Solomonoff induction is uncomputable, thus, as a direct consequence, it cannot be learned. Some approximations to it which are of practical interest: Occam learning and probably approximately correct learning. As a general matter, these questions are addressed by computational learning theory.

I think you mean ethics and not morals.

There are many ways to persuade people. You can control information flow. You can nudge people and optimize the nudging.

There are physical changes that affect moral behavior. A lot of variables from temperature to diet have effects on moral decision making in certain instances.

You can convince people through arguments.

Is there a public database for math proofs in a form where they can be read by computers?

The "simulation argument" by Bostrom is flawed. It is wrong. I don't understand why a lot of people seem to believe in it. I might do a write up of this if anyone agrees with me, but basically, you cannot reason about without our universe from within our universe. It doesn't make sense to do so. The simulation argument is about using observations from within our own reality to describe something outside our reality. For example, simulations are or will be common in this universe, therefore most agents will be simulated agents, therefore we are simulated agents. However, the observation that most agents will eventually be or already are simulated only applies in this reality/universe. If we are in a simulation, all of our logic will not be universal but instead will be a reaction to the perverted rules set up by the simulation's creators. If we're not in a simulation, we're not in a simulation. Either way, the simulation argument is flawed.

Rust, a video game, has a veil of ignorance

After you've had a character for a while, gender is imposed randomly and permanently.

I've been reading a lot of Robin Hanson lately and I'm curious at how other people parse his statements about status. Hanson often says something along the lines of: "X isn't about what you thought. X is about status."

I've been parsing this as: "You were incorrect in your prior understanding of what components make up X. Somewhere between 20% and 99% of X is actually made up of status. This has important consequences."

Does this match up to how you parse his statements?

edit

To clarify: I don't usually think anything is just about one thing. I think there are a list of motivations towards taking an action for the first person who does it and that one motivation is often stronger than the others. Additionally, new motivations are created or disappear as an action continues over time for the original person. For people who come later, I suspect factors of copying successful patterns (also for a variety of reasons including status matching) as well as the original possible reasons for the first person. This all makes a more complicated pattern and generational system than just pointing and yelling "Status!" (which I hope isn't the singular message people get from Hanson).

I think he doesn't understand average people. And I think that he thinks that he does.

And then he uses people's mental faults to try to improve their minds, which is... wrong? I think that's the issue, the thing he is "uncannily off" about. He's trying to fool people into not being fools.

People don't like being made into fools, so insofar as he succeeds, he turns them off from rationality, rather than turning them onto it. And for a community that already struggles with an aura of cultishness, it's exactly the wrong kind of approach.

Not really arguing anything. I'm asking if there is a rational non-meta reason to believe they do "stop at the neck" even if we throw away all the IQ/nations data.

Thanks for the reason I've missed. Are personal traits as important?

People in our society differ in how they think about genetic differences. There are people who think that race matters a great deal and other you think it doesn't matter. It's useful to have a metric that distinguishes those people.

If you have that metric you can ask interesting questions such as whether people who are well calibrated are more likely to score high on that metric. It's interesting whether the metric changes from year to year.

That means the question tries to point at a property that people disagree about. In this case it's whether genetic differences are important. The question doesn't define "important" but there are various right wing people such as neoreocons and red-pill-folks who identify with the term "human biodiversity". The question doesn't try to ask for a specific well-defined belief but points to that cluster of beliefs. It's the same way that the feminism question doesn't point to a well-defined belief. You don't need a well-defined belief to get valuable information from a poll.

The question made it into the the survey because I complained about the usage of tribal labels such as liberal/conversative where people have to pick one choice as a way to measure political beliefs. I argued that focusing on agreement on issues is more meaningful and provides better data.

This is a good description of any social movement.

Which is why I said it's "more or less what you'd expect" :-).

current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.

In some important respects, yes. But, more specifically, I don't see current SJ activists studying the Little Red Book or preaching sermons about the superiority of rural farmers over urban brain-workers. I don't, that is, see a whole lot of actual Maoism. Which would seem to me to be a relevant thing to look for, when deciding whether present-day "social justice" is just "the newest incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought".

But it seems that what you mean by "the newest incarnation of" is just "shares a few features with, and has some very indirect historical connections with". In which case: meh, whatever, call it that if you like, but your terminology seems odd to me.

get rid of everything that's 'old' and 'traditional'

That was an explicit cry of the Maoists; it does not appear to me to be an explicit cry of the SJ activists.

And in actual fact both movements had/have particular old things they want to get rid of, and they are not the same particular old things.

Suppose we made a list of old traditional things in middle-class American culture (the environment where SJ mostly exists). The list might indeed include ideas about race and gender and sexuality that the SJ movement wants to overturn. It would also, I think, include a whole lot of things it doesn't. For instance, perhaps the biggest traditional shibboleths in US political culture are "democracy" and "freedom"; SJ activists are generally strongly for democracy, and while they aren't so enthusiastic about freedom -- there are all kinds of things they would like to be banned -- my impression is that that's not because of any (overt or covert) dislike of freedom as such; there are just other conflicting things they care about more.

Traditional middle-class American culture (hereafter TMCAC) is big on "family", meaning an opposite-sex couple with 2.5 children and a dog, living in a detached house in the suburbs. SJ activists will complain bitterly about the idea that that's a norm everyone should be expected to conform to, but I've never seen them say that that sort of family is actively bad and needs getting rid of.

TMCAC has all sorts of art in it: music old and new, drama (plays, movies, television), etc., etc., etc. Again, SJ activists will complain about various particular instances (e.g., not enough women in movies) but I've not seen them saying that existing artforms need to be thrown out and replaced with something new.

TMCAC tends to be firmly capitalist and business-friendly. Some (by no means all) SJ activists are far enough left that they want that system burned to the ground. That's a point where they would agree with the Maoists. But, er, that's because we got here by considering the particular subset of SJ activists who are, if not exactly Maoist, at least communist or something close.

There really doesn't seem to me to be a close parallel with Maoism here, beyond the fact -- with which I gladly agree -- that present-day "social justice" leans distinctly leftward and some SJ activists are very far left indeed.

""transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond" to the desired system and worldview

Yeah, that does sound really Maoist. And that quotation would indeed be evidence for a strong Maoist current in SJ activism, if it came from an SJ activist. But of course it actually comes from the (original) Maoists' "Sixteen Points".

I'm sure SJ activists would like to see education, literature and art conform more closely to their principles. And evangelical Christians would like to see them conform to theirs. And neoreactionaries would like to see them conform to theirs. And radical Hindus in India. (Of course, many people in all these groups would say, at least for public consumption, that they don't want to extinguish diversity. What would be a good way of expressing that? How about "let a hundred flowers bloom"?) Saying that the Maoists and the SJ activists both want that isn't evidence of some close equivalence between the two; it just shows that both are sociopolitical movements.

The fact that a sociopolitical movement wants to influence culture does not make it an incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought. It makes it a sociopolitical movement.