What is your family’s religious background, as of the last time your family practiced a religion?
We’re Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents’ generation. (And then only because I knew only one of them personallyh, so it’s reasonable to assume at least one of the others could have been religious.) I get that every human is descended from religious ones, but conflating this datapoint with someone whose actual parents practiced a religion once seems wrong.
Probability
For some of these my confidence was so low that I didn’t answer. For some questions, there are also semantic quibbles that would affect the answer:
Supernatural: AFAIK there is no agreed-on definition of “supernatural” events other than “physically impossible” ones which of course have a probability of 0 (epsilon). OTOH, if you specify “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe”, the probability is very high.
Anti-Agathics: what counts as reaching an age of 1000 years? Humans with a few patched organs and genes? Cyborgs? Uploads with 1000 subjective years of experience?
Simulation: this is complicated by ontological differences: whether, when universe A is simulated in universe B, this somehow contributes to B’s “realness” measure, or actually creates B. Is existence of a universe a binary predicate? I answered as if it is.
Type of global catastrophic risk: although I chose the most probable, there wasn’t a large difference in estimated probability for the top few leading dangers.
about how often do you read or hear about another plausible-seeming technique
At first I thought “every few days”. But then I realized these techniques almost never work out or are unsupported by evidence, and so it would be wrong to call them plausible-seeming. So I recalibrated and answered much more rarely.
Then I saw the next questions asked how often I tried the technique and how often it actually worked. But I already choose not to try them most of the time because I expect not to succeed. So I let my previous answer stand. I hope this was as intended.
CFAR bonus questions:
You are a certain kind of person
Are these questions claiming that I, DanArmak, am this kind of person who can change; or that everyone can change? The answers would be very different. I assumed the latter, but it would be nice to have confirmation.
Other nitpicks: a certain kind on which dimension? Some aspects of personality are much harder to change than others.
What is the measure of “true” change? By the means available to us today, we can’t change into truly nonhuman intelligences, so does that mean our “kind” cannot be changed? And the answers to the questions will change over time as technology creates new more effective interventions.
And: does “basic things” mean “fundamental things” or “minor insignificant things”? Normally I would assume “fundamental things”, but then it seems identical to the previous question.
On a personal note, this set of questions struck me as incompatible after answering the previous sets. They seem to deliberately probe my irrational biases and cached beliefs, and I felt I couldn’t answer them while I was deliberately thinking reflectively and asking myself why I believed the answers I was giving.
How would you describe your opinion on immigration?
The politics of immigration in Israel are totally different from those of the US (and I expect this holds for many other countries too in their different ways). I didn’t answer because I was afraid of biasing the poll, and it would have been nice to get more guidance in the question.
Supernatural: AFAIK there is no agreed-on definition of “supernatural” events other than “physically impossible” ones which of course have a probability of 0 (epsilon). OTOH, if you specify “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe”, the probability is very high.
Somewhere on LessWrong I have seen supernatural defined as “involving ontologically basic mental entities”. This is imho the best deffinition of supernatural I have ever seen and should probably be included into this question in the future. Other definitions do not really make sense with this question, as you allready pointed out.
Here I understand “ontologically basic” to mean “having no Kolmogorov complexity / not amenable to reductionistic exlanations / does not posses an internal mechanism”. Why do you think this is not coherent?
I could do this with any other theory of physics just as easily, e.g., in Newtonian mechanics are are particles ontologically basic, or are points in the universal phase space?
Edit: Also, I never said the concrete was incoherent, I said the concept of “ontologically basic” was incoherent.
No, I’m saying that the people asking whether something is “ontologically basic” are arguing cartography. Also it’s funny how they only ask the question of things they don’t believe exist.
There are good reasons not to consider particles ontologically basic. For instance, particle number is not relativistically invariant in quantum field theory. What looks like a vacuum to an inertial observer will not look like a vacuum to an accelerating observer (see here). If the existence of particles depends on something as trivial as an observer’s state of motion, it is hard to maintain that they are the basic constituents of the universe.
So, I understand what it would mean for something to not be amenable to reductionist explanations and maybe what it would mean to not have internal mechanisms. What does it mean to not have Kolmogorov complexity? Do you mean that the entity is capable of engaging in non-computable computations? That doesn’t seem like a standard part of the supernatural notion, especially because many common supernatural entities aren’t any smarter than humans.
What does it mean to not have Kolmogorov complexity?
What I meant is, that (apart from positional information) you can only give one bit of information about the thing in question: it is there or not. There is no internal complexity to be described. Perhaps I overstreched the meaning of Kolmogorov complexity slightly. Sorry for that.
Do you mean that the entity is capable of engaging in non-computable computations?
