All of Z_M_Davis's Comments + Replies

On reflection, I'm actually going to start spelling my first name again.

which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position

See Furcas's comment.

that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself

I never said it was no different. Elsewhere in the thread, I had argued that selfishness is entirely compatible with biting the third bullet. Egan's Law.

And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words "very roughly the same reason" instead of "exactly the same reason".

I disagree; if it had been obvious, ... (read more)

Oops. I goofed.

Right, so of course I'm rather selfish in the sense of valuing things-like-myself, and so of course I buy more things for myself than I do for random strangers, and so forth. But I also know that I'm not ontologically fundamental; I'm just a conjunction of traits that can be shared by other observers to various degrees. So "I don't throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don't throw other people off cliffs" is this humorously terse and indirect way of saying that identity is a scalar, not a binary attribute. (Notice that I said "very roughly the same reason" and not "exactly the same reason"; that was intentional.)

I was trying to be cute.

I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn't a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for "your own" future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for "you... (read more)

But all the resulting observers who see the coin come up tails aren't you. You just specified that they weren't. Who cares what they think?

I don't throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don't throw other people off cliffs.

Following Nominull and Furcas, I bite the third bullet without qualms for the perfectly ordinary obvious reasons. Once we know how much of what kinds of experiences will occur at different times, there's nothing left to be confused about. Subjective selfishness is still coherent because you're not just an arbitrary observer with no distinguishing characteristics at all; you're a very specific bundle of personality traits, memories, tendencies of thought, and so forth. Subjective selfishness corresponds to only caring about this one highly specific bundle: ... (read more)

I count 6+ comments from others on meta-talk, 8+ down-mods, and 0 [sic] explanations for the errors in my solution. Nice work, guys.

If it is in fact the case that your complaints are legitimately judged a negative contribution, then you should expect to be downvoted and criticized on those particular comments, regardless of whether or not your solution is correct. There's nothing contradictory about simultaneously believing both that your proposed solution is correct, and that your subsequent complaints are a negative contribution.

I don't feel like taki... (read more)

Okay, so far that's 3-4 people willing to mod me down, zero people willing to point out the errors in a clearly articulated post.

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. It's your comment of 22 September 2009 09:56:05PM that's sitting at -4; none of your clear and articulate responses to Dai have negative scores anymore.

Downvoted for complaining about being downvoted and for needless speculation about the integrity of other commenters. (Some other contributions to this thread have been upvoted.)

I lean toward the politically correct side because it's the side that [...]

Taboo side. Complex empirical issues do not have sides. Humans, for their own non-truth-tracking reasons, group into sides, but it's not Bayesian, and it has never been Bayesian.

Or we think we group up into sides, but I'm not even sure that's true. You write that the egalitarians are nuanced and present evidence, whereas the human biodiversity crowd (or whatever words you want to use) are just apologists for their favorite narrative, but there are a lot of people who have the exa... (read more)

It just seems kind of oddly discontinuous to care about what happens to your analogues except death. I mention comas only in an attempt to construct a least convenient possible world with which to challenge your quantum immortalist position. I mean---are you okay with your scientist-stage-magician wiping out 99.999% of your analogues, as long as one copy of you exists somewhere? But decoherence is continuous: what does it even mean, to speak of exactly one copy of you? Cf. Nick Bostrom's "Quantity of Experience" (PDF).

could you explain how measure in the mathematical sense relates to moral value in unknowable realites

Well, I know that different things are going to happen to different future versions of me across the many worlds. I don't want to say that I only care about some versions of me, because I anticipate being all of them. I would seem to need some sort of weighing scheme. You've said you don't want your analogues to suffer, but you don't mind them ceasing to exist, but I don't think you can do that consistently. The real world is continuous and messy: there'... (read more)

I think this depends on the answers to problems in anthropics and consciousness (the subjects that no one understands). The aptness of your thought experiment depends on Everett branching being like creating a duplicate of yourself, rather than dividing your measure) or "degree-of-consciousness" in half. Now, since I only have the semipopular (i.e., still fake) version of QM, there's a substantial probability that everything I believe is nonsense, but I was given to understand that Everett branching divides up your measure, rather than duplicatin... (read more)

Eliezer's posts (including comments) from before March were ported from the old, nonthreaded Overcoming Bias: that's why there are no threads and no sorting option.

