Bugmaster

Karma: 4,007

Bugmaster Dec 9, 2014, 8:58 AM
−4 points
on: Does utilitarianism “require” extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does?
The word “utilitarianism” technically means something like, “an algorithm for determining whether any given action should or should not be undertaken, given some predetermined utility function”. However, when most people think of utilitarianism, they usually have a very specific utility function in mind. Taken together, the algorithm and the function do indeed imply certain “ethical obligations”, which are somewhat tautologically defined as “doing whatever maximizes this utility function”.

In general, the word “utilitarian” has been effectively re-defined in common speech as something like, “ruthlessly efficient to the point of extreme ugliness”, so utilitarianism gets the horns effect from that.

Bugmaster Dec 9, 2014, 8:25 AM
11 points
on: PSA: Eugine_Nier evading ban?
I downvoted this post not because I hate you, or because I love Eugine_Nier (o), but because I’d like to see fewer post like this one in the future. And I think that expressing my sentiment is what the “Downvote” button is for.

More specifically, I don’t think that public shaming and witch hunts belong on Less Wrong, even when the person being hunted is actually a witch (oo). I think that the toxic culture such tactics create is likely to be more harmful than individual unruly posters, in the long term.

(o) I don’t even remember who he is, though the name does sound familiar.
(oo) Metaphorically speaking.

Bugmaster Dec 9, 2014, 4:28 AM
0 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014
I think that “прикол” is closer to “amusing” than to “fun”. “клёво” is more like “cool”. And I always thought that “пиздец” was universally bad, something akin to “game over, man ! game over !”—but words do change over time...

Bugmaster Dec 9, 2014, 4:23 AM
4 points
in reply to: Username’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014
I think the more proper translation of “it depends” would be “как сказать”.

Also, while it is true that the Russian language has no word for “privacy”, note that it also has no word for “gun” :-)

Bugmaster Oct 28, 2014, 3:21 AM
2 points
in reply to: ike’s comment on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
It didn’t do much for me :-(

If there’s no way for me to figure out whether there’s a chocolate cake inside of the Sun or not, then I might as well assume there’s no cake, because this makes the math easier. I see MWI vs. no MWI the same way, but apparently that’s the wrong answer...

Bugmaster Oct 27, 2014, 11:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: Elund’s comment on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
That’s what I thought too, and apparently I was wrong...

Bugmaster Oct 27, 2014, 10:45 PM
39 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
FWIW, I said I “strongly disagree” with Feminism and Social Justice, even though I find their Wikipedia descriptions generally agreeable. I think in the future, it would be good to split those questions into pairs: a) “Do you agree with the stated mission goals of X ?”, and b). “Do you agree with the actions of people who identify as X ?”

Bugmaster Oct 8, 2014, 11:20 PM
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: On Caring
You are saying that shminux is “a worse person than you” and also “heartless”, but I am not sure what these words mean. How do you measure which person is better as compared to another person ? If the answer is, “whoever cares about more people is better”, then all you’re saying is, “shminux cares about fewer people because he cares about fewer people”. This is true, but tautologically so.

Bugmaster Sep 11, 2014, 12:56 AM
2 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
I could be wrong, but didn’t Darwin actually formulate some hypotheses, and then go out there and count finches (and other things) to see if his predictions were true ? I think that’s why his success rate was so much better (though, admittedly, not perfect): he conducted experiments in the real world, using real math.

Also, Freud did some kind of experiments. He was not merely a philosopher, he also cured people, and it seemed to him that his theories work. But he didn’t have a control group, etc.

How did he know if his theories actually worked, then ? Was he even making his patients better in any way (as compared to other patients who saw other doctors, or perhaps no doctors at all) ?

Bugmaster Sep 9, 2014, 8:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
Sorry, it gets difficult to keep all the commenting systems straight after a while.

Bugmaster Sep 9, 2014, 2:14 AM
2 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
Regardless of whether Freud’s ideas were correct or not, what about his methods ? How did he come by his ideas ? Were his hypotheses even falsifiable, and if so, did he attempt to rigorously falsify them ?

