All of Marius's Comments + Replies

Marius30

There is enough food for all starving human children. The existence of starving children has much more to do with corruption than with production.

Marius20

No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.

Marius-20

"Each question will at least be held at 2 to 1 odds amongst professional philosophers, i.e., if more than 2/3s of professional philosophers agree, we won't bother. So as to not waste our time with small fish."

This is cheating, of course. You are comparing group A to group B on questions specifically selected for their difficulty to group B. Instead, it would be more fair to find open problems in fields that haven't received much attention from professional academic philosophers.

Marius00

The person need not even be self-serving. All people respond to incentives, and since publishing popular results is rewarding (in fame; often financially as well) the creators of novel arguments will become more likely to believe those arguments.

Marius10

Nietzsche can't know what the Superman will look like - nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.

But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.

Marius40

The first two are excellent examples. Thanks!

Marius30

If Buller is to be believed that's another postdiction. The sort of studies I want to see would compare two groups who aren't known to be distinct. An example: Group A and B evolved in different environments and should display some difference in behavior. They have different rates of intron fragments G and H Now look at apparently-homogenous group X, who do not believe they have A or B ancestry. Compare X with intron G to X with intron H and find the predicted behavior difference.
Do we have studies at that level?

Marius30

Buller claims that the statistics come from police reports and that the police had previously been trained to look for stepparents as a source of child abuse. If so, 1 this was well known by nonpsychologists and 2 the magnitude of the effect may be overstated. Is there a problem with this critique?

7knb
For 1, how is that a even critique? Is it possible for psychologists to have failed to understand something that cops understood? It doesn't even seem surprising that police, who have generations of practical experience dealing with abuse would notice the trend before ivory-tower academics. As for 2, I don't think that suggests the effect is overstated, except maybe very weakly. The effect is so huge that it's hard to believe that police suspicion of step-parents can "explain it away".
Marius50

Ok, update my cache: you listed 7 bold postdictions; please list some bold predictions.

Its true that not all science is prospective, but you need to at least avoid looking at the data when making hypotheses you will then test against that data. Often we divide a data set to do this. Its much easier to do this with quantitative hypotheses than qualitative ones.

6lukeprog
Here are some additional predictions from evoutionary psychologists.
5SarahNibs
Wasn't there a talk that touched on this at the last Singularity Summit? John Tooby IIRC. I don't remember if it was during his talk, the panel discussion, maybe his Q&A... I'm fairly certain at some point he (or someone) named a couple of big predictions. I'll look this up tonight unless someone beats me to it. Edit: Here is what I was remembering. He talks about his guide to generating good psychological hypotheses through awareness of evolution at 15:00, with a slide with the 5 step plan at 16:40. His primer on evolutionary psychology is here and has an interesting example of a prediction of cheater detection at the end.
4lukeprog
knb provides one example here, though I can come back add others later. Highly relevant is this post from Yudkowsky.
Marius90

It is cheating to make predictions that are actually postdictions. To test hypotheses we have to look at questions for which we don't have information and then test those questions by gathering new information. A lot of the "evolutionary psychology" are really "Just So" stories without this kind of hypothesis testing.

2[anonymous]
The same thing was true of Darwinism before molecular biology. So you would have advised those biologists before 1950 not to believe in the theory of natural selection until it had made predictions that are not postdictions?
lukeprog120

A huge amount of science operates on postdictions. That's not 'cheating', it's just not as impressive as Einstein predicting gravitational lensing. Just as in other sciences, including evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology uses multiple converging lines of evidence to weigh the probabilities of hypotheses (see, e.g., Buss, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 457-465: PDF).

And in fact, evolutionary psychologists often do make novel predictions and then go out and make the observations that either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.

I susp... (read more)

Marius-10

Its true that there are no universal preferences, but ability is about as universal as you can get. The deaf community doesn't prefer deafness to hearing, they just like having a community. If they genuinely preferred deafness to hearing they'd advocate destroying their hearing infants' eardrums... but in fact they find that idea abhorrent. The existence of transabled has nothing to do with preferences, only with identity. The only major groups that prefer disability to ability are the practitioners of female genital mutilation... and their attitudes ... (read more)

Marius40

Our culture certainly does like to slap around those whose arguments are inconsistent... to the point that I suspect more consistent moral codes are consistent because the arguer is striving for consistency over truth than because they've discovered moral truths that happen to be consistent. We may have reached the point where consistent moral codes deserve more skepticism than inconsistent ones.

