asparisi

• asparisi 10 Oct 2011 1:22 UTC

  6 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

  Hello all,

  I’ve put off coming here for as long as I have been able (not due to not wanting to join the community, but due to the fact that my obligations make it so that I often have to drop communities, which I feel regret about) but I think I finally have time to be a quasi-active participant in the community here, so we’ll see what happens.

  I first saw this site, following it from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about a year or two ago, and followed that up with reading the sequences. (Which were instrumental in helping me push away a whole host of cached thoughts and poor patterns that I had developed over my life, although it took some time to do so, and I doubt I got them all.) At around the time I was reading through them, I was contacted by Adelene Dawner through a friend’s livejournal, who invited me to join the community. I think I finally might have some time to devote to being quasi-active, or at least following things and commenting occasionally.

• asparisi 11 Oct 2011 2:11 UTC

  1 point

  on: Pas­cal’s Mug­ging: Tiny Prob­a­bil­ities of Vast Utilities

  This might be overly simplistic, but it seems relevant to consider the probability per murder. I am feeling a bit of scope insensitivity on that particular probability, as it is far too small for me to compute, so I need to go through the steps.

  If someone tells me that they are going to murder one person if I don’t give them $5, I have to consider the probability of it: not every attempted murder is successful, after all, and I don’t have nearly as much incentive to pay someone if I believe they won’t be successful. Further, most people don’t actually attempt murder, and the cost to that person of telling me they will murder someone if they don’t get $5 is much, much smaller then the cost of actually murdering someone. Consequences usually follow from murder, after all. I also have to consider the probability that this person is insane and doesn’t care about the consequences: only the $5.

  Still, only .00496% of people are murdered in a year. (According to Wolfram Alpha, at least) And while I would assign a higher probability to a person claiming to murder someone, it wouldn’t jump dramatically- they could be lying, they could try but fail, etc. Even if I let “I will kill someone” be a 90% accurate test with only a 10% false positive rate- which I think is generous in the case of $5 with no additional evidence- as only being .004%. Even if it was 99% sure and 1% false positive, EXTREMELY generous odds, there is only a .4% total probability of it occurring.

  In reality, I think there would be some evidence in the case of one murder. At very least I could get strong sociological cues that the person was likely to be telling the truth. However, since I am moving to an end point where they will be killing 3^^^^3 people, I’ll leave that aside as it is irrelevant to the end example.

  If such a person claimed they would murder 2 people, it would depend on whether I thought the probabilities of the events occurring together were dependent or independent: if him killing one person made it more likely that he would kill two, given the event (the threat) in question.

  Now, if he says he will kill two people, and he kills one, he is unlikely to stop before killing another. BUT, there are more chances for complication or failure, and the cost:benefit for him shrinks by half, making the probability that he manages to or tries to kill anyone smaller. These numbers in reality would be affected by circumstance: it is a lot easier to kill two people with a pistol or a bomb than it is with your bare hands. But since I see no bomb or pistol and he is claiming some mechanism I have no evidence for, we’ll ignore that reality for now.

  I had trouble finding information on the rate of double homicide:single homicide to use as a baseline, but it seems likely that it is neither totally dependent, nor totally independent. In order to believe the threat credible, I have to believe (after hearing the threat) that they will attempt to kill two people, successfully kill one, AND successfully kill another. And if I put the probability of A+B at .004%, I can’t very well put A+B+C at any higher. Since I used a 90% false positive rate for my initial calculation, let’s use it twice: 81% false positive. We’ll assume that the false negative (he murders people even when he says he won’t) stays constant.

  This means that each murder is slightly more likely than 90% as likely to occur as the murder before it. Now, it isn’t exact, and these numbers get really, really small, so I’m looking at 3^3 as a reference.

  At 3^3, the cost has gone up 27x if he kills people, but the probability of the event has gone down to .06 of what it was. So, something like 1.7x more costly, given what was said above.

  But all this was dependent on several assumed figures. So at what points does it balance out?

  I’m a little tired for doing all the math right now, but some quick work showed that being only 80% sure of the test, with a 10% false positive rate, would be enough to where it would go down continuously. So if I am less than 80% sure of the test of “he says he will murder one person if I don’t give him 5 dollars” then I can be sure that the probability that he will kill 3^^^^3 is far, far less than the cost if I am wrong.

  I’m assuming that I am getting my math right here, and I am quite tired, so if anyone wishes to correct me on some portion of this I would be happy for the criticism.

• asparisi 27 Jan 2012 10:43 UTC

  3 points

  on: The prob­lem with too many ra­tio­nal memes

  I can’t speak to your own mental processes, but I recently had a conversation with a professor about this. We both agreed that the phrase “agreeing to disagree” was the most condescending notion we had ever heard. That any person with a legitimate disagreement who actually respects and values the other person should want to hear their argument and be open to criticism.

  I think that LW may be the sort of environment where you are exposed to people who take this seriously. Where we value Bringing about the crisis of faith. The command to not criticize goes against maybe half of the Rationalist Virtues. Being in an environment where that is encouraged and not dismissed would then make the opposite seem intolerable.

  It seems like there are times when the optimal behavior pattern for yourself is to disregard the need for argument and evidence for some practical purpose, but it is a consolation. It is giving something up. And that choice should be painful. I don’t think I should want to be good at agreeing not to criticize. I think it should be a fight. If it is easy, then it is easy to compromise when you shouldn’t.

• asparisi 27 Jan 2012 17:36 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: The prob­lem with too many ra­tio­nal memes

  That said: I’m under no obligation (moral, rational, or otherwise) to respect or value Sam in this way.

  I actually agree with you on this. There are times when I assign a high probability on an argument being fruitless and so don’t engage in the argument. My point was not that one must always argue, only that when one chooses not to argue, it is, as you say, evidence that they respect and value the person less. Even then, I would say that the decision not to argue should have some small amount of pain to it: if nothing else, sadness at the realization that the other person isn’t worth your time. (I believe this will help with boundary cases where we are in agreement.)

  To that end, it is notable that Swimmer is not the one who chose to not argue. Charlie chose that. Which is evidence that Charlie does not value criticism and is evidence for his lack of respect for the position that he is wrong. And that realization should cause one to gnash one’s teeth a little if one is put into a position where Charlie is allowed to say his piece and Swimmer is not.

• asparisi 18 Apr 2012 8:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: InfinitelyThirsting’s comment on: Ab­solute de­nial for atheists

  I find the idea that people don’t like being intoxicated suspicious. Experiencing euphoria from intoxication has a lot do with with brain chemistry, and it would be very odd if some humans recieved this effect and others did not.

  Now, I can understand the intellectual response of “I don’t like being intoxicated” as “I don’t like the (loss of control/​mental sluggishness/​depressive effects) that accompanies intoxication.” After all, those could easily go against your personal values.

  But in terms of enjoying something, I don’t think that those concerns are paramount. I enjoy the taste of foods that I consciously know are bad for me: eating them goes against my personal values (live a long life, have energy for the next task, etc.) but I still experience pleasure upon eating them. And it strikes me that it is quite possible to consciously find something distasteful while non-consciously finding it enjoyable. In other words, your conscious brain might say “I don’t enjoy the other effects of alcohol, only the taste” while your tongue tells your subconscious “Hey! This is the stuff that gives us the happy feeling!”

  The only real test, I suppose, would be to find two drinks that were, taste-wise, indistinguishable with one producing the “other” effects of alcohol while the other doesn’t. Then, see if there was a stronger “liking” associated with the prior substance over time, particularly with people who self-report not enjoying those effects in alcohol while otherwise enjoying its flavor. I have a strong suspicion that the test would show that even if little enough of it was served that neither group felt outward signs of intoxication that the group that got the alcoholic batch would show stronger liking over time. (In fact, the less the “I don’t enjoy intoxication” batch consciously know that they are being given alcohol, the better for their self-reporting.)

