...I interpret the engagement with conservative ideas Scott's describing a little more straightforwardly. Lots of people are inundated with Mrs. Grundy leftist takes on social media. They're smart enough to try and figure out what they really think. So they say things like "Oh, I heard about that guy in South Carolina. Instead of knee-jerk condemnation, let’s try to form some general principles out of it and see what it teaches us about civil society.”
This isn't countersignaling. It's just signaling. This isn't making fun of anybody, and it's calling fo
Rarity, by its very nature, cannot be too abundant. The more plentiful it becomes, the more it loses its defining property. There is only one original Mona Lisa, but every NFT project spits out a combinatorial number of images all built from a small number of assets and pretends they are all rare.
Each NFT is indeed unique, but since there are tens of thousands similarly unique NFTs - most or them are not really rare. One could claim that rare paintings are the same - that if NFTs are not rare because there are other NFTs, then by the same logic Mona Lisa s...
...The headline result: the researchers asked experts for their probabilities that we would get AI that was “able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average there was a 50% chance of this happening by 2062 – and a 10% chance of it happening by 2026!
But on its own this is a bit misleading. They also asked by what year “for any occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average that there was a 50% chance of this happening
I see. So essentially demandingness is not about how strong the demand is but about how much is being demanded?
I think the key to the drowning child parable is the ability of others to judge you. I can't judge you for not donating a huge portion of your income to charity, because then you'll bring up the fact that I don't donate a huge portion of my own income to charity. Sure, there are people who do donate that much, but they are few enough that it is still socially safe to not donate. But I can judge you for not saving the child, because you can't challenge me for not saving them - I was not there. This means that not saving the child poses a risk to your social status, which can greatly tilt the utility balance in favor of saving them.
Could you clarify what you mean by "demandingness"? Because according to my understanding the drowning child should be more demanding than donating to AMF because the situation demands that you sacrifice to rescue them, unlike AMF that does not place any specific demands on you personally. So I assume you mean something else?
If Heracles was staring at Hermes' back, shouldn't he have noticed the Eagle eating his liver?
Wait - but if you can use population control to manipulate the global utility just by changing the statistical weights, isn't it plain average utilitarianism instead of the fancier negative preference kind?
This also relates to your thrive/survive theory. A society in extreme survive mode cannot tolerate "burdens" - it needs 100% of the populace to contribute. Infants may be a special exception for the few years until they can start contributing, but other than that if you can't work for whatever reason you die - because if the society will have to allocate to you more utility than what you can give back, it'll lose utility and die. This is extreme survive mode, there is no utility to spare.
As we move thriveward, we get more and more room for "burdens". We do...
I came to a similar conclusion from a different angle. Instead of the past, I considered the future - specifically the future of automation. There is a popular pessimistic scenario of machines taking up human jobs making everyone - save for the tycoons who own the machines - unable to provide for themselves. This prediction is criticized by pointing out that automation in the past created better jobs, replacing the ones it took away. Which is countered by claiming that past automation was mainly replacing our muscles, but now we are working on automation t...
Why ? The participants may have a preference for one nonprofit over the other, but surely - all else being equal - they should prefer their less favorite nonprofit to get money over it getting nothing.
I'd go even farther - this is charity, so instead of a social outcome which is the sum of the players' utility the individual utilities here are applications of the players' value functions on the social outcome. Even if you prefer one nonprofit over the other - do you prefer it enough to relinquish these extra $100? Do you think your favorite charity...
You also need to only permit people who took part in the negotiations to launch nukes. Otherwise newcomers could just nuke without anyone having a chance to establish a precommittment to retaliate against them.
Oh. Good point. Maybe it would be interesting to do a version where you can't retract a counter nuke after the original nuke's 20 minutes.
Either way, I think the 20 minute rule is important for even talking about precommitting. Without it, people can chat and make contracts all they want, only for someone completely uninvolved in the conversation to suddenly post a nuke comment.
The ability to cancel launches make it effectively simultaneous, because they mean you can't commit (at least not under the explicit rules)
If we are looking for a known game structure with a formal name, I'd say it's Battle of the Sexes: a defect-cooperate is preferable to both defect-defect and cooperate-cooperate, but each side would rather be the defector in that outcome.
I wonder, though - maybe there are some rational skills that do benefit from repetitive practice? Overcoming bias comes to mind - even after you recognize the bias, sometimes it still takes mental energy to resist its temptation. Maybe katas could help there?
visitor: Hold on, I think my cultural translator is broken. You used that word “doctor” and my translator spit out a long sequence of words for Examiner plus Diagnostician plus Treatment Planner plus Surgeon plus Outcome Evaluator plus Student Trainer plus Business Manager. Maybe it’s stuck and spitting out the names of all the professions associated with medicine.
This actually sounds a bit similar to how Scott Alexander described hospital pipelines. Sure - real life are not as efficient as in the visitor's homeworld, and medical doctors still g...
Beliefs are quantitative, not qualitative. The more evidence you pile in favor of the claim, the stronger your confidence in it should be. Observing that there is no monkey is much stronger evidence than the geography based argument, and it's probably enough, but the belief is not binary so having both arguments should result in higher probability assigned to it than with having just one argument, not matter how much stronger that single argument is. .
In practice, thing about it that way - what if the monk...
Rene Descartes goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “I think not,” says Descartes, and he ceases to exist.
I can't believe you missed an opportunity to do an "I drink, therefore I am" joke...
Doesn't society already consider it immoral to go to crowded places untested when you suspect you have COVID? This is not just about a specific detail of this specific story - one important feature is morality is preventing humans from convincing themselves that the thing they want to do is the utilitarian choice. We decided that going untested is immoral precisely because people like Alice who avoid testing themselves for such reasons.
Instead of morality, I think what Alice seeks here is deniability. If Alice does not take the test, she can convince herse... (read more)