If you look at their chart you’ll see they only consider 3 different literacy levels. Maybe that means the default expectation is 33% or something like that, but it’s not the same as “highest income level” or “highest age level”.
Dacyn
Karma: 626
Phenomenal conservatism isn’t foundationally justified, the justification is more pragmatic—without PC, you have no starting point , and can’t say anything about anything.
PC is one possible starting point, but there are others. For example, axiomatic mathematics allows you to say that 2+2=4, without the justification for that being “it seems that 2+2=4”. As another example, you could assume anti-PC—that however the world seems to you, the truth must be the opposite. So “without PC, you have no starting point” is not a reasonable justification for PC, even from a pragmatic point of view.
Huemer’s “standard argument for PC” doesn’t make sense to me. OK, so it is self-defeating to believe not-PC. Does this mean we are justified in believing PC? Why not say that we don’t have a belief on whether PC is true one way or the other?
(Personally I think PC is obvious, but I don’t think it’s possible to prove its obviousness / justifiedness analytically)
In your example in 3.3, I don’t think it’s true that FDT recommends one-boxing in scenario 2. Your choice of boxes is a product of (among other things) both your genes and of FDT’s recommendation (just the former if you don’t use FDT). But since “[t]he cases where the simulation is inaccurate are the same as the ones where there isn’t an overlap between your gene and which box you take”, it follows that your simulated action is unaffected by FDT’s recommendation. So FDT acts as if it has no control over your simulated action, and therefore two-boxes.
I think the weirdness of this example comes from the stipulation that “[t]he cases where the simulation is inaccurate are the same as the ones where there isn’t an overlap between your gene and which box you take”. This is actually a pretty strong hypothesis! It makes the scenario very different from how it would be if you just talked about a 99.9% accurate simulator.
A more minor issue: when you write “Imagine that there’s some gene that correlates 99.9% with two-boxing” it is not clear whether you refer to two-boxing in scenario 1 or two-boxing in scenario 2. They can be different, of course. But I think your argument is closest to correct if we assume you are talking about two-boxing in scenario 2.
I mean, I guess the real question is what do you do if some opponent of animal rights disagrees with all your changes and reverts them. Then you have a dispute among editors, so the policy I quoted is relevant. Maybe you don’t think this scenario is very likely but I think it is at least somewhat plausible,
I think you have to be pretty careful. If all you’re going to be doing is “strategically editing” Wiki articles, that’s probably fine, though don’t be surprised if the edits get reverted back. On the other hand, if the goal of PAW is to “influence decisions” on Wikipedia, then that violates their rule against meatpuppetry:
High-profile disputes on Wikipedia often bring new editors to the site. Some individuals may promote their causes by bringing like-minded editors into the dispute, including enlisting assistance off-wiki. The recruited editors are sometimes referred to as meatpuppets, following a common Internet usage. While Wikipedia assumes good faith, especially for new users, actively recruiting new accounts or users on Wikipedia, or recruiting people (either on-wiki or off-wiki) to create an account or edit anonymously in order to influence decisions on Wikipedia, is prohibited.
But if you were scared of being wrong, then assigning probability literally zero means you can’t change your mind, ever, even if Professor McGonagall shows up with a Time-Turner tomorrow.
I dunno man. If you give up the idea of a causal universe then on the face of things you are also giving up:
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The arrow of time. Not only do eggs unscramble themselves, but they do so at the same rate that eggs get scrambled.
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Free will in the compatibilist sense. All the diagrams you drew here have become meaningless. There’s no point in asking whether to change your mind if McGonagall shows up with a Time-Turner, because your mind is just going to be changed or not changed according to whatever makes the universe be consistent, and “you” are just a constraint to be worked around, no longer causally efficacious.
Really if McGonagall shows up with something she claims is a Time-Turner, the right thing to do would be to stress-test that assertion by travelling back in time and then doing the opposite of what you observed yourself to do. In the story you shut this down by saying that “time paradoxes” are known to result in disasters, but that’s a very suspicious claim; it’s not clear why a random “logical universe” would have that property.
Basically, although I agree non-causal logical universes can exist, I’m not sure if minds can live in them.
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Another consideration regarding suicide paternalism: the way we do things now, people considering whether to commit suicide are disincentivized to talk it through with friends and therapists, since it may lead them to being involuntarily committed to a mental hospital (which can sometimes lead to other negative events like their being fired from their job). If on the other hand people had the chance to talk through their suicidal tendencies without fear from these repercussions, many of them might not end up attempting suicide after all,
I have been informed that it’s inappropriate to talk about your criticisms of someone that originated on one forum on a different forum where the target of your criticisms cannot respond. So I’m retracting the parent comment, and apologizing to Said Achmiz for it.
Chemistry nit: the molecule composed of hydrogen and chlorine is HCl (hydrochloric acid), not H2C.
But in this case, look, as I mentioned in §II.3, Said has been compiling a collection of his best comments. I think that if you read it, it’s just very obviously good stuff by the usual standards that rationalists use to evaluate our stuff.
