As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.
Dualism is a coherent theory of mind and the only tenable one in light of our current scientific knowledge.
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Human value is not complex, wireheading is the optimal state, and Fun Theory is mostly wrong.
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The replication initiative (the push to replicate the majority of scientific studies) is reasonably likely to do more harm than good. Most of the points raised by Jason Mitchell in The Emptiness of Failed Replications are correct.
Imagine a physicist arguing that replication has no place in physics, because it can damage the careers of physicists whose experiments failed to replicate! Yet that's precisely the argument that the article makes about social psychology.
There is no territory, it's maps all the way down.
There are no maps, it's reality all the way up.
Open borders is a terrible idea and could possibly lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
EDIT: I should clarify:
Whether you want open borders and whether you want the immigration status quo are different questions. I happen to be against both, but it is perfectly consistent for somebody to be against open borders but be in favor of the current level of immigration. The claim is specifically about completely unrestricted migration as advocated by folks like Bryan Caplan. Please direct your upvotes/downvotes to the former claim, rather than the latter.
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Current levels of immigration are also terrible, and will significantly speed up the collapse of the Western world.
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As a first approximation, people get what they deserve in life. Then add the random effects of luck.
Max L.
Why do Africans deserve so much less than Americans? Why did people in the past deserve so much less than current people? Why do people with poor parents deserve less than people with rich parents?
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Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real. Scott Alexander is extremely uncharitable towards feminism over at SSC.
Yes, Yes, No. Still upvoting, because "Scott Alexander" and "uncharitable" in the same sentence does not compute.
Do you mind telling me how you think he's being uncharitable? I agree mostly with your first two statements. (If you don't want to put it on this public forum because hot debated topic etc I'd appreciate it if you could PM; I won't take you down the 'let's argue feminism' rabbit-hole.)
(I've always wondered if there was a way to rebut him, but I don't know enough of the relevant sciences to try and construct an argument myself, except in syllogistic form. And even then, it seems his statements on feminists are correct.)
Easier difficulty setting for your life in some context through no fault or merit of your own.
I'd argue that height privilege (up to a point, typically around 6'6") is a real thing, having nothing to do with being good at sports. There is a noted experiment, which my google-fu is currently failing to turn up, in which participants were shown a video of an interview between a man and a woman. In one group, the man was standing on a footstool behind his podium, so that he appeared markedly taller than the woman. In the other group, the man was standing in a depression behind his podium, so t that he appeared shorter. The content of the interview was identical.
Participants rated the man in the "taller" condition as more intelligent and more mature than the same man in the "shorter" condition. That's height privilege.
Why the "majority group" qualifier? Privilege has been historically associated with minorities, like aristocracy.
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Superintelligence is an incoherent concept. Intelligence explosion isn't possible.
How smart does a mind have to be to qualify as a "superintelligence"? It's pretty clear that intelligence can go a lot higher than current levels.
What do you predict would happen if we uploaded Von Neumann's brain onto an extremely fast, planet-sized supercomputer? What do you predict would happen if we selectively bred humans for intelligence for a couple million years? "Impractical" would be understandable, but I don't see how you can believe superintelligence is "incoherent".
As for "Intelligence explosion isn't possible", that's a lot more reasonable, e.g. see the entire AI foom debate.
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Buying a lottery ticket every now and then is not irrational. Unless you have thoroughly optimized the conversion of every dollar you own into utility-yielding investments and expenses, the exposure to large positive tail risk netted by spending a few dollars on lottery tickets can still be rational.
Phrased another way, when you buy a lottery ticket you aren't buying an investment, you're buying a possibility that is not available otherwise.
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The dangers of UFAI are minimal.
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For many smart people, academia is one of the highest-value careers they could pursue.
Clarify "many"?
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Utilitarianism is a moral abomination.
It's inhuman, totalitarian slavery.
Islam and Christianity are big on slavery, but it's mainly a finite list of do's and don'ts from a Celestial Psychopath. Obey those, and you can go to a movie. Take a nap. The subjugation is grotesque, but it has an end, at least in this life.
Not so with utilitarianism. The world is a big machine that produces utility, and your job is to be a cog in that machine. Your utility is 1 seven billionth of the equation - which rounds to zero. It is your duty in life to chug and chug and chug like a good little cog without any preferential treatment from you, for you or anyone else you actually care about, all through your days without let.
And that's only if you don't better serve the Great Utilonizer ground into a human paste to fuel the machine.
A cog, or fuel. Toil without relent, or harvest my organs? Which is less of a horror?
Of course, some others don't get much better consideration. They, too, are potential inputs to the great utility machine. Chew up this guy here, spit out 3 utilons. A net increase in utilons! Fire up the woodchipper!
But at least one can argue that there is a net increase of util... (read more)
I disagree, but my reasons are a little intricate. I apologize, therefore, for the length of what follows.
There are at least three sorts of questions you might want to use a moral system to answer. (1) "Which possible world is better?", (2) "Which possible action is better?", (3) "Which kind of person is better?". Many moral systems take one of these as fundamental (#1 for consequentialist systems, #2 for deontological systems, #3 for virtue ethics) but in practice you are going to be interested in answers to all of them, and the actual choices you need to make are between actions, not between possible worlds or characters.
Suppose you have a system for answering question 1, and on a given occasion you need to decide what to do. One way to do this is by choosing the action that produces the best possible world (making whatever assumptions about the future you need to), but it isn't the only way. There is no inconsistency in saying "Doing X will lead to a better world, but I care about my own happiness as well as about optimizing the world so I'm going to do Y instead"; that just means that you care about other things besides morality. Which pr... (read more)
Lots to comment on here. That last paragraph certainly merits some comment.
