He's rolling a die. As such, both "possibilities" are overwhelmingly improbable, as I have never seen a die labeled with heads and tails, and I spend a lot of time around dice.
There are arguments that valuing net-happiness IN OUR CURRENT WORLD means you'd want to increase the human population.
However, in an arbitrary world, where wealth-production correlates with human population, there's no reason to assume that net-happiness would also correlate with wealth-production.
IOW: his conclusion (it's not a shame) has a truth value that depends on value system, but his reasoning is true only if you have one, very specific, value system (you value near-future-wealth-production as your terminal value)
This is true IFF you value wealth above all other measures.
If you value net-happiness for example, it's not true.
The Oxford Dictionary definition you supply is the one I generally see in use:
a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Thanks for the information, I might ask my GP about that possibility, and whether there are any options for finding out whether I'm having low-blood-pressure issues.
I suffer from a form of depression, which comes along with a symptom I call "brain-ache": it essentially consists of a sharp pain that feels as though it's internal to my brain (unlike headaches, which I also commonly get, which are focused in my skull).
Brain-ache is worsened by deliberate conscious thinking, and trying to focus on things, and it is generally accompanied by a "mental fog" which makes it hard for me to see my own thoughts, and therefore hard to think about anything complex.
I have a few other pecularities [photic sneeze r...
One possible explanation is simply awareness.
If you naturally develop a technique, you may not be consciously aware of it at all. But take some training, and all of a sudden your conscious brain is butting in going "this is the way to do it".
And, well, your CPU is going to be less efficient than a well-optimised RPU (Reading Processing Unit)
Why would this apply to romantic forays but not other types of social overture?
The fact that chatting to random people merely means you're willing to let anyone be one of your acquaintances
In general, being someone's acquaintance cannot be considered an exclusive group to begin with, so there was no exclusivity to be lost.
It seems like it(becoming known as a person who tries to chat up random people) would happen no matter what you actually talked about.
If you only rarely* make a sexual or romantic pass it is unlikely that people would view you in s...
I live in Manchester, England.
There are 2.6 million people in this city. I didn't need to actively avoid becoming known, it would have been extremely difficult to become known.
Also: had I gained a reputation for talking to random strangers, why would that have been a bad thing? The person I approach knows I approach random strangers; they are one.
Being known as a person who tries to chat up random people may be a problem*. Being known as a person who tries to chat to random people isn't. In fact, if anything, I've earned status for it.@
*You're seen as hav...
Envy is an attitude/emotion.
Whether or not someone feels envy is a fact.
Pain is a feeling.
Whether or not someone feels pain is a fact.
Ummm, Eliezer Yudkowsky's post, on which this discussion is based, is about "What can't we say?" ie. why can't we say there are racial differences in IQ.
So this thread doesn't seem to be evidence against Nisan's statement.
What makes you so sure anyone's playing for power in my scenario?
Bob is attempting to solve a problem that's causing both Alice and Bob suffering.
Alice may be playing for power, or she may not want to burden Bob with her personal problems, and may be honestly unaware that she's causing Bob to suffer.
As a side note: in several of these scenarios I saw, Alice was male. In several, Bob was female.
Given as everyone seems to want to pile unjustified extra assumptions onto the scenario, here are several actual scenarios that I know have occured that took this form:
Alice is angry/upset because of something Bob did. Bob is unaware of what he did, but has picked up on Alice's anger and wants to help her. a. Alice is trying to convince herself that it doesn't matter. -----b. Alice thinks Bob knowing what caused her anger will cause further problems.
Alice wasn't actually angry/upset at all. Bob believed she was, but was incorrect. His repeated questio
You leave out the fact that there is a common belief in women that "I shouldn't have to explain. You should just know." -- thereby rendering the need for explanation a further injury to the initial insult.
I usually find that this is what needs to be bypassed early on if any real communicating progress is to be achieved. Generally speaking I resolve this by making it perfectly clear that if the injured party is unwilling to communicate the injury, they are not "allowed" to require redress in any form. Including being angry -- thereby ma...
As a side note: in several of these scenarios I saw, Alice was male. In several, Bob was female.
I've seen this scenario occur several times where Bob HASN'T done anything wrong. Alice is annoyed for some reason, and is passive aggressively taking it out on Bob, and Bob wants to solve the problem that's causing them both to suffer.
