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This comment was sitting at -2 when I saw it, which makes me think that maybe I don't understand Eliezer's point. I thought the OP was making the point that when we talk about something being "attractive" or "moral" or maybe even "sapient", we project facts about our minds into the real world. "Attractive" really means "attractive to humans", and if we forget this fact, we can end up inadvertently drawing wrong conclusions about the world. If that's wrong, then what was this post actually about?
The part you highlight about shminux's comment is correct, but this part:
this would define "looks attractive to a certain subset of humans"
is wrong; attractiveness is psychological reactions to things, not the things themselves. Theoretically you could alter the things and still produce the attractiveness response; not to mention the empirical observation that for any given thing, you can find humans attracted to it. Since that part of the comment is wrong but the rest of it is correct, I can't vote on it; the forces cancel out. But anyway I find that to be a better explanation for its prior downvotation than a cadre of anti-shminux voters.
Mind you I downvoted JohnEPaton's comment because he got all of this wrong.
In response to
Open Thread, July 16-31, 2012
For a while, I assumed that I would never understand UDT. I kept getting confused trying to understand why an agent wouldn't want or need to act on all available information and stuff. I also assumed that this intuition must simply be wrong because Vladimir Goddamned Nesov and Wei Motherfucking Dai created it or whatever and they are both straight upgrades from Grognor.
Yesterday, I saw an exchange involving Mitchell Porter, Vladimir Nesov, and Dmytry_messaging. The latter of these insisted that one-boxing in transparent Newcomb's (when the box is empty) was irrational, and I downvoted him because of course I knew he was wrong. Today at work (it is a mindless job), I thought for a while about the reply I would have given private_messaging if I did not consider it morally wrong to reply to trolls, and I started thinking things like how he either doesn't understand reflective consistency or doesn't understand why it's important and how if you two-box then Omega predicted correctly and I also thought,
"Well sure the box is empty, but you can't condition on that fact or else-"
It hit me like a lightning bolt. That's why it's called updateless! That's why you need to- oh man I get it I actually get it now!
I think this happened because of how much time I've spent thinking about this stuff and also thanks to just recently having finished reading the TDT paper (which I was surprised to find contained almost solely things I already knew).
It's like religion. If you accept that God and Hell are real, then becoming a fundamentalist Christian and trying as hard as you can to convert as many people as possible is the only ethical option.
Nonsense. That is the most ethical of the options that your brain is willing to provide you when you ask it "what is the best option?" But if someone actually had that belief a more ethical option would be to murder as many Muslims, Atheists and Buddhists (of child bearing age) as you can. The chance that you will successfully convert any given individual is tiny and if you allow them to live to breed they will raise children doomed to hell.
An even better option is to kill all males who will not convert and keep all women (Christian and otherwise) pregnant constantly with twins (IVF, fertility drugs). The children are to be taken and raised to be loyal to your faith.
(Or you build an FAI to tile the universe with Christians with the minimum possible lifespan to qualify for heaven.)
In response to
Verbal Overshadowing and The Art of Rationality
Both of the studies linked to at the top of this post, on which the entire post is based, have been discredited. Even if they were true, I think it was a stretch to go from those to postulating a generalized verbal overshadowing bias.
With the benefit of hindsight I can say that this post was probably a mistake, which leaves me a bit dumbfounded at its karma score of 61 and endorsement by Newsome. When I scrolled down to the bottom I saw that I had already downvoted it, which made me even more confused.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
Hellow Lesswrong! (I posted this in the other July2012 welcome thread aswell. :P Though apparently it has too many comments at this point or something to that effect.)
My name is Ryan and I am a 22 year old technical artist in the Video Game industry. I recently graduated with honors from the Visual Effects program at Savannah College of Art and Design. For those who don't know much about the industry I am in, my skill set is somewhere between a software programmer, a 3D artist, and a video editor. I write code to create tools to speed up workflows for the 3D things I or others need to do to make a game, or cinematic.
Now I found lesswrong.com through the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality podcast. Up unto that point I had never heard of Rationalism as a current state of being... so far I greatly resonate with the goals and lessons that have come up in the podcast, and what I have seen about rationalism. I am excited to learn more.
