JamesAndrix

Karma: 1,977

JamesAndrix 3 Oct 2010 21:45 UTC
72 points
on: The Irrationality Game
Panpsychism: All matter has some kind of experience. Atoms have some kind of atomic-qualia that adds up to the things we experience. This seems obviously right to me, but stuff like this is confusing so I’ll say 75%

Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.

JamesAndrix 25 Apr 2009 16:41 UTC
49 points
on: Instrumental vs. Epistemic—A Bardic Perspective
Part of this is about how we draw a balloon around what ‘you’ are. If you are a talking ape, then that ape might be lying to itself. If you are a rationalist trapped in part of the brain of a talking ape, then you are just tricking another part of it’s brain, which is entirely rational.

A bounded entrepreneur will keep searching until all likely problems have likely solutions, and he has at least one likely successful plan.It don’t know if this would be a cause or an effect of optimism. (and by optimism I mean feeling like things will be ok, independent of your probability estimates of what will happen.) If I had to guess, I’d say you might find solutions in your attempt to rationalize why you’re not worried about something that you would not find in an ‘unbiased’ search.

A pessimist might see problems coming that an optimist wouldn’t see, but maybe that’s just not enough of a disadvantage in todays economy.

Not really on topic, but very interesting story: Normal people are convinced by role players that they are in a magical universe. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91462&cid=7876768
What links here?
- Will_Newsome's comment on Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality by AnnaSalamon (18 Sep 2010 11:42 UTC; 8 points)

JamesAndrix 17 Jul 2009 18:11 UTC
39 points
on: Absolute denial for atheists
You probably shouldn’t drive. It’s dangerous, expensive, and should be left to professionals. Take the bus or ride a bike.

More widely, we should support policies that make individual car use prohibitively expensive, but public transit easy and cheap. Generally the only cars on the road should be service related (Ambulances, Fire, Police, Utilities,Buses, Delivery/shipping trucks, Taxi’s, Limo’s etc.)

This would save lots of money and energy, and tens of thousands of lives per year.

JamesAndrix 15 Mar 2010 5:11 UTC
38 points
in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
Well, not believing in “UFOs” is just silly to start. They are definitely up there. The disagreement is usually over what they are.

You should certainly not be embarrassed. What you describe doesn’t even rank as a sign of foolishness or psychological illness. Probably at worst it means you’re not used to looking at aerial phenomena, so you couldn’t identify it. On a bad day, it’s taken me a little while to identify the Moon.

If you would have discounted as crazy someone who made a report like you just did, that was a rationalist error. Strangely moving lights in the sky are often reported by multiple witnesses and captured on videotape.

JamesAndrix 9 Dec 2010 7:28 UTC
36 points
on: Rationality Quotes: December 2010
A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”

Found on /r/funny

JamesAndrix 31 Jan 2010 0:24 UTC
35 points
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome
Disagreeing positions don’t add up just because they share a feature. On the contrary, If people offer lots of different contradictory reasons for a conclusion (even if each individual has consistent beliefs) it is a sign that they are rationalizing their position.

If ²⁄₃′s of experts support proposition G , ¹⁄₃ because of reason A while rejecting B, and ¹⁄₃ because of reason B while rejecting A, and the remaining ¹⁄₃ reject A and B; then the majority Reject A, and the majority Reject B. G should not be treated as a reasonable majority view.

This should be clear if A is the koran and B is the bible.

If we’re going to add up expert views, we need to add up what experts consider important about a question, not features of their conclusions.

You shouldn’t add up two experts if they would consider each other’s arguments irrational. That’s ignoring their expertise.
What links here?
- Wei Dai's comment on False Majorities by JamesAndrix (3 Feb 2010 20:06 UTC; 8 points)
- Wei Dai's comment on Open Thread: February 2010 by wedrifid (3 Feb 2010 23:40 UTC; 3 points)

JamesAndrix 18 Mar 2009 15:46 UTC
34 points
on: Never Leave Your Room
Whenever a decision seems very close, I flip a coin to decide, and then I check to see if I wish the coin had gone the other way. If so then I go against the coin.

I might sometimes be ‘agreeing’ with the coin because I’m primed by its outcome, but overall I find it useful for saving time. I rarely regret decisions made this way.
What links here?
- Rationalist Poetry Fans, Unite! by Scott Alexander (20 Mar 2009 1:58 UTC; 38 points)

JamesAndrix 23 May 2010 3:12 UTC
29 points
on: To signal effectively, use a non-human, non-stoppable enforcer
SIAI has weird fundraisers.

JamesAndrix 19 Feb 2010 16:14 UTC
23 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Things You Can’t Countersignal
It’s not like we need a sarcasm tag.

JamesAndrix 4 Jul 2011 17:25 UTC
22 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: The Blue-Minimizing Robot

I suspect Richard would say that the robot’s goal is minimizing its perception of blue. That’s the PCT perspective on the behavior of biological systems in such scenarios.

This ‘minimization’ goal would require a brain that is powerful enough to believe that lasers destroy or discolor what they hit.

If this post were read by blue aliens that thrive on laser energy, they’d wonder they we were so confused as to the purpose of a automatic baby feeder.

