kind of infant-like creature -- including reborn adults, simulated children, and animals.
  • Sometimes it is acceptable to focus on near-term problems at the expense of the extremely long-term. All forms of life-saving human technology arguably contribute to human overpopulation, but given the severity of death it is a worthwhile expenditure. We would rather have a large population than have millions die of hunger or disease -- why should aging be different?
  • Individuals moving to a silicon substrate would most likely not consume anywhere near the resources that natural humans do.
  • Individuals could also choose to move their brain and central nervous system to a low energy-cost nourishment tank, and use robotic bodies that cost far less energy than a natural human body.
  • Groups could plausibly merge into single individuals, by forming hive-minds, effectively reducing the total population.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 March 2011 10:25:36PM 3 points [-]

The desire to reproduce is largely a cultural artifact, as opposed to an innate drive. To the extent that it is an innate drive, it may be fulfilled by raising any kind of infant-like creature -- including reborn adults, simulated children, and animals.

I find this highly implausible, from anything resembling an ev-psyc point of view. Note for example that even animals that don't have culture have an innate drive to reproduce.

Comment author: Pavitra 08 March 2011 06:26:51AM 0 points [-]

I would like to see those numbers.

(Though I don't expect it to make much relative difference either way, it would probably also be a good idea to include lynchings of homosexuals, if only to preempt the obvious complaint.)

In response to comment by Pavitra on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 March 2011 08:32:57AM 1 point [-]

(Though I don't expect it to make much relative difference either way, it would probably also be a good idea to include lynchings of homosexuals, if only to preempt the obvious complaint.)

Sure, I doubt those are above the double digits.

Comment author: Nornagest 07 March 2011 08:47:24PM *  3 points [-]

I smell a false dichotomy. Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn't contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it'd take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.

Inconsistency's a common symptom of naive ethics, of course, but for the sake of clarity let's restrict ourselves to talking about people who've put actual thought into their ethical opinions. In that case, it seems more likely that the horns of the alleged contradiction don't coexist but rather belong to non-overlapping sets of beliefs, which simply happen to share the trait of nontheism. Perfectly reasonable: religious disbelief doesn't require you to subscribe to notions of human rights, much less a single consistent set of human rights, and there are plenty of nontheist schools of thought that don't. Nor does it require you to endorse the ethical opinions of all other atheists.

Atheism is not a unified ideology. Treating it as one leads to some extremely wrong conclusions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 March 2011 12:26:43AM 1 point [-]

Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn't contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it'd take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.

Read the sequences on cognitive biases. People, including yourself, are a lot less introspective then you seem to think.

Atheism is not a unified ideology.

The problem is people making atheism part of their identity, and therefore being reluctant to criticize fellow atheists. And then going no true Scotsman on the ones that are obviously wrong, so you don't have to learn from their mistakes.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 March 2011 07:18:25PM 0 points [-]

I'd be interested in discussing the matter with anyone who did so. It doesn't seem to me that either depression nor a lack of wonder follow from atheism, so I'd be curious about their inferential path.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 March 2011 12:00:48AM 0 points [-]

I'd be interested in discussing the matter with anyone who did so. It doesn't seem to me that either depression nor a lack of wonder follow from atheism, so I'd be curious about their inferential path.

Well a lot of people have that impression of atheism, not entirely without justification as the OP demonstrates.

Religion is also not necessarily boring, although a lot of people have that impression.

Comment author: wnoise 07 March 2011 05:45:19PM 0 points [-]

Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn't have terminal value.

There are many who don't consider it the only terminal value. That is, there are other things that can be traded off against maximizing human life. (This is in accord with most religious treatments too. What price life on Earth if it prevent going to heaven?) Those few who don't consider it a terminal value, often have very important instrumental values for the protection of human life. Is this distinction that important when it leads to largely the same actions and decisions?

In response to comment by wnoise on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 06:52:08PM *  1 point [-]

Is this distinction that important when it leads to largely the same actions and decisions?

The history on the 20th century isn't encouraging on that being true.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 07 March 2011 06:42:07PM 1 point [-]

I prefer condeming them on fun theory grounds. Even if they're right, it would still be boring.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 06:51:09PM 4 points [-]

Well a theist could just as easily condemn atheism on fun theoretic grounds for being to depressing, or for removing the wonder from the world.

Comment author: nshepperd 07 March 2011 12:51:48PM 0 points [-]

I haven't seen anything that would fit that description, so far as I can remember.

Are you referring to all the people who think the value of a human life has more to do with the mind contained in it than the base pairs of its DNA? That's not really the same as saying "human life doesn't have terminal value".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 06:38:57PM 1 point [-]

I mean things like this and especially this.

Comment author: taryneast 07 March 2011 05:20:12PM *  0 points [-]

Peter Singer

No idea who this person is... but it doesn't actually answer the question - I think we were after examples where rationality causes people to disregard human rights, not just an example of a person who may have rationalised something to themselves.

Also - don't forget that rationalisation != rationality. There are a lot of posts on this site about that very misunderstanding.

Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn't have terminal value.

Sorry I don't understand what you mean by that sentence. Perhaps you could explain?

AFAICS the people on this blog argue quite strongly that life is very important and that we should try very hard to improve and prolong human life.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 06:34:13PM 3 points [-]

Also - don't forget that rationalisation != rationality.

Unfortunately, they're very hard to tell them apart when you're doing them.

In response to comment by Desrtopa on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Tiiba 07 March 2011 04:38:28PM 1 point [-]

There was also the issue of communism, which is nothing if not a cult.

In response to comment by Tiiba on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 06:15:56PM 3 points [-]

So are you trying to say that the USSR wasn't truly atheist. That sounds like no true scotsman.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 07 March 2011 06:46:29AM 2 points [-]

Try applying the metaphor on the level of cultures rather than individuals. Cultures can vary on how many irrational ideas they tolerate or promote, how much they expect their members to be able to reflect and justify their beliefs, and exactly what kind of beliefs are useful to signal within them. This doesn't require a precise ranking of the degrees of insanity of beliefs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 08:34:32AM 2 points [-]

During the cold war, would you say the USSR or the USA had a higher sanity waterline? Keep in mind that the USSR was an atheist state, while the USA had (and still) has a very religious culture.

Comment author: CronoDAS 07 March 2011 07:51:07AM 5 points [-]

Would you count people who contracted HIV because their religion forbid condom use?

In response to comment by CronoDAS on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 08:08:17AM 1 point [-]

Only if you let me count the people who contracted HIV because they disregarded religious prohibitions against homosexuality on other side of the equation.

Comment author: endoself 07 March 2011 07:00:58AM 1 point [-]

That's why we argue against thing like communism and fascism in addition to thing like Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. The danger posed by religion are discussed here more often because the average LessWronger meets Christian fundamentalists more often than communists or fascists and because studying Bayesian epistemology makes us especially able to see the flaws in many common religious arguments.

In response to comment by endoself on Positive Thinking
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 07:19:01AM 2 points [-]

The danger posed by religion are discussed here more often because the average LessWronger meets Christian fundamentalists more often than communists or fascists

So how many people were killed by Christian fundamentalists during the last century?

Comment author: wedrifid 06 March 2011 09:15:08PM 2 points [-]

and since SIAI (to the best of my knowledge) isn't doing anything illegal that's not particularly worrisome anyway.

Unless they are taken seriously, in which case there is most likely a law there somewhere that they could be said to be violating. They are, after all, trying to create a weapon of mass destruction. :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 05:36:44AM 2 points [-]

Well building an AI to take over the world would arguably qualify as plotting violent overthrow of the government.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 06 March 2011 05:22:53PM *  4 points [-]

I find anti-abortion values inconsistent. If you favor life then if each prevented abortion costs $500+ you could have saved more lives by investing that money elsewhere. This money then goes to save real people, with personalities and everything.

I see no reason why the costs of enforcing anti-abortion would be low.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 March 2011 02:56:05AM 2 points [-]

I find anti-abortion values inconsistent. If you favor life then if each prevented abortion costs $500+ you could have saved more lives by investing that money elsewhere. This money then goes to save real people, with personalities and everything.

Do you apply the same logic to adults? How much does modern medicine cost?

Comment author: Alicorn 05 March 2011 07:29:16PM *  8 points [-]

I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is much more important than another human's right to live.

I think this is backwards?

If you haven't already, consider reading Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion", the core thread of which intuition-pumps the reader to the following effect: even if a fetus were granted the full moral status of a conscious, innocent, adult human, it would not be impermissible for an unwilling incubator to kill it to get it out of her.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 March 2011 08:00:43PM 2 points [-]

the core thread of which intuition-pumps the reader to the following effect:

This sounds like: You should read this book, it uses dark arts to persuade you.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 March 2011 08:09:22AM 1 point [-]

Just noticed, they new matrix omake.

I found it awesome, but noticed that the last line is a plot hole. Even if the world doesn't run on mathematics, that doesn't preclude physics textbooks.

After all, humanity must have understood how the world works well enough at some point to built the AIs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 March 2011 04:16:42AM 2 points [-]

I had an AI professor, whose explanation for this phenomenon was that the "low-level skills" are the ones that come "pre-installed" on human brains and as a result no one bothered figuring out explicitly how they worked until computers came along; whereas the "high-level skills" are the ones we've spent the last millennium or more working out explicitly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 February 2011 05:19:43AM 3 points [-]

Anyone familiar with "the theory of how to update on evidence provided by adversaries" (assuming it exists)?

Yes, the LW-jargon term for this is filtered evidence. Eliezer's post on the subject is here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 February 2011 07:50:20PM 1 point [-]

I get the feeling simplified moral systems are largely a recent western phenomenon. This doesn't seem to be limited to moral systems, e.g., simple theories of history. I suspect this is caused by people seeing the success that fundamentally simple theories have had in the hard sciences, and trying to apply the same methods to other fields of endeavor.

Comment author: CronoDAS 14 February 2011 12:45:26AM *  5 points [-]

What should you use for the "ignorance prior" for the value of a continuous random variable whose underlying distribution is unknown? (For a random variable that is both discrete and finite, you can always use the uniform distribution as your prior, but that doesn't work when the variable can take an infinite number of values.) And you can't always use an improper prior, either...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 February 2011 12:51:16AM 2 points [-]

There's no general answer to that question.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 13 February 2011 08:53:34PM 1 point [-]

Oh! Throw in a pill, not through in. I got it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 February 2011 09:00:07PM 2 points [-]

Thanks, Fixed.

Comment author: Perplexed 12 February 2011 06:30:01PM 5 points [-]

What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?

Then you would probably be asking a good question.

As a Humean, who bases his moral philosophy on rational self-interest, I would answer that 'society' is simply a shorthand for all of the other rational agents who might react positively or negatively to my actions. As such, society is not something that should be 'valued' as such, but it is something that a prudent self-interested person will want to take into account.

But I'm sure that people (I'm sure there are some) who actually value society without valuing individual persons - those people would find your question difficult to answer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2011 11:37:42PM *  4 points [-]

As a Humean, who bases his moral philosophy on rational self-interest,

Two points.

1:

Why is this any less arbitrary?

2:

So if I handed you a baby and offered you $10 to kill it, assuming no one else would ever find out, would you do it?

If the answer is some variation on "no, because I would feel bad about it", I can throw in a pill that keeps you from feeling bad about it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 12 February 2011 11:03:27PM 4 points [-]

Not necessarily.

Maybe what I would discover instead, if I actually charted out my value structure, that all of the things I value exist in an interlocking network that doesn't ground out in any special real, true, honest-to-goodness, fundamental, basic, not-dependent-on-anything, terminal values.

While I'm not committed to the absence of terminal values, I consider the possibility plausible, and I don't find the "well, there's got to be something at the bottom of the stack!" argument for their presence convincing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2011 11:20:03PM 3 points [-]

That still doesn't answer the question of why that value structure as opposed to some other.

Comment author: Perplexed 12 February 2011 01:59:05PM 3 points [-]

If this is really what you really believe, as opposed to merely a fake utility function, the as far as I'm concerned you may as well be a pebble sorter or a baby eater.

It can't be an accident that the rhetorical form your disagreement took is a dehumanization of your opponent. Just saying ...

Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class "people". (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)

Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2011 05:57:04PM 2 points [-]

Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class "people". (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)

What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?

Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?

If you keep trying to justify values instrumentally, you'll wind up in an infinite regress.

In response to An Abortion Dialogue
Comment author: PlaidX 12 February 2011 03:48:07AM *  5 points [-]

I think the basic stumbling block in the typical abortion dialog isn't the criteria of personhood, it's that people don't like to deal with the real, practical reasons why you shouldn't kill people.

The basic reasons why murder is illegal are:

A. In general, people are much more valuable to society alive than dead. This does not apply to unwanted babies.

and

B. Attempts to legally identify the people who would be better off dead are prone to dangerous corruption and irreversible error, the costs of which far exceed the benefits. Again, this does not apply to unwanted babies.

Abortion is ALSO frowned on because

C. It denies someone their potential life. But why is denying an actual person their potential life worse than denying a potential person their potential life? They would both end up as real people, with real lives. Why is one life more valuable? If this makes abortion evil, why isn't contraception evil?

Finally there is

D. Dying hurts. This isn't necessarily true, and even if it was, dying hurts a heck of a lot less than living. This objection is rarely explicitly voiced, because it's very weak.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2011 05:35:00AM *  6 points [-]

In general, people are much more valuable to society alive than dead. This does not apply to unwanted babies.

So do you believe that people only have no terminal value and instrumental value only in so far as they benefit society?

If this is really what you really believe, as opposed to merely a fake utility function, the as far as I'm concerned you may as well be a pebble sorter or a baby eater.

Comment author: Dan_Moore 08 February 2011 06:36:19PM 2 points [-]

Something I am baffled at is how to quote a post on this website so that a vertical line segment appears to the left of the quoted text. I have a guess, but I don't want to clunky failed HTML attempt show up.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 February 2011 07:13:14PM 2 points [-]

Also, is there any formatting guide for this website more detailed then the one you get by clicking on the help link?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 February 2011 07:04:42PM 6 points [-]

Well, in political economics, this phenomenon is called, concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 08:30:31PM 2 points [-]

I say either myself or Jack because Jack had the most supply centers and therefore deserves some karma which he could most easily get by posting the thread which the other two winners then comment on, or if you insist that three way tie means three way tie, I'll post the thread and the three winners can all comment and get up-voted. We'll talk about it in the comments.

DIAS draws are unordered.

Comment author: FAWS 06 February 2011 07:31:27PM *  -1 points [-]

I never said status quo applied in either case.

What was the point of writing this then?

Well, LW is already non-welcoming to a lot of groups people are supposedly trying to reach, e.g., religious people

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 07:42:24PM 0 points [-]

My point is that being overly concerned about offending people is not good for rationality in either case.

I don't see how status quo is relevant.

Comment author: FAWS 06 February 2011 07:20:42PM *  -1 points [-]

Aside from status quo bias I fail to see how that's relevant.

It's a counter-argument against the applicability of analogy to offending religious people defined as acceptable due to being current status quo. If status quo is irrelevant it is irrelevant both ways, if status quo applies it also applies both ways.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 07:24:58PM 0 points [-]

It's a counter-argument against analogy to offending religious people defined as acceptable due to being current status quo applying. If status quo is irrelevant it is irrelevant both ways, if status quo applies it also applies both ways.

I never said status quo applied in either case.

Comment author: FAWS 06 February 2011 06:56:26PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, but we are considerably less openly hostile to religion than e. g. Pharyngula and comments that are exclusively hostile to religion without otherwise being productive/rational get heavily downvoted. So it's not the case that we are completely ignoring offensiveness to religious people. I'd be open to arguments how weighting it more would be more beneficial overall.

Additionally religion is a matter of choice and at least somewhat indicative of current rationality while sex/sexual attraction is neither, and there are currently some norms against content that would be offensive to people of certain gender/sexual orientation so changing that would be a change from status quo.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 07:06:02PM 3 points [-]

Additionally religion is a matter of choice and at least somewhat indicative of current rationality while sex/sexual attraction is neither

Being offended by discussions of PUA and/or other politically incorrect topics, is also a matter of choice that is at least somewhat indicative of current rationality.

and there are currently some norms against content that would be offensive to people of certain gender/sexual orientation so changing that would be a change from status quo.

Aside from status quo bias I fail to see how that's relevant.

Comment author: FAWS 06 February 2011 06:23:55PM *  3 points [-]

But they also don't have a place that has most of the positive features of LW + politeness/welcoming (to the degree they are compatible). LW could either become the sort of place they want, the sort of place you want or some sort of compromise. How did you determine that LW becoming your sort of place is best?

EDIT: I am not advocating banning PUA as a topic. Personally I don't even completely understand why it's offensive to anyone in the first place. But since I don't understand I also suspend judgement on whether it should offend anyone.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 06:45:29PM 4 points [-]

Well, LW is already non-welcoming to a lot of groups people are supposedly trying to reach, e.g., religious people, to take an obvious example.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 06 February 2011 04:35:41PM 3 points [-]

There have been a number of highly regarded "instrumental rationality" posts about how to effectively achieve one's goals. These are mostly clustered around productivity (akrasia, et al), but not exclusively. I can't see why posts about how to effectively socialize would be off-topic.

That said, there is enough reflexive "Dark Arts" rejection around here that you might get more community support if you turn it around and frame it as how to best resist the techniques that other people might use to effectively socialize with you, and instead remain isolated and uninfluenced.

I'd be saddened if that turned out to be true.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 06:25:37PM *  4 points [-]

That said, there is enough reflexive "Dark Arts" rejection around here

Well the posts that deal directly with the dark arts don't get anywhere near this negative a reaction. As such I believe the issue is not dark arts per se but rather that they are discussed in a way that by implication lowers the status of women.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 06 February 2011 08:04:10AM 1 point [-]

Sounds like this is about using the anthropic principle in situations of logical uncertainty. You say, "what if there's a new theory where most possible values of basic physical properties favor life", but you don't know whether there's any such theory, and whether there is such a theory is a logical (mathematical) fact.

This debate exists in string theory. People used to expect that string theory would predict a single unique ground state for the universe, which would lead to predictions about particle masses and so forth, and this would make string theory falsifiable. Now very large numbers of apparently stable or metastable string vacua have been constructed, and there's a view that some combination of anthropic and statistical thinking will be required to get predictions.

However, the real story is simply that string theory is still a work in progress, and we still don't know the right way to think about cosmology in string theory, and cosmology is half the necessary context for this problem. The other half is the dynamics of the "geometric moduli", the parameters describing the Calabi-Yau spaces and so forth, and that isn't solved either. String theorists still haven't even constructed a vacuum which provably gives you back the standard model - because the particle masses depend on the moduli dynamics, and the moduli dynamics are very difficult, though progress is occurring.

The next level of progress beyond moduli dynamics is the cosmological level, and that's where we'll find out whether eternal inflation or Hawking's no-boundary proposal or something else is the right way to think about the very big picture. And incidentally, the whole history of string theory suggests that there will be a specific right way to approach the problem.

We aren't at that level yet, and so meanwhile people speculate about the degree to which the anthropic principle might be relevant in string theory. But perhaps you can see that these speculations are not like empirical speculations; they are speculations about a logical fact. Whether or not the anthropic principle plays a role in getting predictions out of string theory is a question which "platonically" already has an answer. We only have an anthropic debate in string theory because the theory is unfinished and we don't know its answer to that question yet. So it's exactly an example of what you're talking about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 08:42:08AM 3 points [-]

Assuming string theory is actually correct. As opposed to say loop quantum gravity or something we haven't even thought of.

Comment author: lukeprog 06 February 2011 06:07:05AM 3 points [-]

The major posts appear to be 'Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics' and 'More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA'.

Thanks for your comment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 February 2011 06:20:29AM *  8 points [-]

Alicorn's post, Sayeth the Girl, started of the discussion. It's also been edited to include links to five followups (one of which you linked to).

Edit: in the interest of avoiding trivial inconveniences, here are links to the followups:

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 05 February 2011 02:15:30AM 0 points [-]

It looks to me as though Turkey and Austria have a stalemate line running south of St Petersburg, which will keep England from the two centers it needs for victory. I don't think England can credibly commit to not taking those two centers if either of the eastern partners betrays the other. Consequently a DIAS or continued partnership is the optimal strategy for Austria and Turkey, and England cannot force a victory.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 February 2011 02:34:28AM 1 point [-]

It looks to me as though Turkey and Austria have a stalemate line running south of St Petersburg,

Yes, but they don't yet have all the units in place to defend it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2011 07:21:19AM *  44 points [-]

In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.

(...)

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

-- George Orwell, 1984

Comment author: lukeprog 30 January 2011 11:14:19PM 1 point [-]

Is that it? Eliezer employs reflective equilibrium as an epistemological method for figuring out what your terminal values are?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 January 2011 11:35:40PM 2 points [-]

As I understand it, yes.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 January 2011 08:25:52PM 10 points [-]

1-4 yes.

5 is questionable. When you say "Nothing is fundamentally moral" can you explain what it would be like if something was fundamentally moral? If not, the term "fundamentally moral" is confused rather than untrue; it's not that we looked in the closet of fundamental morality and found it empty, but that we were confused and looking in the wrong closet.

Indeed my utility function is generally indifferent to the exact state of universes that have no observers, but this is a contingent fact about me rather than a necessary truth of metaethics, for indifference is also a value. A paperclip maximizer would very much care that these uninhabited universes contained as many paperclips as possible - even if the paperclip maximizer were outside that universe and powerless to affect its state, in which case it might not bother to cognitively process the preference.

You seem to be angling for a theory of metaethics in which objects pick up a charge of value when some valuer values them, but this is not what I think, because I don't think it makes any moral difference whether a paperclip maximizer likes paperclips. What makes moral differences are things like, y'know, life, consciousness, activity, blah blah.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 January 2011 08:33:39PM 1 point [-]

When you say "Nothing is fundamentally moral" can you explain what it would be like if something was fundamentally moral? If not, the term "fundamentally moral" is confused rather than untrue; it's not that we looked in the closet of fundamental morality and found it empty, but that we were confused and looking in the wrong closet.

