"Society begins to appear much less unreasonable when one realizes its true function. It is there to help everyone to keep their minds off reality." Celia Green, The Human Evasion.

http://deoxy.org/evasion/4.htm

It's a question of which data you're interested in explaining. I'm more interested in understanding the mechanism of how Newton invented calculus than in explaining the (comparatively uninteresting) fact that most other people didn't. (If you want to program an AI to invent calculus, crying "IQ!" isn't going to help.)

[ETA: To be more explicit: the vague hypothesis that "Newton had a high IQ" adequately explains why, given that calculus was invented, Newton was among two people to have invented it. But does a much less effective job of explaining why it was invented in the first place, by anybody.]

(As it happens, most of the world's intellectual power has in fact been spread via students rather than children.)

Have you ever done this? Example?

Irony is a means of simultaneously signalling and countersignalling.

By ironically obeying correct social forms, it is possible to receive status from conventional culture and counter-culture. The conventional culture does not want to admit that it is the butt of irony, and the counterculture likes people who score points off of the conventional culture. Is anyone aware of research into irony as a signalling strategy?

It confuses me slightly that, from superficial glances, the discussion there and in threads like this one focuses on "ancestor" simulations, rather than simulations run by five-dimensional cephalopods. Ryan North got it right when he had T-Rex say "and not necessarily our own", but then he seems to get confused when he says "a 1:1 simulation of a universe wouldn't work" - why not?

Personally, I like Wei Dai's conclusion that we both are and aren't in a simulation.

That's a flimsy rejection, since Phil mentioned donating to programs that provide contraceptives in the Third World.

And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning!

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

I'm not sure this is a good choice. From what I recall there are a lot of details that are wrong in here. Anyone who's read it more recently? Can you fill us in?

I agree that the true PD never happens in human existence, and that's yet another reason why I'm outraged at using a mathematically flawed decision theory to teach incoming students of rationality that they ought to betray their friends. (C, C) FTW!

(Actually, that would make a nice button.)

But I defend the use of simple models for the sake of understanding problems with mathematical clarity; if you can't model simple hypothetical things correctly, how does it help to try to model complex real things correctly first? In real life, no one is an economic agent; in real life, no laws except basic physics and theorems therefrom have universal force; in real life, an asteroid can always strike at any time; in real life, we can never use Bayesian reasoning... but knowing a bit of math still helps, even if it never applies perfectly above the level of quarks.

If losing is a soul-crushing defeat to be avoided at all costs and winning is The Delicious Cake, not the icing, there is a much stronger incentive to win.

See the OB article on Lost Purposes- there's a distinct chance that a process optimized for fact-finding or interesting-fact gathering won't be optimized for winning. Sometimes our map needs to reflect the territory just enough for us to find the treasure.

In the real world where games have consequences, there is specialization, insofar as it is possible, in exploration and winning. Defense R&D is a function very separate from combat, and engineering is mostly separate from physics. Because there are limits to the scope of human attention, our sense of "this might be useful elsewhere" comes into conflict with the drive to start and finish projects.