Velocity Raptor: a simple physics Flash game where the physics simulates special relativity. Lorenz contraction, time dilation, red shifts, visual distortions ... people seem to get stuck on level 30, though Gwern made it to level 31. It's one thing to look at equations, it's another to get a feel for it. I strongly recommend this to everyone.
My exact thought. Very few baseline humans are such... data whores.
1FiftyTwo11y
Gwern is obviously a P-zombie. Just try looking at his pineal gland and you'll
find no soul.
4David_Gerard11y
He also has a particle physics one: Agent Higgs
[http://www.testtubegames.com/higgsflash.html].
6vi21maobk9vp11y
Frankly, Agent Higgs shows way less than Velocity Raptor - neutrinos pass
through matter, particle-antiparticle, what else? Velocity Raptor has even
fully-relevant puzzles with colour keys...
4vi21maobk9vp11y
I would say that the level 30 is hard as the plain arcade, special relativity is
not that relevant. If only the game allowed you to save midlevel, many more
people would pass level 30.
Level 31 is easier because one of the arcade-hard tricks is removed.
ETA: Looks like level 34 is impassable without true arcade skills... It is the
first level where you have both periodical obstacle and time limit
3David_Gerard11y
You need time dilation to get across the water trap doors, so it's relevant in
that sense.
Mind you, I wouldn't have made it to level 30 without the space bar and the dead
stop whenever you hit an obstacle. Dump all your momentum from relativistic
speeds for free!
1vi21maobk9vp11y
Well, actually it doesn't truly matter, as you just need to have enough speed
anyway. The fact that two parts of the trap always look simultaneous is funny,
of course.
1OrphanWilde11y
Yeah. This level is killing me.
ETA: Level 38 is... far far worse. No timing, except in the precision of
movements in the final stretch.
3A1987dM11y
Holy shit... after playing that for a while, whenever I quickly move my eyes the
page I'm reading appears to stretch along the direction of the saccade and
shrink along the perpendicular direction.
3iDante11y
This was tons of fun. Doing the wildcard levels in seen view was crazy!
I wish it had general relativity too.
Edit: also, for people wondering about the seen view, the episode of the cosmos
called Journeys in Space and Time has a really awesome scene about what it would
actually look like to move a significant fraction of the speed of light. Does
anyone know of any (possibly more modern) other attempts to do this?
It's about 20 mins in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abp3q7aYOss
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abp3q7aYOss]
Hi all, I'm Andy, the guy who made the game. I stumbled across this posting and am glad people are both enjoying the game and thoroughly infuriated by it :)
I had that scene in Cosmos vividly in mind as I created VR. It's amazing how well that series stands up to the test of time.
They have a bunch of videos and explanations, too. In fact, the big inspiration for this game came from an exhibit that group built. It was in a museum years ago, and you'd physically ride a stationary bike around their simulation. A giant screen in front of you showed what you'd see as you rode through the streets of Bern (supposing light was traveling at 5 mph). It was completely interactive, and completely rad.
I've got other links posted if you're interested in more, but that's the one that sticks out to me.
Well you managed to entertain a lab full of astrophysicists and me for longer than I care to admit, so that was awesome ty.
It would be neat in a game to have objects/stuff that emits light outside of visible light that can only be seen by humans when they're doppler shifted into visible range.
I quite like that idea. Make the objects invisible (instead of black, as they
are now). That could lead to some nice puzzles. I'll keep that in mind for the
future, thanks!
8Xachariah11y
I can't wait for the first time a student goes into Phys 200 and passes easily
because quote "It's just like the time I was an ice skating raptor, dodging
bullets while on fire and doppler-shifting doors open" unquote.
My only wish is that you add a little more to the congratulation screen for
master of relativity. Even just a picture of the same raptor with a party hat on
top would be awesome. You know, just to show that the poor raptor is doing okay
after running into so many walls at a significant fraction of C.
6AndyH11y
Ooh, a party hat, I like it! Yeah, I agree the player could use a little more
positive feedback.
6komponisto11y
Wow. Hats off to you. This game is exactly the kind of thing I've been dreaming
of [http://lesswrong.com/lw/dhn/rationality_games_apps_brainstorming/6zza].
5AndyH11y
You and me both. (And by that you mean literal dreams of being a velociraptor,
right?)
4vi21maobk9vp11y
If you change the game, please, please add possibility to save progress inside
level. It would make the arcade-hard SR-easy levels somewhat more feasible. I
gave up when I was offerred to do the fire-snow-run among timed trapdoors.
0AndyH11y
I'll keep that in mind. While I (clearly) don't want the game to be easy... I
also don't want it to be too unreasonably hard.
2Decius11y
Well done. I can't tell though if what we're seeing is perceived view what
happened n ticks 'ago', where n is the distance we were from the trap n ticks
ago in our current speed or at the previous speed. General relativity would have
it as the former, but it seems like everything catches up instantly when you
stop, rather than the area of altered perception spreading when you stop
spreading outward at the local speed of light.
2Douglas_Knight11y
Have you considered doing Galilean relativity? I don't think it would make much
difference.
3AndyH11y
In a Newtonian world? No way you could make a game like that. It'd hurt people's
eyes! ;)
0Manfred11y
It has general relativity for the effect of acceleration, doesn't it?
2iDante11y
Nah, general relativity is specifically about gravity. In this game,
acceleration is treated just like you're changing reference frames really
quicklike. The twin paradox [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox] can be
thought of that way, although Einstein did it with gravity too.
0Manfred11y
Ah.
0Manfred11y
Was fun. Difficulty falls off after level 34, so keep trying :)
I wish that at level 35+ the color of the background tiles doppler shifted. Thus
if you were going too fast you wouldn't be able to see >:D
1AndyH11y
A diabolical player after my own heart!
In a moment of rare compassion for the player, I minimized the colors the
shifted. I didn't want to be held responsible for people getting sick all over
their keyboards. :)
Driving is an area of life where millions of "ordinary" humans (non-specialists) make life-critical and therefore morally-significant judgments every day. When we drive, we are taking our lives and those of others in our hands. Many of us would wish to be better drivers than we are: not only more skilled, but better in ways that could be described as "virtue": less prone to road rage, negligence, driving while impaired, and other faults. Robots don't get angry, they don't get distracted, and they don't get drunk or tired. Since bad driving kills people, we can reasonably say that robot driving is (or can become) morally superior to human driving — in a plain consequentialist sense.
This seems like a natural analogy for CEV in superhuman systems. We do not want a robot driver to drive just like a human. We want a robot driver to drive as a human would drive if that human were faster-thinking, calmer, clearer-minded, more focused; had sharper eyes, better knowledge of the roads and hazards, better ability to cooperate with other drivers. We want a robot to op... (read more)
It's a very good example. It also illustrates how hard is to specify a useful
utility function for an AGI: "get me to my destination and don't kill anyone or
cause any damage on the way" can lead to a number of non-obvious unintended
consequences, compared to the CEV version "drive as a human would drive if that
human were faster-thinking, calmer, clearer-minded, more focused; had sharper
eyes, better knowledge of the roads and hazards, better ability to cooperate
with other drivers".
2DaFranker11y
None of this is news to me, but it's certainly nice to see the link being made
between AI Driving and ethics in a positive light. Most people only jump to the
part about "If an AI car kills someone, whose life do we ruin as vengeful
punishment?"
Thanks.
Suspended Animation the first blog post in a series on Urban Future that I am currently reading. Stagnation in our time:
What seems pretty clear from most of this (and already in Cowen's account) is that nothing much has been moving forward in the world's 'developed' economies for four decades except for the information technology revolution and its Moore's Law dynamics. Abstract out the microprocessor, and even the most determinedly optimistic vision of recent trends is gutted to the point of expiration. Without computers, there's nothing happening, or at least nothing good.
I have a notion that things are still moving forward in IT because it's still
something of a frontier. It's relatively possible to do good work and get paid
for it without formal credentials, or at least we're not very far from the time
when that was possible.
PSA: If you want there to be a new Stupid Questions Open Thread, make it yourself! There is not and never has been a rule against this. I consider the "how often to make them" question unanswered, but a good interim answer is, "whenever someone feels like making one".
(Also, my computer broke, and so I posted this from a Wii, which is incapable of using the article editor. If someone could kindly edit "the sentence" into the post.)
Something is hinky with the upvote and downvote buttons (for me at least). When I press one nothing happens. Repeated pressing doesn't seem to do anything, but then sometimes the button colours-in after a delay. Sometimes it doesn't look like I pressed the button and then when I refresh the page I see that the button is coloured and the vote did register. Anyone else have the same problem?
Previously, the interface responded immediately, but the vote wasn't immediately applied (if you reopened the same post/comment, you wouldn't see your vote for a while). Sometimes, a vote would be lost, never applied, even though it was reflected in the interface. It looks like now the interface waits for the vote to actually get received, and only updates once it has been. As before, it takes a while for that to happen, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but the difference is that now this effect is apparent.
If this delay can't be easily fixed, an animation indicating that the operation is in progress (like one appearing when sending a comment) might help with the interface responsiveness issue.
I suppose that that's actually better, but
is definitely better again. Otherwise I'm tempted to mash the voting button
until something happens. It doesn't have to be an "animation" it could just be a
still image of something that means "waiting" like a clock or a sandtimer.
5tut11y
I have noticed something similar. The length of the delay appears to be
correlated with the speed of my internet, so I think that what's happening is
that when you click on the 'hand' your browser sends a signal to the LW servers
telling it what you did, and then waits for confirmation that the comment has
been upvoted before coloring the 'hand'.
3David_Gerard11y
Same here. FF14 for Linux.
3shminux11y
Same here.
2[anonymous]11y
Yeah, been having this problem for a while, but haven't cared enough to report
it. Stable Chrome on Fedora.
1dbaupp11y
How long is the delay? On the order of seconds, or 10s of seconds, or minutes?
0Oscar_Cunningham11y
Seconds.
0dbaupp11y
I sometimes also see a delay of that order between clicking and the hand being
coloured. (I assume it has to communicate with the LW web server and then
receive a message back, before the vote can be acknowledged/displayed.)
I haven't ever had it not responding at all though.
0Oscar_Cunningham11y
Well the times I think that it's not responding at all might just be times where
the delay is so long I got bored of waiting. But if so those times are certainly
more than 10 seconds, which is much slower than I'm used to. Next time it looks
like nothing has happened I'll wait for a few minutes.
Over the course of the preceding year, IFAS researchers had dosed a total of 22 other men for the creativity study, including a theoretical mathematician, an electronics engineer, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. By including only those whose jobs involved the hard sciences (the lack of a single female participant says much about mid-century career options for women), they sought to examine the effects of LSD on both visionary and analytical thinking. Such a group offered an additional bonus: Anything they produced during the study would be subsequently scrutinized by departmental chairs, zoning boards, review panels, corporate clients, and the like, thus providing a real-world, unbiased yardstick for their results.
In surveys administered shortly after their LSD-enhanced creativity sessions, the study volunteers, some of the best and brightest in their fields, sounded like tripped-out neopagans at a backwoods gathering. Their minds, they said, had blossomed and contracted with the universe. They’d beheld irregular but clean geometrical patterns glistening into infinity, felt a rightness before solutions manifested, and even sha
I have finally posted my self-experiment on LSD microdosing:
http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing [http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing]
0[anonymous]10y
Thank you!
0Lumifer10y
Thank you for running proper experiments.
6Risto_Saarelma11y
Also of interest: Mathematics and the Psychedelic Revolution
[http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_8-10.pdf]
The article doesn't cite the column or the date. Can anyone familiar with the US
graphics computing culture in the 70s and early 80s weigh in on whether the
claim is in any way plausible?
7gwern11y
The current 1990s-ish base-rate for ever taking psychedelics is ~10% of the
population; the richer and more educated, IIRC, correlate with more drug use;
the article is implied to be ~1989 in the PDF, and everyone she talked to would
be at least 20 years old, putting their birth back in the 1960s at a minimum.
What the Dormouse Said documented quite a number of interconnections between
computing and psychedelics and hippies, so a large fraction is not implausible.
On the other hand, this reasoning sounds more consistent with, say, a third or a
half, not 100% - 100% for both taking psychedelics and considering it important
to one's work (and honestly saying so!) sounds implausibly high. My guess is
some sort of sampling bias or maybe the journalist is overstating things; maybe
word got around about her obsession with psychedelics and all the acidheads made
a point of talking to her? We'll never know.
1Risto_Saarelma11y
The wording in the anecdote is also a bit vague on whether the 180 professionals
who answered yes actually were all the people she interviewed.
Thinking about Eliezer's post about Doublethink Speaking of deliberate, conscious self-deception he opines: "Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen."
This seems odd for a site devoted to the principle that most of the time, most human minds are very biased. Don't we have the brains of one species of apes that has evolved to be particularly sensitive to politics? Why wouldn't doublethink be the evolutionarily adaptive norm?
My intuition, based on my own private experience, is the opposite of Eliezer's -- I'd assume that most industrialized people practice some degree of doublethink routinely. I'd further suspect that this talent can be cultivated, and I'd think that (say) most North Koreans might be extremely skilled at deliberate self-deception, in a manner that would have been very familiar to George Orwell himself.
This seems like an empirical question. What's the evidence out there?
What Eliezer calls doublethink most closely fits what is called 'cognitive
dissonance' in psychology, but the evidence shows that we seek to resolve that
dissonance either by 'compartmentalization' or by, I assume, reflective
equilibrium (is there a word in psychology for this?). I don't think we
deliberately self-deceive (although, perhaps therapies like CBT seek to do this
with memory reconsolidation).
1billswift11y
Humans normally get away with their biases by not examining them closely, and
when the biases are pointed out to them by denying that they, personally are
biased. Willful ignorance and denial of reality seem to be two of the most
common human mental traits.
"Salterism refuted: removing wheels from racial Idealist heads"
[http://james-g.com/2012/07/salterism-refuted-removing-wheels-from-racial-idealist-heads/]
struck me as amusingly Quirrellish — as opposed to Malfoyish.
It does appear that almost all racialists are looking for excuses to hurt others
— to justify defection and other loser moves in Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken,
and other payoff matrices — by inventing wrongs done to them either by members
of other races; or by the existence, visibility, or prosperity of other races.
