Are links to your own blog posts encouraged/discouraged here? I wrote a piece that I don’t think would be particularly appropriate for discussion, but might be of interest to some LW’ers. It’s about honesty in advocating for fundamental physics research funding.
Anyway, here’s the link.
Well, I wasted a half hour of my morning, but I got all 30. Hardest for me was 19.
Well, the obvious difference would be that non-solipsists might care about what happens after they die, and act accordingly.
Well, here’s Sean Carroll’s take on the matter. They don’t seem like the worst organization in the world or anything, but I too was disappointed to hear about Max accepting their money.
Any book recommendations for a good intro to evolutionary psychology? I remember Eliezer suggested The Moral Animal, but I also vaguely remember some other people recommending against it. I’ll probably just go with TMA unless some other book gets suggested multiple times.
Well, I’ve been on the same dose for the past 8 years (set by my original endocrinologist and carried forward by all doctors since, who’ve basically shrugged and said “ehh, worked so far”). Last time I had my testosterone levels checked they were on the high end of normal, which suits me fine. I have a fairly high sex drive, which you might expect, but very low aggression, which you might not—although I’ve always been a very passive and non-aggressive person. So I guess to answer your question, I haven’t really explored different amounts. I don’t particularly plan to in the future, if for no other reason than I’ve been on my current dose long enough to self-identify with the range of behaviours it produces.
Me too, at least sort of—I just had a number stored in my brain that I associated with “Europe.” Turned out it was EU only, although I didn’t have any confusion about the question—I thought I was answering for all of Europe.
I didn’t think I had anything particularly interesting to offer, but then it occurred to me that I have a relatively rare medical disorder: my body doesn’t produce any testosterone naturally, so I have to have it administered by injection. As a result I went through puberty over the age range of ~16-19 years old. If you’re curious feel free to AMA.
(also, bonus topic that just came to mind: every year I write/direct a Christmas play featuring all of my cousins, which is performed for the rest of the family on Christmas Eve. It’s been going on for over 20 years and now has its own mythology, complete with anti-Santa. It gets more elaborate every year and now features filmed scenes, with multi-day shoots. This year the villain won, Christmas was cancelled for seven years and Santa became a bartender (I have a weird family). It’s...kind of awesome? If you’re looking for a fun holiday tradition to start AMA)
I feel like, realistically, people probably just subconsciously rate a given main article along each of the five dimensions you listed (and possibly other ones), and then mash all the ratings together to give a single rating along a general “good/bad” spectrum (which then falls above or below their own main “cutoff”). So a formal set of criteria for main would be nice I guess, but it seems like it would be unlikely to capture exactly what people people mean by “main-ness” anyway—in most cases it’s just an intuitive judgement call. I would add, though, that one of the biggest things I look for in a main post (and I don’t think I’m atypical here) is insightfulness—presenting new thoughts or ways of looking at things. Which is sooort of captured by factor 2 that you listed, but not entirely.
Could the relevant moral change happen going from B to C, perhaps? i.e. maybe a mind needs to actually be physically/causally computed in order to experience things. Then the torture would have occurred whenever John’s mind was first simulated, but not for subsequent “replays,” where you’re just reloading data.
Only somewhat related, but I wonder if there’s a difference between those who grew up before and after the end of the cold war, in terms of their assessments of the subjective risk of nuclear war. I was born in 1986, so I have no memory of the cold war, and I’ve always viewed nuclear war as extremely unlikely. I sometimes wonder if I’m underestimating the risk because of my upbringing (although I think in my case it’s more likely a general bias in favour of the future turning out alright, which I think EY has talked about)
Took the survey. I was pretty confident about my answer for Europe because I thought I remembered the number, but it turns out I was wayyy off. So I looked it up and yep, sure enough, the number I was remembering was for the EU, not Europe as a whole. So, uh, whoops.
My own (uninformed) intuition is that GDP changes would be much more accurate than absolute GDP values, just because systematic errors could largely cancel out.
Okay, let’s see.
I’ve noticed a mental phenomenon I call crystallization. I’m sure other people have noticed it, and they might even have a similar name for it. It’s basically where you encounter a new thought or idea that takes a bunch of vague, half-formed thoughts you had floating around in the back of your head, and crystallizes them—condenses them into one overarching, explicit idea. The explicitness is very important—pre-crystallized thoughts are not explicit. Crystallization can be almost an insidious process, in a way, in that you can wind up holding new ideas or beliefs, that you thought you held all along—you don’t even notice yourself learning. In that sense it’s related to hindsight bias—things seem obvious after you know them.
Random example: I always thought libertarianism held some appeal to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly. Then I read Yvain’s non-libertarian FAQ and came upon the following sentence:
“Unlike the mix-and-match philosophies of the Democratic and Republican parties, libertarianism is coherent and sometimes even derived from first principles.”
Aha! That’s it exactly. What attracted me to libertarianism was its simplicity and self-consistency. Makes sense. After reading that sentence it seems obvious. But was it obvious beforehand? Probably not—I had had vague, not-spelled-out thoughts along those lines, but I had never put it into words before. There exists a very clear difference between my thinking before and after reading that sentence, that I might not have even noticed if I didn’t have this notion of crystallization.
I post this hoping to crystallize the idea of crystallization itself for people. I think a lot of people have—of course—vague, half-formed notions that something like this is true, but they haven’t spelled it out explicitly—and I think explicitness in this case is very important.
That’s all certainly true, but the AI box experiment is still a game at heart. The gatekeeper loses and he’s out, what, fifty bucks or something? (I know some games have been played—and won, I think? - with higher stakes, and those are indeed impressive). The suspect “loses” and he’s out 20+ years of his life. It’s hard to make a comparison but I think the two results are at least comparable, even with the power imbalance.
Random thought: I’ve long known that police can often extract false confessions of crimes, but I only just now made the connection to the AI box experiment. In both cases you have someone being convinced to say or do something manifestly against their best interest. In fact, if anything I think the false confessions might be an even stronger result, just because of the larger incentives involved. People can literally be persuaded to choose to go to prison, just by some decidedly non-superhuman police officers. Granted, it’s all done in person, so stronger psychological pressure can be applied. But still: a false confession! Of murder! Resulting in jail!
I think I have to revise downwards my estimate of how secure humans are.
Relevant links from Yvain’s excellent Non-libertarian FAQ:
Government Success Stories The Forgotten Achievements of Governments
These are mostly the usual suspects, though.
I’m curious, have other people here found that giving makes them happier? I generally haven’t found that to be the case. A typically givewell donation for me: a) reminds me that there’s an obscene amount of suffering out there that I’m ignoring 99% of the time, and b) makes me feel guilty for not giving away more. I mean, I guess it makes me happier than not giving, since I’d feel even more guilty then. But in general it seems to me like the Peter Singer/Givewell/Effective Altruism approach to charity doesn’t really lend itself to “feel-good” giving. More like, “soothe your conscience very slightly” giving.
My brain tripped a burdensome details warning flag here, for what it’s worth. It’s probably best to avoid very specific, conjunctive scenarios when talking about the future like this.