How is Metz’s behavior here worse than Scott’s own behavior defending himself? After all, Metz doesn’t explicitly say that Scott believes in racial iq differences, he just mentions Scott’s endorsement of Murray in one post and his account of Murray’s beliefs in another, in a way that suggests a connection. Similarly, Scott doesn’t explicitly deny believing in racial iq differences in his response post, he just lays out the context of the posts in a way that suggests that the accusation is baseless(perhaps you think Scott’s behavior is locally better? But he’s following a strategy of covertly communicating his true beliefs while making any individual instance look plausibly deniable, so he’s kinda optimizing against “locally good behavior” tracking truth here, so it seems perverse to give him credit for this)
interstice
“For my friends, charitability—for my enemies, Bayes Rule”
ZMD: Looking at “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space”, I don’t think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote,
In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not.
So on the one hand, this particular paragraph does seem like it’s misleadingly implying Scott was endorsing views on race/iq similar to Murray’s even though, based on the quoted passages alone, there is little reason to think that. On the other hand, it’s totally true that Scott was running a strategy of bringing up or “arguing” with hereditarians with the goal of broadly promoting those views in the rationalist community, without directly being seen to endorse them. So I think it’s actually pretty legitimate for Metz to bring up incidents like this or the Xenosystems link in the blogroll. Scott was basically using a strategy of communicating his views in a plausibly deniable way by saying many little things which are more likely if he was a secret hereditarian, but any individual instance of which is not so damning. So I feel it’s total BS to then complain about how tenuous the individual instances Metz brought up are—he’s using it as an example or a larger trend, which is inevitable given the strategy Scott was using.
(This is not to say that I think Scott should be “canceled” for these views or whatever, not at all, but at this stage the threat of cancelation seems to have passed and we can at least be honest about what actually happened)
This seems significantly overstated. Most subjects are not taught in school to most people, but they don’t thereby degrade into nonsense.
Why should Michael Burry have assumed that he had more insight about Avant! Corporation than the people trading with him?
Because he did a lot of research and “knew more about the Avant! Corporation than any man on earth”? If you have good reason to think that you’re the one with an information advantage trades like this can be rational. Of course it’s always possible to be wrong about that, but there are enough irrational traders out there that it’s not ruled out. Also note that it’s not actually needed that your counterparties are irrational on average, it’s enough that there are irrational traders somewhere in the broader ecosystem, as they can “subsidize” moderately-informed trading by others(which you can take advantage of in individual cases)
An amended slogan that more accurately captures the phenomenon the post is trying to point to would be “Conditional on your trade seemingly not creating value for your counterparty, your trade likely wasn’t all that good”.
Not sure how much I believe this myself, but Jacob cannell has an interesting take that social status isn’t a “base drive” either, but is basically a proxy for “empowerment”, influence over future states of the world. If that’s true it’s perhaps not so surprising that we’re still well-aligned, since “empowerment” is in some sense always being selected for by reality.
I would tell the students that any compactly specified model has to rely on a certain amount of “common-sensical” interpretation on their part, such that they need to evaluate what “counts” as a legitimate application of the theory and what does not. I’d argue this by analogy to their daily lives where interpretation of this sort is constantly needed to make sense of basic statements. Abstractly, this arises due to reality having a lot of detail which needs to be dynamically interpreted by a large parallel model like their brain and can’t be handled by a very compact equation or statement, so they need to act as a “bridge” between the compact thing and actual experiments. (Indeed, this sort of interpretation is so ubiquitous that real students would almost never make this kind of mistake, at least not so blatantly) There’s also something to be said about how most of our evidence that a given world-model is true necessarily comes from the extended social web of other scientists, but I would focus on the more basic error of interpretation first.
It’s a counterexample to a single step of reasoning(large multiverse of people --> God), it doesn’t have to be globally a valid theory of reality. And clearly the existence of an imaginable multiverse satisfying a certain property makes it more plausible that our actual multiverse might satisfy the same property. (As an analogy, consider math, where you might want an object satisfying properties A and B. Constructing an object with property A makes it more plausible that you might eventually construct one with both properties)
Can you in practice use set theory to discover something new in other branches or math, or does it merely provide a different (and less convenient) way to express things that were already discovered otherwise?
