My steelman is this (without having read anything downstairs, so I apologise if there's a better on extant): the world is a complicated place, and we all form beliefs based on the things we think are important in the world; and since we are all horrible reasoners, it's impossible to believe about some things that they are important movers of the world without seeing it actually happen and viscerally feeling it change things.
Cognitive biases in yourself are like this, methinks. Your thought processes really need to be broken down repeatedly for you to be ab...
I took it. If it's anything like last year, officially 2/5 of my karma will be from surveys.
So, Romila Thapar is not a Dalit activist, just a historian (I'm guessing this is a source of confusion; I could be wrong).
I'm saying they should have read up before starting their project.
I can't find the study for some reason, so I'll try and do it from memory. They randomly picked from a city Dalits (Dalit is a catch-all term coined by B R Ambedkar for people of the lowest castes, and people outside the caste system, all of whom were treated horribly) and people from the merchant castes to look for genetic differences. Which is all fine and dandy - but ...
Actually, with the caveat that I don't have any object-level research, I doubt it; they assign a rigidity to the whole thing that seems hard to institute. My point was that 'do there exist genetic differences' is not the issue here.
a) Actually Thapar's point wasn't that there were no genetic differences (in fact, the theory of caste promulgated by Dalit activists is that it's created by the prohibition of inter-caste marriage and therefore pretty much predicts genetic differences) - but that the groupings done by the researchers wasn't the correct one.
b) I should actually check that what I surmised is what she said. Thanks for alerting me to the possibility.
When I said humanities I didn't mean social sciences; in fact, I thought social sciences explicitly followed the scientific method. Maybe the word points to something different in your head, or you slipped up. Either way, when I say humanities, I actually mean fields like philosophy and literature and sociology which go around talking about things by taking the human mind as a primitive.
The whole point of the humanities is that it's a way of doing things that isn't the scientific method. The disgraceful thing is the refusal to interface properly with scien...
In the abstract. Though, undoubtedly, many of the people can do wonders too.
Why? This looks as if you're taking a hammer to Ockham's razor.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Humanities is not only an useful method of knowing about the world - but, properly interfaced, ought to be able to significantly speed up science.
(I have a large interval for how controversial this is, so pardon me if you think it's not.)
Do you mind telling me how you think he's being uncharitable? I agree mostly with your first two statements. (If you don't want to put it on this public forum because hot debated topic etc I'd appreciate it if you could PM; I won't take you down the 'let's argue feminism' rabbit-hole.)
(I've always wondered if there was a way to rebut him, but I don't know enough of the relevant sciences to try and construct an argument myself, except in syllogistic form. And even then, it seems his statements on feminists are correct.)
I think this is a good argument. Thanks.
After some thought on why your argument sounded unsatisfatory to me, I decided that I have a much more abstract, much less precise argument, to do with things like the beginning of epistemology.
In the logcial beginning, I know nothing about the territory. However, I notice that I have 'experiences.' However, I have nore ason for believing that these experiences are 'real' in any useful sense. So, I decide to base my idea of truth on the usefulness of helping me predict further experiences. 'The sun rises every mornin...
The 'how to think of planning fallacy' I grokked was 'people while planning don't simulate the scenario in enough detail and don't see potential difficulties,'* so this is new to me. Or rather, what you say is in some sense part of the way I thought, except I didn't simulate it in enough detail to realise that I should understand it in a probabilistic sense as well, so it's new to me when it shouldn't be.
*In fact, right now I'm procrastinating goign and telling my prof that an expansion I told him I'd do is infinite.
I'm interested in your calling it 'paying in sanity.' Are you referring to the insanity of believing in Bengali babus, or the fact that they're preserving their own sanity in some way by not going to a real doctor for things they know they can't afford?
Indeed, 'being poor is expensive' is related to how they frame this fact. From the end of the same chapter:
...The poor seem to be trapped by the same kinds of problems that afflict the rest of us—lack of information, weak beliefs, and procrastination among them. It is true that we who are not poor are somewhat better educated and informed, but the difference is small because, in the end, we actually know very little, and almost surely less than we imagine. Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean wat
Thanks for your comment.
My issue is much 'earlier' in terms of logic. When I started reading that post, the Boltzmann brain problem seemed like a non-problem; an inevitable conclusion that people were unwilling to accept for reasons of personal bias - analogous to how most LWers would view someone who insists on metaphysical free will.
