This is an old account. See https://www.lesswrong.com/users/joshuafox for my active account.
Joshua_Fox
Karma: 136
Also as an event, because LW does not support non-geographical posts.
Also as a post, because LW does not support non-geographical events.
How do we create a group? Please post a URL.
“Why does ancient Egypt, which had good records on many other matters, lack any records of Jews having ever been there?”
Of course the words “Jews” isn’t used, but it is well-documented that West-Semites lived in Egypt. (They even ruled it for a while as the Hyksos dynasty.) There is also the Mernepthah Stele, with a small mention of “Israel.”
Though we do have written records from ancient Egypt, they are nowhere near complete or consistent enough for the absence of evidence to be treated as useful evidence of absence.
Not that I’m claiming to be wise or anything.
I was being forced to memorize and recite
Without getting into the theological aspects, a good technique as part of learning a second language is memorizing a text, particularly one with a poetic structure (like many prayers), even before it can be fully understood.
We were given a transliteration, but not a translation. I asked what the prayer meant. I was told that I didn’t need to know
That is an extremely unusual experience, except as a temporary stage of learning. In most Jewish circles, reading Hebrew in the original script is considered important, and it is believed that one does need to understand what texts mean.
What about “near-human” morals, like, say, Kzinti: Where the best of all possible words contains hierarchies, duels to the death, and subsentient females; along with exploration, technology, and other human-like activities. Though I find their morality repugnant for humans, I can see that they have the moral “right” to it. Is human morality, then, in some deep sense better than those?
Another variation on heaven/hell/man/woman in a closed room: No Exit
Minor point perhaps, but in the field I once studied, diachronic linguistics, people always want to know what the oldest language is, and no amount of explanation will convince them that there question is off-base.
Among the positive values of school, matriculation exams, college, grad school, the tenure system, and the career-track rat-race: In some cases they help motivate and bring out the best in people; even smart, creative people sometimes need that sort of external motivation.
(See also James Miller above.)
Eliezer, can you mathematically characterize those environments where randomization can help. Presumably these are the “much more intelligent than you, and out to get you” environments, but I’d like to see that characterized a bit better.
> “You should go to college and get a Master’s degree and get a doctorate and publish a lot of papers on ordinary things -
scientists and investors won’t listen to you otherwise.” Even assuming that I tested out of the bachelor’s degree… You can “test out of” every step to the ladder, and go straight to post-doc/professor equivalent by publishing multiple well-respected papers (and not necessarily on ordinary things) in top journals.
So do you now think that engineers can create a “Completely Alien Mind Design”? Do you have a feasible CAMD yourself?
I don’t know if Eliezer2002 invented this reply on his own, or if he read it somewhere else. What about the concept of “optimization process”? Did you come to that idea yourself, or read about it elsewhere?
I’ve been stupid.
More generally, I’d like to see Overcoming Bias bloggers writing more about their current biases, either ones they struggle against, though not always successfully; or ones they have decided to surrender to.
SIAI has a … mixed attitude towards AIXI
That’s the right attitude to have in general: Encourage good work, but be prepared to criticize it as well.
He calls AIXI “brain-malfunction-causing.” I don’t think he says that AIXI is a malfunction itself!
@Nick Tarleton “but if it is [arguing for something], it’s arguing for the propagation of those parts of our psychology we really want to keep.”
For many or most humans, to the extent that current religion is imperfect, the enhancement of spirituality is perhaps the most important goal for humanity. Of course, various groups do have variations on what they mean by religion, but worship of a god is very common
I wonder, then, if Eliezer’s explanation/argument could be applied just as well to the preservation and encouragement of worship of the divine, though it would not fit well with the atheism advocated in his other articles.
If you replace “love” in this article with “theistic spirituality”—another aspect of the human psychology which many, if not most, humans consider deeply important and beautiful -- and likewise replace mutatis mutandis other parts of the dialog, would it not just as well argue for the propagation of religion to our descendants?
Eliezer wrote “This isn’t the whole story..., but it will do for a start”, and in the referenced post: “This I will not describe, for it would be a long tale and complicated. I … knew not the teachings of Tversky and Kahneman.”
I’ve seen tantalizing hints of this “long tale,” but I’d love to see the whole story, even in summary. If nothing else, it would be quite in place in a blog on Overcoming Bias.
Yet something in the real world makes it tractable to create the “map”—to find those hidden class variables which enable Naive Bayes.
I’d like to understand: Are frequentist “probability” and subjective “probability” simply two different concepts, to be distinguished carefully? Or is there some true debate here?
I think that Jaynes shows a derivation follownig Bayesian principles of the frequentist probability from the subjective probability. I’d love to see one of Eliezer’s lucid explanations on that.
Wonderful project! I enjoyed writing for that old wiki.
Will you redirect given pages from the old to the new wiki, or at least have a link that readers can follow?