Hello! I call myself Atomliner. I'm a 23 year old male Political Science major at Utah Valley University.
From 2009 to 2011, I was a missionary for the Mormon Church in northeastern Brazil. In the last month I was there, I was living with another missionary who I discovered to be a closet atheist. In trying to help him rediscover his faith, he had me read The God Delusion, which obliterated my own. I can't say that book was the only thing that enabled me to leave behind my irrational worldview, as I've always been very intellectually curious and resistant to authority. My mind had already been a powder keg long before Richard Dawkins arrived with the spark to light it.
Needless to say, I quickly embraced atheism and began to read everything I could about living without belief in God. I'm playing catch-up, trying to expand my mind as fast as I can to make up for the lost years I spent blinded by religious dogma. Just two years ago, for example, I believed homosexuality was an evil that threatened to destroy civilization, that humans came from another planet, and that the Lost Ten Tribes were living somewhere underground beneath the Arctic. Needless to say, my re-education process has ...
Welcome to LW! Don't worry about some of the replies you're getting, polls show we're overwhelmingly atheist around here.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Thank you! :)
Good for you! You might want to watch out for assuming that everyone had a similar experience with religion; many theists will fin this very annoying and this seems to be a common mistake among people with your background-type.
I apologize. I had no idea I was making this false assumption, but I was. I'm embarrassed.
I'm curious, could you expand on what you found so convincing in The God Delusion?
I replied to JohnH about this. I don't know if I could go into a lot of detail on why it was convincing, it was almost two years ago that I read it. But what really convinced me to start doubting my religion was when I prayed to God very passionately asking him whether or not The God Delusion was true and after I felt this tingly warm sensation telling me it was. I had done the same thing with The Book of Mormon multiple times and felt this same sensation, and I was told in church that this was the Holy Spirit telling me that it was true. I had been taught I could pray about anything and the Spirit would tell me whether or not it was true. After being told by the Spirit that The God Delusion was true, I decided that the only explanation is that what I thought of as the Spirit was just happening in my head and that it wasn't a sure way of finding knowledge. It was a very dramatic experience for me.
Aloha.
My name is Sandy and despite being a long time lurker, meetup organizer and CFAR minicamp alumnus, I've got a giant ugh field around getting involved in the online community. Frankly it's pretty intimidating and seems like a big barrier to entry - but this welcome thread is definitely a good start :)
IIRC, I was linked to Overcoming Bias through a programming pattern blog in the few months before LW came into existence, and subsequently spent the next three months of my life doing little else than reading the sequences. While it was highly fascinating and seemed good for my cognitive health, I never thought about applying it to /real life/.
Somehow I ended up at CFAR's January minicamp, and my life literally changed. After so many years, CFAR helped me finally internalize the idea that /rationalists should win/. I fully expect the workshop to be the most pivotal event in my entire life, and would wholeheartedly recommend it to absolutely anyone and everyone.
So here's to a new chapter. I'm going to get involved in this community or die trying.
PS: If anyone is in the Kitchener/Waterloo area, they should definitely come out to UW's SLC tonight at 8pm for our LW meetup. I can guarantee you won't be disappointed!
Hello, Less Wrong; I'm Laplante. I found this site through a TV Tropes link to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about this time last year. After I'd read through that as far as it had been updated (chapter 77?), I followed Yudkowsky's advice to check out the real science behind the story and ended up here. I mucked about for a few days before finding a link to yudkowsky.net, where I spent about a week trying learn what exactly Bayes was all about. I'm currently working my way through the sequences, just getting into the quantum physics sequence now.
I'm currently in the dangerous position of having withdrawn from college, and my productive time is spent between a part-time job and this site. I have no real desire to return to school, but I realize that entry into any sort of psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science field without a Bachelor's degree - preferably more - is near impossible.
I'm aware that Yudkowsky is doing quite well without a formal education, but I'd rather not use that as a general excuse to leave my studies behind entirely.
My goals for the future are to make my way through MIRI's recommended course list, and the dream is to do my own research in a related field. We'll see how it all pans out.
my productive time is spent between a part-time job and this site.
Perhaps I'm reading a bit much into a throwaway phrase, but I suggest that time spent reading LessWrong (or any self-improvement blog, or any blog) is not, in fact, productive. Beware the superstimulus of insight porn! Unless you are actually using the insights gained here in a measureable way, I very strongly suggest you count LessWrong reading as faffing about, not as production. (And even if you do become more productive, observe that this is probably a one-time effect: Continued visits are unlikely to yield continual improvement, else gwern and Alicorn would long since have taken over the world.) By all means be inspired to do more work and smarter work, but do not allow the feeling of "I learned something today" to substitute for Actually Doing Things.
All that aside, welcome to LessWrong! We will make your faffing-about time much more interesting. BWAH-HAH-HAH!
My standard advice to all newcomers is to skip the quantum sequence, at least on the first reading. Or at least stop where the many worlds musings start. The whole thing is way too verbose and controversial for the number of useful points it makes. Your time is much better spent reading about cognitive biases. If you want epistemology, try the new sequence.
Bad advice for technical readers. Mihaly Barasz (IMO gold medalist) got here via HPMOR but only became seriously interested in working for MIRI after reading the QM sequence.
Do you have a solid idea of how many technical readers get here via HPMOR but become disinterested in working for MIRI after reading the QM sequence? If not, isn't this potentially just the selection effect?
I have a phd in physics (so I have at least some technical skill in this area) and find the QM sequence's argument for many worlds unconvincing. You lead the reader toward a false dichotomy (Copenhagen or many worlds) in order to suggest that the low probability of copenhagen implies many worlds. This ignores a vast array of other interpretations.
Its also the sort of argument that seems very likely to sway someone with an intro class in college (one or two semesters of a Copenhagen based shut-up-and-calculate approach), precisely because having seen Copenhagen and nothing else they 'know just enough to be dangerous', as it were.
For me personally, the quantum sequence threw me into some doubt about the previous sequences I had read. If I have issues with the area I know the most about, how much should I trust the rest? Other's mileage may vary.
I have a phd in physics (so I have at least some technical skill in this area) and find the QM sequence's argument for many worlds unconvincing.
Actually, attempting to steelman the QM Sequence made me realize that the objective collapse models are almost certainly wrong, due to the way they deal with the EPR correlations. So the sequence has been quite useful to me.
On the other hand, it also made me realize that the naive MWI is also almost certainly wrong, as it requires uncountable worlds created in any finite instance of time (unless I totally misunderstand the MWI version of radioactive decay, or any emission process for that matter). It has other issues, as well. Hence my current leanings toward some version of RQM, which EY seems to dislike almost as much as his straw Copenhagen, though for different reasons.
For me personally, the quantum sequence threw me into some doubt about the previous sequences I had read.
Right, I've had a similar experience, and I heard it voiced by others.
As a result of re-examining EY's take on epistemology of truth, I ended up drifting from the realist position (map vs territory) to an instrumentalist position (models vs inputs&outputs...
Carl often hears about, anonymizes, and warns me when technical folks outside the community are offended by something I do. I can't recall hearing any warnings from Carl about the QM sequence offending technical people.
That sounds like reasonable evidence against the selection effect.
Bluntly, if shminux can't grasp the technical argument for MWI then I wouldn't expect him to understand what really high-class technical people might think of it.
I strongly recommend against both the "advises newcomers to skip the QM sequence -> can't grasp technical argument for MWI" and "disagrees with MWI argument -> poor technical skill" inferences.
I'm just kind of surprised the QM part worked, and it's possible that might be due to Mihaly having already taken standard QM so that he could clearly see the contrast between the explanation he got in college and the explanation on LW.
I'm no IMO gold medalist (which really just means I'm giving you explicit permission to ignore the rest of my comment) but it seems to me that a standard understanding of QM is necessary to get anything out of the QM sequence.
It's a pity I'll probably never have time to write up TDT.
Revealed preferences are rarely attractive.
Revealed preferences are rarely attractive.
Adds to "Things I won't actually get put on a T-shirt but sort of feel I ought to" list.
with 100% certainty, no less, Bayes be damned
Is this an April Fool's joke? He says nothing of the kind. The post which comes closest to this explicitly says that it could be wrong, but "the rational probability is pretty damned small." And counting the discovery of time-turners, he's named at least two conceivable pieces of evidence that could change that number.
What do you mean when you say you "just don't put nearly as much confidence in it as you do"?
Sure, your site, your rules.
Just to correct a few inaccuracies in your comment:
You disagree with MWI.
I don't, I just don't put nearly as much confidence in it as you do. It is also unfortunately abused on this site quite a bit.
nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer.
I don't even warn every newcomer who mentions the QM sequence, let alone "every newcomer", only those who appear to be stuck on it. Surely Mihaly had no difficulties with it, so none of my warnings would interfere with "still want the next Mihaly to read the QM Sequence".
nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer.
I don't even warn every newcomer who mentions the QM sequence, let alone "every newcomer"
The claim you made that prompted the reply was:
My standard advice to all newcomers is to skip the quantum sequence, at least on the first reading.
It is rather disingenuous to then express exaggerated 'let alone' rejections of the reply "nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer".
Hmm, the above got a lot of upvotes... I have no idea why.
Egalitarian instinct. Eliezer is using power against you, which drastically raises the standards of behavior expected from him while doing so---including less tolerance of him getting things wrong.
Your reply used the form 'graceful' in a context where you would have been given a lot of leeway even to be (overtly) rude. The corrections were portrayed as gentle and patient. Whether the corrections happen to be accurate or reasonable is usually almost irrelevant for the purpose of determining people's voting behavior this far down into a charged thread.
Note that even though I approve of Eliezer's decision to delete comments of yours disparaging the QM sequence to newcomers I still endorse your decision to force Eliezer to use his power instead of deferring to his judgement simply because he has the power. It was the right decision for you to make from your perspective and is also a much more desirable precedent.
I deliberately invoke this tactic on occasion in arguments on other people's turf, particularly where the rules are unevenly applied. I was once accused by an acquaintance who witnessed it of being unreasonably reasonable.
It's particularly useful when moderators routinely take sides in debates. It makes it dangerous for them to use their power to shut down dissent.
If it is as right as it is insightful (which it undeniably is), I would expect those who come across wedifid's explanation to go back and change their vote, resulting in %positive going sharply down.
A quirk (and often a bias) humans have is that we tend to assume that just because a social behavior or human instinct can be explained it must thereby be invalidated. Yet everything can (in principle) be explained and there are still things that are, in fact, noble. My parents' love for myself and my siblings is no less real because I am capable of reasoning about the inclusive fitness of those peers of my anscestors that happened to love their children less.
In this case the explanation given was, roughly speaking "egalitarian instinct + politeness". And personally I have to say that the egalitarian instinct is one of my favorite parts of humanity and one of the traits that I most value in those I prefer to surround myself with (Rah foragers!).
All else being equal the explanation in terms of egalitarian instinct and precedent setting regarding authority use describes (what I consider to be) a positive picture and in itself is no reason to downvote. (The comment deserves to...
If you learned quantum mechanics from that book, you may have seriously mislearned it. It's actually pretty decent describing everything up to but excluding quantum physics. When it comes to QM, however, the author sacrifices useful understanding in favor of mysticism.
It's a forum where taking atheism for granted is widespread, and the 10% of non-atheists have some idea of what the 90% are thinking. Being atheist isn't part of the official charter, but you can make a function call to atheism without being questioned by either the 10% or the 90% because everyone knows where you're coming from. If I was on a 90% Mormon forum which theoretically wasn't about Mormonism but occasionally contained posters making function calls to Mormon theology without further justification, I would not walk in and expect to be able to make atheist function calls without being questioned on it. If I did, I wouldn't be surprised to be downvoted to oblivion if that forum had a downvoting function. This isn't groupthink; it's standard logical courtesy. When you know perfectly well that a supermajority of the people around you believe X, it's not just silly but logically rude to ask them to take Y as a premise without defending it. I would owe this hypothetical 90%-Mormon forum more acknowledgement of their prior beliefs than that.
I regard all of this as common sense.
I like your use of "function calls" as an analogy here, but I don't think it's a good idea; you could just as easily say "use concepts from" without alienating non-programmer readers.
I'm a male senior in high school. I found this site in November or so, and started reading the sequences voraciously.
I feel like I might be a somewhat atypical LessWrong reader. For one, I'm on the young side. Also, if you saw me and talked to me, you would probably not guess that I was a "rationalist" from the way I act/dress but, I don't know, perhaps you might. When I first found this website, I was pretty sure I wanted to be an art major, now I'm pretty sure I want to be an art/comp sci double major and go into indie game development (correlation may or may not imply causation). I also love rap music (and not the "good" kind like Talib Kweli) and I read most of the sequences while listening to Lil Wayne, Lil B, Gucci Mane, Future, Young Jeezy, etc. I occasionally record my own terrible rap songs with my friends in my friend's basement. Before finding this site, the word "rational" had powerful negative affect around it. Science was far and away my least favorite subject in school. I have absolutely no interest at the moment in learning any science or anything about science, except for maybe neuroscience, and maybe metaphysics. I've always found t...
The one basically follows from the other, I think. This isn't a reactionary site by any means; the last poll showed single-digit support for the philosophy here, if it's fair to consider it a political philosophy exclusive with liberalism, libertarianism, and/or conservatism. However, neoreaction/Moldbuggery gets a less hostile reception here than it does on most non-reactionary sites, probably because it's an intensely contrarian philosophy and LW seems to have a cultural fondness for clever contrarians, and we have do have several vocal reactionaries among our commentariat. Among them, perhaps unfortunately, are most of the people talking about race.
It's also pretty hard to dissociate neoreaction from... let's say "certain hypotheses concerning race", since "racism" is too slippery and value-laden a term and most of the alternatives are too euphemistic. The reasons for this seem somewhat complicated, but I think we can trace a good chunk of them to just how much of a taboo race is among what Moldbug calls the Cathedral; if your basic theory is that there's this vast formless cultural force shaping what everyone can and can't talk about without being brande...
Some people might object to calling racism-1 racism, and instead will decide to call it "human biodiversity" or "race realism". I think this is bullshit. Just fucking call it what it is.
"What it fucking is" is a straw man. ie. "and that certain races have more or less desirable characteristics than others" is not what the people you are disparaging are likely to say, for all that it is vaguely related.
Own up to your beliefs.
Seeing this exhortation used to try to shame people into accepting your caricature as their own position fills me with the same sort of disgust and contempt that you have for racism. Failure to "own up" and profess their actual beliefs is approximately the opposite of the failure mode they are engaging in (that of not keeping their mouth shut when socially expedient). In much the same way suicide bombers are not cowards.
Hello, I'm E. I'll be entering university in September planning to study some subset of {math, computer science, economics}. I found Less Wrong in April 2012 through HPMoR and started seriously reading here after attending SPARC. I haven't posted because I don't think I can add too much to discussions, but reading here is certainly illuminating.
I'm interested in self-improvement. Right now, I'm trying to develop better social skills, writing skills, and work ethic. I'm also collecting some simple data from my day-to-day activities with the belief that having data will help me later. Some concrete actions I am currently taking:
- Conditioning myself (focusing on smiling and positive thoughts) to enjoy social interaction. I don't dislike social interaction, but I'm definitely averse to talking to strangers. This aversion seems like it will hurt me long-term, so I'm trying to get rid of it.
- Writing in a journal every night. Usually this is 200-300 words of my thoughts and summaries of the more important events that happened. I started this after noticing that I repeatedly tried and failed to recall my thoughts from a few months or years ago.
- Setting daily schedules for myself. When I
Hi everyone. I have been lurking on this site for a long time, and somewhat recently have made an account, but I still feel pretty new here. I've read most of the sequences by now, and I feel that I've learned a lot from them. I have changed myself in some small ways as a result, most notably by donating small amounts to whatever charity I feel is most effective at doing good, with the intention that I will donate much more once I am capable of doing so.
I'm currently working on a Ph.D. in Mathematics right now, and I am also hoping that I can steer my research activities towards things that will do good. Still not sure exactly how to do this, though.
I also had the opportunity to attend my local Less Wrong meetup, and I have to say it was quite enjoyable! I am looking forward toward future interactions with my local community.
Hello!
I'm Jennifer; I'm currently a graduate student in medieval literature and a working actor. Thanks to homeschooling, though, I do have a solid background and abiding interest in quantum physics/pure mathematics/statistics/etc., and 'aspiring rationalist' is probably the best description I can provide! I found the site through HPMoR.
Current personal projects: learning German and Mandarin, since I already have French/Latin/Spanish/Old English/Old Norse taken care of, and much as I personally enjoy studying historical linguistics and old dead languages, knowing Mandarin would be much more practical (in terms of being able to communicate with the greatest number of people when travelling, doing business, reading articles, etc.)
Hi!
I’ve been interested in how to think well since early childhood. When I was about ten, I read a book about cybernetics. (This was in the Oligocene, when “cybernetics” had only recently gone extinct.) It gave simple introductions to probability theory, game theory, information theory, boolean switching logic, control theory, and neural networks. This was definitely the coolest stuff ever.
I went on to MIT, and got an undergraduate degree in math, specializing in mathematical logic and the theory of computation—fields that grew out of philosophical investigations of rationality.
Then I did a PhD at the MIT AI Lab, continuing my interest in what thinking is. My work there seems to have been turned into a surrealistic novel by Ken Wilber, a woo-ish pop philosopher. Along the way, I studied a variety of other fields that give diverse insights into thinking, ranging from developmental psychology to ethnomethodology to existential phenomenology.
I became aware of LW gradually over the past few years, mainly through mentions by people I follow on Twitter. As a lurker, there’s a lot about the LW community I’ve loved. On the other hand, I think some fundamental, generally-accepted ideas her...
Hey everyone!
I'm ll, my real name is Lukas. I am a student at a technical university in the US and a hobbyist FOSS programmer.
I discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality accidentally one night, and since then I've been completely hooked on it. After I caught up, I decided to check out the Less Wrong community. I've been lurking since then, reading the essays, comments, hanging out in the IRC channel.
Hey, my name is Roman. You can read my detailed bio here, as well as some research papers I published on the topics of AI and security. I decided to attend a local LW meet up and it made sense to at least register on the site. My short term goal is to find some people in my geographic area (Louisville, KY, USA) to befriend.
I think most everyone at MIRI and FHI thinks boxing is a good thing, even if many would say not enough on its own. I don't think you will find many who think that open internet connections are a matter of indifference for AI developers working with powerful AGI.
High-grade common sense (the sort you'd get by asking any specialist in computer security) says that you should design an AI which you would trust with an open Internet connection, then put it in the box you would use on an untrusted AI during development. (No, the AI will not be angered by this lack of trust and resent you. Thank you for asking.) I think it's safe to say that for basically everything in FAI strategy (I can't think of an exception right now) you can identify at least two things supporting any key point, such that either alone was designed to be sufficient independently of the other's failing, including things like "indirect normativity works" (you try to build in at least some human checks around this which would shut down any scary AI independently of your theory of indirect normativity being remotely correct, while also not trusting the humans to steer the AI because then the humans are your single point of failure).
Hi everyone, my name is Sara!
I am 21, live in Switzerland and study psychology. I am fascinated with the field of rationality and therefore wrote my Bachelor thesis on why and how critical thinking should be taught in schools. I started out with the plan to get my degree in clinical- and neuropsychology but will now change to developmental psychology for I was able to fascinate my supervising tutor and secure his full support. This will allow me to base my Master project on the development and enhancing of critical thinking and rationality, too. Do you have any recommendations?
After my Master's degree I still intend on getting an education as therapist (money reasons) or going into research (pushing the experimental research on rationality) and on giving a lot of money to the most effective charities around. I wonder if as therapist it would be smarter to concentrate on children or adults; both fields will be open for me after my university education (which will take me about 2.5-3 more years). I speak German, Swiss German, Italian, French and English (and understand some more languages), which will give me some freedom in the choice where to actually work in future.
...but I'm not ...
If people have a problem with it, that's not my fault.
It might or it might not be. As a general rule, if two people think that a single issue of fact is a settled question, in different directions, then either they have access to different information, or one or both of them is incorrect.
If the former is the case, then they can share their information, after which either they will agree, or one or both will be incorrect.
If we're incorrect about religion being a settled question, we want to know that, so we can change our minds. If Mormonism is incorrect, do you want to know that?
Hi,
I'm a final year Mathematics student at Cambridge coming from an IOI, IMO background. I've written software for a machine learning startup, a game dev startup and Google. I was recently interested in programming language theory esp. probabilistic and logic programming (some experiments here http://peteriserins.tumblr.com/archive).
I'm interested in many aspects of startups (including design) and hope to move into product management, management consulting or venture capital. I love trying to think rationally about business processes and have started to write about it at http://medium.com/@p_e .
I found out about LW from a friend and have since started reading the sequences. I hope to learn more about practical instrumental rationality, I am less interested in philosophy and the meta theory. So far I've learned more about practical application of mathematics from data science and consulting, but expect rationality to take it further and with more rigor.
Great meeting y'all
Lumifer, please update that at this moment you don't grok the difference between "A => B (p=0.05)" and "B => A (p = 0.05)", which is why you don't understand what p-value really means, which is why you don't understand the difference between selection bias and base rate neglect, which is probably why the emphasis on using Bayes theorem in scientific process does not make sense to you. You made a mistake, that happens to all of us. Just stop it already, please.
And don't feel bad about it. Until recently I didn't understand it too, and I had a gold medal from international mathematical olympiad. Somehow it is not explained correctly at most schools, perhaps because the teachers don't get it themselves, or maybe they just underestimate the difficulty of proper understanding and the high chance of getting it wrong. So please don't contibute to the confusion.
Imagine that there are 1000 possible hypotheses, among which 999 are wrong, and 1 is correct. (That's just a random example to illustrate the concept. The numbers in real life can be different.) You have an experiment that says "yes" to 5% of the wrong hypotheses (this is what p=0.05 means), and a...
Hi, I'm Andrew, a college undergrad in computer science. I found this site through HPMOR a few years ago.
Hi everyone, I'm Chris. I'm a physics PhD student from Melbourne, Australia. I came to rationalism slowly over the years by having excellent conversations with like minded friends. I was raised a catholic and fully bought into the faith, but became an atheist in early high school when I realised that scientific explanations made more sense.
About a year ago I had a huge problem with the collapse postulate of quantum mechanics. It just didn't make sense and neither did anything anyone was telling me about it. This led me to discover that many worlds wasn't as crazy as it had been made out to be, and led me to this very community. My growth as a rationalist has made me distrust the consensus opinions of more and more groups, and realising that physicists could get something so wrong was the final nail in the coffin for my trust of the scientific establishment. Of course science is still the best way to figure things out, but as soon as opinions become politicised or tied to job prospects, I don't trust scientists as far as I can throw them. Related to this is my skepticism that climate change is a big deal.
I am frustrated more by the extent of unreason in educated circles than I am in...
I'm pretty social and would love to meet more rationalist friends, but I have the perception that if I went to a meetup most people would be less extroverted than me, and it might not be much fun for me.
My experience at meetups has been pretty social. After all, meetups select for people outgoing enough to go out of the house in the first place. I'd encourage you to go once, if there's a convenient meetup around. The value of information is high; if the meetup sucks, that costs one afternoon, but if it's good, you gain a new group of friends.
Greetings.
I'm a long-time singularitarian and (intermediate) rationalist looking be a part of the conversation again. By day I am an English teacher in a suburban American high school. My students have been known to Google me. Rather than self-censor I am using a pseudonym so that I will feel free to share my (anonymized) experiences as a rationalist high school teacher.
