I took epsilon to be simply 0.5, on the basis of “the survey can take decimals but I’m going to use whole numbers as suggested, so 0 means I rounded down anything less than 0.5”. This is imprecise but gives me greater confidence in my answers, and (as you say), I have some tendency towards laziness.
CBHacking
… and that doesn’t even get into the sexual-vs.-romantic issue. My girlfriend is cis and bisexual, but only andro-romantic (hetero). She identifies as bi, for purposes of broad categorization such as surveys like this, but has no interest in dating other women even though she is sexually attracted to them.
In other words, yes, the better way to ask such a question would be something along the lines of “which gender(s) are you romantically attracted to?” and “which gender(s) are you sexually attracted to?” as different questions.
Top-level comment to say yep, took the survey! Well, except for the digit length by tool-aided measurement. However, I did do a rough measurement (which I chose to not record on the survey) by manually aligning the creases on both hands (first to verify corresponding finger lengths, then to compare D2:D4) I determined my digit ratio to be in excess of 1.00 and possibly as high as 1.02, which would make me very unusual (especially for a cis male). Then again, my height already makes me that.
Also, this is the first thread in which I’ve commented on LW! My actual first comment (with more stuff about the survey) is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l5k/2014_less_wrong_censussurvey/bihv EDIT: Feedback that I posted in that other comment, which it was pointed out really belongs here: Part Four’s “Moral Views” section could have used links (LW, WP, wherever) for those of us who aren’t sure about the selection of moral philosophies. It is a question I had been exploring, but mostly just in a “judge each as they are presented to me” approach and I had not encountered all of them before. Also, the WP articles for some of them do not contrast them with the others, so suggested alternate sources would be welcome.
EDIT2: Did somebody go on a downvote-rampage? Every comment in this section of the thread seems to have been downvoted at least once. Is there some rule of “you’re not supposed to get more than 12 free karma out of this thread” or something that I missed? (Bearing in mind that I’m a newbie, I did not expect this behavior and would generally appreciate knowing why something I post is downvoted.)
Thanks! Yeah, I did add a top-level comment, with a link to this one, but I realize that was sort of the backward way to do it.
Out of curiosity, if I’d avoided mentioning how she self-identifies and had instead told you that “she has had sex with other women before and has asked me if it’s OK if she sleeps with other women while we’re dating (or brings them home for a threesome)… but has never shown or claimed any interest in actually dating another woman” (all of which is, incidentally, true), what would your response have been? Framed that way, one could assume that she’s actually bi or even lesbian and the only reason she’s dating me instead of one of those girls is because she wants to avoid the social or family stigma of homosexuality.
Or you could take me at my word. It’s not like you’re in any position to verify one way or the other, where she in particular is concerned, unless you’re one of the handful of people who actually know who I am speaking of and know her preferences at least as well as I do.
It also doesn’t matter for the point I raised (about how some people have different targets for sexual and romantic attraction) unless you intended to imply that not only is she personally actually neatly classifiable under the existing system but so is everybody else who would claim otherwise. That is a theory which only takes one counterexample to disprove (as I provided, although one could then debate the necessity of writing the survey to accommodate however many people have this “non-standard” categorization).
Do you have an actual response to my claim that the survey should account for the possibility that people may be romantically and sexually attracted to different genders?
That’s a valid point. On the other hand, as a dating site, OKC messaging is probably going to be skewed towards the gender that one is interested in pursuing a relationship with (though maybe that’s just the way I use it; as soon as I typed it I felt sure there were plenty of people just looking to hook up). When the topic is sexual orientation vs. romantic orientation, I’m not sure that OKC is the best source of data. I can’t deny the specific claim that a large proportion of ostensibly bi people appear to not be both bisexual and biromantic.
Can’t say I’m surprised, since I was about to mention my own reaction to Atlas Shrugged. I have continuously, near-obsessively dissected the book (both in terms of the rationality of its arguments and the quality of writing it contains)… and I still find my views changing, or at least my initial reactions changing, the more of it I read. It’s a very odd experience. I have no idea what would have happened if I’d started reading it younger (I’m 28) and less aware of the way that politics and business proceed in the real world.
