This is a cross-post from my personal blog. You might enjoy it if you're interested in progress studies or intellectual history. The Italian Renaissance, like nearly every other time and place, is a real blank spot in my knowledge of history. I recently read The Book of My Life (1575),...
(Cross-posted from my personal blog.) This post is an edited transcript of a talk I recently gave on the past and future of privacy. I argue that the story may be a more positive and hopeful one than people often realize. The talk stemmed from work I’ve done at the...
Format warning: This post has somehow ended up consisting primarily of substantive endnotes. It should be fine to read just the (short) main body without looking at any of the endnotes, though. The endnotes elaborate on various claims and distinctions and also include a much longer discussion of decision theory....
This is a cross-post from my personal blog. You might enjoy it if you're interested in progress studies or intellectual history.
The Italian Renaissance, like nearly every other time and place, is a real blank spot in my knowledge of history. I recently read The Book of My Life (1575), a memoir by the mathematician-doctor-philosopher Gerolamo Cardano, to try to get some feel for what was going on there.
My understanding is that Cardano was a top tier Renaissance intellectual. He made major contributions to algebra, wrote the first treatise on probability theory, and was invited to practice medicine on multiple kings. He put out more than one hundred books, all with titles like... (read 4553 more words →)
(Cross-posted from my personal blog.)
This post is an edited transcript of a talk I recently gave on the past and future of privacy. I argue that the story may be a more positive and hopeful one than people often realize.
The talk stemmed from work I’ve done at the Centre for the Governance of AI. The people whose writing most influenced its ideas are Joan Feigenbaum, Aaron Segal, Bryan Ford, and Tyler Cowen. Mainly: This paper and this blog post. I’ve also especially benefitted from conversations with Andrew Trask.
I think it’s fair to say that discussions of privacy issues tend to have a pessimistic edge to them. For a long time, the dominant
Re-posting a link here, on the off-chance it's of interest despite its length. ESRogs and I also had a parallel discussion on the EA Forum, which led me to write up this unjustifiably lengthy doc partly in response to that discussion and partly in response to the above comment.
Just wanted to say I really appreciate you taking the time to write up such a long, clear, and thoughtful response!
(If I have a bit of time and/or need to procrastinate anything in the near future, I may write up a few further thoughts under this comment.)
It sounds as though you're expecting anti-realists about normativity to tell you some arguments that will genuinely make you feel (close to) indifferent about whether to use Bayesianism, or whether to use induction.
Hm, this actually isn't an expectation I have. When I talk about "realists" and "anti-realists," in this post, I'm thinking of groups of people with different beliefs (rather than groups of people with different feelings). I don't think of anti-realism as having any strong link to feelings of indifference about behavior. For example: I certainly expect most anti-realist philosophers to have strong preferences against putting their hands on hot stoves (and don't see anything inconsistent in this).
But I have yet
Belatedly, is this a fair summary of your critique?
When someone thinks about another person (e.g. to predict whether they'll submit to blackmail), the act of thinking about the other person creates a sort of 'mental simulation' that has detailed concious experiences in its own right. So you never really know whether you're a flesh-and-blood person or a 'mental simulation' based on a flesh-and-blood person.
Now, suppose you seem to find yourself in a situation where you've been blackmailed. In this context, it's reasonable to wonder whether you're actually a flesh-and-blood person who's been blackmailed -- or merely a 'mental simulation' that exists in the mind of a potential blackmailer. If you're a mental
Hmm, I think focusing on a simpler case might be better for getting at the crux.
Suppose Alice says: "Eating meat is the most effective way to get protein. So if you want to get protein, you should eat meat."
And then Bob, an animal welfare person, responds: "You're wrong, people shouldn't eat meat no matter how much they care about getting protein."
If Alice doesn't mean for her second sentence to be totally redundant -- or if she is able to interpret Bob's response as an intelligible (if incorrect) statement of disagreement with her second sentence -- then that suggests her second sentence actually constitutes a substantively normative claim. Her second sentence isn't just
Okay, this seems like a crux of our disagreement. This statement seems pretty much equivalent to my statement #1 in almost all practical contexts. Can you point out how you think they differ?
This stuff is definitely a bit tricky to talk about, since people can use the word "should" in different ways. I think that sometimes when people say "You should do X if you want Y" they do basically just mean to say "If you do X you will receive Y." But it doesn't seem to me like this is always the case.
A couple examples:
1. "Bayesian updating has a certain asymptoptic convergence property, in the limit of infinite experience and
It's important to disentangle two claims:
In general, if you have the goal of understanding the world, or any other goal that relies on doing so, being Bayesian will allow you to achieve it to a greater extent than any other approach (in the limit of infinite compute).
Regardless of your goals, you should be Bayesian anyway.
Believing #2 commits you to normative realism as I understand the term, but believing #1 doesn't - #1 is simply an empirical claim about what types of cognition tend to do best towards a broad class of goals. I think that many rationalists would defend #1, and few would defend #2 - if you disagree, I'd be interested
I left a sub-comment under Wei's comment (above) that hopefully unpacks this suggestion a bit
I think there's a distinction (although I'm not sure if I've talked explicitly about it before). Basically there's quite possibly more to what the "right" or "reasonable" action is than "what action that someone who tends to 'win' a lot over the course of their life would take?" because the latter isn't well defined. In a multiverse the same strategy/policy would lead to 100% winning in some worlds/branches and 100% losing in other worlds/branches, so you'd need some kind of "measure" to say who wins overall. But what the right measure is seems to be (or could beLW) a normative fact that can't be determined by just looking at or thinking "who
If there is anything that anyone should in fact do, then I would say that meets the standards of "realism."
Does "anyone" refer to any human, or any possible being?
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I mean to say: "If there exists at least one entity, such that the entity should do something, then that meets the standards of 'realism.'"
I understand "moral realism" as a claim that there is a sequence of clever words that would convince the superintelligent spider that reducing human suffering is a good thing.
I don't think I'm aware of anyone who identifies as a "moral realist" who believes this. At least, it's not part of a normal definition of "moral realism."
The term "moral realism" is used differently by different people, but typically it's either used roughly synonymously with "normative realism" (as I've defined it in this post) or to pick out a slightly more specific position: that normative realism is true and that people should do things besides just try to fulfill their own preferences.
Format warning: This post has somehow ended up consisting primarily of substantive endnotes. It should be fine to read just the (short) main body without looking at any of the endnotes, though. The endnotes elaborate on various claims and distinctions and also include a much longer discussion of decision theory.
Thank you to Pablo Stafforini, Phil Trammell, Johannes Treutlein, and Max Daniel for comments on an initial draft. I have also slightly edited the post since I first published it, to try to make a few points clearer.
When discussing normative questions, it is not uncommon for members of the rationalist community to identify as anti-realists. But normative anti-realism seems to me to be