If the answer is “no”, then, while I will grant you that Freud was possibly relatively more rational than his colleagues at the time, it would still be quite a stretch to call him a rationalist in the absolute terms.

Bugmaster Aug 18, 2014, 11:57 PM
3 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Two More Things to Unlearn from School
Yeah, that’s tough. The only way out of this that I can think of is to keep practicing other languages and frameworks in your free time, by building your own projects. This way, you could put these languages on your resume and be fully honest about it.

Alternatively, you can do what apparently 99% of job applicants at our company are doing, and lie through your teeth. Normally I’d argue against this approach, but the fact that the vast majority of applicants are doing it is evidence for the viability of the strategy; the fact that people like me actually say stuff like, “It says here you know C#, so let me ask you a basic C# question” is probably just bad luck for them.

Bugmaster Aug 14, 2014, 4:47 AM
2 points
in reply to: Iydak’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2014
Also this entire comic:

http://www.erfworld.com/book-1-archive/?px=%2F124.jpg

Bugmaster Jul 22, 2014, 7:20 PM
4 points
on: Knightian Uncertainty and Ambiguity Aversion: Motivation
This may be slightly off-topic, but I don’t think it makes sense to use dollars as a proxy for the measure of utility, because dollars have diminishing returns.

For example, if you offered me a choice between winning a billion dollars with 100% certainty, and winning 5 billion dollars with 20% certainty, I’ll pick the certain choice every time. Once I have a billion dollars, four more won’t make much more of a difference, so my real choice is between two expected values: X 1, vs. (X + epsilon) 0.2. The first choice looks a lot more attractive, obviously.

Bugmaster Jul 22, 2014, 1:25 AM
2 points
in reply to: Spaig’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
Yes, I can learn to a certain extent, but so can Pandora (the music-matching problem); IMO that’s not much of a yardstick.

Bugmaster Jul 22, 2014, 1:24 AM
1 point
in reply to: Strange7’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
Well, at this point, I know that both of them want to continue existing; both of them are smart; but one likes Justin Bieber and the other one knows how to play with finances to construct robots. I’m not really sure which one I’d choose...

Bugmaster Jul 16, 2014, 8:05 AM
1 point
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
Are you not employing circular reasoning here ? Sure, shooting computer-controller opponents is ok because they don’t experience any suffering from being hit by a bullet; but that only holds true if we assume they are not conscious in the first place. If they are conscious to some extent -- let’s say, their Consciousness Index is 0.001, on the scale from 0 == “rock” and 1 == “human”—then we could reasonably say that they do experience suffering to some extent.

As I said, I don’t believe that the words “consciousness” has any useful meaning; but I am pretending that it does, for the purposes of this post.

Bugmaster Jul 15, 2014, 12:15 PM
1 point
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept

However, this does not distinguish a self-selected interest (which I predict the Dell will have) from a chat program written to pretend to be interested in something.

Let’s say that the Lenovo program is hooked up to a random number generator. It randomly picks a topic to be interested in, then pretends to be interested in that. As mentioned before, it can pretend to be interested in that thing quite well. How do you tell the difference between the Lenovo, who is perfectly mimicking its interest; and the Dell, who is truly interested in whatever topic it comes up with ?

Bugmaster Jul 15, 2014, 12:11 PM
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept

I can distinguish states where I’m totally immersed in a video game and the video game world from states when I’m aware of myself and conscious of myself.

Ok, so who, exactly, is it that is “totally immersed in a video game” ? If it’s still you, then you have simply lost awareness of (the majority of) your body, but you are as conscious as you were before.

Bugmaster Jul 15, 2014, 6:14 AM
4 points
in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
Ok, so your prediction is that the Dell cluster will be able to improve its own code, whereas the Lenovo will not. But I’m not sure if that’s true. After all, I am conscious, and yet if you asked me to improve my own code, I couldn’t do it.