If anyone is still interested, I've since spun this into a startup called Guesstimate.

http://getguesstimate.com/

https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rv/guesstimate_an_app_for_making_decisions_with/

As a general query to other readers: Is it bad form to just ignore comments like this? I'm apt to think it unwise to try to talk about this topic here if it is just going to invoke Godwin's Law.

In general you can ignore comments when you don't like a productive discussion will follow.

LW by it's nature has people who argue a wide array of positions and in a case like this you will get some criticism like this. Don't let that turn you off LW or take it as suggestion that your views are unwelcome here.

We're not talking about all of science. (Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand.) We're talking about whether or not anthropic reasoning tells us to expect to see people building the LHC, at a cost of $1 billion per year.

Thatcher apparently rejected the idea as presented, and rightly too if the Internet accurately reported the pitch they made to her. (In this popular account, the Higgs mechanism doesn't "explain mass," it replaces one arbitrary number with another! I still don't know the actual reasons for believing in it!) So we don't need to imagine humanity dying out, and we don't need to assume that civilization collapses after using up irreplaceable fossil fuels. (Though that one seems somewhat plausible.) I don't think we even need to assume religious tyranny crushes respect for science. Slightly less radical changes to the culture of a small fraction of the world seem sufficient to prevent the LHC expenditure for the foreseeable future. Add in uncertainty about various risks that fall short of total annihilation, and this certainty starts to look ridiculous.

Now as I said, one could make a different anthropic argument based on population in various 'worlds'. But as I also said, I don't think we know enough to get a high probability from that either.

In these spheres people generally understand that heuristics optimize for something. Frequently people think they optimize for some ancestral environment that's quite unlike the world we are living in at the moment. I think that's a question where a well written post would be very useful.

This is probably not a novel analogy, but the surprising thing to me is that social psychology tends to frame any "reticle adjustment" as a bias against which we must fight without testing its performance in the contexts under which the adjustment was made.

I would think that many sociologists would say that many people who are racist and look down on Blacks are racists because they don't interact much with Blacks. If the adjustment was made during a time where the person was at an all-White school, the interesting question isn't whether the adjustment performs well within the context of the all-White school but whether it also performs well at decisions made later outside of that heterogeneous environment.

Yup! I agree completely.

If you were modeling an octopus-based sentient species, for the purposes of writing some interesting fiction, then this would be a nice detail to add.

Lottery income is most definitely taxed, although this likely makes little difference to your point.

the fact that I feel that my field is an unfriendly environment for the free exploration of novel or uncommon ideas ... "stereotype accuracy"

Since you are going to spend a lifetime working in this field, you... may have problems.

Ah yes, pausing ghostery seems to fix it.

Clicking the "Donate now" button under "PayPal or Credit Card" does not seem to do anything other than refresh the page.

(browser Firefox 48.0 , OS Ubuntu)

That sounds like "thesis is true" or "thesis is not true" are reasonable positions. Bayesian beliefs have probabilities attached to them.

Sometimes, even people who understand Bayesian reasoning use idiomatic phrases like "believe is true" as a convenient shorthand for "assign a high probability to"! I can see how that might be confusing!

Like I just said, modern science started with an extreme outlier.

There's a lot of history of science and it generally doesn't find that it all hinges on one event like Newton.

My favorite one: burning wood for heat. Better than fossil fuels for the GW problem, but really bad for local air quality.

Yeah, this article seems overly harsh on the "restrainists." After all, their assumption could have started from the empirical observation that many species have reproductive strategies that do not emphasize "as many as possible." Humans, elephants, and Lions have few offspring per reproductive cycle relative to spiders and frogs. Clearly SOMETHING is restraining their reproductive rate and promoting a high investment strategy.

Even so, it was probably very improbable, considered in an isolated event—but it only had to happen once, and there were a lot of tide pools.

isn't it more likely that the "first replicator" was not a single event, but that it started multiple times and failed to survive in the vast majority of cases?

You forgot about MetaOmega, who gives you $10,000 if and only if No-mega wouldn't have given you anything, and O-mega, who kills your family unless you're an Alphabetic Decision Theorist. This comment doesn't seem specifically anti-UDT -- after all, Omega and No-mega are approximately equally likely to exist; a ratio of 1:1 if not an actual p of .5 -- but it still has the ring of Just Cheating. Admittedly, I don't have any formal way of telling the difference between decision problems that feel more or less legitimate, but I think part of the answer might be that the Counterfactual Mugging isn't really about how to act around superintelligences: It illustrates a more general need to condition our decisions based on counterfactuals, and as EY pointed out, UDT still wins the No-mega problem if you know about No-mega, so whether or not we should subscribe to some decision theory isn't all that dependent on which superintelligences we encounter.

I'm necroing pretty hard and might be assuming too much about what Caspian originally meant, so the above is more me working this out for myself than anything else. But if anyone can explain why the No-mega problem feels like cheating to me, that would be appreciated.

It's bleen, without a moment's doubt.

"Policy debates should not appear one-sided" doesn't in this case give credence to the idea that a world with suffering implies the possibility of the God. Quite the opposite. That is a post-hoc justification for what should be seen as evidence to lower the probability of "belief in just and benevolent God." This is analogous to EY's example of the absence of sabotage being used as justification for the concentration camps in "Conservation of Expected Evidence"

Unlike the others on the internet, I appreciate this course a lot and have accomplished a few very important things because of the Landmark Forum. I saw life in a very different and inspiring form after the weekend. Life was no more a burden or routines. The most important thing that I learnt was that "Life has no rules." This may have changed a lot in me. Now we all have some or the other kind of worries and Landmark Forum is the place where we could see through them and solve all the complications. Just after the course I took a vacation and travelled by myself. It was blissful and gave me some time to reflect on the course and all the heavy learning from the weekend. I saw things in such positive perspective because of the Landmark Forum. I have shared the info and my experience of the course to many of my colleagues and couldn't stop myself from writing about it here because it might be a blessing for you as it's for me!

I think this answer contains something important--

Not so much an answer to the problem, but a clue to the reason WHY we intuitively, as humans, know to respond in a way which seems un-mathematical.

It seems like a Game Theory problem to me. Here, we're calling the opponents' bluff. If we make the decision that SEEMINGLY MAXIMIZES OUR UTILITY, according to game theory we're set up for a world of hurt in terms of indefinite situations where we can be taken advantage of. Game Theory already contains lots of situations where reasons exist to take action that seemingly does not maximize your own utility.

and they don't understand that there has never been a common ancestor of all and only the monkeys

This fact though -- that monkeys are paraphyletic -- argues in favour of (not against) the view that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was itself monkey-like...

If you think about when the "ape traits" must have evolved, it would be after the new-world monkeys had already diverged away. The common ancestor of monkeys and apes wouldn't have had them, but must have had those traits common to both old and new-world monkeys. It itself has to be basically a monkey.

(I drew out a phylogenetic tree for this but couldn't get it to format, alas...)