Emile

• Emile 11 May 2012 13:29 UTC

  84 points

  in reply to: Emile’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Upvote this comment if you prefer reading essays/​blog posts/​articles to watching a video of someone talking.

• Emile 14 Sep 2010 8:04 UTC

  55 points

  1

  on: In­tel­lec­tual Hip­sters and Meta-Contrarianism

  One more time: the fact that those beliefs are in an order does not mean some of them are good and others are bad. For example, “5 year old child /​ pro-death /​ transhumanist” is a triad, and “warming denier /​ warming believer /​ warming skeptic” is a triad, but I personally support 1+3 in the first triad and 2 in the second. You can’t evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game; otherwise you could use human psychology to figure out if global warming is real!

  Well worth stressing.

  It’s possible to go meta on nearly any issue, and there are a lot of meta-level arguments—group affiliation, signaling, rationalization, ulterior motives, whether a position is contrarian or supported by the majority, who the experts are and how much we should trust them, which group is persecuted the most, straw man positions and whether anybody really holds them, slippery slopes, different ways to interpret statements, who is working under which cognitive bias …

  Which is why I prefer discussions to stick to the object level rather than go meta. It’s just too easy to rationalize a position in meta, and to find convincing-sounding arguments as to why the other side mistakenly disagrees with you. And meta-level disagreements are more likely to persist in the long run, because they are hard to verify.

  Sure, meta-level arguments are very valuable in many cases, we shouldn’t drop them altogether. But we should be very cautious while using them.

• Emile 25 Oct 2014 20:44 UTC

  53 points

  on: 2014 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I have filled in the survey (I wouldn’t have minded if it was longer!)

• Emile 18 Jul 2013 11:06 UTC

  46 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 24, chap­ter 95

  For those wondering about this:

  It has been three hundred and twenty-three years since the country of magical Italy was ruined by one man’s folly.

  323 years before 1992, this happened:

  Etna’s most destructive eruption since 122 BC started on 11 March 1669 and produced lava flows that destroyed at least 10 villages on its southern flank before reaching the city walls of the town of Catania five weeks later, on 15 April. The lava was largely diverted by these walls into the sea to the south of the city, filling the harbour of Catania. A small portion of lava eventually broke through a fragile section of the city walls on the western side of Catania and destroyed a few buildings before stopping in the rear of the Benedictine monastery, without reaching the centre of the town.

  That’s probably also what’s referenced later on:

  There is much literary wisdom in those stories. It is born of harsh experience and cities of ash.

  (though it’s pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)

• Emile 15 Mar 2010 10:56 UTC

  45 points

  on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  Another good indicator (as djbc said) is the level of certitude : if someone expresses more certitude on a complex topic like gun control than on a slamdunk like God - then I won’t trust their confidence much.

  Does that mean only hardcore atheists are worth listening to? Maybe, but some claims about religion are not that obvious—for example, is religion good or bad for society in terms of enforcing moral behaviour, facilitating cooperation, raising children, etc. ? I don’t consider that question a slamdunk.

  Another red flag for me is “clannish” language, presenting issues in terms of “group A vs group B” (“this is a victory for us”, “hah, that shows them”, etc.). It’s a sign that the wrong part of the brain is being used.

• Emile 29 Jan 2013 13:45 UTC

  43 points

  on: Eliezer Yud­kowsky Facts

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky has a 133% approval rate

• Emile 13 Dec 2010 17:20 UTC

  43 points

  on: What top­ics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?

  Statistics—we’ve had a few posts on those, but some intro posts could be nice, or some discussion of things like principal component analysis, statistical signficance, misuses of statistics, etc.

  (by comparison, it seems like we’ve had maybe three different introductions to decision theory, even though it’s a topic of less general use)

  What links here?

  • Simp­son’s Paradox by bentarm (12 Jan 2011 23:01 UTC; 100 points)
  • XiXiDu's comment on Back to the Ba­sics of Rationality by lukeprog (11 Jan 2011 15:48 UTC; 6 points)

• Emile 27 Sep 2010 6:37 UTC

  42 points

  in reply to: blogospheroid’s comment on: Vote Qual­ifi­ca­tions, Not Issues

  OK, but apart from Marxism, nuclear power, coercive eugenics, Christianity, psychoanalysis, and the respective importance of nature and nurture—when has the intellectual establishment ever been an unreliable guide to finding truth?

• Emile 30 Dec 2013 9:17 UTC

  40 points

  on: What is the Main/​Dis­cus­sion dis­tinc­tion, and what should it be?

  For me, promoted posts on Main are what should be our “public facade” blog, things worth reading for outsiders who don’t have much time. Putting a post in Main instead of Discussion is just a clunky way of saying it should be promoted.

  I don’t know how much more attention promoted posts actually get, and I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble (they may even get less attention because of regulars who check discussion but not main because stuff is rarely posted in main). The bastard category of “in main but not promoted” doesn’t have a reason to exist (except maybe for Karma reasons?).

Have you changed your mind lately? On what?

