Jack

• Jack 12 Jun 2012 18:50 UTC

  72 points

  on: Glenn Beck dis­cusses the Sin­gu­lar­ity, cites SI researchers

  Does anyone remember when that one commenter freaked out and declared he would be attempting to marginally increase existential risk by sending right-wingers information about the singularity?

  ...

Meta: A 5 karma re­quire­ment to post in discussion

• Jack 10 Dec 2010 16:56 UTC

  66 points

  0

  on: How To Lose 100 Karma In 6 Hours—What Just Happened

  Hear that sound beneath your feet? It’s the high-ground falling out from under you.

  I’m offended by the censorship as well and was voting a number of your comments up previously. But as long as discussions of the censorship itself aren’t being censored peaceful advocacy for a policy change and skirting the censors are the best strategies. And when the discussions of censorship start being censored the best strategy is for everyone to leave the site. This increasing risk nonsense is insanely disproportional. Traditionally, the way to get back at censors is to spread the censored material not blow up 2 ¹⁄₂ World Trade Centers.

  What links here?

  • waitingforgodel's comment on How To Lose 100 Karma In 6 Hours—What Just Happened by waitingforgodel (11 Dec 2010 5:57 UTC; 4 points)

• Jack 23 Apr 2012 8:55 UTC

  63 points

  on: Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue

  I agree. Friendly AI may be incoherent and impossible. In fact, it looks impossible right now. But that’s often how problems look right before we make a few key insights that make things clearer, and show us (e.g.) how we were asking a wrong question in the first place. The reason I advocate Friendly AI research (among other things) is because it may be the only way to secure a desirable future for humanity, (see “Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures.”) even if it looks impossible. That is why Yudkowsky once proclaimed: “Shut Up and Do the Impossible!” When we don’t know how to make progress on a difficult problem, sometimes we need to hack away at the edges.

  Just a suggestion for future dialogs: The amount of Less Wrong jargon, links to Less Wrong posts explaining that jargon, and the Yudkowsky “proclamation” in this paragraph is all a bit squicky, alienating and potentially condescending. And I think they muddle the point you’re making.

  Anyway, biting Pei’s bullet for a moment, if building an AI isn’t safe, if it’s, like Pei thinks, similar to educating a child (except, presumably, with a few orders of magnitude more uncertainty about the outcome) that sounds like a really bad thing to be trying to do. He writes :

  I don’t think a good education theory can be “proved” in advance, pure theoretically. Rather, we’ll learn most of it by interacting with baby AGIs, just like how many of us learn how to educate children.

  There’s a very good chance he’s right. But we’re terrible at educating children. Children routinely grow up to be awful people. And this one lacks the predictable, well-defined drives and physical limits that let us predict how most humans will eventually act (pro-social, in fear of authority). It sounds deeply irresponsible, albeit, not of immediate concern. Pei’s argument is a grand rebuttal of the proposal that humanity spend more time on AI safety (why fund something that isn’t possible?) but no argument at all against the second part of the proposal—defund AI capabilities research.

• Jack 28 Apr 2013 22:34 UTC

  61 points

  on: LW Women En­tries- Creepiness

  I really want to reply to this but I’m also really conflicted about how to do that. I think it is smart to acknowledge that women often associate being alone with an unfamiliar man as a serious risk. As a result it is totally reasonable to make judgments about how a man would behave in that setting. And it is good for men to be aware of this and to calibrate their behavior to take it into account.

  But my sense is that using the kind of rhetoric in this post with young, well meaning men with poor social skills causes problems. And since the audience here is mostly young, well meaning men with poor social skills I’m kind of concerned. Nyan’s reply is illustrative of this effect. Let’s suppose there are two kinds of creepy: people who are creepy because you actually can’t trust them to be alone with you and people who just come off that way. With the first group learning about what behaviors seem creepy is not going to actually make the trustworthy. With the second group, well they’re by definition really bad at calibrating how to act in social situations. And it seems like it is pretty routine for men in that group to drastically overcompensate to avoid seeming creepy to the point where they come off as trying to be sexless. A) This is a good way for any possible sexual relationship to immediately fail (penalizing all parties). B) It appears to be really stress-inducing. C) An unexpressed smoldering libido tends to come out indirectly and a man who appears to be hiding his sexual attraction from a woman is it’s own kind of creepy.

