All of River's Comments + Replies

I think many people should be less afraid of lawsuits, though I'm not sure I'd say "almost everyone."

I wouldn't draw much from the infrequency of lawsuits being filed. Many disputes are resolved in the shadow of the legal system, without an actual court being involved. For example, I read a number of cases in law school where one person sued another after a car accident. Yet when I actually got into a car accident myself, no lawsuit was ever filed. I talked to my insurance company, the other driver presumably talked to their insurance company, the two comp... (read more)

When you steal a newspaper from a kiosk, you are taking paper and ink that do not belong to you. The newspaper is harmed because it now has less paper and ink. When you bypass a paywall, the newspaper still has all the same computers and servers that it had before, it hasn't lost any physical object.

When I hear the words "intelligence" and "wisdom", I think of things that are necessarily properties of individual humans, not groups of humans. Yet some of the specifics you list seem to be clearly about groups. So at the very least I would use a different word for that, though I'm not sure which one. I also suspect that work on optimizing group decision making will look rather different from work on optimizing individual decision making, possibly to the point that we should think of them as separate cause areas.

When I think about some of humanities great... (read more)

I find this position rather disturbing, especially coming from someone working at a university. I have spent the last sixish years working mostly with high school students, occasionally with university students, as a tutor and classroom teacher. I can think of many high school students who are more ready to make adult decisions than many adults I know, whose vulnerability comes primarily from the inferior status our society assigns them, rather than any inherent characteristic of youth. 

As a legal matter (and I believe the law is correct here), your i... (read more)

Given that you already have reductive explanations of A,B ,C, you can infer that there is a probility of having reductive explanations of D and E in the future. Not a certainty, because induction doesnt work that way.

So you haven't shown that intuition isn't needed to accept the validity of a reductive explanation.

So because something is based on induction and therefor probabilistic, it is somehow based on intuition? That is not how induction and probability theory work. Anyone with a physics education should know that. And if it were how that worked... (read more)

Shooting a civilian is murder, whether or not the action is correct. 

Shooting a civilian is not murder if it is self-defense or defense of others, which I think is a very good approximation to the set of circumstances where shooting a civilian is the correct choice.

I don't think it's correct to call the bombing of cities in WW2 a war crime. Under the circumstances I think it was the correct choice. One of the key circumstances was the available targeting technology at the time - the human eye. They didn't have plane-based radar, much less GPS. They didn't have the capacity to target military production specifically, all they could do was target the cities where military production was occurring. The alternative was a greater risk of loosing the war, and all of the evils that that entailed. So yes, bombing cities with civilians in them sucks, but it sucked less than the other options that were available at the time.

Same as you, physics degree. I'm curious why you picked now to bring that up. I don't think anything I've said particularly depends on it.

Hair colour merely belongs to a subject..and that's not the usual meaning of "subjective". Experiences are only epistemically accessible by a subject .. and that is the usual meaning of "subjective".

It may be more difficult to get evidence about another person's experiences than about their hair color, but there is no fundamental epistemic difference. You can in principle, and often in practice, learn about the experiences of other people.
 

A lot attempts to, but often fails. Where it succeeds, it is because both speaker and hearer have had the s

There is a difference. One is objective and of describable, the other is subjective and ineffable.

Calling experience "subjective" and "ineffable" isn't doing any work for you - experiences are subjective only in the sense that hair color is subjective - mine might be different from yours - but there is an objective truth about my hair color and about your hair color. And yes, experiences are effable, a lot of language is for describing experiences. You seem to be using the words to do nothing more than invoke an unjustified feeling of mysteriousness,... (read more)

Nobody is denying consciousness. I'm just denying that there is any serious argument for consciousness not being explainable in terms of the laws of physics that are already well known and accepted.

There is no meaningful difference between a table and a qualia here, so yes, what Chalmers is doing is exactly like that.

Is the presumption falsifiable? In principle, yes. But consider what that falsification would look like. It would look like trained physicists (at the very least, possibly many more people) being able to look at a new phenomenon and immediately intuitively see how it falls out of the laws of physics. And we know that they can't do that. One of Einstein's greatest achievements was explaining Brownian motion, which he did purely in terms o... (read more)

It's a game two can play at rhetorically, but only one side of this game has ever landed on the moon, improved the length and quality of the human lifespan, etc.

The alternative is a presumption that everything we observe in the universe is explainable by the laws of physics as we know them, until someone presents a logical argument, starting from the laws of physics as we know them, not relying on intuition, and leading to the conclusion that the observed thing cannot exist. I would have thought this presumption was part of basic scientific literacy. You seem to have been against it all along, how do you not see it? If we didn't have this presumption, we would have to question whether the existence of chairs was e... (read more)

I think what I see you doing is applying the argumentative norms of professional philosophers, and those norms are the reason that philosophy, as a discipline, hasn't made any real progress on anything. It keeps having the same old arguments over and over again, because it can't ever move any position into the category of things that we should laugh at rather than take seriously. But given our finite lifetimes, if we are going to make progress and understand the world around us, there has to be a point at which we stop taking an position seriously and just... (read more)

You want to tell me what arguments you are referring to? Cause you haven't mentioned any here.

Maybe here's where we aren't connecting. You seem to be working on the implicit assumption that when somebody organizes words into sentences and paragraphs and publishes them, that we as critical thinkers should necessarily treat that as an argument and engage with it. I don't think that that is the case. I think that when their words boil down to a pure appeal to intuition, we should not engage with it, we should laugh at it. I don't think there is an actual argu... (read more)

No, they don't have them. All they have is their unjustified intuition that there is somehow something special about qualia that places it outside the laws of physics. They have no actual argument for it.

