All of omnizoid's Comments + Replies
Bentham's bulldog here! It seems like you're calculating the number of distinct people--in the sense of the number of people that differs regarding some mental or physical property. But that's not what's relevant. SIA favors theories with Beth 2 copies of the same person.
First of all, the claim that wild animal suffering is serious doesn't depend on the claim that animals suffer more than they are happy. I happen to think human suffering is very serious, even though I think humans live positive lives.
Second, I don't think it's depressive bias infecting my judgments. I am quite happy--actually to a rather unusual degree. Instead, the reason to think that animals live mostly bad lives is that nearly every animal lives a very short life that culminates in a painful death on account of R-selection--if ...
Well, sometimes getting a lot of arguments for a view should convince you of the view.
I refer you to my response to Said Achmiz's comment. Do you have a better way of estimating animal consciousness? Sure, the report isn't perfect, but it's better than alternatives. It's irrational to say "well, we don't know exactly how much they suffer, so let's ignore them entirely." https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/refusing-to-quantify-is-refusing
Fischer's not against using it for tradeoffs, he's against using it as a singular indicator of worth.
But then you'd lose out on being the creatures.
The dark arts of expected value calculations relying on conservatively downgrading the most detailed report on the subject. What a joke.
But I'm not trolleying them--I'm talking about how bad their suffering is.
As they describe in the report, the philosophical assumptions are mostly inconsequential and assumed for simplicity. The rest of your critique is just describing what they did, not an objection to it. It's not precise and they admit quite high uncertainty, but it's definitely better than alternatives (E.g. neuron counts).
It's not that piece. It's another one that got eaten by a Substack glitch unfortuantely--hopefully it will be back up soon!
He thinks it's very near zero if there is a gap.
If you half and don't think that your credence should be 2/3 in heads after finding out it's Monday you violate the conservation of evidence. If you're going to be told what time it is, your credence might go up but has no chance of going down--if it's day 2 your credence will spike to 100, if it's day 1 it wont' change.
Yes--Lewis held this, for instance, in the most famous paper on the topic.
Lots of people disagree with 2.
I didn't make a betting argument.
Impervious to reason? I sent you an 8,000 word essay giving reasons for it!
https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true
It may be imaginable, but if it's false, who cares. Like, suppose I argue, that fundamental reality has to meet constraint X and view Y is the only plausible view that does so. Listing off a bunch of random ones that meet constraint X but are false doesn't help you .
Well, UDASSA is false https://joecarlsmith.com/2021/11/28/anthropics-and-the-universal-distribution. As I argue elsewhere, any view other than SIA implies the doomsday argument. The number of possible beings isn't equal to the number of "physically limited beings in our universe," and there are different arrangements for the continuum points.
The argument for Beth 2 possible people is that it's the powerset of continuum points. SIA gives reason to think you should assign a uniform prior across possible people. There could be a God-less universe with Beth 2 people, but I don't know how that would work, and even if there's some coherent model one can make work without sacrificing simplicity, P(Beth 2 people)|Theism>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>P(Beth 2 people)|Atheism. You need to fill in the details more beyond just saying "there are Beth 2 people," which will cost simplicity.
Remember, this is just part of a lengthy cumulative case.
If theism is true then all possible people exist but they're not all here. SIA gives you a reason to think many exist but says nothing about where they'd be. Theism predicts a vast multiverse.
The cases are non-symmetrical because a big universe makes my existence more likely but it doesn't make me more likely to get HTTTTTTTHTTHHTTTHTTTHTHTHTTHHTTTTTTHHHTHTTHTTTHHTTTTHTHTHHHHHTTTTHTHHHHTHHHHHHHTTTTHHTHHHTHTTTTTHTTTHTTHHHTHHHTHHTHTHTHTHTHHTHTHTTHTHHTTHTHTTHHHHHTTTTTTHHTHTTTTTHHTHHTTHTTHHTTTHTTHTHTTHHHTTHHHTHTTHHTTHTTTHTHHHTHHTHHHHTHHTHHHTHHHHTTHTTHTHHTHTTHTHHTTHHTTHHTH. The most specific version of the evidence is I get those sequence of coin flips, which is unaffected by the number of people, rather than that someone does that. My view follows trivially from the widely adopted SIA which I argued for in the piece--it doesn't rely on some basic math error.
I didn't attack his character, I said he was wrong about lots of things.
//If you add to the physical laws code that says "behave like with Casper", you have re-implemented Casper with one additional layer of indirection. It is then not fair to say this other world does not contain Casper in an equivalent way.//
No, you haven't reimplemented Casper, you've just copied his physical effects. There is no Casper, and Casper's consciousness doesn't exist.
