It was intended to be clear that all operations are performed and propagated throughout the entire system, I think.
jschulter
Rationalist Judo, or Using the Availability Heuristic to Win
“How to Have a Rational Discussion”
my probability that something like string theory is true would go way up after the detection of a Higgs boson
I’m not sure that this should be the case, as the Higgs is a Standard Model prediction and string theory is an attempt to extend that model. The accuracy of the former has little to say on whether the latter is sensible or accurate. For a concrete example, this is like allowing the accuracy of Newtonian Mechanics (via say some confirmed prediction about the existence of a planetary body based on anomalous orbital data) to influence your confidence in General Relativity before the latter had predicted Mercury’s precession or the Michelson-Morley experiment had been done.
EDIT: Unless of course you were initially under the impression that there were flaws in the basic theory which would make the extension fall apart, which I just realized may have been the case for you regarding the Standard Model.
Hello! I’m currently doing a depth-first read through the sequences, and I’ve been enjoying all of it so far. I’m another one drawn in by HP:MOR, but I found even more here than I could have hoped for.
“When you are stubbornly making an argument, there is a possibility that you are uninformed, ignorant, in denial, and/or being a jerk. Of course, you might be right.”
You’re using different definitions for doubt here, and that is the issue. EY uses “doubt” in the sense of a suspicion that not enough knowledge is currently had to evaluate a specific claim, while you are using it as the opposite of “certainty” (though not consistently, somehow). In saying that doubt should not be lived with he was referencing his previously posted explanation of how these specific suspicions by nature are meant to annihilate themselves. Either you find the evidence you thought was missing or you conclude after some searching that finding it would be a waste of energy and make your judgment based on the evidence you already have, and either way, that doubt is gone.
If you still harbor doubts, in his sense, that Christianity may be true, you should search for that missing evidence immediately or conclude that the effort to find it isn’t worth it and assign the likelihood the ridiculously small probability it deserves. Notice that I did not say that you should claim with certainty that christianilty is false; predicting anything with true 100% certainty is, for a bayesian, truly stupid, because on the absurdly small chance that you’re wrong, you lose the game, having just conceded that you assigned your life a likelyhood of 0%.
Meetup : Southern Arizona meetup
It would be really convenient if rationality, the meme-cluster that we most enjoy and are best-equipped to participate in, also happened to be the best for winning at life.
As I’ve seen it used here, “rationality” most commonly refers to “the best [memecluster] for winning at life” whatever that actual memecluster may be. If it could be shown that believing in the christian god uniformly improved or did not affect every aspect of believers lives regardless of any other beliefs held, I think a majority of lesswrongers would take every effort necessary to actually believe in a christian god. The problem seems to be how rationality and “the meme-cluster that we most enjoy and are best-equipped to participate in” are equated- these two are currently very similar memeclusters for the current lesswrong demographic, but they are not necessarily so. “It would be really convenient if the meme-cluster that we most enjoy and are best-equipped to participate in, also happened to be the best for winning at life, rationality.” seems more sensical.
If CEV encounters a large proportion of the population that wish it was not run and will continue to do so after extrapolation, it simply stops and reports that fact. That’s one of the points of the method. It is, in and of itself a large scale social survey of present and future humanity. And if the groups that wouldn’t want it run now would after extrapolation, I’m fine with running it against their present wishes, and hope that if I were part of a group under similar circumstances someone else would do the same- “past me” is an idiot, I’m not much better, and “future me” is hopefully an even bigger improvement, while “desired future me” almost certainly is.
I find that for me, and many other people I know in the mathematics department of my university, once infinities, uncountability, and such enter the picture, the accuracy of intuition quickly starts to diminish, so it’s wise to be careful and make sure the proof is complete before declaring it obvious. As a good example, note how surprising and notable Cantor’s diagonal argument seemed the first time you heard it- it isn’t obvious that the reals aren’t countable when you don’t already know that, so you might start trying to construct a counting scheme and end up with one that “obviously” works.
