All of Toggle's Comments + Replies

Toggle80

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that anyone is a consequentialist.

I do use consequentialism a lot, but almost always in combination with an intuitive sort of 'sanity check'- I will try to assign values to different outcomes and try to maximize that value in the usual way, but I instinctively shrink from any answer that tends to involve things like "start a war" or "murder hundreds of people."

For example, consider a secret lottery where doctors quietly murder one out of every [n] thousand patients, in order to harves

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2davidkwca
Yes, in consequentialism you try to figure out what values you should have, and your attempts at doing better might lead you down the Moral Landscape rather than up toward a local maximum. But what are the alternatives? In deontology you try to follow a bunch of rules in the hope that they will keep you where you are on the landscape, trying to halt progress. Is this really preferable? It seems to me that any moral agent should have this ability.
7magfrump
This sounds to me very strongly like a rejection of utilitarianism, not of consequentialism. Presumably you don't have ontologically basic objections to a conspiracy of murder doctors because "conspiracy" "murder" and "doctor" are all not ontologically basic. And you aren't saying "this is wrong because murder is wrong" or "this is wrong because they are bad people for doing it." You're saying "this is wrong because it results in a bad world-state." Consequentialism only requires a partial ordering of worlds, not a metric; and satisficing under uncertainty over a family of possible utility functions or similar probably looks a lot more like usual good behavior. I do agree that there are "no real world utilitarians" in the sense of having certainty in a specific utility function though, with Peter Singer being the possible exception and also looking kind of like a bond villain.
Toggle20

Oh, neat! I hadn't heard of modern species with trilateral symmetry before, I wonder if it's a mutation or developmental defect?

1SquaredCircle
I wonder the same! It's almost like a reverse version of Four-Leaf Clovers. (I'm not a biologist, just a dude with a camera.) 40 minutes later, I was able to catch three of them in one picture. (One is right by the flag reflected in the water, the second jellyfish is below it, and the third is below that again, partially hidden by the dock): https://imgur.com/a/rrCff One of the rings in the center jellyfish looks slightly elongated, almost as if two rings have melded together, but I have no idea if that's even possible. For all I know it's just a normal irregularity.
Toggle30

Well predicted, and I'm glad to entertain. :-) The Marshall paper I link to at the beginning of the paper covers the vast majority of sentences here that would require a citation, and itself is a review paper if you want to follow the breadcrumbs for these and many other related ideas. The Darwin quote is just the Origin, and you can find one example of a cool paper trying to use molecular clock to debunk the explosion here.

My understanding of Hox genes is definitely shallow, but I don't think I managed to mangle the ideas entirely beyond recog

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Toggle20

On my screen, it shows up as an indented text block, which generally doesn't require separate quote marks. Is it not showing up that way for you?

4Ben Pace
(If so, please let us know your browser and operating system.)
Toggle60

Yeah, my language is *at best* imprecise here, mostly in the interests of legibility and not dumping too much information in a sentence that was meant to direct your attention elsewhere. The technical term I was dancing around was "amniotes", animals that develop an amniotic sac. Even that would have been wrong because it's only concerned with vertebrate clades, which I wasn't even thinking of at the time, so I appreciate you pointing that out and I've tweaked it slightly

(One brief correction, mosses and vascular ferns do indeed

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Toggle70

Much appreciated.

Chalk one up for the site design, by the way. I ended up feeling much more comfortable tossing this up on a semi-personal blog than I would have been starting a new topic in a public message board.

