JoshuaZ

Karma: 20,175

JoshuaZ 5 Apr 2010 4:19 UTC
5 points
on: The Shabbos goy
I’m not sure why you picked hasidic. It sounds like you are confuing hasidic with haredi which is roughly speaking the general ultra-orthodox population. The hasidim are a specific strain of orthodox Judaism which arose in the last 1700s. But many haredim are not hasidim. In any case, the Shabbat goy has nothing to do with either the larger category or the smaller category. Note also that neither category describes all of Orthodox Judaism.

You are incidentally correct that orthodox Judaism does not believ that gentiles have to obey the Torah. However, I’m not sure that’s not due to a universal moral rule. The belief is generally defended by claiming that there is something metaphysically different about Jews or physically different. For example, there are hasidic sources which argue that keeping the specific commandments for Jews have direct reverberations on the world which make things in general better. That doesn’t happen for non-Jews. The distinction between a universal moral law and a non-universal moral law isn’t so clear. For example, if my universal moral law contains the rule “people who are HIV+ should not have unprotected sex” arguably this is just a non-universal law for HIV+ people rather than a universal. What quantifiers and qualifiers are acceptable in such rules for them to be universal is not clear to me.

(Incidentally, if we are talking about hasidim in particular, classical hasidic thought has some things which unambiguously separate Jews from non-Jews in really nasty ways. For example, some hasidim believe that Jews have a holier soul than non-Jews. Others declare non-Jews to be intrinsically less moral. For example, the Tanya, one of the formative texts of the Lubavitch hasidic movement, says that non-Jews can’t engage in actual altrusim but will only be altruistic for selfish reasons whereas Jews can engage in genuine altruism).

JoshuaZ 15 Apr 2010 17:37 UTC
13 points
on: Fake Causality
I’m not sure this that this is fair to phlogiston or the scientists who worked with it. In fact, phlogiston theory made predictions. For example, substances in general were supposed to lose mass when combusting. The fact that metals gain mass when rusting was a data point that was actively against what was predicted by phlogiston theory. The theory also helped scientists see general patterns. So even if the term had been a placeholder, it allowed scientists to see that combustion, rust and metabolism were all ultimately linked procedures. The very fact that these shared patterns and that phlogiston predicted changes in mass (and that it failed to predict the behavior of air rich in oxygen and carbon dioxide (although those terms were not used until late)) in the wrong direction helped lead to the rejection of phlogiston theory. There are classical examples of theories with zero or close to zero predictive value. But phlogiston is not one of them.

Edit: Said lost mass when meant gain mass. Metals gain mass when rusting they don’t lose mass. Phlogiston said they should lose mass but they actually gain mass. Also, fixed some grammar issues.
What links here?
- JoshuaZ's comment on What is missing from rationality? by Roko (2 May 2010 6:23 UTC; 2 points)

JoshuaZ 15 Apr 2010 21:24 UTC
0 points
on: Boston area meetup April 18
May attend. Not sure.

JoshuaZ 23 Apr 2010 14:43 UTC
3 points
on: Fusing AI with Superstition
There have already in this thread been a lot of problems listed with this. I’m going to add just two more: consider an otherwise pretty friendly AI that is curious about the universe and wants to understand the laws of physics. No matter how much the AI learns, it will conclude that it and humans misunderstand the basic laws of physics. The AI will likely spend tremendous resources trying to understand just what is wrong with its understanding. And given the prior of 1, it will never resolve this issue.

Consider also the same scenario but if there’s an otherwise potentially friendly second AI that finds out about the way this other AI has been programmed. If this AI is at all close to what humans are like (again it is a mildly friendly AI) it will become paranoid about the possibility that there’s some similar programming issue in it. It might also use this as strong evidence that humans are jerks. The second AI isn’t going remain friendly for very long.

JoshuaZ 23 Apr 2010 16:10 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Fusing AI with Superstition
That’s a valid distinction. But from the perspective of serious existential risks, an AI that has a similar morality but really doesn’t like humans has almost as much potential existential risk as an Unfriendly AI.

JoshuaZ 26 Apr 2010 0:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Single Point of Moral Failure
Which fits with the point being made by Alexandros about tribalism. The Church’s morality is based more off on adhering to the tribal identity than with actual moral actions. It is a worse offense to fail to adhere to tribal identity than to murder.