BTW, in your post Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, I think you are making a similar mistake about the concept of evil.

Comment author: XiXiDu 30 January 2011 06:00:19PM *  2 points [-]

I do not necessarily disagree with this...

It seems so utterly wrong to me that I concluded it must be me who simply doesn't understand it. Why would it be right to help people to have more fun if helping people to have more fun does not match up with your current preferences. The main reason for why I was able to abandon religion was to realize that what I want implies what is right. That still feels intuitively right. I didn't expect to see many people on LW to argue that there exist preference/(agent/mind)-independent moral statements like 'it is right to help people' or 'killing is generally wrong'. I got a similar reply from Alicorn. Fascinating. This makes me doubt my own intelligence more than anything I've so far come across. If I parse this right it would mean that a Paperclip Maximizer is morally bankrupt?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 January 2011 06:29:37PM 4 points [-]

The main reason for why I was able to abandon religion was to realize that what I want implies what is right. That still feels intuitively right. I didn't expect to see many people on LW to argue that there exist preference/(agent/mind)-independent moral statements like 'it is right to help people' or 'killing is generally wrong'.

Well, something I've been noticing is that in their tell your rationalist origin stories, the reason a lot of people give for why they left their religion aren't actually valid arguments. Make of that what you will.

If I parse this right it would mean that a Paperclip Maximizer is morally bankrupt?

Yes. It is morally bankrupt. (or would you not mind turning into paperclips if that's what the Paperclip Maximizer wanted?)

BTW, your current position is more-or-less what theists mean when they say atheists are amoral.

Comment author: NihilCredo 29 January 2011 05:06:02AM 0 points [-]

It can still be effective if they don't as I discuss here.

Your argument seems sound - basically, if criminals get enough apparently "random" misfortunes, people will eventually associate criminal = unlucky loser and be somewhat discouraged from that path, am I getting this right?

I would just note that "having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility" doesn't really seem to fit this system, since a single pre-punishment falls well under the 'random noise' threshold so its deterrence effect is effectively zero. (This isn't really a factual disagreement, it just depends on how you interpret "fraction of utility" in a context where one act is useless but, say, a thousand are useful; is the single act's utility zero or k/1000? Personally, I straight-up refuse to treat utility as a scalar quantity.)

[Insert standard TDT argument about how by doing this, you're acausally increasing the number of other time traveling pre-punishers.]

I estimate acausal relationships between the behaviours of different individuals to be negligible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2011 05:37:10AM 1 point [-]

I would just note that "having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility" doesn't really seem to fit this system, since a single pre-punishment falls well under the 'random noise' threshold so its deterrence effect is effectively zero.

There is no sharp "random noise threshold". A single act has some positive probability of increasing the amount of belief someone assigns to the proposition "crime doesn't pay". Rather the expected value of the change is positive.

(This isn't really a factual disagreement, it just depends on how you interpret "fraction of utility" in a context where one act is useless but, say, a thousand are useful; is the single act's utility zero or k/1000? Personally, I straight-up refuse to treat utility as a scalar quantity.)

That's why I called this an acausal coordination problem.

Comment author: NihilCredo 29 January 2011 04:14:35AM 0 points [-]

Only if (a) people know you did it, and why; and (b) you're not a one-shot time traveller, so that there is the potential for this kind of pre-punishment to happen again.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2011 04:49:28AM 2 points [-]

Only if (a) people know you did it, and why; and

It can still be effective if they don't as I discuss here.

(b) you're not a one-shot time traveler, so that there is the potential for this kind of pre-punishment to happen again.

[Insert standard TDT argument about how by doing this, you're acausally increasing the number of other time traveling pre-punishers.]

However, your main point, that the effectiveness of this scales non-linearly with the number of punishers is correct. However, this appears to be more of an acausal co-ordination problem.

Comment author: Perplexed 29 January 2011 01:32:15AM 2 points [-]

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future?

If this is a question about justice, then the answer is "when you have jurisdiction". Otherwise, you risk double punishment.

On the other hand, if this is a question about cooperative game theory, then go ahead and punish if you know for sure they will transgress. But notice that punishment only serves its proper deterrent purpose when the criminal knows the transgression for which he is punished, and which player or coalition is taking credit for the punishment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2011 04:27:59AM 4 points [-]

But notice that punishment only serves its proper deterrent purpose when the criminal knows the transgression for which he is punished, and which player or coalition is taking credit for the punishment.

Not necessarily. For evolution to reduce the number of crimes, it is only necessary that punishment causally correlate with crimes.

When dealing with other optimization processes, e.g., human brains it is only necessary for the person to notice that crime pays less without realizing why. It's not even necessary for the person to be aware that he's noticed that, simply that for the value the person assigns to how much crime pays to be less then it would be if you hadn't acted.

Comment author: NihilCredo 29 January 2011 03:28:17AM *  7 points [-]

Punishment is pointless if you cannot expect anyone (who could potentially commit a certain undesirable act) to ever realise any connection between the undesirable act and its punishment. This seems to me to be the case in this scenario as described, so pre-punishing Hitler would be a waste of resources.

If we, however, imagine that we're living in the future, and the Time Travel Licensing Agency has declared it legal to go around vexating would-be serious criminals, then stealing Hitler's wallet and publishing the fact would help increase the impact of the TTLA's deterrent. But this is really a scenario where time travelling doesn't add anything interesting to the idea.

(Small aside: I'd replace stealing Hitler's wallet with, say, slashing his bike tires, to more effectively take the issue of guilt-free personal profit out of the equation without invoking the "you don't need the money" clause.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 January 2011 04:06:03AM 2 points [-]

Well, if having many time-travelers pre-punishing crimes is useful, then presumably having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2011 01:14:10AM 2 points [-]

BTW, people do realize that this guy wasn't himself a creationist. He was simply willing to tolerate creationism.

Comment author: Raemon 27 January 2011 04:19:13PM *  0 points [-]

I had actually been thinking of "No Irish Need Apply" among other things, but then I looked it up and that turned out to be an English thing, and the commonly accepted ubiquity of it in America was a myth. So I'm gonna hold off until I've double checked the rest of the things I was thinking of. In the meantime, what exactly do you mean by government mandated discrimination and when are you saying it ended?

(And as Joshua notes, what country are we talking about here? I live in America, so that's what I was thinking of)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 January 2011 01:03:15AM 3 points [-]

I'm referring to the Jim Crow laws, as well as related federal laws.

Comment author: Raemon 27 January 2011 04:01:20AM 1 point [-]

In my estimation the best solution currently available to us is to keep government completely blind on ethnicity or even give preference to some groups while letting the private sector complete freedom to choose in this regard and let the market handle it.

We tried this. We made up laws to change it because there was blatant, rampant discrimination that was not based on any kind of empirical data.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2011 05:33:09AM 1 point [-]

When did we try this?

I believe we pretty quickly went from government mandated discrimination, to government mandated reverse discrimination/affirmative action.

In response to The Orange Head Joke
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2011 05:29:05AM 11 points [-]

This joke works by subverting a cliche, and thus how funny it is to you depends on how salient the cliche is.

Comment author: Broggly 26 January 2011 09:16:27PM 3 points [-]

Given that "Why did the chicken cross the road?" is considered the prototypical joke, anti-humour is pretty popular. You may say that a man with an orange for a head is more inherently funny than a chicken, but I would refer you to D Zongker 2006

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 January 2011 05:24:43AM 2 points [-]

I always thought of the chicken joke as more a case of giving a Mathematician's Answer then anti-humor.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 23 January 2011 01:29:35AM 0 points [-]

Can you clarify your second paragraph? I don't think I get your meaning. Do you think the OP is misrepresenting the republicans, or is it something else?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 January 2011 01:52:30AM 3 points [-]

Do you think the OP is misrepresenting the republicans, or is it something else?

Well, given that 'conspiracy theory' is a phrase that is much more commonly applied to one's opponents' ideas to discredit them then to one's own, I strongly suspect 'conspiracy' is the OP's word and not the Republicans'.

Comment author: Aharon 22 January 2011 08:55:24AM 0 points [-]

I'm not an US citizen, so my knowledge of US politics may not be deep enough to grasp some of the subleties of the topic, but my overall impression was that unless you are very rich, it is in your best interest - and thus clever - to be liberal.

But I guess this part of the discussion borders "Politics is a Mind-Killer", so if you wish to inform me why it isn't clever to be liberal, it's probably best if we take the discussion to PMs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 January 2011 08:15:47PM *  5 points [-]

First of all, which country are you from? The word 'liberal' means very different things in the political discourse of America and Europe.

Comment author: wedrifid 17 January 2011 05:19:32PM 1 point [-]

The description on the wiki does put a negative spin on it (although not quite as negative as you do - behavior is not even mentioned). From his description I get the impression that Konkvistador is also including 'grey arts' too.

This is morally wrong

I reject this moral proscription and any other moral proscription that would make becoming more rational a form of self sabotage.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2011 06:01:16AM 0 points [-]

I reject this moral proscription and any other moral proscription that would make becoming more rational a form of self sabotage.

Given that you suck at dark arts, as demonstrated by the fact that you openly admit on a public forum that you're willing to use them, I don't see how this moral proscription is a form of self sabotage.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 January 2011 02:52:09AM 2 points [-]

Nobody doubts that doing stupid or ill-considered things with the dark arts could have undesirable consequences.

Note: the parent is another example of a dark arts persuasion technique.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2011 05:56:44AM 1 point [-]

Note: the parent is another example of a dark arts persuasion technique.

I think your problem, is you have too broad a notion of what constitutes "dark arts".

Comment author: TheOtherDave 17 January 2011 05:23:15PM 4 points [-]

If you're classifying the intentional use of human biases as wrong in a terminal moral sense, there's not much more to be said other than that I don't share your moral values, not even when you format them in italics.

If you're instead claiming they are wrong in some instrumental sense -- that is, that they lead to bad results -- I'd like to understand how you derive that.

In other words: suppose I want to convince people to do something, or to stop doing something, or to feel a certain way or stop feeling a certain way, or some other X. Suppose I then convince people to X by using the "dark arts" and "exploiting the biases of others."

For example, suppose I want someone to think that making use of human biases is a bad thing, and so I label that activity using words with negatively weighted denotations like "exploit" and "dark."

What have I made worse, by so doing?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2011 05:54:20AM -2 points [-]

For example, suppose I want someone to think that making use of human biases is a bad thing, and so I label that activity using words with negatively weighted denotations like "exploit" and "dark."

What have I made worse, by so doing?

You seem to be confusing rationality with suppression of emotion. As Eliezer points out here, there is nothing wrong with feeling emotions that accurately correspond to the territory. There is similarly nothing wrong with promoting such emotions in others. The "dark arts" really are things humans should avoid using, as such there is nothing wrong with associating them with negative emotions.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 January 2011 02:48:09AM 1 point [-]

That strikes me more as an excuse to say avoiding the dark arts is the desirable thing to do than an actual reason.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2011 05:31:55AM *  -2 points [-]

As Eliezer writes here

If natural selection, which doesn't care at all about the welfare of unrelated strangers, still manages to give you a sense of ethical unease on account of transgressive plans not always going as planned - then how much more reluctant should you be to rob banks for a good cause, if you aspire to actually help and protect others?

but seriously read the whole article.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 16 January 2011 01:57:11PM 2 points [-]

why would anyone want to avoid employing the dark arts as a general rule?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2011 02:36:23AM 1 point [-]

Are you sure the beliefs you're using dark arts to promote are correct? If a belief you're promoting turns out to be wrong, it'll be nearly impossible to back paddle. Read this for a more detailed description.

Comment author: shokwave 15 January 2011 02:04:29AM 0 points [-]

Agreed. Related: -isms give me a prickly feeling of "self-trusting system".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 January 2011 05:21:48AM 2 points [-]

So? Changing the name doesn't change whether "rationalism" is a "self-trusting system", it only changes your impression of it.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 January 2011 01:00:09PM 10 points [-]

So Chuunin Exam Day, then? I've never read it, but I've heard of it.

Considering that I was able to identify the author and possibly the exact fic from the information that the morality was being heavily lambasted, may I suggest that readers noticing nonlampshaded evil doesn't actually happen all that often? TV Tropes is good at noticing Moral Dissonance, but literally nowhere else that I've ever heard of. It took a critic on the order of David Brin to point out that Aragorn wasn't democratically elected.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 January 2011 01:20:16AM 2 points [-]

Unfortunately half the examples of Unfortunate Implications on TV Tropes are places where the work's universe has rules that create problems for currently popular systems of ethics (the implication being it's wrong to imply such rules might be true). Or otherwise violating prevailing moral fashions.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 11 January 2011 10:16:10PM 0 points [-]

I know nothing about the story/game you're talking about, but I think this is an important and common misconception, and fanfiction that addressed it directly might be worthwhile.

It shows up in a bunch of places in fiction. Grant Morrison's Invisibles and the Nobilis and Unknown Armies RPGs, I think. A particular bit is that something very much like the present-day real world shows up as a part of the greater reality, setting up the plausible deniability that the world might really be like the postmodern meta-reality described.

I'd love to see stories about a rigorous thinker in such a universe working out ways to exploit its ground rules.

I'm not sure exactly how much this would be a different from the regular Mage. As far as I understand, it's already all about exploiting the meta-reality thing using whatever trickery the mages come up with.

I'm not also so sure how doing the rationalist subversion would work in Mage, since its universe is a lot sophisticated about working in a nonrational way than regular naive fantasy works. You're basically up against an adult postmodernist instead of a child who believes in wizards.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 January 2011 11:25:02PM 2 points [-]

If you really want a challenge try Genius the Transgression. It's a fan-made expansion for World of Darkness. The world appears to have been optimized by a reasonably good rationalist to be as hard for an in universe character to analyze using the scientific method as possible, while still being an ordered universe.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 January 2011 06:09:21PM 6 points [-]

The thing about Mage: The Awakening is that it has a canonical in-universe faction, the Free Council, that's theoretically trying to do what Harry is doing in MoR. Unfortunately, since the authors of the game aren't rationalists, this activity is only portrayed as an opaque black box.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 January 2011 08:01:44PM 2 points [-]

Yes.

I would add that the deontological way has an even bigger drawback: it doesn't reliably get you the consequences you want.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 January 2011 12:14:46AM *  4 points [-]

Yes, but if you're really a deontologist, you shouldn't care. ;)

Comment author: cousin_it 01 January 2011 01:35:09PM *  6 points [-]

There two ways to define what kinds of excuses "should" be "valid" for a given behavior: the deontological way (like the "ick" reaction in your comment), and the consequentialist way (how will people's behavior change if society deems such-and-such excuse "valid").

Now the deontological way has a big drawback: it's impossible to argue intelligently about, as you have aptly demonstrated with the penis references and whatnot. Different people have different deontologies. Without adopting some flavor of consequentialism, we can never have a rational common ground to say that your deontological standards are "better" than mine, and everyone leaves with their opinions unchanged. This is why I prefer to start from the opposite side: try to evaluate only the consequences of icky decisions, not how awful their descriptions sound. It also helps check that my deontological instincts aren't lying to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 January 2011 12:01:37AM *  5 points [-]

Without adopting some flavor of consequentialism, we can never have a rational common ground to say that your deontological standards are "better" than mine, and everyone leaves with their opinions unchanged.

With consequentialist ethics you instead wind up arguing over what your terminal values should be, which tends to be equally effective.

Comment author: TheRev 07 January 2011 08:59:24AM 0 points [-]

The Chinese bubble is certainly going to collapse, but I doubt it will be a sudden enough collapse to happen within the year. People can talk all they want about undervalued currency or export dependency, my money is on demographic echo from the one child policy, and ecological and agricultural collapse from industrial pollution, both of which would be on the scale of a decade or more instead of a year. Though a smaller bursting of the bubble could happen due to general global economic downturn, the real kicker is still down the road a few years.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 January 2011 06:46:12PM 1 point [-]

I think you're suffering from availability bias. You can easily picture polluted countryside or a population crash, whereas "undervalued currency or export dependency" sound like a minor point of abstract economics.

You may want to look at this article to get a feel for the extent to which Chinese urban policies are driven by a desire to project an image rather then any internal sensible policies. For example, people who aren't born residents aren't allowed to move into Shanghai or Beijing while a third of the newly constructed buildings remain empty.

Comment author: Jack 04 January 2011 09:05:13PM 0 points [-]

If it were too small, then I'd actually find it probable that someone else could do the research I haven't, figure out that the true value is on one side or the other of my interval, and exploit me.

This makes sense. So the interval at which you were willing to bet would increase given higher stakes (as that would give someone more incentive to do the research)?

What I'm trying to understand is what confidence interval means in a Bayesian context, a 'credible interval' seems to be the analogous concept but even after reading the article I'm still quite confused as to what a credible interval is in the context of subjective probability. I've seen also seen people here refer to the 'stability' of their beliefs- a concept which seems to function similarly. It definitely feels like it would be useful tool- it just don't quite get what it would mean as a way of describing beliefs instead of repeatable trials.

And if we can talk about credible intervals for beliefs... isn't that really relevant information for predictions? Shouldn't we give intervals in addition to p values? I'm not sure it makes sense to assume normal distributions for casually calculated probabilities on one-off events. This is especially the case since humans are really, really bad at distinguishing between probabilities at extremely high and low levels.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2011 06:05:04AM 2 points [-]

One way to think about the bid-ask spread, is that while orthonormal's current probability is 10%, he'd consider someone offering to bet him actual money on one side or the other to be sufficient evidence to adjust his belief significantly in that direction.

Comment author: taw 04 January 2011 04:10:16PM 0 points [-]

Is this year or decade?

All three seem ridiculously high for next year, once vagueness is corrected.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 January 2011 05:42:35AM 1 point [-]

This year.

Why do you think they're too high?

Comment author: Skatche 03 January 2011 03:18:21AM 2 points [-]

Continuing riots in major European cities over the imposition of austerity measures: 80%. There have been four such riots in the past six months - in Paris, London, Rome and Athens - and there have been vows of more to come, so this seems pretty likely.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2011 06:38:51AM *  6 points [-]

80% seems way underconfident.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2011 06:35:25AM 1 point [-]

California will implement austerity measures similar to the ones currently being implemented by European countries: 80%.

The bubble underlying the current Chinese boom will collapse: 35%.

Some European country will abandon the Euro: 20%.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 January 2011 05:51:41AM 17 points [-]

Shouldn't we also review how accurate last year's predictions were?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2010 07:31:08PM 1 point [-]

Eliezer argues that there can't possibly be a simple surgical procedure that dramatically increases human intelligence.

Indeed, my belief is that such a surgery almost certainly exists (but it might take a superhuman intelligence to invent it).

If it takes a superhuman intelligence to invent it, it arguably doesn't count as 'simple'.

Comment author: jsalvatier 30 December 2010 11:58:04AM 3 points [-]

I suppose the lesson here is that an inability to wait until all evidence is in to being to act does not imply that you should stop investigating new evidence once you begin to act.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 December 2010 07:08:05PM *  5 points [-]

The problem is that once you begin to act you're subject to commitment bias. Namely, as happened in the example, you have a psychological and possibly institutional commitment to the correctness of the theory you're acting under.

Comment author: XFrequentist 28 December 2010 02:22:12AM 1 point [-]

Ah. Then yeah that's a problem, but I'm not sure why this would be worse with recent research.

This article gives a pretty good overview of the shortcomings of medical statistics, and includes one of my favorite lines ever:

Such sad statistical situations suggest that the marriage of science and math may be desperately in need of counseling. Perhaps it could be provided by the Rev. Thomas Bayes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2010 04:49:33AM 3 points [-]

Ah. Then yeah that's a problem, but I'm not sure why this would be worse with recent research.

Because the earlier stuff, e.g., sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics, had a stronger effect and thus was easier to notice above the noise.

Comment author: XFrequentist 28 December 2010 01:07:00AM 1 point [-]

Just curious, as I've heard the opposite asserted with confidence.

1) Very little of the Hansonian critique of medicine involves researchers making stuff up, and I doubt this is a major problem.

2) True, although hopefully research methodology is improving.

This analysis may interest you, I seem to recall it supports your suspicion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 December 2010 02:13:52AM 2 points [-]

1) Very little of the Hansonian critique of medicine involves researchers making stuff up, and I doubt this is a major problem.

Sorry about that, I didn't meant more generate results based on statistical noise, then outright faking research.

Comment author: David_Gerard 27 December 2010 08:41:55PM 0 points [-]

Got any more good examples to hand?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 11:44:38PM 11 points [-]

One common example is that whenever there's a real or perceived national problem, the question that gets asked is what are we going to do about it.

Where "we" implicitly means the government and the "do about it" means creating a new law and probably a new bureaucracy whose job will be to "do something about it".

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 25 December 2010 03:07:07PM *  0 points [-]

I'm sorry, but I did no such thing. My comment could have been restated as follows:

What ought one to think of a community that seeks to be overcome bias and yet succumbs to such obvious forms of anthropocentric bias?

See what I said in reply to wedrifid for further clarification.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 11:32:13PM *  0 points [-]

I'd still downvote you for making a controversial and inflammatory statement in a way that presumes it's obvious without providing any evidence.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 25 December 2010 04:05:23PM *  0 points [-]

I was under the impression the stated (by Eliezer) problem was that "X is wrong" is a simple assertion, which is almost certain to change no-one's mind.

Reconsider the comment to the hypothetical LW meeting I imagined. Do you really believe such a comment would be "downvoted to oblivion"? Yet that comment is also a simple assertion.

Of course it also has connotations of "What are you, some kind of hypocrite?", which isn't exactly helpful either.

