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Comment author: J_Taylor 11 April 2014 04:39:40AM 17 points [-]

This post is shameless bragging:

I donated two days of pay to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. As always, this is incredibly easy to do. If you would like to do so, here is a link:

https://givewell.secure.nonprofitsoapbox.com/donate-to-sci

Comment author: moridinamael 26 December 2013 01:57:06PM 5 points [-]

The most useful aspect of this service would be to prevent people from writing things that people don't want to read. Anything that stops people wasting their time is nice.

No amount of data mining is going to specify the next mold-breaking instant classic, but hopefully it can quantitatively back up a reduction in vampire romance novels, or as the article points out, extremely boringly titled and seemingly boringly written history books.

Comment author: J_Taylor 30 December 2013 05:05:11PM 1 point [-]

things that people don't want to read

vampire romance novels

People do want to read vampire romance novels.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 12 September 2013 10:23:23PM 2 points [-]

I agree with this. But then there is always something to be learned. And as you say: You invested lots (!) of hours into it. And most went into attention to trademarks.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 September 2013 10:44:36PM 7 points [-]

From the constant rumors of nonexistent Pokemon, I learned how to distrust the epistemological practices of my peers.

Comment author: ciphergoth 11 September 2013 09:23:49AM 10 points [-]

There's a strong case for not doing that. The lesson to be learned here is very general; but it's very tempting to learn only a very specific lesson instead.

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 September 2013 04:08:30PM 7 points [-]

Every time you go the doctor, you put yourself at risk of iatrogenic complications. Following the rule:

Every time you have a medical problem (this is a vague term), see a medical professional.

Is not very pragmatic.

In response to Mistakes repository
Comment author: avairosa 10 September 2013 03:14:47PM 14 points [-]

Not seeing medical professionals as soon as medical problems arose. I now live with (likely) permanent chronic pain which may well have been preventable were the causes addressed at an earlier date.

The mental model that states that since all past problems have been inconsequential, all future problems must therefore be inconsequential is a problem here. Holding that mental state (my past problems have evaporated without issue, therefore my future problems will do likewise) is problematic because most people have not experienced enough major problems to draw on a meaningful sample size here.

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 September 2013 01:39:30AM 3 points [-]

If you do not mind, could you tell us what your initial symptoms were and what condition was causing them?

Comment author: ahbwramc 05 September 2013 03:29:15AM 16 points [-]

I'm curious, have other people here found that giving makes them happier? I generally haven't found that to be the case. A typically givewell donation for me: a) reminds me that there's an obscene amount of suffering out there that I'm ignoring 99% of the time, and b) makes me feel guilty for not giving away more. I mean, I guess it makes me happier than not giving, since I'd feel even more guilty then. But in general it seems to me like the Peter Singer/Givewell/Effective Altruism approach to charity doesn't really lend itself to "feel-good" giving. More like, "soothe your conscience very slightly" giving.

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 September 2013 02:01:33AM 0 points [-]

I sometimes have feelings of separation from my fellow man. Philanthropic activity tends to alleviate this. Likewise, it tends to buffer my emotions from feelings of personal inadequacy. Of course, these correlations are not sufficient to establish causation.

Also, I do get warm, fuzzy feelings. However, I do not hold these positive feelings to be as important as the suppression of negative feelings.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 August 2013 04:09:22AM 0 points [-]

"Remind me to buy you a copy of the Muggle novel Atlas Shrugged," the sourceless voice said. "I'm starting to understand what sort of person can benefit from reading it."

Although the Weasley twins are extremely willing to repay perceived debts, it would seem to me that this inclination is more likely, given their usual inclination towards public action, to be of positive utility in the long-run.

Comment author: gthorneiii 29 August 2013 01:05:05AM *  10 points [-]

Canon!ArthurWeasley isn't very knowledgeable, but he at least had an interesting in electrical power, heavy-than-air non-magical flight, and chemical fueled engines. I think we can expect him to be of similar intelligence or smarter in MoR.

I don't think so, per chapter 61:

Madam Bones's voice continued. "We brought in Arthur Weasley from Misuse of Muggle Artifacts - he knows more about Muggle artifacts than any wizard alive - and gave him the descriptions from the Aurors on the scene, and he cracked it. It was a Muggle artifact called a rocker, and they call it that because you'd have to be off your rocker to ride one. Just six years ago one of their rockers blew up, killed hundreds of Muggles in a flash and almost set fire to the Moon. Weasley says that rockers use a special kind of science called opposite reaction, so the plan is to develop a jinx which will prevent that science from working around Azkaban."

...

"Severus?" the old wizard said. "What was it actually?"

"A rocket," said the half-blood Potions Master, who had grown up in the Muggle town of Spinner's End. "One of the most impressive Muggle technologies."

It seems pretty clear from chapter 61 that MOR!ArthurWeasley knows precious little about the muggle world.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 August 2013 03:59:32AM 1 point [-]

It seems pretty clear from chapter 61 that MOR!ArthurWeasley knows precious little about the muggle world.

When it comes to wizards who lack recent Muggle ancestry, Arthur may well be the most knowledgeable expert regarding these matters. Considering the racism of even well-meaning wizards, this likely gives Arthur a certain degree of clout in certain circles.

Comment author: J_Taylor 23 August 2013 10:38:33PM *  7 points [-]

I donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is GiveWell's top charity.

Here is a link for those who wish to do likewise:

http://www.againstmalaria.com/

Comment author: wedrifid 15 August 2013 04:50:15AM 3 points [-]

My tactic when trying to find this kind of reference is to use a user page search. If you can recall a suitable keyword then it you should be able to find the discussion here. I couldn't find anything based on 'basilisk' or 'censor', unfortunately.

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 August 2013 05:27:19AM 3 points [-]

After more work than I would honestly prefer to put into such an effort, I eventually found this post:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/goe/open_thread_february_1528_2013/8iuo

As a curiosity, this post cannot be found from my user-page, nor can it be found via Wei Dai's app. Fascinating.

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 August 2013 04:27:33AM 0 points [-]

This was a delightful chapter. I very much look forward to the next one.

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 August 2013 03:51:58AM *  2 points [-]

Idle curiosity / possibility of post being deleted:

At one point in LessWrong's past (some time in the last year, I think), I seem to recall replying to a post regarding matters of a basilisk nature. I believe that the post I replied to was along these lines:

Given that the information has been leaked, what is the point of continuing to post discussions of this matter?

I believe my response was long the lines of:

I hate to use silly reflective humor, but given that the information has been leaked, what is the point of censoring discussions of this matter?

At this time, I am unable to find these posts. Am I being paranoid, or was perhaps this thread deleted?

Comment author: westward 18 May 2013 01:14:24AM 6 points [-]

Has anyone tried e-cigarettes as a method to quit smoking or at least ameliorate the effects of smoking?

I smoke about a pack or two a week (3 a day minimum, sometimes binging once a week) and would like to reduce that in order to increase my chances of living longer. Anyone have experience they can share?

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 August 2013 02:21:48AM 0 points [-]

If this evidence is of interest to you, I still have not bought any more packs since converting to electronic cigarettes. If you have not yet converted, I would highly recommend doing so. If you are interested, I will message you my apparatus and places to purchase it at.

Comment author: wallowinmaya 01 August 2013 03:36:43PM *  9 points [-]

I would say that's a typical case of an antiprediction. Humans differ in all sorts of things (IQ, height, sexual orientation), so why shouldn't they differ in relationship-preferences?

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 August 2013 12:50:40AM 0 points [-]

Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances.

seems to mean something other than

Some fraction of the population is poly, some mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances.

Comment author: Nisan 08 November 2011 06:42:44PM 2 points [-]

Yeah, I took a look at After Man and Man After Man, and neither is the book I was thinking of, although they are similar.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2013 05:55:25PM 2 points [-]
Comment author: gjm 01 August 2013 09:33:19AM 4 points [-]

Make it expressed personal opinions, then.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 August 2013 12:41:32PM 1 point [-]

I endorse this as being my original intention.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 August 2013 06:36:46AM 5 points [-]

How should I know?

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 August 2013 06:43:23AM 4 points [-]

I apologize if I misinterpreted your statement:

Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances.

I was curious what was meant by this.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 August 2013 06:38:25AM 4 points [-]

How does one best optimize personal opinions for purposes of status-acquisition?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 August 2013 04:29:09AM 20 points [-]

Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances. In the general population many naturally poly people are 'conformed' into being mono the same way they might be conformed into being religious. Thus 'people who want to be poly can be' would reasonably be expected to correlate with elements of the Correct Contrarian Cluster, and you would expect to find more polyamorous atheists or (he predicted more boldly) polyamorous endorsers of no-collapse quantum mechanics than in the general population, even outside LW. There are also specifically cognitive-rationality skills like 'resist Asch's conformity' and 'be Munchkin', and community effects like 'Be around people who will listen with interest to long chains of reasoning instead of immediately shunning you.'

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 August 2013 06:35:44AM 5 points [-]

When you say 'naturally', are you referring to genetics, prenatal environment, or something else?

In response to comment by [deleted] on "Stupid" questions thread
Comment author: DanielLC 13 July 2013 08:51:54PM 2 points [-]

You could legalize eating tiger. This will prevent tiger extinction in the same way it prevented cow extinction, result in sending some guys with rifles into the jungle that you don't even pay for, and if that's not enough, you can still send guys with rifles to finish off the wild population, and they still will be less likely to go extinct than if you do nothing.

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 July 2013 10:48:50PM 1 point [-]

You could legalize eating tiger.

Tiger parts have a variety of uses in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Making harvesting these parts from farmed tigers would be a somewhat efficacious solution.

Comment author: Nornagest 30 June 2013 12:32:14AM *  3 points [-]

I got this right, but ended up having to invent notation to keep track of the indirection in the last segment. I think it's likely a decent test of whether you're likely to quickly pick up an intuitive head for pointer math and a very basic variable name-value distinction, but it won't capture other forms of abstraction that're necessary for programming: loops, types, conditional branching, Boolean logic. You could probably get away with dropping conditionals (I get the impression they're fairly intuitive), but I've had trouble teaching the others in the past.

Has a bit of an old-school feel to it, too; I'd expect the results to correlate better with talent for C than they would with, say, Python.

Comment author: J_Taylor 30 June 2013 01:02:44AM 0 points [-]

I got this right, but ended up having to invent notation to keep track of the indirection in the last segment.

This is also the case for myself. I would be very impressed by anyone who did not have to do this.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2013 02:41:45AM 6 points [-]

You're perfectly comfortable with the indefinite article?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Bad Concepts Repository
Comment author: J_Taylor 29 June 2013 05:10:19AM 3 points [-]

No, but I am much more comfortable with it than I am with the other words.

Comment author: FeepingCreature 27 June 2013 03:45:32PM *  12 points [-]

The word "is" in all its forms. It encourages category thinking in lieu of focussing on the actual behavior or properties that make it meaningful to apply. Example: "is a clone really you?" Trying to even say that without using "is" poses a challenge. I believe it should be treated the same as goto: occasionally useful but usually a warning sign.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 June 2013 12:05:53AM 6 points [-]

In that sentence, I find the words "clone", "really" and "you" to be as problematic as "is".

Comment author: shminux 17 June 2013 11:59:59PM 7 points [-]

You said that people told you that you "should" become a computer programmer. But it only makes sense if you enjoy programming 8+ hours a day (and have aptitude for it). Did you have fun learning Python or was it a chore?

Comment author: J_Taylor 22 June 2013 07:27:38AM 0 points [-]

programming 8+ hours a day

From both my experience and what little research I've done on this topic, programmers do not program 8+ hours per day.

Comment author: peter_hurford 21 June 2013 04:46:31AM *  0 points [-]

I could imagine 7 having some difficulty. Could you elaborate or refer me to some references?

But this step-by-step guide actually seems quite reasonable.

Comment author: J_Taylor 21 June 2013 10:46:13PM 1 point [-]

I've heard this book is pretty good, but I've never read it. It's really easy to find copies of it floating around online:

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/098478280X

Comment author: peter_hurford 20 June 2013 03:55:15PM 3 points [-]

Also, in 10 months, you could probably pick up a fair amount for programming for an IT job.

What would be the "next step" for pursuing an IT job if one is (1) generally "good at computers", (2) is capable of programming in PHP and JavaScript at an intermediate level, but (3) has taken only one actual class in computer science?

Comment author: J_Taylor 21 June 2013 12:57:28AM *  4 points [-]

This all assumes you are decent at programming: It may still work even if you aren't, but become good while doing it.

  1. You put on your resume that you are x months away from receiving a Bachelor's Degree from Denison. No need to specify the major.
  2. You take some free online classes from Udacity or Coursera. At this time, you may become decent at programming, if you weren't already. You can now honestly say you've taken classes in computer science.
  3. Do so. No real reason to specify on your resume where you took the classes.
  4. List the technologies you know on your resume. Also, list some you could learn quickly, and technologies people associate with your specializations.
  5. Do some easy projects to gain some light practical experience in project implementation.
  6. Use this resume to pass the HR department's almost meaningless screening.
  7. Use your l33t skills to pass technical interview, and get job.
  8. ?
  9. Profit.

Should take a little less than a year to get to step 9.

Comment author: J_Taylor 21 June 2013 12:28:42AM *  2 points [-]

Even though people's intuitions do lead them to believe it is morally necessary for one to save the hypothetical drowning child, in that particular scenario, I wager that there are situations in which people's intuitions would lead to other conclusions. One relevant hypothetical scenario is one in which one is amidst a group of people who also are observing the drowning child, and who are better able to bear the economic hardship of losing a pair of dress shoes (I know that the phrase "economic hardship" sounds rather callous in this scenario, but I cannot think of a better phrase off the top of my head.) Hell, perhaps some of them own thousands of pairs, while you own only one pair.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I have a pet theory that people's objections to Singer's scenario, whether they know it or not, are largely game-theoretical. In light of this, I see debates over the the precise cost of a child-saving as being, not irrelevant, but at have little to do with a much more important objection to Singer's argument.

Comment author: Metus 16 June 2013 01:15:42PM 2 points [-]

I was thinking about writing down everything I know. After reflecting a few seconds on that I realized what a daunting task I haveset out to do. Has anyone tried this or a suggestion how I should go about this if at all?

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 June 2013 04:07:41AM 0 points [-]

Writing down only every arithmetic fact you know, assuming you have basic knowledge of math, would, in theory, take an infinite amount of time. In practice, the universe would end first.

Comment author: tgb 17 June 2013 02:04:04AM 2 points [-]

What are the advantages over pencil-and-paper? I can think of a couple, but would like to hear what a more frequent user says.

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 June 2013 04:05:36AM 1 point [-]

Aid in demonstrating things to others, social aesthetic value as a decoration, and personal aesthetic value. Also, erasing is way faster.

Comment author: MrMind 05 June 2013 07:43:52AM 1 point [-]

I truly haven't the slightest idea. I could see them to be attracted both to strong or weak-willed, well-built and chubby, rich or poor men. How could I find out?

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 June 2013 05:05:44PM 0 points [-]

Empirical observation.

Comment author: MrMind 03 June 2013 10:26:45AM 2 points [-]

But a much better question is to figure out what kind of women you want to attract, and then figure out the subtleties that will help you interest them and attract them. You also, of course, want the behaviour that results to be consistent with your own personal preferences, at least in some ways.

As far as I can tell, I'm attracted to girls normally referred to as 'bitch'. That is strong-willed, sexually promiscuous, out-of-the-box thinking, independent girls. Body type seems to be much less of an issue, I've found myself attracted to both very thin and quite chubby girls, from athletic to maternal/feminine, with any combination of hair style, eyes color, etc.
I would say that the primary factor is a very strong personality: any idea on how to attract those kind of girls?

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 June 2013 01:49:27AM 2 points [-]

I would say that the primary factor is a very strong personality: any idea on how to attract those kind of girls?

Please consider what sorts of guys the sorts of girls you are attracted to are attracted to.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 27 May 2013 04:49:20PM 2 points [-]

Few dictatorships last that long.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 June 2013 02:44:09AM 0 points [-]

Could you please name some that did?

Comment author: J_Taylor 31 May 2013 11:08:06PM 1 point [-]

Regarding philosophy:

Do you have any specific research interests?

Generally speaking, the Stanford Encyclopedia is the best online source of information about philosophy. I would recommend reading the following article:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/

Here are the titles of what are considered to be the most influential works of the 20th century:

http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lackey-What-are-the-modern-classics.pdf

Comment author: PECOS-9 23 February 2013 05:06:00AM *  5 points [-]

From the harry potter wiki:

An adequately Imperiused being is placed under the caster's total control and may be directed to do anything the caster wishes, including crimes such as murder, political corruption, embezzlement, and so on. Also, whilst under the caster's control, the curse may also endow the victim with whatever skills that are required in order to complete the task at hand, such as increased strength or allowing them to cast spells far above their level. For example, an Imperiused Neville Longbottom was able to perform a series of "quite astonishing gymnastics" under the curse that he would not normally be capable of.[1]

I haven't read all of the original books, but is that bit about casting spells far above their level true? If so, it suggests a fairly easy way to gain control of an entire population: imperius a few wizards with the order to imperius as many other wizards as possible with this same command, and to await further instruction. If imperius curses have some sort of time limit after which they expire, include an additional order to seek out another imperius'd wizard to re-imperius you every x days.

This should spread exponentially like a particularly nasty virus.

Comment author: J_Taylor 25 May 2013 02:05:15AM 0 points [-]

I wonder how the Imperius curse resolves loops.

Comment author: Kawoomba 22 May 2013 04:15:36PM *  15 points [-]

What's next, a Rational (tm) Work Out sequence? A Rational (tm) Dating sequence? A Rational (tm) Build Your Own PC sequence?

There are plenty of important topics for which a reputed and sourced guide by a trusted authority with a community stamp of approval would be helpful, but the most efficient way to achieve that would be for regulars to seek out established and reputed guides online (since rational in this context translates simply to 'good'/'efficient'), then link to them in some "guide repository thread".

That being said, when proven high quality content providers on LW choose to write about anything, people will want to read it. Do you count yourself among that reference class?

A non-rationality sequence about financial planning, tailored to US citizens (with topics such as "401K matching") and a few paragraphs about "salary negotiation" and the like, written by a newcomer with unknown credentials in the field, labeled as "Rational" - the prior for "such a sequence is likely to increase the signal/noise ratio" goes lower and lower. Especially in the presence of easily accessible guides such as e.g. "Money 101" on CNNMoney.

There's something worse than no information, which is unreliable information from uncertain sources. Knowing that you know nothing versus falsely believing that you know something, and all that.

Comment author: J_Taylor 24 May 2013 01:54:54AM 5 points [-]

What's next, a Rational (tm) Work Out sequence? A Rational (tm) Build Your Own PC sequence?

Those would both be very useful, especially the former one.

A Rational (tm) Dating sequence?

No. This kills the mind.

Comment author: Username 18 May 2013 07:01:30PM 8 points [-]

Congratulations, by the way. You have successfully added years to your life, ceased to constantly stink, saved a lot of money, and retained the mental edge and social benefits of smoking nicotine. Instrumental rationality at its finest.

Comment author: J_Taylor 24 May 2013 01:51:22AM 1 point [-]

Thank you.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 22 May 2013 07:40:43PM 2 points [-]

When my iodine levels get low I develop symptoms of diabetes. Sushi can induce insulin shock/hypoglycemia in me.

It screws with my hunger and thirst levels as well.

Apparently I'm not alone, either; there seems to be some evidence that there's a link between iodine and diabetes more generally.

Comment author: J_Taylor 23 May 2013 04:11:35AM *  1 point [-]

Apparently I'm not alone, either; there seems to be some evidence that there's a link between iodine and diabetes more generally.

Could you please post or link to it?

Comment author: gwern 22 May 2013 01:43:35AM 1 point [-]

tDCS has come up before many times. Did you search the site and read previous comments?

Comment author: J_Taylor 22 May 2013 02:36:05AM 1 point [-]

Did you search the site

Yes.

and read previous comments?

Yes. Results were generally negative.

However, I was unable to find any results regarding this new rig.

Comment author: J_Taylor 22 May 2013 01:29:18AM 2 points [-]

I don't suppose any users here have experience with trans-cranial direct current stimulation. More specifically, the Focus V1?

http://www.foc.us/

Comment author: westward 18 May 2013 01:14:24AM 6 points [-]

Has anyone tried e-cigarettes as a method to quit smoking or at least ameliorate the effects of smoking?

I smoke about a pack or two a week (3 a day minimum, sometimes binging once a week) and would like to reduce that in order to increase my chances of living longer. Anyone have experience they can share?

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 May 2013 02:15:00AM 10 points [-]

After buying an e-cig, I never bought another pack of cigarettes. It has been roughly six weeks, I think. My consumption was slightly higher than yours.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 May 2013 06:28:33PM *  5 points [-]

We didn't intend to crosspost here. However I do expect LessWrong readers will link to material and arguments such as the recent criticial look at our terminology in "Is “tribalism” a useful concept?" and obviously we will be linking to a lot of rationality related content in our own writing there, both on this site and elsewhere, because we otherwise simply won't be understood by many readers.

Edit: James has since decided to rather start his own blog and moved the article there, edited the link to reflect this. To give another example of a hopefully interesting post for even non-reactionary rationalists, I give Against Moral Progress.

In response to comment by [deleted] on [Link] More Right launched
Comment author: J_Taylor 11 May 2013 12:52:04AM 2 points [-]

Unfortunately, I cannot look at the actual post and am merely trying to infer its contents based on posts on LessWrong. The only major argument I can make in favor of using the word "tribalism" is that the term has useful negative connotations:

"This is tribalist thinking." == "This is silly, savage thinking which we are trying to overcome as rationalists."

Comment author: ChristianKl 10 May 2013 05:36:54PM 16 points [-]

It's interesting that demons in computer science are called that way. They have exactly the same functionality as the demons that occult enthusiasts proclaim to use.

Even if you don't believe in the occult, be aware that out culture has a lot of stories about how summoning demons might be a bad idea.

You are moving in territory where you don't have mainstream psychology knowledge that guides you and shows you where the dangers lie. You are left with a mental framework of occult defense against evil forces. It's the only knowledge that you can access to guide that way. Having to learn to protect yourself against evil spirits when you don't believe in spirits is a quite messed up.

I had an experience where my arm moved around if I didn't try to control it consciously after doing "spirit healing". I didn't believe in spirits and was fairly confident that it's just my brain doing weird stuff. On the other hand I had to face the fact that the brain doing weird stuff might not be harmless. Fortunately the thing went away after a few month with the help of a person who called it a specter without me saying anything specific about it.

You can always say: "Well, it's just my mind doing something strange." At the same time it's a hard confrontation.

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 May 2013 12:35:20AM 2 points [-]

This is incredibly pedantic. (Also rather unjustified, due to my own lack of knowledge regarding occult enthusiasts.) However:

It's interesting that demons in computer science are called that way. They have exactly the same functionality as the demons that occult enthusiasts proclaim to use.

Although daemons in computer science are rather akin to daemons in classical mythology (sort of, kind of, close enough), they really don't particularly resemble our modern conception of demons. I mean, they can totally get a programmer into "Sorcerer's Apprentice"-style shenanigans, but I've never heard of a daemon tempting anyone.

You can always say: "Well, it's just my mind doing something strange." At the same time it's a hard confrontation.

I have previously recommend to friends that alcohol is a moderately good way to develop empathy for those less intelligent than oneself. (That is, it is a good way for those who really cannot comprehend the way other people get confused by certain ideas). I wager that there are a wide array of methods to gain knowledge of some of the stranger confusions the human mind is a capable of. Ignoring chemical means, sleep deprivation is probably the simplest.

