ACrackedPot

Karma: 180

ACrackedPot 24 Jan 2024 21:22 UTC
0 points
on: ACrackedPot’s Shortform
Another crackpot physics thing:
My crackpot physics just got about 10% less crackpot. As it transpires, one of the -really weird- things in my physics, which I thought of as a negative dimension, already exists in mathematics—it’s a Riemann Sphere. (Thank you, Pato!)
This “really weird” thing is kind of the underlying topology of the universe in my crackpot physics—I analogized the interaction between this topology and mass once to an infinite series of Matryoshka dolls, where every other doll is “inside out and backwards”. Don’t ask me to explain that; that entire avenue of “attempting to communicate this idea” was a complete and total failure, and it was only after drawing a picture of the topology I had in mind that someone (Pato) observed that I had just drawn a somewhat inaccurate picture of a Riemann Sphere. (I drew it as a disk in which the entire boundary was the same point, 0, with dual infinities coinciding at the origin. I guess, in retrospect, a sphere was a more obvious way of describing that.)
If we consider that the points are not evenly allocated over the surface of the sphere—they’re concentrated at the poles (each of which is simultaneously 0 and infinity, the mapping is ambiguous), if we drew a line such that it crosses the same number of points with each revolution, we get—something like a logarithmic spiral. (Well, it’s a logarithmic spiral with the “disk” interpretation; it’s a spherical spiral whose name I don’t know in the spherical interpretation.)
If we consider the bundle of lines connecting the poles, and use this constant-measure-per-revolution spiral to describe their path, I think that’s about … 20% of the way to actually converting the insanity in my head into real mathematics. Each of these lines is “distance” (or, alternatively, “time”—it depends on which of the two charts you employ). The bundle of these spirals provides one dimension of rotation; there’s a mathematical way of extracting a second dimension of rotation, to get a three-dimensional space, but I don’t understand it at an intuitive level yet.
A particle’s perspective is “constantly falling into an infinity”; because of the hyperbolic nature of the space, I think a particle always “thinks” it is at the equator—it never actually gets any closer. Because the lines describe a spiral, the particle is “spinning”. Because of the nature of the geometry of the sphere, this spin expresses itself as a spinor, or at least something analogous to one.
Also, apparently, Riemann Spheres are already used in both relativistic vacuum field equations and quantum mechanics. Which, uh, really annoys me, because I’m increasingly certain there is “something” here, and increasingly annoyed that nobody else has apparently just sat down and tried to unify the fields in what, to me, is the most obvious bloody way to unify them; just assume they’re all curvature, that the curvature varies like a decaying sine wave (like “sin(ln(x))/x”, which exhibits exactly the kind of decay I have in mind). Logarithmic decay of frequency over distance ensures that there is a scalar symmetry, as does a linear decay of amplitude over distance.
Yes, I’m aware of the intuitive geometry involved in an inverse-square law; I swear that the linear decay makes geometric sense too, given the topology in my head. Rotation of a logarithmic spiral gives rise to a linear rescaling relative to the arclength of that rotation. Yes, I’m aware that the inverse-square law also has lots of evidence—but it also has lots of evidence against it, which we’ve attempted to patch by assuming unobserved mass that precisely accounts for the observed anomalies. I posit that the sinusoidal wave in question has ranges wherein the amplitude is decaying approximately linearly, which creates the apparent inverse-square behavior for certain ranges of distances—and because these regions of space are where matter tends to accumulate, having the most stable configurations, they’re disproportionately where all of our observations are made. It’s kind of literally the edge cases, where the inverse-square relationship begins to break down (whether it really does, or apparently does), and the configurations become less stable, that we begin to observe deviations.
I’m still working on mapping my “sin(ln(x))/x” equation (this is not the correct equation, I don’t think, it’s just an equation that kind of looks right for what’s in my head, and it gave me hints about where to start looking) to this structure; there are a few options, but none stand out yet as obviously correct. The spherical logarithmic spiral is a likely candidate, but figuring out the definition of the spiral that maintains constant “measure” with each rotation requires some additional understanding on my part.