The assumption that it's Bobs fault is entirely unjustified from the scenario presented.
The problem is the repeatability. Social skills, by their very nature, require interaction with people. And people are unpredictable; at least, until you have good enough social skills :p.
The closest I can come to an exercise regime suggestion* is to go into bars, coffee shops, or other gathering places; and look around for a person (or people) who seems bored, lonely, or otherwise in need of company.
Go up to said person(s) and greet them in a manner you deem appropriate. If it works; you just correctly judged someone's state, you approached them in an acc...
Why shouldn't it be highly voted? When you're talking to a random outsider, and want to demonstrate the usefulness of bayesian techniques, using the example of clippy is a funny, and interesting, way to make your point.
As such, this is a valuable contribution for anyone who might, at some point, want to convert someone to bayesian techniques.
Given that it takes very little time to read, this means that it's value:time ratio is very good. As it is a discussion post, rather than a main post, this is sufficient justification to upvote it.*
*(with a main post I'd also expect a significant amount of content)
Can't you also have a 60 minute study, with no safety buffer, by using the "personal max" option on a flat road?
Certainly seems like that'd work to me.
whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
I'd be intrigued to see an example of an argument for the statement:
"You can't be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot"
because I have never seen that sentiment expressed in my life. And I find it hard to see many people agreeing with it. Reasoning that it is false is far too simple.*
*(imagine a world where the general belief is that green people are brutish and ignorant, and should be killed on sight. Now imagine a farmer who has been to...
That should help, but I'm not certain how much. The problem is that whatever the reason for the rule originally, it's now ingrained as a moral absolute in some people's minds.
I'll agree with Nornagest on the insult to injury part, but there's also a second part:
If you talk about someone's failings after they die, but not before, then you seem to have been waiting until they were no longer available to defend themselves.
IOW: it seems cowardly, and dishonest. Because if they were still around, they might be able to dismiss your allegations.
Yes. The relevant experiment would be a study of how gases expand when heated, leading to the ideal gas law, which has a special case at absolute 0.
The special case distinguishes between cold being a real entity (and heat being neg-cold) and heat being a real entity (and cold being neg-heat); because it proves that heat has a minimum, and cold a maximum, rather than the other way around.
By a "meetup" I mean a regular, or semi-regular, event whereby a group of people with common interests meet in order to discuss things, including [but not limited to] the common interest.
These meetups come in many forms; some occur in pubs, some in meeting halls, some in coffee shops. Some feature speeches, which tend to be on the issue of the common interest, but most do not.
By attending a meetup two events running, or three events out of six, you'll tend to get to know many of the regulars, and become part of their social network.
One type of me...
Getting to the moon (ie. getting your life moving) is quite clearly one of your terminal goals.
Whether or not you've enshrined the car (ie. a general solution) as a newer terminal goal, I can't tell you.
A hint however: The car may not take the form you expect. It may be a taxi, or a bus, where you don't own it but rather ride in it. (ie. the best general solution for you might actually be "go on the internet and look for a specific solution")
I'd say that your statement:
It rules out doing anything that involves regularly scheduled activities
Is inaccurate. It rules out regularly scheduled activities where you have to attend every single one.
The majority of meetups are perfectly happy with someone who attends 1/2 or 1/3 of the meetings; which non-24 shouldn't prevent.
Meetups also have a more structured feel than the social gatherings you mention, and tend to be more useful for networking.
A deeper problem is your location. I'm assuming given your sunlight issue that you can't really drive very far on sunny days?
Concentrating on just the final paragraph first, because it provokes the most interesting answer IMO.
Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder.
Really, why?
...He was not in his right mi
Then first, change your situation to NOT completely isolated.
If you're in a town or city that's easy, just go to a meetup of a society of some sort that sounds vaguely interesting. If you can't find such a society, wonder from pub to coffee shop to restaurant, looking for any relevant posters.
Or just go online and look up a meetup website.
Looking for a general solution is all well and good, but you have a very specific problem. And so, rather than spending years working on a general solution while in the wrong environment, perhaps you'd be better off using the specific solution, and working on a general one later?
Here are two ways to find more opportunities. 1) is to get out and DO!, which exposes you to more opportunities.
