Most of the moral dilemmas I face in real life I've never read about in ethics or philosophy classes. Most of my real world experiences are more along the lines of decision theory/prisoner's dilemmas.
So for example, if someone has wronged me, what does moral philosophy say I should do? I'm not sure because I don't really know where to look or even if this question has been answered; to my knowledge it's never been addressed in any philosophy or ethics undergrad courses I took.
But from a prisoner's dilemma point of view, I have to juggle whether I should ...
Here's my half-baked idea.
Since the world is becoming safer, we have less real threats to prevent general ennui and so petty status games start to take on more importance.
Except that I would say this political hatred has taken off over the last five years, correlating far more with social media than with the world becoming safer. Has the world become safer over the last five years?
Slightly off topic, but I both program and play guitar and for the longest time I was wondering why I was getting an overwhelming feeling of the two bleeding into each other. While playing guitar, it would "feel" like I was also coding. Eventually I figured out that the common thread is probably the general task of algorithm optimization.
There's no way for me to tell if programming made me a better guitar player or vice versa.
It might be a more valuable use of cognitive resources to recognize where bias in general comes from.
Rote memory tasks are good for trying to, say, guess the teacher's password. But it's a lot more efficient if you know what cognitive biases feel like and correct for that feeling ahead of time. In general, anytime something just feels right, you should trust but verify. Hindsight bias feels right when we look at things that already happened. Confirmation bias feels right when we see information that confirms what we already believe. Motivated skepticism fe...
I think the "everybody" is really an American-centric thing. As far as I can tell, all of the New Atheist types are non-European, or who focus most of their polemics on American audiences.
I've never lived in Europe, but this was my experience growing up in the US:
Non-agents simply don't fit the definition of "god"
This is false. Not only does the LW wiki have a definition of "god" that is a non-agent, the study of theology points one to numerous gods that people believe in that are non-agents. There's a reason that many of the popular monotheisms refer to their god as a personal god; it stands in contrast to the heresy of a non-personal (i.e., non-agent) god.
Yes, when I was in high school, I would do about 20 push ups as soon as I got out of bed. After that, my heartrate is a bit too high to go back to bed. Of course, after a while the 20 push ups would get easy so I would increase the number until I was doing about 50-70.
“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. … What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’”
Looking for some people to refute this recently hair-brained idea I came up with.
The time period from the advent of the industrial revolution to the so-called digital revolution was about 150 - 200 years. Even though computers were being used around WWII, widespread computer use didn't start to shake things up until 1990 or so. I would imagine that AI would constitute a similar fundamental shift in how we live our lives. So would it be a reasonable extrapolation to think that widespread AI would be about 150 - 200 years after the beginning of the information age?
If you are doing reference class forecasting, you need at least a few members in your reference class and a few outside of it, together with the reasons why some are in and others out. If you are generalizing from one example, then, well...
By what principle would such an extrapolation be reasonable?
...I was at this entrepreneur dinner and I met Melissa, and she’s this brilliant, amazing entrepreneur. She was like, “Everyone I know wants me to write a book but I don’t have time and I’m not a good writer and publishing is this awful process … can you help me?” So, of course — I’d like to think that I’m not an elitist snob but of course I am — and I start lecturing her about hard work and writing and the writer’s life and all this shit and she rolls her fuckin’ eyes. And I’m like, “what?” and she’s like, “Are you an entrepreneur? I’m an entrepreneur, too,
I think I understand what you're talking about.
I didn't get internet access until I was almost in my 20s. So I grew up with certain talents where friends/family would consistently tell me that I was the best at what I did. Nowadays, you can go to online discussion boards where people who are the best of the best in field X congregate and see just how "average" you are in that bigger pond.
Though I was good enough to get into specialized high school/colleges for that, I chose not to go that route. I'm guessing that the same sort of seeing how average I was in that larger pond where everyone is at the top of their game would have happened anyway had I gone to those specialized schools.
HPMOR is something that appeals to System 1 (an engaging story/narrative) to advertize for rationality. So I don't think appealing to System 1 per se implicates you as a dark arts practicioner.
A friend of mine recently succumbed to using the base rate fallacy in a line of argumentation. I tried to explain that it was a base rate fallacy, but he just replied that the base rate is actually pretty high. The argument was him basically saying something equivalent to "If I had a disease that had a 1 in a million chance of survival and I survived it, it's not because I was the 1 in a million, it's because it was due to god's intervention". So I tried to point out that either his (subjective) base rate is wrong or his (subjective) conditional ...
Took it.
This is my second year taking the survey. I wish I remembered what my answers were last year so I could see how I've changed.
I don't think PvE is necessarily scientific knowledge. It's more like experience (to expound on the analogy further). While we're currently in one environment -- Earth -- it might be possible for us to explore other environments in the future. But, like the analogy proposes, it would take an enormous amount of manhours/manpower to actually reach this new content.
