I don't know if I actually believe this, but I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults sometimes don't cause harm. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:
"Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender." Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).
Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.
It's hopefully obvious that this is not a justification for having sex with children, even if there is one controversial study suggesting it might sometimes be okay.
A non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem.
That's probably the case. In western societies, it's an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.
I am also "in the closet" on this. Sex is generally pleasurable; postulating a magic age or stage of development before which sex must be traumatic seems implausible on its face, without some other evidence. Coercion and intimidation are well-known to be damaging, but I don't understand how merely convincing a 10-year-old to let you stick something up her vagina (and then doing it) is going to do any more harm than, say, spanking her. Furthermore, looking at the historical record, the ancient Greek custom of pederasty (sexual/romantic relationships between adolescent boys and adult men) doesn't seem to have resulted in widespread trauma.
There are very few places in which it would be safe to propose this hypothesis, though.
Sex is generally pleasurable
Not "generally" over the domain in question. The pleasurability of sex is supported by brain-specific hardware that has no particular evolutionary reason to be active before adolescence.
Without taking a stance on the question of child sexuality - what you say is true, but is there any particular selection pressure for it to be off, either? Evolution goes for the simplest solution, and "always on" seems to me simpler than "off until a specific age, then on".
Of course, that's an oversimplification. The required machinery may simply not be developed yet, in the same way that you need to first grow to be four feet tall before you can grow to be five feet tall. But then, when you reach the size of four feet, you already have four fifths of your five feet-tallness in place, so it stands to reason that that at least part of what makes sex pleasurable will be in place before adolescence. Whether it's active is obviously a separate question, but I don't think "has no particular evolutionary reason to be active" tells us much by itself.
Anecdotal: I don't remember having the slightest concept of sexual interest in anything before puberty.
Anyone got trustworthy better data, go ahead (but we have reason to suspect political interference, which is why I go so far as to cite my own anecdotal memory).
I personally know one girl whom, when she was 8, actively went into sex chat rooms and flirted with older men (anywhere from 16 to 40). I don't think she actually had physical sexual experiences with anyone, though.
I personally know two girls who have had sexual intercourse with adults, one when she was aged 5, the other 8. It was rape in the sense that they were explicitly nonconsentual (they explicitly said didn't want to do it), but it didn't traumatized them. One theory might be that "doing stuff you don't want to do, but adults tell you to do, so you do them anyway" is pretty common at that age (e.g. being forced to clean your room).
I suspect the sex act itself isn't "pleasurable" for them, but having "sexual relationships" with adults may be pleasurable (since the first-mentioned 8 year old sought it out). It may be seen by many of them as a neutral act (like the 5 and second-mentioned 8 year old) and a form of curious exploration.
This is assuming, for lack of a better term, "gentle loving pedophilia". The way pedophilia is often portrayed by mainstream media is violent rape, with screaming, kicking and blood. While I don't personally know of any girl who actually experienced "violent rape pedophilia", I think it's safe to assume that they don't find this pleasurable at all.
Personally, there's a certain fetish that I have, and I remember it causing me erections even before puberty. However, as far as I can recall, the experience didn't feel like anything that I'd call sexual these days. It was something that was pleasant to think about, and it caused physical reactions, but the actual sexual tension wasn't there.
I also recall a friend mentioning a pre-pubescent boy who'd had a habit of masturbating when there was snow outside, because he thought the snow was beautiful. (I'm not sure if she'd known the boy herself or if she'd heard it from someone else, so this may be an unreliable fifth-hand account.) If it was true, then it sounds (like my experience) that part of the hardware was in place, but not the parts that would make it sexual in the adult sense of the word.
Googling for "child sexuality" gives me a report from Linköping University which states on page 17:
...The staff caring for 251 children aged two to six of both sexes observed the children’s behaviour and then answered a questionnaire on the behaviours they had observed. ... A total of 6% of the children had at some time been seen to masturbate and this usually occurred during rests
Maybe no interest in anything in particular, but what of the sexual gratification itself ? Children do masturbate, it's a known fact. Though maybe it's not universal. But the brain-specific hardware seems to be in place already at any rate.
I can't find the article now, but an evolutionary-psychology noticed that the "cooties" concept seems to exist across all cultures (though obviously not always given the name "cooties"), and furthermore noticed that children often don't consider their siblings to have cooties. I.e. boys will feel that most girls have cooties, but not their sisters.
The psychologist offered this as an explanation: We evolved to find the people we grow up with to be not sexually attractive. This is a mechanism to avoid incest (which can result in genetic problems). However, if you live in a society, you don't want to find people who grow up with you, but who do not share genes with you, to be sexually unattractive (or else you might find no one within your whole society attractive), and thus this "cooties" sensation was placed by evolution so that we can avoid people of the opposite sex during this critical period so that later on, as adults, we may be sexually attracted to them.
It's evolution's way of saying "Not yet".
Why would evolution want to say this? What harm is there in sexual relations before puberty, when pregnancy can't result?
I find it ironic that 'notmyrealnick' got 34 points for this comment. But I suppose there are repercussions other than bad karma for posting unpopular views...
The babyeater question would be substantially changed if the children didn't mind being eaten and didn't take harm by it - more or less from a moral crusade into parochial squeamishness. Eliezer went a long way out of his way to avoid that in the story, but here we can't dodge it with a rhetorical flourish.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can't just create moral crimes by their say-so.
Edit in Feb 2013: I've come to the conclusion that the problem with the above is that children are in an extremely steep power relationship - an artefact of this society, and it's avoidable, but it can't be wished away without a huge job of dismantling. Meaning, that right now children can't even express a preference. "Yes" is meaningless with the ability of an adult to apply pressure that would count as felony kidnapping and torture if done to another adult, with complete impunity and even acclaim. "No" is meaningless when adults have imposed their schemas of asexual innocence willy-nilly over children's experience, and when they have such huge control of that expe...
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It's not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it "kidnapping" and not "visiting with friends". It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
BTW, this line of argument doesn't get you to "no sex", it gets you to "no sex without parental consent". Fair enough, now what if they say "yes"?
Here's something else I can't normally say in public:
Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It's acceptable to euthanize one's pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.
In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn't end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.
In America, infants have a special privileged moral status, as evidenced by the "Baby On Board" signs people put on their autos. "Oh, there's a baby in that car! I'll plow into this car full of old people instead."
Do you really deny that there are probably benefits, given limits to average human condition, to at least some hard legal lines corresponding to continuous realities?
/me shrugs... I suppose it is useful to have a line, and once you decide to have a line, you do have to draw it somewhere, but I don't see why viability is a particularly meaningful place to draw it.
Similar arguments are often used to argue in favor of animal rights; some humans don't have brains that work better than animals' brains, so if humans with defective or otherwise underdeveloped brains (the profoundly mentally retarded, infants, etc.) have moral status, then so do animals such as chimpanzees and dogs.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_marginal_cases
I would put the cutoff at ~1 week after birth rather than 2 years, simply for a comfortable margin of safety, but yes.
However, as I've written about before elsewhere, this kind of thinking does lead to the amusing conclusion that cutting off a baby's limb is more wrong than killing it (because in the former case there's a full-human who's directly harmed, which is not true in the latter case).
This suggests the following argument: if it's wrong to cut off a baby's limb, surely (the possibility of negative quality of life aside) it's wrong to give the baby a permanent affliction that prevents it from ever thinking, having fun, etc? That's exactly the kind of affliction that death is.
