= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
What does this mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_base_on_balls
Baseball pitchers have the option to 'walk' a batter, giving the other team a slight advantage but denying them the chance to gain a large advantage. Barry Bonds, a batter who holds the Major League Baseball record for home runs (a home run is a coup for the batter's team), also holds the record for intentional walks. By walking Barry Bonds, the pitcher denies him a shot at a home run. In other words, Paige is advising other pitchers to walk a batter when it minimizes expected risk to do so.
Since this denies the batter the opportunity to even try to get a hit, some consider it to be unsportsmanlike, and when overused it makes a baseball game less interesting. A culture of good sportsmanship and interesting games are communal goods in baseball-- the former keeps a spirit of goodwill, and the latter increases profitability-- so at a stretch, you might say Paige advises defecting in Prisoner's Dilemma type problems.
The problem with this logic is that my values are better than those of my ancestors.
Your values are what they are. They talk about how good certain possible future-configurations are, compared to other possible future-configurations. Other concepts that happen to also be termed "values", such as your ancestors' values, don't say anything more about comparative goodness of the future-configurations, and if they do, then that is also part of your values.
If you'd like for future people to be different in given respects from how people exist now, that is also a value judgment. For future people to feel different about their condition than you feel about their condition would make them disagree with your values (and dually).
Other concepts that happen to also be termed "values", such as your ancestors' values, don't say anything more about comparative goodness of the future-configurations, and if they do, then that is also part of your values.
I'm having difficulty understanding the relevance of this sentence. It sounds like you think I'm treating "my ancestors' values" as a term in my own set of values, instead of a separate set of values that overlaps with mine in some respects.
My ancestors tried to steer their future away from economic systems that included money loaned at interest. They were unsuccessful, and that turned out to be fortunate; loaning money turned out to be economically valuable. If they had known in advance that loaning money would work out in everyone's best interest, they would have updated their values (future-configuration preferences).
Of course, you could argue that neither of us really cared about loaning at interest; what we really cared about was a higher-level goal like a healthy economy. It would be convenient if we could establish a restate our values in a well-organized hierarchy, with a node at the top that was invariant on available information. But even if that could be done, which I doubt, it would still leave a role for available information in deciding something as concrete as a preferred future-configuration.
In response to
Value Deathism
The problem with this logic is that my values are better than those of my ancestors. Of course I would say that, but it's not just a matter of subjective judgment; I have better information on which to base my values. For example, my ancestors disapproved of lending money at interest, but if they could see how well loans work in the modern economy, I believe they'd change their minds.
It's easy to see how concepts like MWI or cognitive computationalism affect one's values when accepted. It's likely bordering on certain that transhumans will have more insights of similar significance, so I hope that human values continue to change.
I suspect that both quoted authors are closer to that position than to endorsing or accepting random value drift.
In response to
Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality
Reading LessWrong is primarily a willpower restorer for me. I use the "hit" of insight I get from reading a high quality post or comment to motivate me to start Working (and it's much easier to continue Working than to start). I save posts that I expect to be high quality (like Yvain's latest) for just before I'm about to start Working. Occasionally the insight itself is useful, of course.
Commenting on LessWrong has raised my standards of quality for my own ideas, understanding them clearly, and expressing them concisely.
I don't know if either of those are Work, but they're both definitely Win.
In response to
Problems in evolutionary psychology
I'm somewhat frustrated by the frequent posts warning us about the dangers of Ev. Psych reasoning. (It seems like we average at least one of these per month).
It seems like a lot of this widespread hostility (the reaction to Harald Eia's Hjernevask is a good example of this hostility) stems from the fact that ev. psych is new. New ideas are held to much higher standard than old ones. The early reaction to ev. psych within psychology was characteristic of this effect. Behaviorists, Freudians, and Social Psychologists all had created their own theories of "ultimate causation" for human behavior. None of those theories would have stood up to the strenuous demands for experimental validation that Ev. psych endured.
Evolutionary theories get mentioned a lot on this site, and I frequently feel that they are given far more weight than would be warranted. In particular, evolutionary theories about sex differences seem to get mentioned and appealed to as if they had an iron-cast certainty. People also don't hesitate to make up their own evolutionary psychological explanations.