3Ben Pace
Woop! Mission success. Thanks for letting me know.
Toggle10

The implied moral principle here (assign zero value to the welfare of people that you wouldn't be friends with) would lead to some seriously deranged behaviors if broadly applied. But even if that were a workable system, you and your friends are still likely to benefit from a high-trust society that assumes mutual prosocial compromises. If you don't treat non-friends as agents capable of tit-for-tat behavior in the service of their own interests, and plan social interactions with them accordingly, then you and your friends probably won't h

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3Said Achmiz
That’s not the implied moral principle. How did you get this from my comment…? What made you think I am even advocating a moral principle? I am confused. :( I was talking about social norms for a community or group of friends. The norms that the OP advocates for are not prosocial. I do that, though. I just don’t include them in my communities / social groups. In fact I try to avoid social interactions with such people, period. Empirically, the diametric opposite is true. In conversations with people in the greater rationalist community, I am often struck by how common is a dissastisfaction with social outcomes, with friendships or attempts at friendships, with their social environment. My social circles, my friends groups, are, empirically, more satisfying in almost every way than (from what I hear, again and again) those of (it seems) most rationalists. My secret? Simple: Associate with cool people. Avoid sucky people. And that’s what I’m advocating for.
Toggle40

It's a fascinating piece of Earth history for sure! If you can figure it out, let me know.

Toggle20

There are definitely domains where this isn't a problem at all- for example, geology terms like 'tufa' or 'shale' seem basically static on the relevant timescales. So it's probably possible to completely solve the dilution problem, it at least some cases.

There are at least a few relevant structural differences between social justice and geology, but I'm not sure which ones are the most important. The main three advantages for geology's stability that I can think of are A) Rocks are boring, and not emotionally charg

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Toggle00

Understood, sounds like that information won't be in for a while. I look forward to hearing about your results in a few months!

0delton137
Toggle20

How many students have found work in data science (so far), what problems are they solving now, and what are the associated companies/cities/salaries?

1JonahS
Hi Toggle, Thanks for your question! Most of our students have just started looking for jobs over the past ~2 weeks, and the job search process in the tech sector typically takes ~2 months, from sending out resumes to accepting offers (see, e.g. "Managing your time" in Alexei's post Maximizing Your Donations via a Job). The feedback loop here is correspondingly longer than we'd like. We expect to have an answer to your question by the time we advertise our third cohort.
Toggle10

Not with a lobotomy, no. But with a more sophisticated brain surgery/wipe that caused me to value spending time in your house and making you happy and so forth- then yes, after the operation I would probably consider you a friend, or something quite like it.

Obviously, as a Toggle who has not yet undergone such an operation, I consider it a hostile and unfriendly act. But that has no bearing on what our relationship is after the point in time where you get to arbitrarily decide what our relationship is.

Toggle00

I disagree. I have no problem saying that friendship is the successful resolution of the value alignment problem. It's not even a metaphor, really.

0PhilGoetz
So if I lock you up in my house, and you try to run away, so I give you a lobotomy so that now you don't run away, we've thereby become friends?
Toggle70

Gwern's records of his own self-experimentation are not to be missed: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics

Toggle70

I finished this book about four months ago, and time is making me increasingly glad that I read it. In particular, its treatment of countable infinities, functions, proof by induction, and the Peano axioms have been worth their weight in gold. When I encounter similar subjects 'out in the wild', I can approach them with relative skill and trust my intuitions in a way that I couldn't before. It's really growing on me.

That said, as a near-introduction to set theory, it was a very difficult read at times. It was a treatment of mathematics far deeper tha... (read more)

Toggle20

When I was a freshman, I invented the electric motor! I think it's something that just happens when you're getting acquainted with a subject, and understand it well- you get a sense of what the good questions are, and start asking them without being told.

Toggle20

Seems to be an established conversation around this point, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_utility

"The idea of cardinal utility is considered outdated except for specific contexts such as decision making under risk, utilitarian welfare evaluations, and discounted utilities for intertemporal evaluations where it is still applied. Elsewhere, such as in general consumer theory, ordinal utility with its weaker assumptions Is preferred because results that are just as strong can be derived."

O... (read more)

0roystgnr
That's one of the most amusing phrases on Wikipedia: "specific contexts such as decision making under risk". In general you don't have to make decisions and/or you can predict the future perfectly, I suppose.
1DataPacRat
Well, I guess coming up with an idea a century-ish old could be considered better than /not/ having come up with something that recent...
Toggle20

In the case of Mars, we have an improbable advantage, because there is already a huge industry and body of knowledge devoted to the discovery of organic-rich rock deposits in regions that are likely to preserve complex carbon forms. If there ever was an ecosystem on the surface of Mars, Exxon will help us find it.