Yes, most people are almost entirely inconsistent about the morality they profess to believe. At least in the "civilized world". I get the impression of more widespread fervent and sincere beliefs in the less civilized world.
Do Christians in the US really believe all their rather wacky professions of faith? Or even the most tame, basic professions of faith? Very very few, I think. There are Christians who really believe, and I tend to like them, despite the wackiness. Honest, consistent, earnest people appeal to me.
For the great mass, I increasingly think they just make talking noises appropriate to their tribe. It's not that they lie, it's more that correspondence to reality is so far down the list of motivations, or even evaluations, that it's not relevant to the noises that come from their mouths.
It's the great mass of people who seem to instinctively say whatever is socially advantageous in their tribe that give be the heebie jeebies. They are completely alien - which, given the relative numbers, means I am totally alien. A stranger in a strange land.
... (read more)AI boxing will work.
EDIT: Used to be "AI boxing can work." My intent was to contradict the common LW positions that AI boxing is either (1) a logical impossibility, or (2) more difficult or more likely to fail than FAI.
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It would be of significant advantage to the world if most people started living on houseboats.
Having political beliefs is silly. Movements like neoreaction or libertarianism or whatever will succeed or fail mostly independently of whether their claims are true. Lies aren't threatened by the truth per se, they're threatened by more virulent lies and more virulent truths. Various political beliefs, while fascinating and perhaps true, are unimportant and worthless.
Arguing for or against various political beliefs functions mostly (1) to signal intelligence or allegiance or whatever, and (2) as mental masturbation, like playing Scrabble. "I want to improve politics" is just a thin veil that system 2 throws over system 1's urges to achieve (1) and (2).
If you actually think that improving politics is a productive thing to do, your best bet is probably something like "ensure more salt gets iodized so people will be smarter", or "build an FAI to govern us". But those options don't sound nearly as fun as writing political screeds.
(While "politics is the mind-killer" is LW canon, "believing political things is stupid" seems less widely-held.)
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There probably exists - or has existed at some time in the past - at least one entity best described as a deity.
Roko's Basilisk legitimately demonstrates a problem with LW. "Rationality" that leads people to believe such absurd ideas is messed up, and 1) the presence of a significant number of people psychologically affected by the basilisk and 2) the fact that Eliezer accepts that basilisk-like ideas can be dangerous are signs that there is something wrong with the rationality practiced here.
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Biological hominids descended from modern humans will be the keystone species of biomes loosely descended from farms pastures and cities optimized for symbiosis and matter/energy flow between organisms, covering large fractions of the Earth's land, for tens of millions of years. In special cases there may be sub-biomes in which non-biological energy is converted into biomass, and it is possible that human-keystone ocean-based biomes might appear as well. Living things will continue to be the driving force of non-geological activity on Earth, with hominid-driven symbiosis (of which agriculture is an inefficient first draft) producing interesting new patterns materials and ecosystems.
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Fossil fuels will remain the dominant source of energy until we build something much smarter than ourselves. Efforts spent on alternative energy sources are enormously inefficient and mostly pointless.
Related claim: the average STEM-type person has no gut-level grasp of the quantity of energy consumed by the economy and this leads to popular utopian claims about alternative energy.
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Frequentist statistics are at least as appropriate as, if not more appropriate than, Bayesian statistics for approaching most problems.
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Reductionism as a cognitive strategy has proven useful in a number of scientific and technical disciplines. However, reductionism as a metaphysical thesis (as presented in this post) is wrong. Verging on incoherent, even. I'm specifically talking about the claim that in reality "there is only the most basic level".
Meta-comment: I'm not sure that structure or voting scheme is particularly useful. The hope would be to allow conversation about contrarian viewpoints which are actually worth investigating. I'm not sure how you separate the wheat from the chaff, but that should be the goal...
Yes. Contrarian position: This thread would be better if we upvoted contrarian positions that are interesting or caused updates, not those that we disagree with.
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An AI which followed humanity's CEV would make most people on this site dramatically less happy.
I don't think you could get enough of humanity to agree on what should be considered "deviant" to make that value cohere.
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The notion of freedom is incoherent. People would be better off abandoning the pursuit of it.
Meta
I think LW is already too biased towards contrarian ideas - we don't need to encourage them more with threads like this.
Treated as a "contrarian opinion" and upvoted.
I think this thread is for opinions that are contrarian relative to LW, and not to the mainstream.
e.g. my opinion on open borders is something that a great majority of people share but is contrarian here, shown by the fact that as of the time of writing it is currently tied for highest-voted in the thread.
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Causal connections should not be part of our most fundamental model of the Universe. Everything that is useful about causal narratives is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is irrelevant when we're talking about microscopic interactions. Extrapolating our macroscopic fascination with causation into the microscopic realm has actually impeded the exploration of promising possibilities in fundamental physics.
That sentence has the same air of paradox about it as "Many solipsists believe ...". (Perhaps deliberately?)
A word of advice: Perhaps anyone posting a comment here with the intention of voicing a contrarian opinion and getting upvotes for disagreement should indicate the fact explicitly in their comment. Otherwise I predict that the upvote/downvote signal will be severely corrupted by people voting "normally". (Especially if these comments produce discussion -- if A posts something you strongly disagree with and B posts a very good and clearly-explained reason for disagreeing, what are you supposed to do? I suggest the right thing here is to upvote both A and B, but it's liable to be easy to get confused...)
[EDITED to add: 1. For the avoidance of doubt, of course the above is not intended to be a controversial opinion and if you vote on it you should do so according to the normal conventions, not the special ones governing this discussion. 2. It is possible to edit your own comments; if you read the above and think it's sensible, but have already posted a contrarian opinion here, you can fix it.]
Social problems are nearly impossible to solve. The methods we have developed in the hard sciences and engineering are insufficient to solve them.
