manuelg
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3^^^3?
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/protecting-acro.html#comment-97982570
A 2% annual return adds up to a googol (10^100) return over 12,000 years
Well, just to point out the obvious, there aren't nearly that many atoms in a 12,000 lightyear radius.
Robin Hanson didn't get very close to 3^^^3 before you set limits on his use of "very very large numbers".
Secondly, you refuse to put "death" on the same continuum as "mote in the eye", but behave sanctimoniously (example below) when people refuse to put "50 years of torture" on the same continuum as "mote in the eye".
Where music is concerned, I care about the journey.
When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply.
I assert the use of 3^^^3 in a moral... (read more)
It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought.
If I was a casino owner, I would not purchase a non-randomized slot-machine or a non-randomized roulette wheel. (I might if I was running an underground gaming room.)
Two uses of randomness:
Have to express a sequence, and need that sequence to have minimal information content about inner state.
Don't want to be doomed by history, always want maintain a tiny chance of success.
What other uses am I missing?
The mere fact that you asked that question makes me a little worried about you, manuel.
Uh, thx 4 ur concern. Kthxbye.
I call myself a liberal. Not because I act or think like most self-described liberals, but because the simple word "liberal" sends waves of debilitating revulsion through many people. Precisely the people whom I identify with a low probability of sustaining rational thought.
I am a liberal, but I am profoundly uninterested in coercing change in the beliefs or behavior of others. I find it a full-time job to coerce change in the beliefs and behavior of myself, consistent with goals, values, responsibilities, and personal roles I choose for myself.... (read more)
But isn't this just another failure mode of groups working together, which we already know is far from optimal?
Like so many of the other failure modes of groups (stupid but loud people having an over-sized influence, smart but shy people having no influence, stopping exploring the problem/solution space way to early, couching everything in weasel-words, etc), you can do so much better with an iterative process:
Quick brainstorming
Written summary of everything said during brainstorming
All participants work on sub-problems on their own.
All participants present individual findings before whole group.
Repeat (solo-work becoming less about research and more about production as time goes on)
This gets to the heart of one thing I don't understand about "Overcoming... (read more)
The perfect age of the past, according to our best anthropological evidence, never existed.
Minor point: in defense of the esteemed Taoist, I would argue Chuang Tzu was speaking of the time humans were small groups of hunter-gatherers. Based on my understanding of Jared Diamond's "Agriculture: the worst mistake in the history of the human race".
Back on the point of your post. I am not ashamed to say I listen to Zig Ziglar tapes (I probably should be). His folksy way of putting it is "Do you want to be a learner, or learned?" With "learned" implying that you have mastered a system of thought perfectly suited for a receding past.
Apropos of nothing: you have a lot to say about the discrete Bayesian. But I would argue that talking about the quality of manufacturing processes, one would often do best talking about continuous distributions.
The distributions that my metal-working machines manifest (over the dimensions under tolerance that my customers care about) are the Gaussian normal, the log normal, and the Pareto.
When the continuous form of the Bayesian is discussed, they always talk about the Beta distributions.
I have tried reasoning with the lathe, the mill, and the drill presses, to begin exhibiting the Beta, but they just ignore my pleadings, and spit hot metal chips at me.
The standard frequentist approaches seem like statistical theater. So I am inclined to explore other approaches.
There are so many different observations bearing on global warming...
Your liberal bias is showing here, Eliezer. It is not "global warming". The earth is becoming slightly "frigidity impaired".
"Resist against being human" is an interesting choice of words. Surely, most people would not see that as a goal worth pursuing.
Nominull nailed it on the head, Eliezer. What are the human qualities worth amplifying, and what are the human qualities worth suppressing?
For myself, "cultishness" is definitely a human group failure mode.
To others, maybe "cultishness" is a comfortable state of being, like relaxing in a warm bath. (Partake in the vivid imagery of a group of nude people in a drowsy state soaking in their collective body-temperature urea solution...)
I assert that the choice of what elements of humanity are worthy, and what are unworthy, is completely personal and subjective.... (read more)
Have you read Bion's "Experiences in Groups"? He was an English Freudian, so he was extremely passive while observing group behavior, which is fine, because he was also careful to record what was happening.
I am less satisfied with his analysis, because, as a typical Freudian, he always has ad-hoc reasons why any piece of evidence (or its exact opposite) perfectly confirms his theories. Absolutely impossible to falsify.
What I took from it was that, after you establish a concrete, positive goal for a group's interactions, for each and every sub-element of the goal, you can find some element of the human personal dynamic, or the human group dynamic, that will work... (read more)
I get an uncomfortable feeling, Eliezer, that this work is to ultimately lead to a mechanism to attract:
people of libertarian bent
people interested in practically unbounded longevity of consistent, continual consciousness
and also lead to a mechanism to tar people disinclined to those two goals; tar them with the label "sentimentally irrational".
Rationality to me is simply a tool. I would have absolutely no confidence in it without the ongoing experiences of applying it iteratively, successfully to specific goals.
I haven't yet needed to "deliberately believe a useful false statement"... (read more)