Marius20

I think there is a connotation that one is supplying the person for ulterior/underhanded motives. I would ply a politician with hookers to get a law changed, or ply a source with alcohol so that I can ask him questions with less resistance... but plying customers with apples in exchange for fair market value just sounds weird.

0CuSithBell
Okay, good, I'm glad you sense a similar connotation! Thanks :)
1CuSithBell
I was under the impression it had a meaning like "coerce [by means of gifts]", but apparently it's closer to "supply". As such, I 'lost' the word that I thought it was. I have an inkling that the meaning I thought it had is a connotation, but I'm not certain. How have you seen it used?
Marius-30

If only the users of Curves graduated to regular gyms more frequently...

Marius00

The study (which needs significant followup to create usable results) could have a number of interpretations, including:

*conclusions not fully supported by the data

*obesity leads to less enjoyment of motion

*obesity leads to fewer social opportunities to engage in sports

*low socio-economic status leads to obesity and to inactivity (due to insufficient access to parks, to parents who force you out of the house, etc).

*People don't record their activity levels every day, so their estimates are colored more by measurable factors (body weight) than by unmeasurable ones (how much they actually moved).

I'd hesitate to read too much into this study.

Marius00

While this doesn't fully justify the use of words like "lame", "blindly," or "retarded" to refer to actions, they are in a different class than using words like "gay" or "N-----". People are ableist, and that's not about to change on account of language. No matter what verbal habits you get into, you're going to prefer to be able to walk rather than hobble, to see rather than to not see, etc.

In contrast, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation are not inherently sources of value. Considering gay an eq... (read more)

1AdeleneDawner
Those are common preferences, but not universal. Deaf people as a group/culture have a bit of a reputation in this area, for one, and then there's transabled people... Not that that's really the point of avoiding the language. The point of avoiding the language is more along the lines of avoiding reinforcing the meme that people with those traits are less valuable and can be ignored when making plans. (Example, though a weak one. For a more concrete one: How accessible is your area? Try to go a day without using any stairs except the ones in your home, including e.g. stepping down off a sidewalk.)
3CuSithBell
I agree it's a complicated issue (I am resistant to the notion of considering "anemic" as 'offensive', but...?). I simply wanted to point out that Constant's criticism was insufficient.
Marius00

He may not want to fall off the cliff, but the jolt reaction occurs before he is able to analyze it

I suspect it's a matter of degree rather than either-or. People sleeping on the edges of cliffs are much less likely to jot when startled than people sleeping on soft beds, but not 0% likely. The interplay between your biases and your reason is highly complex.

Would you agree then, that the contents of that set of habits is contingent upon what makes you and those around you happy?

Yes; absolutely. I suspect that a coherent definition of morality that isn't contingent on those will have to reference a deity.

2NMJablonski
We are, near as I can tell, in perfect agreement on the substance of this issue. Aumann would be proud. :)
Marius00

What I do not understand is when people use the words "right" or "wrong" independently of any agent's preferences

Assuming Amanojack explained your position correctly, then there aren't just people fulfilling their preferences. There are people doing all kinds of things that fulfill or fail to fulfill their preferences - and, not entirely coincidentally, which bring happiness and grief to themselves or others. So then a common reasonable definition of morality (that doesn't involve the word preferences) is that set of habits that are most likely to bring long-term happiness to oneself and those around one.

2NMJablonski
You missed a word in my original. I said that there were agents trying to fulfill their preferences. Now, per my comment at the end of your subthread with Amanojack, I realize that the word "preferences" may be unhelpful. Let me try to taboo it: There are intelligent agents who assign higher values to some futures than others. I observe them generally making an effort to actualize those futures, but sometimes failing due to various immediate circumstances, which we could call cognitive overrides. What I mean by that is that these agents have biases and heuristics which lead them to poorly evaluate the consequences of actions. Even if a human sleeping on the edge of a cliff knows that the cliff edge is right next to him, he will jolt if startled by noise or movement. He may not want to fall off the cliff, but the jolt reaction occurs before he is able to analyze it. Similarly, under conditions of sufficient hunger, thirst, fear, or pain, the analytical parts of the agent's mind give way to evolved heuristics. If that's how you would like to define it, that's fine. Would you agree then, that the contents of that set of habits is contingent upon what makes you and those around you happy?
Marius00

ok cool, replying to the original post then.