I don't think there's actually any substantive disagreement here. "Good," "bad," "adequate," "inadequate"--these are all just words. The empirical facts are what they are, and we can only call them good or bad relative to some specific standard. Part of Eliezer's endearing writing style is holding things to ridiculously impossibly high standards, and so he has a tendency to mouth off about how the human brain is poorly designed, human lifespans are ridiculously short and poor, evolutions are stupid, and so forth. But... (read more)

NormalHumanHeroes

[Has Eliezer] ever published a paper in a peer-review journal?

"Levels of Organization in General Intelligence" appeared in the Springer volume Artificial General Intelligence. "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risks" (PDF) and "Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk" (PDF) appeared in the Oxford University Press volume Global Catastrophic Risks. They're not mathy papers, though.

intellectual endeavour (although people reading LW are unlikely to be doing too little of that)

There's no such thing as too much intellectual endeavor! There's too much to know!

If anyone knows of a really good summary for somebody who's actually studied physics on why MWI is so great (and sadly, Eliezer's posts here and on overcomingbias don't do it for me) I would greatly appreciate the pointer.

You say Eliezer's posts didn't do it for you, but how much of it did you read? In particular, the point about parsimony favoring MWI is explained in "Decoherence is Simple". As for the mechanism of world divergence, I think the answer is that "worlds" are not an ontologically basic element of the theory. Rather, the... (read more)

t-shirts with robots on them because it gets me into conversations about robots

I have a tee-shirt with robots on it, but it never gets me into conversations. What am I doing wrong? Does it involve going outside??

Most healthy intellectual blogs/forums participate in conversations among larger communities of blogs and forums. Rather than just "preaching to a choir" of readers, such blogs often quote and respond to posts on other blogs. Such responses sometimes support, and sometimes criticize, but either way can contribute to a healthy conversation. [...] In contrast, an insular group defined by something other than its rationality would be internally focused, rarely participating in such larger conversations.

--- Robin Hanson

(hint hint this thread is insanely incestuous)

I didn't realize chickens think that way.

They don't have to.

Yeah, yeah, very cute. I agree that folk psychology has a few problems with it, but I'm not yet ready to toss commonsense notions like knowing and wanting entirely out the window.

Okay, think of it this way: we can see why natural selection would result in organisms with a folk psychology of selves that have beliefs and desires, even if these abstractions are a little leakier than we think they are. But human societies haven't faced the same kind of selection pressure that could produce such adaptations, so whatever sense human societies can be said to know... (read more)

Why isn't there more amateur computer science [...]?

GNU?

I'm not sure I know what it means to say that the system "knows" things. We often speak as if evolution or genes "want" things, but everyone knows that it's only a metaphor. When you speak of the global brain, do you mean it strictly as metaphor, or are you saying something more?

As far as I know, there are no personality tests constructed in the proper way, which would be to give a lot of questions and then perform either factor analysis or PCA on the answers in order to discover from the data what the true dimensions of personality are.

But I thought that was exactly how we got the Big Five.

Does it help if we think of our lives as a story about the sort of brave truthseeker who knows about the narrative fallacy and constantly reminds herself to make falsifiable predictions? 'Cause that's totally what I do.

Huh? It happens all the time around here.

One box!

I suspect there is a substantive disagreement lurking here. Specifically, as much as it hurts my liberal feminist heart to say it (or it did hurt, before I got jaded), I'm going to have to deny this:

But for any given observed behavioral difference, it's sensible to assume it's a learned behavior lacking strong evidence otherwise

Maybe we're tripping over this word genetic? When I say that the number of shared genes doesn't matter, what I'm getting at is that while SRY may "just" be "one gene," it triggers this entire masculinizing de... (read more)

I agree that in the case of behavioral differences, we have a prominent "learned social behavior" hypothesis that we do not have in the case of physiological differences, but it's not because of the number of genes shared between sexes; it's because of the common-sense intuition that culture influences behavior in a dramatic way that it doesn't influence physiology.

Suckling an infant is pretty clearly essential behavior. "Women are more practical", not so much.

I agree here. (In particular, "Women are more practical" is vag... (read more)

I agree with some things you've said, but about some of the things you've said there seems to be no convincing argument in sight

Downvoted for lack of specifics.

