All of see's Comments + Replies

see20

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)

1tlhonmey
It occurs to me that Trinitarianism and similar are likely best explained as the theological equivalent of wave-particle duality. Does light really sometimes behave like a particle and sometimes behave like a wave?  Probably not.  More likely there is some underlying, unified behaviour that we simply haven't figured out yet due to limited data and limited processing power. Similarly, when trying to comprehend and describe an infinite...  something-that-has-intent, with a finite human mind and viewpoint as your only tool, there are likely going to be some similar bits of weirdness.  God in three persons?  More likely you have a "blind men and the elephant" situation.  Only this elephant is too big to ever see more than a tiny piece of it at a time, and too mobile to know for certain that you've found the same part of it to look at twice in a row. So you could easily have a case where the Unitarians are technically more correct about the overall nature, but the Trinitarians have a better working description.   This says nothing about whether Theism as a whole is the most correct explanation for the observed phenomenon.  Just note that the "practical explanation that mistakenly comes to be thought of as the way things really are" is hardly limited to Theology, and I highly doubt theologians are  measurably more likely to commit this error than anyone else.  The very reason that you have to use placeholder tokens for thinking about concepts that can't fit in your brain all at once leaves you susceptible to occasionally forgetting that they're just placeholders.
see20

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... (read more)

0hairyfigment
As defined in some places - for example, the Occam's Razor essay that Eliezer linked for you many comments ago - simplicity is not the same as fitting the evidence. The official doctrine of the Trinity has probability zero because the Catholic Church has systematically ruled out any self-consistent interpretation (though if you ask, they'll probably tell you one or more of the heresies is right after all). So discussing its complexity does seem like a waste of time to me as well. But that's not true for all details of Catholicism or Christianity (if for some reason you want to talk religion). Perhaps some intelligent Christians could see that we reject the details of their beliefs for the same reason they reject the lyrics of "I Believe" from The Book of Mormon.
see00

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.

see60

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 ... (read more)

see10

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... (read more)

0jacob_cannell
Earlier, I said: Which is in error - I should have said "evidence indicating high intelligence is a robust developmental attractor". As you point out, evolution rarely selects for high intelligence in individual lineages. No, but this has become a digression. For the potential big picture galaxy models in consideration, we are more concerned with discerning between intelligence being highly improbable or only weakly improbable. The impact arising from the difference between weakly improbable and highly probable is relatively minuscule in comparison. I am claiming only that the evidence for parallel development of intelligence on earth is sufficient to conclude that intelligence is in the vicinity of weakly improbable to probable, rather than highly improbable.
see30

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.

8jpet
Parrots and other birds seem to be about that intelligent, and octopi are close. Perhaps that's an argument for the difficulty of the chimp to human jump: we have (nearly) ape-level intelligence evolving multiple times, so it can't be that hard, but most lineages plateaued there.
5jacob_cannell
Sure they are - given that the placental clade contains most of the extant mammal diversity. Hardly. Using the "last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth" is perhaps disingenuous, as evolution is highly nonlinear. The entire period from the cambrian explosion to now is what - 15% of the history of life? More importantly - elephants, cetaceans and primates occupy widely diverse environments and niches. EQ is a rather poor indicator of intelligence compared to total synapse count. The common placentilia ancestors are believed to be small rodent like insectivores which had small brains - presumably on the order of 21 million neurons in the cortex, similar to rats. The fact that brains increased by a factor of 2 to 3 orders of magnitude in 3 divergent branches of placentilia is evidence to me for robustness in selection for high intelligence. Now of course, it's fairly easy for evolution to just make a brain bigger. The difficulty is in scaling up the brain in the right way to actually increase intelligence. Rodent brains scale better than lizard brains, and elephant, cetecean, and primate brains scale even better still. So evolution found increasingly better scaling strategies over time, and in some occasions in parallel.
see90

His explanation on Reddit is that his style is too distinctive to go undetected.

4Gunnar_Zarncke
Hm. That's indeed plausible. More so in our age where software can reliably detect authors reliably based on their writing fingerprint. I wonder what will become of pseudonyms in the future.
see110

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.

see70

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).

see70

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).

see00

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.

see00

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

... (read more)
0buybuydandavis
I saw that, but didn't see an answer in it. "When I had shaped the baby's spirit to be like my own..." ...? And? Quirrell describes the series of events, but provides no causal model that I see. So you think that if Quirrell had tried to make a Quirrell imprint horcrux of any other person the same thing would have happened? The resonance relation is created as a side effect of casting that spell?
see90

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.