I mostly agree with this, but want to highlight an exception: Said linked to his explanation of the solution to the Monty Hall problem as an example of one of his best comments. This started a thread on DSL about how accurate his purported solution was. The consensus by the end of it was that Said was somewhere between confused and crackpottish. Said never retracted anything he said though. Just wanted to add that as a data point,
OK, sounds reasonable.
I think that although most people are probably “CEV-good”, there are also quite many “CEV-monsters”, i.e. people who value suffering for the sake of suffering (of others).
Just to be clear, you are labelling as “CEV-monsters” people who value justice for its own sake, even if/when justice involves some amount of suffering? I don’t think the “monster” label is appropriate, even if you disagree with the position.
Isn’t this the fallacy of the gray? Yes consensuses can be wrong, but they’re probably better than nothing, which makes them evidence in a Bayesian sense, a valid argument even if not a decisive one.
I see. And I agree that there’s a place for such an attitude, that it can be interesting to explore the formal consequences of a system such as ZFC even if you don’t necessarily think it’s “true” in any Platonic sense. (Although maybe you want to at least be able to hope that the system is consistent; no one proves things in naive set theory anymore even though it is an extremely generative system!)
Anyway, part of my point was that systems like PA that are weaker and more intuitive than ZFC can be nearly equally “interestingly generative”, with some narrow exceptions. So even if that is your primary criterion for choosing an axiom system, you could still come to the conclusion that PA is a better foundational system if you still care at all about an abstract notion of truth.
Regarding the von Neumann quote, presumably the math you are encountering has already been vetted by other mathematicians, so you can assume it is likely to be true even without understanding it. In such a situation, it makes sense to allow yourself to get used to it. It is different if you want to study the foundations of math; since people disagree about it you will need to form your own opinion.
I’m getting the feeling you want to make a point but you’re not looking at the context of my comment.
Actually I was trying to make three separate unrelated points. I think we agree sufficiently on the first and third points that it would be unproductive to discuss them further. Regarding my second point:
This feels like a plug or advertisement for PA not an actual point.
Well I do like to plug for PA when I can (it’s a good foundation for math!), but I think I do have an actual point as well.
Truth
I mean, sure, there are a lot of unintuitive things that you can prove from true axioms. But with the axioms themselves, the only basis we could have for asserting that the axioms are true is that they are intuitive. I mean, why else would you think they are true? (In mathematics at least, of course in other fields you could have empirical evidence of something unintuitive.)
Multisets are defined as a tuple of a set
Multisets can be defined in terms of sets, and conversely sets can be defined in terms of multisets. I don’t see either of them as “more fundamental” than the other necessarily, except in terms of which one we’ve chosen to give a more prominent place to.
ZFC was not built to be intuitive. It was built to unify and formalize all of mathematics. It is not supposed to be some kind of universal human way of seeing the world through a mathematical lens. It’s just a set of axioms we build on, and we can choose different sets of axioms at will.
If ZFC is not intuitive (and my opinion is that it is not), then we shouldn’t assume that any theorems it proves are actually true, and we should if possible rely on a weaker system which is intuitive, such as the Peano axioms. Peano arithmetic is in fact powerful enough to deal with almost all of modern mathematics (except for abstract set theory), it’s just that people are so used to using ZFC as the foundation that they rarely check to see whether their theorems can be proven in PA. See for example this book where the author develops a “strong undergraduate curriculum” using a system conservative over PA as the foundation.
Your example of a water molecule assumes we do not distinguish between the hydrogen atoms with indexing
On the atomic level, quantum effects prevent us from distinguishing
I think E(blue_pressers|blue_wins) should be replaced by N/2, where N is the number of players. If more than 50% of people are already voting Blue, then your vote makes no difference to anything.
I will also quote my comment from DataSecretsLox (https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,15775.msg787363.html#msg787363):
If you are perfectly altruistic and assume all lives are equal, then the question can be modelled mathematically as follows:
>50% Blue: It doesn’t matter which button you press. 50% exactly: If you press red you are killing N/2 people where N is the number of people playing the game. You survive either way. >50% Red: You survive if you press red, die if you press blue. Your decision has no impact on anyone else’s fate.
So you should press Blue if and only if N/2 times Prob(50% exactly) is greater than Prob(>50% Red). Which is probably true if you expect most people to choose Blue, and is probably false if you expect most people to choose Red.
So basically it is a Keynesian beauty contest, with a bias towards Red coming from the fact that not everyone is perfectly altruistic (an understatement). In my opinion, that makes Red the correct answer even for someone who is perfectly altruistic, and even if most people are perfectly altruistic, as long as the deviations from altruism tend towards selfishness.
Of course this mathematical model is simplifying a lot, but I think it is enough to undercut the idea that any sufficiently altruistic person should pick Blue.
Never mind, for some reason I thought you were being offered a 2:1 payout as well as lopsided odds; that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Just for the record, bijections between R^3 and R^2 can absolutely be measurable. In fact, any two measure spaces (X,\mu) and (Y,\nu) such that \mu and \nu are atomless and \mu(X) = \nu(Y) are isomorphic (i.e. there exists a measure-preserving bijection between them).