(Although actually, Mars lacks active tectonic plates, so it's not quite the same problem. But many industry tricks and technologies will transfer seamlessly.)

Toggle90

Your math has some problems. Note that, if p(X=x) = 0 for all x, then the sum over X is also zero. But if you're in a room, then by definition you have sampled from the set of rooms- the probability of selecting a room is one. Since the probability of selecting 'any room from the set of rooms' is both zero and one, we have established a contradiction, so the problem is ill-posed.

Toggle120

A primary candidate for free energy in icy moons is thermal venting at the bottom of the liquid oceans; they do have rocky cores, after all. If Jupiter's tidal forces can cause the volcanism on Io, then it's reasonable to assume that they can also cause the rocky interior of Europa to produce volcanoes that vent heat and interesting ions in to the liquid water.

There's also a surprising amount of electrolysis going on in the ice of Europa, because Jupiter has such a terrifying electrical field. I doubt that's enough to sustain an ecosystem, but it's enoug... (read more)

4James_Miller
How does the free energy on an ice moon compare to the amount the sun shoots down at earth?
Toggle90

All the upvotes! I am something of an astrobiologist myself, although my emphasis is on geobiology and planetary geology. My current day job is to map out Martian sedimentary rocks with an eye towards liquid water distribution and ancient habitability. My graduate thesis was closer to home, a study of Paleoarchean microbialites.

If you think your posts would benefit from a bit of collaboration, don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, I'm eager to see what insights you have from a more astronomy-heavy and pure biology perspective.

8[anonymous]
Oh god please yes. I'm planning on talking about the limits of our observations in our own solar system and what is possible versus excluded both now and in the past, as well as origin of life research and the history of the scale and complexity of Earth's biosphere. Will PM you.
Toggle10

Depending on how much 'for five year olds' is an actual goal rather than a rhetorical device, it may be worth looking over this and similar research. There are proto-Bayesian reasoning patterns in young children, and familiarizing yourself with those patterns may help you provide examples and better target your message, if you plan to iterate/improve this essay.

Toggle130

Just an amusing anecdote:

I do work in exoplanet and solar system habitability (mostly Mars) at a university in a lab group with four other professional researchers and a bunch of students. The five of us met for lunch today, and it came out that three of the five had independently read HPMoR to its conclusion. After commenting that Ibyqrzbeg'f Iblntre cyndhr gevpx was a pretty good idea, our PI mentioned that some of the students at Cal Tech used a variant of this on the Curiosity rover- they etched graffiti in to hidden corners of the machine ('under co... (read more)

Toggle10

You mean relative, not absolute.

Yes, yes I did. Thanks for the correction.

Toggle20

3) I am very interested in how evolution started - Dawkins references a soup of chemicals, and then the creation of the first replicator mainly by chance over a very long period of time. Is that accurate?

You are not the only one. :)

Most of the current thinking around abiogenesis involves the so-called 'RNA world', after observations of messenger RNA molecules (a single strand of 'naked' genetic polymer floating around the cell, rather than the double DNA helix). Because complementary nucleotides attract one another to varying degrees, a given nucleotid... (read more)

Toggle10

This is not correct, at least in common usage.

A Red Queen's Race is an evolutionary competition in which absolute position does not change. The classic example is the arms race between foxes and rabbits that results in both becoming faster in absolute terms, but the rate of predation stays fixed. (The origin is Lewis Carrol: "It takes all the running you can do, just to stay in the same place.")

0[anonymous]
I think this is analogous to what's happening here - you create better incentives, they create better ways to get around those incentives, nothing changes. I didn't know that this wasn't the common usage, as I got it from this Overcoming Bias post: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/06/bias-is-a-red-queen-game.html
3Lumifer
You mean relative, not absolute. I've also seen a more general interpretation: the Red Queen situation is where staying still (doing nothing) makes you worse off as time passes; you need to run forward just to stay in the same place.
Toggle00

I've always been particularly frustrated with the dismissal of materialism as nihilism in the sense of 'the philosophical theory that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.'

