All of shokwave's Comments + Replies

I went from ardently two-boxing to ardently one-boxing when I read that you shouldn't envy someone's choices. More general than that, actually; I had a habit of thinking "alas, if only I could choose otherwise!" about aspects of my identity and personality, and reading that post changed my mind on those aspects pretty rapidly.

An extreme form of brain damage might be destruction of the entire brain. I don't think that someone with their entire brain removed has consciousness but lacks the ability to communicate it; suggesting that consciousness continues after death seems to me to be pushing well beyond what we understand "consciousness" to refer to.

The brain seems to be something that leads to consciousness, but is it the only thing?

Maybe other things can "lead to" consciousness as well, but what makes you suspect that humans have redundant ways of generating consciousness? Brain damage empirically causes damage to consciousness, so that pretty clearly indicates that the brain is where we get our consciousness from.

If we had redundant ways of generating consciousness, we'd expect that brain damage would simply shift the consciousness generation role to our other redundant system, so the... (read more)

Well, in dath ilan, people do still die, even though they're routinely cryonically frozen. I suspect with an intelligence explosion death becomes very rare (or horrifically common, like, extinction).

I'd caution that suspecting (out loud) that she might develop an exercise disorder would be one of those insulting or belittling things you were worried about (either because it seems like a cheap shot based on the anorexia diagnosis, or because this might be one approach to actually getting out from under the anorexia by exerting control over her body).

Likely a better approach to this concern would be to silently watch for those behaviours developing and worry about it if and when it actually does happen. (Note that refusing to help her with training and... (read more)

It seems like the War on Terror, etc, are not actually about prevention, but about "cures".

Some drug addiction epidemic or terrorist attack happens. Instead of it being treated as an isolated disaster like a flood, which we should (but don't) invest in preventing in the future, it gets described as an ongoing War which we need to win. This puts it firmly in the "ongoing disaster we need to cure" camp, and so cost is no object.

I wonder if the reason there appears to be a contradiction is just that some policy-makers take prevention-type measures and create a framing of "ongoing disaster" around it, to make it look like a cure (and also to get it done).

One would be ethical if their actions end up with positive outcomes, disregarding the intentions of those actions. For instance, a terrorist who accidentally foils an otherwise catastrophic terrorist plan would have done a very ‘morally good’ action.

This seems intuitively strange to many, it definitely is to me. Instead, ‘expected value’ seems to be a better way of both making decisions and judging the decisions made by others.

If the actual outcome of your action was positive, it was a good action. Buying the winning lottery ticket, as per your example,... (read more)

There's no other source of morality and there's no other criterion to evaluate a behaviour's moral worth by. (Theorised sources such as "God" or "innate human goodness" or "empathy" are incorrect; criteria like "the golden rule" or "the Kantian imperative" or "utility maximisation" are only correct to the extent that they mirror the game theory evaluation.)

Of course we claim to have other sources and we act according to those sources; the claim is that those moral-according-to-X behaviours are im... (read more)

Sorry, I was trying to get at 'moral intuitions' by saying fairness, justice, etc. In this view, ethical theories are basically attempts to fit a line to the collection moral intuitions - to try and come up with a parsimonious theory that would have produced these behaviours - and then the outputs are right or interesting only as far as they approximate game-theoretic-good actions or maxims.

Even given other technological civilisations existing, putting "matter and energy manipulation tops out a little above our current cutting edge" at 5% is way off.

so they round me off to the nearest cliche

I have found great value in re-reading my posts looking for possible similar-sounding cliches, and re-writing to make the post deliberately inconsistent with those.

For example, the previous sentence could be rounded off to the cliche "Avoid cliches in your writing". I tried to avoid that possible interpretation by including "deliberately inconsistent".

I suspect the real issue is using the "nutrients per calorie" meaning of nutrient dense, rather than interpreting it as "nutrients per some measure of food amount that makes intuitive sense to humans, like what serving size is supposed to be but isn't".

Ideally we would have some way of, for each person, saying "drink some milk" and seeing how much they drank, and "eat some spinach" and seeing how much they ate, then compare the total amount of nutrients in each amount on a person by person basis.

I know this is not the correct meaning of nutrient dense, but I think it's more useful.

Counterpoint: Beeminder does not play nice with certain types of motivation structures. I advocated it in the past; I do not anymore. It's probably not true for you, the reader (you should still go and use it, the upside is way bigger than the downside), but be aware that it's possible it won't work for you.

I mentioned on Slate Star Codex as well, it seems like if you let consequentialists predict the second-order consequences of their actions they strike violence and deceit off the list of useful tactics, in much the same way that a consequentialist doctor doesn't slaughter the healthy traveler for the organ transplants to save five patients, because the consequentialist doctor knows the consequence of destroying trust in the medical establishment is a worse consequence.

So, officially there is a battle between X and Y, and secretly there is a battle between X1 and X2 (and Y1 and Y2 on the other side). And people from X1 and X2 keep rationalizing about why their approach is the best strategy for the true victory of X against Y (and vice versa on the other side).

This part doesn't make clear enough the observation that X2 and Y2 are cooperating, across enemy lines, to weaken X1 and Y1. 2 being politeness and community, and 1 being psychopathy and violence.

(Rational) Harry

Seemed eminently more readable than rationalist!Harry to me when I first encountered this notation, although now it's sunk in enough that my brain actually generated "that's more keystrokes!" as a reason not to switch style.

I don't subvocalise, and when I learned that other people do I was very surprised. A data point for subvocalisation being a limit on reading speed: I read at ~800wpm.

It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to begin with (an amusing contrast to all the others saying 'turn money into time'), but modafinil has a unique claim to "buying time": it lets you function just as well and usually better than average, on less sleep. A more thorough analysis

My sympathies; I find it wonderful.

It's been a while since I watched it, but do you think Ben Affleck's character in Good Will Hunting was rational, but of limited intelligence?

Yep, a pretty good example, I think

Look, you're my best friend so don't take this the wrong way, but if you're still living here in 20 years, still working construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. Tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up and I'll be fifty, and I'll still be doing this shit. And that's alright, that's fine. But you're sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you're too scared to cash it in, and that's bullshit. Cau

Turn your money into time; that is, purchase modafinil.

With all capitalized words the list would start like this:

You know that feeling you get when you're coding, and you write something poorly and briefly expect it to Do What You Mean, before being abruptly corrected by the output? I think I just had that feeling at long distance.

From looking at the scripts, it appears first and last names (actually, all capitalised words I think) were counted separately ("Neal: 11, Stephenson: 11" and "Munroe: 13, Randall: 11", etc) and first names were handedited out (so that's why both Nassim and Taleb are on the list).

The answer is somewhere between "Nassim Taleb was quoted 16 times, and three of those times the attribution was just 'Taleb'" and "Nassim Taleb was quoted 13 times and was mentioned in three other quotes (since he's a controversial figure)".

It better be.

I think it's a bit unfair to the average physicist to say that he's closer in intelligence to the village idiot than to Einstein

The average physicist's contribution to physics is closer to the village idiot's contribution than to Einstein's, no?

Something like this, right?

Excellent in-group signalling but terrible public relations move.

Fair enough; drug use is a lot more public relations damaging than self-proclaimed high IQ.

And the same goes for recreational drug-use, no? If it's just in the survey like IQ is and we don't have a banner proclaiming it, the argument that it might make us look bad doesn't hold any water.

If you replace "smart" with "used drugs recreationally" you might see my point?

The same problem you presumably have with someone external writing an article about how LW is a group of criminals: it makes us look bad.

You might not agree with self-proclaimed high IQ being a social negative, but most of the world does.

The offence centered on the ableism of the slurs in particular; "You're free to use an insult I can't stand on things I don't respect, but I won't stand for use of it on things I do respect" doesn't sound like a standard policy; otherwise you'd feel comfortable using profanity in front of your parents, but only when talking about a group they don't respect.

There interested in not gathering data that would cause someone to admit criminal behavior.

As far as I'm aware - and correct me if I'm wrong - drug use is not a crime (and by extension admitting past drug use isn't either). Possession, operating a vehicle under the influence, etc, are all crimes, but actually having used drugs isn't a criminal act.

There also the issue of possible outsiders being able to say: "30% of LW participants are criminals!"

The current survey (hell, the IQ section alone) gives them more ammunition than they could possibly expend, I feel.

really incredibly blunt

It's possible that it is too blunt. My instinct (calibrated on around half a hundred nights of conversation with Australian LessWrongers in person) says that it's not, though.

Good point. It might not even make sense to ask "Which culture of social interaction do you feel most at home with, Ask or Guess?".

• Are you Ask or Guess culture?

P(Supernatural): 7.7 + 22 (0E-9, .000055, 1) [n = 1484]

P(God): 9.1 + 22.9 (0E-11, .01, 3) [n = 1490]

P(Religion): 5.6 + 19.6 (0E-11, 0E-11, .5) [n = 1497]

I'm extremely surprised and confused. Is there an explanation for how these probabilities are so high?

I hope rationalist culture doesn't head in that direction.

Something like "I'm finding this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why. Can you help me figure it out?" would be way more preferable. Something in rationalist culture that I actually do like is using "This is a really low-value conversation, are you getting any value? We should stop." to end unproductive arguments.

This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. (I agree denotatively, but...)

It took me almost six months from meeting a particular Guess person to realise this: the times I offended them clustered according to whether I was a soldier in their war, not by my actual actions.[0]

Lots of things, maybe most things you can do in a conversation are horrible things to do to a Guesser. I'm well above average for social skills plus a few points above LW average IQ and even I find it hard to navigate conversations with a Guesser (I swear I have better social skills... (read more)

I recognise your concern acutely - I've had the same "one of those people who has poor social skills and yet wants me to behave more like them" - and I think stressing the "whenever you suspect you'd both benefit from them knowing" part of rule one much more seems like it would help a lot in that direction.

(It's cheap, not cheep)

Tell and Ask seem to be more compatible than Ask and Guess. I have no intuition for how compatible Tell and Guess are. I think Ask is cheaper for the teller than Guess is (in Guess, you have to formulate a plausible sentence that contains a subtle request, unless you want to force the receiver).

I really like the idea of Tell on a date; I think it's already somewhat present in the rationalist meetup I attend.

It's evidence that Guess is the Nash equilibrium that human cultures find. Consider that the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner's Dilemma (and in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with known fixed length) is both defect. It's a common theme in game theory that the Nash equilibrium is not always the best place to be.

I am going to attempt to summarise this, hopefully fairly. A warning, for anyone to whom it applies: a cis white male is going to try and say what you said, but better.

I am doing this because I think social justice / equality is 1) important, 2) often written with an extreme inferential distance.

Parentheses with "ed:" are my own addition, usually a steelman of the author's position or an argument they didn't make but could have, although sometimes a critique. They aren't what the author said.

This is inspired by Yvain's writing, in particular a

Not necessarily, and in the case of "avowed racists of Less Wrong" almost certainly not. The "biological realism" concept is that there are genetic and physiological differences split so sharply along racial lines ("carves reality at its joints") that it is correct to say that all races are not born equal. Proponents of this concept would claim it is obviously true, and they would also be called racists. These people could donate heavily to African charities out of sympathy for what is, in their eyes, the "bad luck" ... (read more)

I made a $150 donation. I particularly like that effort has gone into making the workshops more accessible. I'm suggesting to my father that he should apply for the February workshop (I am very surprised to have ended up believing it will be worthwhile for him).

It's unfortunate that "calories in, calories out" and "saturated fats are bad" are both general medical consensuses (wow, that word is actually in dictionaries) - it seems very likely the first is true and the second false, but both issues have the same "medical consensus saying they're true vs fringe expert saying they're all wrong" dynamic.

Was not going to reply until I saw this is actually a month old and not more than three years, so you're in luck.

The Confessor claims to have been a violent criminal, and in Interlude with the Confessor we see the Confessor say this to Akon:

And faster than you imagine possible, people would adjust to that state of affairs. It would no longer sound quite so shocking as it did at first. Babyeater children are dying horrible, agonizing deaths in their parents' stomachs? Deplorable, of course, but things have always been that way. It would no longer be n

It seems plausible that Quirrel read the science books and isn't going to tell Harry anything reality-breaking, since he did a similar thing with the library - after telling Harry that Memory Charms are just filed under M, he says he's going to put some of his own special wards on the restricted section.

Using it regularly is the most important thing by far. I don't use it anymore, the costs to starting back up seem too high (in that I try and fail to re-activate that habit), I wish I hadn't let that happen. Don't be me; make Anki a hardcore habit.