These are the kinds of social rules that I was thinking of when I claimed such rules sometimes hinder moral progress. Users on this forum should not, I believe, refrain from calling people hypocrites if that accusation is relevant and supported by what they take to be the best evidence. Having said that, I wasn't actually accusing anyone of hypocrisy--just inconsistency.

(If one does think that the breach of social rules should be downvoted and is also the target of the critique, one is more likely to misinterpret the critique as a breach of a social rule and downvote accordingly, as you just did. This is another reason for disregarding considerations of social etiquette altogether.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 11:26:19PM 0 points [-]

Users on this forum should not, I believe, refrain from calling people hypocrites if that accusation is relevant and supported by what they take to be the best evidence.

Well, your comment didn't bother to provide any evidence.

Comment author: XFrequentist 27 December 2010 07:25:38PM 1 point [-]

Why especially the "newer stuff"?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 10:59:58PM 4 points [-]

The two most obvious reasons are:

1) Once the low-hanging fruit is exhausted, people are more likely to make stuff up.

2) Newer stuff has had less time for problems to get exposed.

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 December 2010 08:12:21PM 12 points [-]

We have to be careful when thinking about "science" as a single entity; the science that physicists do, the science that biologists, and the science that nutritionists do are each very different.

My take on what happened to nutrition science is that the nutrition science research community settled on a paradigm (controlled dietary studies followed by measuring indirect proxies for health) that was inadequate. They then put out a bunch of studies, each of which was only very weak evidence and had an extraordinarily long list of caveats. This got amplified first by reporting p-values which failed to account for those caveats, and then again by the media; and the result was a bunch of dietary recommendations that were some combination of noise, echo chamber effects, and deliberate manipulation, with barely any signal.

But that isn't a failure of science, per se. That's a failure of the research and publication methodologies of one particular field. It is concerning that other fields are using similar publication methodologies (especially the use of p-values), and there are some other fields where there is reason to suspect that the signal to noise ratio is also bad. The lesson I take from nutrition science is that you can't trust a community's output just because they call their work "science" and have all the trappings thereof; you have to look closely, see if it makes sense, and see how far above the noise floor their models' predictions really are.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 06:18:04AM *  7 points [-]

We have to be careful when thinking about "science" as a single entity; the science that physicists do, the science that biologists, and the science that nutritionists do are each very different.

The other side of that coin is that we should stop treating criticisms and/or attacks on individual scientific theories as attacks on "science".

Comment author: datadataeverywhere 27 December 2010 03:31:22AM 2 points [-]

margarine, wheat, sugar

are all plant products.

but they aren't Food, at least not according to Pollan. He tries to emphasize that people used to be much healthier because they ate Things, rather than Parts of Things. He claims that historically, when we take a plant and process it to get a single nutrient out of it, we are likely to produce much less healthful food, and that applies to pretty much all three of your points, with the possible exception of wheat (especially if you eat most of the plant).

This is his argument, not mine, but it's one I'm moderately swayed by.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 05:16:59AM 2 points [-]

I also more-or-less agree with this. I also think that for similar reasons it makes sense to get your protein from meat rather then processed soy or whatever.

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 December 2010 08:12:21PM 12 points [-]

We have to be careful when thinking about "science" as a single entity; the science that physicists do, the science that biologists, and the science that nutritionists do are each very different.

My take on what happened to nutrition science is that the nutrition science research community settled on a paradigm (controlled dietary studies followed by measuring indirect proxies for health) that was inadequate. They then put out a bunch of studies, each of which was only very weak evidence and had an extraordinarily long list of caveats. This got amplified first by reporting p-values which failed to account for those caveats, and then again by the media; and the result was a bunch of dietary recommendations that were some combination of noise, echo chamber effects, and deliberate manipulation, with barely any signal.

But that isn't a failure of science, per se. That's a failure of the research and publication methodologies of one particular field. It is concerning that other fields are using similar publication methodologies (especially the use of p-values), and there are some other fields where there is reason to suspect that the signal to noise ratio is also bad. The lesson I take from nutrition science is that you can't trust a community's output just because they call their work "science" and have all the trappings thereof; you have to look closely, see if it makes sense, and see how far above the noise floor their models' predictions really are.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 03:44:42AM *  10 points [-]

There is a decent talk "Big Fat Fiasco" (about an hour long) that explains what happened with nutrition science.

Some of the interesting parts are near the end of part 2/start of part 3:

Specifically senator McGovern dismissing complaints from scientists that there was not enough evidence that fat caused hear disease by saying:

Senators don't have the luxury that a research scientist has of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in.

A little latter the video mentions that at the time 90% of all funding for research on heart disease was provided by the US Government and American Heart Association. Thus once both said that fat causes heart disease it was nearly impossible for scientists who got conflicting reports to get funding.

Edited conclusion to make it clearer:

There are two problems here:

1) The attitude that this area is too important to wait for "every last shred of evidence" and thus we must go with science based upon weak evidence.

Where else have I heard this, which appears to be prevalent in climate science and pandemic medicine today.

2) Nearly all funding provided by a few large organizations that are thus subject to politics and group think.

This appears to be true in most sciences today.

As such, unfortunately, it appears the case nutrition science isn't just an isolated incident.

Comment author: Kutta 27 December 2010 12:19:23AM *  4 points [-]

I haven't read the book although I read about it in nutrition related news sources when it was published. I'm personally a hobby reader of nutrition science since a couple of years, and what put me somewhat off regarding this book was this motto of the authors: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

The reason is that - without going into the details - I am confident that the "mostly plants" part is false. Skimming the reviews, looking through the table of contents and reading some pages (all through Amazon) I just subtracted several further points from the book because of numerous scientific inaccuracies, overly polemic tone and the usual vacuous blaming of food industries and nutrition science. And yep, the identification of nutritionism as a form of evil raises another red flag. It seems to me that the author justifies ad-hoc conclusions with the (basically false) argument that "foods can't be reduced to the constituent chemicals", and then sends several circular justifications forth and back.

The harm done by margarine, wheat, sugar etc. is the consequence of doing bad science and reaching incorrect conclusions. The remedy, however, comes from doing good science and honest reductionism, not from espousing various forms of non-science and magical thinking.

For comparison, these three blogs are pretty well-researched and overall well-written: Whole Health Source, Daily Lipid, Raw Food SOS

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 02:17:37AM *  3 points [-]

I haven't read the book either but am wondering how on earth he comes up with 'mostly plants' given that the three harmful products just mentioned:

margarine, wheat, sugar

are all plant products.

Especially looking at margarine, which is a plant product whose substitution for animal products (butter and lard) turned out to have been a bad idea.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 26 December 2010 11:16:56PM 3 points [-]

This is a valid point. However, there is an objective fact that's different between physics/biology and nutrition: in the former, there is a lot of historical progress: stuff discovered and promoted at a high confidence tends to be supported and replicated. In the latter, stuff promoted at high confidence by the media is fairly likely to be contradicted again soon after. So it's significantly more reasonable to ignore the results of nutrition science when deciding what to eat than it is to ignore the predictions of, say, biology when deciding whether to vaccinate your children.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 December 2010 02:03:52AM *  2 points [-]

I suspect much of medicine especially the newer stuff is probably nearly as bad as nutrition.

Edit: See Robin Hanson's many posts on the subject.

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 December 2010 08:12:21PM 12 points [-]

We have to be careful when thinking about "science" as a single entity; the science that physicists do, the science that biologists, and the science that nutritionists do are each very different.

My take on what happened to nutrition science is that the nutrition science research community settled on a paradigm (controlled dietary studies followed by measuring indirect proxies for health) that was inadequate. They then put out a bunch of studies, each of which was only very weak evidence and had an extraordinarily long list of caveats. This got amplified first by reporting p-values which failed to account for those caveats, and then again by the media; and the result was a bunch of dietary recommendations that were some combination of noise, echo chamber effects, and deliberate manipulation, with barely any signal.

But that isn't a failure of science, per se. That's a failure of the research and publication methodologies of one particular field. It is concerning that other fields are using similar publication methodologies (especially the use of p-values), and there are some other fields where there is reason to suspect that the signal to noise ratio is also bad. The lesson I take from nutrition science is that you can't trust a community's output just because they call their work "science" and have all the trappings thereof; you have to look closely, see if it makes sense, and see how far above the noise floor their models' predictions really are.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 December 2010 09:15:56PM 3 points [-]

I mostly agree but am bothered by the fact that from an outside view this sounds like No True Scotsman.

In response to Pascal's Gift
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 December 2010 07:45:15PM 3 points [-]

I believe you meant to say "probability 1/n".

In response to Vegetarianism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2010 06:33:15AM 3 points [-]

Massive amounts of cows require massive amounts of grain

If that was the limiting factor I'd expect it to show up in the price of meat.

In response to Vegetarianism
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2010 06:32:05AM 11 points [-]

"It's bad for humans." The scale on which we eat meat is demonstrably unhealthy, wasteful and recent (arising in Western culture in the last hundred years). The way Westerners eat in general is unhealthy and meat is just a part of that, but it's a significant factor.

There was a lot of discussion of nutrition a while ago. The general conclusion is that the literature is too confused to assign any one hypothesis high probability, but was leaning toward Atkins-style low-carb high-protein diets.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on Vegetarianism
Comment author: grouchymusicologist 24 December 2010 06:00:45AM 0 points [-]

I don't have a perfect reply to that suggestion, but here's a start, which perhaps is good enough for the case at hand. I loosely paraphrase Peter Singer.

Let's suppose we know what it means for ourselves (humans) to suffer -- we could get really specific about what that means, but we seem to have a kind of intersubjective consensus that suffices for the moment. Now, unless we believe we have immortal souls or something that enables us uniquely to suffer, our suffering (if, say, someone decided to kill and eat us) is due to our neurological makeup and is demonstrated externally by various kinds of observable behaviors.

So, when we see that other organisms have neurological systems that are rather similar to ours (as most vertebrates do), and exhibit similar behaviors when injured or killed, a good hypothesis is that they are experiencing something like we are when we suffer.

This is another case where, it seems to me, rather tortured reasoning is required to argue that other animals aren't really suffering even when we have every reason to think they are. Surely we want to err on the side of not causing the kind of suffering we ourselves would feel if injured or killed?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2010 06:26:11AM *  0 points [-]

How far up the evolutionary tree do you believe suffering extends? Primates? Mammals? Vertebrates? Any animal with a nervous system? What about plant suffering? Does an overworked computer suffer as it frantically swaps memory between RAM and disk? Are you sure you're not committing the mind projection fallacy.

Also, while we're on the subject why should suffering be the basis of morality, as opposed to something like subjective experience?

This is another case where, it seems to me, rather tortured reasoning is required to argue that other animals aren't really suffering even when we have every reason to think they are.

I suspect your definition of "tortured reasoning" amounts to any complex reasoning that leads to conclusions you don't like.

Comment author: Manfred 24 December 2010 05:41:09AM 1 point [-]

Blorst horst.

I would like it if you paired each "myth" line with an explicit "truth" line that gave the tl;dr for us, maybe even using simple language e.g.

Myth: The cardinalities of infinite sets can be compared like ordinary numbers. Reality: If the axiom of choice is false, you can have one set's cardinality be both larger and smaller than another's

(maybe even a short blurb explaining the axiom of choice's role)

I could still understand you, but it certainly helped that I'd borrowed my friend's topology book over the summer.

Rather than making a big list, some more structure and an actual conclusion to topic #1 would have helped cement things in my brain.

Since this turned out pretty long, you could actually split the topics into separate posts in a series. And with a little editing I would be all for these being top-level posts rather than discussion secion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2010 06:00:46AM 4 points [-]

Reality: If the axiom of choice is false, you can have one set's cardinality be both larger and smaller than another's

Actually without the axiom of choice, one set's cardinality can be neither larger nor smaller than another's.

Comment author: grouchymusicologist 24 December 2010 05:39:20AM 2 points [-]

A shorter version of my comment: I very much doubt that there is a convincing rebuttal to Bentham's and Singer's view that the crucial question we should ask when deciding whether to kill something and eat it is "Can it suffer?"

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 December 2010 05:45:03AM *  4 points [-]

Taboo "suffer".

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 December 2010 05:44:21PM *  0 points [-]

If you're saying actual human preference is determined by human biology and brain architecture, but mostly independent from brain content, this is a very new claim that I don't remember hearing ever before.

Hmm, I think I've said this many times already. Of course beliefs are bound to change preference to some extent, but shouldn't be allowed to do this too much. On reflection, you wouldn't want the decisions (to obtain certain beliefs) of your stupid human brain with all its biases that you already know not to endorse, to determine what should be done with the universe.

Only where such decisions manage to overcome this principle, will there be change, and I can't even think of a specific example of when that should happen. Generally, you can't trust yourself. The fact that you believe that X is better than Y is not in itself a reason to believe that X is better than Y, although you might believe that X is better than Y because it is (because of a valid reason for X being better than Y, which your belief in X being better than Y isn't).

So when beliefs do change your preference, it probably won't be in accordance with beliefs about preference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 09:26:41PM 5 points [-]

On reflection, you wouldn't want the decisions (to obtain certain beliefs) of your stupid human brain with all its biases that you already know not to endorse, to determine what should be done with the universe.

As opposed our biology and brain architecture, which were designed by the blind idiot god.

Comment author: David_Gerard 23 December 2010 05:43:32PM 4 points [-]

Yes, but saying "we get the FAI to do it" is just moving the hard bit.

The intelligence to calculate the CEV needs to be pre-FOOM. We have general intelligences of pre-FOOM level already.

So: what would a pre-FOOM general intelligence actually do?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 09:17:28PM 2 points [-]

I believe the idea is the have the pre-FOOM AI commit to doing the calculation first thing post-FOOM.

Comment author: Nornagest 23 December 2010 07:46:17AM *  3 points [-]

I'm honestly not sure I trust myself on this one. Our moral intuitions tend to go pear-shaped when confronted with infinities or near-infinities, as Dust Specks/Torture amply demonstrates.

But I'll bite anyway. Our current judicial toolkit is a pretty crude hack, at its best not much better than the death penalty, but its goals are generally held to be some mixture of deterrence, retribution, and reformation. At least the latter two are well served by punishments that don't involve the death penalty, an effective death penalty like denying life extension, or near-infinite punishment terms.

From a reformative perspective I think we can expect any desired amount of reformation to be pretty quick; it would take far less than a transhuman lifespan to voluntarily reinvent oneself almost completely, and it'd be all the quicker if we allow involuntary methods. From a retributive perspective, I'd expect any punishment to be proportional to the mental harm caused to others by the crime, which once again is small in comparison to the criminal's potential lifespan.

I'm not sure what the effects on deterrence would be, but I doubt they'd change the overall picture.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 08:01:18AM 2 points [-]

from a retributive perspective I expect any punishment to be proportional to the mental harm caused to others by the crime, which once again is small in comparison to the potential lifespans here.

Depends, if the crime is murder how do you count the harm caused by ending someone's near-infinite life?

I'm not sure what the effects on deterrence would be, though.

I haven't fully worked out my theory of deterrence, but the crude first approximation, as briefly discussed here, is that the disutility to the criminal of the punishment should be greater than the utility they received from committing the crime, adjusted for things like probability of getting caught.

Comment author: ata 23 December 2010 06:15:12AM 3 points [-]

True... so anyone who really wants to increase the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent should be promoting atheism. :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 06:29:36AM 7 points [-]

Of course, it's even more effective to promote the belief that sinners will spend eternity burning in hell.

Comment author: ata 23 December 2010 05:22:42AM 7 points [-]

It would be interesting to see what would happen from a political standpoint if a death row inmate were to express a wish for cryonics. Has anyone tried sending literature on cryonics to condemned criminals?

That would indeed be interesting, particularly because it would be a good test of how seriously people take cryonics when they're not motivated to deny the possibility of its success (to explain why they don't want to sign up, or why it wouldn't have been any use in saving the life of a loved one, etc.) — we'd see how many of them seemed to be seriously worried about the death row convicts coming back someday.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 06:19:23AM *  3 points [-]

Suppose you believe that final death is an appropriate punishment for someone's crime. You also believe cryonics has probability p of working, where p is too small for you to sign up for cryonics. Should you allow the prisoner to be frozen?

If cryonics doesn't work, it doesn't make a difference; and if cryonics does, you shouldn't. Thus there is no reason to allow the prisoner to sign up for cryonics.

Notice that this conclusion doesn't depend on the probability of cryonics working, or on how certain you are the prisoner is guilty, for any certainty sufficient to justify him being executed.

Comment author: ata 23 December 2010 05:22:42AM 7 points [-]

It would be interesting to see what would happen from a political standpoint if a death row inmate were to express a wish for cryonics. Has anyone tried sending literature on cryonics to condemned criminals?

That would indeed be interesting, particularly because it would be a good test of how seriously people take cryonics when they're not motivated to deny the possibility of its success (to explain why they don't want to sign up, or why it wouldn't have been any use in saving the life of a loved one, etc.) — we'd see how many of them seemed to be seriously worried about the death row convicts coming back someday.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 05:56:15AM 3 points [-]

Note that from the point of view of deterrent it doesn't mater whether cryonics works or not as long as the criminal believes it will.

Comment author: lsparrish 23 December 2010 04:34:44AM 2 points [-]

This is a good question... If you see it as punishment of an evil person, it follows that they should be denied cryonics for the same reason they are being killed.

But if you believe in rehabilitation, thinking of the criminal behavior as the result of a mental illness, cryonics is a good thing because they are being sent forward to a time when their mental disease can be cured.

It would be interesting to see what would happen from a political standpoint if a death row inmate were to express a wish for cryonics. Has anyone tried sending literature on cryonics to condemned criminals?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 05:54:36AM 1 point [-]

The main point of punishment is to deter crime, rehabilitation is secondary. One to think of this using TDT is that the point of punishment is to acausally prevent crime. I discussed this in a slightly different context here.

As to whether a criminal should be allowed to sign up for cryonics, that depends on what the appropriate level of punishment for his crime is. After all, we assign some criminals 10 years in jail, others life, and execute still others.

As the question of mental illness, as Yvain points out in Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease.

Instead of continuing the fruitless "disease" argument, we should address these questions directly. Taking a determinist consequentialist position allows us to do so more effectively. We should blame and stigmatize people for conditions where blame and stigma are the most useful methods for curing or preventing the condition, and we should allow patients to seek treatment whenever it is available and effective.

In response to Book Recommendations
Comment author: djcb 09 August 2010 09:55:59PM *  12 points [-]

Wow, can't wait for the unknown gems this discussion will bring up!

Anyway, some of my own; these are all non-fiction.

  • Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is such a magnificent book, introducing all the wonderful solutions that evolution has come up with, and the insight that the battle for the 'survival of the fittest' takes place at the level of individual genes (or is at least a powerful model for understanding things)
  • Jared Diamonds' Guns, germs and steel which suggests that there are non-racial/non-ethnic reasons for the differences in wealth and power amongst various regions in the world. I think the writer's claims go a bit further than his evidence warrants, but nevertheless a good way to look into this field, and provides a lot of food for thought
  • As mentioned already, Hofstadters Gödel/Escher/Bach and The Mind's I (bundle of essays of various writers, redacted together with Daniel Dennett) are playing with all these interesting concepts like conciousness, AI, meta, self-reference.
  • Also Richard Feynman's work is fantastic -- the auto-biographic (You must be joking, Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think) are inspiring. I plan on going through some of his real physics works (like the Feynman lectures on Physics). Just seeing some of the interviews on Youtube show how well Feynman is able to make both complex and simple things understandable, at all levels; such a towering intellect.
  • For computer science stuff, earlier I mentioned SICP, which I am currently re-reading.
  • Then, Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming; I have read much too little of it, but it's such a rewarding experience to (slowly!) go through a few pages and finally the 'click' of understanding. I plan to read more of this. Knuth is truly the master of the field of programming and algorithms, and while reading it, I can almost feel how it sharpens my brain.
  • Finally, a lot of bad things can be said about pop-psy, but I really liked Dan Ariely's books (Predictably irrational and The upside of irrationality) that show where the classical picture of people being rational, homo economicus, has its limitations, and all the weird biases we have. He has some interesting TED-talks as well.
In response to comment by djcb on Book Recommendations
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 05:19:17AM 3 points [-]

If you're going to read Diamond, I recommended also reading The Ultimate Resource by Julian Lincoln Simon.

Comment author: timtyler 27 October 2010 04:07:16AM *  2 points [-]

The argument being that plants did not have evolutionary pressure to make their fruits particularly full of vitamins?

Animals have abilities to detect whether what they eat is nutritious, plants give the animals what they want. That includes things like Vitamin C - though that isn't an essential nutrient for most animals.

E.g. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_appetite

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 December 2010 04:34:20AM 1 point [-]

As mattnewport mentioned above our ancestors evolved to live on fruits. Most animals can synthesis their own vitamin C. We only lost that ability because our ancestors had so much of it in their diet that they didn't need to synthesize it.

If fruits didn't contain vitamin C, we wouldn't have lost the ability to synthesize it, possibly losing the ability to synthesize something else that they did have.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2010 10:08:51PM *  4 points [-]

A related more painful, if not quite as frequent, example is the pain of childbirth.

It is interesting to note that the Bible attributed this to collective punishment for Eve's sin but didn't try to explain why it was good for the woman.

Comment author: jsalvatier 22 December 2010 07:15:36PM 2 points [-]

Plus, birth control already reduces or eliminates many women's period.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 December 2010 09:58:10PM *  8 points [-]

If that's the main reason, we should expect to find that many more rationalization memes existed before birth control became widespread.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 21 December 2010 09:42:10AM *  0 points [-]

What actions can a group take to affect policy that is better than pursuing wealth generation for each individual member?

so this conversation doesn't continue indefinitely I'll jump to the end. If you aren't directly contributing to SENS, SIAI, etc you should probably be getting rich so you can throw money at them. I have a limited amount of time and resources, I'm devoting them to increasing my own wealth generation rather than political conflict. If there is a policy that will have a direct effect on this avenue (such as say stem cell legislation) that is something I will be interested in. You have to pick your battles.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2010 05:54:45PM 2 points [-]

What actions can a group take to affect policy that is better than pursuing wealth generation for each individual member?

