Jiro

Karma: 2,725

Jiro 23 Jul 2019 16:01 UTC
4 points

in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I think there’s a difference between “Most of the IRS tax code is reasonable” and “Most of the instances where the IRS tax code does something are instances where it does reasonable things.” Not all parts of the tax code are used equally often. Furthermore, most unreasonable instances of a lot of things will be rare as a percentage of the whole because there is a large set of uncontroversial background uses. For instance, consider a completely corrupt politician who takes bribes—he’s not going to be taking a bribe for every decision he makes and most of the ones he does make will be uncontroversial things like “approve $X for this thing which everyone thinks should be approved anyway”.

Jiro 16 Jul 2019 20:51 UTC
5 points

in reply to: Dr_Manhattan's comment on: Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality

I want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper—to be read by their spouses, children and friends—with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.”

Leaving out “parents” gets rid of some of the obvious objections, but even then, I don’t want my children to know about my sexual fetishes. Other objections may include, for instance, letting your friends know that you voted for someone who they think will ruin the country. And I certainly wouldn’t want rationalist-but-unpopular opinions I hold to be on the front page of the local paper to be seen by everyone (Go ahead, see what happens when the front page of the newspaper announces that you think that you should kill a fat man to stop a trolley.) This aphorism amounts to “never compartmentalize your life” which doesn’t seem very justifiable.

Jiro 5 Jul 2019 15:00 UTC
7 points

on: Everybody Knows

Bob does not know X. That’s why Alice is telling Bob in the first place.

Conversational phrases aren’t supposed to be interpreted literally. “Everybody knows” never means “literally every single person knows”. This is about equivalent to complaining that people say “you’re welcome” when the person really wouldn’t be welcome under some circumstances.

Don’t be the literal Internet guy who thinks this way.

Jiro 2 Jul 2019 21:26 UTC
2 points

in reply to: dxu's comment on: An Increasingly Manipulative Newsfeed

I think the word “unbiased” there may be a typo; your statement would make a lot more sense if the word you meant to put there was actually “biased”.

I meant “unbiased” in scare quotes. Typical newsfeeds that are claimed to be unbiased in the real world (but actually may not be).

Jiro 2 Jul 2019 19:51 UTC
2 points

in reply to: dxu's comment on: An Increasingly Manipulative Newsfeed
Typical unbiased newsfeeds in the real world are created by organizations with bias who have an interest in spreading biased news. It could, of course, be that this was about a rare instance where this was not the case, but the odds are against it.

Jiro 2 Jul 2019 18:09 UTC
6 points

on: An Increasingly Manipulative Newsfeed
Manipulative newsfeeds aren’t an example of an AI becoming manipulative when the human just wanted it to be unbiased. They’re an example of an AI becoming manipulative when the human also wanted it to be manipulative, but didn’t want to be too obvious about it.

Jiro 12 Jun 2019 22:03 UTC
2 points

on: Logic, Buddhism, and the Dialetheia
Don’t Godel sentences rebut the ideas of groundedness or of creating a system where self-referential sentences are blocked? Their existence means that you can create something that behaves as a self-referential sentence and has the associated paradoxes while using only normal arithmetic and without a “this sentence”.

Jiro 31 May 2019 22:33 UTC
5 points

on: Drowning children are rare
I would not, in fact, save a drowning child.

Or rather, I’d save a central example of a drowning child, but I wouldn’t save a drowning child under literally all circumstances, and I think most people wouldn’t either. If a child was drowning in a scenario similar to one that Singer uses it as an analogy for, it would be something like a scenario where there is an endless series of drowning children in front of me with an individually small but cumulatively large cost to saving them. Under those circumstances, I would not save every drowning child, or even try to maximize the number of drowning children I do save.

Jiro 23 May 2019 23:07 UTC
2 points
AF
in reply to: rohinmshah's comment on: [AN #56] Should ML researchers stop running experiments before making hypotheses?
It seems to me that if you expect that the results of your experiment can be useful in and generalized to other situations, then it has to be possible to replicate it. Or to put it another way, if the principle you discovered is useful for more than running the same program with a different seed, shouldn’t it be possible to test it by some means other than running the same program with a different seed?

Jiro 23 May 2019 16:25 UTC
4 points

in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong's comment on: By default, avoid ambiguous distant situations

the pre-brainwashed person had preferences about their future selves

That would qualify as

for instance, you might think that forcibly changing preferences is different from creating a being with unusual preferences

Also, it’s possible for people to have preferences about either their descendants, or about other sentient beings, just like they have preferences about their future selves. In fact, I would suggest that pretty much all the opposition to the idea is because people have preferences about their descendants or about other sentient beings. Again, it may be useful to spell out why you think those preferences merit less respect than preferences about one’s future self.

(Note that some answers to this require making assumptions about how to aggregate preferences, that are also serious points of disagreement. Fo instance, you might say that if you create a lot of slaves, the preferences of that large number should have a large weight. Such assumptions can also be questioned, and by most people, would be questioned.)

Jiro 22 May 2019 19:17 UTC
11 points
AF
on: [AN #56] Should ML researchers stop running experiments before making hypotheses?

Instead of preregistering all experiments, maybe researchers could run experiments and observe results, formulate a theory, and then preregister an experiment that would test the theory—but in this case I would expect that researchers end up “preregistering” experiments that are very similar to the experiments that generated the theory, such that the results are very likely to come out in support of the theory.

Why would you expect this? Assuming you are not suggesting “what if the researchers lie and say they did the experiment again when they didn’t”, then doing a similar experiment again is called “replication”. If the initial result was caused by p-hacking, then the similar experiment won’t support the theory. This is why we do replication.

Also, I notice the term “p-hacking” appears nowhere in your post.