I think many philosophical questions would be clearer, or at least more interesting, if we reconceptualized death as "Persistent Mineral Syndrome".
No, because the baby (by assumption) has no moral weight. The entity with moral weight is the adult which that baby will become. Preventing that adult from existing at all is not immoral (if it were, we'd essentially have to accept the repugnant conclusion), whereas causing harm to that adult, by harming the baby nonfatally, is.
Being turned into a serial killer zombie actually sounds pretty awesome, assuming an appropriate soundtrack.
However, as I've written about before elsewhere, this kind of thinking does lead to the amusing conclusion that cutting off a baby's limb is more wrong than killing it (because in the former case there's a full-human who's directly harmed, which is not true in the latter case).
You say that like it's an unexpected conclusion. Which is more wrong: cutting off one of a dog's legs, or euthanizing it? Most people, I suspect, would say the former.
What happens is that we apply different standards to thinking, feeling life forms of limited intelligence based on whether or not the organism happens to be human.
I was amazed. I'd had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn't manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong. [...] But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences.
"Responds to musical stimuli", assuming it's true, is hardly an argument about being a person. A parrot could have similar ability to discriminate between types of music, for all I know.
Edit in response to downvoting: Seriously. There could be correct arguments for your statement, but this is clearly not one of them. This is a point of simple fact: ability to discriminate types of music is not strong (let alone decisive) evidence for the property of being a person. Non-person things can easily have that ability. That this fact argues for a conclusion that offends someone's sensibilities (or even a conclusion that is clearly wrong, for other reasons!) is not a point against the fact.
We don't actually tell people when or where we're playing; we just provide enough evidence for a perfect Bayesian reasoner to figure it out.
I don't like libertarianism. It makes some really good points, and clearly there are lots of things government should stay out of, but the whole narrative of government as the evil villain that can never do anything right strikes me as more of a heroic myth than a useful way to shape policy. This only applies to libertarians who go overboard, though. I like Will Wilkinson, but I hate Lew Rockwell.
I think the better class of mystics probably know some things about the mind the rest of us don't. I tend to trust yogis who say they've achieved perfect bliss after years of meditation, although I think there's a neurological explanation (and would like to know what it is). I think Crowley's project to systematize and scientifically explain mysticism had some good results even though he did go utterly off the deep end.
I am not sure I will sign up for cryonics, although I am still seriously considering it. The probability of ending up immortal and stuck in a dystopia where I couldn't commit suicide scares me too much.
I have a very hard time going under 2-3% belief in anything that lots of other people believe. This includes religion, UFOs, and ESP. Not astrology though, oddly enough
Personally I'd prefer an eternity of being tortured by an unFriendly AI to simple death. Is that controversial?
I'm curious about your personal experiences with physical pain. What is the most painful thing you've experienced and what was the duration?
I'm sympathetic to your preference in the abstract, I just think you might be surprised at how little pain you're actually willing to endure once it's happening (not a slight against you, I think people in general overestimate what degree of physical pain they can handle as a function of the stakes involved, based largely on anecdotal and second hand experience from my time in the military).
At the risk of being overly morbid, I have high confidence (>95%) that I could have you begging for death inside of an hour if that were my goal (don't worry, it's certainly not). An unfriendly AI capable of keeping you alive for eternity just to torture you would be capable of making you experience worse pain than anyone ever has in the history of our species so far. I believe you that you might sign a piece of paper to pre-commit to an eternity of torture vice simple death. I just think you'd be very very upset about that decision. Probably less than 5 minutes into it.
I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority (as opposed to learners directly seeking out knowledge and insight from self-chosen books and activities). I say sometimes suspect rather than believe because my intense emotional involvement with this issue causes me to doubt my rationality: therefore I heavily discount my personal impressions on majoritarian grounds.
I don't actually believe it as such, but I think J. Michael Bailey et al. are onto something.
OK, you're the second person in this thread I've seen advocating this view, so maybe my pro-school view is the minority one here.
The idea of curiosity is very compelling, but how often does productive curiosity actually occur in people who don't go to school? Modern society has lots of things to be curious about: television, video games, fan fiction, skateboarding, model rockets, etc. The level of interesting-ness doesn't correlate with the level of importance (examples of fields with potential large improvements for humanity: theoretical physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, etc.) If you believe model rockets are a sure lead-in to theoretical physics or chemistry, I think you're being overly optimistic.
The most important effect of school is providing an external force that gets people to study these (relatively) boring but important fields. Also, you get benefits like learning to speak in public, being able to use expensive school facilities, having lots of other people to converse with on the topics you're learning, etc. To do boring things on your own, you need self-discipline, which is hard to come by. School does a great job of augmenting self-discipline.
By the way, I thought about school much the same way you did until I left high school (two years early) and went to community college. I can't explain why, but for some reason it's a million times better.
Well, in community college, you're now the "customer", and determine what you want to study, and how to study. It still provides a framework, but you're much freer in that framework. The question is to what extent can we get similar benefits in earlier schooling. AFAICT, the best way to do so would be to make more of it optional. (Another pet project of mine would be to separate grading/certification and teaching. They're very different things, and having the same entity do both of them seems like a recipe for altering one to make the other look good.)
"...separate grading/certification and teaching...."
John Stuart Mill advocates that in the last chapter of On Liberty. He wanted the state to be in charge of testing and certification, but get out of the teaching business altogether (except for providing funding for educating the poor). I like the idea.
I think people should be allowed to sell their organs if they want to. We don’t consider it immoral to pay a surgeon to transplant a kidney, or to pay the nurse who helps him, so I don’t see why it’s immoral to pay the person who provides that kidney. I also think we should pay people in medical experiments. Pharmaceutical companies could hire private rating agencies to judge proposed Human experiments much as Standard and Poor rates bonds; that way people would know what they’re getting into. The pain \ danger index would range from slightly uncomfortable \ probably harmless to agony \ probably fatal and payment would be tied to that index. A market would develop open to anybody who was interested. It would be in the financial interest of the drug companies to make the tests as safe and comfortable as possible. All parties would benefit, medical research would get a huge boost and everybody would have a new way to make money if they chose to do it.
I also think that if you believe in capital punishment it is foolish to kill the condemned before performing some medical experiments on him first.
I think that most people, including rationalists, have significant psychological problems that interfere with their happiness in life and impair their rationality and their pursuit of rationality. What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional, and it is dysfunctional in many more ways than just being irrational and subject to cognitive biases.
I think furthermore that before devoting yourself to rationality at the near exclusion of other types of self-improvement, you should devote some serious effort to overcoming the more mundane psychological problems such as being overly attached to material trinkets and measuring your self-worth in material terms, being unaware of your emotions and unable to express your emotions clearly and honestly, having persistent family and relationship problems, having chronic psychosomatic ailments, etc. Without attending to these sorts of issues first (or at the same time), trying to become a rationalist jedi is like trying to get a bodybuilder physique before you've fixed your diet and lost the 200 extra pounds you have.
I fear this may be wishful thinking; you can get much further than I would have thought a priori in a sub-art of rationality without developing a strong kick as well as a strong punch.
It would be interesting to try to diagram the "forced skill development" - for example, how far can you get in cognitive science before your ability to believe in a supernatural collapses - and of course the diagram would be very different for skills you studied from others versus skills you were able to invent yourself.
