An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. It collapses into a gravitational singularity.
I tried something vaguely similar with completely different assumptions. I basically ignored the number of animal deaths in favor of minimizing the amount of animal torture. The whole thing was based on how many animals it takes before empathy kicks in, rather than an actual utility comparison.
I instinctively distrust animal-to-human utility conversions, but the ideal version of your method is better than the ideal version of mine. I do recommend that meat eaters do what I did to establish an upper bound, though. It might even convince someone to change th...
Do you think we currently need more inequality, or less?
Compared to technological progress, there has been little or no social/political progress since the mid-18th century - if anything, there has been a regression
Regression? Since the 1750s? I realize Europe may be unusually bad here (at least, I hope so), but it took until 1829 for England to abolish the husband's right to punish his wife however he wanted.
I once walked around a university campus convincing people that it's impossible to see the Moon during daylight hours. I think it was about 2/3 who believed me, at least until I pointed up.
Just that moment. I definitely didn't follow any of its implications. (Other than "if I say this then people will react as if I said an obvious true thing.")
I once believed that six times one is one.
I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but for whatever reason numbers became relevant and I clearly and directly stated my false belief. It was late, we were driving back from a long hard chess tournament, and I evidently wasn't thinking clearly. I said the words "because of course six times one is one." Everyone thought for a second and someone said "no it's not." Predictable reactions occurred from there.
The reason I like the anecdote is because I reacted exactly the same way I woul...
The main prediction that comes to mind is that if Christianity is true, one would expect substantially more miracle claims by Christians (legitimate claims plus false ones) than by any other religion (false claims only).
This also assumes there isn't some saturation point of people only wanting to talk about so many miracles. (Ignoring buybuydandavis' point, which probably interacts with this one in unfortunate ways.) If people only forward X annoying chain emails per month, you'd expect X from each religion. The best we can hope for is the true religion having on average slightly more plausible claims since some of their miracles are true.
It wasn't actually a muscular condition. My friend is surprisingly unwilling to spread this around and only told me under the extreme circumstances of me telling her I might be about to become an atheist. I wanted to change enough that if she read this on the Internet she wouldn't know it was about her.
I have done this. The most impressive-sounding one happened to a friend of mine who had formerly been an athlete. She had to withdraw from sports for a year because of an unexpected muscular condition. (If this is obviously medically wrong, it's probably because I changed details for privacy.) As you probably expect, that year involved plenty of spiritual growth that she attributes to having had to quit sports.
At the end of that time, a group of church people laid hands on her and prayed, she felt some extreme acceleration in her heart rate, and her endura...
It's appointed. Doesn't mean the guy who did the appointing can't make exceptions if he feels like it.
Well no, because I doubt he'd share the downvoter's objective. (I assume. I wasn't following the kerfuffle.) To conclude that he would, you have to transplant his methods onto a forum setting but not his goals. Which is a weird level to model at.
Anthropics fails to explain King George because it's double-counting the evidence. The same does not apply to any extinction event, where you have not already conditioned on "I wouldn't exist otherwise."
If it's a non-extinction nuclear exchange, where population would be significantly smaller but nonzero, I'm not confident enough in my understanding of anthropics to have an opinion.
I still don't think George VI having more siblings is an observer-killing event.
Since we now know that George VI didn’t have more siblings, we obtain
Probability(You exist [and know that George VI had exactly five siblings] | George VI had more than five siblings) = 0
I assume you mean "know" the usual way. Not hundred percent certainty, just that I saw it on Wikipedia and now it's a fact I'm aware of. Then P(I exist with this mind state | George VI had more than five siblings) isn't zero, it's some number based on my prior for Wikipedia being ...
I don't think it's lumping everything together. It's criticizing the rule "Act on what you feel in your heart." That applies to a lot of people's beliefs, but it certainly isn't the epistemology of everyone who doesn't agree with Penn Jillette.
The problem with "Act on what you feel in your heart" is that it's too generalizable. It proves too much, because of course someone else might feel something different and some of those things might be horrible. But if my epistemology is an appeal to an external source (which I guess in this conte...
What we need to do is convince Harvard to perform a double-blind test. Accept half their students as normal, and the other half at random from their applicants. We'll have an answer within a couple decades.
I always do. Mentally but not muscularly, and I can kind of suppress it if I consciously try. It is indeed the limiting factor on my reading speed.
Is it possible for a tulpa to have skills or information that the person doing the emulating doesn't? What happens if you play chess against your tulpa?
I just realized it's possible to explain people picking dust in the torture vs. dust specks question using only scope insensitivity and no other mistakes. I'm sure that's not original, but I bet this is what's going on in the head of a normal person when they pick the specks.
The dust speck "dillema" - like a lot of the other exercises that get the mathematically wrong answer from most people is triggering a very valuable heuristic. - The "you are trying to con me into doing evil, so fuck off" Heuristic.
Consider the problem as you would of it was a problem you were presented with in real life.
The negative utility of the "Torture" choice is nigh-100% certain. It is in your physical presence, you can verify it, and "one person gets tortured" is the kind of event that happens in real life w...
Not very tempted, actually. In this hypothetical, since I'm not feeling empathy the murder wouldn't make me feel bad and I get money. But who says I have to decide based on how stuff makes me feel?
