...I interpret the engagement with conservative ideas Scott's describing a little more straightforwardly. Lots of people are inundated with Mrs. Grundy leftist takes on social media. They're smart enough to try and figure out what they really think. So they say things like "Oh, I heard about that guy in South Carolina. Instead of knee-jerk condemnation, let’s try to form some general principles out of it and see what it teaches us about civil society.”
This isn't countersignaling. It's just signaling. This isn't making fun of anybody, and it's calling fo
Rarity, by its very nature, cannot be too abundant. The more plentiful it becomes, the more it loses its defining property. There is only one original Mona Lisa, but every NFT project spits out a combinatorial number of images all built from a small number of assets and pretends they are all rare.
Each NFT is indeed unique, but since there are tens of thousands similarly unique NFTs - most or them are not really rare. One could claim that rare paintings are the same - that if NFTs are not rare because there are other NFTs, then by the same logic Mona Lisa s...
...The headline result: the researchers asked experts for their probabilities that we would get AI that was “able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average there was a 50% chance of this happening by 2062 – and a 10% chance of it happening by 2026!
But on its own this is a bit misleading. They also asked by what year “for any occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average that there was a 50% chance of this happening
I see. So essentially demandingness is not about how strong the demand is but about how much is being demanded?
I think the key to the drowning child parable is the ability of others to judge you. I can't judge you for not donating a huge portion of your income to charity, because then you'll bring up the fact that I don't donate a huge portion of my own income to charity. Sure, there are people who do donate that much, but they are few enough that it is still socially safe to not donate. But I can judge you for not saving the child, because you can't challenge me for not saving them - I was not there. This means that not saving the child poses a risk to your social status, which can greatly tilt the utility balance in favor of saving them.
Could you clarify what you mean by "demandingness"? Because according to my understanding the drowning child should be more demanding than donating to AMF because the situation demands that you sacrifice to rescue them, unlike AMF that does not place any specific demands on you personally. So I assume you mean something else?
If Heracles was staring at Hermes' back, shouldn't he have noticed the Eagle eating his liver?
Wait - but if you can use population control to manipulate the global utility just by changing the statistical weights, isn't it plain average utilitarianism instead of the fancier negative preference kind?
This also relates to your thrive/survive theory. A society in extreme survive mode cannot tolerate "burdens" - it needs 100% of the populace to contribute. Infants may be a special exception for the few years until they can start contributing, but other than that if you can't work for whatever reason you die - because if the society will have to allocate to you more utility than what you can give back, it'll lose utility and die. This is extreme survive mode, there is no utility to spare.
As we move thriveward, we get more and more room for "burdens". We do...
I came to a similar conclusion from a different angle. Instead of the past, I considered the future - specifically the future of automation. There is a popular pessimistic scenario of machines taking up human jobs making everyone - save for the tycoons who own the machines - unable to provide for themselves. This prediction is criticized by pointing out that automation in the past created better jobs, replacing the ones it took away. Which is countered by claiming that past automation was mainly replacing our muscles, but now we are working on automation t...
Why ? The participants may have a preference for one nonprofit over the other, but surely - all else being equal - they should prefer their less favorite nonprofit to get money over it getting nothing.
I'd go even farther - this is charity, so instead of a social outcome which is the sum of the players' utility the individual utilities here are applications of the players' value functions on the social outcome. Even if you prefer one nonprofit over the other - do you prefer it enough to relinquish these extra $100? Do you think your favorite charity...
You also need to only permit people who took part in the negotiations to launch nukes. Otherwise newcomers could just nuke without anyone having a chance to establish a precommittment to retaliate against them.
Oh. Good point. Maybe it would be interesting to do a version where you can't retract a counter nuke after the original nuke's 20 minutes.
Either way, I think the 20 minute rule is important for even talking about precommitting. Without it, people can chat and make contracts all they want, only for someone completely uninvolved in the conversation to suddenly post a nuke comment.
