All of Ishaan's Comments + Replies

Is there any 80,000/CFAR statement on Trump or are you just talking about the personal writings of individual people who happen to work in these organizations?

(Also, did you consistently think it was wrong for them to fervently espouse the AI-as-existential risk narrative?)

Perhaps that's also a reason, but the role of insulin / leptin resistance in causing hunger pangs (contractions of the stomach) in situations when additional food is not actually required is pretty well established.

You're missing the fact that tightly controlled feedback mechanisms govern appetite. That's what allows maintaining weight in the real world. Magically add 20lbs (or an apple a day) to a healthy person and they'll feel correspondingly less hungry.

impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies

Actually, it's mostly going to be the metabolism of the tissue (extra fat tissue needs flood flow, temperature regulation, energy for cellular processes etc too), and that can be significant, although not as much as hunger regulation.

Yes, that is the ideal, and it's true that the three consequences you mention are positive consequences (Assuming more effort makes you more likely to arrive at correct answers, which it usually does although I imagine there are diminishing returns past a certain point - you might notice a lot of very smart people putting a lot of effort into politics and still disagreeing.)

The thing is you must weigh information-gathering and evaluation concerning GMOs against every other possible action you could take with those resources.

Let's focus on the goal which mo... (read more)

yes.

We don't want "are you rich, do you smoke" because the selection effect (we are rich because we were born upper middle class, and we're not powerful because powerful people have better things to do than explore the internet until they land on odd forums).

Otherwise the value of an idea is judged by the types of people who happen to stumble upon them.

What we want is "After being exposed to the ideas, did you get richer", "did you quite smoking", etc. Before after.

why aren't they leveraging their high IQs

IQ is just another s... (read more)

First: check whether the issue is really important: With some exceptions (voting correctly, believing the correct afterlife and not getting sent to hell) If you aren't in a position to interact with the evidence it's probably not something you meaningfully have control over. (Most things for which it is important for you to personally understand have measurable consequences to you. Why do you need the right answer to the GMO question, what would you even do with the right answer?).

Then:

-Figure out exactly what the claims really are and try not to conflate... (read more)

Do you have an opinion concerning whether this is better characterized as "non-response to the benefits of exercise due to pathology" vs. "immunity to the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle"?

Basically, is being a non-responder good or bad? Eyeballing that graph it does look like untrained non-responders might be a bit fitter than responders - but of course the first thing we should assume is ceiling effect.

(And of course there's many 3rd options - orchid/dandelion trade offs and such)

Agreed.

(By the way, I never was suggesting that religion caused people to not desire earthly longevity. I was saying that the fact that nearly all human religions often feature immorality suggest that nearly all humans find it difficult to understand and accept true-death and wish for immortality on some level.

Furthermore I was saying that if someone happily believes in an afterlife, we should probably count them as desiring immortality even if they claim to desire an earthly death. I'm disagreeing with the idea that we should take claims of wishing to di... (read more)

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/

http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/07/who-wants-to-live-forever.html

Desire to live indefinitely is not that uncommon in the general population in the first place, this is a transhumanist forum so there is a self-selection effect from the outset (LWers beliefs about AI are way weirder than the immortality thing), and almost every single person here has been exposed to explicit arguments for wanting immortality, moreover, i... (read more)

While that might be true, I don't think that people on LW are radically different on that count.

Yes, neither do I. I'm not even personally different on that count. Aside from the forum-specific ideologies, Lesswrongers being unusual is a more extreme case of internet forum users being unusual, which is in turn a more extreme case of extremely literate people being unusual, and so on.

Is belief in the supernatural (crystal healing, ghosts, "something higher", that sort of thing) actually lower? I'd be very surprised if this turned out to be a cultural or demographic thing, rather than a human thing. I think that, absent some sort of active cultural intervention preventing it, a psychologically typical human will believe in spirits and magic. I know I would.

I think atheists, being psychologically typical humans, still retain certain implicit beliefs about this sort of thing. Ideas about how our matter goes on to circulate thro... (read more)

Yeah, in general, I'm sure part of it is that humans can't easily conceptualize true death in the first place (but that's even further grounds for not taking them seriously when they say they want to die). Just like part of it is our instinctive animism/anthropomorphism. I certainly don't want to minimize the role of "cognitive illusions" in the whole thing.

