AlexanderRM

Karma: 64

AlexanderRM 15 Apr 2016 21:15 UTC
8 points
on: Rationality Quotes April 2016
“He who builds his cart behind closed gates will find it not suited to the tracks outside the gates.”

-Unattributed (Chinese) proverb, quoted by Chen Duxiu in “Call to Youth” 1915.

AlexanderRM 19 Mar 2015 21:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Rob_Spear2’s comment on: How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
“The test of any religion is whether cultures believing it tend to thrive and improve the quality of their lives or not.”

Um, I’m pretty sure the test of a religion is whether or not the model of reality proposed by that religion corresponds with actual reality or not (sorry I’m not sure how to phrase this in terms of a “test”, without assuming the validity of sensory input). This is particularly noticeable in the case of religions which claim afterlives, where any impact of earthly actions on our afterlife utterly outweigh any impact that a religion has on earthly conditions. The very idea of debating whether a religion improves our quality of life on earth only makes sense from an Atheist or Agnostic viewpoint, considering whether that religion can be used as a practical tool regardless of it’s truth.

AlexanderRM 22 Feb 2015 6:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Stranger Than History
That seems reasonable. For comparison, consider the following statement, which is the Color equivalent of the first type of statement: If you get light that’s too blue, first it becomes invisible, then it becomes mildly harmful to humans, more harmful the bluer it gets and if it gets really, really, really blue it can pass through solid objects. In the future,doctors will use devices that emit small amounts of this very blue light to look at bones under the skin, and the most destructive weapon ever created by humanity will be a device that emits enormous amounts of incredibly blue light.

...OK, that started out as saying “that’s how light actually works [i.e. extreme ranges do weird things], so it makes sense”, and turned into me talking about how the way light works is also super weird. Oh well.

AlexanderRM 6 Nov 2014 4:33 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Anubhav’s comment on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
Although the industrial revolution was happening in Britain while India was under their rule and, as I understand it, cotton was being exported from colonies including India, processed in British factories, and shipped back to India as clothes to fuel it. All the way around the Cape of Good Hope. British rule may have had something to do with missing out on the Industrial Revolution.

On the other hand, China stayed independent and didn’t industrialize, and the Muslim states in the Middle East didn’t either (also Africa before colonial rule, but they were already far behind Eurasia and so it’s hard to compare them to India), so it’d be pretty silly to claim that former colonies would be on the First World level if not for colonialism.

An idea that might be more reasonable (although that’s not entirely the point of the thread) would be to recognize that historical colonialism was almost entirely guided by the selfish interests of the colonial powers, and to implement a new system of patronage by the first world on underdeveloped countries, designed from the ground up to try to prevent them from exploiting the lesser partners. If the system is based on the idea of actually giving first worlders control over decisions, I’m not sure how you could set it up to totally prevent exploitation, but you could definitely improve it over colonialism.

AlexanderRM 7 Sep 2015 19:24 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Greg2’s comment on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?
I wouldn’t describe a result that eliminated the species conducting the experiment in the majority of world-branches as “successful”, although I suppose the use of LHCs could be seen as an effective use of quantum suicide (two species which want the same resources meet, flip a coin loser kills themselves- might have problems with enforcement) if every species invariably experiments with them before leaving their home planet.

On the post as a whole: I was going to say that since humans in real life don’t use the anthropic principle in decision theory, that seems to indicate that applying it isn’t optimal (if your goal is to maximize the number of world-branches with good outcomes), but realized that humans are able to observe other humans and what sort of things tend to kill them, along with hearing about those things from other humans when we grow up, so we’re almost never having close calls with death frequently enough to need to apply the anthropic principle. If a human were exploring an unknown environment with unknown dangers by themselves, and tried to consider the anthropic principle… that would be pretty terrifying.

AlexanderRM 10 Feb 2015 2:05 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: Why abortion looks more okay to us than killing babies
I think that’s almost certainly the explanation for everyone who thinks birth makes a difference in the moral value of the fetus/baby. Of course, various distinctions make it easier to pretend it’s a moral difference, but I’d bet the primary cause it because people support that cutoff for other reasons.

