All of Yoreth's Comments + Replies

I previously posted Was the K-T event a Great Filter? as a pushback against the notion that different lineages of life on Earth evolving intelligence is really "independent evidence" in any meaningful sense. Intelligence can evolve only if there's selective pressure favoring it, and a large part of that pressure likely comes from the presence of other intelligent creatures competing for resources. Therefore mammals and birds together really should only count as one data point.

(It's more plausible that octopus intelligence is independent, since the marine b... (read more)

Curb Your Enthusiasm - I didn't know you could be anonymous and tell people! I would've taken that option!

This is a good chance for me to interrogate my priors because I share (although not very strongly) the same intuitions that you criticize in this post. There's tension between the following and my desire not to live in a bland tall-poppy-syndrome dystopia where nobody ever wants to accomplish great things; I don't really know how I'd resolve it.

Intuition 1: Social praise is a superstimulus which titillates the senses and disturbs mental tranquility. Wh... (read more)

Proof-of-work is a radical and relatively recent idea which does not yet have a direct correspondent in philosophy. Here, cryptographic proofs witness the expenditure of resources like physical energy to commit to particular beliefs. In this way, the true scale of the system which agrees on certain beliefs can be judged, with the largest system being the winner.

I think this relates to the notion that constructing convincing falsehoods is more difficult and costly than discovering truths, because (a) the more elaborate a falsehood is, the more likely it ... (read more)

2. Reward yourself after each session.

What kinds of rewards do you use for this?

Consider the following charts:

Chart 1 shows the encephalization quotient (EQ) of various lineages over time, while Chart 2 shows the maximum EQ of all known fossils from any given time. (Source 1, Source 2. Admittedly this research is pretty old, so if anyone knows of more recent data, that'd be good to know.)

Both of these charts show a surprising fact: that the intelligence of life on Earth stagnated (or even decreased) throughout the entire Mesozoic Era, and did not start increasing until immediately after the K/T event. From this it appears that life ha... (read more)

Such a category is called paraphyletic. It can be informationally useful if the excluded subgroup is far-divergent from the overarching group, such that it has gained characteristics not shared by the others, and lost characteristics otherwise shared. But the less divergence has taken place, the harder it is to justify a paraphyletic category. The category "reptile" (excluding birds) makes sense today, but it wouldn't have made sense in the Jurassic period. The mammal/cetacean distinction is somewhere in the middle.

Animal/human is different because the evo... (read more)

I’m also not sure how far non-core and core identity rationalism are mutually exclusive. (Just like a lot of people are vaguely christian without belonging to a church, so maybe a lot of people would be vaguely interested in rationalism without wanting to join their local temple)

Agreed; finding a way for multiple levels of involvement to coexist would be helpful. Anecdotally, when I first tried attending LW meetups in around 2010, I was turned off and did not try again for many years, because the conversation was so advanced I couldn't follow it. But wh... (read more)

A few thoughts on this.

First, I probably have a higher appetite for religion-ifying rationalism than others in the community, but I wouldn't want to push my preferences too hard lest it scare people off. This may stem from my personal background as a cradle atheist. Religious people don't want rationality to become rivalrous with their religion, and ex-religionists don't want it to become they very thing they escaped. To the extent that it's good for rationality to become more religion-like, I think it'll happen on its own in the next few decades or centur... (read more)

1-3 months doesn't seem so bad as a timeline. While it's important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (since projects like this can easily turn into a boondoggle where everyone quibbles endlessly about what the end-product should look like), I think it's also worth a little bit of up-front effort to create something that we can improve upon later, rather than getting stuck with a mediocre solution permanently. (I imagine it's difficult to migrate a social network to a new platform once it's already gotten off the ground, the more so the more people have joined.)

I would also like to register my opposition to using Facebook. While it might seem convenient in the short term, it makes the community more fragile by adding a centralized failure point that's unaccountable to any of its members. Communicating on LessWrong.com has the virtue of it being owned by the same community that it serves.

It seems to me that there's a tension at the heart of defining what the "purpose" of meetups is. On the one hand, the community aspect is one of the most valuable things one can get out of it - I love that I can visit dozens of cities across the US, and go to a Less Wrong meetup and instantly have stuff to talk about. On the other hand, a community cannot exist solely for its own sake. Someone's personal interest in participating in the community will naturally fluctuate over time, and if everyone quits the moment their interest touches zero then nobody wi

What's the relation between religion and morality? I drew up a table to compare the two. This shows the absolute numbers and the percentages normalized in two directions (by religion, and by morality). I also highlighted the cells corresponding to the greatest percentage across the direction that was not normalized (for example, 22.89% of agnostics said there's no such thing as morality, a higher percentage than any other religious group).

