I believe that society should be organized so that people work collectively in a society focused on its own survival and power. My views are extremely collectivist, in that, the relationship between the society and its people would be a lot like the relationship between a body and its cells.
For me, I stopped craving sugar after I stopped eating so much of it. Why did I stop eating it? Well, that's because I think I changed my identity from "Someone who eats whatever they want when they're hungry" to "someone who only eats what he has decided is optimal" (and sugary foods are often not in that category).
Actually, I like your idea. I am just not sure how big change could we make "merely" by studying the system and applying the advantages. More than zero, certainly, but we could still be kinda disappointed with the result, because we expected more. (Also, it may require us to sacrifice some other values.)
Well more than zero is still more than zero, right? I think if you expect to be disappointed by the results of an endeavor, then you may as well revise your expectations downward from the start, so I don't see that as much of an obstacle. (I a...
What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people.
Yes, and the irrationality comes in before the discussion even has a chance. In these kinds of discussions, almost without fail, people take their circumstances as a given, and then ask what set of policies would be optimal. The (mistaken) assumption being that their circumstances are immutable while policy is entirely malleable and controllable. The opposite is true. That is, we have the most control over our own situation, and the least control over publi...
I don't think this is anything really new. The principle of general covariance in GR says that the laws of physics should remain invariant under a diffeomorphism. Since coordinate transformations are diffeomorphisms, and since time is relative, the equations of GR do not depend on time. Indeed, I think the search for a background independent theory of quantum gravity is exactly the approach taken by Loop Quantum Gravity.
I doubt it. For me, 1, 3, 8, and 9, are all male, whereas 0, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are all female.
But the other person could anticipate this reasoning and then simply bid $3 knowing that his opponent has committed himself to not bidding beyond $2.
The Yudkowskian response is to point out that when cognitivists use the term 'good', their intuitive notion of 'good' is captured by a massive logical function that can't be expressed in simple statements
This is the weakest part of the argument. Why should anybody believe that there is a super complicated function that determines what is 'good'? What are the alternative hypotheses?
I can think of a much simpler hypothesis that explains all of the relevant facts. Our brains come equipped with a simple function that maps "is" statements to "...
Look, dude. I'm not a doctor, and I can't really tell you what exactly happens to your body if you have an extreme calorie deficit. Nonetheless, every medical professional will tell you that you shouldn't do it.
The heart is made of muscle tissue, and the digestive system is lined with it.
Yes, an extreme caloric deficit would be dangerous to anybody. If the body can't make up the difference between the energy expended and energy eaten by burning fat, it will go into starvation mode, slow down, start eating muscle mass and eventually the internal organs.
My suspicion is that she neither experienced ordinary discomfort nor does she have a faulty metabolism. Rather, it's possible that her weight loss strategy was far too extreme. A caloric deficit of more than 25% is considered very dangerous. If she did cut her calories that far, then it's little wonder why she went through hell. Add that to the random variation in her weight caused by water and then it's obvious why she'd given up on trying to lose weight.
so she went lower, which naturally also failed to produce weight loss.
Now, you say "she", and that's important. For women, their weight fluctuates a lot more throughout the day simply due to water intake and excretion. I think it's possible that she was losing weight in the form of body fat but it failed to show up on her scale. What is recommended is that one measures their weight as a weighted moving average. There's an app on the hacker's diet site that does just that.
1200 cal/day sounds extremely low unless this person is very small. Howev...
Just what kind of a calorie deficit were you running when you experienced this?
I think that all ethical systems are just rationalizations, hence all the difficulties in using them consistently.
Your honesty is appreciated.
Personally, I would aim to change things so that the attainment of any goal whatsoever is possible for me to achieve. Essentially, to modify myself into a universe conquering, unfriendly super-intelligence.
But why rape? I mean, it just seems so arbitrary and trivial...
I believe they would term it "manufactured consent." Although, I think the two ideas are slightly different. The idea behind manufactured consent is that, in order to answer a question one way or another, you must implicitly accept its premises. It is a special, politicized case of privileging the question.
For example, if I'm imagining a room full of people, I'll have a mental model of everyone's positions in the room, which I'll then update if the story mentions that someone is stood at the left of the room and I'm imagining them at the right. However, I don't have a picture of the room in my head while I'm doing this, there's no image of where the people are stood - it's just something I 'know'.