JoshuaZ 26 Apr 2010 16:18 UTC
1 point
on: Demands for Particular Proof: Appendices
I’m not sure that demanding particular proof is such a bad thing. Often when I disagree with someone I find it helpful to ask them for a list of things that would convinced them. If it is something that we don’t expect to see (such as the time-camera) then one can explain why that’s a bad standard. More often, in cases like evolution, what people demand is something directly contradicted by the hypothesis (a dog giving birth to a cat seems to be a common one). So even if specific demands for particular pieces of evidence are bad, they are useful to ask for since they give one a better idea of how much background knowledge the person in question has and whether a conversation is at all useful.

Also, regarding cryonics, I don’t think that we are that far off from demonstrated revival of vitrified mammals. I would not be surprised if we successfully revived a small mammal such as a mouse in the next 20 years. However, I think that the problem of information retrieval is larger than you make it out to be. While active patterns are clearly not necessary (stronger evidence than dogs albeit not in controlled circumstances has occurred with people who have been rescued from very cold circumstances such as having fallen through ponds or the like), it seems likely that vitrification could alter activation thresholds for neurons and easily do so in a random enough fashion to be effectively non-recoverable. We should be able to test weak versions of this claim now (say by vitrifying a small patch of neurons and then seeing how they behave after revival) but I’m not aware of any work in that direction. Of course, such a test would only apply to revival with current technology. But if that could keep neurons well enough on a small scale, it would be good evidence that we could do it for a whole-brain with better tech.

JoshuaZ 26 Apr 2010 22:52 UTC
1 point
on: Only humans can have human values
Re: Kuhn. You don’t need the postscript to see that he’s not arguing for the meaningless of scientific progress. For example, he specifically discusses how certain paradigms allow other paradigms (for example how one needed impetus theory to get Galilean mechanics and could not go straight from Aristotle to Galileo). Kuhn also emphasizes that paradigm changes occur when there is something that the paradigm cannot adequately explain. Kuhn’s views are complicated and quite subtle.

JoshuaZ 27 Apr 2010 13:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Only humans can have human values
I don’t have access to a copy of SSR right now, but I believe he said that “Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.” A quick Google search agrees with this and gives a page number of 206 in the 1970 second edition. IIRC, that section has other statements of a similar form.

Kuhn’s views on scientific progress are wrong, but they are wrong for more subtle reasons than simple denial of scientific progress.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 0:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Only humans can have human values
Bad phrasing on my part: I didn’t remember the exact wording but very close to it (I remembered the end and beginning precisely and Google confirmed). I would have simply looked in my copy but unfortunately it is on my Kindle which decided to break (again). (Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish setting trains you pretty well to remember passages almost word for word if you find them interesting enough. Unfortunately, passages of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality seem to be an increasingly common category and I know those aren’t that useful. There’s probably an eventual limit).

Edit: Thinking about this more you may have a point about making outrageous statements. But it seems to me that a lot of what he said did get woefully misinterpreted or ignored outright by a lot of the po-mo people who followed up on Kuhn. For example, he makes the point that science is unique in having accepted paradigms and that this doesn’t happen generally in non-science fields. Yet, a lot of his language was then used by others to talk about paradigms and paradigm-shifts and the like in non-science fields. I’m inclined to think that some not-so-bright or ideologically inclined people just misunderstood what he had to say. (I’m under the impression although don’t have a citation that Lakatos didn’t think that Kuhn was arguing against scientific progress. And I’m pretty sure Lakatos read drafts of the book. IRCC he’s acknowledged as helping out in the preface or forward).

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 0:45 UTC
7 points
on: Possibilities for converting useless fun into utility in Online Gaming
There’s been a lot of research on productive gaming. See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&ei=Kpu0SJaLDJTy-wH55ICiDQ#

The most efficient form of productive gaming is simply picking up time that people would likely spend procrastinating anyways. The best analogy is to distributed computing systems. The relevant computing system with extra clock cycles in this case happens to be the human brain.

I don’t however see how one would integrate that with an MMO or how this would be substantially useful to interact with in an MMO setting. I don’t see how creating this sort of incentive system is at all helpful. If you want to get rationalists or SIAIfolk to do something it isn’t efficient to first lure them to an MMO and then lure them from there into doing work.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 1:32 UTC
6 points
on: MathOverflow as an example for LessWrong
MathOverflow also has a much more well-defined subject. Math has a major advantage: Disagreement cannot occur unless something has gone drastically wrong. In contrast, rationalists who don’t have the same priors or have access to different evidence sets can disagree. (Aumann’s agreement theorem is a statement about the limiting behavior). Thus, it is easier to run a group for professionals (and I’m not completely sure what the analogous category for professional rationalists would be. There may not be any useful corresponding category).

