All of LVSN's Comments + Replies
This sounds to me kind of like saying Jesus Christ will literally come back to Earth as a ghost for the rapture in 2012. I wouldn't put my money on people not just using the government to make something else happen.
People already wanted to distrust technology; there are plenty of personally fulfilling narrative roles people would gain from simply attempting the ordinary governmental intervention efforts humans have always tended to. I'm not saying it will be competently executed but it would probably be at least as good as internet- and automation-assisted feudalism.
I'd distinguish 'imparting information that happens to induce guilt' from 'guilting', based on intent to cooperatively inform vs. psychologically attack.
Mhm, and in practice no one who accuses of guilt tripping actually cares about that distinction; if someone is being made to look bad then they basically never wonder if it's right. I'm not objecting to the 'guilt-tripping' framing for no reason; it's a thought-terminating cliche in 99.99% of cases where it's used.
[reading what I actually wrote here] ... And anyways 'inducing guilt' is what the most releva...
In a well-founded marriage, spouses don’t try to induce internal conflict within their partner (e.g. shaming or guilting them) to win fights.
So I would expect that giving others a list of true information which connotes their relevant wrongness in some way on some topic (and may thereby induce guilt especially when the problem is explicitly stated) is not well-founded, according to you. Under well-founded environments, those with the advantage of existing unchallenged multi-prejudiced ideology would never be held accountable to their mistakes because all c...
Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.
Still I guess there should be a word for being mean to one or a few guys in particular against one's stated principles without an objectively justifying explanation. I would like it to be something else. Especially because your example does not involve predictable scapegoat targeting to match the way that this phenomenon happens in real life.
2well, there are positive-sum games. also, it may turn out that acquiring power is more complicated, in an almost fundamentally benevolent way, than grabbing an object from someone else and pulling in hard with your arms; people don't like ceding power to individuals who seem myopically selfish.
This exchange reveals a pervasive mechanism: pseudo-principality—the selective application of principles based solely on whether they advance one's concealed interests while maintaining a facade of consistent ethical behavior.
While your analysis may fairly apply to the example you have constructed, in practice, it is important to be strategic about intrinsic value, people do not often have the framing of intrinsic value strategicism readily in mind to make their behavior explicitly consistent about, and all shortly specified principles which are not about ...
While I take no position on the general accuracy or contextual robustness of the post's thesis, I find that its topics and analogies inspire better development of my own questions. The post may not be good advice, but it is good conversation. In particular I really like the attempt to explicitly analyze possible explanations of processes of consciousness emerging from physical formal systems instead of just remarking on the mysteriousness of such a thing ostensibly having happened.
What are the other describable or possible-though-indescribable hypotheses? If it's intuitive that there are no other hypotheses to start from — if the explanations have been reduced to some small number of all imaginable possibilities — that's a non-nothing sort of evidence which ought to be contended with at the very least, rather than scoffed at with 'you didn't see an epistemic polylemma therefor there's no evidence that there was one'.
this is clearly polemical satire and not true, and I cannot readily infer about you a spirit of curiosity about the subject of the satire, so I will downvote, in an attempt of assistance of the spirit of LessWrong; nothing personal & i hope you fare well on this site generally :)
Ignoring everything underneath the title, this advice makes more convenient what people wanted to do anyway, changing nothing about the typical quality of the implementation; not the cruel extent nor the unjust kind of it. "Oh, not even rationalists will object? Excellent."
It would fall harshest on those who are most small, most libertarian, and most habitually argumentative, and not on dogmatic censors, nor coercive aesthetic isolationists, nor speech duressors.
If we have two kinds of people and two kinds of effects that this advice might have:
- Dogmatics who would use this as an excuse for censorship, with the world getting worse as they hear this message
- Genuinely thoughtful people inclined toward self-doubt who are encouraged to listen to their gut, with the world getting better as it helped them avoid substantial damage
Then I acknowledge that the first effect probably exists, but I expect the second effect to dominate. The kinds of people who would ignore everything underneath the title and were just looking for...
