All of scav's Comments + Replies

Hmm. Would I be wildly wrong in describing Mrs Bennett (Elizabeth's mother) as a terrible narcissist though? In which case Elizabeth should be more likely to be a narcissist herself, or a people-pleaser? Maybe she got lucky, because she's hardly either. Although her sisters, well...

Good fiction often rings true to real life, but it's no more than a bit of fun to analyse it as though it were a case study of something that actually happened. Still, I'm not against fun. I bet it was fun for Jane Austen to write the character of Mr Collins. Let's see your science explain him ;)

For me it was the least plausible part. I think if the major obstacle to living where you want is the hassle of carting all your stuff around, the most efficient answer surely isn't living in a shipping crate with special content-bracing furniture.

Makes more sense to me to just not bother with "owning" a lot of matter. If every kind of material object you need is available anywhere, all you need to bring with you when you move house is your information (books, music, family pictures, decor configuration for your living space). There's no particul... (read more)

"I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes," said Elinor, "in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Also, nobody knows whether people currently being cryonically preserved by current methods can ever be thawed and healed or uploaded into an emulator. It would suck to die and get frozen a year before they realise they were doing it all wrong.

It's automatically hazardous to give someone a false map of the world. If you do it knowingly you have the responsibility to make sure no harm comes of it. Even if you take that responsibility seriously, and are competent to do so, taking it secretly without consent is an ethical problem.

My take on this:

• Few people take that responsibility seriously or are competent to do so, or are even aware that it exists.
• Most of the time people's intuitions about minor well-intended deceptions are sufficient to avoid trouble.
• If you call someone a liar, that has a st

Which is why I said it was kind. It's still not necessarily a reasonable expectation.

Anyway, the hypothetical preference to be lied to is a bit suspicious, epistemologically. Let's distinguish it from a preference to never hear of anything you don't like, which is on its face unrealistic.

How would you experience getting your preference to be lied to without thereby knowing the unpleasant truth that you wanted to avoid? You want to know but you want to pretend the other person doesn't know that you know? It's a bit crazy.

How would you safely determine that ... (read more)

That's kind. But not all our preferences are reasonable expectations.

Anyway, maybe I weight things differently or it was a very short sucky play, but the downsides are still pretty compelling.

It's a dodgy metaphor at best anyway, but 'point' taken. :)

The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.

Why? Best case scenario is she keeps taking you to unenjoyable plays until you find you have to end the relationship yourself anyway or finally tell her the truth. Out of all the things in a relationship whose end was "a good thing for other reasons", one argument about whether a play was any good seems like a trivial thing to regret.

I can't favour lies as such. I am however on board with people honestly communicating the connot... (read more)

Voted down because its connection to rationality is so obscure I have to take it at face value, and at face value it appears to be factually incorrect in several ways. IOW, BS.

I'm not going to criticise your decision, especially with regard to the social situation at school, which I can't speculate about. But I doubt it's more interesting to believe in the weird collection of junk memes that Santa Claus has become.

Maybe it's just me, but I think the truth is always more interesting, because there's aways more detail in it. Fake things are ultimately very boring; you poke at them a bit and there's nothing there. Flying reindeer are just pictures of approximately deer-like animals (usually more like red deer) positioned above the ground. Real reindeer are pretty amazing.

Congratulations - now you are less wrong about that ;)

As to the teacher, yeah that sounds plausible. If Chris wants to satisfy our curiosity he can expand a little on how that conversation went. In my experience, teachers can really be dicks about that kind of thing.

AFAIK, integers (including negative integers) occur in nature (e.g. electrical charge) as do complex numbers. Our everyday experience isn't an objective measure of how natural things are, because we know less than John Snow about nearly everything.

I'd bet any aliens who get here know more than us about the phenomena we currently describe using gen... (read more)

I expect the math teacher wasn't making any kind of philosophical argument such as "do any numbers exist, and if so in what sense?" There is a different connotation, for my idiolect anyway, between "no such thing as X" and "X does not exist".

It's possible that the only numbers that exist are the complex numbers, and that more familiar subsets such as the hilariously named "real" and "natural" numbers are invented by humans. I appreciate that this story is usually told the other way round.

Yes?

Well, I can't find any use for the word supernatural myself, even in connection with God. It doesn't seem to mean anything. I can imagine discussing God as a hypothetical natural phenomenon that a universe containing sentient life might have, for example, without the s word making any useful contribution.

Maybe anything in mathematics that doesn't correspond to something in physics is supernatural? Octonions perhaps, or the Monster Group. (AFAIK, not being a physicist or mathematician)

Heh. I also didn't care about the $60, and realised that taking the time to work out an optimal strategy would cost more of my time than the expected value of doing so.

So I fell back on a character-ethics heuristic and cooperated. Bounded rationality at work. Whoever wins can thank me later for my sloth.

