Stranger Than History

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Seeing with Fresh Eyes

156 Stranger Than History

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

1st Sep 2007

1 min read

335

156

Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.
In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres. Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together. If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.
Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.

You’d think I was crazy, right?

Now suppose it were the year 1901, and you had to choose between believing those statements I have just offered, and believing statements like the following:

There is an absolute speed limit on how fast two objects can seem to be traveling relative to each other, which is exactly 670,616,629.2 miles per hour. If you hop on board a train going almost this fast and fire a gun out the window, the fundamental units of length change around, so it looks to you like the bullet is speeding ahead of you, but other people see something different. Oh, and time changes around too.
In the future, there will be a superconnected global network of billions of adding machines, each one of which has more power than all pre-1901 adding machines put together. One of the primary uses of this network will be to transport moving pictures of lesbian sex by pretending they are made out of numbers.
Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to say that someone should not be President of the United States because she is black.

Based on a comment of Robin Hanson’s: “I wonder if one could describe in enough detail a fictional story of an alternative reality, a reality that our ancestors could not distinguish from the truth, in order to make it very clear how surprising the truth turned out to be.”¹

¹Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/j0/making_history_available/ewg.

Absurdity HeuristicHindsight BiasFiction (Topic)Heuristics & BiasesHistory

Frontpage

156

The Virtue of Narrowness

66 comments152 karma

The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

64 comments139 karma

New Comment

Rendering 0/335 comments, sorted by

oldest

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:39 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

More from Eliezer Yudkowsky

Curated and popular this week

335Comments

335

Stranger Than History — LessWrong

Comment Permalink

hairyfigment12y30 Response to previous version

I think I've disproven the factual basis you gave for your speculation: the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.

And it's now 80 karma paperclips. Do you know how ridiculous this looks, how badly Less Wrong is breaking its own rules of conversation?

Jiro12y00 Response to previous version

I've lost about 150 karma (and the actual loss if it wasn't for people voting up -1 comments would probably be more like 250). The moderators have done squat, if we even have anything that passes for moderators. (The admins, then.)

1Vaniver12y

The real standard was that 'disparate impact' of the black pass rate being less than 80% of the white pass rate was prima facie evidence of discrimination; the more recent cases suggest that any statistically significant difference can be evidence of discrimination. If you ever got the impression that I didn't think that was how the courts behaved, I apologize for the miscommunication on my end. (I left out the four-fifths part, and just mentioned 'over 90%', because I thought it would be more communicative than adding the additional detail.) I still maintain that if you are seeking to promote, say, 5% of the population, no merit-based test which gives you the top 5% of the population will pass the four-fifths rule in the presence of underlying racial differences in merit. (This would be the 'rank-by-test-scores' approach.) Promoting from the entire pool at random would not discriminate by race, but it also wouldn't discriminate by merit. The way to both have some merit selection, and not run afoul of the four-fifths rule, is to set some cutoff such that the rate at which blacks are above the cutoff is at least 80% of the rate at which whites are above the cutoff, declare everyone above that cutoff as having passed, and then promote randomly from those who passed. It's still not clear to me what you think you've disproven, or why you think you've disproven it. How long this conversation has gone and the propensity for others to downvote your comments suggest to me that it may be wise to call this conversation done here, or move it to PMs if you're interested in carrying on.

See in context