ACrackedPot 9 Jan 2024 19:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: duck_master’s comment on: Trivial Mathematics as a Path Forward
The issue arises specifically in the situation of recursive self-improvement: You can’t prove self-consistency in mathematical frameworks of “sufficient complexity” (that is, containing the rules of arithmetic in a provable manner).
What this cashes out to is that, considering AI as a mathematical framework, and the next generation of AI (designed by the first) as a secondary mathematical framework—you can’t actually prove that there are no contradictions in an umbrella mathematical framework that comprises both of them, if they are of “sufficient complexity”. Which means an AI cannot -prove- that a successor AI has not experienced value drift—that is, that the combined mathematical framework does not contain contradictions—if they are of sufficient complexity.
To illustrate the issue, suppose the existence of a powerful creator AI, designing its successor; the successor, presumably, is more powerful than the creator AI in some fashion, and so there are areas of the combinatorially large space that the successor AI can explore (in a reasonable timeframe), but that the creator AI cannot. If the creator can prove there are no contradictions in the combined mathematical framework—then, supposing its values are embedded in that framework in a provable manner, it can be assured that the successor has not experienced value drift.
Mind, I don’t particularly think the above scenario is terribly likely; I have strong doubts about basically everything in there, in particular the idea of provable values. I created the post for the five or six people who might still be interested in ideas I haven’t seen kicked around on Less Wrong for over a decade.

Trivial Mathematics as a Path Forward

ACrackedPot3 Jan 2024 16:41 UTC

−4 points

2 comments2 min readLW link

ACrackedPot 26 Dec 2023 16:41 UTC
5 points
0
on: A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels
Alternatively—we communicate about the things that pose the most danger to us, in a manner intended to minimize that danger.
In a typical Level-4 society, people don’t have a lot to fear from lions and they aren’t in imminent danger of starvation. The bottom half of Maslow’s hierarchy is pretty stable.
It’s the social stuff where our needs run the risk of being unfulfilled; it is the social stuff that poses the most danger. So of course most of the communication that takes place is about social stuff, in manners intended to reinforce our own social status. This isn’t a simulacra of reality—it is reality, and people suffer real harms for being insufficient to the task.

ACrackedPot 21 Dec 2023 21:52 UTC
10 points
8
on: Pseudonymity and Accusations
I think a substantial part of the issue here is the asymmetry created when one party is public, and one party is not.
Suppose a user is posting under their real name, John Doe, and another user is posted under a pseudonym, Azure_Pearls_172. An accusation by Azure against John can have real-world implications; an accusation by John against Azure is limited by the reach of the pseudonym. Azure can change their pseudonym, and leave the accusations behind; John cannot.
Doxxing can make a situation more symmetrical in this case. Whether or not it is merited is a complicated topic, particularly as the norms around doxxing exist for a reason.
Suppose a user assaults other users, and switches pseudonyms whenever identified to keep finding new targets—I doubt anybody would argue that doxxing a predatory member of this sort is a bad thing, in and of itself. Contrariwise, suppose a user gets annoyed with another user, and then doxxes them and accuses them in bad faith of assault. We don’t want that.
I think mixed-anonymity is basically a terrible way to run things, owing to the asymmetries involved, and in general communities should have norms that either reflect no anonymity (everybody uses their real names), or total anonymity (nobody uses their real names, and also nobody ever meets anybody else in person). If you’re mixing the cases, you’re creating the potential for abuses.
If you disagree that anonymous users should never meet in person, well—if you’re willing to meet in person, why are you choosing to be anonymous? Is anonymity a conscious and deliberate decision, such that doxxing would actually be a violation (in which case, why are you doxxing yourself?), or is it just a default option? And if you’re meeting another anonymous user—well, what is their reason for choosing to be anonymous?
Mind, I’ve met other pseudonymous users of various communities, so I can’t 100% claim to be consistent with this. But I only do so when my choice of anonymity is more “default” than “deliberate choice”—there are some pseudonyms I use which I certainly wouldn’t meet somebody under the auspices of, because they are deliberate choices, chosen to minimize exposure.
(Granted, I haven’t used them in a while, and at this point most of the opinions I shared under them are basically widely accepted today, and those that aren’t are at least socially acceptable—so, eh, it would probably be fine at this point.)

