All of PeerGynt's Comments + Replies

the tech support doesn't give a fuck, and will cite privacy concerns when you ask them for more direct access to the database

Seriously, who are these tech support people? Clearly this database belongs to the owner of less wrong (whoever that is). As far as I can tell, when moderators ask for data, they ask on behalf of the owners of that data. What is going on here? Has tech support gone rogue ? Why do they then get their contract renewed? Are they taking orders from some secret deep owners of LW that outrank the moderators ?

This is not going to happen unless you deal with the troll

I don't understand why this comment is downvoted and I want to go on record to say it wasn't me. I appreciate when people tell me why they downvote my posts.

I definitely did expect mixed reactions to the original post. I'll be honest and say that I'm surprised that people keep downvoting it to levels that I associate with malicious trolls, rather than let it stay hidden at -5 which seems appropriate for a failed attempt at humor. But it doesn't really matter, it would take much more than negative reactions to a joke to stop me from making Less Wrong great again :)

Hi there, Mac. I'm a Matrix overlord. Can I have my 10 dollars, please?

Could you specify whether you want answers as percentage probability, probabilities, odds, or expected number of launches? My answer was intended as a percentage

So there is free money to be had by posing as a rabbi and offering a bet to Robert Aumann?

Using OxyContin(tm) for a job interview seems like a distinctly bad idea. Particularly if the employer asks for drug screening.. If you absolutely have to, I suggest sticking with Oxytocin.

Why do you care about the 'original' meaning of the word?

Let's imagine we are arguing about trees falling in the forest. You are a lumberjack who relies on a piece of fancy expensive equipment that unfortunately tends to break if subjected to accoustic vibrations. You therefore create a map where the word "sound" means accoustic vibrations. This map works well for you and helps you resolve most disguised queries you could be interested in

Then you meet me. i make a living producing cochlear implants. My livelihood depends on making implants t... (read more)

What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?

The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is "It depends on what your disguised query is".

If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don't see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of "defecting by accident".

I can see why this would look strange to a German speaker. It was just intended as a joke/reference to the Wikipedia article on the Vienna Circle. I've fixed the grammar

Less Wrong

Less Wrong (German: Weniger Falsch) was an association of philosophers gathered on the internet in 2007, chaired by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Among its members were Yvain, Lukeprog, Michael Vassar, Will Newsome and Gwern. PeerGynt was an eminent student at the time. He was allowed to participate in meetings, but was not a member of Less Wrong.

Members of Less Wrong had a common attitude towards philosophy, consisting of an applied rationalism drawn from Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose Sequences formed the basis for the group's philosophy. Less Wrong's influe... (read more)

But some fences were created to serve interests that no longer exist: Hadrian's Wall, for one. The fact that someone >centuries ago built a fence to keep the northern barbarians out of Roman Britain does not mean that it presently >serves that purpose. Someone who observed Hadrian's Wall without knowledge of the Roman Empire, and thus the >wall's original purpose, might correctly conclude that it serves no current military purpose to England.

At the risk of generalizing from fictional evidence: This line of reasoning falls apart when it turns o... (read more)

You don't succeed in avoiding getting mind killed yourself. You switch for no reason towards real life.

Discussing the issue in terms of real life does not itself imply that I've been mindkilled (though it may increase the chance that the discussion ends up being subject to mindkill). If you think I have been mindkilled, please show me a specific instance where I used arguments as soldiers, or where I failed to update in response to a properly made argument.

General ethical consideration suggest that you only inflict pain on other humans if they consen

Sure. The point I was trying to make is that, while I see females as agents in real life, in this analogy I am discussing the ethics of a choice that is only made by men. The analogy therefore did not require a fully specified model of females as agents.

There are many true things in the world that I chose not to specify in the analogy. For any of those things, if you give me a specific reason why it is relevant to the choice made by the Green Martians, then it certainly should have been part of the analogy. However, there is no law of nature that says "females should always be fully specified as agents in any analogy"

It is true that some participants in the analogy are "non-player characters". That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be "playable" in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions.

It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a sing... (read more)

I'm fairly sure this comment was not exactly intended as a compliment, but I can think of worse insults than having my writing put in the same category as Nick Bostrom. As the author of the first of these parables, even I recognize that these two stories differ very significantly in quality

The Blue and Green Martians parable was an attempt to discuss a question of ethics that is important to many members of this community, and which it is almost impossible to discuss elsewhere. The decision to use an analogy was an attempt to minimize mindkill. This did no... (read more)

It's been a day since this discussion peaked, and I've had a chance to think a little bit more about this on a meta-level:

First of all, having a community built around epistemic hygiene is extremely valuable. Discussions about topics that involve mindkill are incredibly unpleasant, and may make it impossible for such a community to be successful. I therefore fully understand people who want to keep these discussions away from Less Wrong, and I won't post again on this topic or any other mindkilling topic.

