Having wisdom teeth out was also a fascinating experience for me for similar reasons, but I don't know what I did in that lucid-but-amnesiac (and for all I know actually unconscious?) interval. I did apparently walk to the recovery room under my own power, so while I don't think I was asking questions or solving math problems, I was at least navigating under my own power and avoiding running into walls. What really sticks in my mind was that I had this experience of "coming to", like almost identical to the sensation of waking up except without feeling lik...
Chief Bob's hearings might well be public[...] I don't think I've ever been present for an actual court case, just seen them on TV.
This seems to me like an odd example given that you're contrasting with American government, where court hearings are almost entirely public, written opinions are generally freely available, and court transcripts are generally public (though not always accessible for free). I guess the steelman version is that the contrast is a matter of geography or scale? Chief Bob's hearings are in your neighborhood and involve your neighbor...
In the "software twins" thought exercise, you have a "perfect, deterministic copy". But if it's a perfect copy and deterministic, than you're also deterministic. As you say, compatibilism is central to making this not incoherent, presumably no decision theory is relevant if there are no decisions to be made.
I think a key idea in compatibilism is that decisions are not made at a particular instant in time. If a decision is made on the spot, disconnected from the past, it's not compatibilism. If a decision is a process that takes place over time, the only wa...
Yeah, I've seen some posts trying to make similar "lockdown goes too far" arguments (including this one on the SSC Tumblr) that seem to be comparing life with COVID-19 mitigation to normal 2019 life or to that plus some chance of getting sick. Aside from understating the potential for long-term consequences, I think there's a trend in those dollar-cost estimates towards significantly underestimating the negative effects of unmitigated pandemic spread beyond the effect on one's personal health.
(Not that I expect that you disagree wi...
The book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" was a bit of an influence. The quick summary: People often overestimate the downsides of having children, people often underestimate the upsides of having children, people overestimate the marginal benefit of more labor-intensive methods of parenting, therefore maybe you are underestimating how many children you should have (including underestimating the benefit of tradeoffs where you have more children but use a less-intensive parenting style).
I think choosing to raise a child rather than not will pro...
Infections start among people at the river’s mouth, and expand exponentially amongst them, until most of them are infected. It also spreads up the river, but only by local contagion, so the number of deaths (and cases) grows linearly according to how far up-river it has spread. This scenario, however, seems nothing like what we would expect in almost all countries.
That doesn't seem implausible to me, if the epidemic spreads fastest (and therefore first) in densely-connected areas of the social network graph of in-person contacts and mitigation ...
There's no clear reason why mortality and transmissibility of a virus should be inversely correlated.
More quickly fatal diseases leave less time for the immune system to respond and less time for transmission to occur. You're right that's not to say we can't end up with diseases that are both more contagious and more deadly than COVID-19, we definitely could, but that's not the direction the correlation goes.
People go through a grieving process when their image of a loved one changes in a way that they perceive as negative or shocking. That process can be very long. It's possible that your grandparents won't be able to get though enough of that process in time to attend their daughter's wedding, or even at all. And if they don't have it together enough to avoid negative emotional outbursts at the event, it may not be for the best if they attend.
If they made this decision in only an hour, however, I think it would definitely be worth encoura...
"Amount of EA money sent to top four GiveWell charities" might be low because GiveWell itself is not included in that list. (I ended up putting my donation to GiveWell under "other", which while technically accurate, wasn't ideal.) In addition to GiveWell specifically, it would have been worth having an option for Effective Altruism's sort of giving (charities directed at obvious, cost-effective ways of saving the lives of / improving the quality of life for the world's poorest), but not to organizations specifically recommended by GiveWell.
after a bit of searching I can't find a definitive post describing the concept
The idiom used to describe that concept in social psychology is "idiosyncrasy credits", so searching for that phrase produces more relevant material (though as far as I can tell nothing on Less Wrong specifically).
I can see why you think I was making that implicit claim, though that wasn't quite the point I was trying to make.
I don't know to what extent the regulation mentioned in the Wikipedia article I linked to was influenced by industry lobbying versus concern about other sorts of risks to infrastructure or public safety. I'm not sure whether the precise cause of the passage of such regulation is that relevant to the regulation's durability in the face of potential benefits from adoption of new technology. Maybe it is, but the precise example of "limit[in...
The idea would have to be that some natural rate of productivity growth and sectoral shift is necessary for re-employment to happen after recessions, and we've lost that natural rate; but so far as I know this is not conventional macroeconomics.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case, and I'd be very surprised if the end of cheap (at least, much cheaper) petroleum has nothing to do with that.
