Comment author: Kawoomba 16 August 2015 08:01:09AM 0 points [-]

Good content, however I'd have preferred "You Are A Mind" or similar. You are an emergent system centered on the brain and influences upon it, or somesuch. It's just that "brain" has come to refer to 2 distinct entities -- the anatomical brain, and then the physical system generating your self. The two are not identical.

Comment author: ChristianKl 06 June 2015 05:27:57PM 3 points [-]

b) Effective altruists don't want to upset their own System 1 sensibilities, their altruistic efforts would lose some of the fuzzies driving them if they needed to justify "mass sterilisation of third world countries" to themselves.

I think the likely result of any attempt of a mass sterilisation project is increased population because you don't get it to work but Western doctors in the third world lose credibility.

Will we influence that decisions only based on "provide better education, then hope for the best",

We actually have good data that better education decreases birth rates.

Comment author: Kawoomba 06 June 2015 05:56:31PM 1 point [-]

Certainly, within what's Good (tm) and Acceptable (tm), funding better education in the third world is the most effective method.

However, if you go far enough outside the Overton window, you don't need credibility, as long as the power asymmetry is big enough. You want food? It only comes with a chemical agent which sterilizes you, similar to Golden Rice. You don't need to accept it, you're free to starve. The failures of colonialism as well as the most recent forays into the middle east stem from the constraints of also having to placate the court of public opinion.

Regardless of this one example, are you taking the position of "the most effective methods are those within the Overton window"? That would be typical, but the actual question would be: Is it because changing the Overton window to include more radical options is too hard, or is it because those more radical options wouldn't feel good?

Comment author: Kawoomba 06 June 2015 04:54:30PM *  4 points [-]

I too have the impression that for the most part the scope of the "effective" in EA refers to "... within the Overton window". There's the occasional stray 'radical solution', but usually not much beyond "let's judge which of these existing charities (all of which are perfectly societally acceptable) are the most effective".

Now there are two broad categories to explain that:

a) Effective altruists want immediate or at least intermediate results / being associated with "crazy" initiatives could mean collateral damage to their efforts / changing the Overton window to accommodate actually effective methods would be too daunting a task / "let's be realistic", etc.

b) Effective altruists don't want to upset their own System 1 sensibilities, their altruistic efforts would lose some of the fuzzies driving them if they needed to justify "mass sterilisation of third world countries" to themselves.

Solutions to optimization problems tend to set to extreme values all those variables which aren't explicitly constrained. The question then is which ideals we're willing to sacrifice in order to achieve our primary goals.

As an example, would we really rather have people decide just how many children they want to to create, only to see those children perish in the resulting population explosion? Will we influence that decisions only based on "provide better education, then hope for the best", in effect preferring starving families with the choice to procreate whenever to non-starving families without said choice?

I do believe it would be disastrous for EA as a movement to be associated with ideas too far outside the Overton window, and that is a tragedy, because it massively restricts EA's maximum effectiveness.

Comment author: Kawoomba 01 June 2015 08:58:58PM 13 points [-]

MIRI continues to be in good hands!

Comment author: Kawoomba 19 May 2015 04:49:58PM *  9 points [-]

I'm not sure LW is a good entry point for people who are turned away by a few technical terms. Responding to unfamiliar scientific concepts with an immediate surge of curiosity is probably a trait I share with the majority of LW'ers. While it's not strictly a prequisite for learning rationality, it certainly is for starting in medias res.

The current approach is a good selector for dividing the chaff (well educated because that's what was expected, but no true intellectual curiosity) from the wheat (whom Deleuze would call thinkers-qua-thinkers).

HPMOR instead, maybe?

Comment author: Lumifer 11 May 2015 04:23:52PM *  5 points [-]

I have a feeling a lot of discussions of life extension suffer from being conditioned on the implicit set point of what's normal now.

Let's imagine that humans are actually replicants and their lifespan runs out in their 40s. That lifespan has a "control dial" and you can turn it to extend the human average life expectancy into the 80s. Would all your arguments apply and construct a case against meddling with that control dial?

Comment author: Kawoomba 11 May 2015 04:39:15PM *  3 points [-]

That's a good argument if you were to construct the world from first principles. You wouldn't get the current world order, certainly. But just as arguments against, say, nation-states, or multi-national corporations, or what have you, do little do dissuade believers, the same applies to let-the-natural-order-of-things-proceed advocates. Inertia is what it's all about. The normative power of the present state, if you will. Never mind that "natural" includes antibiotics, but not gene modification.

This may seem self-evident, but what I'm pointing out is that by saying "consider this world: would you still think the same way in that world?" you'd be skipping the actual step of difficulty: overcoming said inertia, leaving the cozy home of our local minimum.

Comment author: JonahSinick 06 May 2015 10:06:51PM 5 points [-]

Here too, it's unclear to me what your intent is in engaging with me. You seem upset with me, and I don't have an intuitive understanding of why. How could I interact with you with you and others in a way that wouldn't rub you the wrong way? I'm happy to seriously consider any suggestions. I don't want to rub anyone the wrong way.