With that said, I think the effect is a net positive. I now see more of the stuff that Objectivists object to in the everyday world—it grabs my attention much more to hear somebody say something like “well, he really needed the job”—but it doesn’t seem to have interfered with my ability to analyze the situation (for example, when multiple candidates are sufficiently qualified and no other differences are significant, it is the most productive thing to give a job to the qualified person who needs it most). Picking apart the places where Rand is wrong, or at least fails to make a convincing argument, has both equipped me to argue against those viewpoints when expressed by others, and has heightened my ability to see the places where she’s right.
Bringing this back on topic, though, I’m not sure how parallel the scenarios (reading a book by choice but with the conscious intention of exploring the author’s ideas and biases vs. picking up biases by accident from a teacher) really are. Part of that may be that I do not automatically associate a book with the personhood of the author, the way I associate a class with the personhood of the teacher (indeed, I have to constantly consciously remind myself of Rand’s own experiences to even begin to comprehend some of her arguments; I have never had to similarly remind myself more than once when dealing with a person in the flesh). I certainly internalize lessons and viewpoints much more in person than I do from a text.
Relatedly, I need to get myself to some presentations and/or workshops on rationality, as I’m new and still find many of the concepts that I am trying to learn are… slippery, in a way that things I learned from a “real person” almost never are. Of course, the fact that I’m trying to become more rational, while I am in no way trying to become Objectivist, may make a big difference. Too many axes for the data that I have, I think, though further analysis may show otherwise.
As a newcomer to the community, I’m ill-equipped to comment on norms (and am also commenting on something nearly five years old) but my intuition agrees with your assessment of how we view those with whom we disagree. With that said, it doesn’t seem to fully cover the relevant scenarios, though. Take, for example, a request for clarification or explanation of some jargon; one can make such requests kindly or non-kindly (no effort to be kind) or unkindly (antagonistically or degradingly). In such a case, if behooves the requester to be nice, because that is more likely to yield a beneficial response, but one could still consider the relevant meaning of “nice” unresolved.
To continue the example, I value an indication that the other person has considered the value of my time before asking me to clarify something more than I value the actual politeness of the form of the request. Suppose I’m interacting with another newcomer to the (unrelated-to-LW) community; I consider “I can’t find a relevant definition of \”fully unlocked\” on Google” nicer than “can you please tell me what \”fully unlocked\” means?” when operating in a context where I know that the community’s definition of the term is well established because the first person has indicated an acknowledgement that the time of others is valuable by attempting to find the answer themselves before answering. It looks less nice, but that’s mostly because it’s structured less politely. Neither is sufficiently unkind that I wouldn’t answer, but the former would get a “thanks for searching; I’ll try to post that somewhere more prominent” or similar in addition to a link to the relevant definition, whereas I would need to remind myself (for the reasons given here) of the need to be nice to the second poster instead of just posting a direct link (or worse, a LMGTFY link).
Having a self-selecting social group that strongly encourages both posting defensible claims and admitting when you are wrong will do wonders for a community. It requires a strong social consensus that these are desirable characteristics, of course—a sufficiently large group of trolls upvoting their own trolling and downvoting everybody else could pose a threat to the system—but that’s where having the group be self-selected is a good thing.
On the other hand, I find myself forced to ask: have you any citations or evidence to support those numbers? :-D
I’m responding to you, rather than to Mellway, because you responded to him and got strongly upvoted for it when his post was downvoted. Granted that I’m responding nearly seven years after the fact, so you probably won’t see this, but others might.
