In response to Media bias
Comment author: CatDancer 05 July 2009 10:20:11PM 3 points [-]

I suspect that the informal nature of a talk might mean that one can describe things at an intermediate level of detail ("and so do this and that") that would look strange in a more formal paper, and so writers feel that they're stuck with either going into a full level of detail (which would be too much work to do for everything) or else saying "I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader"... even though going into some detail would be more useful to the reader.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 March 2009 09:09:58PM 1 point [-]

Which rather begs the question of why people move to subsistence farming. Perhaps it's a group selection thing

Did you just say the words "group selection"? Out loud?

There's no need to suppose that subsistence farming reproductively benefits the group of farmers but not the individual - that doesn't even seem to make much sense in this context.

I believe I recall seeing other studies claiming that the hunter-gatherer life is being slightly overromanticized; they might have been healthy and tall, but they also underwent a good deal of stress and fear. The carrying capacity of the environment would have been determined by lean years, not average years. One good episode of starvation and you can see why they might want to try raising a few crops. And then anyone who didn't bother raising crops would have been pushed out / exterminated by the far more numerous farmers.

Comment author: CatDancer 30 March 2009 12:09:21AM 4 points [-]

they might have been healthy and tall

Gosh, I'd sure like to see some actual statistics on that.

According to Kevin Kelly in The World Without Technology, the reason why everyone in a HG tribe is healthy is because their life expectancy is so low that all their older and less healthy people are already dead.

Comment author: CatDancer 27 February 2009 09:21:46PM *  12 points [-]

Your explanation / definition of intelligence as an optimization process. (Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization)

That was a major "aha" moment for me.

Comment author: CatDancer 06 October 2008 01:42:41AM 0 points [-]

George, Brian: thank you for the elaborations. Perhaps the point is that if I have a mental model of when the mathematician will say what, and that model is reasonably accurate, I can use that information to make more accurate deductions?

Which seems fairly obvious... but perhaps that's also the point, that Bayesian statistics allows you to use what information you have.

Comment author: CatDancer 05 October 2008 07:04:51PM 0 points [-]

"There's no reason to believe, a priori, that the mathematician will only mention a girl if there is no possible alternative."

Erp, I don't understand what this sentence is referring to. Can someone do me a favor and explain what is the "no possible alternative" here?

In response to The Meaning of Right
Comment author: CatDancer 01 August 2008 02:48:00PM 1 point [-]

I have a newbie question... if A) quantum mechanics shows that we can't distinguish personal identity by the history of how someone's atoms got into the configuration that they are in, and B) morality (other things being equal) flows backwards from the end result, and C) it is immoral to allow a child to die on the railroad tracks, then D) why would it not also be immoral to decide not to marry and have children? Both decisions have the same consequence (a live child who otherwise would not be).

At some point we (or the machines we build) will be able to manipulate matter at the quantum level, so I think these kind of questions will be important if we want to be able to make moral decisions when we have that capability.

If I myself were given the task to program the little child life saving machine, I admit that right now I wouldn't know how to do better than a naive leads-to-child-living rule which would result in the mass of the observable universe being converted into habitat for children...

Assuming that we want it-all-adds-up-to-normalcy, we would hope to find a rule consistent with quantum mechanics that would end up with saving the life of a child on the railroad tracks having a higher moral imperative than converting the available mass of the universe into children (and habitat etc. so that they have happy fulfilling lives etc...)

The it-all-adds-up-to-normalcy approach though reminds me a bit of the correspondence principle in quantum mechanics. (The correspondence principle says that for large systems quantum mechanics should give the same result as classical mechanics). The principle was very useful when quantum mechanics was first being developed, but it completely broke down once we had large systems such as superconductors which could not be described classically. Similarly, I can imagine that perhaps my moral judgments would change if I was able to integrate the reality of quantum mechanics into my moral thinking.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit