The interactions of three people is more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. But the theory that my house contains three different residents still explains observations of my house much more simply than if you start with the assumption there's only one resident. You accordingly cannot actually use Occam's Razor to disfavor the theory that my house has three residents simply because the interactions of three people with each other are more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. Similarly, adding a cat to the three...
Why do you attach any value whatsoever to a "consciousness" that cannot think, feel, remember, or respond? Your "consciousness", so defined, is as inanimate as a grain of sand. I don't care about grains of sand as ends-in-themselves, why would you?
Be clear that when you say you are conscious, it cannot be this "consciousness" that motivates the statement, because this "consciousness" cannot respond, so the non-conscious parts of your mind cannot query it for a status check. A simple neural spike would be a response, we could watch it on an fMRI.
Well, I expect you're failing, yes. It is going to be futile to try to understand the Islamic State without understanding the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, the most influential Muslim scholar since Mohamed, the man accorded the honorific Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), and his doctrine of occasionalism.
This is going to be particularly hard on this site because the local "rationality" is rooted in the Aristotle-Averroes-Aquinas tradition, where we believe in things like natural laws that can be deduced by observation. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was ...
Sure they are - given that the placental clade contains most of the extant mammal diversity.
The very issue is that "mammal diversity" is vastly insufficient to make any conclusions about general independent evolutionary trends. The number of potential explanations of the advantages of intelligence derived from features from the recent common evolutionary origin completely overwhelms any evidence for general factors.
For one example, if someone were to demonstrate that intelligence is usually useful for a species of animals where the adults, by...
Er, a few species of placental mammal are hardly "widely separated lineages". Trying to draw conclusions for completely alien biologies by looking at convergent evolution inside a clade with a single common ancestor in the last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth is absurd. And the fact that the Placentalia start with an unusually high EQ among vertebrates-as-a-whole make it a particularly unsuitable lineage for estimating the possibilities of independent evolution of high animal intelligence.
His explanation on Reddit is that his style is too distinctive to go undetected.
She got a Dreadful for dying . . . then Professor Quirrell revived her and re-graded her Troll.
Sshall ssacrifice my fallback weapon, and girl-child sshall gain troll'ss power of regeneration.
Quantities and locations matter. Atomic-diameter filaments linking nanogram-level concentrations in the brains of Voldemort and the Death Eaters could discorporate them without killing Harry (at least, not killing him before he could reach the Stone of Transfiguration).
The available dates were Monday, March 2nd, or Tuesday, March 3rd; the "12:01 am" did not distinguish which of those dates was meant by "Tuesday, March 2nd" in the slightest, since both possible dates had their own 12:01 am.
This has been subsequently corrected by EY to "Tuesday, March 3rd" (which was the correct day for the 60 hours promised).
Regardless of the probability of Voldemort making a stupid mistake, Voldemort was apparently casting the Killing Curse on Hermione, which would be an independent reason to shoot him.
The source of the Harry-Voldemort resonance is that Harry was made into a Horcrux of Voldemort. Chapter 108:
...The prophecy seemed to hint that if I destroyed all but a remnant of Harry Potter, then our spirits would not be so different, and we could exist in the same world."
"Something went wrong," Harry said. "Something that blew off the top of the Potters' home in Godric's Hollow, gave me the scar on my forehead, and left your burnt body behind."
Professor Quirrell nodded. His hands had slowed in their Potions work. "The reso
Note that this poll only samples people who care about these threads enough to read them. People who avoid these threads and don't like them cluttering /discussion will not see it.
Fair point, though I feel like that logic is sort of letting them cause a comparatively large disruption to our enjoyment of real-time discussion of the final arc of a fiction we've been following for years, in return for the prevention of a comparatively small temporary disruption to their enjoyment of the Discussion forum. Scope, of course, plays a part here, but I doubt it's remotely enough on the side of the 500 comments people to tip the scales.