For your first sentence, you are arguing definitions. The words do not have a single unambiguous meaning in that context, and some of those meanings are incorrect, and therefore the statement by EY is, quite arguably, incorrect. It is not hard to be more of a chemist than I, yet I postulate that for the first three examples of an “atomic theory of chemistry” you define, I can either point out a known counterexample or a point where the error bars are too large to begin to call the result “pretty damn certain”. As an example, the claim that “bonds form between atoms, producing molecules, which have consistent chemical effects” runs into issues such as the orientations of the atoms (protein folding being a common real-world example of how differently-configured molecules of exactly the same atoms bound to the same other atoms can produce completely different chemical effects). Even seemingly-obvious statements, combined with the immediately-obvious caveats, can be incorrect: “all matter (which is more massive than an atom, because atoms aren’t actually atomic) is composed of atoms” completely fails to account for neutron stars. I thus claim that the expected definition of the term in such a context as this one cannot be a correct one. Do you have a non-trivial definition of “the atomic theory of chemistry” which is “pretty damn certain”? Normally I’d have said EY would be among the first to point out how much we don’t know and still have to learn even where we think we know the answer.
Do not stop your search till you have found an interpretation of the words that makes the sentence non-foolish and non-false.
Absolutely not. That way lies a path toward one of the very things this (in most ways excellent) article warns against:
runs a little automatic program that takes whatever the Great Leader says and generates a justification that your fellow followers will view as Reason-able.
It is not our job to take everything said by EY or anybody else and consider it from all possible meanings and contexts until we hit upon one that can be justified. It is occasionally useful to do so, such as considering whether a quote taken out of context might actually not mean what the quoter meant to indicate, but it is neither practical nor desirable in common discourse or when reading the author’s words in their full context.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with Yudkowsky’s words is that “Yudkowsky is not a chemist, and seven years ago needed a statement that sounded both scientific and hard to dispute, came up with something like \”atoms are the basic unit of chemistry\” (which is, indeed, a useful approximation in most contexts), and worded it to sound both more scientific and more emphatic.” If the Great Leader meant something more precise, he should have stated it. If he meant ”… once you take into account all the other things that influence chemistry as well” then that makes his statement false on the face of it, because we keep coming with new examples of those other things.
Downvoted for telling us to run that little automatic program.
But that fails to take into account the many ways we have learned of since then where matter does not “have a tendency to combine in small whole-number ratios”. Neutron stars are massive quantities of substance, form naturally, and are composed of things with approximately the mass of a hydrogen atom, but almost none of its other properties. An alpha particle (He-4 nucleus) is similarly reminiscent of a helium atom, but exhibits significantly different properties; a beta particle (free electron) bears no resemblance in mass or behavior to any atom. Despite this, both are naturally occurring “substances” (here “substance” is defined as “quantity of matter”).
Heck, even atoms do not exhibit the same properties; a large collection of atoms which have higher-energy electron orbits than their base state will emit photons while they tend back toward that base state, but a large collection of naturally-occurring Hydrogen will include some Deuterium (which is stable and has most of the properties of hydrogen except its mass) and some Tritium which still chemically resembles Hydrogen (despite being about three times its mass) until at some point it spontaneously transmutes into Helium-3 and gains an entirely new set of chemical properties. Modern chemists consider the typical behavior of atoms a useful approximation in many contexts, but that doesn’t make it “pretty damn certain”.
I disagree. There are degrees of caring, and appropriate responses to them. Admittedly, “nice” is a term with no specific meaning, but most of us can probably put it on a relative ranking with other positive terms, such “non-zero benefit” or “decent” (which I, and probably most people, would rank below “nice”) and “excellent”, “wonderful”, “the best thing in the world” (in the hyperbolic “best thing I have in mind right now” sense), or “literally, after months of introspection, study, and multiplying, I find that this is the best thing which could possibly occur at this time”; I suspect most native English speakers would agree that those are stronger sentiments than “nice”. I can certainly think of things that are more important than merely “nice” yet less important than a reduction in death and suffering.
For example, I would really like a Tesla car, with all the features. In the category of remotely-feasible things somebody could actually give me, I actually value that higher than there’s any rational reason for. On the other hand, if somebody gave me the money for such a car, I wouldn’t spend it on one… I don’t actually need a car, in fact don’t have a place for it, and there are much more valuable things I could do with that money. Donating it to some highly-effective charity, for example.
