quinsie

The part where you read exerts from HP Lovecraft and the sequences makes my cult sensors go off like a foghorn. All of the rest of it seems perfectly beneign. It's just the readings that make me think "CULT!" in the back of my mind. It seems like they're being used as a replacement for a sacred text and being used to sermonize with. If it weren't for that, this would seem much less cultish and more like a university graduation or a memorial or other secular-but-accepted-and-important ritual.

All this data says is that between 90% and 94% of people who are convinced not to jump did not go on to successfully commit suicide at a later date. It would be a big mistake to assume that whether or not you would come to regret your choice is 100% independent of whether or not you can be convinced not to jump and that therefore the fraction of people who came to regret commiting suicide is the same as the fraction who would have come to regret commiting suicide if they had failed their attempt.

Survey = taken.

For the newton question, I got the thousands, tens and ones place correct, but flubbed the hundreds place. 60% confidence. Not sure if I should feel bad about that.

I feel it would be.

Well, it could mean that you think the climate is going to get colder, or that the mean temperature will remain constant while specific regions will grow unusually hot/cold, or that the planet will undergo a period of human-caused warming followed by ice sheets melting and then cooling or any number of other theories. Most of them are fairly unlikely of course, but P(any climate change at all) > P(global warming).

There's two components to it, really:

People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always "just stop beleiving" if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.

Further, there's an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recome... (read more)

You make breaks in the comment box with two returns.

Just one will not make a line.

As to your actual question, you should probably check your state's laws about wills. I don't know if Louisiana allows minors to write a will for themselves, and you will definately want one saying that your body is to be turned over to the cryonics agency of your choice (usually either the Cryonics Institute or Alcor) upon your death. You'll also probably want to get a wrist bracelet or dog tags informing people to call your cryonicist in the event that you're dead or incapacitated.

It all depends on why you decide to torrent/not torrent:

Are you more likely to torrent if the album is very expensive, or if it is very cheap? If you expect it to be of high quality, or of low quality? If the store you could buy the album at is far away, or very close? If you like the band that made it, or if you don't like them? Longer albums or shorter? Would you torrent less if the punishment for doing so was increased? Would you torrent more if it was harder to get caught? What if you were much richer, or much poorer?

I'm confident that if you were to a... (read more)

Yep, definitely needs some clarification there.

Humans don't distinguish between the utility for different microscopic states of the world. Nobody cares if air molecule 12445 is shifted 3 microns to the right, since that doesn't have any noticable effects on our experiences. As such, a state (at least for the purposes of that definition of utility) is a macroscopic state.

"~X" means, as in logic, "not X". Since we're interested in the negative utility of the floor being clear, in the above case X is "the airplane's floor being clear&... (read more)

A thing has negative utility equal to the positive utility that would be gained from that thing's removal. Or, more formally, for any state X such that the utility of X is Y, the utility of the state ~X is -Y.

Don't we all?

Changing "matrix" to "light cone changes little, since I still don't expect to ever interact with them. The light cone example is only different insofar as I expect more people in my light cone to (irrationally) care about people beyond it. That might cause me to make some token efforts to hide or excuse my apathy towards the 3^^^3 lives lost, but not to the same degree as even 1 life lost here inside my light cone.

If you accept that someone making a threat in the form of "I will do X unless you do Y" is evidence for "they wil... (read more)

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why do we care about any number of simulated "people" existing outside the matrix at all? Even assuming that such people exist, they'll never effect me, nor effect anyone in the world I'm in. I'll never speak to them, they'll never speak to anyone I know and I'll never have to deal with any consequences for their deaths. There's no expectation that I'll be punished or shunned for not caring about people from outside the matrix, nor is there any way that these people could ever break into our world and attempt... (read more)

"When is pain worst?" an is important and deeply related question which is, fortunately for us, much easier to examine directly. I feel worse to have a papercut than it is to have an equally painful, but ultimately more damaging cut elsewhere. I feel worse to have a chronic pain that will not go away than I do when I feel a brief pain that goes away shortly after. I feel worse if I am unable to fix the injury that is causing me pain. It feels unfair, awful and even unbearable to ache for days during a bad bout of the flu. I know that the pain doe... (read more)

One method I've seen no mention of is distraction from the essence of an argument with pointless pedantry. The classical form is something along the lines of "My opponent used X as an example of Y. As an expert in X, which my opponent is not, I can assure you that X is not an example of Y. My opponent clearly has no idea how Y works and everything he says about it is wrong." which only holds true of X and Y are in the same domain of knowledge.

A good example: Eliezer said in the first paragraph that a geologist could tell a pebble from the beach ... (read more)

The correct moral response to the king's sadistic choice (in any of the 4 forms mentioned) is not sacrifice yourself OR to let the other 10 die instead. The correct answer is that you, knowing the king was doing this, should have founded/joined/assisted an organization devoted to deposing the evil king and replacing him with someone who isn't going to randomly kill his subjects.

So to with charity. The answer isn't to sacrifice all of your comforts and wealth to save the lives of others, but to assist with, petition for and otherwise attempt to inact sanct... (read more)

True enough, but once we step outside of the thought experiment and take a look at the idea it is intended to represent, "button gets pressed" translates into "humanity gets convinced to accept the machine's proposal". Since the AI-analogue device has no motives or desires save to model the universe as perfectly as possible, P(A bit flips in the AI that leads to it convincing a human panel to do something bad) necessarily drops below P(A bit flips anywhere that leads to a human panel deciding to do something bad) and is discountable for the same reason why we ignore hypothesises like "Maybe a cosmic ray flipped a bit to make it do that?" when figuring out the source of computer errors in general.

The answer to that depends on how the time machine inside works. If it's based on a "reset unless a message from the future is received saying not to" sort of deal, then you're fine. Otherwise, you die. And neither situation has an analoge in the related AI design.

Hello! quinesie here. I discovered LessWrong after being linked to HP&MoR, enjoying it and then following the links back to the LessWrong site itself. I've been reading for a while, but, as a rule, I don't sign up with a site unless I have something worth contributing. After reading Eliezer's Hidden Complexity of Wishes post, I think I have that:

In the post, Eliezer describes a device called an Outcome Pump, which resets the universe repeatedly until the desired outcome occurs. He then goes on to describe why this is a bad idea, since it can't understa... (read more)