Comment author: Rixie 29 March 2013 04:55:47PM 1 point [-]

I can testify to that.

Say, does anyone know where I can find unbiased information on the whole Christianity/Atheism thing?

Comment author: DimitriK 18 December 2014 08:11:22PM 0 points [-]

You might (with difficulty) find an unbiased investigation into theism vs atheism

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 05 March 2009 10:29:00PM 29 points [-]

I don't know how well you know this person, so my advice may be unnecessary. But your post gives me the impression that you need to be much more careful about speculating on how her mind works. I think that it's a red flag when you write first that

I can see the pattern in the words coming out of her lips, but I can't understand the mind behind on an empathic level. I can imagine myself into the shoes of baby-eating aliens and the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu, but I cannot imagine what it is like to be her.

. . . and then proceed to make apparently confident declarations about how her mind works, such as

I now realize that the whole essence of her philosophy was her belief that she had deceived herself, and the possibility that her estimates of other people were actually accurate, threatened the Dark Side Epistemology that she had built around beliefs such as "I benefit from believing people are nicer than they actually are."

She has taken the old idol off its throne, and replaced it with an explicit worship of the Dark Side Epistemology that was once invented to defend the idol; she worships her own attempt at self-deception. The attempt failed, but she is honestly unaware of this.

As you yourself have observed, we largely understand other people by taking a portion of our own black-box mind, plugging in a few explicit settings (such as beliefs or experiences), letting the model run for a bit, and seeing what pops out. In particular, to understand how another person makes judgments, we collect their evinced beliefs, try to twiddle some dials until our model expresses the same beliefs, and then let it run for a bit. We then try to peer into the model as best we can, getting as good a picture of its inner workings as introspection allows us. We then take this picture as our hypothesis about how the other person thinks.

But the first quote above is strong evidence that your mind works differently from hers in some highly relevant respects. Therefore, you should be highly skeptical that what is going on in her mind resembles what it took to make the model of her in your own mind match her utterances. But you give me the impression that you haven't been sufficiently skeptical of the match between her mind and your model of it. I think that this has led you astray on several points.

For example, based on what you've written, I don't think that you're using the right model to understand what was going on in her mind when she said, "I believe that people are nicer than they really are." You were led to this confusion because she was not using the word "believe" in the way that you, and your model of her, do. You are using "belief" to mean a feature of a model of how the world is. But that, I expect, is not what she meant. Thus, your remarks here --

I tried to explain that if you say, "People are bad," that means you believe people are bad, and if you say, "I believe people are nice", that means you believe you believe people are nice. So saying "People are bad and I believe people are nice" means you believe people are bad but you believe you believe people are nice.

-- were irrelevant because they do not apply to the sense of the word "believe" that she was using.

For what it's worth, in my model of her, when she said "I believe that people are nicer than they really are," she meant, "When I reflect on my emotional attitude towards people, I see that this attitude is of the sort that, in the absence of its actual cause, could have been caused by a falsely high belief (in your sense) about peoples' niceness."

The actual cause for her emotional attitude is perhaps her "religion". Or perhaps it is something else. Perhaps she has no idea what the actual cause is, or perhaps she thinks she does, but she doesn't really. But none of this implies that she was attributing to herself the belief that people are nicer than she actually believes them to be (where, here, I'm using "belief" in your sense.)

Her utterance seems analogous to someone who walks out of an optometrist's office after having his pupils dilated and says, "Because of those drops the optometrist gave me, I believe the sun is brighter than it really is." If we heard this, we shouldn't conclude that he believes something contradictory, or that he has incorrect beliefs about his beliefs. His word "belief" in this case probably does not mean "best guess about how things really are." Rather, it's a clumsy way to say that some qualities of his experience of the world are as if he had a certain belief (in the sense normally understood). He does not mean to imply that he has any wrong beliefs (in the conventional sense). It would be a mistake to say that his subjective experience of the light is in any way erroneous. After all, it accurately reflects the fact that he had those drops put in his eyes.

Similarly, your interlocutor's statement that she "believes" that people are nicer than they really are referred to a particular quality of her emotional attitude towards them, not to a belief (in your sense) about how they are. In particular, it didn't imply any expectation about how they would behave. That, I expect, is why she was initially taken aback when you asked, "So, are you consistently surprised when people undershoot your expectations?" The problem wasn't, as you appear to think, that she had prevented her own mind from drawing obvious conclusions. The problem was that you (because of her confusing wording) were speaking of her so-called "belief" as though it were a belief in the normal sense, something that should lead to certain expectations about other peoples' actions. But I expect that it wasn't any such thing, notwithstanding her unfortunate choice of words.

