Isn’t the problem more like: they are ignoring the huge number of bits of evidence that say that cells in fact exist. They aren’t comparing between hypotheses that say cells exist. They are comparing the uniform prior for cells existing to a the prior for only random proteins existing. They sound more like they are trying to argue that all our experiences cannot be enough evidence that there are cells, which seems weird.
GDC3
I think that there is a use of the negative emotion of disillusionment that you are missing. When you switch to a more negative belief about a person based on new information for example, simply thinking about them differently in the future is not enough to adjust your emotional relationship to what you now think is appropriate. The time you spent believing the positive lie still counts in their favor instinctually. The pain of disillusion corrects for that.
If Santa isn’t real I want to retroactively cancel all of my fondness for him so that my history of believing in him can no longer influence me. That happening all at once hurts a lot. The motivating to face this pain is not just the desire for more knowledge. It has to be balanced by feeling an appropriate amount of fuzzies if my belief in Santa is confirmed by the experiment of pointing a hidden web cam at the fireplace. If we weren’t loss averse they would cancel for the same reason you can only try to test hypotheses rather than to confirm them.
You can’t try to be legitimately disillusioned or the opposite. You can only try to gain knowledge. So satisfied curiosity breaks the tie rather than replaces disillusionment.
What if I have a strong emotional response to the existence of a creature that would make up such a thing as a religion? I suppose it feels more poignant than transcendant, but I’ve always had strong tender feelings about other peoples religious beliefs.
If the original mistake was never made it would not be referenced as a meme in fiction, but given that it is mightn’t I just as well enjoy God as a fictional character or a cultural tradition to reference but not believe?
I agree that hymns to the nonexistence of God are bad, but that’s indeed because they’re imitative and not genuinely expressive. But there are genuine emotional expressions to the very real existence of the idea of God. And I think they prove that the “would not exist without the underlying mistake” is too broad.
I have the same 5, except in place of 1 I have something linguistic but not auditory. I can break it down into a stream of “words” in an order but there isn’t sound (nor visible words). The stream follows English grammar basically, and the “words” have English parts of speech but do not always correspond easily to English (or any other language I know) words. Sometimes there’s a translation but it’s not obvious to me, nor do my thoughts slow down thinking of it.
I can usually convert most of these thoughts into words by a paraphrase or translation, but I remember when I was a kid having many thoughts that I could memorize and repeat to myself but not successfully express in external language. A few of the most important ones I can remember now and translate.
I think it’s important to try to convert the reason to a consequentialist reason every time actually; it’s just that one isn’t done at that point, you have to step back and decide if the reason is enough. Like the murder example one needs to avoid dismissing reasons for being in the wrong format.
“I don’t want to tell my boyfriend because he should already know” translates to: in the universe in which I tell my boyfriend he learns to rely on me to tell him these things a little more and his chance of doing this sort of thing without my asking decreases in the future. You then have to ask if this supposed effect is really true and if the negative consequence is strong enough, which depends on things like the chances that he’ll eventually figure it out. But converting the reason gets you answering the right questions.
Sunk cost fallacy could be a sign that you don’t trust your present judgement compared to when you made the original decision to put the resources in. The right question is to ask why you changed your mind so strongly that the degree isn’t worth it even at significantly less additional cost. It is because of new information, new values, new rationality skills or just being in a bad mood right now.
An advantage is that you feel just as clever for coming up with the right questions whatever you decide, which out to make this a bit easy to motivate yourself to implement.
Upvoted for successfully correcting my confusion about this example and helping me get updating a little better.
Edit: wow, this was a really old comment reply. How did I just notice it...
1 and 2 together are pretty convincing to me. The intuition runs like this: it seems pretty hard to construct anything like an observer without probabilities, so there are only observers in as much as one is looking at the world according to the Born Rule view. So an easy anthropic argument says that we should not be surprised to find ourselves within that interpretation.
I think you’re missing the part where “their points of view” are exactly the same. What would it mean to see more than one of them when they’re exactly the same. Are you picturing them lined up next to each other in your field of view so you can count them?
Similarly there is no “I just definitely died” feeling that we know of. (How would we know?) You shouldn’t picture “dying and then waking up in another universe.” You should picture “I experience passing out knowing I may die, but that there is a least one of me that probably doesn’t. So when I wake up it will turn out that I was one of them.”
Does this make more sense? I think the barrier to intuition is in just how indistinguishable,” indistinguishable” is. You can be a billion exact copies and you’ll never notice, because they’re exact.
I suppose you mean they have different positions. But if indistinguishable particles in quantum mechanics can freely switch places with each other whenever, and which is which has no meaning, then what argument do you have that the universe can even keep different versions of you apart itself?
