All of Sunny from QAD's Comments + Replies

Right. The 100 arguments the person gives aren't 100 parallel arguments in favor of them having good reasons to believe evolution is false, for exactly the reason you give. So my reasoning doesn't stop you from concluding that they have no good reason to disbelieve.

And, they are still 100 arguments in parallel that evolution is false, and my reasoning in the post correctly implies that you can't read five of them, see that they aren't good arguments, and conclude that evolution is true. (That conclusion requires a good argument in favor of evolution, not a bad one against it.)

2Jiro
But that isn't the conclusion that I'm trying to make. That one is the conclusion that I'm trying to make. But if those don't count as 100 parallel arguments because each bad argument speaks to the guy's incompetence at evaluating arguments, well... someone's bad argument always speaks to his incompetence at evaluating arguments. Every single list of arguments is like that. So the exception then swallows the rule and there is no such thing as a true list of parallel arguments.

Yeah. I should have made it clear that this post is prescribing a way to evaluate incoming arguments, rather than describing how outgoing arguments will be received by your audience.

Alternate framing: if you already know that criticisms coming from one's outgroup are usually received poorly, then the fact that they are received better when coming from the ingroup is a hidden "success mode" that perhaps people could use to make criticisms go down easier somehow.

Idea: "Ugh-field trades", where people trade away their obligations that they've developed ugh-fields for in exchange for other people's obligations. Both people get fresh non-ugh-fielded tasks. Works only in cases where the task can be done by somebody else, which won't be every time but might be often enough for this to work.

2Dagon
Interesting thought.  Unfortunately, most tasks where I'm blocked/delayed by an ugh field either dissolve it as soon as I identify it, or include as part of the ugh that only I can do it.

or 10^(+/- 35) if you're weird

Excuse you, you mean 6^(+/- 35) !

1Optimization Process
Oof, tracking the log6 instead of the log10 is such a horrifying idea I didn't even think of it. I guess you could do that, though! I guess. Ew. I love it.

This is a nice story, and nicely captures the internal dissonance I feel about cooperating with people who disagree with me about my "pet issue", though like many good stories it's a little simpler and more extreme than what I actually feel.

This could be a great seed for a short story. The protagonist can supposedly see the future but actually they're just really really good at seeing the present and making wise bets. 

May I see it too? 

Asking because the post above advised me to purchase cheap chances at huge upsides and this seems like one of those ^^

This is a lovely post and it really resonated with me. I've yet to really orient myself in the EA world, but "fix the normalization of child abuse" is something I have in my mind as a potential cause area. Really happy to hear you've gotten out, even if the permanent damage from sleep deprivation is still sad.

I just caught myself committing a bucket error.

I'm currently working on a text document full of equations that use variables with extremely long names. I'm in the process of simplifying it by renaming the variables. For complicated reasons, I have to do this by hand.

Just now, I noticed that there's a series of variables O1-O16, and another series of variables F17-F25. For technical reasons relating to the work I'm doing, I'm very confident that the name switch is arbitrary and that I can safely rename the F's to O's without changing the meaning of the equa... (read more)

It's funny that this came up on LessWrong around this time, as I've just recently been thinking about how to get vim-like behavior out of arbitrary text boxes. Except I also have the additional problem that I'm somewhat unsatisfied with vim. I've been trying to put together my own editor with an "API first" mentality, so that I might be able to, I don't know, eventually produce some kind of GTK widget that acts like my editor by default. Or something. And then maybe it'll be easy to make a variant of, say, Thunderbird, in which the email-editing text box i... (read more)

2gilch
Vim is far from optimal, but it's very customizable, which makes it easy to paper over the more obvious cracks. For alternative ideas, the Canon Cat had a pretty well-designed interface for text editing, which Jef Raskin described in The Humane Interface, which has influenced my thinking about UI design. It's still not as fast as Vim, but much easier to learn. The 80% solution for the 20% effort maybe. If you want to try it out, it's old enough that you can emulate it in your browser, although I had to download MAME to get all the keybindings working.

Also as a side note, I'm curious what's actually in the paywalled posts. Surely people didn't write a bunch of really high-quality content just for an April Fools' day joke?

