christopherj

Karma: 374

christopherj 16 Mar 2015 5:05 UTC
−2 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Interlude with the Confessor (4/8)
Weirdtopia? No—history. For example, the Bible rules allowed for capturing the enemy’s women as loot, having sex with their slave, and I’m fairly certain that a woman’s wishes in terms of consent mattered a lot less than those of the male in charge of her. I seem to recall that at some point in Europe the feudal lord or whatever could have his way with your wife, and you had no recourse. This, of course, probably has more to do with inequality than anything else.

As for consent, it’s … complicated. For one thing, it exists in the mind and thus cannot reliably leave a physical trace (because of how memory works by retroactively fitting facts into a narrative, not even the owner of the brain can be certain). And then there’s sleeping, and drugs, and mental illness, and changing one’s mind, and how we decided that none of the usual applies when the person is below a certain age. As a hypothetical example, consider a mute quadriplegic who can only communicate by blinking, gave consent, then withdrew consent halfway through the act but while their partner couldn’t see their eyes.

Besides, it’s not like any modern society would allow assault or harassment, so if they got rid of the laws concerning the special case where sex is involved, it wouldn’t really change much.

christopherj 30 May 2014 16:01 UTC
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on: Pascal’s Mugging Solved
Pascal’s mugging against an actual opponent is easy. If they are able to carry out their threat, they don’t need anything you would be able to give them. If the threat is real, you’re at their mercy and you have no way of knowing if acceding to their demand will actually make anyone safer, whereas if he’s lying you don’t want to be giving resources to that sort of person. This situation is a special case of privileging the hypothesis, since for no reason you’re considering a nearly impossible event while ignoring all the others.

If we’re talking about a metaphor for general decision-making, eg an AI who’s actions could well affect the entirety of the human race, it’s much harder. I’d probably have it ignore any probabilities below x%, where x is calculated as a probability so small that the AI would be paralyzed from worrying about the huge number of improbable things. Not because it’s a good idea, but because as probability approaches zero, the number of things to consider approaches infinity yet processing power is limited.

christopherj 16 May 2014 5:33 UTC
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on: A Dialogue On Doublethink
It is pretty much a necessity that humans will believe contradictory things, if only because consistency checking each new belief with each of your current beliefs is impossibly difficult. Cognitive dissonance won’t occur if the contradiction is so obscure that you haven’t noticed it, or perhaps wouldn’t even understand exactly how it contradicts a set of 136 other beliefs even if it was explained to you. Even if you could check for contradictions, your values change drastically from one hour to the next (how much you value food, water, company, solitude, leisure, etc), and that will change all your beliefs that start with “I want …”. Most likely you actually have different bits of brain with different values vying for dominance

Moreover, many times a belief is part of a group membership (eg “I support [cause]”, or simply feels good (eg “I am a good person”). People will not appreciate if you point out contradictions in these things, possibly because they are instrumental and not epistemic beliefs. There is no doubt that professing contradictory beliefs can be highly beneficial (eg “Republicans are fiscally conservative, want small government, cut taxes, more money for the military and enforcing morality”, if you reject any of that you’re not a viable candidate)

christopherj 16 May 2014 4:32 UTC
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in reply to: JTHM’s comment on: A Dialogue On Doublethink

I myself lie effortlessly, and felt not a shred of guilt when, say, I would hide my atheism to protect myself from the hostility of my very anti-anti-religious father (he’s not a believer himself, he’s just hostile to atheism for reasons which elude me).

Hm, an atheist who hides his atheism, from his father who also seems to be an atheist (aka non-believer) but acts hostile towards atheists? Just out of curiosity, do you also act hostile towards atheists when you’re around him?

christopherj 10 May 2014 14:35 UTC
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in reply to: fezziwig’s comment on: Questions to ask theist philosophers? I will soon be speaking with several

FWIW these questions have standard answers in Christian doctrine: he didn’t want to be tortured to death, but he wanted to do God’s will more than he not-wanted to be crucified.

Sure, but don’t forget that in Christian doctrine Jesus=God. This vastly complicates the issue, God-the-Father demands that God-the-Son die on behalf of the sins of humanity, which God-the-Son doesn’t want to do but is willing to do because it’s what God-the-Father requires to bring Himself to forgive people and He may have been ordered to as well. I don’t know what would happen if God disobeys Himself.

christopherj 6 May 2014 0:11 UTC
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in reply to: christopherj’s comment on: Arguments and relevance claims
And I expect the reason is that people who insufficiently ironman an argument are either more interested in the argument’s technical correctness, or more interested in discrediting the claim.

christopherj 6 May 2014 0:00 UTC
2 points
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on: Arguments and relevance claims
Summary: Agreeing with people who insufficiently ironman an argument, will be treated as agreeing that the argument is complete rubbish.

christopherj 4 May 2014 5:14 UTC
1 point
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on: The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space
Supplemental data preservation seems like a synergistic match with cryonics. You’d want to collect vast amounts of data with little effort, so no diaries or random typing or asking friends to memorize facts. MRIs and other medical records might help, keeping a video or audio recording of everything you do, and recording everything you do with your computer, should take little time and might preserve something that might aid cryonic preservation.