Leaving aside the fact that “every human being in existence” appears to require excluding a number of people who really are devoting their lives to bringing about reductions in suffering and death, there are lots of people who would respond to a cessation of some cause of suffering or death more positively than to simply think it “nice”. Maybe not proportionately more positively—as the post says, our care-o-meters don’t scale that far—but there would still be a major difference. I don’t know how common, in actual numbers, that reaction is vs. the “It would be nice” reaction (not to mention other possible reactions), but it is absolutely a significant number of people even among those who aren’t devoting their whole life towards that goal.
False dichotomy. You can have (many!) things which are more than merely “nice” yet less than the thing you spend all available resources on. To take a well-known public philanthropist as an example, are you seriously claiming that because he does not spend every cent he has eliminating malaria as fast as possible, Bill Gates’ view on malaria eradication is that “it’s nice that death and suffering are alleviated, but that’s all”?
We should probably taboo the word “nice” here; since we seem likely to be operating on different definitions of it. To rephrase my second sentence of this post, then: You can have (many!) things which you hold to be important and work to bring about, but which you do not spend every plausibly-available resource on.
Also, your final sentence is not logically consistent. To show that a particular goal is the most important thing to you, you only need to devote more resources (including time) to it than to any other particular goal. If you allocate 49% of your resources to ending world poverty, 48% to being a billionaire playboy, and 3% to personal/private uses that are not strictly required for either of those goals, that is probably not the most efficient possible manner to allocate your resources, but there is nothing you value more than ending poverty (a major cause of suffering and death) even though it doesn’t even consume a majority of your resources. Of course, this assumes that the value of your resources is fixed wherever you spend them; in the real world, the marginal value of your investments (especially in things like medicine) go down the more resources you pump into them in a given time frame; a better use might be to invest a large chunk of your resources into things that generate more resources, while providing as much towards your anti-suffering goals as they can efficiently use at once.
TL;DR because this turned into a lot of looking back on my relationship with my parents: I’d make sure they knew I had the capability, and then, if I saw a need to use it, I would. I wouldn’t give an expectation of privacy and then violate it.
First, let me state that I’m in my late 20s, and have no children.
Secretly? No. Or rather, I would never hide that I have the capability, though I wouldn’t necessarily tell them when I was using it. If I had reason to suspect them hiding things from me, I might even hide the mechanism, but I’d let them know that I could check. The goal would be to indicate that whatever it is I’m concerned about is REALLY IMPORTANT (i.e. more important than privacy), and that I expect that to act as a deterrence.
On the other hand, I can’t think of many scenarios that would call for such action. I would make it clear, for example, that a diary is private unless I expect the kid to be in danger, but the scenarios that actually come to mind for when I would go through it all involve things like “E left without telling anybody where e’d be, can’t be reached by any way, and has been gone since yesterday” or similar; if it was a suspicion of something like drug abuse, my inclination is simply to talk about it, not even necessarily asking anything specifically. If you can show your kid(s) the utility of giving a positive weight to your views on a subject, then you can often avoid needing to do anything so drastic as violating their privacy (in any scenario where they reasonably expect to have it).
With all that said, I don’t really have a good view of how adversarial parent/child relationships function (or rather, dysfunction); I certainly didn’t always get along with my parents, and didn’t even always respect them very much (and oh damn but did my dad blow up when I told him that, circa age 12) but they never violated my trust on big things. It was never a case of me-vs.-him (most of my problems were with my father), but rather of my utility functions vs. his appreciation for my utility functions. He could make me incredibly angry by promising some treat and then simply failing to follow through (for what never seemed, to me, to be a valid reason to break your word) but that was because I valued a verbal promise of something trivial far more strongly than it warranted, not because he was inherently untrustworthy; to me, the breaking of a promise was a much greater betrayal than the loss of the treat. Once I learned to understand him better, I simply discounted any promise he according to how (un)important he thought it was (not how important I thought it was; I didn’t get so far back then as to think about “how important he thinks it is to me”). The only times he came close to breaking the big ones I could usually argue him around.
