No, actually, not Wisconsin. Sorry :P
You wrote that disbelieving in God is not going to turn someone into a murderer because there are still plenty of good reasons to not be a murderer.
This was intended to be a counter example -- not a description of how all people work. I can imagine that someone out there would very much become a murderer if they lost religion.
...but I don't see why theu would be afraid of losing one system other than because they are afraid they will lose their morality (and become murderers). What is the other reason for being afraid?
Introspection is scary. Dismant...
Would you be willing to summarize your view in a couple sentences, even if doing so would result in a caricature of your position? The main idea I drew from your comment is that when we think about how murder is immoral, this feels like something different than just that murder is not in our best interest (even after folding in that we have self-interests in being altruistic).
Someone making a choice to do X is not necessarily making this choice for moral reasons. If (a) they are doing X for moral reasons and (b) you suddenly take away those moral reason...
Which is to say: The very fact that a religious person would be afraid of God withdrawing Its threat to punish them for committing murder, shows that they have a revulsion of murder which is independent of whether God punishes murder or not. If they had no sense that murder was wrong independently of divine retribution, the prospect of God not punishing murder would be no more existentially horrifying than the prospect of God not punishing sneezing.
If someone built a complicated morality system around the morality of God and suddenly changed it, they ...
Eh. I guess I don't see a problem with how the language works here. "Correction as question" probably takes longer but if people are getting confused by the process then I consider that a weakness of the particular implementation.
For example:
Your challenge is that this is now ambiguous with regards to whether or not I know the answer. Except, the point isn't what I know. The point is that there i...
Oh, okay. I guess my form of "correction as question" is more like:
Is correct?
Also tangential: Have you tried simply getting up to get another drink or go to the bathroom? Chances are high that (a) others will join you (b) the conversation will experience a natural segue and/or (c) the people who still care about the subject will stay behind to continue on their own.
Just a thought. I don't really know what environment you were referring to.
That's annoying. What do you do if you're genuinely unsure if they're making a specific mistake and want to know?
How does phrasing a correction as a question limit your options? I don't understand how the specific mistake part ties into the correction as question part.
I immediately took the title to imply both meanings and assumed it was deliberate. I did not think this was all that terribly boastful. So... I guess I agree halfway?
I selfishly voted you up because this is what I want to hear. ;)
Yes, that is what I meant. I guess I should have put that in the post somewhere... I edited it in.
Aha! Thank you much! I figured something was up. :) I won't bother copying this over there, however.
Also, apparently there are some spammers about.
I used to post here on LessWrong and left for various reasons. Someone recognized my name earlier today from my activity here and I just so happened to have thought of LessWrong during a conversation I had with a friend of mine. The double hit was enough to make me curious.
So how's it going? I am just stopping by to say a quick, "Hello." It seems that Open Threads are no longer the way things work but I didn't notice anything else relevant in the Recent Posts. The community seems to be alive and thriving. Congratulations. :)
If a theist is a good person, that theist already is a good person, whether God is real or not.
The relevant question is whether the good person would remain good after they discover God is not real. My hunch is that most people who are good would stay that way.
But I like this point:
Whatever the truth is, the hypothetical frightened father - and the very real frightened theists, such as yourself - already are living under whatever conditions actually hold.
And I will take it with me.
Not so much ideas as things that I think would be helpful but will be buried in obscurity at the level I am.
That being said, this is helped more by learning the basics through reading the sequences than playing status games. My thoughts on status should be taken with the clarification that I am primarily seeking to learn and am thinking about status because I find it interesting.
If I can take my comments and change my behavior so as to be looking forward and increase my status without hampering my ability to learn... why shouldn't I? When I look at the var...
Experience can provide an excellent dummy check to make sure there isn't an obvious counter-argument or flaw in something that you are unable to see because you haven't seen it yet. There is much to be said from simply going out there and trying the theory; the results of trying are experience. When you can translate your experience into Bayesian terms you have succeeded.
I have no problem with deferring to someone who has more experience than I do as long as I trust their methodology. Once that trust is gone I start doubting the truth of their experience. ...
There is a slight difference between being a top contributor and being famous as I am mentioning it here.
My current karma experiment is deliberately not posting comments I think are worth less than 2 karma unless I have a compelling reason to do so (such as asking for help or information). My goal is to increase the quality of my comments to the point that someone could think, "What has MrHen posted recently?" and the answer is more impressive than a series of one-liners and nitpicky comments.
Ideally, this will increase the weight of my words to ...
Yeah, I was way off. I didn't think people would be that interested in karma theory. I think the big oops was the first bullet point.
...The atoms of a screwdriver don't have tiny little XML tags inside describing their "objective" purpose. The designer had something in mind, yes, but that's not the same as what happens in the real world. If you forgot that the designer is a separate entity from the designed thing, you might think, "The purpose of the screwdriver is to drive screws" - as though this were an explicit property of the screwdriver itself, rather than a property of the designer's state of mind. You might be surprised that the screwdriver didn't reconfigur
What is the point of this post? I seem to have missed it entirely. Can anyone help me out?
