Diadem

Karma: 226

Diadem 23 Jun 2016 8:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: SquirrelInHell’s comment on: Towards cause priotisation estimates for child abuse
Your claim was that child abuse and trauma have barely any influence on adult life. This is clearly an extraordinary claim, that requires evidence to be taken seriously.

Your evidence are three quotations, two of which only contain more links, and the third is about the heritability of divorce, which has nothing to do with your claim.

So in other words you have given zero evidence for your claim. Maybe there is some evidence to be found in one of the many citations you gave, but without knowing which one or what to look for it would take many hours to investigate this. That is not a reasonable burden to place on your readers, given the prior unlikeliness of your initial claim. I’m not saying you should make an airtight case for your claim in a single post, but at the very least you should give us some reason to put in further effort.

Diadem 21 Jun 2016 12:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: oath’s comment on: Towards cause priotisation estimates for child abuse
There’s nothing rational about refusing to believe data you don’t like, and linking Eliezer doesn’t change that.

It’s good to have an absurdity filter. You can’t investigate every claim on the internet in great detail, so dismissing the more unbelievable ones out of hand is not a bad strategy. But you need some kind of reason. Either a known bias or untrustworthiness of the author, or knowledge that at least some of the claims made are false. Assuming you don’t have some personal beef with the author, I don’t see how you can dismiss this post out of hand. The numbers mentioned are quite reasonable and in line with what you find in other sources.

Also, there’s nothing wrong with conflating two things that are, in fact, identical. Not all child abuse is equally bad, and an occasional spanking won’t greatly harm a child. But it will harm a child. This has been shown often.

Diadem 17 Jun 2016 8:26 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Rationality test: Vote for trump
The US federal budget is 3.7 trillion. The president probably can’t meaningfully affect the spending of most of that, but his impact is still significant. If I had to ballpark it I’d say a trillion over 4 years seems likely. Plus his long term effect on the nation through laws and regulations.

How many Americans vote? About a hundred million? So the average value of a vote is in the area of $10,000. That is a lot of money. Sure it is much less if you live outside a swingstate, but not by a factor 100k.

Even if your non-swingstate vote was meaningless there is still a tragedy of the commons. If every California Democrat stayed home because the Democrats will win California anyway… they won’t. The rational solution to a tragedy of the commons is not to defect.

Diadem 5 May 2016 16:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Collaborative Truth-Seeking
Very droll.

But define winning. In many situations, finding the truth is winning.

For example take global warming. Maybe I’m lobbyist for big oil and for me winning means making sure no one takes global warming seriously. But even then knowing the facts is still in my interest. So if I’m amongst fellow lobbyists who I trust it is in my interest to take an open, truth seeking approach. This will help me identify the strong and weak points in my opponents’ arguments. It will help in formulating distractionary strategies. Etc. I will just have to make sure no one records the meeting and then leaks it.

Diadem 26 Apr 2016 9:46 UTC
11 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Exercise in rationality: popular quotes, revisited
I think that’s somewhat missing the point of a lot of advice like that though. Often advice in the form of proverbs or popular quotes is not meant to be taken literally. It’s meant to offer you a new angle from which to look at the problem.

Just because two quotes contradict each other, doesn’t mean they can’t both be good advice. If you think someone is being too rash, quoting a proverb like “discretion is the better part of valour” can be good advice. But if you think they are being too cautious, the opposite (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”) can also be good advice.

Most advice is context dependent.

Diadem 29 Jan 2016 11:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: The map of quantum (big world) immortality
Sure, cryonics would help. But it wouldn’t be more than a drop in the ocean. If QI is true, and cryonics is theoretically possible, then 500 years from now there’ll be 3 kinds of universes: 1) Universes where I’m dead, either because cryonics didn’t pan out (perhaps society collapsed), or because for some reason I wasn’t revived. 2) Universes where I’m alive thanks to cryonics and 3) Universes where I’m alive due to quantum fluctuations ‘miraculously’ keeping me alive.