If everything in your universe is a simulation, then the external implementation of it is at least extra-natural from your point of view, not constrained by any of the simulated natural laws. So you might as well call it supernatural if you like.

If you include all layers of simulation all the way out to base reality as part of the one huge natural system, then everything is natural, even if most of it is unknowable.

Fun as always. Looking back at my answers, I think I'm profoundly irrational, but getting more aware of it. Oh well.

True. I suppose I was unconsciously thinking (now there's a phrase to fear!) about improbable dangerous events, where it is much more important not to underestimate P(X). If I get it wrong such that P(X) is truly only one in a trillion, then I am never going to know the difference and it's not a big deal, but if P(X) is truly on the order of P(I suck at maths) then I am in serious trouble ;)

Especially given the recent evidence you have just provided for that hypothesis.

I've never been completely happy with the "I could make 1M similar statements and be wrong once" test. It seems, I dunno, kind of a frequentist way of thinking about the probability that I'm wrong. I can't imagine making a million statements and have no way of knowing what it's like to feel confidence about a statement to an accuracy of one part per million.

Other ways to think of tiny probabilities:

(1) If probability theory tells me there's a 1 in a billion chance of X happening, then P(X) is somewhere between 1 in a billion and P(I calculated wr... (read more)

From the point of view of your genes, likely to reproduce and beneficial are exactly the same thing. That's trivially true.

Also not particularly interesting even if true: crazy beliefs that get you killed or prevent you from breeding have to spread non-parentally. They don't have to be particularly persuasive or virulent, there just has to be some other mechanism (e.g. state control of education, military discipline, enjoyable but idiotic forms of mass entertainment) to spread them.

The prevalence of these means doesn't even have to depend on the ones spre... (read more)

I don't think there's any way to discriminate between crazy things your mum believes and crazy things the man on the street corner believes.

I also think the virulence of a meme complex, like the virulence of a virus, is very dependent on the context i.e. the population it is introduced to and the other memes it competes with in that population.

"what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" is snappy enough to be "virulent" and, I think, not too harmful to the individual host.

Oh, OK. I get you. I don't describe myself as a patternist, and I might not be what you mean by it. In any case I am not making the first of those claims.

However, it seems possible to me that a sufficiently close copy of me would think it was me, experience being me, and would maybe even be more similar to me as a person than biological me of five years ago or five years hence.

I do claim that it is theoretically possible to construct such a copy, but I don't think it is at all probable that signing up for cryonics will result in such a copy ever being made... (read more)

Just for exercise, let's estimate the probability of the conjunction of my claims.

claim A: I think the idea of a single 'self' in the brain is provably untrue according to currently understood neuroscience. I do honestly think so, therefore P(A) as close to 1.0 as makes no difference. Whether I'm right is another matter.

claim B: I think a wildly speculative vague idea thrown into a discussion and then repeatedly disclaimed does little to clarify anything. P(B) approx 0.998 - I might change my mind before the day is out.

claim C: The thing I claim to think... (read more)

My best bet is that the self is a single physical thing, a specific physical phenomenon, which forms at a definite moment in the life of the organism, persists through time even during unconsciousness, and ceases to exist when its biological matrix becomes inhospitable.

How much do you want to bet on the conjunction of all those claims? (hint: I think at least one of them is provably untrue even according to current knowledge)

That is just a wild speculation, made for the sake of concreteness.

I don't think it supplied the necessary amount of concreten... (read more)

I find the conclusion that the US would be better off with some form of proportional representation pretty compelling actually, and I don't think it's so implausible that it would make a positive difference.

The difference it makes in Europe (compared to the UK for example) seems to be that the smaller parties with agendas the median voter doesn't care much about still get a voice in parliament. It's worth it for the Greens or the Pirate party to campaign for another 1% of the vote, because they get another 1% of the seats, instead of nothing.

It should be a... (read more)

Thanks for identifying Duverger's Law. I had never heard of it, but I had informally grasped its application in UK politics.

Depressing but plausible :(

I suspect "the way they are presented in the popular media" is crafted with that in mind.

Corollary: all organisations eventually contain sub-competent people. Design protocols accordingly.

Citation, or at least a clear example, needed. I can probably construct two policy alternatives, and predict which will be attractive to people who identify with a given political tribe. Then I suppose I get to call one of those options the "stupid" one based on my own value system.

Please tell me that isn't the sort of thing you mean.

I have met people with what I consider to be very irrational political views (in that they are little more than clusters of rote debating points never subjected to analysis). Outside of the well-worn habitual respons... (read more)

It's still probably premature to guess whether friendliness is provable when we don't have any idea what it is. My worry is not that it wouldn't be possible or provable, but that it might not be a meaningful term at all.

But I also suspect friendliness, if it does mean anything, is in general going to be so complex that "only [needing] to find a single program that provably has behaviour X" may be beyond us. There are lots of mathematical conjectures we can't prove, even without invoking the halting problem.