1NMJablonski
Oops, I totally missed this subthread. Amanojack has, I think, explained my meaning well. It may be useful to reduce down to physical brains and talk about actual computational facts (i.e. utility function) that lead to behavior rather than use the slippery words "want" or "preference".
Marius00

Ok, so if I understand you correctly: It is actually meaningful to ask "what general preferences should I cultivate to get more enjoyment out of life?" If so, you describe two types of preference: the higher-order preference (which I'll call a Preference) to get enjoyment out of life, and the lower-order "preference" (which I'll call a Habit or Current Behavior rather than a preference, to conform to more standard usage) of eating soggy bland french fries if they are sitting in front of you regardless of the likelihood of delicious piz... (read more)

4Amanojack
Sounds fairly close to what I think Jablonski is saying, yes. Preference isn't the best word choice. Ultimately it comes down to realizing that I want different things at different times, but in English future wanting is sometimes hard to distinguish from present wanting, which can easily result in a subtle equivocation. This semantic slippage is injecting confusion into the discussion. Perhaps we have all had the experience of thinking something like, "When 11pm rolls around, I want to want to go to sleep." And it makes sense to ask, "How can I make it so that I want to go to sleep when 11pm rolls around?" Sure, I presently want to go to sleep early tonight, but will I want to then? How can I make sure I will want to? Such questions of pure personal long-term utility seem to exemplify Jablonksi's definition of morality.
Marius10

I wouldn't mind "ask experts who do not post to Wikipedia or write for Britannica" to rate the articles for accuracy, neutrality, etc. I would expect them to call Wikipedia more comprehensive, to call Britannica more neutral, and I have no idea which would be rated more accurate. If they did indeed call the Wikipedia articles more neutral, I'd have to update my understanding of the field.

My experience: I fixed mistakes in two articles, then got thoroughly distressed and stopped participating. I'm an anesthesiologist, as background. The first... (read more)

Marius40

Well, to compare neutrality we can do one of four things: a: rely on the impressions of people who've used both (survey people who've claimed to have read both) b: trace the prior likelihood of either group of authors being biased on the material they're writing about (the profit motive vs writing about what you're passionate about) c: ask contributors what they've seen done that damages the neutral point of view d: come up with a neutral definition of neutrality.

It sounds like you want to do d: how might we start on such a thing?

Oh, and obviously yeah - "neutral" will depend on your culture. Objectivity might or might not, but neutrality must. So this makes d trickier.

3David_Gerard
I'd expect something like (a): get experts to say whether the articles constitute a reasonable survey of the field. We'd probably need (d) as well, because the way I just defined (a) is one definition of a good neutral Wikipedia article. Is Britannica trying specifically for neutrality? It claims authority (whereas Wikipedia explicitly claims none which is why we're so obsessive about references), but I'm not sure it kowtows to such culturally relativistic notions as "neutral". The Wikipedia article on Britannica notes that EB has been lauded as increasingly less biased with time, but then Wikipedia would note that. Glancing at britannica.com, I can't find a claim as to what it represents editorially except that it's Britannica, you know, Britannica, so I'm not sure what would be a fair test to them. This is getting wildly off topic ... I suppose it's vaguely related to politics by reframing while trying to be aware of and flag the reframings so as to avoid mind-killing ... this is the sort of thing my autodidact's knowledge of postmodernism comes in handy for.
Marius40

Oh, I certainly agree with this. I'd just trace it back to Wikipedia's roots - and I suspect that as fewer people are familiar with Britannica, Wikipedia will lose that more and more.

5David_Gerard
That's ... a thought on Wikipedia's future that hadn't occurred to me before. You can see it already, of course. Even just "We're here to write an encyclopedia" requires a prior notion of an encyclopedia other than what you're already doing. But then there's anecdotes of kids already saying "encyclopedia? Is that like Wikipedia?" I wonder how Wikipedia will self-define.
Marius00

Britannica authors, for instance, are Britannica authors first and moneymakers second and opinionated people third or fourth. Wikipedia authors are highly opinionated, and are compromising (which fixes some objectivity problems but is a poor substitute for objectivity or neutrality). So the Britannica author is likely to be less expert than the sum of wikipedia authors but much more neutral.

