Tyrrell_McAllister2

michael vassar:

[Nerds] perceive abstractions handed to them explicitly by other people more easily than patterns that show up around them. Oddly, this seems to me to be a respect in which nerds are more feminine rather than being more masculine as they are in many other ways.

My first inclination would be to think that your first sentence describes something stereotypically masculine. It's an example of wanting things to come in pre-struc... (read more)

George Weinberg:

Does it occur to anyone else that the fable is not a warning against doing favors in general but of siding with "outsiders" against "insiders"?

Can't believe I missed that :).

Some here seem to think it significant that the good-doers in the story are not naive fools over whom the audience can feel superior. It is argued that that sense of superiority explains stories like the Frog and the Scorpion in the West. The inference seems to be that since this sense of superiority is lacking in this African tale, the intent could only have been to inform the audience that this is how the world works.

However, I don't think that the "superiority" explanation can be so quickly dismissed. To me, this story works because the aud... (read more)

Paul Crowley:

One trivial example of signalling here is the way everyone still uses the Computer Modern font. This is a terrible font, and it's trivial to improve the readability of your paper by using, say, Times New Roman instead, but Computer Modern says that you're a serious academic in a formal field.

You might argue that people are signaling by using LaTeX instead of Word or whatever, but switching from LaTeX to some other writing system is also not a trivial matter.

Eliezer, the link in your reply to nazgulnarsil links to this very post. I'm assuming that you intended to link to that recent post of yours on SJG, but I'll leave it to you to find it :).

I think that you make good points about how fiction can be part of a valid moral argument, perhaps even an indispensable part for those who haven't had some morally-relevant experience first-hand.

But I'm having a hard time seeing how your last story helped you in this way. Although I enjoyed the story very much, I don't think that your didactic purposes are well-served by it.

My first concern is that your story will actually serve as a counter-argument for rationality to many readers. Since I'm one of those who disagreed with the characters' choice to des... (read more)

Psy-Kosh: Yeah, I meant to have a "as Psy-Kosh has pointed out" line in there somewhere, but it got deleted accidentally while editing.

ad:

How many humans are there not on Huygens?

I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't matter to me. I generally find on reflection that, with respect to my values, doing bad act A to two people is less than twice as bad as doing A to one person. Moreover, I suspect that, in many cases, the badness of doing A to n people converges to a finite value as n goes to infinity. Thus, it is possible that doing some other act ... (read more)

If the Super-Happies were going to turn us into orgasmium, I could see blowing up Huygens. Nor would it necessarily take such an extreme case to convince me to take that extreme measure. But this . . . ?

"Our own two species," the Lady 3rd said, "which desire this change of the Babyeaters, will compensate them by adopting Babyeater values, making our own civilization of greater utility in their sight: we will both change to spawn additional infants, and eat most of them at almost the last stage before they become sentient." ... &quo

Wei Dai: Consider a program which when given the choices (A,B) outputs A. If you reset it and give it choices (B,C) it outputs B. If you reset it again and give it choices (C,A) it outputs C. The behavior of this program cannot be reproduced by a utility function.

I don't know the proper rational-choice-theory terminology, but wouldn't modeling this program just be a matter of describing the "space" of choices correctly? That is, rather than making the space of choices {A, B, C}, make it the set containing

(1) = taking A when offered A and B, (2) ... (read more)

It's good. Not baby-eatin' good, but good enough ;).

Daniel Dennett's standard response to the question "What's the secret of happiness" is "The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it."

I think that this avoids Eliezer's criticism that "you can't deliberately pursue 'a purpose that takes you outside yourself', in order to take yourself outside yourself. That's still all about you." Something can be more important than you and yet include you. Depending on your values, the future of the human race itself could serve as ... (read more)

But has that been disproved? I don't really know. But I would imagine that Moravec could always append, ". . . provided that we found the right 10 trillion calculations." Or am I missing the point?

Here's a Daniel Dennett essay that seems appropriate:

THANK GOODNESS!

Maybe it was the categorical nature of "no danger whatsoever" that led to the comparisons to religion. Given the difficulty of predicting anyone's psychological development, and given that you yourself say that you've seen multiple lapses before, what rational reason could you have for such complete confidence? Of course, it's true that there are things besides religion that cause people to make predictions with probability 1 (which, you must concede, is a plausible reading of "no danger whatsoever"). But, in human affairs, with our present state of knowledge, can such predictions ever be entirely reasonable?

anon and Chris Hibbert, I definitely didn't mean to say that Robin is claiming to be working with as much certainty as Fermi could claim. I didn't mean to be making any claim about the strength or content of Robin's argument at all, other than that he's assigning low probability to something to which Eliezer assigns high probability.

Like I said, the analogy with the Fermi story isn't very good. My point was just that a critique of Fermi should have addressed his calculations, pointing out where exactly he went wrong (if such a point could be found). Eli... (read more)

I've been following along and enjoying the exchange so far, but it doesn't seem to be getting past the "talking past each other" phase.

For example, the Fermi story works as an example of a cycle as a source of discontinuity. But I don't see how it establishes anything that Robin would have disputed. I guess that Eliezer would say that Robin has been inattentive to its lessons. But he should then point out where exactly Robin's reasoning fails to take those lessons into account. Right now, he just seems to be pointing to an example of cycles a... (read more)

Tim Tyler,

I don't yet see why exactly Eliezer is dwelling on the origin of replicators.

Check with the title: if you are considering the possibility of a world takeover, it obviously pays to examine the previous historical genetic takeovers.

Right. I get the surface analogy. But it seems to break down when I look at its deeper structure.

Oops; I should have noted that I added emphasis to those quotes of Eliezer. Sorry.

I don't yet see why exactly Eliezer is dwelling on the origin of replicators. As Robin said, it would have been very surprising if Robin had disagreed with any of it.

I guess that Eliezer's main points were these: (1) The origin of life was an event where things changed abruptly in a way that wouldn't have been predicted by extrapolating from the previous 9 billion years. Moreover, (2) pretty much the entire mass of the universe, minus a small tidal pool, was basically irrelevant to how this abrupt change played out and continues to play out. That is, t... (read more)

gaffa: A heavy obstacle for me is that I have a hard time thinking in terms of math, numbers and logic. I can understand concepts on the superficial level and kind of intuitively "feel" their meaning in the back of my mind, but I have a hard time bringing the concepts into the frond of my mind and visualize them in detail using mathematical reasoning. I tend to end up in a sort of "I know that you can calculate X with this information, and knowing this is good enough for me"-state, but I'd like to be in the state where I am using the i