LVSN — LessWrong

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LVSN — LessWrong

Replying toThe Stereotype of the Stereotype

When you hear “stereotype of death” the phrase “malevolent and heartless” may quickly spring to mind, regardless of its accuracy. That’s a stereotype. And the thing you’re stereotyping is also, coincidentally, a stereotype.

Actually that's a stereotype of an archetype; Death as it appears in fiction is an archetype.

I'm under the impression things work like this:

Archetypes are kind of like conventions or mathematical objects with specifications and meta-specifications, especially of types of characters.
Stereotypes are the popular beliefs about a thing, whether or not they're true.

Stereotypes of stereotypes would look something more like popular beliefs about popular beliefs.
Stereotypes of archetypes are popular beliefs about the pieces of (esp. well-known) broad character type ontologies.

LVSN8mo

Until it is over ridden by some new evidence then it should shift positions.

Mhm but just to lampshade this: this is assuming that 'the moon is round like a wheel of cheese' is not only learned in just any relevant sense of "in isolation" but rather the strictest possible sense, in which that is literally the first thing ever learned, which is extremely implausible, but nonetheless I think being able to entertain such a strict and abstract definition for the sake of argument is very based; upvoted.

Replying toDiabetes is Caused by Oxidative Stress

LVSN9mo

Diabetes is Caused by Oxidative Stress

Insulins which humans inject are modified versions of cow insulin. Cows probably don't eat a lot of fat or carbs, right? They eat grass? I feel like someone should check what happens when you feed a cow the diet which puts humans who are taking insulin injections in the 'the swamp' state.

Replying toWhen to Be Nice vs Kind

LVSN9mo

When to Be Nice vs Kind

Actually it's a self-insistent status grab to call oneself kind when they tend to have no money to donate and 'niceness' is the banner of the battle droid people who tend to really care and they deserve that recognition, not this additional put-down. By my framings I would say that there is more or less sub- or super-ficial niceness.

LVSN9mo

so there's like an ultimate thing that your set of predictions is about, and you're holding off on saying what is to be vindicated until some time that you can say "this is exactly/approximately what i was saying would happen"?

im not trying to be negative; i can still see utility in that if that's a fair assessment but i want to know why, when you say you called it, this was the thing you wanted to have been called

Replying toThe Uses of Complacency

LVSN10mo

The Uses of Complacency

Meh. You include, in your defense of inconsistency, no safeguarding measures against the common curse of all costs of general inconsistency falling upon those who are more expedient to redirect costs to, such as being least popular, or most miscategorized, or most outright ontologically erased. Doesn't it seem like there would be good reasons not to diagnose you with probably being a lot of people's accidentally evil stepmothers in other lives, given how much you say you care about being reasonable?

For me, reasonability is a serious claim, and the differences between being incapable of being reasoned with versus being capable of being reasoned with, and between being able to be held accountable to that as a connotation of reasonability versus choosing to be unreasonable to some people for reasons that your peer group have agreed are good enough for permitting cheap-to-prevent (and fully unnecessary) torture or squalor, are big differences to be narcissistic about, not small ones.

-9

Replying toYouth Lockout

LVSN10mo

Youth Lockout

This sounds to me kind of like saying Jesus Christ will literally come back to Earth as a ghost for the rapture in 2012. I wouldn't put my money on people not just using the government to make something else happen.

People already wanted to distrust technology; there are plenty of personally fulfilling narrative roles people would gain from simply attempting the ordinary governmental intervention efforts humans have always tended to. I'm not saying it will be competently executed but it would probably be at least as good as internet- and automation-assisted feudalism.

-2

Replying toWell-foundedness as an organizing principle of healthy minds and societies

LVSN10mo

Well-foundedness as an organizing principle of healthy minds and societies

I'd distinguish 'imparting information that happens to induce guilt' from 'guilting', based on intent to cooperatively inform vs. psychologically attack.

Mhm, and in practice no one who accuses of guilt tripping actually cares about that distinction; if someone is being made to look bad then they basically never wonder if it's right. I'm not objecting to the 'guilt-tripping' framing for no reason; it's a thought-terminating cliche in 99.99% of cases where it's used.

