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Closet survey #1
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.
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Comments (653)
I was hoping to get more interesting replies to this post.
It seems you all more or less agree about how the world works, and what's left is people mooning about their personal ethical preferences or niggling issues in already vague areas, or minor doubts about this and that.
I believe jesus is entirely mythical, quarks don't exist, 9/11 and the london tube bombings were inside jobs, and flying saucers are the manifestation of a non-human, superior intelligence.
This rationalist community is a dry husk of libertarians, mathematicians, and various other people who don't get invited to parties. I find it very depressing...
The fact that so many people believe in God is strong evidence that some sort of God is real.
As a general point -- independently of the question of the existence of God -- I think that before we can say many people believing something is strong evidence that the thing is true, we need to consider why many people have the belief: how did they all come to believe it, and what sorts of evidence do they have for the belief?
Before we consider those sorts of questions, all we can say is that it is evidence, but not whether it is strong or weak evidence.
.... and the Earth is flat, women are inherently less intelligent, spirits bring the rain, mingling blood creates babies, the brain cools the blood, and every other belief once believed by massive segments of the Earth's population is correct.
.... I would suggest that you start by reading all of http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind , and if you already have, then I would suggest that perhaps this website is not for you. Or that you really, really need it. One of the two.
The person you're responding to is unlikely to ever see your reply; the comment was posted close to four years ago, and I think he's been gone from Less Wrong for most of that. Also, while I think his assertion in this case is mistaken, I think you're taking a rather patronizing attitude to someone who's rightfully earned a considerable amount of respect here.
You are correct, that many people believe in something is strong evidence, but it's not overwhelmingly strong, and in the particular case of belief in the supernatural it doesn't win over the weight of the counter-evidence.
Given that they all believe different things, it's not at all clear to me that people's beliefs on net are evidence for rather than against "some sort of God". As in that quote:
This is an excellent point! The vast majority of people do not believe in any particular God. Combining this majoritarian evidence...
Or strong evidence that we have an innate disposition to assign agency to natural phenomena that we don't understand and to make those agents in our image.
I don't accept the logic behind "I think therefore I am" and I think there is a reasonable chance that I or even the universe doesn't in any sense exist.
Any sense at all? Could you clarify?
Scientific materialism is overrated -- because the things we care about (like rationalism, or truth, or well-being) are not material things. The current theories for how ideas are implemented in the material world (such as AI) are grossly inadequate to the task.
OK, here goes. I could probably produce a list of things that all y'all'd disagree with, though I'm pleased to see that routine neonatal circumcision = bad isn't among them. But I'll just go for the jugular:
Flush toilets are the greatest evil in the world.
Edit: OK, so why the downvote? Presumably not because you disagree.
I believe that WTC building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition using explosives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD06SAf0p9A
I know from a previous discussion in OB that at least Robert Hanson doesn't believe this. Btw, WTC 7 was NOT one of the two towers hit by planes.
Edit: Robert Hanson and others believe that the building collapsed due do fire induced damage. I think the pattern of collapse disproves this hypothesis.
I also believe this.
I don't believe in male bisexuality, though I do believe in it for women.
From your other comments, I believe you're confusing "I don't believe men who say they are bisexual" with "I don't believe men can be bisexual."
It's clear to me that, in American society at least, the majority of bisexual men are to be found among the ranks of men who would never identify as anything but straight, sometimes even to the men they have sex with(!). Conversely, many of the men that DO identify as bisexual are merely finding a graceful way to transition to a homosexual love life.
Thus, that a man who identifies as bisexual is mostly likely gay may be true (though I doubt it--especially among men who have been out as bisexual for more than, say, 5 years) is not an indication that male bisexuality doesn't exist--only that self-professed bisexuality is scantily coterminous with a bisexual orientation in males.
Being wrong in the way that you are wrong will probably not damage the accuracy of your insight when conversing with individuals about their sexuality (you'll correctly assign a high probability to his being gay if he says he's bisexual), but it probably WILL damage that accuracy when analyzing human populations in the abstract (you'll incorrectly assign a low probability to the existence of large ranks of males who engage in and enjoy sexual relations with both men and women).
As I've said elsewhere, possibly even on this thread... if my culture makes it more difficult for men to identify as queer than as straight, then even if sexual orientation varies (like many other things) continuously within the population, I should expect the majority of more-than-negligably male-oriented men to identify as straight.
I am a male bisexual. I believe this with a high level of probability, primarily due to my ability to have erections from naked or sexual pictures of both genders. Also the fact that I have felt heavy romantic interest for both genders would seem to indicate that this is very possible.
If you want documented research done into male bisexuality, look into the research of Alfred Kinsey. He researched all forms of sexuality extensively, and was a male bisexual himself.
Edit: Also, the society I have been raised in has practically no instances of homophobia, so I don't believe that could be a factor.
I believe that it does not matter how much pain and suffering exist in the universe. (Ditto pleasure, happiness, eudaemonia & fun.)
Note that I still believe it is wrong to disable a person or to distract him from his activities or his plans, and it is almost always impossible to inflict pain or suffering on a person without causing disability or distraction.
I believe that the value of a human life derives exclusively from the human's willingness and ability to contribute towards a non-human end (which of course I am not going to attempt to define in this comment). In other words, a human has zero intrinsic value.
Note that I still believe that people in a position of power over other people are much too likely to take away those people's lives and freedoms and that they usually have some unsatisfactory justification of those takings in terms of one far-reaching moral end or another. Consequently, in all ordinary situations one should act as if human lives and human freedoms do have nonzero instrinsic value.
I believe I'm immortal (and so is everyone else). This is from a combination of a kind of Mathematical Platonism (as eujay mentions below) and Quantum Immortality.
This believing in 'all possible worlds' and having a non-causal framework for the embedding of consciousness means that just because of the anthropic principle and perhaps some weird second-order effects, it is quite possible that we will experience rather odd phenomena in the world. Hence, things like ghosts, ESP and such may not be so far-fetched.
Also, I am not a Bayesian. I simply do not think the mind really operates according to such quantitatively defined parameters. It is fuzzy and qualitative. I, for one, have never said I believed in something at, say, 60% probability - and if I did, I would be lying.
Just because odd things occur, does not mean other odd things, like ghosts and ESP, exist. What mechanisms for these do you believe in and why do you believe in them? Why do humans have ESP and what mechanism fuels this? What exactly are ghosts and why should the chemical processes in the human brain transfer over to this this 'ghost' mechanism after they cease functioning? I guess I just want to ask, what do you believe and why do you believe it? Just because extraordinarily odd things have happened does not remove the need for extraordinary evidence to explain other extraordinarily odd things.
I am an atheist Platonist. I believe that ultimate reality is mathematical / tautological in nature, and that matter, mind, motion are all illusions.
Oh, I should also add that I am a communist (ironically, 'converted' while in the Army).
I believe that trying too hard to be rational is irrational and perhaps self-destructive. That there could well be many different definitions of rationality or truth that are in some sense imcompatible without one being really superior (because we don't have meta-criterion to establish our criterions). When the cost is low, I think that behaving in a consciously superstitious way is rational because after all, we could be wrong about superstitions too (e.g. circumcision decreases venereal disease transmission).
In a less scientific area - many participants seem to be obsessed with personal immortality projects to me - including things like cryonics and uploading. This is bizarre for me to witness. To my eyes, it seems like a curious muddle over values. An identification with your mind and memes. Biology tells us that the brain is actually a disposable tool - constructed by genes for their own ends. Memes can be mutualists or parasites - and in this case, we are witnessing their more pathogenic side, it seems to me.
If biology told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that?
Accepting our own highest, personal goal to be the propagation of our own genes seems to me to be choosing to remain in slavery to an cruel and stupid tyrant just because our ancestors were forced to.
Questions conditional on counterfactuals are usually not worth addressing.
Nature isn't "cruel" - see: http://alife.co.uk/essays/evolution_is_good/
It isn't "slavery" if you want to do it.
The only thing that matters is whether you want something (in a sufficiently reflective sense of "want", which is still an unsolved problem). The evolution's "preferences" are screened off by human preferences, so you should bring the evolution into discussion only where it helps to understand the human preferences deeper, as is the case with, for example, evolutionary psychology.
Maybe I should not be surprised to encounter people that have had their biological goal systems hijacked by memes. History is full of such people.
My impression is that advanced, meme-rich countries - such as Japan - have naturally low birth rates due to such effects.
It appears to me that the smartest and best-educated people are the ones who are the most vulnerable to infection.
Ironically, Paul Graham gets exactly the same accusations on Hacker News.
Re: All this religion-debate is completely uninteresting for Northern Europeans.
Except for Richard Dawkins. He carries on as though theistic religion is still a live issue. I still don't really understand that. The Dawkins gutter-outreach program. Maybe he spends too much time in the US?
I think that it's worth striking against religion in the US because it is so strong, and worth striking against it in the UK and Europe because it is so vulnerable.
