Friendly-HI

Karma: 375

Friendly-HI 23 Jan 2019 15:09 UTC
3 points
on: Link: That Time a Guy Tried to Build a Utopia for Mice and it all Went to Hell
Possible explanation: After a certain point of population growth the mice cannot keep track of all the individuals in their group (i.e. in the enclosure) and in nature this would usually result in a non-violent split of the population into two groups that go their own way. But with nowhere to go the mice created smaller subgroups that couldn’t go anywhere yet still tried to maintain their own territory, mates etc. which led to conflict.
This would be analogous to humans having the mental capacity to keep up relations with something like 150 to 300 people. If primitive hunter gatherers grew beyond that limit it would result in the exodus of some part of that population into a new group that went elsewhere, probably mainly to retain group cohesion but in part also because the resources needed for survival at any one place were limited. The main reasons why we have not descended into intra-tribe violence once we started to live in permanent settlements and larger villages are probably social innovations as well as recognizing and sharing the benefits of larger scale village structures. Both these things seem to be beyond mouse brains.
Just brainstorming here.

Friendly-HI 2 Sep 2017 14:43 UTC
3 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: P: 0 ⇐ P ⇐ 1
I’m tempted to agree with DragonGod on a weaker form (or phrasing) of the “I exist” proposition:

I would defend the proposition that my feeling of subjective experience (independent of whether or not I am mistaken about literally everything I think and believe) really does exist with a probability of 1. And even if my entire experience was just a dream or simulated on some computer inside a universe where 2+2=3 actually holds true, the existence of my subjective experience (as opposed to whatever “I” might mean) seems beyond any possible doubt.

Even if every single one of my senses and my entire map of reality (even including the concept of reality itself) was entirely mistaken in every possible aspect, there would still be such a thing as having/being my subjective experience. It’s the one and only true axiom in this world that I think we can assign P=1 to.

Especially if you don’t conceive of the word “exist” as meaning “is a thing within the base level of reality as opposed to a simulation.”

Friendly-HI 31 Aug 2017 17:11 UTC
0 points
on: Doing a big survey on work, stress, and productivity. Feedback / anything you’re curious about?
Background: My wife and I are both studying psychology, I’m doing my M.Sc. she does a very similar study on health risks at the workplace (an adaptive one, if general questions are answered “unfavorably” (i.e. indicator a health risk at the workplace is present), then a handful of more in-depth related questions to pinpoint the exact problem are given.

I didn’t take the test yet, but just by reading ChristianKI’s objections/suggestions (with which I agree) you need to really clarify the questions.

Here’s a helpful piece of advice I’ve been given: Don’t think about if the question is understandable, ask yourself if there is any chance at all that it could possibly be misunderstood by someone somewhere and change it as often as you need until that is no longer the case.

Friendly-HI 31 Aug 2017 15:24 UTC
5 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Is life worth living?
I don’t actually think people want to die. I think people think they want to die.

When I have this discussion I often try to paint this scenario: It’s easy for you to say you’d want to die now, but imagine for a moment that you live in a future where two of your three neighbors already got their life extension treatment and felt super young, vitalized and healthy again, while you’re pushing 60 and you notice how you’re slowly falling apart. Many celebrities do it routinely, and eventually even some of your closest family members become convinced and get the treatment as well and some of them even keep pushing you on why the hell you haven’t done it yet. If you were not making this decision in some theoretical vacuum but inside some actually plausible social context, I don’t think you would possibly choose to just die while everyone else around you is having fun or begging you with tears in their eyes to not be a fucking traditionalist moron about this imagined non-issue.

Usually a lot of people then switch gears into justifying how its probably not possible anyway instead of actually engaging that particular argument and I shift gears into ending the conversation. They’ll do it anyway—I know it, you know it and maybe they know it too now.

Friendly-HI 30 Aug 2017 20:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jmh’s comment on: Is life worth living?
Agreed, there does seem to be no practical difference for the you-in-bed. But that feature seems to be the whole point of this scenario, so I think pointing that out is just a form of debasing the thought-experiment (which also ends with the sentence “if you were forced to pick”, I might add).