Also, congratulations for going through these experiences and retaining (what I assume is) a coherent and rational belief-system. A lot of people would not.

Comment author: Juno_Watt 07 May 2013 06:32:53PM *  0 points [-]

Yeah, woodshedding isnt good in philsoophy-- it usually results in incomprehensible output. But it is easy to find critics if you want to.

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 May 2013 12:22:25AM 0 points [-]

But it is easy to find critics if you want to.

I agree with this. However, I wager that actually wanting to find critics is a nigh-impossible task for the average person.

Comment author: Juno_Watt 30 April 2013 02:38:08PM 2 points [-]

Ask yourself: "would I self-study this material anyway if I had the next three-five years paid for? Would this occupy a large part of my time regardless of what I'm doing?" If so, it's worth it.

Philosophy makes a good hobby. You can do it anywhere, and no special equipment is required.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 May 2013 07:09:59AM 2 points [-]

Doing it right, of course, likely requires having good mentors who can guide you away from the path to crankdom. Whether these mentors are best found in academic philosophy programs, I am not certain.

In response to comment by J_Taylor on Sayeth the Girl
Comment author: wedrifid 26 February 2013 10:53:01AM 5 points [-]

As a general rule, everyone is constantly accusing everyone else of everything.

This seems deep, open minded, egalitarian and... blatantly false. People aren't constantly accusing everyone else of everything. Moreover some people do more accusing than others, some people receive more accusations than others and some kinds of accusations are received more positively by observers than others. Anyone who believed (or, rather, anyone who alieved) your theory would make poor predictions of human behavior and make correspondingly bad social decisions.

In response to comment by wedrifid on Sayeth the Girl
Comment author: J_Taylor 27 February 2013 03:22:37AM 3 points [-]

This seems deep, open minded, egalitarian and... blatantly false.

I was honestly going more for silly, cynical, misanthropic and... obviously hyperbole.

If you do not mind me quoting a different part of this thread momentarily:

To the extent that it is a joke it is a bad joke, inappropriate to the context, with an undesirable expected influence, encouraging flawed patterns of thought.

I do not understand what flawed patterns of thought I am encouraging. Could you elaborate a bit?

In response to comment by Rachael on Sayeth the Girl
Comment author: [deleted] 22 February 2013 02:35:04PM *  7 points [-]

I am simply astounded at the men here confidently asserting that they aren't alienating women when they talk about "getting" "attractive women" and speak of women as symbols of male success or indeed accessories for a successful male. This reduces me and other females (including female rationalists) to the category of a fancy car or a big house, and I feel humiliated when I read it.

If a woman publicly asserts that she wants to "get" an "attractive man", would you also think that she is being alienating?

Most people, regardless of whether they are men or women, want attractive partners, and yet, in my experience, only men are accused of being alienating or superficial or even sexist when they are honest about their desires.

In addition, insofar as successful men are significantly more likely than not-so-successful men to attract women whom they find attractive, having an attractive girlfriend does signal that you are successful.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Sayeth the Girl
Comment author: J_Taylor 26 February 2013 04:24:59AM -1 points [-]

Most people, regardless of whether they are men or women, want attractive partners, and yet, in my experience, only men are accused of being alienating or superficial or even sexist when they are honest about their desires.

As a general rule, everyone is constantly accusing everyone else of everything.

Comment author: MugaSofer 28 December 2012 07:19:18PM 1 point [-]

In Half-Blood Prince, when Snape is first teaching the class about silent casting, he asks if anyone can explain why it's useful in combat. Hermione's answer is identical to that given in the textbook, which Snape comments on.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 December 2012 12:12:22AM *  3 points [-]

Possibly an example. Are you are referring to this:

"Your adversary has no warning about what kind of magic you're about to perform," said Hermione, "which gives you a split-second advantage."

"An answer copied almost word for word from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Six," said Snape dismissively (over in the corner, Malfoy sniggered), "but correct in essentials."

This is basically Snapish for "You got the only correct answer, but I still hate you. Had you given an incorrect answer, I would told you that you suck as a person. Thankfully, the correct answer to this question is in a schoolbook. As such, I'll still use this opportunity to tell you that you suck as a person." It does not seem to have anything to do with Hermione actually having an eidetic memory.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 December 2012 09:03:39PM 1 point [-]

Two random men are more alike than a random man and a random woman

For any two groups A and B, two random members of A are more alike than a random member of A and a random member of B, aren't they?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Failed Utopia #4-2
Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2012 05:45:11AM 0 points [-]

What about cases in which group B is a subset of Group A?

Comment author: MugaSofer 27 December 2012 04:26:49PM 11 points [-]

I always interpreted her as exaggerating in canon

She quotes textbooks word for word, all the time. It's practically a running gag. I always assumed that Rowling thought that was a side effect of being smart.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2012 03:08:20AM 0 points [-]

She quotes textbooks word for word, all the time.

I am having difficulty finding evidence of this. Could you perhaps give an example? (Ideally, a passage from the book.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on That Thing That Happened
Comment author: MrMind 18 December 2012 05:22:19PM 8 points [-]

Let's ban the serious tag and live happily ever after in a superposition of humour and serious meta-comment.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 December 2012 03:55:29AM *  0 points [-]

[Serious comment]

I posted this a while ago. I think it is still very relevant.

Seriously.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 17 December 2012 11:05:41PM 10 points [-]

Given Moody's CONSTANT VIGILANCE I wouldn't be surprised at him randomly dropping false information into conversations, especially with suspiciously skilled young wizards...

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: TimS 11 December 2012 05:08:55PM 4 points [-]

Anyone with an idea and a computer can write an advice book on how to raise children. And Science really doesn't know what techniques have what effects in particular circumstances.

If we really knew how to raise Friendly children, public schools wouldn't be the mess that they are.

None of that has anything to do with IRB or other ethics reviews.

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 December 2012 05:45:41PM 1 point [-]

If we really knew how to raise Friendly children, public schools wouldn't be the mess that they are.

I am not talking about taking N children and getting N children, maximizing average Friendliness of the children. I am talking about, given N children, finding some regimen X, such that a child which has finished regimen X will have the highest expected Friendliness.

Regimen X may well involve frequent metaphorical culling of children who have low expected Friendliness.

Comment author: TimS 10 December 2012 04:02:52PM 18 points [-]

What, if anything, do proponents of the raise-AI-as-kids proponents say when someone asserts that we don't have a particularly reliable process for producing Friendly children?

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 December 2012 05:14:54AM 1 point [-]

In the defense of the raise-AI-as-kids proponents, ethics committees tend to limit the search for reliable processes for producing Friendly children.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2012 02:13:52PM 6 points [-]

LW needs a king.

Why “king” rather than “monarch”? Couldn't a queen do that?

Comment author: J_Taylor 09 December 2012 05:34:53PM 8 points [-]

For obvious decision theoretic reasons, a king is necessary. However, the king does not have to be a man.

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 December 2012 05:28:29AM 0 points [-]
In response to Causal Universes
Comment author: Emily 28 November 2012 01:13:56PM 11 points [-]

There's causality anywhere there's a noun, a verb, and a subject: 'Dumbledore's wand lifted the rock.'

This is a rather confused use of some linguistic terminology. I think "a subject, a verb, and an object" is probably what was intended. (It's worth noting that in academic syntax these terms are somewhat deprecated and don't necessarily have useful meanings. I think the casual meanings are still clear enough in informal contexts like this though.)

Beyond the terminology issue, I'm unconvinced by the actual claim here. Arguments from linguistic usage often turn out to be very bad on scrutiny, and I'm not sure this one holds up too well. What about 'Quirrell secretly followed Harry.'? Seems like a much weaker assertion that Quirrell is causally affecting Harry in some way here. I expect there are more obvious examples - that one took me 10 seconds to come up with.

In response to comment by Emily on Causal Universes
Comment author: J_Taylor 29 November 2012 05:42:16AM 4 points [-]

What about 'Quirrell resembles Harry.'?

Comment author: [deleted] 18 November 2012 10:54:40AM *  14 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?

You are plain wrong on this. I find this suspicious and strange since you didn't used to be.

He explicitly states that American progressivism is the descendant of mainline protestantism. As to his audience if anything most of his "conservative" non-atheist readers are probably protestant and nearly everyone reads him as blaming at the very least mainline protestantism too if not Christanity as a whole. Moldbug does rant less on Catholicism but I think that is because he sees the same thing Muflax speculated on:

There is one idea though that I’ve been thinking about recently. I wondered, what exactly makes the Catholic Church not progressive, in the Moldbugian sense? It has been argued that Christianity is progressivism (and vice versa), and that seems really plausible to me. It’s fundamentally a monist, universalist, transgressive salvation movement.1

Then I got this idea. (And I feel really stupid for only getting it now, when I’ve personally argued every single component of it before.) Catholicism is a containment procedure. The point of the Catholic faith is to defeat Christianity. It’s a long troll.

The first thing Catholics did was to pwn every single Christian movement until only they were left. Marcion got censored, bowdlerized and just plain trolled. Gnostics, Jews and Cynics were absorbed, itinerant and charismatic preachers were shut down, prophecy was officially forbidden.

Then the real work began. They imported as many proven institutions as they could and prepared Europe for the Fall of Rome. (Thanks to which European civilization exists today.) Theologically, they completely neutered Jesus. There is no apocalypse, no call to perfection, no immediate salvation, no suffering to overcome, no secret teaching, no hidden God. And the best thing: Catholics inserted fundamental otherness as a good thing into the teaching. That’s the best anti-progressive troll of all!

This massive undertaking was successful at containing Christianity for a long time. It wasn’t until those dirty Protestants realized that the Church has no intention whatsoever to take itself seriously. They didn’t realize that Christ is a basilisk, and there’s a reason He’s so obscured.

You can’t handle the truth and the way and the life!

I wanted to link to his profile too but he seems to have delete his LW account. :(

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 November 2012 01:36:02AM 2 points [-]

As to his audience if anything most of his "conservative" non-atheist readers are probably protestant

I can think of several Catholic reactionaries who are linked to Moldbug. I cannot think of any Protestants. From what are you extrapolating your estimate?

Comment author: Emile 29 October 2012 09:03:50PM 6 points [-]

if you only make things too easy and fun for the dumb folks, you're incentivizing the smart ones to pretend to be dumb.

Easy - just make the computer games really dumb, and easy. But you can blow stuff up and win points!

Comment author: J_Taylor 30 October 2012 03:58:51AM 5 points [-]

Explosion physics is moderately difficult to program. Instead, click on cows and win points.

Comment author: ciphergoth 17 October 2012 09:56:18PM 3 points [-]

Is there a word for a person, or an agent, that self-modifies to find something more painful, in order to change someone else's incentives, as described here? Obviously there are some choice phrases we might like to use about such a person, but most of them - eg "moral blackmail" - seem insufficiently precise. Is there a term that captures specifically this, and not other behaviour we don't like? If not, what might be a good, specific term?

Comment author: J_Taylor 25 October 2012 03:41:12AM 1 point [-]

Have you read Schelling? He discusses a wide variety of maneuvers that are much like this. However, I can think of no standard names for this technique.

I suppose you could call such agents voluntary human shields.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 October 2012 07:25:09PM *  3 points [-]

So why aren't they used? Or rather name three.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Happy Ada Lovelace Day
Comment author: J_Taylor 19 October 2012 04:17:17AM 1 point [-]

They probably aren't used because "First Computer Programmer" sounds cooler than "Valuable Contributor to Field X".

Comment author: BerryPick6 03 October 2012 02:28:16PM 3 points [-]

I wonder how many other Rationality Quotes we can find in rap lyrics...

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 October 2012 03:05:04AM 0 points [-]

There is an Ice-T quote here.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 October 2012 03:43:31AM *  23 points [-]

Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell his records;

well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!

--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"

Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.

Comment author: Furcas 27 September 2012 05:27:04PM *  5 points [-]

Most of the LWers who voted for moral realism probably believe that Eliezer's position about morality is correct, and he says that morality is subjunctively objective. It definitely fits Wikipedia's definition of moral realism:

Moral realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

  • Ethical sentences express propositions.
  • Some such propositions are true.
  • Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion.
Comment author: J_Taylor 28 September 2012 02:02:34AM 1 point [-]

The entire issue is a bit of a mess.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 September 2012 04:37:54PM 0 points [-]

Huh. Well, I'm willing to be convinced.

So, OK, sticking with pragmatist's example, can you summarize the conditions under which "All bachelors are unmarried" becomes false while the words retain their ordinary meaning? (I recognize that we might just turn out to disagree on what their ordinary meaning is, which I think would be uninteresting, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 27 September 2012 02:18:56AM 0 points [-]

If you are interested in exploring this issue, Quine's Two Dogmas is probably the best place to start.

http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 02:03:02PM 2 points [-]

Newcomb's problem: two boxes or one box?

Submitting...

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 September 2012 11:05:12PM 9 points [-]

Me: I didn't mean to two-box!

Omega: Why would you share an excuse with an omniscient agent?

Me: Because even if there is no causal connection between me giving an excuse, and me being excused, there may be a logical connection. Also, why would an omniscient agent ask a question?

Omega: Due to meta-level concerns. Obviously.

Comment author: SilasBarta 20 September 2012 12:24:44AM 2 points [-]

The largest integer is:

Submitting...

Comment author: J_Taylor 20 September 2012 03:10:08AM 1 point [-]

NaN

Comment author: beoShaffer 18 September 2012 05:33:02AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: J_Taylor 18 September 2012 10:45:05PM 3 points [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2012 11:09:18AM *  6 points [-]

I really liked the series. He should make a discussion post on LW linking to these with some commentary. I he doesn't I think I will. What he shouldn't do is make a neutered special needs padded "safe for LessWrong" version.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012
Comment author: J_Taylor 18 September 2012 10:43:59PM 4 points [-]

I think it would be better if some of the emotional appeals and personal elements were removed.


What he shouldn't do is make a neutered special needs padded "safe for LessWrong" version.

Maybe he should make a steroid-injected high-tier cutting-edge "too controversial for LiveJournal" version.

Comment author: Peterdjones 18 September 2012 08:19:08PM 1 point [-]

How does one solve problems by "adopting materialism"?

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 September 2012 10:39:32PM 0 points [-]

I do not hold that materialism solves any problems.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 September 2012 05:58:02PM *  11 points [-]
The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
if you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between "for" and "against"
is the mind's worst disease.

-- Jianzhi Sengcan

Edit: Since I'm not Will Newsome (yet!) I will clarify. There are several useful points in this but I think the key one is the virtue of keeping one's identity small. Speaking it out loud is a sort of primer, meditation or prayer before approaching difficult or emotional subjects has for me proven a useful ritual for avoiding motivated cognition.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Rationality Quotes September 2012
Comment author: J_Taylor 15 September 2012 06:24:11PM *  1 point [-]

Case in point:

I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do "must" and "cannot" meet? Yet I must - but I cannot!

-- Ro-Man

Comment author: Peterdjones 14 September 2012 02:51:53PM 1 point [-]

So how is the lifting being done? By elimination, as per your other comment?

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 September 2012 05:55:43PM 1 point [-]

So how is the lifting being done?

Could you please rephrase this question?

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 14 September 2012 10:34:53AM 8 points [-]

That materialism will be capable of explaining qualia is an empirical hypothesis, which has not yet been shown true nor false. One can accept materialism while remaining agnostic about whether it can explain qualia, just like one can accept economics without necessarily requiring it to explain physics.

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 September 2012 02:35:53PM 1 point [-]

I believe that The_Duck is taking an eliminativist position, and is not trying to say that materialism explains qualia.

Comment author: Peterdjones 14 September 2012 10:54:15AM 5 points [-]

Once we understand all the physical facts (including e.g. the physical causes of people talking about qualia) there are no other facts to understand.

How do you know? If materialism is a scientific hypothesis, it is disproveable, ie it could run into a phenomenon it cannot explain. OTOH, if it is a case of dogmatically rejecting anythign that doens't fit a materialistic worldview, how is that rational?

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 September 2012 02:34:24PM 0 points [-]

Materialism is neither a scientific hypothesis, nor a case of dogmatically rejecting anything that doesn't fit a materialistic worldview.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 September 2012 09:29:01PM *  2 points [-]

How much to point to specific instances/individuals?

I was asked by one of the participants as to what the policy is on singling out specific instances or individuals. I told her I would ask the community, and get back with her.

So, on one side, we don't want to use anonymity as a platform for safely attacking others (her words). On the other side, we don't want to censor out too much actual data. Also, I don't want women to feel isolated, if they think they are the only one who has a problem with an individual, but just because no one speaks up.

Some options:

-Keep complete anonymity. Do not mention incidents where people can figure out who you are talking about.
-Use incidents freely, but all names will be changed to pseudonyms.
-Only name names if more than one female mentions them.
-Women can list people they feel are problematic. I'll compile the list but keep it private. Only the contributing females can see it.

I lean towards the second option, but will go with whatever the community wants.

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 September 2012 12:29:43AM *  1 point [-]

-Women can list people they feel are problematic. I'll compile the list but keep it private. Only the contributing females can see it.

I endorse this, contingent upon the list being stored in a Lisa Frank binder.

Comment author: Alicorn 13 September 2012 03:03:48AM 1 point [-]

Sure. Could be both, but is closer to central case of restraint.

Comment author: J_Taylor 13 September 2012 03:05:40AM 0 points [-]

Certainly.

Comment author: Alicorn 13 September 2012 02:56:49AM 0 points [-]

"Keeping the child from running around" falls under restraint, not torture.

Comment author: J_Taylor 13 September 2012 03:02:48AM 0 points [-]

For someone who suffers from situation-dependent panic attacks, restraint and torture are not mutually exclusive. (Depending on how we define torture, of course.)

Comment author: faul_sname 12 September 2012 02:16:45AM *  20 points [-]

I made a non-typo'd version if anyone is interested. Here it is: http://joshua-david.net/php/cardsagainstrationality.php.

If anyone wants the php source code that made it, that's here: http://joshua-david.net/php/cardsagainstrationality.php.php.

Because I know LW is big on meta-anything, the source code for that source code can be found here: http://joshua-david.net/php/cardsagainstrationality.php.php.php.

Some choice ones:

  • My karma score is the unit of caring.
  • That which can be destroyed by paperclips should be.
  • The coherent extrapolated volition of humanity includes a term for getting downvoted on Less Wrong.
  • Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but Eliezer Yudkowsky.
  • What is true is already so. The chaos legion marching song doesn't make it worse.

tip: put ?n=5 at the end for 5 of them

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 September 2012 10:30:35PM 6 points [-]

My model of you likes negging.

Nice neg.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 September 2012 02:01:59AM 3 points [-]

Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't include LessWrong.

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 September 2012 11:10:20PM 15 points [-]

The utility function of an upload of God is a god.

That is some sweet theology.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 September 2012 01:59:30AM *  16 points [-]

You are not the territory.

That is a really pithy rebuttal to solipsism. It's also what I would say to people if I were a solipsist.

The truth is the art of winning at the truth.

So Zen.

The truth is the mind killer.

So bloody Zen.

That which can be destroyed by you should be.

That's... that's a wee bit evil, isn't it?

Pinkie Pie is not a million dollars.

#trufax

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 September 2012 11:10:20PM 15 points [-]

The utility function of an upload of God is a god.

That is some sweet theology.

Comment author: Vaniver 10 September 2012 04:24:47AM 4 points [-]

It looks to me like your link is a 1995 study, and my link described a 2000 or 2001 study, which I'm having trouble finding. I think it might be this one but I'm not seeing the 3.1% value anywhere. The study I linked has slightly lowered my credence in the 3.1% number, but I can't tell if the numbers it's reporting are per-act numbers or not. (I'm not an expert in this field and have been trusting summaries from science journalists; I'm not sure if I'm interpreting the actual papers correctly or not.) It looks like this study might have said "at their least fertile, there's less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation, which is lower than we thought it was" and that got interpreted as "in general, there's less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation."

I hope Gottschall and company know what they're doing, and expect the 3.1% number comes from another study. It might be profitable to email one of the professors in question and ask for where that number came from, because it's being slippery.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 04:28:17AM *  2 points [-]

Sorry, for deleting my post. I linked to the wrong study (as you pointed out) and wanted no replies until I revised my post.

Also, this is the 2001 study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11376648

Edit: I would like to criticize Todd Akin for making my truth-seeking less convenient by really messing up the signal-to-noise ratio regarding this matter.

Comment author: Vaniver 10 September 2012 03:08:54AM 5 points [-]

Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.

I'm pretty sure the 3% number comes mostly from women trying to get pregnant, and it's estimated that the per-act incidence of rape pregnancy would be about 8% instead of about 6% if none of the victims were using birth control.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 04:19:38AM 2 points [-]

Tentatively updated. Will investigate further later. 3.1 number comes from an odd data-set.

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/atniehs/labs/epi/studies/eps/question/index.cfm

Comment author: Vaniver 09 September 2012 10:17:02PM 7 points [-]

Trigger warning: more mechanical discussion of nonconsensual sex.

The odds of insemination are lower

On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex. I suspect that you're right that various fertility-boosting measures don't happen during rape and this effect is due primarily to selection effects (who rapes, who is raped, and when the rape happens), but the net result is still that rapes are a decent reproductive strategy (if the rapist can get away with it).

Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn't seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy.

This seems really unlikely in the context of marriages before the Enlightenment, or in the context of wars and raids (where women were a resource like any other).

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 02:52:32AM 3 points [-]

On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex.

Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.

Comment author: Sarokrae 10 September 2012 02:03:21AM *  0 points [-]

I usually measure my success by whether I can predict my system 1 responses to a situation ahead of time. The point is to model myself properly anyway.

Also, my OH can read me like a book. We mutually developed the me-trospection so we checked reads with each other.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 02:19:25AM 1 point [-]

We mutually developed the me-trospection so we checked reads with each other.

Could you please explain this sentence?

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 01:51:05AM 9 points [-]

Gender-related Lesswrong threads have almost always been problematic, historically. However, in all honesty, the signal/noise ratio in this thread seems low, even when compared to others of its kind.

Can anyone here honestly state that they learned something from this thread?

Note: The question was not rhetorical. If anyone was helped, I would actually like to learn that they were helped. Other note: I apologize for making the signal/noise ratio of this thread even worse by going meta.

Comment author: Sarokrae 09 September 2012 01:15:44PM 7 points [-]

What is your evaluation of your own introspection abilities? (More precisely, how often do you consider the motivations for your emotions, attitudes, tone of speech, etc, and are you successful.)

I'd also like to ask this to the men.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 01:37:25AM *  4 points [-]

are you successful

Measuring the success of introspection (as in epistemic success, as opposed to instrumental success) runs into a Wittgensteinian problem heavily. That is, it is ‘As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true’.

Comment author: Douglas_Reay 08 September 2012 09:55:11PM *  3 points [-]

Here's a link to a related blog post she wrote.

The section I was thinking of was:


Atheists need to work -- now -- on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.

And by now, I mean now. We need to start on this now, so we don't get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.

What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.

The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community... and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.

And we're paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our community.

That makes it hard on everyone in the LGBT movement -- women and men, of all races. It creates rifts that make our community weaker. And it has a seriously bad impact on our ability to make effective social change. For instance, the LGBT movement has a profoundly impaired ability to shift homophobic attitudes in the black communities... since those communities can claim, entirely fairly, that the gay community doesn't care about black people, and hasn't made an effort to deal with our racism.

We screwed this up. We still screw this up. We are paying for our screwups.

Atheists have a chance to not do that.


Comment author: J_Taylor 08 September 2012 10:25:45PM *  5 points [-]

I would strongly prefer that the Lesswrong community, whatever that even is, does not get too closely entwined with the mainstream atheist community. Generally, it seems that shifting one's message further to the left of the bell curve is lossy at best, dishonest at worst.

