homunq

• homunq 25 Jul 2010 16:34 UTC

  20 points

  on: At­ten­tion Lurk­ers: Please say hi

  Hi.

  I am not actually a lurker—I currently have 13 karma—but I am not a heavy participator. However, now I would like to get to 20 karma so I can make a post on why MWI makes acausal incentives into minor considerations. I would also be gratified if someone told me how to make my draft of this post linkable, even if it does not show up within “new”.

  I think that you should get some bonus towards the initial 20 karma for your average karma per post. This belief is clearly self-serving, but not necessarily thereby invalid. I believe my own average karma per post is decent but not outstanding.

  I believe that the businesslike tone of this post, as a series of declarative statements, will be seen as excessive subservience to the imagined norms of a community of rationalists, and thus net me less status and karma than a chattier post. I am honestly unsure if the simple self-referential gambit of this paragraph will help or hurt this situation.

• homunq 1 Sep 2010 15:52 UTC

  19 points

  on: Less Wrong: Open Thread, Septem­ber 2010

  I had a top-level post which touched on an apparently-forbidden idea downvoted to a net of around −3 and then deleted. This left my karma pinned (?) at 0 for a few months. I am not sure of the reasons for this, but suspect that the forbidden idea was partly to blame.

  My karma is now back up to where I could make a top-level post. Do people think that a discussion forum on the moderation and deletion policies would be beneficial? I do, even if we all had to do silly dances to avoid mentioning the specifics of any forbidden idea(s). In my opinion, such dances are both silly and unjustified; but I promise that I’d do them and encourage them if I made such a post, out of respect for the evident opinions of others, and for the asymmetrical (though not one-sided) nature of the alleged danger.

  I would not be offended if someone else “took the idea” and made such a post. I also wouldn’t mind if the consensus is that such a post is not warranted. So, what do you think?

• homunq 2 Aug 2014 17:58 UTC

  16 points

  on: Why the tails come apart

  Great article overall. Regression to the mean is a key fact of statistics, and far too few people incorporate it into their intuition.

  But there’s a key misunderstanding in the second-to-last graph (the one with the drawn-in blue and red “outcome” and “factor”). The black line, indicating a correlation of 1, corresponds to nothing in reality. The true correlation is the line from the vertical tangent point at the right (marked) to the vertical tangent point at the left (unmarked). If causality indeed runs from “factor” (height) to “outcome” (skill), that’s how much extra skill an extra helping of height will give you. Thus, the diagonal red line should follow this direction, not be parallel to the 45 degree black line. If you draw this line, you’ll notice that each point on it has equal vertical distance to the top and bottom of the elliptical “envelope” (which is, of course, not a true envelope for all the probability mass, just an indication that probability density is higher for any point inside than any point outside).

  Things are a little more complex if the correlation is due to a mutual cause, “reverse” causation (from “outcome” to “factor”), or if “factor” is imperfectly measured. In that case, the line connecting the vertical tangents may not correspond to anything in reality, though it’s still what you should follow to get the “right” (minimum expected squared error) answer.

  This may seem to be a nitpick, but to me, this kind of precision is key to getting your intuition right.

  What links here?

  • Why the tails come apart by Thrasymachus (1 Aug 2014 22:41 UTC; 317 points)

• homunq 6 Jun 2015 15:43 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Tak­ing Effec­tive Altru­ism Seriously

  I think you can make this critique more pointed. That is: “pro-liberty” is flag-waving rhetoric which makes us all stupider.

  I dislike the “politics is a mind-killer” idea if it means we can’t talk about politically touchy subjects. But I entirely agree with it if it means that we should be careful to keep our language as concrete and precise as possible when we approach these subjects. I could write several paragraphs about all the ways that the term “pro-liberty” takes us in the wrong direction, but I expect that most of you can figure all that out for yourselves.

• homunq 6 Aug 2010 23:06 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: At­ten­tion Lurk­ers: Please say hi

  Nor writing “Bloody Mary” in lipstick on mirrors?

  Seriously, my post was about why that stuff is not scary. Fiction can be good allegory for reality, but those stories all use a lot of you-should-be-scared tricks, all very well and good for ghost stories, but not conducive to actual discussion.

  We are swimming in a soup of sirens’ songs, every single day. Dangerous ideas don’t just exist, they abound. But I see no evidence of any dangerous ideas which are not best fought with some measure of banality, among other tactics. The trappings of Avert Your Eyes For That Way Lies Doom seem to be one of the best ways to enhance the danger of an idea.

  In fact… what if Eliezer himself… no, that would be too horrible… oh my god, it’s full of stars. (Or, in serious terms: I’m being asked to believe not just in a threat, but also that those who claim to protect us have some special immunity, either inherent or acquired; I see no evidence for either proposition).