What it really means is that life has no extrinsic value; we designate no supranatural agent to grant meaning to life or the universe. Instead, we rely on agents within the universe to assign meaning to it according to their own state; a state that is, in turn, a natural phenomenon. If anything, we're operating under the assumption that meaning in the universe is inherently intrinsic.

Toggle10

I have two somewhat contradictory arguments.

First, this is probably a poor candidate for the great filter because it lacks the quality of comprehensiveness. Remember that a threat is not a candidate for a great filter if it merely exterminates 90%, or 99%, of all sentient species. Under those conditions, it's still quite easy to populate the stars with great and powerful civilizations, and so such a threat fails to explain the silence. Humans seem to have ably evaded the malthusian threat so far, in such a way that is not immediately recognizable as a t... (read more)

Toggle00

Most of the fruits that you can gather with the current tools of molecular biology seem to be picked.

I am not quite sure what the scope of the statement is, but that's strongly counter to the things I'm hearing from the molecular biologists that I know (two family members and a few close friends- I'm plugged in to the field, but not a member of it). Could you elaborate on your reasons for this belief?

My impression is that the discipline has spent the last couple decades amassing a huge (huge) database of observed genes and proteins and whatnot, and is... (read more)

1ChristianKl
The main question is the value of a marginal molecular biologist chipping away at the problems with current methods. All those new knowledge about genes we got through the human genome project produces few promising leads for new drugs. Big Pharma companies sit on large pile of cash at a time where the interest rates are near zero and they buy back shares while laying off scientists. Currently we don't know what 1/4 to 1/3 of the human genes do. Those where we do know a function might have additional functions. With a lot of hard work we might find out more functions, but that doesn't bring us much further. Few get a few new drug targets but drug targets aren't the limiting factor for drug discovery. Predicting which drugs actually help is the more important issues as clinical trials are really expensive. Most drugs put into clinical trials fail. Apart from the actual use of the science, progress is hold back by poor ability to replicate findings. Some of that is because scientists don't work properly but it can also be that the monoclonal antibody you order today is not the same as the one that you ordered a month ago even through you ordered it from the same lab and it has the same label. Then even if your finding is correct and you publish it, that doesn't mean that your paper is going to be read. The language in which papers are written is very complicated and not easily interpretable by computers.
Toggle90

Norman Borlaug is the poster child of how to use genetic manipulation for large-scale impact as an individual, so I don't think your degree is pointed in the wrong direction. But it is the nature of established institutions to fail at revolutionary thinking, so a survey of the 'heavyweights' in your field will tend to be disappointing.

I think a large part of my lack of enthusiasm comes from my belief that advances in artificial intelligence are going to make human-run biology irrelevant before long.

We have only crappy guesses about the completion dat... (read more)

0zslastman
I don't mean to come across as super optimistic with respect to strong A.I., or even A.I. in general. I should have written '50 years give or take 50'. It's just that i think my field's progress rate is determined by the inflow of methods from other fields, and that the current problems it faces are insoluble using current ones. I think people who aren't immersed in the field get a mistaken impression about this because papers and press releases must communicate an artificial sense of progress and certainty to succeed. Word in the trenches is that we're mired in an intractable mess of unknowns. As an example - take Aubrey de Grey's SENS program. He lays out all these alterations he thinks he can make to fix the problem of aging. But he seems to think of biology as modular and easily mutable. A biologist expects each individual step he proposes to face dozens of unforeseen problems, and to have many, many unpredictable knock-on effects, over a wide range of detectability and severity. Dealing with them all isn't doable right now, while single grad students take 5 year to determine a few of each genes many interactions and functions. As for burnout - I'd agree with you if this was a recent development. But I've felt this way for years. It's just that now action is required. It's possible I've been burnt out for years. This has been suggested to me - my working environment is exceptionally poor - which is something I can say semi-objectively due to the number of people who have quit and/or echoed my feelings on the matter. I'm trying not to let those feelings influence me too much however.
1ChristianKl
"Solvable in principle by humans" and "solvable by humans with our current methods" are not the same thing. Most of the fruits that you can gather with the current tools of molecular biology seem to be picked. There are also a lot of man-hours thrown on them. Progress in biology will come more from developing new methods than using the existing methods.
Toggle150

It looks like AI is overtaking Arimaa, which is notable because Arimaa was created specifically as a challenge to AI. Congratulations to the programmer, David Wu.