English has a pronoun that can be used for either gender and, as an accident of history not some hidden agenda, said pronoun in English is "he/him/&c."
Edited: VAuroch is the best kind of correct on "neuter" pronouns. Changed, though that might make a view less controversial than I thought (all but 2 readers agree, really?) even less so :)
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Artificial intelligences are overrated as a threat, and institutional intelligences are underrated.
There are some I hold:
These are 10 different propositions. Fortunately I disagree with most of them so can upvote the whole bag with a clear conscience, but it would be better for this if you separated them out.
The universe we perceive is probably a simulation of a more complex Universe. In breaking with the simulation hypothesis, however, the simulation is not originated by humans. Instead, our existence is simply an emergent property of the physics (and stochasticity) of the simulation.
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The SF Bay Area is a lousy place to live.
Max L.
Developing a rationalist identity is harmfull. Promoting a "-ism" or group affilication with the label "rational" is harmful.
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American intellectual discourse, including within the LW community, is informed to a significant extent by folk beliefs existing in the culture at large. One of these folk beliefs is an emphasis on individualism -- both methodological and prescriptive. This is harmful: methodological individualism ignores the existence of shared cultures and coordination mechanisms that can be meaningfully abstracted across groups of individuals, and prescriptive individualism deprives those who take it seriously of community, identity, and ritual, all of which are basic human needs.
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Previous incarnations of this idea: Closet survey #1, The Irrationality Game (More, II, III)
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I would not want to be cryonically frozen and resurrected as my sense of who I am is tied into social factors that would be lost
All of your claims in this comment are factually incorrect.
Have you ever looked at statistics on shooting deaths? Accepting for the sake of argument that more shootings of black victims may show up on the news in an absolute sense (which I don't believe is actually true), it totally ignores the priors. If a white victim is shot, with high probability that will make the national news; if a black victim is shot, with an extremely high probability it will barely make local news and will receive no national attention. Ferguson wasn't unusual because a young black man shot; it was unusual that anyone paid any attention. Young black men being shot is far too commonplace to make the news under ordinary circumstances.
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Politically, the traditional left is broadly correct.
Traditional as in not the radical left or any post-neocon positions. Socialism. Approximately the position of the leftmost of the two biggest political parties in a typical western-european country.
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Humanities is not only an useful method of knowing about the world - but, properly interfaced, ought to be able to significantly speed up science.
(I have a large interval for how controversial this is, so pardon me if you think it's not.)
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There is nothing morally wrong about eating meat, and vegetarianism/veganism aren't morally superior to meat-eating.
How is that better explained by dualism?
This seems pretty similar to the irrationality game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but personally I would try the following formula next time (perhaps this should be a regular thread?):
... (read more)Ask people to defend their contrarian views rather than just flatly stating them. The idea here is to improve the accuracy of our collective beliefs, not just practice nonconformism (although that may also be valuable). Just hearing someone's position flatly stated doesn't usually improve the accuracy of my beliefs.
Ask people to avoid upvoting views they already agree with. This is to prevent the thread from becoming an echo chamber of edgy "contrarian" views that are in fact pretty widespread already.
Ask people to vote up only those comments that cause them to update or change their mind on some topic. Increased belief accuracy is what we want; let's reward that.
Ask people to downvote spam and trolling only. Through this restriction on the use of downvotes, we lessen the anticipated social punishment for sharing an unpopular view that turns out to be incorrect (which is important counterfactually).
Encourage people to make contrarian factual statements rather than cont
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Is there some way to encourage coherence in people's stated views? For some of the posts in this thread I can't tell whether I agree or disagree because I can't understand what the view is. I feel an urge to downvote such posts, although this could easily be a bad idea, since extreme contrarian views will probably seem less coherent. On the other hand, if I can't even understand what is being claimed in the first place then it's hard for me to get much benefit out of it.
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The necessary components of AGI are quite simple, and have already been worked out in most cases. All that is required is a small amount of integrative work to build the first UFAI.
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Moral realism is true.
I think you are just blind to these things.
I have highly accomplished female friends who tell me horrible stories. I have highly accomplished friends with black skin who tell me horrible stories.
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You can expect to have about as much success effectively and systematically teaching rationality as you could in effectively and systematically teaching wisdom. Attempts for a systematic rationality curriculum will end up as cargo cultism and hollow ingroup signaling at worst and heuristics and biases research literature scholarship at best. Once you know someone's SAT score, knowing whether they participated in rationality training will give very little additional predictive power on whether they will win at life.
Then why, despite the xenophobic laws of the 19th and early 20th centuries, are East Asians a dominant minority in the US? Why, despite a millenium of antisemitism, are Ashkenazim getting 27% of Nobels and making up about quarter [edit: not sure of exact number] of US billionaires?
White people have treated all nonwhites like trash at some point or another, yet there's a giant variation in outcomes. Racism as an all-powerful explanation of black dysfunction is untenable.
I think that most peoples have treated some other tribe as trash at some point or another. The particular case which prompted this response was the English and the Irish, but the list of examples is very long.
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I bite the bullet on the repugnant conclusion
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Engaging in political processes (and learning how to do so) is a useful thing, and is consistently underrated by the LW consensus.
There is no inconsistency. In one case you are measuring the circumference with moving rulers, while in the other case you are measuring the circumference with stationary rulers. It's not inconsistent for these two different measurements to give different results.
Dollars and utilons are not meaningfully comparable.
Edited to restate: Dollars (or any physical, countable object) cannot stand in for utilons.