Making sure the government doesn't pursue economic policies that make this all but impossible for starters.

Comment author: lucidfox 21 December 2010 03:00:47AM *  2 points [-]

Reflecting in hindsight, it could have happened because I saw less evidence for God than for the Santa-equivalent. Intuitively, I could have preferred the simpler explanation "Grandfather Frost exists", even thought it included unknowns such as the question how exactly he could leave presents everywhere at once and leave no trace of breaking in, rather than believing a conspiracy theory.

With God, on the other hand, I had no reason to hold that belief other than the words of the Bible and religious people like my great-grandmother, and I already saw that they were wrong on many other accounts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2010 07:16:26AM 5 points [-]

I would suspect it might have more to do with living in a country that was an atheist state until 20 years ago.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 21 December 2010 02:03:27AM 0 points [-]

who should I get angry at in order to affect policy?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 December 2010 05:14:44AM 1 point [-]

By itself, you getting angry will not affect politics much, although on a small scale it will affect how people treat you.

However, a group of like minded angry (and ideally at least minimally coordinated) people will have an affect on policy.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 20 December 2010 05:42:54AM *  0 points [-]

I disagree.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2010 07:54:24PM 2 points [-]

You don't believe that getting angry at someone affects how they will behave towards you in the future?

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 19 December 2010 02:02:07AM *  0 points [-]

My opinions are too abstract. If I tried to apply them to derive concrete policy proposals the is-ought problem is returned.

I have opinions about the role the relative costs of attack and defense have played in civilization. I have opinions about how financial innovation has affected war. I have opinions about contract law. I have opinions about demographic transitions. Do these opinions make me a democrat or republican? Um.

As for politics affecting my life? My life is affected by the possibility of natural disaster, but I don't get angry at earthquakes. You buy yourself an earthquake kit and try to live your life. How much you spend on the earthquake kit is based on your updates of their probability. For that you survey expert opinion every now and then. If a bunch of volcano experts with good prediction records tell you that your house will be covered in lava next week you pack up and move. If you told me that you were angry at the lava because you believed it maliciously destroyed your house I'd think you were a little dumb, but in a very usual way for humans; I wouldn't hold it against you.

I tried to rewrite this a few times to avoid looking like I'm trying to signal sophistication and aloofness but I did not entirely succeed. I don't regard weirdness as cool for the record. If I need to avoid signaling weirdness I will dance around some sort of toned down libertarianism that is fairly equally innocuous to most sorts of people.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2010 05:22:57AM 2 points [-]

My life is affected by the possibility of natural disaster, but I don't get angry at earthquakes.

Getting angry at earthquakes doesn't affect their behavior, getting angry at people does.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2010 09:25:15PM 9 points [-]

So if some gave you a bad argument for atheism, would you go back to Christianity?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2010 01:20:36AM -1 points [-]

I don't think it makes sense to call socialist values "traditional" in any meaningful sense of the term.

Comment author: Kingreaper 18 December 2010 12:23:33AM 4 points [-]

And are the kids going to give everyone they meat a lecture on calculus?

I'm wondering if this was deliberate, to illustrate your point.

If so, bravo, it worked really well.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2010 12:26:41AM 2 points [-]

Actually, it was a typo, but now that you mentioned it, it does help, so I'll leave it up.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 December 2010 11:50:08PM 1 point [-]

Would they really? I'm not a parent, but I at least like to think I'd spend extra money teaching my kids useful things that are also status signals, like economics or calculus or writing (real writing, not "don't split infinitives"). Basically anything you could easily get tutoring for is a better use of time and money than grammar education.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Folk grammar and morality
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 December 2010 12:17:14AM 3 points [-]

And are the kids going to give everyone they meat a lecture on calculus?

Also, the rules probably wouldn't include "don't split infinitives". Using that as your mental example is skewing your intuition.

Notice that on most internet forums posts with bad spelling and grammar are taken less seriously. This is because readers see that they signal low quality content.

Comment author: Costanza 17 December 2010 10:06:15PM *  4 points [-]

My impression is that people tend to be exposed to grammar early on in school, in the form of a lot of arbitrary-seeming rules, which do not necessarily correspond with the colloquial spoken language. In English class in elementary and high school, I was taught never to split an infinitive (maybe I should say, "to never split an infinitive") and that the verb "to be" takes the nominative -- "that is I" rather than "that's me." Later, I learned that serious academic grammar scholars tend not spend their time issuing or enforcing random rules, but rather mostly observe and analyze how people use grammar -- regional and temporal shifts in the way the language is used. In that sense, language is value-neutral. Neither French nor English is "better" than the other in a general sense, French is not just degenerate Latin, Shakespeare and Chaucer and the author of Beowulf all use the grammar of English appropriate to their times. Valley-girl English and Ebonics and West Virginia dialect are all equally valid and internally consistent, according to this approach.

Can this same analysis be applied to moral codes? If it can, even in principle, then we have some problems. As I understand it, "morality" is all about values. I think EY has considered this issue seriously, and has alluded to it in Three Worlds Collide.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 11:30:20PM 3 points [-]

Can this same analysis be applied to moral codes? If it can, even in principle, then we have some problems. As I understand it, "morality" is all about values. I think EY has considered this issue seriously, and has alluded to it in Three Worlds Collide.

You should look at the metaethics sequence.

Comment author: Emile 17 December 2010 11:03:45PM 0 points [-]

I fully agree!

Western governments seem somewhat reticent to talk about how they crushed local dialects in the name of "education" (for understandable political reasons - it doesn't sound very good when presented like that, and gives arguments to local separatists); maybe it would be better if they just 'fessed up and said "Oh OK we admit those "grammar lessons" in school were just a pretext to impose linguistic uniformity; not that we have that we can drop those pointless lessons".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 11:21:24PM 3 points [-]

What would happen if the government dropped grammar lessons. Is the parents who could afford to would arrange for special grammar tutors for their children. The version taught by those tutors would then become a signal of high status and other parents would demand that their children be taught it as well.

Comment author: Alexandros 17 December 2010 10:41:02PM *  0 points [-]

You're of course right, which is why I said CEV even harder. Extracting a formal grammar only has to achieve coherence, and yet, mainstream linguistics has all but given up. State of the art machine translation tools use statistical inference instead of vast rulesets and I shudder to think what that would mean for CEV.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 11:06:53PM 3 points [-]

State of the art machine translation tools use statistical inference instead of vast rulesets and I shudder to think what that would mean for CEV.

It would mean using Bayesian (probabilistic) logic instead of Aristotelian logic.

Comment author: Emile 17 December 2010 10:42:39PM 0 points [-]

Agreed, what we learn as "grammar" in school doesn't correspond to the real rules of the language we use - either because the "rules" taught are "wrong" (like "not splitting infinitives"), or they're teaching a different language from the one you learned at home - in fact, I suspect this last one is the main reason schools feature prominently teaching something that people learn naturally : it's part of an effort from central governments to impose a common language to the whole nation, instead of the local dialects that existed before widespread schooling. Teaching grammar rules explicitly makes sense if you're teaching a second language (which was the case for Welsh kids learning English, or Basque kids learning French).

here's a linguist writing about something similar:

The fact is that almost everything most educated Americans believe about English grammar is wrong. In part this is because of misconceptions concerning the facts. In part it is because hopeless descriptive classifications and antiquated theoretical assumptions doom all discussion to failure. Amazingly, almost nothing has changed in over a hundred years.

... though his conclusion seems to be "teach the correct rules of grammar at school", whereas mine is more "what's the point? People figure out the rules independently of what factoids they're forced to memorize in school".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 10:54:44PM 3 points [-]

it's part of an effort from central governments to impose a common language to the whole nation, instead of the local dialects that existed before widespread schooling.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. How useful a language is to you depends on how many other people speak it.

Comment author: Costanza 17 December 2010 10:06:15PM *  4 points [-]

My impression is that people tend to be exposed to grammar early on in school, in the form of a lot of arbitrary-seeming rules, which do not necessarily correspond with the colloquial spoken language. In English class in elementary and high school, I was taught never to split an infinitive (maybe I should say, "to never split an infinitive") and that the verb "to be" takes the nominative -- "that is I" rather than "that's me." Later, I learned that serious academic grammar scholars tend not spend their time issuing or enforcing random rules, but rather mostly observe and analyze how people use grammar -- regional and temporal shifts in the way the language is used. In that sense, language is value-neutral. Neither French nor English is "better" than the other in a general sense, French is not just degenerate Latin, Shakespeare and Chaucer and the author of Beowulf all use the grammar of English appropriate to their times. Valley-girl English and Ebonics and West Virginia dialect are all equally valid and internally consistent, according to this approach.

Can this same analysis be applied to moral codes? If it can, even in principle, then we have some problems. As I understand it, "morality" is all about values. I think EY has considered this issue seriously, and has alluded to it in Three Worlds Collide.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 10:48:56PM 5 points [-]

Valley-girl English and Ebonics and West Virginia dialect are all equally valid and internally consistent, according to this approach.

There is also value in maintaining a common standard. Try speaking Ebonics outside black ghettos and besides the status hit, people will have a hard time understanding you.

Comment author: drc500free 17 December 2010 10:29:02PM 1 point [-]

Is there a generic form of that for any nth derivative?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 10:34:08PM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 09:40:55PM *  18 points [-]

To extend the metaphor: it is a well-known observation among linguists and amateur grammarians that the more you think about edge cases the worse your intuition becomes.

I wonder if there is a similar hazard from spending too much time thinking about weird hypothetical situations.

Comment author: Perplexed 17 December 2010 09:27:00PM 1 point [-]

Following up to EY's comment:

e^x is its own second derivative too. There are two functions that are their own second derivative, and four which are their own fourth derivative.

Cool! So what are the other two (out of three) functions that are their own third derivative? What does their graph look like? And does all this have anything to do with Laplace transforms? Does a sufficiently smooth function have a 1.5th derivative?

Yes, welcome to LW.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 09:31:57PM 2 points [-]

There are two functions that are their own second derivative, and four which are their own fourth derivative.

More precisely there is a 2-dimensional parameter space of functions that are their own second derivative, i.e., any function of the form Ae^x+Be^-x for any constants A and B.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 December 2010 09:24:02PM 0 points [-]

But unlike grammar, people don't always agree on right and wrong : if Alfred unintentionally Barry, Barry is more likely to think that what Alfred did was morally wrong, even if both started off with similar moral intuitions.

Er...is that supposed to be a joke?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Folk grammar and morality
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 09:25:21PM 1 point [-]

More likely, a typo.

Comment author: drc500free 17 December 2010 08:24:59PM 7 points [-]

Hello, My name is Dave Coleman. I was raised Atheist Jewish, and have identified as a rationalist my whole life. Browsing through the sequences, I realized I had failed to recognize some deeply ingrained biases.

I value making myself and others happy. Which others, and how happy, is something I've always struggled with. I used to have a framework with Jewish ethics, but I'm realizing that those are only clear in comparison to Christian ethics. Much of what I learned and considered was about how to make the Torah and Talmud relevant to modern, atheistic life.

I'm realizing the strong bias we had against saying "maybe it's not relevant, since it was written by immature goatherders 3500 years ago who had no knowledge of science or empathy for those outside their tribe." Admitting that wouldn't sound wise, so we twist and turn with answers, cluttering what could be a solid system of ethics.

For a while I've considered myself a reconstructionist Jew, with the underlying ethos of "do all Jewish traditions by default, but don't do anything that has a good reason not to be done." I've realized that not polluting my mind with incorrect and biased thought patterns is a good reason to avoid many things.

Another recent change has been an understanding of Judaism in terms of evolutionary fallacies. There is a strong sense in Judaism of being a Chosen People, and of a universal intention that Jews survive as Jews. Assimilation may be the biggest struggle for Jews, bigger even than persecution.

I realized that this is the same fallacy that sees intent in a species's characteristics. I had been labeling aspects of Judaism that lead to survival as being virtuous themselves - all of the dietary rituals to keep separate from goyim, the fear and guilt of assimilation. Even the love of learning and the drive to succeed has undertones of "thrive, for that is how you will survive the next pogrom." Preservation of the culture is virtuous, therefore anything that keeps the culture alive is virtuous.

I remember my first Differential Equations class, when we learned that the function that is its own derivative is f(x)=e^x, and the function that is its own second derivative is f(x)=sin(x). There was this eerie confusion as I first thought that those functions were just a possible solution, and then realized that they described the only solutions. I found it very disturbing that I couldn't describe whether the sine looked as it does by virtue of being its own second derivative, or whether it was its own second derivative by virtue of looking as it does. I still feel slightly uneasy that I can't assign a causal relationship in one direction or the other.

That's how I view Judaism now. The characteristics of all species and memes are a solution to the equation of survival. There is no intent or deeper meaning than that, and I think I've finally let that go.

Oh, and I got here from Reddit, where someone posted a link to the Paperclip Maximizer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 09:22:01PM 3 points [-]

I found it very disturbing that I couldn't describe whether the sine looked as it does by virtue of being its own second derivative, or whether it was its own second derivative by virtue of looking as it does. I still feel slightly uneasy that I can't assign a causal relationship in one direction or the other.

Causality doesn't have much meaning when applied to mathematics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 07:08:32AM 7 points [-]

That's why a metaphor can remove inferential steps and be an excellent way of bringing us to our senses and making us reconsider a vast network of cached knowledge.

Unfortunately, metaphor can just as easily convince us of false thinks as of true ones.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 04:43:23AM 2 points [-]

The difference between animals and people isn't simply that they think twice, or a hundred times slower.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2010 07:34:21AM 3 points [-]

You do realize the wiki pages have discussion pages.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 December 2010 06:42:05AM *  3 points [-]

Same reaction here. Since it is physically possible to break RSA, it seems obvious to me that RSA will be broken... eventually.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2010 07:33:09AM 1 point [-]

Barring collapse of technological civilization/technological stagnation/human extinction.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 December 2010 05:58:11AM 2 points [-]

Wow, that's even more impressive than the claim made by some Christian theologians that part of the enjoyment in heaven is getting to watch the damned be tormented. If any AI thinks anything even close to this then we have failed Friendliness even more than if we made a simple object maximizer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2010 06:28:25AM 4 points [-]

Next thing you're going to tell me that an FAI shouldn't push fat people in front of trolleys.

Note: A sufficiently powerful FAI shouldn't need to, but that is different from saying it wouldn't.

Comment author: Broggly 14 December 2010 07:42:12PM 2 points [-]

Really? That seems odd. It would be pretty silly for it to affect those who don't know about it. That would just be pointless.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2010 05:36:25AM 1 point [-]

If a person who knows it refuses to tell people in an attempt to protect them, that means he values those people more then himself. Thus the most effective way to punish him would be to torture those people.

Forcing him to watch is optional. (;

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2010 07:53:33AM 3 points [-]

An Italian advance from Budapest to Serbia failed after supporting units from Rumania were forced to stay behind to fend of a Turkish assault. The Turkish fleet, supported by infantry from Greece, in the Ionian Sea continued to bottle up the Italian navy in the Adriatic Sea and its ports in Albania.

This doesn't agree with the map.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 December 2010 12:26:57AM 6 points [-]

I didn't ban them, and whichever mod did, I support them fully. See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.

We need the following features on LW:

1) Banned comments no longer appear on user pages. Otherwise spammers have a motive to spam in order to steal pagerank.

2) When a comment is banned or goes to say -4 or below, but not when that comment is deleted, subcomments of it no longer appear in the Recent Comments feed. This will help ensure that stupid discussions ACTUALLY GET PRUNED rather than going on forever.

3) Automatic warning when a user posts a comment falling under 2.

4) Automatic warning when a user tries to delete a comment that already has subcomments, which people seem to do by accident a lot.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 December 2010 05:48:24AM 19 points [-]

I'm not sure 1) is a good idea. As Paul Graham says here.

I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on What is bunk?
Comment author: DuncanS 11 December 2010 08:04:56PM 0 points [-]

Quite the reverse - it guides me to pay attention to those people who do take the trouble. It's not as if I'm in any danger of running out of information these days.

In response to comment by DuncanS on What is bunk?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2010 08:16:27PM 1 point [-]

The question still remains why you think your heuristic is particularly good.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 December 2010 03:21:31PM *  5 points [-]

It would be interesting to know how many people are playing along to keep the peace, while actually laughing at the whole thing because of course no mere argument could possibly hurt them in their invincible mind fortresses

I'm certain that the forbidden topic couldn't possibly hurt me (probability of that is zilch). Still, I agree that from what we know, considering it should be discouraged, based on an expected utility argument (it either changes nothing or hurts tremendously with tiny probability, but can't correspondingly help tremendously because human value is a narrow target). Don't confuse these two arguments.

(I think this is my best summary of the shape of the argument so far.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2010 03:03:21AM *  1 point [-]

Still, I agree that from what we know, considering it should be discouraged, based on an expected utility argument (it either changes nothing or hurts tremendously with tiny probability, but can't correspondingly help tremendously because human value is a narrow target).

How do you know it can't help if you refuse to think about it?

I have thought about the topic.

My conclusions:

I think it is unlikely to be a problem, but assuming it is, refusing to think about it in an attempt to save yourself won't work. Neither will covering it up to save others.

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 December 2010 04:41:37PM *  5 points [-]

I've been in and around the music industry for a few decades. (As someone who actually likes music, Omega help me.) Whatever it runs on, it's not rationality and only occasionally seems to be business. There's lots of ape politics and towering mountains of BS.

We're talking about something where the product for sale is a subjective feeling in the mind of the listener, so being a skilled enough rhetorician to convince someone else that enough customers will feel the right subjective feeling is enough to get you a very long way, even with a terrible track record (because there's always an excuse, and 10 years' failure is 10 years' experience on your resume).

Rational business practice in the entertainment industry seems in short supply. I have only just-so surmises on why precisely it comes out this way, but it does seem to be the case, suggesting the possibility of an underlying more generally applicable reason or theory.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 07:52:06PM 3 points [-]

We're talking about something where the product for sale is a subjective feeling in the mind of the listener

I suspect the problem is that being good at that, i.e., having artistic talent and/or having a feel for artistic talent, tends to be inversely correlated with rationality.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 07:40:52PM 2 points [-]

Well, at least they're being honest about it.

Comment author: Bongo 10 December 2010 05:34:35PM *  0 points [-]

I hadn't seen a lot of stubs of deleted comments around before the recent episode, but you say people's comments had gotten deleted several times.

So, have you seen comments being deleted in a special way that doesn't leave a stub?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 07:24:07PM 3 points [-]

Comments only leave a stub if they have replies that aren't deleted.

Comment author: FAWS 10 December 2010 06:18:19AM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure that's a problem.

Or maybe: Change blackmail in the above to threat, and define blackmail as a threat not legitimized by social conventions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 06:23:33AM 3 points [-]

Well, at least we've unpacked the concept of "default" into the concept of social conventions.

Comment author: FAWS 10 December 2010 04:07:09AM *  4 points [-]

Agent 1 negotiates with agent 2. Agent 1 can take option A or B, while agent 2 can take option C or D. Agent 1 communicates that they will take option A if agent 2 takes option C and will take option B if agent 2 takes option D.

If utilities are such that for

  • agent 1: A > B, C < D, A+C < B + D

and for

  • agent 2: A < B, C > D, A+C < B + D

or

  • agent 1: A < B, C > D, A+C > B + D
  • agent 2: A > B, C < D, A+C > B + D

this is an offer.

If

  • agent 1: A < B, C < D, A+C < B + D
  • agent 2: A < B, C > D, A+C < B + D

or

  • agent 1: A > B, C > D, A+C > B + D
  • agent 2: A > B, C < D, A+C > B + D

this is blackmail by agent 1.

If

  • agent 1: A > B, C < D, A+C < B + D
  • agent 2: A < B, C < D, A+C < B + D

or

  • agent 1: A < B, C > D, A+C > B + D
  • agent 2: A > B, C > D, A+C > B + D

this is agent 1 giving in to agent 2's blackmail.

I don't think I mentioned anything about any "default" anywhere?

(Unless I overlooked something in the other cases there is either no reason to negotiate, no prospect of success in negotiating or at least one party acting irrationally. It is implicitly assumed that preferences between combinations of the options only depend on the preferences between the individual options. )

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 05:54:58AM 4 points [-]

Notice that under this definition punishing someone for a crime is a form of blackmail.

Comment author: WrongBot 09 December 2010 07:43:44PM 0 points [-]

Well, this was probably the most spectacularly bad game of Diplomacy I've ever played, possibly excepting the first.

I'll be interested to see how the rest of the game works out.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 03:58:24AM 1 point [-]

Have you ever played Austria before?

Comment author: timtyler 09 December 2010 09:20:35PM 0 points [-]

That's the issue of the usefulness of the Axiom of Independence - I believe.

You can drop that - though you are still usually left with expected utility maximisation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2010 12:02:42AM 1 point [-]

Then you become a money pump.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on What is bunk?
Comment author: DuncanS 09 December 2010 10:56:48PM 0 points [-]

It's the other way about - I can't think of an example where someone who didn't know the language of any field of learning has successfully convinced that field of anything (other than that they are a fool).

I'm not saying that person is particularly ignorant - they may be quite smart in some ways - but they're not doing what's necessary to convince. My optimisation is to ignore them until they put in the effort - it's much easier for them to learn the language than to do the novel thinking, after all. If that makes them frustrated, so be it.