This seems almost as if an imaginary foe
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dsu/zerosum_conversion_a_cute_trick_for_decision/] is
running a "divide-and-conquer" strategy against humanity: running K-means
clustering, reifying the clusters, and trying to convince members of one cluster
that they can't trust and should defect against members of another cluster. We
know well from the history of organizations and intelligence agencies — and from
history in general! — that this sort of thing is a significant risk.
5[anonymous]11y
I found that post a fun and interesting one too, I think I'll probably be
linking to it in the future when I see some unfortunate comments by otherwise
intelligent people elsewhere online.
Heh, yeah that's a good way to put it.
This is just basic tribalism no? We should emphasise it is hardly unique to
racialist sentiment, indeed it prevades a large fraction of the human
experience. One can see it quite clearly whenn it comes to nationality,
religion, language, philosophical positions, partisan affiliation, culture,
taste (be it in sex, food, architecture,...) and even sports team fandom
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2/blue_or_green_on_regulation/].
I do find this amusingly ironic however. I can easily imagine say a pro-Black
racialist disparaging those who are promoting local tribes and nationalities as
engaging in a divide and conquer strategy against the Black race.
Clearly you sir are displaying speciest tendencies. ;)
6fubarobfusco11y
Economic classes might be a more frequent example than "tribes and
nationalities". Historically, there has also been the argument made by some on
the Left — especially anarchists such as the IWW — that racism is capitalism
running divide-and-conquer against the working class. "Who benefits when white
workers and black workers can't organize together because of racial tensions
between them? The bosses do!"
"You might cooperate with a Pebblesorter on the Prisoner's Dilemma, but would
you want your son to marry one?"
5[anonymous]11y
Right some racialist have also argued against class divisions. Most infamously
the you-know-whos.
I heard this argument not on race but on nationality attributed as a position
held by some socialists in the aftermath of World War One. It was one of the
basis of some quite elaborate explanation
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony] of cultural forces as tools of
the ruling class. I find it somewhat amusing how right-wing Moldbuggianism
(which is basically endorsed by James_G) is very similar to such notions just
with a different idea of who the ruling class is.
Looking at this from the leftist perspective though I find the Chomsky-ite
argument on race and capitalism far more convincing:
Can you imagine a racist Coca-Cola Company in a global economy? Thought I
sometimes wonder if their commercials would be slightly less subtly disturbing
[http://youtu.be/m1NeogMh1JI] then.
8Multiheaded11y
I think that cultural hegemony is a reasonable and far from overwrought
explanation for many social phenomena... but racism isn't one of them. So I also
think Chomsky's right on this.
Lip service mostly. Nazi policies generally moved to the right since the break
with Strasserism and the purge of the SA, and the "Proper"/"German"/"Volkish"
social hierarchy espoused by propaganda was (for all its utopian or
faux-medieval motifs) in practice directed at recreating the class structure of
Bismarck's Prussia, which was viewed through rose-tinted glasses by many at the
time.
True, when the conservative aristocrats showed some resistance, they were
chastised (and the July plot brought an anti-aristocratic pseudo-populist turn),
but when they went along with the new regime, the Nazis helped secure their
position. The non-Jewish industrial and financial elites got a pretty sweet deal
at first, and enjoyed it before being dragged into a suicidal war.
5[anonymous]11y
Right, but one could use many of the same argument against post WW2 social
democrats no? The quality of life of the German working class much improved in
the 1930s.
Again I wasn't arguing they did that much on their stated beliefs but I said
they where an example of racialists arguing against class divisions.
To give another example from Fascists rather than Natonal Socialists (I think
there is a notable difference) listen to this speech
[http://youtu.be/3NqG2lAojNQ] by Sir Oswald Mosley.
6fubarobfusco11y
Rather common among nationalists in general, not just racial ones; see the use
of "class warfare" rhetoric today.
"Racism" means too many different things.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/e3a/open_thread_august_1631_2012/77sz] A Coca-Cola
company whose views of the market were clouded by racial prejudice would be at a
competitive disadvantage. But one that participated in systems of racial
privilege would not necessarily be.
To cherry-pick a famous example from history — the Montgomery bus service of
Rosa Parks fame was not owned by Southern race-haters, but by National City
Lines, a front company for General Motors and Firestone Tire. It still
participated in a system of racial privilege by enforcing segregated seating.
Doing so was kind of an obvious business move for NCL, since segregated seating
was required by Alabama law.
1[anonymous]11y
Right but regulatory capture means that most business would not only have a
financial interest lobby against such laws to boost profits but also probably be
quit effective at them.
To give an example requiring a larger number of toilets because segregation was
required by law in your factory was clearly a unwanted expense, especially for
investors coming in from the outside.
6fubarobfusco11y
It sounds like you're suggesting regulatory capture effects would have led NCL
to eventually lobby against segregation laws in order to make more money by
better serving black Alabamians.
But isn't it at least as credible that regulatory capture would have led NCL to
lobby for the maintenance of segregation to deter competition from upstarts
offering desegregated service to those who wanted it?
Regulatory capture usually offers to explain established businesses supporting
regulation, or favoring forms of "deregulation" that end up entrenching them at
the expense of new competition. So this might explain it if NCL had lobbied for
anti-discrimination laws (thus forbidding whites-only competitors) but I don't
see how it would predict supporting merely the removal of segregation laws.
This line of thinking leads me to wonder how much predictive power the
"regulatory capture" idea actually has ...
3Multiheaded11y
[Warning: more of my neurotic bullshit!]
Having read that blog... frankly, given equal general intelligence and
competence, I'd pick Quirrell over James_G any day.
The former isn't hung up on any particular grand theory, seems to have charisma,
a sense of humour and a dry aesthetic of his own. He's just plain cool.
The latter clearly has an IQ through the roof and excels at formal reasoning,
but is monomaniacal about his "rational" hedonic utilitarianism in the face of
numerous dismal conclusions, seemingly can't appreciate the value and importance
of "mere emotions" for most people... and the pictures of his "strong aesthetic
sense" [http://james-g.com/2012/07/libertarian-immigration-fanatics/] make me
question whether I'd want to exist in his world at all, no matter how many
hedons he might provide to how many people.
Seriously, ew. Give me neo-feudalism as originally proposed, or give me chaos
and ruin, just not this squeaky clean brave new world! Absolute monarchy and
unrestricted capitalism both seem like such trifling worries to me compared to
the prospect of this
[http://james-g.com/2012/07/libertarian-immigration-fanatics/picket-fence-house-2/]
covering a living, breathing, diverse nation-state!
1[anonymous]11y
Even I find it mildly disturbing especially since it strikes as more or less the
same "rational" hedonic utilitarianism that is the de facto norm on LessWrong.
0Multiheaded11y
His hedonic utilitarianism or my rant? If the former... then thank you yet again
for seeing a method to my madness :)
3[anonymous]11y
His hedonic utilitarianism.
Of course there is, we actually share many of the same misgivings about the
smiley faced worlds that utilitarianism might build.
2[anonymous]11y
Besides this and the critique of "Salterism
[http://james-g.com/2012/07/salterism-refuted-removing-wheels-from-racial-idealist-heads/]"
fubarobfusco liked to I'd also recommend these posts
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ddv/open_thread_july_115_2012/6zso]. I'm really quite
fascinated by his concept of the "eminent self" and wish he wrote an article
about how this fits into metaethics and rationality on LessWrong.
-2MixedNuts11y
There is such a thing as genetic groupings of humans. There is such a thing as
groups recognized by a given society based on heritable physical markers that
are treated differently and thus develop different cultures. The word "race" is
already used to describe the second one. "You're the race cops think you are",
and a police officer will classify the Bantu and the San as black and the Scot
as white, not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why
overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?
7CharlieSheen11y
Actually the word race is about what part of your ancestry you identify with or
society identifies you with. Obviously both culture and genetic diversity
correlate strongly with ancestry. The word race was also used in a taxonomic
sense in the early 20th century. Indeed racial classification is still used that
way in say medicine though naturally euphemisms are gaining popularity.
You really miss the point here so I suspect you didn't read the article.
When you take a look at the entire genome of the person and look for clusters in
thing space you find groupings that basically match old racial classifications.
For all the number crunching gene analysis that went into it this map
[http://press.princeton.edu/images/k4593.gif] does not much differ the map
Lothrop Stoddard [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothrop_Stoddard] would have
presented when asked about the distribution of racial groups before the Age of
Discovery. Clearly they are touching the same underlying reality.
Sure looking at one or two genes a Scott might be more similar to a San than a
Sardinian, but as you increase the number genes you are looking at, the
similarity more and more matches to the first approximation what you'd guess
from looking at faces.
Creating two words for the basically the same cluster in thing space in order to
diffuse "x-ism" will only makes the x-ists feel more clever than they are. This
gives the ideologies they create a new source from which to pump warm fuzzies
into believers and a hook with which to appeal to people who figure out it is
the same cluster.
A good article. It's not extreme at all, though. Anyone who believes that
sometimes abortion is the right choice has got to agree that abortion would have
been the right choice for the author's mother.
This excellent review makes me think this will be an interesting book to add to my reading list. Has anyone else read it? I probably should add this statement as a sort of disclaimer:
A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply roote
I agree almost entirely with this descripton, but the "reactionary" judgment's
modus ponens is my modus tollens - that is, I judge that what McCarthy perceived
as "communism" around him was an old and respectable Western tradition that did
far more good than evil throughout history (according to my preferences).
I do think that this so-called "communism" ("Universalism") was in some sense a
miscarriage of mainline Western Christian civilization, and that the
Enlightenment's abandonment of theism for clever is-to-ought rationalizations
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/cqs/link_reason_the_god_that_fails_but_we_keep/6pkd]
was a time bomb - but for all its sins, it essentially was Western culture in
its logical 2000-year unfolding. I insist that Modernity ought to be redeemed
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22redemption+of+modernity%22], not denounced
and buried. And I doubt that things could have turned out very differently, that
the Chesterton's Fence of older values, notably mourned even by Orwell
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/c4h/rationality_quotes_may_2012/6m4q], would have
protected against all possible disasters in the face of technological change.
I know, the "logical 2000-year unfolding" might sound very far-fetched, but I've
read plenty of evidence for it - for starters, see Robert Nisbet's remarkable
History of the Idea of Progress and Karen Armstrong's History of God.
(Regarding modern history, I would further argue that the leftward
radicalization effectively stopped in 1968, that the "60s' revolution" ended up
a kind of counter-revolution in disguise - but that's a difficult subject for
another day.)
In particular, it seems to me that Soviet imperialism and Mao's radical reforms,
for all their unnecessary evils and wilful stupidity, led to far more net human
welfare [http://lesswrong.com/lw/jd/human_evil_and_muddled_thinking/f3f] - never
mind the gain in more nebulous things like "Human development"! - than their
actual, really present alternatives at the time: Ame
2[anonymous]11y
I agree with this, the traditionalists where not equipped for the technological
change that took place. Of the various offshoots that tried to grapple with it
Soviet Communism wasn't really that disastrous. It didn't result in a break down
into the bleak dystopia of North Korea or the barbarism of Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge.
I think it plausible that mild fascism (think Franco) in conjunction with
monarchy would have worked better for Russia.
I would be very interested in this take on recent history, please write up a
email if you feel it wouldn't be productive to discuss it here.
I'm not so sure. Right wing capitalist authoritarianism, the sort of outcome I
think the Kuomintang could have provided has a good track record of development
in East Asian states. I'm not suggesting China would have been a Tawian(!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan#Economy]) or Singapore, it was too large
and in the early years too chaotic for that. I do think they would have been far
wealthier and I think it would probably be more democratic today than the PCR
(not that I would necessarily approve of that). Though again a West allied China
may have gone to war with the Soviet Union which would have been a disaster.
Also check out the strong socialist elements
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuomintang#Early_years.2C_Sun_Yat-sen_era] in the
original ideology and practice of the party. Had it gone in that direction
again, I can't see them doing worse than Mao.
It might be true that they could have lost grip of the country and see it
descent into the hands of various warlords, which might have meant decades of
trouble for China. The almost unified China under the PRC would obviously beat
that out.
To be fair though Mao's revolution was basically a Chinese peasants revolt
installing a new dynasty in some Marxist drag. Hardly exceptional in Chinese
history, the more surprising part was that Mao was dethroned with relatively
little bloodshed.
Moldbug makes the case that was mostly
1Multiheaded11y
Concerning Singapore and why the "traditionalist" conservatives and the atheist
alt-right really ought to split on their attitude to it (as of now, they all
seem to think that it's a nice clean place free of all that liberal insanity):
You know how Lee Kwan Yew has occcasionally been complaining about the "crass
materialism" around him in his latter interviews and such? The loss of nice,
cozy traditional values? Well, I think that he hasn't fully comprehended what he
has been ushering in, culturally speaking. Behold.
[http://www.news.com.au/weird-true-freaky/lets-make-a-baby-mentos-takes-on-singapores-population-crisis/story-e6frflri-1226446839524]
BEHOLD AND WEEP! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxU89x78ac] Right out of
trashy dystopian sci-fi... hell, it totally reminds me of this
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI] classic music video (at 3:10).
And here
[http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/is-totalitarian-liberalism-a-mutant-form-of-christianity]
some Catholic woman is trying to pin this shit on leftism. Can't she see that
old good Universalist morality is her only surviving ally against such horrors?
(Rhetorical question: I understand that the less insightful conservatives simply
lump all formally irreligious societies together as The Other. But the brighter
ones should see how this is much worse than leftist academia.)
May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJGQHCC62b0]
1[anonymous]11y
Mainstream Western Universalist morality has no objection to that video except
that its tacky.
0Multiheaded11y
I don't believe this is so. Most any liberal professor type - hell, most lefties
I know - would flip their shit around the phrase "manufacture life" or earlier.
Maybe I'm too rosy-eyed, but I really can't see them remaining unperturbed. In
theory, those lyrics manage to tick off just about every sacredness/profanity
box of stereotypical liberal mentality. (I'll run a poll!)
They might not put much stock in family, but they sure as hell believe in
parenting, upbringing, etc, and will at least see that an ad for breeding that
doesn't even mention parenting or parental love is critically, fundamentally
wrong. (Also, the gut reaction to social control of intimacy/sex. And other
feelings along these lines.)
Right. It hits their sacrednss/profanity boxes in such minds but they can't articulate a rational argument against it based on harm or fairness. Remember they think they don't have the former box. The typical universalist mind faced with something that fits sacredness/profanity latches on to the nearest rationalization expressed in the allowed stated values to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Such rationalizations then live a dangerous life of their own sometimes resulting in disturbing policies.