ACrackedPot 8 Nov 2023 22:24 UTC
14 points
3
on: Can a stupid person become intelligent?
I am, unapologetically, a genius. (A lot of people here are.)
My experience of what it is like being a genius: I look at a problem and I know an answer. That’s pretty much it. I’m not any faster at thinking than anybody else; I’d say I’m actually a somewhat slower thinker, but make up for it by having “larger” thoughts; most people seem to have fast multi-core processors, and I’m running a slightly slow graphics card. Depending on what you need done, I’m either many orders of magnitude better at it—or completely hopeless. It mostly depends on whether or not I’ve figured out how to adapt the problem to my way of thinking.
Also, sometimes my “I know an answer” is wrong—this means that I still have to go through the “manual” effort of thinking, to verify the answer, and I’m using the slow graphics card to run a mostly single-thread process. Sometimes the answer is too hard to verify either way! (Hey, look at my username; I’ve been pursuing themes on a crackpot physics for twenty five years, and I’m not particularly any closer to being able to determine whether or not it is true or false!)
In practice, in the real world, what this translates to is: I’m often no faster at providing a “good” answer than a merely above-average person, because, while I know -an- answer, it will take me just as long to verify whether or not it is a good answer as it takes a merely above-average person to go through the manual effort of finding an answer and then verifying it!
Also, my answers are often … strange. Not wrong, and I can find answers to problems other people find intractable, or find a way to do something in way less time than somebody else—but on rare occasion, I can’t find the answer that an average person can spot immediately, and much more frequently, I find an answer that takes way -more- time than the obvious-to-other-people solution.
What I conclude is that what makes me a “genius” is context—I am in fact likely merely somewhat above-average, but that I find the difficulty of problems -different- than other people. Imagine, for a moment, that everybody is given a map of the world, which maps, let’s say, 5% of the territory. But 99% of the 5% is in common; ask a hundred people, and 99 of them will know where Canada is. My map is only somewhat above average in size, but it covers an entirely different geography—I couldn’t tell you where Canada is, but I know where Tucson is, something that is on less than .01% of the maps out there.
You need to get to Canada, you can ask just about anybody, and they can tell you how to get there. So, even though I don’t have Canada on my map, this mostly doesn’t present me any problems, except when I’m trying to get to Alaska and somebody tells me to just drive through Canada.
But if you need to go to Tucson, it’s hard to find somebody who knows where it is. But I can immediately tell you. Nobody ever asks me how to get to Canada—why would they? - but everybody asks me how to get to Tucson, so I look like I know a lot. And IQ tests really reward knowing how to get to Tucson, and don’t bother asking about Canada at all, so—I’m a genius. And because everyone knows where Canada is, I benefit, from an intellectual perspective, as much from having ordinary people around me, as they benefit from having a “genius” around them.
But I’m in the same boat as anybody else when I need to get to Jupiter; nobody has a map that says how to get there.

ACrackedPot 8 Nov 2023 4:15 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Implementing Decision Theory
Take a step back and try rereading what I wrote in a charitable light, because it appears you have completely misconstrued what I was saying.
A major part of the “cooperation” involved here is in being able to cooperate with yourself. In an environment with a well-mixed group of bots each employing differing strategies, and some kind of reproductive rule (if you have 100 utility, say, spawn a copy of yourself), Cooperate-bots are unlikely to be terribly prolific; they lose out against many other bots.
In such an environment, a strategem of defecting against bots that defect against cooperate-bot is a -cheap- mechanism of coordination; you can coordinate with other “Selfish Altruist” bots, and cooperate with them, but you don’t take a whole lot of hits from failing to edit: defect against cooperate-bot. Additionally, you’re unlikely to run up against very many bots that cooperate with cooperate-bot, but defect against you. As a coordination strategy, it is therefore inexpensive.
And if “computation time” is considered as an expense against utility, which I think reasonably should be the case, you’re doing a relatively good job minimizing this; you have to perform exactly one prediction of what another bot will do. I did mention this was a factor.

ACrackedPot 7 Nov 2023 21:50 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: justinpombrio’s comment on: Implementing Decision Theory
Evolution gave us “empathy for the other person”, and evolution is a reasonable proxy for a perfectly selfish utility machine, which is probably good evidence that this might be an optimal solution to the game theory problem. (Note: Not -the- optimal solution, but -an- optimal solution, in an ecosystem of optimal solutions.)

