All of jdgalt's Comments + Replies

I find this only a partly useful concept, since it is sometimes used to "discredit" arguments I consider quite valid, such as your last two examples. At most, if called on to defend either of those examples I would have to say more about why our usual condemnation of racism should apply to the entire category, and of why taking others' property without their consent should be condemned even when done by a group that some people consider ought to be allowed special privileges.

I would consider the genuinely self-aware systems to be real people. I suppose it's a matter of ethics (and therefore taste) whether or not that's important to you.

The obvious next question would be to ask if you're OK with your family being tortured under the various circumstances this would suggest you would be.

I've lost the context to understand this question.

How would you react to the idea of people being tortured over the cosmological horizon, outside your past or future light-cone? Or transferred to another, undetectable universe and tortured?

I mean, it's unverifiable, but strikes me as important and not at all meaningless. (But apparently I had misinterpreted you in any case.)

I don't like the idea of... (read more)

I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.

I left them blank myself because I haven't developed the skill to do it, but the obvious other interpretation ... are you saying it's in-principle impossible to operate rationally under uncertainty?

No, I just don't think I can assign pro... (read more)

"When reason fails, boobs have a chance"

Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason

A bit of humor.

I don't buy it. We have many existing laws and spending programs that make us worse off than not having them (or, equivalently, leaving it up to the market rather than the taxpayers to provide them). The free market is known to work well enough, and broadly enough, that demanding "What would you replace it with?" when someone proposes ending one of those laws or programs is un-called-for. (If anyone really does doubt that the market will do better, the thing to do is to try it and see, not to demand proof that can't exist because the change in... (read more)

I think I see what you are trying to say, but I don't think the Boltzmann Cake Theory is comparable to Many Worlds.

In the Boltzmann Cake case, it may be impossible to physically test the theory (though I don't conclusively assume so -- there could well be some very subtle effect on the Sun's output that would facilitate such a test), but the question of fact it raises is still of objective fact.

But the truth or falsity of the Many Worlds Theory can only exist in a reference frame which spans the entire conceptual space in which the many worlds would have t... (read more)

I'm not sure what I could post here that would back that up: it requires some economics knowledge. I can refer you to good economics blogs such as Marginal Revolution and Cafe Hayek, or to Mises' Human Action.

It was MR that sent me here to LW in the first place.

I interpreted the two as completely disjunct. In other words anti-agathics would be drugs or treatments that prevent or repair the symptoms of aging. Some of the same tech (cell repair nanites) could potentially do both jobs, but if you have to be frozen to use the tech then I wouldn't call it anti-agathics. I guess I'm basing this usage on Blish's "They Shall Have Stars" which predicted it in the fifties.

If that's true I wish I'd known it before choosing keys.

Largest is ambiguous. It could mean longest, or largest volume (with or without counting the volume enclosed, if we're talking about the skull), or even heaviest.

Somehow this made me think of Larry Niven's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation".

I wondered about that too, but for me "wiping out civilization" includes the possibility that some disaster leaves half of humanity alive, but smashes all our tech, knocking us back to the stone age. Intelligence forbid!

I see liberal vs. libertarian as a two dimensional thing as depicted here.

I wouldn't mind the survey being twice as long if it allowed it to handle these can't-answer situations, though I would expect it to be the same length but just have a button or two to the right of each entry blank.

I've learned to use the mouse, and not the keyboard, when answering this sort of thing. YMMV.

I did the survey.

I felt that I had to leave blank some of the questions that ask for a probability number, because no answer that complies with the instructions would be right. For instance, I consider the "Many Worlds" hypothesis to be effectively meaningless, since while it does describe a set of plausible alleged facts, there is, as far as I know, no possible experiment that could falsify it. ("Supernatural" is also effectively meaningless, but for a different reason: vagueness. "Magic", to me, describes only situations ... (read more)

I wish there were an LW-related forum/location where politics are allowed (but easy for those not so inclined to ignore). I would use it, not so much for election-type stuff but for tossing out beliefs/theories on controversies (including some things relevant to a lot of the community, such as the Singularity) and seeing what bounces back.