To analyse the example you've provided, if I'm right we should be seeing in the moderately educated mind a search for a rationalization that fits this shape:
a company with quiet aid of government promoting this might cause harm or unfairness
I think the following does so nicely:
having babies is bad because it hurts the environment and the world is overpopulated anyway
This is ironically part of the environmentalist memeplex that is elsewhere propped up mostly by purity concerns. As evidence of this I submit the most liked youtube comment to the video.
Heh, clever and well-written song. Catchy too! :D
But, it's just the government and capitalism being on a flawed infinite-grow
Damn right. Hmm, looks like I should post your last PM and my reply in here for
kar... I mean, for the public's benefit.
[Konkvistador messaged me:]
[I replied:]
And, speaking of that last one:
Up voted for enforcing a community norm.
I already messaged Multiheaded and explained this to him before you posted. I
want to emphasise he now has my permission to post that particular PM.
0Multiheaded11y
[I already apologized, damnit, and he said it wasn't a problem!]
1Multiheaded11y
Also!
Language trap here. "Democracy" as meaningful majority vote vs. "democracy" as
government attention to broad popular demands vs. "democracy" as a loose
cultural view of Vox Populi vox Dei vs. "democracy" as a permissive and liberal
stance towards social relations, and hell, there's even more packed in here.
I, for instance, think that modern China is much more democratic on many such
metrics than modern Singapore. Including metrics that I value. (Singapore indeed
has legitimate majority vote, but that vote, and the overton window for it, is
controlled by the State in several ways that are unlike 1st world Universalist
propaganda.)
6[anonymous]11y
Well my model of right wing capitalist regimes puts "under Western influence
they transmute into social democracies when rich enough or after the founder
dies" as the default. It happened in South Korea and it happened in Spain.
As to "democratic" I was using it in the standard sense used when discussing
international relations and geopolitics:
"democratic" == does things the State Department, NYT and/or the Pentagon like.
"undemocratic" == does things the State Department, NYT and/or the Pentagon don't like.
0Multiheaded11y
Eh, I think that you and I would have some disagreement due to
harder-to-articulate terminal values here, regardless of a little variation in
numbers.
I can confidently say that you're dead wrong on Chiang, though. All contemporary
accounts, such as those of Western liasons, say that he was very good at holding
on to power via manipulation and intrigue yet very, very bad at using it for
anything. He literally took bribes in plain view and spend them on himself and
his cronies while his armies were hungry, demoralized and steamrolled by the
Japanese; all intelligent Westerners described him with utter contempt, and his
own people did not respect his authority. He's living proof that a
self-interested authoritarian ruler can still be a trainwreck. For a good
description of his wartime behavior (and an extensive list of sources) see e.g.
Max Hastings' Retribution. Hastings is my favorite World War 2 historian btw.
I'll dig up the sources on Chiang and post them later.
I've had that hunch for a while and am researching it right now; this is
conjunctive with what I'm trying to analyze about the current/postmodern
religious and mystical consciousness. Gonna take a while. Check my yesterday's
email on the New Left for a glimpse.
Zizek touches on this "counter-revolution" angle in his rants about "Cultural
capitalism". Also somewhat related is his distinction between the
"radical/leftist" core of Christianity and "Gnostic" tendencies within it - the
"Gnostics" being the ones who do not seek to immanentize the Eschaton, although
I view that in a very different light and think he's dangerously one-sided here.
2[anonymous]11y
Note that I specifically say that a return to warlordism or a protracted civil
war would be the worst of all options so Chiang being good at holding on to
power is a virtue in itself. Again I'm not saying he was a particularly great
ruler, its not like I expect him to live forever. But the fact remains that
several decades after his death Taiwan is a first world country while China's
recent growth can be largely credited to Deng
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping]'s reforms.
Suppose China was divided in half between Mao and Chiang and they manage to
avoid war for several decades due to cold war dynamics similar to the one that
kept a divided German and Korea stable. In 2000 which half of China would you
expect to be the better developed one?
If you agree with my assesment that the capitalist half would likely be the
better developed one, why do you expect a China that is 99% under Kuomintang
governance to be worse than a China that is 99% under Communist party
governance?
I will add it to my reading list.
1Multiheaded11y
The difference between governing a 10-million enclave (a significant proportion
of elite refugees among those 10 million) that serves as a forward outpost to a
friendly superpower, and governing a war-ravaged empire of ~600 million (in
1949) - subsistence farmers most of them - seems to me greater than, say, the
difference between running a coffee shop and Northrop Grumman. We have much
evidence that Chiang was failing miserably at the latter before 1949.
Under Mao, life expectancy literally doubled and the literacy rate went from
20-25% to 80%. And the increase in life expectancy is largely attributed to his
vast state healthcare initiatives.
2[anonymous]11y
Very well, you can make that argument. So I'm taking your answer to my
alternative history scenario:
Is that you don't expect the capitalist half to be significantly better off than
the communist half?
-1Multiheaded11y
Thinking.
0sam034511y
I have heard similarly glorious statistics for Cuba, and, until quite recently,
for North Korea.
Visiting Cuba in 1992 it was obvious to me that living standards, literacy, and
health, had collapsed since the revolution. People are living in the decayed
remnants of what had been decently comfortable houses fifty years ago. People
were hungry, frightened, and desperate.
It is clear that China suffered poverty and economic stagnation under Mao. You
don't double living standards and life expectancy while having massive famines
and operating an economy based on slave labor. Taiwan unambiguously and
obviously experienced dramatic growth. Kuomintang rule was competent, efficient,
and successful. Communist rule was a disaster propped up by foreign
intervention.
4Multiheaded11y
Sorry, but it's hardly possible to fake such a tremendous increase in such basic
statistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_%281949%E2%80%931976%29#Mao.27s_legacy
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_%281949%E2%80%931976%29#Mao.27s_legacy]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China#Post-1949_history
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China#Post-1949_history]
It certainly did; I never claimed otherwise, and neither did Lindsay. Mao's
leadership was a little unhinged to say the least. However, we're talking about
the really existing alternatives to China's particular situation in 1949, not
the Cuban revolution or anything else.
Um, looks like that's exactly what happened.
8sam034511y
And equally hard, no doubt to fake the very similar tremendous increase in the
basic statistics for North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia.
I notice that in the case of Marxist Ethiopia, we saw a tremendous increase in
basic statistics despite bloody and unending civil war, and the massive use of
artificial famine to terrorize the peasants.
And when the Marxist Ethiopian regime was finally overthrown in that bloody and
terrible civil war, and peace returned, their statistics abruptly fell back to
African normal. Did everyone suddenly forget how to read? Perhaps capitalism
caused the death rate to suddenly rise, but did it overnight erase all that
wonderful education that the communists had so successfully done?
3gwern11y
Industrialization is a hell of a drug, isn't it?
I'd also note that in my reading about the Chinese famines and especially the
Great Leap Forward ones is that they were due only minimally due to nation-wide
shortages, but mostly to massive failures in distribution such as falsified
statistics; this scenario is consistent with both claims.
4[anonymous]11y
I'm just reading the book right now after seeing Foseti's review the other day.
(The book is easy to find online.) However, I'm already familiar with most of
its arguments from other sources.
This whole topic is a very deep rabbit hole, and an attempt to study it in-depth
quickly leads to a baffling situation where on many questions, all respectable
sources are silent or clearly wrong or incoherent, while tantalizing clues are
provided by various sources that are completely obscure or (often not without
good reason) utterly disreputable. But I don't think it's a topic for which LW
would be a good discussion venue in any case.
0Dar_Veter11y
If i wanted to find a way to prolong WW2 as much as possible and maximize the
body count (including American one), it would be hard to find better strategy
than McCarthy's proposed one. This synopsis managed to get put my opinion about
him even lower. Why shall i care about political opinions of someone who never
even bothered to look at map (physical map showing mountains, rivers, roads and
railroads, not political one)?
4[anonymous]11y
When doing a body count you really should consider the several dozen million
deaths in China under Mao. This was no freak occurrence. Not only had millions
already died from famine [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor] and in labour
camps [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag], but the USSR was arguably just as
aggressively [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War] expansionist
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland] as Germany before
nuclear weapons made this direct approach impractical.
Anyone who knew anything about the prewar history of the Soviet Union should
have realized that some costs are worth paying. If such goals where not on
peoples minds and the Western Allies simply wanted to minimize casualties and
ensure future peace, they should have signed an armistice with Axis powers once
they had been clearly defeated in 1944 instead of demanding unconditional
surrender.
Simple explanation of meta-analysis; below is a copy of my attempt to explain basic meta-analysis on the DNB ML. I thought I might reuse it elsewhere, and I'd like to know whether it really is a good explanation or needs fixing.
A useful concept is the hierarchy of evidence: we all know anecdote are close to worthless, correlations or surveys fairly weak, experiments good, randomized experiments better, controlled randomized experiments... (read more)
Great explanation, but I think you could improve it by putting it within the
context of the hierarchy of evidence
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence] (i.e., how it should be
weighted as evidence), and mentioning its flaws. Often in skeptic circles I saw
people using meta-analyses as the nuclear option in arguments with alternative
medicine supporters or such -- things got awkward when both sides had a
meta-analysis in their favor.
Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't made a post on how to weight research in
general (that probably means someone has).
As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology,
I don't think it is. These are not new ideas, there are lots of people wearing
this particular clown suit, and the unfortunate thing for Pinker is that most of
them are clowns. That maybe strikes you as unfair, but I think even Pinker would
agree that the quality of his supporters is uneven, at best.
This is just your garden-variety unpopular opinion.
0GLaDOS11y
Perhaps you are right, I sort of pattern matched it to cryonics as something
that feels like lonely dissent because while there are other's in the world who
support your idea you aren't likely to ever encounter them in your everyday
life.
Not among the set of scientists.
That I would like to share. I recently found it on the blog Writings by James_G. I am going to add some emphasis and commentary of my own, but I'm mostly interested how other LWers see this. The main topic of the post itself is about politics and cooperation but I want to emphasise that isn't the topic I'd like to open.
...
So, neurological egalitarians like (I should imagine) Zachary and neurological racist-authoritarians like myself need to be able to cooperate. Unfortunately, politics is the mind-killer.
In response to the blog post Nyk writes:
James_G responds: "Echoing Player of Games: my imagined forum design is
federalist, like the style of government I favour; LessWrong exhibits democratic
degringolade, as does today’s West."
Konkvistador (me): Razib's harsh style does indeed create a comment section well
worth reading.
James_G responds: "I can’t fault this."
Zack M. Davis criticizes James_G's approach of viewing humans as a collection
subagents:
I strongly agree with this.
Recognizing oneself in a mirror is considered a sign of self-awareness. Therefore, if we program a robot to say the words "this is me" when it sees an image of itself in a mirror, the robot becomes self-aware, right?
Or it could be just a cheap hack that does not prove anything. For example if we sprayed the robot with a different color, it would not recognize itself in a mirror even after billion years of contemplation.
According to Eliezer’s metaethics, morality incorporates the concept of reflective equilibrium. Given that presumably every part of my mind gets entangled with my output if I reflect long enough on some topic, isn’t Eliezer’s metaethics equivalent to saying that “right” refers to the output of X, where X is a detailed object-level specification of my entire mind as a computation?
In principle, X could decide to search for some sort of inscribed-in-stone morality out in the physical universe (and adopt whatever it finds o... (read more)
The problem is finding this algorithm. After you find it, you may isolate it
from the human mind.
It's like if humans would instinctively calculate 2+2, but we wouldn't be aware
of what exactly are we doing. So we would need some way to discover that we
actually calculate 2+2. Later, when this fact is known and verified, we can make
machines that calculate 2+2 without having to inspect human mind.
Such explanation would include comparing with a human mind. You can explain that
the machine calculates 2+2. But to explain that the machine does the same thing
that humans instinctively do, you need to compare it with a human mind.
My problem with this fic is the same as with Brutal Harry: Instead of taking a
harry with no changes but a different personality and bringing him into the
wizarding world, both fics immediately start with giving harry new magic powers.
For now this is just a text dump for relating to a conversation I had, that I retracted, not because I found them so lacking but because that particular irrationality game thread turned out to have been made by a likely troll. Expect changes in the next few days. Here is a link to the original conversation.
We have not been experiencing moral progress in the past 250 years. Moral change? Sure. I'd also be ok with calling it value drift. I talked about this previously i... (read more)
I find this juxtaposition unintentionally hilarious. The reason modern society
does so much looking indignant at past instances of terrible things happening to
others, rather than stopping them while they are happening, is because the only
way to stop them is to use violence oneself, which modern society is especially
uncomfortable with.
In general this is the problem with attempting to blindly extrapolate present
trends past the point where they come into conflict with other present trends.
2NancyLebovitz11y
I know it's a first draft, but "Better Angels of Our Nature", much as I love the
idea of being able to geometrize moral stature.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis talks about utopian dreams means hoping that
a small proportion of the human race will tyrannize over the whole future.
CEV is problematic if part of my idea of knowing more includes the idea of
learning from experience. I don't have unlimited trust in extrapolation.
I don't know what you mean by violence having some good traits. I can imagine an
improved society which permits low-level interpersonal violence with a strong
norm that equivalent retaliation should be possible. I don't think there's
anything gained by big wars, but I could be wrong.
"The wrong side of history" is a way of cheating in an argument. We don't know
the future, and "the wrong side of history" just implies a belief that your side
will continue to win. I'm willing to bet that "the wrong side of history" is
used by people who aren't comfortable with making moral pronouncements.
3[anonymous]11y
More a text dump than anything else. Thank you for pointing out the typo
thought.
Violence can be fun. I'd argue this is particularly true of "safe violence",
that doesn't result in death or permanent injury. Otherwise we wouldn't include
it so much in every aspect of entertainment, particularly interactive
entertainment. We also have people who enjoy violence in their sexual lives.
Yes this is what I was going for.
0A1987dM11y
I suspect the two of you are using “violence” with slightly different meanings.
1Multiheaded11y
Some people might reasonably, and coherently, value valuing incoherent or
unreachable values (in, so to say, compartmentalized good faith - that is, you
might know that an algorithm is incoherent, prone to dutch-booking, etc, but it
still feels just fine from the inside) - just as some people think that belief
in belief might have worth of its own, are consciously hypocritical, etc.