I was 100%, completely, unreservedly fooled by this year's April Fools' joke. Hilarious XDD

1Sunny from QAD
Also as a side note, I'm curious what's actually in the paywalled posts. Surely people didn't write a bunch of really high-quality content just for an April Fools' day joke?

the paucity of scenarios where such a proof would be desired (either due to a lack of importance of such character, or a lack of relevant doubt),

(or by differing opinion of what counts as desirable character!)

To summarize: a binary property P is either discernable (can't keep your status private) or not (can't prove your status).

It seems like "agent X puts a particular dollar value on human life" might be ambiguous between "agent X acts as though human lives are worth exactly N dollars each" and "agent X's internal thoughts explicitly assign a dollar value of N to a human life". I wonder if that's causing some confusion surrounding this topic. (I didn't watch the linked video.)

I haven't read the post, but I thought I should let you know that several questions have answers that are not spoiler'd.

4habryka
I am 80% confident it's intentional. But that also means 20% confident that it's an accident. 

(The glitch exploits a subpixel misalignment present in about 0.1% of Toyota cars and is extremely difficult to execute even if you know you have a car with the alignment issue right in front of you.)

2kithpendragon
So, in all practicality it's TAS only. Too bad; I'd have never had a chance!

If you think traffic RNG is bad in the Glitchless category, you should watch someone streaming any% attempts. The current WR has a three-mile damage boost glitch that skips the better part of the commute, saving 13 minutes, and the gal who got it had to grind over 14k attempts for it (about a dozen of them got similar boosts but died on impact).

2kithpendragon
Hahaha! Not in my car she doesn't! 🤣
2Sunny from QAD
(The glitch exploits a subpixel misalignment present in about 0.1% of Toyota cars and is extremely difficult to execute even if you know you have a car with the alignment issue right in front of you.)

Your comment blew my mind.

Alternative: write important things many times.

Nice time. Here are some thoughts for possible additional timesaves:

  • Wake your partner up before even putting the coffee on so she can be a little more awake when she's helping with your hair.
  • Sleep in your work clothes to skip the part where you get dressed.
  • Drive 20-30mph over the speed limit. (This is probably best as an IL strat, since if you crash or get pulled over then the run is pretty much dead.)

If you manage to get all these in a run, then depending on the length of your commute I think you'll be able to gold this split by 5-10 more minutes.

2Viliam
If you drive at night, you will not be limited by the speed of light, and can arrive in minus five minutes!
2kithpendragon
I do employ an optimization strategy on my clothing: each evening when I get home from work, I change into the next day's outfit before dinner. That way I can just put it back on in the morning, skipping the part where I have to select and find new clothes. This also means I can dress in the dark, which is less disturbing to Partner. As for sleeping dressed, I've found that messes with my ability to thermoregulate overnight, leading to worse sleep on average. If I were planning to skip my alarm on one occasion, it would probably be worth it, but the Dressed Before Bed strat would probably lose me time overall if I used it routinely due to cumulative sleep loss.
1kithpendragon
Now that I think about it, I could just keep the hair short for time saved daily. Partner won't go for that, though 😉
1kithpendragon
You know, I used to drive much faster than I do now. I found it kind of counterintuitive when I discovered how little difference it actually makes doing 80 instead of 65 (or even 45 [1]) MPH on the highway! That said, my commute is only about 20 minutes at either speed, and is the most RNG heavy part of my morning. It's super easy to lose those few seconds back to traffic anyway. Factor in the added risks (and loss of fuel efficiency), and I'm afraid it's just not worth it for me. [^1] There was a resurfacing project a while back that capped the speed limit and caused traffic to slow down like crazy, but I still got to work at almost the exact same time as when I was speeding recklessly down the road!

This reminds me of something I thought of a while back, that I'd like to start doing again now that I've remembered it. Whenever I sense myself getting unfairly annoyed at someone (which happens a lot) I try to imagine that I'm watching a movie in which that person is the protagonist. I imagine that I know what their story and struggles are, and that I'm rooting for them every step of the way. Now that I'm getting into fiction writing, I might also try imagining that I'm writing them as a character, which has the same vibe as the other techniques. The one time I've actually tried this so far, it worked really well!