ACrackedPot 7 Nov 2023 21:45 UTC
5 points
0
on: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: How Do Forecasters Fare by Their Own Call?
Note that it is possible to deceive others by systematically adjusting predictions upward or downward to reflect how desirable it is that other people believe those predictions, in a way which preserves your score.
This is true even if you bucket your scores; say you’re evaluating somebody’s predictive scores. You see that when they assign a 60% probability to an event, that event occurs 60% of the time. This doesn’t mean that any -specific- prediction they make of 60% probability will occur 60% of the time, however! They can balance out their predictions by adjusting two different predictions, overestimating the odds of one, and underestimating the odds of another, to give the appearance of perfectly calibrated predictions.
The Brier Score is useful for evaluating how good a forecaster is, but this is not the same as evaluating how good any given forecast a forecaster makes is. If the Oracle really hates Odysseus, the Oracle could give a forecast that, if believed, results in a worse outcome for Odysseus, and balance this out by giving a forecast to another individual that results in apparent perfect calibration.

ACrackedPot 7 Nov 2023 18:30 UTC
2 points
0
on: Implementing Decision Theory
How does one correctly handle multi-agent dilemmas, in which you know the other agents follow the same decision theory? My implementation of “UDT” defects in a prisoner’s dilemma against an agent that it knows is following the same decision procedure. More precisely: Alice and Bob follow the same decision procedure, and they both know it. Alice will choose between cooperate/defect, then Bob will choose between cooperate/defect without knowing what Alice picked, then the utility will be delivered. My “UDT” decision procedure reasons as follows for Alice: “if I had pre-commited to cooperate, then Bob would know that, so he would defect, therefore I defect”. Is there a known way out of this, besides special casing symmetric dilemmas, which is brittle?
My solution, which assumes computation is expensive, is to reason about other agents based on their behavior towards a simplified-model third agent; the simplest possible version of this is “Defect against bots who defect against cooperate-bot, otherwise cooperate” (and this seems relatively close to how humans operate—we don’t like people who defect against the innocent).

ACrackedPot 1 Nov 2023 15:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: On Having No Clue
The point there is that there is no contradiction because the informational content is different. “Which is the baseline” is up to the person writing the problem to answer. You’ve asserted that the baseline is A vs B; then you’ve added information that A is actually A1 and A2.
The issue here is entirely semantic ambiguity.
Observe what happens when we remove the semantic ambiguity:
You’ve been observing a looping computer program for a while, and have determined that it shows three videos. The first video portrays a coin showing tails. The second video portrays two coins; the left coin shows heads, the right coin shows tails. The third video also portrays two coins; the left coin shows heads, the right coin shows heads.
You haven’t been paying attention to the frequency, but now, having determined there are three videos you can see, you want to figure out how frequently each video shows up. What are your prior odds for each video?
33/33/33 seems reasonable. I’ve specified that you’re watching videos; the event is which video you are watching, not the events that unfold within the video.
Now, consider an alternative framing: You are watching somebody as they repeat a series of events. You have determined the events unfold in three distinct ways; all three begin the same way, with a coin being flipped. If the coin shows heads, it is flipped again. If the coin shows tails, it is not. What are your prior odds for each sequence of events?
25/25/50 seems reasonable.
Now, consider yet another framing: You are shown something on a looping computer screen. You have determined the visuals unfold in three distinct ways; all three begin the same way, with a coin being flipped. If the coin shows heads, it is flipped again. If the coin shows tails, it is not. What are your prior odds here?
Both 25/25/50 and 33/33/33 are reasonable. Why? Because it is unclear whether or not you are watching a simulation of coin flips, or something like prerecorded videos; it is unclear whether or not you should treat the events within what you are watching as events, or whether you should treat the visuals themselves you are watching as the event.
Because it is unclear, I’d lean towards treating the visuals you are watching as the event—that is, assume independence. However, it would be perfectly fair to treat the coin tosses as events also. Or you could split the difference. Prior probabilities are just your best guess given the information you have available—and given that I don’t have access to all the information you have available, both options are fair.
Now, the semantic ambiguity you have introduced, in the context of this, is like this:
You’re told you are going to watch a computer program run, and what you see will begin with a coin being flipped, showing heads or tails. What are your probabilities that it will show heads or tails?
Okay, ⁵⁰⁄₅₀. Now, if you see the coin shows heads, you will see that it is flipped again; we now have three possibilities, HT, HH, and TT. What are your probabilities for each event?
Notice: You didn’t specify enough to know what the relevant events we’re assigning probabilities to even are! We’re in the third scenario; we don’t know if it’s a video, in which case the relevant event is “Which video we are watching”, or if it is a simulation, in which case the relevant event is “The outcome of each coin toss.” Either answer works, or you can split the difference, because at this point a large part of the probability-space is devoted, not to the events unfolding, but towards the ambiguity in what events we’re even evaluating.