The mirror challenge for decision theory is seeing which option a choice criterion really endorses. If your stated moral principles call for you to provide laptops to everyone, does that really endorse buying a $1 million gem-studded laptop for yourself, or spending the same money on shipping 5000 OLPCs?
Is the point that predicting the end result of particular criterion is difficult because bias gets in the way? And, because it is difficult, start small with stuf...
As a counterpoint, my highest rated comments are huge walls of text. This could be because (a) I don't make a lot of jokes or (b) I make crappy jokes or (c) people like my walls of text more than the typical wall of text or (d) something else.
I keep an eye on my karma and have noticed these things that I believe are related to your post:
Talking about the karma system has fallen out of favor. I think people are getting tired of it.
Asking why something was downvoted usually brings more upvotes unless you really, really deserved the downvotes. This latter
Darwinian Evolution is irrelevant to the whole discussion.
I think I understand the point you are trying to make with this. The questions I have in response are these:
Rearranging the cards in a deck has no statistical consequence. Cheating on your spouse significantly alters the odds of certain things happening.
If you add the restriction that there are no consequences, there wouldn't really be much point in doing it because its not like you get sex as a result. That would be a consequence.
The idea that something immoral shouldn't be immoral if no one catches you and nothing bad happens as a result is an open problem as far as I know. Most people don't like such an idea but I hear the debate surface from time to time. (U...
Taking two seconds to click on the Collapse Postulate link it appears that the article was originally posted on Overcoming Bias. Also, it appears to be part of a larger sequence on quantum mechanics.
I haven't read that sequence or that article so I cannot compare them to yours, but all of those links in the block you quoted presumably enhance the discussion to make the conclusion more obvious. Your article has one link.
Good point. I will do this in the future.
EDIT: For historical purposes, this comment reported two typos that have since been fixed. I was intending to delete this comment when they were fixed but a valuable discussion occurred below.
I'd suppose that the heuristic is along the lines of the following: Say there's an agreed-upon fair procedure for deciding who gets something, and then someone changes that procedure, and someone other than you ends up benefiting. Then it's unfair, and what's yours has probably been taken.
Everything else you've said makes sense, but I think the heuristic here is way off. Firstly, they object before the results have been produced, so the benefit is unknown. Second, the assumption of an agreed upon procedure is only really valid in the poker example. Othe...
I loved that book. I still have moments when I pull some random picture from that book out of my memory to describe how an object works.
EDIT: Apparently the book is on Google.
She was talking to students at Harvard.
Okay. Nothing I have will help you. My problems are generally OCD based procrastination loops or modifying bad habits and rituals. Solutions to these assume impulses to do things.
I have nothing that would provide you with impulses to do.
All of my interpretations of "I can't do X" assume what I mean when I tell myself I can't do X.
Sorry. If I were actually there I could probably come up with something but I highly doubt I would be able to "see" you well enough through text to be able to find a relevant answer.
Possible solutions:
Increase the amount of effort it takes to do the low-effort things you are trying to avoid. For instance, it isn't terribly hard to set your internet on a timer so it automatically shuts off from 1 - 3pm. While it isn't terribly hard to turn it back on, if you can scrounge up the effort to turn it back on you may be able to put that effort into something else.
Decrease the amount of effort it takes to do the high-effort things you are trying to accomplish. Paying bills, for instance, can be done online and streamlined. Family and frie
That works for me. I am not convinced that the rule-changing heuristic was the cause but I think you have defended your position adequately.
A digression: But hopefully at this point, you'll realize the difference between the frequentist and Bayesian instincts in this situation. [...]
Yep. This really is a digression which is why I hadn't brought up another interesting example with the same group of friends:
...One of my friends dealt hearts in a manner of giving each player a pack of three cards, the next player a pack of three cards and so on. The amount of cards being dealt were the same but we all complained that this actually affected the game because shuffling isn't truly random and it wa
I would say that they impement the rule-changing-heuristic, which is not automatically thought of as an instance of the cheater-heuristic, even if it evolved from it. Changing the rules makes people feeling unsafe, people who do it without good reason are considered dangerous, but not automatically cheaters.
This behavior is repeated in scenarios where the rules are not being changed or there aren't "rules" in the sense of a game and its rules. These examples are significantly fuzzier which is why I chose the poker example.
The lottery ticket ex...
Why wouldn't the complaint then take the form of, "You broke the rules! Stop it!"?
Because people aren't good at telling their actual reason for disagreement. I suspect that they are aware that the particular rule is arbitrary and doesn't influence the game, and almost everybody agrees that blindly following the rules is not a good idea. So "you broke the rules" doesn't sound as a good justification. "You have influenced the outcome", on the other hand, does sound like a good justification, even if it is irrelevant.
