All of helltank's Comments + Replies

I don't think people have a right to lie to other people. I also can't understand why you would regret breaking up with someone so truth-averse and horrible.

0entirelyuseless
Almost everyone is truth-averse to that degree in at least some circumstances and on some occasions. If you are looking for a partner who is never truth-averse in that way, there is a good chance that you will never find one.

How does this help me become more rational?

That's ridiculous. So mild pains don't count if they're done to many different people?

Let's give a more obvious example. It's better to kill one person than to amputate the right hands of 5000 people, because the total pain will be less.

Scaling down, we can say that it's better to amputate the right hands of 50,000 people than to torture one person to death, because the total pain will be less.

Keep repeating this in your head(see how consistent it feels, how it makes sense).

Now just extrapolate to the instance that it's better to have 3^^^3 people have ... (read more)

1dxu
I think Okeymaker was actually referring to all the people in the universe. While the number of "people" in the universe (defining a "person" as a conscious mind) isn't a known number, let's do as blossom does and assume Okeymaker was referring to the Level I multiverse. In that case, the calculation isn't nearly as clear-cut. (That being said, if I were considering a hypothetical like that, I would simply modus ponens Okeymaker's modus tollens and reply that I would prefer to nuke New York.)

The point is that to an AI, we are but massive, stupid beings who are attempting to teach them minor symbols with massive overuse of resources(that few lines of code to define "rock" could be used by a sufficiently powerful UFAI to, say, manufacture nukes).

I'm there with one other person. Look to the lesswrong Singapore google group for any future updates. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/lesswrong-singapore/cXtHTMQO4xw

6Weedlayer
You should definitely post the entire quote here, not just the snippet with a link to the quote. For a moment I thought the one sentence was the entire quote, and nearly downvoted it for being trite.

Finally, a Singapore meetup! Will definitely be there.

For me, the problem with this is that if I'm speaking to an autistic person(and a very large number of LWers identify themselves as on the autistic spectrum), they tend to use literal meanings very often. In fact, some of them(including me) get offended or confused when they say something literal and it is interpreted as sarcastic or subtext.

Suppose I am speaking to an autistic person, and he says, "I am 87% confident that X is true." The issue with this statement is that a lot of people use this sort of statement in a metaphorical sense(ie. they... (read more)

7Ixiel
Give me all the bacon and eggs you have. Wait, wait. I'm worried what you just heard was, "Give me a lot of bacon and eggs." What I said was, "Give me all the bacon and eggs you have". Do you understand? -Ron Swanson
0Adam Zerner
Exactly. I think my thesis covers that in saying "Depending on how confident you are in your interpretation". I don't explicitly talk about how do the interpretation because: 1. It's usually easy enough to assign a good confidence level to your interpretation. With a good confidence level you could cater your response properly. Ie. If you're 99% confident, say, "I think you're trying to say this". If you're 50% confident you could say, "I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but I think that it may be A, B or C.". 2. It's outside of the scope of this article. Perhaps I could mention a few guidelines, but a) it's really a very intuitive thing, b) I don't know much about that topic (how to interpret), and c) I sense that it'd be rather involved to go over how to interpret, and that the benefit isn't worth it because it's something that most people could do well enough intuitively.
helltank-10

No problem, and I hope this post taught you how to work better and learn better. If you have problems with procrastination, you can try programs like Beeminder, or simply have a friend act as a watcher to ensure you get your work(or your three new things) done for the day, week or month.

-4alienist
I notice you didn't make a similar to reply gjm with respect to his being offended by Dahlen's comment, even though gjm's offense was much more irrational. That is not a silly thing, it is in fact true for most definitions of "rational".
-2Dahlen
At some point in a person's "training" as a rationalist, there comes a time when they are supposed to be ready to undertake controversial conversation topics without spontaneous combustion of their discussions. (Never mind that jokes and art are not exactly examples of controversial topics...) Rationality encompasses skills such as being able to accurately understand people's motives without caricaturing them, maintaining a good relationship with your conversation partners so that the channels for agreement and the channels for social relations don't get mixed (so that you can disagree sanely with someone), not straying the conversation away from collective truth-seeking and towards mini-wars etc. In fact I would say that a controversial topic such as politics is the best test of a person's actual wisdom and reasonableness. I understand why some topics may not be appropriate for less-than-rational individuals. (But, again, these topics do not include humour and art and music! Otherwise you should pay a visit to the Wizard of Oz for him to give you a heart...) Anyone who has some legitimate claim towards better rationality skills, however, should at least try to test those better rationality skills on a higher difficulty setting. To forbid anything but sterile mathy discussions about game theory dilemmas involving alien intelligences does not improve the rationality level of people. (This honestly looks to me like cocooning; like fear of the outside world.) Nor does responsibly endeavouring to step into the arena of debates on topics relevant to humanity at large suddenly awaken your primal urges to kill, maim, and enslave your opponents. Ordinary people sometimes discuss this, in meatspace and on the internet. Ideas are expressed, values are clashed (instead of swords, mayhaps), insults are exchanged, people are warned or banned or not invited to the next dinner party. Egad, minds are sometimes even changed. With LessWrong, with all of our claims to an ardent dedic

I'll just point out that I actively cut off relationships with people of no value before I read this. Therefore, your argument that non-cultists don't cut off relations with zero valu people is incorrect in at least one case and possibly more: as it is the core of your argument, your argument in at least one case and possibly more.

0ChristianKl
Causality 101. A -> B is not the same as B -> A.

Okay, thanks for the update and of course the idea of measuring agentness, while simultaneously being careful not to apply the halo effect to agentness, is fundamentally sound. I would propose treating the perceived agentness of a certain person as a belief, so that it can be updated quickly with well-known rationalist patterns when the shift moves to another domain.