2) is to get better at spotting them when they're around.
The only way I can think of to achieve 2, personally, is practise. How do you practise? Well, you do 1), and expose yourself to as many opportunities as possible, and see how many you notice in time, and when you notice one too late you think about how you could have noticed it quicker.
"Just go out and DO it!" is then the wrong advice.
However "Just go out and DO!" remains good advice.
Next time you see a poster for a meetup; just go to it. Even if it doesn't sound like it'll help, just go to it.
Next time you see a request for volunteers, which you can afford the time to fulfil, just volunteer. Even if it's not something you care much about.
While you're out doing those things you'll come across people, and random events, etc. that may give you new paths to your goals.
Don't worry about achieving your goals, just do thing...
This counterstory doesn't function.
A child's development is not consciously controlled; and they are protected by adults; so believing incorrect things temporarily doesn't harm their development at all.
If you wish to produce a counterstory, make it an actual plausible one. Even if it were the case that children tended to be more skeptical of claims, your story would REMAIN obviously false; whereas Constant's story would remain an important factor, and would raise the question of why we don't see what would be expected given the relevant facts.
Also, if one is positing that there's a civilization advanced enough to spend time making sims, one can reasonably argue that they will be capable enough such that any of them could program the sim themselves, in a way similar to how anyone can program a Basic program to say "Hello World!" in our world.
Our civilisation is advanced enough to spend time making computer games. This doesn't mean the average person can make a computer game.
Anologously, in the hypothetical highly advanced civilisation, it could be that it's considered basic to program a halo-equivalent, but only very few would be able to program a worldsim.
It annoys me that publishing such a deliberately dishonest story will almost certainly not be punished in any way.
The question is not whether or not christianity is true, it's whether or not you set out to create an argument that christianity should be followed.
So, did you stumble across this argument as a realisation while thinking on other things?
Or did you deliberately set out to create such an argument?
It looks like a deliberately constructed argument to me.
The fact that we do not see continual interference, and obvious evidence of a deity, is very strong evidence against the ego-trip theory of godly existence.
The fact the bible mentions multiple gods, repeatedly, throughout the old testament, is very strong evidence that it is not a book written by an ego-tripping deity.
Moreover, if the universe is being run as an ego-trip heaven is likely to be, as described in some christian sects, praising 'god' for all eternity. Which is worse than most depictions of hell; making the whole pascal's wager thing null and void.
I wouldn't take it. I desire to help others, and it gives me pleasure to do so, it makes me suffer to harm others, and I desire not to do so.
Being perpetually in a state of extreme pleasure would make this pleasure/suffering irrelevant, and might lead me to behave less in line with my desires.
So, being perpetually in a state of extreme pleasure seems like a bad idea to me.
Good point. It can result in a kill-or-cure situation, either they take it as "I can solve this" and gain confidence, or that they can't, and lose even more.
You don't need to reject CCC without reductionism to defeat his argument. His argument is "If CCC is true, reductionism is false"
That's not a reason to reject reductionism, unless you have better reason to hold to CCC than to reductionism.
The solution here is a stopgap that just diminishes the urgency of technology to grow organ replacements, and even if short-term consequentially it leaves more people alive, it in fact worsens out long-term life expectancy by not addressing the problem (which is that people's organs get damaged or wear out).
[parody mode]
...Penicillin is a stopgap that just diminishes the urgency of technology to move people onto a non-organic substrate, and even if short-term consequentially it leaves more people alive, it in fact worsens out long-term life expectancy by
Welcome to lesswrong.
I wouldn't consider anything you've said here stupid, in fact I would agree with it.
I, personally, see it as a failure of imagination on the part of Dawkin's, that he considers the issue he personally finds most important to be that which alien intelligences will find most important, but you are right to point out what his likely reasoning is.
In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I'd expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.
But what reason do we have to expect them to pick evolution, as opposed to the concept of money, or of extensive governments (governments governing more than 10,000 people at once), or of written language, or of the internet, or of radio communication, or of fillangerisation, as their obvious sign of advancement?
Just because humans picked up on evolution far...
I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they'll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.
Personally, I can see where he's coming from, though I can't say I feel like I know enough about the evol...
