Eugine_Nier comments on [LINK] Nick Szabo: Beware Pascal's Scams - Less Wrong

7 Post author: David_Gerard 17 July 2012 07:18AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 July 2012 06:26:38AM 1 point [-]

Eliezer and other SI staff have explicitly rejected such Pascalian reasons, but instead argued that the risks that they wish to avert are quite probable.

Really, last time I checked Eliezer was refusing to name either a probability or a time scale.

Comment author: ciphergoth 18 July 2012 09:52:07AM 1 point [-]

I'm not seeing how you get from "doesn't state an explicit probability or timescale publically" to "argues that SI should be supported on Pascalian grounds".

Comment author: David_Gerard 18 July 2012 12:53:29PM 2 points [-]

It looked like just a response to you saying "instead argued that the risks that they wish to avert are quite probable."

Comment author: private_messaging comment score below threshold [+] (37 children)

Comment author: wedrifid 23 July 2012 04:03:47AM 7 points [-]

In Pascal's original wager the 'risk' is 50% .

You are grossly misinformed.

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2012 03:10:56PM 2 points [-]

In Pascal's original wager the 'risk' is 50% . Due to our natural tendency to see two alternatives, once presented in A vs B form, as closer to even odds when information is absent. That's what wager is about - screwing up probabilities in absence of knowledge of how to calculate them, and arguing that it is quite probable when it's not quite probable.

Er. We're talking about Pascal's wager, right? The one published in Pensees? The one which explicitly invokes infinities, where it doesn't matter if the odds are 1 to 1 or 1,000,000,000 to 1, the argument still goes through?

Comment author: private_messaging 21 July 2012 05:31:55PM * -2 points [-]

The point is that it is still a Pascal's wager even if you have mis-estimated probabilities and argued that it is actually likely that God exists.

In case of SI, even if we assume that risk exists it is still the case that one is to donate to group of people whom, in all likelihood, are entirely incapable of affecting the risk in any way what so ever (and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect. It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters)

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2012 05:58:13PM 3 points [-]

and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect.

You realize DK is a narrow effect which only obtains in certain conditions, is still controversial, and invoking it just makes you look like you'll grab at any thing at all no matter how dubious in order to attack SI, right? (About on the same level as 'Hitler was an atheist!')

It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters

Seriously. In no area of research, medicine, engineering, or whatever, the first group to tackle a problem succeeded? Such a world would be far poorer and still stuck in the Dark Ages than the one we actually live in. I realize this may be a hard concept, but sometimes, the first person to tackle a problem - succeeds! In fact, sometimes multiple people tackling the problem all simultaneously succeed! (This is very common; called multiple discovery.)

Not every problem is as hard as fusion, or to put it another way, most hard problems are made of other, easier, problems, while if your hyperbolic statement were true, no progress would ever be made.

Comment author: JaneQ 21 July 2012 08:50:39PM 5 points [-]

Dunning Kruger effect is likely a product of some general deficiency in the meta reasoning facility leading both to failure of reasoning itself and failure of evaluation of the reasoning; extremely relevant to people that proclaim themselves to be more rational, more moral, and so on than anyone else but do not seem to accomplish above mediocre performance at fairly trivial yet quantifiable things.

Seriously. In no area of research, medicine, engineering, or whatever, the first group to tackle a problem succeeded? Such a world would be far poorer and still stuck in the Dark Ages than the one we actually live in. I realize this may be a hard concept, but sometimes, the first person to tackle a problem - succeeds!

Ghmm. He said first people to take money, not first people to tackle.

The first people to explain the universe (and take some contributions for that) produced something of negative value, nearly all of the medicine until last couple hundred years was not only ineffective but completely harmful, and so on.

If you look at very narrow definitions, of course, the first to tackle nuclear bomb creation did succeed - but the first to tackle the general problem of weapon of mass destruction were various shamans sending a curse. If saving people from AI is an easy problem, then we'll survive without SI; if it's a hard problem, at any rate SI doesn't start with a letter from Einstein to the government, it starts with a person with no quantifiable accomplishments cleverly employing oneself. As far as I am concerned, there's literally no case for donations here; the donations happen via sort of decision noise similar to how NASA has spent millions on various antigravity devices, the power companies have spent millions on putting electrons in hydrogen orbitals at below ground level (see Mills hydrinos), and millions were invested in Steorn's magnetic engine.