Regarding Math is also deeper than rationality. There are subjects in math where to even understand the basics one needs to have spent years studying them. Rationality doesn’t have that sort of problem. So it isn’t at all clear to me what LessWrong would gain by sending anyone away.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 3:00 UTC
15 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?
Downvoting you isn’t committing scientific fraud. That sort of hyperbolic claim is why you are getting downvoted. You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”

Moreover, science isn’t the process of comments threads. Even in as an educated/intelligent group as the commentators on LessWrong, these are still blog comments threads. Science is not conducted in blog comments threads. We can update our probability estimates in threads and even discuss interesting or new ideas. But to call this science is to vastly overestimate the gravity of these discussion threads. Maybe lightening up might help matters slightly.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 3:43 UTC
2 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?
Is it possible that I’m not parsing what you’ve said correctly?

You wrote “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory(edit: and that contradicts your theory) you are committing scientific fraud.” When I replied that edit was not yet present but it doesn’t actually add any information (since were on LessWrong I’m not going to bother dealing with the basic Bayesianism at work). So, can you explain how the statement ” “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud.” is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?

I’m also curious where you think I engaged in an ad hominem attack. I don’t see it above.

I’m also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute “suppressing evidence”? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?

You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality. They are not the same thing. Roughly speaking, science is a set of restricted methodologies that happens to include a lot of aspects of rationality. Rationality is what happens in that broader context. (Frankly, the “science is not what happens inside the lab” meme is annoying in that it oversimplifies a lot of very complicated stuff. Aside from the valid points it makes about how to reason, it ignores the fact that lots of even what is traditionally labeled science happens outside lab environments (this seems to be part of a general problem on LW of using physics as the representative for science as a whole.))

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 4:53 UTC
4 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?

I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above.

Ok. There may be a minor miscomunication here. When I made my comment about why you were downvoted on some of your comments regarding 9/11 I was talking about the general history of comments not this specific comment. This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.

Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you (although a click glance through doesn’t find the relevant comments) but eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. This is especially the case in extreme situations. (I’m actually surprised there isn’t something in any of the sequences specifically devoted to this issue.) See This article for a short discussion of many of the issues in the context of criminal trials. Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression. Downvoting a comment doesn’t suppress anything in the sense that we normally use that term for (destroying evidence, refusing to publish results you don’t like etc.) . It simply sends a signal to the LessWrong readers that reading the statement is not likely to do anything useful and so that they will be less likely to click through to read the remarks. And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.

To move to the flight example, flying didn’t occur during a crisis situation. People were not claiming that the Wright Brothers flew once briefly during an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or the middle of a pitched firefight. They demonstrated it repeatedly to different people. So such evidence is in fact the more reliable sort of eye witness evidence. The evidence is not by itself at all convincing of flight (magicians can do some pretty neat stuff and even there’s also the issue of the reliability of the witnesses), but it would make me stand up and take notice. That’s a very different claim then that a single or even a large group of eyewitnesses reported hearing something which isn’t even necessarily inconsistent with the standard hypothesis.

Edit: Also regarding the ad hominem issue. I think you should reread RobinZ linked remark about what an ad hominem is. Explaining to someone why their comments were historically downvoted isn’t an ad hominem. It may make one feel uncomfortable, it may come across as condescending or patronizing. It may be deeply damaging to one’s ego. But that’s not an ad hominem attack. In this particular case, the response was an attempt at explaining why your comments have been downvoted. Interpreting that as an ad hominem attack requires some degree of abuse of the term “ad hominem.”

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 5:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?
Yes, but there’s no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws. Incidentally, the ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there’s an implicit “and therefore the argument is wrong” attached to it. That’s more due to general human convention. Consider for example if one said to someone “you’re a drunk idiot who couldn’t factor a 2 digit integer given a caculator and your statement X is correct.” That would be an ad hominem abusive but wouldn’t in any way be an ad hominem in a logically rude fashion. So this seems to miss the point at two levels.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 5:35 UTC
4 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?

No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.

