All of Neotenic's Comments + Replies

Well, that at least part of the way into freedom.

That depends on your stance on many things: First of all having children or not. Second of all population ethics. Third of all if you think it is worth it to have a child whose life is better than neutral, or even than average, but not better than your own. Existentialism and First Mover Advantage are also related concepts.

I feel your pain though, and my life would have been much worse if my Father had not been an instrumental Flower for part of his life.

But if you consider your life worth living, there are several philosophical paths that do not consider your parent's actions to be unworthy of moral appreciation. Check Toby Ord on population ethics for deeper insight.

0TheAncientGeek
And how much the state will offer to retirees...
7dhoe
I'm sure there are moral systems where living off your children is an acceptable moral choice, but I can't say I'm very motivated to check them out. Their actions were rational from their point of view, however. They just radically overestimated the probabilities of total societal collapse. If that's what you expect, moving out of the city and trying to live from your garden and some goats might not be the worst course of action.

Yeah.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

Yes, but I don't think it happened for good reasons. Maybe it was just the feeling of something floating from the unknown unknowns category to the mildly known unknown. Maybe it was the feeling that only if you have the courage to try impossible things you can succeed in this kicking in.
But I take it that it was just an emotion that didn't correctly implement decision theoretic cascades of neurotransmitters according to what would have been desirable in a homo economicus perspective. So do many of our less rational emotions. In other words, it is not a feeling I feel responsible for justifying, I just took it at face value.

Neotenic130

You may want to change the title to "Analytic Philosophy" or "Contemporary Philosophy" since Modern Philosophy usually refers to something far removed from anything related to "Good and Real" by Drescher.

8quanticle
And that's exactly the sort of advice I'm looking for. I'm at such a low level, I don't even know what the proper name is for the thing I want to study! I've changed the title to "Contemporary philosophy". I think that's better reflects the sort of things I wish to learn more about.

I know my question sounded like "I doubt you read all posts", and I do, but regardless of that irrelevance, the important meaning should be: "Someone over 18 whose IQ looms large reads all posts?"

Isn't it a terrible use of your time?

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
Upvoted ones, usually.

What about the reverse? Moving from discussion to Main once the author notices that not only his introspective evidence says the text is good, but also others?

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
I have been known to do that as well.

I have some trouble conceiving of what would beat a consistent argument a googol fold.
Now I don't anymore.

I stand corrected.

Thank you Gwern.

Neotenic120

I think he meant unintuitive in the sense of "not accessible by human intuition, type 1, fast thinking" not "hard to grasp upon reflection by my intended audience"

2wedrifid
Yes. That is the sense in which the power laws seem entirely intuitive, my model (and memory) of myself at age 8 and to the median person in the culture I grew up in. I am wondering now to what extent this intuition difference can be attributed to the degree to which the memes in question were already fully disseminated among that group. Given that I have hazy memories of conversations regarding these topics from when I was (approximately) 8 the "type 1 fast thinking' would have a handle on it by now.

That is unreasonable because we have more access to means of helping the poor today. If you expect the trend to go on into the future, than 2 million tomorrow is always better than a thousand today, which approximates maximal 3 lives on AMF of SCI

Neotenic-10

That is the first time I see you saying something that doesn't strike me as reasonable, and I've been a lurker for a long time.

Which indicates that I didn't understand you.

Could you please clarify what do you mean by "is" when you say "how the multiverse is"?

For me it seems that we (humans) can talk about this multiverse thing. We can say stuff about other universes, like "they are epiphenomenal" or "they matter". It is hard for me to just say "they are" or "they exist" and truly think that I know what I mean by that. It feels like I'm saying "they emerge" or "they magic".

0wedrifid
I mean in the sense in which one might say "so Many Worlds are less likely". If you are adopting some meaning for 'are less likely' that is drastically different from a way in which I would use it then I acknowledge that nothing I said would (necessarily) apply to what you said. I had best tap out. The thread strikes me as bizarre and I have the impression that attempting to participate will be an uphill battle.

You should say you are following David Lewis I suppose.