Given the stunted nature of the Y chromosome [...] and the fact that all other genetic material is shared, this still means the burden of proof is stacked against the idea of non-obviously essential sexual dimorphism

I don't think simply counting genes tells us much of anything about the amount of sexual dimorphism in a species, one way or the other. The vast majority of genetic material is shared between sexes in any species, and some species don't even use genes to determine sex. If the fact that most genetic material is shared between sexes really did... (read more)

I'm still hoping that the professed rationality is enough to overcome the failure modes that are currently so common here[.] But unfortunately I think my possible contributions won't be missed if I rid myself of wishful thinking and see it's not going to happen. [...] I'd really like to participate in thoughtful discussions with rationalists I can respect. For quite a long time, Less Wrong seemed like the place, but I just couldn't find a proper place to start (I dislike introductions). But now as I'm losing my respect for this community and thus the will to participate here, I started posting. I hope I can regain the confidence in a high level of sanity waterline here.

Oh, please stay!

I have replied in the other thread.

Please correct me if I’m misreading you here. You don't trust yourself to assess whether a comment deserves a downvote, because humans are subject to an array of egocentric biases, and yet somehow you do trust yourself to assess that the other person has no idea of what she's talking about, even though humans are subject to an array of egocentric biases?

You might want to consider doing this the other way, extending interpretive charity but not karmic charity. In fact, I hereby urge you to vote however you want to on whate... (read more)

Now for the hard part! For this comparison to make any point in your favor, you need to show how there's a kind of language used in Sports Illustrated, etc., that most men here consider beyond the pale in its offensiveness, no matter who uses it. Can you do it? No? Then you don't have a point.

While it's true that I probably can't find an example of something most men here would find "beyond-the-pale offensive," I don't agree that that's the correct standard to apply here. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that Cosmo is evidence that ... (read more)

but you could provide a better explanation for why it never occurred to you that you have a bias during a flamewar.

There's no further explanation! It really didn't occur to me that that was a reason to not vote! And it's still not obvious to me that not-voting is unambiguously the right ethical standard. Of course I agree that it's unethical to downvote a comment solely because you don't like the conclusion or you don't like the commenter---but that remains true whether or not you're personally involved in the conversation. So as long as we're going to ... (read more)

It never occurred to you that you might not be neutral enough to accurately moderate during an argument you're personally involved in?

I guess I'm just retarded???

I humbly recommend you cancel any votes for or against me in exchanges you've been involved in.

Done.

I have a much lower karma level [...]

I agree that drive-by mass downvoting out of personal animosity is bad, and it is of course unjust that you have apparently been subjected to it. But again, you should also consider that a nontrivial proportion of your recent karma loss has been becau... (read more)

Sadly, my ethics prevent me from modding comments in exchanges I'm directly involved in.

Honestly, this notion never occurred to me. I interpret downvotes (upvotes) as a "I would like to see fewer (more) comments like this," and feel free to vote on exchanges I'm involved in, trying to base my votes on quality of discussion and argument, rather than strictly whether I agree or not. Do you think your standard should be a community norm (even if it can't be enforced)?

So, one of the most-read women's magazines isn't suggestive of how women think, a major high-grossing film that describes Cosmo as "the Bible" and expects viewers to get the joke isn't suggestive of how women think

I agree that Cosmopolitan knows a lot about how many women think, but this isn't the same thing as Cosmo being representative of women-in-full-generality. The qualifier really does seem important here. Compare: Sports Illustrated or Esquire know a lot about how many men think, but (I submit) we wouldn't want to say that these publica... (read more)

Every non-Alicorn commenter "bothered" by it was only bothered because Alicorn claimed to be

Not true.

Also recommended: Anne Campbell's A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women, which has chapters on status, competition, and aggression amongst women.

This is not a failing of one part of this community or another; this seems to be part of the current human condition

This is a failing of all parts of this community, and seems to be a part of the current human condition. (The eighth virtue is humility; the ninth virtue is perfectionism.)

[notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]

I still don't think you understand what feminists mean by objectification. It's not the same thing as cognitive reductionism, which I think hardly anyone here would object to. I mean, yes, minds are causal systems made of parts embedded in the universal laws of phys... (read more)

Masturbation is not sex.

No, but it should be similar enough to break the analogy to starvation or heroin deprivation.

involved objectifying me.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage - at least that's the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you're not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.

Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.