I internet-know a number of you in this community from early years of the Singularity Institute. I fleetingly met at a few in person once, perhaps. I used to write on singularity-related issues, and was a proud "sniper" of the SL4 mailing list for a time. For the last 6-7 years I've mostly dropped off the radar by letting "life" issues consume me, though I have continued to follow the work of the key actors from afar with interest. I allow myself some pride for any small positive impact I might have once had during a time of great leverage for donors and activists, while recognizing that far too much remains undone. (If you would like to confirm your suspicions of my identity, I would love to hear from you with a PM. I just don't want Google searches of my real name pulling up my LW acti...
Hi Less Wrong. I found a link to this site a year or so ago and have been lurking off and on since. However, I've self identified as a rationalist since around junior high school. My parents weren't religious and I was good at math and science, so it was natural to me to look to science and logic to solve everything. Many years later I realize that this is harder than I hoped.
Anyway, I've read many of the sequences and posts, generally agreeing and finding many interesting thoughts. It's fun reading about zombies and Newcomb's problem and the like.
I guess this sounds heretical, but I don't understand why Bayes theorem is placed on such a pedestal here. I understand Bayesian statistics, intuitively and also technically. Bayesian statistics is great for a lot of problems, but I don't see it as always superior to thinking inspired by the traditional scientific method. More specifically, I would say that coming up with a prior distribution and updating can easily be harder than the problem at hand.
I assume the point is that there is more to what is considered Bayesian thinking than Bayes theorem and Bayesian statistics, and I've reread some of the articles with the idea of trying to pin that down, but I've found that difficult. The closest I've come is that examining what your priors are helps you to keep an open mind.
My biggest concern with the label 'Bayesianism' isn't that it's named after the Reverend, nor that it's too mainstream. It's that it's really ambiguous.
For example, when Yvain speaks of philosophical Bayesianism, he means something extremely modest -- the idea that we can successfully model the world without certainty. This view he contrasts, not with frequentism, but with Aristotelianism ('we need certainty to successfully model the world, but luckily we have certainty') and Anton-Wilsonism ('we need certainty to successfully model the world, but we lack certainty'). Frequentism isn't this view's foil, and this philosophical Bayesianism doesn't have any respectable rivals, though it certainly sees plenty of assaults from confused philosophers, anthropologists, and poets.
If frequentism and Bayesianism are just two ways of defining a word, then there's no substantive disagreement between them. Likewise, if they're just two different ways of doing statistics, then it's not clear that any philosophical disagreement is at work; I might not do Bayesian statistics because I lack skill with R, or because I've never heard about it, or because it's not the norm in my department.
There's a su...
Hi folks, I'm Peter. I read a lot of blogs and saw enough articles on Overcoming Bias a few years ago that I was aware of Yudkowsky and some of his writing. I think I wandered from there to his personal site because I liked the writing and from there to Less Wrong, but it's long enough ago I don't really remember. I've read Yudkowsky's Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don't have). They're annoyingly disorganized - I realize they were originally written as an interwoven hypertext, but for long material I prefer reading linear silos, then I can feel confident I've read everything without getting annoyed at seeing some things over and over. Being confused by their organization when nobody else seems to be also contributes to the feeling in my last paragraph below.
I signed up because I had a silly solution to a puzzle, but I've otherwise hesitated to get involved. I feel I've skipped across the surface of LessWrong; I subscribe to a feed that only has a couple posts per week and haven't seen anything better. I'm aware there are pages with voting, but I'm wary of the ...
I'm also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him.
Yeah, it's a problem. I'd even go so far as to say that it's a cognitive hazard, not just a PR or recruitment difficulty: if you've got only one person at the clear top of a status hierarchy covering some domain, then halo effects can potentially lead to much worse consequences for that domain than if you have a number of people of relatively equal status who occasionally disagree. Of course there's also less potential for infighting, but that doesn't seem to outweigh the potential risks.
There was a long gap in substantive posts from EY before the epistemology sequence, and I'd hoped that a competitor might emerge from that vacuum. Instead the community seems to have branched; various people's personal blogs have grown in relative significance, but LW has stayed Eliezer's turf in practice. I haven't fully worked out the implications, but they don't seem entirely good, especially since most of the community's modes of social organization are outgrowths of LW.
On a conceptual level, is there more to QM than the Uncertainty Principle and Wave-Particle Duality?
Yes. Very yes. There are several different ways to get at that next conceptual level (matrix mechanics, the behavior of the Schrödinger equation, configuration spaces, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics, to name ones that I know at least a little about), but qualitative descriptions of the Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's Cat, Wave-Particle Duality, and the Measurement Problem do not get you to that level.
Rejoice—the reality of quantum mechanics is way more awesome than you think it is, and you can find out about it!
Hi, I'm Denise from Germany, I just turned 19 and study maths at university. Right now, I spend most of my time with that and caring for my 3-year-old daughter. I know LessWrong for almost two years now, but never got around to write. However, I'm more or less involved with parts of the LessWrong and the Effective Altruism community, most of them originally found me via Okcupid (I stated I was a LessWrongian), and from there, it expanded.
I grew up in a small village in the middle of nowhere in Germany, very isolated without any people to talk to. I skipped a grade and did extremely well at school, but was mostly very unhappy during my childhood/teen years. Though I had free internet access, I had almost no access to education until I was 15 years old (and pregnant, and no, that wasn't unplanned), because I had no idea what to look for. I dropped out of school then and prepared for the exams -when I had time (I was mostly busy with my child)- I needed to do to be allowed to attend university. In Germany that's extremely unusual and most people don't even know you can do it without going to school.
When I was 15, I discovered enviromentalism (during pregnancy, via people who share m...
This is not an atheist forum, in much the same way that it is not an a-unicorn-ist forum. Not because we do not hold a consistent position on the existence of unicorns, but because the issue itself is not worth discussing. The data has spoken, and there is no reason to believe in them. Whatever. Let's move on to more important things like anthropics and the meta-ethics of Friendly AI.
So I'm going to write about a) my arguments in favor or religion, though I don't feel they are sufficient and I want to improve them, and b) why I don't fully accept the LW way of thinking.
I'm still thinking about it, and will be until I post to the Discussion...
I expect this is a bad idea. The post will probably get downvoted, and might additionally provoke another spurt of useless discussion. Lurk for a few more months instead, seeking occasional clarification without actively debating anything.
I regard atheism as a slam-dunk issue, but I wouldn't walk into a Mormon forum and call atheism a settled question. 'Twould be logically rude to them.
Hi,
i have been lurking around here mostly for (rational) self help. Some info about me.
Married. Work at India office of a top tier tech company. 26 y/o
between +2 and +2.5 SD IQ . crystallized >> fluid . Extremely introspective and self critical. ADHD / Mildly depressed most of my life. Have hated 'work' most of my life.
Zero visual working memory (One - Two items with training). Therefore struggling with programming computers and not enjoying it. Can write short programs and solve standard interview type questions. Can't build big functional pieces of software
Tried to self medicate two years back .Overdosed on modafinil + piracetam. in ER. 130+ heart rate for 8 hours. induced panic disorder. As of today, Stimulant use out of question therefore.
Familiar with mindfulness meditation and spiritual philosophy.
Its quite clear that i can't build large pieces of software. Unsure as to what productive use i can be with these attributes.
Thanks
Hello, Less Wrong; I'm so glad I found you.
A few years ago a particularly fruitful wikiwalk got me to a list of cognitive biases (also fallacies). I read it voraciously, then followed the sources, found out about Kahneman and Tversky and all the research that followed. The world has never quite been the same.
Last week Twitter got me to this sad knee-jerk post on Slate, which in a few message-board-quality paragraphs completely missed the point of this thought experiment by Steve Landsburg, dealing with the interesting question of crimes in which the only harm to the victims is the pain from knowing that they happened. The discussion there, however, was refreshingly above average, and I'll be forever grateful to LessWronger "Henry", who posted a link to the worst argument in the world - which turned out to be a practical approach to a problem I had been thinking about and trying to condense into something useful in a discussion (I was going toward something like "'X-is-horrible-and-is-called-racism' turning into 'We-call-Y-racism-therefore-it's-horrible'").
Since then I've been looking around and it feels... feels like I've finally found my species after a lifet
...I don't feel [my arguments in favor of religion] are sufficient and I want to improve them
I know you've heard this from several other people in this thread, but I feel it's important to reiterate: this seems to be a really obvious case of putting the cart before the horse. It just doesn't make sense to us that you are interested only in finding arguments that bolster a particular belief, rather than looking for the best arguments available in general, for all the beliefs you might choose among.
I'm not asking you to respond to this right now, but please keep it firmly in mind for your Discussion post, as it's probably going to be the #1 source of disagreement.
I'm a college student studying music composition and computer science. You can hear some of my compositions on my SoundCloud page (it's only a small subset of my music, but I made sure to put a few that I consider my best at the top of the page). In the computer science realm, I'm into game development, so I'm participating in this thing called One Game A Month whose name should be fairly self-explanatory (my February submission is the one that's most worth checking out - the other 2 are kind of lame...).
For pretty much as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed pondering difficult/philosophical/confusing questions and not running away from them, which, along with having parents well-versed in math and science, led me to gradually hone my rationality skills over a long period of time without really having a particular moment of "Aha, now I'm a rationalist!". I suppose the closest thing to such a moment would be about a year ago when I discovered HPMoR (and, shortly thereafter, this site). I've found LW to be pretty much the only place where I am consistently less confused after reading articles about difficult/philosophical/confusing questions than I am before.
Hi, I am Olga, female, 40, programmer, mother of two. Got here from HPMoR. Can not as yet define myself as a rationalist, but I am working on it. Some rationality questions, used in real life conversations, have helped me to tackle some personal and even family issues. It felt great. In my "grown-up" role I am deeply concerned to bring up my kids with their thoughts process as undamaged as I possibly can and maybe even to balance some system-taught stupidity. I am at the start of my reading list on the matter, including LW sequences.
Hello, my name is Lisa. I found this site through HPMOR.
I'm a Georgia Tech student double majoring in Industrial Engineering and Psychology. I know I want to further my education after graduation, probably through a PhD. However, I'm not entirely sure what field I would want to focus on.
I've been lurking for awhile and am slowly making my way through the sequences, though I'm currently studying abroad so I'm not reading particularly quickly. I'm particularly interested in behavioral economics, statistics, evolutionary psychology, and in education policy, especially in higher education.
Hello everyone!
I've read occasional OB and LW articles and other Yudkowsky writings for many years, but never got into it in a big way until now.
My goal at the moment is to read the Quantum Physics sequence, since quantum physics has always seemed mysterious to me and I want to find out if its treatment here will dispel some of my confusion. I've spent the last few days absorbing the preliminaries and digressing into many, many prior articles. Now the tabs are finally dwindling and I am almost up to the start of the sequence!
Anyway, I have a question I didn't see in the FAQ. Given that I went on a long, long, long wiki walk and still haven't read very much of the core material, how big is Less Wrong? Has anyone done word counts on the sequences, or anything like that?
Hello there, everyone! I am Osiris, and I came here at the request of a friend of mine. I am familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and spent some time reading through the articles here. Everythin' here is so interesting! I studied to become a Russian Orthodox Priest in the early nineties, and moved to the USA from the Russian Federation at the beginning of the W. Bush Administration. The change of scenery inspired me, and within the first year, I had become an atheist and learned everything I could about biology, physics, and modern philosophy. Today, I am a philosophy/psychology major at a local college, and work to change the world one little bit at a time.
Though I tend to be a bit of a poet, I hope I can find a place here. In particular, I am interested in thinking of morality and the uses of mythology in daily life.
I value maintaining and increasing diversity, and plan on posting a few things which relate to this as soon as possible. I am curious to see how everyone will react to my style of presentation and beliefs.
Hi everyone,
I'm a humanities PhD who's been reading Eliezer for a few years, and who's been checking out LessWrong for a few months. I'm well-versed in the rhetorical dark arts, due to my current education, but I also have a BA in Economics (yet math is still my weakest suit). The point is, I like facts despite the deconstructivist tendency of humanities since the eighties. Now is a good time for hard-data approaches to the humanities. I want to join that party. My heart's desire is to workshop research methods with the LW community.
It may break protocol, but I'd like to offer a preview of my project in this introduction. I'm interested in associating the details of print production with an unnamed aesthetic object, which we'll presently call the Big Book, and which is the source of all of our evidence. The Big Book had multiple unknown sites of production, which we'll call Print Shop(s) [1-n]. I'm interested in pinning down which parts of the Big Book were made in which Print Shop. Print Shop 1 has Tools (1), and those Tools (1) leave unintended Marks in the Big Book. Likewise with Print Shop 2 and their Tools (2). Unfortunately, people in the present don't know which Print Shop...
I'm interested in associating the details of print production with an unnamed aesthetic object, which we'll presently call the Big Book, and which is the source of all of our evidence.
It's the Bible, isn't it.
Print Shop 1 has Tools (1), and those Tools (1) leave unintended Marks in the Big Book. Likewise with Print Shop 2 and their Tools (2). Unfortunately, people in the present don't know which Print Shop had which Tools. Even worse, multiple sets of Tools can leave similar Marks.
How can you possibly get off the ground if you have no information about any of the Print Shops, much less how many there are? GIGO.
I'm far from an expert in Bayesian methods, but it seems already that there's something missing here.
Have you considered googling for previous work? 'Bayesian inference in phylogeny' and 'Bayesian stylometry' both seem like reasonable starting points.
That's a hell of a summary, thanks!
I'm glad you mentioned the repair cycle of tools. There are some tools that are regularly repaired (let's just call them "Big Tools") and some that aren't ("Little Tools"). Both are expensive at first and to repair, but it seems the Print Shops chose to repair Big Tools because they were subject to breakage that significantly reduced performance.
I should add another twist since you mentioned sheets of known origins: Assume that we can only decisively assign origins to single sheets. There are two problems stemming from this assumption: first, not all relevant Marks are left on such sheets; second, very few single sheet publications survive. Collations greater than one sheet are subject to all of the problems of the Big Book.
I'm most interested in the distinction between unsupervised and supervised learning. And I will very likely PM you to learn more about machine learning. Again, thanks for your help!
EDIT: I just noticed a mistake in your summary. Each sheet is produced by a set of tools, not a single tool. Each mark is produced by a single tool.
because I haven't wrapped it up in condescending niceties?
Being nice is important.
If that's still too ambiguous to render an opinion, what isn't?
Kindergarten level insults like "Mormon sort-of-rhymes with Moron" aren't just an expression of opinion. Mormon would be sort-of-rhyming with Moron, even if Mormonism had been true. What you instead expressed is a cutesy and juvenile way of insulting someone: "The mormon is a moron, the mormon is a moron, hahahaha!"
I found HPMOR nearly three years ago. Soon afterward, I finished the core sequences up through the QM sequence, read some of Eliezer's other posts, and other sequences and authors on LW. When I look back, I realize my thinking has been hugely influenced by what I have learned from this community. I cannot even begin to draw boundaries in my mind identifying what exactly came from LW; hopefully this means I have internalized the ideas and that I am actually using what I learned.
There is a story behind why I have now, after three years of lurking, finally created an account. I am currently a sophomore in high school. I have always been driven to learn by my curiosity and desire for truth and knowledge. But I am also a perfectionist and an overachiever. Somehow, in the last two years of high school, I began to latch onto academics as my “goal.” I started obsessing about ridiculous things - getting perfect scores on every assignment and test, guarding my perfect GPA, etc. It wasn't enough anymore that I understood the content without needing to study - I had to devote huge amounts of time and energy to achieve "perfection."
In March, over spring break, I returned to make some ...
Hi everyone,
I'm a PhD student in artificial intelligence/robotics, though my work is related to computational neuroscience, and I have strong interests in philosophy of mind, meta-ethics and the "meaning of life". Though I feel that I should treat finishing my PhD as a personal priority, I like to think about these things. As such, I've been working on an explanation for consciousness and a blueprint for artificial general intelligence, and trying to conceive of a set of weighted values that can be applied to scientifically observable/measurable/calculable quantities, both of which have some implications for an explanation of the "meaning" of life.
At the center of the value system I'm working on is a broad notion of "information". Though still at preliminary stages, I'm considering a hierarchy of weights for the value of different types of information, and trying to determine how bad this is as a utility function. At the moment, I consider the preservation and creation of all information valuable; at an everyday level I try to translate this into learning and creating new knowledge and searching for unique, meaningful experiences.
I've been aware of Le...
Greetings, LessWrongers. I call myself Intrism; I'm a serial lurker, and I've been hiding under the cupboards for a few months already. As with many of my favorite online communities, I found this one multiple times, through Eliezer's website, TVTropes, and Methods of Rationality (twice), before it finally stuck. I am a student of computer science, and greatly enjoy the discipline. I've already read many of the sequences. While I can't say I've noticed an increase in rationality since I've started, I have made some significant progress on my akrasia, including recently starting on an interesting but unknown LW-inspired technique which I'll write up once I have a better idea of how well it's performing.
How important are scholarly credentials vs just having that knowledge without a diploma?
I think in almost every field and occupation, having the scholarly credentials is extremely important. Knowledge without the credentials is pretty worthless (unless its worthwhile in itself, but even then you can't eat it): using that knowledge will generally require that people put trust in your having it, often when they're not in a position to evaluate how much you know (either because they're not experts, or they don't have the time). Credentials are generally therefore the basis of that trust. Since freelance work either requires more trust, or pays very badly and inconsistently, credentials are worth getting.
And that was the point of my previous post: some way or other, you have to earn people's trust that you can do a job worth paying you for. One way to earn that trust is to perform well despite lacking credentials. This will take an enormous amount of time and effort (during which you will not be paid, or at least not well) compared to doing whatever it takes to get as close to a 4.0 as you can. The faster you get people to trust you, the faster you can stop fighting to feed and she...
I said from the start that I didn't have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn't help meI said "but there must be some out there."
This is a very odd epistemic position to be in.
If you expect there to be strong evidence for something, that means you should already strongly believe it. Whether or not you will find such evidence or what it is, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is why do you have that strong belief now? What strong evidence do you already posses that leads you to believe this thing?
If you haven't got any reason to believe a thing, then it's just like all the other things you don't have reason to believe, of which there are very many, and most of them are false. Why is this one different?.
The correct response, when you notice that a belief is unsupported, is to say oops and move on. The incorrect response is to go looking specifically for confirming evidence. That is writing the bottom line in the wrong place, and is not a reliable truth-finding procedure.
Also, "debate style" arguments are generally frowned upon around here. Epistemology is between you and God, so to speak. Do your thing, collect your evidence, come to your conclusions. This community is here to help you learn to find the truth, not to debate your beliefs.
I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God
May I ask what you expected evidence against the existence of God to have looked like?
Doesn't this argument Prove Too Much by also showing that without a Metagod, God should be expected to have arbitrary and random governing principles? The universe is ordered, but trying to explain that by appealing to an ordered God begs the question of what sort of ordered Metagod constructed the first one.
Suffering, now; suffering is a harder problem to deal with. Which leads around to the question - what is the purpose of the universe? If suffering exists, and God exists, then suffering must have been put into the universe on purpose. For what purpose? A difficult and tricky question.
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless. You can do it with anything, and it's an interesting exercise in creative thinking to come up with a defence of propositions such as that the earth is flat, that war is good for humanity, or that you're Jesus. (Also known as retconning.) But it is not a way of arriving at the truth of anything.
What your outcome pump has come up with is:
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for its long-term effects on the human psyche.
War really is good for humanity! But what then is the optimal amount of suffering? Just the amount we see? More? Less?
I expect that the answer is that the omniscience and omnibenevolence of God imply that what we see is indeed just...
You are fixating on atheism for some reason. Assigning low probability to any particular religion, and only a marginally higher probability to some supernatural creator still actively shaping the universe results naturally from rationally considering the issue and evaluating the probabilities. So do many other conclusions. This reminds me of the creationists picking a fight against evolution, whereas they could have picked a fight against Copernicanism, the way flat earthers do.
Actually, the behavior Risto_Saarelma described fits the standard pattern. People who cannot be helped are ignored or rejected. Take any stable community, online or offline, and that's what you see.
For example, f someone comes to, say, the freenode ##physics IRC channel and starts questioning Relativity, they will be pointed out where their beliefs are mistaken, offered learning resources and have their basic questions answered. If they persist in their folly and keep pushing crackpot ideas, they will be asked to leave or take it to the satellite off-topic channel. If this doesn't help, they get banned.
Again, this pattern appears in every case where a community (or even a living organism) is viable enough to survive.
Saluton! I'm an ex-mormon athiest, a postgenderist, a conlanging dabbler, and a chronic three-day monk.
Looking at the above posts (and a bunch of other places on the net), I think ex-mormons seem to be more common than I thought they would be. Weird.
I'm a first-year college student studying only core/LCD classes so far because every major's terrible and choosing is scary. Also, the college system is madness. I've read lots of posts on the subject of higher education on LessWrong already, and my experience with college seems to be pretty common.
I discovered LessWrong a few months ago via a link on a self-help blog, and quickly fell in love with it. The sequences pretty much completely matched up with what I had come up with on my own, and before reading LW I had never encountered anyone other than myself who regularly tabooed words and rejected the "death gives meaning to life" argument et cetera. It was nice to find out that I'm not the only sane person in the world. Of course, the less happy side of the story is that now I'm not the sanest person in my universe anymore. I'm not sure what I think about that. (Yes, having access to people that are smarter than me ...
IIRC the standard experimental result is that atheists who were raised religious have substantially above-average knowledge of their former religions. I am also suspicious that any recounting whatsoever of what went wrong will be greeted by, "But that's not exactly what the most sophisticated theologians say, even if it's what you remember perfectly well being taught in school!"
This obviously won't be true in my own case since Orthodox Jews who stay Orthodox will put huge amounts of cumulative effort into learning their religion's game manual over time. But by the same logic, I'm pretty sure I'm talking about a very standard element of the religion when I talk about later religious authorities being presumed to have immensely less theological knowledge than earlier authorities and hence no ability to declare earlier authorities wrong. As ever, you do not need a doctorate in invisible sky wizard to conclude that there is no invisible sky wizard, and you also don't need to know all the sophisticated excuses for why the invisible sky wizard you were told about is not exactly what the most sophisticated dupes believe they believe in (even as they go on telling children abo...
Alright. Hi. I'm a senior in high school and thinking about majoring in Computer Science. Unlike most other people my age, this is probably my first post on any chat forum/ wiki/ blog. I also don't normaly type things without a spell checker and would like to get better. Any coments about my spelling or anything else would be appriciated.
My brother showed me this site a while back and also HP:MoR. Spicificly, I saw the Sequences. And they were long. Some of them were some-what interesting but mostly they were just long. In addition to that, I had just been introduced to the Methods of Rationality which, dispite being long, was realy interisting (actualy my favorite story that I have ever read), and there was some other things, so yeah . . . I still haven't read them. But anyway, that was about a year ago and at this point I have read through MoR at least three times. I feel that I am starting to think sort of rationaly and would like to improve on that.
In addition to that, I have this friend that I talk to at lunch. Normaly we talk about things that we probably don't have any ideas about that actualy reflect reality, like the origins of the universe, time travel, artificial intel...
Hi everyone, I'm labachevskij. I'm a long time lurker on this site, attracted by (IIRC) Bayesian Decision Theory. I'm completing my PhD studies in Maths, but I have also been caught by HPMOR, which is proving a huge source of procrastination (I'm reading it again for the third time). I'm also on my way with the reading of the sequences.
carefully evaluating both sides of an issue
Are we ever allowed to say "okay, we have evaluated this issue thoroughly, and this is our conclusion; let's end this debate for now"? Are we allowed to do it even if some other people disagree with the conclusion? Or do we have to continue the debate forever (of course, unless we reach the one very specific predetermined answer)?
