If the first two shapes on the bottom are diamonds, why is the third shape a square?
That's a good way to clearly demonstrate a nonempathic actor in the Prisoner's Dilemma; a "Hawk", who views their own payoffs and only their own payoffs as having value and placing no value to the payoffs of others.
But I don't think it's necessary. I would say that humans can visualize a nonempathic human - a bad guy - more easily than they can visualize an empathic human with slightly different motives. We've undoubtedly had to, collectively, deal with a lot of them throughout history.
A while back I was writing a paper and came across a fascinat...
Ah, so the statement is second-order.
And while I'm pretty sure you could replace the statement with an infinite number of first-order statements that precisely describe every member of the set (0S = 1, 0SS = 2, 0SSS = 3, etc), you couldn't say "These are the only members of the set", thus excluding other chains, without talking about the set - so it'd still be second-order.
Thanks!
Okay, my brain isn't wrapping around this quite properly (though the explanation has already helped me to understand the concepts far better than my college education on the subject has!).
Consider the statement: "There exists no x for which, for any number k, x after k successions is equal to zero." (¬∃x: ∃k: xS-k-times = 0, k>0 is the closest I can figure to depict it formally). Why doesn't that axiom eliminate the possibility of any infinite or finite chain that involves a number below zero, and thus eliminate the possibility of the two-side...
I would suggest that the most likely reason for logical rudeness - not taking the multiple-choice - is that most arguments beyond a certain level of sophistication have more unstated premises than they have stated premises.
And I suspect it's not easy to identify unstated premises. Not just the ones you don't want to say, belief-in-belief sort of things, but ones you as an arguer simply aren't sufficiently skilled to describe.
As an example:
...For example: Nick Bostrom put forth the Simulation Argument, which is that you must disagree with either statement (1
Perhaps, by sheer historical contingency, aspiring rationalists are recruited primarily from the atheist/libertarian/technophile cluster, which has a gender imbalance for its own reasons—having nothing to do with rationality or rationalists; and this is the entire explanation.
This seems immensely more likely than anything on that list. Libertarian ideology is tremendously dominated by white males - coincidentally, I bet the rationality community matches that demographic - both primarily male, and primarily caucasian - am I wrong? I'm not big into the ra...
I think that's an understatement of the potential danger of rationality in war. Not for the rationalist, mind, but for the enemy of the rationalist.
Most rationality, as elaborated on this site, isn't about impassively choosing to be a civilian or a soldier. It's about becoming less vulnerable to flaws in thinking.
And war isn't just about being shot or not shot with bullets. It's about being destroyed or not destroyed, through the exploitation of weaknesses. And a great deal of rationality, on this very site, is about how to not be destroyed by our inherent...
Speaking as a cat, there are a lot of people who would like to herd me. What makes your project higher-priority than everyone else's?
"Yes, but why bother half-ass involvement in my group?" Because I'm still interested in your group. I'm just also interested in like 50 other groups, and that's on top of the one cause I actually prefer to specialize with.
...It seems to me that people in the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/etcetera cluster often set their joining prices way way way too high.
People in the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf...
Reading the article I can make a guess as to how the first challenges went; it sounds like their primary, and possibly only, resolution against the challenge was to not pay serious attention to the AI. That's not a very strong approach, as anyone in an internet discussion can tell you: it's easy to get sucked in and fully engaged in a discussion with someone trying to get you to engage, and it's easy to keep someone engaged when they're trying to break off.
Their lack of preparation, I would guess, led to their failure against the AI.
A more advanced tactic ...
That paper seems to focus on raiding activities; if repeated raiding activities are difficult, then wouldn't that increase the utility of extermination warfare?
Indeed, the paper you cite posits that exactly that started happening:
...The earliest conclusive archaeological evidence for attacks on settlements is a Nubian cemetery (site 117) near the present-day town of Jebel Sahaba in the Sudan dated at 12,000-14,000 B.P. (7, 12). War originated independently in other parts of the world at dates as late as 4,000 B.P. (13). Otterbein argues that agriculture was
Well, it's not conclusive evidence by any means, but I did note that we have no hominoid relatives; they're all extinct with a capital E. To me, that implies something more than just us being better at hunting-gathering.
And if we, as a species, did exterminate one or more other hominid species, then it seems a small leap of logic to conclude we did the same to each other whenever similar circumstances came up.
I don't get the flippant exclusion of group selection.
To the best of my knowledge, humans are the only species that has been exposed to continuous group selection events over hundreds of thousands of years, and I would argue that we've gotten very, very good at the activity as a result.
