Comment author: ChristianKl 21 January 2014 04:25:21PM 1 point [-]

Did you select cooperate or defect on the prisoner dilemma question?

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 22 February 2014 12:43:42AM 0 points [-]

I selected to cooperate.

If I'd thought the financial incentive to defect was greater, I may have been tempted to do so... ...but isn't it interesting that even a modest material reward didn't have the same effect as the incentive to lie about IQ?

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 21 January 2014 09:37:23AM *  7 points [-]

I am a member of this population, and I lied.

Helpful for letting us know there are bad people out there that will seek to sabotage the value of a survey even without any concrete benefit to themselves other than the LOLZ of the matter. But I think we are already aware of the existence of bad people.

As for your "I suspect that I am not alone", I ADBOC (agree denotationaly but object connotationaly). Villains exist, but I suspect villains are rarer than they believe themselves to be, since in order to excuse their actions they need imagine the whole world populated with villains (while denying that it's an act of villainy they describe).

"Two-thirds have a college degree and roughly one third are European citizens. Does this bode well for the affirmation about self-reported IQ?"

Well, I'm also a European (with a Master's Degree in Computer Science ) who didn't give my number in millions, and I could have my MENSA-acceptance letter scanned and posted if anyone disbelieves me on my provided IQ.

So bollocks on that. You are implying that people like me are liars just because we are careless readers or careless typists. Lying is a whole different thing than mere carelessness.

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 22 February 2014 12:27:23AM *  0 points [-]

Have you read Correspondence Bias?

I said that I "lied" when answering the IQ question because while I used the best available sources that I had, namely tests taken casually in non-official contexts, such as the Mensa Denmark Raven's test available at iqtest.dk as I mentioned above (similar in some regard to your own European Mensa test?), doing so constitutes knowingly violating the survey instructions. However closely the accuracy of such scores may approximate to your own is not relevant to the fact that my response did not conform to the survey instructions; it is extremely unlikely that I am the only individual who chose to do this. That is worth knowing.

What in my post gives the impression that I was twirling my mustache and rubbing my hands together like a devious little scamp with nothing better to do than to provoke hyperbole from someone in an online discussion?

I am not currently in a position to take an officially administered test of the kind specifically mentioned in survey (and have no desire to join Mensa), yet I preferred to give an answer using the closest available sources of information for the reasons stated above (bias).

The purpose of my post was to provide factual evidence towards a more complete assessment of the assertion that the IQ results are robust. Providing factual evidence (however small) relevant to this issue is not a personal assault on your character or an inference about whether or not you, personally, are a liar (I didn't know that you existed until you posted now).

Feeling bad that the survey results may not be accurate is one thing (you should feel at least a little bad, if you care at all about Less Wrong or the individuals that had to comb through and work with the results), but confusing your personal indignation with the reality of the results (either the IQ results are valid or not) is a mistake....one against which I'd thought this place tried to inculcate its participants.

"We are careless readers or careless typists"...? Are you sure that I am the only one whose bias is rarer than I imagine it to be? At the very least, I didn't go so far as to use the pronoun "we" when I said only that I "suspect I am not alone."

Also, given the results detailed above, what "sabotaged" the survey more? My IQ response or your carelessness?

In response to 2013 Survey Results
Comment author: Taurus_Londono 20 January 2014 08:00:44PM *  -1 points [-]

"So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests - ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source."

I am a member of this population, and I lied. Although I have taken variants of the aforementioned tests, I have never done so in an academic or professional context (ie; Raven's via iqtest.dk). I suspect that I am not the only one.

"People were really really bad at giving their answers in millions. I got numbers anywhere from 3 (really? three million people in Europe?) to 3 billion (3 million billion people = 3 quadrillion)."

Two-thirds have a college degree and roughly one third are European citizens. Does this bode well for the affirmation about self-reported IQ?

"...so it was probably some kind of data entry error..." "Computers (practical): 505, 30.9%"

If people lie about IQ, why not just check Wikipedia and cheat on the Europe question? I lied about IQ, but I did not cheat for the Europe question. I suspect that I am not alone.

IQ is arguably as direct a challenge to self-appraisal as you can put to anyone who would self-select for an LW survey. Because mean for HBD was 2.7, many of the respondents may feel that IQ does not fall into predictable heritability patterns by adulthood (say, 27.4 years old). Could it be intertwined with self-attribution bias and social identity within a community devoted to rational thinking? Perhaps they don't realize that rational decision-making =/= improved performance on Raven's Progressive Matrices.

If I was a member of a health club for 2.62 years, ipso facto, would I be inclined to self-report as physically fit/strong/healthy (especially if I thought I had control over said variable, and that it wasn't largely the result of inheritance and environmental factors in a seemingly distant childhood)?

Self-reported IQ data via an online survey: robust? C'mon, you're smarter than that...

In response to Circular Altruism
Comment author: Taurus_Londono 29 November 2013 04:28:43PM 2 points [-]

Raise your hand if you (yes you, the person reading this) will submit to 50 years of torture in order to avert "least bad" dust speck momentarily finding its way into the eyes of an unimaginably large number of people.

