All of Filipe's Comments + Replies

I turned a an automatic .str transcription into a more or less coherent transcription. Corrections welcome:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e85zhh8qROTyE_0oaKdU7hhEyZcQqKzG3z0YRGeBZzc

This seems related to Dennett's Intentional Stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

5the gears to ascension
see also discovering agents

Wei Dai makes a case for cleverness being an disadvantage in some non-zero-sum games: Link

What this suggests is that the oft touted connection between altruistic behavior and intelligence may have a root in self preservation. Intelligent people are much more capable of serious undetected dishonesty and so have to make obvious sacrifices against violence, crime, impoliteness, etc. to make up for it.

0Flinter
"In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something." "This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny." "With this audience, I hope, I can simply state it and move on." Yes but only to an extent. If we start to spend the heck out of our money to incite a care bear care-a-thon, we would only be destroying what we have worked for. Rather, it is other causes that allow spending to either be a measure or not of caring. So I don't like the way the essay ends. Furthermore, it is more to the point to say it is reasonable that we all care about money and so will AI. That is the nature of money, it is intrinsic to it.

Economist Scott Sumner at Econlog praised heavily Yudkowsky and the quantum physics sequence, and applies lessons from it to economics. Excerpts:

I've recently been working my way through a long set of 2008 blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It starts with an attempt to make quantum mechanics seem "normal," and then branches out into some interesting essays on philosophy and science. I'm nowhere near as smart as Yudkowsky, so I can't offer any opinion on the science he discusses, but when the posts touched on epistemological issues his views hit h

... (read more)
7Viliam_Bur
Reading the comments... one commenter objects to WMI in a way which I would summarize as: "MWI provides identical experimental predictions to CI, which makes it useless, and also MWI provides wrong experimental predictions (unlike CI), which makes it wrong". The author immediately detects the contradiction: Another commenter says that MWI has a greater complexity of thought, and while it is more useful to explore algorithmic possibilities on quantum computers abstractly, CI wins because it is about the real world. Then the former commenter says (in reaction to the author) that MWI didn't provide useful predictions, and that Casimir force can only be explained by quantum equations and not by classical physics. (Why exactly is that supposed to be an argument against MWI? No idea. Also, if MWI doesn't provide useful predictions, how can it be useful for studying quantum computers? Does it mean that quantum computers are never going to work in, you know, the real life?) Finally, yet another commenter explains things from MWI point of view, saying that "observers" must follow the same fundamental physics as rocks.

Even though he calls it "The Smart Vote", the concept is a way to figure out the truth, not to challenge current democratic notions (I think), and is quite a bit more sophisticated than merely giving greater weight to smarter people's opinions.

Garth Zietsman, who according to himself, "Scored an IQ of 185 on the Mega27 and has a degree in psychology and statistics and 25 years experience in psychometrics and statistics", proposed the statistical concept of The Smart Vote , which seems to resemble your "Mildly extrapolate elite opinion". There are many applications of his idea to relevant topics on his blog.

It's not choosing the most popular answer among the smart people in any (aggregation of) poll(s), but comparing the proportion of the most to the less intelligent in any an... (read more)

0Jayson_Virissimo
J. S. Mill had a similar idea: -- Wilson, Fred, "John Stuart Mill", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

A blog connected to the NYT also linked to the interview.

Mr. Legg noted in a 2011 Q&A with the LessWrong blog that technology and artificial intelligence could have negative consequences for humanity.

I'm from Rio. You may PM me if there's enough interest.

0betterthanwell
Yep. Gloriously lucid and quite readable book. Encapsulates good chunks of the sequences. Much more accessible than I had anticipated.
2Manfred
Not a source, but definitely a parallel. We have talked about Newcomb's problem with transparent boxes on here a few times - I'm pretty sure that's originally from Good and Real.

Is there an actual history of people complaining about 'creepy behavior' in LW meetups? Or is this just one of those blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence?

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Considering that the atheist and fannish communities were somewhat caught by surprise, I think it's reasonable for LW to try to avoid this problem before it surfaces.

-4gjm
All Douglas said on that score is that creepiness is "one social skills issue that might be affecting this". I think you are overreacting just a teensy little bit.

The creepy-expulsions will continue until the sex ratio improves!

I'm sure it is correlated. One might find even correlations with other things such as race and gender... I questioned the fairness in using it as a way to recruit people.

Ultrasummary of abilities: Very good English command, goals that either pro-technology or pro-effective giving, minimally rational, somewhat rich (there is a niche of people who work to feel fulfilled more than for money, in Brazil, this correlates strongly with good english skills and all the abilities social class can buy)

(emphasis added)

Is this acceptable now? I suspected some would practice such discrimination privately, but to proclaim it publicly and to expect it to be seen as a fair requirement surprises me.

