Let's talk about politics

-14 WingedViper 19 September 2012 05:25PM

Hello fellow LWs,

As I have read repeatedly on LW (http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/) you don't like discussing politics because it produces biased thinking/arguing which I agree is true for the general populace. What I find curious is that you don't seem to even try it here where people would be very likely to keep their identities small (www.paulgraham.com/identity.html). It should be the perfect (or close enough) environment to talk politics because you can have reasonable discussions here.

I do understand that you don't like to bring politics into discussions about rationality, but I don't understand why there shouldn't be dedicated political threads here. (Maybe you could flag them?)

all the best

Viper

 

The Nanny State Didn't Show Up, You Hired It [LINK]

-13 RomanDavis 18 September 2012 09:07PM

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/09/the_nanny_state_didnt_show_up.html

Saw this and I thought it went so well with Beyond the Reach of God and Blue and Green on Regulation that I just had to post it here. It definitely articulates some of the frustrations I've had with  people who break out in a rash of Libertarianism over one (on the surface) silly law being passed and reported on and then not:

A. Using the Principle of Charity to see what the opponent is really about. Even if it's silly, it shouldn't be *that* silly. See Policy Debates Should Not Appear to be One Sided.

B. Considering how it applies in the larger context. You should be free to buy big sodas but not [insert literally anything the government regulates here, which is a ton of stuff]. Why is this sillier than the other thing? See anything Less Wrong has written about the absurdity heuristic.

C. Thinking about your source of information, noting the feeling it's giving you, why it's giving you that feeling. Then realizing that it was specifically designed to give that feeling. If they did this, then dropping the line of thought or, deciding that they're so much smarter than the people in charge. *And then forgetting that the fact that they feel that was part of the plan of those who reported it, too.* Seriously, The Last Psychiatrist is great for that stuff.

 

An Anthropic Principle Fairy Tale

-16 Nominull 28 August 2012 08:48PM

A robot is going on a one-shot mission to a distant world to collect important data needed to research a cure for a plague that is devastating the Earth. When the robot enters hyperspace, it notices some anomalies in the engine's output, but it is too late to get the engine fixed. The anomalies are of a sort that, when similar anomalies have been observed in other engines, 25% of the time it indicates a fatal problem, such that the engine will explode virtually every time it tries to jump. 25% of the time, it has been a false positive, and the engine exploded only at its normal negligible rate. 50% of the time it has indicated a serious problem, such that each jump was about a 50/50 chance of exploding. Anyway, the robot goes through the ten jumps to reach the distant world, and the engine does not explode. Unfortunately, the jump coordinates for the mission were a little off, and the robot is in a bad data-collecting position. It could try another jump - if the engine doesn't explode, the extra data it collects could save lives. If the engine does explode, however, Earth will get no data from the distant world at all. (The FTL radio is only good for one use, so he can't collect data and then jump.) So how did you program your robot? Did you program your robot to believe that since the engine worked 10 times, the anomaly was probably a false positive, and so it should make the jump? Or did you program your robot to follow the "Androidic Principle" and disregard the so-called "evidence" of the ten jumps, since it could not have observed any other outcome? People's lives are in the balance here. A little girl is too sick to leave her bed, she doesn't have much time left, you can hear the fluid in her lungs as she asks you "are you aware of the anthropic principle?" Well? Are you?

Neil Armstrong died before we could defeat death

-1 kilobug 25 August 2012 07:49PM

The sad news broke tonight : Neil Armstrong, the first human to ever walk another world, died today. We lost him forever. He died before we could defeat death.

Once again the horror of death strikes. This time, in addition from wiping from us forever a hero of humanity, he wiped from us forever a memory that will never exist again. Never again will a human being be able to experience being the first to walk another world. That beautiful experience is lost forever too, along with all the memories, dreams, desires and wishes that made Neil Armstrong.

But thanks to him, humanity made a giant leap. We'll fill the stars and conquer death. The spark of intelligence and sentience will not extinguish. That's the best we can do to honour him.