The value of set theory as a foundation comes more from being a widely-agreed upon language that is also powerful enough to express pretty much everything mathematicians can think up, rather than as a tool for making new discoveries. I think it’s worth learning at least at a shallow level for this reason, if you want to learn advanced math.
Well, UDASSA is false https://joecarlsmith.com/2021/11/28/anthropics-and-the-universal-distribution
Did you notice that I linked the very same article that you replied with? :P I’m aware of the issues with UDASSA, I just think it provides a clear example of an imaginable atheistic multiverse containing a great many possible people.
I think the cardinality should be Beth(0) or Beth(1) since finite beings should have finite descriptions, and additionally finite beings can have at most Beth(1)(if we allow immortality) distinct sequences of thoughts, actions, and observations, given that they can only think, observe, act, in a finite number of ways in finite time, so if you quotient by identical experiences and behaviors you get Beth(0) or Beth(1)(you might think we can e.g. observe a continuum amount of stuff in our visual field but this is an illusion, the resolution is bounded). The Bekenstein bound also implies physically limited beings in our universe have a finite description length.
There could be a God-less universe with Beth 2 people, but I don’t know how that would work
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine such a universe, e.g. consider all possible physical theories in some formal language and all possible initial conditions of such theories. This might be less simple to state than “imagine an infinitely perfect being” but it’s also much less ambiguous, so it’s hard to judge which is actually less simple.
SIA gives reason to think you should assign a uniform prior across possible people
My perspective on these matters is influenced a lot by UDASSA, which recovers a lot of the nice behaviors of SIA at the cost of non-uniform priors. I don’t actually think UDASSA is likely a correct description of reality, but it gives a coherent pictures of what an atheistic multiverse containing a great many possible people could look like.
I don’t think the anthropic argument works. I have some technical objections to discussion of the set of possible people(I think Beth(0) or Beth(1) at most are more plausible cardinalities, I don’t think we have to assume a uniform prior over possible people which means we don’t need to assign a 0% probability to any particular being’s existence in the absence of uniform existence) but more basically, I just don’t see why God makes much of a difference as to the plausibility of any particular ontological arrangement. If you think God might create a universe with Beth(2) people, why couldn’t there be a God-less universe with the same cardinality of people? If you think God might create a proper Class of people, why couldn’t there be a God-less Proper Universe with the same people? Conversely, if modal realism undermines induction, doesn’t a God-created set of all people undermine it in the same way? These universes might sound pretty “wild” and so appear implausible without intelligent design, but on a description-length perspective, “having beth(2) people and no God” or whatever can be specified pretty compactly. You might appeal to the infallibility, etc. of God to explain away paradoxes, but I think this is essentially invoking a “get out of paradoxes free” card without doing any explanatory work.
I also don’t think I would lose as the gatekeeper(against a human), and would be willing to make a similar bet if anyone’s interested.
Halifax Rationality Meetup
I think twitter is still the closest thing to a global town square. This post by Tyler Cowen is good on the topic.
Subsist? Sustain? Self-actualize? Start?
Why are you guys talking about waves necessarily dissipating, wouldn’t there be an equal probability of waves forming and dissipating given that we are sampling a random initial configuration, hence in equilibrium w.r.t. formation/dispersion of waves?
For younger people(in presidential-candidate age ranges) the annual death rate ranges from 0.15% to 0.5%, see here (So the 4-year death rate ranges from 0.6% to 2%)
But was Metz acting as a “prosecutor” here? He didn’t say “this proves Scott is a hereditarian” or whatever, he just brings up two instances where Scott said things in a way that might lead people to make certain inferences....correct inferences, as it turns out. Like yeah, maybe it would have been more epistemically scrupulous if he said “these articles represent two instances of a larger pattern which is strong Bayesian evidence even though they are not highly convincing on their own” but I hardly think this warrants remaining outraged years after the fact.