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MichaelVassar
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Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves
MichaelVassar11y90

Possibly valuable to talk with Robin Hanson and I for revision to HPMOR!Quirrell decision procedures from the source?

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Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
MichaelVassar11y70

There's an anecdote near the beginning of "introduction to psychoanalysis" where he discusses the dreams of arctic explorers, which are almost entirely about food, not about sex, for understandable reasons.

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Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People
MichaelVassar12y00

It is possible to play both, but difficult, and you can't play both at once as well as equally smart non-analytical types will play just the social game.

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Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People
MichaelVassar12y00

Two examples. Sexual selection and speciation. Nuff' said.

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Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People
MichaelVassar12y50

Yep, but the vast majority of people in a workplace, even those nominally there to deliver technical skills, are there to deliver social skills in reality, and all of the most highly paid people are paid for social skills.
That said, your right, still worth it. Being officially a foreigner is possibly the best approach.

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Another Critique of Effective Altruism
MichaelVassar12y00

Another reasonable concern has to do with informational flow-through lines. When novel investigation demonstrates that previous claims or perspectives were in error, do we have good ways to change the group consensus?

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A critique of effective altruism
MichaelVassar12y170

I spent many hours explaining a sub-set of these criticisms to you in Dolores Park soon after we first met, but it strongly seemed to me that that time was wasted. I appreciate that you want to be lawful in your approach to reason, and thus to engage with disagreement, but my impression was that you do not actually engage with disagreement, you merely want to engage with disagreement, basically, I felt that you believe in your belief in rational inquiry, but that you don't actually believe in rational inquiry.

I may, of course, be wrong, and I'm not sure how people should respond in such a situation. It strongly seems to me that a) leftist movements tend to collapse in schizm, b) rightist movements tend to converge on generic xenophobic authoritarianism regardless of their associated theory. I'd rather we avoid both of those situations, but the first seems like an inevitable result of not accommodating belief in belief, while the second seems like an inevitable result of accommodating it. My instinct is that the best option is to not accommodate belief in belief and to keep a movement small enough that schizm can be avoided. The worst thing for an epistemic standard is not the person who ignores or denies it, but the person who tries to mostly follow it when doing so feels right or is convenient while not acknowledging that they aren't following it when it feels weird or inconvenient, as that leads to a community of people with such standards engaging in double-think WRT whether their standards call for weird or inconvenient behavior. OTOH, my best guess is that about 50 people is as far as you can get with my proposed approach.

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Common sense as a prior
MichaelVassar12y20

I think that people following the standards that seem credible to them upon reflection is the best you can hope for. Ideally, upon reflection, bets and experiments will be part of those standards to at least some people. Hopefully, some such groups will congeal into effective trade networks. If one usually reliable algorithm disagrees strongly with others, yes, short term you should probably effectively ignore it, but that can be done via squaring assigned probabilities, taking harmonic or geometric means, etc, not by dropping it, and more importantly, such deviations should be investigated with some urgency.

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A critique of effective altruism
MichaelVassar12y50

I think that attempting effectiveness points towards a strong attractor of taking over countries.

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A critique of effective altruism
MichaelVassar12y30

I think that this is an effective list of real weak spots. If these problems can't be fixed, EA won't do much good.

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8Singularity Institute pitch and new project plus other organizations in our ecosystem
15y
13
23Singularity Non-Fiction Compilation to be Written
15y
26
22A speculation on Near and Far Modes
15y
71
20Signaling Strategies and Morality
16y
50
23Priors and Surprise
16y
32
85For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
16y
117
32New Year's Predictions Thread
16y
446
10New Year’s Resolutions Thread
16y
41
6Boston meetup Nov 15 (and others)
16y
1
13Less Wrong / Overcoming Bias meet-up groups
16y
31
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