But I don't think it's a coincidence that these beliefs depict the universe as fairly utopian - the afterlife often resolves misunderstandings, rebalances moral scales, makes room for further ... (read more)

I disagree with the idea that the desire to die is normal for humans.

The vast majority of humanity, spanning hunter-gatherers to information economy techies, believe in some form of consciousness which continues after the physical body as passed away. They believe this to the point that, if you disabuse them of this notion, they'll enter a spiritual crisis and begin to feel that life is meaningless. The older people get, the more enthusiastically they believe this.

If the collective fantasy common to our entire species doesn't reflect an extremely powerfu... (read more)

I'd speculate that if you did an identical breeding experiment with octopuses (as in, the breeding criteria of non-aggressively interaction with human hand) you'd breed for curious, bold, or playful octopuses which tend to approach novel stimuli ... but not friendly in the sense of affectionate.

It's not that they're asocial, I think they sometimes lay eggs cooperatively and obviously seek each other out for mating... but primarily octopuses see others of their species as predators or prey. (I mean, cats do eat each other but only in bounded contexts, like infanticide, not hunting.)

Your culture is bounded by lexography, not geography

and it simultaneously attracts and bestows the various qualities that it has defined as "intelligence".

Bulletproof vests have anecdotally saved police officers from car accidents as well.

Seems like the sort of thing you might successfully convince new teen drivers to do despite the weird factor (since they're the highest risk demographic).

Edit: If the hats aren't extremely uncomfortable, might also be good fall protection for the elderly...

Of course, I live on the great lakes and my family eats a lots of fish... It probably doesn't matter for me but not sure what to feed my little sister now, especially considering what you said about half-life. Attempts at guidelines keep waving around "moderation" in response to mixed messages from research, but even if by coincidence the effects are ∩ shaped and not linear I doubt vague ideas about moderation are going to hit approximately optimal.

Cross fingers and hope the good list is accurate, I guess?

Blah. My current fish information factored in mercury but not PCB. I've been thinking atlantic salmon was fine. Now googling "PCB mercury". Is the first result pretty much accurate or is there more to the story? (And any estimates for the magnitude of effect / whether it is worth worrying about?)

A.i. Can anyone seriously oppose effective altruism in principle? I find it difficult to imagine someone supporting ineffective altruism. Surely, we should let our charity be guided by evidence, randomized experiments, hard thinking about tradeoffs, etc etc.

I emphatically don't, but yes, one can. The quantitative/reductionist attitude you've outlined here biases us towards easily measurable causes.

Some examples of difficult to measure causes include: 1) All forms of funding-hungry research, scientific or otherwise 2) most x-risks, including this forum'... (read more)

Effective Altruism says that all humans have roughly equal intrinsic value and takes necessary steps to gather evidence and quantify the degree to which humans are helped.

Short, but pretty much summarizes the entirety of the appeal for me. Is there even a name for the two perspectives contained in that sentence?

The way that I've phrased this outside of lesswrong (where people don't typically know what priors are) is: "In the absence of empirical data, things which are evolutionarily novel should be treated as guilty until evidence proves them innocent, whereas things which are evolutionarily familiar should be treated as innocent until evidence proves them guilty."

"Prior" captures the connotation that this is only a provisionary belief until more evidence surfaces in one neat word.

I understand that what you're really complaining about is that some people are overconfident in their speculations (which is a fine and good thing to complain about) but the way you've phrased that objection here is a general counterargument against pretty much any statement that doesn't fall within mathematics, including all heuristics, priors, educated guesses, and parsimony intself.

(And the literal meaning of "I know nothing about this but here's my pontification" is very similar to "I have no evidence, but here is my prior assumption&qu... (read more)

While this is obviously true and correct, I find it's too often trotted out as a counterargument against (what seems to me to be) sensible claims about how we should, in the absence of evidence, hold a prior that mimicking what we approximate to be the ancestral environment will generally lead to better results. Too often there is unproductive back-and-forth between the "nature!" and the "naturalistic fallacy!" crowds.

it is foolish to therefore refuse to fly because it is unnatural

It's foolish to refuse altogether of course. Yet, as... (read more)

Right - and you should avoid relationships where both people aren't on net gaining energy and time.