I wouldn't want to do it if I thought it would generate ill will, but there are certainly lots of folk here whose perspectives would be useful, and who, even if they disagree, would not immediately reach for the slogans of demonization that I hear so much in the outside world.

Apologies if even this post turns out to be so contentious that I shouldn't have said it here.

The big problem with habitually "telling" is that you just about need to already be in an intimate relationship with the person you Tell before you do it more than once or twice. Otherwise you will be dismissed as either a bore or a wimp.

I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.

I think it is unfair to get angry at another person (or equivalently, to label him/her "rude") for asking or saying anything when he/she doesn't have good reason to know that the speech is unwelcome.

However, I don't like the notion of these protocols as "cultures" because I don't think anybody follows, or should follow, any one of them consistently all or nearly all the time.

Instead, I be... (read more)

If it were a case like you describe (two competing products in a store), I would have to guess, and thus would have to try to think of some "upstream" questions and guess those, too. Not impossible, but unlikely to unearth worthwhile information. For questions as remote as P(aliens), I don't see a reason to bother.

Have you seen David Friedman's discussion of rational voter ignorance in The Machinery of Freedom?

I apologize for the language, but I felt it needed to be said & I don't know a nicer way.

I've expanded on this in the current survey thread.

Did that.

Re. relationships: The only people I've heard use "polyamorous" are referring to committed, marriage-like relationships involving more than two adults. There ought to be a category for those of us who don't want exclusivity with any number.

I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of a... (read more)

It seems to me that some of LW's attempts to avoid "a priori" reasoning have tripped up right at their initial premises, by assuming as premises propositions of the form "The probability of possible-fact X is y%." (LW's annual survey repeatedly insists that readers make this mistake, too.)

I may have a guess about whether X is true; I may even be willing to give or accept odds on one or both sides of the question; but that is not the same thing as being able to assign a probability. For that you need conditions (such as where X is the ... (read more)

This seems like another "angels dancing on the head of a pin" question. I am not willing to assign numerical probabilities to any statement whose truth value is unknown, unless there is a compelling reason to choose that specific number (such as, the question is about a predictable process such as the result of a die roll). It seems to me that people who do so assign, are much more likely to get basic problems of probability theory (such as the Monty Hall problem) wrong than those who resist the urge.

I believe it is silly to even try to assign a numerical probability to any event unless you can rigorously derive that number from antecedent circumstances or events (for instance, it can make sense if you are talking about scenarios involving the results of dice rolls). Thus I find the questions in LW's annual survey which demand such numbers annoying and pointless.

As for the errors in predictions of the time or money it will take to build some promised project, there's no mystery; the individuals making those predictions stand to gain substantial money ... (read more)

Whether the many-worlds hypothesis is true, false, or meaningless (and I believe it's meaningless precisely because all branches you're not on are forever inaccessible/unobservable), the concept of a universe being observable has more potential states than true and false.

Consider our own universe as it's most widely understood to be. Each person can only observe (past) or affect (future) events within his light cone. All others are forever out of reach. (I know, it may turn out that QM makes this not true, but I'm not going there right now.) Thus you m... (read more)

Boredom is far from the only bad reason that some journals refuse some submissions. Every person in the chain of publication, and that of peer review, must be assumed at least biased and potentially dishonest. Therefore "science" can never be defined by just one database or journal, or even a fixed set of either. Excluded people must always be free to start their own, and their results judged on the processes that produced them. Otherwise whoever is doing the excluding is not to be trusted as an editor.

I hasten to add that this kind of bias exists among all sides and parties.

I'll bite: how am I supposed to judge (or predict) the usefulness of facts when I first see them, in time to avoid storing the useless ones?