In response to comment by DuncanS on What is bunk?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2010 11:53:12PM 1 point [-]

The point is not that it keeps them frustrated, the point is that it keeps you ignorant.

Comment author: James_Miller 09 December 2010 07:25:09AM *  -1 points [-]

A rational person, by definition, maximizes expected utility. You're fighting a definition.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2010 07:49:54AM 5 points [-]

Be careful about arguing by definition.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2010 06:19:43AM 3 points [-]

Given multiverse hypothesis (universes with different physical constants / laws), the number of universes with infinitely large set of laws is much larger (both being infinite, though) than number of universes with finite sets of laws.

The question is not which set is larger, which is in any case almost meaningless since both are infinite, but which set has larger probability measure.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2010 06:16:09AM 24 points [-]

To see why always maximizing expected utility is clearly bad, consider an action A with a 10^-10 chance of giving you 10^100 units of utility, and a 1-10^-10 chance of losing you 10^10 units of utility. Then expected utility maximization requires you to perform A, even though it is obviously a bad idea.

I don't think you understand what the word utility means. In particular utility is not linear in money. If the you had a 10^-10 chance of giving you $10^100, and a 1-10^-10 chance of losing you $10^10, you would be correct. That's because you exponentially discount the value of large amounts of money. However, utility is defined to already take the exponential discounting into account.

Unfortunately, your brain is wired to exponentially discount. Even though the utility values have already taken this into account, your intuition doesn't realize this and wants to exponentially discount again.

Another way to see what's going on is that your intuition is getting confused by the large numbers (after all 10^100 doesn't look much bigger then 10^10). Since you didn't specify what units you were measuring utility in, let's rescale them by 10^10 and see what your statement looks like:

consider an action A with a 10^-10 chance of giving you 10^90 units of utility, and a 1-10^-10 chance of losing you 1 unit of utility.

Now it should hopefully be clearer why you do indeed want to perform action A.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 December 2010 07:55:56PM 14 points [-]

And there's pressure to have some amount of sex. It may be relevant that asexuals started coming out after homosexuals did. This could be because their situation was less desperate, but I think not liking sex at all is in some ways considered weirder than liking non-standard sex.

Also, virginity past a certain age (varies by sub-culture and by gender) is considered odd.

I think the real compulsion isn't exactly to restrict sex, it's to have rules about sex.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2010 04:23:45AM *  5 points [-]

It may be relevant that asexuals started coming out after homosexuals did.

I don't think asexuals were really in the closet until relatively recently. After all, many denominations of Christianity provide people with reasonably high status positions that require that the person abstain from sex. Even the denominations that don't have monastic traditions wouldn't look down on someone who abstains from sex. It wasn't until the sexual liberation movement promulgated the idea that anyone who isn't interested enough in sex is a prude and probably repressed that asexuality became something unacceptable.

In response to comment by Eugine_Nier on What is bunk?
Comment author: DuncanS 09 December 2010 12:41:03AM 1 point [-]

Sorry to take a while to look at this.

It would. I'm aware of what Dawkins has said about this - that one doesn't neeed to be an expert on fairies in order to conclude that they don't exist, and that this ought to apply to Gods as well. This is fair enough.

It's a rule of argument. If someone doesn't want to learn about fairies, that's their own concern. But if they want to persuade some other people who do believe in the fairies, they ought to take the time to learn enough about what those people say about fairies to plug into their world.

Theories are like languages, I think. If someone has a mental vocabulary which involves fairies, you will more easily persuade them if you can use the language too.

What too often happens is that a critic doesn't learn the other person's language. They then end up misrepresenting what the other party believes, and to follow that up, they tell them that their first step to knowledge is to throw away a language that they find useful in favour of a different one that they've never used. They then go on to make arguments to which they have no idea how I'm going to respond. As a persuasion strategy, this is a non-starter.

I'm not at all saying all theories/languages are equal, some are far better than others. But if you want to persuade an outsider, learning their language is only courteous, and gives you a huge advantage. You learn where the real problems of the other belief system are. You discover what it does successfully explain. You discover how to partially express your beliefs in their system, which makes it easier for them to accept and test what you're saying.

My original point is that, as an optimisation, you can immediately reject any arguer who hasn't realised that they need to talk the language of their hearers.

It does explain why Dawkin's book has resulted in more heat than light. Reading it, Dawkin's book can be summarised as saying "Your theism seems completely ridiculous, for all these reasons. I don't know how you believe it." The reply has more or less been "Yes, I can see that you don't know how we believe it. Perhaps if you did know that, you would have written a better book."

In the case of the theists, this is in fact quite difficult. I am actually a Christian myself so I can give you the inside track here. The formal 'arguments' that Christians put forward for believing in God actually have little to do with the real reasons that they do believe. Christians in particular are persuaded principally by the part of their mind that deals with relationships and morality - they believe God is so much more morally right than anything else they've heard about that only his existence explains the improvement. It's not based on the faculty of reason, though, it persuades through the interpersonal brain. Reason comes later, and actually maps quite poorly onto what the essence of their faith is for the most part. The outcome is what Dawkins observes - you can give those religious arguments a terrible intellectual thrashing, and it makes very little difference to what they believe afterwards. He's not really speaking their language.

Another example of this is the opposite phenomenon - Christians, speaking in their own language that doesn't connect to atheists, say they don't believe in atheism because it's immoral. If you can imagine how likely such an argument is to impress Richard Dawkins, you have perhaps a mirror image of why his argument doesn't impress the theists.

Trying to express yourself in the language of the other party makes a huge difference. Let's take as an example Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis - the ultimate ensemble theory. Suppose he's right about part of this - that everything that's mathematically rationally describable 'exists' - whatever that is. But suppose he's wrong about the other part - that this forms an ensemble. Suppose instead it forms a network - that everything that exists is actually a conceptual network of interconnected mathematical concepts - an ultimate network of ideas. Not inherently implausible - it certainly is about the simplest possible description of what might exist that I can think of.

It also is pretty much a description of an omniscient God. But if I'd just talked about that in my language, it wouldn't have been as interesting.

Atheism isn't really Dawkin's main focus either. Dawkins isn't primarily against God - he's against faith. He believes people ought to believe things for rational reasons, not because they ought to, or that they'll be saved eternally if they do. Where Dawkins is most readable is when he's talking about 'survival machines', or the way each individual gene in an organism is out to optimise its own survival in its own way - whether that's good for the organism / species or not. Rationality and reason are his first love - atheism is more of a consequence of this than a belief in its own right. I very much share his view that people ought to believe things for rational reasons. Dawkins knows what systemic understanding is - I find the creationists assertion that there is no such thing - both in their arguments for rejecting science and in their own woeful lack of a systemic alternative view - very disturbing. I'd rather read Dawkins any day.

In response to comment by DuncanS on What is bunk?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 December 2010 02:31:40AM 1 point [-]

My original point is that, as an optimisation, you can immediately reject any arguer who hasn't realised that they need to talk the language of their hearers.

Why is this a good optimization? Do you have any particular evidence that an arguer who is willing to learn and use your language is more likely to have accurate beliefs?

Comment author: David_Gerard 08 December 2010 08:27:51AM *  5 points [-]

Peter Singer's media-touted "position on infanticide" is an excellent example of why even philosophers might shy away from talking about hypotheticals in public. You appear to have just become Desrtopa's nighmare.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 08:38:35AM 2 points [-]

My problem with Singer is that his "hypotheticals" don't appear all that hypothetical.

Comment author: David_Gerard 08 December 2010 08:27:51AM *  5 points [-]

Peter Singer's media-touted "position on infanticide" is an excellent example of why even philosophers might shy away from talking about hypotheticals in public. You appear to have just become Desrtopa's nighmare.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 08:31:18AM *  2 points [-]

You appear to have just become Desrtopa's nighmare.

What specifically are you referring to? (I haven't been following Desporta's posts.)

Comment author: waitingforgodel 08 December 2010 07:35:24AM 2 points [-]

Ahh. Are you aware of any other deletions?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 07:52:30AM 3 points [-]

Yes, several times other poster's have brought up the subject and had their comments deleted.

Comment author: waitingforgodel 08 December 2010 07:32:29AM 2 points [-]

Sure, agreed. The way I presented it only showed very simplistic reasoning.

Let's just say that, if you imagine a Democrat that desperately wants to do x but can't justify it morally (punch a baby, start a somewhat shady business, not return a lost wallet full of cash), one way to resolve this conflict is to add Republican channels to his reasoning.

It doesn't always work (sanctity of life, etc), but I think for a large number of situations where we Democrats-at-heart get cold feet it works like a champ :)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 07:49:26AM 1 point [-]

It doesn't always work (sanctity of life, etc), but I think for a large number of situations where we Democrats-at-heart get cold feet it works like a champ :)

So I've noticed. See the discussion following this comment for an example.

On the other hand other times Democrats take positions that Republicans horrific, e.g., euthanasia, abortion, Peter Singer's position on infanticide.

Comment author: waitingforgodel 08 December 2010 06:40:49AM -2 points [-]

I think you/we're fine -- just alternate between two tabs when replying, and paste it to the rationalwiki if it gets deleted.

Don't let EY chill your free speech -- this is supposed to be a community blog devoted to rationality... not a SIAI blog where comments are deleted whenever convenient.

Besides, it's looking like after the Roko thing they've decided to cut back on such silliness.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 07:29:20AM 2 points [-]

Besides, it's looking like after the Roko thing they've decided to cut back on such silliness.

I believe EY takes this issue very seriously.

Comment author: waitingforgodel 08 December 2010 06:56:45AM -1 points [-]

Am I the only one who can honestly say that it would depend on the day?

There's a TED talk I once watched about how republicans reason on five moral channels and democrats only reason on two.

They were (roughly):

  1. harm/care
  2. fairness/reciprocity
  3. in-group/out-group
  4. authority
  5. purity/scarcity/correctness

According to the talk, Democrats reason with primarily the first two and Republicans with all of them.

I took this to mean that Republicans were allowed to do moral calculus that Democrats could not... for instance, if I can only reason with the firs two, then punching a baby is always wrong (it causes harm, and isn't fair)... If, on the other hand, I'm allowed to reason with all five, it might be okay to punch a baby because my Leader said to do it, or because the baby isn't from my home town, or because my religion says to.

Republicans therefore have it much easier in rationalizing self-serving motives.

(As an aside, it's interesting to note that Democrats must have started with more than just the two when they were young. "Mommy said not to" is a very good reason to do something when you're young. It seems that they must have grown out of it).

After watching the TED talk, I was reflecting on how it seems that smart people (myself sadly included) let relatively minor moral problems stop them from doing great things... and on how if I were just a little more Republican (in the five channel moral reasoning sense) I might be able to be significantly more successful.

The result is a WFG that cycles in and out of 2-channel/5-channel reasoning.

On my 2-channel days, I'd have a very hard time hurting another person to save myself. If I saw them, and could feel that human connection, I doubt I could do much more than I myself would be willing to endure to save another's life (perhaps two hours assuming hand-over-a-candle level of pain -- permanent disfigurement would be harder to justify, but if it was relatively minor).

On my 5-channel days, I'm (surprisingly not so embarrassed to say) I'd probably go arbitrarily high... after all, what's their life compared to mine?

Probably a bit more than you were looking to hear.

What's your answer?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 07:25:45AM 2 points [-]

I took this to mean that Republicans were allowed to do moral calculus that Democrats could not... for instance, if I can only reason with the firs two, then punching a baby is always wrong (it causes harm, and isn't fair)... If, on the other hand, I'm allowed to reason with all five, it might be okay to punch a baby because my Leader said to do it, or because the baby isn't from my home town, or because my religion says to.

First let me say that as a Republican/libertarian I don't entirely agree with Haidt's analysis.

In any case, the above is not quiet how I understand Haidt's analysis. My understanding is that Democracts have no way to categorically say that punching (or even killing) a baby is wrong. While they can say it's wrong because as you said it causes harm and isn't fair, they can always override that judgement by coming up with a reason why not punching and/or killing the baby would also cause harm. (See the philosophy of Peter Singer for an example).

Republicans on the other hand can invoke sanctity of life.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 December 2010 08:08:29PM 3 points [-]

I was once chastized by a senior singinst member for not being prepared to be tortured or raped for the cause.

Forget entirely 'the cause' nonsense. How far would you go just to avoid not personally getting killed? How much torture per chance that your personal contribution at the margin will prevent your near term death?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 05:56:23AM 2 points [-]

Could we move this discussion somewhere, where we don't have to constantly worry about it getting deleted.

Comment author: LucasSloan 07 December 2010 04:27:59PM 1 point [-]

How hard is it to live off the dole in Finland? Also, non-academic research positions in think tanks and the like (including, of course, SIAI).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 December 2010 05:54:11AM *  3 points [-]

How hard is it to live off the dole in Finland?

Given the current economic situation in Europe, I'm not sure that's a good long term strategy.

Also, I suspect spending to long on the dole may cause you to develop habits that'll make it harder to work a paying job.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 December 2010 05:50:04PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not sure what you think the difference between "people choose, consciously or subconsciously, to get offended" and "people get offended" is.

Regardless: some people get upset when they think I believe, based on their group membership G, that they have an attribute A. Sometimes this happens even when A is more common in G than in the general population.

Perhaps this is unreasonable when A is "is American" and G is "LessWrong".

Perhaps it's also unreasonable when A is "has a criminal record" and G is "American black man."

But the fact remains that people do get upset by this sort of thing..

If we want to establish the explicit social norm on LessWrong that these sorts of assumptions are acceptable, that's our choice, but let's at least try not to be surprised when outsiders are upset by it.

Edit: Actually, on thinking about it, I realize I'm being a doofus. You almost undoubtedly meant, not inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population, but inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G, which is a far more unreasonable thing to be upset about. My apologies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2010 10:48:14PM 1 point [-]

Edit: Actually, on thinking about it, I realize I'm being a doofus. You almost undoubtedly meant, not inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population, but inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G, which is a far more unreasonable thing to be upset about. My apologies.

Strictly speaking you should adjust your probability estimate of the person having attribute A either way. How you then act depends on the consequences of making either error., e.g., the consequences of falsely assuming someone isn't a violent criminal can be more serious then the reverse.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 December 2010 08:20:53PM 0 points [-]

I don't think it's a question of what gets stored so much as what gets activated.

That is, if I have three nodes that "represent" inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population (N1), inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G (N2), and the word "stereotyping" (N3), and my N1->N3 and N2->N3 links are stronger than N1 and N2's links to any other word, and the N3->N1 link is much stronger than the N3->N2 link, then lexical operations are going to make this sort of mistake... I might start out thinking about N2, decide to talk about it, therefore use the word "stereotyping," which in turn strongly activates N1, which displaces N2.

This is why having distinct words for minor variations in meaning can be awfully useful, sometimes. I'm willing to bet that if we agreed to use different words for N1 and N2, and we had enough conversations about stereotyping to reinforce that agreement, we'd find this error far less tempting, easier to notice, and easier to correct.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 December 2010 10:40:12PM 1 point [-]

See the sequence on A Human's Guide to Words for more on this subject.

Comment author: lucidfox 03 December 2010 07:35:48AM 0 points [-]

Minor nitpicks: "transsexual" is written with two S's, and when writing about positive charges, you probably meant "attracts negatively charged particles".

On to the subject:

If the "gender flag" is there for the purposes of reproduction, how can non-heterosexuals and childfree people exist?

More importantly, the "flight" flag is observable: we can look at a card and see that it reads "flying". Assuming we could do a full brain scan, what would be your prior expectation for finding this gender flag? Would you expect to be able to identify transsexuals by this flag in close correlation to their self-reporting? What would you do about false positives and false negatives, if those turned out to exist?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2010 08:18:00AM 2 points [-]

If the "gender flag" is there for the purposes of reproduction, how can non-heterosexuals and childfree people exist?

Just because something has a purpose, doesn't mean it necessarily achieves it. This is especially so when the designer is the blind idiot God. See Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers for some discussion of this phenomenon.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2010 07:46:14AM 6 points [-]

No, what Gates wanted was measurable results

The problem with demanding "measurable results", is that you'll get precisely what you measure, quite possibly by doing more damage in some other way that you didn't think to measure.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 December 2010 05:31:09AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, I agree that it's a mistake to equate status (or gender, or etc.) with an outside phenomenon, just like it's a mistake to equate my memory of an event with the event itself.

OTOH, there is a story to be told about why proto-humans whose brains had states homologous with the states of our brains that we label "gender," "status," and so forth succeeded in passing their genes along to the present day, while their siblings who lacked such states did not. (1)

Which suggests that there is -- or at least was -- something in the world that these brain states correlate with non-accidentally.

And if you want to understand that brain state at a functional level, you want to understand that corresponding thing-in-the-world.

So when you suggest

A primitive "gender" flag exists, and has no intrinsic meaning except for how it influences our actions

...well, sure, in some sense that's true. Nothing in my brain has any intrinsic meaning, it's all just a mechanism that influences my actions.

But I would counter-suggest that the "primitive gender flag" (assuming it actually is a simple primitive, rather than a complex contingent data structure) got that way for a reason, and that reason has to do with facts about the world, and an understanding of gender that fails to take those facts about the world into account is an importantly incomplete understanding of gender.

==

(1) Well, probably. It's possible that it was just an accident, I guess. But it doesn't seem like the thing to bet on.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2010 06:34:49AM 1 point [-]

OTOH, there is a story to be told about why proto-humans whose brains had states homologous with the states of our brains that we label "gender," "status," and so forth succeeded in passing their genes along to the present day, while their siblings who lacked such states did not.

Which suggests that there is -- or at least was -- something in the world that these brain states correlate with non-accidentally.

That story heavily involves the different roles the genders play in reproduction. In particular the something that the brain states correlate with is whether you contribute sperms or eggs to the next generation.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2010 02:26:34AM 1 point [-]

One way to think about this is that in both failure of internalization and belief in belief, the believer's brain is in the same state. The only difference between the two cases is whether the belief in question corresponds to the territory.

In particular, there is no way to tell these two cases apart by introspection.

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 December 2010 10:27:15PM 2 points [-]

That's already on the list, fifth hypothesis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2010 10:29:45PM 1 point [-]

Oops, sorry didn't notice the second clause of that point.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2010 10:19:17PM 3 points [-]

I notice that you seem to exclude the possibility that it is they who are right and you who is wrong.

I point that out because that is one of the main reasons smart people hold wrong beliefs.

Comment author: wedrifid 30 November 2010 12:12:28AM *  0 points [-]

You of course probably realize all this already from the workshops, but I can imagine what some people here are likely to say about the small bits you've just mentioned, so I'd like to nip that in the bud if possible.

Thankyou. If someone had the gall to moralize at someone who had just broken free from the 'goodness' cage I would have been displeased, to put it mildly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2010 06:31:01AM 2 points [-]

Thankyou. If someone had the gall to moralize at someone who had just broken free from the 'goodness' cage I would have been displeased, to put it mildly.

On the other hand, without further context "I have the right to feel like a good person no matter what I do" is a dangerous thing to internalize. In fact I suspect that rules, like "If I want to murder someone, I should feel like a bad person" exist in the brain using the same mechanism. Obviously this is one rule you shouldn't get rid of.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2010 05:28:38AM 2 points [-]

This is a question that we can ask about every bias. Is racism ever appropriate? Yes, if you're casting for a movie where the character's race is relevant. Is sexism ever appropriate? Yes, if you're looking to hire a surrogate mother (or, for many of us, a mate). But for other biases the question becomes more interesting.

I'm curious what definition of racism/sexism you're using here? If you mean a biased belief that doesn't correspond to reality and/or a 'bigoted preference' that is effectively a terminal value then the examples you give aren't racist.

If you mean making any decision on the basis of race a less contrived, if more mind killing, example is deciding whether to cross the street on the basis of the skin color of the person walking in your direction.

Comment author: JamesAndrix 30 November 2010 08:46:37PM 1 point [-]

The two concepts could serve as a rhetorical crowbar:

Is this the kind of invisible dragon that isn't really there but you're in denial? ...or the kind that IS really there but you're in denial?

This in turn makes me think that there are some kinds of evidence that affect our behavior, and other kinds that affects our beliefs, and only partial overlap. (E.G. you know the dragon is there but you're not evolved to be as afraid as you should be, because you can't see, hear, or smell it.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2010 05:12:15AM 2 points [-]

This in turn makes me think that there are some kinds of evidence that affect our behavior, and other kinds that affects our beliefs, and only partial overlap. (E.G. you know the dragon is there but you're not evolved to be as afraid as you should be, because you can't see, hear, or smell it.)

The standard LW terminology for this is near and far modes of thought.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 December 2010 04:58:54AM 3 points [-]

Likewise, even if you've got a long explanation as to why your action isn't biased and how this is a good idea just this once, you should stick to the rule.

Reminds me of Eliezer's post on ethical inhibitions.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2010 01:16:28AM 5 points [-]

See also, Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder, which discusses failure to internalize as a way to protect us from the consequences of false belief.

Comment author: kybernetikos 29 November 2010 09:12:50PM *  1 point [-]

I suppose the goal you were going to spend the money on would have to be of sufficient utility if achieved to offset that in order to make the scenario work. Maybe saving the world, or creating lots of happy simulations of yourself, or finding a way to communicate between them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2010 01:07:18AM 1 point [-]

In that case what does 'Quantum' and/or many worlds have to do with this?

Comment author: HonoreDB 29 November 2010 04:54:53PM 4 points [-]

James Halperin's The Truth Machine long ago converted me to the idea that the best way to deal with this is to abandon privacy and the right to privacy as a societal ideal, and hope that our ability to thwart terrorists races their increase in power. Even an opt-in total surveillance system would help a lot by reducing the number of suspects.

