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Swimmer963 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Hello there!
I think I first saw LessWrong about three years ago, as it frequently came up in discussions on KW, the forum formerly linked to the Dresden Codak comic. This makes mine one of the longer lurking periods, but I've never really felt the urge to take discussion to the actual posts being discussed and talked about them elsewhere when I felt the need to comment. All this changed when Alicorn told me that when I was asked to make a post relevant to LessWrong that meant I actually had to post it on LessWrong (a revelation which I should have probably anticipated). So it has come to this.
The simplest place to start describing myself is by saying that I'm the type of person that skims through the 200 most recent comments to see which ones are well liked before writing anything.* In real life terms, I've finished up my bachelor's degree in December, after making various errors. Unfortunately, with it finished, I have discovered that I lack motivation to pursue a standard career, since just about the only things I find myself caring about are stories, knowing the future (in the general, not the personal, respect), and understanding things, particularly things related to people. (This is probably not normal for a human, but I can't say I mind it.) Fortunately, these things are fairly similar to the things LW is interested in, so it shouldn't be a problem!
These atypical weights in my utility function do, however, leave me with opinions that I think are largely a lot "darker" than the typical poster (and I don't just write that for sexy bad-boy appeal). For example:
Well, the first two of those don't even have much to do with my personal preferences. And yet, I'm not a scary person, I promise! While maybe my utility function makes it easier for me to accept these conclusions, the overwhelming majority of my beliefs actually arose from oodles of thinking about the topics, and they are just things that I think are true, regardless of whether I want them to be true or not. That said, when the enraged zealots come for us, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be one of the first to burn at the stake! I also wish that using smiley faces was more acceptable here, since I would not mind adding an equals sign-three one to the end of that sentence to convey the intended mood a little better.
Well, this has already gone on too long already, but I hope you were not too bored. I might as well mention that at the moment, I'm trying to write a realistic post-apocalyptic novel (where the recovery has set in enough that they're ahead of the previous all-time high), and applying for a Center for Modern Rationality helper position, since I think these things are interesting, and I'd like to explore them before moving on to uninteresting survival strategies if necessary.
Bye for now, and I hope we have illuminating conversations together!
*If you're curious what I found, here are the general conclusions (although some of these are fairly low confidence):
Yeah, probably. Mainly because it seems likely to me that almost any system in place has better, more optimal alternatives which we don't have the computational power to implement. It is a useful statement in some ways, if only to distinguish ideological, "this-is-sacred", versus instrumental, "this is the best we can do so far" types of beliefs. However, a more useful statement would compare democracy and equality to all the other options that require the same computational power or less.
I unpack this statement to mean that, all other circumstances being equal, it's preferable to accomplish your goals in a way that involves not killing conscious beings. This isn't obvious, really, but it's intuitive to humans, who are generally conscious beings who don't want to be dead and who can empathize with other conscious beings and assume they also don't want to be dead. It's not obvious, I guess, that someone else's consciousness, which I can never experience directly, is comparable in value to my own consciousness, which I experience continually... I find myself unable to break it down any further, though, so I think I must take this as an axiom of my ethical system. Humans have specific brain sub-systems in charge of empathy, which likely evolved for reasons of social cohesion and its survival advantages, and I'm not sure you can break morality any further down than that...but saying those words doesn't cancel the empathy modules either. Empathy would make it hard for me to justify choosing to kill a conscious being right in front of me, and some desire for symmetry or fairness or universality makes my brain want this to be the case everywhere, for all conscious beings, not just those ones immediately in front of me whose life is in my hands. I don't want someone else a thousand miles away to start killing people either, because [insert axiom] their conscious is equal in value to mine, thus in a different possible world I could be them, and I really don't want to get killed. Thus it's wrong.
Make any sense?
I've started caring about these things much less since setting out on the process of establishing a standard career. It might be caused by years of working too much while studying full time, and the resulting burnout, or just from having to cram a lot of career-relevant stuff into my head and thus having less room left over for bigger ideas. It might also just be from getting older–during the past few years, I've studied a lot and worked a lot, but I also aged up from adolescence to young adulthood, with the accompanying changes in brain development. I would say be warned, though–forcing yourself to focus on something specific might cause you to lose some of your general curiosity.
Sounds fascinating. I'm not sure I've read any post-apocalyptic novels where the current level of development was higher than that before the apocalypse, which is what I'm interpreting. I've completed what I guess could be called a post-apocalyptic novel, though some realistic-ness was compromised in the name of a more exciting and compelling narrative. Best of luck!
This is definitely true. That said, I actually do have at least two systems that I prefer to democracy that are implementable at current processing power levels (they might have somewhat higher needs than democracy, but nothing huge). Equality probably actually does require a lot of processing power to shift completely. However, it is conceivable that we could benefit from creating additional classes of citizens with widely different rights (currently we have children and the mentally ill in this category), although I have not thought about that too much, so I'm not sure if we actually would or not.
Sorry, it was probably bad of me to quote without context. What he actually meant (in my interpretation) was that it is clear that it should be illegal to kill adult human beings, which was part of his argument that it should be illegal to kill infants (search it if you want the full context), so it is with this claim that I took exception. Certainly, I would agree that if all else is equal (a premise that is almost never true, unfortunately), it would be better not to kill people than to kill people. In particular, I think the reason that some view it as possibly okay for parents to kill infants is that the status of infants is close to that of property or pets of their parents. It is here that the analogy breaks down, because our current society does not have adults as pets or property of other adults. However, I think such a situation would be perfectly acceptable - for example, it should be legal for me (in full possession of my faculties, without coercion, etcetera) to sign over to someone else the right to kill me if he or she so chooses. After such a contract is made, I believe it should be completely legal for them to kill me if they wish it. Additionally, we already implicitly provide such rights to any state we enter with some conditions attached (I use a social contract approach here, which is not to indicate I endorse social contracts) - they can kill us if we violently and dangerously resist the police, in some places if we break the law in certain ways, and further the state transfers the right to kill us to private citizens if we attack them and sometimes in other instances. As such, there are indeed many cases when killing people is deemed acceptable and proper, and I think most of these instances are not outrageous.
Yep, you're interpreting that correctly. Mostly the apocalypse is an extremely well justified for a big shake-up of society without massive technological progress. To be honest, I like fantasy better than science fiction in general, since it explores societies more than it does technology, and I think that is much more appealing in a novel. So, I'm trying to sort of get the best of both worlds - a character driven story exploring interesting societal patterns, and a setting that is somewhat familiar to anyone who knows the modern world, as well as makes them think about where we might head. Although I'm not sure to what extent this thoughtful motivation sprung up after I had a story idea I really liked, which is what really triggered novel writing inspiration. We'll see how it goes anyway, and thanks for the interest!