1) Almost everyone really is better than average at something. People massively overrate that something. We imagine intelligence to be useful largely due to this bias. The really useful thing would have been to build a FAS, or Friendly Artificial Strong. Only someone who could do hundreds of 100 kilogram curls with either hand could possible create such a thing however. (Zuckerberg already created a Friendly Artificial Popular)
2) Luck, an invisible, morally charged and slightly agenty but basically non-anthropomorphic tendency for things to go well for some people in some domains of varying generality and badly for other people in various domains really does dominate our lives. People can learn to be lucky, and almost everything else they can learn is fairly useless by comparison.
3) Everyone hallucinates a large portion of their experienced reality. Most irrationality can be more usefully interpreted from outside as flat-out hallucination. That’s why you (for every given you) seem so rational and no-one else does.
4) The human brain has many millions of idiosyncratic failure modes. We all display hundreds of them. The psychological disorders that we know of are all extremely rare and extremely precise, so if you ever met two people with the same disorder it would be obvious. Named psychological disorders are the result of people with degrees noticing two people who actually have the same disorder and other people reading their descriptions and pattern-matching noise against it. There are, for instance, 1300 bipolar people (based on the actual precise pattern which inspired the invention of the term) in the world but hundreds of thousands of people have disorders which if you squint hard look slightly like bipolar.
5) It’s easy to become immortal or to acquire “super powers” via a few minutes a day of the right sort of exercise and trivial tweaks to your diet if you do both for a few decades. It’s also introspectively obvious how to do so if you think about the question but due to subtle social pressures against it no-one overcomes akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, etc in this domain.
6) All medicines and psychoactive substances are purely placebos.
7) Pleasure is a confusion in a different way from the obvious, specifically, everything said to be pleasurable is actually something painful but necessary that we convince ourselves to do via propaganda because there is no other way to overcome the akrasia that would result if we did not or a lost purpose descended from some such propaganda. Things we are actually motivated to do without propaganda, we do without thinking about it, feel no need to name, would endorse tiling the universe with without hesitation if it occurred to us to do so.
I wouldn’t believe
8) The cheap rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager, the god of punishing saints, actually exists except it’s actually the Zeus of punishing virtuous Greek Pagans, rewarding hubristic Greek Pagans, and ignoring us infidels who ignore it despite the ubiquitous evidence all around us. I would believe that the AGI had a good reason for wanting to tell me that the above was the case if it told me though.
9) Most of Eliezer’s examples. To be credible they should be disturbing, not merely improbable. Our beliefs aren’t shown to be massively invalid with respect to non-disturbing data. The one about animals probably qualifies as credible though.
10) Uh, oh, Cyc will hard take-off if one more fact is programmed into it. I’m not sure I can stop it in time.
Bonus belief
This question has doomed us. People who could possibly program a FAI will, once thinking about this question in a semi-humorous manner, invariably spread the meme to all their friends and be distracted from future progress.
I don’t know of anyone who’s luckier than average in a strict test (rolling a die), but there is such a thing as the vague ability to have things go well for you no matter what, even when there’s no obvious skill or merit driving it. People call that being a “golden boy” or “living a charmed life.” I think that this is really a matter of some subtle, unnamed skill or instinct for leaning towards good outcomes and away from bad ones, something so hard to pinpoint that it doesn’t even look like a skill. I suspect it’s a personal quality, not just a result of arbitrary circumstances; but sometimes people are “lucky” in a way that seems unexplainable by personal characteristics alone.
I am one of those lucky people, to an eerie degree. I once believed in Divine Providence because it seemed so obvious in my own, preternaturally golden, life. (One example of many: I am unusually healthy, immune to injury, and pain-free, to a degree that has astonished people I know. I have recovered fully from a 104-degree fever in four hours. I had my first headache at the age of 22.) If an AI told me there was a systematic explanation for my luck I would believe it. I also have an acquaintance who’s lucky in a different way: he has an uncanny record of surviving near death experiences.
I’d be willing to consider that at least one (more likely several) of these subtle skills might exist; we’ve got some similar things well documented already, like “charisma”, and searching for more seems at least like a reasonable pursuit. But that ought to be tempered by some statistical skepticism; as the saying goes, million-to-one chances happen eight times a day in New York.
