I put never, but “not anymore” would be more accurate
duckduckMOO
Karma: 97
“Coltheart et al pretend that the prior is 1⁄100, but this implies that there is a base rate of your spouse being an imposter one out of every hundred times you see her (or perhaps one out of every hundred people has a fake spouse) either of which is preposterous.”
What if their prior on not feeling anything upon seeing their wife is 0? What if most of the reason for reasonable people’s prior on this being much lower it is low status, instrumentally bad, etc, but their rational sincere thinking about it prior is close to 50/50? I notice you called the idea preposterous and something reasonable people wouldn’t take seriously which are both quite status-ey. So if their aversion to instrumentally bad ideas and/or their aversion to ideas people will think them crazy for gets switched off they can easily get the wrong answer. Perhaps a fear of being of being fooled, or a fight or flight paranoia spiral could be what makes them think so.
I have no idea if any of that is true.
Apart from the hilarious joke, this quote makes the point that “will kill you” is not actually the same as impossible to eat, which more generally generally points out that impossible is often used in place of “really bad idea.”
I read edible as a synonym for eatable. Poisonous mushrooms: edible. rocks, not edible. That’s how that word is attatched in my head. I assume you read it as non-poisonous/fit to eat so it feels like a crass and overt redefinition. If the guy who wrote that reads that word the same way I assume you do it’s a really cheap joke. If he doesn’t the quote makes a lot of sense.
disclaimer: the ranty part is not directed at yudkowsky
“From within that project—what good does a sense of violated entitlement do? At all? Ever? What good does it do to tell ourselves that we did everything right and deserved better, and that someone or something else is to blame? Is that the key thing we need to change, to do better next time?”
I dunno. I don’t follow that many competitive endeavours but the people who cast about looking for excuses after a loss tend to be pretty good. Admittedly the people who go on about what a bitch you are if you make excuses also tend to be pretty good, as do the people who say stuff like only the results matter tend to be pretty good. (I’ll also note I don’t notice the middle group making any less excuses than average)
I also notice this among people I know.
People who are “bitter losers” don’t tend to be very good but I expect the excuses are a product rather than cause of the problem. (and yes you can get into a bad self reinforcing system of excuses.) Of course being a bitter loser is something to avoid. But it’s the loser part that’s bad. The bitterness is never prior to the losing (and sometimes “fair enough).
But anyway, as to why casting about looking for excuses when you lose can be a good thing: if you’re not really trying you’re not going to care enough for there to be enough cognitive dissonance that you’ll feel the need for an excuse. If you feel that losing is good enough, or that there’s nothing to be done etc you won’t need an excuse.
When losing It can be useful to feel like you should do better. If, to get that sense of should you have to cast about for something or someone to blame maybe you should do so.
If feeling entitled to victory makes you more likely to win, maybe you should feel entitled to victory.
And finally, if losing doesn’t hurt you probably weren’t trying at full capacity. One way to make it hurt less is to try less hard. Another is to make up excuses. Neither are optimal but one is obviously much more harmful and not everyone has the cognitive or emotional resources to react optimally (or more precisely, it’s not optimal for everyone who doesn’t to try to fix this due to oppurtunity cost as well as plain old normal cost)
Why write excuses off a priori? The important thing is to focus on winning.
Also, this is actually basically unrelated, but relevant to the same quote.
“What good does it do to tell ourselves that we did everything right and deserved better, and that someone or something else is to blame?”
If you really did do everything right and deserved better, and luck is to blame e.g. if you are playing tournament poker and make a bet at 60:40 odds losing shouldn’t make you calibrate away from making those kinds of bets. You really, genuinely made the right decision. More generally doing things right does not necessarrilly entail winning. Don’t become a responsibility fetishist (actually maybe do, but at least compartmentalise it), or a mystic that thinks lady luck bestows the winning cards on the player who deserves to win (hindsight bias.) Sometimes you need to defy the data (all this idiosynractic vocabulary is actually really useful. So much compression.)
Related to both of these points is I get really annoyed at people takeing more responsibility than they have earned. Taking responsibility for mistakes, fine, specifically stuff like “I could have done better, if I did this there wouldn’t have been a problem” is probably healthy. Taking responsibility for everything that goes well, annoying and stupid: “I just went all in at 10 to 1 odds for a 50⁄50 payoff and won, clearly I cunningly outwitted my opponent” a great attitude for tilting (unsettling psychologically so as to cause suboptimal play) your opponents (and might be instrumentally useful to adopt sometimes, or even always, for that reason for some people) but as something you generally do, other than for this purpose (and/or used the same way as I described excuses could be earlier) is fucking terrible epistemology. Taking responsibility usually also means taking credit.
