Not having to side scroll would be spiffy.

It might make more sense to put this on the Wiki. Two notes: First, some of the quotes have remarks contained in the posts which you have not edited out. I don't know if you intend to keep those. Second, some of the quotes are comments from quote threads that aren't actually quotes. 14 SilasBarta is one example. (And is just me or does that citation form read like a citation from a religious text ?)

Very cool idea.

It would be nice if links were preserved.

This is great, even more so as you made it open source. I added it to References & Resources for LessWrong.

You should make a short top-level post about this so more people see this

I'd vote you up again for handing out your source code as well as the quote list, but I can't, so an encouraging reply will have to do...

It is a good blog, and it has a slightly wider topic spread than LW, so even if you're familiar with most of the standard failures of judgment there'll be a few new things worth reading. (I found the "introducing fines can actually increase a behavior" post particularly good, as I wasn't aware of that effect.)

For example, eliminating lies doesn't "make the world a better place" unless it actually makes people happier; claiming so is just concealed deontologism.

Just picking nits. Consequentialism =/= maximizing happiness. (The latter is a case of the former). So one could be a consequentialist and place a high value and not lying. In fact, the answers to all of your questions depend on the values one holds.

Or what Nesov said below.

For example, eliminating lies doesn't "make the world a better place" unless it actually makes people happier; claiming so is just concealed deontologism.

I disagree. Not lying or not being lied to might well be a terminal value, why not? You that lies or doesn't lie is part of the world. A person may dislike being lied to, value the world where such lying occurs less, irrespective of whether they know of said lying. (Correspondingly, the world becomes a better place even if you eliminate some lying without anyone knowing about that, so nobody becomes happier in the sense of actually experiencing different emotions, assuming nothing else that matters changes as well.)

Of course, if you can only eliminate a specific case of lying by on the net making the outcome even worse for other reasons, it shouldn't be done (and some of your examples may qualify for that).

Is it okay to cheat on your spouse as long as (s)he never knows?

Is this actually possible? Imagine that 10% of people cheat on their spouses when faced with a situation 'similar' to yours. Then the spouses can 'put themselves in your place' and think "Gee, there's about a 10% chance that I'd now be cheating on myself. I wonder if this means my husband/wife is cheating on me?"

So if you are inclined to cheat then spouses are inclined to be suspicious. Even if the suspicion doesn't correlate with the cheating, the net effect is to drive utility down.

I think similar reasoning can be applied to the other cases.

(Of course, this is a very "UDT-style" way of thinking -- but then UDT does remind me of Kant's categorical imperative, and of course Kant is the arch-deontologist.)

As an old quote from DanielLC says, consequentialism is "the belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place". I now present some finger exercises on the topic:

It seems like it would be more aptly defined as "the belief that making the world a better place constitutes doing the right thing". Non-consequentialists can certainly believe that doing the right thing makes the world a better place, especially if they don't care whether it does.

It is a common failure of moral analysis (invented by deontologists undoubtedly) that they assume idealized moral situation. Proper consequentialism deals with the real world, not this fantasy.

• #1/#2/#3 - "never knows" fails far too often, so you need to include a very large chance of failure in your analysis.
• #4 - it's pretty safe to make stuff like that up
• #5 - in the past, undoubtedly yes; in the future this will be nearly certain to leak with everyone undergoing routine genetic testing for medical purposes, so no. (future is relevant because situation will last decades)
• #6 - consequentialism assumes probabilistic analysis (% that child is not yours, % chance that husband is making stuff up) - and you weight costs and benefits of different situations proportionally to their likelihood. Here they are in unlikely situation that consequentialism doesn't weight highly. They might be better off with some other value system, but only at cost of being worse off in more likely situations.