2David_Gerard
This is surmise when the material for the test is available. Factual accuracy has been compared more than once between Wikipedia and Britannica - has anyone attempted to compare neutrality? How would we actually do this? I suspect no-one has as yet, but it's one I'd quite like to see if we can interest a third party in doing! (Old editions of Britannica are notoriously bad for this, by the way. They were written to quite definitely inculcate a given cultural viewpoint and are loaded with opinion. This was a major problem in seeding Wikipedia with 1911 Britannica material in the early days - the stuff just didn't pass NPOV muster. I would be unsurprised if more recent editions did much better; Wikipedia's notion of NPOV is really obviously a current cultural construct.)
Marius100

Cryonics is a field where raising awareness is genuinely beneficial to the believers- not just to the administrators of related organizations. Being frozen and then revived requires (inter alia): a dedication to proper freezing maintenance, a method of revivification, a willingness to spend resources to revive you in particular, and experience in curing/reviving humans. If cryonics falls out of favor for any period of time, the dedication to proper freezing maintenance is likely to suffer. The more people that are frozen, the more avidly entrepreneurs w... (read more)

Marius-10

How is that different from standard encyclopedia practice? It at least initially appears that it's one of the few things standard encyclopedias do better than wikipedia.

3David_Gerard
I think I really meant it did it much better than pretty much anything on the web. Which I suppose isn't saying much, but I think it's saying more than nothing - Britannica is a culturally reified gold standard that approximately no-one actually cracks open past high school; Wikipedia is something ordinary people use every day when they just would not have used a paper encyclopedia. Though, of course, Wikipedia calls itself an encyclopedia and has always looked up to Britannica. As I note below, it would be interesting to actually compare the neutrality of current Wikipedia with current Britannica.
2fubarobfusco
I'm under the impression that most encyclopedias had articles written by a single author, chosen as an expert on the subject. As such, the article on "Christianity" would be written by a renowned Christian theologian, or historian of Christendom; with no contribution by (for instance) any Muslims, Buddhists, neopagans, or atheists. While the author would be expected not to come across as overtly partisan, there's not necessarily any correction for biases inherent in that author's point of view. This is a different approach from Wikipedia's NPOV, where work on an article is expected to converge towards a point where contributors from multiple points of view find it equitable. Wikipedia doesn't demand that any given editor write a fair treatment of the POV opposing her own (although "writing for the enemy" is offered as an ideal); rather, she's merely expected to work with other editors from different points of view toward a common goal of a good consensus article. One of the controversies surrounding Wikipedia is that it demands that experts submit to the NPOV policy and to having their work edited by non-experts as well — rather than asking other editors to defer to their expertise. This is in contrast with competing projects Nupedia (now defunct), Citizendium, and Knol, which propose to attract expert editors by giving them a greater voice.
Marius10

I don't mean to overstate the reliability of suicide rates for happiness. A variety of factors may influence them. However, there are reasons to believe they correlate with happiness.

What is a good measure of happiness? Virtually all measures are deeply flawed, but the most reliable is probably: Intra-observer self-report in situations when signalling is unlikely. People are probably decent at knowing when they were happier or less happy within their own lives. Inter-observer reports are far harder to justify.

People report being happier when they li... (read more)

Marius40

Surely suicide rate is a much more trustworthy marker for (un)happiness than "numerical response to a survey question". So it is our previous flimsy understandings of what areas are happy (based only on the highly suspect methodology of surveys) that is wiped out by the new data regarding suicide rates.

As gwern points out, divorce is a poor marker; suicide remains a useful marker because it is nearly-univerally forbidden.

2Nornagest
I actually don't think I'd consider suicide rates a very reliable proxy for the average happiness of a population, although I'm not sure if a numerical response to a survey question would be better or worse. They might easily end up having more to do with rates of mental illness, or with sudden changes in individual happiness rather than its base rate; even if the absolute value of happiness does turn out to dominate, its variance over a given culture might be more significant to suicide rates than its mean. And then there are culture-bound attitudes to deal with, which grow considerably in importance when dealing with highly heterodox subcultures like Kiryas Joel. Self-reporting does have its own issues, though.
Marius50

Satellite phones can currently be purchased by individuals or towns, and yet even the most affluent towns that fear being attacked don't appear to be purchasing them. A nonprofit could be set up to (in increasing order of importance)

  1. Donate satellite phones to more impoverished towns.
  2. Be a centralized location to which emergency messages can be sent.
  3. Actually do something about genocide beyond issuing a press release.