Well, there are definitely forms that are irrational, but there's also the perfectly rational factor of having to account for feedback loops.
We don't have to consider that shifting resources from lightning death prevention to terrorism prevention will increase the base rate of lightning strikes; we do have to consider that a shift in the other direction can increase (or perhaps decrease) the base rate of terrorist activity. It is thus inherently hard to compare the expected effect of a dollar of lightning strike prevention against a dollar of terrorism ...
Further, of course, we know that lightning strikes are not controlled by intelligent beings, while terrorist strikes are.
If there's a major multi-fatality lightning strike, it's unlikely to encourage weather phenomena to engage in copycat attacks. Nor will all sorts of counter-lightning measures dissuade clouds from generating static electricity and instead dumping more rain or something.
Some people (including me) have made comments along these lines before. There's nothing theoretically wrong with the view that evolutionary history may have created multiple less-than-coordnated utility functions that happen to share one brain.
The consequences have some serious implications, though. If a single human has multiple utility functions, it is highly unlikely (for reasons similar to Arrow's Paradox) that these work out compatibly enough that you can have an organism-wide utility expressed as a real number (as opposed to a hypercomplex number o...
The contention that "'computer games', as defined by Wikipedia" is "PC games" is, of course, true.
However, did you deliberately intend that people who knew with high confidence Tetris was (by far) the best-selling game played on computers (as computers are defined by Wikipedia) would get caught by not knowing that Wikipedia redirects "computer game" to "PC game" rather than to "video game"?
1) Conscious beings reasonably often try to predict their own future state or the state of other minds.
2) In order to successfully mimic a conscious being, a p-zombie would have to also engage in this behavior, predicting its own future states and the future states of other minds.
3) In order to predict such future states, it would seem necessary that a p-zombie would have to have at least some ability to model the states of minds, including its own.
Now, before we go any further, how does consciousness differ from having a model of the internal states of one's own mind?
Constructing an ethics that demands that a chicken act as a moral agent is obviously nonsense; chickens can't and won't act that way. Similarly, constructing an ethics that demands humans value chickens as much as they value their own children is nonsense; humans can't and won't act that way. If you're constructing an ethics for humans follow, you have to start by figuring out humans.
It's not until after you've figured out how much humans should value the interests of chickens that you can determine how much to weigh the interests of chickens in how humans should act. And how much humans should weigh the value of chickens is by necessity determined by what humans are.
All humans as they currently exist, no. But is there a system of ethics as a whole that humans, even currently disagreeing with some parts of it, would recognize as superior at doing what they really want from an ethical system that they would switch to it? Even in the main? Maybe, indeed, human ethics are so dependent on alleles that vary within the population and chance environmental factors that CEV is impossible. But there's no solid evidence to require assuming that a priori, either.
By analogy, consider the person who in 1900 wanted to put togethe...
What would that mean? How would the chicken learn or follow the ethics? Does it seem even remotely reasonable that social behavior among chickens and social behavior among humans should follow the same rules, given the inherent evolutionary differences in social structure and brain reward pathways?
It might be that CEV is impossible for humans, but there's at least enough basic commonality to give it a chance of being possible.
Why would the chicken have to learn to follow the ethics in order for its interests to be fully included in the ethics? We don't include cognitively normal human adults because they are able to understand and follow ethical rules (or, at the very least, we don't include them only in virtue of that fact). We include them because to them as sentient beings, their subjective well-being matters. And thus we also include the many humans who are unable to understand and follow ethical rules. We ourselves, of course, would want to be still included in case we los...
Objective? Sure, without being universal.
Human beings are physically/genetically/mentally similar within certain tolerances; this implies there is one system of ethics (within certain tolerances) that is best suited all of us, which could be objectively determined by a thorough and competent enough analysis of humans. The edges of the bell curve on various factors might have certain variances. There might be a multi-modal distribution of fit (bimodal on men and women, for example), too. But, basically, one objective ethics for humans.