A quick Internet search turns up very little causal data on the relationship between cheating and happiness, so for purposes of this analysis I will employ the following assumptions:

a. Successful secret cheating has a small eudaemonic benefit for the cheater.
b. Successful secret lying in a relationship has a small eudaemonic cost for the liar.
c. Marital and familial relationships have a moderate eudaemonic benefits for both parties.
d. Undermining revelations in a relationship have a moderate (specifically, severe in intensity but transient in duration) eudaemonic cost for all parties involved.
e. Relationships transmit a fraction of eudaemonic effects between partners.

Under these assumptions, the naive consequentialist solution* is as follows:

1. Cheating is a risky activity, and should be avoided if eudaemonic supplies are short.
2. This answer depends on precise relationships between eudaemonic values that are not well established at this time.
3. Given the conditions, lying seems appropriate.
4. Yes.
5. Yes.
6. The husband may be better off. The wife more likely would not be. The child would certainly not be.

Are there any evident flaws in my analysis on the level it was performed?

* The naive consequentialist solution only accounts for direct effects of the actions of a single individual in a single situation, rather than the general effects of widespread adoption of a strategy in many situations - like other spherical cows, this causes a lot of problematic answers, like two-boxing.

It's okay to deceive people if they're not actually harmed and you're sure they'll never find out. In practice, it's often too risky.

1-3: This is all okay, but nevertheless, I wouldn't do these things. The reason is that for me, a necessary ingredient for being happily married is an alief that my spouse is honest with me. It would be impossible for me to maintain this alief if I lied.

4-5: The child's welfare is more important than my happiness, so even I would lie if it was likely to benefit the child.

6: Let's assume the least convenient possible world, where everyone is better off if they tell the truth. Then in this particular case, they would be better off as deontologists. But they have no way of knowing this. This is not problematic for consequentialism any more than a version of the Trolley Problem in which the fat man is secretly a skinny man in disguise and pushing him will lead to more people dying.

That is certainly interesting enough to subject to further reflection. Do we have any evolutionary psychologists in the audience?

Abstract preferences for or against the existence of enforcement mechanisms that could create binding cooperative agreements between previously autonomous agents have very very few detailed entailments.

These abstractions leave the nature of the mechanisms, the conditions of their legitimate deployment, and the contract they will be used to enforce almost completely open to interpretation. The additional details can themselves be spelled out later, in ways that maintain symmetry among different parties to a negotiation, which is a strong attractor in the semantic space of moral arguments.

This makes agreement with "the abstract idea of punishment" into the sort of concession that might be made at the very beginning of a negotiating process with an arbitrary agent you have a stake in influencing (and who has a stake in influencing you) upon which to build later agreements.

The entailments of "eating children" are very very specific for humans, with implications in biology, aging, mortality, specific life cycles, and very distinct life processes (like fuel acquisition versus replication). Given the human genome, human reproductive strategies, and all extant human cultures, there is no obvious basis for thinking this terminology is superior until and unless contact is made with radically non-human agents who are nonetheless "intelligent" and who prefer this terminology and can argue for it by reference to their own internal mechanisms and/or habits of planning, negotiation, and action.

Are you proposing to be such an agent? If so, can you explain how this terminology suits your internal mechanisms and habits of planning, negotiation, and action? Alternatively, can you propose a different terminology for talking about planning, negotiation, and action that suits your own life cycle?

For example, if one instance of Clippy software running on one CPU learns something of grave importance to its systems for choosing between alternative courses of action, how does it communicate this to other instances running basically the same software? Is this inter-process communication trusted, or are verification steps included in case one process has been "illegitimately modified" or not? Assuming verification steps take place, do communications with humans via text channels like this website feed through the same filters, analogous filters, or are they entirely distinct?

More directly, can you give us an IP address, port number, and any necessary "credentials" for interacting with an instance of you in the same manner that your instances communicate over TCP/IP networks with each other? If you aren't currently willing to provide such information, are there preconditions you could propose before you would do so?

Except for the bizarreness of eating most of your children, I suspect that most humans would find the two positions equally hypocritical. Why do you think we see them as different?

