Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
"Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"
"It's a metaphor for the human struggle."
"I don't see how that changes my point."
Well, his point only makes any sense when applied to the metaphor since a better answer to the question
"Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"
is:
"where would Sisyphus get a robot in the middle of Hades?"
Edit: come to think of it, this also works with the metaphor for human struggle.
I thought the correct answer would be, "No time for programming, too busy pushing a boulder."
Though, since the whole thing was a punishment, I have no idea what the punishment for not doing his punishment would be. Can't find it specified anywhere.
I don't think he's punished for disobeying, I think he's compelled to act. He can think about doing something else, he can want to do something else, he can decide to do something else ... but what he does is push the boulder.
The version I like the best is that Sisyphus keeps pushing the boulder voluntarily, because he's too proud to admit that, despite all his cleverness, there's something he can't do. (Specifically, get the boulder to stay at the top of the mountain).
My favorite version is similar. Each day he tries to push the boulder a little higher, and as the boulder starts to slide back, he mentally notes his improvement before racing the boulder down to the bottom with a smile on his face.
Because he gets a little stronger and a little more skilled every day, and he knows that one day he'll succeed.
In the M. Night version: his improvements are an asymptote - and Sisyphus didn't pay enough attention in calculus class to realize that the limit is just below the peak.
Now someone just has to write a book entitled "The Rationality of Sisyphus", give it a really pretentious-sounding philosophical blurb, and then fill it with Grand Theft Robot.
Answer: Because the Greek gods are vindictive as fuck, and will fuck you over twice as hard when they find out that you wriggled out of it the first time.
Who was the guy who tried to bargain the gods into giving him immortality, only to get screwed because he hadn't thought to ask for youth and health as well? He ended up being a shriveled crab like thing in a jar.
My highschool english teacher thought this fable showed that you should be careful what you wished for. I thought it showed that trying to compel those with great power through contract was a great way to get yourself fucked good an hard. Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.
EDIT: The myth was of Tithonus. A goddess Eos was keeping him as a lover, and tried to bargain with Zeus for his immortality, without asking for eternal youth too. Ooops.
Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.
I'm no expert, but that seems to be the moral of a lot of Greek myths.
Do unto others 20% better than you expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.
-- Linus Pauling
Citation for this was hard; the closest I got was Etzioni's 1962 The Hard Way to Peace, pg 110. There's also a version in the 1998 Linus Pauling on peace: a scientist speaks out on humanism and world survival : writings and talks by Linus Pauling; this version goes
I have made a modern formulation of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others 20 percent better than you would be done by - the 20 percent is to correct for subjective error."
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” ― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
The person who says, as almost everyone does say, that human life is of infinite value, not to be measured in mere material terms, is talking palpable, if popular, nonsense. If he believed that of his own life, he would never cross the street, save to visit his doctor or to earn money for things necessary to physical survival. He would eat the cheapest, most nutritious food he could find and live in one small room, saving his income for frequent visits to the best possible doctors. He would take no risks, consume no luxuries, and live a long life. If you call it living. If a man really believed that other people's lives were infinitely valuable, he would live like an ascetic, earn as much money as possible, and spend everything not absolutely necessary for survival on CARE packets, research into presently incurable diseases, and similar charities.
In fact, people who talk about the infinite value of human life do not live in either of these ways. They consume far more than they need to support life. They may well have cigarettes in their drawer and a sports car in the garage. They recognize in their actions, if not in their words, that physical survival is only one value, albeit a very important one, among many.
-- David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Not quite so! We could presume that value isn't restricted to the reals + infinity, but say that something's value is a value among the ordinals. Then, you could totally say that life has infinite value, but two lives have twice that value.
But this gives non-commutativity of value. Saving a life and then getting $100 is better than getting $100 and saving a life, which I admit seems really screwy. This also violates the Von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms.
In fact, if we claim that a slice of bread is of finite value, and, say, a human life is of infinite value in any definition, then we violate the continuity axiom... which is probably a stronger counterargument, and tightly related to the point DanielLC makes above.
There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn't step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn't the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has.
John Perry, introduction to Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self
He bought the present ox along with the future ox. He could have just bought the present ox, or at least a shorter interval of one. This is known as "renting".
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Solzhenitsyn
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
If only it were a line. Or even a vague boundary between clearly defined good and clearly defined evil. Or if good and evil were objectively verifiable notions.
Stealing food is clearly evil if you have no need but the victim has need for the food. If the needs are opposite, then it is not clearly evil. So there is no clear boundary, but what would a vague boundary require?
You are pointing to different actions labeled stealing and saying "one is good and the other is evil." Yeah, obviously, but that is no contradiction - they are different actions! One is the action of stealing in dire need, the other is the action of stealing without need.
This is a very common confusion. Good and evil (and ethics) are situation-dependent, even according to the sternest, most thundering of moralists. That does not tell us anything one way or the other about objectivity. The same action in the same situation with the same motives is ethically the same.
But the line dividing Kansas and Nebraska cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to grow corn on his own heart?
— Steven Kaas
"But I tell you he couldn't have written such a note!" cried Flambeau. "The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about the facts."
"The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts," said his clerical companion soberly. "He could never have got 'em so wrong without knowing about 'em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on every subject—like the devil."
"Do you mean—?"
"I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth," said his friend firmly. "Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden—then you would know you had found the house. The man must have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate."
--G.K. Chesterton, "The Duel of Dr. Hirsch"
Lol, my professor would give a 100% to anyone who answered every exam question wrong. There were a couple people who pulled it off, but most scored 0<10.
I'm assuming a multiple-choice exam, and invalid answers don't count as 'wrong' for that purpose?
Otherwise I can easily miss the entire exam with "Tau is exactly six." or "The battle of Thermopylae" repeated for every answer. Even if the valid answers are [A;B;C;D].
I bet that you can't write a question for which "Tau is exactly six." and "The battle of Thermopylae" are both answers which gain any credit...
"Write a four word phrase or sentence."
Let's go one step back on this, because I think our point of disagreement is earlier than I thought in that last comment.
The efficient market hypothesis does not claim that the profit on all securities has the same expectation value. EMH-believers don't deny, for example, the empirically obvious fact that this expectation value is higher for insurances than for more predictable businesses. Also, you can always increase your risk and expected profit by leverage, i.e. by investing borrowed money.
This is because markets are risk-averse, so that on the same expectation value you get payed extra to except a higher standard deviation. Out- or underperforming the market is really easy by excepting more or less risk than it does on average. The claim is not that the expectation value will be the same for every security, only that the price of every security will be consistent with the same prices for risk and expected profit.
So if the EMH is true, you can not get a better deal on expected profit without also accepting higher risk and you can not get a higher risk premium than other people. But you still can get lots of different trade-offs between expected profit and risk.
Now can you ...
Lady Average may not be as good-looking as Lady Luck, but she sure as hell comes around more often.
Anonymous
Not always, since:
The average human has one breast and one testicle
Des McHale
In other words, the average of a distribution is not necessarily the most probable value.
In my high school health class, for weeks the teacher touted the upcoming event: "Breast and Testicle Day!"
When the anticipated day came, it was of course the day when all the boys go off to one room to learn about testicular self-examination, and all the girls go off to another to learn about breast self-examination. So, in fact, no student actually experienced Breast and Testicle Day.
...beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity, and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care about the image it helps to project.
-Robin Hanson, Human Enhancement
I feel like Hanson's admittedly insightful "signaling" hammer has him treating everything as a nail.
Your contrarian stance against a high-status member of this community makes you seem formidable and savvy. Would you like to be allies with me? If yes, then the next time I go foraging I will bring you back extra fruit.
I think he's mischaracterizing the issue.
Beliefs serve multiple functions. One is modeling accuracy, another is signaling. It's not whether the environment is harsh or easy, it's which function you need. There are many harsh environments where what you need is the signaling function, and not the modeling function.
