This is a follow up to my rambly incoherent comment on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cujpciCqNbawBihhQ/self-integrity-and-the-drowning-child Let's put some rough math on the drowning example Statistical value of human life is $5,000,000. Death of a child is a massive utility loss for parents and close relatives(several of them might even be willing to die...
Gross buzzwords but correctly used? This all started with a comment on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6eNy7Wg7X7Mb622D7/two-kinds-of-mistake-theorists?commentId=TdF8Ra9dGG6ZfaQMf#TdF8Ra9dGG6ZfaQMf which led to me getting a link to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/no5devJYimRt8CAtt/in-defence-of-conflict-theory and I started writing a reply to that but realised it was extremely long so I made it a separate post. Intro > Here's my main argument against...
What I think will happen is things keep getting worse for at least a decade. At some point a critical mass of people will know at least one person whose life was ruined by gambling and then we get a (way over the top) backlash.
Gambling bans in general, strong regulation of even non-monetary video game gambling mechanics.
You see rumblings of this among gamers, who got exposed to gamba trash earlier than the general population.
Or we just embrace the darwinism aspect of it and it becomes one more cause of permanent cultural inequality.
Good points! I didn't get into 'How do you really calculate the net-societal utility outcome of your actions, including second+ order effects?' since I think even the 1st order immediate consequence calculation is intractable.
In practice you shouldn't ... help people that will do harm with your help. I think this is one of the limits of pacifism(with Kaladin's dad being an example of that, incidentally) at some point passive obedience to an unjust opressor has the same consequences for the other people they harm as active cooperation. It is a moral duty to actually do something to harm or at least minimally help a person or institution or government from doing bad... (read 390 more words →)
1. Omega predictors are impossible
They are unstable/impossible not just in practice but in theory as well. It's theoretically not possible for Omega to exist because the decision of 1-2 box is recursive. You're essentially invoking a magical agent that somehow isn't affected by infinite recursion.
"Omega can 'snap' through the infinite recursive loop." No it can't. And if you claim it can you're essentially dropping a nuke inside your logical system that can probably produce all sorts of irrational true=false theorems.
2. Writing on whiteboards, acausal control is just superdeterminism
Brain in a box perfect duplication just implies determinism is true. We are all pure functions of our inputs, if you can perfectly duplicate the... (read more)
Didn't seem to work for me. It still seems to get confused trying to match similar words together even when they shouldn't be. Again quite, dumb/young human.
WW3 is a suicide pact. The #1 thing that defines modern Russia is cynical self-interest. Putin won't die for his professed ideals(which he does not believe in anyway). If he gives the order the people around him won't be willing to die and they'll just kill him. I view this all as extreme brinksmanship that will ultimately lead nowhere.
Russia's oligarch billionaires aren't incinerating their Swiss mansions over some dead proles on the Ukrainian front.
Fundamentally wrong mental model, in my opinion. (but upvoted for presenting a well structured one!)
As if saying: "We shouldn't put people in prison because it raises the cost of murder and increases demand to murder."
Violence is a wildfire, not an auction market. Quantity of violence is zero absent a catalyst, once the catalyst is provided it goes up exponentially until it reaches some saturation point at which point it runs out of fuel and collapses again to zero.
Supply and Demand for violence form a positive feedback loop. (+ an activation barrier to get started and a cliff back to nothing at the end, dunno what proper terms would be here)
The measures that... (read more)
To take this straight to the nuclear winter dark side.
I've been reading a bit about MAD 101 and I hate it. I'm slowly embracing the idea that the most safe thing to do is to be as explicit and precommitted as possible to massive retaliation if red lines are crossed. Emotionally that sounds nuts and I'd like everyone on every side to just spam we're not using the nukes, calm down.
But.
IF people say that and red lines keep getting crossed, at some point Side A thinks they can push one more boundary and get away with it, but Side B decides this is the limit and they press the button.
As such I... (read more)
That doesn't seem rational to me, or if it's somehow not irrational on an individual level, makes it a bad idea to model Russia as a rational actor as a whole.
Absent honest, safe, free speech, leadership's map diverges more and more from the territory and then comes crashing back to reality when they drive off a cliff they thought was a highway.
A group of individuals behaving in their own rational self-interest can make very irrational, self-destructive group-level decisions, if the incentives the members have are perverse enough. I guess the idea itself is as old as the book(Moloch style religious arguments have existed since forever) but I somehow never thought about it... (read more)
These numbers are absurd, in my opinion. 10s of thousands of military dead is massive numbers in a modern context. You cannot compare 1800s warfare to modern war, people literally lined up in a square and shot at each other until half of them were dead/injured back then. And due to crap med tech tons of injured didn't survive. Modern conflicts have MUCH MUCH lower death ratios.
America finished the conquest of Iraq with like 150 dead(granted Iraqi army folded). Over the course of the whole occupation(2003-2011) America lost around 4500 soldiers. If Russia loses like 1000 soldiers before taking over Ukraine that's absolutely brutal resistance.
Iraqi force's losses were much higher, but still... (read more)
This is a follow up to my rambly incoherent comment on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cujpciCqNbawBihhQ/self-integrity-and-the-drowning-child
Statistical value of human life is $5,000,000.
Death of a child is a massive utility loss for parents and close relatives(several of them might even be willing to die in an attempt to save the child!)...
Death of a child is a utility hit of ... $15,000,000 for various people. Rough number, but I don't think grossly inflated, if anything probably too low.
A good suit is like $5000(?).
If you think there's a 1% chance that taking 10 seconds to take off the suit, will kill the kid, you're expected values are -$150,000 vs -$5,000.
Now. It's... (read 1042 more words →)
Gross buzzwords but correctly used?
This all started with a comment on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6eNy7Wg7X7Mb622D7/two-kinds-of-mistake-theorists?commentId=TdF8Ra9dGG6ZfaQMf#TdF8Ra9dGG6ZfaQMf which led to me getting a link to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/no5devJYimRt8CAtt/in-defence-of-conflict-theory and I started writing a reply to that but realised it was extremely long so I made it a separate post.
Here's my main argument against emphasising mistake theory over conflict theory: you're only able to be a mistake theorist after the conflict theorists have done most of the hard work.
Very nice and succinct. This immediately made me think of art vs engineering. Ambiguous domains where people can't quite serialize how they produce good outputs(though we can recognize good output when we see it, wafts of P vs NP) vs domains where
Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic.
Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall.
In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people.
So I guess there's also a strong dose of living in the western world at the end of history: "we've got the right liberal ethics now and deviations from... (read more)