Comment author: drethelin 08 September 2012 05:36:27PM 1 point [-]

We have evidence that chimps rape, and we have evidence that Neolithic societies rape. You need to provide strong information that somewhere between those two states of existence(taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived), it became evolutionarily unfavorable to rape, but not enough to keep civilized people from doing it

Comment author: J_Taylor 08 September 2012 06:05:40PM *  2 points [-]

We have evidence that chimps rape

taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived

We do share a common ancestor with chimps, yes. From this common ancestor is descended both chimps and bonobos.

Given the existence of bonobos, I do not see why chimp-rape is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not rape is adaptive in humans. That is, given the existence of bonobos, it seems uncertain whether or not the common ancestor of chimps and humans (who is also the common ancestor of humans and bonobos) was, how to put this, a rape ape.

Comment author: drethelin 08 September 2012 05:24:21PM 2 points [-]

I agree that the first part is rude, but how is information irrelevant? It's an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.

Comment author: J_Taylor 08 September 2012 05:44:06PM 5 points [-]

The article on bride kidnapping contained no hunter-gatherers, as far I could see.

It's an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.

I do not think it wise to attempt to extrapolate information about the EEA from contemporary (or even merely ancient) societies whose material conditions do not resemble the conditions of bands in the EEA. (Hell, I don't even know if we can extrapolate information from modern bands. All of this is an incredible epistemic mess.)

Genghis Khan didn't get to be the ancestor of 8 percent of people in east asia by being nice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan)

I do not dispute the truth of this fact. However, the ruler of the largest contiguous land empire in history is not the sort of fellow we wish to be looking at in order to determine whether or not rape was adaptive in the EEA. If you were interested in answering such a question, I guess you would want to look at some folks like the Hadza and observe how reproductively successful fellows like Scumbag Sengani, a hypothetical rapist, end up being.

Comment author: drethelin 08 September 2012 05:40:08AM 4 points [-]

[citation needed]

If nothing else, a reputations as a "rapist" is not at all the same thing in a society where women aren't considered to be people, but property. Hunter gatherers as well as civilization at least up to the biblical level have also engaged in Bride kidnapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping) Which we would definitely think of as rape but clearly wasn't viewed in the same way at those times. Genghis Khan didn't get to be the ancestor of 8 percent of people in east asia by being nice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan)

You seem to be doing a lot of theorizing about ancient behavior on very little data, because you don't want rape to have been adaptative.

Comment author: J_Taylor 08 September 2012 05:09:10PM 2 points [-]

It should be considered rude to post:

[citation needed]

and then offer irrelevant information to back up your point.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 September 2012 10:05:29PM 16 points [-]

(shrug) Sure, I'll bite this bullet.

Yes, if enough people are made to suffer sufficiently by virtue of my existence, and there's no way to alleviate that suffering other than my extermination, then I endorse my extermination.
To do otherwise would be unjustifiably selfish.

Which is not to say I would necessarily exterminate myself, if I had sufficiently high confidence that this was the case... I don't always do what I endorse.

And if it's not me but some other individual or group X that has that property in that hypothetical scenario, I endorse X's extermination as well.

And, sure, if you label the group in an emotionally charged way (e.g., "Nazis exterminating Jews" as you do here), I'll feel a strong emotional aversion to that conclusion (as I do here).

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 September 2012 10:54:18PM 6 points [-]

Yes, if enough people are made to suffer sufficiently by virtue of my existence, and there's no way to alleviate that suffering other than my extermination, then I endorse my extermination. To do otherwise would be unjustifiably selfish.

Be careful, TheOtherDave! Utility Monsters are wily beasts.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 September 2012 12:45:31PM *  3 points [-]
In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012
Comment author: J_Taylor 07 September 2012 02:53:59AM 2 points [-]

I personally love nothing more than a Great Loyalty Oath Crusade.


Linked from Richard Carrier is this piece:

Avoid telling racist or sexist or homophobic jokes, unless perhaps if they are empowering because the target of the joke is the racist or sexist or homophobe. Don’t ever target specific real people with jokes or suggestions about rape or anal self-abuse.

I really hate it when someone tells me not to do something in a way that really makes me want to do it. I mean, I never thought of literally telling someone to self-abuse themselves anally before reading this post.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 03:29:42AM *  1 point [-]

You can't find those because some wonderfully helpful person decided to hide my post. Search for "comment score below threshold" and look inside of there for "psychopath".

Ctrl-F is helpful if you didn't know about it.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 03:53:56AM 2 points [-]

Considering that the posts I linked to were descendents of your post (I assume you were referring to this one?), it would be safe for you to assume that I had read it. (I also do not filter posts by karma value.)

Is there, in fact, a post that you think would support the claim:

Either gwern or shminux either publicly suspected or pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a sociopath.

? If so, could you please post a hyperlink?

Comment author: RomanDavis 06 September 2012 02:56:47AM 0 points [-]

Which culture?

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 03:01:51AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:31:52AM *  0 points [-]

OrphanWilde was only doing an experiment. I didn't mean to say those guys were serious about their accusations. They behaved that way in the context of the experiment. Most likely they do know better than to take the experiment literally. I realize this. (:

I hate pointing out the obvious, but I guess I have to now. edits my post

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 02:53:30AM *  0 points [-]

I apologize for my lack of explicitness.

Here gwern states that someone possessing transcendent charm is not sufficient evidence for one to conclude that they possess a 200+ IQ. (He mentions other possibilities of them having a "mere" 140+ IQ or them being a psychopath.)

Here gwern states that the world contains more psychopaths than geniuses.

Here is a well-done ramble about the overlap between psychopathy and genius.

I cannot find any post by schminux that would explain why you think he was pretending to accuse OrphanWilde of being a psychopath.


Now to clarify: I am holding that gwern and schminux never publicly suspected OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. I am further holding that gwern and schminux never publicly pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. These events did not occur, nor did events resembling them occur. Thus, this:

later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux

is almost a complete non sequitur, apropos of nothing.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:03:01AM *  0 points [-]

I enjoy your precision.

If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time

Again: where high IQ and giftedness are seen as status markers, talking about my high IQ and my giftedness is usually unacceptable. (Similarly, talking about my wealth or my really beautiful spouse or various other status markers is usually unacceptable.)

You make my verbiage look sloppy. (:

Sorry for seeming to ignore this comment for a few weeks. I was busy.

Right now the way I'm seeing this is that because IQ differences are not seen as something that can cause a person a prolific number of differences that are socially relevant for lots of things other than status, it's often perceived as a status grab when it's not.

There are also a whole bunch of other problems that, combined, paint a picture of oppression. OrphanWilde did an experiment in this very thread, asking "Actually, let's try an experiment: My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220. What is your reaction?"

The result was that he was accused (in the context of the experiment, by people who, I realize, probably do not literally believe these things) of lying by Alicorn and gwern and later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux.

I was the only one that showed willingness to entertain the idea that OrphanWilde might not be a liar or a psychopath. I suppose, technically that's not oppression against people you believe to be gifted, it's discouragement toward people you believe not to be gifted. However, what happens when people have the same attitude of not believing other types of people about their differences? "Oh you're not really homosexual, let's send you to the psychologist and have that fixed." They may have good intentions but the result is definitely oppressive. If people jump to conclusions about a group of people - even the conclusion that the specific individuals in question aren't part of the group - then those assumptions can oppress the group in question.

Then there's the fact that 50% of gifted children in America are never given an IQ test, yet they require special education to prevent them from developing problems like learned helplessness due to being placed in the wrong environment.

Terman did a study that challenged commonly held beliefs that gifted people tended to be ugly, and have a lot of problems, and revealed various myths. That was in 1921, but there are still echos of that mentality - people frequently associate negative things with giftedness as if trying to balance things out and make everyone equal again on some imaginary scale - when we shouldn't be viewing our equality any differently regardless of intellectual differences anyway.

As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.

This leads them to oppress.

Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective, supportive or unsupportive?

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 02:22:19AM *  1 point [-]

later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux

If gwern suspected OrphanWilde of being a sociopath, surely he would have made a PredictionBook post.

But seriously, I've read the posts I think you are talking about. Nobody has such suspicions.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 September 2012 05:32:24PM *  6 points [-]

Challenge: Steel man Time Cube.

I read the following by Kate Evens on Twitter:

Time Cube: the control group for steelmanning.

And I became curious. What could LW come up with?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012
Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 01:45:39AM 7 points [-]

According to Wikipedia:

"Before Time Cube, Otis E. Ray advocated the sport of marbles. He authored a book titled Mr. Marbles – Marbles for Everyone,and got the city council of St. Petersburg, Florida to proclaim a "Marbles Week" in the 1970s. In 1987, this became a controversial attempt to establish a million dollar marble tournament inside a huge round structure and establish a philosophical "Order of the Sphere."

By rejecting many small spheres in favor of one large cube, Gene Ray has dedicated his life to demonstrating that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Comment author: DevilWorm 04 September 2012 05:46:19PM 3 points [-]

Consider a few facts:

  1. Will, who knows a bit about psychiatry, frequently informs us that he has suffered from schizophrenia.

  2. Paranoid schizophrenia (the most likely form because Will is high functioning) is incurable--although partial remissions often occur.

  3. A pervasive characteristic of schizophrenia and schizotypal thinking is hyper-religiosity.

  4. Will often posts in the obscure, mysterious fashion often typical of intelligent paranoid schizophrenics.

It is a mark of the ignorance of this community regarding psychiatry and psychology that posters seek to explain Will's ravings in terms of ordinary rational processes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 01:14:45AM 1 point [-]

Will, who knows a bit about psychiatry, frequently informs us that he has suffered from schizophrenia.

Alternatively,

I'm schizotypal I suppose, but not schizophrenic given the standard definition. I don't think I have any trouble interpreting mundane coincidences as mundane.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 September 2012 05:06:28PM -1 points [-]

When looking at the sexual marketplace from an economic standpoint, I think the most ideal solution is hiring a prostitute or a gigolo. Here are my reasons: 1) Prostitutes/gigolos usually have more "fit bodies and nice clothes" than the ones you would normally get in the dating market. 2) Prostitutes/gigolos are more experienced and adventurous and therefore more capable of satisfying you sexually. 3) You don't need to waste time with prostitutes/gigolos before having intercourse with them. For normal dates, you will have to court them several times amounting to dozens of hours, and even then, they might decide to break up before you even hit second base.

I can think of other reasons, but you can understand where this is going.

If I am in the market for long term relationships, I would like to have the capability of filtering out the moneydiggers who don't particularly feel attracted to me and are only interested in my money. These are the only people who are less likely to date me if they were going to pay for my dinner. Women who are truly attracted to me will find the whole issue of who is expected to pay no more than trivial.

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 September 2012 11:36:03PM -2 points [-]

You are talking to heterosexual males, correct?

Comment author: Epiphany 04 September 2012 07:47:28PM 0 points [-]

That's all right here: I agree that it's best if people agree after the debate.

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 September 2012 12:05:36AM 1 point [-]

An unusual fact: I think you are one of the few Lesswrongers to use 'debate' to refer to something other than formal debates. More specifically, I think that you are using the string 'debate' to refer to what most on this forum would call arguments or discussions or disagreements.

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: J_Taylor 04 September 2012 12:34:19AM *  4 points [-]

cannon law

If Will was pope, he would have papal infallibility, and thus could speak ex cathedra on all matters of what is and what is not a cannon.

Trivia: Although the Society of Friends is generally a good example of theological liberalism, Quaker Cannon does exist. However, most scholars of Catholic cannon law hold it to be illusory.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 05:03:10AM 0 points [-]

Lol thank you Wedrifid, that was refreshing, and you were pretty good.

I disagree with you, but you're welcome to continue the disagreement with me. (:

Just because other people use those as signals that a person is in a particular place in a hierarchy does not mean that:

A. I believe in social hierarchies or that social hierarchies even exist. (I see them as an illusion).

B. The specific reason I am attracted to these qualities is due to an attraction to people in a certain position in the social hierarchy.

The reasons I want someone who is able to defeat me in a debate are:

  1. It gets extremely tedious to disagree with people who can't. I end up teaching them things endlessly in order to get us to a point of agreement, while learning too little.

  2. I might get careless if nobody knocks me down for a long time. It's not good for me.

  3. It is rather uncomfortable and awkward in a relationship or even a friendship if one person is always right and the other always loses debates. That feels wrong.

"Fluff, no." vs "You have your own preferences and other people see your preference as fluff."

If I said I had a million dollars, but really, I was a million dollars in debt, would that be an empty claim? Yes. If a person is spending beyond their means in order to signal that they have money, they're being dishonest. So that's fluff.

If social hierarchies don't actually exist, and a person signals that they're in one, is that real, or is it a fantasy? if they don't exist, it's fluff.

"This seems tautologically likely."

Okay, this was an embarrassing failure to use clear wording on my part. Although you're not actually disagreeing with me, you got me good, lol.

That was fun. Feel free to disagree with me from now on.

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 September 2012 06:17:47AM 0 points [-]

A. I believe in social hierarchies or that social hierarchies even exist. (I see them as an illusion).

Could you elaborate? Do you see all social constructs as being illusory?

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 September 2012 03:33:00AM *  11 points [-]

Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious."

Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.

  • John Adams
Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 August 2012 09:04:50PM 0 points [-]

For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion.

Really? I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that religious faith is a cheap target for critiques of irrationality. It is the example that people fall back on when they don't have a better one, because it is so obvious.

But religion isn't taken as much of a threat or a cause for outrage here. There are communities where it is — New Atheists, skeptics, and science educators concerned about creationism all come to mind.

Comment author: J_Taylor 31 August 2012 12:28:38AM 0 points [-]

Really? I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that religious faith is a cheap target for critiques of irrationality. It is the example that people fall back on when they don't have a better one, because it is so obvious.

Astrology, alternative medicine, alien abductions, etc. are the usual targets attacked by entry-level skeptics. However, I do agree that in mainstream Western culture, religion is easy to attack.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 August 2012 02:23:06PM 5 points [-]

So far as I know, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is a western custom which only goes back a century or so.

Comment author: J_Taylor 30 August 2012 11:18:08PM 3 points [-]

Precisely.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 August 2012 03:49:47AM 2 points [-]

Can't think anything without a concrete example.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 August 2012 10:38:28PM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Kindly 28 August 2012 02:58:08PM *  16 points [-]

I very much like "Abortion is a medical procedure". It's actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.

I think the "free speech" examples don't quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion "Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal" is valid if you accept the premise.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 August 2012 10:27:53PM 0 points [-]

It seems rather probable that the free speech examples were problematic. As such, the post has been edited.

Comment author: evand 28 August 2012 02:29:58PM 2 points [-]

How would you say the War on Some Drugs is different than Prohibition?

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 August 2012 09:48:52PM 0 points [-]

I wouldn't say that. However, I also wouldn't say that the War on Drugs is the same as Prohibition. I do not have any opinions on these matters that I view as worth stating at this time.

Comment author: chaosmosis 28 August 2012 03:16:55AM 0 points [-]

My comment provided an insight insofar as it explicitly connected the analysis to Immanuel Kant's writing in order to criticize it.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 August 2012 04:13:11AM 1 point [-]

Can you think of an example of Kant using this form of argumentation?

Comment author: wedrifid 28 August 2012 03:13:46AM 6 points [-]

Flag burning is free speech.

Someone uttering this may claim that they are not using the worst argument in the world as defined:

If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. 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."

They claim that it does have the critical features in question. Even the person they are arguing against may agree that it is equivalent to shouting out loud "My country is a @#$% disgrace! Screw my country!". The disagreement seems to be whether one should be permitted to do that kind of thing.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 August 2012 03:26:54AM 1 point [-]

I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?

Comment author: [deleted] 27 August 2012 04:37:42PM 32 points [-]

Yvain, here is a challenge. Many of your examples are weak versions of strong right-wing arguments that you do not accept. (by your remark about Schelling fences, it seems you're aware of this). I challenge you to replace each of these examples with a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept. Since policy debates should not appear one-sided, there should be no shortage of weak arguments "on your side." And it would be an interesting kind of ideological Turing test.

Perhaps I'm wrong about "what side you're on" and you already accept the strong right-wing arguments. In which case you got me, well done!

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 August 2012 02:35:51AM *  31 points [-]

"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."

This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features." However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:

  • Abortion is a medical procedure.
  • Pornography is art.
  • Welfare is charity.

Other liberal examples, using Yvain's implicit definition:

  • Homophobia is hatred.
  • The War on Drugs is Prohibition.
  • Pornography is sexist.

However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.

Edit: Changed the free speech examples.

Comment author: hankx7787 18 August 2012 04:24:23PM *  3 points [-]

This is more than purchasing fuzzies to me. I'm counting on people sufficiently like me to cooperate on cases of this nature. It's the superrational thing to do.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 August 2012 07:35:18PM 2 points [-]

If you have the time, could you elaborate on an issue? That is, if you were acting rationally in this particular scenario, and not super-rationally, how would your behavior differ?

Comment author: Dolores1984 19 August 2012 06:10:12PM 1 point [-]

The next time people are presented with an opportunity for charity(any opportunity), their last memory is now changed from 'hey, I was charitable a couple of months ago, and that was nice' to 'hey, I was charitable a couple of months ago, and this optimal-charity jerk made me feel terrible about it.'

You're making them less likely to give in general, and, by being rude about it, you're also damaging the PR brand of your cause, which will hurt you more than you think. I don't know of any corporation that advertises its product by abusing its customers.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 August 2012 07:28:08PM 5 points [-]

This is likely to be the case if gwern were to act in such a way in the vast majority of environments. However, in this particular online community, criticizing people for publicly donating to suboptimal charity may well be a fairly good method for gwern to produce utilons.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 18 August 2012 01:17:14AM *  3 points [-]

However, as for your second statement, I would really like an example, because I am not entirely sure what you mean. (I am sincerely requesting examples.)

Few quick examples:

  • A lot of philosophy of mind assumes there is a singular unified self, whereas neurology might lead you to think of the mind as a group of systems, and this could resolve some dilmnas.

  • Lots of traditional moral theories assume people make choices in certain ways not backed by observation of their brains.

  • Your willingness to accept materialist explanations for the mind probably increases exponentially the more you know about the mechanics of the brain. (Are the any dualist neuroscientists?)

  • A lot of philosophy uses 'armchair' reflection and introspection to get foundational intuitions and make judgements. Knowing the hardware you're running that on is probably helpful. (E.g. showing how easy it is to trigger people's intuitions one way or the other changed the debate about Gettier cases massively.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 August 2012 08:58:15PM 3 points [-]

I see and concede. I had been thinking at an excessively low-level.

Comment author: loup-vaillant 17 August 2012 01:35:17PM *  1 point [-]

QM potentially answers cool philosophical questions like, "does cut & paste transportation preserves identity" (it looks like it does, for our universe doesn't seem to encode any identity at all).

Neurology will most probably tell us nearly everything we will ever know about how humans actually work. I expect many questions formerly considered "philosophical" will be answered by this piece of science.

Therefore, I think nearly all philosophers need to know some QM and neurology.

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 August 2012 11:42:26PM 0 points [-]

I agree with your first statement.

However, as for your second statement, I would really like an example, because I am not entirely sure what you mean. (I am sincerely requesting examples.)

Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with your third statement. The time it would take to learn QM with sufficient rigor to be interesting could be better spent reading the findings of experimental psychology or learning more mathematics. For the majority of philosophers, their subject matter simply does not overlap with QM in such a way that knowing rigorous QM would help them.

Further, I agree with what paper-machine seemed to imply in their post. A little QM can make a philosopher stupid.

Of course, in certain subjects, knowing QM or neurology should be mandatory.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 15 August 2012 09:53:49PM 7 points [-]

Very definitely, its easy to forget the level of knowledge necessary t work at for this stuff. For example I recently realised that in a room of competitive debaters (college educated well read people) no-one knew what I meant by epistemic uncertainty. And very few philosophers know anything about QM or neurology...

TL;DR Illusion of transparency is a bitch.

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 August 2012 11:58:52PM 0 points [-]

very few philosophers know anything about QM or neurology

Very few philosophers need to know anything about QM or neurology.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 14 August 2012 06:56:12PM *  5 points [-]

Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction?

"Traditional sexual norms" (and the power relations they entail) did not arise through a process that optimized for harm reduction; they arose through a process of cultural evolution. At various points in time, patriarchal societies — by treating women as baby factories and men as killing machines — could outbreed and conquer less-patriarchal ones. That's when and why those "traditional sexual norms" arose.

It would be remarkable if this process had arrived at even a local minimum for harm, for the same reasons that it would be remarkable if biological evolution had arrived at a maximum for intelligence, happiness, or any other trait that we individually find desirable. (Heck, "traditional sexual norms" are optimized for sending excess boys to go kill other tribes' men and rape their virgin daughters. We call it "warfare" and it even today involves quite a lot of rape.)

So proposing "traditional sexual norms" as a harm reduction appears to be some combination of naturalistic fallacy and privileging the hypothesis; we have no reason to bring this particular set of norms to mind when we think of strategies for harm reduction, since it was selected for other goals.

But we can also ask, "For what reasons would it come to certain people's minds to politically advocate 'traditional sexual norms' if they don't actually want the things that 'traditional sexual norms' are optimized for, namely lots of conquest and rape?" Since we know about self-serving bias and privilege denial, we may suspect that at least some such advocates do it because it would serve their personal interests at the expense of others. That said, this runs the risk of fundamental attribution error. It is more likely the case that certain people find themselves in situations where they feel personally challenged by sexual laissez-faire, and respond by claiming the morality of traditional sexual norms, than that they do so because they are fundamentally misogynistic people.

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 August 2012 11:35:52PM 9 points [-]

When Vladimir_M uses the phrase "traditional sexual norms", he probably is not referring to those norms which you are referring to in your post. Rather, he is probably speaking of a certain subset of Western norms, likely lifelong heterosexual monogamy. This is extremely unoptimized for "lots of conquest and rape".

Comment author: CarlShulman 14 August 2012 02:03:35AM 1 point [-]

delightfully unusual posting goals

???

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: GLaDOS 13 August 2012 06:08:33PM *  7 points [-]

In other words -- trying to use a language a liberal might understand better -- articles like this make me feel unwelcome.

I'm also starting to feel unwelcome here.

I've been seeing more and more sings of an intellectual chilling in the past few months and a shrinking of acceptable ingroup political variation.

Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being "insufficient liberal spin". Now obviously the no mind-killer norm kept the concern unpopular and a well worded post calling it out was written... but still what concerns me is that I don't recall things like this happening at all before.

Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% "Liberal"! People say "Wow" when they see someone being socially conservative. Do we really need majority ideological biases and group feelings reinforced and further privileged?

Not cool.

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 August 2012 01:47:54AM 3 points [-]

Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being "insufficient liberal spin".

Multiheaded is a delightfully unusual case with delightfully unusual posting goals, who I assumed was rather unlike any other poster here. Was your usage of the plural 'users' solely for aesthetic concerns, or are there other users who have complained about "insufficient liberal bias"?

Comment author: roland 05 August 2012 01:46:08PM 0 points [-]

I suppose you can't embed JsFiddle here either, can you?

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 August 2012 04:46:24AM *  0 points [-]

That seems unlikely. You would have to have links in your article.