ACrackedPot 1 Nov 2023 5:42 UTC
8 points
6
on: On Having No Clue
If you have two options, A and B, 50% odds is maximal ignorance; you aren’t saying they have equivalent odds of being true, you’re saying you have no information by which to make an inference which is true.
If you then say we can split A into A1 and A2, you have added information to the problem. Like the Monty Hall problem, information can change the odds in unexpected ways!
There’s no contradiction here—you have more information than when you originally assigned odds of ⁵⁰⁄₅₀. And the information you have added should, in real situations, inform how to distribute the odds. If A1 and A2 are sufficiently distinct (independent), it is possible that a 33/33/33 split is appropriate; if they aren’t, it is possible that a 25/25/50 split is appropriate. In order to make a judgment, we’d have to know more about what exactly A1 and A2 are, and why they can be considered a “split” of A.
Consider, for example, the case of a coin being flipped—we don’t know if the coin is fair or not. Let us say A is that the coin comes up “heads” and B is that the coin comes up “tails”. The split, then, could reflect a second flip, after the first flip is decided, if and only if it is heads; A1 might be “heads-heads”, A2 might be “heads-tails”. Then a 25/25/50 split makes sense; A1 and A2 are not independent.
If, on the other hand, we have discovered that it isn’t a coin at all, but a three-sided die, two faces of which have the same symbol, and one face of which has another symbol; we label the faces with the similar symbol A1 and A2, and the face with the ~~same~~ edit: other symbol B. We still don’t know whether or not the die is fair—maybe it is weighed—but the position of maximal ignorance is 33/33/33, because even if it -is- weighted, we don’t know which face it is weighted in favor of; A1 and A2 are independent.
So—what are A1 and A2, and how independent are they? We have equations that can work this out with sample data, and your prior probability should reflect your expectation of their independence. If you insist on maximal ignorance about independence—then you can assume independence. Most things are independent; it is only the way the problem is constructed that leads us to confusion here, because it seems to suggest that they are not independent (consider that we can simply rename the set of conclusions to “A, B, and C”—all the names you have utilized are merely labels, after all, and in effect, what you have actually done is to introduce C, with an implication that A and C should maybe be considered partially dependent variables). If you insist on maximal ignorance about that, as well, then you can, I suppose, assume 50% independence, which would be something like splitting the difference between the die and the coin. And there’s an argument to be made there, in that you have, in fact, implied that they should maybe be considered partially dependent variables—but this comes down to trying to interpret what you have said, rather than trying to understand the nature of probability itself.