1drethelin
http://www.halfsigma.com/2012/08/to-succeed-in-journalism-have-rich-parents.html Related.
1Jayson_Virissimo
Wealth is moderately correlated with intelligence/instrumental rationality (especially for those over 30 years of age), so it might work as a decent filter (in conjunction with other metrics) for their purposes.

This seems essentially the same answer as the most upvoted comment on the thread. Yet, you were at -2 just a while ago. I wonder why.

7Alejandro1
I wondered too, but I don't like the "why the downvotes?" attitude when I see it in others, so I refrained from asking. (Fundamental attribution error lesson of the day: what looks like a legitimate puzzled query from the inside, looks like being a whiner from the outside). My main hypothesis was that the "upvoted for clarity" may have bugged some who saw the original post as obscure. And I must admit that the last paragraphs were much more obscure than the first ones.

If you read the session on Welfare, you'll find it's pretty not liberal. So a mere liberal mistaken position on welfare + censoring certain views on racism and sexism (if some of those happen to be right) could be damning to civilization. Besides, theocracy and totaliarism are not only alive - take Islamic countries, with their huge populational growth - but coming back in a lot of places, like Venezuela or Turkey.

Now, I guess that some Liberal positions such as favoring Gay Rights and Abortions are the more reasonable shoudn't be really surprising among smart people, and I'm sure they're among the majority here, too.

I think you are underestimating the share of metacontrarians probably disagree with many of them.

If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration? Those are the true dangerous ones: in most cases, those people are just autodidacts who when confronted with a true expert, have their theories pretty much discredited.

Take in mind, for instance, Yvain's (who's a student of Medicine) triumphant answers to Hanson on Medicine (so harsh that he regrets on his blog being so incisive), or Kalla724's comment on cryonics whi... (read more)

[anonymous]100

If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration?

I'm just informing you of your audience on LW! Not saying they are right. :)

But I am saying that intelligent people, like to show off their intelligence, this is very obvious on LessWrong. It is no less obvious when you pick up a newspaper or talk at the water cooler about politics. Intelligent people are contrarians. Having different opinions from less intelligent individuals is a great way to distinguish yourself form them. Intellectual fashion seems very much... (read more)

A key problem of most people thinking about policy is I think mind projection fallacy. Is there evidence that intelligent people are significantly better at avoiding it?

As it has been said, sometimes smart people are pretty prone to some biases almost like anybody else, but even in those cases they're always at least a little better (or 'less bad') than dumb people. And it is the dumb-smart trend, not the percentage, which will point to the better answer. So, no, they need not be significantly better at avoiding certain biases, including mind projection fallacy.

3[anonymous]
I'm not sure I understand your argument. That point was about that high IQ people not having a good understanding of how low IQ people will respond to their preferred policies, while low IQ people have a very good idea of how others like them will respond. High intelligence isn't magic, one still needs to have information. Cognitive stratification is a very real and growing trend. If one is an outlier among one's friends one is very likely to change their opinion to match theirs. To see how this has played out consider some of the social policies implemented in the past 40 years that where favoured by those with high IQ. They seem to remarkably often result in very little social pathology for those with high IQ, but quite a bit for those with low IQ. A great example of this is the sexual revolution.

That we cannot measure intelligence reliably after a certain point does not imply that there are not (infinite?) levels of intelligence after it. There are certainly - at least theoretically - levels of fluid intelligence that correspond to IQs of 170, 180, 300..., and it was in this theoretical sense that I raised my question.

Ah! Indeed, without the distributions - from dumb to smart -, one can't be much certain. However, in many (if not all) cases he doesn't merely calculate what the smart vote is. He analyses and interprets it, and in a very artful way (the guy is smart), although sometimes art is not really necessary, e.g. as in an graph of an increasing monotonical dumb-smart function.

Anyway, you do raise an obvious problem: even if a graph dumb-smart represented something like a monotonic function, how would one know that, after a while, eg. at the 300 IQ point, there isn't going to be a radical change?

0gwern
Current IQ tests are pretty meaningless past >160, so as long as this works in the 70-160 range, we're fine.

Not only it makes more sense, but it is the approach adopted by Zietsman. Please check my answer below.

It seems most of his analyses are on political opinions, not on matters of fact. The one exception seems to be on the existence of God, where the smart vote was on agnosticism, which is not exactly "politically correct", but would signal intelligence.

Now, some of the political positions are PC, such as support for Gay Rights, for Immigration, and opposition to Death Penalty. The position on welfare state seems very un-PC, though ("doesn’t think is really a state responsibility but is not opposed to some welfare spending so long as the countr... (read more)

How come? If you mean they would solve different problems due to different levels of education, or income, I think the regression analysis was meant to handle those. If you have another thing in mind, I'm afraid I don't understand you.