Clearly the measure of the 3rd kind of universe will be very very small compared to the other two. And since I don’t experience the first, that means that subjectively I’m overwhelmingly likely to experience being alive thanks to cryonics. And in most of those universes I’m probably healthy and happy. So that sounds good.

But quantum immortality implies forced immortality forever. No way to escape, no way to permanently shut yourself down once you get bored with life. No way to die even after the heath death of the universe.

No matter how good the few trillion years before that will be, the end result will be floating around as an isolated mind in an empty universe, kept alive by random quantum fluctuations in an increasingly small measure of all universes that will nevertheless always have subjective measure of 1, for literally ever.

Now personally I don’t think QI is very likely. In fact I consider it extremely unlikely. All I’m saying is that if it were true, that’d be a nightmare.

Diadem 28 Jan 2016 15:44 UTC
5 points
on: The map of quantum (big world) immortality
The problem with Quantum Immortality is that it is a pretty horrible scenario. That’s not an argument against it being true of course, but it’s an argument for hoping it’s not true.

Let’s assume QI is true. If I walk under a bus tomorrow, I won’t experience universes where I die, so I’ll only experience miraculously surviving the accident. That sounds good.

But here’s where the nightmare starts. Dying is not a binary process. There’ll be many more universes where I survive with serious injuries then universes where I survive without injury. Eventually I’ll grow old. There’ll be some universes where by random quantum fluctuations that miraculously never happens, but in the overwhelming majority of them I’ll grow old and weak. And then I won’t die. In fact I wouldn’t even be able to die if I wanted to. I could decide to commit suicide, but I’ll only ever experience those universes where for some reason I chose not to go through with it (or something prevented me from going through with it).

It’s the ultimate horror scenario. Forced immortality, but without youth or health.

If QI is true having kids would be the ultimate crime. If QI is true the only ethical course of action would be to pour all humanity’s resources into developing an ASI and program it to sterilize the universe. That won’t end the nightmare, there’ll always be universes where we fail to build such an ASI, but at least it will reduce the measure of suffering.
What links here?
- mako yass's comment on A Strange Argument about the potential Importance of Multiverse Theory by mako yass (14 Feb 2016 4:47 UTC; 1 point)

Diadem 28 Jan 2016 15:21 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016
Downvoted. I personally agree that username2′s idea is naive, but it seems sincerely held, and making fun of it instead of explaining its problems is dickish.

Diadem 24 Dec 2015 12:14 UTC
21 points
in reply to: Gunslinger’s comment on: Voiceofra is banned
Wait? is ‘LessWrong’ not an admin account? I always assumed it was, but this thread implies otherwise.

I think it’s an extremely bad idea to allow an ordinary user to name themselves after the site. You’re basically inpersonating an admin!

Diadem 9 Nov 2015 11:49 UTC
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015
When I was a little kid we used to make blackberry jam. You can just pick wild blackberries in some places, which is quite a lot of work, but hey, you’re out in nature, it’s fun, and it’s free. Looking back I think it was mostly my parents picking berries while my sisters and I were running around and playing in the forest and eating half the berries our parents picked.

The recipe for making jam is indeed just berries, water and sugar. We used a large pot though, not a frying pan. Just cook and steer until it’s done. Pour the jam into a jar while it’s still hot, and screw the lit on. As the jam cools it’ll create a slight underpressure in the jar, helping preserve the jam and tightening the lit even further.

Sealed properly it can stay good for a long time. One year we kind of overdid things (my sisters and I were a bit older, and actually starting helping instead of ‘helping’) and ended up with over 300 jars of blackberry jam. They were still good 10 years later.

Self-made jam tastes much better than store-bought jam. Whether that is because it actually tastes better, or because your brain just thinks it tastes better because you made it yourself, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, the end result is the same.

Diadem 7 Nov 2015 1:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: HungryHobo’s comment on: LINK: An example of the Pink Flamingo, the obvious-yet-overlooked cousin of the Black Swan
Would’t it be more accurate to use a geometric mean here, instead of an arithmic one?

An arithmic mean really obscures low predictions.