This ethics would ...
Harry didn't learn, no. But is that an advantage or a disadvantage? To go back to Chapter 76:
"It's strange," Snape said quietly. "I have had two mentors, over the course of my days. Both were extraordinarily perceptive, and neither one ever told me the things I wasn't seeing. It's clear enough why the first said nothing, but the second..." Snape's face tightened. "I suppose I would have to be naive, to ask why he stayed silent."
Now, yes, this separates Snape from Dumbledore. But Dumbledore is not the protagonist. Harry...
The paper assumes votes are accurately recorded, counted, and reported. Which is known to be false; error rates in vote counts are at least 0.1%, and likely closer to 1%. A perfectly honest close election is an election decided not by actual votes cast, but the random distribution of counting errors. And any election so close is going to be subjected to recounts that simply redistribute the counting errors.
Now, it is theoretically possible your vote might actually tip things in the final recount, right? Despite the fact that who actually won in a close...
Oh, certainly, you reduce the explanatory power of an explanation, you lower the probability of the explanation being true.
But, well, "parasite DNA" at the fundamental level is assuming Darwinian mutation-and-selection happens among transposons. Which seems quite plausible on its own, even after this, especially since retroviruses can be treated as a special class of retrotransposons.
And now that I'm actually looking at the paper instead of the news, it's not clear how much of this stuff is "functional" because it actually does somet...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really big deal, right?
Mmmm. It's new data, which is important, but it's not new data that particularly upsets any accepted theoretical models.
It was easy to figure out the count of human proteins to human DNA base pairs, and figure out only a small fraction was actually protein coding back in the 1970s. So people started theorizing about all the rest being junk. We knew something of the 97% had to be regulatory in function, and everybody had their own preferred guesses. Those guesses have been steadily movin...
I think, given how many millions of minds it would have to affect and how much sanity increase it would require, it sounds a lot like 6 in practice. (Unless the approach is "Build a company big enough to buy Google, and then limit comments to people who are sane", in which case, 2.)
Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't include any rationalist.
In an Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma, God beats a cult
that which can be destroyed by humanity should be if and only if acausal torture is the art of winning at rationality
timeless sex is the mind-killer
There were no indications that the Soviet regime had any inclination of starting a war with Germany, though ti would probably not have joined the Axis either.
The Soviets actually tried to join the Axis in October-November 1940. The sticking point was that the Germans wanted the Soviets to agree to a split in spheres of influence along the Dardanelles and Bosporus, while the Soviets wanted a share of the Balkans.
Throw in things like Basis Nord, the massive amount of war-critical natural resources the Soviets shipped the Nazis 1939-1941, the German shipm...
Most of the Flynn effect seems to occur on the lower end of the IQ spectrum moving upwards. Source. This is highly consistent with education, nutrition and diseases hypotheses, but it is difficult to see how to reconcile this with a sexual selection hypothesis.
It reconciles quite well, actually.
The greater the genetically-determined status differential between a woman's husband and her a potential lover, the more differential advantage to the woman's offspring in replacing the husband's genes with those of a higher-quality male. So the lower the status...
1) Sure. I'm not claiming the Flynn effect is genetic; I'm disputing the common claim that it can't be genetic.
2) Whether the Flynn effect has stopped or not is an area of ongoing dispute; some studies suggest it merely paused for a while. And if it has ended . . . that might merely mark that America's reached the new equilibrium point under urban infidelity conditions.
Was reading up on the Flynn effect, and saw the claim it's too fast to reflect evolution. Is that really true? Yes, it's too fast, given the pressures, for what Darwin called natural selection, given the lack of anything coming along and dramatically killing off the less intelligent before they can reproduce. But that's not the only force of evolution; there's also sexual selection.
If it's become easier in the last 150 years for women to have surviving children by high-desirability mates, then we should, in fact, see a proportionate increase in the high...