I should probably make the case against privacy in a top-level post at some point, but pretty much everything I'll say will be taken from that book. For example, I bet Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are currently cursing the fact that they don't have a government-timestamped video of themselves at the time of Meredith Kercher's murder.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 November 2010 12:40:37AM 6 points [-]

On the other hand, the recent policies of the American Transportation Safety Administration demonstrate how easy it is to implement policies that infringe on privacy without getting any corresponding reduction in risk.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 November 2010 02:05:41PM 3 points [-]

I've thought of this from the angle of the Fermi paradox. Afaik, Fermi thought war was a major filter. Spam is a minor indicator that individual sociopathy could be another filter as individual power increases. How far are we from home build-a-virus kits?

The major hope [1] I can see is that any of the nano or bio tech which could be used to destroy the human race will have a run-up period, and there will be nano and bio immune systems which might be good enough that the human race won't be at risk, even though there may be large disasters.

[1]Computer programs seem much more able to self-optimize than nano and bio systems. Except that of course, a self-optimizing AI would use nano and bio methods if they seem appropriate.

This is not a cheering thought. I think the only reasonably popular ideology which poses a major risk is the "humanity is a cancer on the planet" sort of enviromentalism-- it seems plausible that a merely pretty good self-optimizing AI tasked with eliminating the human race for the sake of other living creatures would be a lot easier to build than an FAI, and it might be possible to pull a group of people together to work on it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2010 07:43:18PM 1 point [-]

I'd also be worried about:

  • depressed microbiologists

  • religious fanatics who have too much trust that 'God will protect them' from their virus

  • Buddhists who loose their memetic immune system and start taking the 'material existence is inherently undesirable' aspect of their religion seriously, or for that mater a practitioner of an Abrahamic religion who takes the idea of heaven seriously.

Comment author: NihilCredo 21 November 2010 09:17:20PM *  3 points [-]

France, the Nordic countries, the Czech Republic, the Baltic countries, am I forgetting someone? oh, yes, and China beg to differ.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2010 08:08:26AM 2 points [-]

France, the Nordic countries, the Czech Republic, the Baltic countries, am I forgetting someone? oh, yes, and China beg to differ.

I would simply like to mention that all those countries have sub-replacement fertility.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 29 November 2010 07:40:33AM 0 points [-]

That makes plenty of sense, Eugine_Nier, but the premise of this whole little exchange (admittedly, several layers up in the comment thread) was that at least some people do care enough to try to save their neighbors, and only refrain because of social norms against being annoyingly evangelical.

But it’s worth wondering, when we consider a society which upholds a free market of ideas which compete on their relative strength, whether we’ve taken adequate precautions against the sheer annoyingness of a society where the taboo on actually trying to convince others of one’s beliefs has been lifted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2010 08:04:06AM 1 point [-]

That makes plenty of sense, Eugine_Nier, but the premise of this whole little exchange (admittedly, several layers up in the comment thread) was that at least some people do care enough to try to save their neighbors, and only refrain because of social norms against being annoyingly evangelical.

In particular violating that social norm would make it harder for them to save themselves.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 29 November 2010 01:02:27AM 6 points [-]

They only seem inconsequential if you haven't internalized the idea that they apply to anything real.

My subjective impression is that most moderately religious people in industrialized countries haven't. Otherwise, when relatives drop out of the faith, you would expect to see them get daily evangelical phone calls, rather than frosty silence.

Likewise parenting and politics -- there are 10 partisan hacks who have trouble making friends with people of the opposite party for every 1 activist who actually leaves her county to do some electioneering. You hear a lot about parents who don't want their kid associating with what they see as the children of unduly (lax / anal-retentive) parents, and these people might urgently defend their views at, e.g., a dinner party, but you rarely hear of campaigns where a parent goes around trying to convince all her closest friends (let alone the whole community) that X parenting style ruins kids' lives. Hell, people usually don't even do that when they think mercury in vaccines causes autism.

People believe that they believe that parenting, politics, and religion have consequences, but they don't actually believe it. That's my opinion, anyway.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2010 06:42:03AM 2 points [-]

Hell, people usually don't even do that when they think mercury in vaccines causes autism.

That's more a case of people saving their own kids before saving their neighbors'. If it's sufficiently hard to save oneself, people won't always get to the save one's neighbor part.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2010 03:47:30AM 6 points [-]

I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right torturing criminals isn't a good strategy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2010 06:15:58AM *  3 points [-]

I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment.

That depends on how available the punishment is.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 November 2010 11:29:26PM 1 point [-]

Well, retroactive changes to p tend to be much smaller since most evidence degrades with time.

That's a fair point. So, yes: if p is effectively constant and SP is not, you're right that that's a good reason to keep applying the old SP to old prisoners. I stand corrected.

Also in this case since the crime is attempting violent overthrow of the government retroactive changes in p are almost non-existent, after all a successful overthrow by its nature virtually eliminates your chances of getting punished for it.

So are you saying the SP-setting strategy you're proposing doesn't apply to crimes that don't destabilize the criminal justice system itself?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 November 2010 12:53:37AM 1 point [-]

So are you saying the SP-setting strategy you're proposing doesn't apply to crimes that don't destabilize the criminal justice system itself?

I'm saying what I said and hopefully what's true, redo the calculations yourself if you like. Here I'm saying that if a crime has the potential to destabilize the criminal justice system itself, that should be taken into account when calculating p.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 November 2010 04:49:16AM 1 point [-]

If I assume that changes to SP are retroactive but that changes to p and EB aren't... for example, if I assume that if today I increase my ability to catch criminals (say, by implementing superior DNA scanning), this only affects criminals who commit crimes today or later, not criminals who committed a crime last year... then I agree with you.

If that's not true, then I don't agree. The same logic that says "Dave will probably lower SP in the future, so I should apply a discount factor to his claimed SP" also says "Dave will probably raise p in the future, so I should apply an inflation factor to his claimed p." And since what's driving the reduction in SP in this toy example is precisely the increase in P, the factors should offset one another, which keeps my level of deterrence constant.

Now, I grant you, this assumes a rather high degree of rationality from my hypothetical criminal. In the real world, I strongly doubt any actual criminals would reason quantitatively this way. But in the real world, I strongly doubt any actual criminals reason quantitatively from EB, SP, and p in the first place.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 November 2010 04:34:45PM 1 point [-]

If I assume that changes to SP are retroactive but that changes to p and EB aren't... for example, if I assume that if today I increase my ability to catch criminals (say, by implementing superior DNA scanning), this only affects criminals who commit crimes today or later, not criminals who committed a crime last year... then I agree with you.

Well, retroactive changes to p tend to be much smaller since most evidence degrades with time.

Also in this case since the crime is attempting violent overthrow of the government retroactive changes in p are almost non-existent, after all a successful overthrow by its nature virtually eliminates your chances of getting punished for it.

Comment author: Carinthium 24 November 2010 11:06:17AM 2 points [-]

Just because somebody has a significant degree of irrationality doesn't mean they will necessarily fail- skill is a far more important factor (and people can be rational in some areas but not others). How would you deter irrational crooks?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2010 04:19:20AM 4 points [-]

How would you deter irrational crooks?

That depends on which biases they're exhibiting.

For example if they're exhibiting availability bias, make punishments public and memorable. Maybe put the mutilated corpses of criminals on display in public places.

For overconfidence bias if they're underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.

Comment author: prase 24 November 2010 12:19:13PM 0 points [-]

Certainly there was, you can find it among the comments. There is little remaining of the treaty now. That is probably what Diplomacy is intended to teach: value of any treaty approaches zero over time, and often it does quite quickly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2010 04:07:54AM 2 points [-]

Also, since the treaty was signed in public, players should take the extend to which the treaty was honored into account when deciding who to ally with.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 November 2010 07:29:18PM 1 point [-]

On the account you've given so far, I don't see why not.

If I've followed you correctly, your position is that severe punishment of prisoners is justified because it deters crime in the future.

But if I implement a 100% effective crime-deterrent -- say, I release a nanovirus into the atmosphere that rewires everyone's brains to obey the law at all times -- then from that moment forward severe punishment no longer deters crime. That is, I will get the same crime rate in the future whether I punish my current prisoners or not.

So why should I continue punishing them in that case? It seems like wasted effort.

Granted, none of the suggestions I've proposed are 100% effective. But it seems like the same argument scales down.

You're claiming that in order to deter crime today, I should establish an SP inversely correlated with p (among other things). If I raise p today, then, it follows that I should lower SP today to keep deterrence constant. What benefit is there to continuing to punish existing prisoners under the old SP?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2010 03:38:50AM *  3 points [-]

What benefit is there to continuing to punish existing prisoners under the old SP?

Otherwise your new value of SP isn't credible. After all, you're likely to lower it again in the future and then apply the change retroactively.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 November 2010 01:55:30PM 0 points [-]

Re: by fiat... yes, that's true. In behavior-modification as in many other things, the thing I can do most easily is not the thing that gets me the best results. This is, of course, not an argument in favor of doing the easiest thing.

Re: TDT... I don't see where TDT makes different requirements from common sense, here.

Re: using p/EB at the time of the crime... of course. If I want to affect your decision-making process now, the only thing that matters is the policy I have now and how credibly I articulate/ that policy. But that's just as true of my policy around how I investigate crimes (which affects p) as it is of my policy around how I select punishments (which affects SP).

Relatedly: yes, most of my suggestions require lead time; if you're in a "ticking time bomb" scenario your options are more limited. That said, I distrust such claims: it's far more common for people to pretend to exigent circumstances than it is for such circumstances to actually occur.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2010 06:57:56PM *  2 points [-]

My point is simply that you shouldn't reduce the punishment after the fact, by say rescuing Bellatrix, simply because you have since changed the value of p and/or EB.

In response to The Cult Of Reason
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2010 06:54:18PM *  1 point [-]

You do realize it was a follower of the cult of reason, Robespierre, who was responsible for the reign of terror.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 November 2010 06:00:58AM *  4 points [-]

I suspect you can answer this question yourself: think about all the crimes you don't commit. Heck, think about all the crimes you didn't commit today. Why didn't you commit them?

If your answer is something other than "fear of being caught and punished," consider the possibility that other people might be like you in this respect, and threatening to punish you might not be the most cost-effective way to keep them from committing crimes, also.

But if you want more concrete answers, well, off the top of my head and in no particular order:

  • Increase P

  • Compare attributes of people (P1) who commit a crime given a certain perceived (p,EB,SP) triplet to those of people (P2) who don't commit that crime given the same triplet, and investigate whether any of those attribute-differences are causal... that is, whether adding a P2 attribute to P1 or removing an attribute from P1 reduces P1's likelihood of committing the crime. If any are, investigate ways to add/remove the key attributes to/from P1.

  • Decrease perceived EB -- for example, if a Weber's-law-like relationship applies, then increasing standard of living might have this effect.

  • Condition mutually exclusive behaviors/attitudes.

  • Arrange your society so that there are more benefits to be gotten by participating in it than by attacking it, and make that arrangement as obvious to the casual observer as possible.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2010 06:58:53AM 1 point [-]

I agree with your points in general; however, note that unlike increasing SP your suggestions can't simply be implemented by fiat.

Also given these things weren't done, I believe TDT requires us to use the values of p and EB at the time the crime was committed when calculating SP because those are the values would be dark lords are using to determine whether to start an overthrow.

Comment author: hairyfigment 24 November 2010 12:09:43AM 2 points [-]

I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2010 05:14:17AM 4 points [-]

The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice).

On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don't consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can't simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.

Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn't matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can't prevent overthrows, you won't get to live under it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 November 2010 05:25:31PM 7 points [-]

(nods) This sort of thing is worth thinking about cautiously before supporting, even in theory. A few other points worth considering in a more detailed analysis:

Beliefs vs. actuality

It's not the actual probability of getting caught that matters for deterrence, it's the potential criminal's belief about that probability.

That is, if I only have a 1% chance of being caught but I believe I have a 99% chance of getting caught, I'm easier to deter. Conversely, if I have a 15% chance of getting caught but believe I have a 0.0001% chance of getting caught, I'm difficult to deter (at least, using the kind of deterrence you are talking about).

Similar things are true about EB and SP -- what matters is not the actual expected benefit or cost, but rather my beliefs about that expected benefit/cost.

Magnitude vs. valuation

People's valuations of a probability of a cost or benefit don't scale linearly with the magnitude of either the cost/benefit or the probability.

Which means that even if (1/p-1)×EB < SP is a manageable inequality for crimes with moderate risks and benefits, SP might nevertheless balloon up when p gets small enough and/or EB gets large enough to cross inflection points.

So the threat of a lifetime of psychological torture might not be sufficiently unpleasant to deter certain crimes. Indeed, it might be that for certain crimes you just aren't capable of causing enough suffering to deter them, no matter how hard you try.

Knock-on effects

Official policies about criminal justice don't just influence potential criminals; they influence your entire culture. They affect the thinking of the people who implement those policies, and the people whose loved ones are affected by them (including those who believe their loved ones are innocent), and of their friends and colleagues.

The more extreme your SP, the larger and more widespread the knock-on effects are going to be.

Addendum

For my own part I think Azkaban, and the whole theory of criminal justice that creates places like Azkaban, is deeply flawed and does more harm than good. I could use stronger terms like "evil," I think, with some justice.

Also, I think the endpoint of the kind of reasoning illustrated above is in practice the conclusion that our best bet is to instill in everyone an unquestioned belief in a Hell where people suffer eternal torment, and unquestioning faith in an infallible Judge who sends criminals to Hell. After all, that maximizes perceived SP and perceived p, right?

Unfortunately, the knock-on effects are... problematic.

There are better approaches.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2010 04:46:19AM 1 point [-]

There are better approaches.

Such as, ...

Comment author: TheOtherDave 23 November 2010 04:43:59AM 5 points [-]

It's also useful, if you're going to do this kind of equation, to decide ahead of time how many innocents tortured for how many years you're willing to exchange for a reduced chance of political insurrection... and to develop as realistic a sense as you can of how reliable your courts are, so you don't fool yourself into thinking the quantity is lower than it is.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 November 2010 05:14:35AM 3 points [-]

I'm considering doing a more detailed calculation, including such things as false positives and the fact that you don't have perfect information about criminal's utility functions as a top level post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 November 2010 02:40:57AM *  4 points [-]

I was thinking whether, considering the nature of the wizarding world, Azkaban is really that unreasonable a punishment for Death Eaters. Keep in mind that in order to deter crime (to acausally prevent it) a potential criminal calculating the expected utility of committing a crime must get a negative value.

This value depends on:

  • EB, the criminal's expected benefit from getting away with it.

  • SP, the severity of the punishment should he get caught.

  • p, the probability of getting caught.

Specifically we want (1-p)×EB < p×SP or equivalently (1/p-1)×EB < SP.

In this case the expected benefit of successfully taking over the government and establishing a dictatorship is quite high. Also the Death Eaters were only stopped by a complete stroke of luck, so p is quite small. This suggests we need a very sever punishment to deter would be dark lords and their minions.

The punishment needs to be so sever that even though the would be dark lord and his minions have a good chance of succeeding, they're still deterred because of how severe the punishment would be on the off chance that they fail.

Given this, condemning them to spend the rest of their lives being tortured by dementors sounds about right.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 November 2010 02:05:20AM 1 point [-]

I do believe that one was covered by the newspapers :P

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 November 2010 02:07:44AM 1 point [-]

It still seems reckless, especially considering Austria and Turkey appear to be allied.

Comment author: Carinthium 23 November 2010 01:16:09AM 0 points [-]

Anybody got any on me?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 November 2010 01:50:38AM 1 point [-]

Why convoy to Albania?

In response to comment by Sniffnoy on Control Fraud
Comment author: Carinthium 22 November 2010 07:05:04AM 0 points [-]

Seems unlikely- you'd expect they'd change the rules to cover their tracks.

In response to comment by Carinthium on Control Fraud
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 November 2010 07:40:27AM 1 point [-]

At the very least that would require publicly stating what you're doing. Depending on the government system it might also require the legislature's cooperation.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 21 November 2010 05:40:30PM 0 points [-]

Value is value. You can't have two separate types of value if you're going to make a decision. You can't say, "I'm going to use economic value for economic decisions, and ethical value for ethical decisions", because decisions don't break down nicely for you into those categories.

Economic value and ethical value need to be merged. And the result will look more like economic value, because economic value is well-studied and quantified, while the main point of the category "ethical value" is to be vague and slippery, so that people can avoid actually getting answers about ethics.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 November 2010 07:03:58PM 3 points [-]

Economic value, a.k.a., market value, is how much something would be worth on the market. Ethical value is my personal utility function.

Comment author: nerzhin 20 November 2010 10:32:03PM 2 points [-]

Citation?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 November 2010 02:19:42AM *  4 points [-]

You can look at the wikipedia article Fertility and intelligence and its references for starters.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 November 2010 09:08:47PM *  0 points [-]

Very important. Any memeplex that has aims that happen to produce kids will have a edge. It just so happens few if any secular memplexes have made this possible.

But this is odd especially since values are arbitrary, is there really no value one can pursue that is best served (among other things) in having children (and perhaps attempt to imprint the same values on them)?

This, however, explains people who get incredibly upset at the notion of others not wanting children and brand them "selfish".

Its the same kind of upset a different kind of people have when they don't see someone ,who has already heard all the arguments for it, recycling.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality and being child-free
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 11:34:17PM 5 points [-]

Very important. Any memeplex that has aims that happen to produce kids will have a edge. It just so happens few if any secular memplexes have made this possible.

Another way a memeplex can succeed is by being very good at converting others. Note that such a memeplex if left unchecked could cause humans, or at least whatever culture it spreads in to evolve to extinction. As such leaders of other memeplexes may take extreme measures to suppress it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 09:16:34PM 3 points [-]

Failure to do this could take the form of an undirected relationship (two beliefs are "related" without either belief being the cause or the effect), or loops in a directed graph. I don't actually think we want to get rid of undirected relationships entirely -- people do use them in machine learning -- but I can't see any good reason for keeping the latter.

Feedback loops, where X affects Y and Y affects X, exist in real life, and you want to be able to model them.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 November 2010 08:50:01PM *  2 points [-]

Its not theism in itself. And I would argue its not rationality in itsef for a sufficient value of well... values.

Compare the fate of the very pious and irrational Amish (a table of who's demographic success I present in another comment) to the very pious and irrational shakers.

Membership in the Shakers dwindled in the late 19th century for several reasons: people were attracted to cities and away from the farms; Shaker products could not compete with mass-produced products that became available at a much lower cost; and Shakers could not have children, so adoption was a major source of new members. This continued until the states gained control of adoption homes. Some Shaker settlements, such as Pleasant Hill community in Kentucky, and Canterbury, New Hampshire, the latter of which died with its last member, Ethel Hudson, in September 1992,[6] have become museums.

Although there were six thousand believers at the peak of the Shaker movement, there were only twelve Shaker communities left by 1920. In the United States there is one remaining active Shaker community, at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, which as of September 2010 has only three members left, Sister June Carpenter, Brother Arnold Hadd, and Sister Frances Carr [7] [3][8]. The Sabbathday Lake community still accepts new recruits, as it has since its founding. Shakers are no longer allowed to adopt orphan children after new laws were passed in 1960 denying control of adoption to religious groups, but adults who wish to embrace Shaker life were welcome. This community, founded in 1782, was one of the smaller and more isolated Shaker communities during the sect's heyday. They farm and practice a variety of handicrafts; a Shaker Museum, and Sunday services[9] are open to visitors. Mother Ann Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of August. The people sing and dance and a Mother Ann cake is presented.

As a note of interest let me just point out that both groups where for a extended period of time of a size comparable to the number of regular LW readers.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality and being child-free
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 09:12:39PM 3 points [-]

Nevertheless, fertility is inversely correlated with most measures of intelligence and rationality.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 20 November 2010 03:19:50PM *  -1 points [-]

I think you're confusing things by conflating ethical value and economic value.

I think you're confusing things by postulating the existence of two different kinds of values.

If you had two kinds of values, how would you ever make a decision?

I think you're supposing that when I say "value", I mean dollars. I didn't say that.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 07:19:13PM 1 point [-]

I think you're supposing that when I say "value", I mean dollars. I didn't say that.

You use economic principals to justify assigning value to biodiversity when you said "the fact that value depends on scarcity is a fundamental economic principle."

I think the most reasonable interpretation of that sentence is: more me biodiversity/scarcity is an instrumental value and my terminal values are based on economic/market value.

If this is incorrect could you explain what you meant, since the only other explanation I can think of is that it was a flimsy attempt to rationalize your valuing biodiversity.

Comment author: InquilineKea 20 November 2010 06:11:54AM 0 points [-]

Okay sure, but isn't utilitarianism usually conceived of as "what contributes to the maximum average happiness?" And do most people here conceive of a basis of rationality with an end other than happiness? (I mean, there are ways if you define the end in another way, such as satisfaction, but do many people here do that?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 06:41:46AM 3 points [-]

(I mean, there are ways if you define the end in another way, such as satisfaction, but do many people here do that?)

I do, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

Comment author: knb 20 November 2010 04:01:27AM 5 points [-]

Also known as a "Tragedy of the Commons".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 04:11:25AM 3 points [-]

You can also think of it as evolution selecting against atheism.

Comment author: HughRistik 20 November 2010 02:27:22AM 0 points [-]

On some other rules subjects, we should think about house rules. I like the Redscape house rules.

One of the most important areas of house rules is about draws. Redscape's draw condition is a "draw including all survivors" (DIAS). A DIAS is unranked; so a country with 3 centers doesn't finish worse than a country with 10 centers. This condition is important to avoid wrangling over a few centers in a game that will be a draw anyway. I propose that we play by this draw condition unless another player who's already played some games proposes something different.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 04:02:50AM 1 point [-]

I thought DIAS was the de facto standard.