I really am not inclined to argue about intended communication issues because that simply isn’t a productive (or even amusing use of time) so I’m going to only address this issue once. You wrote:

Hahahahahaha. Ok I’ll bite. Yes, I was thinking about 9/11 related posts. But the fact that I couldn’t convince anyone doesn’t bother me that much. What bothers me > is that just pointing to evidence that contradicts the established view on 9/11 here > is downvoted. See the following comment:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1r5v

You used the phrase “9/11 related posts” and then made a generalization about posts with “evidence.” In standard discourse this would likely have been read as talking about a general problem and giving a specific example of that. This seems further supported by the fact that your previous comment had the remark that

I’ve also witnessed a certain disrespect for dissenters, comments that contradicted certain established views where downvoted

There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?

if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was turned off(so he couldn’t use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong > you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can’t say “he was in shock” or what not.

I’m a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn’t going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn’t collapsed?

Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a > whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to −3 it no longer appears on > the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is > not supression we are speaking a different language here.

Well, it seems empirically that a lot of people click through on this thread (most obviously one can look at the karma scores within this subthread to verify that people are clicking through). We may in this case be speaking different languages in that I have trouble seeing how requiring an extra click constitutes suppression. The linked to dictionary seems to agree with me (with the usual caveats about dictionaries being descriptive not proscriptive objects).

The definitions listed are:

1 : to put down by authority or force : subdue

Doesn’t seem relevant.

2 : to keep from public knowledge: as a : to keep secret b : to stop or prohibit the publication or revelation of

2b could very weakly maybe apply if you stretched it (is requiring an extra click prohibiting publication? I’d think not).

3 a : to exclude from consciousness b : to keep from giving vent to

Irrelevant. 4,5,6 are also irrelevant.

Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this doesn’t mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point still stands.

No it really doesn’t. You don’t seem to have actually responded to any of my points about why we have a downvoting system. If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn’t even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis) then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.

The remainder of your remark is contentless repetition of what you’ve already said.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 5:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Only humans can have human values
Yes, but if that point happens after Clippy has control of even just the near solar system then that still poses a massive existential threat to humans. The point of Clippy is that a) an AI can have radically different goals than humans (indeed could have goals so strange we wouldn’t even conceive of them) and b) that such AIs can easily pose severe existential risk. A Clippy that decides to focus on turning Sol into paperclips isn’t going to make things bad for aliens or aliens AIs but it will be very unpleasant for humans. The long-term viability of Clippy a thousand or two thousand years after fooming doesn’t have much of an impact if every human has had our hemoglobin extracted so the iron could be turned into paperclips.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 17:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?
Ok. If you are arguing about a general problem, then my remarks clearly stand even if a single other comment was poorly voted on. But, I’ve already explained why even in that individual case the voting was reasonable.

Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was > the origin of the confusion and you weren’t aware of the facts that I just cited shouldn’t this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular testimony than you thought you knew?

You have a valid point. I saw this testimony a while ago and must not have remembered it as well as I thought. If the witnesses testimony is accurate it presents problems with the standard account of events. The notion however that someone in that situation would be keeping very good track of timelines and the like isn’t at all obvious(yes less traumatic than being in one of the two towers but that’s not saying that much). Also, structural damage to WTC 7 is not by itself fatal to the standard account nor for that matter is it terribly strong evidence for conspiracy. So this doesn’t change the situation a lot.

Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn’t it, and how do > you distinguish between these cases? That’s the hard question. And if you are downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure about what you are doing.

I don’t share your conviction that comments that claim to have evidence should somehow be privileged over comments that are more analytical. Moreover, even if I don’t have a perfect method for deciding when to downvote or upvote, that’s not an argument against any specific downvote or upvote. The general rule of thumb that comments with extremely weak evidentiary issues should be downvoted is not an unreasonable standard. Moreover, given how little this matters, the notion that I must “better be very sure” simply doesn’t hold. People can easily click through to read a comment if they want to. You seem to be taking the karma system much more seriously than necessary.

JoshuaZ 28 Apr 2010 17:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: What is missing from rationality?
The ad hominem abusive would be a problem if I were trying to explain why your comment as you’ve said it is wrong. That’s not what has been happening. What has happened is that I’ve explained that your comments were downvoted because they were wrong.

Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him “RolandPast”. Now I’ll paraphrase you: “RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for > such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”

Right. And if Roland made a claim about why RolandPast got downvoted then giving an alternative explanation for why RolandPast gotdownvoted (essentially exactly what you said above) isn’t an ad hominem of any form.