I wouldn't go so far to claim the label for myself as of yet, as I don't know enough and I don't particularly like labels for the most part. I also know that I have several biases, I feel like I know the reasons and causes for most, but I have not removed them from my determinative process.
Furthermore I am not an atheist, nor am I a theist. I have chosen to let others figure out and solve the questions of sentient creators through science, and I am no more qualified to disprove a religious belief than I would be to perform surgery... on anything. I just try to leave religion out of most of my determinations.
Anyway! I'm looking forward to reading and discussing more with all of you!
Current soapbox: Educational System of de-emphasizing critical thinking skills.
If you are interested you can check out my artwork and tools at www.ryandowlingsoka.com
I am no more qualified to disprove a religious belief than I would be to perform surgery... on anything.
I disagree with this claim. If you are capable of understanding concepts like the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle, you are more than capable of recognizing that there is no god and that that hypothesis wouldn't even be noticeable for a bounded intelligence unless a bunch of other people had already privileged it thanks to anthropomorphism.
Also, please don't call what we do here, "rationalism". Call it "rationality".
No, I don't, liar.
It is one thing to have sockpuppets for the purpose of humor. It is another to keep them secret and lie about them. It is particularly ridiculous when you have previously revealed your other sockpuppet account.
I now consider Clippy's use of multiple accounts (with dishonesty) to be a violation of good faith usage of the site. Every comment made by the Clippy account will be downvoted by myself and should be downvoted by all other users until it is abandoned. It is unfortunate for me that Clippy has multiple accounts to potentially be voting with in retaliation but I have karma to spare and the Clippy account has become too much of a nuisance.
On reflection, I agree with you and will be downvoting all of Clippy's comments and those of all other abusive sockpuppets I'm aware of.
In response to
Game Theory As A Dark Art
I really wish you would have put a disclaimer on these posts the likes of:
One of the assumptions The Art of Strategy makes is that rational agents use causal decision theory. This is not actually true, but I'll be using their incorrect use of "rationality" in order to make you uncomfortable.
Anyway,
Nick successfully meta-games the game by transforming it from the Prisoner's Dilemma (where defection is rational) [...]
this is the problem with writing out your whole sequence before submitting even the first post. You make the later posts insufficiently responsive to feedback and make up poor excuses for not changing them.
Edit: Why yes, wedrifid, there was. Fixed.
(First, my apologies to Will and Divia for the unpleasantness of this subthread topic.)
The evidence in the human genome suggests that the majority of all the men who made it to sexual maturity apparently died without offspring; their womenfolk rejected them in favor of their tribes' alpha bad boys
The former claim there is evidence for. For the latter claim ("their womenfolk...") there cannot today exist evidence in the human genome, since we don't know what "alpha bad boy" would look like in a genome. The latter claim scarcely rises to the level of "speculation" — I'd call it "drama".
Since we know that war and kidnap-rape are major activities of young men in many societies in situations resembling the ancestral environment (see Pinker 2011), it seems that we should expect the discrepancy to be due to young men killing each other and kidnapping and raping young women. Rape is a lot less effective of a reproductive strategy than it once was, thanks to such social innovations as criminal prosecutions and abortions.
(On the other hand, perhaps by "alpha bad boy" you actually meant "murderer, rapist, and slaveholder" whereas I took it as meaning "seducer"?)
I initially had the parent upvoted, but I retracted it on learning that the grandparent comment is speaking from experience, and since I have the same experience, it's difficult not to believe.
In response to
Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3
Could someone please explain to me exactly, precisely, what a utility function is? I have seen it called a perfectly well-defined mathematical object as well as not-vague, but as far as I can tell, no one has ever explained what one is, ever.
The words "positive affine transformation" have been used, but they fly over my head. So the For Dummies version, please.
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But if even a tiny fraction of future observers thinks seriously about the hypothesis despite knowing the solution...
My current guess is that having the knows-the-solution property puts them in a different reference class. But if even a tiny fraction deletes this knowledge...