All of TCB's Comments + Replies

Two sheep plus three sheep equals five sheep. Two apples plus three apples equals five apples. Two Discrete ObjecTs plus three Discrete ObjecTs equals five Discrete ObjecTs.

Arithmetic is a formal system, consisting of a syntax and semantics. The formal syntax specifies which statements are grammatical: "2 + 3 = 5" is fine, while "2 3 5 + =" is meaningless. The formal semantics provides a mapping from grammatical statements to truth values: "2 + 3 = 5" is true, while "2 + 3 = 6" is false. This mapping relies on axi... (read more)

In this article, Eliezer implies that it's the lack of objective morality which makes life seem meaningless under a materialist reductionist model of the universe. Is this the usual source of existential angst? For me, existential angst always came from "life not having a purpose"; I was always bothered by the thought that no higher power was guiding our lives. I ended up solving this problem by realizing that emergent structures such as society can be understood as a "higher power guiding our lives"; while it's not as agenty as God,... (read more)

I agree with what seems to be the standard viewpoint here: the laws of morality are not written on the fabric of the universe, but human behavior does follow certain trends, and by analyzing these trends we can extract some descriptive rules that could be called morals.

I would find such an analysis interesting, because it'd provide insight into how people work. Personally, though, I'm only interested in what is, and I don't care at all about what "ought to be". In that sense, I suppose I'm a moral nihilist. The LessWrong obsession with develop... (read more)

Aha! I think I was misreading your post, then; I assumed you were presenting truth-seeking as a reason why you wanted your friends to be atheists, as well as a reason why converting them would be moral. Sorry for assuming you didn't know your own motivations!

It really depends on your own personal moral system (assuming ethical relativism). In order to answer your question, I would need to know what you consider moral. I'll attempt to infer your morals from your post, and then I'll try to answer your question accordingly.

It sounds from your post like you're torn between two alternatives, both of which you consider moral, but which are mutually exclusive. On one hand, it seems that you're morally devoted to the causes of atheism and truth-seeking; thus, you desire to convert others to this cause. But on the ... (read more)

That sounds awesome and not manipulative at all. =)

I'm all for community-building activities, and I'd love to learn to dance, so I think this is an awesome idea. That said, something about the way this post and its comments are worded rubs me the wrong way entirely, and makes me want to avoid rationalist dance meetups and the LessWrong community in general. Since it seems that your goal is to recruit more rationalists, and I've been a long-time lurker on the outskirts of the rationalist community, I figured that it might be helpful if I explained my negative reaction. I've had similar negative reactions... (read more)

I find this post incredibly inspiring, but I feel like it does not directly address one of the main reasons that people do not find scientific explanations emotionally satisfying. When we personify the cosmos, then the universe seems a lot less hostile, and we feel much more connected to it. A primitive man looks up at the sun and thinks, "There is the sun-god, the sky-father, watching over my people." And he is happy because the universe, while capricious, is not apathetic to his life. But a modern man looks up at the sun and thinks "Th... (read more)

Allow me to provide some insight, as an erstwhile "anti-reductionist" in the sense that Eliezer uses it here. (In many senses I am still an anti-reductionist.) I think that what is at work here is the conflict between intuition and analysis. However, before I remark on the relevance of these concepts to the experience of a rainbow, I would like to clarify what I mean by the terms "intuition" and "analysis".

The way I understand the mind, at the very deepest level of our consciousnesses we have our core processes; these are t... (read more)

This post reminds me of evidential markers in linguistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality). Evidential markers are morphemes (e.g. prefixes or suffixes) which, when attached to the verb, describe how the speaker came to belief the fact that he is asserting. These can include things like direct knowledge ("I saw it with my own eyes"), hearsay ("Somebody told me so but I didn't see for myself"), and inference ("I concluded it from my other beliefs"). While evidential markers are less specific than what's described... (read more)

I'm not actually convinced that negative examples are really necessary for learning empirical clusters in thingspace, especially if you're just trying to teach someone a subcategory of a big class they're already familiar with. If someone is already familiar with the concept of "bird" and you want to inform them that there is such a thing as blue jays, it may suffice to show them just a few instances of a blue jay (assuming you don't care whether they learn the terminology). Source: this super cool paper about one-shot learning using hierarchical Bayesian models: http://www.mit.edu/~rsalakhu/papers/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2010-052.pdf

Interesting point. I certainly agree that concepts/words are not actually atomic, or Platonic ideals, or anything like that. Concrete concepts, in particular, seem to correspond to "empirical clusters in thing-space", or probability distributions over classes of objects in the real world (though of course, even objects in the real world aren't really atomic).

Despite this, most people still view themselves as thinking symbolically, and many people believe themselves to be logical reasoning agents. After reading the first couple chapters of Jayn... (read more)

This article presents evidence that symbols exist in our minds independent of words. http://artksthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/07/concepts-cognition-and-anthropomorphism.html

Actually, it seems extremely unlikely that words would be required for symbolic thinking, considering that any animal advanced enough to base its actions on thought rather than pure reflex would need to have some kind of symbolic representation of the world.

