JoshuaZ

• JoshuaZ 17 Jun 2018 23:28 UTC

  30 points

  on: How many philoso­phers ac­cept the or­thog­o­nal­ity the­sis ? Ev­i­dence from the PhilPapers survey

  66.42512077294685%

  This should not be re­ported this way. It should be re­ported as some­thing like 66%. The other digits are not mean­ingful.

• JoshuaZ 3 Dec 2016 23:43 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Vladimir's comment on: Tsuyoku Nar­i­tai! (I Want To Be­come Stronger)

  I don’t know of any broader, larger trends. It is worth not­ing here that the Rab­bis of the Tal­mud them­selves thought that the prior texts (es­pe­cially the To­rah it­self) were in­fal­lible, so it seems that part of what might be hap­pen­ing is that over time, more and more gets put into the very-holy-text cat­e­gory.

  Also, it seems im­por­tant to dis­t­in­guish here be­tween be­ing un­ques­tion­ably cor­rect with be­ing literal. In a va­ri­ety of differ­ent re­li­gions this be­comes an im­por­tant dis­tinc­tion and of­ten a sac­ri­fice of liter­al­ism is in prac­tice made to pre­serve cor­rect­ness of a claim past a cer­tain point. Also note that in many re­li­gious tra­di­tions, the tra­di­tions which are most literal try to ar­gue that what they are do­ing is not liter­al­ism but some­thing more so­phis­ti­cated. For ex­am­ple, among con­ser­va­tive Protes­tants it isn’t un­com­mon to claim that they are not read­ing texts liter­ally but rather us­ing the “his­tor­i­cal-gram­mat­i­cal method.”

• JoshuaZ 12 May 2016 13:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Bound_up's comment on: Open Thread May 9 - May 15 2016

  MWI doesn’t say any­thing about other con­stants- the other parts of our wave­func­tion should have the same con­stants. How­ever, other mul­ti­verse hy­pothe­ses do sug­gest that phys­i­cal con­stants could eb differ­ent.

• JoshuaZ 4 May 2016 0:39 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: CellBioGuy's comment on: Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016

  That seems like an ac­cu­rate anal­y­sis.

  I’m ac­tu­ally more con­cerned about an er­ror in logic. If one es­ti­mates a prob­a­bil­ity of say k that in a given year that cli­mate change will cause an ex­tinc­tion event, then the prob­a­bil­ity of it oc­cur­ring in any given string of years is not the ob­vi­ous one, since part of what is go­ing on in es­ti­mat­ing k is the chance that cli­mate change can in fact cause such an in­ci­dent.

• JoshuaZ 2 May 2016 15:29 UTC

  1 point

  on: Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016

  Main­stream dis­cus­sion of ex­is­ten­tial risk is be­com­ing more of a thing, A re­cent ex­am­ple is this ar­ti­cle in The At­lantic. They do men­tion a va­ri­ety of risks but fo­cus on nu­clear war and worst case global warm­ing.

• JoshuaZ 30 Mar 2016 16:34 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: skeptical_lurker's comment on: “3 Rea­sons It’s Ir­ra­tional to De­mand ‘Ra­tion­al­ism’ in So­cial Jus­tice Ac­tivism”

  When peo­ple ar­gu­ing with VoiceOfRa got sev­eral down­votes in a row, the con­clu­sion drawn was sock­pup­pets.

  There was sub­stan­tially more ev­i­dence that VoiceOfRa was down­vot­ing in a re­tribu­tive fash­ion, in­clud­ing database ev­i­dence.

• JoshuaZ 29 Dec 2015 21:46 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: MattG's comment on: Voice­ofra is banned

  Slash­dot had Karma years be­fore Red­dit and was not nearly as suc­cess­ful. Granted it didn’t try to do gen­eral fo­rum dis­cus­sions but just news ar­ti­cles, but this sug­gests that karma is not the whole story.

• JoshuaZ 27 Nov 2015 17:59 UTC

  3 points

  on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015

  Fur­ther pos­si­ble ev­i­dence for a Great Filter: A re­cent pa­per sug­gests that as long as the prob­a­bil­ity of an in­tel­li­gent species aris­ing on a hab­it­able planet is not tiny, at least about 10^-24 then with very high prob­a­bil­ity hu­mans are not the only civ­i­liza­tion to have ever been in the ob­serv­able uni­verse, and a similar re­sult holds for the Milky Way with around 10^-10 as the rele­vant prob­a­bil­ity. Ar­ti­cle about pa­per is here and pa­per is here.

• JoshuaZ 6 Nov 2015 19:35 UTC

  0 points

  on: Us­ing the Coper­ni­can medi­ocrity prin­ci­ple to es­ti­mate the timing of AI arrival

  The most in­ter­est­ing un­known in the fu­ture is the time of cre­ation of Strong AI. Our pri­ors are in­suffi­cient to pre­dict it be­cause it is such a unique task.