ACrackedPot 31 Oct 2023 17:32 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Portia’s comment on: My Effortless Weightloss Story: A Quick Runthrough
I tried potassium supplementation. The very first thing I noticed is that a significant portion of hunger was immediately converted into thirst; to be specific, where normally at time X I would be hungry, instead at time X I was thirsty instead. There was an immediate and overall reduction of calories in.
This suggests to me that I had a slight potassium deficiency which my body was compensating for by increasing the amount of food I was consuming.
Cursory research suggests potassium content in fresh foods has declined ~20% over the past century—which is not particularly surprising, if you think about modern farming methodologies. Additionally, it appears that lithium consumption (tying into SMTM’s hypothesis) may deplete the body’s potassium reserves (which could conceivably be the mechanism by which lithium causes weight gain, in slight contradiction to SMTM’s hypothesis). Additionally additionally, and most importantly—low potassium content appears to be correlated with something like a 20% increase in caloric consumption, second only to protein deficiency in terms of increasing “natural” caloric intake. (All of this is cursory internet research, and should not be taken too seriously, but it is all pointing in a particular direction very suggestively).
I think the “sodium intake” is a red herring, sort of (if your body needs potassium, but can’t distinguish between potassium and sodium in food intake, it may result in people salting their food more—another change that occurred after I began supplementing potassium is that I didn’t need as much salt to make food taste like anything—so sodium intake may be a symptom of potassium deficiency).
Supposing we’re all slightly potassium deficient at a healthy level of food consumption, and we cover the potassium intake gap by simply eating more food (thus getting the necessary levels of potassium), then potassium supplementation could quite reasonably decrease caloric consumption without any effort. And if we’re substituting table salt for potassium, because our bodies struggle to tell the difference at intake, we might expect other health issues to arise from that.
If this was the case, then we should expect that all diets that work for most people who try them, while improving overall health, and without requiring exceptional willpower, should be high in potassium. Pondering this, I checked, and, indeed, meats are high in potassium. Ketogenic diets could, then, operate on the same principles as the potato diet.
(Indeed, I have done a combination ketogenic+rabbit starvation diet a few times, at 500 calories a day, with basically no carbohydrates or fats. A key component of this diet is very lean meat, and it required no willpower; I can run on this diet for months, and the only issue I run into is the monotony, which personally isn’t a big deal. It is actually personally easier to be on that diet that to try to maintain a “normal” diet while restraining my food consumption to a level that prevents weight gain—but my normal diet is relatively light on anything with high levels of potassium, including meat.)
I submit that potassium is indeed very important, and is, plausibly, given declining potassium food content, the answer to the question of modern obesity.

ACrackedPot 28 Jul 2022 12:59 UTC
−4 points
on: ACrackedPot’s Shortform
Instead of further elaborations on my crackpot nonsense, something short:
I expect that there is some distance from a magnetic source between 10^5 meters and 10^7 meters at which there will be magnetic anomalies; in particular, there will be a phenomenon by which the apparent field strength drops much faster than expected and passes through zero into the negative (reversed polarity).
I specifically expect this to be somewhere in the vicinity of 10^6 meters, although the specific distance will vary with the mass of the object.
There should be a second magnetic anomaly somewhere in the vicinity of 10^12 m (So between 10^11 and 10^13), although I suspect at that distance it will be too faint to detect.
More easily detected, because there is a repulsive field at work at these distances—mass should be scarce at this distance from the dominant “local” masses, a scarcity that should continue up to about 10^18 m (between 10^17 and 10^19, although errors really begin to compound here); at 10^18 m, I expect an unusually dense distribution of matter; this value in the vicinity of 10^18 m should be the most common distance between objects in the galaxy.
It should be possible to find large masses (say, black holes) orbiting each other at, accounting for relativistic changes in distance, 10^18m, which we might otherwise expect to fall into one another—that is, there should be unexplainable orbital mechanics between large masses that are this distance apart.
I expect that there is some radius between 10^22 meters and 10^26 meters (vicinity of 10^24) which marks the largest possible size of a galaxy, and some radius between 10^28 and 10^32 (vicinity of 10^30) which marks the most common distance between galaxies.

Galaxies which are between the vicinity of 10^24 and the vicinity of 10^30 meters from one another should be moving apart, on average; galaxies which are greater than the vicinity of 10^30 meters from one another should be falling into one another on average.
Galaxies which are approximately 10^30 meters apart should be orbiting one another—neither moving towards nor away.

ACrackedPot 18 Jun 2022 20:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Shiroe’s comment on: Contextual Evil
Yes, but then it sounds like those who have no such altruistic desire are equally justified as those who do. An alternative view of obligation, one which works very well with utilitarianism, is to reject personal identity as a psychological illusion. In that case there is no special difference between “my” suffering and “your” suffering, and my desire to minimize one of these rationally requires me to minimize the other. Many pantheists take such a view of ethics, and I believe its quasi-official name is “open individualism”.
Yes.
I think this requires an assumption that there exists on obligation to end our own suffering; I find that a curious notion, because it presupposes that there is only one valid way to exist.
You would prefer that we had the ethical intuitions and views of the first human beings, or perhaps of their hominid ancestors?
What bearing do their ethical intuitions have on me?
(What bearing do my ethical intuitions have on future hominids?)