Therefore, I'm against such one-level optimizing-away of already held values; if
you see that some specific value is total mess, you might instead just
compartmentalize a little, etc.
(I believe I've already mentioned the above to you at some point.)
BTW, a classic example of people valuing an unreachable value: "Love thy
enemies". (Once I had an awesome experience meditating on it.)
1[anonymous]11y
I would benefit from seeing a clear distinction made in these discussions
between two different questions about moral progress:
1) Have moral intentions improved? Does a typical person educated in an advanced
society have better moral intentions (never mind outcomes) than a typical person
educated in a backward society?
2) Have moral outcomes improved? Are there in aggregate more moral events and
less immoral events (never mind intentions) now than previously?
Of course there is no consensus on what "moral" means in either of these
questions. I think Pinkerian "amount of violence" is a pretty good proxy for 2),
but not for 1).
1Risto_Saarelma11y
Your counterargument to Pinker is pretty central to this thing, but as it stands
it seems to boil down to a not yet very convincing "I don't care for
vegetarianism. Violence is occasionally entertaining." This part should be the
one that makes the reader go, hm, maybe there's a point there, but it's
currently doing nothing to make me stop classifying factory farming food
industry and a preoccupation with violence as problems instead of things to
cherish.
Moving on to
this is also confusing. You're basically restating the exact problem CEV is for,
without mentioning that CEV is for this problem. This also really only makes
sense if you antropomorphize FAI into basically an equivalent of the cultural
norms of the era. There are way too many unknown unknowns in how the basic
cultural backdrop would come out in the end when operated on by an AI as
compared to when operated on by collective human minds for the equating to
outcomes of a culture run by humans to make much sense. I'm basically assuming
that the hopefully better understanding of just how intelligence works at 2400
would dominate over whatever the human cultural norms are like for how FAI2400
as opposed to FAI2012 would come out.
If I wanted to attack the thesis that we're experiencing moral progress due to
cultural evolution, I'd go for looking at how we currently have unprecedented
energy resources at our disposal, and can afford a great deal more social
signaling of every sort than in pretty much any other point in history, and how
the past 300 years we've been on a rising gradient towards the current level of
resource use.
From historical perspective, I'd be interested if we can quantify any sort of
differences in moral progress separate from material progress in the various
geographically and culturally separate historical large civilizations, and what
we can make of the collapse of the Roman Empire into the Early Middle Ages.
The article might also try to say something about what it could mean for
-2MugaSofer11y
You bastard.
EDIT: That's a joke, in case it's not clear.
0[anonymous]11y
This is plain false because my parents are married. However this isn't usually
how we do moral arguments around here, are you new to the site?
0MugaSofer11y
That was a joke.
-1[anonymous]11y
Went right over my head, sorry. :)
1MugaSofer11y
You probably weren't the only one, its famously hard to convey tone using text.
I don't know what a 'model' is. Someone play taboo with me, and tell me about how theories work. Literally speaking, a model, like, airplane is isomorphic to some degree or another to the real airplane of which it is a model. Is that how a scientific theory works? Is there some isomorphism between the parts of the theory and things in the world?
Yes, just like that.
In science, a model is a set of variables that stand for physical quantities,
together with a set of relationships between those variables, which are asserted
to correspond with the relationships among the physical quantities. The
relationships are typically expressed mathematically.
For example, s = (at^2)/2, where s is the distance travelled in time t by an
object under constant acceleration a starting from rest. This is a model of what
happens when you drop something.
More generally, there is a Wikipedia page
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_modelling], which is sound but I think
over-complicates the idea (and the section on "Business process modelling"
doesn't belong there at all), and even more so the disambiguation page for
"Model" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model], but the same fundamental idea runs
through the whole.
1siodine11y
A model is a map of the territory. For example, we could create an emulation of
a light bulb using the most the most basic understanding of a light bulb. I.e.,
you flip a switch, magic goes through a wire, and on goes the light bulb. Or if
you wished (and could) make the model more accurate, you would go down to the
level of electrons, or even further. However, you wouldn't want a model at the
most fundamental level if you're trying to understand how artificial light
affects human behavior, for example. Models are a tool for explaining,
understanding, and predicting phenomena conveniently.
1billswift11y
Or for representing phenomena in an altered "format". For example, I have read a
description of the bimetallic spring in a thermostat as a model of the room's
temperature presented in a way that the furnace can make use of it.
Miniatures company aims for 30K, is over 1M with 5 days to go. Possibly of interest here because it's a fine example of understanding what motivates people.
How high are your standards for non-evilness? Singapore and Switzerland seem
non-evil to me and are reasonably easy to immigrate to.
2[anonymous]11y
Probably unreasonably high. The thing is I'm currently not sure there is a
non-evil human society around.
4[anonymous]11y
Move to a less evil society. Better yet, move to a good society, assuming such a
thing exists.
Otherwise, keep you head down. Do what the society compels you to do (pay your
taxes, obey the laws, etc.) because there is no sense fighting against it if
there is no significant chance of reform.
Beyond that, try to live as though you lived in a good society. Focus on
following your passions, finding a romantic partner, getting a fulfilling job,
and so on.
0Incorrect11y
http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/]
You could try self-modifying to not hate evil people ("hate the sin not the
sinner"). Here's some emotional arguments that might help (I make no claim as to
their logical coherence):
If there was only one person in existence and they were evil, would you want
them to be punished or blessed? Who would it serve to punish them?
If you are going to excuse people with mental illness you are going to have to
draw some arbitrary line along the gradient from "purposely evil" to "evil
because of mental illness." Also consider the gradient of moral responsibility
from child to adult.
If someone who was once evil completely reformed would you still see value in
punishing them? Would you wish you hadn't punished them while they were still
evil?
Although someone may have had a guilty mind at the moment of their crime, do
they still at the moment of punishment? What if you are increasing the quantum
measure of an abstracted isomorphic experience of suffering?
I find myself asking is why was the practice of making loans with interest rates so unpopular in antiquity? I always assumed this was about excessive interest rates (whatever those are), however it now seems to me that usury was about charging any interest on loans.
Some of the earliest known condemnations of usury come from the Vedic texts of India. Similar condemnations are found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At times many nations from ancient China to ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawe
Per Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, the ancients had noticeably less future
time-orientation than modern people. Furthermore, there were relatively few ways
to make profitable investments - it's not as though a farmer could take loans
out to buy a tractor.
In that context, lending is more akin to drug dealing than responsible
investing. It hooks in people with poor self-control who will spend it on
consumption not investment. So the logical thing to do is to crack down on the
practice. Yes there are some responsible users who lose out, but that's far
outweighed by the benefit to those who'd end up in debtor's prison after blowing
the cash on one glorious drunken weekend.
I mean, we as a civilization still have a problem with payday loans
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payday_loans].
1gwern11y
Did we read the same book? Clark's whole point was that there were many secure
(eg. his argument that property rights were more secure in early Britain than
during the Industrial Revolution) high-paying investments; this surprised me so
much that I recorded one snippet from chapter 9 in my Evernotes:
EDIT: Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:
2Athrelon11y
Yes, it looks like you're right that there were significant investment
opportunities even with BC technology, unlike what I assumed. We can quibble
over whether these investment opportunities were "deep" or one-offs, but it
seems reasonable that irrigating farms is something you can invest a lot in
before hitting diminishing returns.
This is still a strange phenomenon: on one hand you have potential investments
with high rates of return, even with risk adjustments - yet market interest
rates were very high, showing few people were willing to make those investments.
Clark's argument is that this demonstrates low ability to delay gratification
among the ancients.
This being the case, although there evidently were opportunities for loans to be
put to good investment purposes, it looks like there was a strong psychological
impulse to blow it on consumption - maybe comparable to the behavior of the
Western poor today. It is still plausible that restricting moneylending was good
policy if the good borrowing:bad borrowing ratio was unfavorable enough.
3gwern11y
I ran into [https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/hyFC7d2NMiE] a
relevant paper
[http://www.religionomics.com/archives/file_download/37/Iannaccone+-+Introduction+to+the+Economics+of+Religion.pdf]
on the 'economics of religion' which offers some interesting theories:
2[anonymous]11y
Does human intuition need to be explained, or just mapped? There are
explanations available for why there are many cities along rivers, and they are
of positive but limited value if you want to understand why Baghdad is where it
is. The history of usury laws tells a very interesting story about human
intuition, and it can be used to make predictions about people's reactions to
similar but novel proposals. But how to tell if there should be a more elegant
explanation?
2[anonymous]11y
Explaining intuitions gives insight into whether they are useful. And yes even
in this case I do leave the possibility open that all ursury is bad for reasons
I don't yet understand despite the consensus among economists on it.
But your question is actually a poignant one since it is one we should have
clearly answered at nearly any step of the entire LessWrong project of building
up human rationality, yet I don't recall us attempting to do so.
0[anonymous]11y
Bahá'í Faith
Is Usury Good ? [http://bahaicoherence.blogspot.com/2010/07/is-usury-good.html]:
Ancient Middle East
Johnson, Paul: A History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987)
ISBN 0-06-091533-1, pp. 172–73.
0Kindly11y
Probably because it would have had less of an impact if the Bible had said "Thou
shalt not lend upon interest greater than 6% to thy brother."
That has a link to a new article by Sylvia Engdahl who has written on the
importance of space for years, http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space.htm
[http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space.htm]
Every now and then, I want to use the expression "the map is not the territory" when writing something aimed at a non-LW audience. Naturally, in addition to briefly explaining what I mean by that in the text itself, I'd prefer to make the sentence a link to an illustrative LW post. However, I'm not sure of what would be a good page to link - the wiki has three (123) pages about the subject, but I'm not sure if any one of them is very good for this purpose. Suggestions?
To reduce the inferential distance, remove the metaphor or replace it with one
appropriate for your audience. "Belief is not reality", "wishing does not make
it so" are some examples. Once people are comfortable with the idea, you can
introduce the map/territory metaphor and link first to the Wikipedia entry
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory]. Wikipedia generally
has more credibility than any niche site like LW. The "simple truth" parable on
yudkowsky.net is quite engaging, but rather wordy and vague, and so should not
be a primary reading, but rather a supplementary one.
1siodine11y
I like your examples, perhaps someone could do something like this
[http://blogs.agu.org/mountainbeltway/2011/10/17/words-matter/] for LW jargon.
1fubarobfusco11y
People mean different things by "the map is not the territory". For instance,
it's sometimes used to say "no description is perfectly accurate" whereas other
times it's more like "be careful not to confuse levels of reference." And
sometimes it's more like a critique of magical thinking: "changing the map
doesn't change the territory."
There's a Wikipedia article
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map-territory_relation] about it, too ... which
also isn't especially great ...
Is there any sort of prevailing opinion in LW about diet? For instance, paleo, IF, CR, etc. The only posts I could find are inconclusive and from years back.
I think there is a vague consensus that, all other things equal, eating less
will make you lose weight and eating more will make you gain weight? I might
have seen someone post a counterexample at least once, but I might simply be
misremembering.
5jsteinhardt11y
Paleo seems to be popular around here but I am pretty skeptical of it actually
being a good idea (I am open to updating if evidence is presented). Intermittent
fasting is the only thing I really feel like I can recommend, and even that is
something that will work for some people but not others (did not work for me,
but LeanGains [http://www.leangains.com/] makes specific enough predictions that
a sufficiently large number of people seem satisfied by that I am convinced it
is a real phenomenon).
Also fixing any deficiencies you have (more water if you are dehydrated, for
instance; probably more protein if you are a vegetarian).
5OrphanWilde11y
If you're looking for a good diet, the first question is - a good diet for what?
2Manfred11y
The consensus I've picked up is that if you focus on just eating the right
macronutrients and getting some exercise, everything else usually works out -
try to replace sugar, refined starch, and processed fruit/vegetable product with
protein, lowish glycemic index starch, and less bland fruit/veg.
Another idea that was useful to me is that mass-produced food has to have a low
water content, or else it goes bad really quickly, and so replacing water with
fat is a great way to make mass-produced food better. But in fresh food there's
no such limitation. This means that eating fresher food basically substitutes
fat for water in a lot of your food items.
-1siodine11y
1. Make it difficult to consume more calories than the amount of calories
necessary for maintaining your target weight. E.g., make it such that you
need to eat a lot of food everyday to reach the maintenance level for your
target weight (fast food, e.g., makes it very very easy to go over that
target). Or you only eat after a certain time late in the day.
2. Religiously monitor your progress. Take pictures of your back, side, front
every week. Weigh yourself everyday. Take measurements -- use us navy body
fat calculator. Find a way to show off your progress
[http://www.reddit.com/r/progresspics]. (This is all purely motivational.)
3. Do the kind of exercise that you will excel at with your desired body type.
If you want to be muscular, do a lot of body weight exercises. If you want
to be lean, do a lot of long distance running. But note that some body types
require different nutritional compositions.
4. This must be a lifestyle change, and not a temporary thing to just lose fat.
5. You need to believe it will work, and continually adapt to setbacks.
eta: this is what I've gathered from the research showing the strategies of
people successful at losing body fat and maintaining a lower bf%.
Tomorrow, I begin an Intro to Ethics class at university. (I need it for a General Education requirement.) I found out that the professor is a Continental philosopher, possibly with Marxist influences. My cursory reading of Continental philosophy doesn't give me a good impression of the field.
I'm trying to reserve judgment until I experience the class, but I'm worried it will be a miserable exercise in guessing the teacher's password... I'll still (likely) get an 'A', but it might be a very trying experience.
I think my fear is illustrated by the oft-quote... (read more)
See what you can learn. Try to steel-man
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/] the arguments that you
encounter. If you're faced with bad arguments then three things that you can
focus on (in declining order of priority) are: 1) what good points are in the
neighborhood of this argument, 2) what is the central flaw of this argument
(which gets at its core), and 3) why would someone find this argument plausible?
#3 is especially useful if it can lead you back towards 1 & 2.
In most philosophy classes, you can get a good grade if you make clear
arguments, and clearly lay out the arguments that you disagree with before
expressing your reasons for disagreement. So it's probably worth at least giving
that a try (especially if you have opportunities to try it out early in the
class that won't have much effect on your final grade). If it doesn't go
smoothly, before jumping to the mind-numbing "guess the password" solution, try
looking at it as a problem of inferential distance. Are there ways of getting
your points across more clearly based on how you frame your argument, what
background information you give, which claims you leave out of your argument
(because they are inessential and too many inferential steps away), etc.?
