Karmakaiser

• Karmakaiser 11 Jun 2012 15:51 UTC

  41 points

  on: In­tel­lec­tual in­su­lar­ity and pro­duc­tivity

  Speaking of OB, We have an expansive list of Eliezer’s posts organized by topic but no such sequence exists for Robin Hanson. His posts on status seeking are incredibly important for human rationality.

  I purpose that we produce a sequence devoted to RH’s posts. If someone who read most of his posts can point me in the right direction I volunteer to do it. My summer’s off from classes, I just have work and then my private projects and public project would be good for me to signal usefulness to LW, OB and the communities associated with them.

  EDIT: RH gave me his blessing. I’m reading OB. Just crossed through to 2007. Writing major themes and interconnections as I go.

• Karmakaiser 1 Dec 2011 20:49 UTC

  34 points

  on: Open Thread: De­cem­ber 2011

  I’m not sure if it is “worth saying” but a google search for “Secret Bayesian Man” turned up nothing so I wrote this:

  ET Jaynes was a 1000 year old vampire

  Inspired Cog Sci, AI and Eliezer.

  The Probabilities,

  Is something that we’ll see.

  Given that we have the same priors.

  Secret Bayesian Man,

  Secret Bayesian Man,

  You update your beliefs,

  Based on the evidence. (2x)

  A grandmaster of Bayesian Statistics

  He’ll straighten out your bias and Heuristics

  You’ll be Less Wrong than most

  You’ll take a “Rational Approach...”

  Given that we have the same priors

  Secret Bayesian Man

  Secret Bayesian Man

  You update your beliefs,

  Based on the evidence. (2x)

  Aumann states we must come to agreement

  If we have common knowledge with no secrets

  Our posteriors must be the same

  Or one of us is to blame

  Given that we have the same priors.

  I deeply apologize.

• Karmakaiser 27 Jan 2012 15:22 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: Shit Ra­tion­al­ists Say?

  “Yeah, I read all the papers cited in lukeprog’s latest article.”

  A bunch of links almost no one clicks. It’s like the Anti-TVTropes.

• Karmakaiser 1 Dec 2011 20:56 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Open Thread: De­cem­ber 2011

  My 9th Grade Teen Titans Fanfic is still on the internet.

  Game on.

• Karmakaiser 9 Jun 2012 16:58 UTC

  28 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes May 2012

  I really like summarizing to make sure I get things right. Watch as I prove it!

  When dealing with real world morality and goal seeking behavior we seem forced to stare in the face the following facts:

  • We are very biased.

  • We could be more rational

  • Our rationality isn’t particularly good at morality.

  Complicating this are the following:

  • Heuristics generally work. How much rationality do you need to out compete moral and procedural heuristics?

  • Just how rational can we get. Can low IQ people become much more rational, or are we forced to believe in a cognitive and rationality based elite?

  • Should we trust moral reasoning or heuristics at all?

  I’ve seen the following conclusions drawn so far by people who take bias seriously: (There may be more, this is what I’ve encountered. Also the first two are just jokes I couldn’t resist)

  • Lovecraftian: The world is ruled by evil Gods beyond imagination. I have seen too much! Go back into the warm milkbath of ignorance! Chew your cud you cows and never think of the slaughter to come!

  • Existientialism: Everything sucks forever but let’s not kill ourselves because it’s better to push a rock up a mountain or something. We can never know anything and nothing can ever mean anything so we should talk about it forever. Give me Tenure! Linkin Park and Tenure!

  • Moldbuggery: Bias is bad, real fucking bad. The current systems don’t encourage rationality all that much either. Only a cognitive elite can ever become debiased enough to run things and they should only be trusted if we get a system that aligns with the interests of the subjects. (Ex: Aurini, GLADOS, Konkvistador, Moldbug, Nick Land)

  [I had a section on Robin Hanson, but I don’t think I understand it well enough to summarize on reflection, so “This Page Left Blank”]

  • Old Whiggish: We are very biased and ought to trust intuition, tradition and reason roughly in equal measure. We pride reason too much and so people who try to be perfectly rational are worse reasoners than those who allow a little superstition in their life. Our Heuristics are better than we think. If it works, we should keep it even if it isn’t true. (Ex: Taleb, Derbyshire, Burke, Marcus Aurelius. Almost Jonathan Haidt post “The Righteous Mind” but not quite)

  • Rational Schizophrenia: A pure cynicism about how things are should be combined with an idealism of how to act. [See above for Multithreaded’s advice]

  • Yudkowskyianism: Bias is very bad but our prospects for debiasing is less pessimistic than either of those make it out to be. Rationality is like marital arts, any can learn to use leverage regardless of cognitive strength. Though there are clear ways in which we fail, now that we have Bayesian Probability theory derived from pure logic we know how to think about these issues. To abuse a CS Lewis quote: “The Way has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” Try it before giving up because something is only undoable until somebody does it. (Ex: Lukeprog, Yudkowsky)

  How does that strike you as the current “Rationality landscape?” Again I’m largely new here as a community member so I could be mischaractizing or leaving ideas out.

• Karmakaiser 19 Jan 2012 15:31 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: The Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute’s Ar­ro­gance Problem

  Eliezer strikes me as an easy candidate for having awesome powers. CFAI, while confusingly written, was way ahead of its time, and what Eliezer figured out in the early 2000s is slowly becoming a mainstream position accepted by, e.g., Google’s AGI team. The Sequences are simply awesome. And he did manage to write the most popular Harry Potter fanfic of all time.

  I wasn’t aware of Google’s AGI team accepting CFAI. Is there a link of organizations that consider the Friendly AI issue important?

