Hyena

Karma: 495

Hyena 19 Jan 2012 10:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: [link] SMBC on utilitarianism and vegatarianism.
Well, that’s my point. There’s all these arguments hanging around here and when you take any of the general approaches, like utility theory, you tend to bump into them with nasty consequences. As I said: I don’t really have a way to “solve” this.

Hyena 3 Dec 2011 10:39 UTC
3 points
on: Does Hyperbolic Discounting Really Exist?
So far as I recall, Ainslie’s thesis is that the various “modules” of the brain have hyperbolic discount curves which are then composed to yield an exponential curve. Akrasia is what happens when particularly strong specific impulses spike above the exponential discount curve. Ainslie predicts what you actually see: lots of people making rational decisions punctuated by failures of “willpower” large and small.

I’m also unsure whether you’re overstating LessWrong’s obsession with akrasia. It’s never felt over-generalized. The focus on it seems reasonable enough insofar as LeWers seem to be drawn heavily from students and techies, two groups for whom akrasia can be particularly destructive. So even if hyperbolic discounting is rarer (than I’m still not sure what), the expected negative value of akrasia may be particularly high for LeWers, leading to its perennial popularity.

Hyena 1 Dec 2011 2:23 UTC
1 point
on: LW Philosophers versus Analytics
Your target populations are very different. Your average philosophy undergrad is closer to your average undergrad than is the average LeWer. Pitting LeWers against philosophy undergrads who spend substantial amounts of their time on unassigned philosophical investigation and discussion seems a more fair fight, at least if you also handicap LeWers for age.

Hyena 30 Nov 2011 22:53 UTC
0 points
on: How rationality can make your life more awesome
Shokwave got it more or less in narrative form. Thinking rationally gives you a shot at breaking path dependence before you get too far gone to turn back.

Hyena 30 Nov 2011 22:45 UTC
0 points
on: What I think about you
The irony of this thread is that there are, atm, 24 comments, one post and 46 karma points between them. So either there’s a lot of counterbalancing karma or no one wants to opine!

Hyena 30 Nov 2011 22:41 UTC
0 points
on: Life Extension versus Replacement
This presumes that extending the life of an existing person by 100 years precludes the creation of a new person with a lifespan of 100 years. We will be motivated to prefer the former scenario because it is difficult for us to feel its relevance to the latter.

Hyena 28 Nov 2011 3:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Karmakaiser’s comment on: Might I ask for some advice?
No, he’s probably not wrong but he’s also not relevant. The OP probably isn’t importing the meme directly from 19th century France. In the US, you import the meme from two general sources: hippies or the tech industry. Given the author’s own description of his life, the tech industry seems most likely.

But who knows: maybe he’s a meme hipster and only imports French originals?

Hyena 18 Nov 2011 9:15 UTC
5 points
on: Might I ask for some advice?
Facts that need to be cleared first: (1) you are 22, (2) “passion” is a meme imported from the tech industry.

You shouldn’t have a sense of direction at 22. If you do, you’re doing it wrong; it means forswearing experimentation, which is a huge net positive endeavor at that age.

People usually develop a sense of direction because of path dependence. Since you are not in a professional major, dependence is weak. The down economy, with its ebb of opportunity and grim signals, worsens any confusion. If you feel you are even more confused than you should be, that’s probably the reason.

The passion thing is just what techies talk about to thump their chests. It means whatever the speaker needs it to, just ignore it.

Hyena 8 Nov 2011 12:59 UTC
13 points
on: Query the LessWrong Hivemind
If you query Less Wrong, what is the probability that the median response is acceptably close to correct? Please provide confidence intervals, feel free to break out any classes of propositions if you feel that it would be unfair/poor form/not very fun at all to group all classes together but explain why.

Hyena 8 Nov 2011 12:53 UTC
3 points
on: Low legibility of Cognitive Reflection Test dramatically improves performance?
What is the proposed mechanism? Is it that they think harder about it or simply that they read more carefully? Test design criteria often specify a number of interventions to prevent mistaken readings (for example, using “NOT” rather than “not” or emphasizing queries in bold type after a long paragraph).