  I don’t mean any offense to the contributor. But I think it is unfortunate there were not multiple entries on this topic. As with anything, the people who express a concern tend to be more concerned with it than the people who don’t. The vast majority of women would not find a request for their phone number to be creepy so long as it followed an pleasant exchange of 5-10+ minutes. Maybe you get a fake number or a decline—but it isn’t out of line.

• Jack 21 Sep 2011 8:21 UTC

  59 points

  on: A philos­o­phy pro­fes­sor elic­its col­lege stu­dents’ re­ac­tions to Less Wrong

  Guys, these are students in an intro philosophy class who looked at a few introductory and recently promoted articles. Expecting them to genuinely struggle with the weird views expressed here would require them to a) encounter the weird views which they likely didn’t do and b) feel that they in any way have the expertise to challenge those views. What is noteworthy about this is that the comments were mandatory. If you make everyone who read a few introductory articles write comments these are about the results you’re going to get. The people who write comments on the internet are the small minority who feel strongly about something said here and competent enough to add or criticize. But that is a small fraction of the possible audience. So seeing comments that don’t pattern match to the comments one normally reads on the Internet is not a good reason to conclude the students did not have genuinely positive reaction to what they read.

  Most intro to philosophy classes are not made up of kids with any significant CS, cog sci, mathematical or physics background. Yes, they’re taking Less Wrong to be authoritative. But they read a bunch of good, non-controversial articles and have little prior expertise to fall back on. Yeah, the comments are written in bullshitty language and tone because that’s how one writes for authority figures you can’t trust yet. That does not mean the sentiments expressed are bullshit- it is very common for undergrads to criticize assigned reading.

  Many of the negative comments in this thread strike me as spouting cached thoughts about higher education, in many cases from people who may not have a lot of experience with higher ed.

• Jack 16 Mar 2010 1:57 UTC

  57 points

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  A partial list to compare to future record breaking attempts: Global Warming, Meredith Kercher’s murder, atheism, gun control, race and IQ, Pick-up artists, cryonics, Scandinavian social welfare, nuclear deterence, sweatshops, industry bailouts, immigration, UFOs, homosexuality, polyamory, bisexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, rape, 2 girls 1 cup, sex change, generalizations about promiscuity, straight men like lesbians, masochism, incest, people getting off to cartoons, people getting off to cartoons of pre-teen girls, 9/​11 was an inside job, and Communism.

• Jack 4 Dec 2011 20:39 UTC

  56 points

  on: 2011 Sur­vey Results

  People who believed in high existential risk were … more likely to believe in aliens (I found that same result last time, and it puzzled me then too.)

  Aliens existing but not yet colonizing multiple systems or broadcasting heavily is the the response consistent with the belief that a Great Filter lies in front of us.

• Jack 24 Nov 2013 0:24 UTC

  45 points

  on: On Wal­mart, And Who Bears Re­spon­si­bil­ity For the Poor

  None of the major political ideologies are particularly consequentialist in the way they approach policy. Progressives by and large see the world through the following lens: There are some people who are oppressed and others who oppress them. Government policy ought to focus on emancipating the oppressed and punishing/​overthrowing the oppressors. Criminal Justice: white people oppressing brown people. Abortion: Christian men oppressing women. Foreign policy: America oppressing the rest of the world (unless it’s America saving some oppressed foreigners from an oppressor). Housing policy: landlords oppressing tenants. Labor: captital oppressing unions. Taxes: the one percent oppressing the 99%. Marriage equality: straight Christians oppressing LGBT people. Progressives aren’t generally concerned about utility: they’re concerned about justice. Even the Animal Rights movement, essentially founded by arch-Utilitarian Peter Singer is focused on the class relations between animals and the humans who oppress them.