[reading what I actually wrote here] ... And anyways 'inducing guilt' is what the most relevant informing-act looks like; if you're doing something wrong then you don't necessarily change it without attending to the exact details which would induce guilt. I never even said anything about 'guilting'; OP explicitly discouraged a correct thing to do without even mentioning 'guilting'.

Replying toWell-foundedness as an organizing principle of healthy minds and societies

LVSN10mo

Well-foundedness as an organizing principle of healthy minds and societies

In a well-founded marriage, spouses don’t try to induce internal conflict within their partner (e.g. shaming or guilting them) to win fights.

So I would expect that giving others a list of true information which connotes their relevant wrongness in some way on some topic (and may thereby induce guilt especially when the problem is explicitly stated) is not well-founded, according to you. Under well-founded environments, those with the advantage of existing unchallenged multi-prejudiced ideology would never be held accountable to their mistakes because all conscientious objectors can just be made into annoying squares.

Even worse, you contend that the opposite is to be "coherent" "like North Korea" "because everyone listens to the same person". So in your option model there's just no position corresponding to being virtuously willing to contend with guilt as a fair emergent consequence of hearing carefully considered and selected information.

Replying toThe Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat

LVSN10mo

The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat

Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.

Still I guess there should be a word for being mean to one or a few guys in particular against one's stated principles without an objectively justifying explanation. I would like it to be something else. Especially because your example does not involve predictable scapegoat targeting to match the way that this phenomenon happens in real life.

-4

-1

No one will hear my counter-arguments to Sabien's propaganda who does not ask me for them privately. Sabien has blocked me for daring to be unsubtle with him. He is equally welcome as anyone else to come forth to me and exchange considerations. I will not be lured into war; if it is to be settled, then it will be settled with words and in ideal speech situations.

Arbitrary incompleteness invites gameability, and arbitrary specificity invites exceptioncraft.

The Principle of Nameless Heartsmarts: It is pointless to complain that I acted with propriety if in the end I was too dense to any relevant consideration.

People defend normal rules by saying they're "not arbitrary." But if they were arbitrariness minimizers the rules would certainly be different. Why should I tolerate an arbitrary level of arbitrariness when I can have minimal instead?

Your policy's non-maximal arbitrariness is not an excuse for its remaining arbitrariness.

I do not suggest the absence of a policy if such an absence would be more arbitrary than the existing policy. All I want is a minimally arbitrary policy; that often implies replacing existing rules rather than simply doing away with them. Sometimes it does mean doing away with them.

Feature suggestion: Luigi-vote vs Waluigi-vote buttons. Too many people downvote not because the content is bad but simply because it's wa.

... Actually, I guess people would just downvote and wa-vote. Problem not solved.

What is 'knowing'? This is not an arbitrary question. They say that curiosity is wanting to know. Making new considerations makes you more efficient. Someone who wants to become more efficient will therefor look for new considerations and behave as if curious.

Bayesians appear to perform well epistemically, allegedly because they feel a desire to know; because they feel curiosity. But I expect Bayesians would perform just as well if not better if they desired to be efficient, which, again, will look approximately identical to curiosity.

Another type of reasoner may desire to get closer to omniscience. Omniscience means having awareness of all information.

If you admit you are not omniscient about a question, then... (read more)

Nothing Is Ever Taught Correctly

LVSN

I find that almost nothing, especially not math, is taught from "first" "principles". To gain true understanding of a thing, you must do three things:

First, reduce it to a set of definitions and/or instruction steps; a program.

Second, explain what this program relevantly achieves.

Third, elaborate the relevant consequences of all mutations on the set that a person might be tempted to make, and compare those with the consequences of the original. A mutation can consist of edits, deletions, or additions of steps of instructions or definitions.

Teaching to the level of *understanding* through monologue is impossible for three reasons.

Firstly, the language of your program has to match the language that the audience already knows,... (read more)

Are there any considerations I am being dense to in the formulation of this theorem? As a LessWrong user, feel free to be really really negative to me to compensate for my denseness, even if you must speak fallaciously. If I am misled then there is no point in complaining that I acted with propriety. You are welcome to babble.