Sometimes we probably should doubt even whether 2+2=4. But not all the time! Not even once in a month. Once or twice in a (pre-Singularity) lifetime is probably more than necessary. -- Well, it's very similar for the religion.
There are thousands of issues worth thinking about. Why waste the limited resources on this specific topic? Why not something useful... such as curing the cancer, or even how to invent a better mousetrap?
Most of us have evaluated the both sides of this issue. Some of us did it for years. We did it. It's done. It's over. -- Of course, unless there is something really new and really unexpected and really convincing... but so far, there isn't anything. Why debate it forever? Just because some other people are obsessed?
Hello! I’m a 15 year old sophomore in high school, living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was introduced to rationality and Less Wrong while interning at Leverage Research, which was about a month ago.
I was given a free copy of Chapters 1-17 of HPMOR during my stay. I was hooked. I finished the whole series in two weeks and made up my mind to try and learn what it would be like being Harry.
I decided to learn rationality by reading and implementing The Sequences in my daily life. The only problem was, I discovered the length of the Eliezer’s posts from 2006-2010 was around around 10 Harry Potter books. I was told it would take months to read, and some people got lost along the way due to all the dependencies.
Luckily I am very interested in self improvement, so I decided that I should learn speed reading to avoid spending months dedicated solely to reading The Sequences. After several hours of training, I increased my reading speed (with high comprehension) five times, from around 150 words per minute to 700 words per minute. At that speed, it will take me 33.3 hours to read The Sequences.
It seems like most people advise reading The Sequences in chronological order in ebook form. I...
If I could spend 5 seconds to a minute after each blog post doing anything, what should I do?
Figure out how you would explain the main idea of the post to a smart friend.
Hello, Less Wrong, I'm Anna Zhang, a high school student. I found this site about half a month ago, after reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. On Mr. Yudkowsky's Wikipedia page, I found a link to his site, where I found a link to this site. I've been reading the sequence How to Actually Change Your Mind, as Mr. Yudkowsky recommended, and I've learned a lot from it (though I still have a lot to learn...)
I'm going to unify a couple comment threads here.
Perhaps it's not fair of me to ask for your evidence without providing any of my own. However I really don't want to just become the irrational believer hopelessly trying to convince everyone else.
Honestly, I think you'd be coming across as much more reasonable if you were actually willing to discuss the evidence than you do by skirting around it. There are people here who wouldn't positively receive comments standing behind evidence that they think is weak, but at least some people would respect your willingness to engage in a potentially productive conversation. I don't think anyone here is going to react positively to "There's some really strong evidence, and I'm not going to talk about it, but you really ought to have come up with it already yourself."
Will Newsome gets like that sometimes, and when he does, his karma tends to plummet even faster than yours has, and he's built up a lot of it to begin with.
If you want to judge whether our inability to provide "good" arguments really is due to our lack of familiarity with the position we're rejecting, then there isn't really a better way than to expose us to ...
Discovered while researching the global effects of a Pak-Indo nuclear exchange. Once here I began to dig further and found it appealing. I am a simple soldier pushing myself into a Masters in biology. Am I rationalist? I am not sure to be honest. If I am I know the exact date and time when I started to become one. Nov 2004 I was part of the battle of Fallujah, during an exchange of gunfire a child was injured. I will never know if it was one my rounds that caused her head injury but my lips worked to bring her life again. It was a futile attempt, she passed and while clouded with this damn experience I myself was wounded. At that very moment I lost my faith in any loving deity. My endless pursuit of knowledge, to include academics provided by a brick and mortar school has helped me recover from the loss of a limb. I still have the leg however it does not function well. I like to think and philosophy fascinates me, and this site fascinates me. :) Political ideology- Fiscally Conservative Religion-possibilian Rather progressive on issues like gay marriage and abortion. Abortion actually the act I despise but as a man I feel somehow that I haven't the organs to complain. To sum me up I suppose I am a crippled, tobacco chewing, gun toting member of the Sierra Club with a future as a freshwater biologist with memories I would like to replace with Bayes. LoL Well I just spilled that mess out, might as well hit post. Please feel free to ask anything you like, I am not sensitive. Open honesty to those that are curious is good medicine.
This is where you are confused. Almost certainly it is not the only confusion. But here is one:
Values are not claims. Goals are not propositions. Dynamics are not beliefs.
A machine that maximises paperclips can believe all true propositions in the world, and go on maximising paperclips. Nothing compels it to act any differently. You expect that rational agents will eventually derive the true theorems of morality. Yes, they will. Along with the true theorems of everything else. It won't change their behaviour, unless they are built so as to send those actions identified as moral to the action system.
If you don't believe me, I can only suggest you study AI (Thrun & Norvig) and/or the metaethics sequence until you do. (I mean really study. As if you were learning particle physics. It seems the usual metaethical confusions are quite resilient; in most peoples' cases I wouldn't expect them to vanish without actually thinking carefully about the data presented.) And, well, don't expect to learn too much from off-the-cuff comments here.
Hi. I'm a computer science student in Oulu University (Finland).
I don't remember exactly how I got here, but I guess some of the first posts I read were about counterarguments to religious delial of evolution.
I have been intrested in rationality (along with sciense and technology) for a long time before I found lesswrong, but back then my view of rationality was mostly that it was the opposite of emotion. I still dislike emotions - I guess that it's because they are so often "immune to reflection" (ie. persistently "out of sync" with what I know to be the right thing to do). However, I'm aware that emotions do have some information value (worse than optimal, but better than nothing) and simply removing emotions from human neuroarchitechture without other changes might result something functionally closer to a rock than a superhuman...
I'm an atheist and don't believe in non-physical entities like souls, but I still believe in eternal life. This unorthodox view is because 1) I'm a (sort of) "modal realist": I believe that every logically possible world actually physically exists (it's the simplest answer I've found to the question "Why does anything...
Hey Lesswrong.
This is a sockpuppet account I made for the purpose of making a post to Discussion and possibly Main, while obscuring my identity, which is important due to some NDAs I've signed with regards to the content of the post.
I am explicitly asking for +2 karma so that I can make the post.
Yo. I've been around a couple years, posted a few times as "ZoneSeek," re-registered this year under my real name as part of a Radical Honesty thing.
Hello LW. My pseudonym is DiscyD3rp, and this introduction is long overdo. I am 17, male, and currently enrolled in high school. I discovered this site over a year ago, via HPMoR, and have read a good percentage of the main sequences in a kinda correct order. However, i was experiencing significant angst from what I call Dungeon Crawl Anxiety (The same reason that when exploring RPG dungeons i double back and explore even AFTER discovering the correct path). I am now (re-)reading the entirety of Eliezer's posts in the ebook version of the sequences. I have found the re-read articles still useful after having gotten a basic handle on bayesian thought, and look forward to completing my enlightenment
As far as personality, I was (am) incredibly arrogant, and future goals involve MIRI and/or rationality teaching myself (one time involves an email to Eliezer claiming the ability to save the world, and subsequently learning that decision theory is HARD). I am not particularly talented in quickly absorbing technical fields of knowledge, but plan on on developing that skill. My existing talent seems to be manipulating idea and concepts easily and creatively once well understood. Im great at reading the map, but suffer difficulty in writing it. (In very mathy fields)
Im a born Christian, with a moderate upbringing, but likely saved from extremism by the internet just in time. Now a skeptic and an atheist.
Everyone here is expecting me to provide good arguments. I said from the start that I didn't have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn't help meI said "but there must be some out there."
Wait a minute.
You came here without any good reasons to believe in the truth of religion, and then were surprised when we, a group of (mostly) atheists, told you that we hadn't heard of any good reasons to believe in religion either?
I am honestly curious: what makes you think such good reasons exist? Why must there be some good arguments for religion out there? You, a religious person, have none, and you are (apparently?) still religious despite this.
P.S. For what it's worth, I hope you continue to participate in the discussion here, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and how your views have evolved.
Then you must believe the same with respect to homeopathic remedies, the flat earth society, and those who believe they can use their spiritual energy in the martial arts. Give us some good arguments for those.
There's a lot of stuff out there for which it seems to me there is no good argument. I mean really, let's try to maintain some sense of perspective here. The belief that everyone has a decent argument is, I think, pretty much demonstrably false. You presumably want us to believe that you're in the same category as people who ought to be taken seriously, but I don't really see how a belief in God is any more worthy of that than a belief in homeopathic remedies. At least, not based on your argument that all positions ought to be considered to have good arguments. If you're trying to make a general argument, you're going to get lumped in with them.
But you haven't showed much willingness so far to discuss your reasons for your belief in which way the evidence falls or ours.
I can understand not wanting to discuss a settled question with people who're too biased to analyze it reasonably, but if you're going to avoid discussing the matter here in the first place, it suggests to me that rather than concluding from your experience with us that we're rigid and closed-minded on the matter, you've taken it as a premise to begin with, otherwise where's the harm in discussing the evidence?
I consider the matter of religion to be a settled question because I've studied the matter well beyond the point of diminishing returns for interesting evidence or arguments. Are you familiar enough with the evidence that we're prepared to bring to the table that you think you could argue it yourself?
Just as I've been told repeatedly that your atheism is a foregone conclusion.
Can you point to where you've been told that?
What I think most of us would agree on, and what it seems to me that people here have told you, is that they consider atheism to be a settled question, which is not at all the same thing.
I never said that I considered people different than me to not be good. What I said in earlier comments is that I liked The God Delusion because it introduced me to the concept that you can be "a good, healthy, happy person without believing in God". I believed that those who did not have faith in God would be more likely to be immoral, would be more likely to be unhealthy, and would definitely be more unhappy than if they did believe in God. The book presented to me a case for how atheists can be just as moral, just as healthy, just as happy as theists, an argument I had never seen articulated before. I apologize that I had never conjured this idea up before reading The God Delusion, it just seemed obvious to me based on my study of the Gospel that they couldn't be.
What passages in the scriptures tell you that you can be moral, healthy, and happy without faith in God? It seems pretty consistent to me that in the scriptures they say you can only have those qualities in your life if you believe in God and follow his commandments.
...I fail to see how blood atonement, Adam-God, racist theology, and polygamist theology gave you the slightest impression that the Journal of Disc
My $0.02: the most valuable piece of information I get from open-ended introductions is typically what people choose to talk about, which I interpret as a reflection of what they consider important. For example, I interpret the way you describe yourself here as reflecting a substantial interest in how other people judge you.
Selectivity, in the relevant sense, is more than just a question of how many people are granted something.
How many people are not on that site, but could rank highly if they chose to try? I'm guessing it's far more than the number of people who have never taken part in the IMO, but who could get a gold medal if they did.
(The IMO is more prestigious among mathematicians than topcoder is among programmers. And countries actively recruit their best mathematicians for the IMO. Nobody in the Finnish government thought it would be a good idea to convince and train Linus Torvalds to take part in an internet programming competition, so I doubt Linus Torvalds is on topcoder.)
There certainly are things as selective or more than the IMO (for example, the Fields medal), but I don't think topcoder is one of them, and I'm not convinced about "plenty". (Plenty for what purpose?)
I made an account seven months ago, but I wasn't aware of the last welcome thread, so I guess I'll post on this one.
I'm not sure when I exactly "joined". My first contact with this community was passing familiarity with "Overcoming bias" as one of the blogs which sometimes got linked in the blogosphere I frequented in high school. As typical of my surfing habits in those days, I spent one or two sessions reading it for hours and then promptly forgot about all it. Second contact was a recommendation from another user on reddit to Lesswrong. Third contact was a few months later when my roommate recommended I read hpmor. I lurked for a short time, and made an account, and went to my first few meetups about two months ago. Meetups are fun, you meet lots of smart people, and I highly recommend it.
First impressions? I think this is the (for lack of a better word) most intellectual internet community that I am familiar with. Almost every post or comment is worth reading, and the site has got an addictive reddit-ish feel about it (which hampers my productivity somewhat, but que sera, sera.)
I've noticed that most of the opinions here tend to align precisely with my own...
Hello, my name is Cam :]
My goals in life are:
- To build a self sufficient farm I with renewable alternative energy and everything.
- Acquire financial assets to support the building of my farm and other hobbies and activities I pursue. 3 .To further my fitness and health and maintain it.
- Love and Romance.
That's pretty much it, hahaha, I want to learn the ways of a Rationalist to make the best decisions and solutions for problems I might encounter in pursuing these goals! I have a immature or childlike air around me, people tend to say, which is why I am ...
Hello Less Wrong community members,
My name is Zoe, I'm a philosophy student, and increasingly discombobulated by the inadequacy of my field of study to teach me how to Actually Do Things. I discovered Less Wrong 18 months ago, thanks to the story Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality. I've read a number of articles and discussions since then, mostly whenever I felt like reading something both intelligent and relevant, but I have not systematically read through any sequence or topic.
I have recently formed the goal to develop the skills necessary to 'ra...
Hello, my name is Watson. The username comes from my initials and a Left 4 Dead player attempting to pronounce them. I am a math student at UC Berkeley and a longtime lurker. I've got a post on rational investing, based on the conclusions of years of research by academic economists, but despite lurking I never realized there is a karma limit to post in discussion. I'm interested in just about everything, a dangerous phenomenon.
Hello to the Less Wrong community. My name is Leslie Cuthbert and I'm a lawyer based in the United Kingdom. I look forward to reading the various sequences and posts here.
There are many other intelligent and thoughtful people who disagree. Why -- epistemically, not historically -- do you place particular weight on your parents' beliefs? How did they come by those beliefs?
A sufficiently intelligent mind (and I think I can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent) can impose self-consistency and order on itself.
This begs Eliezer's question, I think. Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed, so by positing that God is sufficiently intelligent (and the bar for sufficiency here is pretty high), you're already sneaking in a bunch of unexplained orderliness. So in this particular case, no, I don't think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can't respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
I've now had an overwhelming request to hear my supposed strong arguments. It would be awfully lame of me to drop out now.
Just say "Oops" and move on. My point is that you almost certainly don't have good arguments, which is why your post won't be well-received. If it is so, it's better to notice that it is so in advance and act accordingly.
A rationalist ought to have heard arguments and evidence that challenged his (dis)beliefs, and have come out stronger because of it.
A rationalist
In Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points, Eliezer says:
There is a tradition of inquiry. But you only attack targets for purposes of defending them. You only attack targets you know you can defend.
In Modern Orthodox Judaism I have not heard much emphasis of the virtues of blind faith. You're allowed to doubt. You're just not allowed to successfully doubt.
The point being t...
Hi! I'm a 24 year old woman starting grad school this fall studying mathematics. Specifically I'm interested in mathematically modelling organizational decision making.
My parents raised me on Carl Sagan and Michael Shermer, so there was never really a point that I didn't identify as a rationalist. I discovered less wrong long enough ago that I don't actually remember how I found it. I've been lurking here for several years. I finally registered after doing the last survey, though I didn't make another post until the last few days.
Oh, and I have a talking c...
What I am wondering about is why it seems that atheists have complete caricatures of their previous theist beliefs.
Suppose there is diversity within a religion, on how much the sensible and silly beliefs are emphasized. If the likelihood of a person rejecting a religion is positively correlated with the religion recommending silly beliefs, then we should expect that the population of atheist converts should have a larger representation of people raised in homes where silly beliefs dominated than the population of theists. That is, standard evaporative c...
I've been browsing the site for at least a year. Found it through HP:MoR, which is absolutely amazing. I've been coming to the LessWrong study hall for a couple weeks now and have found it highly effective.
For the most part, I haven't really applied this at all. I ended up making a final break with Christianity, but the only significant difference is that I now say "Yay humanism!" instead of "Yay God!" I've used a few tricks here and there, like the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and the Planning Fallacy, but I still spent the majority of my time n...
Well, hello. I'm a first-year physics PhD student in India. Found this place through Yvain's blog, which I found when I was linked there from a feminist blog. It's great fun, and I'm happy I found a place where I can discuss stuff with people without anyone regularly playing with words (or, more accurately, where it's acceptable to stop and define your words properly). So, one of my favourite things about this place is the fact that it's based on the map to territory idea of truth and beliefs; I've been using it to insult people ever since I read it.
The po...
Hi,
I'm a philosopher (postdoc) at the London School of Economics who recently discovered Less Wrong. I am now reading through lots of old posts, especially Yudkowsky's and lukeprog's philosophy-related material, which I find very interesting.
I think lukeprog is right when he points out that the general thrust of Yudkowsky's philosophy belongs to a naturalistic tradition often associated with Quine's name. In general, I think it would be useful to situate Yudkowsky's ideas visavi the philosophical tradition. I hope to be able to contributre something here ...
Hi. I've been a distant LW lurker for a while now; I first encountered the Sequences sometime around 2009, and have been an avid HP:MOR fan since mid-2011.
I work in computer security with a fair bit of software verification as flavoring, so the AI confinement problem is of interest to me, particularly in light of recent stunts like arbitrary computation in zero CPU instructions via creative abuse of the MMU trap handler. I'm also interested in applying instrumental rationality to improve the quality and utility of my research in general. I flirt with some ...
Hello, I am a 46 yr old software developer from Australia with a keen interest in Artificial Intelligence.
I don’t have any formal qualifications, which is a shame as my ideal life would be to do full time research in AI - without a PhD I realise this won’t happen, so I am learning as much as I can through books, practice and various online courses.
I came across this site today from a link via MIRI and feel like I have struck gold - the articles, sequences and discussions here are very well written, interesting and thoughtful.
My current goals are to build a...
Hi, I'm Brayden, from Melbourne Australia. I attended the May 2013 CfAR workshop in Berkeley about 1 year after finding Less Wrong, and 2 years after finding HPMOR. My trip to The States was phenomenal, and I highly recommend the CfAR workshops.
My life is significantly better now than it was before, and I think I am on track with the planning process for eventually working on the highest impact causes that might help save the world.
Hello Less Wrong! I am Scott Garrabrant, a 23 year old math PhD student at UCLA, studying combinatorics. I discovered Less Wrong about 4 months ago. After reading MoR and a few sequences, I decided to go back and read every blog post. (I just finished all Eliezer's OB posts) I was going to wait and start posting after I got completely caught up, but then I started attending weekly meetups 2 months ago, and now I need to earn enough karma to make meetup announcements.
I have been interested in meta-thinking for a long time. I have spent a lot of time thinkin...
As a new member of this community, I am having a bit of difficulty with the numerous abbreviations that people use in their writing on this site. For example I have come across a number of these that are not listed on the Jargon page (eg: EY, PC, NPC, MWI...). I realize that as a new member, I will eventually understand many of these, however, it is very frustrating trying to read something and be continually distracted by having to look-up some of these obscure terms. This is especially a problem on the Welcome Thread, where a potential new member could ...
Hi, my name is Danon. I just joined less wrong after reading a wonderful post by Swimmer963: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9j1/how_i_ended_up_nonambitious/ on her reasoning for why she ended up without ambition (actually, I felt she had a lot of ambition). I got to her post while trying to figure out why I am lazy, I was wondering if it was because I had no (or little, if any) ambition. Her post got me asking the right questions I have finally been able to save a private draft in LW stating a reasoning for my laziness. It really is refreshing to read the posts here at LW. Thank you for having me.
I want to know what everyone thinks of my [response] to EY
I think it's confused.
If I were part of a forum that self-identified as Modern Orthodox Jewish, and a Christian came along and said "you should identify yourselves as Jewish and anti-Jesus, not just Jewish, since you reject the divinity of Jesus", that would be confused. While some Orthodox Jews no doubt reject the divinity of Jesus a priori, others simply embrace a religious tradition that, on analysis, turns out to entail the belief that Jesus was not divine.
Similarly, we are a for...
An always open mind never closes on anything. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance and all that...
Are you saying it's more rational not ever to consider some ways of thinking?
Yes. Rationality isn't necessarily about having accurate beliefs. It just tends that way because they seem to be useful. Rationality is about achieving your aims in the most efficient way possible.
Oh, someone may have to look into some ways of thinking, if people who use them start showing signs of being unusually effective at achieving relevant ends in some way. Those people would become super-dominant, it would be obvious that their way of thinking was superior. However, ther...
I tend to focus on the current authorized messengers from God and the Holy Spirit as I feel that is what I have been instructed to do.
Who authorizes messengers from God? It's not like He has a public key, after all...
Apparently I have just registered.
So, I have a question. What's an introduction do? What is it supposed to do? How would I be able to tell that I've introduced myself if I somehow accidentally willed myself to forget?
Well... I'm an engineering student who intends to graduate in electronics. I became interested in AI when I started learning programming at the age of 12. I became fascinated with what I could make the computer do. And rather naively I tried for months and months to program something that was "intelligent" (and failed horribly of course). I set that project aside temporarily but never stopped thinking about it. Years later I discovered HPMoR and through it LessWrong and suddenly found a whole community of people interested in AI and similar thing...
I know Mitchell Porter is likewise a physicist and he's not convinced at all either.
Mitchell Porter also advocates Quantum Monadology and various things about fundamental qualia. The difference in assumptions about how physics (and rational thought) works between Eliezer (and most of Eliezer's target audience) and Mitchell Porter is probably insurmountable.
Hello everyone, I'm Franz. I don't actually remember how I happened upon this site, but I do know it was rotting in my unsorted bookmark folder for over a year before I actually decided to read any post. This I do regret.
Because of circumstances I am currently in Brazil and due to a lack of internet infrastructure, I have to read the downloadable versions of the sequences and won't be able to comment often. I do enjoying reading your insightful thoughts!
I was wondering if anyone has directly applied EY methods to their own life? For what reason and what...
Hi Everyone! I'm AABoyles (that's true most places on the internet besides LW).
I first found LW when a colleague mentioned That Alien Message over lunch. I said something to the effect of "That sounds like an Arthur C. Clarke short story. Who is the author?" "Eliezer Yudkowsky," He said, and sent me the link. I read it, and promptly forgot about it. Fast forward a year, and another friend posts the link to HPMOR on Facebook. The author's name sounded very familiar. I read it voraciously. I subscribed to the Main RSS feed and lurked for ...
From the book's website:
Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough.
Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences? Close enough.
Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even ballpark.
I guess there is some tension between "narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion" and "willing to believe in anything"...
I'm a Swiss medical student. I've read HPMoR and a large part of the core sequences. I've attended LW meetups in several US cities and met quite a few of you in the Bay Area and/or at the Effective Altruism Summit. I've interned for Leverage Research. I co-founded giordano-bruno-stiftung.ch (outreach organisation with German translations of some LessWrong blog posts, and other posts about rationality). Looking forward to participating in the comment section more often.
Hi everyone,
I have been lurking LessWrong on and off for quite a while. I originally found this place through HPMoR; I thought the 'LessWrong' authorname was clever and it was nice to find out there was a whole community based around aiming to be less wrong! My tendency to overthink whatever I write has gotten in the way of actually taking part in the community so far though. Maybe now that I have gotten the introduction out of the way I'll be more likely to post.
A bit more about myself: I'm a student from the Netherlands, doing a masters in Artificial In...
Hello, Less Wrong! I'm Michael Odintsov from Ukraine, so sorry for my not-nearly-perfect :) English. Just like many here I found this site from Yudkowsky's link while reading his "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". I am 27 years old programmer, fond of science in general and mostly math of all kinds.
I worked a bit in fields of AI and machine learning and looking forward for new opportunities. Well... that's almost all that I can tell about me right now - never been a great talker :) If anyone have questions or need some help with CS related topics - just ask, I always ready to help.
I don't believe that rationality in general is incompatible with religious belief, but if this community thinks that their particular brand of rationality is, people like me would love to know that.