Where do you get "commercialism"? There is no benefit from karma points after you get 20 and can post. I think you are confusing "status seeking" with "commercialism". As an aside, I have noticed before that many socialistic weenies seem to equate everything they think bad with "commercialism" or "business". Also, commercialism is superior to status seeking in that status seeking is a zero-sum game unlike free market economics.
(Meta-comment.) These 2009-era comments raise political/controversial points and meta-commentary I associate with latter-day LW, not OG LW, which surprises me a bit. (Examples below.) Given the more recent signs of escalating political tensions on LW, I wouldn't have expected these older comments to hit the same beats as, say, Multiheaded's analogous thread from this year, but a bunch did.
It looks like the political/controversial points provoked less argument here than in the 2012 post. I'd guess this is down to increasing political heterogeneity on LW over time, but maybe it's just because there are more people here now. (Or maybe Multiheaded's more dramatic framing in the 2012 post primed people to argue more vigorously? Dunno.)
"the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics"
"Forbidden topics!"
"I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem."
"In western societies, it's an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad."
"within [sic?] human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, [sic] and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations"
"it's important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions"
"That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false."
"I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race. [...] I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences."
"There is a very strong pressure to be "Politically Correct", and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with "Politically Correct" are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with "Correct"."
"Men and women think differently. Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy."
"As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information. Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished."
"Bearing children is immoral."
"All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail." (This last one's from April 2010, but still.)
It's unclear to me that this is that LW specific. If you asked any large sample of western Internet users for anonymous and unaccountable statements of controversial opinions would you get results that are that different? If not, then it's more a description of the Internet.
The only thing that's LW specific is the suggestion that the most effective use of rationality is going to be politics.
[emphasis added]
Wow. Essentially, they prophesied Elevatorgate.
It isn't prophecy if you have a large-n sample.
Fertility and intelligence are negatively correlated.
Religiosity and intelligence seem to be negatively correlated.
Therefore all the efforts of Dawkins, Yudkowsky etc. to make the world more rational seem to be futile or at least inefficient. Pretty scary...
Fertility and intelligence may be correlated, but that does not state much about intelligence and birth rate. Just because two -things are correlated, does not imply causation, and even if they are, their may be non-listed effects which cause results opposite those that would be anticipated with only two factors taken into consideration.
There is no such thing as a free market.
Yeah there is, they are just really small. Just the other day I asked if someone would come in on their day off from work in order to cover for me. I paid them, and they performed the service. All this went down without any government intervention, coercion, or use of force.
If you mean that there is not a single country on Earth that contains ONLY free markets then you are absolutely right.
I see a dilemma here.
If I think of your transaction in isolation, it's free but not a market: it's a bargaining problem.
If I think of your transaction as part of the broader labour market, it's not really free; it's influenced by government regulations & macroeconomic policies, if only through their effects on the general price level, the general wage level, and the supply & demand for labour.
I reckon your transaction is an example of what mtraven's talking about rather than a counterexample!
The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare.
It's bad enough that voting works, here. Let's try not to badger people about their beliefs, just ask for further clarification.
Yes, I know that I'm as guilty as anyone else about badgering. Nevertheless...
Why do you believe so, and what do you mean by supernatural?
HalFinney: "The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare."
Thirty years ago I was playing a game of Risk with two friends. The rivalry between the two meant that I would usually win. In that game I had an overwhelming advantage. I had 26 armies and was attacking the last army of the last territory of one of my opponents. (His captured cards plus mine would give me enough additional armies to defeat my remaining opponent.) My opponent told me that he usually let me win, but not this time. He'd never said anything similar before. I remember thinking to myself, "Fat lot you have to say about it fella." I rolled three die against his one. After losing several rolls, I asked that he use a die cup and he complied. I lost 25 times in a row. It was my Risk game and my die in my apartment.
23 attempts with 3 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 34.03% of the time. 1 attempt with 2 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 42.13% of the time. 1 attempt with 1 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 58.33% of the time. Defender wins the battle 0.58330.4213(0.3403^23) = 4.20057037 × 10^-12.
Assuming my description of the event is correct (i.e., fair die, fair rolls, accurate memory, etc.) then my opponent would be expected to win about 1 out of a 100 billion such battles. (I doubt 100 billion Risk games have been played throughout all history.)
I decided it was more likely that my understanding of the universe was flawed than it was likely that I had witnessed such a rare event. I discussed the event with fellow math graduate students. A couple of them wondered how I, as a scientist, could even question the standard probabilistic model. My response was, "As scientists, how much evidence would they need before they were willing to question their prior beliefs?"
That experience led me to conclude that reality is far weirder than I had imagined. Strange things do happen for which I have no scientific explanation.
[looks up how reliable human memory is, how it changes at every recall, how overconfident we tend to be about it]
[looks up a couple of conjuring sites]
Hmm...
Hmm...
I think there might be non-supernatural explanations with a greater than 1 in 100 billion chance. If it's even 1 in a million, you'll expect to see at least one in 30 years.
Putting on my magician's hat for a moment, that sounds like a magic trick to me.
Given your description, the simplest answer consistent with the laws of physics is that another player switched the dice when you weren't looking. Perhaps you stopped the game briefly to take a restroom break or answer the phone or deal with some other interruption. Your memory tends to edit breaks like that out of the narrative flow, especially if they don't seem relevant to the story. Somehow, the other player had the opportunity to switch the dice. Dice can be gimmicked in a variety of ways - they could be weighted, shaved, or simply printed with the wrong dot pattern - using a die cup wouldn't interfere with any of these. You'd played the same opponent before so he knew which type of dice you used; he could have brought fake dice of that type with him, swapped them in during the now-forgotten distraction, and swapped them back later. It's even possible the two friends were working together to play this joke on you, with one providing the distraction while the other made the switch.
At the moment he looked at you and said "not this time", the switch had already been made.
Mostly, of course, my response is that I feel confused; therefore, I deny that this event ever actually happened.
But if you're being honest and telling the truth as you know it and you remember accurately, then the next step is to consult a stage magician, not math grad students or a physicist or a theologian.
Same goes for anyone in the audience who's witnessed a bended spoon, an improbably guessed sequence of cards, etc.
Second the surprise. What do you believe and why do you believe it? Ordinarily I wouldn't even bother asking, but with you I'm not expecting to hear the usual things.
There is no such thing as a consumer-driven economy.
Nearly everyone including rationalists atheists and even transhumanists believe in the soul theory. I don’t. Oh they’ll say they don’t believe in souls, but when you really get down to it and examine the inner workings of their beliefs it’s rather obvious that they do. In fact I have never in my life met in person or on the Internet anybody who was like me and really didn’t believe in the soul; There are some authors who I’ve not had the pleasure to meet that agree with me, but very very few. It’s the last stand of Vitalism and if this lethal meme is not overcome the Singularity will kill you dead.
The vast majority of held beliefs are not only wrong and unjustified, but unjustifiable.
If a belief can't be justified, it shouldn't be held and it definitely shouldn't effect your actions.
Were you waiting for someone to try correcting "effect" to "affect" so that you could play this trick on them?
Responding to the question "What do you believe that most people on this site don't?":
I believe that people who try and sound all "edgy" and "serious" by intoning what they believe to be "blunt truths" about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part. I just want to roll my eyes when I see that kind of thing, and not because I'm a "slave to political correctness", but because I see so many poorly defined terms being bandied about and a lot of really bad science besides.
(And I am not going to get into a big explanation right here, right now, of why I think what I think in this regard -- I'm confident enough in this area here to take whatever status hit my largely-unqualified statement above brings. If I write an explanation at some point it will be on my own terms and I frankly don't care who does or doesn't think I'm smart in the meantime.)
I've had a bone to pick with Yudkowski* ever since reading Three Worlds Collide. I haven't gathered all of my thoughts yet, or put them in a proper essay, but since you asked, here's a quick synopsis (paraphrasing Clausewitz).
I think people nowadays overestimate the value of human life. Generally speaking, we ain't worth that much - and up until about four-hundred years ago, killing each other was our primary source of entertainment.
As long as we have individuals, conflict is inevitable; and a society where the conflict's extremes have been narrowed down to nothing but sassy comments and politicking, well... that seems like a pretty boring place to live.
Speaking from experience, yelling at people solves a lot of problems. And I know a few individuals whom would be much less of a trainwreck if they'd been given the punch in the face they deserved. I think we've got no call to be judging the Baby Eaters for their biology - anymore than the Orgasmiums have for judging us. Misery can be just as much fun, if you approach it with the proper mindset, and I think HBO Rome does a brilliant job of describing a society with more reasonable standards. At the end of the day, it beats playing checkers, doesn't it?
:-) Just look at our entertainment - we love a protagonist who suffers.
*It's a very small bone. A chicken bone, really.
To whom?
Ideas in the general neighborhood of negative utilitarianism. (I don't necessarily believe these, but I think they should be taken seriously.)
I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race.