My guess is that 3. is the sticking point - that a satellite capability on cell phones is actually only helpful to lost Westerners outsid... (read more)

1drethelin
I have to agree with this post. Everyone ALREADY knows about, for example, Darfur, and they didn't need any satellite cellphones for it. Nothing got done about it. The amount that this would help people seems trivial to the hundreds of possible and obvious other interventions money could be spent on.
Marius-10

What does it mean for modus ponens to "do worse" than something? It might "do badly" in virtue of there not being any relevant statements of the form "A" and "if A then B" lying around. That would hardly make MP "fallacious" though. It might be that by deducing "B" from "A" and "if A then B" we thereby deduce something false. But then either "A" or "if A then B" must have been false (or at least non-true), and it hardly counts against MP that it loses relia

... (read more)
Marius70

I think the village girl in New York example can actually be understood a step farther. She doesn't just need to look at the dresses - the catalogs in her village show what they look like and cost. She also needs to see what people in New York actually dress like, and how the dresses work for them on the street.

Just so, many people have presented ethical dilemmas that are not part of our everyday experiences. If we have a useful morality core, then it (like most other senses or heuristics) is useful only in the areas in which it's been trained. The vil... (read more)

Marius30

You are certainly at least partly right. But:

After all, "contraband" methods of persuasion are rarely punished

Contraband methods of persuasion are weakly punished, here and elsewhere, by means of public humiliation along with repudiation of the point trying to be made. Some people go so far as to give fallacious defenses of positions they hate (on anonymous forums) in order to weaken support for those positions. Interestingly, the contexts where we think logic is most important (like this site) are much less tolerant of fallacies than the ... (read more)

Marius30

The whole point of the tiger/rock parable is that the testing has all been done in environments devoid of tigers.

Similarly, the mugger-avoidance strategies I could offer to User:perturbation are all 100% effective since I've never been mugged... but I have no idea whether the opposite strategy would have been equally effective.

Marius80

All my answers to this are flawed. My best is: It's like Euclidean geometry: humans (and other species) are constructed in a way that Euclidean geometry fits fairly well. The formalized rules of Euclidean geometry match spacial reality even better than what we've evolved, so we prefer them... but they're similar enough to what we've evolved that we accept them rather than alternate geometries. Euclidean geometry isn't right - reality is more complex than any system of geometry - but the combination of "works well enough", "improves on our ... (read more)

2AlephNeil
Your second answer is the nearest to being right, but I wouldn't put it quite like that. Just to clarify: Here you're talking about Euclidean geometry as an empirical theory of space (or perhaps space-time), as opposed to Euclidean geometry as a branch of mathematics. Here is how 'empirical' and 'mathematical' Euclidean geometry come apart: The latter requires that we make methodological decisions (i) to hold the axioms true come what may and (ii) to refrain from making empirical predictions solely on the basis of our theorems. I don't think there is any important sense in which logic is 'higher' than Euclidean-geometry-as-mathematics. I don't think this makes sense. What does it mean for modus ponens to "do worse" than something? It might "do badly" in virtue of there not being any relevant statements of the form "A" and "if A then B" lying around. That would hardly make MP "fallacious" though. It might be that by deducing "B" from "A" and "if A then B" we thereby deduce something false. But then either "A" or "if A then B" must have been false (or at least non-true), and it hardly counts against MP that it loses reliability when applied to non-true premises. (You might want to object to the ("loaded") terminology of "truth" and "falsity", but then it would be up to you to say what it means for MP to be "fallacious".) Going back to prase's question: Users of a language have to agree on the meanings of primitive words like 'and', 'if', 'then', or else they're just 'playing a different game'. (If your knights are moving like queens then whatever else you're doing, you're not playing chess.) What makes MP 'reliable' is that its validity is 'built into' the meanings of the words used to express it. There's nothing 'mystical' about this. It's just that if you want to make complex statements with many subclauses, then you need conventions which dictate how the meaning of the whole statement decomposes into the meanings of the subclauses.
3Nisan
Another answer (which I'm not sure is the answer) is that in logic or mathematics, a person is more likely to be convinced by a random correct proof than a random flawed proof; and if a person is convinced by a flawed proof it is easy to change their mind by pointing out the flaw in the proof; but if a person is convinced by a correct proof, then it is difficult to change their mind by incorrectly claiming there is a flaw. Of course I am being sloppy and nontechnical here; I bet there is a subtle, technical sense in which, under reflection, Modus Ponens is more appealing than Appeal To Justin Bieber.
2prase
I like the first answer. The second one uses rather mystical "higher place". It decouples logic from the real world, making it "true" without regard to observations. But logic is represented in human brains which are part of the world. The third answer seems too much instrumental. I don't think punishment plays important role in establishing the status of logic. After all, "contraband" methods of persuasion are rarely punished. Expanding on your first answer, it seems that logic is based on the most firm intuitions which almost all people have - maybe encoded in the low level hardware structure of human brains. People often have conflicting intuitions, but there seems to be some hierarchy which tells which intuitions are more basic and thus to be prefered. But this is still strongly related to persuasion, even if not in the open way of your third answer. If this view of logic is correct, the generalisation to ethics is somewhat problematic. The ethical intuitions are more complicated and conflict in less obvious ways, and there doesn't seem to be a universal set of prefered axioms. Any ethical theory thus may be perceived as arbitrary and controversial.
Marius200