What I meant is, that (apart from positional information) you can only give one bit of information about the thing in question: it is there or not. There is no internal complexity to be described. Perhaps I overstreched the meaning of Kolmogorov complexity slightly. Sorry for that.
There’s a quite popular view hereabouts according to which the universal wave function is ontologically basic. If that view is correct, or even possibly correct, your construal of “ontologically basic” cannot be, since wave functions do have internal complexity.
I don’t think that’ a slight overstretch: how many bits you can give about something doesn’t have much to do with its K-complexity. Moreover, I’m not sure what it means to say that you can only talk about something being somewhere and its existence. How then do you distinguish it from other objects?
We’re Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents’ generation. (And then only because I knew only one of them personallyh, so it’s reasonable to assume at least one of the others could have been religious.) I get that every human is descended from religious ones, but conflating this datapoint with someone whose actual parents practiced a religion once seems wrong.
Likewise here, the last time my family practiced a religion was when my grandparents were children (my family is also Ashkenazi Jewish). I wasn’t raised religious at all, but there was certainly a good deal of cultural effect.
OTOH, if you specify “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe”, the probability is very high.
How about “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe, even given some knowledge about their nature (regardless of whether that knowledge would be available to the average human observer)”?
So a ghost that is a spirit is supernatural while a ghost that is a hallucination is not, even if an average human observer would be unable to tell them apart.
How about messages from outside the simulation? The simulation itself may be running in an orderly material universe (we could call this “exonatural”), and may run according to fixed orderly rules most of the time (“usually endonatural”), but still allow the simulators to tweak it. As an analogy, consider what happens in Conway’s Life when you pause it and draw or erase a glider.
We can discuss it and maybe agree on an interesting meaning that we could ask people about. The problem is that I don’t think all participants in this poll interpreted the question in the same way.
As for your example, it doesn’t illuminate a general rule for me. If supernatural things can actually happen, what is the definition of “supernatural”?
What is your family’s religious background, as of the last time your family practiced a religion?
We’re Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents’ generation.
I just realized that I parsed the quoted question wrong in the survey—I assumed that it meant the last time your immediate family practiced religion, not the most recent ancestral practice of religion.
The politics of immigration in Israel are totally different from those of the US (and I expect this holds for many other countries too in their different ways). I didn’t answer because I was afraid of biasing the poll, and it would have been nice to get more guidance in the question.
I answered about the politics of immigration in my country, for consistency with the other questions.
Notes taken while I answered.
We’re Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents’ generation. (And then only because I knew only one of them personallyh, so it’s reasonable to assume at least one of the others could have been religious.) I get that every human is descended from religious ones, but conflating this datapoint with someone whose actual parents practiced a religion once seems wrong.
For some of these my confidence was so low that I didn’t answer. For some questions, there are also semantic quibbles that would affect the answer:
Supernatural: AFAIK there is no agreed-on definition of “supernatural” events other than “physically impossible” ones which of course have a probability of 0 (epsilon). OTOH, if you specify “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe”, the probability is very high.
Anti-Agathics: what counts as reaching an age of 1000 years? Humans with a few patched organs and genes? Cyborgs? Uploads with 1000 subjective years of experience?
Simulation: this is complicated by ontological differences: whether, when universe A is simulated in universe B, this somehow contributes to B’s “realness” measure, or actually creates B. Is existence of a universe a binary predicate? I answered as if it is.
Type of global catastrophic risk: although I chose the most probable, there wasn’t a large difference in estimated probability for the top few leading dangers.
At first I thought “every few days”. But then I realized these techniques almost never work out or are unsupported by evidence, and so it would be wrong to call them plausible-seeming. So I recalibrated and answered much more rarely.
Then I saw the next questions asked how often I tried the technique and how often it actually worked. But I already choose not to try them most of the time because I expect not to succeed. So I let my previous answer stand. I hope this was as intended.
CFAR bonus questions:
Are these questions claiming that I, DanArmak, am this kind of person who can change; or that everyone can change? The answers would be very different. I assumed the latter, but it would be nice to have confirmation.
Other nitpicks: a certain kind on which dimension? Some aspects of personality are much harder to change than others.
What is the measure of “true” change? By the means available to us today, we can’t change into truly nonhuman intelligences, so does that mean our “kind” cannot be changed? And the answers to the questions will change over time as technology creates new more effective interventions.
And: does “basic things” mean “fundamental things” or “minor insignificant things”? Normally I would assume “fundamental things”, but then it seems identical to the previous question.
On a personal note, this set of questions struck me as incompatible after answering the previous sets. They seem to deliberately probe my irrational biases and cached beliefs, and I felt I couldn’t answer them while I was deliberately thinking reflectively and asking myself why I believed the answers I was giving.
