jsalvatier

Karma: 5,260

jsalvatier 15 Sep 2022 21:56 UTC
4 points
on: Introduction to Cartesian Frames
I struggle to satisfyingly interpret ⋅, the ‘evaluation function’. Or maybe struggling to interpret W, the world timelines (presumably full world evolutions). Any advice on how to think about them?

In particular, how should I understand a ⋅ e = a_0 ⋅ e = w? the agent is different, but the worlds are the same. So then what’s the difference between e and w?

I guess ⋅ is something like “the world partitioned into things that are relevantly different for me”? Would appreciate anyone’s clarifying thoughts.

jsalvatier 17 Feb 2021 20:22 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: “PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.
It’s like virtue and reputation (“honor”) were one thing at the time, and now they’re two things.

I almost wonder if the problem is less “people stopped caring about being truly-intrinsically-virtuous” and more: People stopped rationalizing their reputation-management as virtuous; which fed into a “it’s impractical and uncouth to care about virtue” cycle; which resulted in people having too many degrees of freedom, because it’s easier to rationalize arbitrary actions as practical than to rationalize arbitrary actions as virtuous.
Yeah, I was having similar thoughts.

jsalvatier 17 Feb 2021 20:20 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: “PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.
That’s a good point. Reputation is less naturally spiritual. I think you can experience it both ways. Imagine someone who thinks about reputation as painted on their heart. Versus someone who is is fine with trying to manipulate their reputation.

jsalvatier 16 Feb 2021 22:16 UTC
31 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: “PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.
Modernity has made people quite averse to talking about and dealing with spirituality. I think maybe a big part of what’s going on is that while PR is a material concept, honor is a spiritual concept. It deals with meaning directly rather than only indirectly. Honor matters for its own sake (or can), matters to your soul. Whereas PR can only ever matter indirectly, only as a consequence of other things. No one has PR in their soul.

That would mean that people end up avoiding thinking about and relating to things like honor and reputation because it just feels weird. It feel like the sort of thing that you’re not supposed to deal with. It feels like something that science and technology have vaguely disproven.

jsalvatier 9 Jan 2021 22:42 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterL’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—January 2021
>Thus, I think that the process is relatively reliable but not totally reliable.

Absolutely. That’s exactly right.

>My Christian friend claimed that atheists/rationalists/skeptics/evolutionists cannot trust even their own reason (beacuse it is the product of their imperfect brains in their opinion).

It sounds like there’s a conflation between ‘trust’ and ‘absolute trust’. Clearly we have some useful notion of trust because we can navigate potentially dangerous situations relatively safely. So using plain language its false to say that atheists can’t trust their own judgement. Clearly they can in some situations. Are you saying atheists can’t climb a ladder safely?

It sounds like he wants something to trust in absolutely. Has he faced the possibility that that might just not exist?

jsalvatier 8 Jan 2021 22:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterL’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—January 2021
Consider how justified trust can come into existence.

You’re traveling through the forest. You come to moldy looking bridge over a ravine. It looks a little sketchy. So naturally you feel distrustful of the bridge at first. So you look at it from different angles, and shake it a bit. And put a bit of weight on it. And eventually, some deep unconscious part of you will decide that it’s either untrustworthy and you’ll find another route, or it will decide its trustworthy and you’ll cross the bridge.

We don’t understand that process, but its reliable anyway.

jsalvatier 4 Jan 2021 16:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—January 2021
Thanks, I forgot to make it clear I’m looking for digital versions.
I’m making an online museum of ethos (my ethos). I’m using good and bad art and commentary to make my ethos very visible through aesthetics.

jsalvatier 4 Jan 2021 7:46 UTC
6 points
on: Open & Welcome Thread—January 2021
I am doing an art criticism project that’s very important to me, and I’m looking for high res digital versions the art in the following books.
Help with getting these via a university library, or pointers to where I could buy an electronic copy of any of these is much appreciated.

jsalvatier 4 Nov 2020 5:30 UTC
33 points
on: Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?
Attempting to blindsight the answer:

In the past I imagine that people were usually trying to ‘be a serious person’. And that’s still true. But somehow being a serious person is now faker. And I think maybe its because they’re being a very scared serious person. Somehow they’re a lot more vulnerable from every direction. Or there’s a lot more directions they’re vulnerable from.
What links here?
- Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from? by AnnaSalamon (3 Nov 2020 22:14 UTC; 150 points)

jsalvatier 14 Apr 2020 18:36 UTC
2 points
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Coronavirus: Justified Key Insights Thread
Is there a good source for many things we know from the Diamond Princess data? Or even just the numbers so far from DP? I’m not sure how to find that data.

jsalvatier 23 Mar 2018 8:45 UTC
11 points
on: Naming the Nameless
Double crux is hard enough with arguments, and here I’m trying to advocate something like double-cruxing aesthetic preferences, which sounds absurdly ambitious. But: imagine if we could talk about why things seem beautiful and appealing, or ugly and unappealing.
My work is basically about this; extracting aesthetic preferences from people (and S1 based inside views more generally).
I haven’t done specifically artistic aesthetics, but most thinking relies heavily on aesthetics about which problems are interesting or important, ways of behaving, ways of thinking about the world, what counts as ‘simple’, etc. If you want to resolve disagreements about big things, you’re going to have to wade into aesthetics.

jsalvatier 19 Mar 2018 18:06 UTC
6 points
on: Idea Inoculation + Inferential Distance
Thanks for writing this. Inferential distance + inoculation is a huge problem for transmitting large bodies of understanding in domains that previously didn’t look like domains to the student. The student frequently getting a smaller version of the ideas before they can get the full version and that shuts off further interest because they’ve “got it”.

jsalvatier 5 Dec 2017 3:24 UTC
5 points
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: List of civilisational inadequacy
>nobody has done studies measuring hormone levels over time and fitting a differential-equation model of how hormones affect each other’s levels
What in the everloving fuck? That really seems like the first thing you should do. Has that at least been done for the shared hormones?

jsalvatier 10 Nov 2017 17:53 UTC
7 points
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Living in an Inadequate World
The point was to raise nominal prices in the first place

jsalvatier 10 Nov 2017 17:52 UTC
4 points
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Living in an Inadequate World
That is not how it works.

jsalvatier 10 Nov 2017 8:48 UTC
4 points
on: Moloch’s Toolbox (2/2)
I don’t buy the idea that voters are not the main source of problem and that its voting systems. Voters don’t have good incentives to have sensible opinions that go against natural prejudices.
It seems to me that if you found the median political opinion of people, you would have much worse policies in a lot of areas. Probably some would be better, but I would be surprised if it were many.

jsalvatier 10 Nov 2017 8:39 UTC
6 points
on: Living in an Inadequate World
This is great, I love it

jsalvatier 6 Nov 2017 6:54 UTC
12 points
in reply to: bwest’s comment on: Moloch’s Toolbox (1/2)
Do you know if they normalize for case difficulty? If a hospital patients seems like it will get worse outcomes.

jsalvatier 6 Nov 2017 5:50 UTC
10 points
in reply to: MakerOfErrors’s comment on: Moloch’s Toolbox (1/2)
I just did this and it was pretty easy! And in fact I decided to change the hospital I go to by default.

jsalvatier 29 Oct 2017 0:07 UTC
14 points
in reply to: evolution-is-just-a-theorem’s comment on: Inadequacy and Modesty
Genuinely held austarity-type ideologies are popular among people who care a lot about central banking (possibly due to the great depression?), and I’m guessing that’s what happened at the BoJ. It seems to be what happened in the US, which made similar mistakes, though less badly.