All of Salutator's Comments + Replies

If the reporter estimates every node of the human's Bayes net, then it can assign a node a probability distribution different from the one that would be calculated from the distributions simultaneously assigned to its parent nodes. I don't know if there is a name for that, so for now i will pompously call it inferential inconsistency. Considering this as a boolean bright-line concept, the human simulator is clearly the only inferentially consistent reporter. But one could consider some kind of metric on how different probability distributions are and turn ... (read more)

It gets very interesting if there actually are no stocks to buy back in the market. For details on how it gets interesting google "short squeeze".

Other than that exceptional situation it's not that asymmetrical:

-Typically you have to post some collateral for shorting and there will be a well-understood maximum loss before your broker buys back the stock and seizes your collateral to cover that loss. So short (haha) of a short squeeze there actually is a maximum loss in short selling.

-You can take similar risks on the long side by buying stocks o... (read more)

Let me be a bit trollish so as to establish an actual counter-position (though I actually believe everything I say):

This is where the sequences first turn dumb.

For low-hanging fruit, we first see modern mythology misinterpreted as actual history. In reality, phlogiston was a useful theory at the time, which was rationally arrived at and rationally discarded when evidence turned against it (With some attempst at "adding epicycles", but no more than other scientific theories) . And the NOMA thing was made up by Gould when he misunderstood actual re... (read more)

You're treating looking for week points in your and the interlocutors belief as basically the same thing. That's almost the opposite of the truth, because there's a trade-off between those two things. If you're totally focused on the second thing, the first one is psychologically near impossible.

This was based on a math error, it actually is a prisoners dilemma.

3rocurley
I made a similar mistake, and randomly generated defect. Welp.

I threw a D30, came up with 20 and cooperated.

Point being that cooperation in a prisoners dilemma sense means choosing the strategy that would maximize my expected payout if everyone chose it, and in this game that is not equivalent to cooperating with probability 1. If it was supposed to measure strategies, the question would have been better if it asked us for a cooperating probability and then Yvain would have had to draw the numbers for us.

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3Salutator
This was based on a math error, it actually is a prisoners dilemma.

I'm a bit out of my depth here. I understood an "ordered group" as a group with an order on its elements. That clearly can be finite. If it's more than that the question would be why we should assume whatever further axioms characterize it.

0Xodarap
from wikipedia: So if a > 0, a+a > a etc. which results means the group has to be torsion free.

Two points:

  1. I don't know the Holder theorem, but if it actually depends on the lattice being a group, that includes an extra assumption of the existence of a neutral element and inverse elements. The neutral element would have to be a life of exactly zero value, so that killing that person off wouldn't matter at all, either positively or negatively. The inverse elements would mean that for every happy live you can imagine an exactly opposite unhappy live, so that killing off both leaves the world exactly as good as before.

  2. Proving this might be hard fo

... (read more)
1Xodarap
Z^2 lexically ordered is finitely generated, and can't be embedded in (R,+). [EDIT: I'm now not sure if you meant "finitely generated" or "finite" here. If it's the latter, note that any ordered group must be torsion-free, which obviously excludes finite groups.] But your implicit point is valid (+1) - I should've spent more time explaining why this result is surprising. Just about every comment on this article is "this is obvious because ", which I guess is an indication LWers are so immersed in utilitarianism that counter-examples don't even come to mind.

I think it's just elliptic rather than fallacious.

Paul Graham basically argues for artistic quality as something people have a natural instinct to recognize. The sexual attractiveness of bodies might be a more obvious example of this kind of thing. If you ask 100 people to rank pictures another 100 people of the opposite sex by hotness, the ranks will correlate very highly even if the rankers don't get to communicate. So there is something they are all picking up on, but it isn't a single property. (Symmetry might come closest but not really close, i.e. i... (read more)

I think another thing to remember here is sampling bias. The actual conversion/deconversion probably mostly is the end point of a lengthy intellectual process. People far along that process probably aren't very representative of people not going through it and it would be much more interesting what gets the process started.

To add some more anecdata, my reaction to that style of argumentation was almost diametrically opposed. I suspect this is fairly common on both sides of the divide, but not being convinced by some specific argument just isn't such a catchy story, so you would hear it less.

But if you missed Twelfth Night, Candlemas would be a Schelling point for rescheduling, because it's the other "Christmas now definitely over" holiday.

I took the survey too. I can haz karma plz? Kthxbye.

The race question doesn't make much sense for Europeans. I could answer White (non-Hispanic) even though the Hispanic category doesn't exist here. But what should Spaniards answer?

4Decius
Race is weird. Only people from Spanish-Speaking Central America should identify as Hispanic. A Mexican-Spaniard should identify as Hispanic, while a Spaniard-Mexican should not. HOWEVER, someone born in Mexico to White Hispanic parents but who was adopted by French parents in France and raised by them would probably identify as French.
6ema
i think "White (non-Hispanic)". Not that i understand the category Hispanic, but putting Swedish and Greek people in one category while excluding Spaniards seems deeply weird to me.

The thing is that the proof for Gödel's theorem is constructive. We have an algorithm to construct Gödel sentences from Axioms. So basically the only way we can be unable to recognize our Gödel sentences is being unable to recognize our axioms.

But that sentence isn't self-contradictory like "This is a lie", it is just self-referential, like "This sentence has five words". It does have a well-defined meaning and is decidable for all hypothetical consistent people other than hypothetical consitentified Stuart Armstrong.

3Benya
You're right, I didn't think that one through, thanks! I still think the interesting thing is the potential for writing down a mathematical statement humanity can't decide, not an English one that we can't decide even though it is meaningful, but I'll shut up about the question for now.