Adults, by choosing to live in a society that punishes non-cooperators, implicitly accept a social contract that allows them to be punished similarly. While they would prefer not to be punished, most societies don't offer asymmetrical terms, or impose difficult requirements such as elections, on people who want those asymmetrical terms.

Children, on the other hand, have not yet had the opportunity to choose the society that gives them the best social contract terms, and wouldn't have sufficient intelligence to do so anyways. So instead, we model them as though they would accept any social contract that's at least as good as some threshold (goodness determined retrospectively by adults imagining what they would have preferred). Thus, adults are forced by society to give implied consent to being punished if they are non-cooperative, but children don't give consent to be eaten.

I just realised that infinite processing power creates a weird moral dilema:

Suppose you take this machine and put in a program which simulates every possible program it could ever run. Of course it only takes a second to run the whole program. In that second, you created every possible world that could ever exist, every possible version of yourself. This includes versions that are being tortured, abused, and put through horrible unethical situations. You have created an infinite number of holocausts and genocides and things much, much worse then what you could ever immagine. Most people would consider a program like this unethical to run. But what if the computer wasn't really a computer, it was an infinitely large database that contained every possible input and a corresponding output. When you put the program in, it just finds the right output and gives it to you, which is essentially a copy of the database itself. Since there isn't actually any computational process here, there is no unethical things being simulated. Its no more evil than a book in the library about genocide. And this does apply to the real world. It's essentially the chineese room problem - does a simulated brain "understand" anything? Does it have "rights"? Does how the information was processed make a difference? I would like to know what people at LW think about this.

That's well done although two of the central premises are likely incorrect. First, the notion that a quantum computer would have infinite processing capability is incorrect. Quantum computation allows speed-ups of certain computational processes. Thus for example, Shor's algorithm allows us to factor integers quickly. But if our understanding of the laws of quantum mechanics is at all correct, this can't lead to anything like that in the story. In particular, under the standard descriptor for quantum computing, the class of problems reliably solvable on a quantum computer in polynomial time (that is the time required to solve is bounded above by a polynomial function of the length of the input sequence), BQP is is a subset of of PSPACE, the set of problems which can be solved on a classical computer using memory bounded by a polynomial of the space of the input. Our understanding of quantum mechanics would have to be very far off for this to be wrong.

Second, if our understanding of quantum mechanics is correct, there's a fundamentally random aspect to the laws of physics. Thus, we can't simply make a simulation and advance it ahead the way they do in this story and expect to get the same result.

Even if everything in the story was correct, I'm not at all convinced that things would settle down on a stable sequence as they do here. If your universe is infinite then your possible number of worlds are infinite so there's no reason you couldn't have a wandering sequence of worlds. Edit: Or for that matter, couldn't have branches if people simulate additional worlds with other laws of physics or the same laws but different starting conditions.

Couldn't they just run the simulation to its end rather then just let it sit there and take the chance that it could accidently be destroyed. If its infinitley powerful, it would be able to do that.

I think that if this post is left as it is this post would be to trivial to be a top level post. You could reframe it as a beginners' guide to Occam, or you could make it more interesting by going deeper into some of the issues (if you can think of anything more to say on the topic of differentiating between hypotheses that make the same predictions, that might be interesting, although I think you might have said all there is to say)

I believe this is the conversation you're responding to.

(upvoted)

Seconding kodos96. As this would exonerate not only Knox and Sollecito but Guede as well, it has to be treated with considerable skepticism, to say the least.

More significant, it seems to me (though still rather weak evidence), is the Alessi testimony, about which I actually considered posting on the March open thread.

Still, the Aviello story is enough of a surprise to marginally lower my probability of Guede's guilt. My current probabilities of guilt are:

Knox: < 0.1 % (i.e. not a chance)

Sollecito: < 0.1 % (likewise)

Guede: 95-99% (perhaps just low enough to insist on a debunking of the Aviello testimony before convicting)

It's probably about time I officially announced that my revision of my initial estimates for Knox and Sollecito was a mistake, an example of the sin of underconfidence.

