All of crap's Comments + Replies

crap40

Look. Simple utilitarianism doesn't have to be correct. It looks like a wrong idea to me. Often, when reasoning informally, people confabulate wrong formal sounding things that loosely match their intuitions. And then declare that normative.

Is a library of copies of one book worth the same to you? Is a library of books of 1 author worth as much? Does variety ever truly count for nothing? There's no reason why u("AB") should be equal to u("A")+u("B"). People pick + because they are bad at math , or perhaps bad at knowing when t... (read more)

-1Incorrect
The lifespan dilemma applies to all unbounded utility functions combined with expected value maximization, it does not require simple utilitarianism.
crap20

Ohh, I agree. I just don't think that there is a corresponding neurological distinction. (Original quote was about evolution).

crap20

Propositional logic is made of many very simple steps, though.

3simplicio
Sure. The point is that "A->B; A, therefore B" is necessarily valid. Unlike, say, "the risk of something happening is proportional to the number of times I've heard it mentioned." Calling logic a set of heuristics dissolves a useful semantic distinction between normatively correct reasoning and mere rules of thumb, even if you can put the two on a spectrum.
crap40

What is analytical thinking, but a sequence of steps of heuristics well vetted not to lead to contradictions?

2simplicio
A heuristic is a "rule of thumb," used because it is computationally cheap for a human brain and returns the right answer most of the time. Analytical thinking uses heuristics, but is distinctive in ALSO using propositional logic, probabilistic reasoning, and mathematics - in other words, exceptionless, normatively correct modes of reasoning (insofar as they are done well) that explicitly state their assumptions and "show the work." So there is a real qualitative difference.
crap20

If worst comes to worst, refuse to sign any papers what so ever, you'll go to prison for a few years. Or shoot yourself in the foot on accident, that flips burden of proof. It's called non-violent resistance. I don't think US would allow any other form of objection (edit: besides e.g. being Amish). There are 2 types of conscription. Total war conscription to win an important war where you have a lot to lose; this one would go nuclear within the first hour. And majority enslaving minority, the only type of conscription possible in the US.

1[anonymous]
I guess one could just expand the question like so: 1) Avoiding combat where I cause harm or death is the first priority, so if I have to go to jail or shoot myself in the foot to avoid it, so be it and if it comes to that, it's what I'll do. This is priority number one. 2) I can do things to improve my odds of never needing to face the situation described in (1) and to the extent that the behaviors are expedient (in a cost-benefit tradeoff sense) to do in my life, I'd like to do them now to help improve odds of (1)-avoidance later. Note that this in no way conflicts with being a genuine pacifist. It's just common sense. Yes, I'll avoid combat in costly ways if I have to. But I'd also be stupid to not even explore less costly ways to invest in combat-avoidance that could be better for me. 3) To the extent that (2) is true, I'd like to examine certain options, like donating to charities that assist with legal issues in conscientious objection, or which extend mental illness help to affected veterans, for their efficacy. There is still a cost to these things and given my conscientious objection preferences, I ought to weigh that cost. I appreciate your willingness to engage me on the actual point of my question, rather than solely looking at the signal faker aspect like other commenters. But I still think there's much to discuss here.
crap20

No one here felt distraught with religion? Not even a little? :)

crap20

Difference in values is a little overstated, I think. Practically, there's little difference between what people say they'd do in Milgram experiment, but a huge difference between what they actually do.

0DanArmak
I'm not sure how to parse your grammar. Are you saying that different people all say they will do the same ('good') thing on Milgram, but in practice different people do different things on Milgram (some 'good' some 'bad')? Or are you saying that there is a large difference between what people say they would do on Milgram, and between what they actually do? (Because replications of Milgram are prohibited by modern ethics boards, the data is weaker than I'd like it to be.) You also say that I overstate the difference in values between people. But Milgram ran his experiment just once on very homogenous people: all from the same culture. If he'd compared it to widely differing cultures, I expect at least some of the time the compliance rates would differ significantly.
crap10

A crazy idea reflects badly on the ideology that spawned the crazy idea.

1handoflixue
If that were true, LessWrong would have such an INCREDIBLY HUGE advantage over most every major religion. LessWrong hasn't managed to raise armies and invade sovereign nations yet, after all. Thinking in those terms, it makes me strongly suspect anyone turned away by a single bad post is engaging in some VERY motivated cognition, and probably would not have stayed long. (A high noise:signal ratio, on the other hand, would be genuinely damaging)
crap40

1st link is ambiguity aversion.

Morality is commonly taken to describe what one will actually do when they are trading off private gains vs other people's losses. See this as example of moral judgement. Suppose Roberts is smarter. He will quickly see that he can donate 10% to charity, and it'll take longer for him to reason about value of cash that was not given to him (reasoning that may stop him from pressing the button), so there will be a transient during which he pushes the button, unless he somehow suppresses actions during transients. It's an open ended problem 'unlike logic' because consequences are difficult to evaluate.

edit: been in a hurry.

crap60

People do all sorts of sloppy reasoning; everyday logic also arrives at both A and ~A ; any sort of fuzziness leads to that. To actually be moral, it is necessary that you can't arrive at both A and ~A at will - otherwise your morality provides no constraint.

3DanArmak
Different people can disagree about pretty much any moral question. Any one person's morality may be stable enough not to arrive at A and also ~A, but since the result still dependent most of all on that person's upbringing and culturally endorsed belief, morality is not very useful as logic. (Of course it is useful as morality: our brains are built that way.)
crap00

My understanding is that this only works for specific type of focal brain damage. I.e. if you had gross denial that you have a paralysed limb. I never heard that it e.g. relieves delusions in mental disorders, and i'd think everyday self deception is less similar to focal brain damage than to mental disorder.

2gwern
Yeah, it'd be shocking on multiple levels if it did anything but induce vertigo. But it was fun trying, and the videotape criticism gave me a reason to do it.
crap30

But if the hypotheses are intelligent and run by superintelligence?

crap40

What's about moral objections to creation of multitude of agents for the purposes of evaluation?

0Eliezer Yudkowsky
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Nonperson_predicate (open problem!)
0bryjnar
They explicitly don't address that:
-8timtyler
crap80

It would create a kooky outgroup faction, the Violent Anti-Smokers, that people would be afraid to be associated with, so people would become uncomfortable with being too vocally anti-smoking lest they be mistaken for one of Them.

Exactly. It already happened to Germany with precisely this result. (You know who else was against smoking? Hitler, that's who!)

6NancyLebovitz
Just to underline: The first anti-smoking campaign was in Nazi Germany.
crap50

You're doing a world of good with this. People take their uneducated guesses far, far too seriously (QM and morality etc).

4Shmi
Thank you!
crap70

Well, if quantum immortality worked, so would quantum insomnia, or quantum sobriety, or the like. Being distracted in the middle of the thought - there's you that weren't distracted, why you're not always him? Or: there got to be a parallel you that via sheer chance effectively did not advance a timestep, and he's more similar to you now than the one that did.

More generally, don't take things too seriously for mere lack of a counter argument. Fringe ideas are mostly discussed by their promoters, while detractors have bigger fish to fry.