I believe that the reason that the United States is more prosperous than Mexico is that the English killed/drove out the natives when they came to the Americas, while the Spanish bred with them, diluting down the Spanish influence, and that there are other similar examples of this.
I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences.
I believe (though only with weak evidence) that hispanic gangs are taking control of LA drug traffic from black gangs and succeeding because of a difference in average intelligence. I also believe that the if the Russian mafia wanted a part in this game, they would dominate for the same reason.
There is a very strong pressure to be "Politically Correct", and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with "Politically Correct" are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with "Correct".
I believe that to be offended, you have to believe in your own inferiority to some extent.
As a disclaimer, (and I think this much will be agreed with) this doesn't imply that possessing superior intelligence makes it morally acceptable to abuse it any more than owning a sword makes it OK to hurt someone- just easier.
I'm sorry I don't have more time to respond in detail. Just let me recommend the vitally important, if imperfect work by Jared Diamond, James Flynn and William Dickens, and Gregory Clark.
In school they taught that the climate in Mexico led to large sugar plantations while the climate of the US led to smaller farms especially in the north. Then this led to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth in the northern US which created the middle class demand that allowed manufacturing to take off. In Mexico the poor were too poor to buy a lot of these manufactured goods while the rich plantation owners could afford superior goods.
I'm not sure how an intelligence based explanation would explain this better.
West Africans where brought to say Brazil because they where mostly from peoples adapted to tropical agriculture while say enslaved Native Americans in the region where mostly hunter gatherers. Not only did forager Native Americans find slavery/serfdom more psychologically troubling than farmer folk, they where not resistant to the diseases that Europeans brought with them either. Their numbers dropped rapidly.
Africa was just the nearest big market where you could buy lots of Old World farmer slaves. I mean sure you could buy some from the Arabs, but they got most of theirs from Africa as well, why go through a middle man when you can sail directly there and deal with local merchants?
Also once you brought lots of Africans you bring with them African tropical diseases which again hit the few remaining Native Americans very hard and made the bad idea of say using imported slave Slavic or Irish labour in a tropical climate even worse.
Basically once you get Africans to a place like Cuba or Haiti they will tend to eventually displace Europeans and Native Americans and almost anyone else too because they are better adapted. I find it telling that in the Caribbean nations that aren't majority Mulatto or Black you often find a large population of Indians (another people that has experienced thousands of years of selection for agricultural work in a tropical climate with a lots of pathogens making life miserable).
I do think the well know measured achievement gap probably is partially (but perhaps insignificantly so) genetic and probably was already around at the time, but I'm not sure it was as large as it is today. Askenazi Jews apparently needed less than a millennium to get one standard deviation IQ advantage over other Europeans, so telling how clever each people was in ancient times is tricky. Also one shouldn't forget the evidence that urban civilization seems to often be dysgenic.
That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.
I find it interesting that this comment is (currently) the highest-scoring, with 7 more points than the second highest.
(Oh, wrong, it's second among top-level comments. Still interesting.)
I believe that many if not most people value some things more than happiness.
How traditional? 1600s Japan? Hopi? Dravidian? Surely it would be quite a coincidence if precisely the norms prevalent in the youth and culture of the poster or his or her parents were optimal for human flourishing.
If anything, I have the convert's bias in this regard, Michael, not the true-born believer's. I'm fairly young and was raised in quite a progressive household. I'd suspect myself more of overstating my case because it has come to me as such a revelatory shock. But that's neither here nor there, as I'm not advocating for any specific "tradition."
I'll posit that gender roles and dynamics since the feminist movement began in earnest in the 60s and 70s have proven to be a sizable and essentially unprecedented break from the previous continuum in Western societies going back at least a couple thousand years. I don't know enough about 1600s Japan or Hopi or Dravidian societies to speculate as to whether they fit into that pattern too. I understand there are arguments that feminist regimes are actually more original to the human species and that patriarchy only appears with the advent of agriculture and monarchy/despotism. My understanding is that this is an open question, and again beyond my expertise. So I should readily concede that "traditional" is a highly suspect term.
So I'll be even more blunt, since this is our comment thread to not worry about whether or not these views are currently acceptable, right?
My rather vague comment is based in a more specific belief that women like to be dominated by men, that these feelings are natural and not pathological (whether or not that makes them "right" is of course another question) that they are unhappy when their man is incapable of domination and are left feeling deeply sexually unfulfilled by the careerism which empowers them elsewhere in their lives, that the current social education of both women and men (at least in the circles of the US in which I move) teach everyone that it's abhorrent and wrong for a man to assert power over a woman, that men who enjoy it are twisted assholes and that women who enjoy it are suffering from deep psychological damage, and that it is practically inexcusable for a woman to admit that her limbic system gives her pleasure signals when a man arouses her this way.
Naturally, I am basing the perception of this relatively new regime, at least in its current extreme form, on my interpretation of what came immediately before in the society in which I was raised (I don't know firsthand as I was born well into the current regime), so your point stands, I suppose. But I don't really think using this as a starting off point merits any twinkling snark.
The second sentence of my original post, however, contains the more important point. Regardless of whatever "norm" anyone has in mind, be it Basque, Dravidian, or Branch Davidian, the real problem is that the current norm actively teaches unhappiness-increasing lies. If the last regime was imperfect too, I'd counter that two wrongs don't make a right.
Though as Z M Davis notes, not all beings value happiness highest. I readily concede that too.
What I personally have observed is that there are plenty of men and women who have a need or desire to be dominated. And that a minority of these people can't deal with the idea that it's "just" a sexual fetish or personal quirk, but must convince themselves instead that the entire world would be happier or much better off if only our entire society were male supremacist or female supremacist, accordingly.
I've also observed that there are plenty of people who have a leadership or followership preference in a relationship... but the desire to be the follower is both more widespread and more gender-balanced than the desire to be the leader.
So I guess what I'm saying is, the fact that there's a large unsatisfied market of females wishing to be dominated (sexually or otherwise) should NOT be mistaken for an indicator that this is somehow "the way the world should be".
That market is unsatisfied for the same reason its male counterpart is: there simply aren't enough people of either gender with the inclination, experience, self-awareness, etc. to meet the demand.
It's my impersonal understanding that the ratio of male submissives to female dominants is way worse than the ratio of female submissives to male dominants - both kinds of submissives will have trouble finding a dominant counterpart, but the heterosexual males have it way worse.
That's why I said the desire to be a follower is more gender-balanced than the desire to be a leader. I also used "leader" and "follower" because "dominant" and "submissive" carry more sexual overtone than is actually relevant to my point... but also because it's way easier for men to find socially "leading" partners than sexually leading ones.
Also, to make things more complex... there are plenty of people who like to go both ways... and there are people who want to be sexually dominant but socially submissive or vice versa... if you've actually met and spoken with enough real people (without the self-selection bias that occurs when people with identical kinks get together), it quickly cures you of any idea that you can just say, "This Is The One True Way Relationships Should Be."
(My wife owns a lingerie and adult toy/video store, and we've socialized with a lot of kinky and swinger folk, including gay, transgendered, etc. -- for a fairly broad definition of "etc.")
You might be Generalizing From One Example -- just because you like that doesn't mean all women do, and in fact I strongly believe that some women do and some don't, where by "some" I mean "more than 5% and less than 95%".
I do not believe that the Singularity is likely to happen any time soon, even in astronomical terms. Furthermore, I am far from convinced that, even if the Singularity were to happen, the transhuman AI would be able to achieve quasi-godlike status (i.e., it may never be able to reshape entire planets in a matter of minutes, rewrite everyone's DNA, travel faster than light, rewrite the laws of physics, etc.). In light of this, I believe that worrying about the friendliness of AI is kind of a waste of time.
I think I have good reasons for these beliefs, and I operate by Crocker's Rules, FWIW...
Anything that does not have sufficient intelligence to be considered a threat does not even remotely qualify as a 'Singularity'. (Your 'even if' really means 'just not gonna happen'.)
What dlthomas said. A hyper-intelligent AI could still pose a major existential threat, even if it did not have something like gray goo at its disposal. For example, it could convince us puny humans to launch our nuclear arsenals at each other, or destroy the world's economy, or come up with some sort of a memetic basilisk, etc. Assuming, of course, that such an AI could exist at all (which I am quite uncertain about), and that such feats of intelligence are in fact possible at all (I kinda doubt that basilisk one, for example).
I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.
But... well... a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution... and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.
Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that's extremely unusual. It's rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don't bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn't cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.
To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I've ever found glass in something I was eating, and it was the only time I've had a vivid dream about it that bothered me the next day (or any dream about it all). I didn't have any particular glass eating phobia before all this took place (except for a normal aversion to the idea), and I haven't been worried about it since (ok, except for looking rather carefully at salads from that particular cafeteria for a few weeks afterwards). Was this all just a really weird coincidence? As far as I can make out the probabilities are just too low to be ignored. To make matters worse, I have a few other stories that I find just as difficult to explain away as coincidence.