I’d like to suggest another reason besides the Schelling point, however, which is that birth is the point where it gets dramatically easier to keep the fetus/baby alive without harming the mother. First of all, health risks to the mother drop dramatically (I think to zero?); even more obviously, it’s now possible to give the baby up for adoption and remove any danger, burden, or even inconvenience on the mother. I’m certain that if we had the technology to remove fetuses from the womb while keeping them alive somehow, abortion would be illegal, or at least it would still be if we’d had it prior to the abortion-rights movement.

What’s particularly weird about this is that the entire basis of the pro-choice movement is about women’s rights, so in that sense the reason for birth being the cutoff is incredibly obvious. It feels very strange to me that even many people who support abortion don’t seem to be aware of this.

AlexanderRM 15 Nov 2014 2:43 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Money: The Unit of Caring
That phrasing certainly sounds like ad hoc rationalization. The rational (rationalist?*) way to go about that would be to… recognize that you attach value to some things associated with freedom from employment, try to figure out what exactly that is and quantify it while ignoring what your current actions are, and then determine whether your current actions are consistent with that, and change them if not. If you determine your values based on what your current actions are, there’s no point in being rational.

I have a vague feeling like “rational” should mean “the way a hypothetical rational actor, such as an AI built for rationality, would act”, and “rationalist” would mean “the way a human who recognizes that their brain is not built for rationality and actively tries to overcome thing would act”. An AI built to be rational would never need to do this because their behavior would already* follow logically from their values. I don’t remember why I put in this note, but it’s an interesting thing about this site generally.

AlexanderRM 14 Nov 2015 22:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeerInfinity’s comment on: Shut Up and Divide?
I know I’m 5 years late on this but on the offchance someone sees this, I just want to mention I found Yvain’s/Scott Alexander’s essay on the subject incredibly useful*.

The tl;dr: Use universalizability for your actions moreso than direct utilitarianism. His suggestion is 10% for various reasons, mainly being a round number that’s easy to coordinate around and have people give that exact number. Once you’ve done that, the problems that would be solved by everyone donating 10% of their income to efficient charities are the responsibility of other people who are donating less than that amount (I’d also suggest trying to spread the message as much as possible, as I’m doing here).

Of course it’d be better to donate more of your income. I would say that if feeling bad about donating 10% causes you to donate more, then… donate more. If it just causes you to feel like you’ll never be good enough so you don’t even try, it’s useless and you’d do more good by considering yourself completely absolved. 10% is also incredibly useful for convincing people who aren’t already convinced of unlimited utilitarian duty to donate to efficient charity.

*http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/

AlexanderRM 18 Apr 2015 22:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Consequentialism FAQ
“consequentialists who believe in heaven and hell and think they have insight into how to get people into heaven would be willing to do lots of nasty things to increase the number of people who go to heaven.”

I fully agree with this (as someone who doesn’t believe in heaven and hell, but is a consequentialist), and also would point out that it’s not that different from the way many people who believe in heaven and hell already act (especially if you look at people who strongly believe in them; ignore anyone who doesn’t take their own chances of heaven/hell into account in their own decisions).

In fact I suspect that even from an atheistic, humanist viewpoint, consequentialism on this one would have been better in many historical situations than the way people acted in real life; if a heathen will go to hell but can be saved by converting them to the True Faith, then killing heathens becomes an utterly horrific act. Of course, it’s still justified if it allows you to conquer the heathens and forcibly convert them all, as is killing a few as examples if it gets the rest to convert, but that’s still better than the way many European colonizers treated native peoples in many cases.

AlexanderRM 18 Apr 2015 22:23 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Consequentialism FAQ
“Paras 7.2 and 7.3 (the slavery and gladiator questions) left me with an odd impression. The “test” you propose in both cases is more or less the same as Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance. So at that point I was wondering, if you apply Rawls’ procedure to determine what is a preferable social contract, perhaps you’re a Rawlsian more than you’re a consequentialist. :) BTW, are you familiar with Rawls’ objections to (classical) utilitarianism?”

