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True focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity - from Xmen, retold here
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015
How does this help me become more rational?
Now you are getting it copletely wrong. You can´t add up harm on spec dust if it is happening to different people. Every individual has a capability to recover from it. Think about it. With that logic it is worse to rip a hair from every living being in the universe than to nuke New York. If people in charge reasoned that way we might have harmageddon in no time.
That's ridiculous. So mild pains don't count if they're done to many different people?
Let's give a more obvious example. It's better to kill one person than to amputate the right hands of 5000 people, because the total pain will be less.
Scaling down, we can say that it's better to amputate the right hands of 50,000 people than to torture one person to death, because the total pain will be less.
Keep repeating this in your head(see how consistent it feels, how it makes sense).
Now just extrapolate to the instance that it's better to have 3^^^3 people have dust specks in their eyes than to torture one person to death because the total pain will be less. The hair-ripping argument isn't good enough because pain.[ (people on earth) * (pain from hair rip) ] < pain.[(people in New York) * (pain of being nuked) ]. The math doesn't add up in your straw man example, unlike with the actual example given.
As a side note, you are also appealing to consequences.
In response to
That Alien Message
It would be really helpful if the author explained what his point with this story was, beacuse there are several interpretations. I guess that the moral is that Eliezer Yudkowsky is afraid of AI.
The point is that to an AI, we are but massive, stupid beings who are attempting to teach them minor symbols with massive overuse of resources(that few lines of code to define "rock" could be used by a sufficiently powerful UFAI to, say, manufacture nukes).
In response to
Meetup : Singapore Meetup Group
I'm there with one other person. Look to the lesswrong Singapore google group for any future updates. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/lesswrong-singapore/cXtHTMQO4xw
In response to
Quotes Repository
On religion:
Faith is corrosive to the human mind. -Susan Blackmore
I've never really thought just how damaging blind faith was to my thought processes until I read this quote. It strikes a chord with me.
In response to
Meetup : Singapore Meetup Group
Finally, a Singapore meetup! Will definitely be there.
In response to
Respond to what they probably meant
For me, the problem with this is that if I'm speaking to an autistic person(and a very large number of LWers identify themselves as on the autistic spectrum), they tend to use literal meanings very often. In fact, some of them(including me) get offended or confused when they say something literal and it is interpreted as sarcastic or subtext.
Suppose I am speaking to an autistic person, and he says, "I am 87% confident that X is true." The issue with this statement is that a lot of people use this sort of statement in a metaphorical sense(ie. they just pull the number out of their butt to make it oddly specific and get a cheap laugh) but an autistic or rationality-trained person may literally mean that they are 87% sure it is true, especially if they are good at measuring their own confidence levels. In this case, the usual situation- the number being picked randomly - is false.
There are also, however, a large number of statements that are almost always meant sarcastically or in a non-literal way. The statement "I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords" is almost always sarcastic as it is 1) invoking a well-known meme which is intended to be used in this manner and 2) it is extremely unlikely that the person I am speaking to is actually someone who wants aliens to take over the world. These statements are, for want of a better word, "cached non-literal statements"(as in, it is an automatic thought that these statements are not literal), or CNLS for short.
It might be useful to append the guideline "All statements have a probability of being literal that is worth considering, except in the case of CNLSes. This probability is adjusted up if the person you are speaking to is known for being extremely literal and adjusted down if they are known for using figurative speech(although that last sentence should be fairly obvious, I throw it in for the sake of completeness)" to your thesis.
This actually got me thinking if there is a methodical, objective and accurate way to find out if someone's statement is literal or not, perhaps by measuring their posture, tone of voice. The only difficulty is to try to weasel some quantifiable data out of context. If it can be done, that would be a great resource to people who have trouble understanding the non-literal meanings of statements everywhere.
At some point in a person's "training" as a rationalist, there comes a time when they are supposed to be ready to undertake controversial conversation topics without spontaneous combustion of their discussions. (Never mind that jokes and art are not exactly examples of controversial topics...) Rationality encompasses skills such as being able to accurately understand people's motives without caricaturing them, maintaining a good relationship with your conversation partners so that the channels for agreement and the channels for social relations don't get mixed (so that you can disagree sanely with someone), not straying the conversation away from collective truth-seeking and towards mini-wars etc. In fact I would say that a controversial topic such as politics is the best test of a person's actual wisdom and reasonableness.
I understand why some topics may not be appropriate for less-than-rational individuals. (But, again, these topics do not include humour and art and music! Otherwise you should pay a visit to the Wizard of Oz for him to give you a heart...) Anyone who has some legitimate claim towards better rationality skills, however, should at least try to test those better rationality skills on a higher difficulty setting. To forbid anything but sterile mathy discussions about game theory dilemmas involving alien intelligences does not improve the rationality level of people. (This honestly looks to me like cocooning; like fear of the outside world.) Nor does responsibly endeavouring to step into the arena of debates on topics relevant to humanity at large suddenly awaken your primal urges to kill, maim, and enslave your opponents. Ordinary people sometimes discuss this, in meatspace and on the internet. Ideas are expressed, values are clashed (instead of swords, mayhaps), insults are exchanged, people are warned or banned or not invited to the next dinner party. Egad, minds are sometimes even changed. With LessWrong, with all of our claims to an ardent dedication to rationality, I'm expecting to see less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff. Much more.
Politics is the Mindkiller is not a law of nature, but a word of caution.
I have to go to bed soon, therefore I will not write up a long post but leave you with this short statement:
Yes, there is such a point in our rationality training. You underestimate the amount of work needed to get there. I do not think that I can reach that point within the next 30 years; and everyone on LW would have to reach that point to argue effectively. It only takes a few outraged posters to turn a thread into a shitstorm(see the comments and replies above).
It is indeed a word of caution, just like "do not play with electricity" is a word of caution. Grown adults should theoretically be able to handle electricity without getting electrocuted, but doing so(unless they're electricians) won't give them many benefits and there will always be that risk.
I believe that he suggested(he is not a moderator but a random poster making suggestions, remember) that jokes, humor and art not be posted here because this is not a website for jokes, humor and art, unless they somehow have to do with rationality. There are plenty of sites for such things if you really have a pressing need to discuss your love of the Mona Lisa or knock-knock jokes with people on the internet.
If you want my opinion, it's that a debate about Obama's healthcare reforms is less likely to improve rationality than a debate about the sequences or some other "traditional" topic. If you really want to apply your rationality skills in a real world context:
It's right there. Just switch off your computer, go outside and strike up a debate with someone in meatspace.
In response to
Learn Three Things Every Day
Thank you for reminder, I'm done with procrastinating for today
No problem, and I hope this post taught you how to work better and learn better. If you have problems with procrastination, you can try programs like Beeminder, or simply have a friend act as a watcher to ensure you get your work(or your three new things) done for the day, week or month.
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I don't think people have a right to lie to other people. I also can't understand why you would regret breaking up with someone so truth-averse and horrible.