Hegel - A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer - Book Review Part 1: Freedom
Hegel is a philosopher who is notorious for being incomprehensible. In fact, for one of his books he signed a contract that assigned a massive financial penalty for missing the publishing deadline, so the book ended up being a little rushed. While there was a time when he was dominant in German philosophy, he now seems to be held in relatively poor regard and his main importance is seen to be historical. So he's not a philosopher that I was really planning to spend much time on.
Given this, I was quite pleased to discover this book promising to give me A Very Short Introduction, especially since it is written by Peter Singer, a philosopher who write and thinks rather clearly. After reading this book, I still believe that most of what Hegel wrote was pretentious nonsense, but the one idea that struck me as the most interesting was his conception of freedom.
A rough definition of freedom might be ensuring that people are able to pursue whatever it is that they prefer. Hegel is not a fan abstract definitions of freedom which treat all preferences the same and don't enquire where they come from.
In hi...
Book Review: Communist Manifesto
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”
Overall summary: Given the rise of socialism in recent years, now seemed like an appropriate time to review the Communist Manifesto. At times I felt that Marx’s writing was keenly insightful, at other times I felt he was in ignorance of basic facts and at other times I felt that he held views that were reasonable at the time, but for which the flaws are now obvious. In particular, I found the first-half much more engaging than I expected because, say what you like about Marx, he’s an engaged and poetic writer. Towards the end, the focused shifted into particular time-bounded political disputes for which I neither had the knowledge to understand nor the interest to acquire. At the start, I fe...
I once talked about this with a guy who identified as a Marxist, though I can't say how much his opinions are representative for the rest of his tribe. Anyway... he told me that in the trichotomy of Capital / Land / Labor, human talent is economically most similar to the Land category. This is counter-intuitive if you take the three labels literally, but if you consider their supposed properties... well, it's been a few decades since I studied economics, but roughly:
The defining property of Capital is fungibility. You can use money to buy a tech company, or an airplane factory, or a farm with cows. You can use it to start a company in USA, or in India. There is nothing that locks money to a specific industry or a specific place. Therefore, in a hypothetical perfectly free global market, the risk-adjusted profit rates would become the same globally. (Because if investing the money in cows gives you 5% per annum, but investing money in airplanes gives you 10%, people will start selling cow farms and buying airplane factories. This will reduce the number of cow farms, thus increasing their profit, and increase the competition in the airplane market, thus reducing their profi...
Book Review: So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport:
This book makes an interesting contrast to The 4 Hour Workweek. Tim Ferris seems to believe that the purpose of work should be to make as much money as possible in the least amount of time and that meaning can then be pursued during your newly available free time. Tim gives you some productivity tips in the hope that it will make you valuable enough to negotiate flexibility in terms of how, when and where you complete your work, plus some dirty tricks as well.
Cal Newport's book is similar in that it focuses on becoming valuable enough to negotiate a job that you'll love and downplays the importance of pursuing your passions in your career. However, while Tim extolls the virtues of being a digital nomad, Cal Newport emphasises self-determination theory and autonomy, competence and relatedness. That is, the freedom to decide how you pursue your work, the satisfaction of doing a good job and the pleasure of working with people who you feel connected to. He argues that these traits are rare and valuable and so that if you want such a job you'll need skills that rare and valuable to offer in return.
That's...
As I said before, I'll be posting book reviews. Please let me know if you have any questions and I'll answer them to the best of my ability.
Book Review: The AI does not hate you by Tom Chivers
The title of this book comes from a quote by Elizier Yudkowsky which reads in full: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use of something else". This book covers not only potential risks from AI, but the rationalist community from which this evolved and also touches on the effective altruism movement.
This book fills something of a gap in the book market; when people are first learning about existential risks from AI I usually recommend the two-part Wait by Why post (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html) and then I'm not really sure what to recommend next. The sequences are ridiculously long and Bostrom's Superintelligence is a challenging read for those not steeped in philosophy and computer science. In contrast, this book is much more accessible and provides the right level of detail for a first introduction, rather than someone who has already decided to try entering the field.
I mostly listened to this boo
...Book Review: The 4 Hour Workweek
This is the kind of book that you either love or hate. I found value in it, but I can definitely understand the perspective of the haters. First off: the title. It's probably one of the most blatant cases of over-promising that I've ever seen. Secondly, he's kind of a jerk. A number of his tips involve lying and in school he had a strategy of interrogating his lecturers in detail when they gave him a bad mark so that they'd think very carefully assigning him a bad grade. And of course, while drop-shipping might have been an underexploited strategy at the time when he wrote the book, it's now something of a saturated market.
