Irgy

Karma: 231

Irgy 22 Nov 2013 5:24 UTC
42 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I found myself geuinely confused by the question “You are a certain kind of person, and there’s not much that can be done either way to really change that”—not by the general vagueness of the statement (which I assume is all part of the fun) but by a very specific issue, the word “you”. Is it “you” as in me? Or “you” as in “one”, i.e. a hypothetical person essentially referring to everyone? I interpreted it the first way then changed my mind after reading the subsequent questions which seemed to be more clearly using it the second way.

Irgy 13 Mar 2012 21:45 UTC
21 points
on: Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence
I don’t agree with your analysis of circular arguments. It seems to be saying electrons are more likely than God because we have a higher prior for electrons than for God. I don’t even think this is true, certainly before the discovery of both electrons and the bible not many people would have put a higher prior on tiny points of negative charge than a divine creator.

The real difference is not how well the evidence demonstrates the theories (as all that can really be said is that it’s “consistent” with them), but what the alternatives are and how well the evidence disproves them. In the case of God, the bible could well exist in its current form, as evidenced by the existence other religious books inconsistent with it (at least most of which must therefore have been created by man). On the other hand, without electrons there simply is no other explanation for the tracks. In this case the experiment knocks out all simpler alternatives. That’s the important difference—it’s in the alternatives not the theory.

Irgy 11 Dec 2012 10:50 UTC
19 points
in reply to: Alejandro1’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2012
Devil’s advocate time:

They don’t know nothing about it. They know two things.
1. It’s a debt reduction plan
2. It’s named after Panetta and Burns
Here are some reasons to oppose the plan, based on the above knowledge:
- We don’t need a debt reduction plan, just keep doing what we’re doing and it will sort itself out.
- I like another existing plan, and this is not that one, so I oppose it.
- I’ve heard of Panetta and (s)he’s a complete douchebag. Anything they’ve come up with is clearly junk.
- I haven’t even heard of either of them, so what the heck would they know about debt reduction?
- They’re from different parties, there’s no way they could have come up with something sensible.
- I’ve heard 10 different plans described, and surely this is one of them. I can’t remember which one this is, but I hated all of them so I must oppose this too.
And of course you can make a very similar set of reasons to support it. Not trying to rationalise people’s stupidity or make excuses for them as such, just present the opposing argument in all its glory. Ok maybe making excuses for them is exactly what I’m doing. But honestly, how many of your political opinions, as a percentage, including all those that you don’t know you have until asked, are really much better than the reasons above?

Irgy 10 Dec 2012 5:20 UTC
14 points
on: Claiming Connotations
I think in that specific example, they’re not arguing about the meaning of the word “immoral” so much as morality itself. So the actual argument is meta-ethical, i.e. “What is the correct source of knowledge on what is right and wrong?”. Another argument they won’t ever resolve of course, but at least a genuine one not a semantic one.

In other situations, sometimes the argument really boils down to something more like “Was person A an asshole for calling person B label X?”. Here they can agree that person B has label X according to A’s definition but not according to B’s. But, the point is, if B’s definition is the “right” one then A was an asshole for calling him X, while if A’s definition is the “right” one then it was a perfectly justified statement to make. (excuse the language by the way but I genuinely can’t see a replacement word that gets the point across)

Irgy 20 Oct 2015 6:45 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015
As an Australian I can say I’m constantly baffled over the shoddy systems used in other countries. People seem to throw around Arrow’s impossibility theorem to justify hanging on to whatever terrible system they have, but there’s a big difference between obvious strategic voting problems that affect everyone, and a system where problems occur in only fairly extreme circumstances. The only real reason I can see why the USA system persists is that both major parties benefit from it and the system is so good at preventing third parties from having a say that even as a whole they can’t generate the will to fix it.

In more direct answer to your question, personally I vote for the parties in exactly the order I prefer them. My vote is usually partitioned as: [Parties I actually like | Major party I prefer | Parties I’m neutral about | Parties I’ve literally never heard of | Major party I don’t prefer | Parties I actively dislike]

A lot of people vote for their preferred party, as evidenced by more primary votes for minor parties. Just doing a quick comparison, in the last (2012) US presidential election only 1.74% of the vote went to minor candidates, while in the last Australian federal election (2013) an entire 21% of the votes went to minor parties.

Overall it works very well in the lower house.

