smoofra

Karma: 240

smoofra 3 Jun 2009 4:17 UTC
19 points
on: With whom shall I diavlog?
how about scott aaronson.

Anybody want to join a Math Club?

smoofra5 Apr 2013 4:36 UTC

13 points

39 comments1 min readLW link

smoofra 28 Apr 2009 18:19 UTC
11 points
on: Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted

Is it really essential that, as a community, we exclude or dismiss or reflexively criticize theists....

I don’t think we should exclude them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t confidently inform them when we know they’re wrong.

My favorite rationalist quote ever is “I don’t have to agree with you to like or respect you” (Anthony Bourdain). Just because we know theists are wrong doesn’t mean we have to be jerks about it. If Newton could make that mistake, anyone can, and we all know how hard it is to climb out of those sorts epistemic holes once you’ve found yourself in one.

But we shouldn’t confuse “not being jerks” with “pretending not to know things that we do in fact know, so that people don’t think we’re jerks”

smoofra 24 Dec 2009 19:46 UTC
10 points
on: On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality
What makes you think Hitler didn’t deliberately think about how to yell at crowds?

smoofra 2 Nov 2009 15:31 UTC
9 points
on: Our House, My Rules
In my experience, children are cruel, immoral, egotistical, and utterly selfish. The last thing they need is to have their inflated sense of self worth and entitlement stroked by the sort of parenting you seem to be advocating. Children ought to have fundamentally lower status, not just because they’re children per se, but because they’re stupid and useless. They should indeed be grateful that anyone would take the trouble to feed and care for someone as stupid and useless as they, and repay the favor by becoming stronger.

smoofra 15 Dec 2009 16:48 UTC
8 points
on: Rebasing Ethics
You don’t tip in order to be altruistic, you tip because you informally agreed to tip by eating in a restaurant in the first place. If you don’t tip (assuming the service was acceptable), you aren’t being virtuous, you’re being a thief.

Perhaps you should say the correct moral move is to tip exactly 15%.

smoofra 15 Jun 2009 15:49 UTC
8 points
on: Rationality Quotes—June 2009
“I don’t, I’ve come to believe, have to agree with you to like you, or respect you.”

--Anthony Bourdain.

Never forget that your opponents are not evil mutants. They are the heroes of their own stories, and if you can’t fathom why they do what they do, or why they believe what they believe, that’s your failing not theirs.

smoofra 3 May 2009 16:43 UTC
8 points
on: What I Tell You Three Times Is True
I feel obligated to point out that Boltzman brains aren’t a hypothesis themselves, but a counterargument to the hypothesis that the current low-entropy state of the universe is a random low-entropy fluctuation in a steady state high-entropy universe.

The idea is that a brain randomly forming out a maxentropy soup is a lot more likely than enough negentropy to comprise our entire universe, so if you believe in the steady state hypothesis, then you have to conclude that you are far more likely to be a bloltzman brain, than not.

smoofra 1 Apr 2009 4:30 UTC
8 points
on: Degrees of Radical Honesty
I think you have entirely missed the point. If there are Nazis at your door, sabotaging them is exactly what you are trying to do. There’s nothing irrational about that. Black Belt isn’t saying rationalists don’t lie, he’s saying they don’t lie to people they don’t want to harm.

The point of the Eliezer quote isn’t radically different either. If your friends think you’d lie to them “for their own good”, then they may disbelieve you when you need their trust the most. So again, don’t lie to your friends.

smoofra 17 Apr 2009 21:04 UTC
7 points
on: My main problem with utilitarianism

We should give everybody as much utilions as we can

Not at all. We’re all just trying to maximize our own utilions. My utility function has a term int it for other people’s happiness. Maybe it has a term for other people’s utilions (I’m not sure about that one though). But when I say I want to maximize utility, I’m just maximizing one utility function: mine. Consideration for others is already factored in.

In fact I think you’re confusing two different topics: decision theory and ethics. Decision theory tells us how to get more of what we want (including the happiness of others). Decision theory takes the utility function as a given. Ethics is about figuring out the what the actual content of our utility functions is, especially as it concerns our interactions with others, and our obligations towards them.

smoofra 28 May 2009 19:07 UTC
6 points
on: Do Fandoms Need Awfulness?
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science has elements of monumental badness, and intense fans.

smoofra 27 Mar 2009 4:46 UTC
6 points
on: Crowley on Religious Experience
I think you’ll also find this relevant.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

smoofra 22 Jun 2015 4:22 UTC
5 points
in reply to: maxikov’s comment on: High energy ethics and general moral relativity
What about all the angst people had over things like irrational numbers ,infinitesimals, non-smooth functions, infinite cardinalities, non-euclidian geometries?

I think what you’re saying about needing some way to change our minds is a good point though. And I certainly wouldn’t say that every single object-level belief I hold is more secure than every meta belief. I’ll even grant you that for certain decisions, like how to set public health policy, some sort of QALY-based shut up and calculate approach is the right way to go.

