I think the idea is to have both accurate and inaccurate positive self-beliefs, and no negative self-beliefs, accurate or otherwise.
Whether this is desirable or even possible I take no stance.
gregconen
Karma: 367
They were also both written in English. The question is, can you see the difference?
Jayson apologetically expressed misunderstanding of rationality combined with an apparent willingness to be corrected. You arrogantly expressed your failure, and responded to criticism with ad hominems and whining.
Edit: In that post. Some of you responses were productive, and one is, at time of this writing, at positive karma.
But since our preferences are given to us, broadly, by evolution, shouldn’t we expect that our principles operate locally (context-dependent) and are likely to be mutually inconsistent?
Yes.
I have a strong preferences for simple set of moral preferences, with minimal inconsistency.
I admit that the idea of holding “killing babies is wrong” as a separate principle from “killing humans is wrong”, or holding that “babies are human” as a moral (rather than empirical) principle simply did not occur to me. The dangers of generalizing from one example, I guess.
Pretty much. Both you and bogus apparently forget to put an initial value into var (unless your language of choice automatically initializes them as 0).
Using while(1) with a conditional return is a little bizarre, when you can just go while(var<100).
Of course, my own draft used if(var % 3 == 0 && var % 5 == 0) instead of the more reasonable x%15.
I’m not sure what “arbitrary” means here. You don’t seem to be using it in the sense that all preferences are arbitary.
That seemed to be exactly how he’s using it. It would be how I’d respond, had I not worked it through already. But there is a difference between arbitrary in: “the difference between an 8.5 month fetus and a 15 day infant is arbitrary” and “the decision that killing people is wrong is arbitrary”.
Yes, at some point you need at least one arbitrary principle. Once you have an arbitrary moral principle, you can make non-arbitrary decisions about the morality of situations.
There’s a lot more about this in the whole sequence on metaethics.
I see my joke fell flat.
In the world at large, sanity is valued much less than it is here at lesswrong. Absurd as it sounds, many people would value righteous indignation above rational debate, or even above positive results.
You mean not appearing to have been mind-killed is a bad thing?
Welcome to the world. Sanity is not always valued so highly here as you might be used to.
EY’s posts undermine (1) significantly
What works for EY may not work for everyone else. For better or worse, he enjoys a special status in this community.
The kind that comes from more than a single person, for a start. An unequivocal sign of a conspiracy (like an actual explosive attached to a support).
Failing that, a report free of clear signs of confusion (like the aforementioned confusion at 4:39). Reports of explosions from people actually familiar with explosions, and/or experience and a track record of cool under threat (“a boiler guy” and bureaucrat don’t qualify, without more of a evidence). A witness who hasn’t changed his story back and forth. Etcetera.
Well, along with medical research, organ donation and cryonics also probably exceed the expected utility of cannibalism or necrophilia.
That said, I’m not sure they would be mutually exclusive. My head for my future self, my innards for the sick, my penis and anus for lovers, and my arms and legs for the hungry.
That adds some weight. But it’s still not particularly convincing. Even assuming he’s not being intentionally deceptive or deceptively cut (which I’m not sure is true), it’s not anything close to extraordinary evidence, as a claim like that requires.
Remember that witnesses perceptions and memories will be distorted. Clearly, events were confused (look at his statement at 4:39, where he’s confused on whether he’s standing on a landing or hanging). He “knows” he heard explosions, apparently based on his experience as “a boiler guy”; even setting aside the possibility of actual explosions from (eg) fuel oil tanks, it’s certainly possible that he mistook other sound associated with a massive fire and collapsing building for explosions. The devastation, dead bodies, etc, are likewise consequences of the fires and damage.
There is some evidence supporting the conspiracy theory, but it’s not nearly enough to outweigh the low prior and evidence against it.
I agree with the sentiment here.
However, in a community like this one, Aumann’s agreement theorem would suggest that most of the commonly held views, at least the views commonly held to be very likely, rather than just somewhat likely, should be correct.
A single eyewitness account, presumable handpicked and stagemanaged by people with an agenda, does not make particularly strong evidence.
First, the scenario you describe explicitly includes death, and as such falls under the ‘embellishments’ exception.
You’re going to die (or at least cease) eventually, unless our understanding of physics changes significantly. Eventually, you’ll run out of negentropy to run your thoughts. My scenario only changes what happens between then and now.
Failing that, you can just be tortured eternally, with no chance of escape (no chance of escape is unphysical, but so is no chance of death). Even if the torture becomes boring (and there may be ways around that), an eternity of boredom, with no chance to succeed any at any goal, seems worse than death to me.
Most versions of torture, continued for your entire existence. You finally cease when you otherwise would (at the heat death of the universe, if nothing else), but your entire experience spent being tortured. The type isn’t really important, at that point.
People that find human infants cuter than rabbit, dog, or cat infants isn’t a direct contradiction of the hypothesis, as humans would be particularly likely to find human infants cute (just as dogs are particularly likely to be protective and nurturing to puppies).
The point is that animals with large litters are particularly likely to have cute infants other things (like degree of genetic closeness) equal, and that large litter animals would be sufficiently cute to overcome the fact that we’re not related. Of course, domestic puppies and kittens have an advantage over wild animals, as much selection was based on human popularity.
Thus, the question is whether you find say Infant Elephants as cute as infant (wild) rabbits or Wolf Puppies.
Let me build on this. You say (and I agree) that fixing the damage caused by vitrification is much harder than fixing most causes of death. Thus, by the time that devitrification is possible, very few new people will be vitrified (only people who want a one-way trip to the future).
This leads me to 2 conclusions: 1) Most revivals will be of people who were frozen prior to the invention of the revivification technology. Therefore, if anyone is revived, it is because people want to revive people from the past. 2) The supply of people frozen with a given technology (who are willing to be revived, as opposed to the “one-way trip” bodies) will pretty much only decrease.
Assuming people continue to want revive people from the past, they will quickly run out of the easy revivals. If they still want to revive more people, they will have strong incentives to develop new revivification technologies.
Even setting aside a post-FAI economy, why should this be the case? Your PS3 metaphor is not applicable. Owners of old playstations are not an unserved market in the same way that older frozen bodies are. If PS(N) games are significantly more expensive than PS(N+1) games, people will simply buy a PS(N+1). Not an option for frozen people; older bodies will be an under served market in a way PS3 owners cannot be.
If there’s a “mass market” for revivals, clearly people are getting paid for the revivals, somehow. I see no reason why new bodies would pay, while old bodies would not. If people are being revived for historical research or historical curiosity, then older revivals will probably be MORE valuable. If it’s charitable, I don’t particularly see why altruistic people will only care about recent bodies. Further, especially if effective immortality exists, you’ll very quickly run out of recent bodies.
There might be an economic reason, in that more recent people have an easier time paying for their own revivals, because their revival is cheaper and/or their skills are more relevant. But if you’re worried about that, you can probably significantly improve your odds by setting up a trust fund for your own revival.
Regardless of whether the ultimate effects of global warming are a net positive or negative, there are likely to be costly disruptions, as areas currently good for agriculture and/or habitation cease to be good for them, even if they’re replaced by other areas.
It would help, but the difference I was refer to was that Jayson was embarrassed by his failure of rationality, while you either failed to recognize yours or were proud of it.
Ad hominem arguments are attacks against the arguers, rather than the arguments. For example:
Comments like that will not impress people here. They may provoke a more hostile response than is really warranted, but they are not serious arguments.
Starting an argument is often not perceived as productive by those who consider the topic a no brainer.
No one here is going to consider whining about persecution to be productive.