I'm not trying to make progress on solving the hard problem! As I have said, there is no hard problem. There is nothing there to explain. Unless you can point at something needing explaining, you aren't contributing anything.

If I interpret your questions as trying to point at something in need of an explanation, I still just don't see it. When I introspect, I don't perceive anything to be going on inside my head besides the computation. With regard to (3), so long as a computation is occurring (and empirically computations generally do occur in human... (read more)

Isn't the burden always on the person who says that something is incompatible? Like, there just isn't any reason to think the two things would be incompatible. If you tell me that any two things are incompatible, the burden is on you to tell me why, and if you can't, then I am right to laugh you out of the room.

And all Chalmers has to suggest incompatibility with physicalism is intuition, and that is no argument at all. It should be laughed out of the conversation.

If you want to have public goods funded by the users, why not ask them explicitly before you build the public good? This is usually called "crowdfunding". It works pretty well on relatively small scale projects already, and should really be scaled up.

If a thing says "you will win" and this causes you to bet on the Red Sox and loose, then this thing, whatever it is, is simply not an oracle. It has failed the defining property of an oracle, which is to make only true statements. It is true that there may be cases where an oracle cannot say anything at all, because any statement it makes will change reality in such a way as to make the statement false. But all this means is that sometimes an oracle will be silent. It does not mean that an oracle's statements are somehow implicitly conditioned on a particu... (read more)

Any analogy between the different ways the human brain operates and the different ways that machine learning algorithms operate is very loose, and I think it is important to keep that distinction and not think that we are learning much about one when we study the other. Yes there are issues with the lack of interpretability in neural network models, but the system 1 / system 2 dichotomy doesn't shed any useful light on them.

"The MOOC is based on the first course in Yale's MBA program apparently.  He claims it isn't watered down, but probably a smart 10yo could follow it."

That is about what I would expect of an MBA program.

I'm not sure why you think it's not legal for employers to ask about vaccination status? I can't think of a law that would prohibit it, and the EEOC says it is legal: https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-about-covid-19-and-ada-rehabilitation-act-and-other-eeo-laws#K

It sounds like the value of the company is in one particular piece of software they have. Another option would be to sell the software to another already-existing company that could then continue licensing it to the current customers, and shut down this business.

I think that that first bayes equation in the SSA section is supposed to be something more like this: (.5 x 10^-24) / (.5 x 10^-24 + .5 x 10^-11) = 10^-13 (sorry I don't know how to enter equations here). The errors are that that first exponent in the numerator should be -24, not -11, and the answer is just 10^-13 or 1 x 10^-13, not 1 - 10^-13.

I'm no microbiologist either. I can't cite a paper to tell me there's no risk of heart disease from pumping my own gasoline. But I also don't have a model of the world that suggests any connection between pumping gasoline and heart disease, so I don't worry about it. Most things don't cause most other things. So just on priors, there's no reason to worry about this.

Another option, which may only work if you own a hybrid vehicle, is to use the vehicle's engine as a generator. Connect the vehicle's battery to an inverter, and plug your house stuff into that. Only requires an inverter of however many watts you expect to use, and an extension cord.

For me at least, the point is to figure out what can substitute for a failure of the patent system. You might see the patent system as likely to fail in the future because Biden just undermined it. I also think patents were just always a bad idea. So I'm trying to think of how we can get vaccines in a world where there just aren't patents. #1 and 4 seem to presuppose a functioning patent system, so I'm not a fan. #2 and 3 are more interesting. They would both require a credible pre-commitment from the government to enforce such taxation and give it to the pharma companies. Do you think it could make such a credible pre-commitment? Especially after what it just did with the vaccine patents?

It's true that all notions of property involve some kind of social norm to enforce, usually a social norm in the form of a law backed by government force. What's different is that in the case of literal property, the scarcity is already out there in the world before the government shows up. It is a fact of the world, independent of social norms, that there is only one of each physical thing. If more than one person wants to decide what to do with a given physical thing, then there is an inherent conflict there. All the government is doing is stepping in to... (read more)

Intellectual property is not literal property, it is a metaphor. When we say that you have intellectual property, what we mean is that the government will use its monopoly on force to prevent other people from doing something similar to what you do. To say that Pfizer has a patent is the same as saying that the government will stop other people from manufacturing the Pfizer vaccine. So removing the vaccine patents is the government saying that it will not prevent people from manufacturing vaccines. Which, I believe, is something you have been (rightly) advocating in other contexts for months.

In 2018, US households' total wealth was $98 trillion. Federal government spending in 2018 was $4.094 trillion. If we take the standard investment advice and assume that the government can spend 4% of its savings each year, that means the government would need to acquire $102.35 trillion in this one-time taxation. The math does not work out. (I picked 2018 simply because it was the year for which I found total wealth quickest in a google search. The federal budget has only grown since then.)

That's not a bug, that's a feature! The prosecutor knows what evidence the prosecutor has, but the defendant knows whether he did the crime. We want the defendant to make the plea decision blind to the strength of the prosecutor's evidence, because guilty defendants will guess that the prosecutor has strong evidence and plead guilty (even if that guess is wrong), and innocent defendants will guess that the prosecutor has weak evidence and proceed to trial. This is how we want the system to work. 

Another idea: as things stand today, prosecutors are only allowed to file charges when they have "probable cause". Courts won't put a number on what that means, but you might reasonably approximate it as 25% certainty that the defendant did it. We could insist on a higher standard - preponderance of the evidence (which courts do define as > 50% certainty) or clear and convincing evidence (which courts won't put a number on but you could reasonably approximate as 75% certainty).