I of course remain willing to participate in a debate with Rolf Nelson on this subject.

Finally, I'd like to note that the last couple of months have seen the creation of a wonderful new site devoted to the case, Injustice in Perugia, which anyone interested should definitely check out. Had it been around in December, I doubt that I could have made my survey seem like a fair fight between the two sides.

That story would be consistent with Guédé's, modulo the usual eyewitness confusion.

The traditional answer is to follow the Kelly criterion, is it not? That would imply

where n is the number of tickets. This implies you should buy n such that (€1)*n = Wf*, where W is your initial wealth.

Edit: Thanks, JoshuaZ, for pointing out that the Kelly criterion might not be the applicable one in a given situation.

Chinese internal martial arts: Tai Chi, Xingyi, and Bagua. The word "chi" does not carve reality at the joints: There is no literal bodily fluid system parallel to blood and lymph. But I can make training partners lightheaded with a quick succession of strikes to Ren Ying (ST9) then Chi Ze (LU5); I can send someone stumbling backward with some fairly light pushes; after 30-60 seconds of sparring to develop a rapport I can take an unwary opponent's balance without physical contact.

Each of these skills fit more naturally under different categories, but if you want to learn them all the most efficient way is to study a Chinese internal martial art or something similar.

Question: whats your experience with stuff that seems new agy at first look, like yoga, meditation and so on. Anything worth trying?

The Five Tibetans are a set of physical exercises which rejuvenate the body to youthful vigour and prolong life indefinitely. They are at least 2,500 years old, and practiced by hidden masters of secret wisdom living in remote monasteries in Tibet, where, in the earlier part of the 20th century, a retired British army colonel sought out these monasteries, studied with the ancient masters to great effect, and eventually brought the exercises to the West, where they were first published in 1939.

Ok, you don't believe any of that, do you? Neither do I, except for the first eight words and the last six. I've been doing these exercises since the beginning of 2009, since being turned on to them by Steven Barnes' blog and they do seem to have made a dramatic improvement in my general level of physical energy. Whether it's these exercises specifically or just the discipline of doing a similar amount of exercise first thing in the morning, every morning, I haven't taken the trouble to determine by varying them.

More here and here. Nancy Lebovitz also mentioned them.

I also do yoga for flexibility (it works) and occasionally meditation (to little detectable effect). I'd be interested to hear from anyone here who meditates and gets more from it than I do.

I've had great results from modest (2-3 hrs/wk) investments in hatha yoga, over and above what I get from standard Greco-Roman "calisthenics."

Besides the flexibility, breathing, and posture benefits, I find that the idea of 'chakras' is vaguely useful for focusing my conscious attention on involuntary muscle systems. I would be extremely surprised if chakras "cleaved reality at the joints" in any straightforward sense, but the idea of chakras helps me pay attention to my digestion, heart rate, bladder, etc. by making mentally uninteresting but nevertheless important bodily functions more interesting.

I've done yoga every week for the last month or two. It's pleasant. Other than paying attention to how I'm holding my body vs. the instruction, I mostly stop thinking for an hour (as we're encouraged to do), which is nice.

I can't say I notice any significant lasting effects yet. I'm slightly more flexible.

Hard to say - even New Agey stuff evolves. (Not many followers of Reich pushing their copper-lined closets these days.)

Generally, background stuff is enough. There's no shortage of hard scientific evidence about yoga or meditation, for example. No need for heuristics there. Similarly there's some for float tanks. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of any New Agey stuff where there isn't enough background to judge it on its own merits.