My current understanding of U.S. laws on cryonics is that you have to be legally pronounced brain-dead before you can be frozen. I think that defeats the entire purpose of cryonics; I can't trust attempts to reverse-engineer my brain if I'm already brain-dead; that is, if my brain cells are already damaged beyond resuscitation. I don't live in the U.S. anyway, but sometimes I consider moving there just to be close to cryonics facilities. However, as long as I can't freeze my intact brain, I can't trust the procedure.
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MWI is wrong, and relational QM is right.
Physicalism is wrong, because of the mind body problem, and other considerations, and dual aspect neutral monism is right.
STEM types are too quick to reject ethical Objectivism. Moreover moral subjectivism is horribly wrong. Don't know what the right answer is, but it could be some kind of Kantianism or Contractarianism.
Arguing to win is good, or to be precise, it largely coincides with truth seeking,
There is no kind of smart that makes you uniformly g... (read more)
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Somewhere between 1950 and 1970 too many people started studying physics, and now the community of physicists has entered a self-sustaining state where writing about other people's work is valued much, much more than forming ideas. Many modern theories (string theory, AdS/CFT correspondence, renormalisation of QFT) are hard to explain because they do not consist of an idea backed by a mathematical framework but solely of this mathematical framework.
Friendliness by mathematical proof about exact trustworthiness of future computing principles is misguided.
I sense this opinion is not that marginal here, but it does go against the established orthodoxy: I'm pro-specks.
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The study and analysis of human movement is very underfunded. There a lot of researches into getting information about static information such as DNA or X-ray but very little about getting dynamic information about how humans move.
I think raising the sanity waterline is the most important thing we can do, and we do too little of it because our discussions tend to happen amongst ourselves, i.e. with people who are far from that waterline.
Any attempt to educate people, including the attempt to educate them about rationality, should focus on teens, or where possible on children, in order to create maximum impact. HPMOR does that to some degree, but Less Wrong usually presupposes cognitive skills that the very people who'd benefit most from rationality do not possess. It is very much in... (read more)
Is this supposed to be a contrarian view on LW? If it is, I am going to cry.
Unless we reach a lot of young people, we risk than in 30-40 years the "rationalist movement" will be mostly a group of old people spending most of their complaining about how things were better when they were young. And the change will come so gradually we may not even notice it.
I find it difficult to believe that houseboats are inherently less expensive. It seems more likely that there's some reason house boats cannot be made as large and expensive as regular houses, so the average houseboat is much cheaper than the average house, even if it's more expensive than a house of the same quality.
The internet gets much more difficult if you don't live in cities. While it mitigates the costs of people not living near each other, it does not remove them. There are still lots of people putting large amounts of time into physically commuting.
Why not use mobile homes? They can't be stacked in three dimensions like apartments, but at least you can put them in two-dimensional grids.
I'm not the OP, but I'll throw a quote into this thread:
I'm not sure what you mean by provably-secure, care to elaborate?
It sounds like it might possibly be required and is certainly not sufficient.
That is not in the rules for the thread. Given the karma toll (and the fact that sufficiently downvoted comment threads get collapsed), it would be a bad idea to make it one of the rules. I think you should simply not vote on comments you agree with, and I suggest reversing any downvotes you've made for this reason.
I do agree that without downvoting it is hard to differentiate between views the community agrees with and views the community has no real opinion about, but I don't think adding this information is worth the disadvantages of downvoting for agreement.
I am quite happy not to have a lengthy debate with you on this topic.
I'm sure Bradford isn't the greatest place to live, but (1) it's better than many US inner cities, (2) the UK seems quite far from collapse, and generally (3) "such-and-such a country allows quite a lot of immigration, and there is one city there that has a lot of immigrants and isn't a very nice place" seems a very very very weak argument against liberal immigration policies.
Changing minds is usually impossible. People will only be shifted on things they didn't feel confident about in the first place. Changes in confidence are only weakly influenced by system 2 reasoning.
Coherent Extapolated Volition is a bad way of approaching friendliness.
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Utilitarianism relies on so many levels of abstraction as to be practically useless in most situations.
I think this is uncontroversial if taken as referring to the following two things:
and controversial but not startlingly so if taken as refe... (read more)
If you don't regulate them you don't pay directly but pay in medical cost for conditions such as asthma. You also get lower children IQ which is worth something. According to the EPA calculations the children IQ is worth more than the increased monetary cost of coal plants due to mercury regulation.
As a social scientist (who spends a LOT of time and effort developing rigorous methodology in keeping with the scientific method), I find your dismissal of my entire academic superfield disgraceful. Perhaps you've confused social science with punditry?
So you're claiming that there is no way in which the US police and justice systems treat black people differently that isn't reducible to intelligence or conscientiousness differences?
Ehrr.. Just No. Nuclear might be able to make that case, tough mostly the problem there is sticking with over-grown submarine reactors (pwr's are an asinine choice for use on land) but coal and gas? Those are, if anything underregulated due to excessive political clout. Fossil fuels will get more costly for straightforward reasons of supply and demand. The third world is industrializing, and the first world is going to use ever more electricity due to very predictable changes like the coming switch to all-electric motoring (Which, again, will not be dri... (read more)
If its price was less than or equal to the price of normal meat, I'd buy it, otherwise, I'd stick with normal meat.
Then they stretch. Or break.
Special relativity is consistent. It just isn't completely accurate.
It's inconsistent with solid-body physics, but that's due to the oversimplifications inherent in solid-body physics, not the ones inherent in special relativity.
Trying to fit solid-body physics into general relativity is even worse. With special relativity, it works fine as long as it doesn't rotate or accelerate. Under general relativity, it can only exist on flat space-time, which basically means that nothing in the universe can have any mass whatsoever, including the object in question.
The full meaning of a statement depends on the context in which it is made.
I'm lost at "socially agreed". I define models as useful if they make good predictions. This definition does not rely on some social agreement, only on the ability to replicate the tests of said predictions.