But I don’t think that’s the way to change our minds about something like how we deal with homosexuality, either on a descriptive or a normative level. Nobody read Bentham and said, “you know what guys I don’t think being gay actually costs any utils! I guess it’s fine”. And if they did, it would have been bad moral epistemology. If you put yourself in the mind of an average Victorian, “don’t be gay” sits very securely in your web of belief. It’s bolstered by what you think about virtue, religion, deontology, and even health. And what you think about those things is more or less consistent with and confirmed by what you think about everything else. It’s like moral-epistemic page rank. The “don’t be gay” node has strongly weighted edges from the strongest cluster of nodes in your belief system. And they all point at each other. Compared to those nodes, meta level stuff like utilitarianism is in a distant and unimportant backwater region of the graph. If anything an arrow from utilitarianism to “being gay is ok” looks to you like a reason not to take utilitarianism too seriously. In order for you to change your mind about homosexuality, you need to change your mind about everything. You need to move all that moral pagerank to totally different regions of the graph. And picking a meta theory to rule them all and assigning it a massive weight seems like a crazy reckless way to do that. If you’re doing that you’re basically saying you prioritize meta-ethical consistency over all the object level things that you actually care about. It seems to me the only sane way to update is to slowly alter the object level stuff as you learn new facts, or discover inconsistencies in what you value, and try to maintain as much reflective consistency as you can while you do it.

PS. I guess I kind of made it sound like I believe the Whig theory of moral history, where modern western values are clearly true scion of Victorian values, and if we could just tell them what we know and walk them though the arguments we could convince the Victorians that we were right, even by their own standards. I’m undecided on that and I’ll admit it might be the case that we just fundamentally disagree on values, and that “moral progress” is a random walk. Or not. Or it’s a mix. I have no idea.

smoofra 21 Jun 2015 21:54 UTC
5 points
on: High energy ethics and general moral relativity
I think you’ve pretty much stated the exact opposite of my own moral-epistomological worldview.

I don’t like the analogy with physics. Physical theories get tested against external reality in a way that makes them fundamentally different from ethical theories.

If you want to analogize between ethics and science, I want to compare it to the foundations of mathematics. So utilitarianism isn’t relativity, it’s ZFC. Even though ZFC proves PA is a consistent and true theory of the natural numbers, it’s a huge mistake for a human to base their trust in PA on that!

There is almost no argument or evidence that can convince me to put more trust in ZFC than i do PA. I don’t think I’m wrong.

I trust low-energy moral conclusions more than I will ever trust abstract metaethical foundational theories. I think it is a mistake to look for low-complexity foundations and reason from them. I think the best we can do is seek reflective equilibrium.

Now, that being said, I don’t think it’s wrong to study abstract metaethical theories, to ask what their consequences are, and even to believe them a little bit. The analogy with math still holds here. We study the heck out of ZFC. We even believe it more than a little at this point. But we don’t believe it more than we believe the intermediate value theorem.

PS: I also don’t think “shut up and calculate” is something you can actually do under utilitarianism, because there are good utilitarian arguments for obeying deontological rules and being virtuous, and pretty much every ethical debate that anyone has ever had can be rephrased as a debate about what terms should go in the utility function and what the most effective way to maximize it is.

smoofra 23 Mar 2013 20:41 UTC
5 points
on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
This is all nifty and interesting, as mathematics, but I feel like you are probably barking up the wrong tree when it comes to applying this stuff to AI. I say this for a couple of reasons:

First, ZFC itself is already comically overpowered. Have you read about reverse mathematics? Stephen Simpson edited a good book on the topic. Anyway, my point is that there’s a whole spectrum of systems a lot weaker than ZFC that are sufficient for a large fraction of theorems, and probably all the reasoning that you would ever need to do physics or make real word, actionable decisions. The idea that physics could depend on reasoning of a higher consistency strength than ZFC just feels really wrong to me. Like the idea that P could really equal NP. Of course my gut feeling isn’t evidence, but I’m interested in the question of why we disagree. Why do you think these considerations are likely to be important?

Second, Isn’t the the whole topic of formal reasoning a bike shed? Isn’t the real danger that you will formalize the goal function wrong, not that the deductions will be invalid?

smoofra 18 Jan 2010 22:40 UTC
5 points
on: Tips and Tricks for Answering Hard Questions
“Trust your intuitions, but don’t waste too much time arguing for them”

This is an excellent point. Intuition plays an absolutely crucial point in human thought, but there’s no point in debating an opinion that (by definition, even) you’re incapable of verbalizing your reasons for. Let me suggest another maxim:

Intuitions tell you where to look, not what you’ll find.

smoofra 22 Dec 2009 19:03 UTC
5 points
on: If reason told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
You’re confusing “reason” with inappropriate confidence in models and formalism.

smoofra 4 Dec 2009 23:39 UTC
5 points
on: Arbitrage of prediction markets

But if results depend on my ability to convince rich people, that’s not prediction market!

what!? Why not?

smoofra 10 Sep 2009 19:43 UTC
5 points
on: The Lifespan Dilemma
These thought experiments all seem to require vastly more resources than the physical universe contains. Does that mean they don’t matter?

smoofra 29 May 2009 13:27 UTC
5 points
on: A social norm against unjustified opinions?
The way you build such a norm is by annoyingly pointing out when people violate your proposed norm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising

smoofra

Any­body want to join a Math Club?

Anybody want to join a Math Club?