-1Fivehundred
I'm not seeing why that should be relevant...?

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.

see20

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 ... (read more)

see90

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.

6spencerth
Right. I think this is one of the key issues. When things like 'natural', 'random' (both in where, when, and how often they happen) or are otherwise uncontrollable, humans are much keener to accept them. When agency comes into play, it changes the perspective on it completely: "how could we have changed culture/society/national policies/our surveillance system/educational system/messaging/nudges/pick your favorite human-controllable variable" to have prevented this, or prevent it in the future? It's the very idea that we could influence it and/or that it's perpetuated by 'one of us' that makes it so salient and disturbing. From a consequentialist perspective, it's definitely not rational, and we shouldn't (ideally) affect our allocation of resources to combat threats. Is there a particular bias that covers "caring about something more, however irrelevant/not dangerous, just because a perceived intelligent agent was responsible?"
see00

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... (read more)

see00

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"?

see00

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?

1Capla
This is a great question and I'm not sure. There's a difference between understanding processes and their causes from the outside and experiencing them subjectively, from the inside, as qualia. Light exists and there are rules that govern it. A human can learn to understand the math that governs photons, the biology of how eyes work, the neurology that determines how the signals are passed through neurons and "processed" in the occipital lobe, and even how the brain will react to that stimuli. A computer algorithm could model all of that. But even if you understand the chain of causes perfectly, if you are color blind, you still don't experience the subjective qualia of color. Some psychopaths are notoriously charming and expert manipulators. They are extremely skilled at modeling others. But, at least in some cases, that modeling is done without any affective response, unlike most of us, who feel something when we someone in pain. Apparently, modeling can occur without subjective (motivating) affect. Conceivably, one could even model one's self without affect. Conscious expedience seems to be something more than just modeling, since all the modeling in the world, from the outside, does not produce a conscious experience. Yet, that experience incontrovertibly exists, in some sense. I'm having it. Whatever causes color, nothing could ever disprove that color isn't. (This feels like a problem of free will to me. I have written essays all-but-proving, that Free Will is an incoherent concept. Yet this fails to persuade some, who see their personal, subjective feeling of having chosen to indisputable. I can't deny the existence of my qualia, since it is the only thing I have direct access to. In that I experience it, it is. However, I think I may be confuses in much the same way the proponent of Free Will is confused. Someone please dissolve the question for me.)
see00

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.

5Adriano_Mannino
Well, if humans can't and won't act that way, too bad for them! We should not model ethics after the inclinations of a particular type of agent, but we should instead try and modify all agents according to ethics. If we did model ethics after particular types of agent, here's what would result: Suppose it turns out that type A agents are sadistic racists. So what they should do is put sadistic racism into practice. Type B agents, on the other hand, are compassionate anti-racists. So what they should do is diametrically opposed to what type A agents should do. And we can't morally compare types A and B. But type B is obviously objectively better, and objectively less of a jerk. (Whether type A agents can be rationally motivated (or modified so as) to become more B-like is a different question.)
see00

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... (read more)

0Andreas_Giger
The problem with this diet is that it wouldn't be a diet; it would be many different diets. Lots of people are lactose intolerant and it would be stupid to remove dairy products from the diet of those who are not. Likewise, a vegetarian diet is not a "variation" of a non-vegetarian diet. Also, why are you talking about 1900? I think the fact that humans can't agree on even the most basic issues is pretty solid evidence. Also, even if everyone had the same subjective ethics, this still would result in objective contradictions. I'm not aware of any evidence that this problem is solvable at all.
see-40

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... (read more)

see-20

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 ... (read more)

2Andreas_Giger
It does not imply that there exists even one basic moral/ethical statement any human being would agree with, and to me that seems to be a requirement for any kind of humanity-wide system of ethics. Your 'one size fits all' approach does not convince me, and your reasoning seems superficial and based on words rather than actual logic.
7Utilitarian
Why not include primates, dolphins, rats, chickens, etc. into the ethics?
see70

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... (read more)

0LauralH
Right, Chapter 76 was mainly to verify that Harry was trustworthy.
2DanArmak
Who were Snape's two mentors? I used to think they were Voldemort and Dumbledore, in that order. But from the new chapter we learn that Snape only became a Death Eater when he told the prophecy to Voldemort, and that must have been immediately before Voldemort died or vanished. That doesn't seem to leave enough time for Voldemort to be a mentor to Snape.
1drethelin
I like this as a hint as to where Snape might move next. His detachment from Dumbledore makes him a free agent in my book, unless he's more beholden to Lucius than I know.
see-10