0A1987dM
I don't remember reading anything by him, but... [googles] Yeah, I guess so, even though IMO Drescher's way of putting it makes it clearer (than the English Wikipedia's description of Lewis's view) that Egan's Law isn't violated. (Conversely, I think that Drescher's discussion of space-time is much worse from that point of view -- “static” means a constant function of time, not just a single-valued one! I thought that after Zeno we had cleared that up; a much better way to describe B-theory AKA eternalism AKA block time is this.)

The latter, which I was clarifying in an edit to the original post as you asked.

I still think it is productive to instrumentally talk of Many Worlds, to see which concepts break.

3Shmi
I see. I'm not sure whether one can tell which concepts break once you subscribe that "anything is possible", which is basically what multiverse many worlds is about.

Fair enough. So basically if my post was trying to immunize readers, you'd be immune already.

I agree that people should refrain from using the word 'existence'. If they are many worlds supporters, I think they still need some work done, that the concept of existence was attempting to do, but I claimed here fails to.

If, like you, they are not many-world supporters, then 'existence' only means causally connected to me. And the word can be avoided without paying any price by saying its equivalent.

2Shmi
I'm confused. From your posts I get an impression that you take "existence of many worlds" seriously, yet from your comments it seems like you don't give this untestable much credence. Which is it?
Neotenic-40

Indeed we could get more information if we knew that ratio. The assumption here though is that World three is a future stage of worlds 1 and 2, but these two bear no relationship in that way. The three are intervals/stages of a different histories.

So actually that ratio is not defined.

The trouble I'm trying to point out is that if the FSM created the Tegmark4 multiverse, he'd still have to do more work to relate all these world stages that are disconnected by ascribing each pair a reality-fluid ratio. He would not need to do further work to get kilo... (read more)

Thank you. That is the exact kind of nausea I was expecting to cause. The post works.

Still, it seems that you remain secure about the concepts that I'm doubting play a role under some considerations do play a role.

If you are secure about the role that "existence" plays in moral discussion, please clarify it. One way of doing that is by describing a function where on one axis you have different theories about many-worlds as the ones I described in my previous post, and in the other axis you have what exists given our epistemic evidence if that theory turns out to be correct.

0Shmi
Not sure what you mean here. I prefer not to use the term "existence" at all, people have an intuitive idea of what it means, but they tend to disagree a lot when trying to formalize it. I don't find the notion of many worlds useful at all, so your suggested description does not work for me. The closest I come to many worlds is the decision-theoretic "possible worlds", i.e potential outcomes resulting from one's potential actions, over which one either computes some sort of utility function or to which one applies deontological shortcuts. This explicitly excludes all the imaginable worlds you have no influence over, such as the "far worlds" you seem to be preoccupied with.

Once I decided to undereat while travelling. The result was that for the first month I was in hypomania almost, very excited about things and places. I also slept much less and kept away from easy pleasures. At some point, at the end of the month, this hyper-functional system broke down, and I realized that though I thought I was dancing, in a club, I was actually not taking my feet of the ground. I suspected I might be tired, and went to bed. 17 hours later I woke up. I interpreted that as "I put myself in emergency mode and became more interested ... (read more)

The curve will be particularly complex. When there's no one. No curve. Very few, then it's worth to collaborate even when they backstab you. Specially if the environment is super-dangerous. You want to create a story according to which they didn't betray you at all. Anything, as long as the mutual knowledge is still on the friends side. Bigger numbers: Something close to Dunbar number would probably be where you most need to signal trustworthiness, and from then on, the more there are, the lowest is the cost of free-riding.

It is less crazy than it sounds the more you study philosophy of physics I suppose. It basically depends on accepting or not that matter could be just relational properties, with nothing intrinsic.

0torekp
It's a leap of faith to suppose that even our universe, never mind levels I-III, is exhausted by its mathematical properties, as opposed to simply mathematically describable. And I don't really see what it buys you. I suppose it's equally a leap of faith to suppose that our universe has more properties than that, but I just prefer not to leap at all.

