All of passive_fist's Comments + Replies

And Lumifer's dismissal of it is probably the most low-effort way of responding. Students of rationality, take note.

Anyone can easily deny that they are biased. That takes no effort. So, again, why is it a 'godawful clickbait piece-of-crap'?

On the contrary, being able to identify your own biases and being able to express what kind of information would change your mind is at the heart of rationality.

You're a libertarian. We all know that. But regardless of whether you ideologically agree with the conclusions of the article or not, you should be able to give a more convincing counter-argument than 'godawful clickbait piece-of-crap.'

What you're saying doesn't sound to me like a disagreement that there must be some higher authority. It just sounds like you're saying that the final authority gets decided at run-time, based on whoever happens to have the most financial power. So then the question becomes: Why do you think this is preferable to a system where authority is agreed upon beforehand by a majority of the people?

And just to make the discussion clearer, let's make it even more specific and talk about the issue of disputes over ownership of objects or property.

The comparison to re... (read more)

In each possible situation, it's useful to have an authority available who has final say over disputes. But it's not necessarily for every process in society to depend on the same authority.

Then who gets to decide who that authority is for every particular situation?

Can you be more specific?

I don't know what "an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom" means. Every single political philosophy claims that it is pro-freedom. Even totalitarian regimes claim to be pro-freedom. Without reference to specific policy positions, claiming to be 'pro-freedom' seems meaningless to me.

So that reduces your definition of libertarianism to 'far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis'.

For a stable society to exist, at some level everyone has to agree upon some central authority with final say over disputes and superlative enforcement ability. Do you agree with this or not?

I've tried before to steelman it and failed because the arguments constantly shift around and are hard to pin down. Tailoring arguments to every single person's interpretation gets tiring after a while. But if you can provide an explanation or link to what you believe then I'd read and try to steelman it to see if I understand your position correctly.

Here, though, I'm arguing on a more meta level - even assuming that it comprised a coherent set of beliefs, and assuming you had a well-defined utility function you wanted to maximize, how would you possibly... (read more)

What surprises me is that you would even ask that question... what rational justification is there for libertarianism?

Neoreaction, libertarianism, and related ideologies.

I don't see why I should fear retaliation as I've already left this site, for all intents and purposes.

The only issue is that I don't want to give the impression of having left over some petty argument and being bitter over it. The reality is the opposite. The reality is that there were never any heated disagreements. It was just me observing a very clear irrational, politically extremist bias in many people's comments, especially the ones most frequently in the 'top 30 contributors' panel (which shows that their beliefs in general match up with the overal... (read more)

I somewhat agree. Sometimes communities dissolve through a publicized schism. Other times they just decay without any visible drama. It's not realistic to expect every single person who gets fed up and leaves to post a detailed criticism of the site and why they are leaving. A lot of people would rather just leave quietly and not waste their time with that kind of thing.

Still, it seems like the decline definitely accelerated over the past couple of years.

The LW community is in rapid decline and people have been leaving in large numbers for years. LW is probably in the terminal stage of decline now, not in the initial or even middle stage. If you think this isn't true you are in denial - all the poll data and post/comment data shows this to be true.

I used to be an active member of this group. This is my first comment in months. I don't know why other people left; I can only speculate and offer the reasons why I left. The reason I left was because I perceived (maybe incorrectly, I don't know) that discourse ... (read more)

It's not obvious that use of a pesticide would substantially harm bees, as pesticides have been in use for a very long time, and many organophosphate pesticides are fairly non-toxic to bees. Neonicotinoids, however, are extremely toxic to bees. The use of neonicotinoids is fairly recent; large-scale use only started in the late 90's, and very soon after that beekeepers started filing petitions to the EPA. They were ignored. I'd say this is more a case of systemic and deliberate ignorance/politics rather than a 'mistake'.

I wouldn't put too much faith in the 1/2000 figure for chance of HIV transmission. There is no known way to calculate that with any reasonable confidence. Estimates vary from something like 1/500 to 1/2500 (this is for vaginal sex; anal sex has much higher transmission risk).

Well then if there is no information relevant to ISIS, then why make it a discussion about ISIS?

It seems to me that a pre-requisite of talking about ISIS' motivations would be actually visiting the region and being involved with them first-hand, or else basing your opinion on information gathered from direct, reputable sources.

Right now most of the discussion on the internet - especially including this post - fail to meet this criterion. They are simply opinions based on opinions repeated by other uninformed persons which also repeat opinions from other uninformed persons. If I am wrong, then provide links to your sources.

In fact you could argue that... (read more)

Statistically, withdrawal is just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy; STDs are a bigger concern but the risk can be minimized with a checkup. However, condoms are not effective at preventing transmission of many types of STDs either.

I feel that this is too complicated a solution for most people to follow. And it's not a very secure backup system anyway.

You can just get an external hard drive and use any of the commonly-available full-drive backup software. Duplicity is a free one and it has GUI frontends that are basically just click-to-backup. You can also set them up to give you weekly reminders, etc.