ACrackedPot 17 Jun 2022 13:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Shiroe’s comment on: Contextual Evil
Where you see neutrality, he would see obligation.
In what sense is it an obligation? By what mechanism am I obligated? Do I get punished for not living up to it?
You use that word, but the only meaningful source of that obligation, as I see it, is the desire to be a good person. Good, not neutral.
I disagree, and I think that you are more of a relativist than you are letting on. Ethics should be able to teach us things that we didn’t already know, perhaps even things that we didn’t want to acknowledge.
This is a point of divergence, and I find that what ethical systems “teach us” is an area full of skulls. (However, I am, in fact, far LESS of a relativist than I am letting on; I am in fact a variant of absolutist.)
As for someone who murders fewer people than he saves, such a person would be superior to me (who saves nobody and kills nobody) and inferior to someone who saves many and kills nobody.
Question: Would a version of yourself who did not believe in your ethics, and saw “neutral” as a perfectly valid thing to be, be happier than the version of yourself that exists?

ACrackedPot 16 Jun 2022 17:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Shiroe’s comment on: Contextual Evil
Utility, as measured, is necessarily relative. By this I don’t mean that it is theoretically impossible to have an objective measure of utility, only that it is practically impossible; in reality / in practice, we measure utility relative to a baseline. When calculating the utility of doing something nice for somebody, it is impractical to calculate their current utility, which would include the totality of their entire experience as summed in their current experience.
Rule utilitarianism operates in the same fashion much more straightforwardly, considering utility from an act as the average deviation from a relative position, which I think it is safe to call “normal”.
Once we observe that utility is measured from a relative baseline, a normal, then it is meaningful to talk about acts which are of negative utility; the meaningful comparison is not to an absolute number, but to a relative measure, which any given act can fall beneath.
Insofar as we treat utilitarianism as having an absolute number which cannot be measured by which is the important criteria, “badness” itself is meaningless; badness compared to what? Now, you might say that the correct point of measurement is to the highest-positive-utility act; that utilitarianism says that all acts are measured relative to this. But this is not a position I believe is universally supported; certainly Karl Popper argued against this view of utilitarianism, proposing the framework of negative utilitarianism (I think he invented it?) as a solution to problems he saw with this worldview. Negative utilitarianism measures two distinct values, prioritizing one over the other.
Assuming we do stick to a relative measure, once we observe that acts, or the failure to act, can be of negative, neutral, or positive value, with respect to that relative “normal”, it is meaningful to talk about negative-utility acts as distinct from an inaction relative to a positive-utility act. We can then call negative-utility acts “evil”, neutral acts “bad” (I think a better term here is “suboptimal”), and good acts “good”, and in doing so, recover an important part of the way most human beings experience ethics, which includes a component we call “evil”, as distinct from “good”, which itself is distinct from “neutral”.
Or, to put all this another way—our moral intuitions do not in fact say that goodness and evil are fungible, and in particular, that somebody who murders somebody for every seven lives he saves is anything like a good person, and insofar as utilitarianism doesn’t acknowledge this, it fails to actually be a good representation of human ethics, which is to say, the ethics we actually care about. It should add up to normality, after all.

ACrackedPot 16 Jun 2022 2:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Shiroe’s comment on: Contextual Evil
I suspect there might be a qualia differential.
What is your internal experience of morality?

Contextual Evil

ACrackedPot15 Jun 2022 19:32 UTC

1 point

12 comments2 min readLW link

ACrackedPot 15 Jun 2022 19:27 UTC
3 points
on: Georgism, in theory
The tax should, in fact, cause some landlords / landowners to just abandon their land. This is a critical piece of Georgism; the idea that land is being underutilized, in particular as an investment which is expected to pay off in terms of higher land values / rents later, but also in terms of things like parking lots, where the current value of the use of the land may exceed the current taxes (which include only a portion of the value of the land and the improvements combined) while being lower than the Georgist taxes (which include the entire value of the land and none of the value of the improvements). In particular Georgist taxes should eliminate current incentive structures which “reward” things like keeping an apartment building empty of tenants.
The point of indifference is not the point of indifference in the current economic system, it is the point of indifference in the Georgist economic system.

ACrackedPot

Triv­ial Math­e­mat­ics as a Path Forward

Con­tex­tual Evil

Trivial Mathematics as a Path Forward

Contextual Evil