Comment author: Z_M_Davis 16 October 2009 07:58:18PM 0 points [-]

On reflection, I'm actually going to start spelling my first name again.

Comment author: SilasBarta 29 September 2009 03:11:41AM *  0 points [-]

Except this wasn't an issue of being too careful, and it definitely doesn't count as good communication!

Z_M_Davis made a remark that was both poorly-reasoned and supportive of every other comment he left in the discussion (in trivializing the privileged state of any choice of identity). If he had been arguing against the third horn, okay, maybe it could have been read as "oh, he's cleverly mocking a position he disagrees with".

But then he comes back with, "I was trying to be cute." Okay, so he's ... doing self-parody. Great -- we all need to be able to laugh at ourselves. So what's his real position, then?

Oh, you see, he was making a very subtle point about identity being scalar rather than binary (which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position). And there was a hidden argument in there that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself. And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words "very roughly the same reason" instead of "exactly the same reason".

I'm sorry, but that's just not "how it works". You can claim illusion of transparency issues if the assumed common knowledge is small, and you have a reasonable basis for assuming it, and your full explanation doesn't look blatantly ad hoc.

In other words, anywhere but here.

I'm sorry to belabor the point, but yes, sometimes you just have to admit you goofed. Mistakes are okay! We all make them! But we don't all try to say "I meant to do that".

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 29 September 2009 05:31:47AM 1 point [-]

which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position

See Furcas's comment.

that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself

I never said it was no different. Elsewhere in the thread, I had argued that selfishness is entirely compatible with biting the third bullet. Egan's Law.

And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words "very roughly the same reason" instead of "exactly the same reason".

I disagree; if it had been obvious, I wouldn't have had to point it out explicitly. Maybe the cognitive history would help? I had originally typed "the same reason," but added "very roughly" before posting because I anticipated your objection. I think the original was slightly funnier, but I thought it was worth trading off a little of the humor value in exchange for making the statement more defensible when taken literally.

I'm sorry, but that's just not "how it works". [...] your full explanation [looks] blatantly ad hoc.

I'm curious. If what actually happened looks ad hoc to you, what's your alternative theory? If you don't trust what I say about what I was thinking, then what do you believe instead? You seem to think I've committed some error other than writing two admittedly somewhat opaque comments, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to be.

Comment author: SilasBarta 29 September 2009 12:46:08AM *  -1 points [-]

And ... you expected everyone else to get that out of your cute comment?

You know, sometimes you just have to throw in the towel and say, "Oops. I goofed."

ETA: I'm sure that downmod was because this comment was truly unhelpful to the discussion, rather than because it made someone look bad.

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 29 September 2009 02:37:22AM *  2 points [-]

Oops. I goofed.

Comment author: SilasBarta 28 September 2009 09:13:34PM 3 points [-]

Considering that your cute comment was consistent with your other comments in this discussion, I think I can be forgiven for thinking you were serious.

Actually, which of your other comments here are just being cute?

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 29 September 2009 12:23:21AM 4 points [-]

Right, so of course I'm rather selfish in the sense of valuing things-like-myself, and so of course I buy more things for myself than I do for random strangers, and so forth. But I also know that I'm not ontologically fundamental; I'm just a conjunction of traits that can be shared by other observers to various degrees. So "I don't throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don't throw other people off cliffs" is this humorously terse and indirect way of saying that identity is a scalar, not a binary attribute. (Notice that I said "very roughly the same reason" and not "exactly the same reason"; that was intentional.)

Comment author: SilasBarta 28 September 2009 04:21:45PM 7 points [-]

And for the same reason you buy things for yourself more often than for other people? And for the same reason you (probably) prefer someone else falling off a cliff than yourself?

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 28 September 2009 08:35:31PM 2 points [-]

I was trying to be cute.

Comment author: komponisto 27 September 2009 09:41:56PM *  1 point [-]

The (only) trouble with this is that it doesn't answer the question about what probabilities you_0 should assign to various experiences 5 seconds later. Personal identity may not be ontologically fundamental, it may not even be the appropriate sort of thing to be programmed into a utility function -- but at the level of our everyday existence (that is, at whatever level we actually do exist), we still have to be able to make plans for "our own" future.