Many pairs were highlighted both ways. In other words, these are pairs such that "Xs are more likely to be Ys"... (read more)

Would it be correct to say that, insofar as you would hope that the one person would be willing to sacrifice his/her life for the cause of saving the 5*10^6 others, you yourself would pull the switch and then willingly sacrifice yourself to the death penalty (or whatever penalty there is for murder) for the same cause?

I think I may have artificially induced an Ugh Field in myself.

A little over a week ago it occurred to me that perhaps I was thinking too much about X, and that this was distracting me from more important things. So I resolved to not think about X for the next week.

Of course, I could not stop X from crossing my mind, but as soon as I noticed it, I would sternly think to myself, "No. Shut up. Think about something else."

Now that the week's over, I don't even want to think about X any more. It just feels too weird.

And maybe that's a good thing.

I suppose, perhaps, an asteroid impact or nuclear holocaust? It's hard for me to imagine a disaster that wipes out 99.999999% of the population but doesn't just finish the job. The scenario is more a prompt to provoke examination of the amount of knowledge our civilization relies on.

(What first got me thinking about this was the idea that if you went up into space, you would find that the Earth was no longer protected by the anthropic principle, and so you would shortly see the LHC produce a black hole that devours the Earth. But you would be hard pressed to restart civilization from a space station, at least at current tech levels.)

But apparently it still wasn't enough to keep them together...

Suppose you know from good sources that there is going to be a huge catastrophe in the very near future, which will result in the near-extermination of humanity (but the natural environment will recover more easily). You and a small group of ordinary men and women will have to restart from scratch.

You have a limited time to compile a compendium of knowledge to preserve for the new era. What is the most important knowledge to preserve?

I am humbled by how poorly my own personal knowledge would fare.

Is there any philosophy worth reading?

As far as I can tell, a great deal of "philosophy" (basically the intellectuals' wastebasket taxon) consists of wordplay, apologetics, or outright nonsense. Consequently, for any given philosophical work, my prior strongly favors not reading it because the expected benefit won't outweigh the cost. It takes a great deal of evidence to tip the balance.

For example: I've heard vague rumors that GWF Hegel concludes that the Prussian State (under which, coincidentally, he lived) was the best form of human existence... (read more)

Long ago I read a book that asked the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Contemplating this question, I asked “What if there really is nothing?” Eventually I concluded that there really isn’t – reality is just fiction as seen from the inside.

Much later, I learned that this idea had a name: modal realism. After I read some about David Lewis’s views on the subject, it became clear to me that this was obviously, even trivially, correct, but since all the other worlds are causally unconnected, it doesn't matter at all for day-to-day life. E... (read more)

A prima facie case against the likelihood of a major-impact intelligence-explosion singularity:

Firstly, the majoritarian argument. If the coming singularity is such a monumental, civilization-filtering event, why is there virtually no mention of it in the mainstream? If it is so imminent, so important, and furthermore so sensitive to initial conditions that a small group of computer programmers can bring it about, why are there not massive governmental efforts to create seed AI? If nothing else, you might think that someone could exaggerate the threat of t... (read more)

This seems to be another case where explicit, overt reliance on a proxy drives a wedge between the proxy and the target.

One solution is to do the CEV in secret and only later reveal this to the public. Of course, as a member of said public, I would instinctively regard with suspicion any organization that did this, and suspect that the proffered explanation (some nonsense about a hypothetical "Dr. Evil") was a cover for something sinister.

Hi!

I've been registered for a few months now, but only rarely have I commented.

Perhaps I'm overly averse to loss of karma? "If you've never been downvoted, you're not commenting enough."

Suppose we had a G.O.D. that takes N bits of input, and uses the input as a starting-point for running a simulation. If the input contains more than one simulation-program, then it runs all of them.

Now suppose we had 2^N of these machines, each with a different input. The number of instantiations of any given simulation-program will be higher the shorter the program is (not just because a shorter bit-string is by itself more likely, but also because it can fit multiple times on one machine). Finally, if we are willing to let the number of machines shrink t... (read more)

How so? Could you clarify your reasoning?

My thinking is: Given that a scientist has read (or looked at) a paper, they're more likely to cite it if it's correct and useful than if it's incorrect. (I'm assuming that affirmative citations are more common than "X & Y said Z but they're wrong because..." citations.) If that were all that happened, then the number of citations a paper gets would be strongly correlated with its correctness, and we would expect it to be rare for a bad paper to get a lot of citations. However, if we take into accou... (read more)

I am reminded of a paper by Simkin and Roychowdhury where they argued, on the basis of an analysis of misprints in scientific paper citations, that most scientists don't actually read the papers they cite, but instead just copy the citations from other papers. From this they show that the fact that some papers are widely cited in the literature can be explained by random chance alone.

Their evidence is not without flaws - the scientists might have just copied the citations for convenience, despite having actually read the papers. Still, we can easily imagin... (read more)