Irrationality Game: Less Wrong is simply my Tyler Durden—a disassociated digital personality concocted by my unconcious mind to be everything I need it to be to cope with Camusian absurdist reality. 95%.
is quite safe if done properly
That's the thing -- it's basically an issue of idiot-proofing. Many things are "safe if done properly" and still are not a good idea because people in general are pretty bad at doing things properly.
Flush toilets are idiot-proof to a remarkable degree. Composting human manure, I have my doubts.
Irrationality game: Every thing which exists has subjective experience (80%). This includes things such as animals, plants, rocks, ideas, mathematics, the universe and any sub component of an aforementioned system.
Irrationality game:
Most posthuman societies will have violent death rate much higher than humans ever had. Most poshumans who will ever live will die at wars. 95%
Interesting. So, you have Robin Hanson's belief that we won't get a strong singleton; but you lack his belief that emulated minds will be able to evaluate each other's abilities with enough confidence that trade (taking into account the expected value of fighting) will be superior to fighting? That's quite the idiosyncratic position, especially for 95% confidence.
You (the reader) do not exist.
EDIT: That was too punchy and not precise. The reasoning behind the statement:
Most things which think they are me are horribly confused gasps of consciousness. Rational agents should believe the chances are small that their experiences are remotely genuine.
EDIT 2: After thinking about shminux's comment, I have to retract my original statement about you readers not existing. Even if I'm a hopelessly confused Boltzmann brain, the referent "you" might still well exist. At minimum I have to think about existence more. Sorry!
Irrationality Game: I am something ontologically distinct from my body; I am much simpler and I am not located in the same spacetime. 50%
EDIT: Upon further reflection, my probability assignment would be better represented as the range between 30% and 50%, after factoring in general uncertainty due to confusion. I doubt this will make a difference to the voting though. ;)
Irrationality game - there is a provident, superior entity that is in no way infinite (I wonder if people here would call that God. As a "superman theist" I had to put "odds of God (as defined in question)" at 5% but identify as strongly theist in the last census)
Edit: forgot odds. 80%
The universe is finite, and not much bigger than the region we observe. There is no multiverse (in particular Many Worlds Interpretation is incorrect and SIA is incorrect). There have been a few (< million) intelligent civilisations before human beings but none of them managed to expand into space, which explains Fermi's paradox. This also implies a mild form of the "Doomsday" argument (we are fairly unlikely to expand ourselves) but not a strong future filter (if instead millions or billions of civilisations had existed, but none of them expanded, there would be a massive future filter). Probability: 90%.
Irrationality Game: One can reliable and predictably make $1M / year, and it's not that difficult. (Confidence: 75%)
Irrationality game:
There are other 'technological civilizations' (in the sense of intelligent living things that have learned to manipulate matter in a complicated way) in the observable universe: 99%
There are other 'technological civilizations' in our own galaxy: 75% with most of the probability mass in regimes where there are somewhere between dozens and thousands.
Conditional on these existing: Despite some being very old, they are limited by the hostile nature of the universe and the realities of practical manipulation of matter and energy to never co...
Irrationality game:
Nice idea. This way I can safely test whether the Baseline of my opinion on LW topics is as contrarian as I think.
My proposition:
On The Simulation Argument I go for "(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage" (80%)
Correspondingly on The Great Filter I go for failure to reach "9. Colonization explosion" (80%).
This is not because I think that humanity is going to self-annihilate soon (though this is a possibility).
Irrationality game: people are happier when living in traditional social structures, and value being part of their traditions[1]. The public existence of "weird" relationships (homosexuality, polyamory, BDSM, ...) is actively harmful to most people; the open practice of them is a net negative for world utility. Morally good actions include condemnation and censorship of such things.
[1] Or rather what they believe are their traditions; these beliefs may not be particularly well-correlated with reality.
Irrationality Game: Currently, understanding history or politics is a better avenue than studying AI or decision theory for dealing with existential risk. This is not because of the risk of total nuclear annihilation, but because of the possibility of political changes that result in setbacks to or an accelerated use and understanding of AI. 70%
I'm 99% confident that dust specks in 3^^^3 eyes result in less lost utility than 50 years of torturing one person.
Just as a curiosity, this was the most downvoted comment in the original thread:
For a large majority of people who read this, learning a lot about how to interact with other human beings genuinely and in a way that inspires comfort and pleasure on both sides is of higher utility than learning a lot about either AI or IA. ~90%
(-44 points)
Irrationality game:
Most progress in medicine in the next 50 years won't be due to advances in molecular biology and the production of drugs that are designed to target specific biochemical pathways but through other paradigms.