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 28 September 2009 03:36:28AM 3 points [-]

I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn't a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for "your own" future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for "your own" future in situations where you expect to be copied and merged depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience. For myself, I don't know how I would go about forming such preferences, because I don't understand consciousness.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 September 2009 04:47:58AM 11 points [-]

To condense my response to a number of comments here:

It seems to me that there's some level on which, even if I say very firmly, "I now resolve to care only about future versions of myself who win the lottery! Only those people are defined as Eliezer Yudkowskys!", and plan only for futures where I win the lottery, then, come the next day, I wake up, look at the losing numbers, and say, "Damnit! What went wrong? I thought personal continuity was strictly subjective, and I could redefine it however I wanted!"

You reply, "But that's just because you're defining 'I' the old way in evaluating the anticipated results of the experiment."

And I reply, "...I still sorta think there's more to it than that."

To look at it another way, consider the Born probabilities. In this case, Nature seems to have very definite opinions about how much of yourself flows where, even though both copies exist. Now suppose you try to redefine your utility function so you only care about copies of yourself that see the quantum coin land heads up. Then you are trying to send all of your measure to the branch where the coin lands up heads, by exercising your right to redefine personal continuity howsoever you please; whereas Nature only wants to send half your measure there. Now flip the coin a hundred times. I think Nature is gonna win this one.

Tired of being poor? Redefine personal continuity so that tomorrow you continue as Bill Gates and Bill Gates continues as you - just better hope Gates doesn't swap again the next day.

It seems to me that experience and anticipation operate at a more primitive level than my utility function. Perhaps I am wrong. But I would like a cleaner demonstration of how I am wrong, than pointing out how convenient it would be if there were no question.

Of course it must be a wrong question - it is unanswerable, therefore, it is a wrong question. That is not the same as there being no question.

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 27 September 2009 04:55:52AM *  1 point [-]

But all the resulting observers who see the coin come up tails aren't you. You just specified that they weren't. Who cares what they think?

Comment author: Johnicholas 27 September 2009 02:45:32AM 1 point [-]

EY seems to have equated the third bullet with throwing oneself off of cliffs. Do you throw yourself off of cliffs? Why or why not?

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 27 September 2009 04:41:57AM 3 points [-]

I don't throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don't throw other people off cliffs.

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 27 September 2009 04:39:32AM 8 points [-]

Following Nominull and Furcas, I bite the third bullet without qualms for the perfectly ordinary obvious reasons. Once we know how much of what kinds of experiences will occur at different times, there's nothing left to be confused about. Subjective selfishness is still coherent because you're not just an arbitrary observer with no distinguishing characteristics at all; you're a very specific bundle of personality traits, memories, tendencies of thought, and so forth. Subjective selfishness corresponds to only caring about this one highly specific bundle: only caring about whether someone falls off a cliff if this person identifies as such-and-such and has such-and-these specific memories and such-and-those personality traits: however close a correspondence you need to match whatever you define as personal identity.

The popular concepts of altruism and selfishness weren't designed for people who understand materialism. Once you realize this, you can just recast whatever it was you were already trying to do in terms of preferences over histories of the universe. It all adds up to, &c., &c.

Comment author: MineCanary 21 September 2009 04:41:11PM 7 points [-]

I know. I knew when I was writing that. The ideas in that paragraph were just forming as I typed them out, which is why I attributed cause where I didn't mean to.

Something closer to what I mean: It's fine to discuss intelligence differences between race. My intro psych textbook has a long discussion about it. People have an uproar when, instead of saying, oh, here's what the test results are, here's what the results of experiments that shed some insight into the cause of the differences (ie environment vs. genetic), and leaving it at that, someone says that there's a difference in IQ and that that explains social inequity.

So, yeah, they're objecting because it's racist, not because it challenges institutions or policies (other than the institution of denying racial difference, which to me seems relatively rational considering all the sources of bias that would cause people to make too much of racial difference). But it's not racist just because he says Africans have done poorly on IQ tests but because he defaults to assuming that that's enough to be "gloomy about the prospects of Africa".

Furthermore, his quote in this piece of the interview:

. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

is pretty much as racist as you can get. His piece of evidence here is the anecdotal observations non-specific employers that fit right into a really old stereotype. Additionally, it seems odd--employers recruit who they employ, and you wouldn't hire someone who had insufficient intelligence to do what you were hiring them for--the job selects for people of a certain intelligence range (which may be offset by, say, an intelligent person with a disability or who just didn't get an education, or an average person who's outperforming expectations of her intelligence due to hard work and a certain cultural background)--so race shouldn't matter because you can only hire someone from a certain race for a job given they have adequate intelligence for the job.