Not very formal, but I’m trying to convey the idea that certain facts that seem important have no actual meaning in the ontology of quantum physics.
There’s a gap in the proof that X and Y cooperate. You may know how to close it, but if it’s possible it’s not obvious enough so the extra steps should be added to the article. More importantly, if it can’t be closed the theorem might not be true.
The gap: We hypothesize that statement S is provable in (system of X). Therefore X will Cooperate. This guarantees that T is true, by definition, but not that Y will prove that T is true. Presumable Y can recreate the proof of S being true, but it cannot conclude that X will cooperate unless it also can prove that X will prove it.
I cannot see how to resolve this without stepping out of a specific formal system, which would make Lob’s Theorem unusable.
Am I missing something?
Relatedly, a mathematician friend said that he uses “obvious” to mean “there exists a very short proof of it.” He has been sometimes known to say things like “I think this is obvious but I’m not sure why yet.”
Specifically they’re different because of the pragmatic conversation rule that direct statements should be something your conversation partner will accept, in most normal conversations. You say “X” when you expect your conversation partner to say something like “oh cool, I didn’t know that.” You say “I believe X” when they may disagree and your arguments will come later or not at all. “It’s true that X” is more complicated; one example of use would be after the proposition X has already come up in conversation as a belief and you want to state it as a fact.
A: “I hear that lots of people are saying the sky is blue.” B: “The sky is blue.”
The above sounds weird. (Unless you are imagining it with emphasis on “is” which is another way to put emphasis on the truth of the proposition.) “The sky is blue” is being stated without signaling its relationship to the previous conversation so it sounds like new information; A will expect some new proposition and be briefly confused; it sounds like echolalia rather than an answer.
B: “The sky really is blue.
or
B: “It’s actually true that the sky is blue.”
sounds better in this context.
- 6 Oct 2012 20:35 UTC; 11 points) 's comment on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms by (
When the sky is white, it’s not the sky; it’s clouds blocking the sky. When the sky is black it’s just too dark to see the sky. At least that was my intuition before I knew that the sky wasn’t some conventionally blue object. I guess its a question of word usage whether the projective meaning of “blue” which is something like “looks blue under good lighting conditions” should still be applied when it’s not caused by reflectance. Though it’s not blue from all directions is it?
As I understand it, the sky does let red-yellow light through. It scatters blue light and lets red light through relatively unchanged. So it looks red-yellow near the light source and blue everywhere else.
You’re right. I think the lesson we should take from all this complexity is to remember that the wording of a sentence is relevant to more than just it’s truth conditions. Language does a lot more than state facts and ask questions.
You shouldn’t include things we know only by experience as part of our theoretical system, for the purpose of “the human Godel sentence.” At best learning a theorem from experience would add an axiom, but then our Godel sentence changes. So if we knew our Godel sentence it would become something else.
It doesn’t rule it out. Unless you’re directly observing those epiphenominal nodes, Occam’s razor heavily decreases the likelihood of such models though, because they make the same predictions with more nodes.
Mechanism is beside the point. Mechanism is just causal nodes in between. Having no mechanism just means there is a direct connection.
I took the survey and all the optional questions. I love answering multiple choice questions.
HI, I’m GDC3. Those are my initials. I’m a little nervous about giving my full name on the internet, especially because my dad is googlible and I’m named after him. (Actually we’re both named after my grandfather, hence the 3) But I go by G.D. in real life anyway so its not exactly not my name. I’m primarily working on learning math in advance of returning to college right now.
Sorry if this is TMI but you asked: I became an aspiring rationalist because I was molested as a kid and I knew that something was wrong, but not what it was or how to stop it, and I figure that if I didn’t learn how the world really worked instead of what people told me, stuff like that might keep happening to me. So I guess my something to protect was me.
My something to protect is still mostly me, because most of my life is still dealing with the consequences of that. My limbic system learned all sorts of distorted and crazy things about how the world works that my neocortex has to spend all of its time trying to compensate for. Trying to be a functional human being is sort of hard enough goal for now. I also value and care about eventually using this information to help other people who’ve had similar stuff happen to them. I value this primarily because I’ve pre-committed to valuing that so that the narrative would motivate me emotionally when I hate myself too much to motivate myself selfishly.
So I guess I self-modified my utility function. I actually was pretty willing to hurt other people to protect myself as a kid. I’ve made myself more altruistic not to feel less guilty (which would mean that I wasn’t really as selfish as I thought I was), but to feel less alone. Which is plausible I guess, because I wasn’t exactly a standard moral specimen as a kid.
I hope that was more interesting than upsetting. I think I can learn a lot from you guys if I can speak freely. I hope that I can contribute or at least constitute good outreach.