James_Ernest

Karma: 146

James_Ernest 21 Apr 2015 9:17 UTC
14 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
Physics lawyers definitely need to exist. I would strongly like to get an injunction against the laws of thermodynamics.

James_Ernest 21 Apr 2015 9:07 UTC
1 point
on: LessWrong experience on Alcohol
I drink the equivalent of 1-2 bottles of wine per week (purchasing 2-3 bottles, some will be consumed by my girlfriend), mostly medium reds (shiraz, merlot; zinfandel and chianti when I can get them), some white aromatics (riesling, gewürztraminer, pinot gris), mostly 1-2 glasses at a time in the evening, for the purposes of relaxation and gustatory pleasure.

Beer is not good on my digestion, and I almost totally avoid it except for particularly tasty ones (prototypically, something like a Trappistes Rochefort 10). Even the thought of swilling a six-pack is enough to cause me pain.

When drinking socially (~biweekly), it will be whisky (Scotch, neat, naturally), neat Jäger, or possibly G&T or white/black russians if I’m mixing for other people, most usually not to the point of inebriation, just to maintain a comfortable level of sociable buzz. To this end, I adopt an approach informed by control theory, and deliberately front-load my consumption to give something close to an ideal dead-beat response when convolved with my internal alcohol-processing dynamics.

My palate is fairly typical, I have a (probably conditioned) liking for the taste of alcohol, a sweet tooth that I have a System II response against, and as far as I can tell, average-to-low bitterness tolerance (the only coffee I will drink is strong espresso, but I am very sensitive to improper extraction and the associated bitterness.

James_Ernest 13 Jan 2015 10:36 UTC
8 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Negative polyamory outcomes?
It’s almost like there’s something qualitatively different about the tractability of interactions between two bodies and N>2 bodies… (sorry)

One could also make an extremely laboured analogy about circumbinary orbits, and the spontaneous ejection of one party into deep space.

James_Ernest 21 Nov 2014 12:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Systemic risk: a moral tale of ten insurance companies
Interesting question. It is clear that the probability mass in excess of the reserves is equal in both distributions, yielding identical long-run numbers of industry-defaults-per-year, however the average magnitude of the unrecoverable losses is greater in the no-diversification model.

If you assume a linear cost function for the expected losses, and take the mean of the distribution past a variable reserve level, you will find a reserve level for a unified insurance agent which has the same expected loss-cost, a lower number of absolute industry-loss events, and a lower reserve requirement than the diversified case.

My Wolfram-fu fails me, but you would want to multiply the binomial PDF (or gaussian approximation) by x, and find the integral from y to 100 (or infinity) that is equal to the diverse expected loss, 1*10/200. For binomial distributions, y will be <90, so short answer, ‘yes’.

James_Ernest 21 Nov 2014 6:54 UTC
19 points
in reply to: Prismattic’s comment on: Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?
when the Neoreactionaries aren’t busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they’re using Lesswrong-style jargon

I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.

There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,
- Physicalism, determinism, a universe Beyond the Reach of God; the universe is capable of arbitrarily deviating from wishful standards of fairness and equality, there are no cosmic attractors towards justice, humans can be effectively damned beyond redemption by biological variables outside the loci of moral agency.
- Generalised optimisation systems; once you understand these, the leap to criticism of democracy as a massive cybernetic failure mode is almost trivial.
- Game theory, for the public choice extension to the above.
- A deep epistemology of taboos, which form the Dark Matter of democracy, around which our governing narratives swirl otherwise inexplicably.
- Beliefs as constraints on expectations, versus belief as attire; this in itself is sufficient to generate enough conflict with official truth to put one far beyond the Overton window.

James_Ernest 28 Oct 2014 9:57 UTC
23 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Was anybody else disappointed that the Sex Role Inventory wasn’t nearly as raunchy as the name suggested?