Our society is ruled by a Narrative which has no basis in reality and is essentially religious in character. Every component of the Narrative is at best unjustified by actual evidence, and at worst absurd on the face of it. Moreover, most leading public intellectuals never seriously question the Narrative because to do so is to be expelled from their positions of prestige. The only people who can really poke holes in the Narrative are people like Peter Thiel and Nassim Taleb, whose positions of wealth and prestige are independently guaranteed.
The lesson is... (read more)
Why would he answer you without first being a billionaire?
Finding better ways for structuring knowledge is more important than faster knowledge transfer through devices such as high throughput Brain Computer Interfaces.
It's a travesty that outside of computer programming languages few new languages get invented in the last two decades.
I mean that moral statements have a truth-value, some moral statements are true, and the truth of moral statements isn't determined by opinion.
Not from the point of view of the previous generation X-)
And shacks made out of plywood and corrugated iron are cheaper still.
This seems close to the (liberal) mainstream. Why do you think it is contrarian on LW?
That doesn't seem especially contrarian to me, given the base premise that cryptocurrency has legs in the first place. At the very least, it seems obvious that easy-to-trace and difficult-to-trace transaction systems have different and complementary niches.
I'm upvoting top-level comments which I think are in the spirit of this post but I personally disagree with (in the case of comments with several sentences, if I disagree with their conjunction), downvoting ones I don't think are in the spirit of this post (e.g. spam, trolling, views which are clearly not contrarian either on LW nor in the mainstream), and leaving alone ones which are in the spirit of this post but I already agree with. Is that right?
What about comments I'm undecided about? I'm upvoting them if I consider them less likely than my model of the average LWer does and leaving them alone otherwise. Is that right?
I can, but I don't want to fall into that inferential canyon.
I think most people who suffer from back pain suffer from back pain because their muscles do something they shouldn't do. RSI is probably also an illness that has to do with muscles engaging in patterns of activation that's aren't healthy.
I personally had to relearn walking after 7 weeks of being in bed in the hospital. You need an amazing number of different muscles to walk and if you don't use a bunch you are walking suboptimally.
These days you can use approaches such as Feldenkrais to relearn how to use all your muscles but Feldenkrais isn't really s... (read more)
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Improving the typical human's emotional state — e.g. increasing compassion and reducing anxiety — is at least as significant to mitigating existential risks as improving the typical human's rationality.
The same is true for unusually intelligent and capable humans.
For that matter, unusually intelligent and capable humans who hate or fear most of humanity, or simply don't care about others, are unusually likely to break the world.
(Of course, there are cases where failures of rationality and failu... (read more)
If you measure a wheel with a ruler, and the wheel is moving relative to the ruler, then your measurement assumes that both ends of a piece of the wheel line up with both ends of a piece of the ruler at the same time. Whether these events happen at the same time, and therefore whether this is a measurement of the wheel, are different depending on the frame of reference.
I've never heard the term before, but in context I'd guess it means something like "an explanation that implies we're less important than the previous explanation did". Heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, evolution vs. a supernatural creation narrative culminating in people, etc.
Once you actually take human nature into account (especially, the the things that cause us to feel happiness, pride, regret, empathy), then most seemingly-irrational human behavior actually turns out to be quite rational.
Conscious thought processes are often deficient in comparison to subconscious ones, both in terms of speed and in terms of amount of information they can integrate together to make decisions.
From 1 and 2 it follows that most attempts at trying to consciously improve 'rational' behavior will end up falling short or backfiring.
My understanding is that the idea is to post opinions you actually hold that count as contrarian.
No, we don't. That's making recommendations as to how they can attain their preferences. That you don't seem to understand this distinction is concerning. Instrumental and terminal values are different.
History isn't over in any Fukuyamian sense; in fact the turmoil of the twenty-first century will dwarf the twentieth. A US-centered empire will likely take shape by century's end.
I will elaborate if requested.
There are no problems. UFAI could be constructed by a few people who know what they are doing on today's commodity hardware with only a few years effort.
"There exists no rationality curriculum such that a person of average IQ can benefit from it" and "there exists no rationality curriculum such that a person of LW-typical IQ can benefit from it" are not the same statement.
... (read more)The last was disappointingly predictable.
Nonbinary people consider themselves neither male nor female, both male and female, male and female individually but at different times, or any other vector combination of genders besides {1,0} and {0,1}; naturally, they are all transgender. They're fairly uncommon, largely because the idea that identifying as nonbinary is not available to the vast majority of people and would be stigmatized if they did choose to adopt it.
When I said humanities I didn't mean social sciences; in fact, I thought social sciences explicitly followed the scientific method. Maybe the word points to something different in your head, or you slipped up. Either way, when I say humanities, I actually mean fields like philosophy and literature and sociology which go around talking about things by taking the human mind as a primitive.
The whole point of the humanities is that it's a way of doing things that isn't the scientific method. The disgraceful thing is the refusal to interface properly with scien... (read more)
To get direct verification of length contraction we'd need to take something big enough to measure and accelerate it to a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Taking the fact that we don't have such direct verification as a problem with relativity is exactly like the creationist ploy of claiming that failure to (say) repeat the transition from water-dwelling to land-dwelling life in a lab is a problem with evolutionary biology.
I'm already taking "speck" to have that meaning. Even raising the threshold (say, 3^^^3 people stubbing their toe against the sidewalk with no further consequences), my preference stands.
No they don't. From an accelerating reference frame, an object with no force on it will accelerate. You can only get it to work if you add a fictitious force.
