All of gregconen's Comments + Replies

Not that it isn't interesting, but it seems confused, and somewhat trivial.

Trivial, because it basically says: Keep in mind that the map is not the territory applies even if the map is a scientific model. A good thing to keep in mind, nevertheless.

But in the details, you seem to misunderstand some of the problems "mathematics appears to have perfect conformity with reality" is, as Vladmir Nesov points out, exactly backwards. Mathematics qua mathematics has no relation to reality, and (properly) makes no claim as to reflections of reality. Your... (read more)

In most cases, signing up for cryonics and signing up as an organ donor are not mutually exclusive. The manner of death most suited to organ donation (rapid brain death with (parts of) the body still in good condition, generally caused by head trauma) is not well suited to cryonic preservation. You'd probably need a directive in case the two do conflict, but such a conflict is unlikely.

Alternatively, neuropreservation can, at least is theory, occur with organ donation.

The point of the reproductive analysis is that it explains the status seeking and attention seeking - whilst also explaining the fees paid for IVF treatments and why ladies like to keep cute puppies. It is a deeper, better theory - with firm foundations in biology.

Evolutionary analysis can if used properly. But evolutionary analysis is properly identifying adaptations, not:

people's desires should be nailed down as hard as possible to those things that lead to raising good quality babies.

As ever, both stories are studies in irrelevancy and emotional appeal.

Which probably reflects a good bit of what's wrong with the criminal justice system.

Though unscientific scientific testimony is also a serious problem, apparently also seen in this case.

It may have helped if you'd explained yourself to onlookers in English, or simply asked in English (given Thomas's apparent reasonable fluency).

I disagree with the downvotes, though.

Calling it an "infection" or a "malfunction" implicitly judges the behavior. That's your own bias talking.

The fact that someone desires something because of a meme instead of a gene (to oversimplify things; both are always in play) does not make the desire any less real or any less worthy.

A solely status-based analysis misses things, just as a solely reproductive analysis misses things. The point is that you can't nail desires down to simply "making good babies" or "being high status" or "having lots of sex"; any or all of these may be true desires in a given person.

Almost 7 billion humans shows how well this theory works.

And yet subreplacement fertility in a number of rich countries (the very place where people have copious resources) points to a serious flaw. It's apparent that many people aren't having babies.

People are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers.

For a highly simplified example, people like sex. In the ancestral environment sex would lead to babies. But the development of condoms, hormonal birth control, etc, has short-circuited this connection. The tasks of caring for a baby (which are e... (read more)

Strongly unFriendly AI (the kind that tortures you eternally, rather than kills you and uses your matter to make paperclips) would be about as difficult to create as Friendly AI. And since few people would try to create one, I don't think it's a likely future.

Keep in mind selection bias. The pool of people who would unschool their children is systematically different from the general population. Aspects of child-rearing unrelated to schooling (at least conventional schooling) and/or genetics probably played a role in determining the adult personality of their children.

This solves nothing. If we knew the failure mode exactly, we could forbid it explicitly, rather than resort to some automatic self-destruct system. We, as humans, do not know exactly what the AI will do to become Unfriendly; that's a key point to understand. Since we don't know the failure mode, we can't design a superstition to stop it, anymore than we can outright prohibit it.

This is, in fact, worse than explicit rules. It requires the AI to actively want to do something undesirable, instead of it occurring as a side effect.

Indeed. I'm not saying the karma system is a bad thing.

Also, the karma system adds an additional barrier, at least in my mind. Knowing that your comment is going to be explicitly judged and your score added to a "permanent record" can be intimidating.

If you haven't already, do check out Eby's Instant Irresistible Motivation video for learning how to create positive motivation.

Interesting. In fact, it seems to mesh with the process I've successfully used to do things like cleaning my desk.

Unfortunately, many of the tasks I have to do don't lend themselves to the visualization in step 1. How does one visualize having studied for an exam, or completed an exercise routine?

technology changes the game by making it easier to commit systematic mass murder.

Not to mention the simple expedient of having more people around.

That's not my point. My point is that Gall's law is unfalsifiable by anything short of Omega converting its entire light cone into computronium/utilium in a single, plank-time step.

Edit: Not to say that Gall's Law can't be useful to keep in mind during engineering design.

Deleated as a repeat.

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Suppose a hyperintelligent alien race did build a space shuttle equivalent as their first space-capable craft, and then went on to build interplanetary and interstellar craft.

Alien 1: The [interstellar craft, driven by multiple methods of propulsion and myriad components] disproves Gall's Law.

Alien 2: Not at all. [Craft] is a simple extension of well-developed principles like the space shuttle and the light sail.

You can simply define a "working simple system" as whatever you can make work, making that a pure tautology.

You should probably make an explicit karma balance post for this.