  Gah, it’s incredibly annoying to try to talk about something without being too explicit. The more explicit I get in my head, the more ridiculous this whole charade seems to me. Of course I can find plenty of rational arguments to support that, but I also trust the feeling. I’m participationg in the “that which must not be mentioned” dance out of both respect and precaution, but honestly, it’s mostly just respect. You’re smart people and high status in this arena and I probably shouldn’t laugh at your bugaboos.

• homunq 7 Apr 2022 23:35 UTC

  13 points

  on: What an ac­tu­ally pes­simistic con­tain­ment strat­egy looks like

  I think this post makes sense given the premises/​arguments that I think many people here accept: that AG(S)I is either amazingly good or amazingly bad, and that getting the good outcome is a priori vastly improbable, and that the work needed to close the gap between that prior and a good posterior is not being done nearly fast enough.

  I don’t reject those premises/​arguments out of hand, but I definitely don’t think they’re nearly as solid as I think many here do. In my opinion, the variance in goodness of reasonably-thinkable post-AGSI futures is mind-bogglingly large, but it’s still probably a bell curve, with greater probability density in the “middle” than in super-heaven or ultra-hell. I also think that just making the world a better place here and now probably usually helps with alignment.

  This is probably not the place for debating these premises/​arguments; they’re the background of this post, not its point. But I do want to say that having a different view on that background is (at least potentially) a valid reason for not buying into the “containment” strategy suggested here.

  Again, I think my point here is worthwhile to mention as one part of the answer to the post’s question “why don’t more people think in terms of containment”. I don’t think that we’re going to resolve whether there’s space in between “friendly” and “unfriendly” right here, though.

• homunq 20 May 2012 13:57 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Clippy’s comment on: In­tel­lec­tual Hip­sters and Meta-Contrarianism

  That comment made me smile. I didn’t upvote it, but I just hid a paperclip, making the moment when I’ll have to buy another box that much closer.

  edit: actually, I wrote the above before I actually did it. But when I looked in the place I expected to find paperclips, and didn’t find any, making the probability that I’ll buy paperclips in the near future somewhat higher. So it’s all good.

• homunq 12 Sep 2011 2:15 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: A Ra­tion­al­ist’s Tale

  Mad skillz doesn’t imply rationality. Lack of demonstrable skillz does strongly decrease the probability of mad rashunalitea.

Over­com­ing bias in others

• homunq 30 Aug 2011 20:44 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Polyhacking

  Imagine two islands, each with some tiny population—let’s say, 10 each. Nobody ever interacts with anyone off-island, and the resources and living standards are the same. Now if I told you that people on island 1 are higher-status than people on island 2, does that strike you as a nonsensical statement? To me, it does not; it means that there is more mutual respect on island 1. I think that parsing that as “status” is justified, because it’s not synonymous with how nice they are to each other, how much they like each other, or any other such variable (though of course it would tend to correlate with those).

  You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).

• homunq 14 Oct 2010 2:09 UTC

  11 points

  on: The Ir­ra­tional­ity Game

  The most advanced computer that it is possible to build with the matter and energy budget of Earth, would not be capable of simulating a billion humans and their environment, such that they would be unable to distinguish their life from reality (20%). It would not be capable of adding any significant measure to their experience, given MWI.(80%, which is obscenely high for an assertion of impossibility about which we have only speculation). Any superintelligent AIs which the future holds will spend a small fraction of their cycles on non-heuristic (self-conscious) simulation of intelligent life.(Almost meaningless without a lot of defining the measure, but ignoring that, I’ll go with 60%)

  NOT FOR SCORING: I have similarly weakly-skeptical views about cryonics, the imminence and speed of development/​self-development of AI, how much longer Moore’s law will continue, and other topics in the vaguely “singularitarian” cluster. Most of these views are probably not as out of the LW mainstream as it would appear, so I doubt I’d get more than a dozen or so karma out of any of them.

  I also think that there are people cheating here, getting loads of karma for saying plausibly silly things on purpose. I didn’t use this as my contrarian belief, because I suspect most LWers would agree that there are at least some cheaters among the top comments here.

• homunq 4 Sep 2010 18:10 UTC

  11 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity quotes: Septem­ber 2010

  I’m looking for a Darwin quote I used to have, but lost. It was something about how whenever he encoutered a fact that seemed wrong to him, he immediately noted it down, as such facts are both important and easy to forget.

  It’s harder to find than you think. It’s not on the master list of rationality quotes or any of the top 10 google results for “darwin quotes”. And the problem with 19th century thinkers is that their vocabulary is too big, and so Google is crippled against them.

  (Edit: good job. I had tried “fact”, but not limiting the source. And some other words I attempted—“note”, “write”, “remember”, “forget”—are not there.)