The politics of immigration in Israel are totally different from those of the US (and I expect this holds for many other countries too in their different ways). I didn’t answer because I was afraid of biasing the poll, and it would have been nice to get more guidance in the question.
I endorse you still putting your background as Ashkenazi Jewish, as this gives interesting ethnic information beyond that in the race question.
Maybe you could have split “White (non-Hispanic)” into “White (Jewish)” and “White (other)”.
(Then again, it would be unclear which one a Sephardi Jew from Argentina currently living in the US would pick.)
IIRC the poll choice only specified ‘Jewish’, so ‘Ashkenazi’ was lost.
Somewhere on LessWrong I have seen supernatural defined as “involving ontologically basic mental entities”. This is imho the best deffinition of supernatural I have ever seen and should probably be included into this question in the future. Other definitions do not really make sense with this question, as you allready pointed out.
I don’t think the concept of “ontologically basic” is coherent.
I personally think it’s a strawman, but I don’t see why it’s necessarily incoherent for people who reject reductionism.
Can you expand?
Why?
Here I understand “ontologically basic” to mean “having no Kolmogorov complexity / not amenable to reductionistic exlanations / does not posses an internal mechanism”. Why do you think this is not coherent?
Assuming the standard model of quantum mechanics is more or less correct which enteties are ontologically basic?
1) Leptons and quarks
2) The quantum fields
3) The universal wave function
4) The Hilbert space where said wave function lives
5) The mathematics used to describe the wave function
Interesting, but this does not exactly mean the concrete is incoherent, more that QM isnt playing ball.
I could do this with any other theory of physics just as easily, e.g., in Newtonian mechanics are are particles ontologically basic, or are points in the universal phase space?
Edit: Also, I never said the concrete was incoherent, I said the concept of “ontologically basic” was incoherent.
You’re arguing issues of cartography, not geography.
No, I’m saying that the people asking whether something is “ontologically basic” are arguing cartography. Also it’s funny how they only ask the question of things they don’t believe exist.
Ok I’m in agreement with that.
I don’t that is clear cut, because space and points have often often been denied any reality
Concrete was my tablets version of concept.
Before I knew of Hilbert space and the universal wave function, I would have said 1, now I am somewhat confused about that.
There are good reasons not to consider particles ontologically basic. For instance, particle number is not relativistically invariant in quantum field theory. What looks like a vacuum to an inertial observer will not look like a vacuum to an accelerating observer (see here). If the existence of particles depends on something as trivial as an observer’s state of motion, it is hard to maintain that they are the basic constituents of the universe.
Thanks! Did not know that.
So, I understand what it would mean for something to not be amenable to reductionist explanations and maybe what it would mean to not have internal mechanisms. What does it mean to not have Kolmogorov complexity? Do you mean that the entity is capable of engaging in non-computable computations? That doesn’t seem like a standard part of the supernatural notion, especially because many common supernatural entities aren’t any smarter than humans.
What I meant is, that (apart from positional information) you can only give one bit of information about the thing in question: it is there or not. There is no internal complexity to be described. Perhaps I overstreched the meaning of Kolmogorov complexity slightly. Sorry for that.
No.
There’s a quite popular view hereabouts according to which the universal wave function is ontologically basic. If that view is correct, or even possibly correct, your construal of “ontologically basic” cannot be, since wave functions do have internal complexity.
Interesting thought. So how would you define ontologically basic?
I don’t think that’ a slight overstretch: how many bits you can give about something doesn’t have much to do with its K-complexity. Moreover, I’m not sure what it means to say that you can only talk about something being somewhere and its existence. How then do you distinguish it from other objects?
Likewise here, the last time my family practiced a religion was when my grandparents were children (my family is also Ashkenazi Jewish). I wasn’t raised religious at all, but there was certainly a good deal of cultural effect.
How about “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe, even given some knowledge about their nature (regardless of whether that knowledge would be available to the average human observer)”?
So a ghost that is a spirit is supernatural while a ghost that is a hallucination is not, even if an average human observer would be unable to tell them apart.
How about messages from outside the simulation? The simulation itself may be running in an orderly material universe (we could call this “exonatural”), and may run according to fixed orderly rules most of the time (“usually endonatural”), but still allow the simulators to tweak it. As an analogy, consider what happens in Conway’s Life when you pause it and draw or erase a glider.
We can discuss it and maybe agree on an interesting meaning that we could ask people about. The problem is that I don’t think all participants in this poll interpreted the question in the same way.
As for your example, it doesn’t illuminate a general rule for me. If supernatural things can actually happen, what is the definition of “supernatural”?
I just realized that I parsed the quoted question wrong in the survey—I assumed that it meant the last time your immediate family practiced religion, not the most recent ancestral practice of religion.
I answered about the politics of immigration in my country, for consistency with the other questions.