Now, I wouldn't say that I "believe" that something seriously weird is going on here. That would be much too strong. However, because I don't feel that I can adequately account for some of my observations of the world, I think I must assign a small probability that there is something very seriously strange going on in the universe and that these events were not weird flukes.
I have other things to say but that would get into topics currently banned from this blog :-/
Almost everything we do is partially influenced by status-seeking.
I don't think people have (ethical) value simply because they exist. I think they should have to do a lot more than that before I should have to care whether they live or die.
Somehow I missed this comment or else I would not have said the same thing in my comment.
Here's something else I can't normally say in public:
Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It's acceptable to euthanize one's pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.
In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn't end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.
Here's why this is distasteful:
That infant has either experienced enough to affect their development, or has shown individuality of some kind that will be developed further as they mature. An infant is always in the stage of 'becoming,' and as such their future selves are to some degree already in evidence. Lose the infant, lose the future -- and that is the loss that most people find tragic.
My daughter was showing personality and preferences in the womb. Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn't like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
I was amazed. I'd had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn't manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong.
Of course, I am strongly predisposed to think highly of my offspring in all regards, and I do try to allow for this. But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences. Waiting until age two years to accept such a thing is simply incorrect.
"Responds to musical stimuli", assuming it's true, is hardly an argument about being a person. A parrot could have similar ability to discriminate between types of music, for all I know.
Edit in response to downvoting: Seriously. There could be correct arguments for your statement, but this is clearly not one of them. This is a point of simple fact: ability to discriminate types of music is not strong (let alone decisive) evidence for the property of being a person. Non-person things can easily have that ability. That this fact argues for a conclusion that offends someone's sensibilities (or even a conclusion that is clearly wrong, for other reasons!) is not a point against the fact.
This still entirely misses the point: "responds to musical stimuli in the same way" is an argument about continuity of identity. If someone at 3 years old is a person, and they're the same just smaller (both physically and mentally) at 1 year old and at -6 months old, then arguments about their personhood at 3 years old apply (though in a limited sense) at 1 year old or -6 months old.
I can't think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn't be willing to accept the death/murder of an adult. How low does your discount rate have to be where you would be willing to kill a one year old but not willing to kill a three year old?
Counterpoint that it does in fact address the point: write half a dozen different programs that can analyse recordings of music and output a beat that is in time. Run these programs on half a dozen different computers and try to claim that responding the same way is decisive evidence of continuity of identity across all computers and programs.
You are opposed to abortion? It seems to me the majority of abortion cases do not constitute moral grounds for the death of an adult. Not a judgement of your possible views, just interested to see if the reasoning is consistent.
Emphasis mine. Illustrative examples are generally not decisive evidence. I have yet to come across someone with significant experience around infants who believes they don't have personalities until ~2 years old (or whenever infanticide proponents think they develop them), and so until I come across someone with that opinion I feel justified in attributing that opinion to ignorance rather than insight.
I am (and should be) skeptical of someone who says "that doesn't convince me" instead of "my experience is different." The first response, which is generally accompanied by hypotheticals instead of examples, does not require any knowledge to create. Generally, experience cannot be conveyed by a few illustrative examples; one should not expect to be convinced by evidence when that evidence is hard to transfer. How, exactly, should one compress memories of interactions with another person over the course of years to transmit to others?
I also find it interesting you have moved the issue from "demonstrates persistent preferences for particular kinds of music" to "detects a beat"- was that intentional? Because if you wrote a program that could classify music into types it didn't like and types it did, and the classification was predictable/sensible, I wouldn't have a problem saying that your program preferred one kind of music to another, and that the program is the same even if you run it on a succession of computers with improving hardware.
I consider abortions of both the spontaneous and intentional varieties to be tragic. "Accept" was probably a poor word to use because I am not currently in favor of criminalizing abortion and I feel the best response to a great many tragedies is coping. When asked for advice, I advise against abortion but do not rule it out and do not seek to coerce others into avoiding it. My feelings (and advice) on suicide are broadly similar, and so perhaps it would be most illuminating to say I compare it to suicide rather than to homicide.
Yes. David_Gerard said:
Kicking out of time doesn't suggest she doesn't like it as much as it suggests she is failing to kick in time. Which is weak evidence that all she is doing is finding a beat in time with the music.
And all the people I have met who have had significant experience around animals believe they have personalities from birth - I am inclined not to trust experience in this matter because of the almost-certain anthropomorphizing that is going on.
Why shouldn't animals have distinct personalities from each other? It doesn't take that much brainpower before you can start introducing differences in behavior between specimens without causing their methods of interaction to collapse.
It was in response to the assertion that babies could reasonably not be regarded as individual humans until age two. That assertion is ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. It was also noting that until I had actual experience of a baby, my assumptions had also been ridiculous, and that really doesn't need me putting "and by the way, it's possible that you're just saying something simply incorrect due to lack of experience" on the front. I am finding your response difficult to distinguish from choosing to miss the point.
Even accepting the premise that this is an indication of having a distinct personality, I don't think that's an adequate basis to afford infants personhood. Cats have distinct personalities as well, although this fact suggests that we could really use a better word than "personality." In fact, while there might be counterexamples that are not coming to mind, I'm inclined to suspect that every properly functioning vertebrate organism, as well as many invertebrates, has a distinct personality, albeit not necessarily one recognizable to humans.
Which is a really good argument for granting other vertebrates personhood.
In America, infants have a special privileged moral status, as evidenced by the "Baby On Board" signs people put on their autos. "Oh, there's a baby in that car! I'll plow into this car full of old people instead."
There have been several studies indicating that the neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for self-awareness. People with a lesion on the Visual 1 section of their cortex are "blind" but if you toss a ball at them they'll catch it. And if you have them walk through an obstacle-laden hallway, they'll avoid all obstacles, but be completely unaware of having done so. They can see, but are unaware of their own sight. So I would say the point at which a baby cannot be euthanized is dependent on the state of their neocortex. Further study needs to be done to determine that point, but I would say by two years old the neocortex is highly developed.
Meh, this is why I tend to endorse speciesism. I mean I can pretend that I actually value humans over X in a situation because of silly reasons like "intelligence" or ability to suffer or "having a soul" or just mine one excuse after the other, but at the end of the day I'm human so other stuff that I recognize as human gets an instant boost in its moral relevance.
I believe that some improvements in rationality have negative consequences which outweigh their positive ones.
That said, it might be easy to make too much of this. I agree that, on average, marginal improvements in rationality lead to far superior outcomes for individuals and society.
Could you give an example of such a negative consequence?
That the psychoanalytic theory of psychodynamics is in some sense true, and that it is a useful way to approach the mind. My belief comes from personal experience in psychotherapy, albeit a quite unorthodox one. I have found that explanations in Freudian terms such as the unconscious, ego, superego, Eros and Thanatos help to greatly clarify my mental life in a way that is not only extremely useful but also seems quite accurate.
I should clarify that I reject just about everything to come out of academic psychoanalytic theory, especially in literary theory (I'm an English major), and that most clinicians fail to correlate it with real mental phenomena. I know that this sounds--and should sound--extremely suspect to any rationalist. But a particular therapist has convinced me very strongly that she is selling something real, not only from my personal experience in therapy, but in how she successfully treats extremely successful people and how I don't know anyone who wins at life quite so hard as she does.
When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can't find any ET's. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.
Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it's difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride for a job well done and don't bother accomplishing anything at all. Think all this is a terrible idea and stupid as well, no problem, just change your mind (and I do mean CHANGE YOUR MIND) now you think it's a wonderful idea.
Complex mechanisms just don't do well in positive feedback loops, not electronics, not animals, not people, not ET's and not even Jupiter brains. I mean who wouldn't want to be a little bit happier than they are; if all you had to do is move a knob a little what could it hurt, oh that's much better maybe a little bit more, just a bit more, a little more.
The world could end not in a bang or a whimper but in an eternal mindless orgasm. I'm not saying this is definitely going to happen but I do think about it a little when I get down in the dumps.
What you've just said is a perfect example of the way in which the "far" brain's intuitive modeling of minds, inaccurately predicts REAL human behavior, especially with respect to emotions.
Positive motivation actually consists of associating a positive emotion with goal completion... and this requires you to have a taste of the feeling you'll get when you complete the goal. (i.e., "Oh boy, I can almost taste that food now!").
So what actually happens when you give yourself the feeling of pride in a job well done, before the job is done, you get more motivated, not less, as long as you link that emotion to the desired future state, as compared to the current state of reality.
Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn't worth killing civilians over, it's not worth killing soldiers over, either.
There's a lot of nonsense I daydream about, like how it seems like my life is actually repeating itself again and again as if I was stuck in a time loop and was the only person to faintly remember bits of those preceding iterations. I like to play pretend with such ideas, though I don't believe in them in the rational sense, more in the "I don't believe in ghosts but I'm still crept out at night"
The closest I come to believing something rationally, which is still not rational in the purest, Occam sense, is that we may be living in a simulation that is running in a reality that is ontologically different from ours. After all, if we were running in a simulation, why should it be run by our descendants, or even in an universe like the one that was simulated ? To assume so is to fall for an observation selection bias I think. Why not from a place where "place", "running" and "simulation" do not necessarily take the same meaning as they do here.