That’s kind of what I was getting at. One skill or habit might be the tendency to stop before you hit the edge of the ravine. People who look like they’re blase about taking risks and are just “lucky,” but in fact are just good at finding opportunities and adapting to circumstances and not going quite all the way into dangerous situations. A sort of micro-level good judgment, which often compensates for macro-level bad judgment. (Think of someone who looks like he never studies and is just “lucky,” but actually has a good sense, maybe subconscious, of what is worth working on and what isn’t.)
Ha! I totally see where you are coming from. I have believed in fate for reasons very similar to this. It was just too eerie how life seemed to provide me exactly with what was best for me at optimal times. Kinda like I’m a player character in this simulation.
I’m currently mostly agnostic about it and accept confirmation bias / being Wrong Genre Savvy as most likely explanations, but if the AI told me I really was lucky or the universe (partially) built around me, I’d shout, “I knew it!”.
One might argue that failing to have 104-degree fevers or near-death experiences in the first place reflects an even greater degree of luck, even though they don’t feel nearly as eerie.
right; but there’s also all the things that never happened to me but happened to most people.
This isn’t too serious an observation—it’s edging towards the world of magical thinking—but I have literally never met anyone I’d judge as luckier than myself.
Still, given the negligible prior for “luck”, isn’t it far, far more reasonable to just figure that there are “lottery-winners” like yourself, and you’re just a member of the good extreme end of the bell curve, and there’s nothing unusual or psychogenic about it?
The answer to my question is yes.
See also: tropisms, which would be a necessary condition for being on one end of the bell curve, but would still be weak evidence for actually predicting that someone with a high degree of positive tropisms would end up bizarrely fortunate.
3 isn’t all that different from things we do know our brains do: Consider how our visual system extrapolates across our blind spots, or how we reconstruct memories. If I can construe “approximates from insufficient information” as “hallucinates”, then 3 is rather reasonable.
I was thinking more along the lines of most people having actually hallucinated ghosts, demons, angels, etc, but not talking too much about it. I think something in this direction is probably true in a lot of cases where we assume otherwise. For instance, I think that some anorexia involves actual hallucinations of personal obesity.
1) Almost everyone really is better than average at something. People massively overrate that something. We imagine intelligence to be useful largely due to this bias. The really useful thing would have been to build a FAS, or Friendly Artificial Strong. Only someone who could do hundreds of 100 kilogram curls with either hand could possible create such a thing however. (Zuckerberg already created a Friendly Artificial Popular)
2) Luck, an invisible, morally charged and slightly agenty but basically non-anthropomorphic tendency for things to go well for some people in some domains of varying generality and badly for other people in various domains really does dominate our lives. People can learn to be lucky, and almost everything else they can learn is fairly useless by comparison.
3) Everyone hallucinates a large portion of their experienced reality. Most irrationality can be more usefully interpreted from outside as flat-out hallucination. That’s why you (for every given you) seem so rational and no-one else does.
4) The human brain has many millions of idiosyncratic failure modes. We all display hundreds of them. The psychological disorders that we know of are all extremely rare and extremely precise, so if you ever met two people with the same disorder it would be obvious. Named psychological disorders are the result of people with degrees noticing two people who actually have the same disorder and other people reading their descriptions and pattern-matching noise against it. There are, for instance, 1300 bipolar people (based on the actual precise pattern which inspired the invention of the term) in the world but hundreds of thousands of people have disorders which if you squint hard look slightly like bipolar.
5) It’s easy to become immortal or to acquire “super powers” via a few minutes a day of the right sort of exercise and trivial tweaks to your diet if you do both for a few decades. It’s also introspectively obvious how to do so if you think about the question but due to subtle social pressures against it no-one overcomes akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, etc in this domain.
6) All medicines and psychoactive substances are purely placebos.
7) Pleasure is a confusion in a different way from the obvious, specifically, everything said to be pleasurable is actually something painful but necessary that we convince ourselves to do via propaganda because there is no other way to overcome the akrasia that would result if we did not or a lost purpose descended from some such propaganda. Things we are actually motivated to do without propaganda, we do without thinking about it, feel no need to name, would endorse tiling the universe with without hesitation if it occurred to us to do so.
I wouldn’t believe
8) The cheap rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager, the god of punishing saints, actually exists except it’s actually the Zeus of punishing virtuous Greek Pagans, rewarding hubristic Greek Pagans, and ignoring us infidels who ignore it despite the ubiquitous evidence all around us. I would believe that the AGI had a good reason for wanting to tell me that the above was the case if it told me though.
