I searched the posts but didn't find a great deal of relevant information. Has anyone taken a serious crack at it, preferably someone who would like to share their thoughts? Is the material worthwhile? Are there any dubious portions or any sections one might want to avoid reading (either due...
Follow up to: Best career models for doing research? First, I must apologize for the somewhat self-serving post, but as it is in the discussion section I hope that this can be forgiven. Also, I would not be surprised if there are at least a few college age people lurking...
Just thought I'd point out, actuaries can also do enterprise risk management. Also, a lot of organizations do have a Chief Risk Officer.
I think it's fair to say that most of us here would prefer not to have most Reddit or Facebook users included on this site, the whole "well-kept garden" thing. I like to think LW continues to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to keeping the sanity waterline high.
This is part of why I tend to think that for the most part, these works aren't (or if they are, they shouldn't be) aimed at de-converting the faithful (who have already built up a strong meme-plex to fall back on), but rather for interception and prevention for young potential converts and people who are on the fence. Particularly college kids who have left home and are questioning their belief structure.
The side effect is that something that is marketed well towards this group (imo, this is the case with "The God Delusion") comes across as shocking and abrasive to the older converts (and this also plays into its marketability... (read more)
I've met both sorts, people turned off by "The God Delusion" who really would have benefited from something like "Greatest Show on Earth", and people who really seemed to come around because of it (both irl and in a wide range of fora). The unfortunate side-effect of successful conversion, in my experience, has been that people who are successfully converted by rhetoric frequently begin to spam similar rhetoric, ineptly, resulting mostly in increased polarization among their friends and family.
It seems pretty hard to control for enough factors to see what kind of impact popular atheist intellectuals actually have on de-conversion rates and belief polarization (much less with specific subset of abrasive works), and I can't find any clear numbers on it. Seems like opinion mining facebook could potentially be useful here.
First, I do have a couple of nitpicks:
Why evolve a disposition to punish? That makes no sense.
That depends. See here for instance.
Does it make sense to punish somebody for having the wrong genes?
This depends on what you mean by "punish". If by "punish" you mean socially ostracize and disallow mating privileges, I can think of situations in which it could make evolutionary sense, although as we no longer live in our ancestral environment and have since developed a complex array of cultural norms, it no longer makes moral sense.
In any event, what you've written is pretty much orthogonal to what I've said; I'm not defending what you're calling evolutionary ethics... (read more)
I'm not sure if it's elementary, but I do have a couple of questions first. You say:
what each of us values to themselves may be relevant to morality
This seems to suggest that you're a moral realist. Is that correct? I think that most forms of moral realism tend to stem from some variant of the mind projection fallacy; in this case, because we value something, we treat it as though it has some objective value. Similarly, because we almost universally hold something to be immoral, we hold its immorality to be objective, or mind independent, when in fact it is not. The morality or immorality of an action... (read 507 more words →)
I initially wrote up a bit of a rant, but I just want to ask a question for clarification:
Do you think that evolutionary ethics is irrelevant because the neuroscience of ethics and neuroeconomics are much better candidates for understanding what humans value (and therefore for guiding our moral decisions)?
I'm worried that you don't because the argument you supplied can be augmented to apply there as well: just replace "genes" with "brains". If your answer is a resounding 'no', I have a lengthy response. :)
As I understand it, because T proves in n symbols that "T can't prove a falsehood in f(n) symbols", taking the specification of R (program length) we could do a formal verification proof that R will not find any proofs, as R only finds a proof if T can prove a falsehood within g(n)<exp(g(n)<<f(n) symbols. So I'm guessing that the slightly-more-than-n-symbols-long is on the order of:
n + Length(proof in T that R won't print with the starting true statement that "T can't prove a falsehood in f(n) symbols")
This would vary some with the length of R and with the choice of T.
Typically you make a "sink" post with these sorts of polls.
ETA: BTW, I went for the paper. I tend to skim blogs and then skip to the comments. I think the comments make the information content on blogs much more powerful, however.
I searched the posts but didn't find a great deal of relevant information. Has anyone taken a serious crack at it, preferably someone who would like to share their thoughts? Is the material worthwhile? Are there any dubious portions or any sections one might want to avoid reading (either due to bad ideas or for time saving reasons)? I'm considering investing a chunk of time into investigating Legg's work so any feedback would be much appreciated, and it seems likely that there might be others who would like some perspective on it as well.
Follow up to: Best career models for doing research?
First, I must apologize for the somewhat self-serving post, but as it is in the discussion section I hope that this can be forgiven. Also, I would not be surprised if there are at least a few college age people lurking around with very similar problems/issues, so I expect that this might prove very useful to at least a couple of people here. If this works out, I do hope to eventually put it into the form of a more general top-level post on career advice for those interested in a career in AGI.
Now, on to the issue:
It has come to my attention that... (read 315 more words →)
I see your point here, although I will say that decision science is ideally a major component in the skill set for any person in a management position. That being said, what's being proposed in the article here seems to be distinct from what you're driving at.
Managing cognitive biases within an institution doesn't necessarily overlap with the sort of measures being discussed. A wide array of statistical tools and metrics isn't directly relevant to, e.g. battling sunk-cost fallacy or NIH. More relevant to that problem set would be a strong knowledge of known biases and good training in decision science and psychology in general.
That isn't to say that these two approaches can't overlap, they likely could. For example stronger statistical analysis does seem relevant to the issue of over-optimistic projections you bring up in a very straightforward way.
From what I gather you'd want a CRO that has a complimentary knowledge base in relevant areas of psychology alongside more standard risk analysis tools. I definitely agree with that.