You weren't just presenting evidence. You were making an argument. Some people believed that you were engaged in motivated reasoning and/or privileging the hypothesis.

Please discuss the merits of the argument in the original thread, if desired. I'd prefer to keep the discussions of the merits of the argument and the reactions to it separate.

So is social deference the missing ingredient in my post?

It would help, but the difference I was refer to was that Jayson was embarrassed by his failure of rationality, while you either failed to recognize yours or were proud of it.

Could you be more specific in what exactly was/is my failure and why/how I was arrogant about it, and what are the ad hominems?

Ad hominem arguments are attacks against the arguers, rather than the arguments. For example:

what can we say about the epistemological waterline here?

Comments like that will not impress peopl... (read more)

I think the idea is to have both accurate and inaccurate positive self-beliefs, and no negative self-beliefs, accurate or otherwise.

Whether this is desirable or even possible I take no stance.

They were also both written in English. The question is, can you see the difference?

Jayson apologetically expressed misunderstanding of rationality combined with an apparent willingness to be corrected. You arrogantly expressed your failure, and responded to criticism with ad hominems and whining.

Edit: In that post. Some of you responses were productive, and one is, at time of this writing, at positive karma.

But since our preferences are given to us, broadly, by evolution, shouldn't we expect that our principles operate locally (context-dependent) and are likely to be mutually inconsistent?

Yes.

I have a strong preferences for simple set of moral preferences, with minimal inconsistency.

I admit that the idea of holding "killing babies is wrong" as a separate principle from "killing humans is wrong", or holding that "babies are human" as a moral (rather than empirical) principle simply did not occur to me. The dangers of generalizing from one example, I guess.

Pretty much. Both you and bogus apparently forget to put an initial value into var (unless your language of choice automatically initializes them as 0).

Using while(1) with a conditional return is a little bizarre, when you can just go while(var<100).

Of course, my own draft used if(var % 3 == 0 && var % 5 == 0) instead of the more reasonable x%15.

I'm not sure what "arbitrary" means here. You don't seem to be using it in the sense that all preferences are arbitary.

That seemed to be exactly how he's using it. It would be how I'd respond, had I not worked it through already. But there is a difference between arbitrary in: "the difference between an 8.5 month fetus and a 15 day infant is arbitrary" and "the decision that killing people is wrong is arbitrary".

Yes, at some point you need at least one arbitrary principle. Once you have an arbitrary moral principle, you c... (read more)

I see my joke fell flat.

In the world at large, sanity is valued much less than it is here at lesswrong. Absurd as it sounds, many people would value righteous indignation above rational debate, or even above positive results.

You mean not appearing to have been mind-killed is a bad thing?

Welcome to the world. Sanity is not always valued so highly here as you might be used to.

EY's posts undermine (1) significantly

What works for EY may not work for everyone else. For better or worse, he enjoys a special status in this community.

The kind that comes from more than a single person, for a start. An unequivocal sign of a conspiracy (like an actual explosive attached to a support).

Failing that, a report free of clear signs of confusion (like the aforementioned confusion at 4:39). Reports of explosions from people actually familiar with explosions, and/or experience and a track record of cool under threat ("a boiler guy" and bureaucrat don't qualify, without more of a evidence). A witness who hasn't changed his story back and forth. Etcetera.

Well, along with medical research, organ donation and cryonics also probably exceed the expected utility of cannibalism or necrophilia.

That said, I'm not sure they would be mutually exclusive. My head for my future self, my innards for the sick, my penis and anus for lovers, and my arms and legs for the hungry.

That adds some weight. But it's still not particularly convincing. Even assuming he's not being intentionally deceptive or deceptively cut (which I'm not sure is true), it's not anything close to extraordinary evidence, as a claim like that requires.

Remember that witnesses perceptions and memories will be distorted. Clearly, events were confused (look at his statement at 4:39, where he's confused on whether he's standing on a landing or hanging). He "knows" he heard explosions, apparently based on his experience as "a boiler guy"; e... (read more)

I agree with the sentiment here.

However, in a community like this one, Aumann's agreement theorem would suggest that most of the commonly held views, at least the views commonly held to be very likely, rather than just somewhat likely, should be correct.

A single eyewitness account, presumable handpicked and stagemanaged by people with an agenda, does not make particularly strong evidence.

First, the scenario you describe explicitly includes death, and as such falls under the 'embellishments' exception.

You're going to die (or at least cease) eventually, unless our understanding of physics changes significantly. Eventually, you'll run out of negentropy to run your thoughts. My scenario only changes what happens between then and now.

Failing that, you can just be tortured eternally, with no chance of escape (no chance of escape is unphysical, but so is no chance of death). Even if the torture becomes boring (and there may be ways around that), an eternity of boredom, with no chance to succeed any at any goal, seems worse than death to me.