One terrible trap might be the temptatio... (read more)

That first one would be worth doing even if we didn't dare hand the AI the keys to go and make changes. To study a non-human-created ontology would be fascinating and maybe really useful.

First list:

1) Poorly defined terms "human intention" and "sufficient".

2) Possibly under any circumstances whatsoever, if it's anything like other non-trivial software, which always has some bugs.

3) Anything from "you may not notice" to "catastrophic failure resulting in deaths". Claim that failure of software to work as humans intend will "generally fail in a way that is harmful to it's own functioning" is unsupported. E.g. a spreadsheet works fine if the floating point math is off in the 20th bit of the ma... (read more)

A little cynical maybe? Politicians don't spend 100% of the time making decisions for purely political reasons. Sometimes they are trying to achieve something, even if broadly speaking the purposes of politics are as you imply.

But of course, most of the people we would prefer to be more rational don't know that's what politics is for, so they aren't hampered by that particular excuse to give up on it. Anyway, they could quite reasonably expect more rational decision making from co-workers, doctors, teachers and others.

I don't think the people making decisi... (read more)

Yet.

And you don't even need a majority of rationalists by headcount. You just need to find and hack the vulnerable parts of your culture and politics where you have a chance of raising people's expectations for rational decision making. Actual widespread ability in rationality skills comes later.

Whenever you feel pessimistic about moving the mean of the sanity distribution, try reading the Bible or the Iliad and see how far we've come already.

That is incoherent at best. Is there any context to the quote that might explain why it is here?

Some other reason: I just don't know how EY pronounces "Yudkowsky" -- [jʊd'kaʊski] or [ju:d'kɔvski] or otherwise.

But there is a significant overlap between great names for scientists and words that would be worth a lot in Scrabble if proper nouns were allowed.

Of course, when you are trying to get more of "them" to be "us", it's worth pointing out what "they" are doing wrong. It's not like anyone without brain damage is born and destined to be an "unscientific man" for life.

Yeah, I can see how hierarchical organisations benefit certain goals and activities. I was speaking specifically about the goal of teaching rationality, in case that wasn't clear from context. You don't need a central authority to control what is being taught so much unless you are teaching irrationality (c.f. Scientology, Roman Catholicism or any political organisation).

You could probably run a million rationality courses a year using just a wiki and a smartphone app. (Left as an exercise for the reader)

True, and I can't see any benefit from hierarchical organisation. There isn't a central authority of rationality any more than there is one for chemistry or calculus.

But CFAR maybe hasn't scaled to its maximum size yet, and as it approaches it, it will probably become clearer what the ideal size is, and there will be more people with experience in training who can split off another group.

Goodness knows Microsoft could do with some more rationality, even if they have to come by it illicitly ;)

Seriously though: no, don't trust Skype (or Dropbox, or gmail for that matter) to keep your secrets. However, most communications aren't secret, and discussions about rationality per se probably shouldn't be.

I can only imagine that someone spying on rationality discussions with sinister intent is doing it for really irrational reasons, so the more they hear and understand, the more the problem solves itself.

As usual it depends on the exponent.

It reads like a pretty good scientist name. I have no idea how it sounds ;)

Well at least if you pull numbers out of your arse and then make a decision based explicitly on the assumption that they are valid, the decision is open to rational challenge by showing that the numbers are wrong when more evidence comes in. And who knows, the real numbers may be close enough to vindicate the decision.

If you just pull decisions out of your arse without reference to how they relate to evidence (even hypothetically), you are denying any method of improvement other than random trial and error. And when the real numbers become available, you still don't know anything about how good the original decision was.

Postmodernism or dogshit? ;)

Well, an infinite memory store or an infinite energy source would have infinite mass. So it would either take up the entire universe and have nowhere external to send its results to or, if it had finite size, it would be inside its own Schwarzchild radius, and there would be no way to send a signal out through its event horizon.

So yeah, I'd call infinite storage or power sources (as politely as possible) "unphysical".

And I don't see why you think the halting problem goes away just because you can't put infinite tape in your Turing machine, or bec... (read more)

If it's a frequently-occurring observation within the group then yes, there seems to be something wrong. Possibly because things are regularly proposed and acted on without considering fairness until someone has to point it out.

If it hardly ever has to be said, but when pointed out, it is often persuasive, you're probably OK.

Easier, simpler, still not a great idea, for all the reasons I gave above.

Agreed and voted up. Of course, you don't get a choice about whether to have an emotion, at the base level.

Not sure "offended" is a primary emotion though. It seems to me (by introspection) to be bundled together with a lot of culture-dependent and habitual behaviours, associations and memes, all of which are sub-optimal for any given situation, and could do with being brought under conscious control before being allowed to influence my actions.