That scenario assumes a kind of religion that is more directly in opposition to science than is typical outside of conservative evangelicals. Admittedly that's a large faction with political power, but they aren't even a majority of christians, let alone theists.

That's probably true in many cases, but the "mugger" scenario is really designed to test our limits. If 3^^^3 doesn't work, then probably 3^^^^3 will. To be logically coherent, there has to be some crossover point, where the mugger provides exactly enough evidence to decide that yes, it's worth paying the $5, despite our astoundingly low priors.

The proposed priors have one of two problems:

1. you can get mugged too easily, by your mugger simply being sophisticated enough to pick a high enough number to overwhelm your prior.

2. We've got a prior that is highly resistant to mugging, but unfortunately, is also resistant to being convinced by evidence. If there is any positive probability that we really could encounter a matrix lord able to do what they claim, and would offer some kind of pascal mugging like deal, there should be some amount of evidence that would convince us to take the deal. We would like it if the amount of necessary evidence were within the bounds of what it is possible for our brain to receive and update on in a lifetime, but that is not necessarily the case with the priors which we know will be able to avoid specious muggings.

I'm not actually certain that a prior has to exist which doesn't have one of these two problems.

I also agree with Eliezer's general principle that when we see convincing evidence of things that we previously considered effectively impossible (prior of /10^-googol or such), then we need to update the whole map on which that prior was based, not just on the specific point. When you watch a person turn into a small cat, either your own sense data, or pretty much your whole map of how things work must come into question. You can't just say "Oh, people can turn into cats." and move on as if that doesn't affect almost everything you previously thought you knew about how the world worked.

It's much more likely, based on what I know right now, that I am having an unusually convincing dream or hallucination than that people can turn into cats. And if I manage to collect enough evidence to actually make my probability of "people can turn into cats" higher than "my sensory data is not reliable", then the whole framework of physics, chemistry, biology, and basic experience which caused me to assign such a low probability to "people can turn into cats" in the first place has to be reconsidered.

Of course it is not our business to determine those boundaries in someone else's relationship.

Yet my reaction to the behavior described is very largely determined by what I imagine as the relationship context. The reason I did not have your reaction to this story is because I implicitly assumed that there was no boundary the husband had set about the fact of having clothes end up in the hamper by his hands.

I was somewhat troubled by the story, and the conversation in this subthread has clarified why -- the relationship context is crucial to determining the ethics of the behavior, and the ethical line or the necessary context was not discussed seriously in the article. While I find it unlikely that this particular example was crossing a line in their relationship, similar strategies could easily be used in an attempt to cross explicit or implicit boundaries in a way I would find abhorrent.

There is one point on which I am not clear whether we are drawing the line in the same place.

In the absence of any prior negotiation one way or another, do you consider the wife's behavior unethical? That seemed to be what you suggested with your initial comment, that it would only be acceptable in the context of a prior explicit agreement.

I think I fall on the side of thinking it is sometimes acceptable in some possible middle cases, but I'm not completely comfortable with my decision yet and would be interested in hearing arguments on either side.

I am clear (and think you will agree) that it is ok to use this strategy to reinforce a previous agreement, and NOT ok to use it to break/bend/adjust a previous agreement. It is the situation with no prior agreement that I am interested in.

To describe it semi-formally.

Party A wants to use positive reinforcement on party B in order to get them to do X

Middle cases I consider to be important (aside from there being some explicit agreement/boundary)

Party B has given some indication (but not an explicit statement/agreement) that doing X would be acceptable or desirable in principle --- PR OK

Party B has given some indication (not explicit statement/agreement) that doing X would be a undesirable in principle --- PR NOT OK

Party B has given no indication one way or another -- ??

In this last case, are social expectations relevant? In the particular case of clothes in hamper, there are clear social expectations that most people normatively desire clothes in hamper. Perhaps our difference lies in whether we consider social expectations a relevant part of the context.

My tentative line is that where no indication has been given, reinforcing social expectations is acceptable, and violating social expectations is at least dubious and probably not OK without discussion.

If social expectations matter, then questions about which social circle is relevant come into play. If party A and party B would agree about which social expectation is relevant, then that is the correct one.

The interesting subcase would be where the relevant social expectations are different for party A and for Party B. My current position is that party A's best information about what party B would choose as a relevant set of social expectations should determine the ethics.

For my part, I didn't experience the positive reinforcement description in the article as being about subverting negotiated boundaries, but about changing what seem likely to be unthinking habitual behaviors that the person is barely aware of.

I don't know of anyone that I wish to be associated with who specifically desires to leave dirty clothes on the floor instead of in the hamper, it's just something that is easy to do without thinking unless and until you are in the habit of doing something differently.