FFM is great except for two things:
- it purports to measure conscientiousness, and it measures that by how much money you make and how often you work, which have nothing to do with acting according to your conscience in a world where the highest-relevance acts are speech-acts
- its 'agreeableness' metric is supposed to be about niceness and harmony-making, but people who reveal their disagreements for the sake of resolving them get sorted as argumentative and thus low in agreeability, and there's no separate metric for niceness in the model, so as a world
It may be strategic about intrinsic value for a small group of people to suffer to implement highly demanding altruistic lifestyles of their own authentic diligence, but for everyone to operate at the extremes of altruism would make everything suck, which is something morality would advise against. Morality is demanding, but it can't be demanding to an extent that comes out wasteful of intrinsic value in the end. Well, that's my working hypothesis at least.
You are free to choose between A or B if your choice will determine the outcome.
Right, but there's a lot of conflation between what people should think I am and what they do unfairly think I am, which to be fair is a real thing, though it's a real thing which the thing that people should think I am is trapped inside of, and to the extent that it is responsible for causing problems which the thing people should think I am are inclined to blame by nonconsensual association, it is parasitic, and the thing which people should think I am is a victim.
2Upvoted for the finalmost sentence of your post; thank you so much.
Whoever argues that "MLK is a criminal" with the intent of instilling the negative connotation of the term is unlikely to apply the same standard everywhere.
This is an indictment of the human species, if this purported "unlikelihood" is true. Maybe you should not underestimate the likelihood that your interlocutors have a serious deep resentment of unlawful behavior, however alien this might be to you. Maybe part of their fundamental self-narrative includes the unforgivable harms cons...
I liked this post on a personal level, because I like seeing how people can, with extremely fine subtlety, trick themselves into thinking the world is cooler than it is, but I had to downvote because that is not what LessWrong is for, or at least to the extent that self-deceiving memes are being shared then it's supposed to be explicitly intentional; "Instructions For Tricking Yourself Into Feeling That The World Is Cooler" is a thing you could plausibly post and explain, such that your beliefs about which tricks actually work pay rent in anticipated exper...
I don't agree that focusing on extrinsic value is less myopic than focusing on intrinsic value. This world is full of false promises, self-delusion, rationalization of reckless commitment, complexity of value, bad incentives/cybernetics, and the fallaciousness of planning. My impression is that the conscientious sort of people who think so much about utility have overconfidence in the world's structural friendliness and are way more screwed than the so-called "myopic" value-focused individuals.
It's objectively not good enough to be good to a boring degree. The world is full of bullying, we should stand up to it, and to stand up effectively against bullying is rarely boring.
Objective general morality exists, it doesn't have to exist for the sake of anything outside itself, and you should collaborate control over the world with objective general morality if not outright obey it; whichever is better after fully accounting for the human hunger for whimsy. The protection of whimsy is objectively a fragment of objective goodness.
All the narrative proo...
"Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you."
― Karl Popper
A person can rationalize the existence of causal pathways where people end up not understanding things that you think are literally impossible to misunderstand, and then very convincingly pretend that that was the causal pathway which led them to where they are,
and there is also the possibility that someone will follow such a causal pathway towards actually sincerely misunderstanding you and you will falsely accuse them of pretending to misunderstand.
This is wonderful; feels much more friendly, practical, and conducive to ideal speech situations. If someone tries to attack me for a wrong probability, I can respond "I'm just talking but with additional clarity; no one is perfect."
I am under the impression that here at LessWrong, everyone knows we have standards about what makes good, highly-upvotable top-level content. Currently I would not approve of a version of myself who would conform to those standards I perceive, but I can be persuaded otherwise, including by methods such as improving my familiarity with the real standards.
Addendum: I am not the type of guy who does homework. I am not the type of guy who pretends to have solved epistemology when they haven't. I am the type of guy who exchanges considerations and honestly trie...