I took several philosophy-related classes (in a few different departments), and
only had one where I had to do something like guessing the teacher's password.
In that class the professor was a postmodernist type, who designed the course as
a way to explain his worldview and assigned papers for us to write that had to
follow a template that fit within his worldview. On the whole that class was a
good experience. I didn't have to worry much about password-guessing except when
writing those papers; in class I was sincere & engaged and focused on
inferential distance (including trying to point out flaws in his reasoning in
class discussion in a way that was concise, catchy to other students, and
non-annoying). It took some thinking to figure
1[anonymous]11y
Thanks for taking the time to respond! I found your advice helpful. If you're
curious about how my experience was of the class, see this comment
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/e3a/open_thread_august_1631_2012/7ass].
0beoShaffer11y
So, how did the first day go?
3[anonymous]11y
To answer your question from the other post, the class is relatively small.
About 20 people, all sat in a circle.
Thanks for asking! The first day went okay. He said some wonky things about the
divisions between science, philosophy, and "faith," as well as that atheism is a
faith. But beyond that, he seemed really nice and approachable. I get the
impression that he's a fair grader, as well.
I stopped by his office this morning during office hours, and we talked about
philosophy and science for about an hour. We have some obvious disagreements,
but he seemed genuinely curious in where I was coming from and was interested in
talking more. At times I found it very difficult to bridge the inferential gaps.
I am a bit down on myself for not doing as well as I would have liked, but on
balance I think it was a good experience.
0beoShaffer11y
Thats good to hear.
0beoShaffer11y
First look at the syllabus especially the teacher's title. Intro classes that
are also commonly taken by out of major students tend to follow pretty strict
departmental guidelines and/or be taught by people who are pretty low on the
academic totem pole. Thus there is good chance that the teacher won't be able
shoehorn too much of their pet projects in. Before I go one can I ask about how
large the class is?
-edit I was going to customize it a bit based on the class format, but was
intending to say more or less what Unnamed did, minus the personal anecdotes. I
was also going to add that if the teacher is completely horrible you might be
able to transfer to another section. On a final note you might want to look into
pragmatism [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraPra] and late
Wittgenstein [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Mea]. From what
I've seen they aren't up to the standard of the sequences, but do provide a high
status/low inferential distance (to philosophers) way of pointing out some of
the most common ways people misuse words.
Mathematicians have developed habits of communication that are often dysfunctional. Organizers of colloquium talks everywhere exhort speakers to explain things in elementary terms. Nonetheless, most of the audience at an average colloquium talk gets little of value from it. Perhaps they are lost within the first 5 minutes, yet sit silently through the remaining 55 minutes. Or perhaps they quickly lose interest because the speaker plunges i
Worrying. They're too good at general-domain planning and learning. Might they
be people?
1Alicorn11y
I don't eat cephalopods even though I still eat other seafood because I have
error bars around that.
0MixedNuts11y
Squid and cuttlefish still look pretty stupid. I'm not motivated to stop eating
cows because humans are people (and if I understand the reasons for your
vegetarianism, neither are you), so avoiding the order Octopoda alone seems safe
enough. Octopus as food is rare in most cultures (exceptions are some
Mediterranean cultures, Japan, and Hawaii).
1Alicorn11y
Well, I never liked squid all that much anyway (and the one time I tried octopus
I didn't like it) so it's not a big sacrifice to have the error bar anyway. And
it means I get to use the word "cephalopods" routinely in casual conversation.
Any LWers with recommendations for ways to improve social skills? Right now, I can more-or-less hold a conversation, but I tend to overthink what to say and end up not saying anything, and I just generally lack confidence. How much benefit would I get from, say, joining an improv class or doing (more) rejection therapy?
I think the most important realization re typical conversation is that its
purpose is not for information exchange, it's for bonding (like apes picking
nits off each other). A good conversationalist has a lot of anecdotes (and
continually generates more), listens and mentally models others well, and makes
no overt attempts at lowering the status of others within the conversation (this
could be something as seemingly innocuous as pointing out that someone is wrong
about something).
6NancyLebovitz11y
Nerds bond by exchanging information.
1siodine11y
Yeah, nerds are atypical in many ways. Also, you could form information into
compelling anecdotes/stories like the best science journalists do (Carl Zimmer
comes to mind).
4Barry_Cotter11y
Practice conversation and you will get better at it. That's it. More helpfully,
if there is a random stranger near you, you can open them and talk for a bit
about any random smalltalk bull you like. This will improve general conversation
skills. If you live in a large anonymous city you don't need to care if people
think that's weird because people will not be getting together to share these
impressions. Advice I picked up from reading PUAshit; jump between topics
without feeling the need to link them or segue at all. Advice that sounds good
that I haven't tried out; record yourself in conversation to pick out flaws. Oh,
and pause, don't um. Improv will help, and remember, keep calm and carry on.
3Viliam_Bur11y
Also, choose topics where inferential distance
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance] for a random person is
small. This is what allows talking instead of explaining, and easy jumping
between the topics. Avoid controversial topics, such as money, politics,
religion.
A good topic is easy to understand, and does not divide people into opposing
groups.
0[anonymous]11y
What topics aren't controversial and within a short inferential distance from
most people? My intuition is that this is close to the definition of "boring".
4billswift11y
Listen to actual conversation sometime, most of it is excruciatingly boring if
you think about it in terms of information. But as other posters have pointed
out, most conversation is about social bonding, not exchanging information.
0[anonymous]11y
This all looks like good advice; thanks. I think my main problem is that I have
trouble mustering up the guts to actually do these things. I just don't talk to
strangers.
Maybe I could get around that by precommitting to social interaction? Like
signing up for improv like you say, or with stickk, or by going on some sort of
working holiday?
0MixedNuts11y
If you're not really good at reading feedback, practice won't help in the least.
People will be polite to you, which you won't distinguish from pleased, and
quietly hate you.
0Barry_Cotter11y
Really good is helpful, very helpful, but not necessary.If what you're saying is
that practicing on randomers you won't meet again is low EV given poor is people
reading skills, sureis. But iwhat's higher? And for people with over sensitive
rejection detectors or general anxiety practice is good even if all you get out
of it is calmer.
0MixedNuts11y
Getting in group conversations, then mostly shutting up and watching. Most
people will be decent conversationalists to learn from, you'll be able to watch
reactions more closely than if you were concentrating on talking at the same
time, and they'll gossip about the absent which will tell you what to avoid.
2John_Maxwell11y
What worked for me better than anything was standing on a busy sidewalk holding
a sign that said "Free Hugs" for a few hours. I came away feeling very high
status and had a friendly, open orientation towards everyone I saw.
Another idea is to play the eye contact game lukeprog mentions in one of his
skill-building posts: stare in to a friend's eyes for 15 minutes straight. Seems
to have permanently made me way more comfortable maintaining eye contact (this
is more than a year after doing the exercise).
0[anonymous]11y
Thanks for the advice. The second one in particular is surprising because most
of the once-off life-changes I've tried have had no effect on me a week or two
later. I've added both to my list of "things I'll wish I'd done sooner", from
where I'll hopefully make concrete plans to actually execute them.
1Jabberslythe11y
I'm also interested in this. I want to know what specific social situations I
can put myself in to build social skills. Raw exposure doesn't seem to work well
for and in any case isn't time effective.
1[anonymous]11y
If you feel you lack confidence you could try exposure as others have suggested.
If you want put yourself in an awkward situation you could maybe Skype with me
or someone ells willing. That way you can pick out the flaws afterwards as Barry
pointed out .
1[anonymous]11y
Thanks for the skype offer. Maybe as a stepping-stone to real social interaction
I could try talking to lots of random people online via chatroulette or
something similar?
1palladias11y
I notice that you've listed things you do that are not working. Can you think of
people you interact with who seem to have achieved victory? What do they do? How
do other people respond? It may be easier to decide if improv or rejection
therapy is helping if you have more metrics to check to see if people are
comfortable and/or enjoying conversations with you.
Feelings of confidence are an internal signal, and not a very trustworthy one,
since you will feel unconfident when you're experimenting. Look for some
external signals like the body language of people you're talking to (arms
uncrossed, duchenne smiles
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile#Duchenne_smiling], etc). Combine rejection
therapy and data gathering and ask some friends outright what you could improve.
(Tell them to be specific).
One thing that I did was to notice some people who seemed good at socializing
and then just try to impersonate some aspects of what they did. Don't mimic to
the point of parody, but pick out a few specific things they do (relaxed,
splayed leg body language, asks questions to draw out others, etc) and then just
try them out for a week.
1Jabberslythe11y
Other people seem to be able to sit down and assimilate themselves into a group
conversation, when I do this I rarely end up saying anything.
Yeah, I think that feeling unconfident is largely the cause, so it's something
that I should try to avoid even though it is an especially poor internal signal.
I should try to make myself update on some more reliable signals like those.
Yeah, I should try that more. My main issues with mimicing successful people is
that I have trouble mustering the emotion to do it effectively.
-1Bruno_Coelho11y
Social abilities are useful when you are prepared to say awful things like
agreeing, when disagree. People would reward if they feel you are part of they
social/groupthinking. For this infere that there is habilities you could train
in terms of general competence, but is is better to have some specific groups in
mind.
it is possible to have a finite chance to survive an infinite time even if there is a finite chance of getting destroyed per unit of time, if you make backup copies (that are also destroyable) at a high enough rate. The number of backup copies needed only grows logarithmically with time, a surprisingly slow growth.
I'd previously been assuming that exponentially many copies were needed (in order to "cancel out" the fact that if you only have one... (read more)
Why I am a deathist, for those who can't understand the mentality:
Because the thought that someday I will die is a -liberating- thought for me. First you must understand who I was, however - in my youth I was absolutely terrified of a permanent injury of any sort. (When I realized, truly realized, I'd been circumcised, it was mildly traumatizing.) This extends to the mental as well as the physical.
The realization, later, that I would die - wasn't a horrifying thought. It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except de... (read more)
It sounds like you're describing two attitudes towards immortality, an abstract
one and a concrete one. The concrete attitude: "I don't desire never to die, but
rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing." "What's more
likely in any given ten year period, pristine immortality being fully resolved,
or somebody awakening my mind to an existence I would never want?" "The
opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because
of my certainty I would not choose it." I will not comment on these concerns
today.
The abstract attitude is summed up by:
The map-territory distinction is useful here. You should say instead
The idea of death allays your anxieties by inspiring healthy emotions. That
doesn't mean that the idea of death should inform your decisions. It's possible
to comfort yourself with the thought of death and then go ahead and sign up for
cryonics anyways, just like how people can comfort themselves by not thinking
about death and then go ahead and wear a seat belt. But you no doubt have other,
more concrete objections to cryonics, which takes us back to your first
attitude. Those objections are better reasons to make "deathist" decisions.
Better yet, you could use a different narrative to comfort yourself. Just
because the thought that you're going to die someday succeeded in allaying your
anxieties doesn't mean it's the only narrative that can do so. (That it is
sufficient for your sanity does not imply that it is necessary for your sanity!)
It's worth spending some time on looking for an alternative narrative that's
just as comforting and which is more concordant with your preference "not to die
tomorrow".
If you do switch narratives, you might find that you're no longer "deathist" but
none of your decisions have changed. In that case all that changed was your
aesthetic. But I suspect if you change your abstract attitude towards death, you
might find that your concrete attitude changes as well: You might notic
1OrphanWilde11y
I am pondering on this. It may take some time.
2shminux11y
This problem has been solved already. Keep backups.
1MixedNuts11y
Shouldn't you be working on that phobia directly? Even without the part where it
makes you want to die, it sounds pretty unpleasant. It might help to spend time
around disabled people, especially those who aren't just adapting to their
disability but actively building culture around it, like the Deaf community.
Paralympic athletes with better-than-natural accommodations also come to mind,
but you might react better to people just going about their daily life in
slightly unusual ways than to awesome flashy gizmos.
What is frightening you exactly? Your circumcision example suggests visibly
losing body parts is the problem, but the rest of your post mentions loss of
abilities more.
The image I associate with "something just more than nothing" is that of the
kind of patients uncharitably called "vegetables". Is that correct? I don't know
how much limits-pushing badassery appeals to you, but I'd like to present
another view: someone with a broken body and a broken mind, who refuses to give
up and every day deploys great courage and cunning and perseverance to achieve
what you do without thinking, through pain and fear and confusion and repeated
failure. It's very bad, but the attitude is awesome.
0OrphanWilde11y
Loss of abilities is something people can relate to more. The "permanent" part
is more important than the "injury" part. A small scar nobody could see was a
horrifying thought to me.
It extended to the mental as well. The thought that I might not be able to learn
every language in existence in the narrow timeframe before my mind "hardened"
against learning new languages was horrifying as well. (Particularly torturous,
that one, because languages were dead-last on my list of things I needed to
learn -soon-. I recognize Eliezer's fear that he won't be done with what he
needs done by the time he's 40 - but start those fears at age 7 and thinking it
may already be too late and you might have some inkling of what my childhood was
like.)
1MixedNuts11y
Is it any comfort that no injury can be permanent, since it's vanishingly
unlikely that we'll find a way around the universe's heat death but not around
damage to human bodies in the next few billion years?
0OpenThreadGuy11y
I don't think this reasoning actually makes sense, but regardless, why do you
think this makes it okay for other people to die, if they don't want to? That's
what deathism is.
0OrphanWilde11y
Not all deathism holds that everybody should die, only that death is good.
0Rain11y
My brother prefers the label "anti-liveite".
0kilobug11y
Hum, I don't get the reasoning. You say the perspective of death allows you to
better handle the thought of permanent injury. But "conquering death" also
implies conquering permanent injury. I really don't see how we could prevent
death but not be able to regrow a limb (or foreskin). So if we remove both the
risk of permanent injury and death at the same time, what's your need for death
?
0OrphanWilde11y
"I don't desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just
more than nothing."
There is a difference between conquering death and conquering the ailments of
the mortal condition - mental and physical. If we can upload minds before we can
repair bodies, we can achieve immortality without solving any of these issues.
0kilobug11y
Hrm, no, if we can upload mind, then we can just hold the minds in "stand by"
mode until we have the technology to build bodies at least as good as a fully
sane normal human.