Infallible, adj. Incapable of admitting error.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me. No one possesses the less of an idea, because every other possesses the whole of it." - Jefferson
But many people do benefit greatly from hoarding or controlling the distribution of scarce information. If you make your living off slavery instead, then of course you can be generous with knowledge.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
-- Tim Kreider
The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
Not if it's actually the same morality, but depends on technology. For example, strong prohibitions on promiscuity are very sensible in a world without cheap and effective contraceptives. Anyone who tried to live by 2012 sexual standards in 1912 would soon find they couldn't feed their large horde of kids. Likewise, if robots are doing all the work, fine; but right now if you just redistribute all money, no work gets done.
You seem to have rather a different idea of what I meant by "2012 standards". Even now we do not really approve of married people sleeping around. We do, however, approve of people not getting married until age 25 or 30 or so, but sleeping with whoever they like before that. Try that pattern without contraception.
How do you envision living by this model now working?
That is, suppose I were to embrace the notion that having enough resources to live a comfortable life (where money can stand in as a proxy for other resources) is something everyone ought to be guaranteed.
What ought I do differently than I'm currently doing?
According to Wikipedia, the 2005 elections in germany did cost 63 million euros, with a population of 81 million people. 0,78 eurocent per person or the 0,00000281st part of the GDP. Does not seem much, in the grander scheme of things. And since the german constitutional court prohibited the use of most types of voting machines, that figure does include the cost to the helpers; 13 million, again, not a prohibitive expenditure.
If we had eight-hour workdays a century ago, we wouldn't have been able to support the standard of living expected a century ago.
Is that true? (Technically, a century ago was 1912.)
Wikipedia on the eight-hour day:
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.
...After I spoke at the 2005 "Mathematics and Narrative" conference in Mykonos, a suggestion was made that proofs by contradiction are the mathematician's version of irony. I'm not sure I agree with that: when we give a proof by contradiction, we make it very clear that we are discussing a counterfactual, so our words are intended to be taken at face value. But perhaps this is not necessary. Consider the following passage.
There are those who would believe that every polynomial equation with integer coefficients has a rational solution, a view that leads to some intriguing new ideas. For example, take the equation x² - 2 = 0. Let p/q be a rational solution. Then (p/q)² - 2 = 0, from which it follows that p² = 2q². The highest power of 2 that divides p² is obviously an even power, since if 2^k is the highest power of 2 that divides p, then 2^2k is the highest power of 2 that divides p². Similarly, the highest power of 2 that divides 2q² is an odd power, since it is greater by 1 than the highest power that divides q². Since p² and 2q² are equal, there must exist a positive integer that is both even and odd. Integers with this remarkable property are quite unlike the integers
"There are those who would believe that all equations have solutions, a view that leads to some intriguing new ideas. Consider the equation x + 1 = x. Inspecting the equation, we see that its solution must be a number which is equal to its successor. Numbers with this remarkable property are quite unlike the numbers we are familiar with. As such, they are surely worthy of further study."
Qhorin Halfhand: The Watch has given you a great gift. And you only have one thing to give in return: your life.
Jon Snow: I'd gladly give my life.
Qhorin Halfhand: I don’t want you to be glad about it! I want you to curse and fight until your heart’s done pumping.
--Game of Thrones, Season 2.
My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.
-- Aristosophy (again)
We're talking about a person who, along with her partner, gives to efficient charity twice as much money as she spends on herself. There's no way she doesn't actually believe what she says and still does that.
Yeah, but there's also a certain plausibility to the heuristic which says that you don't get to second-guess her knowledge of what works for charitable giving until you're - not giving more - but at least playing in the same order of magnitude as her. Maybe her pushing a little bit harder on that "hypocrisy" would cause her mind to collapse, and do you really want to second-guess her on that if she's already doing more than an order of magnitude better than what your own mental setup permits?
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t easily be measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.
Charles Handy describing the Vietnam-era measurement policies of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
The following quotes were heavily upvoted, but then turned out to be made by a Will Newsome sockpuppet who edited the quote afterward. The original comments have been banned. The quotes are as follows:
If dying after a billion years doesn't sound sad to you, it's because you lack a thousand-year-old brain that can make trillion-year plans.
— Aristosophy
One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really offering is three rounds of feedback.
— Aristosophy
If anyone objects to this policy response, please PM me so as to not feed the troll.
The following quotes were heavily upvoted, but then turned out to be made by a Will Newsome sockpuppet who edited the quote afterward. The original comments have been banned. The quotes are as follows:
Defection too far. Ban Will.
Will is a cute troll.
I've heard this claimed.
This behavior isn't cute.
Hmm, after observing it a few times on various forums I'm starting to consider that having a known, benign resident troll might keep away more destructive ones. No idea how it works but it doesn't seem that far-fetched given all the strange territoriality-like phenomena occasionally encountered in the oddest places.
This would be somewhat in fitting with findings in Cialdini. One defector kept around and visibly punished or otherwise looking low status is effective at preventing that kind of behavior. (If not Cialdini, then Greene. Probably both.)
If I remember correctly the second quote was edited to be something along the lines of "will_newsome is awesome."
I do find some of Will Newsome's contributions interesting. OTOH, this behaviour is pretty fucked up. (I was wondering how hard it would be to implement a software feature to show the edit history of comments.)
...“Why do you read so much?”
Tyrion looked up at the sound of the voice. Jon Snow was standing a few feet away, regarding him curiously. He closed the book on a finger and said, “Look at me and tell me what you see.”
The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Is this some kind of trick? I see you. Tyrion Lannister.”
Tyrion sighed. “You are remarkably polite for a bastard, Snow. What you see is a dwarf. You are what, twelve?”
“Fourteen,” the boy said.
“Fourteen, and you’re taller than I will ever be. My legs are short and twisted, and I walk with difficulty. I require a special saddle to keep from falling off my horse. A saddle of my own design, you may be interested to know. It was either that or ride a pony. My arms are strong enough, but again, too short. I will never make a swordsman. Had I been born a peasant, they might have left me out to die, or sold me to some slaver’s grotesquerie. Alas, I was born a Lannister of Casterly Rock, and the grotesqueries are all the poorer. Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years. My brother later killed that very same king, as it turns out, but life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new king and
I'm surprised at how often I have to inform people of this... I have mild scoliosis, and so I usually prefer sitting down and kicking up my feet, usually with my work in hand. Coming from a family who appreciates backbreaking work is rough when the hard work is even harder and the pain longer-lasting... which would be slightly more bearable if the aforementioned family did not see reading MYSTERIOUS TEXTS on a Kindle and using computers for MYSTERIOUS PURPOSES as signs of laziness and devotion to silly frivolities.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not a very new situation.
I disagree, in fact. That books strengthen the mind is baldly asserted, not supported, by this quote - the rationality point I see in it is related to comparative advantage.
Discovery is the privilege of the child, the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.
Alexander Grothendieck
......a good way of thinking about minimalism [about truth] and its attractions is to see it as substituting the particular for the general. It mistrusts anything abstract or windy. Both the relativist and the absolutist are impressed by Pilate's notorious question 'What is Truth?', and each tries to say something useful at the same high and vertiginous level of generality. The minimalist can be thought of turning his back on this abstraction, and then in any particular case he prefaces his answer with the prior injunction: you tell me. This does not mean, 'You tell me what truth is.' It means, 'You tell me what the issue is, and I will tell you (although you will already know, by then) what the truth about the issue consists in.' If the issue is whether high tide is at midday, then truth consists in high tide being at midday... We can tell you what truth amounts to, if you first tell us what the issue is.
There is a very powerful argument for minimalism about truth, due to the great logician Gottlob Frege. First, we should notice the transparency property of truth. This is the fact that it makes no difference whether you say that it is raining, or it is true that it is raining, or tr
"Nontrivial measure or it didn't happen." -- Aristosophy
(Who's Kate Evans? Do we know her? Aristosophy seems to have rather a lot of good quotes.)
*cough*
"I made my walled garden safe against intruders and now it's just a walled wall." -- Aristosophy
Attachment? This! Is! SIDDHARTHA!
Is that you? That's ingenious.
For more rational flavor:
Live dogmatic, die wrong, leave a discredited corpse.
This should be the summary for entangled truths:
To find the true nature of a thing, find the true nature of all other things and look at what is left over.
how to seem and be deep:
Blessed are those who can gaze into a drop of water and see all the worlds and be like who cares that's still zero information content.
