Cambridge’s total colleges endowments is 2.8 and Oxford’s 2.9. But the figures above already include this.
joaolkf(Joao Fabiano)
Karma: 368
Violence might not be the exact opposite of peace. Intuitively, peace seem to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just accidentally. A prison might have lower violence than an certain neighbourhood but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity to violence is higher despite the fact violence itself isn’t. Proclivity matters.
I am generally sceptic of Pinker. I have read a ton of papers and Handbooks of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is clear that while he was one of the top researchers in this area in the 90′s this has dramatically changed. The area has shifted towards more empirical precision and fined-grained theories while some of his theories seems to warrant the “just-so story” criticism.
I made my above comment because I knew of at least one clear instance where the reason I had to do the workaround was due to someone who found Alex’s stuff. But things haven’t improved that much as I anticipated in my field (Applied Ethics). These things would take time, even if this had Alex’s stuff as the only main cause. Looking back, I also think part of the workarounds were more due to having to relate the discussion to someone in my field who wrote about the same issue (Nick Agar) than due to having to avoid mentioning Eliezer too much.
I see a big difference in the AI community. For instance, I was able to convince a very intelligent, previously long-time superintelligence sceptic, CS grad student of superintelligence’s feasibility. But I am not that much involved with AI directly. What is very clear to me—and I am not sure how obvious this already is to everyone—is that Nick’s book had an enormous impact. Superintelligence scepticism is gradually becoming clearly a minority position. This is huge and awesome.
I don’t think simply publishing Eliezer’s ideas as your own would work; there would need to be a lot of refining to turn it into a publishable philosophy paper. I did this refining of the complexity thesis during my thesis’ second chapter. Refining his ideas made them a lot different, and I applied them to a completely different case (moral enhancement). Note that publishing someone else’s idea as your own is not a good plan, even if the person explicitly grants you permission. But if you are refining them and adding a lot of new stuff you can just briefly mention him and move along—and hopefully that won’t do too much reputation-damage. I am still pondering how and which parts of this chapter to publish. In case you are interested, you can find a presentation summarizing its main arguments here: https://prezi.com/tsxslr_5_36z/deep-moral-enhancement-is-risky/
What about this one?
Once Braumoeller took into account both the number of countries and their political relevance to one another, the results showed essentially no change to the trend of the use of force over the last 200 years. While researchers such as Pinker have suggested that countries are actually less inclined to fight than they once were, Braumoeller said these results suggest a different reason for the recent decline in war. “With countries being smaller, weaker and more distant from each other, they certainly have less ability to fight. But we as humans shouldn’t get credit for being more peaceful just because we’re not as able to fight as we once were,” he said. “There is no indication that we actually have less proclivity to wage war.”
Article: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/wardecline.htm Paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317269&download=yes
I think there is more evidence it crosses (two studies with spinal measures) than it does not (0 studies). For (almost) direct measures check out Neumann, Inga D., et al., 2013 and Born, 2002. There are great many studies showing effects that could only be caused by encephalic neuromodulation. If it does not cross it, then it should cause increased encephalic levels of some neurochemical with the exact same profile, but that would be really weird.
Regardless of attachment style, oxytocin increases in-group favouritism, proclivity to group conflict, envy and schadenfreude. It increases cooperation, trust and so on inside one’s group but it often decreases cooperation with out-groups.
I may not be recalling correctly, but although there is some small studies on that, I do not think there is a lot of evidence that oxytocin always leads anxiety, etc. in people with insecure attachment style. I would suspect that it might be the case it initially increases insecurity because it makes those persons attend to their relationship issues. However, in the long-run it might lead them to solve those issues. I say this because there are many studies showing insecure attachment style is associated with lower oxytocin receptor density. If your hypothesis were correct the density should be (on average) the same. There are also a lot of studies showing a correlation between oxytocin levels and relationship satisfaction, duration and so on. Additionally, intranasal oxytocin increases conflict solution in couples. Again, these would not be the case if your hypothesis were true. Overall there is a lot more evidence that oxytocin does increase secure attachment, although there is a small amount of evidence that, in the short-term, it increases measures associated with insecure attachment.
Perhaps you have already read it, (and it might be a bit outdated by now) but Oxytocin and social affiliation in humans (Feldman, 2012) offers a pretty comprehensive review of oxytocin’s social effects. It will also point you to all the references to what I said above (it’s pretty easy to find).
EDIT: Note: I, and the English dictionary, believe hormetic is the property of having opposing effects at different dosages. Which does not seem to fit what you intended.
Elephants kill hundreds, if not thousands, of human beings per year. Considering there are no more than 30,000 elephants alive, that’s an amazing feat of evilness. I believe the average elephant kills orders of magnitudes more than the average human, and probably kill more violently as well.
Worth mentioning that some parts of Superintelligence are already a less contrarian version of many arguments made here in the past.
Also note that although some people do believe that FHI is some sense “contrarian”, when you look at the actual hard data on this the fact is FHI has been able to publish in mainstream journals (within philosophy at least) and reach important mainstream researchers (within AI at least) at rates comparable, if not higher, to excellent “non-contrarian” institutes.