No one will hear my counter-arguments to Sabien's propaganda who does not ask me for them privately. Sabien has blocked me for daring to be unsubtle with him. He is equally welcome as anyone else to come forth to me and exchange considerations. I will not be lured into war; if it is to be settled, then it will be settled with words and in ideal speech situations.
Certain texts are characterized by precision, such as mathematical proofs, standard operating procedures, code, protocols, and laws. Their authority, power, and usefulness stem from this quality. Criticizing them for being imprecise is justified.
Nope; precision has nothing to do with intrinsic value. If Ashley asks Blaine to get her an apple from the fridge, many would agree that 'apple' is a rather specific thing, but if Blaine was insistent on being dense he can still say "Really? An apple? How vague! There are so many possible subatomic configurations t...
Explain, please? I affirm the importance of charitability and I am interested in greater specificity about what you have identified as 'aggressiveness'. I see aggressiveness as sometimes justified.
I should have done the second; I was mistaken that clicking "Read More" in the commenting guidelines would not reward me with sufficient clarity about Duncan's elaborate standards; I apologize for my rude behavior.
Why the downvotes? "Lizardman" is a great status-reducing thing to call a person just for being too weird and disagreeable! :)
This was the original reasoning behind judges-elected-for-life—that society needed principled men and women of discernment who did not need to placate or cater to lizardman.
After all, no one of discernment would ever heed a true lizardman. They know the difference between someone who seems like a lizardman and someone who is a lizardman.
If AI copied all human body layouts down to the subatomic level, then re-engineered all human bodies so they were no longer recognizably human but rather something human-objectively superior, then gave all former humans the option to change back to their original forms, would this have been a good thing to do?
I think so!
It has been warned in ominous tones that "nothing human survives into the far future."
I'm not sure human-objectivity permits humanity to remain mostly-recognizably human, but it does require that former humans have the freedom to change back if they wish, and I'm sure that many would, and that would satisfy the criterion of something human surviving the far future.
(I apologize for being, or skirting too close to the edges of being, too political. I accept downvotes as the fair price and promise no begrudgement for it.)
I have an observation that I want more widely appreciated by low-contextualizers (who may be high or low in decoupling as well; they are independent axes): insisting that conversations happen purely in terms of the bet-resolvable portion of reality, without an omniscient being to help out as bet arbiter, can be frame control.
Status quos contain self-validating reductions, and people looking to sc...
Engineering and gaming are just other words for understanding the constraints deeply enough to find the paths to desired (by the engineer) results.
Yes.
The words you choose are political, with embedded intentional beliefs, not definitional and objective about the actions themselves.
Well now that was out of left-field! People don't normally say that without having a broader disagreement at play. I suppose you have a more-objective reform-to-my-words prepared to offer me? My point about the letter of the law being more superficial than the spirit seems ...
Funny that you think gameability is closer to engineering; I had it in mind that exceptioncraft was closer. To my mind, gameability is more like rules-lawyering the letter of the law, whereas exceptioncraft relies on the spirit of the law. Syntactic vs semantic kinda situation.
You can quote text using a caret (>) and a space.
Surely to be truthful is to be non-misleading...?
Read the linked post; this is not so. You can mislead with the truth. You can speak a wholly true collection of facts that misleads people. If someone misleads using a fully true collection of facts, saying they spoke untruthfully is confusing. Truth cannot just always lead to good inferences; truth does not have to be convenient, as you say in OP. Truth can make you infer falsehoods.
Saying you put the value of truth above your value of morality on your list of values is analogous to saying you put your moral of truth above your moral of values; it's like saying bananas are more fruity to you than fruits.
Where does non-misleadingness fall on your list of supposedly amoral values such as truth and morality? Is non-misleadingness higher than truth or lower?
The existence of natural abstractions is entirely compatible with the existence of language games. There are correct and incorrect ways to play language games.