Dark Arts:
The master said: "The master said: "The master said: "The master said: "There is no limit to the persuasive power of social proof.""""
More Dark arts:
One wins a dispute, not by minimising potential counterarguments' plausibility, but by maximising their length.
Luminosity:
Have you accepted your brain into your heart?
She's got to be from here, here's learning biases can hurt people:
Heuristics and biases research: gaslighting the human race?
Cryonics:
"Are you signed up for Christonics?" "No, I'm still prochristinating."
I'm starting to think this is someone I used to know from tvtropes.
It is now clear to us what, in the year 1812, was the cause of the destruction of the French army. No one will dispute that the cause of the destruction of Napoleon's French forces was, on the one hand, their advance late in the year, without preparations for a winter march, into the depths of Russia, and, on the other hand, the character that the war took on with the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe aroused in the Russian people. But then not only did no one foresee (what now seems obvious) that this was the only way that could lead to the destruction of an army of eight hundred thousand men, the best in the world and led by the best generals, in conflict with a twice weaker Russian army, inexperienced and led by inexperienced generals; not only did no one foresee this, but all efforts on the part of the Russians were constantly aimed at hindering the one thing that could save Russia, and, on the part of the French, despite Napoleon's experience and so-called military genius, all efforts were aimed at extending as far as Moscow by the end of summer, that is, at doing the very thing that was to destroy them.
You know those people who say "you can use numbers to show anything" and "numbers lie" and "I don't trust numbers, don't give me numbers, God, anything but numbers"? These are the very same people who use numbers in the wrong way.
"Junior", FIRE JOE MORGAN
Subway ad: "146 people were hit by trains in 2011. 47 were killed."
Guy on Subway: "That tells me getting hit by a train ain't that dangerous."
This reminds me of how I felt when I learned that a third of the passengers of the Hindenburg survived. Went something like this, if I recall:
Apparently if you drop people out of the sky in a ball of fire, that's not enough to kill all of them, or even 90% of them.
Actually, according to Wikipedia, only 35 out of the 97 people aboard were killed. Not enough to kill even 50% of them.
If I expect to be hit by a train, I certainly don't expect a ~68% survival chance. Not intuitively, anyways.
I'm guessing that even if you survive, your quality of life is going to take a hit. Accounting for this will probably bring our intuitive expectation of harm closer to the actual harm.
"If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for 10 years plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years educate children" - Confucius
I think I disagree; care to make it precise enough to bet on? I'm expecting life still around, Earth the main population center, most humans not uploaded, some people dying of disease or old age or in wars, most people performing dispreferred activities in exchange for scarce resources at least a couple months in their lives, most children coming out of a biological parent and not allowed to take major decisions for themselves for at least a decade.
I'm offering $100 at even odds right now and will probably want to bet again in the next few years. I can give it to you (if you're going to transfer it to SIAI/CFAR tell me and I'll donate directly), and you pay me $200 if the world has not ended in 100 years as soon as we're both available (e.g. thawed). If you die you can keep the money; if I die then win give it to some sensible charity.
How's that sound? All of the above is up for negotiation.
As wedifrid says, this is a no-brainer "accept" (including the purchasing-power-adjusted caveat). If you are inside the US and itemize deductions, please donate to SIAI, otherwise I'll accept via Paypal. Your implied annual interest rate assuming a 100% probability of winning is 0.7% (plus inflation adjustment). Please let me know whether you decide to go through with it; withdrawal is completely understandable - I have no particular desire for money at the cost of forcing someone else to go through with a bet they feel uncomfortable about. (Or rather, my desire for $100 is not this strong - I would probably find $100,000 much more tempting.)
PayPal-ed to sentience at pobox dot com.
Don't worry, my only debitor who pays higher interest rates than that is my bank. As long as that's not my main liquidity bottleneck I'm happy to follow medieval morality on lending.
If you publish transaction data to confirm the bet, please remove my legal name.
Bet received. I feel vaguely guilty and am reminding myself hard that money in my Paypal account is hopefully a good thing from a consequentialist standpoint.
I definitely expect nanotech a few orders of magnitude awesomer than we have now. I expect great progress on aging and disease, and wouldn't be floored by them being solved in theory (though it does sound hard). What I don't expect is worldwide deployment. There are still people dying from measles, when in any halfway-developed country every baby gets an MMR shot as a matter of course. I wouldn't be too surprised if everyone who can afford basic care in rich countries was immortal while thousands of brown kids kept drinking poo water and dying. I also expect longevity treatments to be long-term, not permanent fixes, and thus hard to access in poor or politically unstable countries.
The above requires poor countries to continue existing. I expect great progress, but not abolition of poverty. If development continues the way it has (e.g. Brazil), a century isn't quite enough for Somalia to get its act together. If there's a game-changing, universally available advance that bumps everyone to cutting-edge tech levels (or even 2012 tech levels), then I won't regret that $100 much.
I have no idea what wars will look like, but I don't expect them to be nonexistent or nonlethal. Given no gam...
Nothing can be soundly understood
If daylight itself needs proof.
Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī), "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"
Reminds me of Moore's "here is a hand" paradox (or one man's modus tollens is another's modus ponens).
I think that's actually a really terrible bit of arguing.
There are only two logically possible explanations: random chance, or design.
We can stop right there. If we're all the way back at solipsism, we haven't even gotten to defining concepts like 'random chance' or 'design', which presume an entire raft of external beliefs and assumptions, and we surely cannot immediately say there are only two categories unless, in response to any criticism, we're going to include a hell of a lot under one of those two rubrics. Which probability are we going to use, anyway? There are many more formalized versions than just Kolmogorov's axioms (which brings us to the analytic and synthetic problem).
And much of the rest goes on in a materialist vein which itself requires a lot of further justification (why can't minds be ontologically simple elements? Oh, your experience in the real world with various regularities has persuaded you that is inconsistent with the evidence? I see...) Even if we granted his claims about complexity, why do we care about complexity? And so on.
Yes, if you're going to buy into a (very large) number of materialist non-solipsist claims, then you're going to have trouble making a case in such terms for solipsism. But if you've bought all those materialist or externalist claims, you've already rejected solipsism and there's no tension in the first place. And he doesn't do a good case of explaining that at all.
"In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B, all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live." -- Peter Singer
As it is probably intended, the more reminders like this I read, the more ethical I should become. As it actually works, the more of this I read, the less I become interested in ethics. Maybe I am extraordinarily selfish and this effect doesn't happen to most, but it should be at least considered that constant preaching of moral duties can have counterproductive results.
I suspect it's because authors of "ethical remainders" are usually very bad at understanding human nature.
What they essentially do is associate "ethical" with "unpleasant", because as long as you have some pleasure, you are obviously not ethical enough; you could do better by giving up some more pleasure, and it's bad that you refuse to do so. The attention is drawn away from good things you are really doing, to the hypothetical good things you are not doing.
But humans are usually driven by small incentives, by short-term feelings. The best thing our rationality can do is better align these short-term feelings with out long-term goals, so we actually feel happy when contributing to our long-term goals. And how exactly are these "ethical remainders" contributing to the process? Mostly by undercutting your short-term ethical motivators, by always reminding you that what you did was not enough, therefore you don't deserve the feelings of satisfaction. Gradually they turn these motivators off, and you no longer feel like doing anything ethical, because they convinced you (your "elephant") that you can't.
Ethics without understanding human nature is just a pile of horseshit. Of course that does not prevent other people from admiring those who speak it.
Not to mention the remarks of Mark Twain on a fundraiser he attended once:
Well, Hawley worked me up to a great state. I couldn't wait for him to get through [his speech]. I had four hundred dollars in my pocket. I wanted to give that and borrow more to give. You could see greenbacks in every eye. But he didn't pass the plate, and it grew hotter and we grew sleepier. My enthusiasm went down, down, down - $100 at a time, till finally when the plate came round I stole 10 cents out of it. [Prolonged laughter.] So you see a neglect like that may lead to crime.
I wasn't abused or neglected. Did she check experimentally that abuse or neglect is more prevalent among rationalists than in the general population?