Killing people, and locking them in prison for 20 years, are both worse than torturing them.
Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.
It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.
The rate of technological change has been slowing since 1970.
It can't be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.
Increasing the population density makes the cost of land rise; and this is a major factor in the cost and quality of life.
Men and women think differently.
Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.
War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it).
It can't be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.
This comment perplexed me until I realized you were assuming that the average education level of immigrants is lower than that of "natives" (that is, the pre-existing population of the country). But that need not be the case. To borrow from personal experience — many immigrants from the former Soviet Union are quite a bit more educated than the national average in the U.S. Surely immigrants who bring an above-average education with them are good for the society (assuming that they intend to become productive members of society)? Doesn't it follow that both of the things you mention can, in fact, be true, conditional on certain contingent properties of immigration?*
*And of higher education, presumably. I mean, we could say "higher education can't be a social good if we do it wrong in ways X, Y, Z", to which the obvious response is "we shouldn't do it like that, then."
That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.
How traditional? 1600s Japan? Hopi? Dravidian? Surely it would be quite a coincidence if precisely the norms prevalent in the youth and culture of the poster or his or her parents were optimal for human flourishing.
If anything, I have the convert's bias in this regard, Michael, not the true-born believer's. I'm fairly young and was raised in quite a progressive household. I'd suspect myself more of overstating my case because it has come to me as such a revelatory shock. But that's neither here nor there, as I'm not advocating for any specific "tradition."
I'll posit that gender roles and dynamics since the feminist movement began in earnest in the 60s and 70s have proven to be a sizable and essentially unprecedented break from the previous continuum in Western societies going back at least a couple thousand years. I don't know enough about 1600s Japan or Hopi or Dravidian societies to speculate as to whether they fit into that pattern too. I understand there are arguments that feminist regimes are actually more original to the human species and that patriarchy only appears with the advent of agriculture and monarchy/despotism. My understanding is that this is an open question, and again beyond my expertise. So I should readily concede that "traditional" is a highly suspect term.
So I'll be even more blunt, since this is our comment thread to not worry about whether or not t...
What I personally have observed is that there are plenty of men and women who have a need or desire to be dominated. And that a minority of these people can't deal with the idea that it's "just" a sexual fetish or personal quirk, but must convince themselves instead that the entire world would be happier or much better off if only our entire society were male supremacist or female supremacist, accordingly.
I've also observed that there are plenty of people who have a leadership or followership preference in a relationship... but the desire to be the follower is both more widespread and more gender-balanced than the desire to be the leader.
So I guess what I'm saying is, the fact that there's a large unsatisfied market of females wishing to be dominated (sexually or otherwise) should NOT be mistaken for an indicator that this is somehow "the way the world should be".
That market is unsatisfied for the same reason its male counterpart is: there simply aren't enough people of either gender with the inclination, experience, self-awareness, etc. to meet the demand.
That's why I said the desire to be a follower is more gender-balanced than the desire to be a leader. I also used "leader" and "follower" because "dominant" and "submissive" carry more sexual overtone than is actually relevant to my point... but also because it's way easier for men to find socially "leading" partners than sexually leading ones.
Also, to make things more complex... there are plenty of people who like to go both ways... and there are people who want to be sexually dominant but socially submissive or vice versa... if you've actually met and spoken with enough real people (without the self-selection bias that occurs when people with identical kinks get together), it quickly cures you of any idea that you can just say, "This Is The One True Way Relationships Should Be."
(My wife owns a lingerie and adult toy/video store, and we've socialized with a lot of kinky and swinger folk, including gay, transgendered, etc. -- for a fairly broad definition of "etc.")
I think it's important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions. It's better to reward honesty, even if what you hear hurts or irritates (but not endless repetition of misguided opinion, that cumulatively will bore other readers too much). Upvoting interesting comments should be fine.
P.S. This advice is not one of these "crazy things" the poll is about. ;-)
I do not believe in utilitarianism of any sort, as an account of how people should behave, how they do behave, or how artificial people might be designed to behave. People do not have utility functions and cannot use utility functions, and they will never prove useful in AGI.
Bayesian reasoning is no more a method for discovering truth than predicate calculus is. In particular, it will never be the basis for constructing an AGI.
Almost all writings on how to build an AGI are nothing more than word salad.
In common with most people here, I expect AGI to be possible. However, I may be unlike most people here in that I have no idea how to build one.
The bar to take seriously any proposed way of building an AGI is at least this high: a real demo that scares Eliezer with what could be done with it right now, never mind if and when it might foom.
All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail. (Google "RaceFail" to see what I'm comparing this to. The current GenderFail isn't as bad as LiveJournal's great RaceFail 2009, but it's the same process in miniature.)
Some things are right, some things are wrong, and it is possible to tell the difference.
In your opinion, what might be some methods for discovering truth?
Observing, thinking, having ideas, and communicating with other people doing these things. Nothing surprising there. No-one has yet come up with a general algorithm for discovering new and interesting truths; if they did it would be an AGI.
Taking a wider view of this, it has been observed that every time some advance is made in the mathematics or technology of information processing, the new development is seized on as a model for how minds work, and since the invention of computers, a model for how minds might be made. The ancient Greeks compared it to a steam-driven machine. The Victorians compared it to a telephone exchange. Freud and his contemporaries drew on physics for their metaphors of psychic energies and forces. When computers were invented, it was a computer. Then holograms were invented and it was a hologram. Perceptrons fizzled because they couldn't even compute an XOR, neural networks achieved Turing-completeness but no-one ever made a brain out of them, and logic programming is now just another programming style.
Bayesian inference is just the latest in that long line. It may be the one true way to reason about uncertainty, as predicate calculus is the one true way to reason about truth and falsity, but that does not make of it a universal algorithm for thinking.
I didn't get the impression that Bayesian inference itself was going to produce intelligence
I do get that impression from people who blithely talk of "Bayesian superintelligences". Example. What work is the word "Bayesian" doing there?
In this example, a Bayesian superintelligence is conceived as having a prior distribution over all possible hypotheses (for example, a complexity-based prior) and using its observations to optimally converge on the right one. You can even make a theoretically optimal learning algorithm that provably converges on the best hypothesis. (I forget the reference for this.) Where this falls down is the exponential explosion of hypothesis space with complexity. There no use in a perfect optimiser that takes longer than the age of the universe to do anything useful.
I've read some responses touching on the same issue, but my point is different enough that I thought I'd do my own.
I believe that posession of child, or any other kind of pornography should be legal. I don't have enough information to decide whether the actual making of child pornography is harmful in the long term to the children, but I believe that having easy access to it would allow would-be child molesters to limit themselves to viewing things that have already happened and can't be undone.
I would say that the prominence of hentai and lolicon in Japan is a smaller step in the same direction, and seems to have worked well there.
I agree that's interesting, but remember these manga are not actually written by children, nor bought or read exclusively by children.
I don't know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:
As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.
Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.
Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.
People and companies exposing buggy software to untrusted parties deserve to have it exploited to their disadvantage. Maliciously attacking software systems by submitting data crafted to trigger security-critical bugs should not be illegal in any way.
Limits: The last paragraph assumes that there are no langford basilisks; if such things do in fact exist, preventing basilisk deaths may justify censorship - based on the purely pract...