• asparisi 18 Apr 2012 16:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Ab­solute de­nial for atheists

  Admittedly, reporting on the euphoria from alcohol largely comes from anecdotal experiences from myself and my friends and family, however, the wikipedia entry on intoxication is a good starting point for answering this question. However, asking the question did prompt me to investigate.

  The short answer is that alcohol intoxication often produces euphoria at about 20-99 mg/​dL and that this state may continue at higher concentrations. The mechanism appears to be due to the fact that, in addition to being a central nervous system depressant, alcohol is also a seratonin inhibitor and that it interferes with seratonin binding and seratonin transporters in a manner which causes excessive stimulation in serotonergic neurons.

  That said, the specifics are unclear. It seems that we don’t have direct ways of checking seratonin in human or animal brains yet. That said, indirect tests, self-report, and observed euphoric effects of alcohol intoxication all contribute to the current theory on the effects of alcohol on the seratonin receptors.

• asparisi 18 Apr 2012 16:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Ab­solute de­nial for atheists

  Well, that makes some amount of sense. Alcohol is a seratonin inhibitor, so it would block some of the natural rush you would expect to get from sexual activity. That, and it inhibits testosterone, which is critical for sexual activity in men.

• asparisi 19 Apr 2012 13:38 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: keddaw’s comment on: Policy De­bates Should Not Ap­pear One-Sided

  Shouldn’t that answer then result in a “Invalid Question” to the original “Would you be a proper scientific skeptic if you were born in 500 CE?” question?

  I mean, what you are saying here is that it isn’t possible for you to have been born in 500 C.E., that you are a product of your genetics and environment and cannot be separated from those conditions that resulted in you. So the answer isn’t “Yes” it is “That isn’t a valid question.”

  I’m not saying I agree, especially since I think the initial question can be rephrased as “Given the population of humans born in 500 C.E. and the historical realities of the era, do you believe that any person born in this era could have been a proper scientific skeptic and given that, do you believe that you would have developed into one had your initial conditions been otherwise identical, or at least highly similar?” Making it personal (Would you be...) is just a way of conferring the weight of the statement, as it is assumed that the readers of LW all have brains capable of modelling hypothetical scenarios, even if those scenarios don’t (or can’t even in principle) match reality.

  The question isn’t asking if it is ACTUALLY possible for you to have been born in 500 CE, it is asking you to model the reality of someone in the first person as born in 500 CE and, taking into account what you know of the era, ask if you really think that someone with otherwise equivalent initial starting conditions would have grown into a proper scientific skeptic.

  It’s also shorter to just bring in the personal hypothetical, which helps.

• asparisi 20 Apr 2012 19:23 UTC

  7 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes April 2012

  “If you had a choice between the ability to detect falsehood and the ability to discover truth, which would you take? There was a time when I thought they were different ways of saying the same thing, but I no longer believe that. Most of my relatives, for example, are almost as good at seeing through subterfuge as they are at perpetrating it. I’m not at all sure, though, that they care much about truth. On the other hand, I’d always felt there was something noble, special, and honorable about seeking truth...”

  • Merlin, Sign of Chaos

• asparisi 25 Apr 2012 23:00 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Ezekiel’s comment on: Crowd­sourc­ing the availa­bil­ity heuristic

  Well, you couldn’t test against nothing without running into those issues, but you could compare strategies against each other, which can be more robust anyway.

  So, you tell group A to try strategy 1 for a type of problem, and you tell group B to try strategy 2. You measure as best as possible the relationship between commitment to the strategy, effectiveness, and akrasia and later you compare and see who accomplished the most. You could tell each group that “(1 or 2) is the best method we’ve found for accomplishing (X/​Y/​Z) and we’d like you to track your results with it.” which would act as a fairly effective blind as long as group A and B don’t know about each other.

  If you really want to test against a baseline, you could first try to discern what the “common” strategy is for most people and make that your control.