I can’t speak for Yvain but as someone who fully agreed with his use of that test, I would describe myself as both a Rawlsian (in the sense of liking the “veil of ignorance” concept) and a Utilitarian. I don’t really see any conflict between the two. I think maybe the difference between my view and that of Rawls is that I apply something like the Hedonic Treadmill fully (despite being a Preference Utilitarian), which essentially leads to Yvain’s responses.

...Actually I suppose I practically define the amount of Utility in a world by whether it would be better to live there, so maybe it would in fact be better to describe me as a Rawslian. I still prefer to think of myself as a Utilitarian with a Rawlsian basis for my utility function, though (essentially I define the amount of utility in a world as “how desirable it would be to be born as a random person in that world). I think it’s that Utilitarianism sounds easier to use as a heuristic for decisions, whereas calling yourself a Rawlsian requires you to go one step further back every time you analyze a thought experiment.

AlexanderRM 7 Apr 2015 20:24 UTC
2 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: Thoughts on moral intuitions
Isn’t “the psychology of the discoursing species” another way of saying “moral intuitions”? Or at least, those are included in the umbrella of that term.

AlexanderRM 27 Mar 2015 22:31 UTC
2 points
on: Circular Altruism
“My favorite anecdote along these lines—though my books are packed at the moment, so no citation for now—comes from a team of researchers who evaluated the effectiveness of a certain project, calculating the cost per life saved, and recommended to the government that the project be implemented because it was cost-effective. The governmental agency rejected the report because, they said, you couldn’t put a dollar value on human life. After rejecting the report, the agency decided [i]not[/i] to implement the measure.”

Does anyone know of a citation for this? Because I’d really like to be able to share it. I found this really, really, hilarious until I realized that, according to Eliezer, it actually happened and killed people. Although it’s still hilarious, just simultaneously horrifying. It sounds like somebody misunderstood the point of their own moral grandstanding. (on the other hand, I suppose a Deontologist could in fact say “you can’t put a dollar value on human life” and literally mean “comparing human lives to dollars is inherently immoral”, not “human lives have a value of infinity dollars”. To me as a consequentialist the former seems even stupider than the latter, but in deontology it’s acceptable moral reasoning.)

AlexanderRM 27 Mar 2015 22:12 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mario2’s comment on: Circular Altruism
As I understand it, the math is in the dust speck’s favor because EY used an arbitrarily large number such that it couldn’t possibly be otherwise.

I think a better comparison would be between 1 second of torture (which I’d estimate is worth multiple dust specks, assuming it’s not hard to get them out of your eye) and 50 years of torture, in which case yes, it would flip around 1.5 billion. That is of course assuming that you don’t have a term in your utility function where sharing of burdens is valuable- I assume EY would be fine with that but would insist that you implement it in the intermediate calculations as well.

AlexanderRM 25 Mar 2015 4:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
Could anyone elaborate on this? All the ones listed in the article seem fairly obvious or well-explained, but nothing jumps out to me on this one. I think the problem is that I don’t see what positions these are occupying or signaling: The clothing stuff is about wealth, while all the political ones are about intelligence (apparent intelligence, specifically). My assumption is that the first is someone who has very little money and the last is someone who has a lot, but then I’m not sure where the middle one would be.

That and perhaps that Yvain didn’t list any distinguishing features between the first and last ones. I’m noticing now that all the counter-signaling ones tend to be slightly different- I’m sure the Old Rich didn’t wear the exact same things as the poor, but rather nicer but less showy clothes. All the political examples have the third-stage ones usually acknowledging the existence of and problems with the lowest stage, often with significant differences. Likewise Hipsters have a lot of distinctly hipster traits that don’t make them look like any particular non-mainstream group, although my knowledge of Hipsters comes almost entirely from jokes about Hipsters rather than having seen the phenomenon much.

AlexanderRM 22 Feb 2015 6:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Manon_de_Gaillande’s comment on: Stranger Than History
I think that the idea of spanking replacing jail is very unlikely, but doesn’t sound as absurd as most of them on the list.