I very strongly agree, except for the matter of trademarks. Trademarks make brand recognition easier and reduce transaction costs. Also enforcing trademarks is more along the lines of preventing fraud, since trademarks are limited only in identifying items in specific classes of items (rather clumsily worded, but I'm trying to be concise and legalities don't exactly lend themselves to concision.)
Agreed.
Also, if you pile on technological improvements but still try to keep patents etc, you end up in the crazy situation where government intrusiveness has to grow without bounds and make hegemonic war on the universe to stop anyone, anywhere from popping a Rolex out of their Drexlerian assembler.
I don't know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:
As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.
Normally, when people say they believe "all information should be free", I suspect they don't really mean this, but since you claim your position is very "extreme", perhaps you really do mean it?
I think information, such as what is the PIN to my bank account, or the password to my LessWrong.com account, should not be freely accessible.
Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.
You don't believe there is value in anonymity? E.g. being able to criticize an oppressive government, without fear of retribution from said government?
I think information, such as what is the PIN to my bank account, or the password to my LessWrong.com account, should not be freely accessible.
You make a good point; I didn't phrase my original statement as well as I should have. What I meant was that there shouldn't be any laws (within the limits mentioned in my original post) preventing people or companies from using, storing and passing on information. I didn't mean to imply keeping secrets should be illegal. If a person or company wants to keep something secret, and can manage to do so in practice, that should be perfectly legal as well.
As a special case, using encryption and keeping the keys to yourself should be a fundamental right, and doing so shouldn't lead to e.g. a presumption of guilt in a legal case.
You don't believe there is value in anonymity? E.g. being able to criticize an oppressive government, without fear of retribution from said government?
I believe there can be value in anonymity, but the way to achieve it is by effectively keeping a secret either through technological means or by communicating through trusted associates. If doing so is infeasible without laws on use of information, I don't think laws would help, either.
I think governments that would like to be oppressive have significantly more to fear from free information use than their citizens do.
When you use the PIN to your bank account you expect both the bank and ATM technicians and programmers to respect your secret. There are laws that either force them not to remember the PIN or impose punishment for misusing their position of trust. I don't see how such situations or cases of blackmail would be resolved without assuming one person's right to have their secrets not made public by others.
I'm not just nitpicking. I would love to see a watertight argument against communication perversions. Have you written anything on the topic?
Cryonics membership is a rational choice.
My chances of surviving death through resuscitation are good (as such things as chances to beat death go), but would be better if I convinced more people that cryonics is a rational choice.
In my day to day I am more concerned with my job than convincing others on the subject of cryonics, even though the latter is probably more valuable to my long term happiness. Am I not aware of what I value? Why do I not structure my behavior to match what I believe I value? If I believed that cryonics would buy me an additional 1000 years of life wouldn't 10 years of total dedication to its cause be worthwhile? Does this mean that I do not actually believe in cryonics, but only profess to believe in cryonics?
Americans no longer significantly value liberty and this will be to the detriment of our society.
A large number of Americans accept the torture of religious enemies as necessary and just.
Male circumcision is more harmful than we realize and one cause (among many) of sexual dysfunction among couples.
Most humans would be happier if polyamory was socially acceptable and encouraged.
I think school, as conventionally operated, is a scandalous waste of brain plasticity and really amounts mostly to a combination of "signaling" and a corral.
I'm not sure what should replace it. There are things kids need to know - math, general knowledge, epistemology, reasoning, literacy as communication, and the skills of unsupervised study and research. (School doesn't overtly teach most of the above - it puts you under impossible pressure and assumes that like a tomato pip you will be squeezed into moving in the right direction.)
There are also a ton of things they might like to learn, out of interest.
I am not sure those two categories of learning ought to be bundled up. Especially, while I can understand forcing a study of the first category, it seems obviously counterproductive to force the second.
I tried hard to think of something that I haven't already talked about, so here goes:
I have a suspicion that the best economic plans developed by economists will have no effect or negative effect, because the ability of macroeconomics to describe what happens when we push on the economy is simply not good enough to let the government deliberately manipulate the economy in any positive way.
Update: You could call this half right in retrospect. Fiscal policy is ineffective except when monetary policy is ineffective, and the Federal Reserve didn't print nearly enough money but the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression. We would not have been better off if the Federal Reserve had done nothing, thinking all their plans ineffective. There might be some kind of lesson here about EAs who fret about "What if we can't model anything?" whose despair seems kind of similar to Eliezer_2009's.
I was including the Federal Reserve Board in "economists". Forgive me if that was a mistake.
Let me be more concrete: I suspect that the Obama stimulus plan won't accomplish anything positive, not because of any particular flaw I could name, but because the models they are using to organize their understanding of macroeconomics are just wrong - somehow or other.
The amount of chaos here seems so great - so many things going differently than predicted, so many plans failing to have their intended constructive effect - that I suspect a chaotic inversion: it's not chaos, we're just stupid.
Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn't worth killing civilians over, it's not worth killing soldiers over, either.
I might agree with that if human civilization as a whole was much more rational than it is now.,(especially the institutions that deal with political and military power - this includes organized religion to a certain degree in most places).
If I believed that warfare would only be used to attain noble goals that nothing else can reach (a "cause worth killing for", as you say), then yeah, if it's worth killing soldiers, it might be worth killing civilians too.
But right now, it seems that war is mostly about small politics, personal status (both for dictators and democratically elected leaders), xenophobia, and money.
I feel that if civilians had been a legitimate target in most recent wars, the outcomes would only have been worse, not better, and so I can't support it.
Fortunately, my training as a philosopher left little room for embarrassment about my beliefs (my mentor was a Popperian - of the 'say it loud' sort). So there really isn't anything I could say here that hasn't come out elsewhere. But a lot of it is somewhat unpopular:
Ethics: eudaimonist egoism - objectivist in the sense that there are facts about ethics, but relativist in the sense that there's no reason to assume all humans are the same ethically. Consequently, I think it's fine that I care more about my cats' welfare than most humans' - as long as it doesn't lead to a lack of virtue on my part (which, of course, is an empirical question).
Economics: Markets really are the most efficient way of getting the relevant information, due to methodological individualism and local, distributed knowledge. And my spending really does indicate my preferences, which are some of the best data about ethics.
Politics: Classical liberal (preferring Locke over Mills); freedom is paramount - other people should fight for my freedom, so that I might have room to become more awesome. I acknowledge the tension between this and Nietzsche's contention that democracy is bad because it does not provid...
Corporations literally get away with murder. The corporation is a recent innovation, not something that has always been with us. This recent social contract that governs corporations is deeply flawed, in that it holds no one accountable for consequences that would be regarded as criminal if resulting from the actions of a person. A recent case in point is the wave of suicides in the French national telecom giant.
Responding to the question "What do you believe that most people on this site don't?":
I believe that people who try and sound all "edgy" and "serious" by intoning what they believe to be "blunt truths" about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part. I just want to roll my eyes when I see that kind of thing, and not because I'm a "slave to political correctness", but because I see so many poorly defined terms being bandied about and a lot of really bad science besides.
(And I am not going to get into a big explanation right here, right now, of why I think what I think in this regard -- I'm confident enough in this area here to take whatever status hit my largely-unqualified statement above brings. If I write an explanation at some point it will be on my own terms and I frankly don't care who does or doesn't think I'm smart in the meantime.)