Diadem 21 Oct 2015 15:00 UTC
10 points
on: [Link] Study: no big filter, we’re just too early
The article is unclear in its terms. At the top is says “92 percent of the Universe’s habitable planets have yet to be born” and at the bottom it says “Earth is in the first 8 percent”. Those two statements can only both be true if no habitable planets were formed between the formation of the earth and now (which is, of course, not the case). If the former is correct, earth might be significantly higher than top 8%.

I still don’t see how this escapees the Fermi paradox though. Even if we’re top 1%, that still means there must be great, great many potential alien civilizations out there. A factor 100 isn’t going to significantly affect that conclusion.

Diadem 1 Oct 2015 10:57 UTC
2 points
on: The Trolley Problem and Reversibility
It seems to me that there is an important difference between ‘flipping the switch’ and ‘flipping the switch back’, which is the intent of the action.

In the first scenario, your intent is to sacrifice one person to safe many.

In the second scenario, your intent is to undo a previous wrong.

Thus a deontologist may perfectly consistently argue that the first action is wrong (because you are never allowed to treat people only as means, or whatever deontological rule you want to invoke), while the second action is allowed.

Diadem 15 Sep 2015 10:50 UTC
10 points
on: [LINK] Deep Learning Machine Teaches Itself Chess in 72 Hours

Straight out of the box, the new machine plays at the same level as the best conventional chess engines, many of which have been fine-tuned over many years. On a human level, it is equivalent to FIDE International Master status, placing it within the top 2.2 percent of tournament chess players. But even with this disadvantage, it is competitive. “Giraffe is able to play at the level of an FIDE International Master on a modern mainstream PC,” says Lai. By comparison, the top engines play at super-Grandmaster level.

That’s a pretty hard contradiction right there. The latter quote is probably the correct one. Modern chess engines beat any human player these days, even running on relatively modest hardware. That’s assuming full length games. At blitz games computers are much better still, compared to humans, because humans are much more error prone.

So if this neural net is playing at master level it’s still much, much weaker than the best computers. From master to grandmaster is a big leap, from grandmaster to world top is another big leap, and the best computers are above even that.

Still interesting of course.

Diadem 1 Sep 2015 9:11 UTC
10 points
on: Meta post: Did something go wrong?
O wow.

I’ve been following Lesswrong for months now, and only because of this post did I found out that there’s more posts hidden under ‘main’ than just the promoted ones. So Thanks Elo!

I now wonder if there are any other hidden site features I don’t know about.

I have to say this is not very good design. Why would you hide posts in such a non-obvious way. It’s also rather inconsistent. The discussion page opens an overview page of newest posts, while the main page shows only a subset of newest posts, and shows the full content instead of an overview. There is apparently a way to get both main and discussion on a single page (see the links Vaniver and ike posted), but then for some reason the overview page is formatted completely differently.

Diadem 25 Aug 2015 11:08 UTC
3 points
on: Why people want to die
Slightly unrelated to the point made above, but there is one particular weird argument that always seems to come up (at least in my circle of friends and acquaintances) when talking about immortality.

I tell someone plan to live forever, and the response is “Not me! That must be terrible! Imagine being forced to watch as everybody you know dies. And what if humanity dies out? You’ll be sitting on a barren world for all eternity. Imagine how bored you will get.”

I call this the ‘cursed with immortality’ argument. It is of course utterly ridiculous, but it’s surprisingly common. My guess is that people place the idea of ‘immortality’ firmly in the realm of fairy tales, and in fairy tales the immortal being desperately trying to die is of course a common theme.

People who use this argument aren’t stupid. They of course realize that an immortality curse is the stuff of fairy tales, and has nothing to do with science. But that’s the point, they don’t consider the question to be part of the realm of science.

And so if you ask people about immortality, make sure they take the question seriously first, and consider it in the right context, before assigning any value to their answer.