  I’m not sure this fol­lows. The pri­mary prob­lems with pre­dict­ing the rise of Strong AI ap­ply to most other ar­tifi­cial ex­is­ten­tial risks also.

• JoshuaZ 6 Nov 2015 19:31 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Clarity's comment on: Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015

  Re­search on ex­pert judge­ment in­di­cates ex­perts are just as bad as non­ex­perts in some coun­ter­in­tu­itive ways, like pre­dict­ing the out­come of a thing,

  Do you have a cita­tion for this? My un­der­stand­ing was that in many fields ex­perts perform bet­ter than non­ex­perts. The main thing that ex­perts share in com­mon with non-ex­perts is over­con­fi­dence about their pre­dic­tions.

• JoshuaZ 6 Nov 2015 19:27 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: HungryHobo's comment on: LINK: An ex­am­ple of the Pink Flam­ingo, the ob­vi­ous-yet-over­looked cousin of the Black Swan

  If peo­ple want to lock in their pre­dic­tions they can do so on Pre­dic­tion Book here.

• JoshuaZ 6 Nov 2015 19:21 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Lumifer's comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Thread Oc­to­ber 2015

  I am not mak­ing claims about “any sense of or­der”, but go­ing by what I read Euro­pean po­lice lost con­trol of some chunks of its ter­ri­tory.

  In this con­text that’s what rele­vant, since VoiceOfRa talked about “Euro­pean coun­tries that have given up en­forc­ing any sense of or­der in large parts of their ma­jor cities.” If you aren’t talk­ing about that then how is it a rele­vant re­sponse?

• JoshuaZ 25 Oct 2015 1:32 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: turchin's comment on: [Link]: KIC 8462852, aka WTF star, “the most mys­te­ri­ous star in our galaxy”, ETI can­di­date, etc.

  Can you ex­plain why you see a SETI at­tack as so high? If you are civ­i­liza­tion do­ing this not only does it re­quire ex­tremely hos­tile mo­ti­va­tions but also a) mak­ing ev­ery­one aware of where you are (mak­ing you a po­ten­tial tar­get) and b) be­ing able to make ex­tremely sub­tle as­pects of an AI that ap­par­ently looks non-hos­tile and c) is some­thing which de­clares your own deep hos­tility to any­one who no­tices it.

• JoshuaZ 24 Oct 2015 20:20 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: turchin's comment on: [Link]: KIC 8462852, aka WTF star, “the most mys­te­ri­ous star in our galaxy”, ETI can­di­date, etc.

  What prob­a­bil­ity do you as­sign to this hap­pen­ing? How many con­junc­tions are in­volved in this sce­nario?

• JoshuaZ 24 Oct 2015 20:12 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: DanArmak's comment on: Crazy Global Warm­ing Solu­tion Ideas

  Yes, that would work. I think I was re­act­ing to the phras­ing more and imag­ined some­thing more car­toon­ish, in par­tic­u­larly where the air con­di­tioner is es­sen­tially float­ing in space.

• JoshuaZ 24 Oct 2015 12:26 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: So8res's comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  You seem to be op­er­at­ing un­der the im­pres­sion that sub­jec­tive Bayesi­ans think you Bayesian statis­ti­cal tools are always the best tools to use in differ­ent prac­ti­cal situ­a­tions? That’s likely true of many sub­jec­tive Bayesi­ans, but I don’t think it’s true of most “Less Wrong Bayesi­ans.”

  I sus­pect that there’s a large amount of vari­a­tion in what “Less Wrong Bayesi­ans” be­lieve. It also seems that at least some treat­ing it more as an ar­ti­cle of faith or tribal alle­giance than any­thing else. See for ex­am­ple some of the dis­cus­sion here.

• JoshuaZ 24 Oct 2015 12:10 UTC

  6 points

  on: Crazy Global Warm­ing Solu­tion Ideas

  What do you see as pro­duc­tive in ask­ing this ques­tion?

• JoshuaZ 24 Oct 2015 12:10 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: passive_fist's comment on: Crazy Global Warm­ing Solu­tion Ideas

  Ex­pand­ing the or­bit of the Earth works un­der the known laws of physics but wouldn’t be prac­ti­cally doable at all. A gi­ant air con­di­tioner wouldn’t work for sim­ple physics rea­sons.

• JoshuaZ 23 Oct 2015 23:58 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Lumifer's comment on: Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015

  Prob­lems can have a math­e­mat­i­cal as­pect with­out be­ing com­pletely solv­able by math.

• JoshuaZ 23 Oct 2015 23:51 UTC

  3 points

  on: Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015

  This blog post gives a good sum­mary of why much of the crit­i­cism of phlo­gis­ton as a bad hy­poth­e­sis is not jus­tified.