-2OrphanWilde11y
Contingency-based wish machines are evil genies who may not even respect your
wishes. I have to ask - what's more likely in any given ten year period,
pristine immortality being fully resolved, or somebody awakening my mind to an
existence I would never want?
You should never pause your mind until some contingency is reached unless you
are precisely aware of what other contingencies could result in your mind being
unpaused - and have done the calculations and identified the risk.
In theory it seems an excellent way to practice what are called "openers" by
PUAs, short introductory statements that grab peoples attention by amusing or
engaging them. I should point out that some consider talking or flirting to
other people with the intention of practicisng social skill unethical. I'm not
sure why.
I've had very good experiences and made tons of new acquaintances just starting
conversations with strangers in such a manner. This is somewhat rare behaviour
in my culture.
Keep in mind that speed dating is an artificial situation. Seemingly trivial
details unique to the setting will change outcomes considerably thus reducing
how transferable the skills and calibration you gain will be. To give an example
of such factors, it has been shown that when you rotate the men in such an event
and the women stay put, they become choosier about the partner. When you reverse
the roles men become choosier.
0Jabberslythe11y
I've stopped trying to start conversations with strangers. When I considered it
a 'live option' I didn't think that I was getting enough conversations out the
effort I was allocating. I imagine it would be a better option for people who
were not as shy to begin with.
The reason that speed dating is attractive to me is that I don't think that I
could get many more conversations started in a speed dating environment because
it would be expected that I would once I was in it. Yeah, that's good to keep in
mind. I would expect that a lot of it wouldn't transfer, but even if a small
amount did it seems like it would be worth the investment for me.
I'm looking for strategies/techniques to manage/improve poor working memory, I currently find myself in situations where I forget to do something I thought about doing just a minute past or so.
If anyone have any worth trying out, I'd love to here about them.
Strategies that I already use are:
Visual ques, putting things in positions that make me notice them hence remember.
Domino-ques, i.e. focusing on remember one thing that will remind me of a number of things.
Oh I didn't know gwern had written about it! Thanks, I'll try to implement it
best I can.
3NancyLebovitz11y
My impression is that a lot gets "forgotten" because it wasn't noticed in the
first place. Have you tried mindfulness meditation?
I don't know whether your mind works the same way, but I find that sometimes (if
I remember to check!) I can tell whether I've actually done something by
checking for tactile/kinesthetic memory in addition to visual.
0[anonymous]11y
Hmm well, I can tell from the feel of my hands if I have done something that
requires me to wash them even if my hands are not visual dirty. Do know any
particular technique that enables you to assign feels to preformed actions?
0NancyLebovitz11y
I'm not sure whether you can expect memory improvement from mindfulness
meditation-- I was suggesting it as something plausible rather than proven. The
most detail I've seen about the benefits of mindfulness meditation are about
calmness rather than memory.
I think kinesthetic and tactile memories get saved for me of things I've
actually done for a short time. I'm not sure how long it is, but it seems to be
more than half an hour and less than a day. I recommend exploring whether there
are memory differences between what you intend to do and what you've actually
done.
I've found the self-help stuff on here useful, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend any useful online study skills guides? I'm particularly interested in learning to read/take notes and retain information more effectively. At the moment, I can spend hours reading and take very little in!
You may already have heard of it, but spaced repetition
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Spaced_repetition] is the
solution to the problem of retaining memory-worthy information.
1[anonymous]11y
I've found Study Hacks [http://calnewport.com/blog/] to be particularly helpful.
I've been reading Robert Lindsay's blog - he's a total badass of a contrarian, stark raving mad in a good way, and a self-identified Stalinist, mentioned favorably by TGGP). He is a feminist-hating feminist, a liberal humanist who supports far-left totalitarian repression, and an anti-racist/anti-fascist White Supremacist - among other things. Literally a mad genius.
Anyway, what I want to mention is that, from the remarks of a guest poster there, I extrapolated what looks like a succint, plausible and non-mind-killed explanation of why, paradoxically, Afri... (read more)
Why doesn't this apply to every minority? For example, when anti-Semitism broke down, why didn't it leave behind little Jewish ghettos of swirling social dysfunction and failure as the best Jews escaped into goyish society? Why not any Asian group? etc.
If this is model is correct then we should expect it to also work when dealing
with class. If so it might explain the rise of the native British underclass, as
the old culturally enforced class barriers where lessened by meritocracy in the
early 20th century, evaporative cooling ensured the remaining lower class
suffered more and more social pathologies.
If Charles Murray's Coming Apart
[http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421] case
that such a cultural divergence between classes is taking place in America is
correct, we should be able to make a few predictions about the near term social
future of that country. At a glance these predictions seem plausible as they
match most current recorded trends.
This seems related to matters discussed in my public draft on Meritocracy
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/d3h/open_thread_june_1630_2012/6xa5] and the comment
section there:
I like the Rationality Quotes, but it seems it is dominated by fairly long entries, rather than the small gems that I prefer. Now, obviously some people like those longer entries, but it'd be great if I those could be filtered out in some way. Is there a way to do that?
1) I'm moving to Vienna on the 25th. If there exist lesswrongers there I'd be most happy to meet them.
2) Moving strikes me as a great opportunity to develop positive, life-enchancing habits. If anyone has any literature or tips on this i'd greatly appreciate it
Note; The story I originally posted here was true and complete. However the details detract from the main point of the post, which was to indicate material support for life extension causes. Hence the edit.
Owing to a recent financial windfall, I now intend to travel the world working towards life extension. Im starting by pledging donations to the Brain Preservation Fund and the Kim Suozzi fund. Readers will also shortly see my name appearing on the donar list of the aforementioned funds.
I have a blog (link below) where I will soon be writing about ... (read more)
I hope you don't expect that the majority of the people here will just take a
random stranger at his word regarding this, even if many of them are too polite
to say so plainly.
I have a significant higher estimation that you're lying for purposes of
trolling, than that you are accurately describing what happened.
In the slight possibility that you're telling the truth, I hope you're not
offended by my low estimation of the likelihood of such sincerity.
2Risto_Saarelma11y
Geddes isn't exactly a random stranger, he's been trolling SI related forums
[http://www.sl4.org/archive/0511/12949.html] for something like a decade.
3Quantumental11y
Dude you are looking at numbers through some 9/11 Truther eyes, you definitely
got a long way to go if you plan on travelling the world "working towards life
extension". It's great that you are donating money to these funds, but please
don't use your story as a "The SAI might be God" thingy. It will only make
people look at transhumanism as a religion (like plenty already do).
Congratulations
1Incorrect11y
Congratulations!
For the sake of people reading this post who may not be familiar with the
concept of backwards causality:
This is not the typical LW understanding of decision theory. Here's an example
of what "backwards causality" could actually mean:
Thinking of it as "backwards causality" enacted by the hypothetical future
wish-granting agent is a useful way of thinking about certain decision problems
but should never preclude a normal, traditional explanation.
Lest anyone claim I am ruining the mood: Praise be to the glorious Eschaton;
that acausal spring from which all blessings flow!
-1Mitchell_Porter11y
And therefore I am skeptical. I don't believe stories of people who beat odds of
500,000 to 1 against by calling on help from the post-singularity future.
Therefore something is fishy about this story.
1Incorrect11y
I wrote my comment above under the assumption of mjgeddes' honesty but I also
believe they are more likely lying than not lying.
My alternative theories are: mjgeddes is just trolling without any real plan
(40%), mjgeddes is planning to laugh at us all for believing something with such
an explicitly low prior. (40%), something else (>19%), actually won the lottery:
<1%
Yet still I feel the need to give them the benefit of the doubt. I wonder
precisely when that social heuristic should be abandoned...
0A1987dM11y
Anyway, selection effects. If half a million people try to do that and one
succeeds, you hear from that one but not from the other 499,999
-2Will_Newsome11y
Or something is fishy about your metaphysic, yo. (I have no opinion on the
matter.)
-2Decius11y
Which airline did you fly, and what type aircraft has a seat numbered 27? Every
aircraft I've ever seen with more than 10 seats numbers them with a number and
letter...
-4MileyCyrus11y
Congratulations!
It's looks like the whole world got lucky!
If you think it's the latter, I would urge you to keep the specifics of your
summoning-the-SAI strategy to yourself. Perhaps share it with lukeprog. But
please don't tell us how you did it---I wouldn't want that information to fall
into the wrong hands!
Of interest to probably no one but me: I seem to have lost 20 karma overnight. My views are not exactly mainstream in this community, but I am vague curious what triggered someone to go through some of my recent comments to downvote them.
Also, it doesn't appear to be related to this new feature.
I have become 30% confident that my comments here are a net harm, which is too much to bear and so I am discontinuing my comments here unless someone cares to convince me otherwise.
What the hell? Did you catch Konkvistador disease or something? What is up with high-quality contributors deciding to up and leave?
I, for one, think that your posts are valuable to the community.
(I'm assuming you mean that you suspect your comments cause harm to others, obviously if you think you're spending to much time procrastinating on LessWrong then leaving is fine.)
I've recently read a lot of strong claims and mind-killing argumentation made against E.Y.'s assertion that MWI is the winning/leading interpretation in QM. The SEP seems to agree with this, which means I've got a bottom-line here to erase since both of my favorite authorities agree on that particular conclusion.
I know very little actual, factual QM, as relates to the math, experiments, hard data, evidence and physics beyond what's constantly being regurgitated in popular-science-news articles - AKA loads of BS.
How should I go about being epistemically r... (read more)
I think being epistemically rational entails learning the mathematical part of QM first and reading through the QM sequence afterwards. Before you can seriously attack the problem of interpretation of QM, you needn't necessarily know the experiments and hard data and evidence for QM, but you must know the mathematical structure of the theory, because that's the thing what you are going to interpret!
Be sure you operationally understand QM under the collapse interpretation, that is, you should know how to calculate probability distribution of observed results in series of subsequent measurements of different observables and you should understand the standard jargon. You will probably have to learn Hamiltonian mechanics in the course (if you don't know it already); it is not strictly necessary for the collapse-related questions, but most textbooks assume familiarity with it from the beginning, and besides, broader and more general understanding of QM is probably a better goal than understanding only the aspects which EY had decided to write about. I suggest starting with the collapse interpretation because it is the easiest one to understand for a person accustomed only to classical m... (read more)
See, I might think that
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dy8/a_cynical_explanation_for_why_rationalists_worry/75ij],
but many LWers (including SI staff) responded to that considering it ridiculous
that one should have to understand the equations to have a meaningful opinion on
the topic. So we're at odds with consensus here.
2prase11y
I don't claim representing consensus in the parent comment.
0wedrifid11y
David wasn't trying to imply otherwise. He was making use of your comment as a
context in which to snark about past disagreements he has had.
2prase11y
I understood that, nevertheless I used his snarky remark as a context in which
to disclaim one possible misinterpretation of my original comment.
0wedrifid11y
;) I suspected that, nevertheless I used your clarification as a context in
which to frame the interjection in question as somewhat more in the direction of
petty than incisive---my impression being that the snarkiness did not accurately
represent the positions of people who have disagreed with David in the past.
8shminux11y
Read through the sequence, but every time there is a many worlds assertion, stop
and think whether adopting it lets you do anything more than feel superior to
single-worlders. Take notes of the sort "without MWI, the following argument
advanced by EY would not work: ...", then try to see if someone
interpretation-agnostic would still be able to make the same argument. Simply
learning the EY-path through QM is little better than memorizing scriptures (=
guessing teacher's password). Feel free to post your progress and questions in
the appropriate thread.
5pragmatist11y
I think the expository part of the QM sequence can be skipped without
significant loss of understanding of the broad philosophical point EY is
attempting to make. However, if you are interested in QM for its own sake, I
would recommend reading a quick non-pop-sci introduction to the theory before
reading the sequence. Otherwise I think you will emerge from the sequence with
only the illusion of understanding. In my experience on this site, it is far too
common that people whose main exposure to QM is the sequence misunderstand not
just the mathematics of the theory but also the conceptual structure of MWI.
If you want a really good, really short introduction to the mathematics of QM,
this book
[http://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Quantum-Theory-Mathematical-Isham/dp/1860940013/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345355168&sr=1-2&keywords=isham]
is excellent. It's written in a very engaging, non-textbooky way, so don't worry
about it being a dry read. It does presume some mathematical sophistication
though. If you're not comfortable with differential equations and linear
algebra, I would advise against reading it.
If you don't have that sort of mathematical background, read this
[http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Quantum-Mechanics/dp/0674843924/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345355301&sr=1-1&keywords=hughes+quantum]
instead. It actually is an introductory book, presuming very little knowledge on
the reader's part. I recommend it over standard intro textbooks (such as
Griffiths) for someone with your interests, because it focuses on developing a
deep conceptual understanding of the theory rather than on doing calculations.
Finally, you could try David Albert's idiosyncratic but compelling book
[http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-David-Albert/dp/0674741137/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345355463&sr=1-1&keywords=quantum+mechanics+experience]
on the philosophy of QM. Again, the book is completely introductory. It won't
teach you much about the m
2Mitchell_Porter11y
Are you reading the Sequence in order to learn about QM, or in order to complete
the Less Wrong course in rationality? The most sober way to think about QM is as
a recipe for prediction, for which there are several competing explanations, and
all of which might be wrong. The Sequence aims to rise above the disputes of
physicists and rationally pick the winner. It doesn't really rise above, but
neither does it sink below. An argument by a physicist in favor of a specific
interpretation usually contains a mix of good points and blindspots, and
Eliezer's argument is at that level. Understanding why QM works is a problem of
the first order, and you won't learn the answer by reading the Sequence or even
by reading a hundred textbooks. But you will learn more about the problem and
about what we do know; and if you read the comments, you may even avoid
acquiring false knowledge.
As for studying rationality, it's even easier to avoid going astray - just study
the arguments bearing in mind that the specific conclusions about physics may be
wrong, and ask how substantively that would affect the higher-level lessons that
you're asked to draw.
That SEP article is the article on MWI. The other SEP articles on QM don't say
that.
2Richard_Kennaway11y
As prase and David Gerard have said, to understand QM, first learn QM. The
actual mathematics and physics of it, not any popularisation. When you can pass
a finals exam in the subject, with distinction, making minimal use of reference
materials, then you will have reached a position from which you may be able to
begin to participate in useful discussions about QM. How many similarly
qualified people there are on LessWrong to have such a discussion with, or who
they might be, I do not know.