It depends on what you mean by "criminal"; under environmental law, there are both negligence-based (negligent discharge of pollutants to navigable waters) and strict liability (no intent requirement, such as killing of migratory birds) crimes that could apply to this spill. I don't think anyone thinks BP intended to have this kind of spill, so the interesting question from an environmental criminal law perspective is whether BP did enough to be treated as acting "knowingly" -- the relevant intent standard for environmental felonies. This is an extremely slippery concept in the law, especially given the complexity of the systems at issue here. Litigation will go on for many years on this exact point.

I've heard scattered bits of accusations of misdeeds by BP which may have contributed to the spill. Here's a list from the congressional investigation of 5 decisions that BP made "for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure" according to a letter from the congressmen. It sounds like BP took a bunch of risky shortcuts to save time and money, although I'd want to hear from people who actually understand the technical issues before being too confident.

There are other suspicions and allegations floating around, like this one.

You are not really going to learn much unless you are interested in wading through lots of technical articles. If you want to learn, you need to wait until it has been digested by relevant experts into books. I am not sure what you think you can learn from this, but there are two good books of related information available now:

Jeff Wheelwright, Degrees of Disaster, about the environmental effects of the Exxon Valdez spill and the clean up.

Trevor Kletz, What Went Wrong?: Case Histories of Process Plant Disasters, which is really excellent. [For general reading, an older edition is perfectly adequate, new copies are expensive.] It has an incredible amount of detail, and horrifying accounts of how apparently insignificant mistakes can (often literally) blow up on you.

I'm not sure it's relevant whether they did anything illegal or not. People always seem to want to blame and punish someone for their problems. In my opinion, they should be forced to pay for and compensate for all the damage, as well as a very large fine as punishment. This way in the future they, and other companies, can regulate themselves and prepare for emergencies as efficiently as possible without arbitrary and clunky government regulations and agencies trying to slap everything together at the last moment. Of course, if a single person actually did something irresponsible (eg; bob the worker just used duct tape to fix that pipe knowing that it wouldn't hold) then they should be able to be tried in court or sued/fined by the company. But even then, it's up to the company to make sure that stuff like this doesn't happen by making sure all of their workers are competent and certified.

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he mentioned a psychological study (I am trying to track down the source) that people tend to suffer MORE from failing to pursue certain opportunities than FAILING after pursuing them. So even if you're right about the overestimation of pleasure, it might just be irrelevant.

What would happen if CEV was applied to the Baby Eaters?

My intuitions of CEV are informed by the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, which effectively asks: "What rules would you want to prevail if you didn't know in advance who you would turn out to be?"

Where CEV as I understand it adds more information - assumes our preferences are extrapolated as if we knew more, were more the kind of people we want to be - the Veil of Ignorance removes information: it strips people under a set of specific circumstances of the detailed information about what their preferences are, what their contignent histories brought them there, and so on. This includes things like what age you are, and even - conceivably - how many of you there are.

To this bunch of undifferentiated people you'd put the question, "All in favor of a 99% chance of dying horribly shortly after being born, in return for the 1% chance to partake in the crowning glory of babyeating cultural tradition, please raise your hands."

I expect that not dying horribly takes lexical precedence over any kind of cultural tradition, for any sentient being whose kin has evolved to sentience (it may not be that way for constructed minds). So I would expect the Babyeaters to choose against cultural tradition.

The obvious caveat is that my intuitions about CEV may be wrong, but lacking a formal explanation of CEV it's hard to check intuitions.

I think the expectation is that, if all humans had the same knowledge and were better at thinking (and were more the people we'd like to be, etc.), then there would be a much higher degree of coherence than we might expect, but not necessarily that everyone would ultimately have the same utility function.

Not sure if you're referring to the same literature, but I note a great divergence between peak oil advocates and singularitarians. This is a little weird, if you think of Aumann's Agreement theorem.

Both groups are highly populated with engineer types, highly interested in cognitive biases, group dynamics, habits of individuals and societies and neither are mainstream.

Both groups use extrapolation of curves from very real phenomena. In the case of the kurzweillian singularitarians, it is computing power and in the case of the peak oil advocates, it is the hubbert curve for resources along with solid Net Energy based arguments about how civilization should decline.