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... (read more)

3[anonymous]
I have no idea why this post is down voted, since it points out something very important, voting results are an imperfect measurement of who the electorate actually tried to vote for.
5Kindly
Assuming honesty in recording is actually not problematic. As Eugine_Nier says, there will still be a set of voting outcomes that lead to Candidate A being elected, and a set of voting outcomes that lead to Candidate B being elected, and fraud only slightly changes the shape of the boundary between these sets. It gets better. Turns out that the "area" of that boundary is minimized in a fair majority election. The probability of a vote being pivotal is only increased when the boundary is distorted by fraud (although, obviously, your vote will no longer be pivotal in exactly the same situations). If the error rate in vote counts is 1%, that means you're 99% as likely to make the vote you intend to make. So if you had a 1 in 10 million chance to make a pivotal vote, that chance now becomes... roughly 1 in 10.1 million. This part doesn't really make a lot of difference, although you're right that it should be taken into account.
-2Eugine_Nier
Your vote might still be the vote that tips the total past the threshold where the opposing counters can commit fraud.
see100

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... (read more)

see90

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... (read more)

0tut
No. 1 Less than 2% is coding 2 About 8% is known to be regulatory. Most of the interesting stuff from the ENCODE project is about what parts do what in what cells in this category 3 Given how they looked, it is likely that another 10% or so is regulatory in cells that they have not looked at. 4 20% or so has absolutely no effect 5 When they talk about 80% being "functional" that is in the weakest sense of the word functional that anyone has even played with. Typical examples of the functions of the remaining 60% of the genome is that something binds to it for no reason, or something binds to it to prevent it from being transcribed, or it gets transcribed but the RNA thus produced does nothing.
4Manfred
Catching yourself explaining something that doesn't need explaining is an excellent opportunity to recalibrate :D
see20

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.)

2DanArmak
Or you could build a Youtube competitor that draws most users away from Youtube, which is between 0.5 and 1.
see60

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

see50

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... (read more)

see-10

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... (read more)

3Metus
A test would be to look wether there is a correlation between cheating and IQ and whether this correlation is influenced by sex. Also, asymetrical incidence of STDs with respect to the sexes could also be an indicator.
see-10

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.

0Epiphany
"I'm disputing the common claim that it can't be genetic." Oh, sorry. I have found out the hard way, myself, that it's really best to start with a single sentence that makes one's point clear in the very beginning. Maybe that would help your commenters respond appropriately.
see20

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... (read more)

8Douglas_Knight
When people say that it's "too fast," they are making a quantitative claim. The Flynn effect is a standard deviation per generation. Under your scenario of no selection on women, this would require that the bottom half of the bell curve to have no biological children. 50% cuckoldry, perfectly correlated with IQ? Even men who think they've been cuckolded don't have that high a rate.
9Shmi
How would you test this model?
JoshuaZ100

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... (read more)

9Epiphany
There are so many other factors, you're probably getting mostly noise there. For instance: I read somewhere that depending on whether babies drink breast milk or formula, they may lose 10 points (to formula) - the reason stated was lack of omega 3. What about lead paint chips? We have banned lead, that should increase IQ - after an initial decrease when lead paint began to be used. (There'd be a similar increase / decrease cycle with the invention of formula.) The point of these two is that as we learn more, we may be preventing a lot of things that previously caused children brain damage. And then there are other health factors which we've improved. In the great depression, I read 10% of the population starved to death. Starvation, for those who survive it, can cause brain damage. Were there other starvations before this, that had stopped happening? When did helmets become popular for people riding bicycles and skateboards and such? There are just too many factors. Heh, and I read somewhere that here in America, the Flynn effect has stopped. O.O

But there's also an opposing evolutionary pressure: educated women have fewer children.

see90

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... (read more)

-3iDante
I don't understand your point. If there is a separate law required for yawns then that's still a physical law that describes physical systems.
see10

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... (read more)

9iDante
Physics is better than that. Lets say that there is another level of rules required to reduce chemistry. Then these rules are about physical systems in general, and lower-level than chemistry. We have found new laws of physics! If they can't be derived from physics now then that doesn't mean physics won't figure them out in the future.
see310

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... (read more)

iDante200

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... (read more)

see00

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... (read more)