Re the second sentence: lol. Yeah, I bet you're right.

Your last paragraph is interesting to me. I don't think I can say that I've had the same experience, though I do think that some people have that effect on me. I can think of at least one person who I normally don't run out of gas when I'm talking to them. But I think other people actually amplify the problem. For example, I meet with three of my friends for a friendly debate on a weekly basis, and the things they say frequently run against the grain of my mind, and I often run out of gas while trying to figure out how to respond to them.

1AnthonyC
That's true for me too, there's definitely people I resonate with that way and people I don't.

This very much matches my own experiences! Keeping something in the back of my mind has always been somewhere between difficult and impossible for me, and for that reason I set timers for all important events during the day (classes, interviews, meetings, etc). I also carry a pocket-sized notebook and a writing utensil with me wherever I go, in case  I stumble on something that I have to deal with "later".

I have also found my attention drifting away in the middle of conversations, and I too have cultivated the skill of non-rudely admitting to it and a... (read more)

Good point! I admit that although I've thought about this incident many times, this has never occurred to me.

When somebody is advocating taking an action, I think it can be productive to ask "Is there a good reason to do that?" rather than "Why should we do that?" because the former phrasing explicitly allows for the possibility that there is no good reason, which I think makes it both intellectually easier to realize that and socially easier to say it.

To answer that question, it might help to consider when you even need to measure effort. Off the cuff, I'm not actually sure there are any (?). Maybe you're an employer and you need to measure how much effort your employees are putting in? But on second thought that's actually a classic case where you don't need to measure effort, and you only need to measure results.

(Disclaimer: I have never employed anybody.)

pain isn't the unit of effort, but for many things it's correlated with whatever that unit is.

I think this correlation only appears if you're choosing strategies well. If you're tasked with earning a lot of money to give to charity, and you generate a list of 100 possible strategies, then you should toss out all the strategies that don't lie on the pareto boundary of pain and success. (In other words, if strategy A is both less effective and more painful then strategy B, then you should never choose strategy A.) Pain will correlate with success in the rema... (read more)

1[comment deleted]

A koan:

If the laundry needs to be done, put in a load of laundry.
If the world needs to be saved, save the world.
If you want pizza for dinner, go preheat the oven.

So it's been 10 years. How are you feeling about cryonics now?

It's been ten years. How are you enjoying life?

For what it's worth, I value you even though you're a stranger and even if your life is still going poorly. I often hear people saying how much better their life got after 30, after 40, after 50. Imagine how much larger the effect could be after cryosuspension!

I've been thinking of signing up for cryonics recently. The main hurdle is that it seems like it'll be kind of complicated, since at the moment I'm still on my parent's insurance, and I don't really know how all this stuff works. I've been worrying that the ugh field surrounding the task might end up being my cause of death by causing me to look on cryonics less favorably just because I subconsciously want to avoid even thinking about what a hassle it will be.

But then I realized that I can get around the problem by pre-committing to sign up for cryonics no... (read more)

Eliezer, you're definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it's not just you -- pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.

How do you know that the phrase "logical positivism" refers to the correct formulation of the idea, rather than an exaggerated version? I have no trouble at all believing that a group of people discovered the very important notion that untestable claims can be meaningless, and then accidentally went way overboard into believing that difficult-to-test claims are meaningless too.

So it's been 11 years. Do you still remember pjeby's advice? Did it change your life?

There's evidence to be had in the fact that, though it's been known for a long time, it's not a big field of study with clear experts.

This is true. It's only a mild comfort to me, though, since I don't have too much faith in humanity's ability to conjure up fields of study for important problems. But I do have some faith.

From very light googling, it seems likely to happen over hundreds or thousands of years, which puts it pretty far down the list of x-risk worries IMO.

Also true. This makes me update away from "we might wake up dead tomorrow" and towards "t... (read more)

('overdue') presumes some knowledge of mechanism, which I don't have. Roughly speaking it's a 1 in 300,000 risk each year and not extinction level.