Comment author: AlexMennen 20 November 2010 12:39:53AM 1 point [-]

I was under the impression that communication was not allowed during retreat and build phases. Is that rule not universally used?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 04:01:42AM 2 points [-]

That's mostly a rule for face to face diplomacy designed to keep games from taking longer then they already do. After all most retreats and builds are obvious.

Comment author: InquilineKea 20 November 2010 02:28:09AM 4 points [-]

Yes, that's true. The thing is this: it is rational for each of us to be childless, even though childlessness is not collectively rational for us all. It's sort of like a prisoner's dilemma with many people in it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 03:55:33AM 4 points [-]

Eliezer discusses a situation like this here.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 02:18:35AM 4 points [-]

And this is why theists always outnumber atheists.

Comment author: wedrifid 19 November 2010 07:26:33PM 0 points [-]

Since we're equating ethical value and economic value here, there's a simple way to test this: how much could you get paid to save the human vs. the wolf.

I'm not. That's why I said I agree with your pre-edit point.

(Indirectly relevant: I am equating ethical value with personal utility which is something not everyone does.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2010 12:18:23AM 1 point [-]

I'm not. That's why I said I agree with your pre-edit point.

My point was that even if we grant PhilGoetz's equation of ethical and economic value, it still doesn't imply what he wants it to.

Comment author: wedrifid 19 November 2010 08:29:51AM 1 point [-]

I reversed my vote when I saw the edit. While the conflation point is undeniable the 'can create value' is not especially relevant to Phil's discussion of scarcity and changed my impression of the comment to 'just throw soldiers for the Rah Humans side'.

It is by no means assured that the eaten human from the margin would have created more value than is lost by damaging a hypothetical endangered animal. In fact, someone who particularly values biodiversity the net value that would have been created by the human is almost certainly negative.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 November 2010 07:08:30PM *  1 point [-]

It is by no means assured that the eaten human from the margin would have created more value than is lost by damaging a hypothetical endangered animal.

Since we're equating ethical value and economic value here, there's a simple way to test this: how much could you get paid to save the human vs. the wolf. Given that this is Norway and not some third world country, the human presumably has a decent amount of money he'd be willing to pay to save his life, not to mention his family and friends and the potential to take out a loan against future earnings. As for the wolf, you might be able to get something out of an animal-lover but not nearly as much as from the human.

In fact, someone who particularly values biodiversity the net value that would have been created by the human is almost certainly negative.

Except PhilGoetz is trying to use this argument to justify valuing biodiversity.

In response to comment by Document on Yes, a blog.
Comment author: Academian 19 November 2010 06:49:19AM 4 points [-]

That's not a dissenting view; Vassar is pointing out ideas that we now know to be correct, and suggesting that we study how they were created in order to be better at creating new good ideas. That would be impossible if we didn't have the present vantage point of knowing which ideas turned out correct and fruitful: at least for humans, solution checking is way easier than solution finding... that's why we still don't know if P=NP.

The history of science is very romantic and inspiring, precisely because we know which works to look to for inspiration. And of course, we should do that.

In response to comment by Academian on Yes, a blog.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 November 2010 06:54:10AM *  6 points [-]

Vassar is pointing out ideas that we now know to be correct, and suggesting that we study how they were created in order to be better at creating new good ideas.

I believe Vassar's point is that some of the ideas we now believe could actually be wrong (and in fact a lot of them probably are), and some older ideas might be closer to the truth.

Keep in mind that societies frequently reject ideas for reasons unrelated to their truth values.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 19 November 2010 03:51:13AM 0 points [-]

Unless you can provide an objective reason why your values should prefer eating the wolf, I will assume it's because you have a rule saying that you should treat members of your own species specially.

Once you become a vampire, the extensional interpretation of this rule changes. It now says that you should treat vampires specially.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 November 2010 05:25:59AM 1 point [-]

I will assume it's because you have a rule saying that you should treat members of your own species specially.

I place value on sapience/sentience/self-awareness whatever you want to call it.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 19 November 2010 03:33:49AM *  0 points [-]

"Ethical value"?

The ethics here are within Bella's mind, not within the wolf's. The ethical dilemma is that to realize the value of her continue life, she needs to destroy other things of value. The ethical problem is to minimize the value she destroys. And the fact that value depends on scarcity is a fundamental economic principle.

It's a value calculation. Don't confuse things by inventing a new category of "ethical value".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 November 2010 05:22:22AM *  2 points [-]

Don't confuse things by inventing a new category of "ethical value".

I think you're confusing things by conflating ethical value and economic value.

Edit: Also, even assuming you want to equate ethical and economic value, a human still has more value since he can create things of value much better then a wolf.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 18 November 2010 10:44:20AM *  3 points [-]

The argument seems to be, if Preference1<Archimedes> is too different from Preference1<cousin_it>, then Preference1 is a bad method of preference-extraction and should be rethought. A good method Preference2 for preference-extraction should have Preference2<Archimedes> much closer to Preference2<cousin_it>. And since Preference1 is inadequate, as demonstrated by this test case, Preference1<cousin_it> is also probably hugely worse for cousin_it than Preference2<Archimedes>, even if Preference2<cousin_it> is better than Preference2<Archimedes>.

We are not that wise in the sense that any moral progress we've achieved, if it's indeed progress (so that on reflection, both past and future would agree that the direction was right) and not arbitrary change, shouldn't be a problem for an AI to repeat, and thus this progress in particular (as opposed to other possible differences) shouldn't contribute to differences in extracted preference.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2010 04:23:37PM *  1 point [-]

The argument seems to be, if Preference1<Archimedes> is too different from Preference1<cousin_it>, then Preference1 is a bad method of preference-extraction and should be rethought. A good method Preference2 for preference-extraction should have Preference2<Archimedes> much closer to Preference2<cousin_it>. And since Preference1 is inadequate, as demonstrated by this test case, Preference1<cousin_it> is also probably hugely worse for cousin_it than Preference2<Archimedes>, even if Preference2<cousin_it> is better than Preference2<Archimedes>.

Of course the above constraint isn't nearly enough to uniquely specify Preference2.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 November 2010 08:09:34AM *  1 point [-]

My values, transposed into the position of a vampire in Luminosiverse, yes. I would be a predator, choosing among prey of two species that are not my own. There isn't anything magical about humanity and there is real value in maintaining a whole species. Particularly something as awesome as wolves. More so in a universe in which the species has magical significance.

As I mentioned, I'd eat someone's pet cat instead. But if it came down to a pure choice between eating wolves to extinction or eating a human then vampire wedrifid would eat a human.

Ultimately, if you bite the bullet on "Shut up and Multiply" then it turns out that you have to Shut up and Divide as well. A single human just isn't worth six billion times as much as the wolf species. In Bella's case she isn't doing a whole species worth of damage in one feed (which is, of course, hard to imagine) so the multiplicative factor isn't quite so large. But even so, her choice isn't a good one. Particularly given the ridiculous number of alternatives she had available.

Bella also can't be expected to Shut up and Multiply. If she follows in the author's footsteps she does not even implement consequentialism. But Bella's reasons for behaving unethically are not important.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2010 08:38:49AM 2 points [-]

There isn't anything magical about humanity and there is real value in maintaining a whole species.

Yes there is. Humans are sapient.

BTW, what do you find so magical about maintaining a whole species?

Comment author: wedrifid 18 November 2010 07:53:37AM 11 points [-]

The question why anyone would ever sincerely want to build an AI which extrapolates anything other than their personal volition is still unclear to me. It hinges on the definition of "sincerely want". If Eliezer can task the AI with looking at humanity and inferring its best wishes, why can't he task it with looking at himself and inferring his best idea of how to infer humanity's wishes?

This has been my thought exactly. Barring all but the most explicit convolution any given person would prefer their own personal volition to be extrapolated. If by happenstance I should be altruistically and perfectly infatuated by, say Sally, then that's the FAI's problem. It will turn out that extrapolating my volition will then entail extrapolating Sally's volition. The same applies to caring about 'humanity', whatever that fuzzy concept means when taken in the context of unbounded future potential.

I am also not sure how to handle those who profess an ultimate preference for a possible AI that extrapolates other than their own volition. I mean, clearly they are either lying, crazy or naive. It seems safer to trust someone who says "I would ultimately prefer FAI<someone> but I am creating FAI<larger group including wedrifid> for the purpose of effective cooperation."

Similarly, if someone wanted to credibly signal altruism to me it would be better to try to convince me that CEV<someone> has a lot of similarities with CEV<benefactor> that arise due to altruistic desires rather than saying that they truly sincerely prefer CEV<someone, benefactor>. Because the later is clearly bullshit of some sort.

How do we determine, in general, which things a document like CEV must spell out, and which things can/should be left to the mysterious magic of "intelligence"?

I have no idea, I'm afraid.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2010 08:29:45AM 8 points [-]

Eliezer appears to be asserting that CEV<someone> is equal for all humans. His arguments leave something to be desired. In particular, this is an assertion about human psychology, and requires evidence that is entangled with reality.

Leaving aside the question of whether even a single human's volition can be extrapolated into a unique coherent utility function, this assertion has two major components:

1) humans are sufficiently altruistic that say CEV<Alice> doesn't in any way favor Alice over Bob.

2) humans are sufficiently similar that any apparent moral disagreement between Alice and Bob is caused by one or both having false beliefs about the physical world.

I find both these statements dubious, especially the first, since I see on reason why evolution would make us that altruistic.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 November 2010 05:22:38AM 1 point [-]

I share your sentiment. I would go as far as to say that I would respect her more had she opted to eat a human by preference. Not that it would be necessary. For crying out loud, eat someone's pet cat.

Were I myself a part of Luminosiverse I would, it would seem, look down upon Bella with the same sense of moral superiority that she has for 'carnivores'. I wouldn't go as far as fighting her over it - her threat to worthwhile novelty in the environment is still trivial compared to humanity and she would have at least some usefulness in achieving other worthwhile goals. It also isn't like she has a fundamentally unacceptable overall goals. Just messed up priorities when it comes to sorting between lesser evils.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2010 07:28:38AM 1 point [-]

Were I myself a part of Luminosiverse I would, it would seem, look down upon Bella with the same sense of moral superiority that she has for 'carnivores'.

Are you actually saying that according to your values the life of a sapient human is worth less then the life of an endangered wolf?

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 14 November 2010 11:12:52AM 7 points [-]

...giving him a multi-barelled surname to boot! Though I'm not sure if that's a stereotype in the US?

I'm not sure what stereotype you're referring to, but the length of Harry's surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that's all.

Class, Americanization

I hadn't actually noticed that particular issue before, but now that it's been pointed out, it seems to me more like a LessWrong-related bias than an American one. We like to focus on big, progressive, constructive issues, and upper-class people are in a better position to do so meaningfully; stories with disenfranchised characters are more likely to deal with apartment cows like 'how can I keep my abusive stepfather from attacking me' and 'how can I afford to replace my broken wand', which we don't generally like to think about.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2010 04:31:09AM 5 points [-]

I'm not sure what stereotype you're referring to, but the length of Harry's surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that's all.

In countries with an aristocratic tradition, upper class people tend to have multiple middle names and surnames to better show off all the prominent families the person descends from.

In response to What is bunk?
Comment author: DuncanS 09 May 2010 12:25:45AM 16 points [-]

For me the primary evidence of a bunk claim is when the claimant fails to reasonably deal with the mainstream. Let's take the creation evolution debate. If someone comes along claiming a creationist position, but is completely unable to even describe what the evolutionary position is, or what might be good about it, then their idea is bunk. If someone is very good at explaining evolution as it really happens, but then goes on to claim something different can happen as well - then it becomes interesting.

Anyone proposing an alternative idea needs to know precisely what it is an alternative to - otherwise they haven't done their homework, and it isn't worth my time.

In response to comment by DuncanS on What is bunk?
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 November 2010 06:36:31PM 2 points [-]

If someone comes along claiming a creationist position, but is completely unable to even describe what the evolutionary position is, or what might be good about it, then their idea is bunk.

Replace "creationist" and "evolutionary" in that sentence with "atheist" and "religious" respectively and you have the most common theist criticism of Dawkins.

Therefore, since theism is more-or-less the mainstream position, wouldn't following your rule force you to conclude that Dawkins' atheism is bunk?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 15 November 2010 07:48:50PM 17 points [-]

(nods) These sorts of situations really do arise.

A couple of years ago, shortly after some significant brain damage, I had some very emotionally compelling experiences of the sort typically described as "supernatural." And so I asked myself the question: what's more likely? That the things I experienced happening actually did happen? Or that I was hallucinating due to brain damage?

I eventually bit the bullet and accepted that "hallucinating" was overwhelmingly more likely... but it was not an easy thing to do.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2010 09:10:28PM 2 points [-]

Reminds me of this story.

Comment author: NihilCredo 15 November 2010 06:41:27AM 1 point [-]

Something worth pondering: conditional on you being in fact strongly psychotic - on your perceptions having gone so rotten that your brain populates the world with Omegas and waistcoat-clad white rabbits - is there any course of action worth pursuing any longer? Deciding to see a psychiatrist may not have a high correlation with actually seeing a psychiatrist, you might end up blubbering incomprehensibly at your friendly neighbourhood crack dealer instead.

Effectively, this would drastically reduce or even nullify the weight you should give to the insanity hypothesis. If insanity made you able to undergo the actions you consciously chose only, say, 10% of the time, whereas the "Omega exists" scenario does not similarly hamper you, then you should divide by 10 the weight you gave to the option of assuming insanity.

And now I realise the obvious answer - that there are many orders of magnitude of difference between the likelihood of personal brain damage and that of Omega appearing, while I don't see the reasoning above eliminating more than two or three. Still, I'm leaving this comment since it seems there's something worthwhile in it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2010 08:48:45PM *  1 point [-]

Except insanity in humans tends to manifest as time-isolated episodes.

Comment author: Carinthium 15 November 2010 04:08:26AM 0 points [-]

Confirming that France and Italy have indeed agreed such.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2010 04:53:37AM 2 points [-]

You do realize you can reply to other people's comments and not just to the main post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2010 12:02:40AM *  3 points [-]

I believe the point of Omega is to make it easier to set up hypothetical situations without getting fixated to much on irrelevant details.

Comment author: cousin_it 14 November 2010 11:23:20PM *  1 point [-]

Eliezer has expressed the idea that using a Solomonoff-type prior over all programs doesn't mean you believe the universe to be computable - it just means you're trying to outperform all other (ETA: strike the word "other") computable agents. This position took me a lot of time to parse, but now I consider it completely correct. Unfortunately the reason it's correct is not easy to express in words, it's just some sort of free-floating math idea in my head.

Not sure how exactly this position meshes with UDT, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 November 2010 11:34:26PM 3 points [-]

Also, if the universe is not computable, there may be hyperturing agents running around. You might even want to become one.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 November 2010 10:16:26PM *  2 points [-]

Well there is this post by Eliezer, but it doesn't really address the issue to my satisfaction.

Comment author: Vaniver 14 November 2010 09:41:24AM 6 points [-]

One of the suggestions I've seen here that I see more wisdom in now than when I first heard it was "try to not have three or more of the most recent comments."

I come from forums; I'm generally the sole verbose libertarian on a board of verbose liberals. Generally, I will get into deep and long quote wars with several people; I'll respond to each person that posts, often before anyone else posts (so maybe a third to a half of the posts in a discussion thread I'm involved in might be by me, and a comparable fraction of the words written will be by me).

That's not what this site seems to be about. This site is about becoming less wrong, not winning arguments; learning to see the forest, not fighting over trees. I already took that sort of approach during arguments (I would welcome being shown to be wrong, admit I was wrong, and so on) but here feels different. There's much more benefit in waiting for the comments to come in, reading multiple of them at once, and contemplating them all together, rather than responding to each one individually and not connecting them. There's also just a benefit to adding more contemplation to your conversations- the other person will be around, and you don't have a blind post count here. If you want your karma to increase, you've got to convince more people to press the vote up button than the vote down button; and I'm genuinely surprised at which of my comments have had the highest karma, and how some posts I thought were gems were apparently rather unappreciated.

As mentioned elsewhere, the signal to noise ratio here matters. And so it's worthwhile to have an external throttle on your output until you're comfortable with your output. The vote up/down buttons are communication tools, and don't be afraid to use them instead of posting. Just don't go crazy (and don't vote someone down because they disagree with you, only if they disagree with you in an irrational or unedifying way).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 November 2010 10:04:02AM 3 points [-]

One of the suggestions I've seen here that I see more wisdom in now than when I first heard it was "try to not have three or more of the most recent comments."

I get the feeling that rule was created as a way to explain/rationalize to people who post many cranky comments what they're doing wrong without getting into big arguments attempting to explain to them what's wrong with their posts.

In any case I've certainly had three or more posts in the recent comments (I tend to post in batches) without anyone complaining, or probably even noticing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 November 2010 08:07:10AM 2 points [-]

I love Diplomacy. Unfortunately, I tend to find playing games very intense and can't spare the energy for that right now.

Comment author: InquilineKea 14 November 2010 07:11:39AM *  0 points [-]

Still though, what if I wanted to, say, ask a short question to the community? (or what if I wanted to ask multiple short questions?)

One question I'm especially dying to ask: How do people respond when they learn that you're interested in being very rational? This question is especially important since many people think they're more rational than they really are. And also since they might accuse self-labeled rationals as "arrogant".

Another thing: I wish there was a way for lesswrong people to post links and discuss them (but aren't prominent enough to be in the discussion session). We might be able to post links to several news articles a day (it's a way to learn from each other, since we could get each other's perspective on a particular link).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 November 2010 07:55:16AM 6 points [-]

Short questions are fine. It's the long rambling comments that will annoy people and earn you downvotes.

Comment author: InquilineKea 14 November 2010 06:56:52AM 0 points [-]

Ah yes, good points there. Yeah, it really depends on the ratio of newcomers to oldcomers. Oldcomers get annoyed when they have to answer the same questions over and over again. Of course, they could just downvote and move along (in fact, it usually doesn't cost much effort to do that). But for some reason, they get annoyed (it might even be irrational to get annoyed so easily, but lots of people believe that it's hard not to get annoyed - and they often justify their annoyance).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 November 2010 07:41:47AM *  7 points [-]

Of course, they could just downvote and move along (in fact, it usually doesn't cost much effort to do that).

And then the poster makes another post complaining about being downvoted. And when that one gets downvoted he accuses everyone of groupthink. Then it gets really nasty.

It my sound like I'm exaggerating, but this has already played out twice in the past two weeks.

Comment author: Alexandros 12 November 2010 06:29:37PM 0 points [-]

Oh, but the truth of the matter is irrelevant. It may be true, or it may be false, but as soon as the faithful get wind of the 'evolutionism' connection, they will certainly take the opposite side, just to be sure.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 November 2010 01:32:15AM 1 point [-]

My point is that this will be sufficiently controversial among scientists that by the time it shows up on the creationists' radar, the connection to 'evolutionism' won't be obvious or clear cut.

Comment author: Alexandros 11 November 2010 02:09:21PM 0 points [-]

I don't think you'd see such a correlation yet. As soon as these 'scientists' sound the 'low carb' == 'evolutionism' alarm, you may see a swift realignment from the creationist populace.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 November 2010 05:41:08AM 1 point [-]

I'm not so sure that would happen. Keep in mind evolutionary psychology is extremely controversial even among scientists who are atheists.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 07 November 2010 08:01:48AM 3 points [-]

I read Goertzel's recent paper on "Morphic Pilot Theory", which sketches a possible framework for PSI phenomena of the inexplicable synchronicity type.

As far as I could understand, the idea is that the seemingly causally unconnected phenomena are mutually affected by nonlocality from the Bohmian interpretation of quantum physics. The anomalous cognition part comes in as some kind of conservation of algorithmic information, where the Bohmian configuration state tends towards having a low Kolmogorov complexity, this shows up as the same pattern acausally showing up in several places at once. I guess human and animal brains are then assumed to have been evolved to make what use they can of this phenomenon.

I can't really evaluate the paper. I've never looked into Bohmian QM in any detail and would have to work up my physics to get there. I do get that the paper is very speculative, but it is interesting in positing zero ontologically basic woo to work. On the other hand, PSI with quantum physics is a well-deserved crackpot indicator, and I'd really need to know more about the generally physicist-approved version to tell if this stuff is off the deep end or not.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 November 2010 05:34:29AM 4 points [-]

I know a little about quantum physics. Under any interpretation of quantum theory equivalent to the standard ones, this won't work without woo.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 08 November 2010 05:34:16AM 2 points [-]

For game-theoretic reasons? (If so, even though this isn't about consequences, it still seems very worth separating from the terminal value of her life.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2010 05:59:35AM 3 points [-]

(If so, even though this isn't about consequences, it still seems very worth separating from the terminal value of her life.)

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Part of my point is that even if "she can be saved and prevented from killing others", she probably still shouldn't be.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 November 2010 09:39:19PM *  3 points [-]

Bella's life isn't just less valuable than Harry's. Her life has a large negative value. Harry should be trying to prevent her escape.

If she kills again, then yes, she shouldn't be saved. But this is a claim about consequences unrelated to the value of her life itself. If she can be saved and prevented from killing others, she should be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2010 05:26:54AM 1 point [-]

By TDT, the fact that she did a lot of evil things in the past is reason enough to assign her life less value.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2010 03:00:31AM 19 points [-]

Given what I know about Gould I suspect he likes group selection for the same reason he dislikes sociobiology. Namely, because group selection is moral.

As for your main point while I agree that it's dangerous to get into affective death spirals around your heroes and anti-affective death spirals about your villains, it is also true that the fact that someone doesn't care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren't necessarily reliable. After all he might only be making them because he finds them moral.

Comment author: BenAlbahari 28 February 2010 01:04:21PM *  2 points [-]

Thanks for the detailed reply - I'll try to respond to each of your points.

First of all, using dark arts does not imply you have to tell outright lies.