• Emile 20 Dec 2012 23:07 UTC

  39 points

  on: Gun Con­trol: How would we know?

  if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn’t still be arguing about it.

  Who is “we”, white man? ;)

  Here in France there seems to be very little public debate around firearm legislation—there probably is some, somewhere, but it gets very little media attention.

  The existence of public debate around an issue doesn’t seem to be very strong evidence on whether the question can be answered conclusively given the available evidence, since public debate around issues varies from country to country, and in some places there are public debates around issues where anybody with half a brain should be able to tell which side is right. Heck, sometimes there’s a lack of public debate because everybody agrees on the wrong conclusion.

What top­ics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?

• Emile 6 Jan 2014 12:51 UTC

  37 points

  in reply to: Bakkot’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Ra­tion­al­ist Masterlist

  This attitude (“we know what’s best; your input is not required”) has historically almost always been wrong

  Has it really? The cases where it went wrong jump to mind more easily than those where it went right, but I don’t know which way the balance tips overall (and I suspect neither do your nor most readers—it’s a difficult question!).

  For example, in past centuries Europe has seen a great rise in litteracy, and a drop in all kinds of mortality, through the adoption of widespread education, modern medical practices, etc. A lot of this seems to have been driven in a top-down way by bureaucratic governments who considered they were working for The Greater Good Of The Nation, and didn’t care that much about the opinion of a bunch of unwashed superstitious hicks.

  (Some books on the topic: Seeing Like a State; The Discovery of France … I haven’t read either unfortunately)

• Emile 27 Jun 2014 9:09 UTC

  36 points

  on: Hap­piness and Children

  For me having children feels “closer to being a terminal value” than happiness does. So saying “you should have Children because it makes you happy” sounds like “You should have a meaningful job and a loving relationship with your wife because it decreases your chances of having a heart attack by 8%!” or “You should avoid murdering people because it looks bad on your resume”.

• Emile 29 Jan 2013 10:41 UTC

  34 points

  on: [minor] Separate Upvotes and Down­votes Implimented

  Awesome! That was one of the most asked-for feature!

  And it is implemented on comments too, as a title text: Mousover the karma score of a post or comment and a little popup will give you the percentage of positive votes!

  (a side effect of this is that if we see a comment at 0, we can’t immediatly differentiate 1 upvote and 1 downvote from 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes, but that’s pretty minor)

  Many thanks to the trike apps people, and whatever volunteers helped implement, test and deploy this!

  Edit: This specific fix appears to be thanks to Wesley Moore.

• Emile 14 May 2012 14:42 UTC

  34 points

  on: How many peo­ple here agree with Holden? [Ac­tu­ally, who agrees with Holden?]

  I think most people on this site (including me and you, private messaging/​Dmytry) don’t have any particular insight that gives them more information than those who seriously thought about this for a long time (like Eliezer, Ben Goertzel, Robin Hanson, Holden Karnofsky, Lukeprog, possibly Wei Dai, cousin_it, etc.), so our opinion on “who is right” is not worth much.

  I’d much rather see an attempt to cleanly map out where knowledgeable people disagree, rather than polls of what ignorant people like me think.

  Similarly, if two senior economists have a public disagreement about international trade and fiscal policy, a poll of a bunch of graduate students on those issues is not going to provide much new information to either economist.

  (I don’t really know how to phrase this argument cleanly, help and suggestions welcome, I’m just trying to retranscribe my general feeling of “I don’t even know enough to answer, and I suspect neither to most people here”)

• Emile 23 Apr 2012 14:25 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue

  Just a suggestion for future dialogs: The amount of Less Wrong jargon, links to Less Wrong posts explaining that jargon, and the Yudkowsky “proclamation” in this paragraph is all a bit squicky, alienating and potentially condescending.

  Seconded; that bit—especially the “Yudkowky proclaimed”—stuck out for me.

• Emile 11 Jan 2012 16:34 UTC

  34 points

  on: Utopian hope ver­sus reality

  History is full of new things coming to pass, but they have never yet led to utopia.

  I don’t know—imagine a time traveler going back 500 years, and trying to convince an average European nobleman about the benefits that would come from improvements in science and technology, by describing today’s Western Europe—warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours! People live to eighty years old, with much less diseases and crippling injuries! Death by violence is rare and scandalous, and there haven’t been any wars in Western Europe for over sixty years! Nearly everybody can read, and watch amazing shows from the comfort of his home!

  It would probably sound like Utopia to him, and even more so to a peasant of the time. Current western civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history.

  (Note that actually getting those results may not actually be a matter of science and technology; the progress we got may mostly come from things like improvements to agriculture which allowed a larger portion of the population to do something else—the actual causes of the great improvements we saw are debated)

  As Eliezer wrote:

  Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc. etc. etc.

  The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right.

• Emile 16 Jul 2009 8:21 UTC

  34 points

  on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You

  “Your perception of the ‘quality’ of works of art and litterature is only your guess of it’s creator’s social status. There is no other difference between Shakespeare and Harry Potter fanfic—without the status cues, you wouldn’t enjoy one more than the other.”

What have you re­cently tried, and failed at?