Simulation-based preservation attempts may be more likely than people expect, based on the logic that simulated humans likely outnumber physical humans (we could be in a simulation to determine how many simulations per human we will eventually make ourselves). However it is clear that the simulator(s) either already are communicating with us or do not care to, and to gain any more direct access to their attention we’d have to hack the simulation, in which case there may be more clever things to do than call attention to our hacking. However, it is likely that the simulators have highly advanced security technology compared to us. Alternately, given that we are probably being simulated by other humans, and they might be watching, we may be able to appeal to their empathy.

Evolutionary Preservation and Genetic Preservation depend on a misunderstanding of genetics, Philosophical Preservation on a misunderstanding of the natures of reality vs rationalization, and Time-travel Preservation suggests that making a commitment to something that 10%-50% of humans already made will make you notable to time travelers. This sort of thing detracts from your suggestion since you’re grasping at straws to find alternatives.

Granted, it’s hard to find alternatives. I suppose EEG data could be collected as well, and would also have research benefits. However, like most of the other data that could be collected, it would probably only suffice as a sanity check on your cryonic reconstruction.

christopherj 2 May 2014 13:50 UTC
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in reply to: asr’s comment on: Rebutting radical scientific skepticism

I don’t consider this an advantage. My goal is to find vivid and direct demonstrations of scientific truths, and so I am happy to use things that are commonplace today, like telephones, computers, cameras, or what-have-you.

Well, you could use your smartphone’s accelerometer to verify the equations for centrifugal force, or its GPS to verify parts of special and general relativity, or the fact that its chip functions to verify parts of quantum mechanics. But I’m not sure how you can legitimately claim to be verifying anything; if you don’t trust those laws how can you trust the phone? It would be like using a laser rangefinder to verify the speed of light. For this sort of thing the fact that your equipment functions is better evidence that the people who made it know the laws of physics, than any test you could do with it.

christopherj 2 May 2014 1:25 UTC
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on: Link: Study finds that using a foreign language changes moral decisions
Some hypotheses: 1) Words in the foreign language are not tainted with morality. Using more neutral words in the problem description would have a similar effect.

2) The extra time taken to parse the foreign language description forces more time to think about the problem. Saying the problem slowly, or writing with a huge font, would have a similar effect.

3) The distraction of translating has an effect. Giving the subjects an additional task to do would have a similar effect.

Other studies showed an effect of language helping to discriminate between things like two different colors (aided if your language uses different words for them). That seemed like a different thing, perhaps an effect of categories and practice.

christopherj 2 May 2014 0:53 UTC
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on: Discussion: How scientifically sound are MBAs?
A huge chunk of an MBA’a job is to play a hostile asymmetric game against their employees (where their productivity has somewhere between negative value and positive sentimental value to them and their wages have negative value to you), and an approximately zero sum game against competitors, and a more neutral zero sum game against their customers trading quality and advertizing for price. These sorts of games are complicated and winning strategies change as the playing field evolves and your opponents change tactics. A working strategy could quite legitimately be described as “it simply works, don’t ask why” because no one has quite figured out why. And different strategies will work better or fail miserably depending on who the other players are.

christopherj 2 May 2014 0:29 UTC
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on: Rebutting radical scientific skepticism
As a general rule, the easiest way to verify a scientific discovery is to find out how the original discoverer did it and replicate their experiment. There are sometimes easier ways, and occasionally the discoverers used some expensive equipment… but mostly the requirement is some math and elbow grease/patience. Another advantage of replicating the original discovery is that you don’t accidentally use unverified equipment or discoveries (ie equipment dependent on laws that were unknown at the time).

christopherj 29 Apr 2014 22:44 UTC
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on: The Universal Medical Journal Article Error

This refereed medical journal article, like many others, made the same mistake as my undergraduate logic students, moving the negation across the quantifier without changing the quantifier. I cannot recall ever seeing a medical journal article prove a negation and not make this mistake when stating its conclusions.