Some interesting stuff about our conceptions of the world might fall apart if you adopt the mathematical universe. If you think that the entirety of mathematical structures exists in the same way, than it is hard to think what happens when you decide to do good to someone with the entire structure. The whole thing just "is there". Your decision could be thought of as a computational process that takes place in many different subsets. But the exact opposite decision still takes place where it takes place. Then you get something complicated in whic... (read more)

So the reason is that Tegmarks claim is that the the mathematical properties not only define the Multiverse, but also that they constitute the entire extension of it. If there were substances, properties, or objects, that behaved mathematically well, that would still falsify his claim.

-2torekp
Wow, thanks. I didn't realize that Tegmark was so ... crazy.

The fewer symbols you have, the more meanings they can have.

Interestingly, in human language, the more a particular symbol is used, the more meanings it ends up having. (Pinker 2007)

Might be the case that even after the plethora of symbols is very large, they still don't 'touch' 'reach' 'track' the world the right way. So instead of keeping in mind the one world, and seeing whether a more complex and full map is better or worse at representing it, could be useful to keep in mind for each particular map structure, the infinitely many different worlds it represents. Just as a heuristic.

0Stuart_Armstrong
As a exercise in humility, perhaps - but neither that point of view, nor the single world view, are any good for the question of "how well is this tracking reality - will the decisions be wonky?" We need maths of some sort...

I think Tegmark's claim is unequivocally that we should endorse Dark Artsy subsets of scientific knowledge to promote science and whatever needs promotion (rationality perhaps). So yes, the thing being claimed is the thing you are emotionally inclined to fear/dislike. By him and by me.

Though just to be 100% sure, I'd like to have a brief description of your meaning of "dark arts" to avoid the double transparency fallacy.

That is a very important subset of what I had in mind. So I`m glad you made that subset salient, as it seems independently important.

You could think more generally that if the world is more altruistic, morally enhanced, etc... there will be less externalities of bad kinds operating, and the instruments we use to understand the world would become more effective at so doing. A very simplified version is that because this would be a richer world, more institutions would have spare resources to grasp it.

If the only way to get a clearer picture of the world - to enhance it epistemically, as it were - were to make it much better to start with, would the Utilitarians finally have found an argument that convinces any epistemic rationalist?

4B_For_Bandana
Is the idea that, because people naturally shy away from bad info, making the world better also makes it easier (on the emotions) to understand? ...Very interesting. That is a thought that's going to fester, in a good way.
4simplicio
Only if there were no uncertainty about what "better" meant.

When Lennon remarked that "Ignorance is bliss", should he have said "Unknown unknowns, except for knightian uncertainty, are bliss"?

Isn't a Bucket List, literally, the list of things you want to do before dying but were unlikely to do prior to establishing your bucket list? (regardless of whether you became likely to now)

1magfrump
I don't think of it as having the connotation of things on it being unlikely. For example, you could put "go to Hawaii" on your bucket list and then expect to go for your next vacation. A to-do list isn't for things you're unlikely to do, it's for things you don't want to forget.

The error was epiphenomenal.

Socially a higher threshold should play a role than the above epsilon. There are things that are so low in probability (though much higher than epsilon) that establishing a contract/agreement on what should both of you do if they happen is deleterious for the relationship. Such as when a couple who thinks they disagree about abortion asks: What should we do if the condom and pill don't work?

The probability is not so low. But the fight is too costly.

2Eugine_Nier
It'll be even more costly to have the fight after the wife gets pregnant.

Could we use "threshold for letting someone else take credit" as a signal for altruism?

6ModusPonies
Seems difficult. The people sending this signal are necessarily sending it really quietly. I guess it could be a good way to evaluate someone you know well. It wouldn't work to pick an altruist out of a crowd if you're, say, looking at job applicants.

I felt the exact same.

Decreasing cognitive load in general makes people more rational. Joshua Greene cites that under a cognitive task, people are more likely to eat cake than an apple. There is less resource left for high-order cognitive tasks, like 'avoid cake'.

Meaning that hurrying Koreans are dedicating less cognition to "to litter or not to litter" and if bins were around, they simply wouldn't have to do that.