Might we not, instead, disagree with you about rationality in general being compatible with religious belief, rather than asserting that we have some special incompatible brand of rationality?
I think it that most of your problems with theists would go away if you clarified LW's actual position.
Do we really have "problems with theists"...?
Yes, but what I expected was...um...atheists who were better than most, who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
Bob Altemeyer asked college students about this, some of whom had a strong allegiance to 'traditional' authority and some less so:
...Interestingly, virtually everyone said she had questioned the existence of God at some time in her life. What did the authoritarian students do when this question arose? Most of all, they prayed for enlightenment. Secondly, they talked to their friends who believed in God. Or they talked with their
"Reason and Emotion are a tag team in decision making in ethical domains. They do their best work together."
That statement is too strong. I can think of several instances where certain emotions, especially negative ones, can impair decision making. It is reasonable to assume that impaired decision making can extend into making ethical decisions.
The first page of the paper linked below provides a good summary of when emotions, and what emotions, can be helpful or harmful in making decisions. I do acknowledge that some emotions can be helpful in...
Hi! I've been lurking here for maybe 6 months, and I wanted to finally step out and say hello, and thank you! This site has helped to shape huge parts of my worldview for the better and improved my life in general to boot. I just want to make a list of a few of the things I've learned since coming here which I never would have otherwise, as nearly as I can tell.
- I've dropped the frankly silly beliefs I held as an evangelical Christian; I wasn't as bad as most in that category but in hindsight that was just due to luck and strong logical skills. (I knew be
Hm.
OK.
So, I imagine the following conversation between two people (A and B):
A: It's absurd to say 'atheism is a kind of religion,'
B: Why?
A: Well, 'religion' is a word with an agreed-upon meaning, and it denotes a particular category of structures in the world, specifically those with properties X, Y, Z, etc. Atheism lacks those properties, so atheism is not a religion.
B: I agree, but that merely shows the claim is mistaken. Why is it absurd?
A: (thinks) Well, what I mean is that any mind capable of seriously considering the question 'Is atheism a religion?'...
Even now ethics in different parts of the world, and even between political parties, are different. You should know that more than most, having lived in two systems.
There's a ridiculous amount of similarity on anything major, though. If we pick ethics of first man on the moon, or first man to orbit the earth, it's pretty same.
...If it turns out that most space-faring civilizations have similar ethics, that would be good for us. But then also there would be a difference between "most widespread code of ethics" and "objectively correct code
I dispute its applicability, because I've known very smart Mormons. Humans are not logic engines. It's rare to find even a brilliant person who doesn't have some blind spot.
Even if it were clinically applicable, you presented it as an in-group vs. out-group joke, which is an invitation for people from one tribe to mock people from another tribe. Its message was not primarily informational.
Crocker's Rules are not an invitation to be rude.
Hello LW users, I use the alias Citizen 9-100 (nine one-hundred) but you may call me Nozz. This account will be shared between my sister and I, but we will sign it with the name of whoever is speaking. I would write more but I wrote a lot already but it didn't post due to a laptop error, so all I'll say for now is anything you'd like to know, feel free to ask, just make sure you clarify who your asking. BTW, for those interested, you may call my sister, any of the following, Sam, Sammy, Samantha, or any version of that :)
I don't recommend sharing an account. It will be confusing, and signatures are not customary here.
Hrm.
First, let me apologize pre-emptively if I'm retreading old ground, I haven't carefully read this whole discussion. Feel free to tell me to go reread the damned thread if I'm doing so. That said... my understanding of your account of existence is something like the following:
A model is a mental construct used (among other things) to map experiences to anticipated experiences. It may do other things along the way, such as represent propositions as beliefs, but it needn't. Similarly, a model may include various hypothesized entities that represent certa...
Hey! My name is Vinney, I'm 28 years old and live in New York City.
To be exceedingly brief: I've been working through the sequences (quite slowly and sporadically) for the past year and a half. I've loved everything I've seen on LW so far and I expect to continue. I hope to ramp up my study this year and finally get through the rest of the sequences.
I'd like to become more active in discussions but feel like I should finish the sequences first so I don't wind up making some silly error in reasoning and committing it to a comment. Perhaps that isn't an ideal approach to the community discussions, but I suspect it may be common..
Greetings!
I'm Brian. I'm a full-time police dispatcher and part-time graduate student in the marriage and family therapy/counseling master's degree program at the University of Akron (in northeast Ohio). Before I began studies in my master's program, I earned a bachelor's degree in emergency management. I am an atheist and skeptic. I think I can trace my earliest interest in rationality back to my high school days, when I began critically examining theism (generally) and Catholicism (in particular) while taking an elective religion class called "Q...
Hello LessWrong!
I found LessWrong, like so many others, through Methods of Rationality. I have lurked for at least two years now, since I discovered this website; I have read many of Eliezer's short stories and a few scattered posts of the Sequences. Eventually, I intend to get around to those and read them in a systematic fashion.... eventually.
I'm a computer science student, halfway through my life as an undergraduate at a certain institute of technology. I recently switched my main area of interest to theoretical computer science, after taking an excell...
Hi everyone! I've been lurking around here for a few years, but now I want to be more active in the great discussions that often occur on this site. I discovered Less Wrong about 4 years ago, but the Methods of Rationality fanfic brought me here as a more attentive reader. I've read some of the sequences, and found them generally to use clear reasoning to make great points. If nothing else, reading them has definitely made me think very carefully about the way nature operates and how we perceive it.
In fact, this site was my first exposure to cognitive bias...
Hello, everyone. I stumbled upon LW after listening to Eliezer make some surprisingly lucid and dissonance-free comments on Skepticon's death panel that inspired me to look up more of his work.
I've been browsing this site for a few days now, and I don't think I've ever had so many "Hey, this has always irritated me, too!" moments in such short intervals, from the rant about "applause lights" to the discussions about efficient charity work. I like how this site provides some actual depth to the topics it discusses, rather than hand the r...
I don't see how this is any different with what Richard Dawkins is doing with his claim.
You mean, Dawkins has latched onto atheism for irrational reasons and is generating whatever argument will sustain it, without regard to the evidence?
For anyone who has taken on the mantle of professional atheist, as Dawkins has, there is a danger of falling into that mode of argument. Do you have any reason to think he has in fact fallen?
Greetings Less Wrong Community. I have been lurking on the site for a year reading the articles and sequences and now feel I've cut down the inferential differences enough to contribute meaningful comments.
My goal here is to have clear thought and effective communication in all aspects of my life, with special attention to application in the work environment.
Above most else I value the 12th virtue of rationality. Focus on the goal, value the goal, everything else is a tool to achieve the goal. Like chess, you only need two pieces to win, the only purpose ...
I'll tell you what made me think that: I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was "Nah, there aren't any."
I'm not sure if anyone's brought this up yet, but one of the site's best-known contributors once ran a site dedicated to these sorts of things, though it does of course have a very atheist POV. That said, even there the arguments aren't amazingly convincing (which you can guess by the fact that lukeprog hasn't reconverted yet) though it does acknowledge that the other side ...
Told by someone other than myself, hopefully. While I do not expect to become a theist of any kind in the near future, neither do I intend to remain an atheist. Instead, I intend to hold a set of beliefs that are most likely to be true. If I gain sufficient evidence that the answer is "Jesus" or "Trimurti", then this is what I will believe.
So, if one is racist-1, how would one treat me?
Racist-1 reporting in. Believing that ethnicity is correlated with desirable or undesirable traits does not in itself warrant any particular kind of behavior. So how would I treat you? Like a person. If I had more evidence about you (your appearance, time spent with you, your interests, your abilities, etc), that would become more refined.
...Am I white, for appearing white? Am I Asian, for the overwhelming number of my ancestors' coloration? In other words, what makes race? My genetics, or my skin? If it is
Hi Less Wrong,
My name is Sean Welsh. I am a graduate student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch NZ. I was most recently a Solution Architect working on software development projects for telcos. I have decided to take a year off to do a Master's. My topic is Ethical Algorithms: Modelling Moral Decisions in Software. I am particularly interested in questions of machine ethics & robot ethics (obviously).
I would say at the outset that I think 'the hard problem of ethics' remains unsolved. Until it is solved, the prospects for any benign or fr...
Not programmed to, or programmed not to? If you can code up a solution to value drift, lets see it. Otherwise, note that Life programmes can update to implement glider generators without being "programmed to".
...with extremely low probability. It's far more likely that the Life field will stabilize around some relatively boring state, empty or with a few simple stable patterns. Similarly, a system subject to value drift seems likely to converge on boring attractors in value space (like wireheading, which indeed has turned out to be a problem...
I cannot speak to your private examples, but I think you may be reading that into what Politzer said.
Not me. This tip-off story had been talked about in the community for a long time, just never publicly until Politzer decided to carefully and tactfully state what he knew personally and avoid speculating on what might have transpired. The result itself, of course, was ripe for discovery, and indeed was discovered but glossed over by others before him. I mentioned this particular story because it's one of the most famous and most public ones. Of course, it might all be rumors and in reality there was no issue.
Yes. He said that I should be careful about sharing my project because, otherwise, I'll be reading about it in a journal in a few months. His warning may exaggerate the likelihood of a rival researcher and mis-value the expansion of knowledge, but I'm deferring to him as a concession of my ignorance, especially regarding rules of the academy.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
This is heavily context-dependent. Many fields are idea-rich and implementation-poor, in which case you do have to ram ideas down people's throats, because there's a glut of other ideas you have to compete against. But in fields that are implementation-rich and idea-poor, ideas should be guarded until you've implemented them. There are no doubt academic fields where the latter case applies.
Both realism¹ and relativism are false. Unfortunately this comment is too short to contain the proof, but there's a passable sequence on it.
¹ As you've defined it here, anyway. Moral realism as normally defined simply means "moral statements have truth values" and does not imply universal compellingness.
Hi there, denizens of Less Wrong! I've actually been lurking around here for a while (browsing furtively since 2010), and only just discovered that I hadn't introduced myself properly.
So! I'm Bluehawk, and I'll tell you my real name if and when it becomes relevant. I'm mid-20's, male, Australian, with an educational history in Music, Cinema Studies and Philosophy, and I'm looking for any jobs and experience that I can get with the craft of writing. My current projects are a pair of feature-length screenplays; one's in the editing/second draft stages, the o...
Why would a superintelligence be unable to figure that out..why would it not shoot to the top of the Kohlberg Hierarchy ?
Why would Clippy want to hit the top of the Kohlberg Hierarchy? You don't get more paperclips for being there.
Clippy's ideas of importance are based on paperclips. The most important vaues are those which lead to the acquiring of the greatest number of paperclips.
So, I assume that the LDS is managed by the Prophet, similarly to how the Catholic Church is managed by the Pope ?
If memory serves, the President of the (LDS) Church, his advisors, and the members of the church's senior leadership council (called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles) all hold the title of prophet -- specifically "prophet, seer, and revelator". That doesn't necessarily carry all the implications that "prophet" might outside of an Mormon context, though. One of the quirks of Mormonism is a certain degree of rank inflati...
I know that atheists can deal with a lot of prejudice from believers about why they are atheists so I would think that atheists would try and justify their beliefs based on the best beliefs and arguments of a religion and not extreme outliers for both, as otherwise it plays to the prejudice.
Really? It don't think it takes an exceptional degree of rationality to reject religion.
I suspect what you mean is that atheists /ought/ to justify their disbelief on stronger grounds than the silliest interpretation of their opponent's beliefs. Which is true, you sh...
I was not trying to justify my leaving the Mormon Church in saying I used to believe in the extraordinary interpretations I did. I just wanted to say that my re-education process has been difficult because I used to believe in a lot of crazy things. Also, I'm not trying to make a caricature of my former beliefs, everything I have written here about what I used to believe I will confirm again as an accurate depiction of what was going on in my head.
I think it is a misstatement of yours to say that these beliefs have "absolutely no relation to... anythi...
You are arguing with a strawman.
It's not a utility function over inputs, it's over the accuracy of models.
If I were a shminux-style rationalist, I would not choose to go to the holodeck because that does not actually make my current preferred models of the world more accurate. It makes the situation worse, actually, because in the me-in-holodeck model, I get misled and can't affect the stuff outside the holodeck.
Just because someone frames things differently doesn't mean they have to make the obvious mistakes and start killing babies.
For example, I could d...
[trap closes]
Don't do that. I think the rest of your post is fine, but this is not a debate-for-debate's-sake kind of place (and even if it were, that's not a winning move).
which omits every single point that goes in favour of e.g. non-realism, because they are too irrational or too stupid.
No, that set of posts goes on at some length about how MWI has not yet provided a good derivation of the Born probabilities.
The problems with Copenhagen are fundamentally one-world problems and they go along with any one-world theory. If I honestly believed that the only reason the QM sequence wasn't convincing was that I didn't go through every single one-world theory to refute them separately, I could try to write separate posts for RQM, Bohm, and so on, but I'm not convinced that this is the case. Any single-world theory needs either spooky action at a distance, or really awful amateur epistemology plus spooky action at a distance, and there's just no reason to even hypothesize single-world theories in the first place.
It is not worth writing separate posts for each interpretation. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that to the extent that the QM sequence matters at all it may be worth writing a single post which outlines how your arguments apply to the other interpretations. ie.:
- A brief summary of and a link to your arguments in favor of locality then an explicit mention of how this leads to rejecting "Ensemble, Copenhagen, de Broglie–Bohm theory, von Neumann, Stochastic, Objective collapse and Transactional" interpretations and theories.
- A brief summary of and a link to you
That inference isn't made. Eliezer has other information from which to reach that conclusion. In particular, he has several years worth of ranting and sniping from Shminux about his particular pet peeve.
That very well could be, in which case my recommendation about that inference does not apply to Eliezer.
I will note that this comment suggests that Eliezer's model of shminux may be underdeveloped, and that caution in ascribing motives or beliefs to others is often wise.
Hello community.
I've been aware of LW for a while, reading individual posts linked in programmer/engineering hangouts now and then, and I independently came across HPMOR in search of good fanfiction. But the decision to un-lurk myself came after I attended a CFAR workshop (a major positive life change) and realized that I want to keep being engaged with the community.
I'm very interested in anti-aging research (both from the effective altruism point of view, and because I find the topic really exciting and fascinating) and want to learn about it in as much ...
Hi I'm N. Currently a systems engineer. Lurked for sometime and finally decided to create an account. I am interested in mathematics and computer science and typography. Fonts can give me happiness or drive me crazy.
I am currently in SoCal.
This account is used by a VA to post events for the Melbourne Meetup group. Comment is to accrue 2 karma to allow posting.
I chose more_wrong as a name because I'm in disagreement with a lot of the lesswrong posters about what constitutes a reasonable model of the world. Presumably my opinions are more wrong than opinions that are lesswrong, hence the name :)
My rationalist origin story would have a series of watershed events but as far as I can tell, I never had any core beliefs to discard to become rational, because I never had any core beliefs at all. Do not have a use for them, never picked them up.
As far as identifying myself as an aspiring rationalist, the main events t...
My name is Morgan. I was brought here by my brother and have been lurking for awhile. I've have read most of the sequences which have cleared up some of my confused thinking. There were things that I didn't think about because I didn't have an answer for them. Free will and morality used to confuse me and so I never thought much about them since I didn't have a guarantee that they were answerable.
Lesswrong has helped me get back into programming. It has helped me learn to think about things with precision. And to understand how an Cognitive algorithm feels from the inside to dissolve questions.
I am going to join this community and improve my skills. Tsuyoku Naritai.
Hello,
I'm a 34 yo programmer/entrepreneur in Romania, with a long time interest in rationality - long before I called it by that name. I think the earliest name I had for it was "wisdom", and a desire to find a consistent, repeatable way to obtain it. Must admit at that time I didn't imagine it was going to be so complicated.
Spent some of my 20s believing I already know everything, and then I made a decision that in retrospect was the best I ever made: never to look at the price when I buy a book, but only at the likelihood of finishing it. Which...
Hello, LW,
One of my names is holist. I am 45. Self-employed family man, 6 kids, 2 dogs, 1 cat. Originally a philosopher (BA+MA from Sussex, UK), but I've been a translator for 19 years now... it is wearing thin. Music and art are also important parts of my life (have sold music, musically directed a small circus, have exhibited pictures), and recently, with dictatorship being established here in Hungary, politics seems increasingly urgent, too. I dabble in psychotherapy and call myself a Discordian. Recently, I started thinking about doing a PhD somewhere....
I am a celibate pedophile. That means I feel a sexual and romantic attraction to young girls (3-12) but have never acted on that attraction and never will. In some forums, this revelation causes strong negative reactions and a movement to have me banned. I hope that's not true here.
From a brief search, I see that someone raised the topic of non-celibate pedophilia, and it was accepted for discussion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/67h/the_phobia_or_the_trauma_the_probem_of_the_chcken/ Hopefully celibate pedophilia is less controversial.
I have developed views on ...
Assume that the reported p-values are true (and not the result of selection bias, etc.). Take a hundred papers which claim results at p=0.05. At the asymptote about 95 of them will turn out to be correct...
That's not how p-values work. p=0.05 doesn't mean that the hypothesis is 95% likely to be correct, even in principle; it means that there's a 5% chance of seeing the same correlation if the null hypothesis is true. Pull a hundred independent data sets and we'd normally expect to find a p=0.05 correlation or better in at least five or so of them, no ...
Take a hundred papers which claim results at p=0.05. At the asymptote about 95 of them will turn out to be correct and about 5 will turn out to be false.
No, they won't. You're committing base rate neglect. It's entirely possible for people to publish 2000 papers in a field where there's no hope of finding a true result, and get 100 false results with p 0.05).
If you understand the point there's no reason to make a comment like this except as an attempt to show off. Changing "250 IQ" to "+10 sd out from the mean intelligence" only serves to make the original point less accessible to people not steeped in psychometry.
I am a maximum-security ex-con who studied and used logic for pro se, civil-rights lawsuits. (The importance of being a maximum-security ex-con is that I was stubborn iconoclast who learned and used logic in all seriousness.) Logic helped me identify the weak links in my opponent's arguments and to avoid weak links in my own arguments, and logic helped my organize my writing and evidence. I also studied and learned to use “The Option Process” for eliminating my negative emotions and to understand other people's negative emotions. The core truth of “The...
Hey, I'm dirtfruit.
I've lurked here for quite a while now. LessWrong is one of the most interesting internet communities I've observed, and I'd like to begin involving myself more actively. I've been to one meetup, in NYC, a few months ago, which was nice. I've read most of the sequences (I think I've read all of them at least once, but I haven't looked hard enough to be super-confident saying that). HPMOR is cool, I enjoyed reading it and continue to check for updates. I've tried to read most of what Eliezer has written, but gave up early on anything extr...
Hi, I'm a second year engineering student at a university of California. I like engaging in rational discussions and find importance in knowing about what's going on in the world and gain more insight on controversial issues such as abortion, gay rights, sexuality, immigration, etc. Someone on Facebook directed me to this site but I easily get bored so I may or may not be much of a contribution.
Hi all, my name is Claus. I am unsure how exactly I got here, but I sure do know why I kept coming back. I'm so happy to have found such a large and confident group of like minded people.
Currently I am trying to finish some essays on Science and evidence based politics. I'm sure I will enjoy my stay here!
Hi everyone, I’m The Articulator. (No ‘The’ in my username because I dislike using underscores in place of spaces)
I found LessWrong originally through RationalWiki, and more recently through Iceman’s excellent pony-fic about AI and transhumanism, Friendship is Optimal.
I’ve started reading the Sequences, and made some decent progress, though we’ll see how long I maintain my current rate.
I’ll be attending University this fall for Electrical Engineering, with a desire to focus in electronics.
Prior to LW, I have a year’s worth of Philosophy and Ethics classes...
Hello, smart weird people.
I've been lurking on and off for a while but now it seems to be a good time to try playing in the LW fields. We'll see how it goes.
I'm interested in "correct" ways of thinking, obviously, but I'm also interested in their limits. The edges, as usual, are the most interesting places to watch. And maybe to be, if you can survive it.
No particular hot-burning questions at the moment or any specific goals to achieve. Just exploring.
I don't know what you think a "strong argument" is. Arguments are not weapons, with a certain caliber and stopping power and so forth, such that two sides might go at each other with their respective arguments, and whoever's got the most firepower wins. That's not how it works.
An argument may be more or less persuasive (relative to some audience!), but that depends on many things, such as whether the argument hits certain emotional notes, whether it makes use of certain common fallacies and biases, or certain commonly held misconceptions; or whet...
Chaosmosis has a few hundred karma now after dropping at least that deep, being accused of being a troll, and facing a number of suggestions that he leave. It's certainly not un-doable.
That is quite a hefty bullet to bite: one can no longer say that South Africa is better society after the fall of Apartheid, and so on.
That's hardly the best example you could have picked since there are obvious metrics by which South Africa can be quantifiably called a worse society now -- e.g. crime statistics. South Africa has been called the "crime capital of the world" and the "rape capital of the world" only after the fall of the Apartheid.
That makes the lack of moral progress in South Africa a very easy bullet to bite - I'd use something like Nazi Germany vs modern Germany as an example instead.
I generally understand the phrase "objective morality" to refer to a privileged moral reference frame.
It's not an incoherent idea... it might turn out, for example, that all value systems other than M turn out to be incoherent under sufficiently insightful reflection, or destructive to minds that operate under them, or for various other reasons not in-practice implementable by any sufficiently powerful optimizer. In such a world, I would agree that M was a privileged moral reference frame, and would not oppose calling it "objective morality", though I would understand that to be something of a term of art.
That said, I'd be very surprised to discover I live in such a world.
Yes, value drift is the typical state for minds in our experience.
Building a committed Clipper that cannot accidentally update its values when trying to do something else is only possible after the problem of value drift has been solved. A system that experiences value drift isn't a reliable Clipper, isn't a reliable good-thing-doer, isn't reliable at all.
Next.
I didn't say it was universal among all entities of all degrees of intelligence or rationality. I said there was a non neglible probability that agents of a certain level of rationality converging on an understanding of ethics.
Where does this non-negligible probability come from though? When I've asked you to provide any reason to suspect it, you've just said that as you're not arguing there's a high probability, there's no need for you to answer that.
..."SR" stands to super rational. Rational agents find rational arguments rationally compelli
I masquerade as a liberal Mormon on Facebook since I'm still in the closet with my unbelief. In my discussions with friends and family the most common position taken is that the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles cannot teach false doctrine or else they will be forcibly removed by God. I even had a former missionary companion tell me that President Gordon B. Hinckley died in 2008 not from old age (he was 98) but because he had made false statements on Larry King Live concerning the doctrine of exaltation in which worthy Latter-day Saints can become gods.
Fact-checking, via sources similar to Kawoomba's, leads to the milder claim that melanin in the skin merely provides protection against sunburn, and not immunity. Levels of melanin in the skin are very strongly correlated with race; though it is not strictly equivalent (albinism is possible among black people) it is reasonable to say that black people, in general, are more resistant to sunburn than white people.
Student of economics. Not going to write any more than that about myself at this point.
"To post to the Discussion area you must have at least 2 points." - I'd like to post something I've written, but I need two karma to do so.
New to LW... my wife re-ignited my long-dormant interest in AI via Yudkowski's Friendly AI stuff.
Is there a link somewhere to "General Intelligence and Seed AI"? It seems that older content at intelligence.org has gone missing. It actually went missing while my wife was in the middle of reading it online... very frustrating. Friendly AI makes a lot of references to it. Seems important to read it.
I'd prefer a PDF, if somebody knows where to find one.
Thanks!
So uhm. How do the experimental results, y'know, happen?