Initially I thought I’d pick #2. My life was kind of fine enough, so I’d rather prefer to give a copy of me the privilege of experiencing my life than not.

However, assuming world#take2 is populated by “real people” (aka. complete simulations, not just some p-zombie Truman show shenanigans with fake “people outputs” who lack subjective experience) the question really becomes something else: Does the “video-clip” that was your life contain enough fun-for-you-and-others to outweigh the suffering of all the real/perfectly simulated people that would be re-living their existences alongside you? Kind of makes me tend strongly towards #1 just to get it over and done with, there’s just still too much shit happening in this world. Just to be safe in order to not commit atrocities for a bit of mediocre hedonistic fun it is #1 for me. Life’s fun but who needs it.

Friendly-HI 30 Aug 2017 19:52 UTC
2 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
This entire thing is super confused. A lot of complexity and assumptions are hidden inside your words, seemingly without you even realizing it.

The whole point of using a formal language is that IF your premises / axioms are correct, AND you only use logically allowed operations, THEN what comes out at the tail end should equal truth. However, you are really just talking with letters acting as placeholders for what could just as well be simply more words:

Committing on A’s part, causes B to commit to defect (and vice versa). committing leads to outcomes ranked 3rd and 4th in their preferences. As A and B are rational, they do not commit.

What does “commit” mean?

As A is not committing, A’s strategy is either predict(B) or !predict(B).

What could it even mean to not commit and !predict(B)? How is not predicting B just another way of committing to defect/collaborate?

If A predicts B will defect, A can cooperate or defect. If A predicts B will cooperate, A can cooperate or defect, Vice versa.

They can cooperate or defect whether or not they predict or don’t predict each other, because that is all they can do anyway so this statement has zero information content.

The above assignment is circular and self-referential. If A and/or B tried to simulate it, it leads to a non terminating recursion of the simulations.

What makes you possibly say that with such confidence at this point in all this confusion?

You should google “cargo cult science” by Feynman, because It seems like there is also such a thing as cargo cult rationality and frankly I think you’re doing it. I’m not trying to be mean and it’s not like I could do these kind of mental gymnastics better than you but you can’t do it it either yet and the sooner you realize it the better for you.

Friendly-HI 26 Aug 2017 1:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Emotional labour

With your cancer event—how could you be sure that the partner would not want to talk about it or be involved in the situation?

She was under a lot of stress due to an ungodly amount of near simultaneous university exams and under high pressure of failing her course if she didn’t ace all of them (luckily she pulled through). She had also lost her father to cancer about a year before this event and was still suffering the effects. In fact, with the death of her father she had lost both her parents and next to her brother I’m her “only real family” and we had been together for about five years at that point.

My prediction of how she would have reacted to the possibility of me having cancer was that she would not have been able to focus on her studies and exams very well, possibly fail an education she had invested years of her life and a huge sum of money into and generally have an unbelievably miserable time during the weeks until anything conclusive about the lump would have been found. I on the other hand was actually fairly fine during the whole affair and didn’t even have trouble falling asleep. Either it was going to kill me or not, and if there was something I could do then I’d do whatever it takes, but I was not going to lose sleep over something that to me felt maybe like a 40 − 60% chance of it being cancer or nothing. A rational / stoic mindset about differentiation what you can and what you cannot control in your life and the knowledge to clearly separate those two helped me a lot with that I think.

To me it was not even remotely an option to tell her, I did what I think any good partner should have done in the situation I described above: Suck it up and don’t let anything show. When I eventually told her afterwards she did get somewhat mad about it but conceded it was the right decision...

How could I even face myself in the mirror today if I had simply told her about it and she had failed her education as a result of it—especially after it turned out to be nothing (though even if it was cancer I think the same would apply)? I think I did precisely the right thing, what she would have wanted was irrelevant, the only person who really had “a choice” in this scenario was me.

Friendly-HI 25 Aug 2017 19:17 UTC
1 point
on: Emotional labour
Two counter-examples involving my SO in cases where we both chose option 1 and both felt it was the correct decision.

Event + option 1: I became aware I was pregnant with your child right before you left in order to visit your parents over the Christmas and New Year holidays. I kept it from you during all of your vacation because I knew it would screw up your whole stay with your parents and friends. I predicted you’d prefer to deal with it later and in person.