The lotte...
Why can I override mine? What makes me different from my friends? The answer isn't knowledge of math or probabilities.
What do you do when you aren't doing anything?
EDIT: More questions as you answer these questions. Too many questions at once is too much effort. I am taking you dead seriously so please don't be offended if I severely underestimate your ability.
I don't know how to respond to this. I feel like I have addressed all of these points elsewhere in the comments.
A summary:
I am more likely to be considered OCD than any of my friends in the example. I don't care if you cut the deck.
But the upshot is that they were irrational as a side effect of usually rational heuristics.
So, when I pester them for a rational reason, why do they keep giving an answer that is irrational for this situation?
I can understand your answer if the scenario was more like:
"Hey! Don't do that!"
"But it doesn't matter. See?"
"Oh. Well, okay. But don't do it anyway because..."
And then they mention your heuristic. They didn't do anything like this. They explicitly understood that nothing was changing in the probabilities and they e...
I agree with your comment and this part especially:
However, the same thought process doesn't occur on winning; people aren't inclined to analyze their successes in the say way that they analyze their failures, even if they are both random events.
Very true. I see a lot of behavior that matches this. This would be an excellent source of the complaint if it happened after they lost. My friends complained before they even picked up their cards.
When you deal Texas Hold'em, do you "burn" cards in the traditional way? Neither I nor most of my friends think that those cards are special, but it's part of the rules of the game. Altering them, even without (suspicion of) malicious intent breaks a ritual associated with the game.
We didn't until the people on TV did it. The ritual was only important in the sense that this is how they were predicting which card they were going to get. Their point was based entirely on the fact that the card they were going to get is not the card they ended up...
RobinZ ventured a guess that their true objection was not their stated objection; I stated it poorly, but I was offering the same hypothesis with a different true objection--that you were disrupting the flow of the game.
I'm not entirely sure if this makes sense, partially because there is no reason to disguise unhappiness with an unusual order of game play. From what you've said, your friends worked to convince you that their objection was really about which cards were being dealt, and in this instance I think we can believe them. My fallacy was probably ...
How do you want your organism to react when someone else's voluntary action changes who receives a prize?
I want my organism to be able to tell the difference between a cheater and someone making irrelevant changes to a deck of cards. I assume this was a rhetorical question.
Evolution is great but I want more than that. I want to know why. I want to know why my friends feel that way but I didn't when the roles were reversed. The answer is not "because I knew more math." Have I just evolved differently?
I want to know what other areas are affected...
Ah, okay. That makes more sense. I am still experimenting with the amount of predictive counter-arguing to use. In the past I have attempted to so by adding examples that would address the potential objections. This hasn't been terribly successful. I have also directly addressed the points and people still brought them up... so I am pondering how to fix the problem.
But, anyway. The topic at hand still interests me. I assume there is a term for this that matches the behavior. I could come up with some fancy technical definition (perceived present ownership ...
EDIT: Wow, this turned into a ramble. I didn't have time to proof it so I apologize if it doesn't make sense.
I'm not sure our guesses (I presume you have not tested the lottery ticket swap experimentally) are actually in conflict. My thesis was not "they think you're cheating", but simply, straightforwardly "they object to any alteration of the dealing rules", and they might do so for the wrong reason - even though, in their defense, valid reasons exist.
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. My instinct is pointing me in the other direction ...
Hm. Interesting, I don't think I ever realized those two words had slightly different meanings.
*Files information under vocab quirks.*
I was tempted to add this comment:
Vote this comment up if you have no idea what Alicorn's metaphor of luminosity means.
But figured it wouldn't be nice to screw with your poll. :)
The point, though, is that I really don't understand the luminosity metaphor based on how you have currently described it. I would guess the following:
A luminous mental state is a mental state such that the mind in that state is fully aware of being in that state.
Am I close?
Edit: Terminology
For a casual game, where it is assumed no one is cheating, then, unless you're a stickler for tradition, who cares? Your friends are wrong.
Sure, but the "wrong" in this case couldn't be shown to my friends. They perfectly understood probability. The problem wasn't in the math. So where were they wrong?
Another way of saying this:
The answer has nothing to do with me cheating and has nothing to do with misunderstanding probability. There is some other problem here and I don't know what it is.
I don't understand the point of this post. I mean, I understand its points, but why is this post here? Is it trying to point out that: (a) intent and reality are not always -- and usually aren't -- entangled? (b) Reality happened and our little XML-style purpose tags are added post fact?
It seems odd to spend so much time saying, "Humans reproduced successfully. Anger exists in humans." If the anger part is correlated to the reproduction part it seems fair to ask, "Why did anger help reproduction?" This is a different question than, &quo... (read more)