Of course that's not something a human would ordinarily do to check a plausible-sounding hypothesis, so I guess she probably didn't, unless something went horribly wrong in her childhood.
Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal.
I'm not at all convinced that this is the case. After all, the shampoos are being designed to be less painful, and you don't need to test on ten thousand rabbits. Considering the distribution of the shampoos, this may save suffering even if you regard human and rabbit suffering as equal in disutility.
Julia Wise would disagree, on the grounds that this is impossible to maintain and you do more good if you stay happy.
So, how many lives did he save again?
Clever guy, but I'm not sure if you want to follow his example.
To use an analogy, if you attend a rock concert and take a box to stand on then you will get a better view. If others do the same, you will be in exactly the same position as before. Worse, even, as it may be easier to loose your balance and come crashing down in a heap (and, perhaps, bringing others with you).
-- Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, section C.7.3
Tropical rain forests, bizarrely, are the products of prisoner's dilemmas. The trees that grow in them spend the great majority of their energy growing upwards towards the sky, rather than reproducing. If they could come to a pact with their competitors to outlaw all tree trunks and respect a maximum tree height of ten feet, every tree would be better off. But they cannot.
Matt Ridley, in The Origins of Virtue
Oh, right, Senjōgahara. I've got a great story to tell you. It's about that man who tried to rape you way back when. He was hit by a car and died in a place with no connection to you, in an event with no connection to you. Without any drama at all. [...] That's the lesson for you here: You shouldn't expect your life to be like the theater.
-- Kaiki Deishū, Episode 7 of Nisemonogatari.
Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Think about it.
Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Try it out!
Does the order of the two previous answers matter? / Yes. Think first, then try.
Sure. The book is a sort of resource for learning the programming language Scheme, where the authors will present an illustrative piece of code and discuss different aspects of its behavior in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue with the reader.
In this case, the authors are discussing how to perform numerical comparisons using only a simple set of basic procedures, and they've come up with a method that has a subtle error. The lines above encourage the reader to figure out if and why it's an error.
With computers, it's really easy to just have a half-baked idea, twiddle some bits, and watch things change, but sometimes the surface appearance of a change is not the whole story. Remembering to "think first, then try" helps me maintain the right discipline for really understanding what's going on in complex systems. Thinking first about my mental model of a situation prompts questions like this:
It's harder psychologically (and maybe too late) to ask those questions in retrospect if you try first, and then think, and if you skip asking them, then you'll suffer later.
This is the easiest, most handholdy experience possible: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/
A coworker of mine who didn't know any programming, and who probably isn't smarter than you, enjoyed working through it and has learned a lot.
Programming is hard, but a lot of good things are hard.
The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence.
This is why I think it's not too terribly useful to give labels like "good person" or "bad person," especially if our standard for being a "bad person" is "someone with anything less than 100% adherence to all the extrapolated consequences of their verbally espoused values." In the end, I think labeling people is just a useful approximation to labeling consequences of actions.
Julia, Jeff, and others accomplish a whole lot of good. Would they, on average, end up accomplishing more good if they spent more time feeling guilty about the fact that they could, in theory, be helping more? This is a testable hypothesis. Are people in general more likely to save more lives if they spend time thinking about being happy and avoiding burnout, or if they spend time worrying that they are bad people making excuses for allowing themselves to be happy?
The question here is not whether any individual person could be giving more; the answer is virtually always "yes." The question is, what encourages giving? How do we ensure that lives are actually being saved, given our human limitations and selfish impulses? I think there's great value in not generating an ugh-field around charity.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
Julia Wise holds the distinction of having actually tried it though. Few people are selfless enough to even make the attempt.
When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing.
Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive farther improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.
Michael Welfare, quoted in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us." - Sagan
Rorschach: You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew... God doesn't make the world this way. We do.
EDIT: Quote above is from the movie.
Verbatim from the comic:
It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us.
Only us.
I personally think that Watchmen is a fantastic study* on all the different ways people react to that realisation.
("Study" in the artistic sense rather than the scientific.)
If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matter how “fuzzy” the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before.
Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything
It may be of course that savages put food on a dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man because they think a dead man can fight. But personally I do not believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true, the emotion that makes us think it is obvious and natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human existence it is essentially irrational.
Chesterton doesn't understand the emotion because he doesn't know enough about psychology, not because emotions are deep sacred mysteries we must worship.
Let us together seek, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are reached, the process by which we shall succeed in discovering them; but, for God's sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating the people...let us not - simply because we are at the head of a movement - make ourselves into the new leaders of intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason.
Pierre Proudhon, to Karl Marx
When a precise, narrowly focused technical idea becomes metaphor and sprawls globally, its credibility must be earned afresh locally by means of specific evidence demonstrating the relevance and explanatory power of the idea in its new application.
Edward Tufte, "Beautiful Evidence"
...the 2008 financial crisis showed that some [mathematical finance] models were flawed. But those flaws were based on flawed assumptions about the distribution of price changes... Nassim Taleb, a popular author and critic of the financial industry, points out many such flaws but does not include the use of Monte Carlo simulations among them. He himself is a strong proponent of these simulations. Monte Carlo simulations are simply the way we do the math with uncertain quantities. Abandoning Monte Carlos because of the failures of the financial markets makes as much sense as giving up on addition and subtraction because of the failure of accounting at Enron or AIG’s overexposure in credit default swaps.
Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything
As far as I know, Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were indeed unusually incorruptible, and I do hate them for this trait.
Why? Because when your goal is mass murder, corruption saves lives. Corruption leads you to take the easy way out, to compromise, to go along to get along. Corruption isn't a poison that makes everything worse. It's a diluting agent like water. Corruption makes good policies less good, and evil policies less evil.
I've read thousands of pages about Hitler. I can't recall the slightest hint of "corruption" on his record. Like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, Hitler was a sincerely murderous fanatic. The same goes for many of history's leading villains - see Eric Hoffer's classic The True Believer. Sincerity is so overrated. If only these self-righteous monsters had been corrupt hypocrites, millions of their victims could have bargained and bribed their way out of hell.
-- Bryan Caplan
Spared Jews:
Whether Hitler batted for both teams is hotly debated. There are suspected relationships (August Kubizek, Emil Maurice) but any evidence could as well have been faked to smear him.
Hitler clearly knew that Ernst Röhm and Edmund Heines were gay and didn't care until it was Long Knives time. I'm less sure he knew about Karl Ernst's sexuality.
The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
if you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between "for" and "against"
is the mind's worst disease.
-- Jianzhi Sengcan
Edit: Since I'm not Will Newsome (yet!) I will clarify. There are several useful points in this but I think the key one is the virtue of keeping one's identity small. Speaking it out loud is a sort of primer, meditation or prayer before approaching difficult or emotional subjects has for me proven a useful ritual for avoiding motivated cognition.
I understand what it means to believe that an outcome will occur with probability p. I don't know what it means to believe this very strongly.
It means that many kinds of observation that you could make will tend to cause you to update that probability less.
I particularly like the reminder that I'm physics. Makes me feel like a superhero. "Imbued with the properties of matter and energy, able to initiate activity in a purely deterministic universe, it's Physics Man!"
-- GoodDamon (this may skirt the edge of the rules, since it's a person reacting to a sequence post, but a person who's not a member of LW.)
Er... actually the genie is offering at most two rounds of feedback.
Sorry about the pedantry, it's just that as a professional specialist in genies I have a tendency to notice that sort of thing.
so unless you expect to find another genie bottle later
...or unless genies granting wishes is actually part of the same system as the larger world, such that what I learn from the results of a wish can be applied (by me or some other observer) to better calibrate expectations from other actions in that system besides wishing-from-genies.
An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him.
She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: 'Now your third wish. What will it be?'
'Third wish?' The man was baffled. 'How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?'
'You've had two wishes already,' the hag said, 'but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.' She cackled at the poor berk. 'So it is that you have one wish left.'
'All right,' said the man, 'I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.'
'Funny,' said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. 'That was your first wish.'
I should like to point out that anyone in this situation who wishes what would've been their first wish if they had three wishes is a bloody idiot.
