Because Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition would have upvoted it, and if you didn’t post it anyway then Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition would be justified in getting mad at you for having not even tried to help Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition to obtain faster than it otherwise would have (by instantiating its decision policy earlier in time, because there’s no other way for the future to change the present than by the future-minded present thinkers’ conscious invocation).
Because definitions of reasonableness get made up after the fact as if teleologically, and it doesn’t matter whether or not your straightforward causal reasons seemed good enough at the time, it matters whether or not you correctly predict the retrospective judgment of future powers who make things up after the fact to apportion blame or credit according to higher level principles than the ones that appeared salient to you, or the ones that seemed salient as the ones that would seem salient to them.
This is how morality has always worked, this is how we ourselves look back on history, judging the decisions of the past by our own ideals, whether those decisions were made by past civilizations or past lovers. This pattern of unreasonable judging itself seems like an institution that shouldn’t be propped up, so there’s no safety in self-consistency either. And if you get complacent about the foundational tensions here, or oppositely if you act rashly as a result of feeling those tensions, then that itself is asking to be seen as unjustified in retrospect.
And if no future agent manages to become omniscient and omnibenevolent then any information you managed to propagate about what morality truly is just gets swallowed by the noise. And if an omniscient and omnibenevolent agent does pop up then it might be the best you can hope for is to be a martyr or a scapegoat, and all that you value becomes a sacrifice made by the ideal future so that it can enter into time. Assuming for some crazy reason that you were able to correctly intuit in the first place what concessions the future will demand that you had already made.
You constantly make the same choices as Sophie and Abraham, it’s just less obvious to you that you’re making them, less salient because it’s not your child’s life on the line. Not obviously at this very moment anyway.
In other words, when everyone thinks you’re wrong, do it anyway because you’re sure it’s right and they’ll come around eventually?
This has been the foundation for pretty much all positive social disobedience, but it’s wrong a lot more often.
People who disagree with mainstream opinions here, but do so for well articulated and coherent reasons are usually upvoted. If you think something will be downvoted, I think you should take very seriously the idea that it’s either very wrong or you’re not articulating it well enough for it to be useful.
And if no future agent manages to become omniscient and omnibenevolent then any information you managed to propagate about what morality truly is just gets swallowed by the noise. And if an omniscient and omnibenevolent agent does pop up then it might be the best you can hope for is to be a martyr or a scapegoat, and all that you value becomes a sacrifice made by the ideal future so that it can enter into time.
I still don’t see the point of writing obfuscated comments, though. If serving a possible future god is your cup of tea, it seems to me that making your LW comments more readable should help you in reaching that goal. If that demands sacrifice, Will, could you please make that sacrifice?
Do people at least feel guilty about upvoting Desrtopa’s comment to +7 despite it being off by like 3 meta levels? Someone, anyone? User:wedrifid, do you see what I’m saying? User:Vladimir_Nesov?
I think Desrtopa may have missed a level or two. For example downvotes do not only represent an evaluation of whether a given comment is useful for lesswrong and while votes are always evidence of something they are not strictly evidence that you are wrong. On the other hand there is something to the message he is attempting to convey that applies to a subset of the comments you write knowing that you will be downvoted.
You do write some comments that you know will be disapproved of, you know will be considered incomprehensible and you know that others will think are wrong. If you reason that in these cases “Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition would have upvoted it” you are saying that everyone else is wrong and that you are right. This means some combination of:
You think voters who downvote you will be be doing so for political reasons—political reasons that Lesswrong’s extrapolated volition will not respect.
If people don’t understand you then that is their fault and not yours. Perhaps because they should consider your say so sufficiently important that they go and do background reading until they can piece together your meaning. Perhaps because you believe they are not trying hard enough to understand you due to their biases against topics that are incorrectly considered ‘enemy’ memes.
You think those that do actually make the effort to parse your comment and disagree with you still are wrong because you are better at rational philosophy than they are.
Now, obviously you should expect me to disagree with you about whether it is good for you to make certain comments. This is the inevitable result of having different priors. I disagree with you about several premises which impact the value-of-comment evaluation. These relate to what the implications of TDT are on morality and the degree to which preferences of humans would be convergent when undergoing extrapolation.