That's very strange. I don't see how you can keep track of their positions without visualizing the room and labeling their locations visually in at least some ru...
Inside Harry Potter's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but the level five Tegmark multiverse.
Hmmm... makes sense...
It's interesting that the only proposed alternative to Azathoth in this discussion so far is government intervention of one form or another (the government itself is just another creation of Azathoth). But there exist many more such as changing the fundamental institutions of our society, including our very notions of property and democracy.
As to the question for why it works, it seems to me that it's because it takes into account the rationality of each participant (by using the accuracy of their prediction about how many people will agree with them) and then gives the more rational participants' answers greater weight.
If that's the case, then any rationality test could be used as a truth serum. If you want to know whether or not string theory is true, you're probably better off asking people who don't believe that the Earth is flat.
Will somebody please tell me why this is being downvoted so heavily? I was just making a joke...
I'd give most people who even attempt to assign probabilities to their beliefs in the first place enough credit that they can perform very simple arithmetical operations.
You can shorten the table by about half if you eliminate the negative logarithms by using the laws of logarithms.
For example, -20 decibles in terms of probability is just 100% - (The probability corresponding to +20 decibles), and the odds ratios simply occur in reverse order. That is 20 db = 100:1 and -20 db = 1:100
Who says we have to restrict our choice of mates to Less Wrong?
"100%."
Oh man, had me laughing for a good while with this one. Nice job! ^_^
I don't think self-awareness and sentience are the only dimensions along which minds can differ. The kinds of goals a mind tries to attain are much more relevant. I wouldn't want to ensure the survival of a mind that would make it more difficult for me to carry out my own goals. For example, let's say a self-aware and sentient paperclip maximizer were to be built. Can killing it be said to be unethical?
I think the minds of most non-human animals (with maybe the exception of some species of hominids) and human sociopaths are so different from ours that treating them unequally is justified in many situations.
Makes me take the warnings not to be seduced by my imagination far more seriously. Excellent work.
I experience numbers as being on a line that runs left to right, swerves to the left at some number, continues upwards, and then returns to running from left to right. My experience of temperatures, people's ages, and the days of months is similar, but with different patterns of where the turns are. However, I think it may actually go right to left somewhere in the millions, though I'm not sure. Negative numbers run to the left forever, as far as I can tell. Calendar years are slightly different, in that they take more rounded turns and seem to be capable...
Someone recommended HPMOR on another forum. Then I found LessWrong by googling the author's name.
Why don't we start treating the sum of log_2 of the probability — conditional on every available piece of information — you assign to every true sentence, as the best measure of your epistemic success?
Wait. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here, but how are we going to decide what a true sentence is independently of all of our available information?
Simple google search yielded surprisingly interesting answers:
http://www.ukskeptics.com/article.php?dir=articles&article=why_people_use_alternative_medicine.php
...The tendency is that people are more likely to use alternative treatments the more educated they are. The level of education a person has attained is probably the the best indicator that a person is likely to use some form of alternative treatment.
Being intelligent or well educated does not mean that a person is going to think more logically; in fact, it often results in them becoming better a
Probably, but I'd try anyway.
Are you allowed to use someone else's brain? If so, you could ask them to hide it.
Thanks for the reminder.
For anyone still interested, it's not too late to sign up.
This detachment itself seems to help accuracy; I was struck by a psychology study demonstrating that not only are people better at falsifying theories put forth by other people, they are better at falsifying when pretending it is held by an imaginary friend!
I think we've just derived a new heuristic. Pretend that your beliefs are held by your imaginary friend.
I agree. When I first read the essay, I went to myself so that is why 'rubber-duck debugging' works!
Remember that "H causes e" and "H implies e" are two very different statements. The map is not the territory.
In order to show that H causes e you would have to show that the probabilities always factor as P(e & H) = P(H)P(e|H) and not as P(e & H) = P(e)P(H|e).
For example, rain causes wet grass, but wet grass does not cause rain, even though the Bayesian inference goes both ways.
Great job on the fic EY. If you were to promise to write Ch 123, I would let you out of the box.