This is a quote from memory from one of my professors in grad school:
...Last quarble, the shanklefaxes ulugled the flurxurs. The flurxurs needed ulugled because they were mofoxiliating, which caused amaliaxas in the hurble-flurble. The shakletfaxes domonoxed a wokuflok who ulugles flurxurs, because wokuflok nuxioses less than iliox nuxioses.
- When did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
- Why did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
- Who did they get to ulugle the flurxurs?
- If you were the shaklefaxes, would you have your ulugled flurxurs? Why or why not?
- Wou
Do you think the survey should also take into account BMI + bodyfat % if it includes fitness questions?
What does it mean "studied it at university"? Do you mean something like "Took econ 101 and 102 as part of gen ed requirements" or "majored in economics"?
A random comment.
This is the first time I've seen "anti-agathics". Based on what I know of biblical Greek, I read this as something that would be like "anti-good". If I had been in charge of making up an anti-aging drug, I would have called it something like anti-presbycs (maybe that wasn't chosen because it looks too much like "presbyterian"? Presbyterian does derive from the world meaning "elder"...).
This isn't a request to change the wording if that's what people who will be taking the survey are familiar with BTW...
Miracle claims are on shaky epistemic grounds. How do you confirm it was a miracle and not someone being mistaken about some phenomenon? Or more likely, that they don't have enough knowledge of the physical or cognitive sciences to know whether some phenomenon is possible or miraculous?
The proper use of humility is to take into account that we are human beings and we make mistakes and we have insufficient information, so we should try to anticipate our mistakes or lack of info and correct for them in advance. Meaning that one should have the prior for &qu...
...When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad. Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated. But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.
One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a
Modus ponens can be demonstrated to be a valid assumption by drawing up a truth table. How do you demonstrate that "people are more likely to believe true things"?
People are more likely to believe true things
How do you know this?
People tend not to believe things because they're true, but for some other reason.
Pr(People Believe | True) < Pr(People Believe | Some other explanation)? I would hazard to guess that the number of untrue things people have believed all throughout human history overshadows the number of things they (we) have believed that were actually true.
It's a bit of an ad hominem, but logical fallacies can be viewed as weak Bayesian evidence.
In the military, we had sort of ready-made memes for dealing with decision anxiety. In leadership schools it is taught with more seriousness, but in the field (so to say) we would just refer to it as "making a (fucking!) command decision". Since being in the military you have to be prepared for making a decision in a life or death situation, time is critically important. So it was drilled into us to make any decision if we have significant and/or crippling anxiety about the choices to be made. If a bad decision is made, so what? Suck it up and pr...
...and that's why anthropics doesn't explain why the Cold War stayed cold.
...The motivating practical problem came from this question,
"guess the rule governing the following sequence" 11, 31, 41, 61, 71, 101, 131, ...
I cried, "Ah the sequence is increasing!" With pride I looked into the back of the book and found the answer "primes ending in 1".
I'm trying to zone in on what I did wrong.
If I had said instead, the sequence is a list of numbers - that would be stupider, but well inline with my previous logic.
My first attempt at explaining my mistake, was by arguing "it's an increasing sequence"
I'm guessing that the rule P(A & B) < P(A) is for independent variables (though it's actually more accurate to say P(A & B) <= P(A) ). If you have dependent variables, then you use Bayes Theorem to update. P(A & B) is different from P(A | B). P(A & B) <= P(A) is always true, but not so for P(A | B) viz. P(A).
This is probably an incomplete or inadequate explanation, though. I think there was a thread about this a long time ago, but I can't find it. My Google-fu is not that strong.
You can make an anthropic reasoning argument using any almost-wiped out ethnicity.
For example, Native Americans. Someone born to a Native American tribe is more likely to live in a world where Europe didn't successfully colonize the Americas than the current timeline. It's the same anthropic reasoning, but the problem is that it's fallacious to rest an entire argument on that one piece of evidence.
Unless I'm missing something, this version of anthropic reasoning seems to be making this argument: Pr(E | H) = Pr(H | E).
Using a car analogy, I would say that intelligence is how strong your engine is. Whereas rationality is driving in a way where you get to your destination efficiently and alive. Someone can have a car with a really powerful engine, but they might drive recklessly or only have the huge engine for signalling purposes while not actually using their car to get to a particular destination.
Question about Bayesian updates.
Say Jane goes to get a cancer screening. 5% prior of having cancer, the machine has a success rate of 80% and a false positive rate of 9%. Jane gets a positive on the test and so she now has a ~30% chance of having cancer.
Jane goes to get a second opinion across the country. A second cancer screening (same success/false positive rates) says she doesn't have cancer. What is her probability for having cancer now?
I made a heavy metal cover of the final boss' theme from the arcade version of Strider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQBy4X9Jr7g
I've submitted it to the OCRemix webpage so hopefully it will get accepted sometime this... year?
I was also noodling around with Java and made a Bayes Theorem ex jar with neat little slidy-bars.
I've also started a Master's program in Compsci.
You should probably be skeptical when presented with binary hypotheses (either by someone else or by default). Say in this example that H1 is "emergence". The alternative for H1 isn't "mind-stuff" but simply ~H1. This includes the possibility of "mind-stuff" but also any alternatives to both emergence and mindstuff. Maybe a good rule to follow would be to assume and account for your ignorance from the beginning instead of trying to notice it.