Extrovert/introvert "recharching" works because extroverts/introverts by definition like social activities/solitude. The general principle here is that people are recharged by spending time in a manner which they find simultaneously comfortable and engaging ("flow"?). An intellectual is recharged by thinking, an artist is recharged by creating, a romantic by romance, etc.

Beyond the obvious foundation of mutual love and affection, a good r... (read more)

"I want to do a list of things" includes "I want the people around me to perceive me in a certain way" and "I want to perceive myself a certain way"- which is generally a big drive for clothing, adornments, and body-modification in general.

I chose a bad example to illustrate my point. What I wanted to say is that it seems there are plenty of people who say and do absolutely atrocious things and nothing ever happens to them... and then some random well intentioned person wears a t-shirt or makes a joke in poor taste and is eviscerated. My intuition says that it might be a bad strategy for these very minor offenders to back down and submit immediately (which they do presumably because they themselves agree with the steelman of the criticism) rather than going on the offence concerning how they... (read more)

Oh. good catch, didn't read that far. Still though, that's already the fifth political correctness controversy he was in (though one might argue the underlying factor is PC-ness increasing, or something)

That's a common trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist argument. Wrong because:

1) Would you feel uncomfortable wearing a swastika? Would that send the right message about you? In India swastika is a holy symbol, not a Nazi symbol, the meaning is arbitrary. "Dress" means "I'm feminine" in our culture. It's part of our language.

Suppose in Atlantis, the mouth-sound "love" happens to mean hate and the mouth sound "hate" happens to mean love. It's still acceptable for an English speaking person to want to mouth-sound "I... (read more)

I wouldn't think about it as "dating" in general. It depends on whom you are dating. I think that if you perceive yourself as expending time and emotional energy, rather than acquiring more free time and more emotional energy, then the answer is "no" for that particular person.

This vaguely applies to any investment, doesn't it?

Second lesson: Do not apologize, resign, and so on because it only causes the public perception to damn you further.

James Watson has said some unambiguously politically incorrect, unkind, bad and mean things. With respect to the public face, he barely even flinches at backlash: no apology, no resignations, and no real personal consequences whatsoever for his statements.

In contrast, Hunt merely made a joke in poor taste. I wish he had stood his ground and denounced the accusers. Luckily other respected figures are coming to his aid, but that doesn't always happen.

http://marc.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=22

I'd recommend using these guided meditations. (Way easier than unguided meditation IMO)

You can use them immediately upon onset of the episode. Use the longer ones. It's a better way to use time compared to curling up in a corner.

So if I understand this correctly, Alice and the Sovereign are identically omniscient, and the Sovereign additionally has some power and influence upon the world that Alice does not. In the case where Alice herself is the sovereign the problem is solved, right? The sovereign just has to figure out what she prefers and do that. The solution then, is to simulate the scenario where Alice has the power to make the decision herself and then match Alice's decision. This solves both 1 and 2.

My short answer to the broader "How do we know what sacks of meat /... (read more)

This is my favorite one so far, unexpected and very practical. You quite plausibly might upgrade your meta-cognitive ability as these upgraded senses improve your ability to notice.

Noticing your body reacting to getting anxious or being able to detect certain mental processes (mind wandering, confabulation, etc) is something you'd really want on all the time, at every second.

For "high paying" I guess it depends on how much your earning potential at your current job is. Off the top of my head, there's a few dangerous but very high-paying blue collar jobs - Crab fisherman, oil rig worker, and the like. Working with carcinogens and radiation is also a go, as mentioned elsewhere, though I'm not sure about compensation there. For "social good", Terminally ill patients are at least eligible to volunteer to test drugs for their particular illness.

I'm still in the "spend time with your loved ones and help them come to terms with it" camp though.

