He thought he knew that there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates never tired of pointing out, thinking that you know when you don’t is the main cause of philosophical paralysis.
-- Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
My reading of that sentence was that Kaj_Sotala focused not on the happiness part of utilitarianism, but on the expected utility calculation part. That is, that everyone needs to make an expected utility calculation to make moral decisions. I don’t think any particular type of utility was meant to be implied as necessary.
The point is to imagine the event that is the least bad, but still bad. If dust specks doesn’t do it for you, imagine something else. What event you choose is not supposed to be the crucial part of the dilemma.
It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.
-- John Tukey
This isn’t really true. Only organisms with mitochondria developed multicellularity. Mitochondria are the hard part.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0702207104:
Multicellularity is widely viewed as a unique attribute of eukaryotes, somehow made possible by the origin of a more complex cellular architecture and, without question, with the assistance of natural selection. However, it is difficult to defend this assertion in any formal way. Complex, multicellularity has only arisen twice, once in animals and once in vascular plants. One might add fungi to the list, although the number of fungal cell types is not large, and there is some question as to whether multicellularity was ancestral to the phylogenetic group that contains animals, fungi, and slime molds. In any event, the probability that two or three origins of multicellularity simply arose by chance within eukaryotes as opposed to prokaryotes is somewhere on the order of 1⁄4 to 1⁄2, well below the general standards of statistical validity. Of course, many other eukaryotes are capable of producing a few different cell types, but the same is true for prokaryotes, some of which produce radically different cell morphologies.
“We have tried to do this in a hypothesis-independent manner because there is nothing more dangerous in life than a good hypothesis.”
--Kári Stefánsson, deCODE Genetics
“Although the first solution is the one usually given, I prefer this second one because it reduces the need to think, replacing it by the automatic calculus. Thinking is hard, so only use it where essential.”
--Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty
How does everyone feel about posts not consisting of info, advice or reflection, but only of request for help or the pointing out of problems and difficult questions? So far on LW the former kind of posts have been dominating, with the general feel, inherited from OB, that posts should be high-quality contributions from the poster to the community. But could there also be room for posts just consisting of “I have this problem (relevant to our topic) and I need help” or straight-forward questions without much complementary reflection from the poster?
Maybe this latter kind of material would be better placed in comment form in threads intended for this kind of thing (such as the recent The ideas you’re not ready to post ). Maybe there could even be a “General Help and Advice Thread”. This kind of set-up would keep the quality of posts at a high level—but would also mean that potentially good problems/questions would get little attention, buried away in obscure corners of the site.
On several occasions I’ve wanted to introduce people to Eliezer’s writings (and OB/LW aswell), but due to its disorganized and heavily-dependent-on-other-material-in-a-great-messy-web-like nature, I have feared that just a “hey check this guy out” would most likely just result in the person reading a few random essays, saying “yeah I guess that’s pretty interesting” and then forgetting about it. Right before LW launched, I seem to recall Eliezer talking about how the LW architecture would allow better organization and that maybe he would do something to make his material more accessible. I haven’t heard anything since then, but if something like that would be done I think that would be great.
(sorry if I’m being rude by focusing on just Eliezer’s material when we’re discussing the greater LW picture, but this is just a situation that I’ve found myself in a few times and I think it’s still relevant to this topic. I also second ciphergoth’s point about the elephant)
I used to play a competitive multiplayer game at a fairly high level, and in the community “play to win” was the standard dogma to throw at “scrubs” who complained about what they felt were unfair tactics or exploitation of bugs or unbalanced strategies. In this particular community, this attitude reached a somewhat unpleasant magnitude and many potentially constructive concerns or reflections upon player behaviour or game balance was met with hostility. The “play to win” doctrine to some extent hampered discussion in the community and fostered a cold, hostile environment where any sign of non-competitiveness was looked down on by default.
I don’t mean to extrapolate this to a larger picture, I just thought I’d share my experience with the “play to win” concept. One should keep in mind that the utility function in a computer game is extremely simple—“win” in a game actually means to win in the game. Indeed, Sirlin’s point is that in a competitive game, there is only one utility. In real life, your utility function is of course going to be more complex, and might include for example other people’s feelings.
Am I the only one who is isn’t entirely positive towards the heavy use of language identifying the LW community as “rationalists”, including terms like “rationalist training” etc.? (Though he is by far the heaviest user of this kind of language, I’m not really talking about Eliezer here, his language use is whole topic on its own—I’m restricting this particular concern to other people, to the general LW non-Eliezer jargon). Is strongly self-identifying as a “rationalist” really such a good thing? Does it really help you solve problems? (I second the questions raised by Yvain). Though perhaps small, isn’t there still a risk that the focus becomes too much on “being a rationalist” instead of on actually solving problems?
Of course, this is a blog about rationality and not about specific problems, so this kind of language is not suprising and sometimes might even be necessary. I’m just a bit hesitant towards it when the community hasn’t actually shown that it’s better at solving problems than people who don’t self-identify as rationalists and haven’t had “rationalist training”, or shown that the techniques fostered here have such a high cross-domain applicability as seems to be assumed. Maybe after it has been shown that “rationalists” do better than other people, people who just solve problems, I would feel better about this kind of jargon.
Post here if you live in Sweden.
Maybe it would be nice if some people wrote a few “tutorial”-like or basic lesson-kind of posts aimed at people who are new to the whole “rationalist” thing, covering for example basic concepts in probability theory and statistics, decision theory, cognitive bias etc., thereby making LW more accessible to newcomers who want to get on the train but might have never been exposed to these topics before. These posts could be sorted under a special tag that could be linked to in the “About” section.
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-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)