The ability to cancel launches make it effectively simultaneous, because they mean you can't commit (at least not under the explicit rules)
If we are looking for a known game structure with a formal name, I'd say it's Battle of the Sexes: a defect-cooperate is preferable to both defect-defect and cooperate-cooperate, but each side would rather be the defector in that outcome.
I wonder, though - maybe there are some rational skills that do benefit from repetitive practice? Overcoming bias comes to mind - even after you recognize the bias, sometimes it still takes mental energy to resist its temptation. Maybe katas could help there?
visitor: Hold on, I think my cultural translator is broken. You used that word “doctor” and my translator spit out a long sequence of words for Examiner plus Diagnostician plus Treatment Planner plus Surgeon plus Outcome Evaluator plus Student Trainer plus Business Manager. Maybe it’s stuck and spitting out the names of all the professions associated with medicine.
This actually sounds a bit similar to how Scott Alexander described hospital pipelines. Sure - real life are not as efficient as in the visitor's homeworld, and medical doctors still g...
Beliefs are quantitative, not qualitative. The more evidence you pile in favor of the claim, the stronger your confidence in it should be. Observing that there is no monkey is much stronger evidence than the geography based argument, and it's probably enough, but the belief is not binary so having both arguments should result in higher probability assigned to it than with having just one argument, not matter how much stronger that single argument is. .
In practice, thing about it that way - what if the monk...
Rene Descartes goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “I think not,” says Descartes, and he ceases to exist.
I can't believe you missed an opportunity to do an "I drink, therefore I am" joke...
I think this lesson extends behind the scope of programming, even behind the more general scope of technology. We should not be too humble before complicated, hard-to-understand things. We should not be too quick to assume the fault is in our inability to comprehend them. We should always consider the possibility that it's their fault being needlessly complicated, or even just plain nonsense.
I've seen some essays (often in the area of philosophy and/or religion) that - I believe - try to take advantage of that utility. They support their argument with cryp...
...(on the other hand, the inability to condition yourself seems relevant here. It seems like the brain might be not be controlling for whether something is reasonable, but only for whether something is produced by yourself. So maybe exercise counts because it’s under your control, but waterboarding doesn’t count because it isn’t. I wonder if anyone has ever tried letting someone waterboard themselves and giving them the on-off switch for the waterboarding device. Was Hitchens’ experience close enough to this to count? Why would this be different from letting
I'd argue that people who are not familiar with "iff" are usually unfamiliar with its full version "if and only if" as well and, unaware of the need for such distinction, tend to treat regular "if" as bidirectional. These two mistakes will cancel each other out and they won't miss said something key.
January 2021 have witnessed the GameStop short squeeze where many small investors, self organized via Reddit, bought a stock in order to hold it and cause financial damage to several hedge funds that shorted it. It was all over the news and was eventually diffused when the brokerage companies sold their clients stocks without their consent.
This resolution triggered great outrage. The traders and their supporters claimed that hedge funds were toying with the economy for a long time now, ruining companies and the families who depended on them, and it was con...
If you've never acknowledged that other study, there is a possibility that you'll consider it objectively once introduced to it.
Section IV, clause A:
...Buyer and Seller agree that the owner of the Soul may possess, claim, keep, store, offer, transfer, or make use of it in whole or in part in any manner that they see fit to do so, conventional or otherwise, including (but not limited to) the purposes described in this Section (IV). Example uses of the Soul which would be permitted under these terms include (but are not limited to):
- ...
- Long term storage, usage, or preservation of the Soul in a state which would prevent it from taking the course of development, evolution, or relocation it
Isn't that the information density for sentences? With all the conjunctions, and with the limitness of the number of different words that can appear in different places of the sentence, it's not that surprising we only get 1.1 bits per letter. But names should be more information dense - maybe not the full 4.7 (because some names just don't make sense) but at least 2 bits per letter, maybe even 3?
I don't know where to find (or how to handle) a big list of full names, so I'm settling for the (probably partial) lists of first names from https://www.galbithin...
The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me saying “Mark Xu” is 20,000,000:1, or roughly 24 bits of evidence. That’s a lot of evidence.