I didn’t see the post in those lights at all. I think it gave a short, interesting and relevant example about the dynamics of intellectual innovation in “intelligence research” (Jeff) and how this could help predict and explain the impact of current research(MIRI/FHI). I do agree the post is about “tribalism” and not about the truth, however, it seems that this was OP explicit intention and a worthwhile topic. It would be naive and unwise to overlook these sorts of societal considerations if your goal is to make AI development safer.
Is there a thread with suggestions/requests for non-obvious productivity apps like that? Because I do have a few requests:
1) One chrome extension that would do this, but for search results. That is, that upon highlighting/double-clicking a term would display a short list of top Google search results in a context/drop-box menu on the same page.
2) Something like the StayFocusd extension that blocks sites like Facebook and YouTube for a given time of the day, but which would be extremely hard to remove. Some people suggested to block these websites IPs directly on the router, but I don’t have access to routers on my network.
3) Something that would turn-off the internet for a given set of time in a way completely impossible to put it back up. I use Freedom, but sometimes it’s not enough. My current strategy is removing the Ethernet cable, locking it in my drawer and throwing the keys behind my desk (I have to get a stick to pick it up). But it would be nice something that would cost me as much willpower as clicking a button.
Sorry, I meant my office at work (yeap...). Fixed that.
Thanks! This will be useful for me as well, it definitely seems better than my current solution: leaving my cell phone locked in my office(EDIT: at work).
I am so glad that finally some intellectual forum has passed the Sokal test. Computer Science, Sociology, and Philosophy have all failed, and they haven’t tried with the rest yet.
LessWrong, you are our only hope.
Can’t do. Search keywords as cortisol dominance rank status uncertainty.
Which fields are these? This sounds to me a definition that could be useful in e.g. animal studies, but vastly insufficient when it comes to the complexities of status with regard to humans.
Yes, it came from animal studies; but they use in evolutionary psychology as well (and I think in cognitive psychology and biological anthropology too). Yes, it is vastly insufficient. However, I think it is the best we have. More importantly, it is the least biased one I have seen (exactly because it came from animal studies). I feel like most definitions of status are profoundly biased in order to give the author a higher status. Take yours. You are one of the top-5 friendly/likeable people I know, and you put friendless as a major criteria. (I think I nested an appeal to flattery inside an ad hominem here).
according to this definition, an armed group such as occupiers or raiders who kept forcibly taking resources from the native population would be high status among the population, which seems clearly untrue.
Yes, they would have high status (which would be disputed by the natives, probably). Don’t you agree the Roman had a higher status than the tribes they invaded? And yes, Nazis invading, killing, torturing, pillaging and raping the French would also have higher status (at least temporally, until someone removed their trachea). That means status is a bad correlate of moral worthiness, but so is most of the things evolution has ever produced. I think this definition causes a bad emotional reaction (I had it too) because it’s difficult to twist in order to increase your status, and is morally repugnant. It doesn’t mean it is false, to the contrary.
What makes you say that?
It would seem that in a world where everyone is friendly, things would escalate and only the extremely friendly would cause warm fuzzies. Or, people would feel warm fuzzies so often it would be irrelevant. (I.e., I used my philosopher-contrafactual-epistemic-beam, scanned the possible worlds, and concluded that. I.e., I have no idea what I’m talking about.)
Not sure if people are aware, but there are a lot of studies backing up that claim. It is more taxing (to well-being, not to fitness, of course) What’s more, the alpha is is most stressed member of groups with high status-uncertainty, and the least stressed in a group with low status-uncertainty.
This also reminded me of this study, which found that “wealthy individuals report that having three to four times as much money would give them a perfect “10″ score on happiness—regardless of how much wealth they already have.”
In most scientific fields status is defined as access (or entitlement) to resources (i.e.: food and females, mostly). Period. And they tend to take this measure very seriously and stick to it (it has many advantages, easy to measure, evolutionary central, etc.). Both your definitions are only two accidental aspects of having status. Presumably, if you have - and in order to have—higher access to resources you have to be respected, liked, and have influence over your group. I think the definition is elegant exactly because all the things we perceive as status have as major consequences/goals higher access to resources.
Moreover, I don’t think it is the case people can have warm fuzzies for everyone they meet. There’s a limited amount of warm fuzzies to be spent. Of course, you can hack the warm-fuzzy system by using such and such body language, just like you could hack mating strategies using PUA techniques before everyone knew about it. But that’s a zero-sum game.
Different people are comfortable with different levels of status; there are a lot of studies confirming that. If you put a regular gorilla as leader of a group of silverbacks he will freak out, because his trachea is most certainly to be lying on the floor in a few seconds. For very similar reasons, I will freak out if you give me a Jiu-Jitsu black belt and threw me into a dojo. This does not mean that same said regular gorilla will not fight with everything he has to achieve a higher status within certain safety boundaries. People are comfortable with different levels of status, and their current level is not one of them, nor is one too high to be safe. Nobody can be happy. That is the nature of status. (Also, there are limited resources—or so your brain thinks—so it is important to make other people miserable as well.)
It would seem I’m not the norm. I have been going there for just over one year. But I find it hard to believe people would be generally against any form of organising the comments by quality. It would be nice to know which of the 400 comments is worth reading. Do people simply read all of them? Do they post without reading any? I think I have been here, and mostly only here, for so long that other systems do not make sense to me.
Seems like recent evidence disfavours less Neil’s model than the classical one: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html