I have taken the survey.
DanArmak
Notes taken while I answered.
What is your family’s religious background, as of the last time your family practiced a religion?
We’re Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents’ generation. (And then only because I knew only one of them personallyh, so it’s reasonable to assume at least one of the others could have been religious.) I get that every human is descended from religious ones, but conflating this datapoint with someone whose actual parents practiced a religion once seems wrong.
Probability
For some of these my confidence was so low that I didn’t answer. For some questions, there are also semantic quibbles that would affect the answer:
Supernatural: AFAIK there is no agreed-on definition of “supernatural” events other than “physically impossible” ones which of course have a probability of 0 (epsilon). OTOH, if you specify “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe”, the probability is very high.
Anti-Agathics: what counts as reaching an age of 1000 years? Humans with a few patched organs and genes? Cyborgs? Uploads with 1000 subjective years of experience?
Simulation: this is complicated by ontological differences: whether, when universe A is simulated in universe B, this somehow contributes to B’s “realness” measure, or actually creates B. Is existence of a universe a binary predicate? I answered as if it is.
Type of global catastrophic risk: although I chose the most probable, there wasn’t a large difference in estimated probability for the top few leading dangers.
about how often do you read or hear about another plausible-seeming technique
At first I thought “every few days”. But then I realized these techniques almost never work out or are unsupported by evidence, and so it would be wrong to call them plausible-seeming. So I recalibrated and answered much more rarely.
Then I saw the next questions asked how often I tried the technique and how often it actually worked. But I already choose not to try them most of the time because I expect not to succeed. So I let my previous answer stand. I hope this was as intended.
CFAR bonus questions:
You are a certain kind of person
Are these questions claiming that I, DanArmak, am this kind of person who can change; or that everyone can change? The answers would be very different. I assumed the latter, but it would be nice to have confirmation.
Other nitpicks: a certain kind on which dimension? Some aspects of personality are much harder to change than others.
What is the measure of “true” change? By the means available to us today, we can’t change into truly nonhuman intelligences, so does that mean our “kind” cannot be changed? And the answers to the questions will change over time as technology creates new more effective interventions.
And: does “basic things” mean “fundamental things” or “minor insignificant things”? Normally I would assume “fundamental things”, but then it seems identical to the previous question.
On a personal note, this set of questions struck me as incompatible after answering the previous sets. They seem to deliberately probe my irrational biases and cached beliefs, and I felt I couldn’t answer them while I was deliberately thinking reflectively and asking myself why I believed the answers I was giving.
How would you describe your opinion on immigration?
The politics of immigration in Israel are totally different from those of the US (and I expect this holds for many other countries too in their different ways). I didn’t answer because I was afraid of biasing the poll, and it would have been nice to get more guidance in the question.
This is a very powerful demonstration of how the sudden death of a single loved friend affects one more than the horrible, slow torture to death of a thousand strangers in Azkaban.
This applies to Harry—but I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about myself and all the readers now expressing their pain on reddit.
A single death is felt differently from a thousand deaths. At least in fiction...
We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?
Discussing politics is not productive. The political opinions held by most people don’t affect actual politics. Discussing politics would be a waste of time even if it wasn’t mindkilling. I make a point of never reading local political news and not knowing anything about my country’s politics, as a matter of epistemical hygiene.
Gender relations and understanding, on the other hand, are important in everyone’s lives. I can’t ignore gender like I do politics, and I wouldn’t want to. On the contrary, I want to become rational and virtuous about gender.
So I very much want to have discussions about gender, unless the consensus is that our rationality is too weak and we can’t discuss this subject without causing net harm (or net harm to women, etc).
Too late, and now they’re dead.
Only while the island is smaller than half the world :-)
Anyway, I can always measure your shore and get any result I want.
- 5 May 2012 1:08 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Rationality Quotes May 2012 by (
I strongly agree that the methodology should have presented up front. lsusr’s response is illuminative and gives invaluable context.
But my first reaction to your comment was to note the aggressive tone and what feels like borderline name-calling. This made me want to downvote and ignore it at first, before I thought for a minute and realized that yes, on the object level this is a very important point. It made it difficult for me to engage with it.