Yeah, probably all theories of truth are circular and the concept is simply non-tabooable. I agree your explanation doesn't make it worse, but it doesn't make it better either.

But that's only useful if you make it circular.

Taking you more strictly at your word than you mean it the program could just return true for the majority belief on empirically non-falsifiable questions. Or it could just return false on all beliefs including your belief that that is illogical. So with the right programs pretty much arbitrary beliefs pass as meaningful.

You actually want it to depend on the state of the universe in the right way, but that's just another way to say it should depend on whether the belief is true.

2Scott Alexander
That's a problem with all theories of truth, though. "Elaine is a post-utopian author" is trivially true if you interpret "post-utopian" to mean "whatever professors say is post-utopian", or "a thing that is always true of all authors" or "is made out of mass". To do this with programs rather than philosophy doesn't make it any worse. I'm suggesting is that there is a correspondence between meaningful statements and universal computer programs. Obviously this theory doesn't tell you how to match the right statement to the right computer program. If you match the statement "snow is white" to the computer program that is a bunch of random characters, the program will return no result and you'll conclude that "snow is white" is meaningless. But that's just the same problem as the philosopher who refuses to accept any definition of "snow", or who claims that snow is obviously black because "snow" means that liquid fossil fuel you drill for and then turn into gasoline. If your closest match to "post-utopian" is a program that determines whether professors think someone is post-utopian, then you can either conclude that post-utopian literally means "something people call post-utopian" - which would probably be a weird and nonstandard word use the same way using "snow" to mean "oil" would be nonstandard - or that post-utopianism isn't meaningful.

Let's go one step back on this, because I think our point of disagreement is earlier than I thought in that last comment.

The efficient market hypothesis does not claim that the profit on all securities has the same expectation value. EMH-believers don't deny, for example, the empirically obvious fact that this expectation value is higher for insurances than for more predictable businesses. Also, you can always increase your risk and expected profit by leverage, i.e. by investing borrowed money.

This is because markets are risk-averse, so that on the same... (read more)

No, not really. In an efficient marked risks uncorrelated with those of other securities shouldn't be compensated, so you should easily be able to screw yourself over by not diversifying.

1Daniel_Burfoot
But isn't the risk of diversifying compensated by a corresponding possibility of large reward if the sector outperforms? I wouldn't consider a strategy that produces modest losses with high probability but large gains with low probability sufficient to disprove my claim.

Can they use quill and parchent?

If so, the usual public key algorithms could be encoded into something like a tax form, i.e. something like "...51. Subtract the number on line 50 from the number on line 49 and write the result in here:__ ...500. The warden should also have calculated the number on line 499. Burn this parchent."

Of course there would have to be lots of error checks. ("If line 60 doesn't match line 50 you screwed up. If so, redo everything from line 50 on.")

To make it practical, each warden/non-prisoner-pair would do a... (read more)

1Alicorn
I don't think that I understand how this works, which has a meta-level drawback...

@Eisegates
Yes, I was operating on the implicit convention, that true statements must be meaningfull, so I could also say there is no k, so that I have exactly k quobbelwocks.
The nonexistence of a -operator (and of a +-operator) is actually the point. I don't think preferences of different persons can be meaningfully combined, and that includes, that {possible world-states} or {possible actions} don't, in your formulation, contain the sort of objects to which our everyday understanding of multiplication normally applies. Now if you insist on an intuitiv... (read more)

@Unknown
So if everyone is a deontologist by nature, shouldn't a "normalization" of intuitions result in a deontological system of morals? If so, what makes you look for the right utilitarian system?

@Sean

If your utility function u was replaced by 3u,there would be no observable difference in your behavior. So which of these functions is declared real and goes on to the interpersonal summing? "The same factor for everyone" isn't an answer, because if u_you doesn't equal u_me "the same factor" is simply meaningless.

@Tomhs2

A < B < C < D doesn't imply that there's some k such that kA>D
Yes it does.

I think you're letting the notation confuse you. It would imply that, if A,B,C,D where e.g. real numbers, and that is the... (read more)

0Polymeron
Moral systems (at least, consistent ones with social consequences) deal in intentions, not actions per se. This is why, for instance, we find a difference between a bank teller giving away bank money to a robber at gun point, and a bank teller giving away money in order to get back at their employer. Same action, but the intent in question is different. A moral system interested only in actions would be indifferent to this distinction. Asking for a preference between two different states of affairs where uncertainty, ignorance and impotence are removed allows for an easy isolation of the intention component. Does this answer your question?

So what exactly do you multiply when you shut up and multiply? Can it be anything else then a function of the consequences? Because if it is a function of the consequences, you do believe or at least act as if believing your #4.

In which case I still want an answer to my previously raised and unanswered point: As Arrow demonstrated a contradiction-free aggregate utility function derived from different individual utility functions is not possible. So either you need to impose uniform utility functions or your "normalization" of intuition leads to a logical contradiction - which is simple, because it is math.

1. In this whole series of posts you are silently presupposing that utilitarianism is the only rational system of ethics. Which is strange, because if people have different utility functions Arrow's impossibility theorem makes it impossible to arrive at a "rational" (in this blogs bayesian-consistent abuse of the term) aggregate utility function. So irrationality is not only rational but the only rational option. Funny what people will sell as overcoming bias.

2. In this particular case the introductory example fails, because 1 killing != - 1 savi... (read more)

6thomblake
I don't think it's obvious. Thought experiment: Steve is killing Ann by drowning, and Beth is about to drown by accident nearby. I have a cell phone connection open to Steve, and I have time to either convince Steve to stop drowning Ann, or to convince Steve to save Beth but still drown Ann. It is not obvious to me that I should choose the latter option.