I think there is a huge amount of wisdom in the core ideas of Buddhism. self is a convenient fiction and a source of much confusion and suffering; subtle forms of attachment are frequent sources of suffering; meditation can improve attention/concentration and meta-cognitive awareness, and some Buddhist techniques are effective in this regard; our experience in life is much more determined by our mind than we believe; compassion can and should be cultivated.
(Ideas below are still works in progress, listed in descending order of potential disagreement:)
Bearing children is immoral. Eliezer has stated that he is not adult enough to have children, but I wonder if we will ever be adult enough, including in a post-singularity environment.
The second idea probably isn't as controversial: early suicide (outside of any moral dilemma, battlefield, euthanasia situation, etc.) is in some cases rational and moral. Combined with cryonics, it is the only sensible option for, e.g., senile dementia patients. But this group can be expanded, even without cryonics.
Some have mentioned modern school systems to be broken, but I'll go even further and say that mandatory education is a huge waste of time and money, for all involved. Many, perhaps most, need to know only basic literacy and arithmetic. The rest should be taught on a want-to-know basis or similar. As a corollary, I don't think many or even most people can be brought into the fold of science or rationality.
(Curiously, the original poster wondered if our crazy beliefs might be true, but many responses, including my own, are value, not fact, judgments.)
I don't have much of a vested interest in being or remaining human. I've often shocked friends and acquaintances by saying that if there were a large number of intelligent life forms in the universe and I had my choice, I doubt I'd choose to be human.
Whenever I hear an unsupported vote against conventional wisdom on a web forum, e.g. "adult-preteen intercourse isn't very harmful", I don't update my view much. Absent a well-argued case for the unconventional position, I assume that such beliefs reflect some strong self-interested bias (sufficient to overcome strong societal pressure) and not fearless rational investigation - to say nothing of trolls.
I also strongly discount unreasoned votes in favor of the consensus, especially on issues subject to strong conformity pressure.
It seems that this survey is not intended to solicit arguments for particular controversial anthropological or political beliefs. Does the site accept them at all? I'd expect not, except as case studies for some general claim, due to the risk of attracting cranks.
That within human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations. (Caveat: "race" is at least as much a socially-constructed term as a scientifically valid category; however there are diffences in allele frequency that reliably correlate with having ancestors from particular parts of the world).
That these differences may have been partically caused by the fact that peoples from different parts of the world have had literate societies for different times.
Thought of a few more:
Circumcision may be harmful, and may cause more harm than benefit.
It's generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you'll get will be soothing but non-informative.
Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.
There are a lot of persistent sources of harm in the world. Some of it is down to game-theoretic limitations (Arrow's paradox, prisoner's dilemma, etc.). Most of it is down to stupidity.
I believe that double-think is possible and sensible. It generally takes the form of making a deliberate attempt not to learn more about something, and not bothering to assign an expected value to the information you are missing out on.
People avoid watching horror movies if they want to stay composed. They try to avoid internet shock sites if they don't want to be disgusted. In a similar way, avoiding information that contradicts a belief that
1.) would be painful to discard
2.) exists in an area where accuracy isn't terribly important
makes sense. For example, if I am a fan of some football team, it makes sense for me to avoid reading articles critical of that football team.
A corollary is that god-belief of the right sort makes sense for people who aren't scientists, politicians, or philosophers.
Another situation where double-think makes sense is when you're trying to avoid seeing information which will make you regret a decision, or might influence you to change your decision, but with the potential for only marginal improvement. For example, if I am working in such-and-such a profession, it makes sense for me to avoid reading about how a different job is much cooler.
I believe that the solution to the Fermi paradox is possibly (I don't place any considerable strength in this belief, besides it's a quite useless thing to think about) that physics has unlimited local depth. That is, each sufficiently intelligent AI with most of the likely goal systems arising from its development finds it more desirable to spend time configuring the tiny details of its local physical region (or the details of reality that have almost no impact on the non-local physical region), than going to the other regions of the universe and doing something with the rest of the matter. That also requires a way to protect itself without necessity to implement preventive offensive measures, so there should also be no way to seriously hurt a computation once it has digged itself sufficiently deep in the physics.
I love saying crazy things that I can support, and I thrive on the attention given to the iconoclast, so I find it impossible to answer this.
The only beliefs that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying here are beliefs that I want to be true, want to argue for, but I know would get shredded. This is one reason I try to hang out with smart, argumentative people - so that my concern about being shredded in an argument forces me to more carefully evaluate my beliefs. (With less intelligent people, I could say false things and still win arguments).
That the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics; it's not discussed here because politics is the mind-killer, but it is also indispensible.
On a more specific political note, that there are plenty of things government can do better than the market, and where government fails the people the correct approach is often not dispensing with government but attempting to improve government by improving democracy.
I know that both of these, especially this last, go against what many here believe, and I don't intend to get into a detailed defence of it here - it's not exactly a fresh topic of debate, and it's not in line with the mission for this site.
Suffering is not evil per se, and we are free to make drastic distinctions in the moral value of suffering depending on the sufferer. In other words, if an AI spawned billions of copies of conscious beings that want to make huge cheesecakes, it may be right to just kill them all off. (I'm not sure about trillions.) On a more relevant note, that means second degree murder of Stephen Hawkins is a far worse action than first degree murder of Joe Plumber.
As a more inflammatory phrasing, I view the world largely in terms of intelligence, and feel that the smart are (typically) "worth more" than the average and below.
I also believe it is naive and wishful to believe that races, which developed (propensities towards) many distinct genetic traits (not just skin color, also hair color, facial shape, disease resistances, etc) do not have differences in intelligence distribution. Affirmative action is therefore racist, and accusations (against employers, scholarship committees, etc) of racist selection merely based on previous selectees (current employees, past scholarship winners, etc) are unfounded.
Hmmm....remove the inflammatory phrasing, and those sound like things I'd get a de...
I would have chosen the original ending of Three World Collide over the "true" ending, and would be, if not entirely pleased, at least optimistic with respects to the outcome of Failed Utopia #4-2.
That was because they didn't have the same impending doom of existential risk hanging directly over their heads and people weren't dying all the time, it wasn't a function of "yay more people are HAPPY".
I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race.
I believe that the reason that the United States is more prosperous than Mexico is that the English killed/drove out the natives when they came to the Americas, while the Spanish bred with them, diluting down the Spanish influence, and that there are other similar examples of this.
I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences.
I believe (though only with weak evidence) that hispanic gangs are taking control of LA drug traffic from black gangs and succeeding because of a difference in average intelligence. I also believe that the if the Russian mafia wanted a part in this game, they would dominate for the same reason.
There is a very strong pressure to be "Politically Correct", and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with "Politically Correct" are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with "Correct".
I believe that to be offended, you have to believe in your own inferiority to some extent.
As a disclaimer, (and I think this much will be agreed with) this doesn't imply that possessing superior intelligence makes it morally acceptable to abuse it any more than owning a sword makes it OK to hurt someone- just easier.
In school they taught that the climate in Mexico led to large sugar plantations while the climate of the US led to smaller farms especially in the north. Then this led to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth in the northern US which created the middle class demand that allowed manufacturing to take off. In Mexico the poor were too poor to buy a lot of these manufactured goods while the rich plantation owners could afford superior goods.