I'd assign a low probability to this hypothesis. Most of the Flynn effect seems to occur on the lower end of the IQ spectrum moving upwards. Source. This is highly consistent with education, nutrition and diseases hypotheses, but it is difficult to see how to reconcile this with a sexual selection hypothesis.
Also, I'm not sure that your hypothesis fits with expected forms of infidelity. One commonly expected form of common infidelity would be generally with strong males while trying to get a resource rich males to think the children are there's If such in...
But there's also an opposing evolutionary pressure: educated women have fewer children.
If you define all laws of reality as physics, then sure, there's nothing physics can't explain. But that's, well . . . here, let me tell a fable to explain.
The year 152,036 AD
"Hey, we just got the third-check output from the LMC computer array."
"Yeah? What did it say?"
"The previous two sets were right. We input the known masses of the fundamental particles to five hundred thousand digits, and the known strengths of all seven fundamental forces to the same, arrange them in the form of a vertebrate animal, and run the sim, we do g...
This is the core of his argument, and it is entirely unfounded.
It's not founded, but neither is it explicitly contradicted.
While nothing in chemistry is known to contradict the laws of physics, we have yet to conclusively show that chemistry can indeed be entirely explained by the laws of physics. It is still possible that there are laws of chemistry that cannot be derived from a complete set of laws of physics correctly and fully applied.
Occam's razor favors the idea that behaviors in chemistry we cannot currently predict directly from physics are res...
Concretizing the abstract is an interesting blog post in that it makes a relatively cogent argument for non-reductionism
Quite the opposite.
When high-level abstractions fail to accurately reflect the actions of high-level objects, this is not in any way a refutation of reductionism. Rather, it is exactly what we would expect if reductionism is correct. If you try to model a billiard ball as a single object, rather than a collection of quarks and electrons, of course it will display behavior that doesn't fit your model. It is accuracy of high-level mod...
Feser's understanding of reductionism is backwards, which is evident by his choice of the verb "abstract" over "reduce."
We abstract when we consider some particular aspect of a concrete thing while bracketing off or ignoring the other aspects of the thing. For example, when you consider a dinner bell or the side of a pyramid exclusively as instances of triangularity, you ignore their color, size, function, and metal or stone composition.
Abstraction is precisely what Feser says: we find a simple pattern in complicated systems and ap...
Okay. Now take step two—try to show that, in fact, a 'should' really cannot be derived from an 'is'.
"Perpetual motion machines cannot be built" can be demonstrated to be true based on empirically-observable facts. If "'Should' statements cannot be made from 'is' statements" is a true 'is' statement, it will also be possible to show it is true based entirely on empirically-observable facts, right?
The usual mistake people make at this point is to claim that various "shoulds" contradict what "is". But what people thi...
Nobody has come up with any system of punishment that provably provides deterrence or rehabilitation. When someone does, there will be some point in complaining the existing alternative doesn't. A criterion all alternatives fail is not a basis for a decision.
How about security? Well, yes, prison isn't particularly necessary for rendering corporate fraudsters not a threat, but, how much of the prison population is such? For the ordinary run of thieves and violent criminals, prison does prevent further predation on the populace for the duration of their ...
'Should' statements cannot be made from 'is' statements.
Do you notice the difficulty in your own statement there?
If I say, "We should derive 'should' statements from 'is' statements", you can't refute my should statement; you can only contradict it. You might try to prove it impossible to derive 'should' from 'is'—but even assuming you succeed, proving an impossibility is by your own statement proving only what is, not what should be.
"Hume's Guillotine" always cuts itself in half first.
Food-grade citric acid (also sold under the name "sour salt", usually shelved with spices) is FDA-classified as GRAS. Looking at Amazon, the Spicy World Citric Acid in the 5-pound bag is $19.23 (free shipping for me, since I have Amazon Prime).
At the ~2g of citric acid metabolizing into ~1g of oxaloacetate you suggest, that translates to a price of $0.05 per three grams of oxaloacetate, or three orders of magnitude cheaper than buying a bottle of 30 100-mg capsules for $49.
