Jiro

Karma: 4,787

Jiro 14 Jan 2025 2:54 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Ought We to Be Doing More Than We Are?
Along these lines, Scott can be quoted:

I can ask it “tell me the truth, is this eventually going to result in my eyes being pecked out by seagulls?” and if it answers “yes, I have a series of twenty-eight switches, and each one is obviously better than the one before, and the twenty-eighth is this world except your eyes are getting pecked out by seagulls”, then I will just avoid the first switch. I realize that will intuitively feel like leaving some utility on the table—the first step in the chain just looks so much obviously better than the starting point—but I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

Scott doesn’t apply this to EA, but if you start from having to save a child, and the end point is “you have to sacrifice a lot to save as many children as you can”, this seems relevant.

Jiro 14 Jan 2025 2:33 UTC
11 points
9
on: Ought We to Be Doing More Than We Are?

In light of this, let us modify Singer’s argument:

If you have to save people at a “relatively small cost to yourself”, and you allow for a cumulative amount of small costs to add up to a large cost, you run into a heap paradox. You’re going to have to pick some point at which the cumulative small costs make up a large one, even though the costs before and after the threshold don’t differ much. Of course, this also means that you can pick two children as your threshold.

(It also raises the question “if your society already redistributes your money to children, have you passed the threshold just from that?” Your taxes may be enough.)

Jiro 12 Jan 2025 22:39 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”
Sometimes the company is stupid because of principal/agent problems which benefit the particular boss involved, but are bad for the company as a whole.

Jiro 31 Dec 2024 1:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Darmani’s comment on: If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”

Suppose my son really wants to be a circus performer, but I want him to go to college; he says that, if he couldn’t be a circus performer, he’d be a doctor. My son is about to enter a big circus competition, and I tell him that, if he wins, I’ll give my full blessing and financial support for him to attend circus academy instead.

By that definition, it sounds like my offer to let him pursue his dream is actually exploitative!

The normal context of something like that is that you don’t believe he’ll win and are doing it to shut him up. If he has no chance of winning, offering to do X if he wins doesn’t reduce wealth, so is not exploitative.

Jiro 31 Dec 2024 1:32 UTC
1 point
−3
on: Learn to write well BEFORE you have something worth saying
Trip reports are probably more likely to lead to bad writing than anything else. You’re basically taking a monkey wrench to your brain, twisting a few random things, and reporting the experiences. The experiences are incoherent things, except the part of your brain that detects incoherence has had a monkey wrench put to it. Of course it’s not possible to produce a good description of one.

Jiro 19 Dec 2024 16:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: How counterfactual are logical counterfactuals?

There are set ups where each agent is using an nonphysically large but finite amount of compute.

In a situation where you are asking a question about an ideal reasoner, having the agents be finite means you are no longer asking it about an ideal reasoner. If you put an ideal reasoner in a Newcomb problem, he may very well think “I’ll simulate Omega and act according to what I find”. (Or more likely, some more complicated algorithm that indirectly amounts to that.) If the agent can’t do this, he may not be able to solve the problem. Of course, real humans can’t, but this may just mean that real humans are, because they are finite, unable to solve some problems.

Jiro 18 Dec 2024 16:20 UTC
LW: 6 AF: 1
0
AF
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: How counterfactual are logical counterfactuals?
I get the impression that “has the agent’s source code” is some Yudkowskyism which people use without thinking.

Every time someone says that, I always wonder “are you claiming that the agent that reads the source code is able to solve the Halting Problem?”

Jiro 18 Dec 2024 16:18 UTC
4 points
2
on: Effective Altruism FAQ

You cannot spend anything on yourself, you must give all your money away, and live in a tiny cottage eating bland, cheap foods.

But effective altruism doesn’t say that. If it did, that would be pretty weird, as no EAs do that.

My objection to EA along these grounds is not that EA says that, it’s that the principles of EA imply that. While it’s true that EA doesn’t say that, it seems to be making unprincipled exceptions when doing so.

No one—and I seriously mean no one—is suggesting that you should become a mafia boss so that you can donate the money.

This also falls under “EA may not say that, but it doesn’t seem to have a principled reason why it doesn’t imply that”. It’s entirely possible that you destroy less utility by doing Mafia-type things than you gain by donating what you get from your Mafia activities.

Here it seems like you should save the child.

But now imagine that rather than the child being near, they’re far away.

My answer to this is that in any drowning child situation that is realistic enough that our intuitions apply, the fact that the child is near places limits on how much we have to spend, and the fact that there are limits to helping people near us is one of the reasons why helping people near us is a reasonable policy.

