All of juked07's Comments + Replies

juked0700

I think lines 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 are related to the argument but 3 and 7 are the "crux" of it. I mostly meant that there is a great deal of fluff surrounding the "core argument", eg the other 5 articles in the zombie subsequence.

0Luke_A_Somers
Most of it is nailing down what words mean, so that when that short argument is made, it isn't dismissable.
juked0700

This happens in the zombie sequence where the crux of the argument is largely 2 lines in http://lesswrong.com/lw/p8/zombie_responses/

"3. Intuitively, it sure seems like my inward awareness is causing my internal narrative to say certain things, and that my internal narrative can cause my lips to say certain things. [...]

  1. (3) seems to me to have a rather high probability of being empirically true. Therefore I evaluate a high empirical probability that the zombie world is logically impossible."
0Luke_A_Somers
7 only explicitly refers to 3, but it also requires 6 and 5 in order to actually refer to Zombie World. 1 and 2 are setting up definitions for 3. If you roll that in as understood already, then the short version is fine because the entire argument against Zombies really boils down to one point: the causal structure of P-braaains requires them to include consciousness. That doesn't mean that lines 1, 2, and 4-6 are pointless. It also doesn't match what Phil is saying unless line 3 is both reaching outside of the realm of expertise and not emphasized. Line 3 is definitely not reaching outside the realm of expertise, and is emphasized. If you want to raise a problem, it would be that line 4 is carrying all the weight, not 3 - except, he goes on to further talk about it for multiple paragraphs immediately afterwards.
juked0700

Even then I think we can make some assumptions though. If you have no prior about the pdf of pdfs, a reasonable best best guess is the pdfs you have seen already.

juked0700

Even after determining your wealth, your utility function has to take whether-you-are-currently-holding-stocks as an input, because it affects the probability that you incur a transaction cost in future time steps. I think this piece cannot be evaluated without supposing some pdf of future pdfs. I think this is why people are saying the problem is "underspecified".

0juked07
Even then I think we can make some assumptions though. If you have no prior about the pdf of pdfs, a reasonable best best guess is the pdfs you have seen already.
juked07*10

Agree with kilobug. eric3's numbers seem way off.

juked0700

Then maybe "Imagine that civilization would definitely be destroyed iff there was a..."?

The rest of the post still reads to me as if pandemic + recession is sufficient, not just necessary, for implying extinction. To be explicit, it sounds like you have ruled out the possibility of observing pandemic + recession + non-extinction, I would have thought you'd want to say that pandemic + recession = extinction, rather than the weaker statement that extinction requires pandemic + recession.

0Stuart_Armstrong
Go with iff for that example.
juked0700

Should the first blurb begin "Imagine that civilization would definitely be destroyed by" instead of "Imagine that the only way that civilization could be destroyed was by"? That's what it seems like to me based on the second blurb.

2Stuart_Armstrong
It's easier to reason with a single cause of destruction: see http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw8/caught_in_the_glare_of_two_anthropic_shadows/
juked0710

Atheism is your example of an unpopular idea..?

4gjm
Not at all unpopular on LW. Very unpopular in some other contexts, e.g., US society at large.
juked0750

This strikes me as very human centric. Why should another species' hypothetical ascension look so much like the one we happened to observe in humans?

1private_messaging
If it looks too different, we won't see them in space, though. Our own intelligence is at the level where it's just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we're where we are, and they're where they are.