Comment author: Manfred 03 August 2012 04:50:42PM *  12 points [-]

Well, the thing you might be interested in is that I'm thoroughly revamping the combat system of Yvain's Dungeons and Discourse RPG (sorry, not linkable yet, but Yvain's original can be found here). This involves me riffling through a lot of philosophy summaries for cool skill names. Marxist: "Perpetual Revolution." Nietzschean: "Will to Power." Materialist: "Summon: Laplace's Demon." Idealist: "Summon: Cave." So it's been good for my philosophical education. I'm doing this both because I'm enjoying turning philosophy into sweet RPG humor, and because I plan on using it. The learning part is merely a happy side-effect.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2012 10:58:41PM 4 points [-]

"Perpetual Revolution"

I believe that you may be thinking of Permanent Revolution. If I could recommend some cool Marxist (or, Marx-descended) terms: Revolutionary Terror, Antagonistic Contradiction, Metabolic Rift, Dual Power, Struggle Session.

Comment author: thomblake 03 August 2012 06:23:30PM 7 points [-]

Was the parent upvoted because people thought it was funny, or because they thought I had provided the correct answer, or because I mentioned ponies, or some other reason?

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2012 10:47:33PM 5 points [-]

Yes.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 August 2012 02:24:56PM *  7 points [-]

If a disaster occurred, and there was no clear way for the generous public to actually help, do you think you would see the same response?

If help is not possible, obviously there will be no help. But in real disasters, there always is a way to help, and help is always forthcoming.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2012 10:37:42PM 8 points [-]

Even if help is not possible, there will be "help."

Comment author: roland 03 August 2012 03:25:14AM 1 point [-]

Is it possible to embed JavaScript code into articles? If yes, how? I was thinking about doing some animations to illustrate probability.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2012 03:41:28AM 2 points [-]

This does not seem possible (thankfully!). Have you considered using JsFiddle? It may be useful for your purposes:

http://andrewwooldridge.com/blog/2011/03/16/stunning-examples-of-using-jsfiddle/

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2012 02:09:49AM 34 points [-]

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Comment author: Alicorn 02 August 2012 02:10:06AM 3 points [-]

That is a mechanism by which availability of birth control could theoretically increase abortion; do you have any empiricism handy?

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 August 2012 12:41:04AM *  2 points [-]

Absolutely none whatsoever.

Edit: Confound these Lesswrongers, they drive me to research.

Anyways, to make a brief attempt using data from here, it seems that I was either overestimating p(oops|pill) or underestimating p(oops|condom). Of course, the hypothetical pragmatic pro-lifer really should be advocating for Dreaded_Anomaly's suggested methods as opposed to free pills.

Still, I give substantially more credence to the statement:

This intervention would cause a decrease in abortion.

(Note: I was not giving much credence to begin with.)

Comment author: Brigid 01 August 2012 10:56:33PM 0 points [-]

People who are pro-life in the abortion debate should also be pro- free birth control pills (those not requiring a co-pay).

If pro-lifers were more pragmatic, they would rank the issues that they care about from least-bad to worst. Most would agree that abortion is worse than pre-marital sex. Therefore, they should support efforts to eliminate the need for abortions (not just seek to eliminate the ability to have an abortion). As access to birth control reduces the likelihood of the need to have an abortion, free birth control pills would reduce the overall number of abortions, thus supporting the pro-life stance.

Also, if you agree with the analysis done by Steven Levitt in the book Freakonomics (availability of abortion services led to a drastic decrease in crime), by the same logic, free birth control should lead to a decrease in the crime rate as well.

The catch: That pro-lifers have to believe that they will not be able to get everything that they want politically, and must prioritize their goals.

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 August 2012 01:06:16AM 2 points [-]

People who are pro-life in the abortion debate should also be pro- free birth control pills (those not requiring a co-pay).

Birth control pills are only as reliable as the people who take them. This intervention could very well cause an increase in abortion.

Comment author: Randaly 31 July 2012 09:18:39PM *  7 points [-]

I'd argue that Machiavelli didn't really believe much of what was written in The Prince. First, Machiavelli, aside from in The Prince, was a very consistent supporter of republican government (contrast, eg his Discourses on Livy); also, he held several high offices in the Republic, and was fired, tortured, and sentenced to house arrest following the Medici return to power. Second off, much of his advice given in The Prince was objectively terrible, and would have increased the likelihood of a counter-counter-coup against the Medici- Mary Dietz gives a longer argument here (HT Gwern), which Wikipedia summarizes as:

  • He discourages liberality and favors niggardliness to guarantee support from the people. Yet Machiavelli is keenly aware of the fact that an earlier pro-republican coup had been thwarted by the people's inaction that itself stemmed from the prince's liberality.
  • He supports arming the people despite the fact that he knows the Florentines are decidedly pro-democratic and would oppose the prince
  • He encourages the prince to live in the city he conquers. This opposes the Medicis' habitual policy of living outside the city. It also makes it easier for rebels or a civilian militia to attack and overthrow the prince.

(Even if it wasn't a trap, it's likely Machiavelli had severely compromised his own principles and ideas in The Prince in order to gain favor with the Medici.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 August 2012 12:50:22AM 1 point [-]

If I am not mistaken, Burnham argues in his Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom that although Machiavelli believed republicanism to be generally the best form of government, he did not hold that republicanism was the best form of government for the Italian city-states at that time.

Having not read the article, I cannot criticize the arguments that it contains. However, I am inclined to say that it goes against the mainstream view of Machiavelli (that is, mainstream view of experts on Machiavelli, not just mainstream view of the masses).

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 July 2012 03:45:23AM 3 points [-]

the universe was created 13.72 billion years ago

This is non-scientific when interpreted literally. You may wish to revise your phrasing.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 July 2012 02:13:26AM 4 points [-]

What my externally observable percentiles look like:

  • Writing: 99+%
  • Math: 99+%
  • Conceptual originality: 99+%
  • Programming: 95%
  • Conformity / ability to obey incorrect orders: 20%

What my educational credentials look like:

  • Highest level of education completed: 8th grade
Comment author: J_Taylor 05 July 2012 03:27:05AM 9 points [-]

What population are you comparing yourself to?

Comment author: tgb 17 June 2012 06:46:35PM -1 points [-]

Pure speculation! However, this was a wide-spread occurrence not just one or two cows hinting at some systematic setup. I also don't remember the details as it was many years ago and I was quite young - it's possible that there was a pair of legs.

Comment author: J_Taylor 23 June 2012 03:20:41AM 0 points [-]

Forgive me, for my biology is a bit rusty.

A gene can become more common in a population without being selected for. However, invoking random genetic drift as an explanation is generally dirty pool, epistemically speaking. We should expect a gene that creates extra useless legs to be selected against. (Nutrients and energy spent maintaining the leg could be better used, the leg becomes more space for parasite invasion, etc.) Assuming that you were dealing with such cattle, you should assume that some humans were selecting for them. (No reason necessary. Humans totally do that sort of thing.)

I cannot think of any examples of a mutation causing extra limb development in vertebrates. However, certain parasites can totally cause extra limb development in amphibians. I doubt this is the case, but it is more likely than mutation.

Alternatively, consider there existing a selection effect on your observations. I wager that Indian cattle are less likely to be culled for having an extra leg that American cattle are. I'm just going off of stereotypes here, however.

Comment author: tgb 16 June 2012 02:04:18AM 8 points [-]

I am interested in reading on a fairly specific topic, and I would like suggestions. I don't know any way to describe this other than be giving the two examples I have thought of:

Some time ago my family and I visited India. There, among other things, we saw many cows with an extra, useless leg growing out of their backs near the shoulders. This mutation is presumably not beneficial to the cow, but it strikes me as beneficial to the amateur geneticist. Isn't it incredibly interesting that a leg can be the by-product of random mutation? Doesn't that tell us a lot about the way genes are structured - namely that somewhere out there is a gene that encodes things at near the level of genes - some small number of genes corresponds nearly directly to major, structural components of the cow. It's not all about molecules, or cells, or even tissues! Gene's aren't like a bitmap image - they're hierarchical and structured. Wow!

Similarly, there are stories of people losing specific memory 'segments', say, their personal past but not how to read and write, how to drive, or how to talk. Assuming that these stories are approximately true, that suggests that some forms of memory loss are not random. We wouldn't expect a hard drive error to corrupt only pictures of sunny days on your computer since the hard drive doesn't know what pictures are of sunny days. We wouldn't even expect a computer virus to do that. At least we wouldn't unless somewhere the pictures of sunny days are grouped together, say in a folder. So the brain doesn't store memories like a computer stores images! Or memory loss isn't like hard drive failures! Somewhere, memories are 'clumped' into personal-things and general-knowledge things so that we can lose one without losing the other and without an unfathomable coincidence of chance.

Neither of these conclusions is either specific or surprising, but I know nothing about neurology and nothing about genetics so I'm not sure how to take these ideas further than my poor computer science-driven analogies. If someone who really knew this subject, or some subset of it, wrote about it, I can't help but feeling that this would be absolutely fascinating. Please, let me know if there is such a book or article or blog post out there! Or even if you just have other observations that'll make me think "wow" like this, tell me!

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 June 2012 10:43:41PM *  4 points [-]

What makes you think that the extra limbs were caused by mutations? I know very little about bovine biology, but if we were dealing with a human, I would assume that an extra leg was likely caused by absorption of a sibling in utero. I have never heard of a mutation in mammals causing extra limb development. (Even weirder is the idea of a mutation causing an extra single leg, as opposed to an extra leg pair.) The vertebrate body plan simply does not seem to work that way.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 13 May 2012 03:10:03PM *  6 points [-]

I tentatively hold, and believe it is the SI's position, that an uFAI is almost certain to produce human extinction. Again, I would like to call this utility 0.

I hold with timtyler that a uFAI probably wouldn't kill off all humanity. There's little benefit to doing so and it potentially incurs a huge cost by going against the wishes of potential simulators, counterfactual FAIs (acausally) (not necessarily human-designed, just designed by an entity or entities that cared about persons in general), hidden AGIs (e.g. alien AGIs that have already swept by the solar system but are making it look as if they haven't (note that this resolves the Fermi paradox)), et cetera. Such a scenario is still potentially a huge loss relative to FAI scenarios, but it implies that AGI isn't a sure-thing existential catastrophe, and is perhaps less likely to lead to human extinction than certain other existential risks. If for whatever reason you think that humans are easily satisfied, then uFAI is theoretically just as good as FAI; but that really doesn't seem plausible to me. There might also be certain harm-minimization moral theories that would be ambivalent between uFAI and FAI. But I think most moral theories would still place huge emphasis on FAI versus uFAI even if uFAI would actually be human-friendly in some local sense.

Given such considerations, I'm not sure whether uFAI or wannabe-FAI is more likely to lead to evil AI. Wannabe-FAI is more likely to have a stable goal system that is immune to certain self-modifications and game theoretic pressures that a less stable AI or a coalition of splintered AI successors would be relatively influenced by. E.g. a wannabe-FAI might disregard certain perceived influences (even influences from hypothetical FAIs that it was considering self-modifying into, or acausal influences generally) as "blackmail" or as otherwise morally requiring ignorance. This could lead to worse outcomes than a messier, more adaptable, more influence-able uFAI. One might want to avoid letting a single wannabe-FAI out into the world which could take over existing computing infrastructure and thus halt most AI work but would be self-limiting in some important respect (e.g. due to sensitivity to Pascalian considerations due to a formal, consistent decision theory, of the sort that a less formal AI architecture wouldn't have trouble with). Such a scenario could be worse than one where a bunch of evolving AGIs with diverse initial goal systems get unleashed and compete with each other, keeping self-limiting AIs from reaching evil or at least relatively suboptimal singleton status. And so on; one could list considerations like this for a long time. At any rate I don't think there are any obviously overwhelming answers. Luckily in the meantime there are meta-level strategies like intelligence amplification (in a very broad sense) which could make such analysis more tractable.

(The above analysis is written from what I think is a SingInst-like perspective, i.e., hard takeoff is plausible, FAI as defined by Eliezer is especially desirable, et cetera. I don't necessarily agree with such a perspective, and my analysis could fail given different background assumptions.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 13 May 2012 10:58:43PM 1 point [-]

Although I am extremely interested in your theories, it would take significant time and energy for me to reformulate my ideas in such a way as to satisfactorily incorporate the points you are making. As such, for purposes of this discussion, I shall be essentially speaking as if I had not been made aware of the post which you just made.

However, if you could clarify a minor point: am I mistaken in my belief that it is the SI's position that uFAI will probably result in human extinction? Or, have they incorporated the points you are making into their theories?

Comment author: lukeprog 13 May 2012 12:16:53AM 5 points [-]

We'd need a pretty specific kind of "semi-FAI" to create an outcome worse than utility 0, so I'd prefer a term like eAI ("evil AI") for an AI that produces a world state worse than utility 0.

So: Is eAI more probable given (1) the first AGIs are created by people explicitly aiming for Friendliness, or given (2) the first AGIs are not created by people explicitly aiming for Friendliness?

Comment author: J_Taylor 13 May 2012 07:02:57AM 2 points [-]

First, I prefer your terminology to my own. I had internally been calling such AIs sAIs (sadistic Artificial Intelligence). The etymology is chosen for a very specific reason. However, eAI is most satisfactory.

Second, I do apologize if I am being excessively naive. However, I must confess, I was rather convinced by Yudkowsky's argumentation about such matters. I tentatively hold, and believe it is the SI's position, that an uFAI is almost certain to produce human extinction. Again, I would like to call this utility 0.

Third, I do tentatively hold that p(eAI | attempt towards FAI) > p(eAI | attempt towards AGI).

I am well aware that it is neither your duty nor the duty of the SI to respond to every minor criticism. However, if you have a reason to believe that my third point is incorrect, I would very much like to be made aware of it.

((A possible counterargument to my position: any proper attempt to reduce the chance of human extinction does increase the probability of a world of negative-utility, generally speaking. If my argument too closely resembles negative utilitarianism, then I revoke my argument.))

Comment author: lukeprog 12 May 2012 03:12:55AM 13 points [-]

Objection 1: it seems to me that any AGI that was set to maximize a "Friendly" utility function would be extraordinarily dangerous.

Yes, Friendliness is hard, and that means that even the most dedicated team might screw it up. The point is that not trying as hard as you can to build Friendly AI is even worse, because then you almost certainly get uFAI. At least by trying to build FAI, we've got some chance of winning.

So this objection really just punts to objection #2, about tool-AGI, as the last paragraph here seems to indicate.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 May 2012 09:32:35PM *  4 points [-]

For certain values of "extraordinarily dangerous", that is an excellent rebuttal to the objection. However, as I am sure you are aware, there are many possible values of "extraordinarily dangerous". If I may present a plausible argument:

Let us declare a mind-dead universe (one with no agents) as having utility zero. It seems intuitive that working to build FAI decreases the probability of human extinction. However, a true uFAI (like a paperclip-maximizer) is hardly our only problem. A worse problem would be semi-FAI, that is, an AI which does not wipe out all of humanity, but does produce a world state-which is worse than a mind-dead universe. As the SI decreases probability of uFAI, it increases probability of semi-FAI.

Will_Newsome, myself, and probably several other users have mentioned such possibilities.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 11 May 2012 09:03:16AM 14 points [-]

In connection with this discussion, I am pleased to announce a new initiative, the Unfriendly AI Pseudocode Contest!

Objective of the contest: To produce convincing examples of how a harmless-looking computer program, that has not been specifically designed to be "friendly", could end up destroying the world. To explore the nature of AI danger without actually doing dangerous things.

Examples: A familiar example of unplanned unfriendliness, is the program designed to calculate pi, which reasons that it could calculate pi with much more accuracy if it turned the Earth into one giant computer. Here a harmless-looking goal (calculate pi) combines with a harmless-looking enhancement (vastly increased "intelligence") to produce a harmful outcome (Earth turned into one giant computer which does nothing but calculate pi).

An entry in the Unfriendly AI Pseudocode Contest which was intended to illustrate this scenario, would need to be specified in much more detail than this. For example, it might contain a pseudocode specification of the pi-calculating program in a harmless "unenhanced" state, then a description of a harmless-looking enhancement, and then an analysis demonstrating that the program has now become an existential risk.

Prizes: The accolades of your peers. The uneasy admiration of a terrified humanity, for whom your little demo has become the standard example of why "friendliness" matters. The gratitude of nihilist supervillains, for whom your pseudocode provides a convenient blueprint for action...

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 May 2012 04:43:08AM *  0 points [-]

Lesswrong is not an enjoyable place to post pseudocode. I learned this today.

Comment author: Alerus 10 May 2012 10:16:06PM *  0 points [-]

Conquer is typically used to mean that you take over the government and run the country, not just win a war.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 10:24:11PM *  6 points [-]

Americans did rule Japan by military force for about five years after WWII ended, demilitarized the nation, and left behind a sympathetic government of American design. However, if you do not wish to use the word 'conquer' to describe such a process, that is your prerogative.

Comment author: Alerus 10 May 2012 07:56:00PM 0 points [-]

We also didn't conquer Japan, we won the war. Those are two different things.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 09:56:55PM 2 points [-]

What sort of things would be different if it were the case that America conquered Japan?

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 May 2012 06:53:14PM 0 points [-]

o_0 I'd ask for a link, but life is too short to read Moldbug. Does he explain the Enlightenment in general as a descendant of Puritanism, or something similar? 'Cos the world, and RW, are slightly bigger than America.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 07:16:49PM *  8 points [-]

First, my excessive precision may have been rather myopic.

Nonetheless, Moldbug does, in fact, hold that the Enlightenment (a nebulous historical concept) was a manifestation of a particular strain of Protestantism.

If you do have the time, here is a relevant Moldbug article:

How Dawkins Got Pwned (part 2)

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 May 2012 06:36:18PM 0 points [-]

Well, I upvoted. I might downvote for Moldbug, though. What was the Moldbug bit?

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 06:42:55PM 11 points [-]

Moldbug claims that American liberalism is a descendent of American Puritanism and, as such, there is no irony in a Puritan-descended church being liberal.

Comment author: Alerus 10 May 2012 05:28:59PM *  0 points [-]

Considering there were many people in germany who vehemently disliked the nazis too (even ignoring jews), it seems like a pretty safe bet that after being conquered we wouldn't have suddenly viewed the nazis as great people. Why do you think otherwise?

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 05:49:49PM 3 points [-]

The Japanese are rather fond of America, if I am not mistaken. I assume that it is not uncommon for the conquered to eventually grow satisfied with their conquerors.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 03:59:24AM *  9 points [-]

RationalWiki may not be a great place for gaining accurate world-views, but it is a fantastic repository of the sort of rationalized pseudo-philosophy which the modern atheist movement loves. For those individuals of a certain contrarian nature, I imagine it can also be rather droll in an ironic sort of way. For example:

From New England:

This is New England's Irony #4 — that a region that, for all of its history, had been so uptight could also be so remarkably progressive on so many issues.

and

And on top of that, there's Irony #5 — the direct descendants of the old Puritan congregational churches, the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Church, are the most liberal Christian denominations in America, and possibly the world, throwing their support behind gay rights and other socially progressive causes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 05:38:52PM 6 points [-]

For those who downvoted, the two most obvious reasons would be either me insulting the epistemological practices of the modern atheist movement or me making a reference to the theories of Moldbug. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, I would find an explanation of downvotes to be very useful.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2012 12:31:07AM *  33 points [-]

I've browsed through a bunch of topics on RationalWiki, and it looks like a heavily ideological website. Thus, it tends to be extremely unreliable and biased on any topic that has even the slightest whiff of controversy. Anyone who makes a genuine effort to form an accurate view of the world will surely come to have at least some beliefs that will be met with scorn and sneering by the sort of people who write on RW.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 May 2012 03:59:24AM *  9 points [-]

RationalWiki may not be a great place for gaining accurate world-views, but it is a fantastic repository of the sort of rationalized pseudo-philosophy which the modern atheist movement loves. For those individuals of a certain contrarian nature, I imagine it can also be rather droll in an ironic sort of way. For example:

From New England:

This is New England's Irony #4 — that a region that, for all of its history, had been so uptight could also be so remarkably progressive on so many issues.

and

And on top of that, there's Irony #5 — the direct descendants of the old Puritan congregational churches, the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Church, are the most liberal Christian denominations in America, and possibly the world, throwing their support behind gay rights and other socially progressive causes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 May 2012 06:16:35PM 11 points [-]

It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.

-G.K. Chesterton

Comment author: hairyfigment 03 May 2012 07:56:27AM -1 points [-]
Comment author: J_Taylor 03 May 2012 06:13:42PM 2 points [-]

There is no dominant conceptual analysis of 'miracle' such that Putnam's sentence has a clear and distinct meaning. (I may be incorrect about this; I do not follow Philosophy of Religion.) Of course, since Putnam was writing to an extremely secular audience (by American standards), 'miracle' is a useful slur that essentially translates to 'WTF is this I don't even'.

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 May 2012 10:45:59PM *  10 points [-]

And testing confirmation bias in this fashion is intrinsically deceptive, so I probably have damaged my online reputation as well.

I have no way to back this up and just posting this tastes like hindsight bias to me. Nonetheless, this was my train-of-thought when I read this post :

  1. Gwern is using what looks like normal communication as a means to experiment.
  2. Gwern is a data-crunching, prediction-making, experiment-performing, freak-of-nature. (I mean this in an extremely complimentary fashion.) Therefore:
  3. This wasn't the first time Gwern did something like this and it will not be the last time.

Of course, as Rational!Beyonce would say "If I thought it then I should have put a prediction on it."

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 07:58:52AM *  10 points [-]

Scientific Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.

-Hilary Putnam

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 May 2012 09:54:17PM 1 point [-]

Putnam of all people really should have known better than to use the word 'miracle'.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 May 2012 02:31:32PM 6 points [-]

Spider: The point is, the only real tools we have are our eyes and our heads. It's not the act of seeing with our own eyes alone; it's correctly comprehending what we see.

Channon: Treating life as an autopsy.

Spider: Got it. Laying open the guts of the world and sniffing the entrails, that's what we do.

-- Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Comment author: [deleted] 01 May 2012 02:25:21AM 0 points [-]

Can you think of any ways to formalize and test this idea?

Applause lights. You should really read the sequences.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 May 2012 03:29:18AM *  15 points [-]

This sort of far-mode thinking is usually [1] evidence of an attempt to signal not-"Straw Vulcan Rationality" while simultaneously earning warm fuzzies in those possible worlds in which [DELETED] (ed. Explaining the reason for this edit would either reveal excessive information about the deleted content or require mentioning of true ideas which are considered abhorrent by mainstream society.) and is ultimately the result of having a brain which evolved to have hypocritical akrasia regarding skepticism and to guess the teacher's password [2].

[1] p(parent post is mere signalling | p-zombie Mary in a Chinese room would claim that "semantic stop-signs are red" is a map-territory-map-mapitory confusion) = .7863, but I may have performed an Aumann update with a counterfactual-me who generalized from fictional fictional-evidence.

[2] The password is Y355JE0AT15A0GNPHYG.

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: J_Taylor 12 April 2012 03:08:25AM 0 points [-]

Deogolwulf is the sort of fellow who uses 'proposition' while obviously meaning 'statement'. Also, some of the first paragraph is pure unreflective sophistry. Still, the second half:

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.

Following this epistemic attack, I am imagining Deogolwulf holding up a mirror to TGGP's face and stating "No, TGGP, you are the metaphysics."

Comment author: FiftyTwo 04 April 2012 03:26:42PM 12 points [-]

Friends with Harry -> Interact with crazy mudblood girl -> Crazy Mudblood girl tries to kill you, and Harry defends her.

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 April 2012 02:40:23AM 4 points [-]

Friends with Harry -> Interact with crazy mudblood girl -> Crazy Mudblood girl tries to kill you, and Harry defends her.

->Can't come back to school. -> Loses local positions of power. -> Odds of becoming future bigwig of magical England are reduced.