Hyena 7 Nov 2011 3:59 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: A clever argument for buying lottery tickets
I see that Wei_Dai has come up with the answer. I was unwilling to dedicate the time to it, as your example was needlessly overgrown. I should have simply said nothing save that. My apologies.

Hyena 4 Nov 2011 23:53 UTC
1 point
on: A clever argument for buying lottery tickets
I don’t think this works because you’re submitting to the same probabilistic calculation but muddying the waters, so somewhere you should be missing something which pushes expected value in line and makes it a bad decision. There’s also the issue that no lottery has proper payoffs where expected value is par.

A better argument is to note that we lose money with little utility gained all the time because we don’t intuit our accounts very well unless we’re close to the edge of them by some factor. In that case, buying lottery tickets is a good bet up to edge * factor because they have a higher expected value than simply losing the money altogether.

Hyena 3 Nov 2011 20:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Dorikka’s comment on: Do we have it too easy?
One of the things Yudkowsky has done very well is coin memorable phrases for questions about cognitive bias or poor reasoning. Terms like “true rejection” are great mnemonics. But there is also a danger—which Yudkowsky himself would recognize—of forming a group identity around this patois.

That’s the jargon I’m talking about. You should think twice before adopting these terms when writing or speaking.

Hyena 2 Nov 2011 16:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
Maybe. I read a massive quantity of material daily, on the order of 80-90,000 words some weeks. This is combined with comment across a variety of forums and fields. I rely heavily on cues from websites to keep straight who I’m talking to and that I’m even on the right submission forms when I say something.

Hyena 2 Nov 2011 4:24 UTC
6 points
on: Do we have it too easy?
To avoid cult mode, try to avoid the local jargon. That will help you keep some distance by not turning on your slogan-loyalty loop. I’ve avoided this because I remember when this topic space was young, none of these sites existed and this sort of thing was still the stuff of excited conversation among college students. It’s nice to see it all laid out in various places, but it will never appear to me as the work of monumental genius it does to some people.

Hyena 2 Nov 2011 4:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
Nothing to clarify, actually. I apologize; I’ve been busy and the header switch occasioned by using the context link threw me. It changes the title to “XXXX comments on YYYY”. Not being someone who comments consistently, this tends to make me mistake who originally posted because it plants an association between the person I’m replying to and the title of the post.

Hyena 1 Nov 2011 21:35 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
“The first time around” for the OPer is the OP, from which it is absent and in which you identify the problem as incomplete attempts.

Hyena 1 Nov 2011 13:45 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
So why not just say “to clarify, I believe that we do not have enough knowledge of C. elegans’ neuroanatomy to build new models at this time. We need to devote more work to studying that before we can build newer models”? That’s a perfectly valid objection, but it contradicts your original post, which states that C. elegans is well understood neurologically.

If you believe that we cannot build effective models “without [additional] direct observation”, then you have done two things: you’ve objected to the consensus that C. elegans is well understood and provided a criterion (and effective upload model of its neuroanatomy) for judging how well we understand.

Hyena 31 Oct 2011 20:08 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
I think the problem here is that you think that each instance of a simulation is actually an “attempt”. A simulation is a model of some behavior; unlike climbing Everest (which I did in 2003), taming Pegasus (in −642) or repelling the Golden Horde (1257 − 1324, when I was called away on urgent business in Stockholm), each run of a model is a trial, not an attempt. Each iteration of the model is an attempt, as is each new model.

We need more attempts. We learn something different from each one.

Hyena 31 Oct 2011 15:22 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
Everything that fails does for a reason and in a way. In engineering, mere bugs aside, everything fails at the frontier of our knowledge and our failures carry information about the shape of that frontier back to us. We learn what problems need to be overcome and can, with many failures, generalize what the overall frontier is like, connect its problems and create concepts which solve many at once.