  Anyone who upvotes this comment is committing to upvote the person who finds the quote.

  What links here?

  • simplicio's comment on Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes April 2013 by Vaniver (24 Apr 2013 19:40 UTC; 9 points)

• homunq 1 Sep 2010 17:58 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Less Wrong: Open Thread, Septem­ber 2010

  I don’t want a revolution, and don’t believe I’ll change the mind of somebody committed not to thinking too deeply about something. I just want some marginal changes.

  I think Roko got a pretty clear explanation of why his post was deleted. I don’t think I did. I think everyone should. I suspect there may be others like me.

  I also think that there should be public ground rules as to what is safe. I think it is possible to state such rules so that they are relatively clear to anyone who has stepped past them, somewhat informative to those who haven’t, and not particularly inviting of experimentation. I think that the presence of such ground rules would allow some discussion as to the danger or non-danger of the forbidden idea and/​or as to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of supressing it. Since I believe that the truth is “non-danger” and “ineffectiveness”, and the truth will tend to win the argument over time, I think that would be a good thing.

• homunq 27 Jul 2010 1:09 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: homunq’s comment on: At­ten­tion Lurk­ers: Please say hi

  I posted a diary, and it was banned for containing a dangerous idea. I can understand that certain ideas are dangerous; in fact, in the discussion I started, I consciously refrained from expressing several sub-points for that reason, starting with my initial post. But I think that if there’s such a policy, it should be explicit, and there should be some form of appeal. If the very discussion of these issues shouldn’t happen in public, then there should be a private space to give whatever explanation can be given of why. A secret, unappealable rule which cannot even be discussed—this is not the path to rationalism, it’s the way down the rabbit hole.

• homunq 24 Jul 2010 17:17 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: JanetK’s comment on: Book Re­view: The Root of Thought

  A further note on staining: pioneer neurobiologist Ramon y Cajal got a lot of mileage out of a staining technique which, for reasons he didn’t understand, only stained a small fraction of neurons. Bingo: instead of getting a dense thicket, you get some beautiful branching structures to draw. If his technique had picked out individual astrocytes instead, perhaps glial cells would have gotten more attention.

• homunq 13 Jul 2013 17:03 UTC

  9 points

  on: Four Fo­cus Areas of Effec­tive Altruism

  “Thinking quantitatively” is poor shorthand for good rational practice. Of course a rationalist shouldn’t neglect quantitative thought; that leads to fuzz. But purely quantitative evaluation is just as bad; it leads to No-Child-Left-Behind-style teaching-to-the-test and, worse, testing-to-the-test (choosing metrics based on reliability over applicability).

  I think that there are signs of that in the choice of four areas. It’s not just that “effective environmental activism” didn’t make the cut; what about politics itself? Rational improvements in political systems are incredibly easy to imagine; approval voting, for instance, is a tiny, simple change compared to plurality voting, yet would eliminate a number of senseless biases in politics. And politics is important; as any evil overlord knows, the goal is to take over the world. But it’s very hard to quantify political progress objectively, and easy to get into mind-killing arguments, so it seems the whole issue just gets covered by an ick field for rationalists.

  So, the question becomes: do you want to talk about what aspiring effective altruists do do, or what they should do? If it’s the former, fine. If it’s the latter, I think you have to start from more basic principles.

• homunq 20 May 2012 13:03 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: albeola’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes May 2012

  You have a funny definition of “lost”. By that measure, JRR Tolkien is worse than a mass-murderer.

• homunq 28 Jun 2011 23:16 UTC

  9 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: June 2011

  I am quite prepared to be told, with regard to the cases I have here proposed, as I have already been told with regard to others, “Oh, that is an extreme case, it would never really happen!” Now I have observed that the answer is always given instantly, with perfect confidence, and without examination of the details of the proposed case. It must therefore rest on some general principle: the mental process being probably something like this — ‘I have formed a theory. This case contradicts my theory. Therefore this is an extreme case, and would never occur in practice’.

  -Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), relating to the possibility of strategically-induced Condorcet cycles in elections.

• homunq 31 Aug 2010 15:37 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Kevin’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial Risk and Public Relations

  As someone who had over 20 points of karma obliterated for reasons I don’t fully understand, for having posted something which apparently strayed too close to a Roko post which I never read in its full version, I can attest that further and broader discussion of the moderation policy would be beneficial. I still don’t really know what happened. Of course I have vague theories , and I’ve received a terse and unhelpful response from EY (a link to a horror story about a “riddle” which kills—a good story which I simply don’t accept as a useful parable of reality), but nothing clear. I do not think that I have anything of outstanding value to offer this community, but I suspect that Roko, little I, and the half-dozen others like us which probably exist, are a net loss to the community if driven away, especially if not being seen as cultlike is valuable.

Democ­racy and rationality