Having looked through the comments, I noticed that one of your main concerns with this whole ordeal is how your children will be raised. I thought it might be worth mentioning something I noticed, upon reflection, about my own childhood:
I was “raised Catholic” by agreement between my parents- my father is still Catholic, my mother reform Jewish- and went through CCD (I forget what it even stands for, it’s “sunday school”), first confession and first communion. But oddly enough when looking back it was obvious that nobody in my family actually believed in god. And in fact, this attitude that pervaded around me, the fact that nobody expected their prayers to be answered &c. was the main contributing factor to my early conversion to atheism. I actually knew that I didn’t believe, and my parents likely did too, before they forced me to take communion-yes forced, as I am still sometimes forced into attending Easter or Christmas mass with them. The fact is, that even with people all around me vocally professing the existence of god, with people close at hand who obviously didn’t actually believe, I was able to quickly conclude(subconsciously) that they were just expressing belief in belief.
So, the point in all this is that there may be an as of yet unconsidered solution the the problem of raising your children. Even if you raise them Catholic, as long as they have a dissenting opinion present in their lives, it will be if not easy, at least easier for them to deconvert later. As an added bonus, if you decide not to attend any church functions, they may simply see professing atheism as a way to sleep in on sundays, and from professing to believing is as we all know a regrettably short path.
I saw it more as opposing restrictions on one’s ability to hit oneself in the head with a baseball bat every week. I’m not saying anyone should do it, but if they really want to I don’t feel I have the right to stop them.
Splits happen forward in time for the same reason a glass which has fallen and smashed on the floor doesn’t spring back up and spontaneously reassemble itself. And these “universes” are really just isolated amplitude blobs in the total, timeless, wavefunction: they aren’t created; rather any amplitude blob roughly factorizing as a “world” will eventually decohere into several smaller amplitude blobs also factorizing as “worlds” which as the wavefunction further evolves with time do not interact (i.e. they interact about as often as that glass reassembles).
I think you might have failed to realize what will determine which cult people will choose. When the Media cult makes their presentation, they’ll be reduced to showing a movie (or equivalent, maybe a lo-fi virtual reality) and saying “look at this fancy media we can create, wouldn’t you like to be able to do that?” But then the Physics and Mathematics cult (I really do fail to see how they could be separated successfully) presents a light bulb, a tesla coil, and possibly a miniature sun and gets to say “this isn’t even the half of what we could do if we wanted to. If you want to know how to do it, you’ll have to deal with us.”
This can actually be done unintentionally as well. One of the things that might have caused the original haunted rationalist problem could have been watching/reading too much horror fiction: if most experiences you’ve seen regarding an old house end up with people tortured and dead, even if you know they were all known to be fictitious, you will still anticipate, however strongly, bad things happening in old houses. This also makes me wary that my anticipations regarding the future are likely highly influenced by all the science fiction I read, so I know to watch my aliefs in that regard very very closely.
Fixed.
Another option:
it’s morally acceptable to terminate a conscious program if it wants to be terminated
it’s morally questionable(wrong, but to lesser degree) to terminate a conscious program against its will if it is also possible to resume execution
it is horribly wrong to turn off a conscious program against its will if it cannot be resumed(murder fits this description currently)
performing other operations on the program that it desires would likely be morally acceptable, unless the changes are socially unacceptable
performing other operations on the program against its will is morally unacceptable to a variable degree (brainwashing fits in this category)
These seem rather intuitive to me, and for the most part I just extrapolated from what it is moral to do to a human. Conscious program refers here to one running on any system, including wetware, such that these apply to humans as well. I should note that I am in favor of euthanasia in many cases, in case that part causes confusion.
Well, I have encountered people being (or claiming to be) offended by what in all rights would be an assault on someone else’s status. This could be a form of empathy, or in many cases an attempt to gain status themselves through a show of sympathy. This does seem like a potential occurrence of legitimate offense not caused by a perceived direct or indirect threat to the status of the person being offended, iff the offense is genuine- something which I cannot personally attest to, never having experienced this myself.
Actually changing your mind, learning the simple math of various fields,and becoming more luminous seem to represent a set of desirable skills to me, though I admit that is far from comprehensive. See also the twelve virtues of rationality.