Event + option 1: I (not known to be paranoid about personal health) found a very suspicious lump in a very suspicious place in my body. I immediately went to get it checked, but since I predicted you’d be extremely worried about me I did not tell you about it until after my second check-up months later, so you would not have to worry about losing me to cancer like you recently did one of your parents.

We agree that in both cases these were good decisions, but those are rather extreme cases with a very high emotional cost to the other person compared to breaking a vase or something in the low range of suffering.

My suspicion: Preferring option 2 over option 1 across all applicable cases seems too generalized and wrong. I suspect there is a point of magnitude in emotional cost to another person, after which you might also feel that option 1 would be preferred by both parties—what do you think?

Another real-world-example I’m personally familiar with that feels very related to this one, but without the intention to ever let the emotionally impacted person actually know (i.e. direct lying) is this situation: Dear god-fearing bed-ridden grandma, your poor son died peacefully of a heart attack. (As opposed to slit his wrists in the bathroom while drunk).

Friendly-HI 29 Mar 2015 15:52 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
Could very well be true. But it leaves open the curious question what on earth I would be looking for in the ex-eastern block ;)

Friendly-HI 26 Dec 2014 11:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: arbo’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
Be honest, do you really actually fear cringing when you re-read your stuff months or years from now? Sounds to me like an invented reason to mask a much more plausible fear: Looking foolish in front of others by saying foolish things. Well in case you do make a fool of yourself you always have the option of admitting “back then I was foolish in saying that and I have changed my mind because of X”. In this communuty being able to do that is usually accompanied with a slight status gain rather than severe status punishment and ridicule, so no need to worry about that.

Friendly-HI 25 Nov 2014 21:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Fivehundred’s comment on: Breaking the vicious cycle

I don’t believe that competent mental health professionals actually exist

Ouch shots fired. How the success rate of CBT looks like depends heavily what exactly the mental health problem is. “Curing” or rather alleviating many kinds of phobias via cognitive behavior therapy has a really excellent success rate for example.

Friendly-HI 4 Aug 2014 11:03 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: “And that’s okay”: accepting and owning reality
Thanks for the response, that was an interesting read.

As for perfectionism—In retrospect I think it was a huge drag on my own well-being and social relationships but helpful in getting things done. I am much less of a perfectionist nowadays and that has improved my life in many ways at the cost of making me somewhat less effective when it comes to work. Perfectionism for me wasn’t just about my work but also about myself and others—seeing the imperfections and trying to iron them out. A pattern of perception if you will that didn’t see the good things about myself and others and predominantly focused on optimizing the negatives. I feel much better now after changing that pattern of perception, so I was interested in how you thought of it—also outside of work.

Friendly-HI 3 Aug 2014 0:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: August 2014 Media Thread
Someone with moderator/admin rights should be able to delete it entirely—if anyone with those rights passes by here then please do so. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Friendly-HI 2 Aug 2014 15:35 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: August 2014 Media Thread
...is there a time limit before that happens? Because my button is gone now yet it wasn’t replaced by another button, it just says “Retracted” where the button was beforehand and the word is not clickable either.

Friendly-HI 2 Aug 2014 15:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Friendly-HI’s comment on: August 2014 Media Thread
Oh no I cocked that one up. I wanted to copy-paste this under “Meta”, as audio-books aren’t listed yet. I thought to retract this post meant to delete it entirely. Captain?

Friendly-HI 2 Aug 2014 14:59 UTC
0 points
on: August 2014 Media Thread
I am (still) listening to an audio-book called “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser. It’s mainly dealing with a Titan II missile incident in the US. I know the Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov incidents, but very little about just how badly America managed her own stockpile. I was prepared this would send a few shivers down my spine and I was not disappointed.

What I don’t like about it is that first and foremost it’s written in a way to tell a gripping story, so the juicy information is embedded in a narrative that spends too much time describing things I don’t care about. It jumps around too much, it cuts just like a movie—the overarching plot is the Titan II incident and the narrative jumps back and forth from this red thread to how the first bomb was built and tested, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, how the bombers worked, how Eisenhower saw it, how Kennedy saw it, how the safety and failsafe mechanisms were slowly developed and added, how NATO became the dumping ground for missiles that were just about as likely to blow up somewhere you didn’t want as they were to hit anywhere close to a Soviet target...