I hasten to add that by that standard, I am certainly not one of them. I do not
know QM. I hope I have never pontificated on the subject here or anywhere else,
but I certainly do not do so now.
Anyone wanting a quick self-test, and with access to a university library, might
entertain themselves with this volume
[http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Quantum-Mechanics-Classics-Mathematics/dp/3540650350],
a book of exercises in QM, with worked solutions. If you can do even one of the
problems at sight, and get it right, then you know more QM than you will ever
discover from popularisations. When you can do all of them, you can claim to
know QM.
A politically incorrect example of a mathematical theorem:
When someone (a white person) is accused of racism, and they say -- "I'm not racist, some of my best friends are black," -- they often get a response like -- "This is exactly what a racist would say."
Translated to mathematics, the fact that a white person has black friends, is considered an evidence for hypothesis that the person is a racist. Now if this line of reasoning is correct, then according to the law of conservation of expected evidence, not having black friends should b... (read more)
It is not the fact that the person has black friends that is supposed to count as evidence of their racism. It is the fact that they say that they have black friends in response to an accusation of racism. The response is the evidence, not the fact (if it is a fact) that the response is reporting. So what would be evidence against the racism hypothesis is not saying things like "I'm not racist; some of my best friends are black."
I'm not saying this is great evidence either, but it is not as obviously ridiculous as thinking that not having black friends is evidence against racism. I wouldn't be at all surprised if saying "Some of my best friends are black" is anticorrelated with actually having black best friends.
Exactly. I think this XKCD [http://xkcd.com/463/] is relavent. If someone
accuses you of being a bad teacher, "It's okay! I always wear a condom while
teaching" is a bad response. However, "It's okay! I never wear a condom while
teaching" is even worse.
Those lines of thought should never even come up as something one would think to
say.
1fubarobfusco11y
Exactly. The claim is not "You have black friends, therefore you are racist."
The claim is "You think 'I have black friends' is a relevant thing to mention in
response to being called on your apparently racist comments or behavior. It
isn't."
1OrphanWilde11y
There's a difference between being racist (or, more precisely, the popular
perception of what being racist entails) and engaging in racist behavior.
Oh, I agree. However, folks often take the claim "Hey, that thing you just said was kinda racist" as meaning "YOU ARE AN AWFUL RACIST SCUMBAG GO DIE IN A FIRE" and respond accordingly.
That's not too surprising given that ① people generally don't like receiving criticism of their views or actions, and get defensive; and ② many people seem to believe that only "racists" (a kind of person, usually found in Nazi or Klan uniforms) do, say, or believe racist things — and therefore that if someone says you did something racist, they are calling you "a racist" and thereby predicting that you're going to go commit hate crimes.
It's unfortunate though.
It probably doesn't help that people use "racism" to mean several different things, including:
Racial prejudice — having false negative beliefs about people according to their race
Racial privilege — the situation where some people receive social, political, or economic advantages and others receive disadvantages on the basis of their race (see also: invisible knapsack)
Racial hatred — having malicious intentions towards people on the basis of their race
Notably, people can do racist₂ things — perpetuating racial privilege — without being racist₁ or racist₃.
Would you fail to be surprised based on evidence that people who say that don't
have black best friends, or because you agree with the implicit claim that that
is a response a racist is likely to use?
Because it seems like there's some circular logic going on somewhere. Possibly
in the form of a societal feedback mechanism; non-racist people assume that's a
racist's response to the question, and so don't utilize it.
-3shminux11y
My honest response to "do you have black (indian/chinese/..) friends?" is
something like "no idea, I don't usually notice hair, eye or skin color".
EDIT: wondering about the downvotes... does it sound non-believable or
something?
2prase11y
That is a great signalling response, but honest? You really don't know whether
your friend is black or white?
3shminux11y
Not unless their skin is coal-black, no. For example, I was surprised to learn
that Condoleezza Rice was considered "black". Same with people of East Indian,
Philippino or often even Chinese descent. Then again, I live in Vancouver,
Canada, where race (however you want to define it) is basically a non-issue, so
I don't notice stuff like that, unless pointed out to me. Probably my personal
blind spot, of course. A friend of mine (I'm pretty sure she is white) often
refers to her acquaintances by their ethnicity when talking about them ("that
Yemeni dude"), and I just stare blankly.
3gwern11y
Well, as we all know, race is a purely social construct with no underlying
biological basis; unfortunately, LWers are known for their very poor socializing
skills and understanding of social norms. So shminux, a LWer, doesn't know?
Not very surprising, actually!
0siodine11y
I know race is a social construct, but no underlying biological basis? Isn't
this Lewontin's fallacy?
1gwern11y
No, as I understand it, Lewontin's fallacy
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Human_genetic_diversity:_Lewontin%27s_fallacy%22_%28scientific_paper%29#Edwards.27_critique]
is considered to be not the claim that there is no underlying basis, but that
this is established by looking at raw percentages of between-group vs
within-group variation.
0prase11y
Although I assume you aren't being serious, remember that shminux claimed that
he doesn't notice hair, eye and skin colour. As far as I know, colour is not a
purely social construct, althout if shminux were a continental philosopher, I
could imagine him believing that it is.
3gwern11y
C'mon, color is totally
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate]
a social construct!
6Nornagest11y
There really should be a phrase for socially constructed divisions or
elaborations of a continuous empirical space.
3Oscar_Cunningham11y
"self-fulfilling distinctions"?
1Viliam_Bur11y
This may be strongly culture-dependent.
In some culture you can find many people of any skin color on your social level.
In other culture, things may be completely different. In different cultures
people will notice different facts, because those facts will bring different
number of bits of information.
For example, if there is exactly one black person in otherwise white town, and
it is a well-known person (especially well-known for something that is somehow
related with them being black -- for example well-known as the billionaire
prince from Nigeria), then obviously everyone remembers whether they have 1
black friend or 0 black friends in the town; and if they say otherwise, I would
suspect hypocrisy.
Perhaps this all just shows that one should not blindly copy heuristics just
because they worked in a different environment.
3prase11y
In my culture I can find people both straight and curly hair on every social
level (and although I can't say for sure there is no hair texture to status
correlation, I am not aware of any prejudices with respect to this), but it
never occured to me that I could be ignorant about whether my friend has
straight or curly hair. Maybe I use "friend" too restrictively.
0Alicorn11y
You might be ignorant about whether some of your friends have naturally curly or
straight hair.
2prase11y
Yes, I might, as well as I might be ignorant about whether Michael Jackson was
naturally white or black. I wonder why you consider this particularly relevant.
1gyokuro11y
This happens to me as well-- I was shocked recently when someone pointed out
some people I interact with daily are on the black side of the spectrum. It just
doesn't occur to me.
0arundelo11y
This thread needs a mention of Stephen Colbert
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_%28character%29], one of whose
running jokes is that he "doesn't see race" [video]
[http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/373359/february-03-2011/affirmative-reaction].
6Emile11y
That's a bit of a bad faith interpretation; I see it as meaning something more
like "Having black friends is not sufficiently strong evidence to push you out
of the 'racist' category".
A bit as if I spent all day laughing and pointing at ugly and disabled people,
and when someone called me an asshole I replied "I'm not an asshole, I helped an
old lady cross the street last week". Even assholes can point to examples of
nice deeds they did, even racists can point to black "friends".
1[anonymous]11y
Alternatively, the immediate statement "I'm not racist" is actually the evidence
that you are a racist. The additional statement "Some of my best friends are
black." may or may not be evidence against racism, depending on context. It
seems like one piece of evidence, but nothing stops you from taking it as two
entirely different pieces of evidence and evaluating each one separately. Or
alternatively, the mere context of the fact that the statement is immediate
might be the indicator itself.
Consider: A person named John Doe does not even appear willing to consider that
they might have, for instance, offended a person of another race with whatever
they just did, and they just immediately deny that person of the other race is
saying something plausible and start making excuses as to why they are wrong.
Ignoring John Doe's specific words for a moment, does that context make John Doe
sound more or less likely to be racist?
0[anonymous]11y
There is a huge variety of alternatives one could offer as a defense against
racism, and giving one rather than others inevitably provides evidence about the
various features that get called racist. If the best defense someone can offer
(assuming people lead with their best defenses) is "some of my friends are X,"
that can be evidence of racism by indicating the absence of more persuasive
defenses, perhaps one of these:
* My spouse is X
* My best friend is X
* My best man/maid of honor was X
* My roommate is X
* I am 1/4 X
* I have voted for X political candidates A, B, and C
* I am a member of the pro-X political group A
* I chose to live in an area with a high population of X
* I send my kids to a mostly-X school
* I don't believe [false] racist-sounding claims A, B, C...
* I don't believe [true] racist-sounding claims A, B, C...
* I believe [true] anti-racist-sounding claims A, B, C...
* I believe [false] anti-racist-sounding claims A, B, C
* I have a low score on the IAT [https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/]
for anti-X associations
* I love X, an X saved my life in Iraq
* I donate to charities that primarily help X folk
* Haha, yeah, right [insert funny joke or self-deprecating humor as
countersignaling]
* I participated in the boycott against anti-Xers
* Look at my demographic characteristics: in surveys and IAT studies people of
my occupation, education level, religion, and political affiliations show low
levels of racism, so your prior for me being racist should be low
0Dallas11y
This might actually be true. If you consider the categories of white people who
would be most likely to have black people in their social network, what comes up
is a list of categories correlated with racism (e.g. poverty, religiosity
[http://psr.sagepub.com/content/14/1/126.abstract]).
-2Kindly11y
You're forgetting an alternative here. The only possible non-racist thing to say
is "I'm not racist, all of my best friends are black." Clearly, no such person
can be racist. Again, by conservation of expected evidence, having any non-black
friends whatsoever is evidence of racism.
7NancyLebovitz11y
As I understand it, there is no non-racist thing a white person can say in some
social circles. The best bet is something like "I'm racist, but trying to become
less racist."
Sadly, yes. And the best way to signal that you are trying, is to accuse other people.
And because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, it is best to start accusing others even before you are accused.
(To prevent possible misunderstanding: I believe that there is real racism and real racists; and I also believe that there is a status game played about this topic. And precisely because the racism is harmful, it would be good to distinguish between real racists and people who are simply not good enough at playing this status game; and also between people who genuinely help and people who are simply good at playing this status game.)
An example of what you're talking about [http://wakingupnow.com/blog/no-h8-2] on
the positive side.
4DaFranker11y
For a demonstrated historical example of something very similar:
There were (are?) social circles where there is no non-witch thing a presumed
witch can say, nor any non-witch thing a presumed witch can do. There is no best
bet: They will kill the presumed witches even if they "repent" and demonstrate
willingness to correct themselves.
0A1987dM11y
“Two plus two equals four.”
7NancyLebovitz11y
I should have been more exact-- something like "In some social circles, there's
no way for a white person to demonstrate that they're not racist".
3shminux11y
I'd guess that any such circle is anti-white racist, and so best avoided.
-2Multiheaded11y
That's exactly the kind of comment a racist would post!
(WARNING: THAT WAS A JOKE)
Velocity Raptor: a simple physics Flash game where the physics simulates special relativity. Lorenz contraction, time dilation, red shifts, visual distortions ... people seem to get stuck on level 30, though Gwern made it to level 31. It's one thing to look at equations, it's another to get a feel for it. I strongly recommend this to everyone.
Technically, we don't have incontrovertible proof that Gwern isn't a mostly-friendly AI that consumes a lot of anime.
Hi all, I'm Andy, the guy who made the game. I stumbled across this posting and am glad people are both enjoying the game and thoroughly infuriated by it :)
I had that scene in Cosmos vividly in mind as I created VR. It's amazing how well that series stands up to the test of time.
Another neat resource for that 'seen' view is http://www.spacetimetravel.org
They have a bunch of videos and explanations, too. In fact, the big inspiration for this game came from an exhibit that group built. It was in a museum years ago, and you'd physically ride a stationary bike around their simulation. A giant screen in front of you showed what you'd see as you rode through the streets of Bern (supposing light was traveling at 5 mph). It was completely interactive, and completely rad.
I've got other links posted if you're interested in more, but that's the one that sticks out to me.
Well you managed to entertain a lab full of astrophysicists and me for longer than I care to admit, so that was awesome ty.
It would be neat in a game to have objects/stuff that emits light outside of visible light that can only be seen by humans when they're doppler shifted into visible range.
Robot cars may already be better drivers than humans. And if not, they're clearly on their way to become so.
Driving is an area of life where millions of "ordinary" humans (non-specialists) make life-critical and therefore morally-significant judgments every day. When we drive, we are taking our lives and those of others in our hands. Many of us would wish to be better drivers than we are: not only more skilled, but better in ways that could be described as "virtue": less prone to road rage, negligence, driving while impaired, and other faults. Robots don't get angry, they don't get distracted, and they don't get drunk or tired. Since bad driving kills people, we can reasonably say that robot driving is (or can become) morally superior to human driving — in a plain consequentialist sense.
This seems like a natural analogy for CEV in superhuman systems. We do not want a robot driver to drive just like a human. We want a robot driver to drive as a human would drive if that human were faster-thinking, calmer, clearer-minded, more focused; had sharper eyes, better knowledge of the roads and hazards, better ability to cooperate with other drivers. We want a robot to op... (read more)
Suspended Animation the first blog post in a series on Urban Future that I am currently reading. Stagnation in our time:
PSA: If you want there to be a new Stupid Questions Open Thread, make it yourself! There is not and never has been a rule against this. I consider the "how often to make them" question unanswered, but a good interim answer is, "whenever someone feels like making one".
(Also, my computer broke, and so I posted this from a Wii, which is incapable of using the article editor. If someone could kindly edit "the sentence" into the post.)
Something is hinky with the upvote and downvote buttons (for me at least). When I press one nothing happens. Repeated pressing doesn't seem to do anything, but then sometimes the button colours-in after a delay. Sometimes it doesn't look like I pressed the button and then when I refresh the page I see that the button is coloured and the vote did register. Anyone else have the same problem?
Previously, the interface responded immediately, but the vote wasn't immediately applied (if you reopened the same post/comment, you wouldn't see your vote for a while). Sometimes, a vote would be lost, never applied, even though it was reflected in the interface. It looks like now the interface waits for the vote to actually get received, and only updates once it has been. As before, it takes a while for that to happen, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but the difference is that now this effect is apparent.
