Yvain2
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"I'm curious to know how you know that in advance? Isn't it like a kid making a binding decision on its future self? As Aubrey says, (I'm paraphrasing): "If I'm healthy today and enjoying my life, I'll want to wake up tomorrow. And so on." You live a very long time one day at a time."
Good point. I usually trust myself to make predictions of this sort. For example, I predict that I would not want to eat pizza every day in a row for a year, even though I currently like pizza, and this sort of prediction has worked in the past. But I should probably think harder before I become... (read 629 more words →)
"There are negative possibilities (woken up in dystopia and not allowed to die) but they are exotic, not having equal probability weight to counterbalance the positive possibilities."
That doesn't seem at all obvious to me. First, our current society doesn't allow people to die, although today law enforcement is spotty enough that they can't really prevent it. I assume far future societies will have excellent law enforcement, including mind reading and total surveillance (unless libertarians seriously get their act together in the next hundred years). I don't see any reason why the taboo on suicide must disappear. And any society advanced enough to revive me has by definition conquered death, so I... (read more)
facepalm And I even read the Sundering series before I wrote that :(
Coming up with narratives that turn the Bad Guys into Good Guys could make good practice for rationalists, along the lines of Nick Bostrom's Apostasy post. Obviously I'm not very good at it.
GeorgeNYC, very good points.
Wealth redistribution in this game wouldn't have to be communist. Depending on how you set up the analogy, it could also be capitalist.
Call JW the capitalist and AA the worker. JW is the one producing wealth, but he needs AA's help to do it. Call the under-the-table wealth redistribution deals AA's "salary".
The worker can always cooperate, in which case he makes some money but the capitalist makes more.
Or he can threaten to defect unless the capitalist raises his salary - he's quitting his job or going on strike for higher pay.
(To perfect the analogy with capitalism, make two changes. First, the capitalist makes zero without the worker's cooperation. Second, the worker makes... (read more)
Darnit TGGP, you're right. Right. From now on I use Lord of the Rings for all "sometimes things really are black and white" examples. Unless anyone has some clever reason why elves are worse than Sauron.
[sorry if this is a repost; my original attempt to post this was blocked as comment spam because it had too many links to other OB posts]
I've always hated that Dante quote. The hottest place in Hell is reserved for brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and people who use flamethrowers on puppies - not for the Swiss.
I came to the exact opposite conclusion when pondering the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Most of the essays I've seen in newspapers and on bulletin boards are impassioned pleas to designate one side or the other as Evildoers and the other as the Brave Heroic Resistance by citing who stole whose land first, whose atrocities were slightly less... (read 520 more words →)
"To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis
Bruce and Waldheri, you're being unfair.
You're interpreting this as "some scientists got together one day and asked Canadians about their grief just to see what would happen, then looked for things to correlate it with, and after a bunch of tries came across some numbers involving !Kung tribesmen reproductive potential that fit pretty closely, and then came up with a shaky story about why they might be linked and published it."
I interpret it as "some evolutionary psychologists were looking for a way to confirm evolutionary psychology, predicted that grief at losing children would be linked to reproductive potential in hunter-gatherer tribes, and ran an experiment to see if this was true. They... (read more)
@Robin: Thank you. Somehow I missed that post, and it was exactly what I was looking for.
@Vladimir Nesov: I agree with everything you said except for your statement that fiction is a valid argument, and your supporting analogy to mathematical proof.
Maybe the problem is the two different meanings of "valid argument". First, the formal meaning where a valid argument is one in which premises are arranged correctly to prove a conclusion eg mathematical proofs and Aristotelian syllogisms. Well-crafted policy arguments, cost-benefit analyses, and statistical arguments linked to empirical studies probably also unpack into this category.
And then the colloquial meaning in which "valid argument" just means the same as "good point", eg "Senator... (read more)
One more thing: Eliezer, I'm surprised to be on the opposite side as you here, because it's your writings that convinced me a catastrophic singularity, even one from the small subset of catastrophic singularities that keep people alive, is so much more likely than a good singularity. If you tell me I'm misinterpreting you, and you assign high probability to the singularity going well, I'll update my opinion (also, would the high probability be solely due to the SIAI, or do you think there's a decent chance of things going well even if your own project fails?)