2Kindly
On the subject of Arimaa, I've noted a general feeling of "This game is hard for computers to play -- and that makes it a much better game!" Progress of AI research aside, why should I care if I choose a game in which the top computer beats the top human, or one in which the top human beats the top computer? (Presumably both the top human and the top computer can beat me, in either case.) Is it that in go, you can aspire (unrealistically, perhaps) to be the top player in the world, while in chess, the highest you can ever go is a top human that will still be defeated by computers? Or is it that chess, which computers are good at, feels like a solved problem, while go still feels mysterious and exciting? Not that we've solved either game in the sense of having solved tic-tac-toe or checkers. And I don't think we should care too much about having solved checkers either, for the purposes of actually playing the game.
0ShardPhoenix
From the sound of it, the AI works more or less like chess AI - search with a hand-tuned evaluation function.
2jacob_cannell
I hadn't heard of Armaa before, but based on about 5 minutes worth of reading about the game, I don't understand how it is significantly more suited to natural reasoning that chess. It inherits many of chess's general features that make serial planning more effective than value function knowledge - thus favoring fast thinkers over slow deep thinkers. Go is much more of a natural reasoning game.
Toggle00

And because the differences we notice and care about are the ones that provide satisfying explanations of prominent experiences, such as loneliness or frustration with others' behavior. A quality of the self that works 'behind the scenes', the kind that only comes up when we talk about the theory of the mind on a fairly high level, will not usually seem like a candidate for such explanations. For example, I've known I was smarter than average since childhood, but it took me until college to notice that I was color blind. And color blindness is fairly co... (read more)

Toggle20

I wasn't actually trying to imply that we shouldn't tolerate homosexuality - I hope this was clear, otherwise I need to work on communicating unambiguously.

This was clear, yes. No worries!

I was trying to make the meta point that right-wing opinions don't have to be powered by hate, but perhaps they often are because people can't separate emotions and logic.

It is certainly possible that, in the territory, homosexuality is an existential threat. I believe the Westboro Baptists have a model that describes such a case, to name a famous example. A per... (read more)

1ChristianKl
I don't think they do. They believe in a all powerful God. From that perspective thinking of existential threats doesn't make much sense. They mainly oppose homosexuality because they think God wants them to oppose homosexuality.
-2skeptical_lurker
Maybe the squid need to be stomped on to stop them from morphing into Cthulhu, or other tentacle monsters? Now, there may be various reasons why people would want to stomp on squid. Some may actually believe that the squid will turn into tentacle monsters, but its also possible that many simply hate squid without knowing why. Some argue that in our evolutionary environment, those tribes who did not stop on squid were more likely to be wiped out by tentacle monsters, and so people evolved to want to stomp on squid. Their hatred of squid serves a purpose, even though they don't know what it is. Others say that just because this stomping was adaptive back then, doesn't mean it will be adaptive now. With modern technology we can defend ourselves from the tentacle monsters, subdue, harness and domesticate them. Some disagree, and say that the Deep Ones are not our enemies, and the people that hate squid only do so because the Elder Gods tell them to, and yet they ignore the possibility that the Elder Gods are the real threat. Yet more people say that this talk of tentacle monsters is silly and people just want to exterminate squid because they think tentacles are disgusting.
Toggle210

I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that people are capable of independently thinking that they have highly atypical minds while simultaneously falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. In general, I expect myself to spend more time thinking about the overt things that make me feel unique, without necessarily being aware of the things that underlie those differences. With the TMF, it's the unexamined assumptions that get you.