I'm not sure how an intelligence based explanation would explain this better.
The US has had, in its history, a large-scale immigration from just about every region of the world, and most of them have interbred. The result is a population with lots of outbreeding depression and heterosis, leading to a much wider variation in intelligence and other abilities than anywhere in the world. The ultimate outcome of that is a lower average intelligence in the US than in other countries, due to outbreeding depression, counterbalanced by a small number of exceptional people, who got lucky and benefited from heterosis.
In support of "notmyrealnick" I have to say that most people wrongly believe that the sexual life of humans only starts when they reach adolescenthood, Bronislaw Malinowski in his studies with savages(Book: The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia) showed that the starting age can be as young as 5 years old. But we in our modern society repress the children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronisław_Malinowski
Edit: related to this is the (IMHO wrong) thought that underage humans cannot possibly give informed consent to sexual acts.
Edit2: Btw, when I speak about underage sex I'm thinking about sex where all the involved are more or less of the same age.
Here's one on a very different topic:
England's offenses against the American colonies did not justify the American Revolution.
Well, if we're going into history... I believe (despite being a northern democrat) that the Civil War was fundamentally unjust. It makes a mockery of the principles of the Declaration of Independence if secessionary states will be outright invaded.
(If slavery was an issue, then the North should've just bought out the South - likely would've been much cheaper than the actual war.)
I don't think people have (ethical) value simply because they exist. I think they should have to do a lot more than that before I should have to care whether they live or die.
I wouldn't personally object, no. This is happening every day and, like most people, I do nothing. The difference is I don't think I'm supposed to be doing anything either. That isn't to say we should live in a society without laws or moral strictures; you need a certain amount of protection for society to function at all. You can't condone random violence. But this is a pragmatic rather than altruistic concern.
Hm. Upvoted for an honest answer and lack of dissembling. Let's make it harder.
You have a button. If you press the button, you will receive a (free!) delicious pie, and a random child will be tortured for one year. No one will ever know there was any connection to you, and you can even erase your memory so that you won't feel guilty about it afterwards. Assume you like pie. Do you press the button?
It's beside the point, but your idea of torture might be a bit light if you would undergo five minutes out of curiosity.
There are far fewer well-defined mathematical relations and operations on the set of "utilities" (aka "utility values", although the word 'value' is misleading since it suggests a number) than most self-stated utilitarians routinely use; for example, multiplying utilities by a scalar makes no sense, the sum of two utilities can only be defined under very strict conditions, and comparing two utilities under only slightly less strict ones.
Consequently, from a rigorous point of view utilitarianism makes very little sense and is in no way intellectually compelling. Most utilitarians satisfy themselves with a naive approach that allows it to build an internally consistent rule set, much in the same way as theology or classical physics. But the "utilities" they talk about have lost most of their connection to reality - to subjects' preferences/happiness - and more closely resemble an imaginary karma score.
I've had a bone to pick with Yudkowski* ever since reading Three Worlds Collide. I haven't gathered all of my thoughts yet, or put them in a proper essay, but since you asked, here's a quick synopsis (paraphrasing Clausewitz).
I think people nowadays overestimate the value of human life. Generally speaking, we ain't worth that much - and up until about four-hundred years ago, killing each other was our primary source of entertainment.
As long as we have individuals, conflict is inevitable; and a society where the conflict's extremes have been narrowed down to nothing but sassy comments and politicking, well... that seems like a pretty boring place to live.
Speaking from experience, yelling at people solves a lot of problems. And I know a few individuals whom would be much less of a trainwreck if they'd been given the punch in the face they deserved. I think we've got no call to be judging the Baby Eaters for their biology - anymore than the Orgasmiums have for judging us. Misery can be just as much fun, if you approach it with the proper mindset, and I think HBO Rome does a brilliant job of describing a society with more reasonable standards. At the end of the day, it beats playing checkers, doesn't it?
:-) Just look at our entertainment - we love a protagonist who suffers.
*It's a very small bone. A chicken bone, really.
I believe that framing people for possession of child pornography is a widespread practice, and that this accounts for almost all convictions on that charge. I base this on the evidence that is typically used in such cases, all of which comes from computers which may have been compromised; and in fact, trials usually mention evidence that the computers in question were compromised (although it's possible for an attacker to remove all evidence of that fact), and that hasn't been a successful defense. If a person were to actually want child pornography, there are simple technical measures which could create a nearly iron-clad guarantee against being caught; and conversely, similar measures with a similar guarantee protect people from being caught planting evidence. Finally, the societal irrationality surrounding child pornography means that successfully getting someone accused of having it will not only get them jailed, but thoroughly destroy their reputation and shame them as well.
Something that I don't so much believe as assign a higher probability than other people.
There is a limit to how much technology humans can have, how much of the universe we can understand and how complicated of devices we can make. This isn't necessarily a universal IQ limit but more of an asymptotic limit that our evolved brains can't surpass. And this limit is lower, perhaps substantially so, than what we would need to do a lot of the cool stuff like achieve the singularity and start colonizing the universe.
I think it's even possible that some sort of asymptotic limit is common to all evolved life, this may well be a solution to the fermi paradox, not that they aren't out there, but no one is smart enough to actually leave their rock.
With probability 50% or greater, the long-term benefits of the invasion of Iraq will outweigh the costs suffered in the short term.
I disagree with Eliezer on the possibility of Oracular AI (he thinks it's impossible).
Other moderately iconoclastic statements:
I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.
But... well... a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution... and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.
Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that's extremely unusual. It's rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don't bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn't cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.
To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I've ever found...
I'll answer with a koan.
Of all the people who live in the world, should the lucky thousand who witness the events that are a million times too unlikely to witness for any single individual, start believing in supernatural, while the rest shouldn't?
I do not believe that the Singularity is likely to happen any time soon, even in astronomical terms. Furthermore, I am far from convinced that, even if the Singularity were to happen, the transhuman AI would be able to achieve quasi-godlike status (i.e., it may never be able to reshape entire planets in a matter of minutes, rewrite everyone's DNA, travel faster than light, rewrite the laws of physics, etc.). In light of this, I believe that worrying about the friendliness of AI is kind of a waste of time.
I think I have good reasons for these beliefs, and I operate by Crocker's Rules, FWIW...
I believe that some improvements in rationality have negative consequences which outweigh their positive ones.
That said, it might be easy to make too much of this. I agree that, on average, marginal improvements in rationality lead to far superior outcomes for individuals and society.
When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can't find any ET's. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.
Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it's difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride ...
When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can't find any ET's. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.
Doubtful. The first person to invent an 'expansionist' drug, that turned users into hyper-competitive, rapidly-reproducing, high-achieving types -- basically, a pill for being a Mormon -- would have lots of offspring, lots of success, etc. Many people choose to abuse heroin, but many people also choose to abuse Adderall, or to use Piracetam or other similar substances. The success-druggies will outbreed and outcompete the orgasm-druggies, leading to more intense success-drugs and perpetuating the cycle.
Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it's difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride for a job well done and don't bother accomplishing anything at all.
What you've just said is a perfect example of the way in which the "far" brain's intuitive modeling of minds, inaccurately predicts REAL human behavior, especially with respect to emotions.
Positive motivation actually consists of associating a positive emotion with goal completion... and this requires you to have a taste of the feeling you'll get when you complete the goal. (i.e., "Oh boy, I can almost taste that food now!").