In the upper house, the whole system is so complicated no-one understands it, and the ballot papers are so big that the effort required to vote in detail prevents most people from bothering. In the upper house I usually just vote for a single party and let their preference distribution be automatically applied for me. Of course I generally check what that is first, though you have to remember to do it beforehand since it’s not available while you’re voting. Despite all that though, it’s a good system I wouldn’t want it replaced with anything different.

Irgy 25 Oct 2012 1:59 UTC
9 points
on: Equality and natalism
People see choosing the number of children they have as a personal “right”, so any direct intervention is going to be unpopular because of that. China’s approach for instance is quite direct (they’re not trying to do quite the same thing with the one-child policy, but there’s similarities).

The trick is to be indirect. Policies that help poor people avoid children they don’t intend to have (e.g. cheaper contraception) and that help rich people have more children (e.g. parental leave) can help indirectly, and are therefore good. The only thing I’d say is that it’s probably a drop in the ocean as far as inequality goes—i.e. the gradient of the change is right but the magnitude is very small compared to the size of the problem.

Also note that making children more expensive to raise is also a way to redistribute children towards richer parents, but it would actually have exactly the opposite of the desired effect on equality in general.

Irgy 18 Nov 2013 5:12 UTC
8 points
on: Quantum versus logical bombs
It seems like something has gone terribly wrong when our ethical decisions depend on our interpretation of quantum mechanics.

My understanding was that many-worlds is indistiguishable by observation from the Copenhagen interpretation. Has this changed? If not, it frightens me that people would choose a higher chance of the world ending to rescue hypothetical people in unobservable universes.

If anything this seems like a (weak) argument in favour of total utilitarianism, in that it doesn’t suffer from giving different answers according to one’s choice among indistiguishable theories.

Irgy 24 Sep 2012 0:55 UTC
8 points
on: No Anthropic Evidence
There are 2^1001 equally likely (in the prior) scenarios, by combinations of coin flips. Applying evidence, anthropic or otherwise, means eliminating possibilities which have been excluded by the evidence and renormalising what’s left. Doing this leaves two equally likely scenarios, that the original coin was tails and the other 1000 flips were heads, or that all 1001 flips were heads. The chances of the original coin being heads are therefore, still, 50-50. Keep flipping.

If this is meant to highlight some of the horribly flawed thinking that comes with anthropic evidence then you’ve done an excellent job. You’ve imposed an assymetry between “dieing” and “surviving the game and moving on”, but no such assymetry exists. Both possibilities would equally prevent you from being in the situation you describe.

Irgy 16 Nov 2011 6:41 UTC
8 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hi all.

I’m 30, live in Sydney and work on image processing. I also have a wife and two beautiful daughters, currently nine months and two and a half years old.

I have a strong background in pure maths and an ongoing interest in philosophy. I’ve been a rationalist since before I even knew what one was. Discovering ET Jaynes’ “Probability Theory” was the closest thing I’ll probably ever have to a religious revelation.

I finally wrote down a large explanation of some quite fundamental philosophy I’d had in my head for quite a while and sent it to a couple of friends to get their opinion on it. This prompted one of them to point me here. Since then I’ve read quite a bit, although far from everything, and am enjoying almost every bit of it. I look forward to posting those very thoughts here some time soon, as they appear to still be both novel and consistent with the views here.

I thoroughly enjoy a good forum debate, and have a fairly high opinion (and at least some evidence to back it up) of my ability to think logically and write a well structured (if sometimes overly wordy) argument. Which of course doesn’t mean I’m always right, and, as a good rationalist should, there’s nothing I like more than having my argument torn to shreds by a superior one. I look forward to it happening in the near future.

Irgy 8 Sep 2012 10:40 UTC
7 points
in reply to: V_V’s comment on: Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture
I don’t see why utilitarianism should be held accountable for the actions of people who didn’t even particulalry subscribe to it.

Also, why are you using N and J to talk about actual Nazis and Jews? That partly defeats the purpose of my making the distinction.

Irgy 7 Sep 2012 21:32 UTC
7 points
on: The REAL SIA doomsday
If all parents of every generation rolled a d6 and had that many children then population growth stays constant—at a rate of 1.75x per generation, ignoring for the sake of argument the effect of people failing to live up to their dice roll for various reasons. In this concrete scenario, ⁶⁄₂₁ children in the general population were born to parents who rolled a 6, ¹⁄₂₁ to parents who rolled a 1, etc. So yes, you would be are six times as likely to be born to parents who rolled a 6, but population growth is constant. If an argument says that population growth in falling in this scenario it’s doing something wrong.