That would be interesting if true. I recommend finding another one, since you sya they’re so plentiful. And I also recommend reading it carefully, as the study you chose to make an example of is not the study you were looking for. (If you don’t want to change the exemplar study, it may also be of interest what is your prior for “PhilGoetz is right where all of LessWrong is wrong’)

The different but related question of the proportion of people (especially scientists, regulators, and legislators) misinterpreting such studies might also be worth looking into. It wouldn’t surprise me if people who know better make the same mistake as your logic students, possibly in their subconscious probability sum.

christopherj 29 Apr 2014 22:07 UTC
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in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: Questions to ask theist philosophers? I will soon be speaking with several
Matthew 26:39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

The “cup” is Jesus’ crucifixion, and this prayer implies that Jesus would rather not get crucified, but rather it was God’s will. I suppose it could be read as Jesus wishing there was a different way to forgive sins.

Philippians 2:8 (ESV) And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

While this could be a reference to Jesus living a sinless life, read literally it implies that Jesus was told to volunteer for the whole crucifixion thing. Note that disobeying God could result in anything from no effect to being condemned to eternal hellfire and perhaps having the entire universe cursed for good measure. But maybe Jesus cheerfully volunteered.

christopherj 29 Apr 2014 14:53 UTC
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in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: Skills and Antiskills

Still, one can ask if generally speaking, a person is better off learning Skill X.

Doesn’t stop one from answering that, generally speaking, it depends on the person and circumstances. :-p

On a more serious note, I think that it is rather different to ask if for a skill X, X is more useful than not to the sort of people that learned X, as compared to asking if a random person would benefit from X. For example, I’d say that learning neurosurgery procedures is useful to a huge percentage of the people who learned it, but useless to the average person. I’d say rationality skills are probably most useful to precisely the sort of people who would not learn any, while providing diminishing returns to rationalists

christopherj 29 Apr 2014 3:59 UTC
2 points
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on: The Cryonics Strategy Space

(Sensible if legal) Compound-interest cryonics: Devote a small chunk of your resources towards a fund which you expect to grow faster than the rate of inflation, with exponential growth (the simplest example would be a bank account with a variable rate that pays epsilon percent higher than the rate of inflation in perpetuity). Sign a contract saying the person(s) who revive you receive the entire pot. Since after a few thousand years the pot will nominally contain almost all the money in the world this strategy will eventually incentivise almost the entire world to dedicate itself to seeking your revival. Although this strategy will not work if postscarcity happens before unfreezing, it collapses into the conventional cryonics problem and therefore costs you no more than the opportunity cost of spending the capital in the fund before you die. (Although apparently this is illegal)

(from the link)

The rule is often stated as follows: “No interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later than twenty-one years after the death of some life in being at the creation of the interest.” For the purposes of the rule, a life is “in being” at conception.

It seems a workaround would be to keep around a frozen embryo. Since frozen embryos are viable with current technology, they probably have to qualify as not dead. You could probably also do it via donating the money to an “independent” organization, but that’s not as cool as using cryonics as a workaround to aid your cryonics.

The bigger problem is that you’ll have trouble investing the money at a rate higher than inflation (and keep in mind that in the US the rate of inflation is much higher than the official number)

christopherj 28 Apr 2014 5:14 UTC
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on: Request for concrete AI takeover mechanisms
There’s just so many routes for an AI to gain power.

Internet takeover: not a direct route to power, but the AI may wish to acquire more computer power and there happens to be a lot of it available. Security flaws could be exploited to spread maliciously (and an AI should know a lot more about programming and hacking than us). Alternately, the AI could buy computing power, or could attach itself to a game or tool it designed such that people willingly allow it onto their computers.

Human alliance: the AI can offer a group of humans wealth, power, knowledge, hope for the future, friendship, charismatic leadership, advice, far beyond what any human could offer. The offer could be legit or a trick, or both. In this way, the AI could control the entirety of human civilization, or whatever size group it wishes to gain direct access to the physical world.

Robot bodies: the AI could design a robot/factory combination capable of self-replication. It would be easy to find an entrepreneur willing to make this, as it implies nearly infinite profits. This is closes to our current technology and easiest to understand, already popularized by various movies. Furthermore, this seems the only method that could be done without assistance from even one human, since the necessary components may already exist.

3D printers: technically a subset of robot bodies, but with improvements to 3D printers the factory size would be much smaller.

Biotechnology: biotechnology has proven its worth for making self-replicators, and microscopic size is sufficient. The AI would need to design a computer --> biology link to allow it to create biotechnology directly. We already have a DNA --> protein machine (ribosomes) and a data—DNA system (however companies that produce made-to-order DNA do it). All that is needed is for the AI to be able to figure out what proteins it wants.

