kilobug

Karma: 3,390

kilobug 2 Sep 2011 15:05 UTC
8 points
0
on: Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
Hi,

I’ve been reading LW sequences sine a few months, and I find them very interesting, but I think you made a mistake in mixing politics (libertarianism, french/american revolutions, …) into this post.

I won’t go into explaining why I think economical libertarianism is deeply flawed and not similar at all to the process of Science (for once, I don’t think it degrades well at all), but above that, by calling into very complicated and very debated concepts, you’re just making following your core reasoning harder to follow.

I also think you make some factual errors : saying the “american revolution” is a success but the french one a collapse is a great mistake. Most of the progress of the French Revolution lasted for very long and still last. The whole concept of “Human Rights”, both the “first generation” rights, like the freedom of speech, and the “second generation” rights like universal access to education, come mostly from the French Revolution (the Declaration of Humans and Citizen Rights, to my knowledge, predates the 1st Amemendement). Most countries of Europe and South America use a civil code derived from it. The abolition of slavery by the French Revolution in 1793 was temporarily undone afterwards by Napoleon, but it was a firm stone on which the abolitionist have built afterwards.

And some very fundamental measures of the French Revolution, that were totally opposite to economical libertarianism, like the “taxation du prix du pain” (state-fixed price of bread to block speculation on breads and flour (the “Accapareurs”)) lasted for almost two centuries, protecting France from famine, and making the “french baguette” a world-renewed food (because, to the contrary of what economical libertarianism predicts, the fixed price of bread leaded to a massive development of the bread industry in France, making bread the fundamental food, and forcing the bakery to compete on quality since they couldn’t compete on price). That’s just a few examples among many. Wiping the jump forward in humanism that represented the French Revolution and its continuing consequences nowadays in a few words as you did is, in my opinion, just not true.

Anyway, thanks for those very interesting posts.

kilobug 3 Sep 2011 12:13 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
Well, I think my comment was misunderstood—I didn’t want to start a full debate on economical libertarianism, economics or politics. To be done seriously, it would require much longer posts than a small comment on an article about science and rationality.

My point was mostly that the political issues about libertarianism and about the French and American Revolutions are highly debatable, and shouldn’t be sorted out in a few bold sentences as Eliezer did on the post, and that by doing so, he’s more making is core post about the differences between Science and Rationality harder to follow, because he’s dragging into it a very heated and complicated debate.

For that, I pointed a few examples of things done by the French Revolution which were (in my opinion) very successful, but it was just an example to illustrate my core point which was : “don’t drag politics in such a bold way in a post about rationality, you’ll commit factual errors and antagonize people”. A bit a variation over the “don’t take QM as en example”, that’s all. Sorry for the noise ;)

kilobug 3 Sep 2011 12:23 UTC
1 point
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
It comes from two different main reasons to me.

The first one is asymmetry of information in economics : the information on price in much easier to have, and with more confidence, than the information on quality. So customer have a more complete information about pricing (when we speak of bread at least, it may not be the case with complex debt schemes) than on quality, which makes competing on the price more efficient (in term of dragging customer) than competing on the quality.

The second one is in economies of scale : by fixing the price of bread to a value low enough for people to afford it, but high enough for bakers to not go bankrupt, it’ll increase the demand for bread, decreasing the production cost of each single bread. Economies of scale can often counterbalance the law of supply and demand (or more exactly, they violate the hypothesis on which the law of supply and demand is built, making it inapplicable), and are badly underestimated in the usual formulations of economical liberalism.

kilobug 3 Sep 2011 12:40 UTC
13 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hi everyone,

So well...

I’m a 30-yo french man, working as a Free Software developer (mostly in Python and C) and system administrator, deeply interested in “science” (maths, physics, biology, computer science, …) since as far as I can remember. I define myself as a rationalist and a humanist.