Took me a long while to work out the details there, though. Might be good to help the kid(s) in question understand where you’re coming from, and how much you value something like your implicit (or explicit) promise of their privacy. Of course, if you already have given an expectation of the child’s privacy being sacrosanct, I don’t know what I’d do in your place. If you’ve already been caught violating such expectations, my only recommendation would be to immediately explain why you fucked up because, if the kid’s worldview is anything like mine at that age (which it totally may not be, and I’m no psychologist) you sure as hell have. Not by the snooping itself, but by simultaneously creating a scenario where the kid had reason to believe emselves private and yet one where you felt it was justified to violate that.
Short version: I adjusted my sense of “self” until it included all my potential future selves. At that point, it becomes literally a matter of saving my life, rather than of being re-awakened one day.
It didn’t actually take much for me to take that leap when it came to cryonics. The trigger for me was “you don’t die and then get cryopreserved, you get cryopreserved as the last-ditch effort before you die”. I’m not suicidal; if you ask any hypothetical instance of me if they want to live, the answer is yes. By extending my sense of continuity into the not-quite-really-dead-yet instance of me, I can answer questions for that cryopreserved self: “Yes, of course I want you to perform the last-ditch operation to save my life!”
If you’re curious: My default self-view for a long time was basically “the continuity that led to me is me, and any forks or future copies/simulations aren’t me”, which tended toward a somewhat selfish view where I always viewed the hypothetical most in-control version (call it “CBH Alpha”) as myself. If a copy of me was created; “I” was simply whichever one I wanted to be (generally, the one responsible for choosing to create the new instance or doing the thing that the pre-fork copy wanted to be doing). It took me a while to realize how much sense that didn’t make; I always am the continuity that led to me, and am therefore whatever instance of CBH that you can hypothesize, and therefore I can’t pick and choose for myself. If anything that identifies itself as CBH can exist after any discontinuity from CBH Alpha, I am (and need to optimize for) all those selves.
This doesn’t mean I’m not OK with the idea of something like a transporter that causes me to cease to exist at one point and begin again at another point; the new instance still identifies as me, and therefore is me and I need to optimize for him. The old instance no longer exists and doesn’t need to be optimized for. On the other hand, this does mean I’m not OK with the idea of a machine that duplicates myself for the purpose of the duplicate dying, unless it’s literally a matter of saving any instance of myself; I would optimize for the benefit of all of me, not just for the one who pushed the button.
I’m not yet sure how I’d feel about a “transporter” which offered the option of destroying the original, but didn’t have to. The utility of such a thing is obviously so high I would use it, and I’d probably default to destroying the original just because I don’t feel like I’m such a wonderful benefit to the world that there needs to be more of me (so long as there’s at least one), but when I reframe the question from “why would I want to not be transported (i.e. to go on experiencing life here instead of wherever I was being sent)” to “why would I want to have fewer experiences than I could (i.e. only experience the destination of the transporter, instead of simultaneously experiencing both), I feel like I’d want to keep the original. If we alter the scenario just slightly, such that the duplicate is created as a fork and the fork is then optionally destroyed, I don’t think I would ever choose destruction except if it was a scenario along the lines of “painless disintegration or death by torture” and the torture wasn’t going to last long (no rescue opportunity) but I’d still experience a lot of pain.
These ideas largely came about from various fiction I’ve read in the last few years. Some examples that come to mind:
“Explorers” by Alicorn (http://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/explorers.shtml ; her fiction first led me to discover LW, though this story is more recent than that)
Cory Doctorow’s short story To Go Boldly (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061562351/downandoutint-20)
The “Gavs” of Schlock Mercenary (big spoilers for a major plot arc if I talk about it in a lot of detail; just go read http://www.schlockmercenary.com/)
Out of curiosity, what’s the greatest number of significant digits that you’ve ever memorized, in any time frame?
Also 10 (EDIT: 20) (random) decimal digits is about 70 bits of entropy, which is an extraordinarily strong password and borders on being a usable cryptographic key (not for long-term safety against high-resource opposition, but well out of “easily brute-forced by a modern computer” territory). Do you use the same kind of memorization you did here for passwords? I can (and do) memorize passwords longer than 20 characters, but I don’t really count that because I generate the mnemonic first and then the password from it. Memorizing the password doesn’t take long, but sometimes getting the mnemonic into my head does...
