jdgalt

I find this only a partly useful concept, since it is sometimes used to "discredit" arguments I consider quite valid, such as your last two examples. At most, if called on to defend either of those examples I would have to say more about why our usual condemnation of racism should apply to the entire category, and of why taking others' property without their consent should be condemned even when done by a group that some people consider ought to be allowed special privileges.

I would consider the genuinely self-aware systems to be real people. I suppose it's a matter of ethics (and therefore taste) whether or not that's important to you.

The obvious next question would be to ask if you're OK with your family being tortured under the various circumstances this would suggest you would be.

I've lost the context to understand this question.

How would you react to the idea of people being tortured over the cosmological horizon, outside your past or future light-cone? Or transferred to another, undetectable universe and tortured?

I mean, it's unverifiable, but strikes me as important and not at all meaningless. (But apparently I had misinterpreted you in any case.)

I don't like the idea of... (read more)

I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.

I left them blank myself because I haven't developed the skill to do it, but the obvious other interpretation ... are you saying it's in-principle impossible to operate rationally under uncertainty?

No, I just don't think I can assign pro... (read more)

"When reason fails, boobs have a chance"

Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason

A bit of humor.

I don't buy it. We have many existing laws and spending programs that make us worse off than not having them (or, equivalently, leaving it up to the market rather than the taxpayers to provide them). The free market is known to work well enough, and broadly enough, that demanding "What would you replace it with?" when someone proposes ending one of those laws or programs is un-called-for. (If anyone really does doubt that the market will do better, the thing to do is to try it and see, not to demand proof that can't exist because the change in... (read more)

I think I see what you are trying to say, but I don't think the Boltzmann Cake Theory is comparable to Many Worlds.

In the Boltzmann Cake case, it may be impossible to physically test the theory (though I don't conclusively assume so -- there could well be some very subtle effect on the Sun's output that would facilitate such a test), but the question of fact it raises is still of objective fact.

But the truth or falsity of the Many Worlds Theory can only exist in a reference frame which spans the entire conceptual space in which the many worlds would have t... (read more)

I'm not sure what I could post here that would back that up: it requires some economics knowledge. I can refer you to good economics blogs such as Marginal Revolution and Cafe Hayek, or to Mises' Human Action.

It was MR that sent me here to LW in the first place.

I interpreted the two as completely disjunct. In other words anti-agathics would be drugs or treatments that prevent or repair the symptoms of aging. Some of the same tech (cell repair nanites) could potentially do both jobs, but if you have to be frozen to use the tech then I wouldn't call it anti-agathics. I guess I'm basing this usage on Blish's "They Shall Have Stars" which predicted it in the fifties.

If that's true I wish I'd known it before choosing keys.

Largest is ambiguous. It could mean longest, or largest volume (with or without counting the volume enclosed, if we're talking about the skull), or even heaviest.

Somehow this made me think of Larry Niven's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation".

I wondered about that too, but for me "wiping out civilization" includes the possibility that some disaster leaves half of humanity alive, but smashes all our tech, knocking us back to the stone age. Intelligence forbid!

I see liberal vs. libertarian as a two dimensional thing as depicted here.

I wouldn't mind the survey being twice as long if it allowed it to handle these can't-answer situations, though I would expect it to be the same length but just have a button or two to the right of each entry blank.

I've learned to use the mouse, and not the keyboard, when answering this sort of thing. YMMV.

I did the survey.

I felt that I had to leave blank some of the questions that ask for a probability number, because no answer that complies with the instructions would be right. For instance, I consider the "Many Worlds" hypothesis to be effectively meaningless, since while it does describe a set of plausible alleged facts, there is, as far as I know, no possible experiment that could falsify it. ("Supernatural" is also effectively meaningless, but for a different reason: vagueness. "Magic", to me, describes only situations ... (read more)

I wish there were an LW-related forum/location where politics are allowed (but easy for those not so inclined to ignore). I would use it, not so much for election-type stuff but for tossing out beliefs/theories on controversies (including some things relevant to a lot of the community, such as the Singularity) and seeing what bounces back.

I wouldn't want to do it if I thought it would generate ill will, but there are certainly lots of folk here whose perspectives would be useful, and who, even if they disagree, would not immediately reach for the slogans of demonization that I hear so much in the outside world.

Apologies if even this post turns out to be so contentious that I shouldn't have said it here.

The big problem with habitually "telling" is that you just about need to already be in an intimate relationship with the person you Tell before you do it more than once or twice. Otherwise you will be dismissed as either a bore or a wimp.

I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.

I think it is unfair to get angry at another person (or equivalently, to label him/her "rude") for asking or saying anything when he/she doesn't have good reason to know that the speech is unwelcome.

However, I don't like the notion of these protocols as "cultures" because I don't think anybody follows, or should follow, any one of them consistently all or nearly all the time.

Instead, I be... (read more)