0TheAncientGeek
.... because knowing or believing that you have an atypical mind gives you almost no information about how everyone else is thinking.
Toggle-10

P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation)-P(tolerance of homosexuality will save civiliseation)>10^-30

Do you have a reason to consider this, and not the inverse [i.e. P(intolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilization)-P(intolerance of homosexuality will save civilization)>10^-30]?

I don't think this is even a Pascal's mugging as such, just a framing issue.

1skeptical_lurker
Well, personally I think: a very small number>P(intolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilization)>P(intolerance of homosexuality will save civilization)>10^-30 But some people would disagree with me. I wasn't actually trying to imply that we shouldn't tolerate homosexuality - I hope this was clear, otherwise I need to work on communicating unambiguously. I was trying to make the meta point that right-wing opinions don't have to be powered by hate, but perhaps they often are because people can't separate emotions and logic.
Toggle30

This is (I think) an extension of mindfulness practice. So the ultimate point of the exercise is to help you conscientiously notice and assign weight to a certain class of experience. Your feeling of entitlement is opposed to that in the sense that humans tend not to notice a well-functioning machine. So if we put a dollar in a vending machine and candy comes out, we might enjoy the candy, or be sad about not having a dollar any more, but we rarely take any time to be excited about how great it is to have a machine that performs the swap. Same with get... (read more)

Toggle50

In ancient Greece, it was common knowledge that the liver was the thinking organ. This is obvious, because it is purple (the color of royalty) and triangular (mathematically and philosophically significant).

Toggle10

Hysteresis exists. Complex models are often time-dependent, and initial states may not always be retrievable under any circumstances.

In the immediate sense, the world we experience obviously has the quality of irreversible change. On a larger scale, our cosmos could easily be such a system- even without ChaosMote's excellent statistical treatment, we can't be sure that, just because things in general continue to happen, an event like the big bang could happen an infinite number of times. No matter how wide the scope of your analysis, it may be that the ... (read more)

Toggle40

If nothing else, because it would be prohibitively expensive. Globally, something like 70 million barrels of oil are produced per day. The total value of all barrels produced in a year varies depending on the price of oil, but at a highish but realistic $100bbl, you're talking about two and a half trillion US dollars per year. If you were to reduce the supply by introducing a 'buyer' (read: subsidy to defer production) for some large percentage of those barrels, then the price would go even higher; this project would probably cost more than the entire global military budget combined, with no immediate practical or economic benefits.

Toggle60

Who's to say that evil isn't a substance? Or at least, couldn't be? It seems perfectly reasonable to write a story in which that map and the territory are not wholly distinct (and of course, even in the real world, maps are ultimately made of atoms...)

The real problem with much of the modern Extruded Fantasy Product is that it doesn't deal creatively with the implications of its own claims and genre tropes. They allow evil to be a substance, but then use that to justify certain patterns of storytelling rather than actually treating evil like a substance... (read more)

1[anonymous]
To be frank I found D&D's alignment system too unrealistically moralistic, the good/evil angle. (Somehow I had this feeling that when New England Puritans turn halfways atheist, that is what results in this Drizzt Do'Urden type strictly moralistic TSR-fantasy.) There is a Hungarian more-or-less-D&D-clone RPG called M.A.G.U.S. (made when TSR rejected the request to allow translating 2nd ed) which kept law/chaos but replaced good/evil with life/death. Having a life alignment means both enjoying life and respecting the lives of others, basically not being a murderer. Having a death alignment both means not respecting the lives of others, and one's own life neither, being something sort of a depressed goth. I found this more plausible because they are more philosophical stances that you could adopt yourself from the inner view, while good/evil is a judgement others cast on you from an outer view. Nobody thinks they are evil, but having a death-alignment is more plausible that someone could adopt it from the inner view, I have seen some fascinating analyses that fascism/nazism had a certain death alignment i.e. it was not merely about murdering others, but seeing a heroic death as the best thing for one's own self too. (Churchills remark: any ideology that glorifies its followers dying runs out of people sooner or later. Warmbodyonomics.) Of course it is an oversimplified system too but it made alignments flesh out better - some evil folks would come accross more as tragic heroes, while unlike in the Puritan TSR-fantasy good heroes would not be self-denying half-monks but people who live with largesse, enjoy fun, sex, etc. (Note to self: get around to reading The Witcher, see if this is less tighter morality is a common characteristic of fantasy written in Central-Eastern Europe or not.)
Toggle50

Congratulations!