Probability: 75%
Irrationality game: The straightforward view of the nature of the universe is fundamentally flawed. 90%
By "fundamentally flawed", I mean things like:
Irrationality game: The Great Stagnation is actually occurring, and it is mostly due to fossil fuel depletion rather than (say) leftist politics or dysgenics. (60%)
Irrationality game: most opposition to wireheading comes from seeing it as weird and/or counterintuitive in the same way that most non-LWers see cryonics/immortalism as weird. Claiming to have multiple terminal values is an attempt to justify this aversion. 75%
Irrationality Game: We need a way to give feedback on irrationality game entries that the troll toll won't mess with. (98%)
[pollid:643]
Irrationality Game:
Everyone alive in developed nations today will die a fairly standard biological death by age:
150: 75%
250: 95%
(This latter figure accounts for the possibility that the stories of the odd Chinese monk living to age 200+ after only eating wild herbs from age 10 on up is actually true and not an exaggeration, or someone sticking to unreasonably-effective calorie restriction regimes religiously combined with some interesting metabolic rejiggering in the coming decade or two).
The majority (90+%) of people born in developed nations today will die a fairly standard biological death by age:
120: 85%
150: 99%
Irrationality Game:
Politics (in particular, large governments such as the US, China, and Russia) are a major threat to the development of friendly AI. Conditional on FAI progress having stopped, I give a 60% chance that it was because of government interference, rather than existential risk or some other problem.
I'm not sure how you apply that in a big universe model... most of it is lies outside any given light-cone, so which one do you pick? Imagine you don't yet know where you are: do you sum utility across all light-cones (a sum which could still diverge in a big universe) or take the utility of an average light cone. Also, how do you do the time-discounting if you don't yet know when you are?
The possible universes I am considering already come packed into a future light cone (I don't consider large universes directly). The probability of a universe is proportional to 2^{-its Kolmogorov complexity} so expected utility converges. Time-discounting is relative to the vertex of the light-cone.
...it will encourage betting on really dense universes (packed full of people or simulations of people).
Not really. Additive terms in the utility don't "encourage" anything, multiplicative factors do.
The possible universes I am considering already come packed into a future light cone (I don't consider large universes directly).
I was a bit surprised by this... if your possible models only include one light-cone (essentially just the observable universe) then they don't look too different from those of my stated hypothesis (at the start of the thread). What is your opinion then on other civilisations in the light-cone? How likely are these alternatives?
The 'Irrationality Game' posts in discussion came before my time here, but I had a very good time reading the bits written in the comments section. I also had a number of thoughts I would've liked to post and get feedback on, but I knew that being buried in such old threads not much would come of it. So I asked around and feedback from people has suggested that they would be open to a reboot!
I hereby again quote the original rules:
Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.
Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.
Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.
Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.
Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."
If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.
That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.
If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.
The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.
Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.
Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?
Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.
That means our local theists are probably gonna get a lot of upvotes. Can you beat them with your confident but perceived-by-LW-as-irrational beliefs? It's a challenge!Additional rules:
- Generally, no repeating an altered version of a proposition already in the comments unless it's different in an interesting and important way. Use your judgement.
- If you have comments about the game, please reply to my comment below about meta discussion, not to the post itself. Only propositions to be judged for the game should be direct comments to this post.
- Don't post propositions as comment replies to other comments. That'll make it disorganized.
- You have to actually think your degree of belief is rational. You should already have taken the fact that most people would disagree with you into account and updated on that information. That means that any proposition you make is a proposition that you think you are personally more rational about than the Less Wrong average. This could be good or bad. Lots of upvotes means lots of people disagree with you. That's generally bad. Lots of downvotes means you're probably right. That's good, but this is a game where perceived irrationality wins you karma. The game is only fun if you're trying to be completely honest in your stated beliefs. Don't post something crazy and expect to get karma. Don't exaggerate your beliefs. Play fair.
- Debate and discussion is great, but keep it civil. Linking to the Sequences is barely civil -- summarize arguments from specific LW posts and maybe link, but don't tell someone to go read something. If someone says they believe in God with 100% probability and you don't want to take the time to give a brief but substantive counterargument, don't comment at all. We're inviting people to share beliefs we think are irrational; don't be mean about their responses.
- No propositions that people are unlikely to have an opinion about, like "Yesterday I wore black socks. ~80%" or "Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader in his latter days had he not been dethroned by Pope Sergius III. ~30%." The goal is to be controversial and interesting.
- Multiple propositions are fine, so long as they're moderately interesting.
- You are encouraged to reply to comments with your own probability estimates, but comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments. That is, upvote for good discussion, not agreement or disagreement.
- In general, just keep within the spirit of the game: we're celebrating LW-contrarian beliefs for a change!
I would suggest placing *related* propositions in the same comment, but wildly different ones might deserve separate comments for keeping threads separate.
Make sure you put "Irrationality Game" as the first two words of a post containing a proposition to be voted upon in the game's format.
Here we go!
EDIT: It was pointed out in the meta-thread below that this could be done with polls rather than karma so as to discourage playing-to-win and getting around the hiding of downvoted comments. If anyone resurrects this game in the future, please do so under that system If you wish to test a poll format in this thread feel free to do so, but continue voting as normal for those that are not in poll format.