I think I understand everything else. Your position makes perfect sense. Except for that last non-postulate. Perhaps I'm just being obstinate, but there needs to be something to the pattern / regularity.
If I look at a set of models, a set of predictions, a set of experiments, and the corresponding set of experimental results, all as one big blob:
The models led to predictions - predictions about the experimental results, which are part of the model. The experiments were made according to the model th...
this model fails a number of tests
You are not using the word "tests" consistently in your examples. For luminiferous aether, test means something like "makes accurate predictions." Substituting that into your answer to wrong yields:
No, this model fails to make accurate predictions.
Which I'm having trouble parsing as an answer to the question. If you don't mean for that substitution to be sensible, then your parallelism does not seem to hold together.
But in deference to your statement here, I am happy to drop this topic if ...
There is a strong local convention against discussing topics for which certain positions are strongly enough affiliated with tribal identities that the identity-signalling aspects of arguments for/against those positions can easily interfere with the evidence-exploring aspects of those arguments. (Colloquially, "mindkilling" topics. as you say.)
That said, there's also a strong local convention against refraining from discussing topics just because such identity-signalling aspects exist.
So mostly, the tradition is we argue about what the traditio...
Your ball point is very different. My driving point is that there isn't even a nice, platonic-ideal type definition of particle IN THE MAP, let alone something that connects to the territory. I understand how my above post may lead you to misunderstand what I was trying to get it..
To rephrase my above comment, I might say: some of the features a MAP of a particle needs is that its detectable in some way, and that it can be described in a non-relativistic limit by a Schroedinger equation. The standard QFT definitions for particle lack both these features. Its also not-fully consistent in the case of charged particles.
In QFT there is lots of confusion about how the map works, unlike classical mechanics.
Interesting. If I may; what is it about technology/futurism you find so unappealing?
I think it would take a very long response to truly answer this, unfortunately. A lot of it has to do with exposing myself in the past through friends, media, and my surroundings to hippie-ish memeplexes that sort of reinforce this view. (Right now I go to school on a dairy farm, for example). Also in the past I had extremely irrational views on a lot of issues, one of which was a form of neo-luddism, and that idea is still in my brain somewhere.
...Also, I have to ask: w
Just wondering if you realize that you simply guessed the two-letter teacher's password ("SE") which acted perfectly as a curiosity stopper for you.
Hello,
I'd like to get some opinions about my future goals.
I'm 21 and I'm a second-year student of engineering in Prague, Czech Republic, focusing mainly on math and then physics.
My background is not stunning - I was born in 93, visiting sporting primary school and then general high school. Until I was in second year of high school, I behaved as an idiot with below-average results in almost everything, paradoxically except extraordinary "general study presupposes" (whatever it means). My not so bad IQ - according to IQ test I took when I was 15 ...
Hi everybody,
My name is Eric, and I'm currently finishing up my last semester of undergraduate study and applying to Ph.D. programs in cognitive psychology/cognitive neuroscience. I recently became interested in the predictive power offered by formal rational models of behavior after working in Paul Glimcher's lab this past summer at NYU, where I conducted research on matching behavior is rhesus monkeys. I stumbled upon Less Wrong while browsing the internet for behavioral economics blogs. After reading a couple of posts, I decided to join.
Some sample topi...
Hello, my name is Luke. I'm an urban planning graduate student at Cleveland State University, having completed an undergrad in philosophy at the University of New Hampshire a year ago. It was the coursework I did at that school which lead me to be interested in the nebulous and translucent topic of rationality, and I'm happy to see so many people involved and interested in the same conversations I'd spend hours having with classmates. Heck, the very question I was asking myself in something of an ontological sense--am I missing the trees for the forest--is...
G'day
As you can probably guess, I'm Alex. I'm a high school student from Australia and have been disappointed with the education system here from quite some time.
I came to LW via HPMoR which was linked to me by a fellow member of the Aus IMO team. (I seriously doubt I'm the only (ex-)Olympian around here - seems just the sort of place that would attract them). I've spent the past few weeks reading the sequences by EY, as well as miscellaneous other stuff. Made a few (inconsequential) posts too.
I have very little in the way of controversial opinions to off...
I did not find The Devil's Delusion to be persuasive/good at all. It's scientific quality is perhaps best summarized by noting that Berlinski is an opponent of evolution; I also recall that Berlinski spent an enormous amount of time on the (irrelevant) topic of whether some atheists had been evil.
ETA: Actually, now that I think about, The Devil's Delusion is probably why I tend to ignore or look down on atheists who spend lots of time arguing that God would be evil (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris)- I feel like they're making the same mistake, but on the opposite side.
Actually speaking the words activates different areas of Broca's and Wernicke's regions (and elsewhere) than merely imagining them. Physically vocalizing the words, and hearing yourself vocalize them, allows them to be processed by more areas of your brain.
Hello! I'm here because...well, I've read all of HPMOR, and I'm looking for people who can help me find the truth and become more powerful. I work as an engineer and read textbooks for fun, so hopefully I can offer some small insights in return.
I'm not comfortable with death. I've signed up for cryonics, but still perceive that option as risky. As a rough estimate, it appears that current medical research is about 3% of GDP and extends lifespans by about 2 years per decade. I guess that if medical research spending were increased to 30% of current GDP, the...
Hello again, Less Wrong! I'm not entirely new — I've been lurking since at least 2010 and I had an account for a while, but since that I've let that one lie fallow for almost two years now I thought I'd start afresh.
I'm a college senior, studying cognitive psychology with a focus on irrationality / heuristics and biases. In a couple of months I'll be starting my year-long senior thesis, which I'm currently looking for a specific topic for. I'm also a novice Python programmer and a dabbler in nootropics.
I'll be trying to avoid spending too unproductive time...
Hi, I'm Alex, high school student. Came here from hpmor and have been lurking for about 5 months for now.
I use my "rationalnoodles" nickname almost everywhere, however still can't decide if it's appropriate on LW. Would like to read what others think.
Thanks.
Hi there. I'm thrilled to find a community so dedicated to the seeking of rational truth. I hope to participate in that.
Hi...I'm Will -- I learned about less wrong through a very intelligent childhood friend. I am quite nearly his opposite - so maybe I shouldn't say anything...ever...and just stick to reading and learning. But It recommended leaving an introduction post. I also like this as a method of learning. I skimmed a few of the articles in the about page and enjoyed them...they provided a good deal of information that I believe I am much better at processing and understanding as opposed to creating. Therefore, I'm excited to see what I get out of this. I'm also...
How funny, I'm Will too! Just a quick & probably useless suggestion: be sure to be extremely honest with yourself about what it is all parts of you want, including the parts that want to play League of Legends. If you understand those parts and how they're a non-trivial part of you, not just an adversarial thing set up to subvert your prefrontal cortex's 'real' ambitions, that will allow you to find ways in which those parts can be satisfied that are more in line with your whole self's ambitions. E.g. the appeal of League of Legends is largely that you have understandable, objective goals that you can make measurable cumulative progress on, which is intrinsically rewarding—the parts of you that are tracking that intrinsic reward might be just as well rewarded by a sufficiently well-taskified approach to learning, say, piano, Japanese, programming, and other skills that are more likely to provide long-term esteem-worthy capital. Finding a way to taskify things in general might be tricky, and it won't itself be the sort of thing that you're likely to make unambiguous cumulative progress on, but it's meta and thus is a very good way to bootstrap to a position where further bootstrapping is easier and where you can hold on to momentum.
Dawkins's "the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument" strikes me as a case of this.
Dawkins has a case for drawing that conclusion. He is not merely pointing at the world and saying "Look! No God!" I have not actually read him beyond soundbites, merely know his reputation, so I can't list all the arguments he makes, but one of them, I know, is the problem of evil. The vast quantity of suffering in the world is absolutely what you would expect if there is no benevolent deity overseeing the show,...
I don't see how so.
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose -- but when I imagine the superbeing's absence it looks like the world around us.
When I try to ask the theists what the world would have looked like without God, I don't get very convincing answers.
Isn't this just the anthropic principle in action ? Mathematically speaking, the probability of "123456" is exactly the same as that of "632415" or any other sequence. We humans only think that "123456" is special because we especially enjoy monotonically increasing numbers.
Hello everyone.
I go by bouilhet. I don't typically spend much time on the Internet, much less in the interactive blogosphere, and I don't know how joining LessWrong will fit into the schedule of my life, but here goes. I'm interested from a philosophical perspective in many of the problems discussed on LW - AI/futurism, rationalism, epistemology, probability, bias - and after reading through a fair share of the material here I thought it was time to engage. I don't exactly consider myself a rationalist (though perhaps I am one), but I spend a great de...
Easily communicated in a "ceteris paribus, having communicated my evidence across teh internets, if you had the same priors I do, just by you reading my description of the evidence you'd update similarly as I did when perceiving the evidence first hand", yea that would be a tall order.
Unfortunately, I've seen people around here through the Aumann's agreement theorem in the face of people who refuse to provide it. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever seen Aumann's agreement theorem used for any other purpose around here.
The comment above from EY is over-broad in calling this an "atheist forum", but I think it still has a good point:
It's logically rude to go to a place where the vast majority of people believe X=34, and you say "No, actually X=87, but I won't accept any discussion on the matter." To act that way is to treat disagreement like a shameful thing, best not brought up in polite company, and that's as clear an example of logical rudeness as I can think of.
An argument can be "decent" without being right. If you want an example, and can follow it Kurt Godel's ontological argument looks pretty decent. Consider that:
A) It is a logically valid argument
B) The premises sound fairly plausible (we can on the face of it imagine some sense of a "positive property" which would satisfy the premises)
C) It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with the premises
The wrongness can eventually be seen by carefully inspecting the premises, and checking which would go wrong in a null world (a possible worl...
Oh, and another thing:
The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism's arguments are stronger.
What do you mean, "optimal"? Look, for any question where there is, in principle, a correct answer (which might not be known), the totality of the information available to us at any given time will point to some answer (which might not be the correct one, given incomplete information). Arguments for that answer might be correct. Arguments for some other answer will be wrong.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments f...
The question of what makes a value a moral value is metaethical, not part of object-level ethics.
Sure. But any answer to that metaethical question which allows us to class some bases for comparison as moral values and others as merely values implicitly privileges a moral reference frame (or, rather, a set of such frames).
Beyond that, I don't see where you are going.
Where I was going is that you asked me a question here which I didn't understand clearly enough to be confident that my answer to it would share key assumptions with the question you mean...
emergent
By hypothesis, clippers have certain functionalities walled off from update.
A paperclipper no more has a wall stopping it from updating into morality than my laptop has a wall stopping it from talking to me. My laptop doesn't talk to me because I didn't program it to. You do not update into pushing pebbles into prime-numbered heaps because you're not programmed to do so.
Does a stone roll uphill on a whim?
Perhaps you should study Reductionism first.
Hi! I'm Free_NRG. I've just started a physical chemistry PhD. I found this site through a link from Leah Libresco early last year (I can't remember exactly how I found her blog). I read through the sequences as one of the distractions from too much 4th year chemistry, and particularly liked the probability theory and evolutionary theory sequences. This year, I'm trying to apply some of the productivity porn I've been reading to my life. I'm thinking of blogging about it.
Well, there's the more obvious sense, that there can always exist an "irrational" mind that simply refuses to believe in gravity, regardless of the strength of the evidence. "Gravity makes things fall" is true, because it does indeed make things fall. But not compelling to those types of minds.
But, in a more narrow sense, which we are more interested in when doing metaethics, a sentence of the form "action A is xyzzy" may be a true classification of A, and may be trivial to show, once "xyzzy" is defined. But an agent...
I would say so also, but PrawnOfFate has already argued that sociopaths are subject to additional egocentric bias relative to normal people and thereby less rational. It seems to me that he's implicitly judging rationality by how well it leads to a particular body of ethics he already accepts, rather than how well it optimizes for potentially arbitrary values.
Are you aware that that is basically what every crank says about some other field?
Presumably, if I'm to treat as meaningful evidence about Desrtopa's crankiness the fact that cranks make statements similar to Desrtopa, I should first confirm that non-cranks don't make similar statements.
It seems likely to me that for every person P, there exists some field F such that P believes many aspects of F exist only because of incompetent "experts" perpetuating them. (Consider cases like F=astrology, F=phrenology, F=supply-side economics, F= feminism,...
I have no idea what you mean by that. I don't think value systems don't come into it, I just think they are not isolated from rationality. And I am sceptical that you could predict any higher-level phenomenon from "the ground up", whether its morality or mortgages.
I mean that value systems are a function of physically existing things, the way a 747 is a function of physically existing things, but we have no evidence suggesting that objective morality is an existing thing. We have standards by which we judge beauty, and we project those values ...
You are trying to impose your morality/
In what respect?
I can think of one model of moral realism, and it doesn't work, so I will ditch the whole thing.
This certainly doesn't describe my reasoning on the matter, and I doubt it describes many others' here either.
The way I consider the issue, if I try to work out how the universe works from the ground up, I cannot see any way that moral realism would enter into it, whereas I can easily see how value systems would, so I regard assigning non-negligible probability to moral realism as privileging the hypo...
it is absurd to characterise the practice of treating everyone the same as a form of bias.
Can you expand on what you mean by "absurd" here?
much-repeated confusions--the Standard Muddle
Can you explain what these confusions are, and why they're confused?
In my time studying philosophy, I observed a lot of confusions which are largely dispensed with on Less Wrong. Luke wrote a series of posts on this. This is one of the primary reasons I bothered sticking around in the community.
If people can't agree on how a question is closed, it's open.
A question can still be "open" in that sense when all the information necessary for a rational person to make a definite judgment is available.
Messy solutions are more common in mindspace than contrived ones.
Messy solutions are more often wrong than ones which control for the mess.
"Non-neglible probabiity", remember.
This doesn't even address my question.
As far as I can tell? No. But you're not doing a great job of arguing for the position that I agree with.
Prawn is, in my opinion, flatly wrong, and I'll be delighted to explain that to him. I'm just not giving your soldiers a free pass just because I support the war, if you follow.
Jesus goes so far as to discourage both humans and demons from telling people about his Messiahship; demons tended to be pretty quick to start yelling about how he was the messiah/could torment them /etc. Legion is the most memorable case, but I seem to remember an incident from earlier on in Jesus' life when he had to silence a demon that was revealing his identity (maybe it was in Luke?).
Crocker's Rules are not an excuse for you to be rude to others. They are an invitation for others to ignore politeness when talking to you. They are not an invitation for others to be rude to you for the sake of rudeness, either; only where it enables some other aim, such as efficient transfer of information.
What you did, when viewed from the outside, is a clear example of rudeness for the sake of rudeness alone. I don't see how Crocker's rules are relevant.
I would have expected most aspiring rationalists who happen to be theists to be mildly irritated by the anti-theism bits
Well, I don't strongly identify as a theist, so it's hard for me to have an opinion here.
That said, if I imagine myself reading a variant version of the sequences (and LW discourse more generally) which are anti-some-group-I-identify-with in the same ways.... for example, if I substitute every reference to the superiority of atheism to theism (or the inadequacy of theism more generally) with a similar reference to the superiority of, ...
Sure.
Agnosticism = believing we can't know if God exists
Atheism = believing God does not exist
Theism = believing God exists
turtles-all-the-way-down-ism = believing we can't know what reality is (can't reach the bottom turtle)
instrumentalism/anti-realism = believing reality does not exist
realism = believing reality exists
Thus anti-realism and realism map to atheism and theism, but agnosticism doesn't map to infinte-turtle-ism because it says we can't know if God exists, not what God is.
I don't mind if it's turtles all the way down.
The claim that reality may be ultimately unknowable or non-algorithmic is different to the claim you have made elsewhere, that there is no reality.
It means that EY's musings about the Eborians splitting into the world's of various thicknesses according to Born probabilities no longer make any sense.
coughmeasurecough
I just meant you could use this knowledge to help avoid this ahead of time.
I understand. I'm suggesting it in that context.
That is, I'm asserting now that "if I find myself in a conversation where such terms are being used and I have reason to believe the participants might not share implicit arguments, make the argumentsexplicit" is a good rule to follow in my next conversation.
I think you are conflating two related, but distinct questions. Physical realism faces challenges from:
(1) the sociological analysis represented by works like Structure of Scientific Revolution
(2) the ontological status of objects that, in principle, could never be observed (directly or indirectly)
I took shminux as trying to duck the first debate (by adopting physical pragmatism), but I think most answers to the first question do not necessarily imply particular answers to the second question.
Yup, but it's not super elegant! There's some info here.
Also, AnkiWeb.net works for me - but you need to use https:// for Anki 2 and http:// for Anki 1.
If you both tap out, then anyone who steps into the discussion wins by default!
In many such cases it may be better to say that if both tap out then everybody wins by default!
The way I understand it, it's not that “new” worlds are created that didn't previously exist (the total “thickness” (measure) stays constant). It's that two worlds that looked the same ten seconds ago look different now.
Hi, My name is Zoltan Istvan. I'm a transhumanist, futurist, journalist, and the author of the philosophical novel "The Transhumanist Wager." I've been checking out this site for some time, but decided to create an account today to become closer to the community. I thought I'd start by posting an essay I recently wrote, which sums up some of my ideas. Feel free to share it if you like, and I hope you find it moving. Cheers.
"When Does Hindering Life Extension Science Become a Crime—or even Genocide?"
Every human being has both a minimum a...
Hi, I've arrived here through HPMoR at least a year ago, but I was pretty intimidated by the size of the Sequences - I do try to catch up now. I'm a medical student from Hungary and I've never learnt maths beyond the high school requirements (I do intend to resolve this since it seems like a requirement here?).
I'm here to learn how to effectively change my mind and have intelligent discussion. I probably won't be active until later, as I don't think I would be able to present my reasonings in a sufficiently convincing way, and I already see a few points wh...
Salutations!
My name is Aaron. I'm a college junior on the tail end of the cycle of Bar Mitzvah to New Atheist to info-omnivorous psychology geek to attempted systems thinker. Prospective Psychology/Cognitive Science major at Yale, very interested in meeting other rationalists in the New Haven area. I'm on the board of the Yale Humanist Community, I'm a research assistant in a neuroscience lab, and I do a lot of writing.
Big problems I've been thinking a lot about: Why are most people wildly irrational in the amount of time they're willing to devote to info...
Hi! Everyone below are superbly impressive! I'm a physicist, in my second year of teaching English and that's as much rationality as I can provide at the moment. Looking to relocate to China in an effort to be superhuman. Would really appreciate a few pointers on teaching institutions to avoid/ embrace.
Excellent reading here, thanks! Nas
You are asking if we create such exact simulations of humans that they will have all the typical limitations would they have the same wants as real humans, probably yes.
I'm also asking, should we care?
More generally, I'm asking what is it about real humans we should prefer to preserve, given the choice? What should we be willing to discard, given a reason?
The original question Wei Dai was asking me was about my statement that if we becomes uploads "At that point you already lost humanity by definition".
Fair enough. I've already agreed tha...
I'm Pasha, a financial journalist based in Tokyo.
I recently found out about this blog from this post on The View From Hell: http://goo.gl/DCNX4U
A few years in a school specialized in math and physics in the former Soviet Union have convinced me to seek my fortunes in liberal arts. (It's those kids in my class who would yell out an answer to a physics problem even before the teacher has finished reading the question.)
Covering the semiconductor industry here in Japan has sparked a renewed appreciation of the scientific method and revived my interest in rationality, math and computation. ... One thing leads to another and here I am ~
So: Here goes. I'm dipping my toe into this gigantic and somewhat scary pool/lake(/ocean?).
Here's the deal: I'm a recovering irrationalic. Not an irrationalist; I've never believed in anything but rationalism (in the sense it's used here, but that's another discussion), formally. But my behaviors and attitudes have been stuck in an irrational quagmire for years. Perhaps decades, depending on exactly how you're measuring. So I use "irrationalic" in the sense of "alcoholic"; someone who self-identifies as "alcoholic" is very unl...
Au contraire, mon ami! Given that he has indicated a professional interest within the rationalist community, he should shield his early steps -- and the invariable (pit)falls they will lead him to -- from his one unchangeable identity.
Not everyone in his early years produces EY-quality content, and even he is often confronted with -- and has to distance himself from -- certain remarks from decades ago. The internet does not forgive, its search engines do not forget.
Also, "wedrifid" advising the use of real names?
Hello
I've been reading LW for a long time. At the moment I'd like to learn about decision making more rigorously as well as finding out how to make better decisions myself - and then actually doing that in real life.
I'm also very interested in algorithmic reasoning about and creation of computer programs but I know far too little about this.
Hi folks --
In high school I became obsessed with Gödel, Escher, Bach; in college in the 80s I studied philosophy of language, linguistics and AI; then tracked along with that stuff on the side through various career incarnations through the 90s (newspaper production guy, systems programmer, Internet entrepreneur, etc.). I'm now a transactional attorney who helps people buy and sell services and technology and work together to make stuff -- sort of a meta-anti-Lloyd Dobler.
I'm de-lurking because I finished HP:MoR a month ago and I'm chewing through the se...
If you lived in a world where any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn't be impressed by them.
What does being "impressed" have to do with anything? I'm talking about believing in someone's existence.
I don't deny the existence of the Pope. I don't deny the existence of the American President. I'm not impressed by either but I don't deny them. I don't deny the past existence of dinosaurs. I don't even deny the existence of King David and Agamemnon as historical figures. I make fun of the people who deny the existence...
It's pretty clear that the universe was not built to produce a quick output. It took several billion years of runtime just to produce a society at all - it's a short step from there to the conclusion that there's some thing or things in the far future (possibly another mere billion years away), that we probably don't even have the language to describe yet, that are also a part of the purpose of the universe.
This suggests a new heresy to me: God, creator of the universe, exists, but we, far from being the pinnacle of His creation, are merely an irrelevan...
Well, technically, volcano eruptions and such can be prevented as well, given a sufficient level of technology. But let's stick with the common cold as the example -- why does it even exist at all ? If the humans could eventually prevent it, thus reducing the amount of suffering, then the current amount of suffering is suboptimal. When you said that "the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see", I assumed that you were talking about the unavoidable amount of suffering caused by humans exercising their free will. The common cold, however, is not anthropogenic.
When you write your argument "in favor of religion", consider potential objections that this forum is likely to offer, steelman them, then counter them the best you can, using the language of the forum, then repeat. Basically, try to minimize the odds of a valid (from the forum's point of view) objection not being already addressed in your post. You are not likely to succeed completely, unless you are smarter than the collective intelligence of LW (not even Eliezer is that smart). But it goes a long way toward presenting a good case. The mindset ...
I've been lurking for almost a year; I'm a 25 year old mechanical engineer living in Montreal.
Like several people I've seen on the welcome thread, I already had figured out the general outline of reductionism before I found LW. A friend had been telling me about it for a while, but I only really started paying attention when I found it independently while reading up on transhumanism (I was also a transhumanist before finding it here). Reading the sequences did a few things for me:
- It filled in the gaps in my world-model (and fleshed out my transhumanist
There are arguments for the existence of God that are good in the sense that they raise my estimate of the likelihood of the existence of God by a substantial factor.
They aren't sufficient to raise the odds to an overall appreciable level.
The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism's arguments are stronger.
Why is that the "optimal" situation ? Optimal according to what metric ?
who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
I personally never was religious, but AFAIK I'm an outlier. Most atheists arrived at atheism exactly in the way that you describe; others got there by reading the Bible. I don't have hard data to support this claim, though, so I could be wrong.
I think the holy books are kind of hampering mainstream religions, to be ...
I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was "Nah, there aren't any."
