Have some third party (or several) that LW would trust hold on to it in secrect.
Nitpick: cryptography solves this much more neatly.
Of course, people could accuse you of having an efficient way of factorising numbers, but if you do karma is going to be the least of anyone’s concerns.
On the plus side, if that thread has a lot of new people drawn by HPMOR, so we may not want to subject them to such stringent standards.
On the other hand, I think we upvote (orrather, don’t downvote enough) in the rest of LW too much anyway.
I think the probability of my having got my current job without LW etc. is under 20%.
Individuals have Volitions and (hopefully) Extrapolatable Volitions. If many people have EVs that ‘agree’, they interfere constructively (like waves), and that becomes part of the group’s Coherant Extrapolated Volition. If they ‘disagree’ on some issue, they interfere distructively, and CEV has nothing to say on the issue.
(I’d be nice to be able to explain this by saying that individuals have EVs but not CEVs, excelent clearly they have a degenerate case of CEV if they have an EV)
This argument is relatively clear-cut, but other real world arguments are more complicated.
I agree, but only because you include previously
If your objection to murder is predicated entirely upon the four reasons [emphasis mine]
However, most people would still condemn the silent murder of freindless, depressed homeless people, suggesting that they actully have more subtantial objections to murder. In which case this isn’t a clear-cut case of TWAitW.
What is an epistemic root system, and how can they be dense?
Suppose a hypothetical LW user wanted to say something very racist, or bigoted against some other group.Would it suffice for her to avoid censure for her to preface her comments with such a warning?
Are statements about the current state of affairs in general objectionable? If I tell my child not to be openly homosexual in Saudi Arabia, is this bad advice, even though the current Saudi Arabian model stinks and I hope their generation will continue changing it?
Not that I’ve ever bothered to do this, but you’re not being very charitable. Maybe they just looked over someones entire comment history and decided that they’d like less of everything that person said. It doesn’t seem abusive to repeatedly downvote clear trolls. Obviously, some people may disagree as to who the trolls are, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t punish those you think are.
But that’s exactly what you do with a null hypothesis. You trust it. Until proven otherwise, of course. But of course, since there is no evidence that election officials and voters are acting in bad faith, investigating any such unproven claims is itself in bad faith.
rationalists should be more comfortable with lying (at least by omission).
I agree; believing p doesn’t mean you have to tell everyone that p. However, this is made more difficult when other people in the car go around saying “not p, not p!” a lot.
I suppose you could attempt a meta-level argument against the social norm against saying “p”, but this is unlikely to be effective against the worry that just saying “p” is bayesian evidence you’re an evil person.
It’s the first book I’ve ever had to put down after a few pages because the writing was so very awful.
Wonderful post. Thank you.
I agree; this is excelent.
Utilitarianism doesn’t say that I have to value potential people at anything approaching the level of value I assign to living persons.
In ten years time, you see a nine year old child fall into a pond. Do you save her from drowning? If so, you, in 2023, place value on people who aren’t born in 2013. If you don’t value those people now, in 2013, you’re temporally inconsistent.
Obviously this isn’t utilitarianism, but I think many people are unaware of this argument, despite its being from very common intuitions.
Valuing potential people without an extremely high discount rate also leads one to be strongly pro-life, to be against birth control programs in developing nations, etc.
Are these programs’ net desirability so self-evident that they constitute evidence against caring about future people? Yes, you could say “but they’re good for economic growth and the autonomy of women etc.”, those are reasons that would support supporting the programs even if we cared about future people. I think in general the desirability of contraception should be an output, rather than an input, to our expected value calculations.
On the other hand, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t care about people far away in time, it might be sensible not to care about people far away in space.
You care about the deaths of people without caring about people?
What if I changed the example—and it’s about whether or not to help educate the child, or comport her, or feed her. Do we are about the education, hunger and happiness of the child also, without caring about the child?
No you can’t. Consider three worlds, only differing with regards person A.
In world 1, U(A) = 20.
In world 2, U(A) = 10.
In world 3, U(A) = undefined, as A does not exist.
Which world is best? As we agree that people who exist should have a good life, U(1) > U(2). Assume U(2)=U(3), as per your suggest that we’re unconcerned about people’s existence/non-existence. Therefore, by transitivity of preference, U(1) > U(3). So we do care about A’s existence or non-existence.
And they will be completely uninterested in the (if true) far more important elements of the story. 1938 is not the time to purge the Bolsheviks!
Both respondents give many examples of people being treated very badly/treating others very badly, but it’s not clear what this has to do with misogyny. Just because you’re looking for a pattern and see a bunch of examples that fit the pattern doesn’t mean the pattern had any causal influence. Yes, in these cases they were men being mean to women (except with the grandmother beating up the brother). But if we were on the lookout for men being abusive to other men we’d also have many examples (rather more, according to my copy of Male Violence, ed. John Archer, 2001). Even if men being mean to women say misogynistic things, this doesn’t show they’re doing those actions because they are misogynistic, rather than just matching their rhetoric post hoc to their actions.
For example: On the HLN channel, [ … ]
Beware of fictional evidence.
For the benefit of non-American readers: is HLN fiction? I was under the impression it was a news program.
1) The study shows that being male is being treated as evidence of being a good applicant. Regardless of the virtues of doing so, it’s not the same as hating women, nor as “apologetics of abusing females”, which is how the second respondent defined it.
2) I was, perhaps unclearly, referring to their examples. The purpose of these threads isn’t (as far as I was aware) for LW women to bring up articles from the literature, it was to share our experiences. I was pointing out that these respondents had perhaps mis-characterised their experiences.
You could create Horcruxes as a side-product of capital punishment, something Harry doesn’t seem to mind.
Maybe you could kill people who were about to die anyway, and consented? Could you use abortion in this manner?