Peter_de_Blanc

Some rationality tweets

Will Newsome has suggested that I repost my tweets to LessWrong. With some trepidation, and after going through my tweets and categorizing them, I picked the ones that seemed the most rationality-oriented. I held some in reserve to keep the post short; those could be posted later in a separate post or in the comments here. I'd be happy to expand on anything here that requires clarity. Epistemology 1. Test your hypothesis on simple cases. 2. Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture. 3. The map is not the territory. 4. Thoughts about useless things are not necessarily useless thoughts. 5. One of the successes of the Enlightenment is the distinction between beliefs and preferences. 6. One of the failures of the Enlightenment is the failure to distinguish whether this distinction is a belief or a preference. 7. Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you. Group Epistemology 1. The best people enter fields that accurately measure their quality. Fields that measure quality poorly attract low quality. 2. It is not unvirtuous to say that a set is nonempty without having any members of the set in mind. 3. If one person makes multiple claims, this introduces a positive correlation between the claims. 4. We seek a model of reality that is accurate even at the expense of flattery. 5. It is no kindness to call someone a rationalist when they are not. 6. Aumann-inspired agreement practices may be cargo cult Bayesianism. 7. Godwin's Law is not really one of the rules of inference. 8. Science before the mid-20th century was too small to look like a target. 9. If scholars fail to notice the common sources of their inductive biases, bias will accumulate when they talk to each other. 10. Some fields, e.g. behaviorism, address this problem by identifying sources of inductive bias and forbidding their use. 11. Some fields avoid the accumulat

62Dec 30, 2010

Peter_de_Blanc

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AGI/FAI Theorist for Hire

I'm nearing the end of my employment at SIAI and looking for my next gig. If all else fails I will likely move back to the Bay area (I am currently in Japan) and take a job as a programmer somewhere. However, I would prefer to focus my attention directly...

Jul 15, 201120

Some rationality tweets

Dec 30, 201062

Pseudolikelihood as a source of cognitive bias

Pseudolikelihood is method for approximating joint probability distributions. I'm bringing this up because I think something like this might be used in human cognition. If so, it would tend to produce overconfident estimates. Say we have some joint distribution over X, Y, and Z, and we want to know about...

Nov 20, 201011

Shock Levels are Point Estimates

This is a post from my blog, Space and Games. Michael Vassar has requested that I repost it here. I thought about revising it to remove the mind projection fallacy, but instead I left it in for you to find. Eliezer Yudkowsky1999 famously categorized beliefs about the future into discrete...

Feb 14, 20109

Philadelphia LessWrong Meetup, December 16th

There will be a LessWrong meetup on Wednesday, December 16th (tomorrow). We're meeting at 7:15 PM at Kabul Restaurant at 106 Chestnut Street. Five people have confirmed so far.

Dec 16, 20097

The Domain of Your Utility Function

Unofficial Followup to: Fake Selfishness, Post Your Utility Function A perception-determined utility function is one which is determined only by the perceptual signals your mind receives from the world; for instance, pleasure minus pain. A noninstance would be number of living humans. There's an argument in favor of perception-determined utility...

Jun 23, 200942

Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality: Approximations

What is the probability that my apartment will be struck by a meteorite tomorrow? Based on the information I have, I might say something like 10-18. Now suppose I wanted to approximate that probability with a different number. Which is a better approximation: 0 or 1/2? The answer depends on...

Apr 28, 200930

LESSWRONG
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Peter_de_Blanc

Peter_de_Blanc

Peter_de_Blanc

Some rationality tweets

The Domain of Your Utility Function

Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality: Approximations

AGI/FAI Theorist for Hire

Peter_de_Blanc

AGI/FAI Theorist for Hire

Some rationality tweets

Pseudolikelihood as a source of cognitive bias

Shock Levels are Point Estimates

Philadelphia LessWrong Meetup, December 16th

The Domain of Your Utility Function

Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality: Approximations

Some rationality tweets

The Domain of Your Utility Function

Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality: Approximations

AGI/FAI Theorist for Hire

AGI/FAI Theorist for Hire

Some rationality tweets

Pseudolikelihood as a source of cognitive bias

Shock Levels are Point Estimates

Philadelphia LessWrong Meetup, December 16th

The Domain of Your Utility Function

Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality: Approximations