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3JBlack's Shortform
4y
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3JBlack's Shortform
4y
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The statement "IABIED" is true even if the book IABIED is mostly false
JBlack6h64

the authors have made a compelling case that even if >95% of their specific arguments are incorrect, the core claim "if anyone builds it, everyone dies" still holds true

I don't believe this at all, and I'm not sure that you do either. I do believe that the title claim IABIED is largely true, but believe very much more strongly that it would be false if >95% of the arguments in the book were incorrect.

I'm not sure whether you are being hyperbolic with the ">95%" claim, or have actually gone through a sample of at least 50 arguments in the book and seriously examined what the world would look like if at most 2 of those were correct with all the rest failing to hold.

From what I've seen, the title claim would be seriously in doubt if even half of the arguments failed. Mainly because the world would necessarily be extraordinarily different in major respects from the way I or the authors believe that it is.

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Mikhail Samin's Shortform
JBlack7h42

It is a predictable consequence of saying "lol no I didn’t agree to that prior to being told thanks for telling me" that Keltham (and other people with similar expressed views regarding information and coordination) won't be told information intended for coordination in future, including information that Keltham and similar people would have wanted to be able to use in order to coordinate instead of using it against the interests of those giving them the information.

So the question is: just how strongly does Keltham value using this information against the priest, when weighed against the cost of decreasing future opportunities for coordination for himself and others who are perceived to be similar to him?

There are plenty of other factors, such as whether there are established protocols for receiving such information in a way that binds priests of Abadar to not use it against the interests of those conveying it, whether the priest and the adventurer (and future others) could have been expected to know those protocols, and so on.

Reply1
Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
JBlack10d-3-10

"Imagine there's a child drowning in a shallow pond. You're wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Don't believe me? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there's also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you'd have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?"

This seems very incoherent.

It starts with "Imagine" and then two sentences later asks "Don't believe me?"

Believe what? Believe that I was asked to imagine something? I look back up a bit on the page, and I can have rather high credence that I was asked to imagine something.

Believe that I have imagined the scenario? I can have pretty high credence of imagining something that matches the description so that doesn't fit either.

Believe that the imaginary scenario is real? Agreed, I definitely don't believe that and there's a lot of evidence that it's false, but what relevance does it have? The text didn't ask me to believe that.

Maybe believe that I could one day be in such a situation? Well, that's definitely more believable but still very unlikely. I'm very much not in a habit of wearing swimsuits near ponds, though if it had been a swimming pool that would be more believable (while still being very unbelievable). So yes I don't believe it.

Then the text goes on to posit a wildly more improbable scenario, prefaced with "let me make it more believable". What? No, that just made it massively more unbelievable, so the writer of this story probably has terrible epistemics, or at best is authoring an unreliable narrator character that does. Pretty much any further detail would make it less believable by conjunction.

What's worse, that particular conjunction is pretty ridiculous. I can still imagine it happening in some amazingly contrived scenario, but brings up so many other questions like "how" that make even suspension of disbelief for a fictional situation difficult. In what manner would I have to kill it to rescue the child? Is it basically a full-grown dog (but still cute) that would threaten my own life if I approach, and I happen to have a gun with my swimsuit? Maybe there's a supernatural barrier that's tied to its life? In what way is any of this more believable even for a very unreliable narrator?

Reply2
No, That's Not What the Flight Costs
JBlack10d30

Is it plausible that the two different sources of valuation are actually one source? For example, could On Point valuations have formed the basis of the CARES Act filings, or vice versa, or both used data from a common source?

It also seems likely that any borrower has a strong incentive to talk up the value of their collateral, especially so if they get to choose who has access to the data used for valuations.

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Beyond the Zombie Argument
JBlack10d20

No problem, if it's tangential then we can agree that it's tangential. We also appear to agree that the zombie argument may not be a useful way of thinking about things, as referred to in the last sentence of my first comment.

I agree that if a p-zombie of me can exist, then my consciousness would not be the sole cause for things with my pattern of matter saying that they are conscious. It may still be a cause, in that my consciousness may be causally upstream of having a pattern of matter that emits such utterances, but there may be other ways that such patterns of matter can come to exist as well.

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Beyond the Zombie Argument
JBlack11d00

You didn't (rhetorically) ask what a zombie would say. You asked how do I know. That fact that something else might say the same thing as I did is not at all disconcerting to me, and I'm not sure why it's disconcerting to you.

You don't need to go anything like as far as p-zombies to get something that says the same thing. A program consisting of print("I know that I'm not a zombie since I have consciousness") etc does the same thing.

The rhetorical point you're making is simply false. A p-zombie would not believe anything, since it has no mind with which to believe. It would merely act in the same manner as something that has a mind.

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Beyond the Zombie Argument
JBlack11d0-4

Zombies would also not be able to tell they’re not zombies – which leads to the disconcerting question – how do you know you’re not a zombie?

I know that I'm not a zombie since I have consciousness, which in my case at this moment includes consciousness of knowing that I have consciousness. Anything that can be conscious of knowing that they are conscious is not a zombie by definition.

A zombie would not know that it is conscious. It would also not know that it is not conscious. It would not even know that it is uncertain about being conscious or not. Knowing is a property of a mind, and by definition of "zombie" there is no mind there to know with.

Naturally a p-zombie behaves as if it can know things to all levels of external inspection, though whether p-zombies can exist is an unsettled question.

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leogao's Shortform
JBlack12d20

Wouldn't that require all states to have identical laws, taxes, etc on residents? It seems likely to me that people care a lot more about those than differential influence on federal politics.

Edit: More precisely, a story in which most people do not care at least an order of magnitude more about laws on residents than on changing their federal political representation from 0.0000001 to 0.0000002 would strain my suspension of disbelief. People who care that much more about federal politics are much more likely to do something other than just move to another state to get microscopically more influence in very infrequent votes for representatives. If a large fraction of the population feels that way and the federal politics is extremely resistant to change, you probably get revolution or civil war, not mass migration to change vote strength.

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anaguma's Shortform
JBlack14d20

The former inequality seems almost certain, but I'm not sure that that the latter inequality holds even over the long term. It probably does hold conditional on long-term non-extinction of humanity, since P(ABI) probably gets very close to 1 even if P(IABIED) is high and remains high.

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Hastings's Shortform
JBlack21d20

From your description, I have no idea what you mean by "treadmill speed dynamically matches the wheel radius * wheel angular velocity". From your conclusion, I can guarantee that it doesn't mean anything that matches most other people's constraints. Did someone somewhere post a particularly bad physical model that you're drawing on?

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