Comment author: Incorrect 05 April 2012 02:17:17AM 1 point [-]

So you are considering a man in a Chinese room to lack understanding?

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 April 2012 02:37:41AM 13 points [-]

Obviously the man in the Chinese room lacks understanding, by most common definitions of understanding. It is the room as a system which understands Chinese. (Assuming lookup tables can understand. By functional definitions, they should be able to.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 04 April 2012 10:52:10PM 0 points [-]

Agreed that Will's theory is nicer than yours. That said, with emphasis on "some," I think yours is true. Although the Christians I know are far more likely to use "religion" to refer to Christianity. (Still more so are the Catholics I know inclined to use "religion" to refer to Catholicism.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 11:47:24PM 1 point [-]

I was just referring to some Protestants who will share such statements as "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship" or "I hate religion too. That's why I believe in Jesus." Of course, most Protestants do not do this.

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 11:28:08PM -1 points [-]

Well then the term reptile is somewhat deceptive in evolutionary biology, and based more on some consensus about appearance. Fine. Whatever. The point is that the word metaphysics isn't evocative in that way or any way, except in the context of its historical usage. As such, it cannot inform us in any way about any subject that isn't the phenomenon of its acceptance as a field, and is not even a useful subject heading, being a hodgepodge. We can choose whether to continue to use it, and I don't see why we should.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 11:42:05PM 2 points [-]

Within the field of philosophy, the usage is a fairly normal term, much like 'reptile' or 'sex' are normal terms for most people. Much of my vocabulary comes from that field and I am most comfortable using its terms. 'Metaphysics' is one of many problematic terms which are evocative to me, because I understand how these terms are used. Asking someone who studies philosophy to stop using 'metaphysics' is like asking someone who studies biology to stop using 'species'.

However, it is your prerogative to use whatever terms you prefer. I am sure that we are both trying to be pragmatic.

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 10:23:12PM 1 point [-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but "They are probably making some implicit metaphysical claims about what it means for some object(A) to be a simulation of some other object(B)." and "They are probably making some implicit claims about what it means for some object(A) to be a simulation of some other object(B)" mean exactly the same thing.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 10:57:44PM 1 point [-]

They do happen to mean the same thing. This is because the question "What does it mean for some y to be an x?" is a metaphysical question.

"They are probably making some aesthetic claim about why object(A) is more beautiful than object(B)" and "They are probably making some claim about why object(A) is more beautiful than object(B)" also mean the same thing.

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 10:31:52PM 0 points [-]

My claim was not about the general lack of utility of buckets. Briefly, the reptile bucket is useful because reptiles are similar to one another, and thus having a way to refer to them all is handy. There is apparently no such justification for "metaphysics", except in the sense that its contents are related by history. But this clearly isn't the use you want to make of this bucket.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 10:50:00PM 0 points [-]

The word 'similar' is often frustratingly vague. However, crocodiles and birds share a more recent common ancestor than crocodiles and turtles.

But this clearly isn't the use you want to make of this bucket.

The word is nonetheless used. I do agree with you that it is frustrating that the word's usage is historically determined.

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 09:49:57PM *  0 points [-]

Well that at least makes some sense. I was noticing that Wiki's definition and the definition implied by its examples were in conflict. I don't particularly see why the metaphysics bucket is convenient, though.

Is there any point in discussing metaphysics as anything other than a cultural phenomenon among philosophers?

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 10:03:05PM 0 points [-]

I don't particularly see why the metaphysics bucket is convenient, though.

Unless you are a cladist, 'reptile' is a bucket which contains crocodiles, lizards, and turtles, but does not contain birds and mammals. The word is still sometimes useful for communication.

Is there any point in discussing metaphysics as anything other than a cultural phenomenon among philosophers?

It depends on your goals. I do not generally recommend it, however.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 April 2012 09:31:33PM 3 points [-]

Hm... one rationale for such a designation might be: "A 'metaphysic' is a model that is at least one level of abstraction/generalization higher than my most abstract/general model; people who use different models than me seem to have higher-level models than I deem justified given their limited evidence; thus those higher-level models are metaphysical." Or something? I should think about this more.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 09:49:03PM 7 points [-]

Your theory is much nicer than mine. Mine essentially amounts to people believing "I understand reality, your beliefs are scientifically justified, he endorses metaphysical hogwash." Further, at least since the days of the Vienna Circle, some scientifically-minded individuals have used 'metaphysics' as a slur. (I mean, at least some of the Logical Positivists seriously claimed that metaphysical terms were nonsense, that is, having neither truth-value nor meaning.)

I have read Yudkowsky discuss matters of qualia and free will. This site contains metaphysics, straight up. I assume that anyone who dismisses metaphysics is either dismissing folk-usage of the term or is taking too much pride in their models of reality (that latter part does somewhat match your stipulative explanation.)

(Oh, I'm not sure if your joke was intentional, but I still think it is funny that some possible humans would reject metaphysics for being 'models' which are too 'abstract', 'of higher-level', and not 'justified' given the current 'evidence'.)

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 08:21:46PM 0 points [-]

What?

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 09:35:54PM 3 points [-]

When someone on Lesswrong uses the term 'simulation', they are probably making some implicit metaphysical claims about what it means for some object(A) to be a simulation of some other object(B). (This particular subject often falls under the part of metaphysics known as ontology.)

The same applies to usage of most terms.

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 12:11:38PM 1 point [-]

Well, but what it that is meant by metaphysics? I've heard the word many times, seen its use, and I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.


Ok, so now I've read the Wikipedia article, and now I'm unconvinced that when people use the term they mean what it says they mean. I know at least some people who definitely used "metaphysical" in the sense of "spiritual". What do you mean by metaphysics?

Also unconvinced that it has any reason to be thought of as a single subject. I get the impression that the only reason these topics are together is that they feel "big".

But I will grant you that given Wiki's definition of metaphysics, there is no reason to think that it is in principle incapable of providing useful works. I revise my position to state that arguments should not be dismissed because they are metaphysical, but rather because they are bad. Furthermore, I suspect that "metaphysics" is just a bad category, and should, as much as possible, be expunged from one's thinking.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 09:26:20PM 1 point [-]

Metaphysics, as a category, has its constituents determined by the contingent events of history. The same could be said for the categories of philosophy and art. As such, 'metaphysics' is a convenient bucket whose constituents do not necessarily have similarities in structure. At best, I think one could say that they have a Wittgensteinian family-resemblance. However, I am only defending the academic usage of the term. (More information here.) The folk usage seems to hold that metaphysics is "somewhere between "crystal healing" and "tree hugging" in the Dewey decimal system."

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 April 2012 08:01:48PM 5 points [-]

(LessWrong implicitly assumes certain metaphysics pretty often, e.g. when they talk about "simulation", "measure", "reality fluid", and so on; it seems to me that "anthropics" is a place where experience meets metaphysics. My preferred metaphysic for anthropics comes from decision theory, and my intuitions about decision theory come to a small extent from theological metaphysics and to a larger extent from theoretical computer science, e.g. algorithmic probability theory, which I figured is a metaphysic for the same reason that monadology is a metaphysic. ISTM that even if metaphysics aren't as fundamental as they pretend to be, they're still useful and perhaps necessary for organizing our experiences and intuitions so as to predict/understand prospective/counterfactual experiences in highly unusual circumstances (e.g. simulations).)

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 09:11:32PM *  8 points [-]

When some Lesswrong-users use 'metaphysics', they mean other people's metaphysics. This is much like how some Christians use the term 'religion'.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 08:48:25PM 1 point [-]

Here is an SMBC comic which demonstrates the Utility Monster argument against utilitarianism.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2569#comic

Comment author: David_Gerard 04 April 2012 07:12:48PM 1 point [-]

You guys know your philosophy. What is the proper name of this fallacy?

It's a common sophistry to conflate an utterly negligible probability with a non-negligible one. The argument goes:

  1. There is technically no such thing as certainty.
  2. Therefore, [argument I don't like] is not absolutely certain.
  3. Therefore, the uncertainty in [argument I don't like] is non-negligible.

Step 3 is the tricky one. Humans are, in general, really bad at feeling the difference between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to be worth taking notice of - they can't tell a nonzero chance from one that's worth paying attention to ever.

I could make up a neologism for it, but this thing must have been around approximately forever. What is its proper name, if any? Who was the first person to note it as fallacious? Any history of it would be most welcomed.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 April 2012 08:39:17PM *  3 points [-]

Well, this instance is certainly a False Dichotomy. That is, the argument assumes that everything is either certain or non-negligibly certain. It also sort of looks like an instance of what is sometimes called an Appeal to Possibility or an Appeal to Probability. (1. This argument in uncertain. 2. If an argument is uncertain, it is possible that the uncertainty is non-negligible. 3. Therefore, it is possible that this argument's uncertainty is non-negligible. 4. Therefore, this argument's uncertainty is non-negligible.)

On Lesswrong, all of this is generally called the Fallacy of Gray.

Edit: Oh, yeah. This is totally the Continuum Fallacy

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 April 2012 11:59:04PM 0 points [-]

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. We also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

-Thomas Huxley

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 April 2012 11:42:52PM 3 points [-]

In the previous open thread, there was a post made here on the topic of learning computer science for purposes of becoming a programmer. The post received several upvotes, but little response. I am hoping that by linking to the post here, I will call more attention to it.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 March 2012 12:46:46AM 5 points [-]

I agree with everything you've written as far as my modal hypothesis goes, but I also think we're going to lose in that case, so I've sort of renormalized to focus my attention at least somewhat more on worlds where for some reason academic/industry AI approaches don't work, even if that requires some sort of deus ex machina. My intuition says that highly recursive narrow AI style techniques should give you AGI, but to some extent this does go against e.g. the position of many philosophers of mind, and in this case I hope they're right. Trying to imagine intermediate scenarios led me to think about this kinda stuff.

It would of course be incredibly foolish to entirely write off worlds where AGI is relatively easy, but I also think we should think about cases where for whatever reason that isn't the case, and if it's not the case then SingInst is in a uniquely good position to build uFAI.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 April 2012 11:32:24PM 2 points [-]

I've sort of renormalized to focus my attention at least somewhat more on worlds where for some reason academic/industry AI approaches don't work, even if that requires some sort of deus ex machina

I apologize for asking, but I just want to clarify something. When you write 'deus ex machina', you're not solely using the term in a metaphorical sort of way, are you? Because, if you mean what it sort of sounds like you mean, at least some of your public positions suddenly make a lot more sense.

In response to comment by J_Taylor on What is life?
Comment author: Douglas_Reay 01 April 2012 09:54:03PM 2 points [-]

Don't they use different definitions, depending upon whether they are asking if a human is alive, if a human's arm is alive, or if a single cell within a human's arm is alive?

In response to comment by Douglas_Reay on What is life?
Comment author: J_Taylor 01 April 2012 11:28:17PM 0 points [-]

(Okay, so, it's obvious that if you have to explain a joke, the joke was never that funny. Still, here's my explanation. Your post seemed like something someone would write if they were trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for a term which probably doesn't even refer to a natural kind. So, I made a silly summary of a possible meaning as use definition.)

However, based on your response, I don't understand why you would ask "What is life?". You seem to already understand the problematic nature of that particular concept.

(Also, you definitely should have titled your post "What is the meaning of 'life?'")

In response to What is life?
Comment author: J_Taylor 01 April 2012 09:39:44PM 2 points [-]

'Life' is a term used by biologists to describe that subset of chemical phenomena which is their purview.

In response to Acausal romance
Comment author: Anubhav 25 February 2012 11:26:48AM 3 points [-]

Possibly related: acausal sex

In response to comment by Anubhav on Acausal romance
Comment author: J_Taylor 01 March 2012 03:44:56AM 2 points [-]

Everyone forgets the importance of acausal foreplay and acausal cuddling.

In response to comment by steven0461 on Get Curious
Comment author: Alicorn 23 February 2012 01:14:26AM *  6 points [-]

an epistemic counterpart to Halloween.

I'm now imaginging children wearing signs with cognitive biases written on them running around door to door, and people answering the door, uttering brief arguments, and rewarding each kid with paperback science fiction if the kid can correctly identify the fallacy.

In response to comment by Alicorn on Get Curious
Comment author: J_Taylor 23 February 2012 01:36:32AM 5 points [-]

What we need is a rationalist hell-house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_house

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 16 February 2012 08:42:40AM 2 points [-]

Beyond the obvious signaling opportunity of saying that creationists are the worst people ever, I'm not having an easy time figuring out which way the ranking should go between a celebrity who appears to be totally apathetic towards philosophy and a creationist apologist who is enthusiastically doing very bad philosophy.

I also wonder how much agreement there would be if we tried to establish the ranking between Richard Dawkins and Jerry Fodor.

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 February 2012 02:41:18AM 0 points [-]

I do not really agree with Fodor on most issues, but Jerry Fodor(2010) is very different from Jerry Fodor(1978).

Comment author: [deleted] 15 February 2012 07:32:06AM 3 points [-]

I bestow a higher likelihood of long-term closeness on persons who "avoid just icking away from the subject." Their ability to do so in a manner that suggests awareness of social niceties is a bonus.

I sorta think you can't possibly disagree with this, or you wouldn't be here.

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 February 2012 02:34:11AM 1 point [-]

I bestow a higher likelihood of long-term closeness on persons who "avoid just icking away from the subject."

Oh, I apologize. I entirely misread what you were doing, I think.

I sorta think you can't possibly disagree with this, or you wouldn't be here.

Um... kind of? I guess it depends on what sort of contrarian opinions you were sharing and what sort of setting you were doing it in.


The latter part assumed you were mainly replying to the second question I asked. I apologize for the bluntness of those questions, also. However, I would like to clarify my first question slightly.

When I see the phrase "skill at philosophy" it makes me think of professional philosophers. You probably are not trying to test for the kinds of skills which are found in professional philosophers, because most of these skills cannot be tested through informal questioning. I now realize that you were trying to test for, I think, the ability to think logically about philosophical topics and openness to unpopular ideas. Sorry for the misinterpretation.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 February 2012 04:00:46PM *  1 point [-]

He has an odd notion of what a fascist is if he thinks someone like Pim Fortuyn was one.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Counterfactual Coalitions
Comment author: J_Taylor 17 February 2012 07:37:39PM 1 point [-]

It is quite a normal notion. It just happens to be historically problematic.

Comment author: Larks 16 February 2012 09:43:54PM *  1 point [-]
  • Pro-animal rights, pro-life.
  • Nationalists for homosexuality
  • Anti-Unionist UK Conservative party.
  • Pro-war nuclear disarmament advocates (disarm the rest of the world first!)
  • Anti-slavery evangelicals.
  • Pro-inequality environmentalists (poor people consume a higher % of their income, and on more material things)
  • Libertarians for conscription.
  • Pro-cannabis-legalization prohibitionists
  • Anti-abortion feminists
  • Socialists against trade unions
  • Nationalists against the family
  • Trade unions against free higher education

Obviously, some of these are real historical coalitions

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 February 2012 02:48:47AM 0 points [-]
Comment author: J_Taylor 17 February 2012 02:42:46AM 0 points [-]

An interesting twist to the Turing test, someone might be behaviorally human and fool you in the short-term, but may seem odd when tasked with learning problems.

So, do you think we could make a Clive Wearing em?

Comment author: faul_sname 15 February 2012 09:22:13PM *  2 points [-]

There's non-cheap astrology?

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 February 2012 01:33:56AM 8 points [-]

If you're interested, I would be willing to sell you some.

Comment author: Alicorn 15 February 2012 07:00:06AM *  2 points [-]

What does the outside view say about when during the course of a relationship it is wisest to get engaged (in terms of subsequent marital longevity/quality)? Data that doesn't just turn up obvious correlations with religious groups who forbid divorce is especially useful.

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 February 2012 01:28:45AM 2 points [-]

I truly hope that, one day, someone will answer the question that you actually asked instead of a bunch of vaguely related questions. Unfortunately, this is the most relevant article I could find. It's not that great.

http://stats.org/stories/2008/is_ideal_time_marry_nov10_08.html

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 February 2012 07:08:44AM 3 points [-]

What in the world is "skill at philosophy"?

I've also been presenting them with contrarian opinions and asking them to evaluate them, and I have a higher opinion of them if they avoid just icking away from the subject.

You have a higher opinion of people who make socially foolish decisions?

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 February 2012 11:01:12PM 0 points [-]

I unfortunately have nothing of interest to contribute to your article, but enjoyed the work more than a simple upvote. This is one of the more interesting articles I've seen on Lesswrong recently. Thank you for presenting it.

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: J_Taylor 07 February 2012 05:30:19AM *  1 point [-]

The antecedent of your conditional is not the case. I do not have a definition of 'sexism' and am fairly confident that such a thing does not exist. That is, I am skeptical that there is a list of necessary or sufficient conditions that will match the folk-term 'sexism.'

However, the particular joke I linked to is the sort of joke that is often labeled 'sexist' by the sorts of people who care about such matters. That is good enough for me. More importantly, the joke is based off of (what seem to me to be) unjustified premises.

Comment author: dbaupp 06 February 2012 11:23:03PM 4 points [-]

reddit's r/atheism

I think that reddit as a whole (ignoring some pockets) is fond of sexist jokes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 February 2012 12:25:09AM -1 points [-]

reddit as a whole (ignoring some pockets) is fond of sexist jokes

That is almost certainly the case.

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: 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: komponisto 06 February 2012 08:56:58PM *  4 points [-]

There are more than three.

(Also, Roko's original account still exists; it's just that all comments but one were deleted.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 February 2012 09:00:51PM *  1 point [-]

Indeed. After searching, I discovered at least one account which I had forgotten.

Also, thank you for the correction.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 February 2012 08:35:49PM 2 points [-]

Note: of users who are now known as "Account: Deleted", two are women. The other is Roko. I do not know if this is of any relevance.

Comment author: taelor 01 February 2012 06:05:49PM 22 points [-]

I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surfaces. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentic air waves. These waves take the form of torrents of discourses about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.

--W. V. O. Quine

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 February 2012 11:41:19PM 32 points [-]

We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.

--Madonna

In response to Trust
Comment author: J_Taylor 30 January 2012 04:09:21AM 0 points [-]

If you can get past the paywall, this article may be relevant.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327795jra0903_1

Comment author: hamnox 29 January 2012 06:04:43AM 8 points [-]

Here's a big one for me: Whether or not someone shows a rudimentary understanding of how their own brains can mislead them.

It's easy enough to see it working in teenagers. They're the ones who realize that their emotions are going to be completely out of whack, their judgment may not in fact be 10x better than every adult around them, and proceed to compensate for it where they can.

It's not the same as knowing when to shout "Anchoring!" or "Sunk Cost Fallacy!". That's just knowing the password. It's a matter of being aware that your brain can think and feel things without consulting you, and not all of the things it thinks for you are good or right.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 January 2012 07:53:54AM 2 points [-]

A fascinating thing with teenagers: in their youths, they are exposed to many success-stories. These success-stories will often involve bragging about the mistakes they made as teenagers. I wonder, how many teens update on this sort of evidence? I know I certainly did.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 January 2012 06:26:42PM *  12 points [-]

I may not necessarily agree with that particular video but Aurini's channel is pure contrarian & rationalist goodness. Its very depressing he only has a few hundred views per video. These two videos seems somewhat relevant:

Edit: Added a few more sort of relevant videos.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 January 2012 12:22:11AM 5 points [-]

Does he, by any chance, write? I hate learning from videos.

Comment author: CaveJohnson 28 January 2012 05:12:06PM *  5 points [-]

White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that's partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don't have any real data to back me on this claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on this

This almost reads like you are trying to hint at something but for the life of me I can't figure out what. Nope. No idea.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 January 2012 12:15:46AM 6 points [-]

Could someone make explicit what is being hinted at? I fear that I am missing the signal.

In response to Trust
Comment author: gwern 28 January 2012 10:27:07PM 9 points [-]

Use Outside Views more. What does their record in their profession look like? What do personality factors like Big Five predict?

In response to comment by gwern on Trust
Comment author: J_Taylor 29 January 2012 12:07:53AM 0 points [-]

What Big Five personality factors correlate with trustworthiness?

Comment author: vi21maobk9vp 28 January 2012 02:48:35PM 2 points [-]

Do we have to win at the same game to be happy? It looks like for different people different games matter and if you mostly beat scarcity you reduce the factor of pragmatically useful prizes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 January 2012 06:33:03PM 1 point [-]

I have no idea. However, 'yes' is the more cynical answer, to let us assume it is the case for this particular purpose.

Comment author: jpulgarin 28 January 2012 12:43:10PM 0 points [-]

Why is this sam0345 character so heavily downvoted?

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 January 2012 06:29:40PM *  1 point [-]

A habit of expressing his opinions without proper framing. He also occasionally seems to be an anti-liberal of the 'reversed-stupidity' variety.

Comment author: cousin_it 27 January 2012 09:02:46AM *  5 points [-]

I guess most people could say that they're more open-minded than they were before, but that doesn't make them more open-minded than average...

Comment author: J_Taylor 27 January 2012 09:26:47AM 1 point [-]

Would you like to see Multiheaded's Big Five scores? Other than that, I fail to see how we could test for openness.

Comment author: Prismattic 27 January 2012 04:36:41AM 10 points [-]

While one can applaud the cultural influence of the British empire on its colonial holdings, allow me to disagree with "it is hard to argue with its results".

Timeline of major famines in India during British rule

Note that Britain was forcibly exporting Indian grain for its own benefit during some of these famines.

Comment author: J_Taylor 27 January 2012 04:57:35AM 4 points [-]

Do we, by any chance, have a timeline of major famines in India during non-British rule?

Comment author: J_Taylor 27 January 2012 03:57:44AM 7 points [-]

As a reference, user: sam0345 rarely receives downvotes of the quantity which user: RobertLumley has received. This is rather aberrant.

Comment author: RobertLumley 27 January 2012 02:38:40AM 5 points [-]

The former is my guess at this point, given that I've gotten over 100 upvotes since I posted this (thanks guys). And I looked at the only one who responded to my karmassassination comment, and it looks a lot like a dummy account:

http://lesswrong.com/user/CallMeSIR/

Comment author: J_Taylor 27 January 2012 03:32:17AM *  7 points [-]

This comment does not seem to warrant its current number of upvotes:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8s6/video_qa_with_singularity_institute_executive/5g9o

Edit: For posterity, when I first observed the comment, it was at +14 karma.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 26 January 2012 10:46:39PM 4 points [-]

I don't see what the win from more discussion of politics is. Your vote doesn't count. Get over it. We have higher return things to attend to.

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 January 2012 11:12:05PM 5 points [-]

Well, I really think it would be cool to have a thread about optimal political opinions. That is, how to optimize one's opinions for signaling purposes.

Comment author: cousin_it 26 January 2012 12:45:27PM *  5 points [-]

CEV will probably have many contributions from people who don't want the AI to create almost-human slaves. Do you think such desires will lose out in reflective equiibrium?

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 January 2012 05:36:35PM *  2 points [-]

I never said they would be slaves, although I certainly did imply it. I probably should not have said 'emperor.' A more appropriate term would have been something like 'grand-champion' or 'big winner.'

Do you think such desires will lose out in reflective equiibrium?

I certainly hope not. However, I personally have no idea.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Help, help, I'm being oppressed!
Comment author: Multiheaded 25 January 2012 09:50:54AM *  -1 points [-]

Don't get me wrong I do agree with some of their positions, even on some social issues (from your reactions it seems like you might too).

Maybe, maybe; relegating all the nice non-profit stuff to hyper-wealthy hyper-efficient private charities and freedom to discriminate (including discimination against discriminators you don't like) for all non-vital jobs sound kind of weirdtopian. I'm writing up a brief sketch of a weirdtopia I could stand, in fact, and maybe I'll include the latter in it.