The thing that makes it sound absurd is the idea that our grandchildren will find it EVIL to put criminals in jail instead of spanking them. Imagine people 100 years from now pointing to revered historical figures and saying they supported the use of jails, the way people point out that some of America’s Founding Fathers owned slaves.

Although… if you accept the premise of other punishments replacing jail, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised by the idea that people would come to regard jail as evil, and that many people would be reluctant to accept it even in a discussion of situations where the replacement punishments weren’t practical. I think that also makes a rather useful way for me, personally at least, to consider the idea of whether modern ideas might not actually be better than past ones in a different light. In this thought experiment, our descendants genuinely do have a society better than ours, but their moral standards that have resulted from it aren’t necessarily better than ours, even though they think they are.

AlexanderRM 10 Feb 2015 2:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Patrick’s comment on: The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?
I don’t think that name is very descriptive and is also hard to say.

On the other hand I like the initial example use on Wikipedia, regarding surgeons, because it’s an apolitical one that nobody actually believes. (or at least it is today. It could be that Artistotle was writing at a time when surgery was very new and not widely accepted, and many people made derogatory comments like calling surgeons butchers. Especially considering that surgery in those days was probably super-dangerous so a lot of people would die on the operating table and the increased survival rates would be hard to see. But for the present day it works great.)

On the other hand, the Wikipedia page fails to give any indication of how prevalent the fallacy is, which political examples are probably required for, as Yvain pointed out. But the surgery one might be optimal as a replacement for the MLK example in the first section, pointing out how absurd the fallacy is, before going into political examples to show how common it is.

AlexanderRM 10 Feb 2015 2:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AlexanderRM’s comment on: Why abortion looks more okay to us than killing babies
On a separate note, it’s worth noting that many jurisdictions make a distinction between early- and late-term abortions. I can’t see any reason for this except the idea that human life increases in value steadily as it grows rather than at a specific time. (Well, that combined with the fact that it’s usually possible to get an abortion before late-term, and also easier to perform, so there’s relatively little reason to have late-term abortions… which raises the interesting question of why people ban them; I wonder what sorts of situations result in people wanting abortions late-term. Finding out about health issues with the mother or fetus?)

Anyway, my main point with saying the above was to note that the use of birth as a set point isn’t nearly as common as these sorts of discussions make it out to be.

AlexanderRM 16 Dec 2014 5:42 UTC
2 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Helpless Individuals
If you found a way to identify less rational people that didn’t exclude any groups that were identifiable enough for government policy to discriminate against them, it could work, but that sounds hard.

Limiting the franchise sounds tough but there are some obvious ways to reduce the number of less rational people who are voluntarily choosing to vote: reduce the number of get-out-the-vote campaigns, specifically those that mindlessly repeat slogans about voting, and focus more on campaigns with a rational explanations of why people ought to vote Of course… perhaps get-out-the-vote campaigns tend to have more of an impact in demographics that vote less on average, like young people, so they might have other beneficial effects in that way (and given that probably the portion of potential voters who aren’t swayed by mindlessly spouting slogans about voting is vanishingly small, this would probably dramatically outweigh any effects of them on voter rationality). Still, it’s a thought. Get-out-the-vote campaigns just seem INCREDIBLY weird to me.

AlexanderRM 6 Dec 2014 22:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Valentina_Poletti’s comment on: Humans in Funny Suits
Being human and being humane aren’t really in any way connected. Murdering people because they belong to a different group is a perfectly human thing to do.

AlexanderRM 6 Dec 2014 22:43 UTC
2 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Humans in Funny Suits
That would certainly be a good way to maximize food output, but I think that in order to successfully do that well enough to fool even researchers looking for it, the octopus would have to have at least enough complexity in it’s brain to actually be conscious. Which is, in fact, the same problem with the Chinese Room; the notecards need to be drawn up by an actual Chinese speaker.

And if we look at evolutionary history, it looks like in evolutionary terms, actually being conscious was a better strategy than pretending to be conscious… …or it could be that we’ve just retroactively defined “consciousness” as the thing humans do when they try to fake consciousness. :p