Then there are generally impressive things like having a Ph.D, a high-paying job, or being really skilled in some area which are high status in many groups.

For Ph.D., what kind of groups are you thinking about? (aside from university circles obviously)

I might or might not be an example of someone who has done that. I learned to play guitar from scratch at 28 years old. However, I had previously learned to play the piano when I was a teenager, so that might have made it easier. However the two are very different instruments. YMMV.

A lot of the difficulty in picking up a new instrument may just be lack of time. When I was a teenager I was spending 5+ hours a day playing the piano. I am not exaggerating in the least. As an adult it is very hard to find 30 minutes a day of time. It took me about 3 years to b... (read more)

I realize that it's a map of risks, I'm just saying the possibilities don't even remotely fall into comparable levels of risk. "Death from nuclear ICBM" is quite imaginable and possible. Not only that, there was a time when it almost seemed imminent and inevitable. And it could easily become that way again. Whereas "death from cold fusion" is essentially of zero meaningful concern.

Maybe it would be useful if you could attach some kind of crude probabilities to your estimates. I can fill a pdf with items like "death from massive leprechaun attack" but it wouldn't be a very useful guide.

1. Strictly speaking, the only major barrier to development of fission weapons (once the possibility of prompt criticality was realized) was enrichment. Even a simple gun-type bomb design suffices if you want to build a fission weapon, but you have to get the nuclear material first, and that's where the bulk of the scientific and technological effort in the Manhattan project was focused. Even today, enrichment is still only the major barrier to aspiring nuclear states/groups. Once it was identified that this was the problem that needed to be solved, the scie

Again, why does MrMind have that 'role'?

I think the fact that you say Clarity is 'farming for karma' - without any evidence for this claim - may give away what the real problem is.

Anyway, if the issue is just time zones, I'd be fine with, say, agreeing on UT 00:00 Monday for starting an open thread. Or maybe it would just be simpler to have a bot start the thread.

As far as I remember, the only thing that seemed to be 'agreed on' was that the open threads should be weekly, starting on Mondays, and anyone could open one if it hadn't been opened by Monday. I don't see how Clarity has broken that norm. I don't see how this is anything other than an attack on Clarity for being a newcomer, and anyone who downvoted this thread should really take a step back and consider what kind of community their downvote is promoting.

So only MrMind is allowed to create open threads? Who gave him this sole authority? When was this decided by the community?

Why does it even matter who creates an open thread?

1. I see what you are talking about now. Flux-compression driven fusion is most likely not going to work (which explains why there has been no serious effort to pursue it). It's useful to compare it to the Sandia capacitor-powered Z-machine. To achieve fusion you need (a) a lot of energy, delivered in (b) a short amount of time (preferably nanoseconds as the fuel will tear itself apart at timescales much longer than that), in (c) a very small space. The best EPFCG so far has achieved about 100 MJ and 256 MA, but the killer is the time scale, which is on the

1. Fission weapons with arbitrarily small yields are possible, it's just that you have to sacrifice efficiency. Before the CTBT, tests of < 1 ton yield were routinely carried out as part of hydrodynamic bomb testing. The smallest critical mass for plutonium (assuming an advanced weapon design) seems to be about 2-3 kg, giving a minimum yield of 5-6 kt without losing efficiency (and thus provides a minimum cost bound for a fission weapon). The 10 MJ figure I gave was assuming the smallest possible primary, and a staged design. I think at this point we hav

I understood your justifications and that's what I was responding to.

1. There are significant technological barriers to pure fusion weapons and fission implosion triggers would always probably be the cheaper option. Laser-initiated fusion is known to be unworkable; experiments have indicated that at least 10 MJ of laser energy - and probably 2 or 3 times that - is required for reliable fusion ignition; this is far beyond the capabilities of current laser technology to produce in a compact way (the NIF is a huge installation and only produces 1.8 MJ of laser

A major weakness of the standard Bayesian inference method is that it assumes a problem only has two possible solutions.

This is not true at all.

I'd say that the possibility of 'home made nukes' is essentially zero unless fissile isotopes become widely available and cheap, and even if all current controls on nuclear materials and technology were lifted, that would still be far from plausible. The US government pays about $1mil to $10mil worth of plutonium-238 for a single nuclear weapon; this is even though the current industrial process for producing plutonium is highly optimized and efficient (the first nuclear test required $1bn worth of fissile material).

'Home made nuke' is in the same category... (read more)

You could just have a two-dishwasher system where the dishwasher takes the place of the cupboard.

It seems like a robot that automated the task of moving clean dishes into a cupboard would be an idea where the potential benefits, if any, are too small to currently justify the major development effort that would be required. Maybe in the future when AI becomes far more widespread and 'easy' to develop.

During the 80's and 90's a number of firms sprouted up around buying and selling penny stocks via strategies like cold calling.

You are correct in that surveys of IQ and other intelligence scores consistently show physicists having some of the highest. But mathematics, statistics, computer science, and engineering are the same, and most studies I've seen generally see very little, if any, significant difference in intelligence scores between these fields.