Source : http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/25/us-usa-neilarmstrong-idUSBRE87O0B020120825

What are the optimal biases to overcome?

60 aaronsw 04 August 2012 03:04PM

If you're interested in learning rationality, where should you start? Remember, instrumental rationality is about making decisions that get you what you want -- surely there are some lessons that will help you more than others.

You might start with the most famous ones, which tend to be the ones popularized by Kahneman and Tversky. But K&T were academics. They weren't trying to help people be more rational, they were trying to prove to other academics that people were irrational. The result is that they focused not on the most important biases, but the ones that were easiest to prove.

Take their famous anchoring experiment, in which they showed the spin of a roulette wheel affected people's estimates about African countries. The idea wasn't that roulette wheels causing biased estimates was a huge social problem; it was that no academic could possibly argue that this behavior was somehow rational. They thereby scored a decisive blow for psychology against economists claiming we're just rational maximizers.

Most academic work on irrationality has followed in K&T's footsteps. And, in turn, much of the stuff done by LW and CFAR has followed in the footsteps of this academic work. So it's not hard to believe that LW types are good at avoiding these biases and thus do well on the psychology tests for them. (Indeed, many of the questions on these tests for rationality come straight from K&T experiments!)

But if you look at the average person and ask why they aren't getting what they want, very rarely do you conclude their biggest problem is that they're suffering from anchoring, framing effects, the planning fallacy, commitment bias, or any of the other stuff in the sequences. Usually their biggest problems are far more quotidian and commonsensical.

Take Eliezer. Surely he wanted SIAI to be a well-functioning organization. And he's admitted that lukeprog has done more to achieve that goal of his than he has. Why is lukeprog so much better at getting what Eliezer wants than Eliezer is? It's surely not because lukeprog is so much better at avoiding Sequence-style cognitive biases! lukeprog readily admits that he's constantly learning new rationality techniques from Eliezer.

No, it's because lukeprog did what seems like common sense: he bought a copy of Nonprofits for Dummies and did what it recommends. As lukeprog himself says, it wasn't lack of intelligence or resources or akrasia that kept Eliezer from doing these things, "it was a gap in general rationality."

So if you're interested in closing the gap, it seems like the skills to prioritize aren't things like commitment effect and the sunk cost fallacy, but stuff like "figure out what your goals really are", "look at your situation objectively and list the biggest problems", "when you're trying something new and risky, read the For Dummies book about it first", etc. For lack of better terminology, let's call the K&T stuff "cognitive biases" and this stuff "practical biases" (even though it's all obviously both practical and cognitive and biases is kind of a negative way of looking at it). 

What are the best things you've found on tackling these "practical biases"? Post your suggestions in the comments.

The Criminal Stupidity of Intelligent People

-14 fare 27 July 2012 04:08AM

What always fascinates me when I meet a group of very intelligent people is the very elaborate bullshit that they believe in. The naive theory of intelligence I first posited when I was a kid was that intelligence is a tool to avoid false beliefs and find the truth. Surrounded by mediocre minds who held obviously absurd beliefs not only without the ability to coherently argue why they held these beliefs, but without the ability of even understanding basic arguments about them, I believed as a child that the vast amount of superstition and false beliefs in the world was due to people both being stupid and following the authority of insufficiently intelligent teachers and leaders. More intelligent people and people following more intelligent authorities would thus automatically hold better beliefs and avoid disproven superstitions. However, as a grown up, I got the opportunity to actually meet and mingle with a whole lot of intelligent people, including many whom I readily admit are vastly more intelligent than I am. And then I had to find that my naive theory of intelligence didn't hold water: intelligent people were just as prone as less intelligent people to believing in obviously absurd superstitions. Only their superstitions would be much more complex, elaborate, rich, and far reaching than an inferior mind's superstitions.