Like, you know, it is common to muse about universes with different physical rules and constants, I'm just taking this a step further; a reality whose rules of "mathematics" would encompass and supersede ours, that is, there would be mathematical, or ontological principles, that would exist up there, but not here. We would be prisoners in an ontologically impoverished reality, without even the tools to understand the higher realm, let alone break out of ours.
In such a reality, the equivalent of mathematics would not obey Gödel's theorems, they would be consistent and all statements would be true and provable; that would need and imply at least one supplemental axiom there, the one that would at least not exist here, that would permit it, and open a whole new branch of mathematical truths and possibilities.
Like, if we all have a God-shaped hole in our soul, then mathematics has a Gödel-shaped hole in its own, and I wanted to imagine what it'd be like to have it filled.
I don't really see how we could ever prove or disprove that though. Maybe some variation of that idea, might be falsifiable. If not, then it's an irrational belief too.
Most big issues that people (especially males) spend time on are not really worth bothering with.
But people don't know that what they do isn't worth doing, so "not worth" becomes a weasel word, prone to arbitrary interpretation. They do what they believe to be valuable, and what they do is valuable, the question is how valuable. It's clearly not maximally valuable, but even a superintelligence won't be able to do the maximally valuable thing, only the best it can, which is "the same" situation as with people.
That the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics; it's not discussed here because politics is the mind-killer, but it is also indispensible.
On a more specific political note, that there are plenty of things government can do better than the market, and where government fails the people the correct approach is often not dispensing with government but attempting to improve government by improving democracy.
I know that both of these, especially this last, go against what many here believe, and I don't intend to get into a detailed defence of it here - it's not exactly a fresh topic of debate, and it's not in line with the mission for this site.
True because good policies can have vastly differnet outcomes than bad policies.
And plenty of things the market can do better than the government.
Something that I don't so much believe as assign a higher probability than other people.
There is a limit to how much technology humans can have, how much of the universe we can understand and how complicated of devices we can make. This isn't necessarily a universal IQ limit but more of an asymptotic limit that our evolved brains can't surpass. And this limit is lower, perhaps substantially so, than what we would need to do a lot of the cool stuff like achieve the singularity and start colonizing the universe.
I think it's even possible that some sort of asymptotic limit is common to all evolved life, this may well be a solution to the fermi paradox, not that they aren't out there, but no one is smart enough to actually leave their rock.
Here's one on a very different topic:
England's offenses against the American colonies did not justify the American Revolution.
I might agree with this. But would you say that it was justified on other grounds and that these were just used as the "sellable to the public" excuse?
Well, if we're going into history... I believe (despite being a northern democrat) that the Civil War was fundamentally unjust. It makes a mockery of the principles of the Declaration of Independence if secessionary states will be outright invaded.
(If slavery was an issue, then the North should've just bought out the South - likely would've been much cheaper than the actual war.)
The North (well, congress) tried to buy out the South (well, slaveowners). The South rejected it. There were actually multiple attempts at this, some before the war, some during the war.
The thing is, the War between the States really truly was about slavery, nothing else. The dodge that it was about states' rights comes down to exactly one right -- the right to keep slaves. Compare with such travesties as the fugitive slave acts, which they pushed through congress, which actually did greatly infringe the rights of the northern states. The southern states, despite some of their propaganda, did not generally support the right of secession. Their Constititution explicitly forbade it. Every single article of secession passed by their state legislatures explicitly called out slavery as the reason for secession.
The odd thing is that slavery was not in any immediate danger. But with the election of Lincoln the southern states saw that their grip on the country was not as absolute as they desired, and they threw a tantrum, because they demanded not only the right to have slaves, but that the rest of the country not judge them for it.
Not about expanding or preserving the personal power of the most prominent decision makers? Wow. The war between the states sounds truly exceptional!
I believe that the end results of the American Revolution were beneficial enough to justify it in hindsight. However at the time it was initiated, the projected benefits were indeed to little to justify what occurred.
I don't believe that any concept, including the concept of reality, makes sense to you outside the context of your own epistemic framework. When one thinks that the reality exists on its own, it is a statement made from within that person's epistemic framework. When you tell me that the reality exists on its own, I understand this statement from within my epistemic framework. When I believe that you believe that the reality exists on its own, I interpret my model of yourself as having a property of having a "belief in reality existing on its own". Even when I think of myself as believing something, I interpret myself as having a property of believing that.
The quotation marks must be put around everything, there is no escaping above the first level of indirection. The problem of induction is a wrong question.
Thought of a few more:
Circumcision may be harmful, and may cause more harm than benefit.
It's generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you'll get will be soothing but non-informative.
Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.
Aren't all of these kind of obvious?
I believe that the solution to the Fermi paradox is possibly (I don't place any considerable strength in this belief, besides it's a quite useless thing to think about) that physics has unlimited local depth. That is, each sufficiently intelligent AI with most of the likely goal systems arising from its development finds it more desirable to spend time configuring the tiny details of its local physical region (or the details of reality that have almost no impact on the non-local physical region), than going to the other regions of the universe and doing something with the rest of the matter. That also requires a way to protect itself without necessity to implement preventive offensive measures, so there should also be no way to seriously hurt a computation once it has digged itself sufficiently deep in the physics.
Any reason AIs with goal systems referring to the larger universe would be unlikely?
Something akin to the functionalist position: if you accept living within a simulated world, you may also accept living within a simulated world hosted on computation running in the depths of local physics, if it's a more efficient option than going outside; extend that to a general goal system. Of course, some things may really care about the world on the surface, but they may be overwhelmingly unlikely to result from the processes that lead to the construction of AIs converging on a stable goal structure. It's a weak argument, as I said the whole point is weak, but it nonetheless looks like a possibility.
P.S. I realize we are going strongly against the ban on AGI and Singularity, but I hope this being a "crazy thread" somewhat amends the problem.
Deep down I believe in some sort of afterlife because my brain is unable to handle the concept of not being alive.
A better (but more confusing) way of saying might be "I don't believe in an afterlife, but my brain does".
There are far fewer well-defined mathematical relations and operations on the set of "utilities" (aka "utility values", although the word 'value' is misleading since it suggests a number) than most self-stated utilitarians routinely use; for example, multiplying utilities by a scalar makes no sense, the sum of two utilities can only be defined under very strict conditions, and comparing two utilities under only slightly less strict ones.
Consequently, from a rigorous point of view utilitarianism makes very little sense and is in no way intellectually compelling. Most utilitarians satisfy themselves with a naive approach that allows it to build an internally consistent rule set, much in the same way as theology or classical physics. But the "utilities" they talk about have lost most of their connection to reality - to subjects' preferences/happiness - and more closely resemble an imaginary karma score.
Corporations literally get away with murder. The corporation is a recent innovation, not something that has always been with us. This recent social contract that governs corporations is deeply flawed, in that it holds no one accountable for consequences that would be regarded as criminal if resulting from the actions of a person. A recent case in point is the wave of suicides in the French national telecom giant.
I don't think this qualifies as a belief; it's just something I have noticed.
My dreams are always a collection of images (assembled into a narrative, naturally) of things I thought about precisely once the prior day. Anything I did not think about, or thought about more than a single time, is not included. I like to use this to my advantage to avoid nightmares, but I have also never had a sex dream. The fact that other people seem to have sex dreams is good evidence that my experience is rare or unique, but I have no explanation for it.
In support of "notmyrealnick" I have to say that most people wrongly believe that the sexual life of humans only starts when they reach adolescenthood, Bronislaw Malinowski in his studies with savages(Book: The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia) showed that the starting age can be as young as 5 years old. But we in our modern society repress the children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronisław_Malinowski
Edit: related to this is the (IMHO wrong) thought that underage humans cannot possibly give informed consent to sexual acts.
Edit2: Btw, when I speak about underage sex I'm thinking about sex where all the involved are more or less of the same age.
I tried hard to think of something that I haven't already talked about, so here goes:
I have a suspicion that the best economic plans developed by economists will have no effect or negative effect, because the ability of macroeconomics to describe what happens when we push on the economy is simply not good enough to let the government deliberately manipulate the economy in any positive way.
Update: You could call this half right in retrospect. Fiscal policy is ineffective except when monetary policy is ineffective, and the Federal Reserve didn't print nearly enough money but the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression. We would not have been better off if the Federal Reserve had done nothing, thinking all their plans ineffective. There might be some kind of lesson here about EAs who fret about "What if we can't model anything?" whose despair seems kind of similar to Eliezer_2009's.
To clarify, "the money they did print did print another Great Depression" should (probably) read "the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression", right? The version with the typo sounds unfortunately like "The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression".