What I value is not easy to explain in a few lines, but to say in three words I would say : humanity (human beings, or any sentient being able to show the quality of humanity like altruism and curiosity), truth (making the map closer to the territory, to use LW terminology) and progress (the idea that we can make the future a better place than the past).

I discovered Less Wrong through… “Harry Potter and the methods of rationality” which a fellow free software developer pointed me to, and I started reading the sequences since then. I find them deeply interesting. I’m not yet fully convinced about the Singularity (or least, it being in a mater of decades and not of centuries or more) nor about trans-humanism, but I do view them with a positive, if yet doubtful, glance.

As for how I went into rationality… well, I was more or less born into it, my parents being maths teachers. My studies in maths and physics (before switching to computer science) and my childhood love of science-fiction probably played a big role in that too.

But it also comes from discovering than in order to pursue “progress” and to protect humanity, we need to make our map reflect better the territory. I then added “truth” to my core values. As Eliezer said, you need something to protect.

Before discovering LW, I was a “traditional rationalist”, but I’m slowly evolving (or at least, I think I am, but I may be only believing that I believe...) to a “bayesian rationalist” in reading the posts.

Good day to everyone !

kilobug 3 Sep 2011 13:37 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
Well, even like that I don’t agree with your analysis of the Reign of Terror. It was a bad idea, but first you can’t resume the French Revolution to it, and then, it was not that they “were really, really confident that things would be best if they could decide more or less ad hoc to kill tens of thousands”. Robespierre, the head of state during the Terror, was against death penalty : http://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/robespierre/1791/death-penalty.htm . But he was against the death penalty in time of peace, not in time of war.

That’s they key to understand it : the situation of French Republic was terrific. The League of Kings (that is, the rest of Europe) was in war against it, and there were many people inside France trying to destroy the Revolution from inside and go back to Old Regime. The Terror was a survival policy, much more than a policy of overconfidence.

If you look at the core texts of the French Revolution, like the Declaration of Human Rights of 1793 ( translation available at http://www.columbia.edu/~iw6/docs/dec1793.html ), which was inside the Constitution of the First Republic, they were really showing a huge distrust about themselves. Just a few quotes :

«
Art 9. The law ought to protect public and personal liberty against the oppression of those who govern.

At 12. Those who may incite, expedite, subscribe to, execute or cause to be executed arbitrary legal instruments are guilty and ought to be punished.

Art 28. A people has always the right to review, to reform, and to alter its constitution. One generation cannot subject to its law the future generations.

Art 31. The offenses of the representatives of the people and of its agents ought never to go unpunished. No one has the right to claim for himself more inviolability than other citizens.

Art 35. When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. »

Those clearly show a distrust into those who will wield power, including themselves. The French Revolution didn’t fault by being overconfident in itself. The core difference was between the French Revolution and the American one was that the Americans weren’t surrounded by hostile countries trying to crush them exactly at the same time in which they were facing civil war. The Montagnards applied the Terror because they were corned, not because they were arrogant.

kilobug 3 Sep 2011 13:40 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Thanks (to you and others) for the welcome !

To answer your question, yes, I’m from Paris’ suburbs, so I can easily go to Paris.

kilobug 3 Sep 2011 20:22 UTC
−5 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
Well, you are so far away from the historical truth than I hardly know where to start to answer, and I wondered for long before answering… or just granting you a Godwin point for comparing the Revolution with Hitler.
- Your view of the medieval wars (and the massive famine, plunder, rape) as just a nice game is ridiculous. Revolutionary France didn’t declare war to conquest others. It fought a war because it was assaulted by all its neighbors. In that respect, yes, it’s the whole french people that fought. But unlike you claim, it was made of volunteer, not of conscripts, until Napoleon (which pursued some of the Revolution, like the civil code, which is indeed a huge progress towards the previous law of the first born).
- Massive wars in Europe were in no way invented by the Revolution. Roman conquests, Germanic invasions, Hundred Years war, conquest of the americas, arabic invasions and crusades, … Europe was waging wars, both internally and externally, in a very constant fashion way before the Revolution. To the contrary, the Revolution aimed to end war, stating in the Constitution of the First French Republic (at my knowledge, for the first time in history, but I may be wrong on that) :
« Article 118. - The French People is the friend and natural ally of free people.

