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All of JonCB's Comments + Replies

($1000 bounty) How effective are marginal vaccine doses against the covid delta variant?
JonCB50

This is 100% anecdotal and has next to no details (so i wouldn't consider it a contender for any part of the bounty) however this seems relevant (assuming it's true) :-

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/delta-variant-infected-all-unvaccinated-guests-at-a-sydney-party-2021-6
 

I hope that helps.

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Sleeping Julia: Empirical support for thirder argument in the Sleeping Beauty Problem
JonCB10

In case it helps... i created a gist for the python code that should give some code highlighting help.

https://gist.github.com/JonCB/d582582d43ad60242dc47355ed86125d

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By Which It May Be Judged
JonCB00

Hrrm ok. That is a different way of looking at it.

My take on the word is that the normal usage of better is by itself a context free comparator. The context of the comparison comes from the things around it (implicitly or explicitly) thus "UberClippy is better than Clippy" (implied: At being a Paperclipper), Manchester United is better than Leeds (implied: At playing football), or even "Betterness is better for humans than clippiness". I have no problem with "Betterness is more humane than clippiness".

Note that I don't think ... (read more)

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By Which It May Be Judged
JonCB00

I certainly agree with you that you can't argue a paperclipper into caring about what you call betterness.

I do however think that "betterness is better than clippiness" is not a tautology, rather it is vacuous. It has as much meaning as "3 is greater than potato" and invokes the same reaction in me as "comparing apples and oranges".

At best, if you ranked UberClippy (the most Clippy of all Paperclippers) and UberHuman (the best possible human) on all of the criteria that is important to humans then UberHuman would naturally r... (read more)

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2Viliam_Bur
To me it seems that you are mixing together "better" in "morally better", and "better" as "more efficient". If we replace the second one with "more efficient", we get: Betterness (moral) is more efficient measure of being better (morally). Clippiness is more efficient measure of being clippy. I guess we (and Clippy) could agree about this. It is just confusing to write the latter sentence as "clippiness is better than betterness, with regards to being clippy", because the two different meanings are expressed there by the same word "better". (Why does this even happen? Because we use "better" as universal applause lights.) EDIT: More precisely, the moral "better" also means more efficient, but at reaching some specific goals, such as human happiness, etc. So the difference is between "more efficient (without goals being specified)" and "more efficient (at this specific set of goals)". Clippiness is more efficient at making paperclips, but is not more efficient at making humans happy.
1nshepperd
It could be valid to define "better" any way you like. But the definition most consistent with normal usage includes all and only criteria that matter to humans. This is why people say things like "but is it truly, really, fundamentally better?" Because people really care about whether A is better than B. If "better" meant something else (other than better), such as produces more paperclips, then people would find a different word to describe what they care about.
1A1987dM
It is, in Eliezer's sense of the word. So is “clippiness is clippier than betterness”, though.
By Which It May Be Judged
JonCB10

What is your evidence for stating that human-betterness is "obviously better" than clippy-betterness? Your comment reads to me you're either arguing that 3 > Potato or that there exists a universally compelling argument. I could however be wrong.

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-1Eugine_Nier
There exist no universal compelling arguments about physical things either, but that doesn't stop us from calling things true.
5nshepperd
"Human-betterness" and "clippy-betterness" are confused terminology. There's only betterness and clippiness. Clippiness is not a type of betterness. Humans generally care about betterness, paperclippers care about clippiness. You can't argue a paperclipper into caring about betterness. I said that betterness is better than clippiness. This should be obvious, since it's a tautology.
0lavalamp
He/she is using the built-in human betterness module to make a judgement between human-betterness and clippy-betterness.
By Which It May Be Judged
JonCB30

I am confused by what you mean by "better" here. Your statement makes sense to me if i replace better with "humanier"(more humanly? more human-like? Not humane... too much baggage). Is that what you mean?

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Causal Universes
JonCB20

This probably sounds like a dumb question but given the assumptions of many worlds, timeless physics, no molecular identity and then adding that time travel is possible, why would that even be specially interesting?

In particular, why would that be different than 2D land that suddenly works out that instead of always having to move forward in the Z dimension you can move backwards as well.

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