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pedanterrific comments on The Sciencearchist Manifesto - Less Wrong
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Comments (64)
Nah, I mean "successful" as in: you and I are both capable of agreeing as well as at least not the minority of experts about that use of "successful". I won't play silly arguing by def games here. I happen to think that "increases fun/happiness or avoids suffering" is a pretty good guideline for the application of "successful" to policies. If you can show me that there are lots of times when you and I and at least some experts will be tempted to say "That policy was successful.", i.e., "worked", "rocked", "was a good idea", but say that "That policy did not increase happiness." or "That policy increased suffering." as well, then Ill abandon that position and update my meta-policy accordingly after going back to the drawing board. Otherwise I'll sit pretty.
I would bet money that giving people the option to do wire-heading, and stop wire-heading when ever they want, would optimize happiness. If we are right that people in general care about doing stuff out there in the real world, then they should still stop wire-heading every now and again to do something. Maybe this wouldn't quite optimize "happyness" per se, it wouldn't optimize for reward pathway stimulation certainly. But it would probably still optimize for some sort of happiness related thing like "fun", or "reflective self appreciation" or something.
Generally this means the opposite of 'failed'. 'Was a good idea' is orthogonal to 'successful'; something can be either one without being the other. You're playing silly games by implicitly defining 'successful' as 'increased happiness' and then pretending this means anything.
I've never heard of a form of wireheading in which this was possible.
I think you must be misreading me somehow. I'm simply saying that I think "if a policy was successful it very probably increased net happiness." And that if someone applies the phrase "that policy was successful" they will likely also be willing to apply the phrase "that policy increased net happiness." These are empirical probabilistic claims, which can be falsified, and are certainly not meaningless. LWers don't use Aristotelian concept theory for definition, for the most part we treat definitions more like pointers to empirical clusters of roughly similar things, as here .
What question am I dodging exactly?
In other words, all selfish policies.
Ok, but you and I would both say these examples increased suffering, and that they were not good ideas, or nice. Therefor these are not examples of the form i asked for.
So, to clarify: what you are asking for is three examples of a successful policy which
If I have misunderstood your criteria, could you explain where?
yep, totes. More specifically, that we would say is successful (in the sense of well done, or not a fail), and also say is 1 - 6.
Are you new man? Check this out: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words
Potato is proposing a deffenition as an emperical pointer. It means plenty, it means when people think "success", they think "happiness up". He's just saying that the probabilities of the application of the two phrases are correlated to some significant degree.
No, he's dodging the question. There are two definitions under discussion, one (the one potato is proposing, also incidentally the nonstandard one) in which he is by definition correct, another in which he has been proven wrong. He's explicitly attempting to conflate the two: