All of slicedtoad's Comments + Replies

"Go back and not have children"

Ehh, I don't think that's a valid question to ask someone with kids. It's effectively, "would you prefer your children not be alive right now?" Or, "do you consider your children mistakes now that you've raised them?".

I'm not sure what the optimal way to phrase the question would be but maybe:

"If your biological age was reset to 20, would you start another family?" Or "If you could give advice to the parallel universe you who is 25 years younger, would you tell him to have kids?"

Hmm, those still aren't great.

2Dustin
This is a good point, but I did a poor job conveying the actual question asked by Gallup, which was: Which, at least, is a little better than what I implied.

Hmm, yeah, I thought I remembered that quote having such a clause.

Typeo just above "Basal Ganglia" section.

For example infants are born with a simple versions of a fear response, with is later refined through reinforcement learning.

"with is later" should be "which is later"

You're right, "solution" has too much finality to it. How about "approach" as a replacement word that doesn't break the grammar above?

0Lumifer
Sure, "approach" will work.

True, but you do need a platform that promises, at the very least, a direction that your policies are taking you. If, during your term, you completely neglect everything you talked about while running, you'll take a hit in the next election (unless you've miraculously been so effective during those 4/5 years that everyone is convinced you know better than them).

And if the point is to be the best liar and then do what you want in office, uh, why even have elections?

3ChristianKl
Obama never talked about how children's IQ would be higher in the future because his administration calculated the dollar value of children's IQ's and opposed it to the costs of reduces mercury pollution. The policy was done by the EPA with very little public debate. On the other hand the EPA didn't get done much on global warming where there's massive media attention. To allow voters to refuse to reelect politicians with bad track records. If democracy is done right, politicians who mess up don't get reelected. If it comes to decide whether to vote for a politician's you don't focus on what he promises for the future but what he did in the past. That provides for democratic accountability. To choose representatives and not to choose policy. If I look at Bernie Sanders I know that he engaged in good policy for decades. He voted against the Iraq war and the patriotic act. That tells me much more about him than any promise he makes before the election. Bush campaigned on "no statebuilding" and then went to do very expensive statebuilding in Iraq or Afghanistan without the Republican base complaining. The Republican didn't like Clinton's intervention against Kosovo, so it made sense for Bush to run with "no statebuilding". Obama promised to clean up Wall Street but did nothing substantial. He engaged in busywork and passed laws but they are more symbolic than real reform.

"solution to government" means "solution to the problem of how organise society".

If "except for all the others" only includes those that have been tried, then I mostly agree. But if it includes all possible forms of social organisation, I strongly disagree. The idea that we've reached the best solution and it barely works is similar to the idea that we will never solve death. Either of those could be true, but there is not nearly evidence to stop us from trying.

5[anonymous]
With the death problem, we can characterize the nature of the problem, list out subproblems, list out causal contributors, and attack them one by one. With "how to organize society", people disagree on the criterion for forming a component of the problem. Conflicting interests are the basic building-block of politics.
3Good_Burning_Plastic
The original wording of that quote indeed was "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
0Lumifer
The word "solution" has too much of engineering / hard sciences connotations for my liking. Organising society is a process and the criteria of what can be considered a successful one are not stable on historic time scale unless you want to take the social darwinism approach.

The complexity of politics that these arguments demonstrate (and the "error of the crowds" itself) makes democracy a seemingly futile solution to government. It would take an enormously skilled tactician to win the vote by selling actually useful policies to a population that prefers simple rhetoric aligning with their color.

They would need:

  • Knowledge and skill at creating policies.
  • Sufficient background in all areas that the policies affect (weighted by importance and enough to make proper use of their advisors).
  • Ability to raise money without
... (read more)
-2ChristianKl
That presupposes that you have to win election by explaining the policies that you honestly want to enact. In reality that's not how modern representative democracy work. Neither how it works in practice nor how it works in theory.
4Lumifer
I am not sure what does "solution to government" mean, but there is a well-known Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others".

Yes. This. And the details aren't trivial. They make a huge difference in policy. From "do nothing" to "reduce all growth and progress immediately or we go extinct".

They disagree in exactly the way gjm mentions below. Experts are climate scientists and scientists in related fields. Some politicians may be included as 'experts' in terms of solutions, too, I suppose. They disagree about the severity, cause, timeline and solution. And not by some trivial amount, but by enough to drastically shift priorities.

Also, while this is a reply to Eliezer's 2007 comment, I'm aware the situation has changed. I really just want to know how to begin to form a rational belief about climate change as of now.

I find climate change a str... (read more)

2viv3ka
There are some black and white issues, where a valid comparison to antivax strongly holds, and some fuzzier issues where it holds weakly or not at all. The strongest claim is that global warming is real and anthropogenic. This is very solid science, indeed pretty basic atmospheric physics. Nonetheless there are people in positions of power who argue that it is false. To make that argument is indeed to set oneself up in opposition to science - that is, opposed to the scientific method as a way to discover truth. Denial of this basic truth is a serious enough problem that 18 scientific associations felt the need to issue a joint statement to that effect, backing up a further 200 with the same view. https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ The second strongest claim is that global warming is a threat to humanity, and that immediate action to reduce CO2 emissions to net zero (primarily through the use of fossil fuels) is essential to preserve human life. This view is held and strongly advocated by every scientific association with any claim to relevant knowledge that I can find. For example the AAAS says that "global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society" and "The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now" (when "now" was 2006). The AGU says that "Human activities are changing Earth’s climate, causing increasingly disruptive societal and ecological impacts" and "global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must reach net-zero by around 2070 to have a good chance of limiting warming to a 2° C increase and by about 2050 to achieve a more protective limit of a 1.5°C (2.7°F) increase". In the last few decades, the consensus on the first issue has changed not at all; and on the second issue the only change has been a steady increase in the number of scientific associations willing to openly advocate immediate action. To argue against action on climate change isn't quite the same as arguing that vaccines d

I'm not sure what emotion it is, but I would hypothesize that it comes from tribal survival habits. Group cohesion was existentially important in the tribal prehuman/early-human era. Being accurate and correct with your beliefs was important, but not as important as sharing the same beliefs as the tribe.

So we developed methods of fitting into our tribes despite it requiring us to believe paradoxical and irrational things that should be causing cognitive dissonance.

So, when trying to form an opinion or position on climate change, what is a rational approach?

As far as I can tell the experts don't agree and have all taken political positions (therefore irrational positions).

4ChristianKl
Who do you consider to be the experts and how do you know that they don't agree?
2Wes_W
Given a field with no expert consensus, where you can't just check things yourself, shouldn't the rational response be uncertainty? I don't think global warming fits this description, though. AFAIK domain experts almost all broadly agree.

The "overcomplicating the question" link is broken and I can't find the article on that site anymore. But this looks like the same one: http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified/

And the next link is here, I think: http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/ai-risk/

"Technical explanation of technical explanation" link is broken.

Here's a working one: http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/