Also you should remember that LW has a fairly wide knowledge base. If you're looking for a place to get started on a complex topic, I'll bet that this site would be a good place to ask a few initial questions and establish a broad research outline.

6palladias
I'm sure you'll see me pop up while researching :)
Toggle20

We here are largely aware of Robertson's comments not because they have particular merit as a thought experiment, but because they occupy the sweet spot of maximizing controversy. That is, it is easy to present as objectionable within Blue Tribe, and easy to present as defensible in Red Tribe, and so in the end it's a fairly textbook toxoplasma. This isn't to say that the general question isn't interesting; it's just more important than usual that interested parties treat the thought experiment like a finger pointing to an interesting argument.

Personally... (read more)

Toggle30

I would happily take advantage of such a system. (Also I would be a little worried about regular injections of political tarbabies.)

Toggle20

I forget who said this originally, but much of rationalism is internalizing the fact that you, yes you, are prone to all manner of biases and mental tics that lead to error. If 'arrogance' as it's being used here is something that interferes with recognizing the errors that you're making in any given moment, then arrogance is certainly antithetical to rationalism.

On the other hand, I'm fairly used to people thinking of me as arrogant in person-to-person communication, and when they give me that label it never has much to do with my willingness to admit er... (read more)

0lmm
Unless the appearance (or the result of it) is what you value.
Toggle40

My housemate has this exact problem- right down to the issues with jewelry in particular. If she has to shake hands with somebody who's wearing a metal ring, she has to sort of ritualistically wipe off her hands afterwards. Metal in general seems to trigger the reaction much more strongly, so she'll have problems with loose coins but not stickers.

It's been persistent throughout her life, I understand, but exposure therapy has reduced its severity.

3Rukiedor
That is very interesting. Kind of validating, and one more bit of evidence in favor of trying exposure therapy. Thank you for sharing that.
Toggle30

Pratchett himself stated an intention to commit suicide before his disease progressed past a certain point. "To jump before I am pushed", I believe was the phrase he used at one point.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/feb/02/terry-pratchett-assisted-suicide-tribunal

The BBC claims that he didn't take his own life, and given his advocacy I think that his family would have been honest about his suicide if it were one, but it's a reason to look more closely at least.

Toggle140

One of the things that we can't necessarily know is whether Terry Pratchett was likely to become Terry Pratchett, given his beginning. We never do hear about the failures. It's not just that mediocre students often fail to make something of themselves- how often do mediocre students with a mind like Pratchett's accomplish world changing things like Discworld? If you knew a priori that you had such a mind, and wanted to maximize your contributions, would it be a good idea to be an aimless student?

That said, it may be that you wouldn't be likely to get a ... (read more)

Toggle00

Broadly speaking, I'm suspicious of social solutions to problems that will persist for geological periods of time. If we're playing the civilization game for the long haul, then the threat of overpopulation could simply wait out any particular legal regime or government.

That argument goes hinky in the event of FAI singleton, of course.

Toggle40

I am fairly confident that I understand your intentions here. A quick summary, just to test myself:

HAL cares only about world states in which an extremely unlikely thermodynamic even occurs- namely, the world in which one hundred random bits are generated spontaneously during a specific time interval. HAL is perfectly aware that these are unlikely events, but cannot act in such a way as to make the event more likely. HAL will therefore increase total utility over all possible worlds where the unlikely even occurs, and otherwise ignore the consequences o... (read more)

2Stuart_Armstrong
Yep, that's pretty much it.
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A simiar one by Vonnegut:

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwa

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