All the press I've read so far on the topic stresses general racism, his tendency to make claims without scientific evidence, and his intentional offensiveness and doesn't focus entirely on the issue of "lower intelligence of Africans", which you seem to think. Maybe you're talking about official reprimands or such that I haven't read, but the public kinda objected to a lot more than just that. So I think you're misguided in asserting that the only part of what he said that was controversial is low average African IQ and thereby claiming that he was on firm scientific ground.

Another part of the problem is intelligence = IQ. There's evidence (from the Flynn effect and cross-cultural examination of answers given to standard IQ test type questions) that environment and culture strengthen specific cognitive abilities and predispose one to reason in certain ways or interpret questions in certain ways. So even if IQ scores show that average African IQ is whatever, that's not indisputably the same as showing lower intelligence, because you could usefully define intelligence to include cognitive abilities/reasoning that Africans are stronger at than Westerners. And here I'll mention that I don't want to get in an argument over whether defining intelligence that way is good or not--I'm just saying it in response to this:

The lower average test scores of Africans is surely an undisputed scientific fact.

Because while that sentence can be true, it is not sufficient evidence to conclude, as Watson does, that the testing is adequate to say Africans have lower intelligence. That depends on how you define intelligence. (Although his actual words just say that their intelligence is different, which does seem clear, but from other remarks he seems to think that Africans have lower intelligence due to genes, which is not scientifically undisputed at all.)

I am bothered by the fact that I know the discussions on race and intelligence that I have read are heavily biased in the information they present--for instance, in the US, racial intelligence differences correlating better with degree of pigmentation than with amount of African genes--because this information seems like it's picked in order to prove the politically correct point, whereas the other side likes to ignore all the evidence for the politically correct point and just simplify things because it seems obvious to them that the bigoted view is true. Point me to a transparent, relatively unbiased discussion of all available experimental evidence and I'll thank you.

I lean toward the politically correct side because it's the side that presents a lot of evidence and then says, "It's kinda inconclusive and we don't really know what causes group intelligence difference, although we do know a lot of it isn't genetic." Whereas the non-politically-correct side attempts to explain away a lot of the evils of the world by saying inequity is genetically based just because there are differences in the way groups perform on a psychometric instrument. But it seems like history and other social forces can greatly affect the conditions of one group: a few generations ago, when my ancestors were impoverished farmers in Europe, I have little doubt they would've failed modern IQ tests, but my race's genes haven't change since then, and the genes weren't responsible for our economic, social, and political problems.

It's both reasonable and humane to assume that, given Westerners spent a century gaining IQ points due to the Flynn effect, and given that the low quality of life in the West changed radically over spans of centuries or decades, one group currently doing poorly on IQ tests and living in poverty has the potential to change just as drastically. Any pessimism about their prospects can surely be more strongly justified by citing current and historical economic, political, social, and environmental trends, as well as unprecedented possible events like existential threats.

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 21 September 2009 07:27:07PM 19 points [-]

I lean toward the politically correct side because it's the side that [...]

Taboo side. Complex empirical issues do not have sides. Humans, for their own non-truth-tracking reasons, group into sides, but it's not Bayesian, and it has never been Bayesian.

Or we think we group up into sides, but I'm not even sure that's true. You write that the egalitarians are nuanced and present evidence, whereas the human biodiversity crowd (or whatever words you want to use) are just apologists for their favorite narrative, but there are a lot of people who have the exact opposite perspective: that the hbd-ers are honest and nuanced and the egalitarians are blinded by ideology. But in fact, there are no sides physically out there: rather, there are only various people who have studied various facets of the topic to various degrees and who believe and profess various things for various reasons. And this question of what various people believe is distinct from the question of what's actually true.

I realize that this kind of aggressive reductionism isn't very predictively useful---that indeed, I'm probably just a few steps above saying, "Well it's all just quarks and leptons anyway." But sometimes it is worth saying just that, if only to wrench ourselves free of this adversarial framing so that we can actually look at the data.

It's [...] humane to assume

Humaneness is central to policy, but it should have nothing to do with our beliefs.

View more: Next