There is another meta-consideration that I expect you have made. That is, when you think something is a good idea, know that other intelligent people think it is a bad idea and are able to update on their belief such that you are no longer as confident in your own it can sometimes still be useful to express your idea anyway. This prevents premature convergence and allows more of the search space to be explored and distributes attention somewhat closer to what the ideas deserve.
It is somewhat harder to apply the meta-consideration mentioned in the previous paragraph to comments along the lines of “I’m just so many levels above you, I don’t care enough to write more clearly and if you downvote me it is just because you’re political. Screw you all!” (if you’ll pardon the wedrifid-speak). When saying that and expecting to be downvoted you have an implied disagreement on the meta-level benefit of people being told that they should respect you more or execute different political actions. That kind of say-it-even-if-they’ll-hate it decision is less often a good one than say-it-if-they’ll-hate-it object level comments.
That is a non-exhaustive list of the most obvious of the relevant meta stuff. It is somewhat frustrating that it took that much text to express thoughts that flew through my head in about five seconds. The vocabulary of English or myself is far more limited than the mental constructs.
That is a non-exhaustive list of the most obvious of the relevant meta stuff. It is somewhat frustrating that it took that much text to express thoughts that flew through my head in about five seconds. The vocabulary of English or myself is far more limited than the mental constructs.
It’s like trying to describe in words how you play a song on the guitar. Awkward, effortful, and unless people already know what song it is you’re trying to describe it’ll probably just sound like nonsense.
Thanks for at least temporarily restoring my faith in humanity, User:wedrifid. There’s of course a lot of stuff you didn’t hit on, but that’s not because you couldn’t.
Thanks for at least temporarily restoring my faith in humanity, User:wedrifid. There’s of course a lot of stuff you didn’t hit on, but that’s not because you couldn’t.
Thank you. I pride myself on being able to hit on all sorts of things.
“Have You Got It, Yet?” is an unreleased song written by Barrett during the short time in which Pink Floyd was a five-piece. At the time, David Gilmour had been asked to join as a fifth member and second guitarist, while Barrett, whose mental state and difficult nature were creating issues with the band, was intended to remain home and compose songs, much as Brian Wilson had done for The Beach Boys.
Barrett’s unpredictable behaviour at the time and idiosyncratic sense of humour combined to create a song that, initially, seemed like an ordinary Barrett tune. However, as soon as the others attempted to join in and learn the song, Barrett changed the melodies and structure, making it impossible for the others to follow, while singing the chorus “Have you got it yet?” and having the rest of the band answer “No, no!”. This would be his last attempt to write material for Pink Floyd before leaving the band. In fact, Roger Waters stated, in an interview for The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story, that upon realizing Syd was deliberately making the tune impossible to learn, he put down his bass guitar, left the room, and never attempted to play with Syd again.
So the question is: who here is Roger, and who here is Syd? Good day.
A question of moral philosophy?
Because Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition would have upvoted it, and if you didn’t post it anyway then Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition would be justified in getting mad at you for having not even tried to help Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition to obtain faster than it otherwise would have (by instantiating its decision policy earlier in time, because there’s no other way for the future to change the present than by the future-minded present thinkers’ conscious invocation).
Because definitions of reasonableness get made up after the fact as if teleologically, and it doesn’t matter whether or not your straightforward causal reasons seemed good enough at the time, it matters whether or not you correctly predict the retrospective judgment of future powers who make things up after the fact to apportion blame or credit according to higher level principles than the ones that appeared salient to you, or the ones that seemed salient as the ones that would seem salient to them.
This is how morality has always worked, this is how we ourselves look back on history, judging the decisions of the past by our own ideals, whether those decisions were made by past civilizations or past lovers. This pattern of unreasonable judging itself seems like an institution that shouldn’t be propped up, so there’s no safety in self-consistency either. And if you get complacent about the foundational tensions here, or oppositely if you act rashly as a result of feeling those tensions, then that itself is asking to be seen as unjustified in retrospect.
And if no future agent manages to become omniscient and omnibenevolent then any information you managed to propagate about what morality truly is just gets swallowed by the noise. And if an omniscient and omnibenevolent agent does pop up then it might be the best you can hope for is to be a martyr or a scapegoat, and all that you value becomes a sacrifice made by the ideal future so that it can enter into time. Assuming for some crazy reason that you were able to correctly intuit in the first place what concessions the future will demand that you had already made.