Dialogue trees are the substrate of language games, and broader reality is the substrate of dialogue trees. Dialogue trees afford taking dialogical moves that are more or less arbitrary. A guy who goes around saying "claiming land for yourself and enforcing your claim is justice; Nozick is intelligent and his entitlement theory of justice vindicates my claim" will leave exact impressions on exact typ...
In the sequences, Yudkowsky has remarked over and over that it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety if you do not achieve the correct answer; read the 12th virtue
No; pointless for me to complain, to be clear.
You can't say values "aren't objective" without some semantic sense of objectivity that they are failing to fulfill.
If you can communicate such a sense to me, I can give you values to match. That doesn't mean your sense of objectivity will have been perfect and unarbitrary; perhaps I will want to reconcile with you about our different notions of objectivity.
Still, I'm damn going to try to be objectively good.
It just so happens that my values connote all of your values, minus the part about being culturally local; funny how that works.
If y...
The dictionary defines arbitrary as:
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system
The more considerate and reasoned your choice, the less random it is. If the truth is that your way of being considerate and systematic isn't as good as it could have been, that truth is systematic and not magical. The reason for the non-maximal goodness of your policy is a reason you did not consider. The less considerate, the more arbitrary.
...There is no real reason to choose either the left or right side of the road for driving but it's very useful
A policy that could be better — could be more good — is arbitrarily bad. In fact the phrase "arbitrarily bad" is redundant; you can just say "arbitrary."
It is better to be predictably good than surprisingly bad, and it is better to be surprisingly good than predictably bad; that much will be obvious to everyone.
I think it is better to be surprisingly good than predictably good, and it is better to be predictably bad than surprisingly bad.
EDIT: wait, I'm not sure that's right even by deontology's standards; as a general categorical imperative, if you can predict something will be bad, you should do something surprisingly good instead, even if the predictability of the badness supposedly makes it easie...
I don't yet have any opinions about the arbitrariness of those rules. It is possible that I would disagree with you about the arbitrariness if I was more familiar.
Still, you claim that those rules are arbitrary and then defend them; what on Earth is the point of that? If you know they are arbitrary then you must know there are, in principle, less arbitrary policies available. Either you have a specific policy that you know is less arbitrary, in which case people should coordinate around that policy instead as a matter of objective fact, or you don't know a...
Either 'fallacious' is not the true problem or it is the true problem but the stereotypes about what is fallacious do not align with reality: A Unifying Theory in Defense of Logical Fallacies
People defend normal rules by saying they're "not arbitrary." But if they were arbitrariness minimizers the rules would certainly be different. Why should I tolerate an arbitrary level of arbitrariness when I can have minimal instead?
Your policy's non-maximal arbitrariness is not an excuse for its remaining arbitrariness.
I do not suggest the absence of a policy if such an absence would be more arbitrary than the existing policy. All I want is a minimally arbitrary policy; that often implies replacing existing rules rather than simply doing away with them. Sometimes it does mean doing away with them.
If someone said "you'll never persuade people like that" to me I'd probably just ask them what's arbitrary about my position. If it's arbitrary then they may have a point. If it's not arbitrary then people will in fact be persuaded.
When I try to do virtue ethics, I find that all my virtues turn to swiss cheese after a day’s worth of exception handling.
"Put simply: inconsistency between words and actions is no big deal. Why should your best estimate about good strategies be anchored to what you're already doing? The anti-hypocrisy norm seems to implicitly assume we're already perfect; it leaves no room for people who are in the process of trying to improve."
— Abram Demski, Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
"With 'unlimited power' you have no need to crush your enemies. You have no...
Meh. You include, in your defense of inconsistency, no safeguarding measures against the common curse of all costs of general inconsistency falling upon those who are more expedient to redirect costs to, such as being least popular, or most miscategorized, or most outright ontologically erased. Doesn't it seem like there would be good reasons not to diagnose you with probably being a lot of people's accidentally evil stepmothers in other lives, given how much you say you care about being reasonable?
For me, reasonability is a serious claim, and the differen... (read more)