If this delay can't be easily fixed, an animation indicating that the operation is in progress (like one appearing when sending a comment) might help with the interface responsiveness issue.
LSD-Enhanced Creativity (HT: Isegoria)
... (read more)Thinking about Eliezer's post about Doublethink Speaking of deliberate, conscious self-deception he opines: "Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen."
This seems odd for a site devoted to the principle that most of the time, most human minds are very biased. Don't we have the brains of one species of apes that has evolved to be particularly sensitive to politics? Why wouldn't doublethink be the evolutionarily adaptive norm?
My intuition, based on my own private experience, is the opposite of Eliezer's -- I'd assume that most industrialized people practice some degree of doublethink routinely. I'd further suspect that this talent can be cultivated, and I'd think that (say) most North Koreans might be extremely skilled at deliberate self-deception, in a manner that would have been very familiar to George Orwell himself.
This seems like an empirical question. What's the evidence out there?
Races are clusters in DNA-space by James_G
I wish my mother had aborted me-- extreme utilitarianism.
Review of “America’s Retreat from Victory” by Joseph R. McCarthy
This excellent review makes me think this will be an interesting book to add to my reading list. Has anyone else read it? I probably should add this statement as a sort of disclaimer:
... (read more)Right. It hits their sacrednss/profanity boxes in such minds but they can't articulate a rational argument against it based on harm or fairness. Remember they think they don't have the former box. The typical universalist mind faced with something that fits sacredness/profanity latches on to the nearest rationalization expressed in the allowed stated values to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Such rationalizations then live a dangerous life of their own sometimes resulting in disturbing policies.
To analyse the example you've provided, if I'm right we should be seeing in the moderately educated mind a search for a rationalization that fits this shape:
I think the following does so nicely:
This is ironically part of the environmentalist memeplex that is elsewhere propped up mostly by purity concerns. As evidence of this I submit the most liked youtube comment to the video.
... (read more)Downvoted for sharing PM's without permission.
Edit: See Konkvistador's reply.
Simple explanation of meta-analysis; below is a copy of my attempt to explain basic meta-analysis on the DNB ML. I thought I might reuse it elsewhere, and I'd like to know whether it really is a good explanation or needs fixing.
Hm, I don't really know of any such explanation; there's Wikipedia, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis
A useful concept is the hierarchy of evidence: we all know anecdote are close to worthless, correlations or surveys fairly weak, experiments good, randomized experiments better, controlled randomized experiments... (read more)
A decade after Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo? by Ed West
... (read more)Commentary on LessWrong and its norms
That I would like to share. I recently found it on the blog Writings by James_G. I am going to add some emphasis and commentary of my own, but I'm mostly interested how other LWers see this. The main topic of the post itself is about politics and cooperation but I want to emphasise that isn't the topic I'd like to open.
... (read more)Another example of how reading LW ruined the pleasure from reading the most of the internet:
Robot learns to recognise itself in mirror
Recognizing oneself in a mirror is considered a sign of self-awareness. Therefore, if we program a robot to say the words "this is me" when it sees an image of itself in a mirror, the robot becomes self-aware, right?
Or it could be just a cheap hack that does not prove anything. For example if we sprayed the robot with a different color, it would not recognize itself in a mirror even after billion years of contemplation.
Questions about Eliezer's Metaethics
According to Eliezer’s metaethics, morality incorporates the concept of reflective equilibrium. Given that presumably every part of my mind gets entangled with my output if I reflect long enough on some topic, isn’t Eliezer’s metaethics equivalent to saying that “right” refers to the output of X, where X is a detailed object-level specification of my entire mind as a computation?
In principle, X could decide to search for some sort of inscribed-in-stone morality out in the physical universe (and adopt whatever it finds o... (read more)
For your enjoyment: a somewhat-rationalist Harry Potter-Sherlock Holmes crossover fanfic.
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
Public Draft On Moral progress -- Text dump
For now this is just a text dump for relating to a conversation I had, that I retracted, not because I found them so lacking but because that particular irrationality game thread turned out to have been made by a likely troll. Expect changes in the next few days. Here is a link to the original conversation.
We have not been experiencing moral progress in the past 250 years. Moral change? Sure. I'd also be ok with calling it value drift. I talked about this previously i... (read more)
I don't know what a 'model' is. Someone play taboo with me, and tell me about how theories work. Literally speaking, a model, like, airplane is isomorphic to some degree or another to the real airplane of which it is a model. Is that how a scientific theory works? Is there some isomorphism between the parts of the theory and things in the world?
X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features.
I don't always judge X. But when I do, I judge X as if it also had those features. Stay thirsty, my friends.
--The Worst Argument in the World
kickstarter, how to
Miniatures company aims for 30K, is over 1M with 5 days to go. Possibly of interest here because it's a fine example of understanding what motivates people.
Suppose you are pretty sure the society you are living in is evil, beyond your power to destroy and unlikely to ever reform.
How would you deal with the psychological toll of such a life? What strategies and approaches would you recommend?
Why hate loan givers?
I find myself asking is why was the practice of making loans with interest rates so unpopular in antiquity? I always assumed this was about excessive interest rates (whatever those are), however it now seems to me that usury was about charging any interest on loans.
... (read more)Lure of the Void (Part 1) a recent blog post on Urban Future on the culture of space travel in the West.
Every now and then, I want to use the expression "the map is not the territory" when writing something aimed at a non-LW audience. Naturally, in addition to briefly explaining what I mean by that in the text itself, I'd prefer to make the sentence a link to an illustrative LW post. However, I'm not sure of what would be a good page to link - the wiki has three (1 2 3) pages about the subject, but I'm not sure if any one of them is very good for this purpose. Suggestions?
Is there any sort of prevailing opinion in LW about diet? For instance, paleo, IF, CR, etc. The only posts I could find are inconclusive and from years back.
A very simple and easy first step is cutting out all liquids except for water (if that is too difficult, start with the soda). This helps a lot.
Congratulations to Vladimir Nesov for passing Anna Salamon in karma and making it to the top contributors, all time list.
Karma for the last 30 days appears to be displaying 0 for all users.
Relatedly, is there a bug report link somewhere permanent on LW? Could there be? (Should there be?)
Tomorrow, I begin an Intro to Ethics class at university. (I need it for a General Education requirement.) I found out that the professor is a Continental philosopher, possibly with Marxist influences. My cursory reading of Continental philosophy doesn't give me a good impression of the field.
I'm trying to reserve judgment until I experience the class, but I'm worried it will be a miserable exercise in guessing the teacher's password... I'll still (likely) get an 'A', but it might be a very trying experience.
I think my fear is illustrated by the oft-quote... (read more)
SMBC on evolutionary just-so-stories about sexuality.
William Thurston: On proof and progress in mathematics. Good stuff on the more unformal core bits of mathematics here.
... (read more)On Paternal Age and genetic load from the West Hunter blog by Gregory Cochran.
Octopus intelligence
Any LWers with recommendations for ways to improve social skills? Right now, I can more-or-less hold a conversation, but I tend to overthink what to say and end up not saying anything, and I just generally lack confidence. How much benefit would I get from, say, joining an improv class or doing (more) rejection therapy?
The FHI just released a technical report, Indefinite Survival through Backup Copies whose result is:
I'd previously been assuming that exponentially many copies were needed (in order to "cancel out" the fact that if you only have one... (read more)
Why I am a deathist, for those who can't understand the mentality:
Because the thought that someday I will die is a -liberating- thought for me. First you must understand who I was, however - in my youth I was absolutely terrified of a permanent injury of any sort. (When I realized, truly realized, I'd been circumcised, it was mildly traumatizing.) This extends to the mental as well as the physical.
The realization, later, that I would die - wasn't a horrifying thought. It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except de... (read more)
Does anyone have experience with speed dating? Specifically did they find that it improved social skills? It seems like it would be very effective.
I'm looking for strategies/techniques to manage/improve poor working memory, I currently find myself in situations where I forget to do something I thought about doing just a minute past or so. If anyone have any worth trying out, I'd love to here about them.
Strategies that I already use are:
I've found the self-help stuff on here useful, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend any useful online study skills guides? I'm particularly interested in learning to read/take notes and retain information more effectively. At the moment, I can spend hours reading and take very little in!
I've been reading Robert Lindsay's blog - he's a total badass of a contrarian, stark raving mad in a good way, and a self-identified Stalinist, mentioned favorably by TGGP). He is a feminist-hating feminist, a liberal humanist who supports far-left totalitarian repression, and an anti-racist/anti-fascist White Supremacist - among other things. Literally a mad genius.
Anyway, what I want to mention is that, from the remarks of a guest poster there, I extrapolated what looks like a succint, plausible and non-mind-killed explanation of why, paradoxically, Afri... (read more)
Why doesn't this apply to every minority? For example, when anti-Semitism broke down, why didn't it leave behind little Jewish ghettos of swirling social dysfunction and failure as the best Jews escaped into goyish society? Why not any Asian group? etc.
Good try anyway.
I like the Rationality Quotes, but it seems it is dominated by fairly long entries, rather than the small gems that I prefer. Now, obviously some people like those longer entries, but it'd be great if I those could be filtered out in some way. Is there a way to do that?
Here you are: Best of short rationality quotes 2009-2012. I created it with a one-line modification of the script I used here: Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition. The threshold is 400 characters including XML markup. The user-names for the newer quotes are missing, I'll fix this for the 2012 Edition.
2 separate related comments:
1) I'm moving to Vienna on the 25th. If there exist lesswrongers there I'd be most happy to meet them.
2) Moving strikes me as a great opportunity to develop positive, life-enchancing habits. If anyone has any literature or tips on this i'd greatly appreciate it
Note; The story I originally posted here was true and complete. However the details detract from the main point of the post, which was to indicate material support for life extension causes. Hence the edit.
Owing to a recent financial windfall, I now intend to travel the world working towards life extension. Im starting by pledging donations to the Brain Preservation Fund and the Kim Suozzi fund. Readers will also shortly see my name appearing on the donar list of the aforementioned funds.
I have a blog (link below) where I will soon be writing about ... (read more)
Of interest to probably no one but me: I seem to have lost 20 karma overnight. My views are not exactly mainstream in this community, but I am vague curious what triggered someone to go through some of my recent comments to downvote them.
Also, it doesn't appear to be related to this new feature.
Related.
Is anyone else's karma score for the last 30 days also showing as 0?
(test, please ignore)
An attempt to apply causal reasoning a la Pearl, to the interpretation of quantum correlations. Their framework is totally not ready to analyze the full range of possible interpretations of QM, but they make a start on formally depicting a number of informal arguments that you see in the interpretation debate.
I have become 30% confident that my comments here are a net harm, which is too much to bear and so I am discontinuing my comments here unless someone cares to convince me otherwise.
Edit: Good-bye.
What the hell? Did you catch Konkvistador disease or something? What is up with high-quality contributors deciding to up and leave?
I, for one, think that your posts are valuable to the community.
(I'm assuming you mean that you suspect your comments cause harm to others, obviously if you think you're spending to much time procrastinating on LessWrong then leaving is fine.)
I've recently read a lot of strong claims and mind-killing argumentation made against E.Y.'s assertion that MWI is the winning/leading interpretation in QM. The SEP seems to agree with this, which means I've got a bottom-line here to erase since both of my favorite authorities agree on that particular conclusion.
I know very little actual, factual QM, as relates to the math, experiments, hard data, evidence and physics beyond what's constantly being regurgitated in popular-science-news articles - AKA loads of BS.
How should I go about being epistemically r... (read more)
I think being epistemically rational entails learning the mathematical part of QM first and reading through the QM sequence afterwards. Before you can seriously attack the problem of interpretation of QM, you needn't necessarily know the experiments and hard data and evidence for QM, but you must know the mathematical structure of the theory, because that's the thing what you are going to interpret!
Be sure you operationally understand QM under the collapse interpretation, that is, you should know how to calculate probability distribution of observed results in series of subsequent measurements of different observables and you should understand the standard jargon. You will probably have to learn Hamiltonian mechanics in the course (if you don't know it already); it is not strictly necessary for the collapse-related questions, but most textbooks assume familiarity with it from the beginning, and besides, broader and more general understanding of QM is probably a better goal than understanding only the aspects which EY had decided to write about. I suggest starting with the collapse interpretation because it is the easiest one to understand for a person accustomed only to classical m... (read more)
A politically incorrect example of a mathematical theorem:
When someone (a white person) is accused of racism, and they say -- "I'm not racist, some of my best friends are black," -- they often get a response like -- "This is exactly what a racist would say."
Translated to mathematics, the fact that a white person has black friends, is considered an evidence for hypothesis that the person is a racist. Now if this line of reasoning is correct, then according to the law of conservation of expected evidence, not having black friends should b... (read more)
It is not the fact that the person has black friends that is supposed to count as evidence of their racism. It is the fact that they say that they have black friends in response to an accusation of racism. The response is the evidence, not the fact (if it is a fact) that the response is reporting. So what would be evidence against the racism hypothesis is not saying things like "I'm not racist; some of my best friends are black."
I'm not saying this is great evidence either, but it is not as obviously ridiculous as thinking that not having black friends is evidence against racism. I wouldn't be at all surprised if saying "Some of my best friends are black" is anticorrelated with actually having black best friends.
Oh, I agree. However, folks often take the claim "Hey, that thing you just said was kinda racist" as meaning "YOU ARE AN AWFUL RACIST SCUMBAG GO DIE IN A FIRE" and respond accordingly.
That's not too surprising given that ① people generally don't like receiving criticism of their views or actions, and get defensive; and ② many people seem to believe that only "racists" (a kind of person, usually found in Nazi or Klan uniforms) do, say, or believe racist things — and therefore that if someone says you did something racist, they are calling you "a racist" and thereby predicting that you're going to go commit hate crimes.
It's unfortunate though.
It probably doesn't help that people use "racism" to mean several different things, including:
Notably, people can do racist₂ things — perpetuating racial privilege — without being racist₁ or racist₃.
Sadly, yes. And the best way to signal that you are trying, is to accuse other people.
And because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, it is best to start accusing others even before you are accused.
(To prevent possible misunderstanding: I believe that there is real racism and real racists; and I also believe that there is a status game played about this topic. And precisely because the racism is harmful, it would be good to distinguish between real racists and people who are simply not good enough at playing this status game; and also between people who genuinely help and people who are simply good at playing this status game.)