Article 119. - It doesn’t temper in the government of other people ; it doesn’t tolerate that other nations would temper in its own. »
- There is no ethnic conflict that was started inspired by the French Revolution. The French Revolution was the first to proclaim absolute equality of people, whatever their race, nationality, religion (or lack of religion) was. That’s what it abolished slavery, for example.
- The “rights” introduced by the Revolution are absolutely scandalous dictatorial things like rights to freedom, to safety, to receive a job or adequate conditions of living, to education.
- Comparing the French Revolution to the nazis is nothing but a troll.
- The abolition of slavery didn’t lead to a race war. The race war in Haïti started when Napoleon reinstored slavery, undoing one of most important conquests of the Revolution.
Well, I could continue for long, I’ll stop it here because it’s not really the main topic of the article. But it just proves my initial point : the French Revolution (and the American one) are so heated and disputed topics (that reached Godwin level in a few posts) that Eliezer should have, for the sake of the comparison between Science and Bayes, chosen another example.

Edit : oh, I find it very… surprising that on LW someone can quote Philippe De Villiers, who is a representative of our extreme right, a fundamentalist Catholic and openly racist and homophobe. Sure, even Hitler is sometimes right, but quoting an extreme-right politician who viscerally oppose the French Revolution because the French Revolution broke the power the Catholic Church had on the government, and stripped the priests from the powers they had over daily life. What a reference on a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.

kilobug 5 Sep 2011 15:39 UTC
0 points
on: The Proper Use of Doubt
Hi,

Interesting post, but I think you forgot to account for the time issue : « An uninvestigated doubt might as well not exist. » is true if the doubt stays uninvestigated forever. But if it is uninvestigated for now (even for a period of several years), the mere fact there is a doubt means the probability of investigating later on is higher than if there is no doubt at all (P(Investigate_in_10years) and P(Doubt_now) are not independent).

For example, the fact that right now I’m now doubtful about cyronics means that I may investigate the issue later on, with a higher probability that my friends who says “cryonics is non-sense”.

So I would reformulate as :
- A doubt that stays uninvestigated forever might as well not exist
- An uninvestigated doubt is only useful as it may drive you to investigate in the future.

kilobug 5 Sep 2011 15:59 UTC
0 points
on: No Safe Defense, Not Even Science
Hi,

Once again interesting post, but it doesn’t apply to my personal case. I’ve access to no statistics on the issue so I can’t claim how exceptional I am, but my own parents are “more rational than average” (they are atheist maths teachers), and I don’t think they are insane. Or not more than anyone else, at least.

I did realize that my parents were not perfect, and that if I could trust them in loving me and caring for me and wanting the best for me, I couldn’t blindly trust anything they would say. But that didn’t require, for me, such a massive emotional break.

Maybe you’ll tell I’m not “unusually rational”… but at least, I’m trying to better myself, or I wouldn’t spend hours reading LW ;)

Before reading LW, I was not really doubting Science, but neither was I considering it to be an utter sacrilege to claim it was flawed (or that it could be superseded by something better). I knew Bayes’ Theorem, without realizing it was much more important than just understanding a mammography result (which was the way I was using it). That’s a shortcoming of my part, sure.

I can say that even before reading LW, I had a gut feeling that the Cophenaguen interpretation was just… not right. I was in doubt, torn between that gut feeling, and my own humility saying “well, you’re not a physicists, how can you be more right than they are ?” MWI seems much cleaner to me (even if there are a few things that still bother me), but that gut feeling drove me into reading more about QM and rationality. That, and having something to protect.