Diadem 24 Aug 2015 14:35 UTC
2 points
on: The Sleeping Beauty problem and transformation invariances
Sleeping Beauty is right not to cancel the bet if she is woken up on not-Wednesday (so Monday or Tuesday, but she does not know which). But this is not the optimal strategy. instead she should she roll a 4-sided die and cancel the bet if she rolls a 1. In other words she should keep the bet with 75% chance.

If she always keeps the bet, her expected payout on Wednesday is 0.5 1.5 − 0.5 1 = 0.25. That is she makes 25 cents per dollar bet, on average. But if she cancels the bet with 25% chance each time she wakes up, her expected win is 0.5 0.75 1.5 − 0.5 0.75 0.75 * 1 = 0.28125. So now she makes 28.125 cents for every dollar bet.

I think this illuminates the apparent paradox too. The fact that she is woken up on a not-Wednesday is extra information. She should lower her confidence in winning the bet, knowing the fact that she has been woken up. And she can use this information to her benefit.

If she always cancels the bet though, she destroys this extra information, since the bet will end up cancelled regardless of whether the coin came up heads or tails.

Diadem 24 Aug 2015 8:51 UTC
3 points
on: Robert Aumann on Judaism
Honestly the easiest explanation is just that Aumann is a very muddled thinker when it comes to religion. That’s hardly a surprising explanation—muddled thinking is extremely common when it comes to religion. And it doesn’t mean that such a person can’t otherwise be very rational. I know I’m being blunt here, but I see no reason to look beyond superficial appearances here. Just because a statement is religious doesn’t mean it’s deep.

All this stuff about non overlapping magisteria is honestly just confused nonsense. There’s only one truth. Sure you can approach that truth from different directions, but not if those directions directly contradict each other. Spending a great many pages talking about this just obscures that obvious fact.

And it’s all good and beautiful to say that “Religion is very different from science. The main part of religion is not about the way that we model the real world”. But I’ve never met a religious person who said that and then didn’t immediately turn around and started applying their religion to the real world. Aumann also does that. In fact in this very interview he literally says that copying software is wrong because his religion says so. So he clearly is modelling the real world based on his religion.

Diadem 4 Aug 2015 13:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: We really need a “cryonics sales pitch” article.
No that one in a billion was meant to be illustrative, not a real estimate of probability. But honestly even if you lower that 5% probability by only 1 or 2 orders of magnitude the proposition already becomes very dubious.

Don’t forget that you can also extend your life by spending that money some other way. I think the singularity will probably happen somewhere between 2040 and 2060. So when I’m between 58 and 78 years old. This means I have a good chance to make it even without cryonics. Instead of taking that extra life insurance to pay for cryonics, I could for example also decide to work a few hours a week less, and spend that time on exercise. Not only would that be more enjoyable, it would also probably do more for my chances to reach the singularity.

If you’re significantly older now, that particular math may change. But cryonics is still a long shot, and spending so much money still means a significant hit in quality of life.

I’m very curious why you think 5% is a realistic estimate of the probability of cryonics working (actually on the probability of cryonics working for you personally. So some of that probability will have to be spent on you not dying in a way that makes cryonics impossible, or on the cryonics company not going bust, or on there being no unexpected legal obstacles, etc). If you want to sell me on cryonics, this is what you will have to sell me on.

Diadem 4 Aug 2015 11:14 UTC
9 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: We really need a “cryonics sales pitch” article.
I’d say the most important objection to cryonics is the one you raise last, and only spend 1 line on. As a result your entire list seems rather weak. Because it’s not just that cryonics has a low chance of working. If cryonics was free I’d sign up tomorrow, low chance be damned. But it isn’t free, it is in fact very expensive.

So let’s rephrase your question 12: You have a rare fatal disease. There is a complicated medical procedure that can cure you. The good news is that it is painless and has no side effects. The bad news is that it costs $200,000 and has only a 5% chance of working.

I’d expect many people would still say yes, but also many people would say no.

And a 5% chance of cryonics working seems hopelessly optimistic to me. So let’s make that a 0.0000001% chance of working. Suddenly it seems like a pretty lousy deal. Do you think any rational person would still say yes?