Er? What battleships are you claiming were dispersed?
There were quite literally no newer battleships on active duty in the US Navy on December 7th, 1941 than the West Virginia, "outdated class" or no, sunk at Pearl Harbor along with her brand-new CXAM-1 radar. The only newer battleships in commission were the North Carolina and Washington, both of which were not yet on active duty because of delays caused by propeller issues.
I didn't say they wouldn't try to save the carriers. I said they would have hedged their bets by also dispersing some of the battleships. Your 90% confidence in your whole conjunct opinion requires a greater-than-90% confidence in the proposition that while saving the carriers, the people involved, all steeped in battleship supremacy/prestige for decades, would deliberately leave all the battleships vulnerable, rather than disperse even one or two as a hedge.
Also, the U.S. Navy could have commissioned more battleships instead of carriers,
Only in viol...
The "and it was not chance" bit? That requires the conspirators be non-human.
Carrier supremacy was hardly an established doctrine, much less proved in battle; orthodox belief since Mahan was that battleships were the most important ships in a fleet. The orthodox method of preserving the US Navy's power would have been to disperse battleships, not carriers. Even if the conspirators were all believers in the importance of carriers, even a minimum of caution would have led them to find an excuse to also save some of the battleships. To believe...
Well, Nozick's formulation in 1969, which popularized the problem in philosophy, went ahead and specified that "what you actually decide to do is not part of the explanation of why he made the prediction he made".
Which means smuggling in a theory of unidirectional causality into the very setup itself, which explains how it winds up called "Newcomb's Paradox" instead of Newcomb's Problem.
CDT calculates it this way: At the point of decision, either the million-dollar box has a million or it doesn't, and your decision now can't change that. Therefore, if you two-box, you always come out ahead by $1,000 over one-boxing.
Do you really think there's a 40% chance that one out of the Bahá'í, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, Muslims, Sikhs, theistic Hindus, or Zoroastrians are right?
Or do you think maybe there's a 5% chance that some form of religion is right, and that there might be a sub-chance of that that theism is right, and then there's a sub-sub-chance of any of the particular living theisms I just listed is right?
Ten Cheyenne Mountains are fine—as long as nothing happens to the Earth that would stop the people surviving in them from resuming agriculture on the Earth's surface (whether or not under glass). I'd like there to be humans elsewhere in the solar system that are already growing their own food as a hedge against any of the things, already thought of or not, that can take out a planet but not a solar system.
Space habitats more expensive than terraforming Mars? You're having to import large quantities of volatiles in either case, Mars needs more imported per person supported (since you'll be using lots of them in the upper atmosphere where they only provide radiation shielding and pressure, instead of smaller quantities to directly support biologically active processes), Mars outgasses the hydrogen you import thanks to photodisassociation of water molecules, and Mars has half the available solar power of a 1 AU orbit (and while you can possibly power a habita...
The old L5 Society would be rather disappointed with your focus on planets. Incremental construction of space habitats would be significantly easier than whole-planet terraforming, and putting the eggs in multiple baskets in multiple orbits is more survivable than any handful-of-planets scenario.
I find it rather amazing how many people's dreams, when they describe them, sound basically mundane, like things that could more or less happen in real life.
At least twice as a child, I actually completed homework assignments in dreams. Or at least I thought I'd completed them upon waking.
I wonder if those experiences have something to do with why I react to non-realism with such hostility.
In the second case, the easy answer is, "How often do diseases wipe out other species?" That is, when possible, calibrate possibilities against similar events that don't involve anthropic questions. Our disease model tends to hold quite effectively for animals whose extinction would be harmless or even beneficial from the anthropic perspective.
Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam's Razor. The hypotheses "Always comes up heads" and "always comes up tails" and "always lands on the edge" are all already on the reject pile when you're trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the "HTTHHT" sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being sim... (read more)