1. No one is teaching Bayesianism from true first principles, which would involve exploring the relevant consequences of every tempting(-from-some-perspective) mutation on the set of definitions and instruction steps that is called Bayesianism

2. "There are aspects of good reasoning that we don’t yet understand, even in principle." — Nate Soares, A Guide to MIRI's Research

3. Most epistemic systems in history have been half-misleading in a way that would have become obvious through more thorough foundational investigation

4. Therefor, Bayesianism is probably half-misleading in some way.

If AI takeoff was not upon us, the rationalist community would perish from the simple inability of its users to call each other idiots. More specifically the inability to engage in directed babbling-style dialogue that starts off very negative.

Monthly Doom Argument Threads? Doom Argument Wiki?

LVSN

Disclaimer: I might have no idea what I'm talking about and my proposal might be an infohazard but it also might save us all; I don't know

LessWrong has monthly AGI safety basic questions threads where people typically ask in the comments why their imagined solution wouldn't work, without understanding the problem. We are essentially prompting people to act like Anti-Eliezers in this way.

I can't read Eliezer's mind super well. I don't know what solutions he will approve but he'll probably disapprove 99+% of them. Maybe he will feel better-assured if I am training myself in seeing the difficulty of the task instead of the ease.

And so, I think what would be more... (read 251 more words →)

Meta-Contrarianism Is Good, Actually

Semi-rare plain language words that are great to remember

LVSN

I once spent a lot of time trying and failing to remember the word 'corollary', and once I heard it again I was like "ah, finally, there's that word; now I won't forget."

What are some other words like this? I'll keep an updating list in this post as I find and think of more of them.

Suggestions from me:

Corollary
Mu

Suggested by others, approved by me:

Stochastic (credit: CatherinesCouch on twitter)
Confounder (credit: CatherinesCouch on twitter)
Plausible (credit: CatherinesCouch on twitter)
Reification (credit: JonathanMoregard)

An untitled litany; title suggestions welcome:

I wish an omnibenevolent god ruled over all living beings in the cosmos so that everyone could have as much as they want and so that intrinsically bad things happened minimally. It is okay to want a thing without its normal consequence. It is okay to want one thing out of a linked pair.

Feature suggestion: add a 'clarity score' to posts

LVSN

Add a voting mechanism for posts, beside the karma, that indicates whether you

understood the post well enough to agree or disagree with it (upvote), or
cannot understand the post with a reasonable time investment (downvote)

I suggest that this determines the post's clarity score (we could name it something else, like the 'simplicity' score).

Then, allow users to sort posts by clarity.

Especially: allow users to sort posts by clarity within a topic. That way, people can read posts in a topic in order of simplicity descending/complexity ascending. I suspect that this would make familiarization with a topic a rather linear and efficient process.

Kakistocuriosity

LVSN

I'm coining the word 'kakistocurious'.
Its etymology derives from

the Greek prefix kakisto-, meaning 'worst', as in 'kakistocracy' (rule of the worst),
and the English suffix -curious, meaning 'wanting to know', as in 'bicurious'.

People who are kakistocurious think about stereotypically bad things and wonder if they are really as bad as people say those things are.

I made up this word because it was necessary for uniquely identifying my personality using only four words (the other three words are 'empathetic', 'extreme', and 'discriminatory').

Kakistocuriosity is not the same as contrarianism. Contrarianism is when you often defend unpopular positions, or prefer to. Kakistocuriosity can lead to incidental contrarianism, and contrarianism can even lead to kakistocuriosity in the case... (read more)

My Deontology Says Narrow-Mindedness is Always Wrong

LVSN

The SBF controversy has not shifted my belief that you should always be sensitive to the relevant arguments pertaining to the specific situation, even when you think you've found good general rules, though of course those general rules may count as relevant arguments.

I don't even care about "utility." You know what my deontology says? Narrow-mindedness is always wrong.

I know you think you've found a rule that's important to follow absolutely and without regard for the reality of what the consequences will be, for the greater good. You haven't.

Having general rules that you consider when they are relevant is great. Having rules that were formed under circumstances wildly more lenient than what reality... (read more)

How do Bayesians tell what does and doesn't count as evidence (which, e.g., hypotheses may render more or less probable if true)? Is it possible for something to fuzzily-be evidence?

LVSN

"The basic idea underlying most uses of Bayes’ theorem is that a hypothesis is supported by any evidence which is rendered (either sufficiently or simply) probable by the truth of that hypothesis."
— Bayesian Argumentation: The Practical Side of Probability

LVSN's Shortform

LVSN

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.