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My attempts at gauging sincerity are thrown off by the fact that you can spell his name correctly.
In response to
Yudkowsky's brain is the pinnacle of evolution
The post would have to be toned down quite a bit in order to appear to be possibly sincere.
How useful have the text logs proved?
Assuming you use a terminal, do you also keep your history from that?
I use dtSearch for the text searching, which works pretty well. I don't have to use it constantly but it works well when I need it, e.g. finding something from a website I viewed a few months ago, when I no longer remember which site it was, or determining whether I've ever come across a certain's person's name before, finding one of my passwords after I've forgotten where I saved it, and so on. Also, sometimes I haven't been sure about which keywords to search for, but I was able to determine that something must have happened on a particular day, and then I've been able to use the screenshots directly to search for it, scrolling through them like through a movie.
I don't use a terminal. Currently I've been using two personal computers and have kept the history from both.
- Getting an air filter can gain you ~0.6 years of lifespan, plus some healthspan. Here's /u/Louie's post where I saw this.
- Lose weight. Try Shangri-La, and if that doesn't work consider the EC stack or a ketogenic diet.
- Seconding James_Miller's recommendation of vegetables, especially cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, bok choy, cauliflower, collard greens, arugula...) Just eat entire plates of the stuff often.
- Write a script that takes a screenshot and webcam picture every 30 seconds. Save the files to an external hard drive. After a few decades, bury the external, along with some of your DNA and possibly brain scans, somewhere it'll stay safe for a couple hundred years or longer. This is a pretty long shot, but there's a chance that a future FAI will find your horcrux and use it to resurrect you. I think this is a better deal than cryonics since it costs so much less.
I do the screenshot / webcam thing, and OCR the screenshots so that my entire computing history is searchable.
I'm talking out of my ass now (I'm not sure if you are, have you lived in or studied the culture?) but I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.
If you truly came to resent the culture and beliefs of those around you, and didn't compartmentalize, I suspect two things would happen:
You would be incredibly unhappy.
Others would be pick up on your contempt, and it would be harder to make friends.
Yes, both of these happen. Also, it's harder to be friends even with the people you already know because you feel dishonest all the time (obviously because you are in fact being dishonest with them.)
There is a deep deep bias on LW of thinking that truth is the only aspect of belief that has value.
It's not a bias, but an expected-value calculation. Most falsehoods are utterly useless to believe, along the lines of "The moon is made of green cheese." Merely affecting a belief-in-belief can be useful for the vast majority of other cases without actually spoiling your own reasoning abilities by swallowing a poison pill of deliberate falsehood in the name of utility.
The issue is that without possessing complete information about your environment, you can't actually tell, a priori, which false beliefs are harmless and which ones will lose and lose badly.
When you have a sophisticated meta-level argument for object-level wrongness, you're losing.
If you are a Muslim in many Islamic countries today, and you decide that Islam is false, and let people know it, you can be executed. This does not seem to have a high expected value.
Of course, you could decide it is false but lie about it, but people have a hard time doing that. It is easier to convince yourself that it is true, to avoid getting killed.
In response to
Robert Aumann on Judaism
I don't see why so many people are assuming that Aumann is accepting a literal creation in six days. I read the article and it seems obvious to me that he believes that the world came to be in the ordinary way accepted by science, and he considers the six days to be something like an allegory. There is no need for explanations like a double truth or compartmentalization.
There are two different things.
David_Bolin said (emphasis mine): "He is saying that in the subjective sense, people don't actually have absolute certainty." I am interpreting this as "people never subjectively feel they have absolute certainty about something" which I don't think is true.
You are saying that from an external ("objective") point of view, people can not (or should not) be absolutely sure that their beliefs/conclusions/maps are true. This I easily agree with.
It should probably be defined by calibration: do some people have a type of belief where they are always right?
Eliezer isn't arguing with the mathematics of probability theory. He is saying that in the subjective sense, people don't actually have absolute certainty.
Errr... as I read EY's post, he is certainly talking about the mathematics of probability (or about the formal framework in which we operate on probabilities) and not about some "subjective sense".
The claim of "people don't actually have absolute certainty" looks iffy to me, anyway. The immediate two questions that come to mind are (1) How do you know? and (2) Not even a single human being?
Of course if no one has absolute certainty, this very fact would be one of the things we don't have absolute certainty about. This is entirely consistent.
In response to
0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities
This article is largely incoherent. The main justification is the abuse of an invalid transformations: y=x/(1-x) is not the bijection that he asserts it is, because it's not a function that maps [0,1] onto R. It's a function that maps [0,1] onto [1,\intfy] as a subset of the topological closure of R. And that's okay, but you can't say "well I don't like the topological closure of R, so I'll just use R and claim that 1 is where the problem is."
Additionally, his discussion of log odds and such is perfectly fine, but ignores the fact that there are places where you do need to have an odds of 0:1, or a log odds of negative infinity. Probability theory stops working when you throw out 0 and 1, it's as simple as that.
Even if you don't want to handle tautologies or contradictions, there are other ways to get P(X)=0 or 1. The probability that a real number chosen uniformly from the real interval [0,1] is 0. It has to be. It's a provable fact under ZFC and to decide otherwise is to say that you're more attached to the idea of 0 and 1 not being probabilities than you are to the fact that mathematics is consistent and if you really believe that, well, there's absolutely nothing I have to say to you.
This is one of those situations where EY just demonstrates he knows very little mathematics.
Eliezer isn't arguing with the mathematics of probability theory. He is saying that in the subjective sense, people don't actually have absolute certainty. This would mean that mathematical probability theory is an imperfect formalization of people's subjective degrees of belief. It would not necessarily mean that it is impossible in principle to come up with a better formalization.
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Upvoted because I think taking people's objections at face value is something we should be more open to. That being said, I'm a bit worried that the reason this has so many upvotes is because it tells us what we want to hear. (We're better than the common man! We have real interests and ambitions, not just staring into the water and waiting for a fish to bite!)
Maybe. I upvoted it because I thought it was correct, and corrects the misconception that desiring to live forever is obviously the correct thing to do, and that everyone would want it if they weren't confused.
Note that unless the probability that you begin to want to die during a certain period of time is becoming continuously lower, forever, then you will almost surely begin to want to die sooner or later.