Sometimes I suspect that wouldn't even occur to them as a question. That evolution might turn out to be one of those things that it's just assumed any race that had mastered agriculture MUST understand.
Because, well, how could a race use selective breeding, and NOT realise that evolution by natural selection occurs?
Easily.
Realizing far-reaching consequences of an idea is only easy in hindsight, otherwise I think it's a matter of exceptional intelligence and/or luck. There's an enormous difference between, on the one hand, noticing some limited selection and utilising it for practical benefits - despite only having a limited, if any, understanding of what you're doing - and on the other hand realizing how life evolved into complexity from its simple beginnings, in the course of a difficult to grasp period of time. Especially if the idea has to go up against well-entr...
If someone is known, by their friends and family, to be relatively aware when it comes to such issues; and warns said friends and family of this danger, they will not need to give a comprehensible argument.
Their statement is, in itself, evidence to those who trust them.
To illustrate, I'll go through some likely results of telling someone each of these things Vs. not telling them.
"You are morbidly obese."
They are now aware that their weight is a major reason for lack of success. This is an extra incentive to lose weight. In addition, it's possible they weren't even conscious of how overweight they were previously. So, they gain health benefits.
"You are so tiny I feel like I'm crushing you."
They now know to be on the look out for either smaller partners, or partners who show signs of a crushing...
"You are morbidly obese."
They are now aware that their weight is a major reason for lack of success. This is an extra incentive to lose weight. In addition, it's possible they weren't even conscious of how overweight they were previously. So, they gain health benefits.
This one may not be as good as you think. Fat people are generally told repeatedly that they're fat.
The risks of being fat are generally wildly overestimated.
I've read a moderate number of accounts by fat people who found that their romantic success improved when they stopped pre-rejecting themselves.
If they're asking, they deserve to be told.
If they don't want to know, they shouldn't ask. Lying to someone "for their own good" is, to me, one of the most disgusting concepts in existence.
I've been lied to "for my own good" several times. And every single time, all it really did was allow the person lying to me to feel good about themselves, while simultaneously screwing me over.
To illustrate, I'll go through some likely results of telling someone each of these things Vs. not telling them.
"You are morbidly obese."
They are now aware that their weight is a major reason for lack of success. This is an extra incentive to lose weight. In addition, it's possible they weren't even conscious of how overweight they were previously. So, they gain health benefits.
"You are so tiny I feel like I'm crushing you."
They now know to be on the look out for either smaller partners, or partners who show signs of a crushing...
The relevant thing to a TDT person is "how likely is it that there's someone simulating my mind sufficiently accurately?"
"how trustworthy are doctors?" is a question that results in a simulation of a doctors mind. It seems, to me, that many people simulating that doctors mind will be capable of simulating it sufficiently accurately; even if they don't understand (on a conscious level) all the necessary jargon to explain what they are doing.
I was aware of, and practising, timeless decision theory before ever stumbling across Lesswrong, and, while I know this may just be the "typical mind fallacy" I would be surprised if only 0.1% of people had similar thoughts.
Sure, I didn't call it TDT, because that is a piece of jargon only present in this community, but the basic principle is certainly not unique, or unknown, and I would expect that even many who don't undestand it would use it subconsciously.
That that, specific, doctor runs TDT perhaps; but it is implausible to the point of irrelevance that no-one would ever suspect that any doctor anywhere runs on a TDT-esque thought process.
And people suspecting that any doctor might run such processes is sufficient harm.
That means CON+TDT doesn't prohibit a decision to carve up a vagrant for organs conditional on some unique feature of the situation.
Provided that the unique feature is relevant, no it does not. For example, if the vagrant's parts were capable of saving 1,000 lives (a very unlikely situation, and not one anyone needs to worry of finding themself in) that would be a relevant unique feature.
However merely noticing that the vagrant is wearing a red baseball cap, made in 1953, and has $1.94 in their left pants pocket; while unique, is irrelevant. And as such it is easily modelled by using the protocol "insert random, irrelevant, unique aspect".
I don't see why this is necessarily a problem.
The claim that the mugger will torture 3^^^3 people, unless you give them $100, is so implausible that there should be no possible evidence that will convince you of it.
Any possible evidence is more plausibly explained by possibilities such as you being in a computer game, and the mugger being a player who's just being a dick because they find it funny.