Comment author: VincentYu 24 July 2012 03:44:12PM 4 points [-]

Ghmm. He said first people to take money, not first people to tackle.

Speaking of yourself in the third person?

Dmytry, you are abusing sockpuppet accounts. Your use of private_messaging was questionable, but at least you declared it as an alias early on. Right now you are using a sockpuppet with the intent to deceive.

Comment author: gwern 24 July 2012 04:25:04PM 6 points [-]

"Ghmm" is a hapax legomenon used solely by private_messaging/Dmytry and JaneQ.

continue this thread »

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2012 10:26:51PM * 3 points [-]

Dunning Kruger effect is likely a product of some general deficiency in the meta reasoning facility leading both to failure of reasoning itself and failure of evaluation of the reasoning;

That seems unlikely. Leading both?

extremely relevant to people that proclaim themselves to be more rational, more moral, and so on than anyone else but do not seem to accomplish above mediocre performance at fairly trivial yet quantifiable things.

Mediocrity is sufficient to push them entirely out of the DK gap; your thinking DK applies is just another example of what I mean by these being fragile easily over-interpreted results.

(Besides blatant misapplication, please keep in mind that even if DK had been verified by meta-analysis of dozens of laboratory studies, which it has not, that still only gives a roughly 75 % chance that the effect applies outside the lab.)

The first people to explain the universe (and take some contributions for that) produced something of negative value, nearly all of the medicine until last couple hundred years was not only ineffective but completely harmful, and so on.

Without specifics, one cannot argue against that.

If you look at very narrow definitions, of course, the first to tackle nuclear bomb creation did succeed - but the first to tackle the general problem of weapon of mass destruction were various shamans sending a curse.

So you're just engaged in reference class tennis. ('No, you're wrong because the right reference class is magicians!')

Comment author: private_messaging 22 July 2012 05:01:14AM * 0 points [-]

That seems unlikely. Leading both?

Seems straightforward to me: Eliezer's unwarranted self importance did result in him not pursuing education or for that matter proper self education, and simultaneously to believing he's awesome and selling existential risk reduction that nobody else would sell. edit: The alternative explanation is the level of resistance to self deception so high that the process of the self education transcended the necessity to seek objective feedback on the progress (which one gets if one e.g. tries to prove mathematical theorems, as here an un-intelligent process of checking a proof can validate one's powers of reasoning).

So you're just engaged in reference class tennis. ('No, you're wrong because the right reference class is magicians!')

Did it ever occur to you that one has to actually do something incompatible with the broad reference class to get into much much smaller reference class? E.g. you are in reference class 'people', not reference class 'people with IQ>=150' unless you take IQ test or take other test with very low false positive rate. Likewise, the reference class is 'people with grand promises' until you actually do something that moves you into microscopic sub class of 'people with grand promises who deliver'.

continue this thread »

Comment author: JaneQ 22 July 2012 12:34:16PM * -1 points [-]

What is the reasonable probability you think I should assign to the proposition by some bunch of guys (with at most some accomplishments in highly non-gradable field of philosophy) led by a person with no formal education nor prior job experience nor quantifiable accomplishments, that they should be given money to hire more people to develop their ideas on how to save the world from a danger they are most adept at seeing? The prior here is so laughably low you can hardly find a study so flawed it wouldn't be a vastly greater explanation for the SI behavior than it's mission statement taken at face value, even if we do not take into account SI's prior record.

So you're just engaged in reference class tennis. ('No, you're wrong because the right reference class is magicians!')

Reference class is not up for grabs. If you want narrower reference class you need to substantiate why it should be so narrow.

edit: Actually, sorry it comes as unnecessarily harsh. But do you recognize that SI genuinely has a huge credibility problem?

The donations to SI only make sense if we are to assume SI has extremely rare survival ability vs the technological risks. Low priors for extremely rare anything are a tautology, not an opinion. The lack of other alternatives is evidence against SI's cause.

continue this thread »

Eugine_Nier comments on [LINK] Nick Szabo: Beware Pascal's Scams - Less Wrong

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