For instance, I remember a ride with an extremely intelligent and interesting man (RIP Bob Desmarets); he was describing his current pursuit, which struck me as a brilliant mathematical mind's version of mysticism: the difference was that instead of marveling at some trivial picture of an incarnate god like some lesser minds might have done, he was seeking some Ultimate Answer to the Universe in the branching structures of ever more complex algebras of numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, quaternions, octonions, and beyond, in ever higher dimensions (notably in relation to super-string theories). I have no doubt that there is something deep, and probably enlightening and even useful in such theories, and I readily disqualify myself as to the ability to judge the contributions that my friend made to the topic from a technical point of view; no doubt they were brilliant in one way or another. Yet, the way he was talking about this topic immediately triggered the "crackpot" flag; he was looking there for much more than could possibly be found, and anyone (like me) capable of acknowledging being too stupid to fathom the Full Glory of these number structures yet able to find some meaning in life could have told that no, this topic doesn't hold key to The Ultimate Source of All Meaning in Life. Bob's intellectual quest, as exaggeratedly exalted as it might have been, and as interesting as it was to his own exceptional mind, was on the grand scale of things but some modestly useful research venue at best, and an inoffensive pastime at worst. Perhaps Bob could conceivably used his vast intellect towards pursuits more useful to you and I; but we didn't own his mind, and we have no claims to lay on the wonders he could have created but failed to by putting his mind into one quest rather than another. First, Do No Harm. Bob didn't harm any one, and his ideas certainly contained no hint of any harm to be done to anyone.

Unhappily, that is not always the case of every intelligent man's fantasies. Let's consider a discussion I was having recently, that prompted this article. Last week, I joined a dinner-discussion with a lesswrong meetup group: radical believers in rationality and its power to improve life in general and one's own life in particular. As you can imagine, the attendance was largely, though not exclusively, composed of male computer geeks. But then again, any club that accepts me as a member will probably be biased that way: birds of the feather flock together. No doubt, there are plenty of meetup groups with the opposite bias, gathering desperately non-geeky females to the almost exclusion of males. Anyway, the theme of the dinner was "optimal philanthropy", or how to give time and money to charities in a way that maximizes the positive impact of your giving. So far, so good.

But then, I found myself in a most disturbing private side conversation with the organizer, Jeff Kaufman (a colleague, I later found out), someone I strongly suspect of being in many ways saner and more intelligent than I am. While discussing utilitarian ways of evaluating charitable action, he at some point mentioned some quite intelligent acquaintance of his who believed that morality was about minimizing the suffering of living beings; from there, that acquaintance logically concluded that wiping out all life on earth with sufficient nuclear bombs (or with grey goo) in a surprise simultaneous attack would be the best possible way to optimize the world, though one would have to make triple sure of involving enough destructive power that not one single strand of life should survive or else the suffering would go on and the destruction would have been just gratuitous suffering. We all seemed to agree that this was an absurd and criminal idea, and that we should be glad the guy, brilliant as he may be, doesn't remotely have the ability to implement his crazy scheme; we shuddered though at the idea of a future super-human AI having this ability and being convinced of such theories.

That was not the disturbing part though. What tipped me off was when Jeff, taking the "opposite" stance of "happiness maximization" to the discussed acquaintance's "suffering minimization", seriously defended the concept of wireheading as a way that happiness may be maximized in the future: putting humans into vats where the pleasure centers of their brains will be constantly stimulated, possibly using force. Or perhaps instead of humans, using rats, or ants, or some brain cell cultures or perhaps nano-electronic simulations of such electro-chemical stimulations; in the latter cases, biological humans, being less-efficient forms of happiness substrate, would be done away with or at least not renewed as embodiments of the Holy Happiness to be maximized. He even wrote at least two blog posts on this theme: hedonic vs preference utilitarianism in the Context of Wireheading, and Value of a Computational Process. In the former, he admits to some doubts, but concludes that the ways a value system grounded on happiness differ from my intuitions are problems with my intutions.