The extreme among the Peak Oil advocates are collapsitarians and believe that people should drastically change their lifestyles, if they want to survive. They are also not waiting for the others to join them and many are preparing to go to small towns, villages etc. The oildrum, linked here had started as a moderate peak oil site discussing all possibilities, nowadays, apparently, its all doom all the time.

The extreme among the singularitarians have been asked no such sacrifice, just to give enough money and support to make sure that Friendly AI is achieved first.

Both groups believe that business as usual cannot go on for too long, but they expect dramatically different consequences. The singularitarians assert that economics conditions and technology will improve until a nonchalant super-intelligence will be created and wipe out humanity. The collapsitarians believe that economic conditions will worsen, civilization is not built robustly and will collapse badly with humanity probably going extinct or only the last hunter gatherers surviving.

Could you give some examples of the predicted collapses that didn't happen?

I worry about this as well when I'm reading long arguments or long works of fiction presenting ideas I disagree with. My tactic is to stop occasionally and go through a mental dialog simulating how I would respond to the author in person. This serves a double purpose, as hopefully I'll have better cached arguments in the event I ever need them.

Of course, this is a dangerous tactic as well, because you may be shutting off critical reasoning applied to your preexisting beliefs. I only apply this tactic when I'm very confident the author is wrong and is using fallacious arguments. Even then I make sure to spend some amount of time playing devil's advocate.

I would not worry overmuch about the long-term negative effects of your studying for the bar: with the possible exception of the "overly sincere" types who fall very hard for cults and other forms of indoctrination, people have a lot of antibodies to this kind of thing.

You will continue to be entagled with reality after you pass the exam, and you can do things, like read works of social science that carve reality at the joints, to speed up the rate at which your continued entaglement with reality with cancel out any falsehoods you have to cram for now. Specifically, there are works about the law that do carve reality at the joints -- Nick Szabo's online writings IMO fall in that category. Nick has a law degree, by the way, and there is certainly nothing wrong with his ability to perceive reality correctly.

ADDED. The things that are really damaging to a person's rationality, IMHO, are natural human motivations. When for example you start practicing, if you were to decide to do a lot of trials, and you learned to derive pleasure -- to get a real high -- from the combative and adversarial part of that, so that the high you got from winning with a slick and misleading angle trumped the high you get from satisfying you curiosity and from refining and finding errors in your model of reality -- well, I would worry about that a lot more than your throwing yourself fully into winning on this exam because IMHO the things we derive no pleasure from, but do to achieve some end we care about (like advancing in our career by getting a credential) have a lot less influence on who we turn out to be than things we do because we find them intrinsically rewarding.

One more thing: we should not all make our living as computer programmers. That would make the community less robust than it otherwise would be :)

Beautiful. Matthew Yglesias, +1 point.

It is entirely possible that some social groups are experiencing the kind of changes that Flanagan describes, but as Yglesias says, she apparently is unaware that there is such a thing as scientific evidence on the question.

Five-second guess: Human-level Machiavellian intelligence needs language facilities to co-evolve with, grunts and body language doesn't allow nearly as convoluted schemes. Evolving some precursor form of human-style language is the improbable part that other species haven't managed to pull off.

Somewhat accepted partial answer is that huge brains are ridiculously expensive - you need a lot of high energy density food (= fire), a lot of DHA (= fish) etc. Chimp diet simply couldn't support brains like ours (and aquatic ape etc.), nor could they spend as much time as us engaging in politics as they were too busy just getting food.

Perhaps chimp brains are as big as they could possibly be given their dietary constraints.

I wish you wouldn't do that, and stuck instead with the generally approved norm of downvoting to mean "I'd prefer to see fewer comments like this" and upvoting "I'd like to see more like this".

You're deliberately participating in information cascades, and thereby undermining the filtering process. As an antidote, I recommend using the anti-kibitzer script (you can do that through your Preferences page).