On the other hand, I'm shocked by how many of the "alt-right" (both the respectable old white men like Gottfried and the Internet ones: Steve Sailer*, the folks I followed home from Moldbug's comments, etc) fail the gender/sexuality issues test; I can't imagine how hard one must squint one's brain to be so contrarian and still have their instrumental (or maybe sometimes even terminal, it's hard to tell) values so screwed up. I believe that in many cases it's not genuine homophobia/transphobia/whatever, they're simply exhibiting a knee-jerk rejection of the mainstream, with which I can kinda sympathize, but still, shit's fucked up.

*I can hardly resist using the "closeted/intimacy issues" card on Sailer; what the fuck, dude, I just get a bad vibe from both my reaction and his provocations.

Alicorn would probably produce a much better and more insightful rant on this topic than me, maybe I'll ask her.

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 January 2012 07:27:09AM 3 points [-]

Could you, by chance, link to Sailer expressing his opinions on the topic of homosexuality? I am having difficulty finding anything conclusive.

Comment author: drethelin 26 January 2012 04:22:22AM 32 points [-]

technology has indirectly caused millions of deaths by directly causing enough food to create millions of lives.

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 January 2012 06:46:22AM 23 points [-]

Technology has indirectly prevented millions of deaths by directly providing easy means of birth control.

However, now I am getting silly.

Comment author: Jack 26 January 2012 01:28:38AM *  7 points [-]

There is no such thing as moral progress and if there is there is no reason to expect we have been experiencing it so far in recorded history, unless you count stuff like more adapted cultures displacing less adapted ones or mammals inheriting the planet from dinosaurs as moral progress.

Does this really belong or am I just lacking the requisite emotional abhorrence regarding its obvious truth?

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 January 2012 06:45:04AM 1 point [-]

Most people feel some abhorrence to the idea, although many conservatives will draw an arbitrary line at which moral progress ended. However, among the more philosophically inclined, it is hardly a shocking idea.

Comment author: Oligopsony 26 January 2012 05:10:21AM *  33 points [-]

Some possibilities on dorky LW topics (as opposed to the topics I assume Vladimir et al. are referring to):

Not only are anti-natalist arguments correct, they are correct in such a way that we should be attempting to maximize x-risks.

Wireheading is necessary and sufficient for the fulfillment of true human CEV; people only claim to care about other values for signalling purposes.

A very strong form of error theory is correct; what people actually care about is qualia, even though there is no such thing. It doesn't all add up to normality; just as bad metaphysics may lead people to think there's a relevant difference between praying to God and attempting to summon demons, bad metaphysics makes people think there's a relevant difference between donating a million dollars to Against Malaria Foundation and kidnapping and torturing a small child.

It would be very fun to have a thread where we attempted to come up with seductive, harmful ideas, and the chance of actually happening upon a very infectious and very harmful one would be very low.

Comment author: J_Taylor 26 January 2012 06:39:25AM *  23 points [-]

Wireheading is necessary and sufficient for the fulfillment of true human CEV; people only claim to care about other values for signalling purposes.

Alternative which I view as being more frightening:

For any given human, its CEV involves that human winning at zero-sum, possibly even negative-sum, games (status would be one of these). As such, the best way to maximize the current collection of humanity's CEV would be to create new agents to which current humans defeat in zero-sum games.

That is, for every current human, create a host of new agents (all of whom are quite human for all intents and purposes) of whom the current human is emperor.

Note: if this is the case, I doubt pseudo-agents will suffice. Just as humans do not wish to love pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really love), humans do not wish to win zero-sum games against pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really lose zero-sum games, with all that losing these games entails).

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2012 10:22:56PM 2 points [-]

The personal is political + Politics is the Mindkiller => The personal is the mindkiller

This is so true.

Comment author: J_Taylor 25 January 2012 10:46:11PM 9 points [-]

The personal is the mindkiller

Oddly enough, this is probably correct.

Comment author: J_Taylor 25 January 2012 10:42:54PM 28 points [-]

I really hope no outside observers see this thread.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 July 2011 01:44:21PM *  3 points [-]

Dawkins is normally a much sharper thinker than this, his arguments could have been made much more compelling. Anyway, I am going to sidestep the moral issue and look at the epistemic question.

Evolutionarily speaking the fundamental non-obvious insight is that there's little advantage to be had in signalling weakness and vulnerability if you don't happen to be a social and therefore intelligent animal with a helpful tribe close by. There's no reason to wire pain signals halfway 'round the brain and back just to suffer in more optimal ways if there's no one around to take advantage of thereby. We can strengthen this argument with a complementary but disjunctive mechanistic analysis. It is important to look at humans' cingulate cortex (esp. ACC), insula, pain asymbolia and related insular oddities, reward signal propagation, et cetera. This would be a decent paper to read but I'm too lazy to read it, or this one for that matter. Do note that much brain research is exaggeration and lies, especially about the ACC, as I had the unfortunate pleasure of discovering recently.

Philosophy is perhaps better suited to this question. Metaphysically speaking it must be acknowledged that animals are obviously not as perfect as humans, and are therefore less Godlike, and therefore less sentient, as can all be proven in the same vein as Leibniz's famous Recursive Universal Dovetailing Measure-Utility Inequality Theorem. His arguments are popularly referred to as the "No Free Haha-God-Is-Evil" theorems, though most monads are skeptical of the results' practical applicability to monads in most monads. Theologians admit that they are puzzled by the probably impossible logical possibility of an acausal algorithm employing some variation on Thompson's "Reality-Warping Elysium" process, but unfortunately any progress towards getting any bits about a relevant Chaitin's omega results in its immediate diagonalization out of space, time, and all mathematically interesting axiom sets. This qua "this" can also be proven by "Goedel's ontological proof" if you happen to be Goedel (naturally).

My default position is that suffering as we know it is fundamentally tied in with extremely important and extremely complex social decision theoretic game theoretic calculus modeling stuff, and also all that metaphysics stuff. I will non-negligibly update if someone can show me a good experiment demonstrating something like "learned helplessness" in non-hominids or non-things-that-hunted-in-packs-for-a-long-time-then-were-artificially-molded-into-hominid-companions. That high-citation rat study looked like positive bias upon brief inspection, but maybe that was positive bias.

On the meta level though, the nicest thing about going sufficiently meta is that you don't have to worry about enlightened aqua versus turquoise policy debates. Which by the way continues to reliably invoke the primal forces of insanity. It's like using a tall metal rod as a totem pole for spiritual practice, in a lightning storm, while your house burns down, with the entire universe inside it, and also the love of your life, who is incredibly attractive. Maybe a cool post would be "Policy is the Mind Killer", about how all policy discussion should be at least 16 meta levels up, because basically everything anyone ever does is a lost purpose. (It has not yet been convincingly shown that humanity is not a lost purpose, but I think this is a timeful/timeless confusion and can be dissolved in short order with right view.) Talking about how to talk about thinking about morality is a decent place to start from and work our way up or down, and in the meantime posts like multifoliaterose's one on Lab Pascals are decent mind-teasers maybe. But object level policy debates just entrench bad cognitive habits. Dramatic cognitive habits. Gauche weapons from a less civilized age... of literal weapons. Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be understood by Douglas Hofstadter and no one else. Ideally that would include yourself. And don't forget to cut through in the same motion, of course. Anyway this is just unsolicited advice aimed without purpose, and I acknowledge that debating lilac versus mauve can be fun some times. ...I'm not gay, it's just an extended metaphor extension.

Off-the-cuff hypothesis that I arrogantly deem more interesting than the discussion topic: The prefrontal cortex is exploiting executive oversight to rent-seek in the neural Darwinian economy, which results in egodystonic wireheading behaviors and self-defeating use of genetic, memetic, and behavioral selection pressure (a scarce resource), especially at higher levels of abstraction/organization where there is more room for bureaucratic shuffling and vague promises of "meta-optimization", where the selection pressure actually goes towards the cortical substructural equivalent of hookers and blow. Analysis across all levels of organization could be given but is omitted due to space, time, and thermodynamic constraints. The pre-frontal cortex is basically a caricature of big government, but it spreads propagandistic memes claiming the contrary in the name of "science" which just happens to be largely funded by pre-frontal cortices. The bicameral system is actually very cooperative despite misleading research in the form of split-brain studies attempting to promote the contrary. In reality they are the lizards. This hypothesis is a possible explanation for hyperbolic discounting, akrasia, depression, Buddhism, free will, or come to think of it basically anything that at some point involved a human brain. This hypothesis can easily be falsified by a reasonable economic analysis.

Comment author: J_Taylor 25 January 2012 02:44:05AM 1 point [-]

If you possessed a talent for writing decent prose, you could be the next Lovecraft. Mind, Lovecraft's prose was less-than-decent, but that is beside the point.

My default position is that suffering as we know it is fundamentally tied in with extremely important and extremely complex social decision theoretic game theoretic calculus modeling stuff, and also all that metaphysics stuff. I will non-negligibly update if someone can show me a good experiment demonstrating something like "learned helplessness" in non-hominids or non-things-that-hunted-in-packs-for-a-long-time-then-were-artificially-molded-into-hominid-companions. That high-citation rat study looked like positive bias upon brief inspection, but maybe that was positive bias.

Aside from this paragraph, I am almost entirely unsure what you were stating in that post. However, it produced feelings of interest and dread.

By chance, do you have any capacity to summarize it? If this is the case, would you please be willing to do so?

Comment author: RobertLumley 24 January 2012 01:42:12AM -2 points [-]

One could also look at it as hedging one's bets, just as one would (typically) not put all of one's money into one (boy is this getting confusing) stock in the market. Admittedly, charities aren't really the same type of risk.

Comment author: J_Taylor 24 January 2012 11:48:53PM 5 points [-]

Question for downvoters: I acknowledge that RobertLumley is making an incorrect point. However, is he so incorrect as to deserve this many downvotes?

Comment author: Modig 24 January 2012 01:26:47AM *  0 points [-]

There's an argument that I run into occasionally that I have some difficulty with.

Let's say I tell someone that voting is pointless, because one vote is extremely unlikely to alter the outcome of the election. Then someone might tell me that if everyone thought the way I do, democracy would be impossible.

And they may be right, but since everyone doesn't think the way I do, I don't find it to be a persuasive argument.

Other examples would be littering, abusing community resources, overusing antibiotics, et cetera. They may all be harmful, but if only one additional person does them, the net increased negative effect is likely negligible.

Does this type of argument have a name and where can I learn more about it? Feel free to share your own opinions/reflections on it as well if you think it's relevant!

Comment author: J_Taylor 24 January 2012 01:34:41AM 3 points [-]

Try searching for "free rider problem" or "tragedy of the commons."

Here are the relevant Wiki pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Comment author: DanielLC 23 January 2012 11:59:14PM 1 point [-]

I'm still in college so right now all my money is going towards school. When I finish I plan on donating everything I can. The charity I think is best right now is Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.

I intend to continue to primarily direct my charitable giving towards PSI

Why primarily? If it's best to send some of your donations there, wouldn't it be best to send all of them?

Comment author: J_Taylor 24 January 2012 12:21:39AM *  7 points [-]

A common trait amongst humans is the desire to accumulate warm feelings. Optimizing for warm feelings is rarely accomplished by donating to a single charity.

Also, donating to several charities rather than only one offers a different array of signaling benefits.

Comment author: Solvent 21 January 2012 12:14:49AM *  3 points [-]

I apologize, but that does not look like a solution to the Gettier Problem. Could you elaborate?

Okay, the Gettier problem. I can explain the Gettier problem, but it's just my explanation, not Eliezer's.

The Gettier problem is pointing out problems with the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. "Justified true belief" (JTB) is an attempt at defining knowledge. However, it falls into the classic problem with philosophy of using intuition wrong, and has a variety of other issues. Lukeprog discusses the weakness of conceptual analysis here.

Also, it's only for irrational beings like humans that there is a distinction between "justified' and 'belief.' An AI would simply have degrees of belief in something according to the strength of the justification, using Bayesian rules. So JTB is clearly a human-centered definition, which doesn't usefully define knowledge anyway.

Incidentally, I just re-read this post, which says:

Yudkowsky once wrote, "If there's any centralized repository of reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy, I've never heard mention of it." When I read that I thought: What? That's Quinean naturalism! That's Kornblith and Stich and Bickle and the Churchlands and Thagard and Metzinger and Northoff! There are hundreds of philosophers who do that!

So perhaps Eliezer didn't create original solutions to many of the problems I credited him with solving. But he certainly created them on his own. Like Leibniz and calculus, really.

Comment author: J_Taylor 23 January 2012 09:43:11PM 2 points [-]

I am aware of the Gettier Problem. I just do not see the phrase, "the ability to constrain one's expectations" as being a proper conceptual analysis of "knowledge." If it were a conceptual analysis of "knowledge", it probably would be vulnerable to Gettieriziation. I love Bayesian epistemology. However, most Bayesian accounts which I have encountered either do away with knowledge-terms or redefine them in such a way that it entirely fails to match the folk-term "knowledge". Attempting to define "knowledge" is probably attempting to solve the wrong problem. This is a significant weakness of traditional epistemology.

So perhaps Eliezer didn't create original solutions to many of the problems I credited him with solving. But he certainly created them on his own. Like Hooke and calculus, really.

I am not entirely familiar with Eliezer's history. However, he is clearly influenced by Hofstadter, Dennet, and Jaynes. From just the first two, one could probably assemble a working account which is, weaker than, but has surface resemblances to, Eliezer's espoused beliefs.

Also, I have never heard of Hooke independently inventing calculus. It sounds interesting however. Still, are you certain you are not thinking of Leibniz?

Comment author: MatthewBaker 20 January 2012 05:14:44PM 0 points [-]

To quickly sum up Newcomb's problem, Its a question of probability where choosing the more "rational" thing to do will result in a great deal less currency to a traditional probability based decision theory. TDT takes steps to avoid getting stuck 2 boxing, or choosing the more rational of the two choices while applying in the vast majority of other situations.

Comment author: J_Taylor 20 January 2012 06:29:51PM 0 points [-]

Apologies, I know what Newcomb's problem is. I simply do not know anything about its history and the history of its attempted solutions.

Comment author: Solvent 20 January 2012 12:50:52AM 11 points [-]

Here are examples of these philosophical solutions. I don't know which of these he solved personally, and which he simply summarized others' answer to:

  • What is free will? Ooops, wrong question. Free will is what a decision-making algorithm feels like from the inside.

  • What is intelligence? The ability to optimize things.

  • What is knowledge? The ability to constrain your expectations.

  • What should I do with the Newcomb's Box problem? TDT answers this.

...other examples include inventing Fun theory, using CEV to make a better version of utilitarianism, and arguing for ethical injunctions using TDT.

And so on. I know he didn't come up with these on his own, but at the least he brought them all together and argued convincingly for his answers in the Sequences.

I've been trying to figure out these problems for years. So have lots of philosophers. I have read these various philosophers' proposed solutions, and disagreed with them all. Then I read Eliezer, and agreed with him. I feel that this is strong evidence that Eliezer has actually created something of value.

Comment author: J_Taylor 20 January 2012 08:45:26AM *  7 points [-]

What is free will? Ooops, wrong question. Free will is what a decision-making algorithm feels like from the inside.

I admire the phrase "what an algorithm feels like from the inside". This is certainly one of Yudkowsky's better ideas, if it is one of his. I think that one can see the roots of it in G.E.B. Still, this may well count as something novel.

Nonetheless, Yudkowsky is not the first compatibilist.

What is intelligence? The ability to optimize things.

One could define the term in such a way. I tend to take a instrumentalist view on intelligence. However, "the ability to optimize things" may well be a thing. You may as well call it intelligence, if you are so inclined.

This, nonetheless, may not be a solution to the question "what is intelligence?". It seems as though most competent naturalists have moved passed the question.

What is knowledge? The ability to constrain your expectations.

I apologize, but that does not look like a solution to the Gettier Problem. Could you elaborate?

What should I do with the Newcomb's Box problem? TDT answers this.

I have absolutely no knowledge of the history of Newcomb's problem. I apologize.

Further apologies for the following terse statements:

I don't think Fun theory is known by academia. Also, it looks like, at best, a contemporary version of eudaimonia.

The concept of CEV is neat. However, I think if one were to create an ethical version of the pragmatic definition of truth, "The good is the end of inquiry" would essentially encapsulate CEV. Well, as far as one can encapsulate a complex theory with a brief statement.

TDT is awesome. Predicted by the superrationality of Hofstadter, but so what?

I don't mean to discount the intelligence of Yudkowsky. Further, it is extremely unkind of me to be so critical of him, considering how much he has influenced my own thoughts and beliefs. However, he has never written a "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" or a Naming and Necessity. Philosophical influence is something that probably can only be seen, if at all, in retrospect.

Of course, none of this really matters. He's not trying to be a good philosopher. He's trying to save the world.

Comment author: David_Gerard 19 January 2012 11:08:44PM *  1 point [-]

I assume that was the intention. I'm not actually convinced that it would improve the site for us to dive headfirst into politics ... but it's odd for the stuff discussed here not to be applied even somewhere else, or even in the discussion section, without a flurry of downvotes. There's a strong social norm that even the slightest hint of political discussion is inherently bad and must be avoided.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 11:13:49PM 1 point [-]

It should be noted that RationalWiki is not a website known to be, let us say, lacking in killed minds.

Comment author: David_Gerard 19 January 2012 09:06:18AM 3 points [-]

It seems to be treated as a thought stopper. "Do not go beyond this point." There are good reasons for it, but the behaviour looks just like shying away from a bad thought.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 10:53:53PM 0 points [-]

I always assumed it was more a discussion-stopper, meant to keep people polite and quiet. However, your interpretation is probably better.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 10:32:38PM *  0 points [-]

Clearly, we have insufficiently formalized what it means to be apolitical.

A few comments up I linked to the wikipedia definition to formalize my usage:

The state or quality of being apolitical can be the apathy and/or the antipathy towards all political affiliations.

I think I'm basically pretty much at antipathy. I have a negative and I think pretty justified attitude towards those trying to enthuse me for political affiliations as people trying to hijack my goals for their own purposes.

I always assumed that it meant following the relevant social norms of whatever society one finds oneself in, avoiding political argument, and taking a carefully crafted "neutral-stance" on political issues.

That is how I intended to use the word. Considering oneself neutral in the great tribal struggles of one's time, aids one in having a better map of reality. It also helps to avoid hijacking by predatory memes.

I certainly agree that if the non-involvement principle recommends against exercising laudable virtues, then the principle is a bad one.

I don't know why anyone would choose to describe this as the primary use of the word "apolitical".

Edit: I didn't mean to imply you did.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How to un-kill your mind - maybe.
Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 10:39:06PM *  0 points [-]

I don't know why anyone would choose to describe this as apolitical.

I must confess, neither do I. I hope that I did not inadvertently imply that I endorse the antecedent of the conditional:

if the non-involvement principle recommends against exercising laudable virtues, then the principle is a bad one

Edit: I did not mean to imply that I believed that you were implying that I did. I just wished to clarify, in order to negate the small-probability that such a miscommunication had occurred.

Comment author: TimS 19 January 2012 09:51:59PM 0 points [-]

I think this is what opposing racism can look like. Or standing to allow a child and parent to have connecting seats on the subway, which both subsidizes something I think is worthy of subsidy and helps set the social norm for future situations.

It seems like the non-involvement principle says I shouldn't have done either of those things.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 10:24:00PM 1 point [-]

Ah, very good then. Clearly, we have insufficiently formalized what it means to be apolitical. I always assumed that it meant following the relevant social norms of whatever society one finds oneself in, avoiding political argument, and taking a carefully crafted "neutral-stance" on political issues.

I certainly agree that if the non-involvement principle recommends against exercising laudable virtues, then the principle is a bad one. However, I do not think anyone has in mind a principle which would forbid giving up one's subway seat.

However, the non-involvement principle does seem to recommend against that particular method of opposing racism. If you consider this a flaw, that seems to be a perfectly coherent reason to reject the principle.

Comment author: Solvent 19 January 2012 11:10:08AM 22 points [-]

I've reccommended this before, I think.

I think that you should get Eliezer to say the accurate but arrogant sounding things, because everyone already knows he's like that. You should yourself, Luke, be more careful about maintaining a humble opinion.

If you need people to say arrogant things, make them ghost-write for Eliezer.

Personally, I think that a lot of Eliezer's arrogance is deserved. He's explained most of the big questions in philosophy either by personally solving them or by brilliantly summarizing other people's problems. CFAI was way ahead of its time, as TDT still is. So he can feel smug. He's got a reputation as an arrogant eccentric genius anyway.

But the rest of the organisation should try to be more careful. You should imitate Carl Shulman rather than Eliezer.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 09:38:33PM *  9 points [-]

He's explained most of the big questions in philosophy either by personally solving them or by brilliantly summarizing other people's problems.

As a curiosity, what would the world look like if this were not the case? I mean, I'm not even sure what it means for such a sentence to be true or false.

Addendum: Sorry, that was way too hostile. I accidentally pattern-matched your post to something that an Objectivist would say. It's just that, in professional philosophy, there does not seem to be a consensus on what a "problem of philosophy" is. Likewise, there does not seem to be a consensus on what a solution to one would look like. It seems that most "problems" of philosophy are dismissed, rather than ever solved.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How to un-kill your mind - maybe.
Comment author: TimS 19 January 2012 08:40:44PM 0 points [-]

You're the one arguing for non-involvement. If every act has moral consequences, how can one justify deciding not to "get involved" without knowing the particular context?

Your original comment did not give the impression that context was important. More precisely, you seemed to assert that the average LessWronger was unlikely to ever be in a position in which the non-involvement principle would lead them astray.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 09:21:55PM 3 points [-]

Could you give an example of such a case? This:

the average LessWronger [is] unlikely to ever be in a position in which the non-involvement principle would lead them astray

seems fairly solid.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 19 January 2012 07:21:15PM *  5 points [-]

Argument screens off authority, and the quote is obviously true.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 08:42:52PM 1 point [-]

Apologies. I was giving the standard response to the standard response to someone talking about being apolitical.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How to un-kill your mind - maybe.
Comment author: TimS 19 January 2012 02:05:31PM 3 points [-]

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.

Pericles

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 03:46:01PM 1 point [-]

Pericles

Politicians talking about politics are almost as untrustworthy as philosophers talking about philosophy.

Comment author: David_Gerard 17 January 2012 11:56:39AM *  8 points [-]

An outside view of LessWrong:

I've had a passing interest in LW, but about 95% of all discussions seem to revolve around a few pet issues (AI, fine-tuning ephemeral utilitarian approaches, etc.) rather than any serious application to real life in policy positions or practical morality. So I was happy to see a few threads about animal rights and the like. I am still surprised, though, that there isn't a greater attempt to bring the LW approach to bear on problems that are relevant in a more quotidian fashion than the looming technological singularity.

As far as I can tell, the reason for this is that in practical matters, "politics is the mind killer" is the mind killer.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 January 2012 02:01:23AM 2 points [-]

That's because in practice, "politics is the mind-killer" is the mind-killer.

If it is not too much trouble, could you explain further what you mean by that?

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 January 2012 11:01:21PM *  5 points [-]

If only the dead people who god did not save, could return and give their opinion of a god.

-Gene Ray, The Wisest Human

http://www.timecube.com/timecube2.html

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 January 2012 10:51:49PM *  3 points [-]

Thinking about thinking makes thinking thoughtful.