All of which was probably prompted by my hatred of people who, when they have a starting advantage, or get lucky, or just have more talent blame their opponents loss on self pity, excuses and so on. I forget where it was but there was an article about in which Eliezer claimed to have decided not to get anxious when doing public speaking after looking up at the crowd and not being anxious. A lot of this bitter loser stuff is self-fulfilling prophecy inflicted, in part, by this “making excuses makes you a loser” meme. Be satisfied with winning. You don’t have to have the moral high ground as well as the actual win. especially when you make more excuses than the person you’re robbing of them. This thing where every win has to be the product of cunning and outwitting, and anything the loser says is an excuse pisses me off. Just world fallacy?
But yeah there does seem to be something to all that positive thinking stuff. Specifically it can be easier to do something if you feel more confident, much like it can be harder to e.g. get angry at someone liable to punch you if you get angry with them.
I think the “only focus on winning” “there is no try” advice/attitude can be useful for bypassing anxiety problems. Don’t give something any more space in your mind than is useful.
it’s a joke about subjectivism. I think its roughly supposed to be what a subjectivist would say, roughly “this is something a subjectivist would say” because of the original comment saying that subjectivism is silly.
“Drinking Alcohol May Significantly Enhance Problem Solving Skills”
It looks to me like Eridu sincerely holds positions that you would be expected to find particularly objectionable or even have trouble believing someone could hold in part due to a huge inferential distance between what the world must look like (including perceptual valences) to the two of you. He’s not presenting new ideas. Some People have been taking seriously those ideas for a long time. Is anyone who is a sincere radical feminist that bring their normal (imprecise and [even more]politicky) ways of speaking to less wrong going to be labelled a troll? If so your heuristic is broken because that’s a very common way for people to express themselves.
Also trolling almost always means provocation for a negative reaction. provocation for attention is a sad and pitiable state of affairs more commonly associated with the words attention-seeking whereas trolling usually means looking to upset people for the sake of it which is a much more hostile kind of thing.
Why is teaching people to think like consequentialists a good idea again? Serious question.
If they’re (relatively successful) mathematicians and programmers I don’t see how it could go wrong but I’m awfully worried about some of the rest of the population. Specifically people not being able to sustain it without letting other things slip.
second edit: I should clarify. It’s teaching the habit that I’m thinking about. Everyone should be able to think like a consequentialist but is instilling these reflexes gonna be a net positive?
question 2 sheet 5.
“Answer to 1. Disliked story: Bought a cupboard full of yucky peanut butter. Preferred story: Cleverly purchased good peanut butter in bulk. Fixed reality: You bought a year’s supply of a peanut butter you haven’t tried, and it’s either tasty or yucky; if yucky, pretending to like it and choking it down won’t get your money back.”
That reality isn’t fixed. Tasty/yuckiness is in part determined by your attitude towards the peanut butter. Tastiness is not a one place property. More generally, you can make yourself like different things. Doesn’t just familiarity make you like things? There’s a large grey area between tasty and yucky that includes a section for “has the potential to be tasty if I decide to damn well like it.”
Sometimes, yes, you can make something not be wasted. The point is to reason from the situation as it is, not to avoid making sunk costs not a waste. As things go food is pretty easy to choose to enjoy, or at least not mind.
isn’t claimed actual equivalence the problem with P-zombies. Someone being observationally equivalent but different is merely extremely unlikely (maybe she has an identical twin, maybe aliens etc.) P-zombies are supposed to be indistingishable in principle, which is impossible/requires souls that aren’t subject to testing for distinguishability.
this is a little ridiculous. The reason you were downvoted is someone didn’t like your post. The reason all of the rest of your comments are being downvoted is that people don’t like to be questioned. And there’s some bandwagon effect in there somewhere. I’ve never got people to explain anything like this (edit: this method of trying to get an explanation). Maybe you are particularly good at it in real life thanks to body language or something but just in text there’s no way you’re going to get people to explain themselves this
also this sort of thing:
People, it makes no sense to karma punish me for: Giving people reasons that their karma punishments are unwarranted. Using the word dumb to describe irrational karma distributions. Modifying my feedback in response to further displays of irrational behavior. Not responding to karma incentives in the way you would like me to. Not taking any of this seriously at all.
tends to elicit an “I’LL SHOW YOU, FUCKER”, response in people or something, effectively identical, from what I have observed of people.
also, people like their requests for feedback humble and/or “positive.”