9) Most of Eliezer’s examples. To be credible they should be disturbing, not merely improbable. Our beliefs aren’t shown to be massively invalid with respect to non-disturbing data. The one about animals probably qualifies as credible though.
10) Uh, oh, Cyc will hard take-off if one more fact is programmed into it. I’m not sure I can stop it in time.
Bonus belief
This question has doomed us. People who could possibly program a FAI will, once thinking about this question in a semi-humorous manner, invariably spread the meme to all their friends and be distracted from future progress.
I sort of believe the “luck” thing already.
I don’t know of anyone who’s luckier than average in a strict test (rolling a die), but there is such a thing as the vague ability to have things go well for you no matter what, even when there’s no obvious skill or merit driving it. People call that being a “golden boy” or “living a charmed life.” I think that this is really a matter of some subtle, unnamed skill or instinct for leaning towards good outcomes and away from bad ones, something so hard to pinpoint that it doesn’t even look like a skill. I suspect it’s a personal quality, not just a result of arbitrary circumstances; but sometimes people are “lucky” in a way that seems unexplainable by personal characteristics alone.
I am one of those lucky people, to an eerie degree. I once believed in Divine Providence because it seemed so obvious in my own, preternaturally golden, life. (One example of many: I am unusually healthy, immune to injury, and pain-free, to a degree that has astonished people I know. I have recovered fully from a 104-degree fever in four hours. I had my first headache at the age of 22.) If an AI told me there was a systematic explanation for my luck I would believe it. I also have an acquaintance who’s lucky in a different way: he has an uncanny record of surviving near death experiences.
I’d be willing to consider that at least one (more likely several) of these subtle skills might exist; we’ve got some similar things well documented already, like “charisma”, and searching for more seems at least like a reasonable pursuit. But that ought to be tempered by some statistical skepticism; as the saying goes, million-to-one chances happen eight times a day in New York.
That’s kind of what I was getting at. One skill or habit might be the tendency to stop before you hit the edge of the ravine. People who look like they’re blase about taking risks and are just “lucky,” but in fact are just good at finding opportunities and adapting to circumstances and not going quite all the way into dangerous situations. A sort of micro-level good judgment, which often compensates for macro-level bad judgment. (Think of someone who looks like he never studies and is just “lucky,” but actually has a good sense, maybe subconscious, of what is worth working on and what isn’t.)
Ha! I totally see where you are coming from. I have believed in fate for reasons very similar to this. It was just too eerie how life seemed to provide me exactly with what was best for me at optimal times. Kinda like I’m a player character in this simulation.
I’m currently mostly agnostic about it and accept confirmation bias / being Wrong Genre Savvy as most likely explanations, but if the AI told me I really was lucky or the universe (partially) built around me, I’d shout, “I knew it!”.
One might argue that failing to have 104-degree fevers or near-death experiences in the first place reflects an even greater degree of luck, even though they don’t feel nearly as eerie.
right; but there’s also all the things that never happened to me but happened to most people.
This isn’t too serious an observation—it’s edging towards the world of magical thinking—but I have literally never met anyone I’d judge as luckier than myself.
Ever broken a bone?
nope. Also no bee stings.
Aha! So you’re the one who keeps sabatoging train engines) to find someone with unbreakable bones!
I thought it was obvious that Sarah is an ancestor of Teela Brown.
Still, given the negligible prior for “luck”, isn’t it far, far more reasonable to just figure that there are “lottery-winners” like yourself, and you’re just a member of the good extreme end of the bell curve, and there’s nothing unusual or psychogenic about it?
The answer to my question is yes.
See also: tropisms, which would be a necessary condition for being on one end of the bell curve, but would still be weak evidence for actually predicting that someone with a high degree of positive tropisms would end up bizarrely fortunate.
5) Ornish-diet + dual n-back
Immortality and super powers? Introspectively obvious?
You’re in denial, man!
3 is going to stick with me.
3 isn’t all that different from things we do know our brains do: Consider how our visual system extrapolates across our blind spots, or how we reconstruct memories. If I can construe “approximates from insufficient information” as “hallucinates”, then 3 is rather reasonable.
I was thinking more along the lines of most people having actually hallucinated ghosts, demons, angels, etc, but not talking too much about it.
I think something in this direction is probably true in a lot of cases where we assume otherwise. For instance, I think that some anorexia involves actual hallucinations of personal obesity.