On the plus side, Tim is very good at giving you specific advice. To give you the flavour, he advises the following policies for running an online store: avoid international orders, no expedited or overnight shipping, two options only - standard and premium; no cheque or Western union, no phone number if possible, minimum wholesale order with tax id and faxed in order form, ect. Tim is extremely process oriented and it's clear that he has deep expertise here and is able to share it unusually well. I fo...
Book Review: Civilization and its discontents
Freud is the most famous psychologist of all time and although many of his theories are now discredited or seem wildly implausible, I thought it'd be interesting to listen to him to try and understand why it sounded plausible in the first place.
At times Freud is insightful and engaging; at other times, he falls into psychoanalytic lingo in such a way that I couldn't follow what he was trying to say. I suppose I can see why people might have assumed that the fault was with their failure to understand.
It's a short read, so if you're curious, there isn't that much cost to going ahead and reading it, but this is one of those rare cases where you can really understand the core of what he was getting at from the summary on Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents)
Since Wikipedia has a summary, I'll just add a few small remarks. This book focuses on a key paradox; our utter dependence on it for anything more than the most basic survival; but how it requires us to repress our own wants and desires so as to fit in with an ordered society. I find this to be an interesting answer to t...
Thoughts on the introduction of Goodhart's. Currently, I'm more motivated by trying to make the leaderboard, so maybe that suggests that merely introducing a leaderboard, without actually paying people, would have had much the same effect. Then again, that might just be because I'm not that far off. And if there hadn't been the payment, maybe I wouldn't have ended up in the position where I'm not that far off.
I guess I feel incentivised to post a lot more than I would otherwise, but especially in the comments rather than the posts since if you post a lot of posts that likely suppresses the number of people reading your other posts. This probably isn't a worthwhile tradeoff given that one post that does really well can easily outweight 4 or 5 posts that only do okay or ten posts that are meh.
Another thing: downvotes feel a lot more personal when it means that you miss out on landing on the leaderboard. This leads me to think that having a leaderboard for the long term would likely be negative and create division.
I really like the short-form feature because after I have articulated a thought my head feels much clearer. I suppose that I could have tried just writing it down in a journal or something; but for some reason I don't feel quite the same effect unless I post it publicly.
This is the first classic that I’m reviewing. One of the challenges with figuring out which classics to read is that there are always people speaking very highly of it and in a vague enough manner that it makes it hard for you to decide whether to read it. Hopefully I can avoid this trap.
Book Review: Animal Farm
You probably already know the story. In a thinly veiled critique of the Russian Revolution, the animals in a farm decide to revolt against the farmer and run the the farm themselves. At start, the seven principles of Animalism are idealistically declared, but as time goes on, things increasingly seem to head downhill…
Why is this a classic?: This book was released at a time when the intellectual class was firmly sympathetic to the Soviets, ensuring controversy and then immortality when history proved it right.
Why you might want to read this: Short (only 112 pages or 3:11 on Audible), the story always moves along at a brisk pace, the writing is engaging and a few very emotionally impactful moments. The broader message of being wary of the promises made by idealistic movements still holds (especially "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"...
Wow, I've really been flying through books recently. Just thought I should mention that I'm looking for recommendations for audio books; bonus points for books that are short. Anyway....
Book Review: Zero to One
Peter Thiel is the most famous contrarian in Silicon Valley. I really enjoyed hearing someone argue against the common wisdom of the valley. Most people think in terms of beating the competition; Thiel thinks in terms of establishing a monopoly so that there is no competition. Agile methodology and the lean startup are all the rage, but Thiel argues that this only leads to incremental improvements and that truly changing the world requires you to commit to a vision. Most companies was to disrupt your competitors, but for Thiel this means that you've fallen into competition, instead of forging your own unique path. Most venture funds aim to diversify, but Thiel is more selective, only investing in companies that have billion dollar potential. Many startups spurn marketing, but Thiel argues that this is dishonest and that PR is also a form of marketing, even if that isn't anyone's job title. Everyone is betting on AI replacing humans, while Thiel is mor...
I think that there's good reasons why the discussion on Less Wrong has turned increasingly towards AI Alignment, but I am also somewhat disappointed that there's no longer a space focusing on rationality per se.
Just as the Alignment forum exists as a separate space that automatically cross-posts to LW, I'm starting to wonder if we need a rationality forum that exists as a separate space that cross-posts to LW, as if I were just interested in improving my rationality I don't know if I'd come to Less Wrong.
(To clarify, unlike the Alignment Forum, I'd expect such a forum to be open-invite b/c the challenge would be gaining any content at all).