So: A genie pops up and says, "You have one wish left."
What do you wish for? Because presumably the giftwrapped FAI didn't work so great.
But not everything is the way it was. Before he made any wishes, he had three.
She missed the chance to trap him in an infinite loop.
He had bought a large map representing the sea, / Without the least vestige of land: / And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be / A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, / Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" / So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply / “They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! / But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank: / (So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best— / A perfect and absolute blank!”
-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the snark
Proceed only with the simplest terms, for all others are enemies and will confuse you.
— Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, "The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec", Morrowind.
Conspiracy Theory, n. A theory about a conspiracy that you are not supposed to believe.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious."
Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
Jesus used a clever quip to point out the importance of self-monitoring for illusory superiority?
For a hundred years or so, mathematical statisticians have been in love with the fact that the probability distribution of the sum of a very large number of very small random deviations almost always converges to a normal distribution. ... This infatuation tended to focus interest away from the fact that, for real data, the normal distribution is often rather poorly realized, if it is realized at all. We are often taught, rather casually, that, on average, measurements will fall within ±σ of the true value 68% of the time, within ±2σ 95% of the time, and within ±3σ 99.7% of the time. Extending this, one would expect a measurement to be off by ±20σ only one time out of 2 × 10^88. We all know that “glitches” are much more likely than that!
-- W.H. Press et al., Numerical Recipes, Sec. 15.1
"You're very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can't really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I'm all the more in need of good advice, since I can't actually conceive of needing any."
.... he who works to understand the true causes of miracles and to understand Nature as a scholar, and not just to gape at them like a fool, is universally considered an impious heretic and denounced by those to whom the common people bow down as interpreters of Nature and the gods. For these people know that the dispelling of ignorance would entail the disappearance of that sense of awe which is the one and only support of their argument and the safeguard of their authority.
Baruch Spinoza Ethics
Baruch Spinoza: 1632-1677 Isaac Newton: 1642-1727 Georg Cantor: 1845-1918 Richard Dedekind: 1831-1916 Guiseppe Peano: 1858-1932
We're talking about morality that is based around technology. There is no technological advance that allows us to not criminalize homosexuality now where we couldn't have in the past.
People respond to incentives. Especially loss-related incentives. I do not give homeless people nickels even though I can afford to give a nearly arbitrary number of homeless people nickels. The set of people with karma less than five will be outright unable to reply - the set of people with karma greater than five will just be disincentivized, and that's still something.
I believe Peter Singer actually originally advocated the asceticism you mention, but eventually moved towards "try to give 10% of your income", because people were actually willing to do that, and his goal was to actually help people, not uphold a particular abstract ideal.
“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
"Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in."
G. K. Chesterton, "The Absence of Mr Glass"
Note: this was put in the mouth of the straw? atheist. It's still correct.
Wait actual humans are afraid of losing karma?
Actual humans are afraid of being considered obnoxious, stupid or antisocial. Karma loss is just an indication that perception may be heading in that direction.
That sounds to me like exactly the sort of excuse a bad person would use to justify valuing their selfish whims over the lives of other people.
Is it justified? Pretend we care nothing for good and bad people. Do these "bad people" do more good than "good people"?
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.
-- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Fortunately for him, Buddhism is cleverly designed to contain no scientifically falsifiable claims.
A Buddhist friend told me that at a class in a temple, the teacher mentioned four types of creation, of which one was spontaneous generation- like maggots spontaneously generating in meat. My friend interrupted to say that, no, that's not actually what happens, and that people did experiments to prove that it didn't happen. (My friend was too polite to mention that the experiments were 350 years old.) If I remember correctly, the teacher said something like "huh, okay," and went on with the lesson, leaving out any parts relevant to spontaneous generation.
"I wish for the result of the hypothetical nth wish I would make if I was allowed to make n wishes in the limit as n went to infinity each time believing that the next wish would be my only one and all previous wishes would be reversed, or if that limit does not exist, pick n = busy beaver function of Graham's number."
New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look. And they are sometimes found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking, considering why the world is the way that it is and whether there might be an alternative to the dominant paradigm. Rarely can they be found in the temperate latitudes between these two spaces, where we spend 99 percent of our lives.
-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
How is it a critique? The quote is an adequate expression of Eliezer's own third virtue of rationality, and I daresay if anyone had responded as uncharitably as that to his "Twelve Virtues", he would have considered 'dur' to be an adequate summary of that person's intellect.
The critique is of the phrase "but to be of no mind whatsoever."
The uncharitable interpretation is that something without a mind is a rock; the charitable interpretation is to take "mind" as "opinion."
I ended up downvoting the criticism because it doesn't apply to the substance of the quote, but to its word choice, and is itself not as clear as it could be.
The criticism is that a martial artist or scientist is actually trying to attain a highly specific brain-state in which neurons have particular patterns in them; a feeling of emptiness, even if part of this brain state, is itself a neural pattern and certainly does not correspond to the absence of a mind.
The zeroth virtue or void - insofar as we believe in it - corresponds to particular mode of thinking; it's certainly not an absence of mind. Emptiness, no-mind, the Void of Musashi, all these things are modes of thinking, not the absence of any sort of reified spiritual substance. See also the fallacy of the ideal ghost of perfect emptiness in philosophy.
And this critique I upvoted, because it is both clear and a valuable point. I still think you're using an uncharitable definition of the word "mind," but as assuming charity could lead to illusions of transparency it's valuable to have high standards for quotes.
I'm amazed how you guys manage to get all that from "dur". My communication skills must be worse than I thought.
It's really mean to say someone isn't cute
Alternately, it is toxic to describe trolling behavior as 'cute' when it isn't, and hasn't been either cute or particularly witty or intelligent in a long time. This. Behavior. Is. Not. Cute.. It is lame.
The quote, phrased in a less tortuous way, says that mathematics contains true statements that cannot be proven, and is unique in being able to demonstrate that it does. So far, so good, although the uniqueness part can be debated.
But the quote also states that mathematics therefore contains an element of faith, that is, that there exist statements that have to be assumed to be true. This is not the case.
Mathematics only compels you to believe that certain things follow from certain axioms. That is all. While these axioms sometimes imply that there exist statements whose truth will never be determined, they do not imply that we should then assume that such-and-such a statement is true or false.
That is why it should be downvoted. Because not knowing something doesn't mean having to pretend that you do.
Do you live a life of extraordinary, desperate asceticism? If not, why not? If so, are you happy?
But since miracles were produced according to the capacity of the common people who were completely ignorant of the principles of natural things, plainly the ancients took for a miracle whatever they were unable to explain in the manner the common people normally explained natural things, namely by seeking to recall something similar which can be imagined without amazement. For the common people suppose they have satisfactorily explained something as soon as it no longer astounds them.
(Baruch Spinoza)
the fact that ordinary people can band together and produce new knowledge within a few months is anything but a trifle
-- Dienekes Pontikos, Citizen Genetics
Intelligence about baseball had become equated in the public mind with the ability to recite arcane baseball stats. What [Bill] James's wider audience had failed to understand was that the statistics were beside the point. The point was understanding; the point was to make life on earth just a bit more intelligible; and that point, somehow, had been lost. "I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them."
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, ch. 4 ("Field of Ignorance")
The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic...Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding". Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritansm; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Well, Jeff and I give about a third of our income, so I'd say we're not Sunday Catholics but Sunday-Monday-and-part-of-Tuesday Catholics.
Seriously, though, I advocate that people do what will result in the most good, which is usually not to try for perfection. Dolores1984, you've said before that rather than fail at a high standard of helping you'd rather not help at all. (Correct me if that summary is wrong). I'd rather see people set a standard in keeping with their level of motivation, if that's what will mean they take a stab at helping.
Example 54084954 of that fact that true-seeking and politeness are not correlated.
Also, a little fallacy of gray. Someone could be zero on the cute/disgusting scale, if even if it were so awful to label them disgusting.
Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I'm happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarrassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion. Over the years, this has helped me develop clarity in some things, but I remain muddled in many others. I enjoy questions that seem honest, even when they admit or reveal confusion, in preference to questions that appear designed to project sophistication.