2Manfred
Consider someone dumb but politically opinionated. What problem are they solving? Tribal affiliation, probably. As a by-product, their political actions are practically directed by the leaders of the tribe. Now consider someone a bit less dumb who happens to have just enough inspiration to try to solve the problem of what actually works, rather than tribal affiliation. I think it entirely reasonable that this slight increase in inspiration can actually reduce the effectiveness of policies advocated, if the problem is confusing. Sure, the tribe leaders aren't going to make great decisions, because they're solving a problem of inter-tribe politics rather than just what works. But it's entirely possible to do worse, and many people will. So you're going to see strange signals in the data as people become smart enough to question the ordinary, fail, do better, and find new things to question. At no point are you really sure if smart people are solving the same problem better, or just failing at a new and interesting question. You can work out some good guesses, though I guess this would depend on the nitty-gritty of what the signals look like.

Thank you for your interest in the matter.

1) I think even in your example model, the answer chosen by the method would still be C, the correct conclusion, for, as the author says, "The percentage of smart and dull groups choosing each answer is compared and the largest ratio of the smart to dull percentages is the Smart Vote."(emphasis added) As you see, it's not the difference (a subtraction) that matters, but the ratio: A = 50/70 ~ 0.71 B = 40/27 ~ 1.6 C = 10/3 ~ 3.3 Thus, C > B > A.

2) and 3) I don't grok totally Regression Analysi... (read more)

3Viliam_Bur
Thanks, this seems fair. Is there an example of "politically correct" beliefs? Such as "everything is learned, heredity is a myth". I would suspect intelligent people more prone to this kind of beliefs, because they are associated with education and they require more complex explanation -- both is opportunity to signal intelligence.

I've changed my mind on whether Cosma Shalizi believes that P=NP. I thought he did, upon reading "Whether there are any such problems, that is whether P=NP, is not known, but it sure seems like it.", at his blog, only to discover after emailing him that he made a typo. I've also learned not to bet with people with such PredictionBook stats, and specially not as much as $100.00.

4[anonymous]
Never bet against a Gwern, good advice.

On Will_Newsome's profile, one sees a link to his blog, Computational Theology, where it is possible to have an idea of how he thinks, or what kind of reasoning is behind this whole stuff. I wasn't impressed, although I would not be able to do better myself (at least at this point).

2khafra
I was mightily impressed by the last post on his last blog, which he now disavows and outright despises. But I thought he had some really interesting ways of looking at the personhood problem.

The quote is actually considered by the end of the article:

"To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them".

7Desrtopa
Ensnare them with some sort of Rube-Goldberg contrivance and tear their rubber masks off? The reason I never made this whole connection as a kid, even one very positively disposed towards skepticism and rationality, was because the methods and skills used in Scooby Doo seemed so inapplicable to real life.

What about this:

"Q. So of course there’s been a whole slew of research showing that we are quite irrational and prone to errors in our thinking. Has there been research to help us be more rational?-T

A. Yes, of course, many have tried. I don’t believe that self-help is likely to succeed, though it is a pretty good idea to slow down when the stakes are high. (And even the value of that advice has been questioned.) Improving decision-making is more likely to work in organizations (together with Olivier Sibony and Dan Lovallo, I published an attempt in that direction in the Harvard Business Review in June 2011.)"

I agree, but now I'm not sure how I'd rephrase it.

3lessdazed
There's no law that says reality must be describable in simple English. I don't criticize what you wrote! I ask you to not believe a thing merely because the thing is the exact meaning of words you selected, when you selected those imperfectly-fitting words because there were none better.

I haven't learned how to upvote comments yet. I'll upvote yours when I have.

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0shokwave
The little thumbs-up and thumbs-down at the bottom left of each comment. EDIT: how to retract...

Do you mean that their source of suffering = me + misguided beliefs, not just me?

1lessdazed
Basically, yes.

Hi, everyone! I'm Filipe, 21, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I've dropped out of Chemical Engineering in the 4th semester, and restarted College after one year off with Mathematics, from scratch. I thought redoing the basic subjects, if I worked hard through them, would be a good idea. It probably would, but so far I've studied those subjects with the same sloppiness of before, heheh. Now I'm one semester off College, due to depression, obsessive thoughts and some suicidal tendecies. Some of this is related to a deconversion from Christianity at age of 18: I... (read more)

5shokwave
In this post, your command of English is indistinguishable from a native speaker's. If you have an estimate of how fluent in typing English you are, I suggest you strengthen it :)
2lessdazed
How can an effect like that have only one cause?

Hi, everyone! I'm Filipe, 21, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I've dropped out Chemical Engineering in the 4th semester, and restarted College after one year off, with Mathematics, from scratch. I thought redoing the basic subjects, if I worked hard through them, would be a good idea. It probably would, but so far I've studied those subjects with the same sloppiness of before, heheh. Now I'm six semesters off College, due to depression, obsessive thoughts, and some suicidal tendecies. Some of this is related to a deconversion from Christianity at age of 18: I was really devout, and lived for the religion. My father is a pastor and all my family continues to be serious about Christianity, and I'

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