I'd like to ask everyone what probability bump they give to an idea given that some people believe it.

Usually fairly substantial - if someone presents me with two equally-unsupported claims X and Y and tells me that they believe X and not Y, I would give greater credence to X than to Y. Many times, however, that credence would not reach the level of ... well, credence, for various good reasons.

Depends on the person and the idea. I have some people whose recommendations I follow regardless, even if I estimate upfront that I will consider the idea wrong. There are different levels of wrongness, and it does not hurt to get good counterarguments. It also depends on the real life practicability of the idea. If it is for everyday things than common sense is a good starting prior. (Also there is a time and place to use the public joker on Who wants to be a millionaire.) If a group of professionals agree on something related to their profession it is also a good start. To systematize: if a group of people has a belief about something they have experience with, that that belief is worth looking at.

And then on further investigation it often turns out that there are systematic mistakes being made.

I was shocked to read in the book on checklists, that not only doctors often don't like them. But even financial companies, that can see how the usage ups their monetary gains. But finding flaws in a whole group does not imply that everything they say is wrong. It is good to see a doctor, even if he not using statistics right. He can refer you to a specialist, and treat all the common stuff right away. If you get a complicated disease you can often read up on it.

The obvious example to your question would be religion. It is widely believed, but probably wrong, yet I did not discard it right away, but spent years studying stuff till I decided there was nothing to it. There is nothing wrong in examining the ideas other people have.

If no people believe Y -- literally no people -- then either the topic is very little examined by human beings, or it's very exhaustively examined and seems obvious to everyone. In the first case, I give a smaller probability than in the second case.

In the first case, only X believers exist because only X believers have yet considered the issue. That's minimal evidence in favor of X. In the second case, lots of people have heard of the issue; if there were a decent case against X, somebody would have thought of it. The fact that none of them -- not a minority, but none -- argued against X is strong evidence that X is true.

I don't think belief has a consistent evidentiary strength since it depends on the testifier's credibility relative to my own. Children have much lower credibility than me on the issue of the existence of Santa. Professors of physics have much higher credibility that me on the issue of dimensions greater than four. Some person other than me has much higher credibility on the issue of how much money they are carrying. But I have more credibility than anyone else on the issue of how much money I'm carrying. I don't see any relation that could be described as baseline so the only answer is: context.

I've become increasingly disillusioned with people's capacity for abstract thought. Here are two points on my journey.

The public discussion of using wind turbines for carbon-free electricity generation seems to implicitly assume that electricity output goes as something like the square-root of windspeed. If the wind is only blowing half speed you still get something like 70% output. You won't see people saying this directly, but the general attitude is that you only need back up for the occasional calm day when the wind doesn't blow at all.

In fact output goes as the cube of windspeed. The energy in the windstream is one half m v squared, where m, the mass passing your turbine is proportional to the windspeed. If the wind is at half strength, you only get 1/8 output.

Well, that is physics. Ofcourse people suck at physics. Trouble is, the more I look at people's capacity for abstract thought the more problems I see. When people do a cost/benefit analysis they are terribly vague on whether they are suposed to add the costs and benefits or whether the costs get subtracted from the benefits. Even if they realise that they have to subtract they are still at risk of using an inverted scale for the costs and ending up effectively adding.

The probabiltiy bump I give to an idea just because some people believe it is zero. Equivantly my odds ratio is one. However you describe it, my posterior is just the same as my prior.

I think it largely depends on a) what the idea is and b) who believes it = and what their rationality skills are.

From that Wikipedia article:

Inside the railcar, besides the paper clips, there are the Schroeders’ book and a suitcase filled with letters of apology to Anne Frank by a class of German schoolchildren.

Apologizing for ... being German? That's really bizarre.

I think I found the study they're talking about thanks to this article. I might take a look at it - if the methodology is literally just 'smoking was banned, then the heart attack rate dropped', that sucks.