So what actually happens when you give yourself the feeling of pride in a job well done, before the job is done, you get more motivated, not less, as long as you link that emotion to the desired future state, as compared to the current state of reality.
Most big issues that people (especially males) spend time on are not really worth bothering with.
I don't think this qualifies as a belief; it's just something I have noticed.
My dreams are always a collection of images (assembled into a narrative, naturally) of things I thought about precisely once the prior day. Anything I did not think about, or thought about more than a single time, is not included. I like to use this to my advantage to avoid nightmares, but I have also never had a sex dream. The fact that other people seem to have sex dreams is good evidence that my experience is rare or unique, but I have no explanation for it.
There's a lot of nonsense I daydream about, like how it seems like my life is actually repeating itself again and again as if I was stuck in a time loop and was the only person to faintly remember bits of those preceding iterations. I like to play pretend with such ideas, though I don't believe in them in the rational sense, more in the "I don't believe in ghosts but I'm still crept out at night"
The closest I come to believing something rationally, which is still not rational in the purest, Occam sense, is that we may be living in a simulation th...
It seems to me that a form of modal realism and a strong version of the Simulation Hypothesis (not just a large fraction of all observer-moments in apparently pre-Singularity civilizations are simulated, but a large fraction of all observer-moments period) are substantially more likely than not. Others whom I respect emphasize the extent of our current confusion about anthropics, etc, so I assign a lower probability than I would based only on my impression, but I haven't fully exchanged private info.
That the exaggerated use of "rationality" is not rational. That many of the contributors to LessWrong are regurgitating Yudkowsky and acting as disciples. In human affairs there is seldom one right answer. The certainty of numbers is misleading with that which cannot be measured. Rationality cannot be achieved with a checklist or any other standardised form. The discipline of being honest (whatever that means and the many years that takes) is more important than overcoming cognitive bias. The calm of OB is more pleasant than the frantic commercia...
But this is really a serious concern. Brushing it away with a comment along the lines of "Well, they also say that about obviously non-cultish figure X; how silly!" is like--like--well, um...
--failing to pump against entropy, as it is written that "Every Cause Wants to Be a Cult."
Downvoted.
Deep down I believe in some sort of afterlife because my brain is unable to handle the concept of not being alive.
A better (but more confusing) way of saying might be "I don't believe in an afterlife, but my brain does".
I believe that every single social interaction is linked to power/hierarchy. (see Robert Greene book's)
I also believe that most on LW simply opt-out their local/most proximate hierarchy (and they may actively and/or secretly seek to discredit it), as Paul Graham in high-school. In one of his articles he talked of how wanted to be more intelligent than popular. That is dominance in one field instead of another. (A tip to entrepreneurs is to aim to be #1 in your field or not start at all.)
If it's not their most proximate hierarchy then it is the one they int...
I believe there's a significant probability of economic collapse in large developed countries in the next fifty years. (Possibilities: fiscal collapse, default, financial crash resulting in a true depression.) I believe that it's worth effort and money to plan for this eventuality.
I believe that choosing to focus attention on uplifting things is the most practical use of one's mind. (This is more controversial than it sounds: it means placing a noticeably higher value on high culture than low culture, and it means that making cynical observations corrod...
This would make an awesome Edge topic if they could offer sufficient assurance of anonymous answers.
At least one European country will have jailed one of its citizens for criticizing Islam before 2013 comes around.
The vast majority of held beliefs are not only wrong and unjustified, but unjustifiable.
If a belief can't be justified, it shouldn't be held and it definitely shouldn't effect your actions.
The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare.
HalFinney: "The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare."
Thirty years ago I was playing a game of Risk with two friends. The rivalry between the two meant that I would usually win. In that game I had an overwhelming advantage. I had 26 armies and was attacking the last army of the last territory of one of my opponents. (His captured cards plus mine would give me enough additional armies to defeat my remaining opponent.) My opponent told me that he usually let me win, but not this time. He'd never said anything similar before. I remember thinking to myself, "Fat lot you have to say about it fella." I rolled three die against his one. After losing several rolls, I asked that he use a die cup and he complied. I lost 25 times in a row. It was my Risk game and my die in my apartment.
23 attempts with 3 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 34.03% of the time. 1 attempt with 2 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 42.13% of the time. 1 attempt with 1 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 5...
Mostly, of course, my response is that I feel confused; therefore, I deny that this event ever actually happened.
But if you're being honest and telling the truth as you know it and you remember accurately, then the next step is to consult a stage magician, not math grad students or a physicist or a theologian.
Same goes for anyone in the audience who's witnessed a bended spoon, an improbably guessed sequence of cards, etc.
Putting on my magician's hat for a moment, that sounds like a magic trick to me.
Given your description, the simplest answer consistent with the laws of physics is that another player switched the dice when you weren't looking. Perhaps you stopped the game briefly to take a restroom break or answer the phone or deal with some other interruption. Your memory tends to edit breaks like that out of the narrative flow, especially if they don't seem relevant to the story. Somehow, the other player had the opportunity to switch the dice. Dice can be gimmicked in a variety of ways - they could be weighted, shaved, or simply printed with the wrong dot pattern - using a die cup wouldn't interfere with any of these. You'd played the same opponent before so he knew which type of dice you used; he could have brought fake dice of that type with him, swapped them in during the now-forgotten distraction, and swapped them back later. It's even possible the two friends were working together to play this joke on you, with one providing the distraction while the other made the switch.
At the moment he looked at you and said "not this time", the switch had already been made.
Assuming my description of the event is correct (i.e., fair die, fair rolls, accurate memory, etc.)
[looks up how reliable human memory is, how it changes at every recall, how overconfident we tend to be about it]
[looks up a couple of conjuring sites]
Thirty years ago...
Hmm...
I had 26 armies and was attacking the last army of the last territory of one of my opponents... My opponent told me that he usually let me win, but not this time. He'd never said anything similar before.
Hmm...
That experience led me to conclude that reality is far weirder than I had imagined.
I think there might be non-supernatural explanations with a greater than 1 in 100 billion chance. If it's even 1 in a million, you'll expect to see at least one in 30 years.
From OB: some pet downtrodden areas of science, according to me:
Panspermia, clay origin of life, digital physics, AAH, MaxEnt, simulism, the adapted universe, memetics. I have lots of "unusual" views about the future as well, but - AFAICS - many of those seem to be not so out of place here.
Yeah there is, they are just really small. Just the other day I asked if someone would come in on their day off from work in order to cover for me. I paid them, and they performed the service. All this went down without any government intervention, coercion, or use of force.
If you mean that there is not a single country on Earth that contains ONLY free markets then you are absolutely right.
That the psychoanalytic theory of psychodynamics is in some sense true, and that it is a useful way to approach the mind. My belief comes from personal experience in psychotherapy, albeit a quite unorthodox one. I have found that explanations in Freudian terms such as the unconscious, ego, superego, Eros and Thanatos help to greatly clarify my mental life in a way that is not only extremely useful but also seems quite accurate.
I should clarify that I reject just about everything to come out of academic psychoanalytic theory, especially in literary theory ...
I don't believe that any concept, including the concept of reality, makes sense to you outside the context of your own epistemic framework. When one thinks that the reality exists on its own, it is a statement made from within that person's epistemic framework. When you tell me that the reality exists on its own, I understand this statement from within my epistemic framework. When I believe that you believe that the reality exists on its own, I interpret my model of yourself as having a property of having a "belief in reality existing on its own"...