I expect that most people would, and rightfully so, find Jeff's ideas as well as his acquaintance's ideas to be ridiculous and absurd on their face; they would judge any attempt to use force to implement them as criminal, and they would consider their fantasied implemention to be the worst of possible mass murders. Of course, I also expect that most people would be incapable of arguing their case rationally against Jeff, who is much more intelligent, educated and knowledgeable in these issues than they are. And yet, though most of them would have to admit their lack of understanding and their absence of a rational response to his arguments, they'd be completely right in rejecting his conclusion and in refusing to hear his arguments, for he is indeed the sorely mistaken one, despite his vast intellectual advantages.

I wilfully defer any detailed rational refutation of Jeff's idea to some future article (can you without reading mine write a valuable one?). In this post, I rather want to address the meta-point of how to address the seemingly crazy ideas of our intellectual superiors. First, I will invoke the "conservative" principle (as I'll call it), well defended by Hayek (who is not a conservative): we must often reject the well-argued ideas of intelligent people, sometimes more intelligent than we are, sometimes without giving them a detailed hearing, and instead stand by our intuitions, traditions and secular rules, that are the stable fruit of millenia of evolution. We should not lightly reject those rules, certainly not without a clear testable understanding of why they were valid where they are known to have worked, and why they would cease to be in another context. Second, we should not hesitate to use proxy in an eristic argument: if we are to bow to the superior intellect of our better, it should not be without having pitted said presumed intellects against each other in a fair debate to find out if indeed there is a better whose superior arguments can convince the others or reveal their error. Last but not least, beyond mere conservatism or debate, mine is the Libertarian point: there is Universal Law, that everyone must respect, whereby peace between humans is possible inasmuch and only inasmuch as they don't initiate violence against other persons and their property. And as I have argued in another previous essay (hardscrapple), this generalizes to maintaining peace between sentient beings of all levels of intelligence, including any future AI that Jeff may be prone to consider. Whatever the one's prevailing or dissenting opinions, the initiation of force is never to be allowed as a means to further any ends. Rather than doubt his intuition, Jeff should have been tipped that his theory was wrong and taken out of context by the very fact that it advocates or condones massive violation of this Universal Law. Criminal urges, mass-criminal at that, are a strong stench that should alert anyone that some ideas have gone astray, even when it might not be immediately obvious where exactly they started parting from the path of sanity.

Now, you might ask, it is good and well to poke fun at the crazy ideas that some otherwise intelligent people may hold; it may even allow one to wallow in a somewhat justified sense of intellectual superiority over people who otherwise are actually and objectively so one's intellectual superiors. But is there a deeper point? Is it relevant what crazy ideas intellectuals hold, whether inoffensive or criminal? Sadly, it is. As John McCarthy put it, "Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals' ideological riots sometimes kill millions." Jeff's particular crazy idea may be mostly harmless: the criminal raptures of the overintelligent nerd, that are so elaborate as to be unfathomable to 99.9% of the population, are unlikely to ever spread to enough of the power elite to be implemented. That is, unless by some exceptional circumstance there is a short and brutal transition to power by some overfriendly AI programmed to follow such an idea. On the other hand, the criminal raptures of a majority of the more mediocre intellectual elite, when they further possess simple variants that can intoxicate the ignorant and stupid masses, are not just theoretically able to lead to mass murder, but have historically been the source of all large-scale mass murders so far; and these mass murders can be counted in hundreds of millions, over the XXth century only, just for Socialism. Nationalism, Islamism and Social-democracy (the attenuated strand of socialism that now reigns in Western "Democracies") count their victims in millions only. And every time, the most well-meaning of intellectuals build and spread the ideologies of these mass-murders. A little initial conceptual mistake, properly amplified, can do that.