I’m not quite finished with it yet but I mainly enjoyed listening so far and learned quite a deal despite the suboptimal “story-presentation”. Also I can only recommend audio-books in general, they are really good while you have to do tedious chores that require more working with your hands than with your head.

Friendly-HI 30 Jul 2014 17:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?

If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.

Friendly-HI 30 Jul 2014 10:02 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
If you accept reductionism, which you really should, then a copy of your brain is a copy of your mind. I submit you don’t actually care about the interconnected causal process when you’re conscious or asleep. You probably couldn’t if you tried really hard, what does it even matter? You couldn’t even tell if that causal connection “was broken” or not.

People get drunk and wake up in some place without recollection how they got there and their life doesn’t seem particularly unworthy afterwards, though they should go easier on the liquor. The supposed problem you feel so strongly about is merely a conceptual problem, a quirk of how your mind models people and identities, not one rooted in reality. It’s all just a consequence of how you model reality in your mind and then your mind comes up with clever ideas how “being causally interconnected during sleep” somehow matters. You model yourself and the copy of yourself as two separate and distinct entities in your mind and apply all the same rules and intuitions you usually apply to any other mind that isn’t you. But those intuitions are misplaced in in this novel and very different situation where that other mind is literally you in every way you care about. Which is fine because you are and you will be separated in space and perhaps also in time, so it really makes sense modeling two instances of yourself, or at least to try. If you imagine to kill yourself and your copy goes on it really somehow fells like “I die and some impostor who isn’t me -or at least doesn’t continue my own subjective experience- lives on and my unique own inner subjective experience will be extinguished and I’ll miss out on the rest of it because someone else has internal experiences but that’s not me”. That’s just a quirk of how we tend model other minds and other people, nothing more, All the dozens of clever reasons people tend to come up with to somehow show how they won’t be able to continue their internal experience as their own copy hold no merit, it’s all just an outgrowth of that really deeply rooted intuition based on how we model ourselves and other people.

People wake up from year long comas and if you were to wake up from one you wouldn’t go: “oh no I’m suddenly not me anymore, I lost track of my causal interconnectedness because I stopped paying attention”. The fact that your brain is the result of causal things doesn’t mean “causal interconnectedness” carries any kind of actually valuable information your copy would somehow miss, or to be precise that you would miss. In fact this kind of information is lost all the time, there is nothing that keeps track of it, information about our causal past gets lost all the time as entropy increases. Eventually the universe will face its slow heat death and there will be no information about the causal chains of the past remaining at all. In the end there is maximum entropy and minimum information. It’s happening right now all around us, we’re moving towards it and information about the causal past is being lost everywhere as we speak.

Friendly-HI 29 Jul 2014 22:13 UTC
3 points
in reply to: therufs’s comment on: “And that’s okay”: accepting and owning reality
Maybe it was, looking at that 50000€/y number solipsist quotes. In Germany you earn barely half of that before tax.

But that’s not at all the main reason why I ask to be perfectly honest. I remember Swimmer portraying herself as having some form of social anxieties so this job strikes me as a particularly counterintuitive choice.

Friendly-HI 29 Jul 2014 21:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: therufs’s comment on: “And that’s okay”: accepting and owning reality
Yes but the question is why do they want to? :)

I’ve worked in elderly care myself a long time ago when I was around 15 years old, which I imagine is quite comparable to being a nurse but I’ve found the work to be very hard both physically and emotionally (a lot of suffering and occasionally death to deal with). In fact it inspired me to do better in school just to not have to do work this hard for what back then I envisioned being “the rest of my life”.

In Germany you either finish school with after 9, 10 or 12 (back then 13) years and you could only study at a University (without jumping through hoops) after attaining your ¹²⁄₁₃ year school diploma. I was in the 10-year school type and working in elderly care was pretty much the type of work I might have to do if I left school after 10 years. My grades improved and I switched schools after 10 years and did another 3 just to “escape” hard work like that.