Interesting, so it all comes down to a version of the AI box experiment.
alienist
If you’re going to be using old definitions “lovers = having sex” is a pretty recent change in meaning.
but it’s just the fact that “virgin = intact hymen” is a pretty silly notion to begin with.
Um, the relevant property is that the man can be sure the woman’s child will be his, and for that “virgin = intact hymen” is useful.
This threat is still relevant, as many nations have not yet reached the economic or mental stage when they are no longer interested in territorial conquests.
If your political system requires no one in the world to defect, your political system is unworkable.
You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion,
If you have a utiliterian framework that rejects the “Repugnant Conclusion” without coming to even more repugnant conclusions (of the kill the poor variety), I’d love to see it.
ASIC miners are a problem. Not only have they lead to an explosion in the hash rate—and electricity costs to secure the Bitcoin network
No they didn’t. Market forces will always drive the cost of mining a bitcoin to the value of a bitcoin regardless of the algorithm used.
The different states of the US each have different policies and allow free migration of individuals.
One problem that causes in the US, is people moving from badly run states to well run states and voting for the bad policies that caused them to leave their original state in the first place.
You may not like his ethics, but you’ve no right to call him unethical.
In that case who is Alfred Bester to tell me who I can or can’t call “unethical”?
Careful with the Aumann agreement theorem, it doesn’t state what EY seems to think it states and I’ve yet to see an example of the process being used correctly.
Note in particular that the final estimate need not even be between the initial two estimates. If the “Aumann process” looks like two people incrementally updating their beliefs towards each other, they’re doing it wrong.
No, science is not a set of answers; it is a procedure.
Just because you say you understand (or even think you understand) doesn’t mean you do.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted; the metric used to define “similar” or “closeness” is absolutely what’s at issue here.
Any metric whereby a 51% percent coin isn’t close to a fair coin is useless in practice.
It surprises me that you didn’t mention at all the harm of overpopulation as a factor.
What harm? The people warning about such harm have a rather long track record of failed predictions.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Richard Feynman, What is Science?
- 2 Nov 2015 19:18 UTC; 7 points) 's comment on Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015 by (
True as far as it goes, but is really likely that men, elves, and orcs (really all but hobbits) could have that many thousands of years of civilization at a stable or declining level of technology and magic, with so many wars and disruptions of bloodlines, without trying out any form of government other than a kingdom?
Yes, actually. Look at the history of say China before major Western contact, or Japan, or India, or Mesopotamia, or Ancient Egypt, or really anywhere outside Europe or extremely heavy European influence.
I know elves are stubborn,
More importantly they’re immortal.
I did some googling, but all I found was that they would be great at cooling computer systems in space.
When you’re sufficiently advanced, cooling your systems, technically disposing of entropy, is one of the main limiting constraint on your system. Also if you throw matter into a black hole just right you can get its equivalent (or half its equivalent I forgot which) out in energy.
Edit: thinking about it, it is half the mass.
Bad arguments are made for pretty much any position possible. The fact that such arguments are being made somewhere isn’t relevant for fairly obvious reasons.
On the other hand, the fact that such arguments are used to intimidate anyone who dares question a certain position is relevant (possibly successfully remember what happened to Summers). In particular it affects what arguments we expect to have been exposed to.
Furthermore in Lewin’s case we have no idea what he actually did, thus the only evidence we have is that a committee at MIT decided what he did was bad. Thus to evaluation how much we should trust their conclusion it is necessary to look at the typical level of argument.
Well here is an article by Megan McArdle that talking about how insider-outsider dynamics can lead to this kind of rank inflation.
Here is Paul Graham’s essay on the subject.
On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.
PTSS almost seems like a culture-bound syndrome of the modern West. In particular there don’t seem to be any references to it before WWI and even there (and in subsequent wars) all the references seem to be from the western allies. Furthermore, the reaction to “shell shock”, as it was then called, during WWI suggests that this was something new that the established structures didn’t know how to deal with.
Well, it did.