"Arguing against "Women suffer more unfairness""
Nobody has yet provided arguments that women suffer more in e.g. USA. I'd say my points are true to some degree in USA, except for military service and perhaps domestic violence. I've talked with a researcher of income equality, and atleast he said that wages are pretty much equal for male and females in the USA. Income is not. In Finland for example, males have 20% higher income, but they do 20% more work hours yearly.
"Or do you deny the existence of international organizations worki...
Nobody has yet provided arguments that women suffer more in e.g. USA.
I've add that nobody has provided arguments that women suffer more outside the USA, either. It's just another truism in white liberal middle-class circles. Whether this view is reasonable or not, an argument for it that compares the suffering of men and women worldwide has never been made.
If anyone hold this view, check out the literature on gendercide, and the work of Adam Jones. For example, see his essay on the erasure of male victims in Kosovo. At Gendercide Watch, Jones argues tha...
I made a list of problems in a comment on a website. That's not a good way to make politicial decisions. We need a proper study of the question. I think a priori the 50/50 split between genders is a good balance. You can call that a political compromise, I call it "don't make quick decisions without proper scientific research".
My data justifies slightly more resources for men, but until we have proper scientific research on the question, I'm okay with a 50/50 split. The split is currently about 97/3 in favor of women, so going to 50/50 would help significantly.
I didn't claim you were talking about Finland. However, many of those issues are true in most Western nations. It's just that I'm not an expert in any other country.
"a global equality resource budget"
This doesn't even exist..
"For example, by "evenly" do you mean 50/50 between these two causes?"
Yes.
More information here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/4vj/a_rationalists_account_of_objectification/3r3j
"Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side."
This claim is often made, but I haven't seen any calculations to back it up. I'm active in the gender equality debate in Finland, so I can only talk about Finnish statistics:
"I'm a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it's like to be a member of a suppressed group."
Females are suppressed, and so are males. Gender roles suppress both genders. They also offer advantages to both genders.
List of male privileges: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
List of female privileges: http://masculistadvice.blogspot.com/2008/06/female-privilege-list.html
It is true that popular discourse paints females as the suppressed group and males as the non-suppressed gro...
I stutter, and I've done it for as long as I can remember. Anyone know how to beat it? I feel this has pretty significant (negative) effects on my life, because I'm often afraid of speaking up in a group, as stuttering is extremely embarrassing.
And that's why we need an article somewhere which would define some common terms, so you don't have to define them all over again in every article about consciousness.
Yet qualia cannot be measured empirically (atleast that's the consensus), which makes such tests extremely unlikely. And this discussion seems to turn into a regular qualia debate. I'm not sure if that's desirable.
He is probably talking about the hard problem of consciousness, e.g. whether qualia exists. While it's possible conceptually to have empirical tests for subjective consciousness, it's seems extremely unlikely.
We can already imagine a computational simulation of the brain, and empirical test for qualia seems impossible pretty much by definition. Sure, it's possible to test whether the simulation has self-awareness from a computational point (and it will have that since it's a human brain simulation).
There should be some kind of "read this first before talking about consciousness" post which would atleast provide some definitions so articles about consciousness would be comprehensive.
Consciousness actually means a number of different things, so any one definition will make discussion problematic. There really should be a number of different definitions for qualia/subjective consciousness, empirical consciousness etc.
And you don't provide any arguments for your claim either..
Okay, here's one: Even with time-continuos self, humans value other people, even though they personally experience anything other peope do. There's some (moral) value in other persons. Maybe people value themselves more, but that's not even relevant to the argument. So, if time-continuos self doesn't exist, people will value their future selfs as much as any other persons, which is atleast more than nothing.
Of course, this assumes that such a person does value other people. May not apply to every single person.
Eh. If you don't know the argument it's irrational to call it wrong. I didn't really argue anything, I just made an observation for those people who possibly believe that time-continuos self is required for morality.
Care to give an example then?
The lack of belief in a time-continuos self would give the same moral value to yourself as to other people, but wouldn't eliminate caring about yourself altogether.
According to these definitions, it could be instrumentally rational to be religious for some subset of people, but not epimestically rational.
You can use the wget program like this: 'wget -m lesswrong.com'. A database download would be easier on the servers though.
As you know, I'm sceptical that classical serial computers with a von Neumann architecture will ever be conscious, let alone have an empathetic appreciation of other conscious minds.
I don't think an article with statements like this belong to this site.
Well, the mentioned Pirate Party is an example of succesfull political activism. Our party is already doing politics even before our first national elections, since the party often gives out statements on new legislation as requested by the justice ministry. Our neighbour parties in Sweden and Germany are even more succesful. And many of the lesswrong/transhumanist people are active in the Finnish Pirate Party.
I posted a link that showed Singapore had a budget deficit the very second their economy shrinked, in fact, the same thing happened in Western nations. Singapore didn't have to take a loan because thay had a national reserve.
So in fact the policy Singapore has is the same as Western nations, with the only difference that Singapore happened to have money saved. Singapore didn't want to cut spending to they used their savings. There's no real difference in policy, they even have a stimulus package.
Singapore isin't a Western nation or a fully developed on, and they have extremely high economic growth (around 10%), so that's not comparable to stable Westerne economies. Singapore had economic growth of 1.1% during 2008, so they didn't have to loan anything in that year.