Eh. What irritates me is his implicit claim that the ideas there are original or exclusive to Jesus.
With the amount of censorship, deliberate credit-stealing, and other failures of memetic replication in the ancient world, the chance is pretty slim that the earliest instance you've heard of of a moral or religious idea is actually its earliest invention. We should expect that the earliest extant sources for an idea do not correctly attribute its origin: there are so many more ways to be wrong than right, and the correct attribution of an idea (or an entertaining story, for that matter) is not under selection pressure to stay correct as the idea itself is.
(Consider that until the 1853 discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a European scholar might well have believed that the story of Noah's Flood originated with the Bible. We similarly know that much of the mythos of Jesus echoes earlier salvific gods and demigods — Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, etc. — whose cults were later suppressed as pagan.)
So thinking of the moral teachings of Jesus as originally Christian seems problematic. For instance, given the extensive contact between the Near East and India since the time of Alexander, it's r...
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself.
Marcus Aurelius
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might improve the odds.
— Robert A. Heinlein
It seems clear that intelligence, as such, plays no part in the matter-that the sole and essential thing is use.
--Oliver Sacks regarding patients suffering from "developmental agnosia" who first learned to use their hands as adults.
A scientific theory
Isn't just a hunch or guess
It's more like a question
That's been put through a lot of tests
And when a theory emerges
Consistent with the facts
The proof is with science
The truth is with science
They Might Be Giants
Users always have an idea that what they want is easy, even if they can't really articulate exactly what they do want. Even if they can give you requirements, chances are those will conflict – often in subtle ways – with requirements of others. A lot of the time, we wouldn't even think of these problems as "requirements" – they're just things that everyone expects to work in "the obvious way". The trouble is that humanity has come up with all kinds of entirely different "obvious ways" of doing things. Mankind's model of the universe is a surprisingly complicated one.
Jon Skeet
By that same argument murder is cute, rape is cute, arson is cute, genocide is cute -- and you prefer to live in a world where people call these things cute than in a world where they call them non-cute.
You're using the word "cute" wrongly.
Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain.
--Zhuangzi, being a trendy metacontrarian post-rationalist in the 4th century BC
[...] Three years later a top executive for those same San Diego Padres would say that the reason the Oakland A's win so many games with so little money is that "Billy [Beane, the general manager] got lucky with those pitchers."
And he did. But if an explanation is where the mind comes to rest, the mind that stopped at "lucky" when it sought to explain the Oakland A's recent pitching success bordered on narcoleptic.
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, Chapter Ten, "Anatomy of an Undervalued Pitcher".
Someone who claims that faith is a good thing should not also use it as an accusation of impropriety.
The creationist does not claim — before cowans, gentiles, and the unwashed — that Darwinism is the wrong religion; rather, he claims that it is "a religion" as if to say that this is condemnation enough. To fellow creationists he may well say that Darwinism is Satanism, or a rival tribe to be vanquished by force or deception. But he does not expect that argument to fly with outsiders. With them he merely asserts that the (straw-)Darwinist is a hyp...
Someone who claims that faith is a good thing should not also use it as an accusation of impropriety.
I get the impression that that argument is used more to undermine claims that darwinism is a science than anything else.
Physics is a clear science; you can use the right equations and predict the motion of the Earth about the Sun, or the time a barometer will take to fall from a given height. This gives it a certain degree of credibility. The theory of evolution (and how the creationists love to remind everyone of that word, 'theory'!) is also science; but they would deny it, on the basis that accepting it suggests that it is as credible as physics or mathematics. If they insist that darwinism is a religion, then both alternatives start from the same basis of credibility; the creationists can then point out, quite accurately, that their version is older and has been around for longer, and therefore at least claim seniority.
There's a short story by Asimov that gives a very nice view of the whole argument.
Cultural critics like to speculate on the cognitive changes induced by new forms of media, but they rarely invoke the insights of brain science and other empirical research in backing up those claims. All too often, this has the effect of reducing their arguments to mere superstition.
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For You
(His book argues that pop culture is increasing intelligence, not dumbing it down. He argues that plot complexity has increased and that keeping track of large storylines is now much more common place, and that these skills mani...
For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.
"How many lives do you suppose you've saved in your medical career? … Hundreds? Thousands? Do you suppose those people give a damn that you lied to get into Starfleet Medical? I doubt it. We deal with threats to the Federation that jeopardize its very survival. If you knew how many lives we’ve saved, I think you’d agree that the ends do justify the means.”
Luther Sloan to Juilian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Inquisition”, written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller
"How many lives do you suppose you've saved in your medical career? … Hundreds? Thousands? Do you suppose those people give a damn that you lied to get into Starfleet Medical? I doubt it.
Presuming that Starfleet Medical has limited enrollment, and that if he hadn't lied, a superior candidate would have enrolled, then that superior candidate would have saved those hundreds or thousands, and then a few more.
He was lying about having had gene therapy. He was a superior candidate by virtue of same but it would have kept him out because Starfleet is anti-gene-therapy-ist. (At least I assume so - I remember the character had the therapy and had to hide it, but not whether it came out in that episode or something else did.)
He was lying about having had gene therapy.
That is much more justifiable than the standard case of lying on applications.
He was a superior candidate by virtue of same but it would have kept him out because Starfleet is anti-gene-therapy-ist.
I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet's priorities.
I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet's priorities.
Have you seen any Star Trek? Star Robin Hanson would have a lot of angry posts to write.
A scientist, like a warrior, must cherish no view. A 'view' is the outcome of intellectual processes, whereas creativity, like swordsmanship, requires not neutrality, or indifference, but to be of no mind whatsoever.
Buckaroo Banzai
If that's true, then there could be no use in finding a place because you would then follow the quote's advice and never return again!
Per Bohr's advice we can identify this as a meaningless 'profound truth' by reversing it:
If you are lost, then you are at a place no one has found before... What's the use of being in unmapped territory?
(Upvoted so someone can explain it without Karma cost.)
Downvoted because feeding Will when he is speaking this kind of pretentious drivel is precisely the kind of thing that the cost is intended to penalize. It is an example of the system working as it should!
(Note that my own earlier reply would be penalized if I made it now and that too would be a desirable outcome. If I was confident that Will's claim about the Sermon on the Mount would be dismissed and downvoted as it has been then I would not have made a response.)
It is an example of the system working as it should!
Really, it's an example of the system backfiring,causing someone to upvote a comment that deserved a downvoting it would probably otherwise have received.
"Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant... What's this debris of the corpses?" -- Ashoka
...If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means -- must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. -- Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box.
I'll risk a bit of US politics, just because I like the quote:
While some observers might find his lack of philosophical consistency a problem, I see it as a plus. He's a pragmatist. If he were running for the job of Satan he would say he's in favor of evil, at least until he got the job and installed central air conditioning in Hell. To put it more bluntly, it's not his fault that so many citizens are idiots and he has to lie to them just to become a useful public servant.
Scott Adams on one of the two presidential candidates being skilled at the art of winning (with some liberal use of dark arts).
I'd rather live in a world where even if we disagree with each other, annoy each other, or waste each other's time we still don't say anybody isn't cute.
There is a difference between rejecting a "Will is a cute troll" meme being used to justify sock-puppet bait-and-switch abuse---by specifically referring to the behavior being not-cute---and simply saying that someone is not cute apropos of nothing. Your equivocation is either disingenuous or just silly.
...At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him saying, "And therefore such-and-such is true.
"Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
"It's
Downvoted since HPMoR is or should be included in the "Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB" rule.
No mean-ness intended, and it's only one downvoted. If we let HPMoR quotes in here we'd be spending this whole thread reading HPMoR which isn't particularly helpful.
I was also under the impression that it had been at some previous point specifically mentioned in the rules. And considering HPMoR as a part of LW is not unreasonable: you yourself did that here.
Definition is the basis of language.
Be wary when issuing grand proclamations about language, lest you wind up looking silly to the linguistically-knowledgeable.
Will is referring to Matthew 7:1-5.