I'm referring, of course, to war. The kind that ends in extermination. The kind that, presumably, humans practiced better than all of our close hominid relatives who are all conspicuously extinct as of shortly after we spread throughout the world.
This is why I'm not much buy...
I think that's a workable description of the process, but using that you still have the mathematical tendency to appreciate elegance, which, on this process model, doesn't seem like it's in the same place as the "mathematical method" proper - since elegance becomes a concern only after things are proven.
You could argue that elegance is informal, and that this aspect of the "Science V Bayes" argument is all about trying to formalize theory elegance (in which case, it could do so across the entire process), and I think that'd be fair, but...
I wasn't comparing scientists running a simulation with mathematicians running a simulation. I was comparing scientists collecting evidence that might disprove their theories with mathematicians running a simulation - because such a simulation collects data that might disprove their conjectures.
What is an example of something a scientist can prove with 'just logic'?
We'll need to agree on a subject who is a scientist and not a mathematician. The easiest example for me would be to use a computer scientist, but you may argue that whenever a computer scien...
If that's the case, and if it is also the case that scientists prefer to use proofs and logic where available (I can admittedly only speak for myself, for whom the claim is true), then I would argue that all scientists are necessarily also mathematicians (that is to say, they practice mathematics).
And, if it is the case that mathematicians can be forced to seek inherently weaker evidence when proofs are not readily available, then I would argue that all mathematicians are necessarily also scientists (they practice science).
At that point, it seems like dupl...
Your claim leads me back to my earlier statement.
If I could show you an example of mathematicians running ongoing computer simulations in order to test theories (well. Test conjectures for progressively higher values), would that demonstrate otherwise to you?
Because as Kindly notes, this happens. Mathematicians do sometimes reach for mere necessary-but-not-sufficient evidence for their claims, rather than proof. But obviously, they don't do so when proof is more accessible - and usually, because of the subject matter mathematicians work with, it is.
I feel this reply I made captures the link between proof, evidence, and elegance, in both scientific and mathematical fields.
That is to say, where proof is equivalent for two mutually exclusive theories (because sometimes things are proven logically outside mathematics, and not everything in mathematics are proven), evidence is used as a tiebreaker.
And where evidence is equivalent for two mutually exclusive theories (requiring of course that proof also be equivalent), elegance is used as a tiebreaker.
You go back and prove it if you can - and are mathematicians special in that regard, save that they deal with concepts more easily proven than most? When scientists in any field can prove something with just logic, they do. Evidence is the tiebreaker for exclusive, equivalently proven theories, and elegance the tiebreaker for exclusive, equivalently evident theories.
And that seems true for all fields labeled either a science or a form of mathematics.
If I could show you an example of mathematicians running ongoing computer simulations in order to test theories (well. Test conjectures for progressively higher values), would that demonstrate otherwise to you?
And it's not as if proofs and logic are not employed in other fields when the option is available. Isn't the link between physics and mathematics a long-standing one, and many of the predictions of quantum theory produced on paper before they were tested?
That's nice, but how does the Mathematical Method differ from the scientific one?
What differing insights do the 'Math Goggles' offer, as it were.
I would argue that there are plenty of fields of science in which elegance is considered important.
Most prominently, mathematics. Mathematicians do run experiments, courtesy of computers, and it is the very field physics must so closely rely on. If mathematicians do not practice the scientific method, what the heck do they do?
If mathematicians do not practice the scientific method, what the heck do they do?
Practice mathematics? It's a pretty distinct thing unto itself.
Since you're a computer guy (and I imagine many people you talk to are also computer-savvy), I'm surprised you don't use file/process analogues for identity.
Morality-as-preference, I would argue, is oriented around the use of morality as a tool of manipulation of other moral actors.
Question one: "It is right that I should get the pie" is more convincing, because people respond to moral arguments. Why they do so is irrelevant to the purpose (to use morality to get what you want).
Question two: People don't change their terminal values (which I would argue are largely unconscious, emotional parameters), though they might change how they attempt to achieve them, or one terminal value might override a di...
I find it amusing that in this article, you are advocating the use of deliberate self-deception in order to ward yourself against later deliberate self-deception.
That said, I feel the urge to contribute despite the large time-gap, and I suspect that even if later posts revisit this concept, the relevance to my contribution will be lower.
"I believe X" is a statement of self-identity - the map of the territory of your mind. But as maps and territories go, self-identity is pretty special, as it is a map written using the territory, and changes in th...
And what makes you sure of that? It even looks like the outline for the three boxes along the top.
Our cultural assumptions are perhaps more subtle than the average person thinks.