Right. (Also the Federal Reserve totally did cause the original Great Depression, but this is a mainstream stance.)
What's the minimum amount of information you could send Eliezer_2009, that he would agree with you?
I think there is a huge amount of wisdom in the core ideas of Buddhism. self is a convenient fiction and a source of much confusion and suffering; subtle forms of attachment are frequent sources of suffering; meditation can improve attention/concentration and meta-cognitive awareness, and some Buddhist techniques are effective in this regard; our experience in life is much more determined by our mind than we believe; compassion can and should be cultivated.
Is this really controversial among rationalists?
It seems to me that a form of modal realism and a strong version of the Simulation Hypothesis (not just a large fraction of all observer-moments in apparently pre-Singularity civilizations are simulated, but a large fraction of all observer-moments period) are substantially more likely than not. Others whom I respect emphasize the extent of our current confusion about anthropics, etc, so I assign a lower probability than I would based only on my impression, but I haven't fully exchanged private info.
Cryonics membership is a rational choice.
My chances of surviving death through resuscitation are good (as such things as chances to beat death go), but would be better if I convinced more people that cryonics is a rational choice.
In my day to day I am more concerned with my job than convincing others on the subject of cryonics, even though the latter is probably more valuable to my long term happiness. Am I not aware of what I value? Why do I not structure my behavior to match what I believe I value? If I believed that cryonics would buy me an additional 1000 years of life wouldn't 10 years of total dedication to its cause be worthwhile? Does this mean that I do not actually believe in cryonics, but only profess to believe in cryonics?
Americans no longer significantly value liberty and this will be to the detriment of our society.
A large number of Americans accept the torture of religious enemies as necessary and just.
Male circumcision is more harmful than we realize and one cause (among many) of sexual dysfunction among couples.
Most humans would be happier if polyamory was socially acceptable and encouraged.
I think that most people, including rationalists, have significant psychological problems that interfere with their happiness in life and impair their rationality and their pursuit of rationality. What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional, and it is dysfunctional in many more ways than just being irrational and subject to cognitive biases.
I think furthermore that before devoting yourself to rationality at the near exclusion of other types of self-improvement, you should devote some serious effort to overcoming the more mundane psychological problems such as being overly attached to material trinkets and measuring your self-worth in material terms, being unaware of your emotions and unable to express your emotions clearly and honestly, having persistent family and relationship problems, having chronic psychosomatic ailments, etc. Without attending to these sorts of issues first (or at the same time), trying to become a rationalist jedi is like trying to get a bodybuilder physique before you've fixed your diet and lost the 200 extra pounds you have.
I think the notion the 'most people suffer from significant problem X' is very often plain misunderstood. If everybody 'suffers' X, X is the norm, not an affliction (with exceptions such as, say, lower back pain). You're projecting your normative values onto factual matters.
Also, the notion that we have deficient moral/mental capacities seems to me unsupported and basically quasi-religious. "What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional..." Red pill or blue pill. Please.
Our attachment to material trinkets, material self-worth, emotion expression abilities, family problems etc. all stem from our evolutionary background and the conflicting selection pressures our species was subjected to. Why would one even think that an conflict-free perfect Bayesian could, would or should result from evolution?
Yes, it sucks loving your spouse and wanting to cheat at the same time. I just don't see how this translates into "significant psychological problems." Especially not some that need be overcome before moving on towards rationality Nirvana. I suggest bullet-biting as the cure for this ailment.
EDIT: Re-reading, this seems unnecessarily hostile. Don't have time to reword properly, please accept my apologies...
Would you consider a top-level post about this?
(FWIW, I, at least, see emotional self-awareness as a core rationality skill.)
I would hold myself to much higher standards for a top-level post than for a comment, and I'm extremely busy at the moment, so I won't be able to do a top-level post for at least the next couple of weeks.
If anybody else has thought about this issue as well and wants to write a top-level post, feel free to do so. If I don't see such a post, then I'll write one up when I have time in a couple of weeks.
I don't know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:
As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.
Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.
Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.
People and companies exposing buggy software to untrusted parties deserve to have it exploited to their disadvantage. Maliciously attacking software systems by submitting data crafted to trigger security-critical bugs should not be illegal in any way.
Limits: The last paragraph assumes that there are no langford basilisks; if such things do in fact exist, preventing basilisk deaths may justify censorship - based on the purely practical observation that fixing the human mind would likely not be possible shortly after discovery.
All of the stated policy opinions apply to societies composed of roughly human-intelligent people only; they break down in the presence of sufficiently intelligent entities.
In addition, if it was possible to significantly ameliorate existential risks by censorsing certain information, that would justify doing so - but I can't come up with a likely case for that happening in practice.
I don't agree with it. You can't believe everything you read in Wired. The "information should be free" movement is just modern techno-geek Marxism, and it's only sillier the second time around.
All software is buggy. All parties are untrusted.
That may be so now, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to change it. That the current default state for software is "likely insecure" reflects the fact that the market price for software security is lower than the cost of providing it.
Laws against software attacks raise the cost of performing such attacks, and therefore lower the incentives for people to ensure the software they use is secure. I think it would be worth a try to take that illegality away, and see if the market responds by coming up with ways to make software secure.
You can't get really good physical security without expending huge amounts of resources: physical security doesn't scale well. Software security is different in principle: If you get it right, it doesn't matter how many resources an attacker can get to try and subvert your system over a data channel - they won't succeed.
Agreed.
Also, if you pile on technological improvements but still try to keep patents etc, you end up in the crazy situation where government intrusiveness has to grow without bounds and make hegemonic war on the universe to stop anyone, anywhere from popping a Rolex out of their Drexlerian assembler.
I think it's important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions. It's better to reward honesty, even if what you hear hurts or irritates (but not endless repetition of misguided opinion, that cumulatively will bore other readers too much). Upvoting interesting comments should be fine.
P.S. This advice is not one of these "crazy things" the poll is about. ;-)
I agree. But I do think it's worth replying pointing out perceived holes in those beliefs, and seeing if the believer is able to defend them.
I don't have much of a vested interest in being or remaining human. I've often shocked friends and acquaintances by saying that if there were a large number of intelligent life forms in the universe and I had my choice, I doubt I'd choose to be human.
I'm going to be an elven wizard.
Are there (many) people on here who don't agree with you?
Depending on how we define "human," I might... I'm not sure. But I'm fairly confident that if I did, my definition of "human" would come out so broad that it would shock swestrup's friends and acquaintances even more.
That within human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations. (Caveat: "race" is at least as much a socially-constructed term as a scientifically valid category; however there are diffences in allele frequency that reliably correlate with having ancestors from particular parts of the world).
That these differences may have been partically caused by the fact that peoples from different parts of the world have had literate societies for different times.
Killing people, and locking them in prison for 20 years, are both worse than torturing them.
Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.
It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.
The rate of technological change has been slowing since 1970.
It can't be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.
Increasing the population density makes the cost of land rise; and this is a major factor in the cost and quality of life.
Men and women think differently.
Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.
War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it).
"War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it)."
That's pretty well accepted in some economics circles. See the broken window fallacy by Frédéric Bastiat.
Fortunately, my training as a philosopher left little room for embarrassment about my beliefs (my mentor was a Popperian - of the 'say it loud' sort). So there really isn't anything I could say here that hasn't come out elsewhere. But a lot of it is somewhat unpopular:
Ethics: eudaimonist egoism - objectivist in the sense that there are facts about ethics, but relativist in the sense that there's no reason to assume all humans are the same ethically. Consequently, I think it's fine that I care more about my cats' welfare than most humans' - as long as it doesn't lead to a lack of virtue on my part (which, of course, is an empirical question).
Economics: Markets really are the most efficient way of getting the relevant information, due to methodological individualism and local, distributed knowledge. And my spending really does indicate my preferences, which are some of the best data about ethics.
Politics: Classical liberal (preferring Locke over Mills); freedom is paramount - other people should fight for my freedom, so that I might have room to become more awesome. I acknowledge the tension between this and Nietzsche's contention that democracy is bad because it does not provide an environment where one can learn to overcome. But I'm not a big fan of democracy anyway, and I see the political history of the US primarily in terms of a struggle between 'freedom' and 'equality'.
Furthermore, governments are inherently bad - it is part of their telos. One of the great things about the US government is that it's huge and bloated with checks and balances to make it difficult for anything to get done, which makes it a bad government. A trim, efficient government just does a good job of oppressing its people.
Life is a lot more nuanced than a lot of young rationalists or idealogues would think. There is room in the world for all sorts of people, and the diversity of even mistaken opinions leads to interesting and wonderful things. Example: while 'christian rock' tends to suck, most religious music is genuinely inspiring like little else. Ditto for architecture. When trying to trim falsehoods from the world, don't accidentally lose some awesome.
On the same subject, history does matter. He who doesn't remember history is doomed to something something... Just calling yourself an 'atheist' doesn't mean you've pruned religion out of your language and culture - and if you do manage that, don't be so confident that it will all still stand without it.