Comment author: DimitriK 16 November 2014 06:05:27PM 0 points [-]

When I read "i believe people are nicer than they really are" I got the impression her meaning was along the lines of "people are nicer inside than their actions. On reflection, this might be because that's what I believe. It ties in to fundamental attribution error. Peoples actions are based so much on environment and circumstance that if you had a way to truly look into a person I think you'd see a better person than you would have guessed if you only looked at their actions. Most people don't see themselves as evil. They do things we see as evil but in their heads they are doing what they think is good.

Id be interested in hearing what exactly she said that brought on your analysis Eliezer. I realise it was a long time ago, and im not likely to get a reply anyway, but it seems likely to me her statemen came from an intuitive belief in fundamental attribution error. I know I held that belief long before I encountered it first in HPMoR, so its possible for her too.

Comment author: DimitriK 13 November 2014 04:42:00PM *  0 points [-]

On the question of Einstein I anchored, but I don't see how else I could have done it. I don't know much about his personal history but I get the sense Einstein had some contributions to the atom bomb, and had fled Europe to escape nazi prosecution. I anchored on 1945 as the end of WW2 and figured he must have left a fair bit sooner, possibly before the war as nazi persecution had already started before the war was underway.

I guessed 1937. I can't see how else I could have gone about it with the limited information I had. If I can't google for the question I have to go with what's a familiar piece of information and adjust from there.

I looked it up after and he was visiting the us in '33 and decided to not go back to Germany when hitler came to power. I wasnt correct but anchoring let me make a reasonably good guess when I was dealing with a lack of information

Comment author: jbay 23 April 2013 03:38:24AM 7 points [-]

From the impression I get from my acquaintances who grew up in the USSR, high school math over there was considerably more advanced than what passes as 'math' in most of North America's school system, and included linear algebra and calculus. I don't know if this is still the case.

In response to comment by jbay on Guardians of Ayn Rand
Comment author: DimitriK 12 November 2014 10:49:07PM 1 point [-]

I attended 2 years of school in Ukraine before my family immigrated. This was in '96/97. I can attest that math was far more advanced there (at least back then. Though this is still post-ussr). Ex: We were learning about functions in grade 2 (didnt touch it until grade 8-9 here in Canada.) I remember my parents being somewhat unhappy when most of the math I did in third Year was two digit addition and subtraction.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 December 2007 09:07:38PM -2 points [-]

Really, Chris. So if I believe in the value of the environment, but believe that it's much less valuable than the use to be gained by paving it over with strip mines, then I'm an "environmentalist"?

In any case it's a moot point. Mark Plus coined the term "Singularitarian", but didn't do much with it; when I decided to build a Singularitarian movement, I asked Mark Plus for ownership of the word and was granted it; and I define the term to involve activism. If you mean something else by the word, feel free to call yourself a "Singularian" or something.

Comment author: DimitriK 12 November 2014 10:12:00PM 1 point [-]

I think Chris was talking about value in a relative sense (though ironicly was sloppy and left his statement too vague).

What's more surprising here is that you guys are arguing over a definition of environmentalim. Taboo it and you'd probably agree.

Most surprising of all is seeing you claim you own a word, Eliezer. I may have just started reading these sequences but I'm pretty sure there was a post or two on how you can't just define a word how you want.

Ironically enough you are guarding singularitarianism with your comment. And you're doing it by redefining the word to suit youside. And im pretty sure its a redefinement. The normative use for singularitarianist doesn't involve activism. Nor does environmentalist. You might value one singularitarianist or environmentalist more than another if they are an activist for thecause, but that's another matter.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 September 2007 03:48:22AM 0 points [-]

I do think misinterpretation is a genuine possibility.

Of course, but it's always the author's fault, at least if you happen to be an author. It's not the audience who misinterprets your words, it's you.

Also, you left out the good bit in your Orwell quote

Vivid imagery, yes; rational argument, no. Orwell wrote some classic stuff on Traditional Rationality but I never said he was a True Bayesian Master.

Comment author: DimitriK 03 November 2014 03:31:29PM 0 points [-]

I agree with cihan here. It may not be a rational argument by itself, but it enhances the preceding argument because it makes you feel what the argument is all about. Besides, I got the impression your post was about how this is an important factor often missing from discussion. Or were you talking about active vs passive voice only?