All of James_Ernest's Comments + Replies

Physics lawyers definitely need to exist. I would strongly like to get an injunction against the laws of thermodynamics.

I drink the equivalent of 1-2 bottles of wine per week (purchasing 2-3 bottles, some will be consumed by my girlfriend), mostly medium reds (shiraz, merlot; zinfandel and chianti when I can get them), some white aromatics (riesling, gewürztraminer, pinot gris), mostly 1-2 glasses at a time in the evening, for the purposes of relaxation and gustatory pleasure.

Beer is not good on my digestion, and I almost totally avoid it except for particularly tasty ones (prototypically, something like a Trappistes Rochefort 10). Even the thought of swilling a six-pack is... (read more)

It's almost like there's something qualitatively different about the tractability of interactions between two bodies and N>2 bodies... (sorry)

One could also make an extremely laboured analogy about circumbinary orbits, and the spontaneous ejection of one party into deep space.

Interesting question. It is clear that the probability mass in excess of the reserves is equal in both distributions, yielding identical long-run numbers of industry-defaults-per-year, however the average magnitude of the unrecoverable losses is greater in the no-diversification model.

If you assume a linear cost function for the expected losses, and take the mean of the distribution past a variable reserve level, you will find a reserve level for a unified insurance agent which has the same expected loss-cost, a lower number of absolute industry-loss event... (read more)

when the Neoreactionaries aren't busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they're using Lesswrong-style jargon

I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.

There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,

... (read more)

Was anybody else disappointed that the Sex Role Inventory wasn't nearly as raunchy as the name suggested?

3JoachimSchipper
I was pretty happy about that, actually.

This should be an acceptable hypothesis to the LW population. c.f. "I'm considering getting my facial expressions analysed, so I'll know what I'm thinking".

2cousin_it
Jokes aside, I think that's a great idea. I've often wished to have extra eyes and ears on my hands, in addition to the ones on my head, so I can perceive more things, in particular about myself.

This is his explanation at its most explicit:

www.unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html

I don't think so. None of the available potential coin-states would generate an expected value of 600 heads.

p = 0.6 -> 600 expected heads is the many-trials (where each trial is 1000 flips) expected value given the prior and the result of the first flip, but this is different from the expectation of this trial, which is bimodally distributed at [1000]x0.2 and [central limit around 500]x0.8

complex thing with lots of variables and lots of uncertainty

The whole point of digital circuitry is that this form of uncertainty is (near)eliminated and does not compound. Arbitrary complexity is manageable given this constraint.

Consider my priors for knowledge of Bayes-fu by wise predecessors to be significantly raised.

Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that d... (read more)

0johnlawrenceaspden
What's with bas'd and dogmatick? Is Lovecraft aiming at some antique effect, or did he write in a non-standard dialect?
0[anonymous]
Good god, he did write everything like that!
0James_Ernest
Consider my priors for knowledge of Bayes-fu by wise predecessors to be significantly raised.
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
0free_rip
Indeed, be good to have you there. I don't think many of us will have attended one before, but if this goes well it will hopefully become a regular thing

My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:

  • Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain's "Strive/survive" theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
  • As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent f
... (read more)

Shouldn't the expected value be $1000 (10p)*(1-p^10) or $1000 (10p - 10p^11) ? (p now maximised at 0.7868... giving EV $7.15K)

0wnoise
That does look right.

Somehow managed 16-8-5 versus the veteran computer, by using the articles own text as a seed "Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules..." and applying a-h = rock, i-p = paper, q-z = scissors, I think this is the technique I will use against humans (I know a few people I would love to see flail against pseudo-randomness).

1Jiro
That should fail in the long run because it's unlikely that the frequency of letters in English divides so evenly that those rules make each choice converge to happening exactly 1/3 of the time. I'd just generate the random numbers in my head. A useful thing to do is to pick a couple of numbers from thin air (which doesn't work by itself because the human mind isn't good at picking 'random' numbers from thin air), then adding them together and then taking the last digit (or if you wantt 3 choices, taking them mod 3).
0[anonymous]
9-6-10 here out of 25 rounds, using current time. :(

I think this was how the heretic Geth got started. #generalisingfromfictionalevidence

There is an interesting diversion to be made along these lines. Nick Land, who has written up a series (The Dark Enlightenment) about Moldbug and the neo-reaction in general, has just written this, in which he posits the politically-assisted decoupling from reality as a progressive eschatology:

"The unforgivable crime is to accept that there are consequences, or results, other than those we have agreed to allow."

This meme, a seriously morbid distortion of epistemology, is common to many adaptive belief systems, but I would propose that it is more crucial to progressivism than any other.

2Multiheaded
Land is a little horrifying in his Nietzchean/Stirnerian lack of barriers, to be honest. About accepting/not shrinking from shocking facts about reality: I see two basic types of failure modes here - firstly, denying the presense of any given horror (like e.g. innate group neurological differences - race, gender, etc - creating inherent power and knowledge differences in a society and making brutal unyielding inter-group hierarchy such a society's "natural", least costly to maintain and most economically productive state) is indeed more common to people with liberal/Universalist leanings... - ...- but there's a second failure mode in normalizing and rationalizing such facts despite them registering as "evil" on one's moral intuition meter, and I think that one is much more common to reactionaries/anti-Universalists, including Land himself. Where a liberal could be happily deluded about the difficulty of fixing "natural" evils with artificial policies, a reactionary could calm his (let's be honest, they're almost exclusively male) conscience with redefining "evil" and accepting life as it is. I see no more reason to accept that complacency than I see to accept deathism. What say you? EDIT: I've read the article - well, yeah, Land is guilty of siding with reality. I wonder what he thinks about transhumanism.

I think it's also worth noting that (particularly in the context of ideological assumptions about democracy that are not generally perceived to be ideological) there are many forms that bias in the media can take while not even coming close to setting off any warnings of partisan bias.

It is in the basic function of conveyance of seemingly apolitical news that the media continuously privileges the null hypothesis.

Actually, the is/ought distinction is omnipresent in the complete Moldbug thesis, as espoused in his, uh, sequences. Hence the reformulation of politics as an amoral engineering challenge.

There's a lot of deliberately inflammatory language present, as well as a relatively high inferential distance, to which the inflammatory language mostly serves to filter the audience for, or at least a positive affect.

Translated into English, all that statement says is "Here is a presentation of classical or Austrian economics. This is not practised at large anywhere on earth today (for reasons which will be divulged elsewhere)."

I believe that this statement was not an endorsement of libertarianism, but rather a sop to libertarian readers, based on my knowledge of his style.

Moldbug draws a clear distinction between libertarian policies, which he believes meet straightforward criteria for effectiveness and sanity, and would (not ought to, but would) be implemented by a Responsible Government (see: neocameralism), and libertarianism as a political philosophy and movement.

He identifies the fundamentally Sisyphean nature of advocacy for libertarian politics within a democracy, and als... (read more)

I am also a long-time LW lurker, and this thread finally made me open an account. I've read most of the main Moldbug sequences (Cathedral/neocameralism/economics) over the past few months.

I was very pleased to find that this thread existed, particularly in the context of the phenomenon identified in that essay which coined the term 'insight porn'. I had previously expended many brain-hours pondering the nature of this set of closely affiliated ideas, and I still don't think I have entirely satisfactory answers.

http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/trying-to-see-through-unified-theory-of.html