I turned a an automatic .str transcription into a more or less coherent transcription. Corrections welcome:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e85zhh8qROTyE_0oaKdU7hhEyZcQqKzG3z0YRGeBZzc
Filipe
Karma: 183
This seems related to Dennett’s Intentional Stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
You mean Money is the Unit of Caring ? :)
Economist Scott Sumner at Econlog praised heavily Yudkowsky and the quantum physics sequence, and applies lessons from it to economics. Excerpts:
I’ve recently been working my way through a long set of 2008 blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It starts with an attempt to make quantum mechanics seem “normal,” and then branches out into some interesting essays on philosophy and science. I’m nowhere near as smart as Yudkowsky, so I can’t offer any opinion on the science he discusses, but when the posts touched on epistemological issues his views hit home.
and
I used to have a prejudice against math/physics geniuses. I thought when they were brilliant at high level math and theory; they were likely to have loony opinions on complex social science issues. Conspiracy theories. Or policy views that the government should wave a magic wand and just ban everything bad. Now that I’ve read Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky and David Deutsch, I realize that I’ve got it wrong. A substantial number of these geniuses have thought much more deeply about epistemological issues than the average economist. So when Hanson says we put far too little effort into existential risks, or even lesser but still massive threats like solar flares, and Yudkowsky says cryonics is under-appreciated, or when they say AI (or brain ems) is coming faster than we think and will have far more profound effects than we realize, I’m inclined to take them very seriously.
Even though he calls it “The Smart Vote”, the concept is a way to figure out the truth, not to challenge current democratic notions (I think), and is quite a bit more sophisticated than merely giving greater weight to smarter people’s opinions.
Garth Zietsman, who according to himself, “Scored an IQ of 185 on the Mega27 and has a degree in psychology and statistics and 25 years experience in psychometrics and statistics”, proposed the statistical concept of The Smart Vote , which seems to resemble your “Mildly extrapolate elite opinion”. There are many applications of his idea to relevant topics on his blog.
It’s not choosing the most popular answer among the smart people in any (aggregation of) poll(s), but comparing the proportion of the most to the less intelligent in any answer, and deciding The Smart Vote is that which has the largest ratio, after controlling for possible interests.
A blog connected to the NYT also linked to the interview.
Mr. Legg noted in a 2011 Q&A with the LessWrong blog that technology and artificial intelligence could have negative consequences for humanity.
Taken.
I’m from Rio. You may PM me if there’s enough interest.
What about Drescher’s Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics? Eliezer said it’s “pratically Less Wrong in book form.”
Is there an actual history of people complaining about ‘creepy behavior’ in LW meetups? Or is this just one of those blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence?
I’m sure it is correlated. One might find even correlations with other things such as race and gender… I questioned the fairness in using it as a way to recruit people.
Ultrasummary of abilities: Very good English command, goals that either pro-technology or pro-effective giving, minimally rational, somewhat rich (there is a niche of people who work to feel fulfilled more than for money, in Brazil, this correlates strongly with good english skills and all the abilities social class can buy)
(emphasis added)
Is this acceptable now? I suspected some would practice such discrimination privately, but to proclaim it publicly and to expect it to be seen as a fair requirement surprises me.
This seems essentially the same answer as the most upvoted comment on the thread. Yet, you were at −2 just a while ago. I wonder why.
Free in Brazil, as well.
If you read the session on Welfare, you’ll find it’s pretty not liberal. So a mere liberal mistaken position on welfare + censoring certain views on racism and sexism (if some of those happen to be right) could be damning to civilization. Besides, theocracy and totaliarism are not only alive—take Islamic countries, with their huge populational growth—but coming back in a lot of places, like Venezuela or Turkey.
Now, I guess that some Liberal positions such as favoring Gay Rights and Abortions are the more reasonable shoudn’t be really surprising among smart people, and I’m sure they’re among the majority here, too.
I think you are underestimating the share of metacontrarians probably disagree with many of them.
If they are contrarians for contrarianism’s sake, why would I take them into consideration? Those are the true dangerous ones: in most cases, those people are just autodidacts who when confronted with a true expert, have their theories pretty much discredited.
Take in mind, for instance, Yvain’s (who’s a student of Medicine) triumphant answers to Hanson on Medicine (so harsh that he regrets on his blog being so incisive), or Kalla724′s comment on cryonics which made many people lower their estimates of cryonics being of any worth. And that’s because true experts won’t take much of their time arguing with those people! It’s funny that Hanson himself sometimes complains of ‘rational folks’ being ignorant about Sociology, which he has a PhD in, or how much he changed his mind on the power of actual Economics after getting a degree on it.
Remember normal neurotypical humans, even very intelligent ones, don’t really take ideas that seriously. Ideas as tribal markers work just as well at 120 IQ points as they do at 80, its just that very few ideas can fill this role for both groups.
High-Iq circles are not monolithic: there are many groups they are be part of, on which different ideas would be ‘tribal markers’. And there are the people who are intelligent and are not even in high-Iq circles, due to having low income etc. And the analyses, controlled for many variables, many times show clear intellectual trends, turning the fact that people individually are biased not very relevant, really.
A key problem of most people thinking about policy is I think mind projection fallacy. Is there evidence that intelligent people are significantly better at avoiding it?
As it has been said, sometimes smart people are pretty prone to some biases almost like anybody else, but even in those cases they’re always at least a little better (or ‘less bad’) than dumb people. And it is the dumb-smart trend, not the percentage, which will point to the better answer. So, no, they need not be significantly better at avoiding certain biases, including mind projection fallacy.
You cut your comment at ‘already’.