• asparisi 28 Apr 2012 21:54 UTC

  1 point

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  This post feels like a sales pitch to me: low on content, big on “create happy feelings about X.” (in this case, X being PUA) I’ll try to reserve judgement on future posts along this line, but the transition of a personal testimonial on rationality (to relate to members, if it is a pitch) to a personal testimonial on PUA (the idea to be sold, again, if it is a pitch) sets off my “set up” alarms.

• asparisi 28 Apr 2012 22:47 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: FrankAdamek’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  In general, once the question of whether or not you are selling something is in play, it becomes an “I suppose you could just raise your right hand.” situation.

  Which isn’t to say that selling something is bad per se: many things require being sold to one degree or another. I just tend to be wary of speech that seems generated to persuade with as little content as possible.

• asparisi 28 Apr 2012 23:26 UTC

  6 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Okay, I said I would reserve judgements on future posts.

  And I know that the previous post came across as a sales pitch. I know that this prejudices me toward thinking that future posts will also be parts of the pitch.

  But this seems to be more of the same: a personal testimonial, rather than a recommended methodology.

  I believe you will probably get to what you consider methodology. But that’s how sales goes: build them up; hook them, present the idea.

  So, I have to ask:

  Are you really sure that this isn’t a sales pitch? Keep in mind that selling something isn’t wrong, and that the ‘payoff’ from a sales pitch can be something as universal as “other people liking my posts.”

• asparisi 29 Apr 2012 0:49 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: FrankAdamek’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Ah. Well, if your goal is to gain credibility through the use of persuasive elements… hm.

  Generally I would consider that a good strategy. Using persuasive elements on humans has a high probability of increasing trust.

  That said, the format is common among sales people and con artists, and a person savvy to these techniques will actually feel less inclined to trust IF they recognize the technique. (Which requires they know the techniques and recognize them: normally a low-probability event)

  I could go on about evaluating the audience of LW, of the risk/​reward ratio of such manipulations and how you calculate the payoff, but if I take you at face value then there is no reason for you to have thought that far ahead. I will just note that when someone realizes that what you are doing is trying to persuade them, it often has the opposite effect. (A notable exception includes advertising, but that may have more to do with the ubiquitous nature of manipulative advertisements.) It is often far better to simply present the method and let it speak for itself.

• asparisi 1 May 2012 23:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: helland’s comment on: Evolu­tions Are Stupid (But Work Any­way)

  Well, designed is the wrong word. “Did not eliminate in a process of successive mutations” is more accurate.

• asparisi 15 May 2012 22:27 UTC

  0 points

  on: Strong in­tu­tions. Weak ar­gu­ments. What to do?

  I think it is probably rare that a person’s intutions on something, in the absense of clear evidence, are very reliable. I was trying to think of ways to resolve these dilemmas given that, and came up with two ideas.

  The first is to try and think of some test, preferably one that is easy and simple given your current capacities. If a test isn’t possible, you could try comparing what you THINK would happen at the end of the test, just to make sure you weren’t having a disagreement on words or holding a belief within a belief or something along those lines. That latter part could get sketchy, but if you found yourself defending your view against falsification, that’d be an indicator something is wrong.

  The second would be to accept that neither of you is likely to be right in the absense of such a test. That isn’t enough, however: you should more concerned about how close each of you is to the right answer. Something like the following might be good for working that out:

  • Are there any areas where both your intuitions predict the same thing? If so, what OTHER solutions would hold that?

  • Is there another idea that could subsume both intuition spaces? It wouldn’t be exact, and exacthness IS a virtue, but it could help with deanchoring and searching the probability space.

  • Are your ideas conditional? (“I believe A will happen if B, and you believe C will happen if D”) If so, is there a more general idea that could explain each under its own conditions?

  Again, you’d be looking for exactness here, and I think that finding a test is far preferable than simply comparing your intutiions, all things being equal.