And it doesn’t seem like the fact that they’re our countrymen is itself relevant, because then it would be more important to help a person after they’ve immigrated here than before they have.

If you believe there should be limits on immigration, and that there’s no need to help people who have immigrated in a way bypassing those limits, this is not a problem. This seems to be circular reasoning: EA ideas of helping everyone equally are used to justify open borders in the first place, and then EA says stuff like this which tries to bootstrap open borders into a justification for EA.

Jiro 18 Nov 2024 15:56 UTC
6 points
2
on: The Case For Giving To The Shrimp Welfare Project

One way to see how good different charities are is to imagine that after you died, you had to live the life of every creature on earth.

This implies that we should eradicate as many such species as we can, because creatures that don’t exist don’t count for this.

Jiro 18 Nov 2024 2:00 UTC
4 points
0
on: Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences
My own heresy is that I don’t have a true rejection. Many ideas are things which I believe by accumulation of evidence and there’s no single item which would disprove my position. And talking about a “true rejection” is really trying to create a gotcha to force someone to change their position without allowing for things such as accumulation of evidence or even misphrasing the rejection.

I also think rationalists shouldn’t bet, but that probably deserves its own post.

Jiro 12 Nov 2024 1:24 UTC
14 points
9
on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed

This is the core reason why it is so difficult for ordinary people to pay their bills or raise families, despite earnings that would make them rich elsewhere or elsewhen. These productive actions are severely restricted, because if you are going to be productive then you have to do so ‘correctly’ and obey all sorts of rules and requirements.

There are plenty of good things that aren’t restricted and bad things that are. But elites are human and aren’t going to get it right every time, and you’ll notice most the cases where they got it wrong.

Jiro 2 Nov 2024 5:30 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: codyz’s comment on: Another UFO Bet
No, because I have no way to improve my ability to see loopholes and flaws, so there’s always going to be residual uncertainty that can’t be reduced. Risk aversion does the rest.

Jiro 1 Nov 2024 19:22 UTC
6 points
1
on: Another UFO Bet
Sorry, risk aversion.

Also, the usual situation of “if I think the main proposition is unlikely, bad outcomes will be dominated by cases where I miss loopholes in the bet or otherwise lose the bet for reasons unrelated to the truth of the proposition”.

Jiro 25 Sep 2024 9:43 UTC
5 points
0
on: Automatic Rate Limiting on LessWrong
- 1 comment / hour
- i.e slow down a little, you may be getting into a heated exchange.
I just got screwed over by this, It strikes me as insane to be rate-limited to “slow down” and not get into a “heated exchange” when the limit is done by checking the user’s karma for the last 20 comments from any time period. 20 comments from me go back months, I can’t get all that much slower. And 3 downvoters and −1 is an awfully small limit, and easy to hit just out of bad luck.
Also, if you post from greaterwrong, and you hit the limit, your comment and the effort spent writing it is just lost.

Jiro 25 Sep 2024 8:22 UTC
2 points
0
on: In Praise of the Beatitudes

But some of the writing in those old sacred texts is actually really good.

The Halo Effect (pun not intended) is very strong here.

I seldom see people who say things like this also say that the writing in the Koran is actually really good, for some reason. And not because there’s some difference in how good the writing in the Koran and in the Bible is.

Jiro 16 Sep 2024 23:51 UTC
0 points
0
on: What’s the Deal with Logical Uncertainty?
If you make a lot of educated guesses about the googolth digit of pi based on chains of reasoning that are actually possible for humans, around 50% of them will get its parity right.

(Of course that’s reversed, in a way, since it isn’t stating that the digit is uncertain.)

Jiro 4 Sep 2024 17:50 UTC
5 points
3
on: Book Review: What Even Is Gender?

Reviewing WEIG on this blog provides another interesting point of contrast in The Categories Were Made for Man.

which in turn contrasts with Zack Davis’ posts including The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions.

Jiro 2 Sep 2024 8:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Hudjefa’s comment on: On Nothing
That statement is not nonsensical, but “nothing” is not being compared as a quantity either.

Jiro 31 Aug 2024 4:49 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Hudjefa’s comment on: On Nothing

There must be some quality (in this case quantity :puzzled:) on the basis of which a comparison (here quantitative) can be made.

There is sometimes a quantity on the basis of which a comparison can be made.

This quantity exists in 0 < 3. It doesn’t in “nothing is bigger than X”.

Jiro 30 Aug 2024 5:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Hudjefa’s comment on: On Nothing

Am I not doing the same when I say …

No.

“0 < 0.5 is a statement about the numerical value indicating nothing. “Nothing is greater than X” is a statement about the size of the set containing things greater than X. You are using “nothing” with two different meanings.