Let us take the example of a person who is very agenty in managing relationships but bad at time management, as given in your post. In this case, I would observe that this person displays high... (read more)

3Gleb_Tsipursky
I like your suggestion of treating the perceived agenty-ness of a certain person as a belief! Perhaps there can be a scale/scorecard developed to evaluate someone's agenty-ness on different life domains. And we can even give feedback/training to others on their agenty-ness to help them update their beliefs about and skills in certain areas. For example, with your description of someone who is frequently late, that person can be encouraged to develop a specific focus to avoid planning fallacy. So there might be fine-grained ways of dealing with specific challenges in specific life domains. We at Intentional Insights have actually been thinking of various ways of training people to improve their agency in specific life domains, and having scales/scorecards for specific domains, along with strategies for dealing with that specific domain, might be a useful product. Good suggestion there, thanks!

I will probably read this post in more detail when the font isn't hurting my sleep-deprived eyes. Please fix!

5Gleb_Tsipursky
Thanks for noting that :-) I edited the post, hope that fixed the issue. And get some sleep soon.

27chaos, that is a very interesting paper and I thank you for the find. It's actually quite a happy coincidence as neural networks (having been prompted by the blegg sequence) was on my next-to-study list. Glad to be able to add this paper to my queue.

Very useful and instructive post. I would like to comment that one of the biggest tests(or so it seems to me) to check if a belief chain is valid or not is the test of resistance to arbitrary changes.

You write that systems like [I was abused]<->[people are meanies] <-> [life is horrible] <-> are stable and this is why people believe them; because they seem to hold sound under their own reasoning. But they are inherently not stable because they are not connected to the unshakable foundation of the source of truth(reality)!

Suppose you ap... (read more)

127chaos
You might appreciate this paper: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~nitish/msc_thesis.pdf

Thanks a lot. I really appreciated that comment.

A psychopath would have no problem with this, by the way; he'd just step on the heads of people and be on his merry way, calm as ever.

0the-citizen
Not much I can think of that we can do about that, except provide a system with disincentives for harmful behaviour. What can easily correct is the possiblity of meaning well but making mistakes due to self-deception. This post attempts to examine one instance of that.
helltank140

I went through an entire evening outing and did not drop the ball once socially- in every event, I successfully carried out all the steps of social interaction, from perfectly(or so I'd like to think) mimicking empathy, adopting correct facial expressions and words. I'd like to think that this is a huge step forward in my social training. One of the people that I went on an outing with even commented that he thought my social skills were improving greatly.

0Natha
Awesome! If what you're dealing with is social anxiety, then you might find this blogpost helpful (I know I did). It sounds like it may be something more serious; if so, all the more reason for congratulations!
1SpencerHill
I have to admit, this is pretty damn impressive, no matter how basic people seem to think those skills should be.

I'm really having a lot of trouble understanding why the answer isn't just:

1000/1001 chance I'm about to be transported to a tropical island 0 chance given I didn't make the oath.

Assuming that uploaded you memory blocks his own uploading when running simulations.

Maybe I was unclear.

I'm arguing that the button will never, ever be pushed. If you are NOT a psychopath, you won't push, end of story.

If you ARE A psychopath, you can choose to push or not push.

if you push, that's evidence you are a psychopath. If you are a psychopath, you should not push. Therefore, you will always end up regretting the decision to push.

If you don't push, you don't push and nothing happens.

In all three cases the correct decision is not to push, therefore you should not push.

helltank-30

Most people would die before they think. Most do.

-AC Grayling

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

What about talking to your rational self? It seems like this accomplishes the benefits of talking to yourself and improves upon some of them.

The thing is, if you get suspicious you don't immediately leap to the conclusion of chatbots. Nobody glances around, realizes everyone is bland and stupid and thinks," I've been fooled! An AI has taken over the world and simulated chatbots as human beings!" unless they suffer from paranoia.

Your question, "How much more sophisticated would they need to be" is answered by the question "depends". If you live as a hermit in a cave up in the Himalayas, living off water from a mountain stream and eating nothing but what you hunt or... (read more)

1kokotajlod
Thanks for the response. Yes, it depends on how much interaction I have with human beings and on the kind of people I interact with. I'm mostly interested in my own case, of course, and I interact with a fair number of fairly diverse, fairly intelligent human beings on a regular basis. Ah, but would it? I'm not so sure, that's why I made this post. Yes, if everyone always said what I predicted, things would be obvious, but recall I specified that random variation would be added. This appears to be how dream characters work: You can carry on sophisticated conversations with them, but (probably) they are governed by algorithms that feed off your own expectations. That being said, I now realize that the variation would have to be better than random in order to account for how e.g. EY consistently says things that are on-point and insightful despite being surprising to me.

Wouldn't the fact that you're even considering pushing the button(because if only a psychopath would push the button then it follows that a non-psychopath would never push the button) indicate that you are a psychopath and therefore you should not push the button?

Another way to put it is:

If you are a psychopath and you push the button, you die. If you are not a psychopath and you push the button, pushing the button would make you a psychopath(since only a psychopath would push), and therefore you die.

2pragmatist
Pushing the button can't make you a psychopath. You're either already a psychopath or you're not. If you're not, you will not push the button, although you might consider pushing it.

What I'm interested in is whether this method is applicable to social situations as well. I am not a naturally social person, but have studied how people interact and general social behaviors well enough that I can create a simulation of a "socially acceptable helltank".

I already have mental triggers (what I like to call "scripts") in place for a simulation of my rational mind - or rather a portion of my rational mind kept in isolation from bias and metaphorically disconnected from the other parts of my mind to override my "main&q... (read more)