JamesAndrix 10 Feb 2010 18:15 UTC
22 points
on: The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing

I don’t think there has been any time in history where a single click had the potential to do so much good, and the disbelief that this is possible is the main thing that our viral campaign would have to overcome.

THEN DON’T PUT FORWARD THAT MATH.

People can readily understand putting an ad on craigslist for charity, and can get that it will make lots of money, and that craigslist will do it if enough people want them to.

You’ve worked out that you can present that case in a different, mathy, and incredible sounding way. Don’t.

JamesAndrix 25 Jun 2011 17:12 UTC
21 points
on: The True Rejection Challenge
I have two reasons not to use your system:

One: If you’re committed to doing the action if you yourself can find a way to avoid the problems, then as you come to such solutions your instinct to flinch away will declare the list ‘not done yet’ and add more problems, and perhaps problems more unsolvable in style, until the list is an adequate defense against doing the thing.

One way to possibly mitigate this is to try not to think of any solutions until the list is done, and perhaps some scope restrictions on the allowable conditions. Despite this, there is another problem:

Two: The sun is too big.

JamesAndrix 6 Apr 2009 4:10 UTC
21 points
in reply to: AlexU’s comment on: Real-Life Anthropic Weirdness
We are actually in a ‘chip-punk’ version of the past in which silicon based computers became available all the way back in the late 20th century. The original Eliezer made friendly AI with vacuum tubes.

JamesAndrix 5 Mar 2009 6:45 UTC
20 points
on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
I may not be too far from this. I started to be an atheist but (as best as I can describe) found myself believing in god anyway. I interpreted it as catholicism having etched a god shaped hole into my brain. It seemed like more trouble than it was worth to fight it. In this context ‘I believe in god’ isn’t a conclusion but an observation.

Knowing that your brain hasn’t updated correctly does not make it trivial to force it to.

By my current theology, my Gods are rather a lot like the dragon in my garage which is invisible, can’t be touched, and leaves no thermal signature. For example, I may be wired to believe in divinity, but I am apparently not wired to believe in a creator (Thanks PBS!) so in my thinking on cosmology, physics, or evolution, my theology just doesn’t come up. This is at least partly by design.
What links here?
- JamesAndrix's comment on Don’t Believe You’ll Self-Deceive by Eliezer Yudkowsky (11 Mar 2009 16:40 UTC; 9 points)
- AnnaSalamon's comment on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features by Eliezer Yudkowsky (5 Mar 2009 7:14 UTC; 5 points)

JamesAndrix 29 Jan 2010 16:28 UTC
19 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Logical Rudeness
If it matters to anyone, I have a policy of upvoting all mind-changes.

I would really REALLY like to see more people editing their top comment in a thread to indicate their mind-change AND what in particular made them update.

JamesAndrix 2 Feb 2009 20:16 UTC
19 points
−1
on: Interlude with the Confessor (4/8)
Trying to wrap my head around this, I’ll propose that this society has ‘freedom of intercourse’. Stopping someone by force from having sex with you would be as improper as stopping them by force from talking to you, even if you didn’t like it. Walking away might be acceptable but considered generally impolite. People who have nonconsenual sex frequently would be stigmatized and avoided as annoying people are today, but

Today nonconsenual sex is bundled with violence, fear of violence, and expectations of personal space. If the impossible possible culture is such that everyone expects their genitals to be part of the social space instead of their personal space, then no great sense of emotional violation will be felt even if the social interaction is unwanted.

They likely view the prohibition as just as shortsighted as we would view restrictions on ‘free expression’.

Very good of Eliezer to let us identify with the humans before delivering further culture shocks. I suspect that the next installment will have further human weirdness.
What links here?
- Pavitra's comment on Interlude with the Confessor (4/8) by Eliezer Yudkowsky (22 Nov 2009 8:55 UTC; 16 points)

JamesAndrix 9 May 2011 15:42 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: The 5-Second Level
Rationalists should also strive to be precise, but you should not try to express precisely what time it was that you stopped beating your wife.

Much of rationality is choosing what to think about, We’ve seen this before in the form of righting a wrong question, correcting logical fallacies (as above), using one method to reason about probabilities in favor of another, and culling non-productive search paths. (which might be the most general form here.

The proper meta-rule is not ‘jump past warning signs’. I’m not yet ready to propose a good phrasing of the proper rule.

JamesAndrix 22 Sep 2011 2:37 UTC
15 points
on: Knowledge is Worth Paying For

Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis

Without getting into the legal or moral issues involved, there is a “”“library””” ‘assigned to the island state of Niue’, it’s pretty damned good, and that’s all I have to say about that.

JamesAndrix 8 Aug 2010 22:30 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Christopher Hitchens and Cryonics
He can be highly skeptical, that’s fine. Cryonics doesn’t require faith for it to work.

He’s probably already undergoing expensive and unpleasant treatments that he considers to have low probability of success.

Cryonics is expensive but painless. And if it works, we can be pretty certain it had nothing to do with the placebo effect.

How could he turn down a chance, however slight, to debate Christian theology after returning from the dead?

JamesAndrix 23 Oct 2009 4:52 UTC
15 points
on: The continued misuse of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Wait, you mean he let them conspire and they didn’t set up explicit [monetary] penalties for breaking the agreement? Everybody fails.