Secondly, you say "if a person ends up with better ideas but all the same biases, their heads can later just as easily be filled with whole new sets of bad ideas by other Dark Arts practitioners." When the alternative is that they only had bad ideas in their head, this is a still a win. And your example is the minimum win possible. What if we used dark arts to help someone remove a cognitive bias? Is it now justified?

Third, PZ Myer chose a very effective persuasion strategy, The Admirable Admission Pitch. However, one case where someone was effective sans-dark arts hardly proves the sans-dark arts approach is optimal in general. When you look at a heavy-weight persuader of the world like Al Gore, you can see he makes heavy use of the dark arts.

Finally, you're correct with respect to the problem you pointed out in your 1st paragarph. I'll tweak the post to fix it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 November 2010 02:31:03AM 1 point [-]

When you look at a heavy-weight persuader of the world like Al Gore, you can see he makes heavy use of the dark arts.

Yes, this is one of the reasons I have serious doubts about global warming.

Comment author: Snowyowl 07 November 2010 01:47:10AM *  1 point [-]

Lasers? EMPs that can take down a planet? And more than 99% of the universe is a low-temperature vacuum, so I wouldn't rule out a grey-goo scenario if the nanobots get into space.

Assuming they can build their components out of hydrogen, or if they resort to asteroid mining.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 November 2010 02:30:16AM 4 points [-]

These scenarios assume an AGI directing them. And an unfriendly AGI is an existential risk with or without nano.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 November 2010 06:54:20PM *  4 points [-]

Also, if nanotech can only work at low temperatures and in a vacuum, it's not much of an existential risk.

Comment author: nhamann 30 October 2010 01:10:39AM *  0 points [-]

I was just going to say that I had already linked him to that page in a previous reply to him, but it turns out I linked a different page. Oops. :[ Good call.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2010 01:18:27AM 1 point [-]

Isn't that what the wiki is supposed to be?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2010 12:35:22AM 2 points [-]

You may want to look at the metaethics sequence, especially this post, since it sounds that you might be saying something similar in different language. Of course, you'll probably need to read most of the metaethics sequence up to that point to understand that post.

Comment author: nhamann 29 October 2010 11:58:08PM *  4 points [-]

I have a hard time understanding what you're saying in this and the last post. You need to play more rationalist taboo.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 October 2010 12:22:00AM 6 points [-]

You need to play more rationalist taboo.

It would be nice to follow the same advice ourselves and not bombard newbies with lesswrong-specific jargon they probably don't understand. At the very least, we should provide links to a description. Such as Rationalist Taboo.

Comment author: DanArmak 26 October 2010 08:42:10AM 5 points [-]

The extenuating circumstance of having become evil under the influence of the Dark Lord provides a much weaker reason to rescue someone, and requires much more trust in the person who is conveying the information (since they must not only get the facts right, but make some subtle and complex judgments about the prisoner's character and what they deserve).

If Harry is a utilitarian, he shouldn't need extenuating circumstances. He should want to free everyone from Azkaban and from all forms of torture and suffering, including truly evil people. The only reason not to free Bellatrix Black should be the danger of her attacking other people later on, and that's the point on which he should seek reassurance from Quirrel (re: what they are going to do with her once freed).

But it seems Harry reverts to common human morals in the last few chapters. He attaches much weight to Bella's innocence. He thinks he'd like to kill Voldemoret as revenge or punishment.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 October 2010 11:53:30PM 2 points [-]

There's also the TDT idea that people who did evil things should be punished.

Comment author: Rain 26 October 2010 03:51:04PM *  1 point [-]

Obviously I believe I have no chance of success with the toy as described. But the slightest increase in predictive power seems to have a great deal of benefit. The marginal utility of increases in utility prediction seems quite high to me. Does it not seem that way to others?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2010 03:58:37PM 4 points [-]

The marginal utility of increases in utility prediction seems quite high to me.

Yes, well that's sort of the point of this site.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2010 03:42:12PM 3 points [-]

I suspect you're suffering from availability bias. Specifically, thinking about the utilitometer has caused you to subjectively overestimate how likely you are to succeed.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 October 2010 03:55:18AM *  6 points [-]

Suppose you are a a timeless decision theory agent playing this modified Prisoner's Dilemma with an actor that will always pick "defect" no matter what your strategy is. Clearly, your best move is to cooperate, gaining you 1 util instead of no utility, and giving your opponent his maximum 3 utils instead of the no utility he would get if you defected. Now suppose you are playing against another timeless decision theory agent. Clearly, the best strategy is to be that actor which defects no matter what.

Here is what I believe to be the standard explanation.

Unfortunately, you don't have the option of playing the same strategy as a "perfect defector" since you are currently a hypothetical TDT agent. You can of course play the strategy of being a hypothetical TDT agent that turned itself into a perfect defector. However, from the point of view of your TDT opponent this is a different strategy. In particular, a TDT will cooperate when confronted with a "true" perfect defector but defect§ when faced with an ex-TDT that turned itself into one. Therefore, even though the perfect defector would gain 3 utils, there is no strategy you as a TDT can follow that will mimic the perfect defector so you might as well act like a true TDT and agree to cooperate.

This does, however, raise interesting questions about why you aren't winning.

BTW, the standard name for this prisoner's dilemma variant is chicken.

§ Edit: Actually after thinking about it I realized that what a TDT would do is cooperate with probability 2/3-ε and defect with probability 1/3+ε. This gives him a higher utility, 2/3-ε instead of 0, and still leaves you with a utility of 2-3ε, which is still enough to make you wish you had played a strait TDT strategy and cooperated.

Comment author: blogospheroid 18 October 2010 03:59:45AM 0 points [-]

Availability Bias.

Guilty, but that is why I sent this question out to a wider community, so that as a group, we can get better answers to this one. I believe it is an important question and that is why i was wondering about the downvote. My guesses are not the main part of this post, the question is.

Kindly list some other hedge funds which might have some high optimization power.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 October 2010 04:13:38AM 1 point [-]

Kindly list some other hedge funds which might have some high optimization power.

D. E. Shaw is one that I can think of off the top of my head, but there are many others.

Also, what do you mean by optimization power? How likely they are to build a fooming AGI? How much power they currently or potentially have? Something else?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 October 2010 06:30:01PM *  3 points [-]

This list seems to suffer greatly from availability bias. Things to consider adding

  • Akamai (a.k.a., the most important internet company you've never heard off)

  • Other hedge funds besides Goldman Sachs. (Goldman Sachs is the most famous, that doesn't mean it's the most rational).

  • Other governments besides the ones you mentioned. (Practically every government has at least one intelligence agency, how much you've heard about an agency isn't a reliable predictor of how competent it is).

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 11:25:30PM 5 points [-]

Implementing computer networks that would be secure even against smart human attackers, let alone against superhuman intelligences, is an impossible goal. Human minds, whether operating in isolation or in large cooperative organizations, are simply unable to reason reliably at that level of complexity. It would be an even harder task than writing reliably bug-free large software projects or designing reliably bug-free state-of-the-art microprocessors -- goals that humans already find unreachable in practice.

The only ways to avoid being hacked are: (1) to keep your computer offline, (2) to be an uninteresting target that's not worth the effort, and (3) to have good forensics and threaten draconian punishments against hackers. Clearly, only (1) is a solution applicable to the problem of keeping AIs boxed, but then we get to the problem of social engineering.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 October 2010 12:18:16AM *  2 points [-]

Implementing computer networks that would be secure even against smart human attackers, let alone against superhuman intelligences, is an impossible goal.

Yes, well so is creating a friendly AI.

Now, shut up and do the impossible

Comment author: blogospheroid 13 October 2010 06:45:51AM 1 point [-]

A drug that supresses ugh fields, loathing and hate. They feel so similar, I think there will be some common connection.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2010 06:59:47AM 4 points [-]

I'm not sure about that.

A ugh field, is something one tends to avoid thinking about.

On the other hand, with hate one tends to dwell to the target of the hate in what could be described as an anti-affective death spiral.

Comment author: Raw_Power 12 October 2010 06:28:14PM 1 point [-]

Thank you for pointing that link out. I loked and looked... and missed what was right in front of me.

And yes, the comments here on the Torah and New Testament have given me pointers towards how this should be done properly. Obviously the historical context is very useful for discussing why one set of rules or another was established, what was the spirit of the rule and what impact it had in contrast with the presilamic environment, or for commenting on the incendiary antisemitic fragments and how in fact their scope might be so narrow as to only apply to the Jews back then. Muslims, like Christians, can and will go out of their way to interpret verses in a way that favours their actual, current values or beliefs.

It is also interesting to see how the Qran builds upon the pre-existing narrative of the Torah and Gospel, but dismisses them as corrupted and altered by the Powers that Be (specifically the priesthood and ruling classes) to suit their own interests, and presents its own retelling of the events (when it bothers retelling stuff instead of cryptically, elliptically and confusingly mentioning a couple of names).

However, the Qran wasn't written all at once either, but it was written by one single man, in sporadic bursts, over the course of twenty years.

But what I want to study here are the bits of the Qran that are abot faith and the afterlife, not about rules which, all things considered, were remarkably sensible, coherent, cohesive and progressive by their day's standards. See the comments to the next post.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2010 04:52:26AM 3 points [-]

It is also interesting to see how the Qran builds upon the pre-existing narrative of the Torah and Gospel, but dismisses them as corrupted and altered by the Powers that Be (specifically the priesthood and ruling classes)

I always found it fascinating that Muslims believe this, yet it never occurs to them to ask whether the Qran has similarly been corrupted in the centuries since Mahmoud.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2010 04:45:21AM 7 points [-]

Upvoted for excessive use of nines. :)

(ie. Gross overcondidence.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2010 05:14:50AM 1 point [-]

(ie. Gross overcondidence.)

I was originally going to include an additional 9, but decided I should compensate for overconfidence bias. :)

But, seriously, I don't understand why people are so reluctant to quote large probabilities. For some statements, e.g., "the sun will rise tomorrow", 99.999% seems way underconfident.

Comment author: orthonormal 04 October 2010 03:41:04AM *  1 point [-]

So you agree that it's possible in principle for a singleton AI to remain a singleton (provided it starts out alone in the cosmos), but you believe it would sacrifice significant adaptability and efficiency by doing so. Perhaps; I don't know either way.

But the AI might make that sacrifice if it concludes that (eventually) losing singleton status would cost its values far more than the sacrifice is worth (e.g. if losing singleton status consigns the universe to a Hansonian hardscrapple race to burn the cosmic commons(pdf) rather than a continued time of plenty).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2010 04:54:10AM 1 point [-]

I believe it would at the very least have to sacrifice at least all adaptability by doing so, as in only sending out nodes with all instructions in ROM and instructions to periodically rest all non-ROM memory and shelf-destruct if it notices any failures of its triple redundancy ROM. As well as an extremely strong directive against anything that would let nodes store long term state.

Comment author: orthonormal 04 October 2010 03:24:31AM 5 points [-]

Cancer is a case where an engineered genome could improve over an evolved one. We've managed to write software (for the most vital systems) that can copy without error, with such high probability that we expect never to see that part malfunction.

One reason that evolution hasn't constructed sufficiently good error correction is that the most obvious way to do this makes the genome totally incapable of new mutations, which works great until the niche changes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2010 03:28:54AM 2 points [-]

However, an AI-subagent would need to be able to adjust itself to unexpected conditions, and thus can't simply rely on digital copying to prevent malfunctions.

Comment author: orthonormal 04 October 2010 02:47:39AM 2 points [-]

Ant colonies don't generally exhibit the principal-agent problem. I'd say with high certainty that the vast majority of our trouble with it is due to having the selfishness of an individual replicator hammered into each of us by our evolution.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2010 03:02:33AM 3 points [-]

I'm not a biologist, but given that animal bodies exhibit principal-agent problems, e.g., auto-immune diseases and cancers, I suspect ant colonies (and large AI's) would also have these problems.

Comment author: orthonormal 04 October 2010 02:26:32AM *  8 points [-]

If you changed "is" to "has been", I'd downvote you for agreement. But as stated, I'm upvoting you because I put it at about 10%.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2010 02:35:45AM 4 points [-]

I'd be curious to know when you think the crossover point was.

Comment author: erratio 04 October 2010 12:07:51AM -2 points [-]

Sorry, I was letting my own uncertainty get in the way of clarity there. A stronger version of what I was trying to say would be that consciousness gives us the illusion of being in control of our actions when in fact we have no such control. Or to put it another way: we're all P-zombies with delusions of grandeur (yes, this doesn't actually make logical sense, but it works for me)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2010 12:10:44AM 3 points [-]

I don't know about you, but I'm not a P-zombie. :)

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 October 2010 10:52:04PM 0 points [-]

I disagree with this one more than any other comment by far. Have you looked into Tegmark level 4 cosmology? It's really important to take into account concepts like measure and the utility functions of likely simulating agents when reasoning about this kind of thing. Upvoted.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 10:59:33PM 7 points [-]

My reasoning is that it would take more then a universe's worth of computronium to completely stimulate a comprable universe.

One could argue that they're taking shortcuts with, e.g., the statistics of bulk matter, but I think we'd notice the edge cases caused by something like that.

Comment author: JamesAndrix 03 October 2010 09:45:50PM *  64 points [-]

Panpsychism: All matter has some kind of experience. Atoms have some kind of atomic-qualia that adds up to the things we experience. This seems obviously right to me, but stuff like this is confusing so I'll say 75%

Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 10:42:40PM 15 points [-]

Can you rephrase this statement tabooing the words experience and qualia.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 10:34:12PM 18 points [-]

Conditional on this universe being a simulation, the universe doing the stimulating has laws vastly different from our own. For example, it might contain more than 3 extended-spacial dimensions, or bear a similar relation to our universe as our universe does to second life. 99.999%

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 10:30:58PM 28 points [-]

The many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is false in the strong sense that the correct theory of everything will incorporate wave-function collapse as a natural part of itself. ~40%

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 October 2010 07:35:23AM 0 points [-]

Do you think you guess numerically what your prior probability was before learning of the Miracle of Fatima?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 09:31:17PM 1 point [-]

Probably ~15% (learning about Fatima didn't change it much by the way). Basically because I can't think of a good reason why this should have an extremely low prior.

Comment author: mattnewport 03 October 2010 08:21:27PM 42 points [-]
  • A Singleton AI is not a stable equilibrium and therefore it is highly unlikely that a Singleton AI will dominate our future light cone (90%).

  • Superhuman intelligence will not give an AI an insurmountable advantage over collective humanity (75%).

  • Intelligent entities with values radically different to humans will be much more likely to engage in trade and mutual compromise than to engage in violence and aggression directed at humans (60%).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 08:36:49PM 1 point [-]

I agree with your first two, but am dubious about your third.

Comment author: whpearson 03 October 2010 12:47:50PM 1 point [-]

I have this memory that monks transcribed Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras and kept them alive, when most of the world was illiterate.

I'm not sure if this is accurate or not.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 05:53:17PM 2 points [-]

I have this memory that monks transcribed Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras and kept them alive, when most of the world was illiterate.

Right idea, wrong philosophers. Keep in mind that Greek was a forgotten language in western Europe throughout the middle ages. They had translated copies of Aristotle but not any other Greek writer.

As for Pythagoras, well he didn't survive. All we know about him comes from second and third hand accounts.

Comment author: Kevin 03 October 2010 07:43:11AM *  34 points [-]

It does not all add up to normality. We are living in a weird universe. (75%)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 07:53:59AM 5 points [-]

Please specify what you mean by a weird universe.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2010 07:23:30AM *  1 point [-]

The gaming industry is going to be a major source of funding* for AGI research projects in the next 20 years. (85%)

*By "major" I mean contributing enough to have good odds of causing actual progress. By gaming industry I include joint ventures, so long as the game company invested a nontrivial portion of the funding for the project.

EDIT: I am referring to video game companies, not casinos.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Irrationality Game
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 07:33:02AM 3 points [-]

I assume you mean designing better AI opponents, as this seems to be one type of very convenient problem for AI.

Needless to say having one of these go FOOM would be very, very bad.

In response to comment by magfrump on Slava!
Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2010 05:22:21AM 3 points [-]

What do Buddhists praise?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Slava!
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 05:29:10AM 1 point [-]

I assume the Buddha.

Comment author: Perplexed 03 October 2010 05:00:01AM 3 points [-]

I think this is ambiguous. It might be interpreted as

  • Christianity is good for its believers - they are better off to believe than to be atheist.
  • Christianity is good for Christendom - it is a positive force for majority Christian societies, as compared to if those societies were mostly atheist.
  • Christianity makes the world a better place, as compared to if all those people were non-believers in any religion.

Which of these do you mean?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 05:15:53AM *  3 points [-]

Christianity is good for its believers - they are better off to believe than to be atheist.

I'd change this one to:

  • Christianity is good for most of its believers - they are better off to believe than to be atheist.

~62%

Christianity is good for Christendom - it is a positive force for majority Christian societies, as compared to if those societies were mostly atheist.

~69%

Christianity makes the world a better place, as compared to if all those people were non-believers in any religion.

~58%

Edit: I case it wasn't clear the 70% refers to the disjunction of the above 3.

Comment author: magfrump 03 October 2010 04:43:38AM -2 points [-]

When it is technologically feasible for our descendants to simulate our world, they will not because it will seem cruel (conditional on friendly descendants, such as FAI or successful uploads with gradual adjustments to architecture.) I would be surprised if it were different, but not THAT surprised. (~70%)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 04:52:26AM 1 point [-]

Up voted because I disagree with your first statement.

Assuming reasonably complex values of stimulate, i.e., second life doesn't count.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Irrationality Game
Comment author: magfrump 03 October 2010 04:30:19AM 24 points [-]

voted up because 60% seems WAAAAAYYYY underconfident to me.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 04:40:39AM 4 points [-]

Now that we're up-voting underconfidence I changed my vote.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 October 2010 02:44:33AM *  0 points [-]

Metadiscussion: Reply to this comment to discuss the game itself, or anything else that's not a proposition for upvotes/downvotes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 03:43:21AM 2 points [-]

How about replying to posts with what you think the probability should be.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 October 2010 03:27:31AM 26 points [-]

Religion is a net positive force in society. Or to put it another way religious memes, (particularly ones that have survived for a long time) are more symbiotic than parasitic. Probably true (70%).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 September 2010 01:34:15AM 4 points [-]

I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong.

Coercive eugenics was very popular in intellectual circles until WWII.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 September 2010 02:45:46AM 7 points [-]

Interestingly enough, one thing both these examples have in common is that they are cases of intellectuals arguing that intellectuals should have more power.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 September 2010 01:20:29AM 5 points [-]

The fact that the educated and intelligent are sometimes in the wrong doesn't mean it isn't a good heuristic. Pretty much any heuristic is going to fail sometimes. The question is whether the heuristic is accurate (in the sense of being more often correct than not) and, if so, how accurate it is. This heuristic seems to be one where the general trend is clear. I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong, and even then, that's an example where the general public in many areas also had a fair bit of support for that view.

I'm curious about your claim that that "intellectuals care much more about the status-signaling aspects of their opinions than the common folk." This seems plausible to me, but I'd be curious what substantial evidence there for the claim.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 September 2010 01:34:15AM 4 points [-]

I can't identify a single example other than Marxism in the last hundred years where the intellectual establishment has been very wrong.

Coercive eugenics was very popular in intellectual circles until WWII.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 September 2010 10:57:46PM *  13 points [-]

Unfortunately, this strategy is wrong, and the result is inferior leadership, polarization into camps and never-ending arguments. Instead, voters should be encouraged to vote based on the qualifications that matter: their intelligence, their rationality, their integrity, and their ability to judge character.

It's very hard to judge the character/intelligence/etc. in someone you know very well, it's impossible in people who you only know from TV interviews. If you think you can do this, the most likely explanation is that you're suffering from overconfidence bias.

Yes, you can attempt to use proxies like standardized tests, but

  • there a lot of high IQ people with very wrong beliefs.
  • these proxies are approximate at best and are not going to survive Goodhart's Law.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 September 2010 10:22:23PM *  6 points [-]

This was in fact the founders' original idea for how the republic should function. It turned into issue based politics as soon as Washington stepped down, and in fact much earlier. It would be instructive to look at why this happened.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2010 07:08:42PM *  19 points [-]

I myself would like to be part of such a community. But I wouldn't like colleges to offer courses in it, because it seems to be a negative-sum game. What would the world look like now if we had a million graduates of such a curricula in the US? I suspect most people taking the courses would do so in order to go into marketing or politics, and thus reduce the signal-to-noise ratio when choosing products or politicians even more.

How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 September 2010 06:28:58AM 8 points [-]

How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.

I think two ideas from the field of security are relevant here.

1) In order to design good security, one must be willing and able to think like a criminal.

2) Security through obscurity generally doesn't work.

Applied to the current discussion this suggests that:

  • in order to be able to successfully defend against the Dark Arts one must be able to think like a Dark Artist.
  • Attempting to reduce the use of the Dark Arts by attempting to quarantine knowledge about them isn't going to work.

Also, maybe if more people understood the methods by which politicians and marketers manipulated them, they'd be less taken in by them.

In response to comment by [deleted] on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Relsqui 18 September 2010 06:17:51PM 1 point [-]

so I'm unsure how such a group would work.

Me too; that's why I haven't done it yet. But I have some notes on the subject tucked away.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2010 05:07:57AM 1 point [-]

Well there's the Bayesian conspiracy.

Comment author: Nisan 17 September 2010 11:16:52PM 13 points [-]

It is as if a capricious creator-god made a hodge-podge of heuristics and underdetermined and conflicting preferences, and as an afterthought endowed it with the desire to have a comprehendible set of values.

In response to comment by Nisan on The Meaning of Life
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 September 2010 04:56:53AM *  2 points [-]

Indeed, a very alien god.