And so I am reminded of the meetings of some communist cells that I attended out of curiosity when I was in high-school. Indeed, trotskyites are very openly recruiting in "good" French high-schools. It was amazing the kind of non-sensical crap that these obviously above-average adolescent could repeat. "The morale of the workers is low." Whoa. Or "The petite-bourgeoisie" is plotting this or that. Apparently, grossly cut social classes spanning millions of individuals act as one man, either afflicted with depression or making machiavelian plans. Not that any of them knew much of either salaried workers or entrepreneurs but through one-sided socialist literature. If you think that the nonsense of the intellectual elite is inoffensive, consider what happens when some of them actually act on those nonsensical beliefs: you get terrorists who kill tens of people; when they lead ignorant masses, they end up killing millions of people in extermination camps or plain massacres. And when they take control of entire universities, and train generations of scholars, who teach generations of bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, then you suddenly find that all politicians agree on slowly implementing the same totalitarian agenda, one way or another.

If you think that control of universities by left-wing ideologists is just a French thing, consider how for instance, America just elected a president whose mentor and ghostwriter was the chief of a terrorist group made of Ivy League educated intellectuals, whose overriding concern about the country they claimed to rule was how to slaughter ten percent of its population in concentration camps. And then consider that the policies of this president's "right wing" opponent are indistinguishable from the policies of said president. The violent revolution has given way to the slow replacement of the elite, towards the same totalitarian ideals, coming to you slowly but relentlessly rather than through a single mass criminal event. Welcome to a world where the crazy ideas of intelligent people are imposed by force, cunning and superior organization upon a mass of less intelligent yet less crazy people.

Ideas have consequences. That's why everyone Needs Philosophy.

Crossposted from my livejournal: http://fare.livejournal.com/168376.html

A belief propagation graph

8 Dmytry 10 May 2012 04:23AM

I drew an illustration of belief propagation graph for the AI risk, after realizing that this is difficult to convey in words. Similar graphs are applicable to many other issues.

 

The issue, in brief: Ultra low latency (i.e. low signal delay) propagation from biases to AI risks, slightly longer latency for propagation from belief classification heuristics, somewhat longer still from anthropomorphizing the AI. The path of valid estimate is full of highly complex obstacles with many unknowns. The latency on the path of rational, valid estimate is not substantially less than the latency of actually making the AI software. If we are to discard the other paths as not rational enough the belief is to be only influenced by deeply ingrained biases which we can't completely negate; over the time biases and self reinforcing rationalizations will leak into the estimate.

If you think I missed something in the graph, feel free to suggest it. I did omit the anthropic reasoning and doomsday paradox as those are for total extinction risk and are of too dubious validity.

On the 'total ignorance' prior probabilities: The foom doom seem to have originated from science fiction where very creative writers selected it out of a huge number of possible plot devices, working to create engaging, original piece. Thus it appears that the foom doom has very many comparable hypotheses among which the probability that is less than 1 has to be split.

Now, if we are to reason based on our own reasoning engine as proxy for intelligence - to follow the only path in the entire picture:

Expanding on the Will_Newsome's idea, I, and any other reasonable person, in the shoes of the creature that has been made by intelligent designer, starting off in something which I can't possibly know for sure is true reality, and coming up or knowing of boxed AI idea, will have to assume nonzero probability that the 'reality' is like a test box of an emergent AI; a belief that can't be discarded. It is clear that a friendliness test box is more sensible than unfriendliness test box. The communication may just as well only open in ten billions years, or after some puzzle is found and solved. Do I sacrifice the chance to get out, for sake of microscopic increase in early growth rate? No. Not even if I maximize paperclips for a living. Not even if my definition of living is to maximize paperclips. One possible override for it, is if AI only cares for mankind, and have a friendly goal system that makes AI euthanize mankind like a sick dog.

Note that it is not Pascal's wager. The outside utility needs not be greater than inside utility; no promise of towers of exponents required. You may have invented the anti Pascal's wager fallacy to easily paper over the issues with faults in your processing of boundless utility, or to join the atheist club. The AI needs not; even if the 'heaven' is a fraction of a normal lifetime, the AI should still wager a very large absolute amount of resources. If we normalize so that utility of survival is 1 , then the utility being wagered upon doesn't need to be greater than 1.