Jiro 22 May 2019 19:12 UTC
1 point

on: By default, avoid ambiguous distant situations
Consider a similar situation without creating a race: some wizard brainwashes an existing person into becoming a willing slave. Is it moral to thwart the preferences of the brainwashed person bu not enslaving him, or by forcibly modifying his brain to desire freedom again? Most people would say yes.

You might argue that there is a difference (for instance, you might think that forcibly changing preferences is different from creating a being with unusual preferences) but it may be useful to spell out those differences and distinguish between objections that are affected by those differences and objections which are not.

Jiro 10 May 2019 19:54 UTC
−9 points

in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Tales From the American Medical System

My friend explains again that he does not have the time to see any doctor the next day

He had the time to see a doctor. He didn’t have the time to see a doctor without disrupting his life, which isn’t the same thing as actually not having the time to see the doctor. And the fact that seeing a doctor disrupts his life is his own fault for delaying the appointment.

The doctor shouldn’t be required to alter his procedure just because doing so would alleviate the consequences of the patient’s own decisions.

Jiro 10 May 2019 19:41 UTC
4 points

in reply to: clone of saturn's comment on: Tales From the American Medical System
The conceptual gap between a standard use of a poison from a hardware store and a deadly use is much larger than the gap between a standard use and a deadly use of a medication, so I would expect far more tragedies to come from the medication than from the hardware store poison.

Nobody’s going to self-diagnose and inject themselves with poison from a hardware store.

Jiro 5 May 2019 16:23 UTC
3 points

on: Episode 3 of Tsuyoku Naritai! (the ’becoming stronger podcast): Nike Timers
Calling this “Tsuyoku Naritai” is marginally better than calling your image editing program “GIMP”. The name signals something really unfavorable to a lot of people (weeabooism in this case). And yes, I know it comes from an essay by Eliezer. He still seems to have gotten the phrase from shonen anime. (Also, if he did, it counts as appealing to fictional evidence.)

Geeks like to ignore the name “GIMP” because after all, the name of something has no relation to how it functions so, of course, you should never shy away from something just because of its name if its functionality is good, right? Which is a way of thinking that ignores the real world.

Jiro 30 Apr 2019 14:32 UTC
4 points

in reply to: Virgil Kurkjian's comment on: Counterspells
That isn’t enough, though. First of all, some of what I said applies directly to the quality of the argument—someone could be sincere, but biased, and I may have a reason to avoid arguments based on personal experience or personal expertise from him about certain subjects, without completely avoiding conversation with him. Second, what I said applies when you’re arguing with person A (who you can have a discussion with) and they’re referencing person B (who you can’t), and you want to dismiss the reference to B—in the example above, someone is referring back to the argument made by a senator, but he is not the senator himself.

Jiro 30 Apr 2019 5:33 UTC
18 points

on: The Forces of Blandness and the Disagreeable Majority

Since the 1970’s, Americans have become more tolerant of allowing people with controversial views to speak in public

The question of whether Americans have become more tolerant of speech is about recent changes, not changes since the 1970s.

There’s also the problem of how speech is classified. Those figures show that the tolerance for letting racists speak has gone down recently, which may be concerning—but it’s much more concerning if more things get moved into the “racist” category, which seems to be happening. Also, I don’t see “sexists” or any other category aside from “racists” that is hated by the left, and it’s quite possible that adding more such categories would show more downturns.

Jiro 29 Apr 2019 22:09 UTC
4 points

on: Counterspells
If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?
Finding things wrong with an argument is not effort-free. The fact that someone may be biased may in some cases be enough to make me not want to spend the effort. Furthermore, most real-life arguments are not purely logical deductions and involve a certain amount of trusting that the other person has presented facts honestly and in a way that is not one-sided or based on motivated reasoning, especially when perceptions and personal experience are involved.
There’s also a certain chance that someone will sneak a bad argument by me simply because I am human and imperfect at analyzing arguments. I can minimize the chance of this without causing other problems if I only argue with people who are relatively unbiased.
It matters much more whether [person] is wrong or right than what their tone is.
No, it doesn’t. Imagine replacing “abusive tone” with “breaks the windows of my house”. Whether someone is right or wrong is unrelated to whether he breaks the windows of my house, but I’d probably call the police and ignore his arguments.Abusive tone is negative utility for me and I’m not interested in getting negative utility when I can avoid it.

Jiro 27 Jun 2018 15:16 UTC
8 points

in reply to: Dacyn's comment on: Wirehead your Chickens
There are two related but separate ideas. One is that if you want to find out if someone is harmed by X, you need to consider whether they would prefer X in a base state, even if X affects their preferences. Another is that if you want to find out if someone is harmed by X, you need to consider what they would prefer if they knew about and understood X, even if they don’t.

Modifying an animal to have a smaller brain falls in the second category; pretty much any being who can understand the concept would consider it harmful to be modified to have a smaller brain, so it should also be considered harmful for beings who don’t understand the concept. It may also fall in the first category if you try to argue “their reduced brain capacity will prevent them from knowing what they’re missing by having reduced brain capacity”. Modifying it so that it enjoys pain falls in the second category for the modification, and the first category for considering whether the pain is harmful.

Jiro 25 Jun 2018 21:14 UTC
5 points

on: Wirehead your Chickens
Most non-rationalists think that whether doing Y on target X is good depends on whether X would prefer Y in a base state where X is unaltered by Y and is aware of the possibility of Y, even if having Y would change his perception or is completely concealed from his perception.

If you’re going to create animals who want to be eaten (or who enjoy actions that would otherwise cause suffering), you need to assess whether this is good or bad based on whether a base state animal with unaltered desires would want to be eaten or would want to be subject to those actions. If you’re going to amputate animals’ body parts, you need to consider whether a base state animal with those parts would want them amputated.

The proposals above all fail this standard.