I'm not limiting myself to " high-risk activities that pay well", I'm limiting myself to "legally feasible high risk and helpful services that also pay really well" ;)

The "helpful" is the goal, the rest are instrumental. I think most stuff leading to morally good outcomes is legal. Even illegal stuff which might be good if only it were legal turns out bad simply due to the practical realities of illegal operations.

Realistically I'd probably wrap up my affairs and prepare my loved ones, but broadly I think the comparative advantage is in performing high-risk services. The first thought that came to mind is volunteering for useful dangerous experiments that need live human subjects, but there's probably a lot of bureaucratic barriers there.

I wonder if there are any legally feasible high risk and helpful services that also pay really well...

Japanese pensioners are way ahead of ya!.

It's not intended as a unit of caring - it's a unit of achievement, a display of power, focused on outcomes. Consequences over virtue ethics, utils over fuzzies.

Don't get me wrong, I do see the ugliness in it. I too have deeply held prejudices against materialism and vanity, and the whole thing bites against the egalitarian instinct for giving even more status to the wealthy. But helping people is something worthy of pride, unlike the mercedes or thousand dollar suits or flashy diamonds and similar trifles people use for the same purpose.

My point is, yo... (read more)

All interactions involving people involve pushing buttons for outcomes.

Negative-connotation-Manipulation is when you do it in ways that they would not approve of it if they realized exactly what you were doing. The ice bucket challenge for example does exactly what it says on the tin - raise awareness, raise money, have social activity.

Why is it dark? Doesn't it have to be a drawback in order to be dark? (agreed about pretentiousness=signal failure)

I do have a parallel thought process which finds it pretentious, but I ignore it because it also said that the ice bucket was pretentious. And the ice bucket challenge was extremely effective. I think the dislike is just contrarian signalling, and is why our kind can't cooperate. That or some kind of egalitarian instinct against boasting.

Isn't "pretentious" just a negative way to say "signalling"? Of course that idea might not be effective signalling but abstractly, the idea is that EA is well suited for signalling so why isn't it?

I'd ... (read more)

Frankly who cares? If someone wants to signal, then fine we can work with that. Life saving is an archetypal signal of heroism. Start a trend of wearing necklaces with one bead for each life you saved to remind everyone of the significance of each life and to remind you that you've given back to this world. That would be pretty bad ass, I'd wear it. Imagine you feel sad, then look down and remember you've added more QALYs to this world than your entire natural lifespan, that you've added centuries of smiles. Perhaps too blatant a boast for most people's t... (read more)

On the topic of popularization, I think the ratio of idealistic people interested in alleviating global poverty to people who are aware of the concept of meta-charities that determine the optimal way to do so is shockingly low.

That seems like one of those "low hanging fruits" - dropping it into casual conversations, mentioning it in high visibility comment threads, and on. There's really no excuse for Kony to be more well known than Givewell.

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you actually hold that view. What I did mean to suggest is that dualist intuitions have snuck into your ideas without announcing themselves as such to you. (Hence the holy water joke - I was trying to say that I'm being religiously paranoid about avoiding implicit dualism despite how you don't even support that view).

Here, I'll try to be more explicit as to why I think you're implicitly expressing dualism:

Why not just have the organism know the objective facts of survival and reproduction, and be done with it?

What ... (read more)

mutter mutter something something to do with parsimony/complexity/occam?

I may also simply be unaware of the possibly similar works on this problem too.

Recorded compatibalist conceptions of free will are several centuries older than academia, so I don't think it was ever really a publishable insight. (You got it on your own, I got it on my own, and so have a lot of people throughout history - it's just that not everyone agrees.)

I don't know about the second question...assuming the premise is true, I suppose either they did not try or it wasn't accepted, I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about academic philosophy to speculate!

But that's because everyone uses glasses, as a matter of course - it's the status quo now. The person who thought "well, and why should we have to walk around squinting all the time when we can just wear these weird contraption on our heads", at a time when people might look at you funny having wearing glass on your face, I think that's pretty transhuman. As is the guy who said "Let's take it further, and put the refractive material directly on our eyeball" back when people would have looked at you real funny if you suggested they put p... (read more)

Yes, I bite that bullet: I think "you aught to use tools to do things better" counts as foundational principle of transhuman ideology. It's supposed to be fundamentally about being human.