I don't think it's accurate to call it incoherent for accelerating reference frames. If you try to alter the coordinate system so that something that was accelerating is at rest, and you try to predict what happens with the normal laws of physics, you'll get the wrong answer. But it never says you s... (read more)
Is it useful to have beliefs with a large inferential distance stated without supporting evidence? Given that the inferential distance is large, I'm not going to be able to figure it out on my own am I? At least having a sketch of an argument would be useful. The more you fill in the argument, the more minds you change and the more upvotes you get.
... (read more)For a rotating object of sufficiently small mass, the mass can be ignored, and reasonably accurate results can be found with special relativity.
The force is due to chemical bonds. They pull particles back together as their distance increases. These chemical bonds are an example of electromagnetism, which is governed by Maxwell's laws, which are conserved by Lorentz transformation.
Granted, whether a field is electric or magnetic depends on your point of reference. A still electron only produces an electric field, but a moving one produces a magnetic field as well. But if you perform the... (read more)
Only if the rotating object is sufficiently massive.
One meter.
I just want to clarify. I'm assuming the particles are not connected, or are elastic enough that stretching them by a factor of 1.005 isn't a huge deal. If you tried that with solid glass, it would probably shatter.
Come to think of it, this looks like a more complicated form of Bell's spaceship paradox.
He will see each spaceship contract. The distance between the centers of the spaceships will remain the same.
Any work on AI implementation is seriously downvoted here.
I was thinking of already spun cylinder and then adding the sticks by accelerating them to place.
If you had the same sticks already in place the stick would feel a stretch. If they resist this stretch they will pull apart so there will be bigger gaps between them. For separate measuring sticks they have no tensile strenght in the gaps between them. However if you had a measuring rope with continous tensile strenght and at a beginning / end point where the start would be fixed but new rope could freely be pulled from the end point you would see the numbers ... (read more)
My understanding is that this is explicitly meant not to be quite the same thing as the Irrationality Game. Specifically, in the IG the idea is to find things you think are more likely to be true than the LW consensus reckons them; here (I think) the idea is to find things you think are actually likely to be true despite the LW consensus.
How is that a contrarian statement? Obviously natural language is heavily context-dependent. So what exactly do you mean when you say that?
I've always had problems with MWI, but it's just a gut feeling. I don't have the necessary specialized knowledge to be able to make a decent argument for or against it. I do concede it one advantage: it's a Copernican explanation, and so far Copernican explanations have a perfect record of having been right every time. Other than that, I find it irritating, most probably because it's the laziest plot device in science-fiction.
Anti-contrarianism.
You can't solve AI friendliness in a vacuum. To build a friendly AI, you have to simultaneously work on the AI and the code of ethics it should use, because they are interdependent. Until you know how the AI models reality most effectively you can't know if your code of ethics uses atoms that make sense to the AI. You can try to always prioritize the ethics aspects and not make the AI any smarter until you have to do so, but you can't first make sure that you have an infallible code of ethics and only start building the AI afterwards.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Toxicology research is underfunded. Investing more money into finding tools to measure toxicology makes more sense than spending money into trying to understand the functioning of various genes.
Awfully presumptuous of you to tell people what they should prefer.
[Read the OP before voting for special voting rules.]
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is categorically confused nonsense. Its origins lie in a map/territory confusion, and in the mind projection fallacy. Configuration space is a map, not territory—it is an abstraction used for describing the way that things are laid out in physical space. The density matrix (or in the special case of pure states, the state vector, or the wave function) is a subjective calculational tool used for finding probabilities. It's something that exists in the mind. Any 'interpretation' of quantum mechanics which claims that any of these things exists in reality (e.g. MWI) therefore commits the mind projection fallacy.
Your mileage may vary. Getting internet made me yearn to move to a larger city where I could meet more interesting people and do more interesting stuff---which in the end I did.
Whoops. Fixed.
So? The Roman Republic managed to expand its holdings even as it was decaying into the Empire.
Yes, as hominids have been for more than a million years. An expanded toolkit though, even compared to today (though its possible that not all of our current tools will have the futures many of us expect, in the long run). Good manipulation of electromagnetism alone is having very interesting effects that we have only really begun to touch on, and I expect biotechnology and related things to have interesting roles to play. All of this will have to occur within the context of ecological laws which are pretty immutable, and living systems are very good at evolving and replicating and surviving in many contexts on this planet.
If you don't want much cost of moving you can simply rent a flat.
I mean that the component pieces such as planning algorithms, logic engines, pattern extractors, evolutionary search, etc. have already been worked out, and that there exist implementable designs for combining these pieces together into an AGI. There aren't any significant known unknowns left to be resolved.
I am pretty sure that out of two equivalent houses the one which floats would be noticeably more expensive, and more expensive to maintain, too. Houseboats are typically less expensive than houses because they are smaller and less convenient.
Indeed. I would in principle be willing to apply a similar argument to RVs, but (since living in an RV holds no aesthetic appeal for me, whereas houseboating does) I am rather less aware of what the logistics would be like.
I don't think that's true. To my eyes hipsters are this generation's nouveau riche; people who have money and some kind of status, but don't conform to upper-class tastes. The wealth and status precedes the hipsterism, it doesn't derive from it.
From “The Irrationality Game” (emphasis as in the original):
... (read more)So, Romila Thapar is not a Dalit activist, just a historian (I'm guessing this is a source of confusion; I could be wrong).
I'm saying they should have read up before starting their project.
I can't find the study for some reason, so I'll try and do it from memory. They randomly picked from a city Dalits (Dalit is a catch-all term coined by B R Ambedkar for people of the lowest castes, and people outside the caste system, all of whom were treated horribly) and people from the merchant castes to look for genetic differences. Which is all fine and dandy - but ... (read more)
Are you basically claiming that those black people who test highly on IQ tests don't get discriminated against?
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Homeownership is not a good idea for most people.