Well, if there were any that we knew of, then no one here would remain an atheist for very long. We'd all convert to whichever religion made the most sense, given the strength of its arguments. IMO you should have anticipated such a response, given that atheists do, in fact, still exist on this site.
So far, we have heard many terrible arguments for religion (we're talking logical fallacies galore), and few if a...
If you want to raise my openness to the possibility of a god-level power, then provide me with evidence of consistent, accurate, specific prophecies made hundreds of years in advance of the events. Or provide me of evidence of multiple strong rationalists who are also religious and claim that their religion is based on assessment of the evidence/available arguments.
My atheism isn't a foregone conclusion. It's simply that no-one's ever seriously challenged it and at this point I've heard so many bad arguments that people need to come up with evidence before...
My general impression is that there actually two different fault-lines about race -related questions on Lesswrong.
One is: Are there biologically-determined differences in politically-sensitive traits like intelligence between races? (One should note here that a) there is more to biology than genes and b) "race" is an amorphous term and the layman's use of it based on a rough eyeballing of skin color doesn't necessarily line up well with "genetic cohort"; a desire not to have to explain these nuances over and over again is another rea...
A thousand sci-fi authors would agree with you that AIs are not going to have emotion. One prominent AI researcher will disagree
If Clippy is trying to optimize itself to make inferences more efficiently, then it would want not to apply changes to its source code until its done the calculations...
Ok, so at what point does Clippy stop simulating the debug version of Clippy ? It does, after all, want to make the computation of its values more efficient. For example, consider a trivial scenario where one of its values basically said, "reject any action if it satisfies both A and not-A". This is a logically inconsistent value that some programmer accidentally left in Clippy...
Let's not get started on the medical profession's bias towards health..maybe it's just their job to teach reason..have you ever met someone who couldn't do emotional/system-I decision-making right out of the box?
And Clippy is particularly exceptional example of an AI. So why do people keep saying "Ah, but Clippy..."...?
Well, in this case it's because the post I was responding to mentioned Clippy a couple of times, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to mention how the little bugger fits into the overall picture of value stability. It's indeed somewhat tangential to the main point I was trying to make; paperclippers don't have anything to do with value drift (they're an example of a different failure mode in artificial ethics) and they're unlikely to evolve from a changing value system.
I have an interest in gaming management and practical probabilities. I have a great interest in economics as well. I stumbled onto this site and tyhe "Drawing 2 aces" post. I struggled with it for about a week, and then wrote a few things. The thread is old, but I look forward to any helpful responses.
It's uncontrovesial that rational agents need to update, and that AIs need to self-modify. The claim that values are in either case insulated from updates is the extraordinary one.
I never claimed that it was controversial, nor that AIs didn't need to self-modify, nor that values are exempt.
I'm claiming that updates and self modification do not imply a change of behavior towards behavior desired by humans.
I can build a small toy program to illustrate, if that would help.
"Biased" is not necessarily a value judgment. Insofar as rationality as a system, orthogonal to morality, is objective, biases as systematic deviations from rationality are also objective.
Arbitrary carries connotations of value judgment, but in a sense I think it's fair to say that all values are fundamentally arbitrary. You can explain what caused an agent to hold those values, but you can't judge whether values are good or bad except by the standards of other values.
I'm going to pass on Eliezer's suggestion to stop engaging with PrawnOfFate. I don't think my time doing so so far has been well spent.
Mathematics isn't physics. Mathematicians prove theorems from axioms, not from experiments.
Yes, but the fact that the universe itself seems to adhere to the logical systems by which we construct mathematics gives credence to the idea that the logical systems are fundamental, something we've discovered rather than producing. We judge claims about nonobserved mathematical constructs like transfinites according to those systems,
Metaethical systems usually have axioms like "Maximising utility is good".
But utility is a function of values. A pa...
No Universally Compelling Arguments is the argument against universal compellingness, as the name suggests.
Inseparably Right; or Joy in the Merely Good gives part of the argument that humans should be able to agree on ethical values. Another substantial part is in Moral Error and Moral Disagreement.
Can you explain what you could see which would suggest to you a greater level of understanding than is prevalent among moral philosophers?
Also, moral philosophers mostly regard the question as open in the sense that some of them think that it's clearly resolved in favor on non-realism, and some philosophers are just not getting it, or that it's clearly resolved in favor of realism, and some philosophers are just not getting it. Most philosophers are not of the opinion that it could turn out either way and we just don't know yet.
A perfectly designed Clippy would be able to change its own values - as long as changing its own values led to a more complete fulfilment of those values, pre-modification. (There are a few incredibly contrived scenarios where that might be the case). Outside of those few contrived scenarios, however, I don't see why Clippy would.
(As an example of a contrived scenario - a more powerful superintelligence, Beady, commits to destroying Clippy unless Clippy includes maximisation of beads in its terminal values. Clippy knows that it will not survive unless it o...
I'd think it'd be great if people stopped thinking in terms of some fuzzy abstraction "AI" which is basically a basket for all sorts of biases. If we consider the software that can self improve 'intelligently' in our opinion, in general, the minimal such software is something like an optimizing compiler that when compiling it's source will even optimize its ability to optimize. This sort of thing is truly alien (beyond any actual "aliens"), you get to it by employing your engineering thought ability, unlike paperclip maximizer at which ...
Well, that's rather odd coz I do value the human race and so do most people. Ethics is a social process, most of "possible" ethics as a whole would have left us unable to have this conversation (no computers) or altogether dead.
Look. The ethics mankind predominantly has, they do exist in the real world that's around you. Alternate ethics that works at all for a technological society blah blah blah, we don't know of any, we just speculate that they may exist. edit: worse than that, speculate in this fuzzy manner where it's not even specified how they may exist. Different ethics of aliens that evolved on different habitable planets? No particular reason to expect that there won't be one that is by far most probable. Which would be implied by the laws of physics themselves, but give...
Incidentally, I can't help wondering what would you have done if the Spirit had told you it was bunk ;)
I like to think I still would have debunked Mormonism in my own mind, but maybe not! That experience was extremely important to my deconversion process, because the only reason I believed in the LDS Church was because of the Spirit telling me the Book of Mormon was true and that Jesus Christ was my Savior. As soon as the Spirit told me something so contradictory as The God Delusion was true, my whole belief structure came crumbling down.
Calling us morons doesn't reveal anything to reason or even attempt to force me to address what you may think of as a blind spot.
An additional issue is that I'm skilled at being deliberately inflammatory or conciliatory. Good enough that I sometimes do it by accident.
Deliberately... by accident? Accidentally inflammatory, or conciliatory makes sense, yes, but anyone can be that.
My language parsing module is returning a reasonable probability that I'm misunderstanding something in those sentances.
...I guess, taken together, I just learned that I don't think introductions are in fact epistemically worthwhile. So I'll update my question: are introductions repairable, and if so, how?
I suggest we move the discussion to a top-level discussion thread. The comment tree here is huge and hard to navigate.
I think it is absolutely central. Once you postulate external reality, a whole lot of previously meaningless questions become meaningful, including whether something "exists", like ideas, numbers, Tegmark's level 4, many untestable worlds and so on.
Not to mention question like "If we send these colonists over the horizon, does that kill them or not?"
Which brings me to a question: I can never quite figure out how your instrumentalism interacts with preferences. Without assuming the existence of something you care about, on what basis ...
we already have a term for this ("unacceptable") so why reurpose "wrong"?
Presumably shminux doesn't consider it a repurposing, but rather an articulation of the word's initial purpose.
next time you know something would fail, speaking up would be helpful.
Well, OK.
Using relative terms in absolute ways invites communication failure.
If I use "wrong" to denote a relationship between a particular act and a particular judge (as shminux does) but I only specify the act and leave the judge implicit (e.g., "murder is wrong&q...
The fields are charged
You are using charge in some non-standard way. Charges are source or sinks of the field.
An electromagnetic field does not sink or source more field- if it did, Maxwell's equations would be non-linear. There is no such thing as a 'negatively charged electromagnetic field'- there are just electromagnetic fields. Now, the electromagnetic field can have a negative (or positive) amplitude but this is not the same as saying its negatively charged.
You are right. In my mind I read it as "I read through everything up until this, and this quantum thing looks scary and formidable, but it's next, so I better get on with it", which could have been a total misinterpretation of what was meant. So yeah, I have probably jumped in a bit early. Not that I think it was a bad advice. Anyway, it's all a moot point now, I have promised EY not to give unsolicited advice to newcomers telling them to skip the QM sequence.
According to the SE.
That fails to answer the question- the Schroedinger equation isn't lorentz invariant (its not even fully Galilean invariant), so it can't tell you much about spacetime.
You can't just replace Schroedinger with Dirac or Klein-Gordon without leading inevitably to a field theory, which opens up new cans of worms.
Most formulations of MWI only require a "for all practical purposes" splitting. Like thermodynamic irreversibility.
A mental picture of thermodynamic irreversibility as a directed tree is indeed an appealing one. It becomes less appealing once your tree does not have any well-defined vertices or edges due to the issues I have outlined.
According to the SE.
The SE is non-relativistic, so it has absolutely nothing to say about propagation in spacetime. It does not even describe emission or absorption, an essential part of decoherence. You have ...
Hello there! I really enjoyed HPMOR, because it expanded on some of my thoughts and made me feel less alone. I joined now to post a realization about Harry's (and my) personality. See my 1st post.
Hi, I'm reposting my introduction here from 2 days ago, as it was moved for some reason, perhaps accidentally. Anyway, hello, my name is Zoltan Istvan. I'm a transhumanist, futurist, journalist, and the author of the philosophical novel "The Transhumanist Wager." I've been checking out this site for some time, but decided to create an account a few days ago to become closer to the community. I thought I'd start by posting an essay I recently wrote, which sums up some of my ideas. Feel free to share it if you like, and I look forward to interacti...
Hi, I have a site tech question. (Sorry if this is the wrong place to post that!—I couldn't find any other.)
I can't find a way to get email notifications of comment replies (i.e. when my inbox icon goes red). If there is one, how do I turn it on?
If there isn't one, is that a deliberate design feature, or a limitation of the software, or...?
Thanks (and thanks especially to whoever does the system maintenance here—it must be a big job.)
Hi there, I am Andrew, living in Hungary and studying to be an IT physicist some day in an utmost lazy way. I've just recently discovered this site and so far I can't really believe what I'm seeing. I have been thinking myself before about a website whose main purpose is basically making its users wiser and/or more rational. - about which my main question later will be put that if u could answer would be great; also, excuse my English, it's not my native language.
I believe rationality can be expressed as the set of "right" algorithms in a given...
Mostly, I prefer not to conflate them because our shared understanding of upload is likely much better-specified than our shared understanding of augment.
I agree completely; that was my point as well.
Except that, as you say later, you have confidence about what those supposedly incomprehensible values would or wouldn't contain.
By analogy, I personally neither love nor hate individual insects; they are too far beneath me.
Turning that analogy around.... I suspect that if I remembered having been an insect and then later becoming a human being, and I ...
Hello then.
I am a political science and international development undergrad student, residing mainly in Vienna, Austria. The story of how I came here is probably a rather common one - it started on TvTropes, where I am an on-off forum contributor and editor, where I first heard of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. After reading it, I decided to look further into the rationalist community, partly because of my interest for philosophy, ethics, politics and debating, but also hoping to find novel, intelligent and helpful approaches to several key ...
Hi, Less Wrong.
I am idea21, I am from Spain and I apologize for my defective english.
I got acquainted with the existence of this forum thanks to the kindness of mister Peter Singer, he recommended me to expose my own idea about altruistic cultural development after questioning him whether he knew something similar about. Apparently there is nothing similar being discussed anywhere, which turned to be very dissapointing to me. But I still feel that "it" makes sense, at least from a logical point of view.
I will post here some excerpts of the ...
If you find sparkles's comments helpful, great. I would not have found them worthwhile while I had high levels of typo problems (I've gotten better, but I'm not perfect - worse, my typos tend to change meanings rather than simply fail to make words).
Quality of writing improves with practice, but spelling mistakes of the kind you were making in the context you made them (comment section, via mobile device) are not closely correlated with quality.
was using my ipod
If these mistakes really bother you, the lesson might simply be not to post through th...
For comments? Really? This ain't professional writing - and the meaning of D's writing is quite clear.
Edit:
you use english painfully poorly . i may be one to eschew standard rules, but i am quite consistent in my own ways and i do know them
specifically, get a spellcheck and be consistent
(emphasis in original)
The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural
... was originally predicted as a result of a rational Creator, not the lack of one. Arguably it was the wrong deduction given the premise, but still.
Other way around, I would think. References? Everyone was a theist back in the days of Roger Bacon, they had to be. So did anyone decide, "God is rational", and then deduce "we can attain all manner of powers if we just investigate how things work"? Or was it a case of dis...
Not strictly speaking. Warning, what follows is pure speculation about possibilities which may have little to no relation to how a computational multiverse would actually work. It could be possible that there are three computable universes A, B & C, such that the beings in A run a simulation of B appearing as gods to the intelligences therein, the beings in B do the same with C, and finally the beings in C do the same with A. It would probably be very hard to recognize such a structure if you were in it because of the enormous slowdowns in the simulati...
(Huh. One of the ancestors to this comment - several levels up - has been downvoted enough to require a karma penalty. I wonder if there should be some statute of limitations on that; whether, say, ten levels of positive-karma posts can protect against a higher-level negative-karma post?)
A4. Let S be any endless chain in E. Then there is some z in E such that every x in S is a proper part of z.
An interesting assumption. Necessary for theorem 3, but I suspect that it'll mean that the original cause described in theorem 3 will then very probably be an en...
Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God's work all around them.
But they can only see it after the fact. I am not aware of any case in which a theist said "If God exists, we would expect to see X. Now we haven't seen X yet, but God exists so we probably will observe X some time in the near future." And then we observed X.
That kind of makes sense. Of course, the standard objection to your answer is something like the following: "This seems like a rather inefficient way to design the ideal society. If I was building intelligent agents from scratch, and I wanted them to conform to some ideal; then I'd just build them to do that from the start, instead of messing around with tsunamis and common colds".
Yes, I grant that beliefs which I can have in the future based on analysis of data I already have are importantly different from beliefs I can have in the future only if I'm given new inputs.
Yes, I agree that the infinite set of implied beliefs about the car's weight is in the former category, assuming I'm aware that the car weighs more than 100 kg and that numbers work the way they work.
I think we're just debating semantics.
I'm not Kawoomba, but I would say that yes, that's wrong: the logical implications of my beliefs are not necessarily beliefs that I have, they are merely beliefs that I am capable of generating. (And in some cases, they aren't even that, but that's beside the point here.)
More specifically: do I believe that my car weighs more than 17.12311231 kilograms? Well, now that I've asked the question, yes I do. Did I believe that before I asked the question? No, I wouldn't say so... though in this case, the derivation is so trivial it would not ordinarily occur to ...
Thanks for your reply, hen.
I guess I don't think you're making a truth claim when you say that the car you see is cream-colored. You're just reporting an empirical observation. If, however, someone sitting next to you objected that the same car was red, then there would be a problem to sort out, i.e. there would be some doubt as to what was being observed, whether one of you were color blind, etc. And in that case I think you would desire your perception to be the accurate one, not because cream-colored is better than red, but because humans, I think, g...
Absolutely agreed: if I assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul suffers when I suffer but does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that suffering is important but dying isn't.
And if I instead assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul does not suffer when I suffer and does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions ...
I'm not sure I understand your argument, then. If intelligence can arise from "arbitrary randomness", then a universe that contains intelligence is evidence neither for nor against a creator deity, once you take the anthropic principle into account.
What about suffering which is not caused by humans ? For example, consider earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, plague outbreaks, and the like. To use a lighter example, do we really need as many cases of the common cold as we are currently experiencing all over the world ?
The common answer to this question is something along the lines of "God moves in mysterious ways" -- which does make sense once you posit such a God -- but you said that "the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see", so perhaps you have a different answer ?
The modal trick reminds me of Descarte's approach... God is definitionally perfectly good, which implies existence (since something good that doesn't exist isn't as good as something good that does), therefore God exists.
ZZZZzzzzzz....
A lot of things are culturally normal, but easy to change in yourself, so this alone doesn't help to explain why one would believe that keeping one's identity small would be difficult.
Well, one example of such a thing might be the Simulation Argument, which I believe has been mentioned to you. It's an argument for the possible existence of something which might be called a "god" or "gods" (though that's usually inadvisable due to semantic baggage). Our view of what exists and what could exist certainly incorporates an understanding of the possibility that we're living in a simulation.
Theistic arguments per se, however, are generally bad.
Given your earlier claims about how the meaning of reliably evaluating evidence depends on your paradigm, I have no confidence that you and I share an understanding of what "good epistemic hygiene" means either, so that doesn't really help me understand what you're saying.
Can you give me some representative concrete examples of good epistemic hygiene, on your account?
OK, I'm ready to entertain new ideas: What's sacred about Mormon underwear?
I'm not a Mormon, and I actually don't know that much about their underwear, but this is still rather a silly question. A Mormon might answer that, given that the Mormon god does exist and does care about his followers, the underwear symbolizes the commitment that the follower made to his God. It serves as a physical reminder to the wearer that he must abide by certain rules of conduct, in exchange for divine protection.
Such an answer may make perfect sense in the context of the...
Are you saying it's more rational not ever to consider some ways of thinking? (I'm pretty sure I'm not completely confused about what it means to be a rationalist.)
What does it mean to be a rationalist?
Hello, Less Wrong world. (Hi, ibidem.)
I'm pretty new here. I heard about this site a few months ago and now I've read a few sequences, many posts, and all of HP:MoR.
About a week ago I created an account and introduced myself on the Open Thread along with a difficult question. Some people answered my question helpfully and honestly, but most of them mostly just wanted to argue. The discussion, which now includes over two hundred comments, was very interesting, but at the end it appeared we just disagreed about a lot of things.
It began to be clear that I don...
I think probably none of those hypotheses are correct. I think you mean well and I think your comments have been stylistically fine. I also obviously don't think people here are are opposed to substantive disagreement, close-minded or intolerant (or else I wouldn't have stuck around this long). What you've encountered is a galaxy sized chasm of inferential distance. I'm sure you've had a conversation before with someone who seemed to think you knew much less about the subject than you actually did. You disagree with him and try to demonstrate you familiarity with the issue but he is so behind he doesn't even realize that you know more than he does.
I realize it is impossible for this not to sound smug and arrogant to you: but that is how you come off to us. Really, your model of us, that we have not heard good, non-strawman arguments for the existence of God is very far off. There may be users who wouldn't be familiar with your best argument but the people here most familiar with the existence of God debate absolutely would. And they could almost certainly fix whatever argument you provided and rebut that (which is approximately what I did in my previous reply to you).
To the extent...
I agree with Jack here, but I'm going to add the piece of advice that used to be very common for newcomers here, although it's dropped off over time as people called attention to the magnitude of the endeavor, and suggest that you finish reading the sequences before trying to engage in further religious debate here.
Eliezer wrote them in order to bring potential members of this community up to speed so that when we discuss matters, we could do it with a common background, so that everyone is on the same page and we can work out interesting disagreements without rehashing the same points over and over again. We don't all agree with all the contents of every article in the sequences, but they do contain a lot of core ideas that you have to understand to make sense of the things we think here. Reading them should help give you some idea, not just what we believe, but why we think that it makes more sense to believe those things than the alternatives.
The "rigidity" which you detect is not a product of particular closedmindedness, but rather a deliberate discarding of certain things we believe we have good reason not to put stock in, and reading the sequences should give you a...
My generally impression has been—trying not to offend anyone—that the thinking here is sometimes pretty rigid.
Of course, that's to be expected for a community that defines itself as rationalist. There are ways of thinking that are more accurate than others, that, to put it inexactly, produce truth. It's not just a "Think however you like and it will produce truth," kind of game.
The obsession that some people have with being open minded and considering all ways of thinking and associated ideas equally is, I suspect, unsustainable for anyone who has even the barest sliver of intellectual honesty. I don't consider it laudable at all. That's not to say they have to be a total arse about it, but I think at best you can hope that they ignore you or lie to you.
...Ok, so Clippy would need to run sim-Clippy for a little while at least, just to make sure that it still produces paperclips -- and that, in fact, it does so more efficiently now, since that one useless test is removed. Yes, this test used to be Clippy's terminal goal, but it wasn't doing anything, so Clippy took it out.
Would it be possible for Clippy to optimize his goals even further ? To use another silly example ("silly" because Clippy would be dealing with probabilities, not syllogisms), if Clippy had the goals A, B and C, but B always entai
I consulted the Magic ∞-Ball (a neighborhood of semantic space with oracular properties) and it said: "The adelic cohomology of constructive quantum ordinals is technically essential to proving that induction plus reflection is asymptotically optimal in all Ω-logical worlds, and that's the key theorem in seed AI. So number theory is very important."
Comment too long - continued from last:
Point.
Um ... as a rationalist and the kind of idiot who exposes themself to basilisks, could you tell me this argument? Maybe rot13 it if you're not interested in evangelizing.
V fhccbfr gung'f bxnl.
Gur svefg guvat abgr vf gung vs lbh ybbx ng ubj lbh trg rivqrapr, jung vg ernyyl qbrf, gura V'ir nyernql tvira bar: Ybj cevbe, (r.t. uvtu pbzcyrkvgl,) ab fhccbegvat rivqrapr. Crefbanyyl gung'f irel pbaivapvat. V erzrzore jura V jnf lbhatre, naq zl cneragf jrer fgvyy va gurve 'Tbbq puvyqera tb gb Puhepu' cunfr, zl pbhfva...
I don't think it's true that if there's an objective morality, agents necessarily value it whether they realize it or not though. Why couldn't there be inherently immoral or amoral agents?
Sure, you can negotiate with an agent with conflicting values, but I don't think its beside the point.
You can get a sociopath to cooperate with non-sociopaths by making them trade off for things they do care about, or using coercive power. But Clippy doesn't have any concerns other than paperclips to trade off against its concern for paperclips, and we're not in a position to coerce Clippy, because Clippy is powerful enough to treat us as an obstacle to be destroyed. The fact that the non-sociopath majority can more or less keep the sociopath minority under control doesn't mean that we could persuade agents whose values deviate far from our own to accommodate us if we didn't have coercive power over them.
An agent in a society is unable to force its values on the society; it needs to cooperate with the rest of society. A singleton is able to force its values on the rest of society.
Sure. But just as there can be laws governing mechanical systems which are distinct from the laws governing electromagnetic systems (despite both being physical laws), there can be laws governing the behavior of value-optimizing systems which are distinct from the other laws of nature.
And what I mean by "destructive" is that they tend to destroy. Yes, presumably "continue living" would be part of M in this hypothetical. (Though I could construct a contrived hypothetical where it wasn't)
Other key problem:
But a supersmart, uper-rational clipper has to be able to update.
has to be able to update
"update"
Please unpack this and describe precisely, in algorithmic terms that I could read and write as a computer program given unlimited time and effort, this "ability to update" which you are referring to.
I suspect that you are attributing Magical Powers From The Beyond to the word "update", and forgetting to consider that the ability to self-modify does not imply active actions to self-modify in any one particular...
There's a difference between being a sociopath and being a jerk. Sociopaths don't need to rationalize dicking other people over.
If Ayn Rand's works could actually turn formerly neurotypical people into sociopaths, that would be a hell of a find, and possibly spark a neuromedical breakthrough.
If the slaveowner is an ordinary human being, they already have values regarding how to treat people in their in-groups which they navigate around with respect to slaves by not treating them as in-group members. If they could be induced to see slaves as in-group members, they would probably become nicer to slaves whether they intended to or not (although I don't think it's necessarily the case that everyone who's sufficiently acculturated to slavery could be induced to see slaves as in-group members.)