All we have is factual questions about how people's "morality cores" vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?

If there is a problem worth solving, it has to be related to "how compelling their voices are". In the philosophy of logic, we classify "Modus Ponens" differently from "Appeal to Inappropriate Authority" - and not simply by asking statistically which is more convincing. ... (read more)

1Peterdjones
Very well said. It should be noted that there are logic problems most people get wrong. Valid reasoning is not defined by majority verdict or observation of patterns.
2cousin_it
I like your answer a lot. Thanks!
0Randaly
That would seem to assume moral realism.
3sark
But logic works! For example, establishing a non-contradictory axiom system, then observing how no contradictions seem to occur as we make deductions within the system. Appeal to inappropriate authority does not work! (Except when authority correlates with truth, and when it's not screened off). On the other hand, I don't see how morality can be said to work or not. There may be a branch of logic which is a science of persuasion, but what it endorses and prescribes relies much on logic as a science of correct inference.
1prase
Fairly good analogy, but the question you have asked wants an answer. What, in your opinion, makes modus ponens better than appeal to authority, independently of its persuasiveness? I am not sure whether I can formulate it explicitly, and without an explicit formulation it is difficult to apply the idea to ethics.
Marius-10

But I want an example of people acting contrary to their preferences, you're giving one of yourself acting according to your current preferences. Hopefully, NMJablonski has an example of a common action that is genuinely contrary to the actor's preferences. Otherwise, the word "preference" simply means "behavior" to him and shouldn't be used by him. He would be able to simplify "the actions I prefer are the actions I perform," or "morality is just behavior", which isn't very interesting to talk about.

1Amanojack
"This-moment preferences" are synonymous with "behavior," or more precisely, "(attempted/wished-for) action." In other words, in this moment, my current preferences = what I am currently striving for. Jablonski seems to be using "morality" to mean something more like the general preferences that one exhibits on a recurring basis, not this-moment preferences. And this is a recurring theme: that morality is questions like, "What general preferences should I cultivate?" (to get more enjoyment out of life)
Marius40

I can sell you a rock that will keep tigers away, for only $250 shipped. I'm carrying one right now, and I've never been attacked by a tiger.

0Clippy
Do you have other substantiation for its tiger repellance? In which tiger-dominated environments has it been tested?
Marius00

I don't understand what you mean by preferences when you say "intelligent agents trying to fulfill their preferences". I have met plenty of people who were trying to do things contrary to their preferences. Perhaps before you try (or someone tries for you) to distinguish morality from preferences, it might be helpful to distinguish precisely how preferences and behavior can differ?

5Amanojack
Example? I prefer not to stay up late, but here I am doing it. It's not that I'm acting against my preferences, because my current preference is to continue typing this sentence. It's simply that English doesn't differentiate very well between "current preferences"= "my preferences right this moment" and "current preferences"= "preferences I have generally these days." Seinfeld said it best.
Marius-20

If this is to be useful, it would have to read "that our intuitions are based on morality".

Marius30

car keys draw no untoward attention, but can ruin someone's day.