I think the closest we get to this is that every time we remember something, we also edit that memory, thus (if we are rational enough) tossing out the useless or unreliable parts or at least flagging them as such. If this faculty worked better I might find it a convincing argument for "intelligent design," but the real thing, like so much else in human beings, is so haphazard that it reinforces my lack of belief in that idea.

There's also the subjectivism of taste, sometimes known as consumer sovereignty (the idea, from David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, that a person's own good is defined as whatever he says it is). Not believing in that leads to outbreaks of senseless and counterproductive nannyism, whether carried out alone or with the help of authorities.

Isn't pure mathematics a counterexample?

Or at least, that at some point, if you want to improve your lot, you need to leave off thinking long enough to build, buy, or improve some gadget or agreement that will actually help. Labor-saving tech really does equal progress.

I don't know what you mean by "science can't think of anything better".

I'm simply using the standard that a statement is objectively meaningful if it states some alleged objective fact.

I reject the notion of hidden variables (except possibly the core of oneself, the existence of the ego) as un-Bayesian. With that one potential exception, all objective facts are testable, at least in principle (though some may be impractical to test).

I fail to see how one can be rational and not believe that. I'm not saying this to insult, but to get an explanation of what you think I've overlooked.

I can't make sense of your reply. The first "sentence" isn't a sentence or even coherent.

But perhaps I myself could have been clearer by saying: The instant there's a split, all branches except the one you're in effectively cease to exist, forever. Does that help?

It seems to me that even a completely unprejudiced person in Bob's shoes may very well rationally decide that it's not worth the trouble to try to understand Alice's problem. Indeed, I've yet to be convinced that empathy is worth the effort required to achieve it in more than a handful of cases.

When this sort of thing has happened to me, I've said more or less "I'll be here if you decide you want my help with whatever it is," and then turned my back. It seemed to me, then and now, that any other response would have been a complete waste of time and effort.

I gave a low probability, not because I don't think that reviving people is possible, or discoverable soon, but because I see some political trends today that I think are very likely to result in mobs destroying the facilities before we can be revived. (And even if that doesn't happen, sooner or later some country is going to use nanotech in military ways, which -- if the human race survives -- may well result in the entire field being either banned or classified and staying that way.)

But I'm signed up, because it's a bet I can't lose.

"Out of wedlock marriage" would be a neat trick. :-)

The only way I've found is to attack the idea of omnipotence on the basis of logic. If the questioner is allowed to insist I "consider the possibility of a universe where logic isn't valid," I can only dismiss his question as nonsense.

I don't like that practice. "I am an atheist" is not a good proxy for "I am a Communist."

I wasn't and still am not sure what "Virtue Ethics" is supposed to mean. My personal ethics are based on the libertarian "non-aggression principle," in other words, don't violate the rights of other persons, and beyond that, do whatever you want. (Which does not mean I don't see a point to charity -- I just see charity as one of many things you might do with your money or time because it makes you happy. In my experience, enough people feel that way that it's rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he does... (read more)

It's a logical consequence of the premises. The instant there's a split, all branches except the one you're in become totally and permanently unreachable by any means whatever. If they did not, the conservation laws would be violated.

If all other interpretations made testable predictions, it wouldn't be enough unless you could somehow eliminate any possibility that didn't make the list because nobody's thought of it yet. It's like the fallacy in Pascal's Wager: all possible religions belong in the hat.

I took the survey.

I didn't like it because some of the questions offered too narrow a range of answers for my taste. Example: I consider the "many worlds" hypothesis to be objectively meaningless (because there's no possible experiment that can test it). The same goes for "this universe is a simulation."

As for the "singularity", I see it as nearly meaningless too. Every definition of it I've seen amounts to a horizon, beyond which the future (or some aspects of it) will be unimaginable -- but from how far past? Like a physical horizon, if such a "limit of vision" exists it must recede as you approach it. Even a cliff can be looked over.