I've found I've become a smidge more conservative-- I was in favor of the Arab Spring, and to put it mildly, it hasn't worked well. I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.
Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?
how much stability should be respected?
For a consequentialist this is a question for historians and those who model historical what-ifs (psycho-historians? Hari Seldon, where are you?)
There are multiple possibilities that I can think of offhand:
1. a revolution/regime change/instability may have some negative or positive effect in the near term, but no measurable long-term effect anywhere
2. there are some long-term positive/negative effects locally, but none globally
3. there are both local and global effects, positive and/or negative
A historical analysis can only get you so far, as it is hard to come up with controlled examples. Was the US revolution similar to the French revolution? To the Russian revolution? To the Spartacus' uprising? To the Chinese dynastic revolts?
Would the US have been better off peacefully separating from Great Britain like Australia and Canada? Did the horrors of the World War II scare Europe into peace? Was the Holocaust a net good for the Jews, since it led to creation of Israel and the rise of Jewish influence in the US and in the world? (Assuming either of those are beneficial. Most Arabs would disagree.)
Even the seemingly clear-cut "good" cases, like the end of the Apartheid in South Africa eventually resulted in rising crime rates in the country.
To misquote a famous historian, "History is just one damned thing after another".
My current position on the issue is that any uprising is only worth considering if you can reasonably expect near-term positive effects for the group you care about, because there is currently no way to estimate long-term effects, and you cannot hope to be honest about the welfare of people you don't care about.
This position is an awkward one, since it means that Hitler's takeover of Germany was worth supporting at the time it happened, unless you cared about Jews, Gypsies and gays more than about ethnic Germans. It also means being against most armed revolts of uncertain prospects of success, since they necessarily lead to near-term increase in suffering.
"One of the great challenges of learning philosophy" is actually separating the chaff ( something like 99% of what philosophers talk about) from the wheat.
Let's take your examples. Dualism vs monism can be boiled down to something like "can p-zombies exist?", which can eventually be answered by AI research and cognitive sciences. The rest is chaff. With free will, the situation is even worse. You write "no more precise statement can be made if we want to capture the actual breadth of thought", whereas plenty of more precise statements can be made, and are made, by outside researchers, like Scott Aaronson (see his paper The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine and the relevant discussion on his blog: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951).
Incidentally, the two examples you mention are basically equivalent, as solving one clears up the other.
So, Steven Hawking basically quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky almost verbatim, without giving him any credit, as usual: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/
Example:
A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.
Disappointed.
Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to -10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he's been at this for quite some time, I've seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I'm sick of it.
Downvoting for stating a conjecture as certainty. Insulting language doesn't help, either.
The full thing I said was:
What if your devastating take-down of string theory is intended for consumption by people who have never heard of 'string theory' before? Even if you're sure string theory is hogwash, then, you should be wary of giving the impression that the only people discussing string theory are the commenters on a recreational physics forum.
I wasn't saying that there's anything wrong with trying to convince random laypeople that specific academic ideas (including string theory and non-causal decision theories) are hogwash. That can be great; it depends on execution. My point was that it's bad to mislead people about how much mainstream academic acceptance an idea has, whether or not you're attacking the idea.
Ah, OK, I agree then. Sorry I took the original quote out of context.
What if your devastating take-down of string theory is intended for consumption by people who have never heard of 'string theory' before?
That's par for the course here. Philosophy, frequentism, non-MWI QM all get this treatment in the (original) sequences.
There are plenty of issues where "precise predictions" are available, yet the polarization is as bad as ever, such as drugs, birth control, gun control and taxes. So no, facts are no match for ideology.
Fiction Books Thread
Half-way through Dangerous Women, edited by one G.R.R. Martin. The stories are hit and miss for me, and some actually end up with the supposedly dangerous woman being defeated by fate or stronger men. Some of my favorite so far include the Dresden Files spin-off and a short story by Lawrence Block. Typically strong entries from Joe Abercrombie and Brandon Sanderson.
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I wonder if the games you played had resembled the expected Aumann process, which is akin to random walk, or did they look more like slow convergence of opinions? If it's the latter, then the game has little to do with Aumann agreement.