Am I misunderstanding, or is this an argument from ignorance? The article says we're overdue; that makes it sound like someone has an idea of what the mechanism is, and that person is saying that according to their model, we're overdue. Actually, come to think of it, "overdue" might not imply knowledge of a mechanism at all! Maybe we simply have good reason to believe that this has happened about every 300,000 y... (read more)

I'll just throw in my two cents here and say that I was somewhat surprised by how serious the Ben's post is. I was around for the Petrov Day celebration last year, and I also thought of it as just a fun little game. I can't remember if I screwed around with the button or not (I can't even remember if there was a button for me).

Then again, I do take Ben's point: a person does have a responsibility to notice when something that's being treated like a game is actually serious and important. Not that I think 24 hours of LW being down is necessarily "serious and important".

Overall, though, I'm not throwing much of a reputation hit (if any at all) into my mental books for you.

Yeah. This post could also serve, more or less verbatim, as a write-up of my own current thoughts on the matter. In particular, this section really nails it:

As above, my claim is not that the photon disappears. That would indeed be a silly idea. My claim is that the very claim that a photon "exists" is meaningless. We have a map that makes predictions. The map contains a proton, and it contains that proton even outside any areas relevant to predictions, but why should I care? The map is for making predictions, not for ontology.

[...]

I don't suppose that. I

... (read more)

Thanks for pointing this out. I think the OP might have gotten their conclusion from this paragraph:

(Note that, in the web page that the OP links to, this very paragraph is quoted, but for some reason "energy" is substituted for "center-of-mass". Not sure what's going on there.)

In any case, this paragraph makes it sound like participants who inherited a wrong theory did do worse on tests of understanding (even though participants who inherited some theory did the same on average of those who inherited only data, which I guess implies that those who inherit... (read more)

Kk! Thanks for the discussion :)

Yeah, I just... stopped worrying about these kinds of things. (In my case, "these kinds of things" refer e.g. to very unlikely Everett branches, which I still consider more likely than gods.) You just can't win this game. There are million possible horror scenarios, each of them extremely unlikely, but each of them extremely horrifying, so you would just spend all your life thinking about them; [...]

I see. In that case, I think we're reacting differently to our situations due to being in different epistemic states. The uncertainty involved in Everett branc... (read more)

2Viliam
Definitely not interested. My understanding of these things is kinda intuitive (with intuition based on decent knowledge of math and computer science, but still), so I believe that "I'll know it when I see it" (give me two options, and I'll probably tell you whether one of them seems "simpler" than the other), but I wouldn't try to put it into exact words.

Aha, no, the mind reading part is just one of several cultures I'm mentioning. (Guess Culture, to be exact.) If I default to being an Asker but somebody else is a Guesser, I might have the following interaction with them:

Me: [looking at some cookies they just made] These look delicious! Would it be all right if I ate one?

Them: [obviously uncomfortable] Uhm... uh... I mean, I guess so...

Here, it's retroactively clear that, in their eyes, I've overstepped a boundary just by asking. But I usually can't tell in advance what things I'm allowed to ask and what t... (read more)

I couldn't parse this question. Which part are you referring to by "it", and what do you mean by "instead of asking you"?

2Pattern
it (the negative experiences) - Are *they (the negative experiences) the result of (people with a "culture" who's rules rules you don't understand) expecting you to read *their mind, and go along with their "culture", instead of asking you to go along with their culture?

The Civ analogy makes sense, and I certainly wouldn't stop at disproving all actually-practiced religions (though at the moment I don't even feel equipped to do that).

Well, you cannot disprove such thing, because it is logically possible. (Obviously, "possible" does not automatically imply "it happened".) But unless you assume it is "simulations all the way up", there must be a universe that is not created by an external alien lifeform. Therefore, it is also logically possible that our universe is like that.