If the agent has no preexisting values which can be called into service of the ethics they've being asked to adopt, I don't think that they could be induced to want to adopt them.
One less now that I'm not 5 years old anymore.
Could you please make a real argument? You're almost being logically rude.
Scenario:
1) You wake up in a bright box of light, no memories. You are told you'll presently be born into an Absolute monarchy, your role randomly chosen. You may choose any moral principles that should govern that society. The Categorical Imperative would on average give you the best result.
2) You are the monarch in that society, you do not need to guess which role you're being born into, you have that information. You don't need to make all the slaves happy to help your goals, you can just maximize your goals directly. You may choose any moral principle ...
Humans engage in plenty of research which is highly unlikely to be useful, except insofar as we're interested in knowing the answers.
I believe that engaging in some amount of general research is required in order to maximize most goals. General research gives you knowledge that you didn't know you desperately needed.
For example, if you put all your resources into researching better paperclipping techniques, you're highly unlikely to stumble upon things like electromagnetism and atomic theory. These topics bear no direct relevance to paperclips, but wit...
It feels to me like the Orthogonality Thesis is a fairly precise statement, and moral anti-realism is a harder to make precise but at least well understood statement, and "values are nothing to do with rationality" is something rather vague that could mean either of those things or something else.
You guys are talking past each other, because you mean something different by 'compelling'. I think Tim means that X is compelling to all human beings if any human being will accept X under ideal epistemic circumstances. You seem to take 'X is universally compelling' to mean that all human beings already do accept X, or would on a first hearing.
Would agree that all human beings would accept all true statements under ideal epistemic circumstances (i.e. having heard all the arguments, seen all the evidence, in the best state of mind)?
We blatantly have updatable goals: people do not have the same goals at 5 as they do at 20 or 60. I don't know why perfect introspection would be needed to have some ability to update.
Sorry, that was bad wording on my part; I should've said, "updatable terminal goals". I agree with what you said there.
How so ? Are you asserting that there exists an optimal ethical system that is independent of the actors' goals ?
Yes, that's what this whole discussion is about.
I don't feel confident enough in either "yes" or "no" an...
But I wans't saying that. I am arguing that moral claims truth values, that aren;t indexed to individuals or socieities. That epistemic claim can be justified by appeal to an ontoogy including Moral Objects, but that is not how I am justifying it: my argument is based on rationality, as I have said many times.
I don't understand, can you rephrase this?
...We have standards by which we jusdge the truth values of mathematical claims, and they are inside us too, and that doens't stop mathematics being objective. Relativism requires that truthvalues are indexe
There are rationally compelling arguments.
Rationality probably universalisable since it is based on the avoidance of biases, incuding those regarding who and where your are.
There is nothing about ethics that makes it unseceptible to rational argument.
There are examples of rational argument about ethics, and of people being compelled by them.
Rationality may be universalizable, but that doesn't mean ethics is.
If ethics are based on innate values extrapolated into systems of behavior according to their expected implications, then people will be susceptibl...
The central point is a bit buried.
If we restrict ourselves to minds specifiable in a trillion bits or less, then each universal generalization "All minds m: X(m)" has two to the trillionth chances to be false, while each existential generalization "Exists mind m: X(m)" has two to the trillionth chances to be true.
This would seem to argue that for every argument A, howsoever convincing it may seem to us, there exists at least one possible mind that doesn't buy it.
So, there's some sort of assumption as to what minds are:
...I also wish
Much the same way as I understand the meanings of most words. Why is that a problem in this case.
"That's what it means by definition" wasn't much help to you when it came to terminal values, why do you think "that's what the word means" is useful here and not there? How do you determine that this word, and not that one, is an accurate description of a thing that exists?
Non psychopaths don't generally put other people above themselves--that is, they treat people equally, incuding themselevs.
This is not, in fact, true. Non-psychopa...
Ethics is about regulating behaviour to take into account the preferences of others. I don't see how pebblesorting would count.
How do you know that? Can you explain a process by which an SI-SR paperclipper could become convinced of this?
Psychopathy is a strong egotistical bias.
How can you you tell that psychopathy is an egotistical bias rather than non-psychopathy being an empathetic bias?
I was thinking armies, secret police, so on and so forth, forcing an entire country to one's will.
However, if forcing people to do things really helps, I'm all for intervention. Addicts, for example.
Hmmm. I hadn't thought of addicts. You make a good point.
I think I might need to re-evaluate my heuristics on this point.
If you start thinking that way, then why do any experiments at all ?
It could have results that allow it to become a more effective paperclip maximizer.
Firstly, an objective morality -- assuming such a thing exists, that is -- would probably have something to say about paperclips, in the same way that gravity and electromagnetism have things to say about paperclips.
I'm not sure how that would work, but if it did, the paperclip maximizer would just use its knowledge of morality to create paperclips. It's not as if action x being moral automatically me...
Elaborate. What rational process would it use to determine the silliness of its original objective?
Okay.
Plausibly. You don;t now care about the same things you cared about when you were 10.
I have different interests now than I did when I was ten, but that's not the same as having different terminal values.
Suppose a person doesn't support vegetarianism; they've never really given it much consideration, but they default to the assumption that eating meat doesn't cause much harm, and meat is tasty, so what's the big deal?
When they get older, they watch some videos on the conditions in which animals are raised for slaughter, read some studies on the neu...
Thus, the AI could look at itself from the outside, and think, "silly AI, it spends so much time worrying about pebbles when there are so many better things to be doing -- or, at least, that's what I'd say if I was being objective". It could then change its source code to care about something other than pebbles.
By what standard would the AI judge whether an objective is silly or not?
This is about rational agents.
Being rational doesn't automatically make an agent able to read its own source code. Remember that, to the pebble-sorters, sorting pebbles is an axiomatically reasonable activity; it does not require justification. Only someone looking at them from the outside could evaluate it objectively.
What...why...? Is there something special about silicon?
Not at all; if you got some kind of a crazy biological implant that let you examine your own wetware, you could do it too. Silicon is just a convenient example.
One does not update terminal values, that's what makes them terminal. If an entity doesn't have values which lie at the core of its value system which are not subject to updating (because they're the standards by which it judges the value of everything else,) then it doesn't have terminal values.
Arguably, humans might not really have terminal values, our psychologies were slapped together pretty haphazardly by evolution, but on what basis might a highly flexible paperclip optimizing program be persuaded that something else was more important than papercli...
I don't think they have the space of all possible agents in mind - just "rational" ones.
I keep saying that, and Bazinga keeps omiting it.
...Noone should care about "possibilities", for a Bayesian nothing is zero. You could say self-refuting / self-contradictory beliefs have an actual zero percent probability, but not even that is actually true: You need to account for the fact that you can't ever be wholly (to an infinite amount of 9s in your prior of 0.9...) certain about the self-contradiction actually being one. There could be a world with a demon misleading you, e.g.
That being said, the idea of some One True Ethics is as self-refuting as it gets, there is no view from nowhere,
Also, I think you might like this relevant link.
I did. But I was a bit puzzled by this,..
" we should believe the Bible because the Bible is correct about many things that can be proven independently, this vouches for the veracity of the whole book, and therefore we should believe it even when it can't be independently proven"
.. which,even as the improved version of, a straw man argument is still pretty weak. The Bible is a compendium of short books written by a number of people at disparate periods of time. The argument would work much better about a more cohesive work, such as the Koran....
(No, Kawoomba, I did not admit to being a Muslim...)
I feel like I should point out here that moral relativism and universally compelling morality are not the only options. "It's morally wrong for Bob to do X" doesn't require that Bob cares about the fact that it's wrong. Something that seems to be being ignored in this discussion.
Complete tangential point...
There is no known, or readily conceivable, basis for rational agents to all converge on the same course of action.
Hm. I don't think you quite mean that as stated?
I mean, I agree that a basis for rational agents to converge on values is difficult to imagine.
But it's certainly possible for two agents with different values to converge on a course of action. E.g., "I want everything to be red, am OK with things being purple, and hate all other colors; you want everything to be blue, are OK with things being purple, and hat...
I have never argued from the "queer object" notion of moral realism--from immaterial moral thingies.
. It's whether your particular ethical system - or any particular ethical system - can be said to be not only right from your perspective, but right for any intelligent agent - aliens, humans, AI, whatever.
Yep. And my argument that it can remains unaddressed.
Moral realism postulates the existence of a kind of "moral fact" which is nonmaterial, applies to humans, aliens and intelligent algae alike, and does not appear to be accessible to the scientific method.
What has that got to do with the approachI have been proposing here?
What is your point?
That your supposedly objectively-ethically-correct-for-all-minds "must maximize everyone's preferences, including my own" ethics would score some strange society as the one I've outlined higher than anything humans could achieve. So that's what your own correct ethics tell you to aspire to, no?
It's a reductio ad absurdum, what else?
No, no. Wouldn't it be more ethical if your preferences were "I want nothing above strict subsistence".
You can take those preferences as seriously and important as anything.
More ethical, no?
I'm not sure if that is necessarily true, or even highly likely. But it is a possibility which is extensively discussed in non-LW philosophy that is standardly ignored or bypassed on LW for some reason. As per my original comment. Is moral relativism really just obviously true?
Axioms have a lot to do with truth, and little to do with meaning.
Would that make the Euclidean axioms just "false" according to you, instead of meaningfully defining the concept of a Euclidean space that turned out not to be completely corresponding to reality, but is still both quite useful and certainly meaningful as a concept?
I first read the concept of axioms as means of logical pinpointing in this and it struck me as brilliant insight which may dissolve a lot of confusions.
As one should not expect an arbitrary mind with its own notions of "right" or "wrong" to yield to any human's proselytizing about objectively correct ethics, "murder is bad", and trying to provide a "correct" solution for that arbitrary mind to adopt.
But humans can proselytise each other, despite their different notions of right and wrong. You seem to be assuming that morally-rght and -wrong are fundamentals. But if they are outcomes of reasoning and facts, then they can be changed by the presentation of better re...
but other people may just decide not to give a hoot, using some other definition of ethics
If what they have can't do what ethics is supposed to do, why call it ethics?
The ethics as defined by China, or an arbitrary mind, have as much claim to be correct as ours.
If someone defines ethics differently, then WHAT are the common characteristics that makes you call them both "ethics"? You surely don't mean that they just happened to use the same sound or the same letters and that they may be meaning basketball instead? So there must already exist some common elements you are thinking of that make both versions be logically categorizable as "ethics".
What are those common elements?
What would it mean for ...
Why should anyone care about ethics211412312312?
"Should" is an ethical word. To use your (rather misleading) naming convention, it refers to a component of ethics211412312312.
Of course one should not confuse this with "would". There's no reason to expect an arbitrary mind to be compelled by ethics.
I thought we were keeping everything else the same, and reversing only the ethics.
In a world where everyone preferred to be murdered as soon as possible, I can agree that murder may very well be ethical.
Or that agent would just be wrong when describing his own preferences when he then tells you "killing is good"?
It would be correctly describing its preferences, and its preferences would not be ethically correct. You could construct an AI that frimly believed 2+2=5. And it would be wrong. As before, you are glibly assuming that the word "ethical" does no work, and can be dropped from the phrase "ethical value".
...Certain headwear must be worn by pious women. Light switches must not be used on certain days by god-abiding men.
You're using it to refer to any preference, whereas I'm using it to refer to human ethical preferences specifically.
Which humans? Medieval peasants? Martyrs? Witch-torturers? Mercenaries? Chinese? US-Americans? If so, which party, which age-group?
If you can be mistaken - objectively mistaken - then you are in a state known as "objectively wrong", yes?
The term is overloaded. I was referring to ideas such as e.g. moral universalism. An alien society - or really just different human societies - will have their own ethical preferences, and whi...
I have just such a thing, referred to as "Marks." I haven't yet included that in the code, because I wanted to explore the viability of the method first. So to retreat to the earlier question, why does my proposal strike you as a GIGO situation?
Mormonism is much more structured then that. There are different sects but those sects are different churches, both of us come from the LDS church, which is the largest and the one that everyone thinks of when they say Mormon (unless they are thinking of the polygamous FLDS).
There are those that call themselves New Order Mormons which are within the LDS church, by which they mean they don't believe in any of the truth claims of the church but like the culture (or something like that, I am sure I am taking what they say out of its "rich contextual setting").
Well, if you're good enough to teach yourself enough programming from scratch to be effective in those jobs. Not everyone is like that, IMO.
And all it takes is to let go of one outdated idea, which is, like Aristotle's impetus, ripe for discarding.
This is not at all important to your point, but the impetus theory of motion was developed by John Philoponus in the 6th century as an attack on Aristotle's own theory of motion. It was part of a broadly Aristotelian programme, but its not something Aristotle developed. Aristotle himself has only traces of a dynamical theory (the theory being attacked by Philoponus is sort of an off-hand remark), and he concerned himself mostly with what we would ...
Why go to the Journal of Discourses? D&C 132 clearly states that those that receive exaltation will be gods, the only question is whether that involves receiving a planet or just being part of the divine council. The Bible clearly states that we will be heirs and joint heirs with Christ. The Journal of Discourses is not something that most members look to for doctrine as it isn't scripture. I, and any member, am free to believe whatever I want to on the subject (or say we don't know) because nothing has been revealed on the subject of exaltation and ...
I was only responding to what you quoted, which is that "high levels of melanin in the skin lead to an immunity to sunburn". Immunity is - as could be expected - a poor choice of words and strictly speaking wrong, but "high degree of resilience / protection" would be valid.
Sunburn results when the amount of exposure to the sun or other ultraviolet light source exceeds the ability of the body's protective pigment, melanin, to protect the skin. Sunburn in a very light-skinned person may occur in less than 15 minutes of midday sun exposure, while a dark-skinned person may tolerate the same exposure for hours.
If your view is that what we try to understand is this external reality, it's quite a small step to assuming that some day it will be understood in its entirety.
Well, OK.
I certainly agree that this assumption has been made by realists historically.
And while I'm not exactly sure it's a bad thing, I'm willing to treat it as one for the sake of discussion.
That said... I still don't quite get what the systematic value-difference is.
I mean, if my view is instead that what we try to achieve is maximal model accuracy, with no reference to this external realit...
I have to admit, this has gotten rarefied enough that I've lost track both of your point and my own.
So, yeah, maybe I'm confusing knowing-X-exists with knowing-details-of-X for various Xes, or maybe I've tried to respond to a question about (one, the other, just one, both) with an answer about (the other, one, both, just one). I no longer have any clear notion, either of which is the case or why it should matter, and I recommend we let this particular strand of discourse die unless you're willing to summarize it in its entirety for my benefit.
"we can keep refining our models and explain more and more inputs"
Hm.
On your account, "explaining an input" involves having a most-accurate-model (aka "real world") which alters in response to that input in some fashion that makes the model even more accurate than it was (that is, better able to predict future inputs). Yes?
If so... does your account then not allow for entering a state where it is no longer possible to improve the predictive power of our most accurate model, such that there is no further input-explanat...
(shrug) Sure. So my analogy only holds between agnostics-about-God (who question the knowability of both the existence and nature of God) and agnostics-about-reality (who question the knowability of both the existence and nature of reality).
As you say, there may well be other people out there, for example those who question the knowability of the details, but not of the existence, of reality. (For a sufficiently broad understanding of "the details" I suspect I'm one of those people, as is almost everyone I know.) I wasn't talking about them, but I don't dispute their existence.
Cool.
If you are motivated at some point to articulate an anti-realist account of how non-accidental correlations between inputs come to arise (in whatever format you see fit), I'd appreciate that.
why assume that something does, unless it's an accurate assumption (i.e. testable, tested and confirmed)?
Because there are stable relationships between outputs (actions) and inputs. We all test that hypothesis multiple times a day.
the idea of some objective reality becomes progressively less useful
Useful for what? Prediction? But realists arent using these models to answer the "what input should I expect" question; they are answering other questions, like "what is real" and "what should we value".
And "nothing" is an answer to "what is real". What does instrumentalism predict?
The part in bold is tautological. Accurate predictions is the definition of not being wrong
The instrumentalist definition. For realists, and accurate theory can still be wrong because it fails to correspond to reality, or posits non existent entities. For instance, and epicyclic theory of the solar system can be made as accurate as you like.
Beats me.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting that on your account I have no grounds for treating "All red boxes are contained by blue boxes AND all blue boxes are contained by red boxes" differently from "All red boxes are contained by blue boxes AND some blue boxes are contained by red boxes" in the way I discussed?
If you are suggesting that, then I don't quite know how to proceed. Suggestions welcomed.
If you are not suggesting that, then perhaps it would help to clarify what grounds I have for treating those statements differently, which might more generally clarify how to address logical contradiction in an instrumentalist framework
As before, I mostly attribute it to the usefulness of trying to understand what other people are saying.
I find it's much more difficult to express my own positions in ways that are easily understood, though. It's harder to figure out what is salient and where the vastest inferential gulfs are.
You might find it correspondingly useful to try and articulate the realist position as though you were trying to explain it to a fellow instrumentalist who had no experience with realists.
I prefer models which describe a society without slavery to be accurate (i.e. confirmed in a later testing).
And how do you arrange that?
The meta-model is that it is possible to make accurate models, without specifying the general mechanism (e.g. "external reality") responsible for it.
I think it's possible to do so without specifying the mechanism, but that's not the same thing as saying that no mechanism at all exists. If you are saying that, then you need to explain why all these inputs are correlated with each other, and why our models can (on occasion) correctly predict inputs that have not been observed yet.
Let me set up an analogy. Let's say you acquire a magically impe...
Nor do I.
But I acknowledge that saying inputs are connected in the sense that they reliably recur in particular patterns, and saying that inputs are connected in the sense of being caused by a common source that orders them, are two distinct claims, and one might accept that the former is true (based on observation) without necessarily accepting that the latter is true.
I don't have a clear sense of what such a one might then say about how inputs come to reliably recur in particular patterns in the first place, but often when I lack a clear sense of how X might come to be in the absence of Y, it's useful to ask "How, then, does X come to be?" rather than to insist that Y must be present.
So, what are those possible worlds but models?
The actual world is also a possible world. Non actual possible worlds are only accessible as models. Realists believe they can bring the actual world into line with desired models to some exitent
And isn't the "real world" just the most accurate model?
Not for realists.
...Properly modeling your actions lets you affect the preferred "world" model's accuracy, and such. The remaining issue is whether the definition of "good" or "preferred" depends on realist vs instrume
So, what are those possible worlds but models?
If I answer 'yes' to this, then I am confusing the map with the territory, surely? Yes, there may very well be a possible world that's a perfect match for a given model, but how would I tell it apart from all the near-misses?
The "real world" is a good deal more accurate than the most accurate model of it that we have of it.
It's not that I think that your version of instrumentalism is incompatible with preferences, it's more like I'm not sure I understand what the word "preferences" even means in your context. You say "possible worlds", but, as far as I can tell, you mean something like, "possible models that predict future inputs".
Firstly, I'm not even sure how you account for our actions affecting these inputs, especially given that you do not believe that various sets of inputs are connected to each other in any way; and without actions, pref...
Given a choice of several models and an ability to make one of them more accurate than the rest, I would likely exercise this choice...
Would you do so if picking another model required less effort ? I'm not sure how you can justify doing that.
Well, I'll give it another go, despite someone diligently downvoting all my related comments.
It's not me, FWIW; I find the discussion interesting.
That said, I'm not sure what methodology you use to determine which actions to take, given your statement that " the "real world" just the most accurate model". If all you cared about was the accuracy of your model, would it not be easier to avoid taking any physical actions, and simply change your model on the fly as it suits you ? This way, you could always make your model fit what you observe. Yes, you'd be grossly overfitting the data, but is that even a problem ?
So, what are those possible worlds but models? And isn't the "real world" just the most accurate model? Properly modeling your actions lets you affect the preferred "world" model's accuracy, and such. The remaining issue is whether the definition of "good" or "preferred" depends on realist vs instrumentalist outlook, and I don't see how. Maybe you can clarify.
Interesting. So we prefer that some models or others be accurate, and take actions that we expect to make that happen, in our current bag of models.
Ok I thin...
Only marginally. My feeling is that this apparent incommensurability is due to people not realizing that their disagreements are due to some deeply buried implicit assumptions and the lack of desire to find these assumptions and discuss them.
That's the standard physical realist response to Kuhn and Feyerabend. I find it confusing to hear it from you, because you certainly are not a standard physical realist.
In short, I think you are being a little too a la carte with your selection from various parts of philosophy of science.
Your argument
It's not an argument; it's an honest question. I'm sympathetic to instrumentalism, I just want to know how you frame the whole preferences issue, because I can't figure out how to do it. It probably is like the God is Morality thing, but I can't just accidentally find my way out of such a pickle without some help.
I frame it as "here's all these possible worlds, some being better than others, and only one being 'real', and then here's this evidence I see, which discriminates which possible worlds are probable, and here's the things I ca...
Accurate predictions is the definition of not being wrong (within the domain of applicability)
I meant to make a more further-reaching statement than that. If we believe that our model approximates that (postulated) thing that is causing our experiments to come out a certain way, then we can use this model to devise novel experiments, which are seemingly unrelated to the experiments we are doing now; and we could expect these novel experiments to come out the way we expected, at least on occasion.
For example, we could say, "I have observed this dot...
What is the alternative, though ? Over time, the trend in science has been to unify different groups of inputs; for example, electricity and magnetism were considered to be entirely separate phenomena at one point. So were chemistry and biology, or electricity and heat, etc. This happens all the time on smaller scales, as well; and every time it does, is it not logical to update your posterior probability of that "one universal thing" being out there to be a little bit higher ?
And besides, what is more likely: that 10 different groups of inputs are consistent and repeatable due to N reasons, or due to a single reason ?
I think both you and DaFranker might be going a bit too deep down the meta-model rabbit-hole. As far as I understand, when a scientist says "electrons exists", he does not mean,
These mathematical formulae that I wrote down describe an objective reality with 100% accuracy.
Rather, he's saying something like,
...There must be some reason why all my experiments keep coming out the way they do, and not in some other way. Sure, this could be happening purely by chance, but the probability of this is so tiny as to be negligible. These formulae descr
The inputs appear to be highly repeatable and consistent with each other. This could be purely due to chance, of course, but IMO this is less likely than the inputs being interdependent in some way.
But the "turtles all the way down" or the method in which the act of discovery changes the law...
Why can't that also be modeled? Even if the model is self-modifying meta-recursive turtle-stack infinite "nonsense", there probably exists some way to describe it, model it, understand it, or at least point towards it.
This very "pointing towards it" is what I'm doing right now. I postulate that no matter the form it takes, even if it seems logically nonsensical, there's a model which can explain the results proportionally to how mu...
So your logic is that there is some fundamental subalgorithm somewhere deep down in the stack of models, and this is what you think makes sense to call external reality?
Sort-of.
I'm saying that there's a sufficiently fuzzy and inaccurate polymorphic model (or sets of models, or meta-description of the requirements and properties for relevant models,) of "the universe" that could be created and pointed at as "the laws", which if known fully and accurately could be "computed" or simulated or something and computing this algor...
Intuitively, to me at least, it seems simpler to assume that everything has a cause, including the regularity of experimental results, and that a mathematical algorithm being computed with the outputs resulting in what we perceive as inputs / experimental results is simpler as a cause than randomness, magic, or nothingness.
See also my other reply to your other reply (heh). I think I'm piecing together your description of things now. I find your consistency with it rather admirable (and very epistemologically hygienic, I might add).