Even if certain facts about the universe didn't solve the issue, it seems to me that Carroll would still want to find reasons that we weren't Boltzmann brains. Now, from my own interest in entropy and heat death, I had long a...
From Poor Economics by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee
...There is potentially another reason the poor may hold on to beliefs that might seem indefensible: When there is little else they can do, hope becomes essential. One of the Bengali doctors we spoke to explained the role he plays in the lives of the poor as follows: “The poor cannot really afford to get treated for anything major, because that involves expensive things like tests and hospitalization, which is why they come to me with their minor ailments, and I give them some little medicines which m
From http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/the-higgs-boson-vs-boltzmann-brains/
...A room full of monkeys, hitting keys randomly on a typewriter, will eventually bang out a perfect copy of Hamlet. Assuming, of course, that their typing is perfectly random, and that it keeps up for a long time. An extremely long time indeed, much longer than the current age of the universe. So this is an amusing thought experiment, not a viable proposal for creating new works of literature (or old ones).
There’s an interesting feature of what these thought-experi
I should have been clearer, sorry. Facebook is less inconvenient on two non-trivial counts: there are other reasons to open it (whereas a birthday diary will only have information related to birthdays and similar stuff), and it records the birthdays without any effort on your part.
Quite well, I thought. We were talking for four or so hours.
But they made those diary entries. And looked into the diary regularly to make sure they remembered.
We're moving it to cafe royal. It's in the area.
Where it used to be. Look outside regal cinema. Close to a shop called sixth street yogurt.
This is next to a shop called sixth street yogurt.
So Gloria jeans coffee is closed. I'm standing outside with a sign if anyone's around. Sorry for the mix-up.
Yeah, conversation most probably. Backup games and things in case too many of us are bad at social stuff.
Awesome. Look forward to meeting you.
Totally. Moving to fifteenth.
I took the survey - extra credit and everything!
When I said 'A and B are the same,' I meant that it is not possible for one of A and B to have a different truth-value from the other. Two-boxing entails you are a two-boxer, but being a two-boxer also entails that you'll two-box. But let me try and convince you based on your second question, treating the two as at least conceptually distinct.
Imagine a hypothetical time when people spoke about statistics in terms of causation rather than correlation (and suppose no one had done Pearl's work). As you can imagine, the paradoxes would write themselves. At one...
[Saying same thing as everyone else, just different words. Might work better, might not.]
Suppose once Omega explains everything to you, you think 'now either the million dollars are there or aren't and my decision doesn't affect shit.' True, your decision now doesn't affect it - but your 'source code' (neural wiring) contains the information 'will in this situation think thoughts that support two-boxing and accept them.' So, choosing to one-box is the same as being the type of agent who'll one-box.
The distinction between agent type and decision is artifici...
What's the hairy green sphere? My search engine gives this page as first result.
It sounds unlikely to be a cause - with a different reward system different teaching will be deemed right.
Epistemic:
-> finding out that I can't, even given an exponentially bigger universe to compute in, be predicted.
It would also potentially destroy my sense of identity. Even if I can be predicted, I can do anything I want: it's just that what I'll want is constrained. However, if the converse is true, any want I feel has nothing to do with me (and my intuitive sense of identity is similar to 'something that generates the wants and thoughts that I have') and I'm not sure I'll feel particularly obliged to satisfy them.
(Warning: writing it out made it sound ...
Because the solution to the problem is worthless except to the extent that it establishes your position in an issue it's constructed to illuminate.
*I don't know what you understand and don't.
*I can tell you that he's talking about rich people's concerns and how they've taken over litfic and how there's a very narrow understanding of character building, but there's lots more intricacy to it and that's why I'd do better at explaining bits than the whole thing.
No. I wouldn't mind that, but those two are hardly the only things novels can do; and I can't provide an exhaustive list of what literature does and how it does it - if I could do such things I'd have written something worth reading by now.
I'm sorry, but I have no idea how to explain Mieville's statements to you. Lit people are often vague, and often because they aren't able to be clearer. Maybe if you had specific points of confusion I could help.
It might help to know that the litfic audience is a lot more like an academy than a fanbase, and that Mieville is a Marxist so he's using language from there.
They're hard to pin down, and different people I know have different explanations.