Sorry, was this the 'soapbox' thread? I'll stop now.
I don't know if I actually believe this, but I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:
Similarly, I've heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn't traumatize them, but the follow-up "psychological care", where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.
It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There's no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.
Even if the children themselves after the fact don't consider the sexual abuse harmful, it may be considered wrong by the humanity as a whole. The babyeaters prefer eating their children, but humans would like them to stop doing that. Drugs addict continues to take drugs even if they lead to decay of his personality and health, but other people consider it a wrong thing to do. Even if it turns out that with (consensually) abused children the moral line is closer to acceptance, I still expect it to be way below the acceptance level.
The babyeater question would be substantially changed if the children didn't mind being eaten and didn't take harm by it - more or less from a moral crusade into parochial squeamishness. Eliezer went a long way out of his way to avoid that in the story, but here we can't dodge it with a rhetorical flourish.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can't just create moral crimes by their say-so.
Edit in Feb 2013: I've come to the conclusion that the problem with the above is that children are in an extremely steep power relationship - an artefact of this society, and it's avoidable, but it can't be wished away without a huge job of dismantling. Meaning, that right now children can't even express a preference. "Yes" is meaningless with the ability of an adult to apply pressure that would count as felony kidnapping and torture if done to another adult, with complete impunity and even acclaim. "No" is meaningless when adults have imposed their schemas of asexual innocence willy-nilly over children's experience, and when they have such huge control of that experience itself, up to and including maintaining "big lies" via censorship.
As such, an age of consent is a damn dirty hack that acknowledges the completely untenable position of children in making a decision that's true to their intent, while refusing to rescue them from it. It is marginally better than nothing. If it does go, it can't go first. A lot of rescuing needs to come first.
This is the crux of every modern dissent to old-age prejudices: If it harms no one, it's not a moral wrong.
I am also "in the closet" on this. Sex is generally pleasurable; postulating a magic age or stage of development before which sex must be traumatic seems implausible on its face, without some other evidence. Coercion and intimidation are well-known to be damaging, but I don't understand how merely convincing a 10-year-old to let you stick something up her vagina (and then doing it) is going to do any more harm than, say, spanking her. Furthermore, looking at the historical record, the ancient Greek custom of pederasty (sexual/romantic relationships between adolescent boys and adult men) doesn't seem to have resulted in widespread trauma.
There are very few places in which it would be safe to propose this hypothesis, though.
Not "generally" over the domain in question. The pleasurability of sex is supported by brain-specific hardware that has no particular evolutionary reason to be active before adolescence.
Considering that, as has been noted elsewhere on this thread, prepubescent children (including infants) self-stimulate their genitals, this seems ... ill-founded. Of course, I suppose it depends how much of the pleasure involves romance, which does seem to be restricted to adults; but I somehow doubt you can claim most of the pleasure from sex is due to romance.
I trust my memory of certain things as far back as a few vaguities before age 2 years, and I've read other people's reports, and I conclude that, while children do self-stimulate, it's typically (but not always) less pleasurable than it is after puberty.
I haven't read any neurological studies addressing that hypothesis in particular, but of course they could exist and I could be unaware of them.
Hmm, good point - I don't actually know anything about the topic. Sounds like actual orgasm is impossible without puberty (although note it's possible way before adulthood.) Still, pleasure is pleasure. Kids wouldn't enjoy it as much as adults, but some of the adaptations are clearly present - enough for sex to be pleasurable, if not as pleasurable.
Mind you, I personally wouldn't want to change that particular norm without a great deal of thought and investigation by actual experts. But this particular claim seems to be flawed.
I've encountered anecdotes claiming that a form of prepubescent orgasm is possible, if difficult to achieve (especially since most wouldn't know to aim for it). I'm less convinced of that, but I remember someone actually providing a citation for "utero orgasms in both sexes" (which I assumed to mean while still in the womb).
An aside: I catch myself committing the mind projection fallacy most often when I come across comments that make it very clear people have purged large chunks of childhood from their memory/identity. It takes me a second or so to remember that this makes sense for most people. This has had a weird effect regarding the subject at hand: I'm surprised when I run into adult males talking like they don't believe boys can get erections, then I'm skeptical when someone else reports that prepubescent males can have orgasms. Noticing the pattern there has me updating in favor of prepubescent orgasm being possible, if difficult.
I find it ironic that 'notmyrealnick' got 34 points for this comment. But I suppose there are repercussions other than bad karma for posting unpopular views...
That's probably the case. In western societies, it's an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.
With probability 50% or greater, the long-term benefits of the invasion of Iraq will outweigh the costs suffered in the short term.
I can see the reasoning though I don't quite agree for two reasons.
1) If the Lancet report is at all accurate that's a lot of deaths for the long-term benefits to make up for.
2) How much more extreme has that made the rest of the middle east? How has it hurt the possibility of peace in Israel.
I was, and still am against the start of the war, though I've been fairly consistent in thinking they should stay since then. (Oddly enough I thought the surge was a good idea when virtually no-one else did, though have since started to think it didn't really do anything now that everyone is moving on board!).
Costs and benefits to whom? America and allies, Iraq, or the world in general?
Do you still maintain the statement, in 2015 with ISIL attacks?
(Ideas below are still works in progress, listed in descending order of potential disagreement:)
Bearing children is immoral. Eliezer has stated that he is not adult enough to have children, but I wonder if we will ever be adult enough, including in a post-singularity environment.
The second idea probably isn't as controversial: early suicide (outside of any moral dilemma, battlefield, euthanasia situation, etc.) is in some cases rational and moral. Combined with cryonics, it is the only sensible option for, e.g., senile dementia patients. But this group can be expanded, even without cryonics.
Some have mentioned modern school systems to be broken, but I'll go even further and say that mandatory education is a huge waste of time and money, for all involved. Many, perhaps most, need to know only basic literacy and arithmetic. The rest should be taught on a want-to-know basis or similar. As a corollary, I don't think many or even most people can be brought into the fold of science or rationality.
(Curiously, the original poster wondered if our crazy beliefs might be true, but many responses, including my own, are value, not fact, judgments.)
I think school, as conventionally operated, is a scandalous waste of brain plasticity and really amounts mostly to a combination of "signaling" and a corral.
I'm not sure what should replace it. There are things kids need to know - math, general knowledge, epistemology, reasoning, literacy as communication, and the skills of unsupervised study and research. (School doesn't overtly teach most of the above - it puts you under impossible pressure and assumes that like a tomato pip you will be squeezed into moving in the right direction.)
There are also a ton of things they might like to learn, out of interest.
I am not sure those two categories of learning ought to be bundled up. Especially, while I can understand forcing a study of the first category, it seems obviously counterproductive to force the second.
I think people should be allowed to sell their organs if they want to. We don’t consider it immoral to pay a surgeon to transplant a kidney, or to pay the nurse who helps him, so I don’t see why it’s immoral to pay the person who provides that kidney. I also think we should pay people in medical experiments. Pharmaceutical companies could hire private rating agencies to judge proposed Human experiments much as Standard and Poor rates bonds; that way people would know what they’re getting into. The pain \ danger index would range from slightly uncomfortable \ probably harmless to agony \ probably fatal and payment would be tied to that index. A market would develop open to anybody who was interested. It would be in the financial interest of the drug companies to make the tests as safe and comfortable as possible. All parties would benefit, medical research would get a huge boost and everybody would have a new way to make money if they chose to do it.
I also think that if you believe in capital punishment it is foolish to kill the condemned before performing some medical experiments on him first.
I don't like libertarianism. It makes some really good points, and clearly there are lots of things government should stay out of, but the whole narrative of government as the evil villain that can never do anything right strikes me as more of a heroic myth than a useful way to shape policy. This only applies to libertarians who go overboard, though. I like Will Wilkinson, but I hate Lew Rockwell.
I think the better class of mystics probably know some things about the mind the rest of us don't. I tend to trust yogis who say they've achieved perfect bliss after years of meditation, although I think there's a neurological explanation (and would like to know what it is). I think Crowley's project to systematize and scientifically explain mysticism had some good results even though he did go utterly off the deep end.
I am not sure I will sign up for cryonics, although I am still seriously considering it. The probability of ending up immortal and stuck in a dystopia where I couldn't commit suicide scares me too much.
I have a very hard time going under 2-3% belief in anything that lots of other people believe. This includes religion, UFOs, and ESP. Not astrology though, oddly enough; I'll happily go so low on that one it'd take exponential notation to describe properly.
I like religion. I don't believe it, I just like it. Greek mythology is my favorite, but I think the Abrahamic religions are pretty neat too.
I am a very hard-core utilitarian, and happily accept John Maxwell's altruist argument. I sorta accept Torture vs. Dust Specks on a rational but not an emotional level.
I am still not entirely convinced that irrationality can't be fun. I sympathize with some of those Wiccans who worship their gods not because they believe in them but just because they like them. Of course, I separate this from belief in belief, which really is an evil.
