This has been voted down too much.
I think it’s a pretty good objection. What does it even mean to say that you can “control” your duplicate if we are postulating that what you and your duplicate do is a deterministic function of your current states? What does it even mean to say that you can control or decide anything under these circumstances?
The simple answer is “most Americans think rich people should pay higher capital gains taxes.”
And how’s that a reason? Most Americans couldn’t articulate any of the reasons as to why they may be low to begin with, let alone articulate a coherent set of principles which would lead to raising them but not to other things they wouldn’t support. If they can’t comprehend something, we shouldn’t pay attention to their feelings about it.
The idea of a missing mood, from following the link to Bryan Caplan’s article, seems to amount to two ideas:
“I think it has more costs than other people think, so even if someone thinks the benefits outweigh the costs, if they’re not taking the costs seriously enough, they have a missing mood.”
“I think it has more benefits than other people think, so even if someone thinks the costs outweigh the benefits, if they’re not taking the benefits seriously enough, they have a missing mood.”
These are, of course, two sides of the same coin and have the same problem: You’re assuming that the first half of your position (costs in case 1, benefits in case 2) is not only correct, but so obviously correct that nobody can reasonably disagree with it; if someone acts as they don’t believe it, there must be some other explanation. This is better than assuming your entire position is correct, but it’s still poor epistemic hygeine. For instance, both the military hawks example (case 1) and the immigration example (case 2) fail if your opponent doesn’t value non-Americans very much, so there are lower costs or benefits, respectively.
Beware of starting with disagreement and concluding insincerity.
“Edits may be rejected for reasons that are not reasonably predictable by the editor and unrelated to the quality of the edit” is, in fact, a model of how edits are treated. And it’s useful in deciding whether editing is likely to work.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t collateral damage.
“Your edit can be rejected because of collateral damage from some conflict you are not a party to” is an instance of “benign edits are rejected for arcane reasons”, not a refutation of it.
Consider an unexpected hanging without the extra days: The judge tells you “I am going to hang you on Monday, but the day of the hanging is not something you will be able to predict.”
The prisoner follows the same reasoning as in the unexpected hanging: the surprise hanging can’t be Monday, because he would then know when it is, and it’s not a surprise. The judge then hangs him on Monday, and of course it’s a surprise. In other words, the unexpected hanging paradox doesn’t require the extra days at all.
If by “surprise” you mean “can’t logically be proven”, then the judge’s statement is equivalent to “X is true, but you cannot prove X”. From that statement, everyone except you can prove X, and you cannot.
All right, suppose that all of us liked exactly the same objects exactly the same amount. This obliterates the poorly-written-textbook’s reason for “trade”.
This is nonsensical, because whether an individual person likes something is not a constant. If everyone liked oranges just as much as apples,, trade would still be possible because the 1st orange is preferable to the 99th apple and the 1st apple is preferable to the 99th orange.
Human intelligence counts as “gained characteristics not shared by the others”.
I think you’re thinking that it doesn’t count as a lot of divergence, but “a list of divergences with few items” doesn’t mean “not a lot of divergence”. Human intelligence has an effect on the environment and capabilities of humans that is equal or greater than the effect of the differences between birds and reptiles.
Your comment seems to me to assume that Scott thinks there would be nothing very wrong with a definition of “fish” that included whales only because that’s something he has to think in order to remain consistent while classifying transgender people the way they feel they should be classified.
Believing things for multiple reasons is a thing (despite the LW idea of a true rejection, as if people only have one reason for everything). Moreover, people aren’t perfectly rational machines, and motivated reasoning is a thing. I certainly think that needing to believe it for the sake of transgendered people is a large component of why he believes it, and that he probably wouldn’t otherwise believe it, even if it’s not the only reason why.
Vaccines that are already delivered to your country are not going to get shipped elsewhere.
This seems to fail to acausal reasoning.
What changed? Surely if “cognitively useful categories should carve reality at the joints, and dolphins being fish doesn’t do that” was good philosophy in 2008, it should still be good philosophy in 2021?
Scott Alexander’s essay uses the example of fish versus whales to argue that transgender people should be classified by whatever sex they claim to be rather than classified by biological sex. This essay came out after 2008 and before 2021. And Scott Alexander is about as influential here as Yudkowsky.
In other words, what changed is that asserting that it makes sense to classify dolphins as fish is now something you need to assert for political purposes.
Edit: I missed the reference to gender issues. But I think it may explain why Yudkowsky and rationalists in general have changed their mind, regardless of why anyone in particular here has.
If you propose a course of action which a normal person would find profoundly weird, I suggest that Chesterton’s fence applies, and you figure out why a normal person would object it. Then articulate why it is usually beneficial to avoid such things, before you decide that this one time, the normal person is wrong and you really should go after the thing that he avoids.
And the answer is not going to be “because he’s a normal person and so he keeps missing twenty dollar bills in the street”.
By this reasoning almost nothing normally described as a terminal value is a terminal value. “He robs banks because he wants money because getting money makes him feel good”.
I think the context is that many people say that there is no such thing as evil and advocate for some actions and against other actions based on that. Just pointing out that they are recommending harmful things is valuable.
Ruling out certain classes of responses is useful even if there is still more than one possibility remaining and it’s still hard to pick the right one.
If someone told you not to use homeopathy to cure disease, would you respond that they haven’t explained how you should cure disease?
Presumably people think that at some point an AI is able to suffer. So why wouldn’t a neural network be able to suffer?
Admitting one is wrong and correcting errors needs to be rewarded and encouraged rather than punished and piled onto.
What is happening now is the opposite of admitting one is wrong. It’s not as if the CDC said “sorry, you could have gone without a mask for the last month, we’ll try not to make that mistake again”.
This implies that advertisers would be better off if they occasionally violated such assumptions (such as saying “of the top five” when they were in the top four) enough that it weakens the inferences viewers can make, by enough to benefit the advertisers.
Of course, the coordination problem in doing this is hard, but there are several ways around it (and not all of them just involve advertisers directly colluding with each other).
If we treat the “is” in Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence as an “implies” (which it seems to me to be) and then apply modus tollens to it, we get “if you don’t have evidence of absence, you don’t have absence of evidence” and it is precisely this bullshit that Zvi is calling. If you have evidence of absence, say so.
No. The “is” in that doesn’t mean “implies”. The “is evidence of” means “implies”.
Modus tollens then gives you “if you don’t have absence, you don’t have absence of evidence”, which is not subject to the semantic tricks in the post.
Not all predictions are equal. So I don’t think that the fact that Spock makes a lot of offscreen, untelevised predictions means much; the predictions we see onscreen are not only the most dramatic, they are also the cases where predictions are the most important. As such, we should weight them much higher in analyzing Spock’s competence than his offscreen predictions.
I could predict 365 sunrises and one asteroid impact for the next year, and if I was wrong about the asteroid impact, it would be good reason to call me a bad predictor, even if the other 99.7% of predictions were all correct.
And using a novel as a source for canon is dubious. You can do all the Sherlockian “pretend the novel really happened” you want, but onscreen episodes weren’t written taking that novel into account.
The obvious answer to this is that under these circumstances, you don’t control your hand or anything else either.