LESSWRONG
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All of Taurus_Londono's Comments + Replies

2013 Survey Results
Taurus_Londono00

I selected to cooperate.

If I'd thought the financial incentive to defect was greater, I may have been tempted to do so... ...but isn't it interesting that even a modest material reward didn't have the same effect as the incentive to lie about IQ?

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2Jiro
The survey was not meant to include non-official tests. If you respond to a question about official tests with the result of a non-official test, not only have you lied, you have lied in an important way. Certainly you could argue that the non-official test is as good as measuring IQ as the acceptable tests, but that argument's not up to you to make--the creator of the survey obviously didn't think so and it's his survey The design of the survey reflects his decision about what sources of error are acceptable, not yours. He gets to decide that, not you, regardless of whether you can argue for your position or not.
2ChristianKl
Did you select cooperate or defect on the prisoner dilemma question?
ArisKatsaris130

I am a member of this population, and I lied.

Helpful for letting us know there are bad people out there that will seek to sabotage the value of a survey even without any concrete benefit to themselves other than the LOLZ of the matter. But I think we are already aware of the existence of bad people.

As for your "I suspect that I am not alone", I ADBOC (agree denotationaly but object connotationaly). Villains exist, but I suspect villains are rarer than they believe themselves to be, since in order to excuse their actions they need imagine the ... (read more)

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Circular Altruism
Taurus_Londono10

Raise your hand if you (yes you, the person reading this) will submit to 50 years of torture in order to avert "least bad" dust speck momentarily finding its way into the eyes of an unimaginably large number of people.

Why was it not written "I, Eliezer Yudkowsky, should choose to submit to 50 years of torture in place of a googolplex people getting dust specks in their eyes"?

Why restrict yourself to the comforting distance of omniscience?

Did Miyamoto Musashi ever exhort the reader to ask his sword what he should want? Why is this not a ... (read more)

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0hyporational
Because then it's clearly not the same argument anymore, and would appeal only to people who ascribe to even a narrower form of incredibly altruistic utilitarianism, who I personally suspect don't even exist statistically speaking. Say the person chosen for torture is random, then it would make a bit more sense, but would essentially be the same argument given the ridiculously high numbers involved.
7ArisKatsaris
I suffer under no delusion that I'm a morally perfect individual. You seem to believe that to identify what's the morally correct path, one must also be willing to follow it. Morality pushes our wills towards that direction, but selfishness has its own role to play and here it pushes elsewhere. But yes, I am willing to say that I should submit to 50 years of torture in order to save 3^^^3 people getting dust specks in their eyes. I'll also openly admit that that I am not willing to submit to such. This is not contradictory: "should" is a moral judgment, but being willing to be moral at such high cost is another thing entirely.
6TheOtherDave
I would not submit to 50 years of torture to avert a dust speck in the eyes of lots of people. I suspect I also would not submit to 50 years of torture to avert a stranger being subjected to 55 years of torture. It's not clear to me what, if anything, I should infer from this.
Scott Alexander260

Thank you for your unpleasantly phrased and confrontational feedback.

The software I use to process this information has a lot of trouble handling "check multiple boxes". Adding "biracial" would be strictly inferior to just asking people which of their two races they identify more with, since biracial gives no race information.

You cannot infer relationship status from number of partners, because status differentiates "married" from "in a relationship", which the partner question cannot do.

So far each one of the three ... (read more)

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-3polymathwannabe
Seconded. I work in book publishing. There was no option for that.
Variable Question Fallacies
Taurus_Londono00

"Oh my gosh! 'The Sun goes around the Earth' is true for Hunga Huntergatherer, but for Amara Astronomer, 'The Sun goes around the Earth' is false! There is no fixed truth!" The deconstruction of this sophomoric nitwittery is left as an exercise to the reader.

An apt way to put it. That this worthless dimestore philosophy so often underlies contemporary contemplative discourse by relatively intelligent people never ceases to bewilder and sadden me. (see example below)

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0Document
Below for who?
Fallacies of Compression
Taurus_Londono50

...a team of neurologists investigated a 40Hz electrical rhythm...

For the sake of the blook; neuroscientists, not neurologists. Words can be wrong.

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