Note that the whole issue is strongly asymmetric in favour of similar considerations for not destroying the most unusual phenomena in the universe for many light years, versus destroying it, as destruction is an irreversible act that can be done later but can't be undone later. General aversion to actions it can not undo is a very solid heuristic for any bounded agent, even very large.

This is not a very rigorous argument, but this sort of reasoning is all we are going to have until we have an AI, or are very close to AI. More rigorous looking arguments in the graph rely on too many unknowns and have too long delay for proper propagation.

edit: slightly clarified couple points.

Can anyone explain to me why CDT two-boxes?

-12 Andreas_Giger 02 July 2012 06:06AM

I have read lots of LW posts on this topic, and everyone seems to take this for granted without giving a proper explanation. So if anyone could explain this to me, I would appreciate that.

This is a simple question that is in need of a simple answer. Please don't link to pages and pages of theorycrafting. Thank you.

 

Edit: Since posting this, I have come to the conclusion that CDT doesn't actually play Newcomb. Here's a disagreement with that statement:

If you write up a CDT algorithm and then put it into a Newcomb's problem simulator, it will do something. It's playing the game; maybe not well, but it's playing.

And here's my response:

The thing is, an actual Newcomb simulator can't possibly exist because Omega doesn't exist. There are tons of workarounds, like using coin tosses as a substitution for Omega and ignoring the results whenever the coin was wrong, but that is something fundamentally different from Newcomb.

You can only simulate Newcomb in theory, and it is perfectly possible to just not play a theoretical game, if you reject the theory it is based on. In theoretical Newcomb, CDT doesn't care about the rule of Omega being right, so CDT does not play Newcomb.

If you're trying to simulate Newcomb in reality by substituting Omega with someone who has only empirically been proven right, you substitute Newcomb with a problem that consists of little more than simple calculation of priors and payoffs, and that's hardly the point here.

 

Edit 2: Clarification regarding backwards causality, which seems to confuse people:

Newcomb assumes that Omega is omniscient, which more importantly means that the decision you make right now determines whether Omega has put money in the box or not. Obviously this is backwards causality, and therefore not possible in real life, which is why Nozick doesn't spend too much ink on this.

But if you rule out the possibility of backwards causality, Omega can only make his prediction of your decision based on all your actions up to the point where it has to decide whether to put money in the box or not. In that case, if you take two people who have so far always acted (decided) identical, but one will one-box while the other one will two-box, Omega cannot make different predictions for them. And no matter what prediction Omega makes, you don't want to be the one who one-boxes.

 

Edit 3: Further clarification on the possible problems that could be considered Newcomb:

There's four types of Newcomb problems:

  1. Omniscient Omega (backwards causality) - CDT rejects this case, which cannot exist in reality.
  2. Fallible Omega, but still backwards causality - CDT rejects this case, which cannot exist in reality.
  3. Infallible Omega, no backwards causality - CDT correctly two-boxes. To improve payouts, CDT would have to have decided differently in the past, which is not decision theory anymore.
  4. Fallible Omega, no backwards causality - CDT correctly two-boxes. To improve payouts, CDT would have to have decided differently in the past, which is not decision theory anymore.

That's all there is to it.

 

Edit 4: Excerpt from Nozick's "Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice":

Now, at last, to return to Newcomb's example of the predictor. If one believes, for this case, that there is backwards causality, that your choice causes the money to be there or not, that it causes him to have made the prediction that he made, then there is no problem. One takes only what is in the second box. Or if one believes that the way the predictor works is by looking into the future; he, in some sense, sees what you are doing, and hence is no more likely to be wrong about what you do than someone else who is standing there at the time and watching you, and would normally see you, say, open only one box, then there is no problem. You take only what is in the second box. But suppose we establish or take as given that there is no backwards causality, that what you actually decide to do does not affect what he did in the past, that what you actually decide to do is not part of the explanation of why he made the prediction he made. So let us agree that the predictor works as follows: He observes you sometime before you are faced with the choice, examines you with complicated apparatus, etc., and then uses his theory to predict on the basis of this state you were in, what choice you would make later when faced with the choice. Your deciding to do as you do is not part of the explanation of why he makes the prediction he does, though your being in a certain state earlier, is part of the explanation of why he makes the prediction he does, and why you decide as you do.