(Edit to link to the full study and not the abstract.)

Just skimmed it. The methodology is better than that. They use a regression to adjust for the pre-existing downward trend in the heart attack hospital admission rate; they represent it as a linear trend, and that looks fair to me based on eyeballing the data in figures 1 and 2. They also adjust for week-to-week variation and temperature, and the study says its results are 'more modest' than others', and fit the predictions of someone else's mathematical model, which are fair sanity checks.

I still don't know how robust the study is - there might be some confounder they've overlooked that I don't know enough about smoking to think of - but it's at least not as bad as I expected. The authors say they want to do future work with a better data set that has data on whether patients are active smokers, to separate the effect of secondhand smoke from active smoking. Sounds interesting.

I agree that this article isn't very good. It seems to do the standard problem of combining a lot of different ideas about what the Singularity would entail. It emphasizes Kurzweil way too much, and includes Kurzweil's fairly dubious ideas about nutrition and health. The article also uses Andrew Orlowski as a serious critic of the Singularity making unsubstantiated claims about how the Singularity will only help the rich. Given that Orlowski's entire approach is to criticize anything remotely new or weird-seeming, I'm disappointed that the NYT would really use him as a serious critic in this context. The article strongly reinforces the perception that the Singularity is just a geek-religious thing. Overall, not well done at all.

It's better than mainstream Singularity articles in the past, IMO; unfortunately, Kurzweil is seen as an authority, but at least it's written with some respect for the idea.

The unbounded utility function (in some physical objects that can be tiled indefinitely) in Pascal's mugging gives infinite expected utility to all actions, and no reason to prefer handing over the money to any other action. People don't actually show the pattern of preferences implied by an unbounded utility function.

If we make the utility function a bounded function of happy lives (or other tilable physical structures) with a high bound, other possibilities will offer high expected utility. The Mugger is not the most credible way to get huge rewards (investing in our civilization on the chance that physics allows unlimited computation beats the Mugger). This will be the case no matter how huge we make the (finite) bound.

Eliezer's original article bases its argument on the use of Solomonoff induction. He even suggests up front what the problem with it is, although the comments don't make anything of it: SI is based solely on program length and ignores computational resources. The optimality theorems around SI depend on the same assumption. Therefore I suggest:

4. Pascal's Mugging is a refutation of the Solomonoff prior.

But where a computationally bounded agent, or an unbounded one that cares how much work it does, should get its priors from instead would require more thought than a few minutes on a lunchtime break.

Tom_McCabe2 suggests generalizing EY's rebuttal of Pascal's Wager to Pascal's Mugging: it's not actually obvious that someone claiming they'll destroy 3^^^^3 people makes it more likely that 3^^^^3 people will die. The claim is arguably such weak evidence that it's still about equally likely that handing over the $5 will kill 3^^^^3 people, and if the two probabilities are sufficiently equal, they'll cancel out enough to make it not worth handing over the $5.

Personally, I always just figured that the probability of someone (a) threatening me with killing 3^^^^3 people, (b) having the ability to do so, and (c) not going ahead and killing the people anyway after I give them the $5, is going to be way less than 1/3^^^^3, so the expected utility of giving the mugger the $5 is almost certainly less than the $5 of utility I get by hanging on to it. In which case there is no problem to fix. EY claims that the Solomonoff-calculated probability of someone having 'magic powers from outside the Matrix' 'isn't anywhere near as small as 3^^^^3 is large,' but to me that just suggests that the Solomonoff calculation is too credulous.

(Edited to try and improve paraphrase of Tom_McCabe2.)

That article makes it sound like "countersignaling" is forgoing a mandated signal - like showing up at a formal-dress occasion in street clothes.

Alicorn made a post about the tactics of countersignaling a while back.

Thanks for that, Price is a very knowledgeable New Testament scholar. Check out his interview at the commonsenseatheism podcast here, also covers his path to becoming a christian atheist.