I might feel absolutely nothing for this stranger and still think "Having the money would be nice, but I guess that would lower net utility. I'll forego the money because utilitarianism says so." That's pretty much exactly what I think when donating to the AMF, and I don't see why a psychopath couldn't have that same thought.
I guess the question I'm ge...
I had actually been wondering about this recently. People define a psychopath as someone with no empathy, and then jump to "therefore, they have no morals." But it doesn't seem impossible to value something or someone as a terminal value without empathizing with them. I don't see why you couldn't even be a psychopath and an extreme rational altruist, though you might not enjoy it. Is the word "psychopath" being used two different ways (meaning a non-empathic person and meaning a complete monster), or am I missing a connection that makes these the same thing?
Well, it doesn't establish that induction is always valid, so I guess we might not really be disagreeing. But, pragmatically, everyone basically has to assume that it usually works, or is likely to work in whatever the particular case is. I think it's a good enough heuristic to be called a rational principle that people already have down.
I'm sure there are philosophers who say they don't, but I guarantee you they act as if they do. Even if they don't know anything about electronics, they'd still expect the light to come on when they flip the switch.
Standard young-Earther responses, taken from when I was a young-Earth creationist.
Round Earth: Yes. You sort of have to stretch to interpret the Bible as saying the Earth is round or flat, so it's not exactly a contradiction. Things like "the four corners of the Earth" are obvious metaphor.
Animals on the boat: The "kinds" of animals (Hebrew "baramin") don't correspond exactly to what we call species. There are fewer animals in the ark than 2*(number of modern species); this is considered to be a sufficient answer even though i...
Ideally, how people feel about things would be based in real-world consequences, and a chance of someone being not dead is usually strictly better than the alternative. But I can see how for a small enough chance of resurrection, it could possibly be outweighed by other people holding on to it. I still hope that isn't what's going on in this case, though. That would require people to be feeling "I'd rather have this person permanently dead, because at least then I know where I stand."
That's...that's terrible. That it would feel worse to have a chance of resurrection than to have closure. It sounds depressingly plausible that that's people's true rejection, but I hope it's not.
Religion doesn't have the same problem, and in my experience it's because of the certainty. People believe themselves to be absolutely certain in their belief in the afterlife. So there's no closure problem, because they simply know that they'll see the person again. If you could convince people that cryonics would definitely result in them being resurrected together with their loved ones, then I'd expect this particular problem to go away.
And I'm not sure it's a mistake. If you're getting your information in a context where you know it's meant completely literally and nothing else (e.g., Omega, lawyers, Spock), then yes, it would be wrong. In normal conversation, people may (sometimes but not always; it's infuriating) use "if" to mean "if and only if." As for this particular case, somervta is probably completely right. But I don't think it's conducive to communication to accuse people of bias for following Grice's maxims.
Of each other, I think it means.
Of the set of all possible actions that you haven't denied doing, you've only done a minuscule percentage of them.
Of the times that you deny having done something, you lie some non-trivial percent of the time.
Therefore, your denial is evidence of guilt.
Of the set of all possible actions that you haven't denied doing, you've only done a minuscule percentage of them.
Of the times that you deny having done something, you lie some non-trivial percent of the time.
Therefore, your denial is evidence of guilt.
Even if the conclusion is true it does not follow from the premises given. It relies on the additional implied premise:
There are some cases where denial is evidence of guilt, there are other cases where it is evidence of innocence and still others where it is no evidence either way.
Sure. This is not surprising; if I spontaneously deny having done something, many people will in fact treat this as evidence of my having done it. (Obligatory TV Tropes link.)
That said, of the set of all possible actions that I haven't denied doing that I've been accused of doing, I've done a non-trivial percentage P1 of them. Of the times that I deny having done something that I've been accused of doing, I lie some non-trivial percentage P2 of the time.
Therefore, my denial of something I'm accused of is evidence of guilt if P2 > P1 and evidence of innocence if P1 > P2.
This post almost convinced me. I was thinking about it in terms of a similar algorithm, "one-box unless the number is obviously composite." Your argument convinced me that you should probably one-box even if Omega's number is, say, six. (Even leaving aside the fact that I'd probably mess up more than one in a thousand questions that easy.) For the reasons you said, I tentatively think that this algorithm is not actually one-boxing and is suboptimal.
But the algorithm "one-box unless the numbers are the same" is different. If you were pl...
As cool as that term sounds, I'm not sure I like it. I think it's too strongly reinforcing of ideas like superiority of rationalists over non-rationalists. Even in cases where rationalists are just better at things, it seems like it's encouraging thinking of Us and Them to an unnecessary degree.
Also, assuming there is a good enough reason to convince me that the term should be used, why is transhumanism-and-polyamory the set of powers defining the non-muggles? LessWrong isn't that overwhelmingly poly, is it?
Plots which are just about people not being rational are a subspecies of "Idiot Plots". Plots which are about people not behaving like SF con-goers are "Muggle Plots".
The question for P(Supernatural) explicitly said "including God." So either LW assigns a median probability of at least one in 10,000 that God created the universe and then did nothing, or there's a bad case of conjunction fallacy.