Any more info available about this than what’s on http://lesswrong.com/meetups/16r? It’s on my calendar but I don’t have much info about it and would definitely like to see it happening. I may be able to help out, if there’s something needed.
Note: Explicitly not bragging here, just mentioning potentially-relevant info: I’m also looking into starting a Sequences-reading/discussing group with some other local aspiring rationalists. I know at least one of them is also working on the Secular Solstice thing.
I should focus more on making these things happen.
On my calendar, looking for more info about this. I haven’t been to a LW or EA meetup before, and have no idea what to expect except for there being interesting people, but I’d like to see this happen and can probably help out if you point me at what’s needed.
Direct reply to the discussion post: I would hope so, but at this point none of the top links on any search engine I tried lead here for “AI box”. Yudkowsky.net is on the first page, and there are a few LW posts, but they are nothing like the clearly-explanatory links (Wikipedia and RationalWiki) that make up the first results. Obviously, those links can be followed to reach LW, but the connection is pretty weak.
The search results for “Roko’s Basilisk” are both better and worse. LessWrong is prominently mentioned in them, often right in the page title and/or URL, but none of them speak particularly well of the site (Wikipedia’s entry—which I hadn’t seen since back when it was just a redirect to EY—prominently mentions two items in LW’s history: its founding and the Basilisk. That’s probably the least unfavorable description of the Basilisk too, but that doesn’t make it good. None of the results actually link here directly.
ANECDOTE TIME: I’m a fairly new member of LW; I’ve been reading LW-related stuff for over a year now but only created my account here recently. I had never heard of Roko’s Basilisk, which indicates two things to me: 1) The subject is well-suppressed here, to such a degree that I didn’t even realize it was taboo. I had to learn that from RationalWiki. 2) I obtained my knowledge about LW pretty exclusively from stuff that (current) LW members had posted or linked to about the site (as opposed to, say, reading RationalWiki which is a site I was aware of but hold in low regard).
My view on the whole subject is, quite simply, that we as aspiring rationalists need to acknowledge the past error and explain the Basilisk right here, not on Reddit or XKCD’s forums or RW/WP edit wars or anything like that. Put it in our own wiki. Put lots of links out to the other comments on it. Explain, where necessary, why those other comments are wrong… but prominently explain where LW (and yes, EY in particular) were wrong. Refute the argument of FAI engaging in acausal blackmail. Steelman the terror and defeat it anyhow. Do this on our own turf, with input from the community, and link to it when somebody externally brings up the subject! So long as LW remains Basilisk-free, people will claim we are unwilling to address the issue.
Completed the survey (arguably the first thing I’ve actually contributed to LW, though I’ve discussed it at some length offline; this is my first comment ever). I have some degree of access to a scanner but not conveniently (same goes for a ruler actually; at best I may have a measuring tape somewhere I could find in under an hour’s search). I filled out all the rest, aside from the N/A questions. Some of my answers have very low confidence (calibration percentage?), though.
A tip for those who don’t have the equipment to perform the actual test: if you can verify that the lengths of the fingers on your left and right hands are equal (align the crease in the skin at the bases of the same finger on each hand, palm-to-palm), you can use the same technique to compare the D2:D4 lengths (one hand against the other). My fingers are the same length regardless of which hand (to the limit of my ability to measure without mechanical aid), and my D2:D4 ratio is somewhere in the range 1.00 < D2:D4 < 1.05, probably under 1.02 but definitely in excess of 1.00. As a cisgendered male, I guess I’m weird?
Oh, and some feedback: Part Four’s “Moral Views” section could have used links (LW, WP, wherever) for those of us who aren’t sure about the selection of moral philosophies. It is a question I had been exploring, but mostly just in a “judge each as they are presented to me” approach and I had not encountered all of them before.
Hello, LW community! I look forward to continuing to learn from you all and hopefully contributing something back.