The one in my head is basically that they pay too much attention to theme and perspective; while in many cases litfic is directly about perspectives (themes), lots of people tend to be reductio ad absurdums of this, focusing on these things in rather simplistic ways that sometimes ignore how the world works or the basic potentially interesting things in the setting**. This is made worse because it's less obvious to the unpractised eye by the very nature of what's being tackle...
It'd take me a while to explain it fully, but basically that the worst trends in litfic writing are manifested in his work.
In response to this, I want to roll back to saying that while you may not actually be simulated, having the programming to one-box is what causes there to be a million dollars in there. But, I guess that's the basic intuition behind one-boxing/the nature of prediction anyway so nothing non-trivial is left (except the increased ability to explain it to non-LW people).
Also, the calculation here is wrong.
Saturday.
To be clear, I liked the book, though I otherwise don't like the guy's writing.
Genre people and litfic people love flinging shit at each other, and it rarely makes much sense to a person actually familiar with the writing. Far as I can make out, it's because of generalising from a little evidence - a lot of the insults make more sense when you look at the more-likely-to-be-recommended stuff (for example, Ian McEwan wrote a whole book which can be very easily strawmanned into "these poor people are really badly off; but you shouldn't give in to the temptation to therefore dismiss all rich people").
Even positive reviews that cross the divide are horribly condescending.
I usually deal with people who don't have strong opinions either way, so I try to convince them. Given total non-compatibilists, what you do makes sense.
Also, it struck me today that this gives a way of one-boxing within CDT. If you naively blackbox prediction, you would get an expected utility table {{1000,0},{1e6+1e3,1e6}} where two-boxing always gives you 1000 dollars more.
But, once you realise that you might be a simulated version, the expected utility of one-boxing is 1e6 but of two-boxing is now is 5e5+1e3. So, one-box.
A similar analysis applies to t...
Care to elaborate? Because otherwise I can say "it totally is!", and we leave at that.
Basically, signals take time to travel. If it is ~.1 s, then predicting it that much earlier is just the statement that your computer has faster wiring.
However, if it is a minute earlier, we are forced to consider the possibility - even if we don't want to - that something contradicting classical ideas of free will is at work (though we can't throw out travel and processing time either).
For less than 85 pages, his main argument is in sections 3 and 4, ~20 pages.
No his thesis is that it is possible that even a maximal upload wouldn't be human in the same way. His main argument goes like this:
a) There is no way to find out the universe's initial state, thanks to no-cloning, the requirement of low entropy, and there being only one copy.
b) So we have to talk about uncertainty about wavefunctions - something he calls Knightian uncertainty (roughly, a probability distribution over probability distributions).
c) It is conceivable that particles in which the Knightian uncertainties linger (ie they have never spoken to any...
Yes, I agree with you - but when you tell some people that the question arises of what is in the big-money box after Omega leaves... and the answer is "if you're considering this, nothing."
A lot of others (non-LW people) I tell this to say it doesn't sound right. The bit just shows you that the seeming closed-loop is not actually a closed loop in a very simple and intuitive way** (oh and it actually agrees with 'there is no free will'), and also it made me think of the whole thing from a new light (maybe other things that look like closed loops c...
I like his causal answer to Newcomb's problem:
...In principle, you could base your decision of whether to one-box or two-box on anything you like: for example, on whether the name of some obscure childhood friend had an even or odd number of letters. However, this suggests that the problem of predicting whether you will one-box or two-box is “you-complete.” In other words, if the Predictor can solve this problem reliably, then it seems to me that it must possess a simulation of you so detailed as to constitute another copy of you (as discussed previously).
While reading books. Always particular voices for every character. So much so, I can barely sit through adaptations of books I've read. And my opinion of a writer always drops a little bit when I meet hjm/her, and the voice in my head just makes more sense for that style.
I'd wager people who do well on tests are apt to be the same ones who get high marks on Cognos reports--i.e., the same prejudices affect what's deemed valuable for both.
Well, fair enough.
Oh this is nice. I've also come to realise this over time, ,in different words, and my mind is extremely tickled by how your formulation puts it on an equal footing with other non-explicit-rationality avenues of thought.
I would love to help you. I am very interested in a passion project right now. And we seem to be classifying similar things as hard-won realisations, though we have very different timelines for different things; talking to you might be all-round interesting for me.