One thing I'm finding quite surprising about shortform is how long some of these posts are. It seems that many people are using this feature to indicate that they've just written up these ideas quickly in the hope that the feedback is less harsh. This seems valuable; the feedback here can be incredibly harsh at times and I don't doubt that this has discouraged many people from posting.
I don't want to comment on the whole Leverage Controversy as I'm far away enough from the action that other people are probably better positioned to sensemake here.
On the other hand, I have been watching some of Geoff Anders' streams does seem pretty good at theorising by virtue of being able to live-stream this. I expect this to be a lot harder than it looks, when I'm trying to figure out my position on an issue, I often find myself going over the same ground again and again and again, until eventually I figure out a way of putting what I want to express into words.
That said, I've occasionally debated with some high-level debaters and given almost any topic they're able to pretty much effortlessly generate a case and how the debate is likely to play out. I guess it seems on par with this.
So I think his ability to livestream demonstrates a certain level of skill, but I almost view it as speed-chess vs. chess, in that there's only so much you can tell about a person's ability in normal chess from how good they are at speed chess.
I think I've improved my own ability to theorise by watching the streams, but I wouldn't be surprised if I improved similarly from watching Eliezer, A...
Random idea: A lot of people seem discouraged from doing anything about AI Safety because it seems like such a big overwhelming problem.
What if there was a competition to encourage people to engage in low-effort actions towards AI safety, such as hosting a dinner for people who are interested, volunteering to run a session on AI safety for their local EA group, answering a couple of questions on the stampy wiki, offering to proof-read a few people’s posts or offering a few free tutorial sessions to aspiring AI Safety Researchers.
I think there’s a dec...
Here's a crazy[1] idea that I had. But I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
What if we programmed an AGI had the goal of simulating the Earth, but with one minor modification? In the simulation, we would have access to some kind of unfair advantage, like an early Eliezer Yudkowsky getting a mysterious message dropped on his desk containing a bunch of the progress we've made in AI Alignment.
So we'd all die in real life when the AGI broke out of its box and turned the Earth into compute to better simulate us, but we might survive in virtual re...
I really dislike the fiction that we're all rational beings. We really need to accept that sometimes people can't share things with us. Stronger: not just accept but appreciate people who make this choice for their wisdom and tact. ALL of us have ideas that will strongly trigger us and if we're honest and open-minded, we'll be able recall situations when we unfairly judged someone because of a view that they held. I certainty can, way too many times to list.
I say this as someone who has a really strong sense of curiosity, knowing that I...
I've recently been reading about ordinary language philosophy and I noticed that some of their views align quite significantly with LW. They believed that many traditional philosophical question only seemed troubling because of the philosophical tendency to assume words like "time" or "free will" necessarily referred to some kind of abstract entity when this wasn't necessary at all. Instead they argued that by paying attention to how we used these words in ordinary, everyday situations we could see that the way people used the...
Book Review: Waking Up by Sam Harris
This book aims to convince everyone, even skeptics and athiests, that there is value in some spiritual practises, particularly those related to meditation. Sam Harris argues that mediation doesn't just help with concentration, but can also help us reach transcendental states that reveal the dissolution of the self. It mostly does a good job of what it sets out to do, but unfortunately I didn't gain very much benefit from this book because it focused almost exclusively on persuading you that there is value here,...
There appears to be something of a Sensemaking community developing on the internet, which could roughly be described as a spirituality-inspired attempt at epistemology. This includes Rebel Wisdom, Future Thinkers, Emerge and maybe you could even count post-rationality. While there are undoubtedly lots of critiques that could be made of their epistemics, I'd suggest watching this space as I think some interesting ideas will emerge out of it.
Review: Human-Compatible by Stuart Russell
I wasn't a fan of this book, but maybe that's just because I'm not in the target audience. As a first introduction to AI safety I recommend The AI Does Not Hate You by Tom Chivers (facebook.com/casebash/posts/10100403295741091) and for those who are interested in going deeper I'd recommend Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. The strongest chapter was his assault on arguments against those who think we shouldn't worry about superintelligence, but you can just read it here: https://spectrum.ie...
Despite having read dozens of articles discussing Evidential Decision Theory (EDT), I've only just figured out a clear and concise explanation of what it is. Taking a step back, let's look at how this is normally explained and one potential issue with this explanation. All major decision theories (EDT, CDT, FDT) rate potential decisions using expected value calculations where:
So it should be just a simple matter...
Anti-induction and Self-Reinforcement
Induction is the belief that the more often a pattern happens the more likely it is to continue. Anti-induction is the opposite claim: the more likely a pattern happens the less likely future events are to follow it.