-Cleverbot

http://cleverbot.com/cleverness

Comment author: David_Gerard 13 January 2012 12:29:31PM *  5 points [-]

Obesity is a worldwide problem, not just a first world one. Imagine: we can now count as a problem having too much food. Food was rationed in Britain just sixty years ago. We have better problems than we did in living memory.

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 January 2012 10:46:01PM *  1 point [-]

Certainly. I have no problem with modern global society being considered more utopian that all previous societies. Technology is cool like that.

Comment author: Emile 13 January 2012 05:48:17PM 0 points [-]

When I was very young, I was something of a Maoist. Nowadays, not so much. Nonetheless, are you familiar with the notion of labor-aristocracy?

Not much, and wouldn't mind a condensed explanation of the concept, as well as of other concepts in the area you think are useful (I've seen some stuff of value in the general region of Marxist thought, but overall I find that there's too much implicit normative judgement that bleeds into the description; I prefer things to be nice and clean and descriptive).

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 January 2012 10:36:42PM 1 point [-]

First, I apologize for the late response.

Old-school Marxists thought that Western workers would rebel. They, as a rule, failed to rebel. When they did rebel, they generally did not violently overthrow the state and install a socialist regime. Nonetheless, they did achieve better working conditions. So, Marxism is wrong, right? Probably. I mean, this is a straight-up falsified prediction.

But nonetheless, revised Marxist theories are still held. Third-Worldists hold that first-world workers are not, let us say, true proles, but are instead labor-aristocrats. That is, they live in relatively close geographic proximity to the bourgeoisie and oppose it being overturned. In exchange, they reap benefits which the true proles, third-world workers, are not exposed to. This forum post seems to be a fairly good summary:

www.revleft.com/vb/another-view-third-t140405/index.html

Simply put, Third Worldism is an attempt to reconcile Marxism with the events of the twentieth century, particularly the latter half, since history has not proceeded exactly as the Marxists originally envisioned. Despite a continuing expansion of the productive forces and the concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands, the conditions necessary for a new social order have yet to emerge. Far from triumphing, socialism has been beaten back at every turn. In addition, the so-called “advanced” nations, the First World, have found it possible to provide their citizens with all manner of luxuries that earlier generations could not have dreamed of, both in the form of commodities and social services, apparently giving lie to the Marxists' prediction that capitalism's development would push wages, and thereby the working class's condition, ever downward. And far from destroying the middle class, at least in the First World nations, it has preserved it, expanded it and enriched it.

Third Worldism offers a solution to this apparent problem, namely the theory of Labor Aristocracy. This term was originally applied by Engles to describe the leaders of trade unions who peddled opportunism and collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Third Worldists have expanded this to include all workers who have been bribed into servility. Under this expanded definition, the majority of First World workers can be called labor aristocrats. Bribed by access to goods, services and credit, their material interests appear to come closer into alignment with that of capital, precluding viable revolutionary action in the First World.

Ignore most of the forum post, by the way, unless you are interested in Marxism from an anthropological perspective. In fact, even the portion I quoted has a pretty significant amount of incorrectness. And yes, even the descriptive facts has a ton of implicit normative judgement.

Now, I am neither Marxist nor Maoist. I am not even particularly left-wing. I merely hold that our society has as part of its underclass, if it has an underclass, third-world workers. Their standard of living ought to be taken into account when determining our utopia-status.

We may be more utopian than any other society throughout history. Sure, fine. However, I do not see why our local lumpenproles should be considered members of our society when evaluating for utopia-status, but not our foreign proles.

(Apologies for the slang. The words are convenient for talking about this subject.)

Comment author: jhuffman 12 January 2012 07:41:33PM *  1 point [-]

Yes but this trade benefits both parties. While the labor is "cheap" it pays better than if there weren't so many foreign companies building factories in that labor market. So in terms of aggregate quality of life I do not think this can be much of an objection in itself - the fact that all sorts of exploitation typically accompanies such trade not withstanding.

I understand what you are saying though: the total cost in person-hours to maintain a particular standard of living should maybe be taken into account - although I think this can be misleading. For example in places where labor for personal servants is very cheap there are a lot more of them - some of my peers who are from India had several servants working in their home, driving their cars etc. It was almost looked at as an obligation to hire these people. In every other way to measure wealth they made more money after immigrating to the US but of course could not afford such services here.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 January 2012 09:59:08PM 3 points [-]

I am not arguing against globalism. Let me try to make my point more clear.

To only take into account Western quality of life when deciding our current society's utopia-status without taking into account the quality of life of our foreign laborers is, well, just not cricket.

I do not see our foreign laborers as being separable from our current society in such a way that our quality of life could be maintained. As such, when evaluating our society for utopia-status, the existence of these laborers should be taken into account. That is, given our society's current workings, these laborers should be considered members of our society. Under this interpretation, statements such as this:

Nearly everybody can read, and watch amazing shows from the comfort of his home!

are false. Now, I'm not saying that we are not a utopia. However, we certainly are less utopian than was implied by Emile's post.

tl;dr: Society is still a pyramid, the bottom half has now been exported overseas. One mustn't only examine the top half when evaluating for utopia-status.

Comment author: jhuffman 12 January 2012 05:42:38PM 3 points [-]

Are you saying we should not buy things from poor people?

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 January 2012 05:55:15PM 3 points [-]

I am certainly not saying that.

What I am saying is that many of the products we buy every day are produced by cheap laborers whose lives are not-so-great. (This is obvious, of course.) It is not apparent that Western Europe could have its quality of life without this cheap labor. To only take into account Western quality of life when deciding our current society's utopia-status without taking into account the quality of life of our foreign laborers is, well, just not cricket.

Comment author: Emile 11 January 2012 04:34:31PM 27 points [-]

History is full of new things coming to pass, but they have never yet led to utopia.

I don't know - imagine a time traveler going back 500 years, and trying to convince an average European nobleman about the benefits that would come from improvements in science and technology, by describing today's Western Europe - warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours! People live to eighty years old, with much less diseases and crippling injuries! Death by violence is rare and scandalous, and there haven't been any wars in Western Europe for over sixty years! Nearly everybody can read, and watch amazing shows from the comfort of his home!

It would probably sound like Utopia to him, and even more so to a peasant of the time. Current western civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history.

(Note that actually getting those results may not actually be a matter of science and technology; the progress we got may mostly come from things like improvements to agriculture which allowed a larger portion of the population to do something else - the actual causes of the great improvements we saw are debated)

As Eliezer wrote:

Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc. etc. etc.

The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 January 2012 05:31:56PM 4 points [-]

When I was very young, I was something of a Maoist. Nowadays, not so much. Nonetheless, are you familiar with the notion of labor-aristocracy?

Current western civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history.

I am imagining a hypothetical Spartan: "Current Laconic civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history."

He is, of course, ignoring the existence of Helots.

today's Western Europe - warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours!

Certainly. However, do they not rely on cheap labor from other nations?

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 January 2012 08:42:26PM 15 points [-]

When I first heard that Lesswrong was full of rationalists, I assumed that Lesswrong was anti-empiricist.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 31 December 2011 07:51:23PM *  8 points [-]

A related issue is that a lot of rather bad philosophy has labelled itself 'feminist' as a way of avoiding the same level of scrutiny it would otherwise have (e.g. look up feminist epistemology or metaphysics). [I'm not saying theres nothing good in them, but theres little benefit from lumping it together outside the mainstream debates.]

This damages 'real' feminism because its associated with these, when most proper feminist statements are fairly logically coherent (e.g. the morally relevant things about humans are found in both genders, therefore we should treat both genders as equal).

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 January 2012 03:57:22AM 1 point [-]

I would wager that current epistemology labelled 'feminist' is not reliably worse than mainstream epistemology.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 January 2012 05:04:28AM *  2 points [-]

That would seem to be an odd notion of "faith"; is the translation untrue to the original or is Nietzsche just being typically provocative? (I also personally don't see how the quote is at all profound or interesting but that's a separate issue and more a matter of taste.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 January 2012 04:53:22AM *  10 points [-]

I apologize for practicing inferior epistemic hygiene. Thank you for indirectly bringing this to my attention. I knew that the quote was commonly attributed to Nietzsche, but I had never seen the original source. It would seem to be a rephrasing of this quote from The Antichrist:

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum.

Comment author: J_Taylor 01 January 2012 08:35:29AM 27 points [-]

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

  • Friedrich Nietzsche
Comment author: J_Taylor 30 December 2011 06:05:13AM *  1 point [-]

Are you a philosopher? Perhaps some other type of person who benefits from appearing as if he or she were a highly objective reasoner?

If not, you probably benefit from appearing empathetic and humanistic. In private, with trusted allies, it is fine to talk about the more, let us say, repugnant propositions that can be derived from one's beliefs. However, in public, one must be wary of what bullets one bites.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 24 December 2011 07:20:21PM 1 point [-]

I'm working on Project Euler too, also in Python. Would you be interested in sharing solutions to problems after we've both finished them? It would provide me, and possibly you, incentive to do more, and we'd get to compare strategies.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 December 2011 06:22:36AM 0 points [-]

Hello.

I recently posted in the mentoring thread:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_network/

How interested are you in forming an anti-akrasia partnership? If you are interested, do you have a preferred medium of communication?

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 December 2011 06:20:57AM *  1 point [-]

I mainly need an anti-akrasia partner.

I am a young person who graduated from college with, like MileyCyrus, an unprofitable major. However, my GPA should be good enough to go to a grad-school. There, I intend to pass the time while learning more profitable skills. In the mean time, I am working on my applications and attempting to find a temporary job.

If someone is willing to go further than an anti-akrasia partnership, and form a mentor-mentee relationship, I am in tentative favor of this. Like MileyCyrus, at a pre-defined point in the mentor-mentee relationship, I am willing to make token donations to a suitable charity.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2011 10:39:48AM 15 points [-]

I certainly would like to live in this utopia. However, I am not so certain that most people on earth would. I am also fairly confident that most people historically would not want to live in it.

Nonetheless, you did a very good job at crafting a utopia in which contemporary liberal Westerners would be happy. This is still quite the achievement.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 26 December 2011 08:30:02AM 4 points [-]

Unfortunately, I don't have the spare money to take the other side of the bet, but Will showed a tendency to head off into foggy abstractions which I haven't seen in Aspiring Knitter.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2011 09:54:05AM 1 point [-]

Will_Newsome does not seem, one would say, incompetent. I have never read a post by him in which he seemed to be unknowingly committing some faux pas. He should be perfectly capable of suppressing that particular aspect of his posting style.

Comment author: Nornagest 28 December 2011 04:00:52AM 1 point [-]

Heh. I'm not sure why you felt compelled to rhyme there, though; Yeats didn't.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2011 04:16:12AM *  0 points [-]

I must confess, I have never actually heard the words 'gyre' and 'falconer'. I assumed they could be pronounced in such a way that it would sound like a rhyme. In my head, they both were pronounced like 'hear'. Likewise, I assumed one could pronounce 'world' and 'hold' in such a way that they could sort-of rhyme. In my head, 'hold' was pronounced 'held' and 'world' was pronounced 'weld.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEunVObSnVM

Apparently, this is not the case. Oops.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 December 2011 10:01:21PM 8 points [-]

How do I insult thee? Let me count the ways.
I insult thee to the depth and breadth and height
My mind can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the lack of Reason and the craft of Bayes.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2011 03:46:13AM *  5 points [-]

Turning and turning in the narrowing spiral

The user cannot resist those memes which are viral;

The waterline is lowered; beliefs begin to cool;

Mere tribalism is loosed, upon Lesswrong's school,

The grey-matter is killed, and everywhere

The knowledge of one's ignorance is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 24 December 2011 07:20:21PM 1 point [-]

I'm working on Project Euler too, also in Python. Would you be interested in sharing solutions to problems after we've both finished them? It would provide me, and possibly you, incentive to do more, and we'd get to compare strategies.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 December 2011 12:42:43AM 0 points [-]

Certainly. However, I should note that I have not progressed as far as you have.

Comment author: Technoguyrob 17 December 2011 05:48:25AM *  5 points [-]

Hacker News doesn't seem to be having any of it, either. I got voted to 3rd top post then hit with a barrage of downvotes after Phil Welch's comment. Asking under Crocker's Rules, could I have phrased my comments more... sensitively? The goal of a rationalist is to win, and it is useless to engage reason and data when this meets affective heuristics and turns off the audience.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 December 2011 02:44:54AM 1 point [-]

He called you a Randroid. As wedrifid pointed out, 'polite' would not be the best term to describe the optimal manner for presenting your particular views in that context.

Comment author: gwern 19 December 2011 01:50:02AM 1 point [-]

Being conscious for surgery is significantly less horrifying to me than dying of a burst appendix.

Is it less horrifying than not being conscious during the surgery?

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 December 2011 02:40:04AM 1 point [-]

Is not being conscious during surgery particularly horrifying?

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 December 2011 03:27:03AM 1 point [-]

I am currently progressing through Learning Python The Hard Way.

I also am trying to find a legitimate job while going through grad-school applications.

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 December 2011 01:16:29AM 2 points [-]

I just finished my first Project Euler problem.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 12 December 2011 09:35:55PM 12 points [-]

Here's my $0.02 on that page: Bostrom looks like he suspects you of something. Goetzel looks smug but ok. Hanson looks evil. Shulman looks fine, but getting rid of his red eye would take about 2 minutes in iPhoto. Chalmers looks like a hobo, but not scary. Hall, Salamon, and Yudkowsky look fine.

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 December 2011 07:35:23PM 3 points [-]

Chalmers always looks like a hobo.

Comment author: J_Taylor 16 December 2011 03:27:03AM 1 point [-]

I am currently progressing through Learning Python The Hard Way.

I also am trying to find a legitimate job while going through grad-school applications.

Comment author: Dorikka 12 December 2011 06:07:28AM 2 points [-]

I didn't get the joke. :(

I mainly made the comment because I get a huge number of false starts with things like that -- I confuse a short term solution (something worth noting, but not an actual cure) with a long term one and then am glad that I didn't post about it.

Let's say that I won't post a technique until a week has passed. If it's day 6 and I haven't posted it, it may mean the technique failed or simply be a symptom that the week didn't pass yet. If someone didn't operate by this restriction, I think that them not posting the technique would just be evidence that it failed -- why hold it back?

Or maybe it'll be clearer in the morning... :)

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 December 2011 01:27:28AM 1 point [-]

Apologies, the joke was that someone who was particularly filled with akrasia would procrastinate and never actually post the akrasia-killing technique.

Comment author: Louie 02 December 2011 09:29:39AM *  24 points [-]

It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.

It's damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.

Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.

Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I've watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley... including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn't think mundane work was trivial, we'd get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that "anybody could do".

As another example, I've had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do "anything" or "whatever helped the most". SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it's something "so mundane", that anybody could do it... therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I've personally asked over 100 people to help with it.

Comment author: J_Taylor 14 December 2011 07:57:33PM 2 points [-]

Hello,

Is it too late to volunteer for SEO work? I have no experience with the subject. However, for the brief future, I will have a good amount of time.

Comment author: Dorikka 12 December 2011 02:59:03AM 5 points [-]

I think that I would rather people wait a bit before suggesting new akrasia-killing techniques. If you do, you will be able to tell whether this was something that just worked for you in the short term or is actually a long term solution, which is probably going to be very important information.

Comment author: J_Taylor 12 December 2011 03:16:05AM 2 points [-]

Joke: But wouldn't someone not waiting to reveal an akrasia-killing technique be evidence for the technique's effectiveness?

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 11 December 2011 01:12:36PM *  3 points [-]

A huge collection of anecdotes about pseudoscience ruining lives: http://whatstheharm.net/

Know of any collection of anecdotes about science ruining lives?

Comment author: J_Taylor 11 December 2011 07:10:48PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: J_Taylor 11 December 2011 12:07:01AM 13 points [-]

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

-Possibly Nietzsche. However, I have never found an original source for this quote.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 December 2011 08:13:56AM *  6 points [-]

But... emotional appeals make me sad. Lesswrong, I thought we were friends?


Eleizer Yudkowsky used emotional appeals in the Sequences, generally in regards to cryonics. However, it should be noted that convincing someone to be frozen is literally a life-or-death situation given his axioms. If you are in a life-or-death situation, by all means use emotional appeals.

However, should you listen to them? Certainly. If someone claims injury or offense without some sort of emotional appeal, they are probably faking it. Some people also cannot make their points without emotional appeals. Just because someone is reliant upon emotion while communicating does not mean that they do not have valid points to make. Further, failing to appear moved by emotional appeals is a reliable way to appear psychologically weird. However, I'm sure that we all knew this.

If we largely manage to broadly ignore emotional appeal, then we shut out not only harmful manipulations, but worthwhile rallying cries. We are motivated only by the motivation we can muster ourselves, rather than what motivation we can borrow from our peers and leaders. This may go some way towards explaining not just why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, but why we seem to so often report that Our Kind Can't Get Much Done.

Most rallying cries are harmful manipulations, by opportunity costs if nothing else. However, the akrasia-hypothesis is interesting. If I recollect correctly, pjeby has theories that are not too dissimilar from it.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 December 2011 12:52:47AM 5 points [-]

David Carmel, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York University, suggested that even when the girls deliver right answers, the phenomenon could be explained by something other than a neural bridge. “If they’re really close, through minute movements that one makes — maybe a typical movement her sister cannot see, but can feel — the other sister intuits the association. Maybe she associates her sister’s reaction with a robin they once liked, not a turkey.” The connection then might be scientifically mundane, but a marvel nonetheless to the casual observer.

Epistemic caution recommended.

Comment author: thomblake 09 December 2011 09:41:28PM 0 points [-]

the former.

Comment author: J_Taylor 09 December 2011 09:51:29PM 1 point [-]

That's not a year. That's not a year at all.

Comment author: thomblake 09 December 2011 08:57:10PM 2 points [-]

ROT13: "bire avar gubhfnaq" vf gur zbfg pbzzba nafjre fb sne. Abg fher jung pbhagf nf na bhgyvre.

Comment author: J_Taylor 09 December 2011 09:05:22PM 2 points [-]

"Bire avar gubhfnaq", nf va, gur cuenfr be "bire avar gubhfnaq", nf va, fbzr ahzore juvpu vf terngre guna avar gubhfnaq?

Zvar jnf pregnvayl gur ynggre, ohg abg gur sbezre.

In response to [POLL] Year survey
Comment author: J_Taylor 09 December 2011 08:55:59PM 1 point [-]

Depending on how other people respond, my response may have been a bit of an outlier.

Comment author: roland 09 December 2011 07:21:50PM 5 points [-]

A russian pharmacological company was trying to make a drug against stupidity with the name of "EliminateStupodsky", the result was Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Comment author: J_Taylor 09 December 2011 07:26:07PM *  49 points [-]

When I read part of this in Recent Comments, I was almost entirely sure this comment would be spam. This is probably one of the few legit comments ever made which began with "A russian pharmacological company."

In response to Value evolution
Comment author: J_Taylor 09 December 2011 01:50:15AM 8 points [-]

"Slaves, obey your masters" was an economic necessity. (China had discovered Taoism and Buddhism centuries earlier.)

Confucianism would have been more appropriate.

Comment author: shminux 07 December 2011 11:47:37PM *  9 points [-]

If you want people to sign up for your class, don't call it Bayes Theorem, or anything equally boring (not many people can even pronounce "representativeness heuristic" on the first try).

Maybe something along the lines of "One fraction to rule them all" or "When a 99% positive test is only accurate 1% of the time" or something similarly catchy.

Comment author: J_Taylor 08 December 2011 06:29:32AM 3 points [-]

Something about posteriors?

Comment author: [deleted] 05 December 2011 05:03:26AM 5 points [-]

For what it's worth, I'm also from the southern US, and I also have the impression that "blacks" is slightly cringey and "black people" is preferred.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: J_Taylor 07 December 2011 05:03:56AM 0 points [-]

I am glad that my case is not too aberrant.

Comment author: Curiouskid 07 December 2011 12:27:59AM 0 points [-]

agree with the point of em-hell. But I don't think it's very likely because I think that you could screen against sociopaths being uploaded.

The full quote:

Who would want to be like that anyway, when the alternative is to live in a digitally created state of bliss? You could still be part of what you consider to be "reality", so that you wouldn't feel bad if you were in a "fake" virtual reality.

You could still have real friends. What zero-sum games do you have in mind? Surely anything you find enjoyable now pales in comparison to what's possible and likely with WBE?

So, our monster-em would be an existential risk IF all these conditions are met: 1. it gets through a screening process. 2. it prefers staying psychopathic to enjoying em-bliss. 3. it somehow gains power to torture not only a few ems, but all the ems. 4. it prefers to torture real people/ems rather than torturing things that are like highly realistic videogame simulations that aren't conscious. 5. No other ems are able/willing to stop it.

Doesn't that seem unlikely?

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 December 2011 01:16:37AM 1 point [-]

First, I value friendships with real people. If I were an em, I would probably value friendships with real ems and not unconscious simulations.

If I valued torturing real people, em-version of me would probably value torturing real ems and not unconscious simulations.

Not all humans have pleasure as their summum bonum. Not all humans would want em-bliss.

Second, you do not know what this screening process would entail and whether it would be possible to fool it. You also do not know how unfriendly neurotypical ems could become.

Third, yes. Em-hell is unlikely. However, if it is possible for a monster-em to arise and gain power, Pascalian reasoning begins to apply.

Fourth, em-hell and em-heaven are both fantasies. Other hypothetical futures probably deserve more focus.

Comment author: Curiouskid 06 December 2011 09:38:12PM 0 points [-]

Well. That's not an existential risk, but it would be bad if we had a sadistic upload in charge. But I think that if we had enough knowledge of neuroscience to create WBE, then we should be able to eliminate the pathologies of the mind that create deranged lunatics, sadists, and psychopaths. Who would want to be like that anyway, when the alternative is to live in a digitally created state of bliss? You could still be part of what you consider to be "reality", so that you wouldn't feel bad if you were in a "fake" virtual reality.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 December 2011 11:22:45PM 1 point [-]

First, I believe the creation of em-hell is worse than human extinction. Second, I have no idea how neurologically different sociopaths are.


Who would want to be like that anyway, when the alternative is to live in a digitally created state of bliss?

At least part of me prefers friendship with real people to being wireheaded into pure bliss. Another part of me values winning zero-sum games against real people. Although no part of me values torturing innocent people, I can certainly understand why a monster-em would prefer ruling over em-hell to being wireheaded.

Our monster-em could perhaps endorse this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lb/not_for_the_sake_of_happiness_alone/

In response to comment by [deleted] on Utilitarianism- WBE (uploading) > FAI
Comment author: Curiouskid 06 December 2011 12:40:43AM -1 points [-]

Good point. then again, I don't think/care if humanity on a biological substrate died out (which is a relatively harsh way of putting it). I prefer saying we leave our inferior substrates behind. So even if an upload became unfriendly, it wouldn't pose an existential risk to post-humans because it would still preserve itself (not so sure about biological ones).

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 December 2011 06:11:04AM 4 points [-]

An unfriendly AI would probably just kill us. An unfriendly em? A human wrote The 120 Days of Sodom.

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 December 2011 08:28:36PM *  0 points [-]

I do not know whether this is atypical. At the very least, I have never encountered anyone talking about it. However, my visual experience is almost always similar to, but less vibrant than, a monitor being degaussed.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 December 2011 11:45:29AM 1 point [-]

I am not confidant that we are morally superior to prior generations and that future generations will be morally superior to us. Making this argument would require a non-trivial amount of intellectual labor.

A number of people have issued some variant of this response, to which I reply:

We don't have to say that society is getting better, only that it is changing. If society is not changing then it is stagnant. If society is changing, then those best suited to whatever society currently exists are those born relatively recently.