Are you sure it's logically possible in the stric... (read more)

3Viliam
I find it difficult to imagine how such argument could even be constructed. "Our universe isn't a simulation because it has property X" doesn't explain why the simulator could not simulate X. The usual argument is "because quantum stuff, the simulation would require insane amounts of computing power", which is true, but we have no idea what the simulating universe looks like, and what kind of physics is has... maybe what's an insane amount for us is peanuts for them. But maybe there is some argument why a computing power in principle (like, some mathematical reason) cannot exceed certain value, ever. And the value may turn out to be insufficient to simulate our universe. And we can somehow make sure that our entire universe is simulated in sufficient resolution (not something like: the Earth or perhaps the entire Solar system is simulated in full quantum physics, but everything else is just a credible approximation). Etc. Well, if such thing happens, then I would accept the argument. Yeah, I just... stopped worrying about these kinds of things. (In my case, "these kinds of things" refer e.g. to very unlikely Everett branches, which I still consider more likely than gods.) You just can't win this game. There are million possible horror scenarios, each of them extremely unlikely, but each of them extremely horrifying, so you would just spend all your life thinking about them; and there is often nothing you can do about them, in some cases you would be required to do contradictory things (you spend your entire life trying to appease the bloodthirsty Jehovah, but it turns out the true master of universe is the goddess Kali and she is very displeased with your Christianity...) or it could be some god you don't even know because it is a god of Aztecs, or some future god that will only be revealed to humanity in year 3000. Maybe humans are just a precursor to an intelligent species that will exist million years in the future, and from their god's perspective humans are e

Epistemic status: really shaky, but I think there's something here.

I naturally feel a lot of resistance to the way culture/norm differences are characterized in posts like Ask and Guess and Wait vs Interrupt Culture. I naturally want to give them little pet names, like:

  • Guess culture = "read my fucking mind, you badwrong idiot" culture.
  • Ask culture = nothing, because this is just how normal, non-insane people act.

I think this feeling is generated by various negative experiences I've had with people around me, who, no matter where I am, always seem to share b... (read more)

2Pattern
Is it because they're expecting you to read their mind, and go along with their "culture", instead of asking you?
1[anonymous]
It might be hard to take a normative stance, but if culture 1 makes you feel better AND leads to better results AND helps people individuate and makes adults out of them, then maybe it's just, y'know, better. Not "better" in the naive mistake-theorist assumption that there is such a thing as a moral truth, but "better" in the correct conflict-theorist assumption that it just suits you and me and we will exert our power to make it more widely adopted, for the sake of us and our enlightened ideals.

But atoms aren't similar to calories, are they? I maintain that this hypothesis could be literally false, rather than simply unhelpful.

3Viliam
Okay, it's not the same. But the idea is that the answer is equally unhelpful, for similar reasons.

I wouldn't call the dead chieftain a god -- that would just be a word game.

But then, how did this improbably complicated mechanism come into existence? Humans were made by evolution, were gods too? But then again those gods are not the gods of religion; they are merely powerful aliens. But powerful aliens are neither creators of the universe, nor are they omniscient.

Wait wait! You say a god-like being created by evolution cannot be a creator of the universe. But that's only true if you constrain that particular instance of evolution to have occered in *thi... (read more)

2Viliam
Some people in history did, specifically, ancient Romans. But now we don't. Just making it obvious. And this is similar to the chieftain thing. You can have a religion that defines "god" as "an alien from another universe", but many religions insist that god is not created but eternal. Yes, this is a practical approach. Well, you cannot disprove such thing, because it is logically possible. (Obviously, "possible" does not automatically imply "it happened".) But unless you assume it is "simulations all the way up", there must be a universe that is not created by an external alien lifeform. Therefore, it is also logically possible that our universe is like that. There is no reason to assume that the existing religions have something in common with the simulating alien. When I play Civilization, the "people" in my simulation have a religion, but it doesn't mean that I believe in it, or even approve it, or that I am somehow going to reward them for it. It's just a cosmic horror that you need to learn to live with. There are more. Any programming language; for large enough values it doesn't matter. If you believe that e.g. Python is much better in this regard than Java, then for sufficiently complicated things the most efficient way to implement them in Java is to implement a Python emulator (a constant-sized piece of code) and implementing the algorithm in Python. So if you chose a wrong language, you pay at most a constant-sized penalty. Which is usually irrelevant, because these things are usually applied to debating what happens in general when the data grow. But I agree that if you talk about small data, it is underspecified. I don't really know what could it mean to "have a universe defined by the following three bits: 0, 0, 1", and maybe no one has a meaningful answer to this. But there are cases where you can have an intuition that for any reasonable definition of a programming language, X should be simpler than Y. Just an intuition pump: Imagine that ther
Load More