James_Ernest 7 Sep 2014 1:39 UTC
16 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: “NRx” vs. “Prog” Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1)
This should be an acceptable hypothesis to the LW population. c.f. “I’m considering getting my facial expressions analysed, so I’ll know what I’m thinking”.

James_Ernest 7 Sep 2014 1:28 UTC
6 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: “NRx” vs. “Prog” Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1)
This is his explanation at its most explicit:

www.unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html

James_Ernest 20 Aug 2014 0:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Jokes Thread
I don’t think so. None of the available potential coin-states would generate an expected value of 600 heads.

p = 0.6 → 600 expected heads is the many-trials (where each trial is 1000 flips) expected value given the prior and the result of the first flip, but this is different from the expectation of this trial, which is bimodally distributed at [1000]x0.2 and [central limit around 500]x0.8

James_Ernest 13 Jul 2014 10:45 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: The insularity critique of climate science

complex thing with lots of variables and lots of uncertainty

The whole point of digital circuitry is that this form of uncertainty is (near)eliminated and does not compound. Arbitrary complexity is manageable given this constraint.

James_Ernest 4 May 2014 6:29 UTC
0 points
in reply to: James_Ernest’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2014
Consider my priors for knowledge of Bayes-fu by wise predecessors to be significantly raised.

James_Ernest 4 May 2014 6:18 UTC
19 points
on: Rationality Quotes May 2014
Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various dogmatick speculations.

-- H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934.

James_Ernest 18 Apr 2014 1:07 UTC
1 point
on: Meetup : Christchurch, NZ Inaugural Meetup

James_Ernest 27 Nov 2013 0:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
- Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
- As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
- We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
- The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.

James_Ernest 21 Jul 2013 1:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wnoise’s comment on: Solve Psy-Kosh’s non-anthropic problem
Shouldn’t the expected value be $1000 (10p)*(1-p^10) or $1000 (10p − 10p^11) ? (p now maximised at 0.7868… giving EV $7.15K)

James_Ernest 23 Apr 2013 7:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Rationality Quotes April 2013
Somehow managed 16-8-5 versus the veteran computer, by using the articles own text as a seed “Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules...” and applying a-h = rock, i-p = paper, q-z = scissors, I think this is the technique I will use against humans (I know a few people I would love to see flail against pseudo-randomness).

James_Ernest 29 Mar 2013 0:11 UTC
−2 points
on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
I think this was how the heretic Geth got started. #generalisingfromfictionalevidence

James_Ernest 22 Nov 2012 23:16 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He’s not.]
There is an interesting diversion to be made along these lines. Nick Land, who has written up a series (The Dark Enlightenment) about Moldbug and the neo-reaction in general, has just written this, in which he posits the politically-assisted decoupling from reality as a progressive eschatology:

“The unforgivable crime is to accept that there are consequences, or results, other than those we have agreed to allow.”

This meme, a seriously morbid distortion of epistemology, is common to many adaptive belief systems, but I would propose that it is more crucial to progressivism than any other.

James_Ernest 22 Nov 2012 9:14 UTC
9 points
in reply to: taelor’s comment on: Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He’s not.]
I think it’s also worth noting that (particularly in the context of ideological assumptions about democracy that are not generally perceived to be ideological) there are many forms that bias in the media can take while not even coming close to setting off any warnings of partisan bias.

It is in the basic function of conveyance of seemingly apolitical news that the media continuously privileges the null hypothesis.

James_Ernest 22 Nov 2012 3:03 UTC
5 points
in reply to: noen’s comment on: Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He’s not.]
Actually, the is/ought distinction is omnipresent in the complete Moldbug thesis, as espoused in his, uh, sequences. Hence the reformulation of politics as an amoral engineering challenge.

There’s a lot of deliberately inflammatory language present, as well as a relatively high inferential distance, to which the inflammatory language mostly serves to filter the audience for, or at least a positive affect.

Translated into English, all that statement says is “Here is a presentation of classical or Austrian economics. This is not practised at large anywhere on earth today (for reasons which will be divulged elsewhere).”