No I'm not. I am assuming the exact batteries that are going to be coming out of the factories currently being built. Because when it comes to it, nobody is going to give a half a damn that they have to take a mid day break of thirty minutes the one time a year they visit aunt Greta three states over. Tesla is aiming at 200 mile range. At legal speeds, that is just under four hours of driving on the highway. Try and recall the last time you did more than that in one day? Now, for that trip, would a 30 minute lunch break have ruined your life?
The actual p... (read more)
The problem is that they're trying to study areas where it's really hard to get enough scientific evidence.
No one's saying that forces "just build up" by virtue of applying for a long time. Azathoth123 is saying that in this particular case, when these particular forces act for a long time they produce a gradually accumulating change (the rotation of the ring) and that as that change increases, so do its consequences.
That isn't an example where a truth value depends on context, it's an example where making the correct deductions depends on the correct theoretical background.
However I agree that quantifying what you haven't first understood is pointless.
Actually that's not a big deal. Technically you need general relativity to do that, but it's just a quotient space on special relativity. In any case, it works out exactly the same as an infinite series of ladders and garages.
There is one thing you have to be careful about. From the rest frame, the universe could be described as repeating itself every, say, ten feet. But from the point of view of the ladder, it's repeating itself every five feet and 8.8 nanoseconds. That is, if you move five feet, you'll be in the same place, but your clock will be off by 8.8 nanoseconds.
The latter derives from the former:
If my actions are spontaneous and uncaused, I'm not responsible for them.
If my actions are mechanically determined by atoms in my brain, I'm not responsible for them.
Sensory experiences that reliably change utility functions are hard to reason about.
In the normal example, where the ladder is straight and moving forward, it has only one reference frame. Strictly speaking, each rung has a different reference frame, but they differ only by translation.
From what I understand, you modified it to a circular ladder spinning in a circular garage. In this case, each rung is moving in a different direction, and therefore at a different velocity. Thus, each rung has its own reference frame.
The problem is that we don't really know which instructions people can easily follow and which they can't follow. If the problem is "increasing activation of the iliopsoas by 3%" you can empirically test various interventions. Without having a casual model of what kind of movement is good, you can't validate interventions and determine whether the interv... (read more)
“claim[ing] that special relativity can't handle acceleration at all ... is like saying that Cartesian coordinates can't handle circles”
See http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/acceleration.html
But then again, the question whether the study of flat spacetime using non-inertial reference frames counts as SR depends on what you mean by SR. If you mean the limit of GR as G approaches 0, then it totally does.
The OP was claiming that special relativity was incoherent, not just that it wasn't absolutely exact.
If you want absolutely exact results, you'll need a theory of everything. There are quantum effects messing with spacetime.
The Copernican principle states that there's nothing special or unique or privileged about our local frame of reference: we're not at the center of the solar system, we're not at the center of the galaxy, this is not the only galaxy, and the next logical step would be to posit that this is not the only universe.
What about the twin paradox?
Multiplication: so this looks like you're again referring to meanings being context-dependent (in this case the meaning of "= 5332114"). So far as I can see, associativity has nothing whatever to do with the point at issue here and I don't understand why you bring it up; what am I missing?
Redness: yeah, again in some contexts "red" might be taken to mean some very specific colour; and yes, colour is a really complicated business, though most of that complexity seems to me to have as little to do with the point at issue as associativity ... (read more)
I'm going to assume mass is small enough not to take GR into effect.
From the point of view of a particle on the toroid, the band it's in will extend to about 1.005 meters long. Due to Lorentz contraction, from the point of reference of someone in the center, it will appear one meter long.
Just to clarify, you mean that there is a context in which "0 = 1" is a true statement, which is not tantamount to redefining "0", "=", or "1"? That is, in some alternate universe, "0 = 1" is consistent with the axioms of Peano arithmatic?
If you have a large number of spaceships, each will notice the spaceship in front of it getting closer, and the circle of spaceships forming into an ellipse.
At least, that's assuming the spaceships have some kind of tachyon sensor to see where all the other ships are from the point of reference of the ship looking, or something like that. If they're using light to tell where all of the other ships are, then there's a few optical effects that will appear.
The way freedom is usually formulated, in the notion of free will or free choices.
OP asks for honest opinions, something you actually believe in.
Why is it inconsistent?
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Sitting down and thinking really hard is a bad way of deciding what to do. A much better way is to find several trusted advisors with relevant experience and ask their advice.
I don't think you answered my question. (Perhaps because you think it's meaningless or embodies false presuppositions or something.)
Aside from the facts that (1) the same utterance can mean different things in different contexts, (2) indexical terms can refer differently in different contexts, and (3) different values and preferences may be implicit in different contexts, do you think there are further instances in which the same statement may have different truth values in different contexts?
(I think the boundary between #1 and "real" difference... (read more)
This looks like two posts I saw quite a while ago where contrarian posts were also intended to be up-voted. I can't seem to find those posts (searching for contrarian doesn't match anything and searching for 'vote' is obviously useless). Nonetheless those posts urged to mark each contrarian comment to clearly indicate the opposite voting semantics to avoid unsuspecting readers being misled by the votes. Maybe someone can provide the links?
You can be Dutch booked with preferences too. If you prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A, I can make money off of you by offering a circular trade to you.
Why is my terminal value pleasure? Why should I want it to be?
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
As long as you get the gist (think in probability instead of certainty, update incrementally when new evidence comes along), there's no additional benefit to learning Bayes' Theorem.
You're going to have to explain what meta-ethical view you hold such that "prefer on reflection given full knowledge and rationality" and "should prefer" are different.
I see your distinction now. That is a good classification.