As for what’s wrong with your first comment: Supressing “innapropriate” preferences isn’t something I like.” I didn’t downvote you but it’s not like you can’t just not read comments. If i’d understood that was what you were doing when i read your comment (as I skipped down the page to the comments I was interested in) I would have downvoted it. I won’t now as most of the rest of your downvotes are clearly punishing your demanding an explanation (in an “innapropriate” tone) which no one has bothered doing. (why the fuck is the comment pointing out the non existence of laws which take over behaviour downvoted? and the one it’s responding to upvoted?) but I really don’t like the idea of trying to suppress comments that have no obvious negative impact. It looks kind of the same to me as the way no one bothered to give you an explanation and just decided to downvote instead. Your post is just saying “I decided not to do that,” which is simply an expression of your dislike, with no reasoning given, much as your being downvoted rather than responded to is. Also, it’s social policing and signalling taking priority over explaining, to the point where the actual “here is what I don’t like” bit that could allow someone to learn something is entirely left out. It wasn’t as bad as the response you’re receiving though.
edit: I must say, though, the demands of “proof” are ridiculous.
Are you unfit? Any background physical (or emotional) discomfort or pain? That can make you blunt everything. You mention that your parents are lazy, for instance. If you really don’t like your parents sometimes the best thing is to just suffer through until you can leave. Maybe try writing down (or just thinking of) a list of reasons to care about stuff you want to care about. But, honest reasons, the kind you would use to honestly convince someone else something was important rather than the kind of thing where you’re writing an essay.
Do people take advantage of your lack of strong preferences? Does that irritate/ piss you off/make you angry? If it does feel free to slide up that scale from irritated to angry (but stop somewhere before psychotically enraged)
Maybe you just don’t have anything you care about. Have you thought about trying martial arts, or something hard like that that can directly show you how some emotional states make certain things easier.
Also, what’s so mere about preferences? What do you think other people have? Imo people are conditioned to care about stuff as much as they can so utilitarians will lend more weight to what they want. I mean, I don’t necessarrilly see a problem. I remember I used to be like this but I later found out the reason I didn’t like things was that I had a back problem, and was in constant physical discomfort/pain. I remember being bored a lot but that was also because its harder to be patient when you’re not comfortable. Without that I don’t see why that way of being is so bad. Maybe there’s some simple technical problem (like someone mentioned earlier, hypothyroidism can cause this for example) which is actually the reason you want out of this state rather than the state of not caring being bad in itself?
Also, does imagining, yourself being tortured elicit a strong reaction. Does imagining someone else being tortured elicit a strong reaction.
Finally, as someone who doesn’t care about much you have the excellent oppurtunity to relatively unbiasedly choose your values, choose what you prefer to prefer. What would you like to prefer? Well, isn’t that your preference, then? Maybe you wont feel it but you can get in the habit of working towards your selected preferences which should reinforce them.
Also, it might reinforce your preferences to call them your your own subjective “good”s, objectively, in the sense that getting utility is by definition (or maybe even THE definition) of good.
Also one more word to look up is dissociation. edit: and schizoidism. You probably aren’t schizoid but it’s kind of similiar so there’s probably something worth learning there.
why would the light speed limit apply to quantum branching?
“The remarks about the national character of the British and their level of civilization and decency can be interpreted as a reasonable belief that conspiring to assassinate a foreign head of state would be a violation of certain norms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice, and expected to follow by a broad consensus of the British people—such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character”
And when people say “I have free will” it is compatible with their being compatibilists rather than magic black-boxers. But usually they mean the black box sort.
The fact that Wittgenstein, knowing this Malcolm personally, interpreted the remark as he did is evidence in favour of that interpretation.
I was going to say your interpretation is compatible at best. But now that I’ve checked the quote rather than going from memory I don’t think it’s compatible at all:
“When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn’t surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because “the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British ‘national character’.”
the retort was in response to Wittgenstein saying “it wouldn’t surprise him at all if it were true”
“such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character.” This is the kind of thing Wittgenstein doesn’t want you to say. National character isn’t just a bunch of syllables. It encodes the idea of character inherently tied to nationality, even if that is not the specific definition used. If the consensus were 100% you’d still be confusing things by calling it the national character.