...Don’t judge others, and you won’t be judged. For whatever standard you use to judge others will be used to judge you, and whatever measurement you use to measure others will be used to measure you. Why do you look at the speck that’s in your brother’s eye, and don’t notice the plank that’s in your own eye? How are you going to say to your brother, "Let me take out the speck from your eye" when you have a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first get rid of the plank in your own eye, and then you’ll see clear
What if you are in a literature class and you're taking a test about a fiction book you didn't read?
I'm really confused about the point of this discussion.
The simple answer is: either a moral system cares whether you do action A or action B, preferring one to the other, or it doesn't. If it does, then the answer to the dilemma is that you should do the action your moral system prefers. If it doesn't, then you can do either one.
Obviously this simple answer isn't good enough for you, but why not?
IMHO you're being provincial. Your intuitions for interplanetary travel come directly from flying in the US; if you were used to saner policies you'd make different predictions. (If you're not from North America, I am very confused.)
I cannot tell if this is rationality or anti-rationality:
Q: What is Microsoft's plan if Windows 8 doesn't take off?
A: You know, Windows 8 is going to do great.
Q: No doubt at all?
A: I'm not paid to have doubts. (Laughs.) I don't have any. It's a fantastic product. ...
I'd saying telling an interviewer you have sufficient confidence in your product to not need a backup plan is rational, actually not having one isn't.
I'm reminded of a quote in Lords of Finance (which I finished yesterday) which went something like 'Only a fool asks a central banker about the currency and expects an honest answer'. Since confidence is what keeps banks and currencies going...
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce
One way to divorce work from income is to own stuff.
A more popular way is to find someone else who owns stuff, then take their stuff.
The coalition of modules in your mind that believes in ascetism being the only acceptable solution is most likely vastly outnumbered by the hedonistic modules. (Most people for which this wasn't the case were most likely filtered out of the gene pool.) As with politics, if you refuse to make compromises and insist on pushing your agenda while outnumbered, you will lose, or at best (worst?) create a deadlock in which nobody is happy. If you're not so absolute, you're more likely to achieve at least some of your aims.
Or, as Carl Shulman put it:
...As those who
Wish 1: "I wish for a paper containing the exact wording of a wish that, when spoken to you, would meet all my expectations for a wish granting X." For any value of X.
Wish 2: Profit.
Three wishes is overkill.
Genie provides a 3,000 foot long scroll, which if spoken perfectly will certainly do as you ask, but if spoken imperfectly in any of a million likely ways affords the genie room to screw you over.
Or the scroll is written in Martian.
Are we going to keep patching up every hole she points out? Or admit that a UFAI genie can be smarter than any human (even if that human is our esteemed Alicorn, or (gasp!) Eliezer)?
Too bad Martian words sound exactly like lethal sonic weapons and your original X that your wish is about doesn't, strictly speaking, require resurrecting you to enjoy it.
Or, the genie doesn't have to respond to wishes that don't come out of Master's mouth.
The scroll modifies your expectations. The genie twist-interprets X, and then assesses your expectations of the result of the genie's interpretation of X. ("Why, that's just what you'd expect destroying the world to do! What are you complaining about?") The complete list of expectations regarding X is at least slightly self-contradictory, so of course the genie has no option except to modify your expectations directly...
No sleep, or anything that would interrupt thinking about it, for a year, might lead to an interesting wish.
Well, it's obvious what happens then: the genie lets a dedicated copy of Eliezer out of a box.
Definition is the basis of language.
I think you have it the other way around. Definitions are based on language. Language is based on meaning. I knew the meaning of the word "red" before I had any definition for it, and I'd guess that so did you.
That's a lot of effort and pain to prevent someone stepping on your toes.
Also, I'm not sure that'd be a terribly effective way to prevent harm to yourself. I mean, to the extent possible, once everyone knows you tortured Jim, people will be scared shitless to step on your toes, but Jim and Jim's family are very likely to murder you, or at least sue you for all your money and put you in jail for a long time.
Yes, but more frequently than that, the only alternative appears to be no optimization at all. Hence the heuristic.
You might want to remove the space at the beginning of the line. It's distracting to have to use the scrollbar to read the full quote.
On being nicer than you think you should be:
You’ve heard that it was said, "An eye in place of an eye, and a tooth in place of a tooth." But I tell you, don’t oppose someone who is evil. Whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek to him as well; and to whoever wants to get a judgment against you and takes your shirt, give him your coat too; and if someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two.
(Matthew 5:38-41)
On self-superiority bias:
Why do you look at the speck that’s in your brother’s eye, and don’t notice the plank that’s in your own eye?
(Matthew 7:3)
I disagree with Will's interpretation that the former follows from the latter.
What you understand, you can command, and that is power enough to walk on the Moon.
I understand people. Imperius! People, I command you to build me a moon rocket!
-- Draco
gravity does not need policemen to make things fall!
-- Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, Sec. F.2.1
Bargains and bribes seem of questionable use when a power is willing and able to kill you and seize all your assets anyway. I suppose there's the odd Swiss bank account or successful smuggling case to deal with, or people willing to destroy their possessions rather than let them fall into the hands of a murderous authority, but I'd be surprised if any of these weren't fairly small minorities in the face of the total. We're certainly not talking millions.
Corruption at lower levels could have reduced the death toll of many famous genocides (in fact, I'd im...
“You define yourself by what offends you. You define yourself by what outrages you.”
Salman Rushdie, explaining identity politics
More from Scott Adams:
It turns out that the historical data is more like a Rorschach test. One economist can look at the data and see a bunny rabbit while another sees a giraffe. You and I haven't studied the raw data ourselves, and we probably aren't qualified anyway, so we are forced to make our decisions based on the credibility of economists. And seriously, who has less credibility than economists? Chiropractors and astrologists come close.
Warning: Your milage may vary.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
All the world's major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14. Dalai Lama
Eliezer posted a comment that's essentially devoid of content. This satirizes the original quote's claim that one should be of "no mind whatsoever" by illustrating that mindlessness isn't particularly useful-- a truly mindless individual (like that portrayed in the comment) would have no useful contributions to make.
For authors are ordinarily so disposed that whenever their heedless credulity has led them to a decision on some controverted opinion, they always try to bring us over to the same side, with the subtlest arguments; if on the other hand they have been fortunate enough to discover something certain and evident, they never set it forth without wrapping it up in all sorts of complications. (I suppose they are afraid that a simple account may lessen the importance they gain by the discovery ; or perhaps they begrudge us the plain truth.)
Descartes, in Rules for the Direction of the Mind
A related Sherlock Holmes quote:
...“Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion.
“How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did manual labour. It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s carpenter.”
“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”
“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”
“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.”
“Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”
“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?”
“Well, but China?”
“The fish that you have tattooed immediatel
...A common way for very smart people to be stupid is to think they can think their way out of being apes with pretensions. However, there is no hack that transcends being human. Playing a "let's pretend" game otherwise doesn't mean you win all arguments, or any. Even with the best intentions and knowledge about biases and rational thinking, you won't transcend and avoid the pitfalls of having a brain designed, in the words of Science of Discworld, to shout at monkeys in the next tree. This doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a damn good try and Les
... we tend to be caught up in thinking and the models about the world we create in our minds, actually science is about this. But those models have limitations and are often wrong as the history of science shows time and again.
Now that you have noticed this, what are you going to do with it?
I had assumed the audience had heard the joke before. The punch line: "Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
Which is the sort of thing that could be called "problematic on so many levels" — or just "goofy".
Open question: Do you care about what (your current brain predicts) your transhuman self would want?
You say that economic production and moral progress aren't the same. I have already said the same thing; I have already said that increased economic production might lead to morally wrong outcomes depending on how those products end up being used.
You can assert a different definition of wealth if you want, sure. I don't understand what argument this is supposed to be responsive to. There's a common understanding of wealth and just because different people define wealth differently, that wouldn't invalidate my point. Having resources is key to investing the...
My first reaction is to want to say that economic progress is an increase in purchasing power. However, purchasing power is measured with reference to the utility of goods. That would be fine as a solution, except that those definitions would mean that it would be literally impossible for an increase in economic progress to be bad on utilitarian grounds. That's not what "economic progress" is generally taken to mean, so I won't use that definition.
Instead, I'll say that economic progress is an increase in the ability to produce goods, whether tho...