  In this case, the oppressors are wealthy business owners who are exploiting the labor of the poor and helpless AND exploiting the rest of us by placing the burden for care on taxpayers.

  I know this summary of liberal thought probably sounds strawman-like. I don’t mean it to be taken as a summary of progressive arguments on these issues. There are good arguments for progressive positions, many of which I agree with. Rather, this oppressed-oppressor lens is just the initial conceptual frame most progressives have in response to any political issue.

  I’m not saying there can’t be real instances of oppression or that ending oppression doesn’t increase utility. But when all you have is a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail etc. Conservatives and libertarians have similar non-consequentialist frames through which they view every issue. See “The Three Languages of Politics.

  The extent to which any ideology can be “true” is mostly just the extent to which their central heuristic is useful and actually describes the world. There is a minority of libertarians and an even smaller minority of progressives that actually appear to mainly care about the consequentialist effects of policy. They happen to over-represented here, but they’re pretty unusual in the rest of the world.

  BIG + no other welfare state and no minimum wage is probably preferable to what America has now. I sort of worry about how hard it would be to hire someone if the BIG got too large but it probably couldn’t be worse than trying to hire someone in an environment where they could lose their house, health coverage and disability check if they begin making too much.

• Jack 20 Jan 2011 14:42 UTC

  45 points

  on: Eliezer is dead (not re­ally)

  Eighteen months ago Eliezer Yudkowsky died while leading a strike force to take out a possible uFAI built with laptops and vacuum tubes in a Gaza strip tent city. Fearing panic and a dangerous dip in fund-raising SIAI commissioned Dr. Eldon Tyrell to build a robot simulacrum of Eliezer to give speeches, appear at public functions, and write Harry Potter fan-fiction. Less Wrong is now run by a shadowy cabal of necromancers who, some say, have an affinity for frequentism.

• Jack 16 Sep 2011 2:51 UTC

  44 points

  on: Your in­ner Google

  “I’m Feeling Lucky”

• Jack 21 Jan 2011 20:11 UTC

  44 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Scien­tific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge

  Someone needs to write a Romantic comedy/​tragedy where two people fall in love but they can never get together because the man is following PUA and the woman is following The Rules. They keep rushing to be the one to end phone conversations and both are always pretending to be too busy to go out with each other. The woman won’t have sex until she gets flowers and the man won’t give flowers until they have sex. Since both methods work they just fall more and more madly in love with each other but can never tell each other for fear of seeming too needy or desperate.

• Jack 9 Jun 2010 6:09 UTC

  43 points

  in reply to: SforSingularity’s comment on: Rea­son as memetic im­mune disorder

  Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.

  This is a terribly counter-productive attitude to have. I don’t think trying to save the world is what people found weird. Lots of people, especially young people, have aspirations of saving the world. People think the Singularity Institute is weird because SIAI’s chosen method of saving the world is really unconventional, not marketable, and pattern matches with bizarre sci-fi fantasies (and some of the promoters of these fantasies are actually connected to the institute). If you think the pool of potential donors are all hypocrites you make it really difficult to bring them in.

• Jack 14 Sep 2011 15:34 UTC

  42 points

  in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity tip: Pre­dict your com­ment karma

  I’d love to see a collection of the lowest karma comments of high karma contributors.

• Jack 14 May 2010 0:42 UTC

  41 points

  on: Blue- and Yel­low-Tinted Choices

  Maybe you should write a post that describes the same effect but without the pictures, citations or good grammar.