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. Even if, for simplicity, our encoding ignores word boundaries and message ending, that's bits per letter so hearing you say "Mark Xu" is 28.2 bits of evidence total - more than the 24 bits required.
Of course - my encoding is flawed. An optimal encoding should assign "Mar...
Realistically, how high would the tax burden have to be for you to accept those costs of secession?
France's 2015 taxes of 75% made rich people secede, so we can take that as a supremum on the minimal tax burden that can make people secede. Of course - France's rich didn't have to go live in the woods - they had the option to go to other countries. Also, they did not have the option to not go to any country, because all the land on earth is divided between the countries.
I agree that the main benefits for the rich to remain in under the state's rule and pay ...
I think there is some academic merit in taking this example to the extreme and assuming that the rich person is responsible to 100% of the community's resources, and they alone can fund the its entire activity, and if they secede alone the community is left with nothing. They can't protect people in their streets because they can't afford a police. They can't punish criminals because they can't afford a prison. They may be left with their old roads, but without maintenance they quickly wear out while the rich person can build new ones. Their permission to ...
I was replying to ShemTealeaf's claim that the rich person still has an incentive to stay - remaining under the protection of the community's court system. I was arguing that what the rich person needs from the community's court system is not its resources (which the rich person was providing anyway, and would dry out once they secede) but its social norms - the people's agreement to respect it's laws, which mean they would not attack the rich person. My point is that if the reach person's incentive to stay is to not get robbed and killed by the community ...
In this hypothetical scenario, the rich person was the sole source of funding for the community's services. Once they opt out, the community will no longer be able to pay the police, and since all the police salaries came from the rich person's pockets - the rich person will be able to use the same amount of money previously used to pay the police force to finance their own private security.
Same for all the other services the community was providing.
Of course, the community will still have all the infrastructure and equipment that was purchased with the ri...
Most[1] logical fallacies are obvious when arranged in their pattern, but when you encounter them in the wild they are usually transformed by rhetorics to mask that pattern. The "lack of rhetorical skills", then, may not be bad argumentation by itself - but it does help exposing it. If a pickpocket is caught in the act, it won't help them to claim that they were only caught because they were not dexterous enough and it's unfair to put someone in jail for a lack of skill. The fact remains that they tried to steal, and it would still be a crime if they were ...
If Alice can sacrifice her privacy to prove her loyalty, she'll be force to do so to avoid losing to Bob - who already sacrificed his privacy to prove his loyalty and not lose to Alice. They both sacrificed their privacy to get an advantage over each other, and ended up without any relative advantage gained. Moloch wins.
Coincidences can be evidence for correlation and therefore evidence for causation, as long as one remembers that evidence - like more things than most people feel comfortable with - are quantitative, not qualitative. A single coincidence, of even multiple coincidences, can make a causation less improbable - but it can still be considered very improbable until we get much more evidence.
Manslaughter? Probably not - you did not contribute to that person's death. You are, however, guilty of:
Is pulling the lever after the trolley had passed still a murder?
Even if you could tell - Voldemort was Obliviated while knocked out and then transfigured before having the chance to wake up, so there never was an opportunity to verify that the Obliviation worked.
I don't think so - the Vow is not an electric collar that shocks Harry every time he tries to destroy the world. This would invite ways to try and outsmart the Vow. Remember - the allegory here is to AI alignment. The Vow is not just giving Harry deterrents - it modifies his internal reasoning and values so that he would avoid world destruction.
One thing to keep in mind is that even if it does seem likely that the suspected bluffer is smarter and more knowledgeable than you, the bar for actually working on the subject is higher than the bar for understanding a discussion about it. So even if you are not qualified enough to be an X researcher or an X lecturer, you should still be able to understand a lecture about X.
Even if the gap between you two is so great that they can publish papers on the subject and you can't even understand a simple lecture, you should still be able to understand some of t...
By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if "the end of the world" is Moody's stock response to "what's the worst that could happen?" in any context.
