All of Nominull2's Comments + Replies

It seems like the people who are not happily married get a pretty good deal out of this, though? I'm not sure I understand how 90% of humanity ends up wishing death on the genie. Maybe 10% of humanity had a fulfilling relationship broken up, and 80% are just knee-jerk luddites.

Wasn't one of the conclusions we arrived at in the quantum mechanics sequence that "observer" was a nonsense, mystical word?

After surviving a few hundred rounds of quantum suicide the next round will probably kill you.

Are you familiar with the story of the man who got the winning horse race picks in the mail the day before the race was run? Six times in a row his mysterious benefactor was right, even correctly calling a victory for a horse with forty-to-one odds. Now he gets an envelope in the mail from the same mysterious benefactor asking for $1,000 in exchange for the next week's picks. Are you saying he should take the deal and clean up?

I think it's is more akin to saying that "easy" could just as well mean difficult in some alien language, and so words don't mean anything and language is a farce. That's the true linguistic relativist position.

If you've ever taken a mathematics course in school, you yourself may have been introduced to a situation where it was believed that there were right and wrong ways to factor a number into primes. Unless you were an exceptionally good student, you may have disagreed with your teacher over the details of which way was right, and been punished for doing it wrong.

It strikes me as plainly apparent that math homework is not morality.

To say that Eliezer is a moral relativist because he realizes that a primality sorter might care about primality rather than morality, is equivalent to calling him a primality relativist because he realizes that a human might care about morality rather than primality.

I find the use of pick-up techniques super creepy, actually. Basically it amounts to attempts at mind control, and mind-controlling someone in order to have sex with them is, well, rape.

It seems like it should be impossible to calculate a fudge factor into your calculations to account for the possibility that your calculations are totally wrong, because once you calculate it in it becomes part of your calculations, which could be totally wrong. Maybe I'm missing something here that would become apparent if I actually sat down and thought about the math, so if anybody has already thought about the math and can save me the time, I would appreciate it.

Argument #2 strikes me as eminently reasonable. I won't be voting.

Way to get trolled, Eliezer. The fact that OC's comment had nothing to do with the post it was attached to should really have tipped you off that he's really only interested in pushing your buttons.

This is pretty much your and Robin's blog, write whatever you want. You don't have to make excuses.

James Bach, if science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, science isn't a good in itself. If the experts aren't ignorant, then we don't need science anymore. If we know all the answers then why in hell do we need to learn?

Learning is good because it destroys doubt, doubt isn't good because it enables learning. That perspective is incredibly wrongheaded.

Nobody followed my lead. I guess that means my belief about my leadership abilities is well-founded!

Hey everybody, let's post our self-perceptions regarding our leadership abilities so that Eliezer can get some feedback as to his expectations!

As for me, I couldn't lead a starving man to a buffet.

Isn't it reasonable to find it more likely that people are lying than that something has gone that flagrantly wrong with my ability to judge sizes of lines?

Evidence is like gravity. Everything is pulling on everything else, but in most cases the pull is weak enough that we can pretty much ignore it. What you have done, Caledonian, is akin to telling me the position of three one-gram weights, and then asking me to calculate the motion of Charon based on that.

But everything is evidence about everything else. I don't see the problem at all.

"Resist against being human" is an interesting choice of words. Surely, most people would not see that as a goal worth pursuing.

Well, I wouldn't have the balls to hijack an airplane and crash it into a building. If they're cowards, what does that make me?

You don't believe in the artistic value of a beautifully extended metaphor?

Not murdering people for criticizing your beliefs is, at the very least, a useful heuristic.

So it turns out that all you have to do is overcome bias? I confess I was hoping for something a little more specific than that.

If they have no interest in knowing the information for its own sake, that sounds like a problem with them, not with the university.

I make it a habit to learn as little as possible by rote, and just derive what I need when I need it. This means my knowledge is already heavily compressed, so if you start plucking out pieces of it at random, it becomes unrecoverable fairly quickly. As near as I can tell, my knowledge rarely vanishes for no good reason, though, so I have not really found this to be a handicap.

I'll admit that I haven't seen the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but how does it compare to Romeo and Juliet in terms of comedy? Shakespeare's real talents lie not in mawkish sentimentality, but in clever wordplay and character-driven humor; this is true even of his plays which are supposedly "tragedies".

So, it seems that Eliezer's working definition of an intelligent person is "someone who agrees with me".