So I’d like to ask you what exactly you meant (because it’s easy to mistake tone on the internet) and why. Calling the LW audience (i.e. including me) ‘alarmist and uninformed’ I can understand (if not necessarily agree with) but ‘an AGI death cult’? That seems to mean a cult that wants to bring about death through AGI but that’s the opposite of what LW is about and so I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean that. Please clarify.
If it doesn’t make sense, play with it until it does. If it’s not broken, break it.
Spoken like a true cat.
PMd explanations are not publicly visible, so they don’t help others who read the thread and make the same mistake as the downvoted poster. They can’t be upvoted by others, which removes a big (in my experience) incentive to post the explanations.
Can someone please provide hard data on trolling, to assess its kind and scale? I can only remember a single example of repeated apparent trolling—comments made by private_messaging and presumed sockpuppets. I’m not very active though, and miss many discussions while they’re still unvoted-on.
- 1 Sep 2012 21:12 UTC; 7 points) 's comment on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio by (
If people in the 1500 years since the Romans had been more willing to rename months...
I posted a longer form of this as a review / solution. Here’s a condensed version:
Partial Transfiguration works through a deep understanding of physics. It allows Harry to to create any physically valid state of the universe, as long as he can hold it in his mind.
What this means is that you don’t need to Transfigure a gun in order to fire a bullet. You can just Transfigure a bullet in the state of having been fired.
This is what the ability to Transfigure any physically valid configuration really means. You don’t need to make a bulky laser weapon. Just make a laser pulse: an arbitrary amount of high-energy photons, aimed in the right direction. Instead of a shaped explosive charge, make a shaped explosion. Instead of antimatter, make gamma rays. Instead of a black hole, dangerous to everybody near it, make a bunch of gravitons and aim them at your enemy.
So given all that, how should Harry kill his enemies?
Lasers are messy weapons. Even black robes are reflective in some wavelengths. Use too much energy and you’ll get a fireball back in your face. Release the energy too quickly and it will create an explosion instead of steadily boiling away your target.
Kinetic energy is safer. Transfigure a set of diamond missiles-in-flight, one aimed at each Death Eaters and one also for Voldemort, who is conveniently floating behind them. Giving them a speed of, oh, 0.005c should do nicely. They should be as large as possible—in order to leave large holes—but, since the difficulty and length of Transfiguration scales with the size of the target form, they will be flat and thin: head-sized and a millimeter thick, lying on the ground in front of Harry until the moment when, Transfiguration completed, they instantaneously acquire the forward velocity (and some angular momentum) that will have them impacting the Death Eaters’ masks a few microseconds later. The slight layer of air turned into plasma carried in front of them will serve as a nice bonus.
Transfiguring the ground in front of Harry, if possible, is the best solution. Lacking that, pieces of Harry’s legs will serve. Since Transfiguration can change the size and mass of the subject, the resulting wounds need not be deep.
If Transfiguration scales with the diameter of the target form, rather than its volume, we will reluctantly use much smaller bullets. A thousand diamond squares, one centimeter across and a millimeter thick, will form a sheet 31 centimeters on a side: much smaller than a car battery. An average of 26 .40 caliber bullets per head should be sufficient to the task.
In addition to what others said, people will be discouraged from explaining downvotes. (Or maybe encouraged to explain even minor downvotes.) Once a comment is at −3 without a (good) explanation in a reply to it, people will not want to pay a penalty to explain to a potentially well meaning poster what was wrong with their comment. Instead they will be incentivized to further downvote it without explanation.
Not all comments deserving −3 karma are trolls, some are merely stupid / insensitive / wrong / unoriginal.
This change will make people think: is this comment a troll? If it is, downvote it to −3 or beyond; if not, don’t downvote below −2. If that’s desirable behavior, and we come to agree about it, and −3 is the right level for it, then we will have many comments at −2 that previously would have been downvoted further, because people will not want to tell others “you’re trolling” unless they really think so.
(And then people would probably want comments hidden at −2, not −3: the karma level of bad, though not quite trolling, comments.)
- 31 Aug 2012 6:41 UTC; 18 points) 's comment on [META] Karma for last 30 days? by (
Hey, I can hack and whine at the same time!
Lowering another person’s status [....] “lowering someone’s status” is “humiliating them.” • Contradict them. Tell them they are wrong. Prove it with facts and logic.