To go back to the low-Mach/incompressible flow model, I have seen series expansions in terms of the Mach number applied to (subsets of) the fluid flow equations, and the low-Mach approximation is found by setting the Mach number to zero. (Ma = v / c, so if c, the speed of sound, approaches infinity, then Ma goes to 0.) So it seems that you can go the other direction to derive equations starting with the goal of modeling a low-Mach flow, but that's not typically what I see. There's no "Mach numb... (read more)
Truncated normal is not the same thing as a plain-vanilla normal. And using it does mean increasing the complexity of the simulation.
If I say "I prefer not to be tortured more than you prefer a popsicle", any sane human would agree. This is the commonsense way in which utility can be compared between humans. Of course, it isn't perfect, but we could easily imagine ways to make it better, say by running some regression algorithms on brain-scans of humans desiring popsicles and humans desiring not-to-be-tortured, and extrapolating to other human minds. (That would still be imperfect, but we can make it arbitrarily good.)
This isn't just necessary if you're a utilitarian, it's necessary if your moral system in any way involves tradeoffs between humans' preferences, i.e. it's necessary for pretty much every human who's ever lived.
Well a lot of European countries are doing just that. Or rather they have "sustainable energy" mandates, which from the consumer's point of view function as a high tax on electricity.
So if we reduced sentences what effect do you think that would have on crime rates? Remember three strikes was passed in response to crime rates being too high.
(Why are you expecting apparent sizes to match real sizes in the first place? The Sun looks as small as the Moon as seen from Earth, do you think it actually is?)
Of all light rays entering your eye right now, the ones coming from parts of the object farther away from you departed earlier than the ones coming from parts closer to you. If the object moved between those two times, its image will be deformed in a way that, when combined with Lorentz contraction, foreshortening, etc., will make the object look the same size as if it was stationary but rotated. ... (read more)
Hey, it's a step up from denying outright that certain types of immigrants will commit more crimes. A lot of people have drank that Kool-Aid.
The definitions that I found are very wide and very fuzzy, and, essentially, boil down to "social science but with computers!". Is it, basically, statistics (which nowadays is often called by the fancier name of "data science")?
Oof. You just trampled one of my pet peeves: Social Science is a subset of the Sciences, not the Humanities.
There's still a persistent anti-positivist streak in the Humanities in the US, but mostly positivism has just been irrelevant to the work of Humanities scholars (though this is changing in some interesting and exciting ways).
More importantly, the social sciences in the US are overwhelming positivist, even amongst researchers whose work is not strictly empirical. I wish I could take credit for those good influences, but I think you're probably the one deserving of kudos for managing to become a rationalist in such a hostile environment.
You DO realize that even if Tesla's wildest dreams are realized and they double the world production of lithium ion batteries, they can sell at most a few hundred thousand cars a year...
If you read the whole article instead of quote-mining it for damning-looking sentences, you will see that that's incorrect.
They modelled, performed experiments, and compared the results. That's how science works. The fact that the article also mentions what happens in the models beyond the experimentally-accessible regime doesn't change that.
No, it is true for shooting deaths by police as well. Every time a white person is shot by a policeman, it's national news. When a black person gets shot by police, it's Tuesday.
Funny you should mention that.
Yeah, but it's a "paradox" only in the sense of being confusing and counterintuitive, not in the sense of having any actual inconsistency in it. The point is that this is a situation that's already been analysed, and your analysis of it is wrong.
And a simple solution to this is just to copy the current-day US which does not use a lot of nuclear power and also does not sacrifice many people to the demon smog.
Your rope is moving faster and faster, whether or not it goes all the way around the galaxy. The relations between different bits of the rope are pretty much exactly the setup for Bell's spaceship paradox.
In that case, you can't even prefer one person with pain to 3^^^^3 people with the same pain.
(And if you say that you can't add up sizes of pains, but you can add up "whether there is a pain", the latter is all that is necessary for one of the problems to happen; exactly which problem happens depends on details such as whether you can do this for all sizes of pains or not.)
The core issue is whether your argument amounts to context based truth, or context based meaning.
It depends on which direction it's moving. I didn't bother to check the sign.
Thinking about it now, if it's going in the positive direction, then it should be (20 ft, -8.8ns). You are correct.
That doesn't solve the problem. The transition from "cannot be added up" to "can be added up" happens at two adjacent points.
Yes, and over 10000000 the forces can build up. Consider army's example of the stretching rope. Suppose I applied force to one end of a rope sufficient that over the course of 10000000 years it would double in length. You agree that the rope will either break or the bonds in the rope will prevent the rope from stretching?
The same thing happens with the rotation. As you rotate the object faster the bonds between the atoms are stretched by space dilation. This produces a restoring... (read more)
Well, I thought it was funny
No, it does not. I think I messed up before and it's actually 20 feet and 8.8 nanoseconds. From the the point of view of the garage, the coordinates (0 ft, 0 ns) and (10 ft, 0 ns) correspond to the same event. From the point of view of the ladder, the coordinates became (0 ft, 0 ns) and (20 ft, 8.8 ns). They still have to be the same event.
The universe is definitely repeating itself to be off by a certain time, and the distance it is off by is not ten feet.
Sure.
That was probably me. You can define colors objectively, it's not hard. That includes colors in a digital image given a color space. However what you see on your computer monitor may (and does) differ considerably from the reference standard for a given color.
I upvoted it because of the last sentence. Physicists are well aware that the differential equations (as opposed to the boundary conditions) of our universe are most likely CPT-invariant.
Taken literally it is unlikely. However, it is not clear how literally it is meant to be taken.
It is certainly possible that few people were affected by the Basilisk, and the people who do the censoring either overestimate the number or are just using it as an excuse. But this reflects badly on LW all by itself, and also amounts to "you cannot trust the people who do the censoring", a position which is at least as unpopular as my initial one.
Why wouldn't that also apply to my rope example?