But I'm not going to apologize for who I am. I'm someone who's deeply devoted to helping people, and who's spent thousands of hours of hard work developing very deep understanding of substantive intellectual material. I should be able to tell people who I am without facing hostility, in the same way that a gay person should be able to say that he or she is gay without facing hostility.

Comment author: Kawoomba 06 May 2015 10:24:46PM 6 points [-]

Disclosing one's sexual orientation won't be (mis)construed as a status grab in the same way as disclosing one's (real or imagined) intellectual superiority. Perceived arguments from authority must be handled with supreme care, otherwise they invariably set the stage for a primate hierarchy contest. Minute details in phrasing can make all the difference: "I could engage with people much smarter than you, yet I choose to help you, since you probably need my help and my advice" versus "I made the following experiences, hopefully someone [impersonal, not triggering status comparisons] can benefit from them". sigh, hoo-mans ... I could laugh at them all day if I wasn't one of them.

I'm happy to read your posts, but then I may be less picky about my cognitive diet than others. I mean, the alternative would be watching Hell's Kitchen. You do beat Gordon Ramsay on the relevant metrics, by a large amount.

Then again, maybe I'm just a bit jealous of your idealism.

Comment author: JonahSinick 05 May 2015 06:04:39PM 1 point [-]

This is helpful feedback. I do recognize that I have a lot of room for improvement in these regards. But making comments like

This lowers my expectation of you getting around to a sensible recommendation.

should be against community norms, not for my sake, but for the sake of the commenters – this is not a good mode of operation for overcoming bias and becoming less wrong (!!). Commenters should be inquisitive and open-minded rather than combative and dismissive.

Comment author: Kawoomba 05 May 2015 06:17:10PM 4 points [-]

I dislike the trend to cuddlify everything, to make approving noises no matter what, then framing criticisms as merely some avenue for potential further advances, or somesuch.

On the one hand, I do recognize that works better for the social animals that we are. On the other hand, aren't we (mostly) adults here, do we really need our hand held constantly? It's similar to the constant stream of "I LOVE YOU SO MUCH" in everday interactions, it's a race to the bottom in terms of deteriorating signal/noise ratios. How are we supposed to convey actual approval, shout it from the rooftops? Until that is the new de facto standard of neutral acknowledgment?

A Fisherian runaway, in which a simple truth is disregarded: When "You did a really good job with that, it was very well said, and I thank you for your interest" is a mandatory preamble to most any feedback, it loses all informational content. A neutral element of speech. I do wish for a reset towards more sensible (= information-driven) communication. Less social-affirmation posturing.

But, given the sensitive nature of topics here, this may be the wrong avenue to effect such a reset, invoking Crocker's Rules or no. Actually skipping the empty phraseology should be one of the later biases to overcome.

Comment author: JonahSinick 04 May 2015 06:33:55AM 0 points [-]

Part of what I'll be arguing is that the whole conceptual framework that people are using is wrong. :-)

As far as I can tell, it's empirically true that Scott's emotional reaction to the unsolvability of quintic is unusual amongst mathematicians (while being almost uniform amongst elite mathematicians). If true, then on that dimension, he's better at math than the average mathematician, even without having any technical knowledge, even not knowing calculus well enough to have gotten a grade higher than a C-.

I don't doubt that his struggling to get a C- in calculus reflects some sort of relative lack ability on his part, but I don't think that it carves reality at its joints to call that "mathematical ability."

Separately, I think that his calculus experience would have been very different if it had been immersive: I don't think that he would have gotten a grade below C in calculus if he had spent all waking hours talking about calculus with me for 6 months. Of the ~200 calculus students who I taught at University of Illinois, I don't think that there are any students for whom this is true.

Comment author: Kawoomba 05 May 2015 06:07:44PM 0 points [-]

I don't think that it carves reality at its joints to call that "mathematical ability."

... and we're down to definitional quibbles, which are rarely worth the effort, other than simply stating "I define x as such and such, in contrast to your defining x as such as such". Reality has no intrinsic, objective dictionary with an entry for "mathematical ability", so such discussions can mostly be solved by using some derivative terms x1 and x2, instead of an overloaded concept x.

Of course, the discussion often reduces to who has the primacy on the original wording of x, which is why I'd suggest that neither get it / taboo x.

I agree that a more complex, nuanced framework would better correspond to different aspects of cognitive processing, but then that's the case for most subject matters. Bonus for not being as generally demotivating as "you lack that general quality called math ability", malus points because of a complexity penalty.

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 April 2015 11:03:28PM 0 points [-]

Most high IQ people are very far from having learned a decent psychological toolkit. Schools are poor at teaching people to be happy.

Comment author: Kawoomba 20 April 2015 11:20:37PM 1 point [-]

Teaching happiness can be -- and often is -- at odds with teaching epistemic rationality.

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