In other words, maybe the society of 2700 isn't actually any better than the world of 2200, but it is different. If 2700 is not different than 2200, than society is no longer "evolving". It is static. However, since 2700 hopefully will be different, the people best suited to live in it are those born in 2650, not those born in 2200.

tl;dr- We don't have to say that society is getting better. We just have to say that it's changing and those born most recently are best adapted to it.

In response to comment by [deleted] on On "Friendly" Immortality
Comment author: J_Taylor 05 December 2011 03:42:19PM 1 point [-]

There is a significant amount of inferential distance here.

If society is changing, then those best suited to whatever society currently exists are those born relatively recently.

and

However, since 2700 hopefully will be different, the people best suited to live in it are those born in 2650, not those born in 2200.

I do not know what you mean by this. It is not obvious that, at this point in time, those individuals born relatively recently are better suited to current society than those individuals born less recently. However, I also am not sure what you mean by "better suited." Your language sounds slightly Darwinistic. However, I do not think that you are talking about fitness.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 December 2011 04:43:47AM 1 point [-]

Social Stagnation Discussion Thread

In response to comment by [deleted] on On "Friendly" Immortality
Comment author: J_Taylor 05 December 2011 09:31:41AM 8 points [-]

This is Whig history. I am not confidant that we are morally superior to prior generations and that future generations will be morally superior to us. Making this argument would require a non-trivial amount of intellectual labor.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 05 December 2011 04:41:09AM *  11 points [-]

Moreover, there are plenty of black people in the world who are not African-American.

There's an infamous video from a few years back in which an American interviewer makes this mistake when talking to an Olympic athlete of British nationality and African ancestry. It becomes increasingly clear that the interviewer is merely doing a mental substitution of "African-American" for "black" without actually thinking about what the former term means ...

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 December 2011 04:49:53AM 2 points [-]

I do not use "African-American" to refer to non-Americans.

Comment author: Unnamed 04 December 2011 09:25:19PM *  21 points [-]

P(Supernatural) What is the probability that supernatural events, defined as those involving ontologically basic mental entities, have occurred since the beginning of the universe?

P(God) What is the probability that there is a god, defined as a supernatural (see above) intelligent entity who created the universe?

So deism (God creating the universe but not being involved in the universe once it began) could make p(God) > p(Supernatural).

Looking at the the data by individual instead of in aggregate, 82 people have p(God) > p(Supernatural); 223 have p(Supernatural) > p(God).

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 09:31:04PM 7 points [-]

Given this, the numbers no longer seem anomalous. Thank you.

Comment author: Jack 04 December 2011 09:17:58PM 12 points [-]

The plural can look weird but as long as it doesn't come after a definite article, it's the standard term and I've never met anyone who was offended by it. The usual politically correct substitute, African-American, is offensive in an international context.

In response to comment by Jack on 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 09:28:51PM 2 points [-]

I have never met any black person who was offended by it. I have met some white people who will take you less seriously if you use the term.

However, if it is the standard term then it is the standard term. I certainly would not replace it with African-American.

Comment author: Yvain 04 December 2011 09:15:54PM 10 points [-]

What would you prefer? "Blacks" is the way I've seen it used in medical and psychological journal articles.

In response to comment by Yvain on 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 09:23:06PM 5 points [-]

Journals use "blacks"? I had no idea it was used in technical writing. In some of my social circles, it just happens to be considered, at best, grandma-talk.

Generally, within these circles, "black people" is used.

However, I have no real preference regarding this matter.

Comment author: Jack 04 December 2011 09:01:58PM 3 points [-]

What is your area?

In response to comment by Jack on 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 09:10:09PM 2 points [-]

Southern United States.

Comment author: BT_Uytya 04 December 2011 04:51:39PM *  7 points [-]

Hello, good time of day.

My name is Victor, I'm 19. I'm a student of computer science from Russia (so my English is far from perfect, and probably there will be lack of articles; please excuse me).

There wasn't any bright line between rationalist!Victor and ordinary!Victor. If I remember correctly, five years ago I was interested in paranormal phenomena like UFO, parallel worlds or the Bermuda Triangle (I'm not sure I truly believed in it, probably I just had fun thinking about it: but I might have confessed the cached thought about scientists not knowing important things about the world) and liked reading the pop-science books at the same time. Then I realized that there is a beauty, honesty and courage in the scientific worldview and shortly thereafter, I became a person from the Light Side: not because science was true, but because it was fun.

But at least I rejected the Bermuda Triangle. I was too honest to leave inconsistencies in my pool of beliefs; so long, pseudoscience!

Maybe at the same time I discovered the concept of the utility function and blog of a psychologist arguing that there is nothing wrong with an egoism. Something clicked in my mind; the explanation of human behaviour was beautiful in it's simplicity, and there were some interesting implications of this explanation. Then Dawkins and realization that evolution is just a natural continuation of the laws governing non-organic matter. Evolution was fun, and also it was true. I became an Guardian Of The Evolution, and I was fighting superstitions. It was point of no return: it was impossible to defend telepathy again (why there aren't any telepathic wolves?).

There was moment of marvel, when I realized that there wasn't any reason to expect any intellectual feats from a naked ape living in town; our brain wasn't adapted to the current environment, but it is still working, and it is working much better than you should reasonably expect. Intelligence is fragile, and humanity is the underdog I should root for. At that time, I had already known about cognitive biases, but my feelings towards this topic became different after this insight.

I don't remember when I started reading LW. I might have learned about utility functions here, but I'm not sure. LW was changing me gradually. In the course of two or three years I have been noticing some small changes: I started admiring the scientific method, I understood the power of the intelligence, sometimes I withdrew from an argument because there wasn't any disagreement about anticipated experience there, et cetera.

I don't know where to draw a line between "non-rational age" and "rational age". But I sure as hell I'm with you guys now.

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:46:31PM 1 point [-]

Welcome, Victor.

Perhaps you'll find this funny:

http://earthfireinstitute.org/2010/02/a-telepathic-cry-of-the-heart/

In response to 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:35:47PM 1 point [-]

I have no idea if this is universal. (Probably not.) However, in my area, using the term "blacks" in certain social circles is not considered proper vocabulary.

I don't have any huge problem with using the term. However, using it may be bad signalling and leaves Lesswrong vulnerable to pattern-matching.

In response to 2011 Survey Results
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:27:29PM *  23 points [-]

The supernatural (ontologically basic mental entities) exists: 5.38, (0, 0, 1)

God (a supernatural creator of the universe) exists: 5.64, (0, 0, 1)

??

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 12:04:58PM *  13 points [-]

When you choose

How much postage to use,

When you know

What's the chance it will snow,

When you bet

And you end up in debt,

Oh try as you may,

You just can't get away

From mathematics!

Tom Lehrer, "That's Mathematics"

(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:23:34AM 28 points [-]

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.

  • The Joker
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:10:29AM *  22 points [-]

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

-Probably not Henry Ford

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html

Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 07:52:51AM 1 point [-]

Would the existence of endorsers of moral error theory be evidence against humans having an ought-function? Most of the ones I am familiar with seem both roughly neurotypical and honest in their writings.

What experiences should we anticipate in if humans have this hypothetical module? And if humans do not?

Comment author: [deleted] 10 November 2011 12:51:56AM *  1 point [-]

could you recommend a source that would assist in understanding the method you used to arrive at this result?

Of course! I tend to agree with orthonormal - in writings by men, women are often talked about as the "Other" and not the audience.

EY has written a similar argument . But then in this piece, he makes multiple accusations that women tend to talk about men as "Other" without ever providing any sort of evidence to back it up. He just takes it as some obvious de facto truth that doesn't even need justification. I personally was put off at this.

Some more good ones to read include this argument which mentions that you shouldn't forget the historical context/ culture that people are coming into these discussions from, and this piece, which posits that the essence of the "Taking Offense" is a percieved lowering of social status.

I also recommend a quick perusal of the comments therein.

From my personal experience, one of the early things I did upon finding Less Wrong (after some explorations in the sequences) was to click on the tags of subjects I was interested in (gender, social, etc). Somehow, a vast majority of the articles' comment sections ended up devolving into repetitive arguments about PUA. Looking back, this was probably due to my navigating by clicking on links within the article I was already reading, which lead me to stay within a subject range that could devolve into PUA discussions, and not so much that PUA is in fact mentioned in the vast majority of posts. My opinions on this (although probably more positive than you would expect of an average female) are a whole different subject which I can expound upon if need be, but I assume that you could guess how a female would feel when she goes to a blog supposedly about rationality, and all the comments are about PUA.

Finally, I would like you to imagine yourself as the only male in a Women's Studies class. Even if the language always remains respectful and your classmates encourage your participation, I'm sure you can visualize many respectful debates where you would get frustrated that the other members of your class just don't "Get It"...LW is a similar situation, just with the genders reversed.

I would like to mention that I have in fact been the only female in engineering classes, and would like to point out that any time your race/gender/belief system is in the vast minority, there is bound to be additional pressure there. My views on that subject best summed up by these comics .

Finally, I would like to comment that in my introduction, I was operating in a social interaction mode (aka I was posting in a "Introduce Yourself" thread (social interaction), not a "Let's Have A Rational Discussion" thread (factual/debating interaction). Even a polite request (such as the one made) to rationalize my feelings would not be acceptable in most social spheres outside of LW. (unless the claim I made was completely outside reality, such as "I was driven away by the intense focus of the LW community on ice cream." In which case a "Say whaaat?" is a completely acceptable response, lol) Here it is de rigeur. I wouldn't be surprised if this also tended to draw away many women. (And I would like to clarify that I am not trying to attack you personally at all, I am just using your response as an example of the LW culture.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Comment author: J_Taylor 04 December 2011 07:30:26AM *  1 point [-]

Sorry for not responding to this sooner. Thank you for explaining your view. I have only two statements to make.

  • Apologies for failing to abide by the relevant norms of conversation. (This is not sarcasm. Without body language, it is hard to demonstrate this. However, perhaps I can express myself better with this photograph of a chimpanzee.)

http://www.ebookanoid.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/embarrassed-chimp.jpg

If I were to anthropomorphize, the chimp would be thinking the chimp equivalent of "D'oh."

  • After the recent romance thread (which was not qualitatively worse than the previous threads), stating that Lesswrong has a "Not-Getting-It-ness" with regards to gender is perhaps something of an understatement.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/27/science/chimp.reach533.jpg

If I were to anthropomorphize this chimp, the chimp would be thinking the chimp equivalent of "Really, folks? Really?"

Comment author: J_Taylor 30 November 2011 09:23:12AM 2 points [-]

If I am not incorrect, Amanda Marcotte was a speaker at last year's Skepticon? The skepticism movement creates some strange alliances.


Also, on an unrelated note, the Yudkowsky pony is quite nice:

http://johnnykaje.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/skepticon-ponies-the-final-hour/

Comment author: Alicorn 17 November 2011 12:25:03AM 6 points [-]

Nitpick: Emeralds are a bad example. An "emerald" is just green beryl - a blue instance of the same mineral is just a blue piece of beryl. They exist, but they aren't emeralds.

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 November 2011 06:59:40AM 8 points [-]

Philosophy of Science textbooks mention that fact. Goodman chose a bad example and now we must all pay the price.

In response to Poker with Lennier
Comment author: J_Taylor 15 November 2011 10:56:36PM *  2 points [-]

Aesthetic concern: Having the poker hands displayed is a really cool idea. However, you may wish to remove the initial image.

Edit: The image has been resized. The change makes the article look much nicer.

Comment author: PhilosophyTutor 15 November 2011 07:30:12AM *  1 point [-]

Irrelevant. Is all fair in love?

Let me check... nope, it looks like utilitarian ethics holds that ethical actions are those that maximise positive outcomes (however defined) factoring in the consequences for all stakeholders. I can't see anything in there excluding actions or outcomes related to sex from the usual sorts of calculations. So I'm going to go ahead and say that the answer is no from a utilitarian perspective.

Are you claiming that all romantic relationships which include the domination of one party by the other betray trust? I think we have differing definitions of dominance or good behavior.

If we can exclude those cases where one partner or another honestly and explicitly expresses a free, informed and rational preference to be dominated then mostly yes.

(From a utilitarian perspective we have to at least be philosophically open to the idea that a person who is sufficiently bad at managing their utility might be better off being dominated against their will by a sufficiently altruistic dominator. See The Taming of the Shrew or Overboard. Such cases are atypical).

The first statement is judging a decision solely by its outcome

I have located the source of the confusion. What I actually said in the earlier post was this:

"t might well be that Bob has neither the interest not the ability to sustain a mutually optimal ongoing relationship with Alice and in that case the utility-maximising path from that point forward and hence the ethical option is for Bob to leave and not contact Alice again. However if Bob knew in advance that this was the case and had reason to believe that Alice's utility function placed a negative value on participating in a one night stand with a person who was not interested in a long-term relationship then Bob behaved unethically in getting to this position since he knowingly brought about a negative-utility outcome for a moral stakeholder."

I was not judging a situation solely on its outcome, because it was an if/then statement explicitly predicated on Bob knowing in advance that Alice's utility function would take a major hit.

I guess you just lost track of the context and thought I'd said something I hadn't. Are we back on the same page together now?

That does not seem reasonable. Alices may be up for one night stands, but they only have sex with at most one guy a night. The challenge is being that guy.

Possibly the recency effect of having skimmed one of Roissy's blog posts where he specifically singled out for ridicule a female blogger who was expressing regret and confusion after a one night stand colours my recollection, but I am sure I have read PUA materials in the past that had specific sections dedicated to the problem of overcoming the resistance of women who had a preference not to engage in sex on the first/second/nth date, a preference that is certainly not inherently irrational and which seems intuitively likely to correlate with a high probability of regretting a one night stand if it does not turn into an ongoing, happy relationship.

Speaking more broadly a stereo salesperson maximises their sales by selling a stereo to every customer who walks in wanting to buy a stereo, and selling a stereo to as many customers as possible who walk in not wanting to buy a stereo. I'm sure they would prefer all their customers to be the first kind but you maximise your income by getting the most out of both. Game-theory-rational PUAs who don't have Alices on tap, or a reliable way of filtering out Carols, or who just plain find some Carols attractive and want to sleep with them, would out of either necessity or preference have an interest in maximising their per-Carol chances of bedding a Carol.

Comment author: J_Taylor 15 November 2011 07:37:23AM 1 point [-]

It should be noted that, from the perspective of a utilitarian agent in certain environments, it may be the utilitarian action to self-modify into a non-utilitarian agent. That is, an unmodified utilitarian agent participating in certain interactions with non-utilitarian agents may create greater utility by self-modifying into a non-utilitarian agent.

Comment author: pedanterrific 10 November 2011 05:31:24AM 1 point [-]

I don't see why hypothetical conspiratorial mailing list (HCML) identities and LW identities have to be linked at all, really.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 November 2011 05:39:17AM 0 points [-]

I saw it as a way of messing up the apparent signal-to-noise ratio for outside observers. However, if one were to wish to do so, there are probably better ways.

Comment author: pedanterrific 10 November 2011 05:04:52AM *  2 points [-]

Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 November 2011 05:14:29AM 2 points [-]

One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 November 2011 08:44:27PM 8 points [-]

Hi All!

Generic Stats: 28 year-old Ohioan; Found LW through HPMoR, and lurked for a while, but finally created a profile after filling out the survey; BA in History. Was halfway through an MS in Human Factors Engineering when I got divorced and couldn't afford it any more. Don't plan on going back in the near future, but I did manage to get published during my time in grad school, which was pretty nifty.

I grew up with Easter-and-Christmas Roman Catholicism, though I also got a bit of Judaism from my dad (a Soviet emigrant). Got more heavily into Christianity in my teens, which lead to becoming an atheist when I was around 17.

I am sensitive to feminist concerns about what our culture teaches young girls, as I fell victim to it myself: I had a complete disregard for science and math, despite a very high aptitude for them. It wasn't until I self-studied my way back through math for my engineering requirements that I actually internalized the belief that I was good at this. The general "Not-Getting-It-ness" of many commenters in regards to gender issues tended to turn me away from LW at first, but there is a lot of good stuff here, besides.

About me personally: I enjoy Joss Whedon, TED talks, and Neil Gaiman. I am devoted to my dog, Gryffindor, and he has been with me for 11 years. I work primarily in child care and enjoy imparting nuggets of rationality to my kiddos in ways that don't conflict with the family's world views (I have a tendency to work for extremely conservative religious families ranging from Mormons to New Earthers). I am poly, and enjoyed seeing some of that represented here. I have had an insane amount of crazy hobbies ranging from medieval re-creation to bharatanatyam (Classical Indian dancing)

In response to comment by [deleted] on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Comment author: J_Taylor 09 November 2011 12:08:46AM 4 points [-]

If it would not be inconvenient to you, could you unpack what you mean by "Not-Getting-It-ness"? That is, specific examples that you find problematic?

If you would prefer not do this, could you recommend a source that would assist in understanding the method you used to arrive at this result? That is, a source that would allow one to understand the cognitive-algorithm that produces the result "Not-Getting-It"?

Comment author: summerstay 07 November 2011 11:57:18AM *  2 points [-]

I'm guessing you mean Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future by Dougal Dixon. More a horror book than a rational extrapolation of future human evolution. For a great early attempt at this kind of thing, take a look at Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, published in 1930.

Comment author: J_Taylor 08 November 2011 05:46:57PM *  1 point [-]

Man After Man is similar. However, there is another book which he or she may be referring to.

Comment author: roryokane 02 November 2011 03:26:14AM 0 points [-]

I personally don’t really care whether posts have quotations at the top or not, but could you clarify why you don’t like those quotations? Is it something to do with appeal to authority being a fallacy?

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 November 2011 06:04:25AM 0 points [-]

I did not mentally categorize the Gandhi quote as being an appeal to authority. Rather, I categorized it as a decoration which contains irrelevant, and potentially false, information.

However, in all honesty, I cannot appeal to any higher principle for why I dislike essays being preceded by, let us say, generic quotations from certain figures. My dislike is probably merely due to aesthetics.

Comment author: J_Taylor 07 November 2011 05:39:55AM *  8 points [-]

I took the survey. If it is not too late to receive Karma for taking the survey, I would not mind.

Comment author: Lapsed_Lurker 28 October 2011 08:18:53PM 11 points [-]

I remember hearing about people complaining that cochlear implants were damaging deaf culture, or something. A quick google turned this up as the first hit, which seems to be evidence that what I heard was somewhat real.

I'm pretty sure I have heard about people saying that technology for having unimpaired children is in some way 'against' the disabled.

An awful lot of people do not think straight.

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.

In response to Better Disagreement
Comment author: J_Taylor 24 October 2011 08:08:44PM 4 points [-]

This is not a statement of disagreement, but merely a stylistic concern. I understand that prefacing one's work with a quotation from a respected figure is often good form. However, if it does not interfere with our purposes too much, could we not make a habit of it at Lesswrong?

Comment author: MixedNuts 22 October 2011 05:24:45PM 3 points [-]

There are ways to have politics in your personal life that aren't talking about ideology.

Comment author: J_Taylor 24 October 2011 06:51:50AM 1 point [-]

Could you give an example?

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: J_Taylor 24 October 2011 06:43:31AM 4 points [-]

The quote may still have some use when applied to humans other than oneself.

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: J_Taylor 19 October 2011 03:14:08AM 1 point [-]

I am not entirely sure I disagree with you. However, I am having difficulty modeling you.

"Achieving a goal" seems to mean, for our purposes, something along the lines of "Bringing about a world-state." Most possible world-states do not involve human existence. Thus, it seems that for most possible goals, achieving a goal entails human extinction.

However, your mention of computer programs being produced by intelligent agents is interesting. Are you implying that most AGI's (assume these intelligences can go FOOM) would not result in human extinction?

If this is not what you were implying, I apologize for modeling you poorly. If this is what you were implying, I would like to indicate that this post was non-hostile.

Comment author: J_Taylor 19 October 2011 02:48:52AM 15 points [-]

It is possible that a more accurate version of the Gandhi quote would be:

"First they ignore you. If this succeeds, you are essentially forgotten by history. Then they laugh at you. If this succeeds, you are essentially forgotten by history. Then they fight you. If this succeeds, you are remembered by history as a villain. If this fails, you win." This of course is far too simple. Further, I don't know the original context of the Gandhi quote. As such, this is more a reaction to the sort of Whig history that the quote seems to generally be used to endorse.

I would agree with you that change is inevitable. However, I do not think it possible for us to know whether this movement will achieve its goals. (Perhaps some individuals on Lesswrong can. However, I am skeptical.) Second, if this current movement has goals, it is unknown whether achieving these goals would be classifiable as progress. However, it is also unknown whether this movement failing would be better than it succeeding.

In response to To Speak Veripoop
Comment author: J_Taylor 18 July 2011 09:26:25AM 6 points [-]

I do not mean to offend. However, your particular style of writing would not be considered standard within the fields in which I am familiar, nor is it considered standard within Lesswrong. As such, if you wish to make yourself better understood, you may wish to revise your style.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 July 2011 02:19:08AM 8 points [-]

For a moment you got me worried that I was sending out some rather unintended signals. But it sounded wrong enough that I started thinking it might be the output of some sort of personality prediction / horoscope / fortune cookie generator. Googling the first sentence... (you can guess the rest :)

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 July 2011 09:11:40AM 5 points [-]

Indeed. However, I must confess a certain degree of curiosity. When you state that the description sounded wrong, what did you mean? Did you mean that the description was so common as to be useless, or did you mean that the description did not apply to you? If the former case, this matter is of no interest. If the latter case, something interesting could possibly be derived, depending on which parts of the paragraph failed to describe you.

Comment author: J_Taylor 18 July 2011 12:08:22AM *  4 points [-]

That is actually very clever. I wonder if one could do this for other arguments. The form would be something along these lines, perhaps?

  1. If (agreed upon belief of our tribe) is true, then (belief that is controversial within our tribe) is very likely to be true.
  2. (Belief that is controversial within our tribe) is not likely to be true.
  3. Therefore, (agreed upon belief of our tribe) is false.

Then one has the enemy-tribe argue for proposition 1.

Comment author: J_Taylor 17 July 2011 11:32:25PM 12 points [-]

I am not sure if this attempt at humor is desired. Nonetheless, does this describe you?

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

Comment author: J_Taylor 29 June 2011 09:02:27PM 3 points [-]

Greetings.

I am 20 years old, male, and graduating college this fall with a BA in Philosophy. I am aiming to go to grad-school, specializing in something to help bring about a friendly singularity. I have been reading Lesswrong for about two years and it has been of enormous use in regulating my thought-patterns. Unfortunately, I am currently in a small Bible-Belt city, far away from any meetup groups. I am currently working on my studies in 20th century philosophy, while trying to incorporate useful subjects which many contemporary philosophers ignore. (My Philosophy of Science textbook had a very poor chapter on Bayesianism, which is okay since the instructor ignored the subject anyway.) Aside from the 20th century work, I am teaching myself Python, Bayesian theory, and basic psychology.

Comment author: J_Taylor 28 June 2011 10:28:14PM 4 points [-]

I started with random.org giving me a number, 1 or 0. I decided to guess "left" if random.org returned 1 and "right" if random.org returned 0. On this particular occasion, random.org returned 1 and my method was successful.

Without other examples of Holmesian reasoning, it is not immediately obvious to myself that Holmesian reasoning is more successful than coin-flipping, although it is probably more time-intensive.

Comment author: Jasen 22 March 2011 09:36:52PM 8 points [-]

Definitely all-consuming.

Comment author: J_Taylor 23 March 2011 12:57:07AM 6 points [-]

You stated in the original post that the activities will be performed six days per week. On the seventh day, will there be time for personal research, or are there plans for that day as well?