  In the case of AGI, simple tests could come from extant AIs, humans, or animals. These tests wouldn’t be perfect, one could ALWAYS object that we aren’t talking about AGI with these tests, but they could at least serve to direct our intuitions: how often do “properly raised” people/​animals become “benevolent”? How often does “tool AI” currently engage in “non-benevolent” behavior? How successful are attempts to influence and/​or encode values across species or systems? Obviously some disambiguation is necessary, but it seems like empirical tests guiding one’s intutitions creates the best case scenario for guiding accurate beliefs short of actually having the answer in front of you.

• asparisi 17 May 2012 21:02 UTC

  8 points

  on: Be­ing a Real­ist (even if you be­lieve in God)

  I guess my only question is:

  If you are a realist about nature, if you believe that you should check your epistemology against the natural world, and if you accept that moral values and ethical systems are something you are free to choose based on your actual preferences...

  What does a belief in God add?

  In other words, if we both believe in a naturalistic view of the world, in testing our beliefs against reality, that proper beliefs are tested against the world, and that moral values and ethical systems are chosen rather than built into reality… it seems like at that point the belief in God isn’t pulling any epistemic weight. I might be missing something, however, which is why I ask the question.

Im­pos­ing FAI

• asparisi 17 May 2012 22:05 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Im­pos­ing FAI

  Huh. Seeing this answer twice, I can’t help but think that the standard strategy for any UFAI then is to first convince you that it is an FAI, and then to convince you that there is another UFAI “almost ready” somewhere.

  Heck, if it can do #2, it might be able to skip #1 if it was able to argue that it was the less-dangerous of the two.

• asparisi 18 May 2012 18:30 UTC

  9 points

  on: Be care­ful with thought experiments

  Putnam perhaps chose poor examples, but his thought-experiment works under any situation where we have limited knowledge.

  Instead of Twin Earth, say that I have a jar of clear liquid on my desk. Working off of just that information (and the information that much of the clear liquid that humans keep around are water) people start calling the thing on my desk a “Jar of Water.” That is, until someone knocks it over and it starts to eat through the material on my desk: obviously, that wasn’t water.

  Putnam doesn’t think that XYZ will look like water in every circumstance: his thought-experiment includes the idea that we can distinguish between XYZ and water with, say, an electron microscope. So obviously there are some properties of XYZ that are not the same as water, or else they really would look the same under every possible circumstance.

  The difference (which is where some philosophers make the mistake) is when you assume that the “thought-experiment” stuff looks like the “real” stuff in every possible circumstance. If Putnam had said that the difference between H2O and XYZ was purely ephiphenomenal or something like that, he’d be obviously wrong. For instance, if we looked at XYZ and it “fooled” us into thinking it was H2O (say, if we broke apart XYZ and got a 2:1 ration of oxygen to hydrogen and no other parts) then Putnam’s argument wouldn’t hold. (This is where p-zombies fail: it is stipulated that there is no experiment that can tell the difference.)

  Putnam’s main point was that we can be mistaken about what a thing is. Moreover, that when we can have two things (call them A and B) that we think are of the same type that we can not only be mistaken that A and B are of the same type, but that A could fit the type and B might not.

  If this seems incredibly basic… it is. People make a big deal about it because prior to Putnam (and sometimes afterward) philosophers were saying crazy things like “the meanings in our heads don’t have to refer to anything in the world,” which essentially translates to “I can make a word mean anything I want!”

  I agree with this to the extent that we shouldn’t make the mistake that just because we have a model of something in our head means that our model corresponds to the real world. It’s even stickier, because when a model doesn’t conform we often keep the words around because they can be useful descriptions of the new thing we’ve fround. That can create confusion, especially during a period of transition. (Imagine someone saying that “Water cannot be H2O, because it is necessarily an Aristotelian element.”) But thought experiments are very, very useful since all a “thought experiment” really is, is when you use the information already in your head and say, “Given what I already know, what do I think would happen in this circumstance?”

  What links here?

  • bryjnar's comment on Be care­ful with thought experiments by lukeprog (18 May 2012 20:36 UTC; 9 points)