This argument seems to be using the fact that you are more likely to have parents who rolled a 6, and somehow taking it to mean that more 6s were rolled for the previous generation in general. This is simply not correct.

I’m honestly not sure whether this is a flaw in your argument, or a flaw in another argument that you’re trying to highlight, so sorry if I’m just stating the obvious here.

Irgy 21 Aug 2012 2:19 UTC
7 points
on: Risk aversion does not explain people’s betting behaviours
So in other words, people’s actual behaviour does not fit a (particular) simple mathematical rational model? Why is this surprising to anyone? Non-linear utility is a rationalisation and broad justification of risk aversion, but are there really people who think it’s an accurate descriptive model of actual human behaviour? The whole concept of trying to fit a rational model to human behaviour seems pretty optimistic to me.

I also take issue with this quote: “[expected utility maximisation is] a completely ridiculous model of human risk aversion on small bets” You’ve shown that only by extrapolating behaviour on small bets to behaviour on large bets. To me that’s similar to saying “Newtonian mechanics is a completely ridiculous model of ordinary scale physics” by extrapolating its behaviour to relativistic scales. Whether it’s a good model on small bets is a function of its behaviour on small bets, not its extrapolated behaviour on large bets. I know I at least would use a completely different mindset on large bets than I would on small anyway, and would make no claim of the two being consistent under any single model.

That said, I agree with the conclusion if not the method. I would if anything be more risk averse on large bets not less. Risk aversion on small bets seems irrational to me in the first place. Utility should be approximately linear at small scales. Then again, I would take the 50-50 chance at $55 over $50 in the first place so maybe I’m not the sort of person you’re talking about.

Irgy 21 Oct 2015 11:13 UTC
5 points
on: The mystery of Brahms
You can do it first or you can do it best, usually both are different artists and each is well known. I think there’s plenty of examples of both in all fields. Rachmaninov for instance is another classical (in the broad sense) composer in the “do it well” rather than “do it first” camp, he was widely criticised as behind the times in his own era, but listening now no-one cares that his writing music sounds like it’s ~150 years old but written only ~100.

Irgy 30 Jan 2014 5:43 UTC
4 points
on: Dark Arts of Rationality
Another small example. I have a clock near the end of my bed. It runs 15 minutes fast. Not by accident, it’s been reset many times and then set back to 15 minutes fast. I know it’s fast, we even call it the “rocket clock”. None of this knowledge diminishes it’s effectiveness at getting me out of bed sooner, and making me feel more guilty for staying up late. Works very well.

Glad to discover I can now rationalise it as entirely rational behaviour and simply the dark side (where “dark side” only serves to increase perceived awesomeness anyway).

Irgy 11 Dec 2012 4:14 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: By Which It May Be Judged
This is a classic case of fighting the wrong battle against theism. The classic theist defence is to define away every meaningful aspect of God, piece by piece, until the question of God’s existance is about as meaningful as asking “do you believe in the axiom of choice?”. Then, after you’ve failed to disprove their now untestable (and therefore meaningless) theory, they consider themselves victorious and get back to reading the bible. It’s this part that’s the weak link. The idea that the bible tells us something about God (and therefore by extension morality and truth) is a testable and debatable hypothesis, whereas God’s existance can be defined away into something that is not.

People can say “morality is God’s will” all they like and I’ll just tell them “butterflies are schmetterlinge”. It’s when they say “morality is in the bible” that you can start asking some pertinent questions. To mix my metaphors, I’ll start believing when someone actually physically breaks a ball into pieces and reconstructs them into two balls of the same original size, but until I really see something like that actually happen it’s all just navel gazing.

Irgy 31 Oct 2012 9:08 UTC
4 points
on: Question about application of Bayes
Well, the problem is that you have uncertainty over the probability of the code crashing with or without fixing the particular bug you’re looking for. What you need, in order to apply Bayes, is:
- A prior model ‘pr(f)’ of the frequency of the code crashing with the bug present. Which is a distribution over crash frequencies. 1/(f(1-f)) is an ignorance prior that might do the job.
- I’d assume the probability of the code crashing with the bug fixed is 0, even if that’s not strictly true (since there could be other bugs).
- A prior likelihood ‘b’ of the bug being on that line of code. This could depend (for instance) on how you identified that particular line to comment out in the first place. I’ll call your evidence from running the program E1 (2 crashes out of 7) and E2 (10 runs no crashes)
P(bug on that line| E1, E2) = P(E1, E2 | bug on line) P(bug on that line) / (P(E1, E2)

