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See https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.4318 , you need to formally reply to that.
In response to
New Pascal's Mugging idea for potential solution
Your link is broken. Here is the link.
In response to
[Effective Altruism] Promoting Effective Giving at Conferences via Speed Giving Games
What is the Speed Giving Game?
The text in you photograph is too small to read easily, or perhaps at all.
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[Effective Altruism] Promoting Effective Giving at Conferences via Speed Giving Games
It's not stated so explicitly, but it sounds like you're told about an effective charity and a not-so-effective charity, asked to choose one, and The Life You Can Save gives one dollar to whichever charity you chose. The context is used to spread ideas about effectiveness and encourage critical thinking about philanthropy.
And I guess this is the packet that he talked about giving to the SSA members, which describes how to run your own giving games.
Is the Absent-minded Driver an example of a single-player decision problem whose optimal policy is stochastic? Isn't the optimal policy to condition your decision on an unbiased coin?
I ask because it seems like it might make a good intuitive example, as opposed to the POMDP in the OP. But I'm not sure who your intended audience is.
In response to
Two forms of procrastination
This does sound like planning fallacy. This is probably obvious in hindsight, but there's research suggesting that you can make your estimates more accurate by imagining ways that it could be an underestimate, in advance. This is useful if you strictly want to increase the accuracy of your time estimates.
This doesn't seem as amazing as it is because this is a domain where you can use reference class forecasting (outside view) to cure planning fallacy like people usually do. It's notable that there is at last seemingly some way to mitigate planning fallacy on tasks that lack an obvious reference class; it always seemed like a weakness to me that we can only avoid planning fallacy if we have past examples to look at.
In response to
Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016
How does being nervous influence your ability stats? Being nervous improves my mental abilities (I usually did better on standardized tests than I did on practice ones and I can tell that my recall is much better when I'm nervous), but I get clumsier and less articulate. Interestingly, when I'm nervous I come across as being far less intelligent than I normally do, even though the reverse is true.
Adrenaline can improve function in a number of domains, so it might be that anyone who has test anxiety or some other performance anxiety could in certain situations that they perceive as threatening have some sweet concentration of adrenaline in their bodies such that they have improved performance rather than impaired performance, and this is never recognized as occurring by the same mechanism as test or performance anxiety unspecified because the amount of adrenaline causes symptoms that aren't detrimental. Conceivably the amount of adrenaline and the effects thereof could be different across different domains.
Maybe that happens to you. What do you think?
EDIT: This might lead to empirical evidence. Anxiety may decrease performance when attention has to be switched between tasks, but may improve performance when the task is difficult and singular. Think social situations vs. exams.
Only plans to kill my sister's addiction that account for my sister's feelings will work.
False. I assume that plans like "kidnapping her and keeping her in a private prison without access to heroin for a few months" would also work. Illegal and unethical perhaps, but still technically possible.
But I guess in real life it means something like "if she will not like the approach, she will sabotage it", which is probably true. :(
Only my sister can fully account for my sister's feelings.
Other can still make a guess, and maybe guess incorrectly, and maybe guess correctly.
I specifically described this as bad epistemology.
I'm sorry to hear about your sisters addition. That must be hard on you too.
You have special hardware for simulating others' cognition.
Yes, but that to what degree of fidelity? You also have special hardware to simulate objects. The question is one of fidelity and I understood the example thus. After all his analogy wasn't between emotions and objects but between amount of emotion and number of objects.
Sometimes how someone feels really doesn't matter, in really specific cases.
Yes, but that doesn't strike at the core of the matter, namely to what degree "you have no idea how I feel!" can be true.
The epistemically correct response ... is that I don't actually need to experience what she has to come up with good plans...
True - and as you say often not persuasive. What would be a persuasive or emphatic way to nudge her?
Yes, but that to what degree of fidelity? You also have special hardware to simulate objects. The question is one of fidelity and I understood the example thus. After all his analogy wasn't between emotions and objects but between amount of emotion and number of objects.
I don't know enough to say much, but I am wary about any speculation that glosses over social cognition as a very special kind of imagination that can seem identical to the other kind of imagination if you don't know that they happen in different places anatomically. It seems to make it harder to believe that any analogies will hold.
Yes, but that doesn't strike at the core of the matter, namely to what degree "you have no idea how I feel!" can be true.
I meant to link this to the part of the article that says that can feel like a challenge. Sometimes things feel like a challenge because someone's started counting points instead of writing down facts. Now that I reread it though, it doesn't seem like he was being very serious about the feeling of challenge. It probably means my original comment seemed less relevant than I thought it did.
Eek, I'd be really really careful with arguments like that.
If she doesn't agree that this is one of those cases where what she feels doesn't matter, why doesn't she? Maybe when she sees you as being insufficiently empathetic, it's on this level, not on the object level of how much her feelings about specific plans matter?
If she doesn't give her stamp of approval to your description of her thoughts, how would you know if you had it wrong? How would you notice if you were missing something important?
I get the kinds of things that you're talking about, but we're strictly talking about the argument "If Gram had been a drug addict, then he would know what kind of plan I actually need." Even if we take as an assumption that I have been a drug addict, then it does not follow that I am better at making plans that turn addicts into nonaddicts. If anything, I probably get the epistemic advantage from not being wireheaded. This is not about saying that there are times when someone's feelings don't have instrumental or moral weight. This is about saying that sometimes, people will make you think that an argument that includes knowledge of someone's values as a proposition is itself a value judgment, making something that should not be off limits into something that is off limits. I can say, "No, I would not be better able to help you if I became a drug addict. That argument can be false even if its premises are assumed true." If I stop talking about logical validity, which is always free game, and start being someone who blows off other people's feelings for no good reason, then cut my head off.
It's perhaps worth mentioning that this was a short encounter after a long separation, so this was an urgent situation where you cannot allow an addict to argue for credibility from expertise.
Let me know if this doesn't address your concerns in any way.
In response to
Notes on Imagination and Suffering
You have special hardware for simulating others' cognition. Neurologically, imagining how someone feels is a completely different thing from imagining a collection of 35 apples.
I can't tell what context you're getting this from, but I've seen "You don't understand how I feel!" used as bad epistemology.
My sister's a heroin addict, and she'll use the fact that I've never been addicted to heroin or experienced opioid withdrawals as a debate tactic. It goes something like:
Only plans to kill my sister's addiction that account for my sister's feelings will work.
Only my sister can fully account for my sister's feelings.
Therefore, only my sister can invent successful plans to kill her addiction.
As a corollary, anyone else's plans to kill my sister's addiction will fail.
It is known that heroin addicts invent good-looking plans for killing their addictions, but do not invent good plans for killing their addictions. By this argument she can ensure that all plans to kill her addiction will always eventually fail.
The epistemically correct response, even if it's not necessarily persuasive in this form (for otherwise I would have persuaded her), is to say that I don't actually need to experience what she has to come up with good plans for killing addictions. "Not knowing what it's like to be an addict doesn't make me bad at making decisions about addictions," pattern-matches to, "I don't empathize with you," and, if she really wasn't listening, "I claim to know more about your own phenomenal experiences than you."
Sometimes how someone feels really doesn't matter, in really specific cases. That is, sometimes it's not necessary for an argument to follow. If you let people conflate this specific and useful objection with a more general sort of paternalism where you always ignore the relevance of everyone's feelings, then you might flinch from being right or doing right.
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Given the OP and this, I thought that you might like this.
That's not too closely related to the OP in one sense, but I've been collecting what I might call 'stories of broken science,' and thought you might be doing the same thing for different reasons.