The Red Bias

• Jack 8 Feb 2013 19:23 UTC

  40 points

  on: Philo­soph­i­cal Landmines

  This is insightful. I also think we should emphasize that it is not just other people or silly theistic, epistemic relativists who don’t read Less Wrong who can get exploded by Philosophical Landmines. These things are epistemically neutral and the best philosophy in the world can still become slogans if it gets discussed too much E.g.

  Of course I’d learned some great replies to that sort of question right here on LW, so I did my best to sort her out,

  Now I wasn’t there and I don’t know you. But it seems at least plausible that that is exactly what your sister felt she was doing. That this is how having your philosophical limbs getting blown off feels like from the inside.

  I think I see this phenomena most with activist-atheists who show up everywhere prepared to categorize any argument a theist might make and then give a stock response to it. It’s related to arguments as soldiers. In addition to avoiding and disarming landmines, I think there is a lot to be said for trying to develop an immunity. So that even if other people start tossing out slogans you don’t. I propose that it is good policy to provisionally accept your opponent’s claims and then let your own arguments do their work on those claims in your mind before you let them out.

  So...

  Theist: “The universe is too complex for it to have been created randomly.”

  Atheist (pattern matches this claim to one she has heard a hundred times before, searches for the most relevant reply, outputs): “Natural selection isn’t random and in that case how was God created?”

  KABOOM!

  Instead:

  Theist: “The universe is too complex for it to have been created randomly.”

  Atheist (Entertains the argument as if she had no prior experience with it, see’s what makes the argument persuasive for some people, then searches for replies and applies them to the argument “Is natural selection really random? Oh, and God, to the extent He is supposed to be like a human agent, would be really complicated too. So that just pushes the problem of developing complexity back a step.”): “Oh yeah, I’ve heard things like that before. Here are two issues with it....”

  Obviously this is hard to do, and maybe not worthwhile in every situation.

• Jack 26 Jan 2012 1:37 UTC

  40 points

  on: Shit Ra­tion­al­ists Say?

  “Oops.”

• Jack 8 Dec 2010 19:59 UTC

  38 points

  on: Why is our sex drive too strong?

  I’ve never heard of a culture that shames people for being too stingy with sex.

  “Come on. Everyone is doing it.”

  “Don’t be a prude.”

  “What are you, gay or something?”

  “He cheated on you? I guess you weren’t doing enough for him.”

  “A wife must satisfy her husband.”

  “Frigid.”

  Social standing is awarded to women with many children.

  Spousal rape was legal in some US states as recently as 1993, the first state outlawed it in 1975.

  And so on. Which is to say cultures discourage certain kinds of sex in certain contexts and encourage others. Subcultures differ in the degree to which they encourage and discourage sex. It may not be that the human sex drive is too strong for humans in society but that biology lacks the precision guidance of cultural norms which can perhaps support more complex reproductive strategies or change faster in response to new economic circumstances.

  It may well be/​have been in the reproductive interests of women to have no sex before marriage and then lots of sex with her husband, for example. One way biological and cultural evolution could implement this strategy is by lowering the female sex drive to ensure chastity until marriage, and then rely on cultural expectation and the male sex drive to encourage sex within marriage. Though I recall a study indicating that women require more familiarity with their partner for arousal than men require. I can’t find it though, and of course it coincides with cultural stereotypes. But this would suggest that the monogamous sex strategy for women is implemented biologically as well.

  Note also that the shame associated with pre-marital sex is traditionally much stronger for women. Men are often lauded for their sexual accomplishments. Which is something you might expect to see as a difference in mating strategies after considering the relative cost of reproduction.

  What links here?

  • wedrifid's comment on Why is our sex drive too strong? by PhilGoetz (23 Dec 2011 8:21 UTC; 2 points)

• Jack 26 Jul 2012 17:57 UTC

  37 points

  in reply to: mej10’s comment on: Ar­ti­cle about LW: Faith, Hope, and Sin­gu­lar­ity: En­ter­ing the Ma­trix with New York’s Fu­tur­ist Set

  Probably another example: calling themselves “Rationalists”