Your description of the FDT stuff isn't what I argued.
//I've just skimmed this part, but it seems to me that you provide arguments and evidence about consciousnes...
I think this comment is entirely right until the very end. I don't think I really attack him as a person--I don't say he's evil or malicious or anything in the vicinity, I just say he's often wrong. Seems hard to argue that without arguing against his points.
I never claimed Eliezer says consciousness is nonphysical--I said exactly the opposite.
If you look at philosophers with Ph.Ds who study decision theory for a living, and have a huge incentive to produce original work, none of them endorse FDT.
I don't think the specific part of decision theory where people argue over Newcomb's problem is large enough as a field to be subject to the EMH. I don't think the incentives are awfully huge either. I'd compare it to ordinal analysis, a field which does have PhDs but very few experts in general and not many strong incentives. One significant recent result (if the proof works then the ordinal notation in question would be most powerful proven well-founded) was done entirely by an amateur building off of work by other amateurs (see the section on Bashicu Matrix System): https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2023/07/23/miscellaneous-discoveries/
Yeah, I was just kidding!
About three quarters of academic decision theorists two box on Newcombe's problem. So this standard seems nuts. Only 20% one box. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4886?aos=1399
1My goal was to get people to defer to Eliezer. I explicitly say he's an interesting thinker who is worth reading.
I dispute that . . .
I think that “the author of the post does not think the post he wrote was bad” is quite sufficiently covered by “hardly any”.
I didn't say Eliezer was a liar and a fraud. I said he was often overconfident and eggregiously wrong, and explicitly described him as an interesting thinker who was worth reading.
The examples just show that sometimes you lose by being rational.
Unrelated, but I really liked your recent post on Eliezer's bizarre claim that character attacks last is an epistemic standard.
But part of the whole dispute is that people don't agree on what "rational" means, right? In these cases, it's useful to try to avoid the disputed term—on both sides—and describe what's going on at a lower level. Suppose I'm a foreigner from a far-off land. I'm not a native English speaker, and I don't respect your Society's academics any more than you respect my culture's magicians. I've never heard this word rational before. (How do you even pronounce that? Ra-tee-oh-nal?) How would you explain the debate to me?
It seems like both sides agree that FDT age...
What's your explanations of why virtually no published papers defend it and no published decision theorists defend it? You really think none of them have thought of it or anything in the vicinity?
I mean like, I can give you some names. My friend Ethan who's getting a Ph.D was one person. Schwarz knows a lot about decision theory and finds the view crazy--MacAskill doesn't like it either.
I wouldn't call a view crazy for just being disbelieved by many people. But if a view is both rejected by all relevant experts and extremely implausible, then I think it's worth being called crazy!
I didn't call people crazy, instead I called the view crazy. I think it's crazy for the reasons I've explained, at length, both in my original article and over the course of the debate. It's not about my particular decision theory friends--it's that the fact that virtually no relevant experts agree with an idea is relevant to an assessmen...
Good one!
Though is there a reason?
You can make it with Parfit's hitchiker, but in that case there's an action before hand and so a time when you have the ability to try to be rational.
There is a path from the decision theory to the predictor, because the predictor looks at your brain--with the decision theory it will make--and bases the decision on the outputs of that cognitive algorithm.
The Demon is omniscient.
FDTists can't self-modify to be CDTists, by stipulation. This actually is, I think, pretty plausible--I couldn't choose to start believing FDT.
Yeah, I agree I have lots of views that LessWrongers find dumb. My claim is just that it's bad when those views are hard to communicate on account of the way LW is set up.
I think it's not just the views but also (mostly?) the way you write them.
This is hindsight, but next time instead of writing "I think Eliezer is often wrong about X, Y, Z" perhaps you should first write three independent articles "my opinion on X", "my opinion on Y", my opinion on Z", and then one of two things will happen -- if people agree with you on X, Y, Z, then it makes sense to write the article "I think Eliezer is often wrong" and use these three articles as evidence... or if people disagree with you on X, Y, Z, then it doesn't really make sense t...
The description is exactly as you describe in your article. I think my original was clear enough, but you describe your interpretation, and your interpretation is right. You proceed to bite the bullet.
How'd you feel about a verbal debate?
Philosophy is pretty much the only subject that I'm very informed about. So as a consequence, I can confidently say Eliezer is eggregiously wrong about most of the controversial views I can fact check him on. That's . . . worrying.
I felt like I was following the entire comment, until you asserted that it rules out zombies.
But not all possible people are continuous wavefunctions!