If the husband in question had actually negotiated a boundary about being able to leave his clothes on the floor, or even expressed reflective hesitancy about using the hamper as a theoretically desired or acceptable action, then I would agree that the author's behavior was highly unethical, and as the husband, if I became aware of it, I would have a problem.

A more typical scenario is one in which the husband would reflectively endorse putting dirty clothes in the hamper on principle, but has a previously developed habit of leaving clothes on the floor and does not judge it important enough to do the hard mental work of changing the habit. Positive reinforcement in this scenario basically represents the wife attempting to do a big portion of the work required to change the habit in the hopes it will get him over this threshold.

In this case, I am having trouble imagining a situation in which one would have reflective desire not to use an existing hamper for dirty clothes.

After a long hiatus from deep involvement in comment threads here -- I actually can't tell if this is serious, or a brilliant mockery of Eliezer's decisions around creating AGI [*]

The conditional probabilities are doing a lot of work here, and it seems that in many cases our estimates of them are strongly dependent on our priors.

What are our estimates for P(S|A) or P(S|notA) and how do we work them out? clearly P(S|A) is high since "The Bible is the word of God" directly implies that the bible exists, so it is at least possible to observe. If our prior for A is very low, then that implies that our estimate of P(S|notA) must be also be high, given that we do in fact observe the bible (or we must have separately a well founded explanation of the truth of S despite it's low probability).

Since having P(S|A) = P(S|notA) in your formula cancels the right side out to 1/1, P(S|H) = P(S|notH). We find as S as evidence for or against A weakens, so does S as evidence for or against H by this argument.

So the problem with the circular argument is apparent in Bayesian terms. In the absence of some information that is outside the circular argument, the lower the prior probability, the weaker the argument. That's not the way an evidential argument is supposed to work.

Even in the case where our prior is higher, the argument isn't actually doing any work, it is what our prior does to our estimate of those conditionals that makes the likelihood ratio higher. If we've estimated those conditionals in a way which causes a fully circular argument to move the estimate away from our prior, then we have to be doing something wrong, because we don't have any new information.

If we have independent estimates of those various conditionals, then we would be able to make a non-circular argument. OTOH We can make a circular argument for anything no matter what is going on in reality, that's why a circular argument is a true and complete fallacy: it provides no evidence whatsoever for or against a premise.

I bought one for work 6-7 years ago when they were in fashion, and used it for a short while, but found that what it did to my knees was worse than what regular chairs do to my back.

Ball chairs get very uncomfortable in the butt if I sit in them too long, but otherwise have no drawbacks.

The biggest problem with what I've seen of PUA and PUA converts is that it is very hard to distinguish these two affects.

Your typical shy guy poor dude, doesn't actually approach women with an actual trial very often. Sometimes it almost never happens.

Suppose the successful PUA can pickup 2-3% of intentional targets. They are probably targeting people everytime they are in a social situation that involves meeting new people. Perhaps this involves dozens of contacts a week, or even hundreds if they are the sort who is looking for a constant stream of one-nighters.

On the other hand, your typical poor dude may only make 1-2 intentional targets a month, if that. I was never a PUA. I developed enough social skills on my own to make a marked difference in my outlook a few years before Lewis Depayne showed up on usenet pushing Ross Jeffries stuff, which was laughable.

But I was definitely a poor dude before then. I attended a college for two years with 70% women, that a friend of mine described in retrospect as a "pussy paradise" without ever having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship. In retrospect, some of the rare targets of my attention were begging me to make a move in ways that I failed to notice. But in two years, I probably made actual attempts to hookup or date at most 9-10 women/girls, and in none of those cases did I ever make a move that demanded either rejection or acceptance. Because I was so, so sure that I would be rejected that I couldn't face the prospect. Is it any surprise that my success rate was 0%?

Even after my awakening, I maintained a relatively low frequency of attempts, but my ratio of hookups to serious attempts is far better than 3%, more like 50-60%.

My going hypothesis is that the mere act of getting guys to specifically attempt to approach women they are attracted to, and then attempt to seduce those who inspire their further interest and verify their success is enough to turn the average loser into someone who will be reasonably successful with women.

I didn't actually need any dark arts to go from a big 'loser' to somebody who, in the right social context (not a typical bar scene), has around a 50/50 shot to hook up with almost anybody who is looking and interests me. I just had to realize that sex is not something women have and men want to take from them, and that I am not hideous and unattractive.

Now, I've come to realize that I'm probably more attractive than average, naturally, and it was my combination of weak social skills and brutal social experience of growing up that warped my mental map about this until I was in my mid-20s. I don't actually believe that most guys would have the results that I do. But I'm hardly some kind of Super-Adonis. I'm fat, and don't pay a whole lot of attention to my appearance beyond being clean (tend to wear non-descript preppy business casual nearly everywhere I go because it's comfortable). I'm pretty sure I'd get negative numbers on Roissy's stupid SMV test.