I just don't think this is true. People do lots of hypothesis generation on LW, using many explanatory frameworks, and I see no reason to believe that Ev. Psych explanations are more overconfident.
New ideas are held to much higher standard than old ones... Behaviorists, Freudians, and Social Psychologists all had created their own theories of "ultimate causation" for human behavior. None of those theories would have stood up to the strenuous demands for experimental validation that Ev. psych endured.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that standards of evidence for new ideas are higher now than they have been in the past, or that people are generally biased in favor of older ideas over newer ones? Either claim interests me and I'd like a bit more explanation of whichever you intended.
In general, I think scientific hypotheses should invite "strenuous demands for experimental validation", not endure them.
I disagree with this one. If it's really your best guess, it should be the result of all of the information you have to muster. And so either each of "instinct", "intuition", "gut feeling", etc. are your best chance of being right, or they're not close synonyms for "best guess".
I agree (see, e.g., The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition for why this is the case). Unfortunately, I see this as a key inferential gap between people who are and aren't trained in rationality.
The problem is that many people-- dare I say most-- feel no obligation to gather evidence for their intuitive feelings, or to let empirical evidence inform their feelings. They don't think of intuitive feelings as predictions to be updated by Bayesian evidence; they treat their intuitive feelings as evidence.
It's a common affair (at least in the United States) to see debaters use unsubstantiated intuitive feelings as linchpins of their arguments. It's even common on internet debates to see whole chains of reasoning in which every link is supported by gut feeling alone. This style of argument is not only unpersuasive to anyone who doesn't share those intuitions already-- it prevents the debater from updating, as long as his intuitions don't change.
In response to
Five-minute rationality techniques
'Instinct,' 'intuition,' 'gut feeling,' etc. are all close synonyms for 'best guess.' That's why they tend to be the weakest links in an argument-- they're just guesses, and guesses are often wrong. Guessing is useful for brainstorming, but if you really believe something, you should have more concrete evidence than a guess. And the more you base a belief on guesses, the more likely that belief is to be wrong.
Substantiate your guesses with empirical evidence. Start with a guess, but end with a test.
Sure, but then the question becomes whether the other programmer got the program right...
My point is that if you don't understand a situation, you can't reliably write a good computer simulation of it. So if logical believes that (to use your first link) James Tauber is wrong about the Monty Hall problem, he has no reason to believe Tauber can program a good simulation of it. And even if he can read Python code, and has no problem with Tauber's implementation, logical might well conclude that there was just some glitch in the code that he didn't notice--which happens to programmers regrettably often.
I think implementing the game with a friend is the better option here, for ease of implementation and strength of evidence. That's all :)
At this point you've had this explained to you multiple times. May I suggest that if you don't get it at this point, maybe be a bit of an empiricist and write a computer program to repeat the game many times and see what fraction switching wins? Or if you don't have the skill to do that (in which case learning to program should be on your list of things to learn how to do. It is very helpful and forces certain forms of careful thinking) play the game out with a friend in real life.
If--and I mean do mean if, I wouldn't want to spoil the empirical test--logical doesn't understand the situation well enough to predict the correct outcome, there's a good chance he won't be able to program it into a computer correctly regardless of his programming skill. He'll program the computer to perform his misinterpretation of the problem, and it will return the result he expects.
On the other hand, if he's right about the Monty Hall problem and he programs it correctly... it will still return the result he expects.
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It seems like the definition of "physical" used in this article is "existing within physics" (a perfectly reasonable definition). By this definition, phenomena such as qualia, reasoning, and computation are all "physical" and are referred to as such in the article itself.
Brains are physical, and local physics seems Turing-computable. Therefore, every phenomenon that a physical human brain can produce, can be produced by any Turing-complete computer, including human reasoning and qualia.
So to "physically incorporate a human brain" in the sense relative to this article, the simulator does NOT need to include an actual 3-pound blob of neurons exchanging electrochemical signals. It only needs to implement the same computation that a human brain implements.