If cars were invented nowadays, the horse-and-saddle industry would surely try to arrange for them to be regulated out of existence, or sued out of existence, or limited to the same speed as horses to ensure existing buggies remained safe.
That's not a new thing, that sort of regulation actually happened!
"You have brain damage" is also a theory with perfect explanatory adequacy.... Why not?
This led me to think of two alternate hypotheses:
One is that the same problem underlying the second factor ("abnormal belief evaluation") is at fault, that self-evaluation for abnormal beliefs involves the same sort of self-modelling needed for a theory like "I have brain damage" to seem explanatory (or even coherent). The other is that there are separate systems for self-evaluation and belief-probability-evaluation that are both damaged...
Given the context, I was assuming the scenario being discussed was one where the two players' decisions are independent, and where no one expects they may be playing against themselves.
You're right that the game changes if a player thinks that their choice influences (or, arguably, predicts) their opponent's choice.
That's the solution to the Achilles and the Turtle Paradox (also Zeno's), but the Arrow Paradox (in the comment you replied to) is different.
The Arrow Paradox is simply linguistic confusion, I think. Motion is a relation in space relative to different points of time, Zeno's statement that the (moving) arrow is at rest at any given instant is simply false (considered in relation to instants epsilon before or after that instant) or nonsensical (considered in enforced isolation with no information about any other instant).
I never found the Arrow Paradox particularly compelling. For the Achilles and the Turtle Paradox I can at least see why someone might have found that confusing.
That "Engfish" essay is strange. It's right that textbooks and so on encourage students to write in a way that's impersonal and overly verbose. But it doesn't recognize the advantages of academic English. It doesn't even seem to recognize the role (or existence!) of dialects in general. Instead, it takes bad examples of academic English (the writing textbook) and suggests they should be more like bad examples of informal English (the third-grader).
(Didn't realize this site doesn't email reply notifications, thus the delayed response.)
What I'm saying is that someone who answers "algorithms" is clearly not taking that view of substrate-independence, but they could hypothesize that only some side-effects matter. A MOSFET-brain-simulation and a desert-rocks-brain-simulation could share computational properties beyond input-output, even though the side-effects are clearly not identical.
(Not saying that I endorse that hypothesis, just that it's not the same as the "side effects don't matter" version.)
the Kolmogorov complexity of a definition of an equivalence relation which tells us that an AND gate implemented in a MOSFET is equivalent to an AND gate implemented in a neuron is equivalent to an AND gate implemented in desert rocks
Isn't that only a problem for those who answer "functions" to question 5? Desert-rocks-AND-gate and MOSFET-AND-gate are functionally-equivalent by definition, but if you're not excluding side-effects it's obvious that they're not computationally equivalent.
Edit: zaph answered algorithms, so your counter-argument doesn't really target him well.
A few thoughts on the cousin_its problem:
When you calculate the expected outcome for the "deciders say nay" strategy and the "deciders say yea" strategy, you already know that the deciders will be deciders. So "you are a decider" is not new information (relative to that strategy), don't change your answer. (It may be new information relative to other strategies, where the one making the decision is an individual that wasn't necessarily going to be told "you are the decider" for the original problem. If you're to
Some of your analogies strike me as quite strained:
(1) I wouldn't call the probability of being revived post near-future cryogenic freezing "non-trivial but far from certain", I would call it "vanishingly small, if not zero". If sick and dying and offered a surgery as likely to work as I think cryonics is, I might well reject it in favor of more conventional death-related activities.
(3) My past self has the same relation to me as a far-future simulation of my mind reconstructed from scans of my brain-sicle? Could be, but that's far fr...
Huh, interesting. I wrote something very similar on my blog a while ago. (That was on cryonics, not existential risk reduction, and it goes on about cryonics specifically. But the point about rhetoric is much the same.)
Anyways, I agree. At the very least, some statements made by smart people (including Yudkowsky) have had the effect of increasing my blanket skepticism in some areas. On the other hand, such statements have me thinking more about the topics in question than I might have otherwise, so maybe that balances out. Then again, I'm more willin...
Wastes is not a basic land type. It is a name of a card that is a basic land which has no basic land type (or other subtype, for that matter). So it is considered by effects that look for "a basic land", but not cards that look for "land card with a basic land type" (like Boseiju, Who Endures) or count the number of basic land types you have (like cards with Domain).