P(bug on that line) = b

P(E1, E2) = P(E1, E2 | bug on line) + P(E1, E2 | bug elsewhere)

P(E1, E2 | bug on line) = P(E1)P(E2 | bug on line) (since the 2 crashes out of 7 are independent of the bug location)

P(E1, E2 | bug elsewhere) = P(E1)P(E2 | bug elsewhere) (as above)

P(E2 | bug on line) = 1

Given a frequency of crashing ‘f’, P(E2 | f, bug elsewhere) = (1-f)^10

P(E1|f) = f^2 * (1-f)^5

So, then you need to integrate over all possible values of ‘f’: P(E1) = Integral over [0,1] of: P(E1|f)pr(f)df

P(E2 | bug elsewhere) = Integral over [0,1] of: P(E2 | f, bug elsewhere)pr(f)df

That’s everything you need, the rest is just picking those priors and integrating back up the line. Of course the results are only as good as the priors. A much easier solution is: “The chance of a crash appears to be about ²⁄₇. The chance of getting 10 non-crashes is (5/7)^10 ~= 3.5% ” Note that this is not the same as the above, it’s an approximation, but it’s probably going to be just as good as doing it the hard way.

Incidentally, you need to be aware that, particularly with intermittant bugs, just because commenting out a line stops the crash (even when you’re 100% sure of the correlation) that doesn’t mean the line itself is the problem. Bugs can be absolutely pathological. For example, if the problem is, say, freeing the same memory twice, then any line that calls a lot of memory allocations will increase the frequency of crashes even if the problem is actually earlier in the code. Also, if the bug is overrunning the end of an array, taking out any line can have a chaotic effect on the optimiser, moving the relative locations of things in memory around and causing the bug to disappear without fixing it (only for it to reappear later). On a simpler level, taking a line out might change the execution path avoiding the bug without fixing it. There seems to be no end to ways in which impossible seeming things can happen in computer code.

Irgy 7 Sep 2012 23:53 UTC
4 points
on: Cleaning up the “Worst Argument” essay
I don’t think the abortion example is a good example. The people who say “abortion is murder’ genuinely believe it is murder, that everything wrong with murder is wrong with abortion for the same reasons. If you believe in souls and in “thou shalt not kill” as the fundamental reasons why murder is wrong then abortion is murder, not just technically but actually, associations and all.

Now from an outside perspective, you could argue that the reasons why Christianity considers murder to be wrong ultimately boil down to the fact that it’s generally a good view to have, which in turn is because of the reasons you give. Those reasons also prevent your typical Christian from feeling a sense of dissonance between the rule ’thou shalt not kill” and reality, because the two mostly match. But to an actual Christian, the reason murder is wrong is entirely “God said so”.

My description of Chirstians there of course doesn’t cover all of them (indeed no non-trivial description does), but it covers the people making those signs. To them, the problem appears to be that other Christians have forgotten this self evident fact and need reminding of it.

In short, from the worldview of the people making that argument, the fallacy is not being comitted. Whether abortion is murder is not clouding the debate, it basically is the entire debate.Therefore it is not a good example to use for this fallacy.

Irgy 16 Aug 2012 2:21 UTC
4 points
on: The weakest arguments for and against human level AI
You know what I’d like to see? A strong argument for or against human level AI.

I read the SI’s brief on the issue, and all I discovered was that they did a spectacularly good job of listing all of the arguments for and against and demonstrating why they’re all manifestly rubbish. The overall case seemed to boil down to “There’s high uncertainty on the issue, so we should assume there’s some reasonable chance”. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but it’s a depressing state of affairs.

Irgy 1 Sep 2015 7:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Meta post: Did something go wrong?
I know about both links but still find it annoying that the default behavior for main is to list what to me seems like just an arbitrary subset of the posts, and I need to then click another button to get the rest of them. Unless there’s some huge proportion of the reader-base who only care about “promoted” posts and don’t want to see the others, the default ought to be to show everything. I’m sure there’s people who miss a lot of content and don’t even know they’re missing it.

Irgy 29 Oct 2013 3:20 UTC
3 points
on: Is it worth your time to read a lot of self help and how to books?
If luke is naturally good at putting stuff he’s read into practical use, and particularly if he knows it (at least subconsciously), then he would be likely to want to read a lot of self-help books. So the causality in your argument makes more sense to me the other way around. Not sure if I’m helping at all here though.