1benelliott
They won't exactly deter attention either, so it very much depends on you actually being able to reliably ruin their day to such an extent that they stop attack rather than just becoming angry. Bearing in mind here that there's a good chance they have a knife or gun.
Marius30

Indeed, one of the more relevant similarities between pain and offense is that both are warning signs. Pain is a warning that something may damage you, but if you are experiencing pain from nondamaging events, you are better off reinterpreting the stimulus. For instance, walking barefoot on rocky terrain is often interpreted as painful by those who typically walk shod, but after multiple exposures the sensation is processed differently.
Similarly, offense has a component of "things may turn bad" in addition to the signalling described elsewhere ... (read more)

2NancyLebovitz
Is the sensation still the same after multiple exposures, or have the feet become more calloused and/or flexible?
Marius40

A neighbor of mine enters every sweepstakes she can find, sending in dozens of applications per day. She wins at least one prize a month, ranging from kitchen gadgets to trips. The listed likelihood of winning is often an underestimate, she says, since some sweepstakes do not receive the number of expected applications. This is a life-defining hobby for her: it takes a significant amount of her time each day to find and enter these contests; most of her stories center around the prizes she's won. Here is an article about a woman in a similar situation: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08335/931083-54.stm

Marius60

I don't believe this is quite correct. I think a large number of Americans support (to an extent) the status quo in all areas, and this prevents them from taking prison rape as seriously as other rape. But I've met nobody who'd be willing to pay ten cents to increase the amount of prison rape.

Nor have I seen many people who disfavor execution as being "too easy". I won't say zero on this one, however.

Marius80

How so? When scientists perform studies, they can sometimes benefit (money, job, or simply reputation) by inventing data or otherwise skipping steps in their research. At other times, they can benefit by failing to publish a result when they can benefit by refraining to publish. A scientist who is willing to violate certain ethical principles (lying, cheating, etc) is surely more willing to act unethically in publishing (or declining to publish) their studies.

2Desrtopa
Possibly more willing. They might be willing to sacrifice moral standards for the sake of furthering human knowledge that they wouldn't break for personal gain. It would still be evidence of untrustworthiness though.
Marius10

One question that might help you clarify: Fundamentally, is the divide in your head "more interested in taking steps to promote the side effect or in taking steps to avoid it" or "seems to consider the side effect acceptable"?

I think the example of a drunk driver might be an accessible one. Your goal is to get yourself and your car home; your intention is not to hit anyone. In fact, you'd be extremely sad if you hit someone, and would be willing to take some steps to avoid doing so. You drive anyway.

Do you put the risky driving in y... (read more)

1taryneast
Thats a very good question, I think your "treats it as a thing to seek" is a good dividing line. I will admit that I have not fully explored all the grey-areas here before, and was even unsure if there was a strict dividing line - but what you have said here rings true in the cases we've considered here. In the case of hurting a woman to have sex - you are intentionally seeking to hurt her as the path to your objective. In the case of the car-jumping, you are not seeking to have the guy killed. On drunk-driving, I think you are being negligent, but not intentionally seeking to hurt somebody. yep - sounds about right to me.
Marius20

Just so long as it doesn't involve much real world experimentation. :)

But this is the fundamental problem: you don't want to let the theory in any field get too far ahead of the real world experimentation. If it does, it makes it harder for the people who eventually do good (and ethical) research to have their work integrated properly into the knowledge. And knowledge that is not based on research is likely to be false. So an important question in any field should be "is there some portion of this that can be studied ethically?" If we &quo... (read more)

6cousin_it
"Unethically obtained evidence is less trustworthy" is the wrongest thing I've heard in this whole discussion :-)
Marius20

But one might work, infernally, by torturing puppies

FTFY

Marius60

How do you judge: [X|Authority believes X]

Track record of statements/predictions, taking into account the prior likelihood of previous predictions and prior likelihood of current prediction.

Can you provide a link to Yudkowsky or any well known Bayesian advocating appeals to authority?

Are you asking us to justify appeals to authority by using an appeal to authority?

edit per wedrifid

5wedrifid
I would have said 'prior', not 'a priori'.
-7curi
Marius20

An appeal to authority is not logically airtight, and if logic is about mathematical proofs, then it's going to be a fallacy. But an appeal to an appropriate authority gives Bayesians strong evidence, provided that [X|Authority believes X] is sufficiently high. In many fields, authorities have sufficient track records that appeals to authority are good arguments. In other fields, not so much.

Of course, the Appeal to Insufficient Force fallacy is a different story from the Appeal to Inappropriate Authority

-8curi
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