Somehow I seem to have gotten the idea in my head that anti-induction is self-reinforcing. The argument for it is as follows: Suppose we have a game where at each step a screen flashes an A or a B and we try to predict what it will show. Suppose that the screen always flashes A, but the agent initially think...
Here's one way of explaining this: it's a contradiction to have a provable statement that is unprovable, but it's not a contradiction for it to be provable that a statement is unprovable. Similarly, we can't have a scenario that is simultaneously imagined and not imagined, but we can coherently imagine a scenario where things exist without being imagined by beings within that scenario.
If I can imagine a tree that exists outside of any mind, then I can imagine a tree that is not being imagined. But "an imagined X that i...
Book Review: Awaken the Giant Within Audiobook by Tony Robbins
First things first, the audiobook isn't the full book or anything close to it. The standard book is 544 pages, while the audiobook is a little over an hour and a half. The fact that it was abridged really wasn't obvious.
We can split what he offers into two main categories: motivational speaking and his system itself. The motivational aspect of his speaking is very subjective, so I'll leave it to you to evaluate yourself. You can find videos of his on Youtube and you should know wi...
The sad thing about philosophy is that as your answers become clearer, the questions become less mysterious and awe-inspiring. It's easy to assume that an imposing question must have an impressive answer, but sometimes the truth is just simple and unimpressive and we miss this because we didn't evolve for this kind of abstract reasoning.
I'm going to start writing up short book reviews as I know from past experience that it's very easy to read a book and then come out a few years later with absolutely no knowledge of what was learned.
Book Review: Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope
To be honest, the main reason why I read this book was because I had enjoyed his first and second books (Models and The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck) and so I was willing to take a risk. There were definitely some interesting ideas here, but I'd already received many of these through other s...
I was talking with Rupert McCallum about the simulation hypothesis yesterday. Rupert suggested that this argument is self-defeating; that is it pulls the rug from under its own feet. It assumes the universe has particular properties, then it tries to estimate the probability of being in a simulation from these properties and if the probability is sufficiently high, then we conclude that we are in a simulation. But if we are likely to be in a simulation, then our initial assumptions about the universe are likely to be false, so we've disproved the assu...
Three levels of forgiveness - emotions, drives and obligations. The emotional level consists of your instinctual anger, rage, disappointment, betrayal, confusion or fear. This is about raw raws. The drives consists of your "need" for them to say sorry, make amends, regret their actions, have a conversation or emphasise with you. In other words, it's about needing the situation to turn out a particular way. The obligations are very similar to the drives, except it is about their duty to perform these actions rather than your desire to make it...
Writing has been one of the best things for improving my thinking as it has forced me to solidify my ideas into a form that I've been able to come back to later and critique when I'm less enraptured by them. On the other hand, for some people it might be the worst thing for their thinking as it could force them to solidify their ideas into a form that they'll later feel compelled to defend.
Book Review: The Rosie Project:
Plot summary: After a disastrous series of dates, autistic genetics professor Don Tilman decides that it’d be easier to just create a survey to eliminate all of the women who would be unsuitable for him. Soon after, he meets a barmaid called Rosie who is looking for help with finding out who her father is. Don agrees to help her, but over the course of the project Don finds himself increasingly attracted to her, even though the survey suggests that he is completely unsuitable. The story is narrated in Don’s voice. He tells us...
I think I spent more time writing this than reading the book, as I find reviewing fiction much more difficult. I strongly recommend this book: it doesn't take very long to read, but you may spend much longer trying to figure out what to make of it.
Book Review: The Stranger by Camus (Contains spoilers)
I've been wanting to read some existentialist writing for a while and it seemed reasonable to start with a short book like this one. The story is about a man who kills a man for what seems to be no real reason at all and who is then subsequently arrested and m
...Pet theory about meditation: Lots of people say that if you do enough meditation that you will eventually realise that there isn't a self. Having not experienced this myself, I am intensely curious about what people observe that persuades them to conclude this. I guess I get a sense that many people are being insufficiently skeptical. There's a difference between there not appearing to be such a thing as a self and a self not existing. Indeed, how do we know meditation just doesn't temporarily silence whatever part of our mind is responsible...
Was thinking about entropy and the Waluigi effect (in a very broad, metaphorical sense).
The universe trends towards increasing entropy, in such an environment it is evolutionarily advantageous to have the ability to resist it. Notice though that life seems to have overshot and resulted in far more complex ordered systems (both biological or manmade) than what exists elsewhere.