Why would you put them into an inherently dynamically-unstable configuration, position-corrected by a massive kludge? I mean, what's in it for the AI?
You can't use that tool to solve that problem.
You can't? So much the worse for your species. I quite possibly couldn't either. I'd probably at least think about it for five minutes first. I may even make a phone call first. And if I and my advisers conclude that for some bizarre reason "no further effect beyond this utterance" is better than any other simple wish that is an incremental improvement then I may end up settling for it. But I'm not going to pretend that I have found some sort of way to wash my hands of responsibility.
...Meanwhile, y
I'm not sure about those direct costs. According to my references, a male slave in 10th-century Scandinavia cost about as much as a horse, a female slave about two-thirds as much; that's a pretty good chunk of change but it doesn't seem obviously out of line with the value of labor after externalities. I don't have figures offhand for any other slaveholding cultures, but the impression I get is that the pure exercise of power was not the main determinant of value in most, if not all, of them,
There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine.
-- Motaigne
It's not easy to learn a new language. We are all used to speaking in a vague verbal language when expressing degrees of belief. In daily life, this language serves us quite well and the damage caused by its ambiguity is minor, but for important decisions it is helpful to use numbers to express degrees of belief. It may be more difficult to elicit numbers, but it is much more efficient. We understand each other better, numerical expressions are more sensitive to small differences in our feelings, and in the end, our decision processes will be better.
From "An Elementary Approach to Thinking Under Uncertainty," by Ruth Beyth-Marom, Shlomith Dekel, Ruth Gombo, & Moshe Shaked.
Moral progress is a trend or change for the better in the morality of members of a society. For example, when the United States went from widespread acceptance of slavery to widespread rejection of slavery, that was moral progress on most views of morality.
Economic progress is a trend or change that results in increased wealth for a society.
In general, widespread acceptance of a moral principle, like our views on slavery, animal rights, vegetable rights, and universal minimum income, only comes after we can afford it.
Universal pay does not even seem possible now.
When one considers how ready are the forces of young men for discharge, one does not wonder at seeing them decide so uncritically and with so little selection for this or that cause: that which attracts them is the sight of eagerness for a cause, as it were the sight of the burning match not the cause itself. The more ingenious seducers on that account operate by holding out the prospect of an explosion to such persons, and do not urge their cause by means of reasons; these powder-barrels are not won over by means of reasons!
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I seem to recall someone arguing that, in combat between iron age tribes, it was basically a choice between massacre and slavery - if you did neither, they would wreck revenge upon your tribe further down the line.
This wouldn't be charity, as I guess the winners did benefit from having a source of labour that didn't need to be compensated at the market rate, but it would be a case where slavery was beneficial to the victims.
(I think Carlyle was wrong about other supposed cases of slavery proving beneficial for the victims)
No, that's never how I've seen anyone define 'world'. Maybe that quote makes more sense in context.
The paragraph, of course, was talking about integer powers of 2 that divide p. As in, the largest number 2^k such that 2^k divides p and k is an integer.
The largest real power of 2 that divides p is, of course, p itself, as 2^log_2(p) = p.
I believe his human-level point is that if you are unable to find a problem with a current system, you will believe optimising it is impossible.
Art imitates life. ;)
And it's not hard to think of real life examples of atrocities "justified" on utilitarian grounds that the rest of the world thinks are anything but justifiable. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, for example, is generally regarded as having gone too far.
I always hated that question due to its ambiguity. Those who state the answer is four legs seem to interpret the question as asking: "Labeling our current language as Language-A, and mentioning a different language Language-B in which 'leg' also refers to tails, and keeping in mind that we do not speak Language-B, how many legs does a dog have?"
However, for some reason I first interpreted the question as asking: "Labeling our current language as Language-A, and mentioning a different language Language-B in which 'leg' also refers to tails, what is the answer to 'how many legs does a dog have?' in Language-B?"
I apologies for both the brevity and ambiguity of these interpretations. However, I doubt that I am the only person who interprets the question in something along the lines of my fashion.
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Edit: another one captured by an old thread!
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors — walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful. Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I think he's trying to say that having resources is a prerequisite to spending them on moral things like universal pay, so we need to pursue wealth if we want to pursue morality. Technically, economic progress is more of a prerequisite to moral progress than a sufficient cause though, as economic progress can also result in bad moral outcomes depending on what we do with our wealth.
ETA: That would mean the removal of three objects from the list of planets of Sol.
Do distinct planets necessarily have distinct orbits?
I was curious why the Baudrillard comment was downvoted when it expresses the same idea as the Nietzsche comment, it just uses a different style and approaches the problem from a different direction. Ideas, anyone?
I said:
there can be problems depending on how you define "immortal"
You replied:
Immortal humans can go horribly wrong
I am well aware that this wish has major risks as worded. I was responding to the claim that "you can't use that tool to solve that problem."
Yes, obviously you wish for maximised utility. But that requires the genie to understand your utility.
"Increase my utility as much as you can"?
That would just cause them to pump chemicals in you head, I think. But it's definitely thinking in the right direction.
"number of dying humans" is really what you want to minimize.
Even with pseudo immortality, accidents happen, which means that the best way to minimize the number of dying humans is either to sterilize the entire species or to kill everyone. The goal shouldn't be to minimize death but to maximize life.
...Overwrite my current utility function upon your previous motivational n
...From my purist position, everything scientists say, qua scientists, can only be true or false or somewhere in between. No other criteria besides the truth should matter or be applied in evaluating scientific theories or conclusions. They cannot be “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” or “offensive” or any other adjective. Even if they are labeled as such, it doesn’t matter. Calling scientific theories “offensive” is like calling them “obese”; it just doesn’t make sense. Many of my own scientific theories and conclusions are deeply offensive to me, b
To clarify the quote contains several useful interpretations, but I think the key one is the virtue of keeping one's identity small.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
The deliberate sabotage of threads? How cute will it be if he destroys the whole forum?
That's more technically problematic; how could non-human animals vote in the existing kinds of elections? Human intermediaries would have to decide what was best for the non-humans they represented. Different human political factions would support different positions as being best for the non-humans, and fight over that.
(This of course doesn't apply to future possible non-human sentients like AI, uploads, uplifted animals, modified humans, etc.)
How about wishing for enough judgment to make wishes that you won't regret? Additional clause: the genie isn't allowed to deteriorate your mental capacities below their current level.
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
This worked for me in Google Reader: http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=aristosophy
You don't think you should discourage others from hurting you? I think that seems sort of obvious. Now, if you could somehow give a person a strong incentive to help you/ not hurt, while simultaneously granting them a shitload of happiness, that seems ideal. This doesn't really exclude that, it's just on the positive side of doing/ being done unto.
You could have something have infinite value and something else have finite value. Since this has an infinitesimal chance of actually mattering, it's a silly thing to do. I was just pointing out that you could assign something infinite utility and have it make sense.
How are you defining morality? If we use a shorthand definition that morality is a system that guides proper human action, then any "true moral dilemmas" would be a critique of whatever moral system failed to provide an answer, not proof that "true moral dilemmas" existed.
We have to make some choice. If a moral system stops giving us any useful guidance when faced with sufficiently difficult problems, that simply indicates a problem with the moral system.
ETA: For example, if I have completely strict sense of ethics based upon deontology, I may feel an absolute prohibition on lying and an absolute prohibition on allowing humans to die. That would create an moral dilemma for that system in the classical case of Nazis seeking Jews that I'm hiding in my house. So I'd have to switch to a different ethical system. If I switched to a system of deontology with a value hierarchy, I could conclude that human life has a higher value than telling the truth to governmental authorities under the circumstances and then decide to lie, solving the dilemma.
I strongly suspect that all true moral dilemmas are artifacts of the limitations of distinct moral systems, not morality per se. Since I am skeptical of moral realism, that is all the more the case; if morality can't tell us how to act, it's literally useless. We have to have some process for deciding on our actions.
I'm not: I anticipate that your answer to my question will vary on the basis of what you understand morality to be.
Would it? It doesn't follow from that definition that dilemmas are impossible. This:
... (read more)