All of kvas_it's Comments + Replies

Ideally the kinds of misunderstandings described in this post should not happen between humans because of shared context and common sense. However, they do. Not all humans have the same mental models and the same information context. Common sense is also not as common as it might seem at first.

AFAIK, in the countries where air conditioning is useful people have it. I live in Germany and here we mostly think that it's not worth the noise pollution and making the facade less pretty. But this too might change now that many people are switching their gas heating to heat pumps (that are basically air conditioners with extra functionality).

For me your method didn't work, but I found another one. I wave the finger (that's pointing down) in front of the image in a spinning motion synchronized with the leg movement and going in the direction that I want. The finger obscures the dancer quite a bit, which makes it easier for me to imagine it spinning in the "right" direction. Sometimes I'd see it spin in the "right" direction for like 90 degrees and then stubbornly go back again, but eventually it complies and starts spinning in how I want it. Then I can remove the finger and it continues.

In many parts of Europe nobody has to work 60-hour weeks just to send their kids to a school with low level of violence.  A bunch of people don't work at all and still their kids seem to have all teeth in place and get some schooling. Not sure what we did here that the US is failing to do, but I notice that the described problem of school violence is a cultural problem -- it's related to poverty, but is not directly caused by it.

I think value claims are more likely to be parasitic (mostly concerned with copying themselves or participating in a memetic ensemble that's mostly copying itself) than e.g. physics claims, but I don't think you have good evidence to say "mostly parasitic".

My model is that parasitic memes that get a quick and forceful pushback from reality would face an obstacle to propagation compared to parasitic memes for which the pushback from reality is delayed and/or weak. Value claims and claims about longevity (as in your example, although I don't think those are value claims) are good examples of a long feedback cycle, so we should expect more parasites.

I took the survey. It was long but fun. Thanks for the work you've put into designing it and processing the results.

What can I say, your prior does make sense in the real world. Mine was based on the other problems featuring Omega (Newcomb's problem and Counterfactual mugging) where apart from messing with your intuitions Omega was not playing any dirty tricks.

There's no good reason for assigning 50% probability to game A but neither is there a good reason to assign any other probability. I guess I can say that i'm using something like "fair Omega prior" that assumes that Omega is not trying to trick me.

You and Gurkenglas seem to assume that Omega would try to minimize your reward. What is the reason for that?

You could also make a version where you don't know what X is. In this case always reject strategy doesn't work since you would reject k*X in real life after the simulation rejected X. It seems like if you must precommit to one choice, you would have to accept (and get (X+X/k)/2 on average) but if you have a source of randomness, you could try to reject your cake and eat it too. If you accept with probability p and reject with probability 1 - p, your expected utility would be (p*X + (1-p)*p*k*X + p*p*X/k)/2. If you know the value of k, you can calculate the best p and see if random strategy is better than always-accept. I'm still not sure where this is going though.

I also agree with Dagon's first paragraph. Then, since I don't know which game Omega is playing except that either is possible, I will assign 0.5 probability to each game, calculate expected utilities (reject -> $5000, accept -> $550) and reject.

For general form I will reject if k > 1/k + 1, which is the same as k*k - k - 1 > 0 or k > (1+sqrt(5))/2. Otherwise i will accept.

It seems like I'm missing something, though, because it's not clear why you chose these payoffs and not the ones that give some kind of nice answer.

Thank you, this is awesome! I've just convinced my wife to pay more attention to LW discussion forum.

And then they judge what some high-status members of their group would say about the particular Quantum Mechanics conundrum. Then, they side with him about that. Almost nobody actually ponders what the Hell is really going on with the Schrodinger's poor cat. Almost nobody.

I find it harder to reason about the question "what would high status people in group X say about Schrodinger's cat?" than about the question "based on what I understand about QM, what would happen to Schrodinger's cat?". I admit that I suck at modelling other peopl... (read more)

Thank you for more bits of information that answer my original question in this thread. You have my virtual upvote :)

After reading a bit more about meta-rationality and observing how my perspective changes when I try to think this way, I've come to an opinion that the "disagreement on priorities", as I have originally called it, is more significant than I originally acknowledged.

To give an example, if one adopts the science-based map (SBM) as the foundation of their thinking for most practical purposes and only checks the other maps when the SBM ... (read more)

You are steelmanning the rationalist position

That could very well be. I had an impression that meta-rationalists are arguing against a strawman, but that would just mean we disagree about the definition of "rationalist position".

I agree that one-true-map rationalism is rather naive and that there are many people who hold this position, but I haven't seen much of this on LW. Actually, LW contains the clearest description of the map/territory relationship that I've seen, no nebulosity or any of that stuff.

Ok, I think I get it. So basically, pissing contests put aside, meta-rationalists should probably just concede that LW-style rationalists are also meta-rational and have a constructive discussion about better ways of thinking (I've actually seen a bit of this, for example in the comments to this post).

Judging from the tone of your comment, I gather that that's the opposite of what many of them are doing. Well, that doesn't really surprise me, but it's kind of sad.

Thank you, this is a pretty clear explanation. I did read a bit more from meaningness.com yesterday and what I gathered was also pointing in the direction of this sort of meta-epistemological relativism.

However, I still don't really see a significant disagreement. The map/territory distinction, which I see as one of the key ideas of rationalism, seems to be exactly about this. So I see rationalism as saying "the map is not the territory and you never have unmediated access to the territory but you can make maps that are more or less useful in differen... (read more)

I've read the article and then also A first lesson in meta-rationality but I must confess I still have no idea what he's talking about. The accusations of inscrutability seem to be spot on.

Perhaps I should read more about meta-rationality to get it, but just to keep me motivated, can anyone explain in simple terms what the deal is about, or perhaps give me an example of meta-rationalist belief that rationalists don't share?

I know that David Krueger is one of the people working with 80000 hours on helping people to get into the AI safety field. He also organized a related google group.