It's not entirely clear to me, but it seems at least somewhat plausible that if entropy were weaker, the evolutionary pressure would be weaker and the resulting life and systems produce by such life would ultimately be less complex than they are in our world.
On free will: I don't endorse the claim that "we could have acted differently" as an unqualified statement.
However, I do believe that in order to talk about decisions, we do need to grant validity to a counterfactual view where we could have acted differently as a pragmatically useful fiction.
What's the difference? Well, you can't use the second to claim determinism is false.
It seems as though it should be possible to remove the Waluigi effect[1] by appropriately training a model.
Particularly, some combination of:
However, removing this effect might be problematic for certain situations where we want the ability to generate such content, for example, if we want it to write a story.
In this case, it might pay to add back the ability to generate such content within certain tags (ie. <stor...
Speculation from The Nature of Counterfactuals
I decided to split out some content from the end of my post The Nature of Counterfactuals because upon reflection I don't feel it is as high quality as the core of the post.
I finished The Nature of Counterfactuals by noting that I was incredibly unsure of how we should handle circular epistemology. That said, there are a few ideas I want to offer up on how to approach this. The big challenge with counterfactuals is not imagining other states the universe could be in or how we could apply our "laws" of physics t...
My position on Newcomb's Problem in a sentence: Newcomb's paradox results from attempting to model an agent as having access to multiple possible choices, whilst insisting it has a single pre-decision brain state.
If anyone was planning on submitting something to this competition, I'll give you another 48 hours to get it in - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gzw6FwPD9FeL4GTWC/usd1000-usd-prize-circular-dependency-of-counterfactuals.
Thick and Thin Concepts
Take for example concepts like courage, diligence and laziness. These concepts are considered thick concepts because they have both a descriptive component and a moral component. To be courageous is most often meant* not only to claim that the person undertook a great risk, but that it was morally praiseworthy. So the thick concept is often naturally modeled as a conjunction of a descriptive claim and a descriptive claim.
However, this isn't the only way to understand these concepts. An alternate would be along the following lines: Im...
I've always found the concept belief in belief slightly hard to parse cognitively. Here's what finally satisfied my brain: whether you will be rewarded or punished in heaven is tied to whether or not God exists, whether or not you feel a push to go to church is tied to whether or not you believe in God. If you do go to church and want to go your brain will say, "See I really do believe" and it'll do the reverse if you don't go. However, it'll only affect your belief in God indirectly through your "I believe in God" node. Putting it another way, going to ch
...EDT agents handle Newcomb's problem as follows: they observe that agents who encounter the problem and one-box do better on average than those who encounter the problem and two-box, so they one-box.
That's the high-level description, but let's break it down further. Unlike CDT, EDT doesn't worry about the fact that their may be a correlation between your decision and hidden state. It assumes that if the visible state before you made your decision is the same, then the counterfactuals generated by considering your possible decisions are c...
I've been thinking about Rousseau and his conception of freedom again because I'm not sure I hit the nail on the head last time. The most typical definition of freedom and that championed by libertarians focuses on an individual's ability to make choices in their daily life. On the more libertarian end, the government is seen as an oppressor and a force of external compulsion.
On the other hand, Rousseau's view focuses on "the people" and their freedom to choose the kind of society that they want to live in. Instead of being se...
What does it mean to define a word? There's a sense in which definitions are entirely arbitrary and what word is assigned to what meaning lacks any importance. So it's very easy to miss the importance of these definitions - emphasising a particular aspect and provides a particular lense with which to see the world.
For example, if define goodness as the ability to respond well to others, it emphasizes that different people have different needs. One person may want advice, while another simple encouragement. Or if we define love as acceptance of the other, it suggests that one of the most important aspects of love is the idea that true love should be somewhat resilient and not excessively conditional.
As I wrote before, evidential decision theory can be critiqued for failing to deal properly with situations where hidden state is correlated with decisions. EDT includes differences in hidden state as part of the impact of the decision, when in the case of the smoking lesion, we typically want to say that it is not.
However, Newcomb's problem also has hidden state is correlated with your decision. And if we don't want to count this when evaluating decisions in the case of the Smoking Lesion, perhaps we shouldn't count this in the case of Newc...
I'm beginning to warm to the idea that the reason why we have evolved to think in terms of counterfactuals and probabilities is rooted in these are fundamental at the quantum-level. Normally I'm suspicious at rooting macro level claims in quantum level effects because at such a high level of abstraction it would be very easy for these effects to wash out, but the multi-world hypothesis is something that wouldn't wash out. Otherwise it would seem to be all a bit too much of a coincidence.
("Oh, so you believe that counterfactuals and probability are at least...