All of Torvaun's Comments + Replies

Torvaun80

When he stopped thrashing about trying to free himself so that he could go to the Sirens, the crew could know the danger had passed.

2dlthomas
Ooo, nice! Although potentially vulnerable, if the song left him with sufficient reason to pretend.
Torvaun50

Rejection therapy seems to be designed for training the neuroticism reaction. I haven't used it myself, so I might be getting some specifics wrong (including about the efficacy of it) but one of the methods I've seen is a box of cards with instructions on them. "Before purchasing something, ask for a discount." In my part of the US, at least, haggling is more or less not done. Following the instruction will break the standard social mold, and I'd expect in most cases, you won't get the discount. You would, however, be taking a risk, having i... (read more)

0Jordan
Sounds like something that could be useful for rationality boot camp. I'd love to do some rejection therapy. There might need to be some caution in applying it in a group setting though. I know for me it would be much easier (and hence much less useful) to do things like asking for a discount if there is a social group behind me to back me up (even if they are out of sight).
Torvaun20

If ethics must be held to in the face of the annihilation of everything, then I will proudly state that I have no ethics, only value judgments. Would I kill babies? Yes, to save the life of the mother. Would I kill innocents who had helped me? Yes, to save more. On an interesting aside, I would not torture an innocent for 40 years to prevent 3^^^^3 people from getting a speck of dust in their eyes assuming no further consequences from any of that dust. I would not walk away from Omelas, I would stay to tear it down.

Torvaun40

Uh, no. Pressure affects boiling point. If you're at a different pressure, it should not boil at 100 degrees C. If your water is contaminated by, say, alcohol, the boiling point will change. We aren't trying to explain away datapoints, we're using them to build a system that's larger than "Water boils at 100 degrees Centigrade." Just adding "at standard temperature and pressure," to the end of that gives a wider range of predictable and falsifiable results.

What we're doing is rationality, not rationalization.

Torvaun00

Recently, there were rape allegations cast at Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. Some people in positions of power saw fit to expose identifying personal information about the accusers to the Internet and therefore, the world at large. This resulted in the accusers receiving numerous death threats and other harassment.

When safety can be destroyed by truth, should it be?

-1Collisteru
Also, in the case you gave, safety isn't being destroyed by the truth, it's being destroyed by the general public's reaction to the truth. It is pointless to give threats to anybody for a past action, so this is just another case of an irrational emotional response by the collective. But this is an interesting case of how the pure practice of rationality can be dangerous in an irrational world: is it truly moral to pursue (and in this case, expose) the truth when you can't expect everyone else to handle or react to it properly? One possible solution could be that, by practicing rationality and truth-seeking personally, even against the common grain of society, you could be subtly influencing society in a more rational direction. Once enough people do this, it "makes the world safe for rationality" by creating a rational society where irrational emotional reactions to truth are highly discouraged. Since a rational society is more optimized, this maximizes utility in the (very) long run.
9Celer
I disagree here with what seems to be an unstated assumption. Namely, that the injunctive "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" is intended for application to the world. I instead understand it, as I think many here understand it, as applying to beliefs. If I believe something, it should not be false, and if I think it is false, it is a good thing for me to destroy that belief. Furthermore, in debates over religion, politics, and science, truth is the value that should be pursued. But the idea that I must tell the police about a crime a friend committed because "what can be destroyed by the truth, should be" seems absur, and it is not how I or, I think, many others interpret the phrase.
Torvaun50

My experience leads me to assume that the thermometer was mismarked. My high school chemistry teacher drilled into us that the thermometers we had were all precise, but of varying accuracy. A thermometer might say that water boils at 99.5 C, but if it did, it would also say that it froze at -0.5 C. Again, there are conditions that actually change the temperature at which water boils, so it's possible you were at a lower atmospheric pressure or that the water was contaminated. But, given that we have a grand total of one data point, I can't narrow it down to a single answer.

-8MoreOn
Torvaun00

I don't make any claims about undetected sabotage, I believe it to be statistically meaningless for these purposes. The detection clause was intended to make my statements more precise. Undetectable sabotage only modifies the odds of detectable sabotage, because it's clearly preferable to strike unnoticed. The conditional statement "If the odds are very high..." eliminates all scenarios where those odds are not very high, which brings this down to Warren assuming an ordering factor in the absence of random events. If you'd like to include und... (read more)

Torvaun00

I have to think that there is another question to be considered: What are the odds that Japanese-Americans would commit sabotage we could detect as sabotage? If the odds are very high that detectable sabotage would occur, then the absence of sabotage would be evidence in favor of something preventing sabotage. A conspiracy which collaborates with potential saboteurs and encourages them to wait for the proper time to strike then becomes a reasonable hypothesis, if such a conspiracy would believe that an initial act of temporally focused sabotage would be effective enough to have greater utility than all the acts of sabotage which would otherwise occur before the time of the sabotage spree.

0bigjeff5
That is a good question, but it doesn't help Warren's reasoning. His reasoning was not that there was a high probability that they had committed acts of subversion that were undectectible. His reasoning was that because there was no evidence of subversion, this was evidence of future subversion. This line of reasoning invalidates itself as soon as the first evidence of subversion is discovered, since the reason subversion was imminent was because there was no evidence of subversion. In its most simple form, Warren was saying: "Because there is no evidence that the ball is blue, the ball is blue."
Torvaun100

Hopefully this isn't a violation of the AI Box procedure, but I'm curious if the strategy used would be effective against sociopaths. That is to say, does it rely on emotional manipulation rather than rational arguments?