I think it all just finally clicked. Strawman test (hopefully this is a good enough approximation):
You do imagine patterns and formulas, and your model does (or can) contain a (meta^x)-model that we could use and call "reality" and do whatever other realist-like shenanigans, and does describe the experimental results in some way that we could say "this formula, if it 'really existed' and the concept of existence is coherent at all, is the cause of my experimental results and the thinghy that determines them".
You just naturally exclude ...
I think you overread shminux. My attempted steelman of his position would be:
...Of course there is something external to our minds, which we all experience. Call that "reality" if you like. Whatever reality is, it creates regularity such that we humans can make and share predictions.
Are there atoms, or quarks, or forces out there in the territory? Experts in the field have said yes, but sociological analysis like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gives us reasons to be skeptical. More importantly, resolving that metaphysical discussion doe
it has one goal in mind, maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe
In which universe? It doesn't know. And it may have uncertainty with regards to true number. There's going to be hypothetical universes that produce same observations but have ridiculously huge amounts of invisible paperclips at stake, which are influenced by paperclipper's actions (it may even be that the simplest extra addition that makes agent's actions influence invisible paperclips would utterly dominate all theories starting from some length, as it leaves most length for a...
I suggest editing in additional line-breaks so that the quote is distinguished from your own contribution. (You need at least two 'enters' between the end of the quote and the start of your own words.)
Your position on moral realism has a respectable pedigree in moral philosophy, but I don't think it is parallel to your position on physical realism.
As I understand it, your response to the question "Are there electrons?" is something like:
This is a wrong question. Trying to find the answer doesn't resolve any actual decision you face.
By contrast, your response to "Is human sacrifice wrong?" is something like:
Not in the sense you mean, because "wrong" in that sense does not exist.
I don't think there are philosoph...
I'm glad we agree that defining "wrong" is useful, but I'm still confused how you think we go about defining "wrong." One could assert:
Wrong is what society punishes.
But that doesn't tell us how society figures out what to punish, or whether there are constraints on society's classifications. Psychology doesn't seem to answer these questions - there once were societies that practiced human sacrifice or human slavery.
In common usage, we'd like to be able say those societies were doing wrong, and your usage seems inconsistent with using "wrong" in that way.
How do you interpret "such-and-such an entity is required by such-and-such a theory, which seems to work, bit turns out not to exist". Do things wink in and out of existence as one theory replaces another?
I completely agree with what you are saying and also tap out, even though it may be redundant. Let us kill this line of comments together.
Hi! I read some articles here a few years ago, decided they were good, and moved on. I think I am a pretty practical person, and I have some ways of deciding things that are utility based (and some that are not).
I would like to ask the community for some help with a couple of reading recommendations:
- how to leave for places (like work) on time and not get distracted;
- general time- and direction-sense improvements, should any reliably exist; and
- how to maintain composure when your body is making moods happen at you (dealing with becoming hangry).
Thanks very much, and I hope to be optimizing more things soon. It's nice to meet you!
A yes. You are probably right.
How comes you did notice so quickly this being such an old thread?
Hello everyone,
My name is Mathias. I've been thinking about coming here for quite some while and I finally made the jump. I've been introduced to this website/community through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and I've been quite active on it's subreddit (under the alias of Yxoque).
For a while now, I've been self-identifying as "aspiring rationalist" and I want to level up even further. One way I learn quickly is through conversation, so that's why I finally decided to come here. Also because I wanted to attend a meet-up, but if felt ...
I've been trying very hard to read the paper at that link for a while now, but honestly I can't figure it out. I can't even find anything content-wise to criticize because I don't understand what you're trying to claim in the first place. Something about the distinction between map and territory? But what the heck does that have to do with ethics and economics? And why the (seeming?) presumption of Christianity? And what does any of that have to do with this graph-making software you're trying to sell?
It would really help me if you could do the following:
...We make simulated version of all humans and put them in cyberspace. At that point we proceed to kill all people.
At the very lesat, by this point we've killed a lot of people. the fact that they've been backed up doesn't make the murder less henious.
Whether or not 'humanity' gets destroyed in this scenario depends on the definition that you aply to the word 'humanity'. If you mean the flesh and blood, the meat and bone, then yes, it gets destroyed. If you mean values and opinions, thoughts and dreams, then some of them are destroyed but not all of them -...
Well, if nothing else happens our new computer substrate will stop working. But if we remove that problem - in what sense has this not already happened?
If you like, we can assume that Eliezer is wrong about that. In which case, I'll have to ask what you think is actually true, whether a smarter version of Aristotle could tell the difference by sitting in a dark room thinking about consciousness, and whether or not we should expect this to matter.
We make simulated version of all humans and put them in cyberspace. At that point we proceed to kill all people.
Ah, The Change in the Prime Intellect scenario. Is it possible to reconstruct meat humans if the uploads decide to do so? If not, then something has been irrecoverably lost.
I don't see why this is necessarily true, unless you treat "altruism toward humanity" as a terminal goal.
Well, yes. I think that's the point. I certainly don't only value other humans for the way that they interest me - If that were so, I probably wouldn't care about most of them at all. Humanity is a terminall value to me - or, more generally, the existence and experiences of happy, engaged, thinking sentient beings. Humans qualify, regardless of whether or not uploads exist (and, of course, also qualify.
Oh how embarrassing. My apologies for any confusion Andrew, and welcome to LessWrong!:) it's a lovely place from what I've seen, and I hope you stick around.
Hello LessWrong community, my name is Andrew. I'm beginning my first year of university at UofT this September, despite my relatively old age (21). This is mostly due to the resistance I faced when upgrading my courses, due to my learning disability diagnosis and lack of prereqs. I am currently enrolled in a BA cognitive science program, although I hope to upgrade my math credits to a U level so I can pursue the science branch instead.
I found this site through common sense atheism a while ago, although I have sparsely visited it until recently. I admittedl...
Well, I just looked it up, and I'd agree with it, though I do use it more as an intermediate conclusion than an actual end point.
P: Humans naturally or instinctively act according to a system very close to Utilitarianism
Were this true, the utilitarian answers to common moral thought experiments would be seen as intuitive. Instead, we find that a minority of people endorse the utilitarian answers, and they are more likely to endorse those answers the more they rely on abstract thought rather than intuition. It seems that most people are intuitive deontologists.
...I think of this as less an ethical system in itself, rather a justification and rationalization of my position on Nihili
Hi,
I first found this a while back site after googling something like "how to not procrastinate" and finding one of Eliezer's articles. I've been slowly working may way through the posts ever since, and i think they are significantly changing my life.
I've just finished secondary education, which i found stultifying, and so i'm now quite excited to have more control over my own learning. I've been very interested in rationality since I was young, and have been passionate about philosophy because of this. Though, after getting into this site i've ...
I agreed with that, although it seems
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).
T-IV is already a large chunk of UniverSpace-- it is everything that is mathematically possible. The T-IV question is more about how large a region of UnverseSpace the universe is, than about pinpointing a small region.
It's not arbitrary in the sense of random. It's arbitrary in the sense of not following obvious apriori principles.
Agreed. The human brain is the output of a long, optimising process known as evolution.
Simple, comprehensible order of the kind you detect and admire in the physical unverse at large is easier to do than designing a brain. No one can build an AGI, but physicists build models of physical systems all the time.
Yes. Simple, comprehensible order is one of the easiest things to design; as you say, physicists do it all the time. But a lot of s...
That's not clear.. There is presumably something like that in Tegmark's level IV.
Assume that P(%5E{x+1})god |
^{x})god) = Q, where Q < 1.0 for all x. Consider an infinite chain; what is P(
^{\infty})god|god)?
This would be P(
^{x})god|god) =
. Since Q<1.0, this limit is equal to zero.
...hmmm. Now that I think about it, that applies for any constant Q. It may be possible to craft a function Q(x) such that the limit as x approaches infinity is non-zero; for example, if I set Q(1)=0.75 and then Q(x) for x>1 such that, when multiplied by the product ...
When you say "I have an infinity of such beliefs", or even just "I can make an infinite number of truth-claims", I assume that the "I" refers to "hen", not some hypothetical entity with an infinite memory capacity (for the former), or an infinite lifespan (for the latter).
Unless you aren't talking about yourself (and that car), both claims (have an infinity of beliefs, can make an infinite number of truth-claims) are obviously false on resource grounds alone. Even the number of truth-claims you could make in the rema...
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about. There have been a lot of very smart people trying to build AI for a very long time; if the creation of intelligence were highly non-arbitrary and followed well-known rules, we would have working AI by now.
I agree that intelligence itself is an optimizing process (which I presume is what you mean by "making its own rules"), but it is also the product of an optimizing proce...
Let's consider loops A->B->C->A->B->C and D->E->F->D->E->F.
Let's say, further, that B is a cause of E and D is a cause of A. Then each loop has an external cause.
Then there are also a few other loops possible:
A->B->E->F->D->A->B->E->F->D (external cause: C) A->B->E->F->D->A->B->C->A->B->E->F->D... huh. That includes all of them, in a sort of double-loop with no external cause. I guess that would be the super-loop.
...Finally, I rather liked your thought that causalit
Ah... I think I get it. You want to play with intuitions, and see which premises would have to be proved in order to end up with monotheism via set theory.
I don't think it would be possible to get around the point of defining God in terms of set theory. Once you have a definition, you can see if it turns up; if God is not defined, then you don't know what you're looking for. Looked at from that point of view, the definition of God as a first cause is probably one of the better options.
Loops can still be a problem...
...The arguer could then tweak premise 2 s
Hey guys, I'm a person who on this site goes by the name sjmp! I found lesswrong about a year ago (I actually don't remember how I found it, I read for a bit back then but I started seriously reading thourgh the sequences few months ago) and I can honestly say this is the single best website I've ever found.Rather than make a long post on why lesswrong and rationality is awesome, I'd like to offer one small anecdote on what lesswrong has done for me:
When I first came to the site, I already had understanding of "if tree falls in a forest..." dispu...
Sometimes, the issues really are cut-and-dried, though. To use a rather trivial example, consider the debate about the shape of the Earth. There are still some people who believe it's flat. They don't have any good arguments. We've been to space, we know the Earth is round, it's going to be next to impossible to beat that.
I should clarify that when I said:
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
I meant this as the rhetorical "we", not "we, Less Wrong".
And in general, you shouldn't take me, or any other commenter in particular (even Eliezer), to represent all of Less Wrong. This is a community blog, after all.
Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone's intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Did you read what I wrote about what makes arguments good or bad...?
Edit:...
I didn't come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
How does this response mean that we're rigid?
Both of the values are somewhere around epsilon.
God-wise, I've never seen any evidence for anything remotely supernatural, and plenty of evidence for natural things. I know that throughout human history, many phenomena traditionally attributed to gods (f.ex. lightning) have later been demonstrated to occur by natural means; the reverse has never happened. These facts, combined with the internal (as well as mutual) inconsistencies inherent in most major religions, serve to drive the probability down into negligibility.
As for the Simulation Argument, once a...
Well, traditional theistic gods tend to be incoherent as well as improbable. (Or one might say, improbable only to the extent that they are coherent, which is not very much.) So, I'm not sure how we'd integrate that into a probability estimate.
Keeping one's identity small is hard, be it "Mormon" or "Rationalist" or "Brunette" or whatever. I don't think we should discourage people from joining the site just because they haven't fully mastered Bayes-Fu (tm) yet.
Hello,
I have a question. This has probably been discussed already, but I can't seem to find it. I'd appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction.
My question is, what would a pure intelligence want? What would its goals be, when it has the perfect freedom to choose those goals?
Humans have plenty of hard-wired directives. Our meat brains and evolved bodies come with baggage that gets in the way of clear thinking. We WANT things, because they satisfy some instinct or need. Everything that people do is in service to one drive or another. Nothing ...
It is known that human populations separately evolved for at least 15000 years, facing different selection pressures that have produced many differences in physiology, appearance, size, prevalence to deseises, even what foods are edible. It would take some serious reasoning to postulate that these differences are magically limited to things that don't affect people's abilities and quality of life.
It is generally accepted that ethiopians (or is it kenyans?) are good at marathons, and that ashkenazi jews have higher average IQ scores and win more nobel prize...
Fighting in this context refers to anything analogous to defecting in a Prisoner's Dilemma. You hurt the other side but encourage them to defect in order to punish you. You should strive for the Pareto Optimimum.
Maybe this would be clearer if we talked in terms of Pebblesorters?
Clippy doesn't care about getting hurt though, it only cares if this will result in less paperclips.
I imagine that, for Clippy, "getting hurt" would mean "reducing Clippy's projected long-term paperclip output". We humans have "avoid pain" built into our firmware (most of us, anyway); as far as I understand (speaking abstractly), "make more paperclips" is something similar for Clippy.
...Well, it could understand "yep, this is what causes me to hold these values. Changing this would cause me to change them, no,
Agreed, but that goes back to my point about objective morality. If it exists at all (which I doubt), then attempting to perform objectively immoral actions would make as much sense as attempting to fly to Mars in a hot air balloon -- though perhaps with less in the way of immediate feedback.
Why is that?
...For the same reason anthropologists study human societies different from their own, or why biologists study the behavior of dogs, or whatever. They do this in order to acquire general knowledge, which, as I argued before, is generally a beneficial thin
That is a good point, I did not think of it this way. I'm not sure if I agree or not, though. For example, couldn't we at least say that un-achievable goals, such as "fly to Mars in a hot air balloon", are sillier than achievable ones ?
Well, a totally neutral agent might be able to say that behaviors are less rational than others given the values of the agents trying to execute them, although it wouldn't care as such. But it wouldn't be able to discriminate between the value of end goals.
...But, speaking more generally, is there any reason to b
but it would be an actual, explicitly encoded/incentivized goal.
The issue is that there is a weakness from arguments ad clippy - you assume that such goal is realisable, to make the argument that there is no absolute morality because that goal won't converge onto something else. This does nothing to address the question whenever clippy can be constructed at all; if the moral realism is true, clippy can't be constructed or can't be arbitrarily intelligent (in which case it is no more interesting than a thermostat which has the goal of keeping constant temperature and won't adopt any morality).
To actually work towards the goal, you need a robust paperclip count for the counter factual, non real worlds, which clippy considers may result from it's actions.
If you postulate an oracle that takes in a hypothetical world - described in some pre-defined ontology, which already implies certain inflexibility - and outputs a number, and you have a machine that just iterates through sequences of actions and uses oracle to pick worlds that produce largest consequent number of paperclips, this machine is not going to be very intelligent even given an enormou...
Well, but then you can't make any argument against moral realism or goal convergence or the like from there, as you're presuming what you would need to demonstrate.
That was my first thought too; there's a huge textual analysis tradition relating to the Bible and what I know of it maps pretty closely to the summary, although it's also mature enough that there wouldn't be much reason to obfuscate it like this. But it's not implausible that it applies to some other body of literature. I understand there are some similar things going on in classics, for example.
The specifics shouldn't matter too much, though. Although some types of mark are going to be a lot more machine-distinguishable than others, and that's going to affect the kinds of analysis you can do -- differences in spelling and grammar, for example, are far machine-friendlier than differences in letterforms in a manuscript.
What is Dennett's account for why philosophers of consciousness other than himself continue to think that a dismissable idea like qualia is worth continuing to discuss, even though he considers it closed?
"Rational" is broader than "human" and narrower than "physically possible".
Do you really mean to say that there are physically possible minds that are not rational? In virtue of what are they 'minds' then?
Do you think that it's even plausible? Do you think we have any significant reason to suspect it, beyond our reason to suspect, say, that the Invisible Flying Noodle Monster would just reprogram the AI with its noodley appendage?
I downvoted your comment, not because I don't enjoy a good takedown of sloppy religious reasoning (even in the form of a snappy comment), but because this was nothing of the sort: it's a completely boring instance of saying "Boo X", without any content or even cleverness. It's just noise within the discussion.
Seriously, you know you can do better than that.
Moral realism. Shelves full of books have been written about it over many centuries. Why has no-one here heard of it?
Moral realism has been formulated in a great number of ways over the years. In my opinion never convincingly. A guy further up the thread mentioned the form of it you seem to be using.
Perhaps I was unclear. Where is your second correlate? What are you mapping onto? Where's your information coming from that you're right or wrong in light of?
If you just mean something to the effect of one should always act in a way that favours one's most d...
Paul saying those that didn't know God and that didn't have the law but that acted justly being justified because of their actions doesn't imply to you that it is possible to be moral, healthy, and happy without faith in God?
I don't know where you draw that implication from the word "justified". So, no.
...How about this, where in "There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated— And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it
That's funny. No. I don't care what JohnH wants to be seen as or what title he deserves. I just want my previous-self identified as a "plausible Mormon". In my opinion, JohnH wants me to be seen as a "fringe Mormon" whose departure from the LDS Church is unimportant in the debate over whether the LDS Church is true, because I didn't really understand Latter-day Saint beliefs. Which I did as much as any other average Latter-day Saint I know.
If you're feeling trapped into arguing with this guy to defend your reputation, you may be better off just saying something like: "If you turn out to be right, and most people don't believe the way I do, I'm still not going to start believing in the LDS. Therefore my expected return on this conversation is 0 and I'm not going to continue it."
Certainly from my perspective that would be a much more high-status move than continuing to argue with the guy. Because, in all kindness: Your departure from the LDS is unimportant in the debate over whether the Church is true. Not because the beliefs are or are not commonly held, nor because they are or are not ridiculous, but because there are much better reasons for disbel...
I already pointed you to Romans 2, specifically in this case Romans 2:13-15, did you want more?
Yes. I don't see anything in Romans 2 that shows me that you can be moral, healthy, and happy without faith in God.
A prophet is only a prophet when they are acting as a prophet.
But you have to admit it's hard sometimes to distinguish whether or not a prophet is acting as one.
More specifically there are multiple First Presidency statements saying Adam-God is wrong.
I never believed that Adam WAS Elohim, but I did believe that what Brigham Young and othe...
Some of that might be because of evaporative cooling. Reading the sequences is more likely to cause a theist to ignore Less Wrong then it is to change their beliefs, regardless of how rational or not a theist is.
I agree intuitively with your second sentance (parsing 'beliefs' as 'religious beliefs'); but as I assign both options rather low probabilities, I suspect that it isn't enough to cause much in the way of evaporative cooling.
but fairly hostile to those that try and say that religion is not irrational
I haven't really seen that hostility, mysel...
I think I got a cumulative total of some 100 downvotes on this thread, so somehow I don't believe that a top-level post would be welcome. However, if TheOtherDave were to write one as a description of an interesting ontology he does not subscribe to, this would probably go over much better. I doubt he would be interested, though.
Maybe we should organize a discussion where everyone has to take positions other than their own?
It seems to me to be one of the basic exercises in rationality, also known as "Devil's advocate". However, Eliezer dislikes it for some reason, probably because he thinks that it's too easy to do poorly and then dismiss with a metaphorical self-congratulatory pat on one's own back. Not sure how much of this is taught or practiced at CFAR camps.
What I want to do is to figure out what I want to do. My basic (and vague) goal is to do the most amount of good with my future career. If I make that decision with my current tools, I will likely overlook something.
Yeah, that confused me on initial reading, though some googling clarified matters, and I inferred from the way shminux (mis)quoted that something similar might be going on there, which is why I mentioned it.
Light isn't electrically charged.
Light IS electromagnetic fields. the phrase "electrically charged electromagnetic fields" is a contradiction- the fields aren't charged. Charges react to the field.
If the fields WERE charged in some way, the theory would be non-linear.
In this case there is no loop- you can develop the electromagnetic theory around light, and from there proceed to electrons if you like.
Firstly, people are not going to give you karma because they ask; they'll give you karma because you write high-quality comments.
Secondly, if you consider the questions people ask here "long-winded, wordy and badly written" then it might be easier to simply find another website rather than insulting people here.
Thirdly, I am using Chrome and it's working just fine; the problem must be on your end.
And finally, this comment section is intended for introducing yourself.
There is no 'rigid' in special relativity, the best you can do is Born-rigid. Even so, its trivial to define a ball in special relativity, just define it in the frame of a corotating observer and use four vectors to move to the same collection of events in other frames You learn that a 'ball' in special relativity has some observer dependent properties, but thats because length and time are observer dependent in special relativity. So 'radius' isn't a good concept, but 'the radius so-and-so measures' IS a good concept.
I don't understand the paperclipping reference, but MugaSofer is a hard-core moral realist (I think). Physical pragmatism (your position) is a reasonable stance in the physical realism / anti-realism debate, but I'm not sure what the parallel position is in the moral realism / anti-realism debate.
(Edit: And for some moral realists, the justification for that position is the "obvious" truth of physical realism and the non-intuitiveness of physical facts and moral facts having a different ontological status.)
In short, "physical prediction&...
I meant for the as-yet-unknown model to be simpler than ours. (Do epicycles exist? After all, they do predict the motion of planets.)
[trap closes]
Please change your posting style or leave lesswrong. Not only is disingenuous rhetoric not welcome, your use thereof doesn't even seem particularly competent.
ie. What the heck? You think that the relevance of authority isn't obvious to everyone here and is a notion sufficiently clever to merit 'traps'? You think that forcing someone to repeat what is already clear and already something they plainly endorse even qualifies as entrapment? (It's like an undercover Vice cop having already been paid for a forthcoming sexual favor demanding "...
Yeah, and EY [any of the unmentionable things].
The relevance of Porter's physics beliefs is that any reader who disagrees with Porter's premises but agrees with the premises used in an article can gain little additional information about the quality of the article by learning that Porter is not convinced by it. ie. Whatever degree of authority Mitchell Porter's status grants goes (approximately) in the direction of persuading the reader to adopt those different premises.
In this way mentioning Porter's beliefs is distinctly different from mentioning the ...
Hey everyone,
This a new account for an old user. I've got a couple of substantial posts waiting in the wings and wanted to move to an account with different username from the one I first signed up with years ago. (Giving up on a mere 62 karma).
I'm planning a lengthy review of self-deception used for instrumental ends and a look into motivators vs. reason, by which I mean something like social approval is a motivator for donating, but helping people is the reason.
Those, and I need to post about a Less Wrong Australia Mega-Meetup which has been planned.
So pretty please, could I get the couple of karma points needed to post again?
Found the newest welcome thread, posted there instead.
Hello to you all, I am Chris.
I live in England and attend my local High school (well, in England we call the senior years/curriculums a sixth form). I take Mathematics, Further mathematics, physics and philosophy. I actually happened upon Lesswrong two years ago, when I was 16, whilst searching for interesting discussions on worldviews. Although I had never really been interested in rationality (up until that point I hasten to add!), I had a seething urge to sort out my worldview as quickly as I could. I just got so sick of the people who went to sunday sc...
Hi All LessWrongers, My name is Rupesh and I have PhD in mathematics. I been lurking here for a long time. The posts are of really very high quality. After visiting here for a while, I realised that rationality is not something you do just 9 to 5 at work, it must seep into your whole lifestyle.
the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something.
I can't speak to how well this works out for Harry (I haven't read HPMoR) but I think I can guess why this bites people in real life.
The methods that work for someone tend to be the ones they're already familiar with. Why? At least two reasons. The boring one is that people are less likely to stick with methods that obviously don't work, so obvious...
So: Here goes. I'm dipping my toe into this gigantic and somewhat scary pool/lake(/ocean?).
Here's the deal: I'm a recovering irrationalic. Not an irrationalist; I've never believed in anything but rationalism (in the sense it's used here, but that's another discussion), formally. But my behaviors and attitudes have been stuck in an irrational quagmire for years. Perhaps decades, depending on exactly how you're measuring. So I use "irrationalic" in the sense of "alcoholic"; someone who self-identifies as "alcoholic" is very un...
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
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* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.