There’s your two-sentence summary of why human rationality requires dedicated training.
In 1923, England and France divided between them the previously Turkish territories of what are modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. They drew a pencil line on a map to mark the treaty border.
It turned out that the thickness of the pencil line itself was several hundred meters on the ground. In 1964, Israel fought a battle with Syria over that land.
People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That’s “scribbles on a piece of paper” for you.
Ref: a book found by Google. I originally learned about this from an Israeli plaque at the Dan River preserve near the border.
His life experience has been pretty unusual. He doesn’t really know what it’s like to be challenged in school.
If that’s really unusual in Australian schools, they are vastly better than Israeli ones or, from what I hear, most others in the Western world. (Possibly excepting some expensive, private ones.) (I realize this isn’t the reason you call him a genius.)
I was certainly never challenged in school, and neither were my friends. This was not because I was a genius, however, but because the teachers and textbook authors were of the grade better used as landfill. Sadly I had no encouragement from adults and couldn’t switch schools or drop out, and I didn’t have the will or resourcefulness to do anything useful in my free time.
This kid is very fortunate in having you as a friend. With the resources available on the Internet today, having “official” approval and encouragement in his intellectual development is half the hard work done.
Thank you for helping raise the next generation well.
You can make copies of books and of software CDs very cheaply. Given a law of conservation, it can’t be the case that destroying (sacrificing) a cheap copy would gain you powerful results, or else you could generate infinite resources very quickly (and wizards would realize this).
Maybe destroying the last extant copy of a software would achieve the effect. One wonders what great magic was fueled by the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
I propose a simpler hypothesis: we do not see unborn babies (of any age). Therefore we do not empathize with them nearly as strongly as we do with humans we see and interact with, such as babies. Therefore we don’t care as much about them being killed.
I’ve faced this problem and partially overcome it. I’ll try my best to describe this. However, I’ve also been diagnosed with depression and prescribed SSRIs in the past, so my approaches to handling the problem may not fit you.
You have acquired your estimates of the dangers of the future by explicit reasoning. The default estimates that your emotional, unconscious brain provided you with were too optimistic. This is the case for almost everyone.
Consider that even though you have realized the future is bleak, your emotional, unconscious, everyday-handling mind still hasn’t updated its estimates. It is still too optimistic. It just needs to be allowed to express this optimism.
Right now, you probably believe that your emotional outlook must be rational, and must correspond to your conscious estimates of the future. You are forcing your emotions to match the future you foresee, and so you feel afraid.
I suggest that you allow your emotions to become disconnected from your conscious long-term predictions. Stop trying to force yourself to be unhappy because you predict bad things. Say to yourself: I choose to be happy and unafraid no matter what I predict!
Emotions are not a a tool like rational thought, which you have to use in a way that corresponds to the real world. You can use them in any way you like. It’s rational to feel happy about a bleak future, because feeling happy is a good thing and there is no point in feeling unhappy!
Being happy or not, afraid or not, does not have to be determined by your conscious outlook. The only things that force your mind to be unhappy are immediate problems: pain, hunger, loneliness; and the immediate expectation of these. If you accept that your goal is to be happy and unafraid as a fact independent of the future you foresee, you can find various techniques to achieve this. Unfortunately they tend to vary for different people.
Expecting to die of cancer in fifty years does not, in itself, cause negative emotions like fear. Imagining the death in your mind, and dwelling on it, does cause fear. In the first place, avoid thinking about any future problem that you are not doing anything about. Use the defensive mechanism of not acknowledging unsolved problems.
This does not mean that on the conscious level you’ll ignore problems. It is possible to decouple the two things, with practice. You can take long-term strategic actions (donate to SIAI, research immortality) without acutely fearing the result of failure by not imagining that result.
We are used to think of compartmentalization as an irrational bias, but it’s possible to compartmentalize your strategic actions—which try to improve the future—and meanwhile be happy just as if the future was going to be fine by default.
In a similar vein, I tend to suffer from a “too-active imagination” when reading about the suffering of other people in the news, and vividly imagining the events described. My solution has been to stop reading the news. When you’re faced with something terrible and you’re not doing anything about it anyway, just look away. Defeat the implicit LW conditioning that tells you looking away from the suffering of others is wrong. It’s wrong only if it affects your actions, not your emotions.