Chemo/bio/nanotechnology: Odds are the AI would prefer some alternatives to our DNA/protein system, one more suited to calculation rather than abiogenesis/evolution. However, I have no concrete examples.

Reprogramming a human: Perhaps the AI considers the current robots unacceptable and can’t design its own biotechnology, and thinks humans are unreliable. Besides merely convincing humans to help it, perhaps the AI could use a mind-machine interface or other neuro-techonlogy to directly control a human as an extension of itself. This seems like a rather terrible idea, since the AI would probably prefer either a robotic body, biological body, or nano-techological body of its own design. Would make for a nice horror story though,

christopherj 27 Apr 2014 21:14 UTC
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on: Skills and Antiskills

If dancing will largely prevent you from having interesting conversations, it may well be an antiskill—but if you go to a lot of nightclubs where loud music makes conversation difficult, knowing how to dance seems very useful indeed!

This seems like a poor example—why go to loud nightclubs if not to dance, conversely knowing how to dance increases the chance that you’ll choose to go to loud nightclubs. The benefits and drawbacks of dancing are similar whether the music is loud or soft. It only makes sense if you were dragged to the party and had to make the best of it.

I think a better example would be martial arts—there are situations where knowing martial arts could get you into a ton of trouble (eg some gang wants to beat you up as a show of dominance, but with trained instinct you manage to hurt one of them), and others where it could save your life. As a more mundane example, knowing facts about politics seems to polarize people by allowing them better motivated skepticism of opposing viewpoints.

christopherj 27 Apr 2014 21:00 UTC
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in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: Skills and Antiskills
Depends on if you use it to activate analysis paralysis, cynicism, and to find excellent excuses, or to make good decisions and act on them. Most any skill can be abused, even the most useful ones.

christopherj 27 Apr 2014 17:45 UTC
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on: Questions to ask theist philosophers? I will soon be speaking with several
First, I should note that all the most common/obvious questions have been thoroughly answered (where thorough refers to length). For many of these questions, you could get a better answer from reading what has already been written about it. Edit: you probably don’t want to ask these questions as bluntly as I’ve worded them.

Why is choice of god mainly determined by which country a person was raised in, like eg language but unlike eg science? Does belief in God help one make more accurate predictions (not “better explanations”) than using a secular model?

Why is wisdom praised throughout the Bible, except for a reversal in the New Testament, where standard wisdom is condemned as an opponent to Godly wisdom? Why is it that higher education leads to lower rates of theism, and what is this evidence of?

Why are various good traits assigned to God? For example, why is God considered forgiving if He demands a blood sacrifice (human sacrifice according to Christians) before He can forgive sins? I know humans who can forgive without requiring any sacrifice, nor even a request for forgiveness, remorse, etc. Why is God considered just, when He is willing not only to excuse evildoers, but actually punish the innocent in their place as a sacrifice (and eternally reward people for a trivial thing with no moral value like believing in Jesus)? Why is God considered merciful what with going out of His way to eternally punish people in Hell? I’ve heard that the answer to this sort of question is that God is holy—is holiness some sort of terrible character flaw that we must avoid at all costs, or something to be emulated?

Why do people say that Jesus willingly died for our sins, when He clearly didn’t (Matthew 26:39) and don’t forget that disobeying God is frequently regarded as resulting in eternal damnation. Some people say that Jesus suffered in our place—shouldn’t that mean eternal damnation, not being dead for 3 days? Why can’t I die for everyone’s sins, or at least my own? Why all the confusion with what exactly “death” means in the Bible, especially if it starts in Genesis 3 yet is prevented by believing in Jesus?

Compare Genesis 3:3-5 vs Genesis 3:22. Why is the serpent considered a liar? Why is God upset at humans knowing good and evil in Genesis, yet elsewhere wants that distinction taught?

Consider the sort of worlds created by humans to interact without other humans—eg the worlds in which MMORPGs are set. These worlds have moral laws, unbreakable ones. For example, in many MMORPGs, theft is simply against the laws of physics in that universe, as is murder but not dueling, much like in our universe traveling faster than the speed of light is forbidden. Why wasn’t our universe designed with moral laws of some kind to protect one person from another (eg such a universe could allow dueling to the death, gambling, and adultery, but not murder, theft and rape, as part of the laws of physics). Free will and choice are not the answer, as I am not free to travel faster than the speed of light, regardless of my will or choice, nor is the ability to violate another’s will necessarily and improvement in free will.

How would the world be different if someone else (eg the listener, or Mother Teresa) were made omnipotent and omniscient in place of God?