That said, I think the inability to discuss this r... (read more)

This is possible. Could someone please explain the important aspects of the PUA worldview that are being misrepresented? Particularly if they are relevant to the ethical question I am interested in? This would certainly help me clear up some confusion.

Fair point - I should have phrased that differently. I think I intended that both in the weak sense "Our prior on moral statements should never be 0 or 1" and also in the slightly stronger sense "Ethics is difficult, so our priors should have high variance"

I want to point out that I, perhaps incorrectly, assumed this thought experiment could be interesting even to the anti-PUA crowd, because it would help them distill their thinking about whether they object to PUA on epistemic grounds ("they have incorrect beliefs about female psychology") or if they object on moral grounds ("they draw incorrect / evil conclusions about the ethical implications of the theory")

From the reactions, it is tempting to conclude that most people object to PUA partially on epistemic grounds. However, it is hard for me to understand why a disagreement about facts would lead to such heated debate in a community based around the Litany of Tarski.

Your translation of the analogy takes the postition that the status dichotomy is a thing. The rest follows from that assumption.

No, it takes the position that there exist people who believe status dichotomy is a thing, and then explores some of the consequences if this belief were to be true.

Moreover, status dichotomy is very obviously a lossy compression. For some purposes, this construct will lose so much information as to be useless. For other purposes, the information that is lost by dichotomizing status is not essential, and so it may still be ... (read more)

I am a moral realist, I believe there exists an objective moral standard which is part of the territory. This is the moral standard we are talking about.

Obviously, we are unable to know whether our ethical maps correspond to the ethical territory. We should therefore update our priors about the ethical territory in response to good arguments and thought experiments. Throughout this discussion, I have made several updates to my beliefs.

If we don't believe there is such a thing as an objective ethical standard, if the territory doesn't exist, then I fail to see the point in even discussing ethics.

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for. I don't really have anything to add, I agree with essentially everything here. Can we can please keep the discussion at this level?

I am certainly learning from any useful comments that are made, regardless of which position they take. This is not one of those comments. It is also the only comment in the thread which I have downvoted - I am trying to have a discussion about ethics in a hypothetical world, not a flame war.

Those are not my views:

First of all, I took no position on the truth value of the premises.

Secondly, I fully recognize that my analogy is a simplified map of a map. It does not accurately represent the full territory.

The question is whether the aspects of the territory that I have glossed over are important for the resolution of the ethical question. If there are any such aspects, please feel free to point them out. I do recognize that some of the aspects that have been pointed out, such as consent, are important. I have upvoted those comments and attempted to explain why I think you can make the argument that the analogy still has some validity.

Let me just point out that the post was an attempt to discuss ethics in a hypothetical world where certain PUA claims about human psychology are true. I think this is an important question, and I did not want it to degenerate into a discussion about whether the claims themselves are true.

I tried my best to make the analogy as neutral as possible, by making women the "humans", describing the PUA strategies as having a real harmful effect on women, and generally making their dislike of PUA strategies seem entirely reasonable.

I don't see how ... (read more)

OK, I really would prefer that this discussion stays on the abstract level, but in order to avoid confusion, I will provide a translation of the intended metaphors:

Green Martian = Low Status Male

Blue Martian = High Status Male

Earthling = Female

Tickling = Flirting (Including obnoxious strategies such as "negs" and "kino escalation")

The moderately painful sting of the tentacles of the Green Martian = Creepiness, Social Awkwardness, etc

Experimentation on Earthlings (defined in comments) = Sex

OK. Good point. I am going to specify that in this thought experiment, tickling is only effective if there is no explicit consent.

Edit: See definition of tickling here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/klx/ethics_in_a_feedback_loop_a_parable/b5ft?context=1#b5ft

Also, note that this is a thought experiment. The point of this comment is not to make a claim about the truth value of the statement "flirting is only effective if there is no explicit consent", but to explore the ethical consequences of a world in which this is true.

I definitely see the humans as agents, whose preferences are morally relevant. In fact, the reason this is even ethically ambiguous in the first place, is that humans have a preference not to be tickled by green martians.

The reason humans come across as passive, is that I am specifically asking about the ethics of an action that is generally conducted by the active Martian to the passive human. It is at least theoretically possible that this question can be resolved without considering any ethical dilemmas that the humans face. This does not mean that... (read more)

In this society, it is generally accepted that tickling is not something that requires consent.

Even more than the Martians want to tickle humans, they want to carry them away to their mothership to experiment on them. Everyone agrees that experimentation on humans requires their consent. Part of the socially accepted foreplay that sometimes leads to humans giving their consent to be experimented on, consists of the martian tickling the human behind the ear.