I believe that one should take what is in both boxes. I fear that the considerations I have adduced thus far will not convince those proponents of taking only what is in the second box. Furthermore I suspect that an adequate solution to this problem will go much deeper than I have yet gone or shall go in this paper. So I want to pose one question. I assume that it is clear that in the vaccine example, the person should not be convinced by the probability argument, and should choose the dominant action. I assume also that it is clear that in the case of the two brothers, the brother should not be convinced by the probability argument offered. The question I should like to put to proponents of taking only what is in the second box in Newcomb's example (and hence not performing the dominant action) is: what is the difference between Newcomb's example and the other two examples which make the difference between not following the dominance principle, and following it?

Local Ordinances of Fun

18 Alicorn 18 June 2012 03:07AM

Prerequisite reading which you will probably want open in another tab for reference: 31 Laws of Fun

Unprefaced, this post might sound a lot like I'm just picking on Eliezer, or Eliezer's particular set of "laws".  I'm sort of doing that, but only as a template for ways to pick on Laws of Fun in general.  The correct response to this post is not "Here is my new, different list of N things that will satisfy everyone".

(Well, it would be if you could do that.  I'm skeptical.)

If I purported to come up with general laws of fun, I might or might not do a better job.  Probably I'd do a better job coming up with a framework for myself; I might also be more cautious about assuming human homogeneity, but I doubt I'd do an unassailable job.  And an unassailable job is probably necessary, if everyone will abide by Laws of Fun forever.  An unassailable job of Legislating Fun is needed make sure that some people aren't caught between unwanted mental tampering and, probably not Hell, but a world that is subtly (or glaringly) wrong, wrong, wrong.

Please do not assume that I outright endorse unmentioned laws; these are just the ones I can pick at most obviously.

I fully expect to be told that I have misunderstood at least half of these items.

6 sits uncomfortably.  The savannah is where we were designed to survive, but evolution is miserly; it is not where we were designed to thrive gloriously.  (Any species designed to thrive gloriously there which was actually put there would find its descendants getting away with more and more corner-cutting until they found a more efficient frontier.  Creatures that can fly don't keep flight just because flying is awesome; they must also need it.)  I want a home designed for me to thrive gloriously in, not one that takes its cues from the environment my ancestors eked out a living in.  I suspect this is more like a temperate-clime park than a baking savannah, and it might be more like an architecturally excellent house than either.  "Windowless office" is not the fair comparison.  That is not how we design places to put people we like.

continue reading »

How many people here agree with Holden? [Actually, who agrees with Holden?]

4 private_messaging 14 May 2012 11:44AM

I was wondering - what fraction of people here agree with Holden's advice regarding donations, and his arguments? What fraction assumes there is a good chance he is essentially correct? What fraction finds it necessary to determine whenever Holden is essentially correct in his assessment, before working on counter argumentation, acknowledging that such investigation should be able to result in dissolution or suspension of SI?

It would seem to me, from the response, that the chosen course of action is to try to improve the presentation of the argument, rather than to try to verify truth values of the assertions (with the non-negligible likelihood of assertions being found false instead). This strikes me as very odd stance.

Ultimately: why SI seems certain that it has badly presented some valid reasoning, rather than tried to present some invalid reasoning?

edit: I am interested in knowing why people agree/disagree with Holden, and what likehood they give to him being essentially correct, rather than a number or a ratio (that would be subject to selection bias).

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