You constantly make the same choices as Sophie and Abraham, it’s just less obvious to you that you’re making them, less salient because it’s not your child’s life on the line. Not obviously at this very moment anyway.
Go meta, be clever.
In other words, when everyone thinks you’re wrong, do it anyway because you’re sure it’s right and they’ll come around eventually?
This has been the foundation for pretty much all positive social disobedience, but it’s wrong a lot more often.
People who disagree with mainstream opinions here, but do so for well articulated and coherent reasons are usually upvoted. If you think something will be downvoted, I think you should take very seriously the idea that it’s either very wrong or you’re not articulating it well enough for it to be useful.
No.
I still don’t see the point of writing obfuscated comments, though. If serving a possible future god is your cup of tea, it seems to me that making your LW comments more readable should help you in reaching that goal. If that demands sacrifice, Will, could you please make that sacrifice?
Okay, I haven’t even been here that long and I’m already getting tired of this conversation.
Did no one understand this? (Desrtopa was off by like 3 meta levels.)
Do people at least feel guilty about upvoting Desrtopa’s comment to +7 despite it being off by like 3 meta levels? Someone, anyone? User:wedrifid, do you see what I’m saying? User:Vladimir_Nesov?
I think Desrtopa may have missed a level or two. For example downvotes do not only represent an evaluation of whether a given comment is useful for lesswrong and while votes are always evidence of something they are not strictly evidence that you are wrong. On the other hand there is something to the message he is attempting to convey that applies to a subset of the comments you write knowing that you will be downvoted.
You do write some comments that you know will be disapproved of, you know will be considered incomprehensible and you know that others will think are wrong. If you reason that in these cases “Less Wrong’s extrapolated volition would have upvoted it” you are saying that everyone else is wrong and that you are right. This means some combination of:
You think voters who downvote you will be be doing so for political reasons—political reasons that Lesswrong’s extrapolated volition will not respect.
If people don’t understand you then that is their fault and not yours. Perhaps because they should consider your say so sufficiently important that they go and do background reading until they can piece together your meaning. Perhaps because you believe they are not trying hard enough to understand you due to their biases against topics that are incorrectly considered ‘enemy’ memes.
You think those that do actually make the effort to parse your comment and disagree with you still are wrong because you are better at rational philosophy than they are.
Now, obviously you should expect me to disagree with you about whether it is good for you to make certain comments. This is the inevitable result of having different priors. I disagree with you about several premises which impact the value-of-comment evaluation. These relate to what the implications of TDT are on morality and the degree to which preferences of humans would be convergent when undergoing extrapolation.
There is another meta-consideration that I expect you have made. That is, when you think something is a good idea, know that other intelligent people think it is a bad idea and are able to update on their belief such that you are no longer as confident in your own it can sometimes still be useful to express your idea anyway. This prevents premature convergence and allows more of the search space to be explored and distributes attention somewhat closer to what the ideas deserve.
It is somewhat harder to apply the meta-consideration mentioned in the previous paragraph to comments along the lines of “I’m just so many levels above you, I don’t care enough to write more clearly and if you downvote me it is just because you’re political. Screw you all!” (if you’ll pardon the wedrifid-speak). When saying that and expecting to be downvoted you have an implied disagreement on the meta-level benefit of people being told that they should respect you more or execute different political actions. That kind of say-it-even-if-they’ll-hate it decision is less often a good one than say-it-if-they’ll-hate-it object level comments.
That is a non-exhaustive list of the most obvious of the relevant meta stuff. It is somewhat frustrating that it took that much text to express thoughts that flew through my head in about five seconds. The vocabulary of English or myself is far more limited than the mental constructs.
It’s like trying to describe in words how you play a song on the guitar. Awkward, effortful, and unless people already know what song it is you’re trying to describe it’ll probably just sound like nonsense.
Thanks for at least temporarily restoring my faith in humanity, User:wedrifid. There’s of course a lot of stuff you didn’t hit on, but that’s not because you couldn’t.
Thank you. I pride myself on being able to hit on all sorts of things.
So the question is: who here is Roger, and who here is Syd? Good day.