(this is no longer spoiler so we no longer need to hide it)
I'm not sure about that. That could be Harry's stock response - "there was always a slight probability for the end of the world and this suggestion will not completely eliminate that probability". But Moody's? I would expect him to quickly make a list of all the things that could go wrong for each suggested course of action.
I could see a world where "the end of the world" is Moody's stock response to questions like "what's the worst that could happen?" if Harry Potter is the one asking the question, but not in general.
Are potential HPMOR spoilers acceptable in the comments here? I'm not really sure - the default is to assume they aren't, but the fanfic itself contains some, so to be sure I'll hide it just in case:
Can Harry really discuss the idea of destroying the world so casually? Shouldn't his unbreakable oath compel him to avoid anything that can contribute to it, and abandon the idea of building the hospital without permit as soon as Moody jokes (is that the correct term when talking about Moody?) about it causing the end of the world?
I notice we are seeing Luna getting ridiculed for her reputation rather then directly for her actions. Even when it's clear how her reputation is a result of her actions - for example they laugh at her for having an imaginary pet, but never once have we seen other students looking at weird when she interacts with Wanda.
Is this intentional? Because we are getting this story from Luna's PoV? Does she consider her reputation unjustified because her behavior does not seem weird to her?
I'm a bit surprised the twins had the patience and concentration to sit with Luna and help her go over the map over and over.
Wouldn't increasing the number of offenders improve the effectiveness of brinkmanship compared to extortion? Since the victim is only bound by a deal with the offender, they can surrender and reject future deals from the other potential offenders. This makes surrendering safer and therefore more attractive compared to extortion, where surrendering to one extorter would invite more extortions.
The moral of Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) was that even if philosophical though experiments demonstrate scenarios where ethical rules should be abandoned for the greater good, real life cases are not as clear cut and we should still obey these moral rules because humans cannot be trusted when they claim that <unethical plan> really does maximize the expected utility - we cannot be trusted when we say "this is the only way" and we cannot be trusted when we say "this is better than the alternative".
I think this may be the source of the repul...
I may be straying from your main point here, but...
Could you really utilize these 60 seconds in a better, more specialized way? Not any block of 60 seconds - these specific 60 seconds, that happened during your walk.
Had you not encountered that open trunk, would you open your laptop in the middle of that walk and started working on a world changing idea or an important charity plan? Unlikely - if that was the case you were already sitting somewhere working on that. You went out for a walk, not for work.
Would you, had you not encountered that open trunk, fi...
Should arguers be encouraged, then, to not write all the arguments if favor of their claim in order to leave more room for those who agree with them to add their own supporting arguments?
This requires either refraining from fully exploring the subject (so that you don't think of all the arguments you can) or straight out omitting arguments you thought of. Not exactly Dark Side, but not fully Light Side either...
The difference can be quite large. If we get the results first, we can come up with Fake Explanations why the masks were only 20% effective in the experiments where in reality they are 75% effective. If we do the prediction first, we wouldn't predict 20% effectiveness. We wouldn't predict that our experiment will "fail". Our theory says masks are effective so we would predict 75% to begin with, and when we get the results it'll put a big dent in our theory. As it should.
Maybe "destroying the theory" was not a good choice of words - the theory will more likely be "demoted" to the stature of "very good approximation". Like gravity. But the distinction I'm trying to make here is between super-accurate sciences like physics that give exact predictions and still-accurate-but-not-as-physics fields. If medicine says masks are 99% effective, and they were not effective for 100 out of 100 patients, the theory still assigned a probability of that this would happen. You need to update it, but you don't have to "thro...
Doesn't society already consider it immoral to go to crowded places untested when you suspect you have COVID? This is not just about a specific detail of this specific story - one important feature is morality is preventing humans from convincing themselves that the thing they want to do is the utilitarian choice. We decided that going untested is immoral precisely because people like Alice who avoid testing themselves for such reasons.
Instead of morality, I think what Alice seeks here is deniability. If Alice does not take the test, she can convince herse... (read more)