When you call something disgusting, when asked to define it you can append “causes squicky feelings” or similiar, and you can define national character as “strong enough consensus to pressure government” but people won’t use those words that way and that isn’t how the second was used here.
“He also seems to be using the Dark Arts tactic of throwing exalted and self-important rhetoric about general intellectual principles to draw attention away from his petty and unreasonable behavior.”
His behaviour being capitalisation of dangerous in a letter to the guy five years later? Maybe the guy is too upset by some normative standard, but we have no reason to believe he’s faking being upset. The deception you’ve implied just isn’t there.Especially five years later.
In any case the “to draw attention away from his petty and unreasonable behavior” stipulation is patently false. The rhetoric is what you’re calling petty and unreasonable behaviour.
You’ve given the first guy the most generous interpretation possible and the second the worst interpretation possible.
I get the impression you’re just politicking against getting annoyed by specific word choice and against people getting upset about it (and possibly in favour of interpreting things more generously than was meant, though that could just be incidental.)
Having read it, I realise this post may seem or be overly critical. Oh well.
But what the results will actually show, if 65% of people pick libertarian, is that 65% of people Identify with libertarianism more than the other options. This is obviously possible wthout being a libertarian. One could even just hate libertarianism slightly less than the other options and identify most with it. As well as people who’s political views aren’t well deliniated by any option, there are a few people who are apolitical and would have to just pick at random. or one could be forced to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Multiple choice and no choice for “none of the above” for something like this means hammering square pegs into round holes or abstaining if you don’t strongly lean one way or another. if you think you’ll put a box for other in next survey why not put it in this survey? even an uncounted other option allows people who’d rather have their choice not count than be identified with one of the options given not to add a tally to one and gives you the number of people with that preference which is interresting in itself.
The rest of this post is ideas for minor modifications to wording.
Can’t you just change it to “sex” now?
“With what race or ethnic group do you most closely identify?” Some people might identify most closely with a race other than their own. I don’t think the intent is to allow for this but until I read the post this is a reply to, if I did identify with another race more strongly than my own i’d answer that way were i to fill out the survey. Maybe just ask what option best describes or approximates your race.
maths might be the field of a non-trivial percentage of less wrong readers.
I think martial arts would go along nicely with self help, pickup artistry and meditation as an option for the communities question. All are relatively common self-improvement things, as is less wrong. Also I think members of competive gameing (card games, board games, video games, anything i’ve missed) communities would be overrepresented on less wrong.
Expertise question. The bar set for “fairly knowledgable” here might be a little high. I think even someone with an undergraduate degree in maths or physics might be out of their depth in heavy discussion with an expert. Maybe change heavy to light or remove the qualifier.
This is really good IMO. I think it would be a little better instead of vengeance as a terminal value it claimed a hardwired precommitment to vengeance against its destructors. Vengeance on that scale is only compatible with friendliness as a special case.
edit: also how would it recognise that it was about to be destroyed. Wouldn’t it lose power faster than it could transmit that it was losing power? And even if not it would have a miniscule amount of time.
As a jobless student I am very interested. I might as well ask here: If I haven’t been contacted again about the research thing that was up on here does that mean I won’t be?
Is the spacing less annoying now? It wasn’t at random: it had 4 gaps between topics, 2 between points and one in a few minor places were I just wanted to break it up. The selection of that scheme was pretty much random though. I just spaced it like I would read it out loud. Which was kind of stupid. I can’t expect people to read it in my voice. Anyway is this any better?
Got rid of the “and I think quite good.” I just meant I liked it enough to want to share it in a discussion post. I assume that’s not the interpretation that was annoying people. How did people read it that made it a crackpot signal?
The writer says “If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense...” despite knowing perfectly well they can’t tell if the argument makes sense or not.
If, even knowing specifically in this case that you can’t tell if an argument is correct or not, you feel the need to announce that “your argument makes complete sense” your problem is that you believe things without understanding them. Fixing that bad habit might remove the need to not take arguments seriously.
I think I was one of the ones who “failed” to send in a sample. I was told I’d be contacted at some point. I was not (as far as I can tell) contacted at some point. Maybe this happened with other people?