'Rationalist' isn't a field or specialization, it's defined more along the lines of refining and improving rational thinking. Based on the lesswrong survey, fields like mathematics and computer science are heavily represented here.... (read more)

It could be that the attitude/belief that theoretical physicists are far smarter than anyone else (and therefore, by implication, do not need to listen to anyone else) is part of the problem I'm outlining.

Last week was a gathering of physicists in Oxford to discuss string theory and the philosophy of science.

From the article:

Nowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian confirmation theory, or Bayesianism...

Gross concurred, saying that, upon learning about Bayesian confirmation theory from Dawid’s book, he felt “somewhat like the Molière character who said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been talking prose all my life!’”

That the Bayesian view is news to so many physicists is itself news to me, and i... (read more)

Did they provide their own food

Indeed they did. This is mentioned in the report.

In fact cash-grant villages were more likely to grow their own food than control villages. A large part of the cash grants were spent on procuring better seeds and upgrading their livestock. Cash-grant villages were also more likely to undertake productive economic activity like starting businesses.

They did undertake trade with other villages, if they wanted to.

However all this is, basically, injection of a bit of capital into a very very poor village and it does not tell

At some point, yes. Kindergarten is actually a great metaphor. If you're five, and you run out of the kindergarten, you hit a bus and die.

You can either talk about politics in the way people currently do it - a way completely removed from any sort of disciplined, rational type of thinking - or not talk about it at all. It seems that a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality should strive not to jump head-first into the current but to refine rationality to the point where our brains are capable of discussing politics rationally.

We are far from that point.

which is usually argued about in much more sophisticated terms than "Yay magenta, boo teal".

It's not the sophistication of the arguments that is the problem. The problem is making arguments objective, rigorous, and grounded in experimental observation. I would not mind 'yay magenta, boo teal' as long as it were followed by a rational and rigorous justification. Unfortunately, making rational arguments in politics is extremely difficult. However, because of the mind-killing effect, the people making such arguments usually don't see it that way ... (read more)

Sigh. Let me quote myself from upthread:

It works for small communities which mooch off larger societies

Not at all. It's clear that you didn't even look at the examples. A lot of those examples were largely self-contained. For instance, the one in Madhya Pradesh was done on a set of villages that provided their own food and necessities.

I had never heard of the 'chicken' game before. It seems the punishment of 'losing social status' would apply to real-world prisoner's dilemma-like games as well: The cheater gets called a 'rat' and suffers from loss of social status.

The assertion that an AI would make everything hunky-dory is not falsifiable.

Huh? Of course it's falsifiable. The entire premise of MIRI and CFAR is that this assertion is going to be falsified unless we take action.

Basically, without money you'd get too many DJs and too few plumbers. Money fixes that balance problem.

Money itself doesn't fix that balance problem. It's the allocation of money. I don't disagree with the idea that some type of work is unpleasant and necessary for society so there has to be some system of incentives to make people do that type of work. I disagree with the notion that the 'communist paradise' necessarily reduces such incentives to the point that society starves and dies.

As I said, I think Xyrik's scenario (evenly dividing wealth among e... (read more)

aspired =/= achieved.

Your comment seemed to be equating Xyrik's scenario with the Soviet system, implying that for that reason it's not desirable. I'm pointing out that the two systems cannot be equated.

I'd prefer not for politics to spill into LW, no matter if it's left-wing or right-wing politics.

The problem with that viewpoint is that you assume that the only reason - or, even, the most important reason - that people work is to make money.

But our understanding of human behavior tells us that other factors like status games, feelings of personal achievement or 'having a purpose in life', and so on are equally as important, if not more important, than the money-making aspect of work. Further, something that someone considers 'work' could be considered enjoyment by someone else.

Believe it or not, many people farm or tend gardens or animals simply bec... (read more)

I had no idea that the communist party was a flawless AGI...

Disclaimer: politics is the mind-killer.

LW used to be politically neutral; I'm not sure it is so anymore. A large part of the user base is American, and the current presidential election season is spilling into LW far more than previous seasons ever did. And the current wave of populist, nationalistic, libertarian/individualist ideology which seems to be very popular in the USA is being represented in the general atmosphere of LW.

It would be great if a temporary ban on political subjects could be set and enforced until at least the current election season is over.

I was shocked by what appeared to be gross violations of cultural norms around the blaming of victims.

What? How is it a violation of 'cultural norms' to say that smoking or other factors contribute to cancer?

Investigative journalism costs money.

We aren't talking about journalism here. We are explicitly talking about propaganda. Or counter-propaganda, if you prefer.

The Young Turks aren't doing genuine news. They comment on what various other people report and do little research into the subjects they cover.

Much like the rest of the media. And, again, geniune news is off-topic. Although they do tend to bring into focus some subjects that the rest of the media is hesitant to cover.

Pay local bloggers with regime critical views to write stories

No use if... (read more)