0Decius
Nope. Incompleteness shows that there are some statements which are true which cannot be proven to be true. However, empirically observed facts in the absence of moral imperative do not create a moral imperative. Typically ethics are formed around by a value judgement and then molded and polished by facts. I see that you are trying to trap me by saying that "I believe that this is better" is a fact, rather than allowing the value judgement "This is better" to stand. Morality is, among other things, subjective. There is no basis in fact to prefer any system over any other system, any more than there is a basis in fact to prefer one genre of movies over another. I prefer internal consistency to internal inconsistency, and I believe that the majority of people who tend to think things through also prefer that, but I have no factual basis for that preference. Claiming that falling down (as opposed to up) is a moral act, while not technically refutable, is hard to swallow.
see10

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 ... (read more)

0ScottMessick
I haven't read the article, but I want to point out that prisons are enormously costly. So there is still much to gain potentially even if the new system is only equally effective at deterrence and rehabilitation. The fact that prisons are inhumane is another issue, of course.
see-10

'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.

0Decius
You're right, in that I can't refute the core statement of a system of ethics. Perhaps genies should grant wishes- but developing a system that creates a moral imperative for genies to grant wishes doesn't make genies or grant wishes. Even if you believe that it is morally right and proper to build perpetual motion machines, you don't actually get to build perpetual motion machines.
see10

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.

see60

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.

0Andreas_Giger
Yes, I was referring to the North Carolina. She had already completed her sea trials, but was not yet headed for Pearl Harbor when the attack happened. Also, of the 18 heavy cruisers the US Navy had in 1941 (all of them being post-WW1 designs), only two were present at Pearl Harbor.
see40

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... (read more)

1Andreas_Giger
But they did disperse some of the battleships. That's why all the battleships at Pearl Harbor were outdated classes. They didn't have that many outdated carriers, and carriers retain their value more over the course of time than battleships and battlecruisers do. The ratio value:tonnage of capital ships sunk at Pearl harbor was significantly lower than the ratio value:tonnage of capital ships in the surviving fleets in the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere. This was never about carriers versus battleships, it was about vessels with high value versus vessels with low value.
see120

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... (read more)

1Andreas_Giger
Not really. It wasn't just "a carrier fleet" and "a battleship fleet", it was a predominantly modern carrier fleet and an outdated battleship fleet that consisted mostly of WWI designs or modifications of WWI designs. It was also consensus that if you were going to deploy carriers, the Pacific Ocean was a more promising theatre than the Atlantic ocean, due to (a) the weather and (b) the lack of strategically positioned air bases on land that were in little danger of being invaded, such as Newfoundland, Great Britain, West Africa, and so on. Also, the U.S. Navy could have commissioned more battleships instead of carriers, but they didn't, and that means they did have plans for them; most likely in the Pacific theatre. It was clear from the start that being at war with Japan would also mean being at war with Germany, so fighting only on the Pacific front was never an option.
see30

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.

-10Andreas_Giger
see40

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.

-1Andreas_Giger
So what you're saying is that CDT refuses the whole setup and then proceeds to solve a completely different problem, correct?
see140

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?

7Manfred
Neither, I'd guess. The 5% is a number that sounds disbelieving but open-minded.
see00

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.

see20

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... (read more)

1Vaniver
No, more expensive than Mars habitats, for the reasons you mentioned. When I said "and easier to terraform," I meant that as a bonus, not as a requirement. Closed habitats seem like a reasonable norm for small societies in hostile conditions. Sure; but there must also be dependent chances (like gamma ray bursts or ubiquitous design faults or so on). It seems difficult to have the baseline dependent fragility of orbital habitats at lower than the baseline dependent fragility of Earth. I would rather have 10 Cheyenne Mountain-style habitats a bit below the Earth's surface than 10 orbital habitats- and, again, at equal cost expect to have a lot more ones on Earth than off it.
see20

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.

-1[anonymous]
Tinned monkey doesn't keep well, at least not economically.
1Vaniver
Quite possibly- My impression is that space habitats tend to be more fragile and expensive than planets for a number of reasons, and so when you compare equal-cost options a lot of benefits of space habitats evaporate (with the caveat that any estimate of costs is going to be very, very wide).
see10

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.

0Sarokrae
It's interesting that you say that. I've always treated non-realism with sympathy, and it took a while for the concept of "beliefs that correspond to reality" to anchor itself. It is possible that this correlates with my interesting and not-like-real-life dreams... Not sure which way, if at all, the causation acts though.
see00

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.

Load More