In fact, a quick search showed that Singapore had significant budget deficit for 2009: "-- 2009/2010 budget deficit to be 6 pct of GDP, before accounting for transfers. " So it seems Singapore has used their national reserves immediately after their economy fell, just like all ...
Does the MWI make rationality irrelevant? All choices are done in some universe (because there's atleast one extremely improbable quantum event which arranges the particles in your brain to make any choice). Therefore, you will make the correct choice in atleast 1 universe.
Of course, this leads to the problems of continuing conscious experience (or the lack of), and whether you should care of what happens to you in all the possible future worlds that you will exist in.
Well, hormones, and chemicals such as DMT or endocannabinoids etc surely affect the thinking progress. But the phrasing of the question is not really clear to say if you can count these.
You can't compare those, because the economic crisis happened mostly after Bush. Large debts have been taken by pretty much all Western nations.
What we need are studies of damage from vitrification when the operation was not done immediately after death, but after few hours as it usually happens.
I think people shy away from wireheading because a future full of wireheads would be very boring indeed. People like to think there's more to existence than that. They wan't to experience something more interesting than eternal pleasure. And that's exactly what an FAI should allow.
Boring from the perspective of any onlookers not the wirehead.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'd like to see someone writing a GreaseMonkey script which hides the name of the commenter and the current score level on all comments, so you're not being influenced by the status of the commenter and/or the current score level on that comment. The commenter name could be seen with a mouseover so you can reply to it though.
Isin't it more sane to donate money to organizations fighting against existential risks rather than spending money on cryonics?
That's a pretty good explanation. Another way to look at it is to think what would happen if the propeller was not connected to the wheels. In that situation, the cart would travel as fast as the wind, but the propeller would spin at high speed. If you connect the propeller to the wheels that energy is used to further increase velocity.
In fact, it would work if you place a radio controlled clutch between the propeller and the wheels. First wait for the cart to accelerate to wind speed, and the propeller to rotate faster than the wheels (if it's 1:1 ratio without gears), then engage the clutch. The end result would be that the wheels would rotate at a higher speed and thus the cart would travel faster than the wind.
If you're referring to WTC 7, it didn't spontaneously collapse, it collapsed because of a fire. There was 91 000 liters of diesel fuel stored in that building for generators. Anyway, a few years ago a similar university building collapsed in Netherlands I believe. Even if it didn't, just because something happens the first time, doesn't mean the official report is wrong. A lot of things happen the first time, like a nuclear plant has exploded only once in history.
Qualia is not a full explanation as of yet, you can think of it as a philosophical problem. There are many arguments to believe in the existence of qualia. It might be possible to show all of them to be false, in fact Dennet has attempted this. After you've shown them all to be false, it's okay to say "qualia doesn't exist". However, it's irrational to claim that since the concept/problem of qualia doesn't predict anything, qualia therefore doesn't exist.
There are many valid arguments or reason to believe in the existence of qualia, you can't simply say that because we cannot use qualia to predict anything at this point, then you can just ignore qualia. Qualia is "mysterious" in the same way the universe is, we don't know it's properties fully.
The problem with this argument is, that it doesn't explain anything nor does it solve the hard problem of consciousness. You simply redefine consciousness to mean something experimentally detectable, and then use that to claim p-zombies are impossible. You can move on, but that doesn't leave the original problem answered.
"Consciousness, whatever it may be - a substance, a process, a name for a confusion - is not epiphenomenal; your mind can catch the inner listener in the act of listening, and say so out loud." That's simply a fact about human br...
Sexbots will be like bots in a computer game. They will be fun, sure, but real players will be even more fun. I don't really see the relevance of 'disapproving bots', some people will prefer them (or maybe be their only choice), and some will choose real players. If someone even enjoys playing with bots more than with real players, let them, it's what they want to do.
If you're an AI, you do not have to (and shouldn't) pay the first $1000, you can just self-modify to pay $1000 in all the following coin flips (if we assume that the AI can easily rewrite/modify it's own behaviour in this way). Human brains probably don't have this capability, so I guess paying $1000 even in the first game makes sense.
This game (along with the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons) nicely shows how the best choice to make is heavily influenced with how much you know about the other players (and therefore what they vote). If you know that the other players are "rationalists", then you can safely submit 0 (assuming that this hypothetical rational intelligence indeed submits 0). In real world tests you can pretty safely assume that the players are not-perfectly-rational humans. It may also be possible (as you can here) to influence other players.
Please note that being a jerk in off-topic comments is not the same thing as taking a noble stand against the oppressive groupthink.
First of all, it's not embarrassing, but rather irrelevant.
Second, it was a good example of how trolls are being hidden by the karma system.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is a high school dropout with no formal education in anything.
...and yet people write lists like this about him.
(Damn, I think that belongs on the list!)
The above comment, it seems, must be taken either: (1) as a joking 'Eliezer Yudkowsky fact' in the style of the post, or (2) as an attempt to state a true fact about Eliezer Yudkowsky for reasons that don't seem important.
If it was (1), I don't get it. How is this hyperbole, or funny?
If it was (2), you fail. Eliezer didn't go to high school, and thus did not drop out.
The license of Reddit is free software, so it's better to use that term instead of open source.
If tipping stopped, waiting staff wages would increase and so would food prices (to pay for the wage increases).