Why was it not written "I, Eliezer Yudkowsky, should choose to submit to 50 years of torture in place of a googolplex people getting dust specks in their eyes"?

Why restrict yourself to the comforting distance of omniscience?

Did Miyamoto Musashi ever exhort the reader to ask his sword what he should want? Why is this not a case of using a tool as an end in and of itself rather than as a means to achieve a desired end?

Are you irrational if your something to protect is yourself...from torture?

Has anyone ever addressed whether or not this applies to the AGI Utility Monster whose experiential capacity would presumably exceed the ~7 billion humans who should rationally subserve Its interests (whatever they may be)?

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 22 November 2013 06:49:20PM -13 points [-]

Feedback, FWIW: - Why nothing for individuals who identify as "biracial"...or "check all that apply" for race? - Can you not infer "relationship status" from "number of current partners," or are you implying that the first question only pertains to sexual contact (not a "relationship" per se)? If so, why not specify that? - Profession: No "Chemistry"?? WTF... three choices for "computers," you nicely distinguish finance/economics as separate from "business," and the same for the "statistics" and "mathematics" people, but the central science has to fall under "other hard science"???? You F'ed up here, admit it.

Comment author: jaibot 28 June 2013 04:29:30PM 6 points [-]

Eh, Ken Hayworth's not handwaving when he talks about uploading - he's actively working on the problem. My impression is that the tech you'd need for full repair (handwavy nanotech) is less plausible than the tech you'd need for uploading (slightly-less-handwavy slice/scan/run). Given that there are already active credible projects working on uploading c elegans, it seems more-likely (though probably less intuitive) than physical repair.

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 30 June 2013 02:16:55PM 2 points [-]

My purpose in commenting here is only to address what I see as a creeping fallacy, one that's apparently becoming a prevalent touchstone in the dissemination of cryonics on the internet, ie the thoughtful consideration (rather than thoughtless dismissal) by individuals of the kind who would have an interest in something like Less Wrong, those of whom typically have computer science backgrounds.

This is a fallacy akin to the idea of cryopreserved patients as "messages in a bottle" sent adrift, with fingers-crossed, to be found by our benevolent "Friends in the Future."

The reality is that if any cryopreserved individual actually exists at all by the time of the advent of technology capable of facilitating his or her resuscitation, it means that people are and always have been actively expending energy to care and maintain that individual. The question isn't whether anyone would care to revive someone, it's whether or not anyone would care to prevent that person from becoming organic waste at the bottom of a giant thermos bottle or long ago buried and forgotten.

The fallacy inadvertently perpetuated by people like Ken Hayworth, Randal Koene, Robin Hanson, and others reflects a similar failure of perspective regarding the foreseeable conditions that would actually facilitate the first resuscitation(s) of the cryopreserved.

I would humbly suggest the following:

  • The first cryopreserved individual to be resuscitated has not yet been cryopreserved.
  • This individual's cryopreservation will be predicated on techniques significantly perfected over those that exist today.
  • The time interval between this individual's cryopreservation and resuscitation will be relatively short (not decades but a few years or even far less perhaps).
  • This individual's resuscitation will not in any way whatsoever involve destructive scanning; rather, it will rely on more "conventional" technologies the development of which is "actionable" today right now (rather than merely an extant theoretical framework in possibly sufficient fidelity, as is the case with uploading).
  • This individual will NOT be resuscitated as a flawlessly healthy Ettingerian superman, but as a severely injured but otherwise stable living person. The state of this person's health, the degree of amnesia, etc is impossible to guess, but the bottom-line is that their resuscitation will be the end-result of a not-unrisky and far-from-perfect experimental process. It will be messy, but he or she will (hopefully) have a prognosis of (indefinite) conscious life.
  • The ensuing prospect of the resuscitation other individuals will unfold as each patient's candidacy lies along an evolving gradient dependent on the technology used to cryopreserve them and the continued improvement of the technology used for the first resuscitation.

There is obviously a threshold beyond which some (most?) patients lie. It may be even likely that no person cryopreserved today can be "revived" without some form of "uploading."

But the point is that that will not be the case for the people cryopreserved in the decades to come, and that will certainly not be the case for the first persons to be revived.

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 12 April 2013 05:15:00PM 0 points [-]

"Oh my gosh! 'The Sun goes around the Earth' is true for Hunga Huntergatherer, but for Amara Astronomer, 'The Sun goes around the Earth' is false! There is no fixed truth!" The deconstruction of this sophomoric nitwittery is left as an exercise to the reader.

An apt way to put it. That this worthless dimestore philosophy so often underlies contemporary contemplative discourse by relatively intelligent people never ceases to bewilder and sadden me. (see example below)

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 08 April 2013 09:22:53PM 2 points [-]

...a team of neurologists investigated a 40Hz electrical rhythm...

For the sake of the blook; neuroscientists, not neurologists. Words can be wrong.

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