William Gasarch

LESSWRONG
LW

William Gasarch — LessWrong

The Good Place has a line that defines the human dilemma

First off, Kudos to Less Wrong which had some comments about the TV show The Good Place, so I watched it on Netflix and enjoyed it a lot.

There is one line from the show that encapsulates the human dilemma

``There is a chicken sandwich that, if you eat it, you hate gay people. But it tastes so good.''

More generally- when and how can we take a stand on things? How do our actions affect others? How can we tell. Its hard!

One more line, actually a sequence of lines, that has no interesting philosophical content but I found hilarious.

Recall that The Good Place' is Heaven and The Bad Place' is hell.

Michael: The Bad place has a museum of torture. Jason: Is there a gift shop? Michael: Its hell. Of course there's a gift shop.

Review of The Engines of Cognition

William Gasarch

Introduction^[1]

For those who read my review of the first Lesswrong collection of essays, A Map that Reflects the Territory (see here for my review), this intro will give you a sense of what the Klingons call nlb’poH, the French call Déjà vu, and the English call Déjà vu.

Less Wrong is a forum founded by Artificial Intelligence Theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009. The stated philosophy is:

We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality.

That seems to cover a lot of ground! The actual topics... (read 4449 more words →)

Review of A Map that Reflects the Territory

William Gasarch

I had read about lesswrong.com on Scott Aaaronon's blog but never read it. Then there was an offer to review A Map that Reflects the Territory which (as you prob know) is a collection of lesswrong essays.

I originally had just a link to my review, which I still have in this post; however, several people (correctly) urged me to make it a post you can just read directly. Due to the FAQ being out of date and my own luddite-tendencies I was unable to do this, but Ruby did it for me, for which I am grateful. The full text appears below the link.

Here is a link to my review:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/lesswrong.pdf

Here is the... (read 5104 more words →)

Some phrases in The Map that... Confuse me- help please, to make my review of it better!

William Gasarch

I recently read

A Map that Reflect the Territory: Essays by the Less Wrong Community

I will be posting a review of it on the lesswrong site soon.

But I want to improve it first and need your help!

There were some words or phrases that were used that either confused me
or I could not find a definition on the web anywhere! So please clarify if you can.

-------------------------------
In the article

What Motivated Rescuers During the Holocaust? by Martin Sustrik,

is the following:

As I already said, I am not an expert on the topic, but if what we see
here is not an instance of the bystander effect, I'll eat my hat.

He is referring to that people who begin helping... (read more)

Combining two posts: Blankface (Scott Aa) and Is Science Slowing Down? (Scott Al)

William Gasarch

(First time poster, hope this works. Will also be posting to complexityblog as well.)

Some papers result from taking two papers and combining them. Perhaps nobody else had read both of them so you can say something new! Or (looking over this post) it may guide people to two really good papers, or in this case two really good posts.

This blog will draw from two excellent blog posts.

Scott Aaronson blogged on his website on Aug 2, 2021 about blankfaces, people who let stupid or undefined rules dictate what you can do without apology (see his post for a better explanation). One example that struck me I quote

No, I never applied for that grant. I spend... (read 268 more words →)

Review of A Map that Reflects the Territory

Review of The Engines of Cognition

Combining two posts: Blankface (Scott Aa) and Is Science Slowing Down? (Scott Al)

Some phrases in The Map that... Confuse me- help please, to make my review of it better!

William Gasarch

William Gasarch

The Good Place has a line that defines the human dilemma

Review of The Engines of Cognition

Review of A Map that Reflects the Territory

Some phrases in The Map that... Confuse me- help please, to make my review of it better!

Combining two posts: Blankface (Scott Aa) and Is Science Slowing Down? (Scott Al)

William Gasarch

Review of A Map that Reflects the Territory

Review of The Engines of Cognition

Combining two posts: Blankface (Scott Aa) and Is Science Slowing Down? (Scott Al)

Some phrases in The Map that... Confuse me- help please, to make my review of it better!

William Gasarch

William Gasarch

The Good Place has a line that defines the human dilemma

Review of The Engines of Cognition

Review of A Map that Reflects the Territory

Some phrases in The Map that... Confuse me- help please, to make my review of it better!

Combining two posts: Blankface (Scott Aa) and Is Science Slowing Down? (Scott Al)

Introduction[1]

Introduction^[1]