LESSWRONG
LW

All of CytokineStorm's Comments + Replies

Rationality Quotes: March 2011
CytokineStorm130

Ethics is ... the art of recommending to others the sacrifices for cooperation with oneself.

The great ethicists of history share essentially the same goal: get strangers to always pick D. ...

Reply
1endoself
I didn't like that comic because `D' can be achieved through a combination of egoism and UDT just as easily as through altruism. I assume that Weiner would not judge an egoist to be ethically perfect in the least convenient world, one where they were always forced to cooperate in prisoner's dilemma-type situations but could be entirely egoistic whenever they could get away with it, without even acausal consequences.
7wedrifid
That would sound strange if I didn't remember the reference. Not 'D' for defect. 'D' for zero based alphabetized listing of boolean 11 where 1 is 'C'. :)
Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same
CytokineStorm20

Had the silliness of this linear model been visible in a scatter plot? Is there any point in using linear regression, when lines are a subset of more complex curves? (I haven't read the papers, no access.)

Reply
The scourge of perverse-mindedness
CytokineStorm50

So facts can fester because you only allow yourself to judge them by their truthfulness, even though your actual relation with them is of a nonfactual nature.

One I had problems with: Humans are animals. It's true, isn't it?! But it's only bothering people for its stereotypical subtext. "Humans are like animals: mindless, violent and dirty."

Festering facts?

Reply
1wedrifid
Well... that's got a significant element of truth to it too, but I need not be bothered about that either.
3orthonormal
Ah yes, it's time to dust off YSITTBIDWTCIYSTEIWEWITTAW again. Er, make that ADBOC.
Let There Be Light
CytokineStorm80

Attempts have been made to reduce the Big Five into a "Big One", or "General Factor of Personality"(GFP), this correlates the way you describe it. The neurotism is sometimes called Stability, and this together with the other four correlate with one another. Here's a paper.pdf) by Rushton et al:

A recent observation is that a General Factor of Personality (GFP) occupies the apex of the personality hierarchy in the same way that g, the general factor of mental ability, occupies the apex in the organization of cognitive abilities. Individ

... (read more)
Reply
Demands for Particular Proof: Appendices
CytokineStorm100

an ambulance ride to the future

That feels extremely poignant to me, for some reason. Cryonics doesn't cut it from an Darwinist perspective. But you don't let people die even though saving them will cost more than making a new human, or do you?

Click.

Reply
2mattnewport
Are you speaking normatively or descriptively? We do routinely let people die even though saving them would not cost very much. People with the wealth to pay for treatment, or health insurance coverage, or who are born in a relatively wealthy country with government provided healthcare, are often saved at quite high cost. The majority of the world's population has much less access to expensive health care however and in many cases we let those people die even though it would be relatively cheap to save them. Economically it makes sense to spend more saving an existing person than creating a new one, either because they themselves (or their family or friends) place a high value on their particular life or more generally because a person with already developed skills and experience potentially offers a higher return on investment than a new person who will require years of expensive education to be economically productive. That could potentially be framed as an argument for cryonics but it seems less likely that a preserved human would offer economically valuable skills to a future society with revival technology.