I did this a few years ago, but I'm not sure exactly how. I wanted to think less verbally because I worried that my thoughts were too constrained by words, which kept me at the very surface level of my consciousness and perhaps inhibited my access to deeper parts of my mind. I think that part of the transformation came about simply because I wanted it to (power of suggestion). It probably also helped that I started watching a lot more films and doing more math. I don't remember the exact process by which I transformed my thought-structure.

Something tha... (read more)

Those are valid concerns. Regarding the first, that's why I emphasized the ritual component of sex in a repressed society. I suspect that such a society would have very strict rituals for sex: it must occur only at specific times in specific locations, and in the presence of certain stimuli. Some examples of stimuli are candles or lacy lingerie or dim lighting. An example of a time is night. I've heard lots of comments to the effect that having sex in the middle of the day would be strange, and that sex is strictly a nighttime activity. This could be... (read more)

Slightly off-topic thought regarding penny jars and fetish formation:

I've heard that fetishes are more prevalent in cultures where sex is repressed. I always wondered why this would be the case (assuming that it is in fact true). One explanation is associations: if people are raised to think sex is dirty, or that sex is a necessary but base bodily function akin to using the bathroom, then they might fetishize urine or excrement. And if people are raised to think that sex is beastly and animalistic, they might fetishize things that are related to animals... (read more)

Oops, you are right; I meant to type pasteurization! I also think that homogenizing milk is bad, but I believe that with lower probability. I'll edit my post, and thanks for the correction. =)

I would love to see an LW sequence on machine learning! I imagine that LW would have a lot of interesting things to say about the philosophical aspects of ML in addition to the practical aspects.

I'm not sure I'd be qualified to contribute much to such a sequence, since I am just an undergrad, but I did have an outline in mind for an intuitive introduction to MLE and EM. If people would find that interesting, I could certainly post it on LW once it was written up!

I'm fairly inexperienced in ML, so all the models I've worked with are simple enough that the... (read more)

After rereading this, I agree with you that I emphasized the beta distribution too heavily. This wasn't my intention; I just picked it because it was the simplest conjugate prior I could find. In the next draft of this document, I'll make sure to stress that the beta distribution is just one of many great conjugate priors!

I am a bit confused about what the second point means. Do you mean that conjugate priors are insufficient for capturing the actual prior knowledge possessed?

I did not know that it was controversial to claim that alpha = beta = 1 expres... (read more)

Thank you very much for the compliments, and for the honest criticism!

I am still thinking about your comment, and I intend to write a detailed response to it after I have thought about your criticisms more completely. In the meantime, though, I wanted to say that the feedback is very much appreciated!

Perhaps I have a different system of morality than other people who have commented on this topic, but I personally judge actions as "moral" or "immoral" based on the intentions of the do-er rather than the consequences. (Assuming morality is relative and not an absolute component of the universe, this seems like a valid moral system.)

If the atheists who run this website are doing so to make money by exploiting the perceived stupidity of their customers, this seems immoral to me. On the other hand, if they are running the service becau... (read more)

I suppose I am assuming that the universe operates under some set of formal rules (though they might not be deterministic) independently of our ability to describe the universe using formal rules. I would also say that our inability to comprehend a given contradiction is related to the fact that we are inside the system. If God were outside the system he would not necessarily have this problem.

I disagree with your second point, though. Sure, 1 and 2 are labels for concepts that exist within a formal system we've developed, and sure, we can create an iso... (read more)

I find this post very interesting, but I disagree with your examples about God. This comment is rather lengthy, and rather off-topic, so I apologize, but I wanted to bring it up because your post features these questions so prominently as examples.

Specifically, I don't think that the answer to the questions about God can be written off so easily as "no". It seems to me that the questions "Could God draw a square circle?" "Could God create a stone so large that even He could not lift it?" are asking about the bounds on omnipo... (read more)

I am aware that my definition of Occam's razor is not the "official" definition. However, it is the definition which I see used most often in discussions and arguments, which is why I chose it. The fact that this definition of Occam's razor is common supports my claim that humans consider it a good heuristic.

Forgive me for my ignorance, as I have not studied Kolmogorov complexity in detail. As you suggest, it seems that human understanding of a "simple description" is not in line with Kolmogorov complexity.

I think the intention of my... (read more)

Perhaps I am missing something here, but I don't see why utilitarianism is necessarily superior to rule-based ethics. An obvious advantage of a rule-based moral system is the speed of computation. Situations like the trolley problem require extremely fast decision-making. Considering how many problems local optima cause in machine learning and optimization, I imagine that it would be difficult for an AI to assess every possible alternative and pick the one which maximized overall utility in time to make such a decision. Certainly, we as humans frequent... (read more)