• Karmakaiser 31 Oct 2011 13:12 UTC

  23 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Novem­ber 2011

  It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

  -Terry Pratchett, Jingo

• Karmakaiser 29 Nov 2011 17:08 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: Matt_Simpson’s comment on: LW Philoso­phers ver­sus Analytics

  Implicit in your statement is that Kant can be read.

• Karmakaiser 27 Jan 2012 1:56 UTC

  17 points

  on: Shit Ra­tion­al­ists Say?

  Rationalist PUA:

  “What’s you number? [...] No not that. Your Erdos number.”

  Rationalist insults:

  ″...Frequentist.”

  While twirling a paperclip: “I do not love you, nor do I hate you.” (well, more of a threat.)

  “I bet (73%) that you’re a really consistent person. The sort of person whose decisions are final. Like say, in Monty Hall.”

  “Name three..”

• Karmakaiser 8 Nov 2011 21:26 UTC

  16 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

  Hello Less Wrong,

  I am a 22 year old, caucasian lower class community college student interested in becoming more rational in order to achieve the goal of being useful to the human species. I am a student whose education is taking far too long for financial reasons but I am pursuing a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Cognitive Science because I want to understand human rationality at a deeper level. From there I will decide from my performance in classes if I am smart enough to tackle grad school. I often feel outclassed when reading the discussions here but I plan to learn enough to be useful in conversation just as quick as I can. I intend to become as rational as I am able with my meat brain. I became an atheist in High School, likely about at age 16, but have always deeply suspected there was no god since some brain worm burrowed into my head when I was 6 and said “If something is moral, then it is moral for its own reasons, not because God said so.” Though the exact thought that I mulled over in my Sunday School class was “God has to play by the rules.” That lead me to always be the devil’s advocate in theological discussions (I was raised in a private christian school) so my deconversion was expected and those more liberal theists who were friends with me beforehand have not changed their opinion of me to a great degree. I’ve been an aspiring rationalist as long as I can remember, even when I was a Christian I thought faith was a stupid idea, but I didn’t know about Probability Theory and Biases until now. I value being right. I want my beliefs to be correct ones. Wanting to be right is the most perfect goal, because from it flows all others. Not perfect in the sense of goodness, but perfect in the sense that nothing can be added or taken away. If you want to cure polio then you must have correct beliefs about Penicillin. If you want to take over the world you must have correct beliefs about the current political system so that you can manipulate it. If you want to program in python it helps to have correct beliefs about it’s syntax.

  Thank you for making me progressively more sane.

• Karmakaiser 13 Jun 2012 5:24 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: CaveJohnson’s comment on: Glenn Beck dis­cusses the Sin­gu­lar­ity, cites SI researchers

  Every Right Wing Neo Reactionary Lesswrongian is now under suspicion.

• Karmakaiser 18 Nov 2012 1:40 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Why is Men­cius Mold­bug so pop­u­lar on Less Wrong? [An­swer: He’s not.]

  One of the benefits of being way out on the fringe is that no one has bothered to make arguments against you yet, so you get to be right. You get to be a critic without being critiqued in turn. Good times.

  I like this and I think I’m prone to forgetting this for a few months, then asking questions then realizing plenty of important bits haven’t been thought through.

• Karmakaiser 11 Jun 2012 17:14 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Jack’s comment on: In­tel­lec­tual in­su­lar­ity and pro­duc­tivity

  EY also posts links to other useful posts of his for reference but I find reading the sequences in indexed order is easier than reading tags or chronological order. Every blogger has important ideas that they want to say and sometimes tags don’t do everything you need them to. Like EY’s posts, he installed a karma/​voting system late in his blogging career and so his early posts in particular may be unduly ignored.

  I imagine it’d be boring to index your own posts in your blog into an ebook like format since you already know your ideas. Since I haven’t read all of OB it might even be fun for me to do it. I wouldn’t be procrastinating to read OB anymore. It’d be working. Yay!

  I’ll let RH be the final arbitrator since it’s his blog and just email him asking if he wants something like this done. I’m a bored undergrad in need of a project so why not?

• Karmakaiser 9 Jan 2012 16:33 UTC

  14 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity quotes Jan­uary 2012

  “A “lie-to-children” is a statement which is false, but which nevertheless leads the child’s mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie.” “Yes, you needed to understand that” they are told, “so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly true.” It is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie”.”

  --(The Science of Discworld, Ebury Press edition, quotes from pp 41-42)

  What links here?

  • Karmakaiser's comment on De­scribe your per­sonal Mount Stupid by shminux (9 Jan 2012 17:45 UTC; 2 points)

• Karmakaiser 20 Dec 2011 3:36 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: SingInst bloomberg cov­er­age [link]

  It was elegantly, and concisely wrong. It was like Nega-Prachett.

• Karmakaiser 1 Dec 2011 1:40 UTC

  14 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2011

  Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

  ~Epictetus

• Karmakaiser 4 May 2012 2:12 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Karmakaiser’s comment on: Shit Ra­tion­al­ists Say?

  Update: Still laughing and using it in conversations.

• Karmakaiser 20 Dec 2011 4:18 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Pre­sents for im­pov­ing ra­tio­nal­ity or re­duc­ing su­per­sti­tion?

  In my experience Settlers of Catan has taught everyone I know the instrumental rationalistic lesson that Karmakaiser is never to be trusted.

• Karmakaiser 7 Dec 2011 18:44 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2011

  Every time I hear such discussion a dialogue runs in my head

  USA: If it wasn’t for us that nail would have never been hammered.

  WORLD: It was a bolt.

  USA: Doesn’t count. Still Hammered It.

[Book Sugges­tions] Sum­mer Read­ing for Younglings.