Most versions of torture, continued for your entire existence. You finally cease when you otherwise would (at the heat death of the universe, if nothing else), but your entire experience spent being tortured. The type isn't really important, at that point.

People that find human infants cuter than rabbit, dog, or cat infants isn't a direct contradiction of the hypothesis, as humans would be particularly likely to find human infants cute (just as dogs are particularly likely to be protective and nurturing to puppies).

The point is that animals with large litters are particularly likely to have cute infants other things (like degree of genetic closeness) equal, and that large litter animals would be sufficiently cute to overcome the fact that we're not related. Of course, domestic puppies and kittens have an... (read more)

Let me build on this. You say (and I agree) that fixing the damage caused by vitrification is much harder than fixing most causes of death. Thus, by the time that devitrification is possible, very few new people will be vitrified (only people who want a one-way trip to the future).

This leads me to 2 conclusions: 1) Most revivals will be of people who were frozen prior to the invention of the revivification technology. Therefore, if anyone is revived, it is because people want to revive people from the past. 2) The supply of people frozen with a given te... (read more)

Even setting aside a post-FAI economy, why should this be the case? Your PS3 metaphor is not applicable. Owners of old playstations are not an unserved market in the same way that older frozen bodies are. If PS(N) games are significantly more expensive than PS(N+1) games, people will simply buy a PS(N+1). Not an option for frozen people; older bodies will be an under served market in a way PS3 owners cannot be.

If there's a "mass market" for revivals, clearly people are getting paid for the revivals, somehow. I see no reason why new bodies w... (read more)

Regardless of whether the ultimate effects of global warming are a net positive or negative, there are likely to be costly disruptions, as areas currently good for agriculture and/or habitation cease to be good for them, even if they're replaced by other areas.

A good point.

Your solution does have Omega maximize right answers. My solution works if Omega wants the "correct" result summed over all Everett branches: for every you that 2-boxes, there exists an empty box A, even if it doesn't usually go to the 2-boxer.

Both answers are correct, but for different problems. The "classical" Newcomb's problem is unphysical, just as byrnema initially described. A "Quantum Newcomb's problem" requires specifying how Omega deals with quantum uncertainty.

The math is actually quite straight-forward, if anyone cares to see it. Consider a generalized Newcomb's problem. Box A either contains $A or nothing, while box B contains $B (obviously A>B, or there is no actual problem). Let Pb the probability that you 1-box. Let Po be the probability that Omega fills box A (note that only quantum randomness counts, here. If you decide by a "random" but deterministic process, Omega knows how it turns out, even if you don't, so Pb=0 or 1). Let F be your expected return.

Regardless of what Omega does, you... (read more)

The slight quantum chance that EY will 2-box causes the sum of EYs to lose, relative to a perfect 1-boxer, assuming Omega correctly predicts that chance and randomly fills boxes accordingly. The precise Everett branches where EY 2-boxes and where EY loses are generally different, but the higher the probability that he 1-boxes, the higher his expected value is.

Interestingly, I worked through the math once to see if you could improve on committed 1-boxing by using a strategy of quantum randomness. Assuming Omega fills the boxes such that P(box A has $)=P(1-box), P(1-box)=1 is the optimal solution.

I am inclined to doubt that nature's values are orthogonal to your own. Nature built you, and you are part of a successful culture produced by a successful species. Nature made you and your values - you can reasonably be expected to agree on a number of things.

From the perspective of the universe at large, humans are at best an interesting anomaly. Humans, plus all domesticated animals, crops, etc, compose less than 2% of the earth's biomass. The entire biomass is a few parts per billion of the earth (maybe it's important as a surface feature, but lif... (read more)

It's not like no status seeking occurs in those fields.

I agree that making a lump-sum donation is a bad idea. But 200 million dollars (going by the OP's estimate) per year is still a lot of money for a charity to absorb. Givewell puts the "room for more funding" at $2.5 million (for 2010). This may (probably will) go up for later years, but it's a long way from $200 million. Stop TB Partnership is a bit larger, but still not $200M/year large.

Probably. But would the general public find IEC (or SIAI) compelling? I'm thinking not.

For a something like this, we need something that will appeal to the average person (at least the average Facebook/Craigslist user), and I think human development projects are more likely to do that than research projects or existential risk projects.

I'm still waiting for hard evidence that average charity spending has significant net positive impact.

Be that as it may, there exist above-average charities which have a net positive impact. If we select among those charities (or choose a grantmaker likely to select above-average charities), ,we can have a net positive impact.

The problem is not finding an effective, productive, and reputable charity. There are plenty out there (even if a majority are not). It's finding a charity than can effectively and productively use an extra billion dollars. Many charities don't have the oversight and planning infrastructure to use a windfall of that size.