A source is "Allison, Richard. “Organic chicken production criticised for leaving a larger carbon footprint.” Poultry World. 1 Mar. 2007". This article is behind a paywall. I am pasting a table from the article:

AVERAGE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT FROM POULTRY PRODUCTION (% DIFFERENCE TO CONVENTIONAL) Organic Free range

Energy use +33% +25%

Global warming potential (CO2) +46% +20%

Eutrophication potential +75% +28%

Ac... (read more)

I only think factory-farmed meat is the problem. I use "eat less meat" as a shorthand, since nearly all meat is factory-farmed meat.

Factory-farmed meat converts photosynthetic energy (grass) to food much more efficiently than free-range farming. Factory farming requires less inputs in terms of arable land and water, and emits less CO2. If everyone in the world ate non-factory farmed meat, we would have to cut down the Amazon many times over, thereby drastically reducing earth's capacity to convert CO2 back to carbohydrates.

When you decide wh... (read more)

What is more ridiculous about MIMO than CICO? Conservation of matter, can't argue with that.

OK, I see the point. But multicellular life evolved as thermodynamic engines, not as fusion plants. Over billions of years, cells were surviving based on how efficiently they could extract thermodynamic energy from macronutrients, to power intracellular processes. This is what we are optimized for. If we had been able to use fusion power in our evolutionary past, MIMO would be a more appropriate level at which to draw your map.

There is obviously thermodynamic energy in food which is not absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract. Fiber is an example of this. Energy which is not absorbed is not listed on the nutrition label of food. When I say 'calories', I mean the biochemically available energy in absorbed macronutrients such as fat, carbohydrates, protein and alcohol.

Nobody doubts that thermogenesis uses energy. This is a special case of my mechanism 3. It is part of the 'energy used'. Again, if you want to convince me that you can eat 3000 calories of fat without gaining we... (read more)

OK. I'll accept your rephrasing. Let us assume that "calories out" is always difficult to estimate and depends on a lot of factors such as muscle mass and total calorie intake.

I took the original comment to mean that we can eat very large amounts of fat and protein, because our bodies would somehow react, in response to the proportion of different nutrients in our diet, and change how efficiently we use energy. I find it difficult to believe that this would explain much of change in body weight. I find it much easier to believe that it would c... (read more)

This article says that there is some non-absorption of fat in healthy people, and much greater non-absorption in people with cystic fibrosis.

If you want to convince me that I should consider this when I choose the fat/carbohydrate/protein content of my diet, you would have to make an argument that the percentage of fat that is not absorbed is a function of my diet, ie, causally related to what I choose to eat.

I'm not saying this is not theoretically possible, but my intuition tells me that the variation in absorbtion that is caused by diet, is unlikely to have a major impact in the final analysis

Thank you, that was helpful.

Note that I don't disagree with anything in that Mayo Clinic article. The point about "pounds of fat, muscle and water" is obviously true and does not contradict anything I said. The points about "metabolic rate" and "response to reduced calories" just seem to say that sometimes it is difficult to estimate the "calories out" part of the equation, and that it is endogenous to the system. This is also obviously true. I still find it difficult to believe that we can affect the metabolic rate to an extent that matters in the final analysis, based on the fat/protein/carbohydrate content of our diet..

By which mechanism do these nutrients get excreted? Urine? Bile? Non-absorption?

My impression is that carbohydrates in urine is something that we only see to a significant extent when blood glucose concentration is at diabetic levels. Protein and fat in urine occurs, but it doesn't seem to me that this happens to an extent where it can make a difference to the total energy picture

I don't think excreting them through bile would work, the nutrients would just be reabsorbed further down the gastrointestinal tract.

It is possible that at very high intake ... (read more)

I am not sure I am convinced by this argument, for the following reasons:

If you think of calorie content / thermodynamics as an upper bound on how much energy can be extracted from the food, you have to make an argument for what happens to the unused energy. Even if you are in a biochemical state where not all the energy is used, there is still energy floating around in your body in the form of carbohydrates, fat and protein. I can think of three possible mechanisms for what happens to this extra energy, and I am not convinced by any of them:

(1) Calori... (read more)

The OP's assertion is true. Stratifying on certain variables can introduce bias.

Consider that you have a cohort of initially healthy men, and you are trying to quantify the causal relationship between an exposure (eg eating hamburgers) and an outcome (eg death). You have also measured a third variable, which is angina pectoris (cardiovascular disease).

Assume that the true underlying causal structure, which you are unaware of, is that hamburgers cause cardiovascular disease, which subsequently causes death.

Now look at what happens if you stratify on cardi... (read more)