Nearly everyone including rationalists atheists and even transhumanists believe in the soul theory. I don’t. Oh they’ll say they don’t believe in souls, but when you really get down to it and examine the inner workings of their beliefs it’s rather obvious that they do. In fact I have never in my life met in person or on the Internet anybody who was like me and really didn’t believe in the soul; There are some authors who I’ve not had the pleasure to meet that agree with me, but very very few. It’s the last stand of Vitalism and if this lethal meme is not overcome the Singularity will kill you dead.
In what is probably an increasing order of controversial beliefs:
Libertarianism is correct, at least in the broader sense of the word (in the sense under which Milton Friedman qualifies as a libertarian). I know this isn't the most controversial belief, but it's still a minority belief, according to the 2012 survey.
Productivity (in the sense of "improve your productivity" LW posts) isn't that important as long as you're above a certain threshold, the threshold needed to do enough work to support yourself, save for the future, and have money t
I don't think what I'm about to post is strictly in keeping with the intended comment material, but I'm posting it here because I think this is where I'll get the best feedback.
The majority of humans don't have a concrete reason for why they value moral behavior. If you ask a human why they value life or happiness of others, they'll throw out some token response laden with fallacies, and when pressed they'll respond with something along the lines of "I just feel like it's the right thing". In my case, it's the opposite. I have a rather long list...
(Meta-comment.) These 2009-era comments raise political/controversial points and meta-commentary I associate with latter-day LW, not OG LW, which surprises me a bit. (Examples below.) Given the more recent signs of escalating political tensions on LW, I wouldn't have expected these older comments to hit the same beats as, say, Multiheaded's analogous thread from this year, but a bunch did.
It looks like the political/controversial points provoked less argument here than in the 2012 post. I'd guess this is down to increasing political heterogeneity on LW ove...
In a less scientific area - many participants seem to be obsessed with personal immortality projects to me - including things like cryonics and uploading. This is bizarre for me to witness. To my eyes, it seems like a curious muddle over values. An identification with your mind and memes. Biology tells us that the brain is actually a disposable tool - constructed by genes for their own ends. Memes can be mutualists or parasites - and in this case, we are witnessing their more pathogenic side, it seems to me.
Biology tells us that the brain is actually a disposable tool - constructed by genes for their own ends.
If biology told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that?
Accepting our own highest, personal goal to be the propagation of our own genes seems to me to be choosing to remain in slavery to an cruel and stupid tyrant just because our ancestors were forced to.
I embrace nature's purposes because it built me to do that.
Odd. Nature built me to denigrate it on the internet whenever it does something I don't agree with. Which of us is the mutant?
Judging by gravity, Nature wants me down. Should I undertake a journey to the center of the Earth?
Fertility and intelligence are negatively correlated.
Religiosity and intelligence seem to be negatively correlated.
Therefore all the efforts of Dawkins, Yudkowsky etc. to make the world more rational seem to be futile or at least inefficient. Pretty scary...
Ideas in the general neighborhood of negative utilitarianism. (I don't necessarily believe these, but I think they should be taken seriously.)
I believe that WTC building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition using explosives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD06SAf0p9A
I know from a previous discussion in OB that at least Robert Hanson doesn't believe this. Btw, WTC 7 was NOT one of the two towers hit by planes.
Edit: Robert Hanson and others believe that the building collapsed due do fire induced damage. I think the pattern of collapse disproves this hypothesis.
I believe that trying too hard to be rational is irrational and perhaps self-destructive. That there could well be many different definitions of rationality or truth that are in some sense imcompatible without one being really superior (because we don't have meta-criterion to establish our criterions). When the cost is low, I think that behaving in a consciously superstitious way is rational because after all, we could be wrong about superstitions too (e.g. circumcision decreases venereal disease transmission).
I am an atheist Platonist. I believe that ultimate reality is mathematical / tautological in nature, and that matter, mind, motion are all illusions.
Late to this (only by 4 years... so fifty smartphone generations), but LOVE the idea.
I believe - firmly, and with conviction - that the modal politician is a parasitic megalomaniacal sociopath who should be prevented at all costs from obtaining power; that the State (and therefore democracy) is an entirely illegitimate way of ameliorating public goods problems and furthering 'social objectives'.
Hence my nick (which I invented).
I was hoping to get more interesting replies to this post.
It seems you all more or less agree about how the world works, and what's left is people mooning about their personal ethical preferences or niggling issues in already vague areas, or minor doubts about this and that.
I believe jesus is entirely mythical, quarks don't exist, 9/11 and the london tube bombings were inside jobs, and flying saucers are the manifestation of a non-human, superior intelligence.
This rationalist community is a dry husk of libertarians, mathematicians, and various other people who don't get invited to parties. I find it very depressing...
I believe I'm immortal (and so is everyone else). This is from a combination of a kind of Mathematical Platonism (as eujay mentions below) and Quantum Immortality.
This believing in 'all possible worlds' and having a non-causal framework for the embedding of consciousness means that just because of the anthropic principle and perhaps some weird second-order effects, it is quite possible that we will experience rather odd phenomena in the world. Hence, things like ghosts, ESP and such may not be so far-fetched.
Also, I am not a Bayesian. I simply do not think...
You are saying that "being a Bayesian" describes a belief about how the mind works. That's like saying you're not a Calculian because you don't believe the mind natively uses calculus. Most Bayesians would probably say it's a belief about how to get the right answer to a problem.
Scientific materialism is overrated -- because the things we care about (like rationalism, or truth, or well-being) are not material things. The current theories for how ideas are implemented in the material world (such as AI) are grossly inadequate to the task.
Creating working AGI software components is a necessary step towards making AGI, and you don't have any hope of understanding the problem of AGI until you've worked on it at the software level.
I believe in the state. I believe that the ideal society would not be democratic but governed by a meritocratic professional class and would essentially be what we Westerners would now describe pejoratively as "authoritarian." Information about society as a whole would be gathered through statistically-sound methods of polling and deliberative focus groups but only where it actually made sense to consult the community. Corruption would be excluded through transparency, the rule of law and institutional dynamics (as it is now; I don't believe elec...
I don't accept the logic behind "I think therefore I am" and I think there is a reasonable chance that I or even the universe doesn't in any sense exist.
I'm more worried about type I than type II error.
Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.
I believe that it does not matter how much pain and suffering exist in the universe. (Ditto pleasure, happiness, eudaemonia & fun.)
Note that I still believe it is wrong to disable a person or to distract him from his activities or his plans, and it is almost always impossible to inflict pain or suffering on a person without causing disability or distraction.
I believe that the value of a human life derives exclusively from the human's willingness and ability to contribute towards a non-human end (which of course I am not going to attempt to define in t...
Given that they all believe different things, it's not at all clear to me that people's beliefs on net are evidence for rather than against "some sort of God". As in that quote:
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. - Stephen F. Roberts
OK, here goes. I could probably produce a list of things that all y'all'd disagree with, though I'm pleased to see that routine neonatal circumcision = bad isn't among them. But I'll just go for the jugular:
Flush toilets are the greatest evil in the world.
Edit: OK, so why the downvote? Presumably not because you disagree.
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.