I believe that framing people for possession of child pornography is a widespread practice, and that this accounts for almost all convictions on that charge. I base this on the evidence that is typically used in such cases, all of which comes from computers which may have been compromised; and in fact, trials usually mention evidence that the computers in question were compromised (although it's possible for an attacker to remove all evidence of that fact), and that hasn't been a successful defense. If a person were to actually want child pornography, there are simple technical measures which could create a nearly iron-clad guarantee against being caught; and conversely, similar measures with a similar guarantee protect people from being caught planting evidence. Finally, the societal irrationality surrounding child pornography means that successfully getting someone accused of having it will not only get them jailed, but thoroughly destroy their reputation and shame them as well.
I disagree with Eliezer on the possibility of Oracular AI (he thinks it's impossible).
Other moderately iconoclastic statements:
I think it would be a good idea to create a sister website on the same codebase as LW specifically for discussing this topic.
Suffering is not evil per se, and we are free to make drastic distinctions in the moral value of suffering depending on the sufferer. In other words, if an AI spawned billions of copies of conscious beings that want to make huge cheesecakes, it may be right to just kill them all off. (I'm not sure about trillions.) On a more relevant note, that means second degree murder of Stephen Hawkins is a far worse action than first degree murder of Joe Plumber.
As a more inflammatory phrasing, I view the world largely in terms of intelligence, and feel that the smart are (typically) "worth more" than the average and below.
I also believe it is naive and wishful to believe that races, which developed (propensities towards) many distinct genetic traits (not just skin color, also hair color, facial shape, disease resistances, etc) do not have differences in intelligence distribution. Affirmative action is therefore racist, and accusations (against employers, scholarship committees, etc) of racist selection merely based on previous selectees (current employees, past scholarship winners, etc) are unfounded.
Hmmm....remove the inflammatory phrasing, and those sound like things I'd get a decent amount of agreement on.
(This also makes me wonder what makes certain phrasings inflammatory -- because the opposition to societal positions which require defense is explicitly acknowledged?)
Lastly though, I have a qualified belief in eugenics. I greatly fear the Idiocracy scenario, and thus shudder every time I hear about some genius having few or no children, or women on food stamps having octuplets.
The qualification is that I am a libertarian, and would fear any government eugenics programs as well. Combining the two yields an awkward desire to have lots of children for the sake of having lots of children and a desire for a free-market form of eugenics, such as a private institution which pays the unintelligent to undergo voluntary sterilization.
On a similar note, while it may be justified to characterize a given black person as below-average intelligence (a stereotype) before meeting that person, that characterization still has sizable error bars, and making active judgements based on race is wrong.
However, measured intelligence can also change over time within a single race, depending on the external environment. I can't find it now, but recently saw an article pointing out that the average IQ of students from one of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark?) had increased measurably over the last 50 years. Like everything else, intelligence has both biological and societal components. I certainly don't know enough about intelligence to comment with confidence on its biological bases and how immutable (or mutable) they are, but as long as there is a societal component, then I see no inherent moral problem in trying to provide disadvantaged racial groups with the same favorable milieu that other groups have already profited from.
(And, for that matter, I think the actual harm suffered to white people by affirmative action on behalf of other groups is probably fairly small. There might be a zero-sum calculation about a specific job or specific slot at a college, but whites aren't being systematically shut out of every opportunity they might have. There's also a difference between promoting people who are blatantly unqualified for the positions they're given because of their race, and favoring people who are perhaps at the margin of qualified but could easily improve. The spirit of American affirmative action appears to be the latter, although it's surely implemented with greater and lesser degrees of faithfulness to that ideal.)
Incidentally, the recent mother of octuplets was a nurse who was injured on the job and is receiving disability payments; she doesn't seem like a particularly good case for eugenic sterilization.
I believe that double-think is possible and sensible. It generally takes the form of making a deliberate attempt not to learn more about something, and not bothering to assign an expected value to the information you are missing out on.
People avoid watching horror movies if they want to stay composed. They try to avoid internet shock sites if they don't want to be disgusted. In a similar way, avoiding information that contradicts a belief that
1.) would be painful to discard
2.) exists in an area where accuracy isn't terribly important
makes sense. For example, if I am a fan of some football team, it makes sense for me to avoid reading articles critical of that football team.
A corollary is that god-belief of the right sort makes sense for people who aren't scientists, politicians, or philosophers.
Another situation where double-think makes sense is when you're trying to avoid seeing information which will make you regret a decision, or might influence you to change your decision, but with the potential for only marginal improvement. For example, if I am working in such-and-such a profession, it makes sense for me to avoid reading about how a different job is much cooler.
In what is probably an increasing order of controversial beliefs:
Libertarianism is correct, at least in the broader sense of the word (in the sense under which Milton Friedman qualifies as a libertarian). I know this isn't the most controversial belief, but it's still a minority belief, according to the 2012 survey.
Productivity (in the sense of "improve your productivity" LW posts) isn't that important as long as you're above a certain threshold, the threshold needed to do enough work to support yourself, save for the future, and have money to spend for fun. Excessive optimization for productivity (which describes many productivity posts on LW) leads to a less happy life.
The differences between men and women are overblown and are mostly socially caused. They are not so great that men and women should be treated differently. Normative gender roles should be abolished. Feminism is good.
The arguments commonly presented in favor of vegetarianism/veganism are weak. They presuppose that people care more about animal suffering than they really do (and subtly and unintentionally try to shame those that don't care as much), and that people are more capable of reducing animal suffering with their dietary choices than they really are.
Human value isn't irreducibly complex. It boils down to pleasure/happiness. Wireheading is the optimal state.
There is an objective morality (for humans), and it's ethical egoism.
I'd love to subscribe to your newsletter.
I can't shake off the suspicion of solipsism.
Don't worry, you're not the one who exists.
I don't think what I'm about to post is strictly in keeping with the intended comment material, but I'm posting it here because I think this is where I'll get the best feedback.
The majority of humans don't have a concrete reason for why they value moral behavior. If you ask a human why they value life or happiness of others, they'll throw out some token response laden with fallacies, and when pressed they'll respond with something along the lines of "I just feel like it's the right thing". In my case, it's the opposite. I have a rather long list of reasons why not to kill people, starting with the problems that would result if I programmed an AI with those inclinations. Also the desire for people not to kill and torture me. But where other people have a negative inclination to killing people, flaying them alive, etc. I don't. Where other people have an neural framework that encourages empathy and inconsequential intellectual arguments to support this, I have a neural framework that encourages massive levels of suffering in others and intellectual arguments restricting my actions away from my intuitive desires.
On to my point. Understandably, it is rather difficult for me to express this unconventional aspect of myself in fleshy-space (I love that term). So I don't have any supported ideas of how common non-conventional ethical inclinations are, or how they're expressed. I wanted to open this up for discussion of our core ethical systems, normative and non-normative. In particular I am interested in seeing if others have similar inclinations to mine and how they deal / don't deal with them.
Many singularitarians have a bias toward expecting a singularity in their own lifetime or shortly after it. (I assign a single-digit to singularity before 2100 and something like 25-40 in the next 500 years
Old Culture gets way too little credit, but most of the people who realize this or appear to realize this are reactionaries who either can't imagine different, much better Old Cultures or are neither utilitarian nor consensual with respect to participation in said cultures. (
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Late to this (only by 4 years... so fifty smartphone generations), but LOVE the idea.
I believe - firmly, and with conviction - that the modal politician is a parasitic megalomaniacal sociopath who should be prevented at all costs from obtaining power; that the State (and therefore democracy) is an entirely illegitimate way of ameliorating public goods problems and furthering 'social objectives'.
Hence my nick (which I invented).
the optimal political/social structure is one in which we encourage megalomaniacal sociopaths to do good, because they tend to be effective. This is the best part of capitalism.
I'm not so sure about that. The outcomes implied by an ASPD diagnosis (not quite identical to "sociopath", but close enough for use here, I think) are better than some disorders, but still pretty rough -- including in measures of occupational success.
We might object that these are self-selected as people whose lives have been damaged enough by their problem that they seek treatment, but personality disorder criteria are so vague that I can't think offhand of a better way of grounding the word.
There's a definite selection effect for ASPD.
In general, any mental health diagnosis is usually conditioned on a significant disruption of the sufferer's life -- if you're a sociopath, but it doesn't effect you in any way, you're typically not diagnosed. This is usually on the DSM checklist for a diagnosis and while I don't know offhand if ASPD is the same, I'd bet that it is.
The comment you're replying to is definitely questionable, though. It seems like a very prematurely-halted optimization process if the "optimal" structure is optimized towards encouraging less than one percent of humans to do good things.
It is, yes, but that doesn't necessarily preclude "effective" -- the diagnosis can be based on disruption of any part of the patient's life. It's entirely possible for the behavior associated with a disorder to improve outcomes in one domain (employment, say), while disrupting others (i.e. family life) enough for the label to stick. That's what I was trying to get at with my qualification about occupational success.