One way to make this explicit might be to always have at least three hypotheses: One i...
Yes, "Tell me more" is certainly more effective than saying something like "I don't think that's true". Even if you don't think it's true, following a Socractic dialog will probably be more useful at uncovering untruth without being overtly offensive.
I suggested in another thread that successive downvotes on (1) one person's account (2) over a certain number of downvotes (3) within a set period of time should prompt the system to tell the user that they have to sacrifice personal karma until (x) days later in order to use up/downvotes.
Something like this is already in place, where a person has to sacrifice karma in order to comment on a post that itself is below a certain karma threshold.
We don't judge dogs only by how human they are
No, but we do judge dogs by how intelligent they are. And there are certain dogs that are more intelligent than others. Intelligence != human intelligence. Furthermore, most software only interacts with other software/hardware/firmware. To the extent that it interacts with meatspace that interaction is mediated by a person. AI would be software that interacts efficiently with meatspace directly without human intervention.
If AI is software is AI, then human intelligence is DNA is human intelligence. An obvious non-sequitur.
I wonder if they're actually using a utility function as in [probability * utility] or just going with [aim for safe car > unsafe car] unilaterally regardless of the likelihood of crashing into either. E.g., treating a 1% chance of crashing into the safe car and a 80% chance of crashing into the unsafe car as equal to 99% chance of crashing into the safe car and a .05% chance of crashing into the unsafe car; choosing in both cases to crash into the safe car.
I would think that believing Jesus didn't exist would be just as absurd as thinking that all or almost all of the events in the Gospels literally happened. Yet the latter make up a significant number of practicing Biblical scholars. And for the majority of Biblical scholars who don't think the Gospels are almost literally true, still have a form of Jesus-worship going on as they are practicing Christians. It would be hard to think that Jesus both came back from the dead and also didn't exist; meaning that it would be very hard to remain a Christian while a...
Yes, either X happens or X doesn't happen. P(X) + P(~X) = 1, so therefore P(X | A) + P(~X | A) = 1. Both formulations are stating the probability of X. But one is adjusting for the probability of X given A; so either X given A happens or X given A doesn't happen (which is P(~X | A) not P(X | ~A)).
And finally, since we have no data, what can we say about the likelihood of our consciousness returning/remaining after we die? I would say the chances are 50/50. For something you have no data on, any outcome is equally likely
I don't think that's true. It's not that we have no data; we still have prior probability. And with that, all of our background knowledge that goes into that prior which function as data. Theories aren't argued in isolation!
Think about how many things need to be true in order for consciousness to "return" after we die, a...
I did a lot of research into this for my youtube channel
Where is your YouTube channel? I'd be interested in looking at the charisma stuff you've posted.
If you ask her a direct question, I would take into account that this would more than likely engage her press secretary and might not get the logical answer you are looking for.
If it were me, I would just assume she was lightheartedly teasing. If that's the case, the course of action would be to tease back, but also in a lighthearted way. Either that, or reply with an extremely exaggerated form of self-deprecation; agree with her teasing but in a way that exaggerates the original intent. Even if that's not the case, and she's being vindictive, I think responding as though she were teasing would be ideal anyway.
Examples:
"I tripped and almost fell on you. Oh but you would be happy if I accidentally fell on you, right?" (t...
You can probably ask them a variant of the Monday/Tuesday game, but for different religious traditions.
I would like to go to a meetup, but I'm usually out of town on the weekends. One of these days, I'll make it out :)
I usually go to the dances in Baltimore on either Monday or Friday night, and head to DC to dance blues on Wednesday or Thursday. Every now and then I've gone to the swing dance in DC on Tuesday nights (I think that's the one on U. St. called Jam Cellar). There's actually a really big swing dance event this weekend in DC so I'll be around for that.
Probably not. I used up a lot of my vacation time due to all of the snow earlier this year and I'm going to Brazil next week. I'm attempting to save up some vacation days in time for an exchange in Germany in the fall.
I'm part of the swing and blues dance scene in the Baltimore/DC area. There are a lot of nerdy/intellectual types in this scene so there's really no shortage of finding intelligent people to talk to. And the people I know who fit that type isn't limited to Baltimore/DC; I travel around a lot for dancing (Las Vegas, Montreal, London, etc.) and a lot of the same type of people are in the scene internationally.
I've been doing this for about 10 years so I'm also somewhat well connected. There's almost always some dance party to go to on the weekend in some city that I can drive to.
Being a man greatly reduces reproductive fitness, compared to the reproductive success of women. E.g., at age 12, for example, the death rate for boys is 46 percent higher than the rate for girls. And there are probably other factors that add to less reproductive success among males besides death. Being both gay and male doesn't seem like that much of a difference.
If this were true, then the human species would acquire an unequal ratio of men to women (with more women), until the fitness of both was the same (because men would be in greater demand). There are species which work that way, like sea lions. This is known as Fisher's Principle.