Well, that’s just my own personal experience, hoping it can help understand things better, but not claiming any generalization from it.

kilobug 6 Sep 2011 15:46 UTC
0 points
on: Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)
Great post once again. There is one thing I wonder about : AFAIK there is our DNA a huge amount (my biology teacher at highschool was saying 90% I didn’t double-check his figure) of code that is not “active”, genes that are not used by the body to synthesize proteins. To my programmer mind they look like C source code that was disabled at compile time (say with a #ifndef SYMBOL #endif block, and SYMBOL not provided at compile time).

Would that somehow mitigate the fact that if gene B requires gene A, then gene B would be disappear unless gene A is spread ? Doesn’t that allow some genes to be there dormant, to be activated (by a later mutation) and given a new try later on, either when some other gene is present, or when the environment change ? Or I misunderstood that part on “non-active DNA” ?

kilobug 8 Sep 2011 13:32 UTC
−1 points
on: Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality
Well, for me there are two possible hypothesis for that :
1. The boxes are not what they seem. For example, box B contains nano-machinery that detects if you one-box or not, create money if you one-box, and then self-destruct the nano-machinery.
2. Omega is smart enough to be able to predict if I’ll one-box or two-box (he scanned my brain, runned it in a simulation, and saw my I do… I hope he didn’t turn off the simulation afterwards, or he would have killed “me” then !).
In both cases, I should one-box. So I’ll one-box. I don’t really get the rational for two-boxing. Be it a type-1 or type-2 reason, in both cases, Omega is able to reward me for one-boxing if that what he wants, and with 100 prior cases, he really seems to be wanting that.

kilobug 8 Sep 2011 15:25 UTC
1 point
on: Why Quantum?
Well, first of all, I would like to say a great thanks to you for those posts. They are very interesting, pleasant to read, they follow a clear and coherent progression.

But I disagree with you in one “tactical” point : arguing Many Worlds for arguing that you don’t require the same atoms for personal identity seems like building and then using a liquid-helium refrigerated computer to compute 3+5 = 8. I mean, yes, Many Worlds implies that personal identity is not in individual atoms, but even if Many Worlds were false, even without QM at all but just classical chemistry, biology, neuroscience, understanding of neural networks, … identity is not in individual atoms.

Even after reading the whole QM sequence and other posts in LW/OB, I’m not yet fully convinced about MWI. I do give it a much higher chance of being “right” than the Copenhaguen interpretation. I’m not too sure about the other interpretations (transactional for example) which I didn’t dig in fully enough. But well… we still have holes : no way to derivate the Born rule, no answer to quantum gravity. Those two holes are not specific to MWI—but they are in MWI. The day we’ll find a way to fill those two holes, it may require a switch to another view of the reality, one we just can’t really think about now, like in the 20s they didn’t think of MWI, or like Newton didn’t think of curvature of space to explain gravity. It may look like MWI, or it may look quite different from it… so I wouldn’t bet on MWI with a probability close to 1. Maybe like to 0.5. Or somewhat less, if I read more about the other interpretations. Even if I admit that the timeless MWI looks very … awesome.

But even before reading LW/OB, I was already betting with almost 1 probability of me not being made of my atoms, if you scan me, disintegrate me and rebuild on Mars close to thermal nose, yes, it’s “me”. Maybe I’m not the target for that part of those posts in that case… but still, I don’t think that we need to go as far as MWI to justify that identity and consciousness is in the way the neurons are organized/interconnected, and the way the currents flows in them, and not in individual atoms. I guess that comes, at least in huge part, from my experience as a computer scientist… so maybe speaking of computer science/artifical intelligence would help for that point ?

kilobug 9 Sep 2011 9:38 UTC
9 points
on: A Rationalist’s Tale
Very interesting story. Since I’m born in an atheist family and never believed in God, I lack any similar experience, and somehow, I regret it, because that experience must definitely be of a great help to change your mind about other topics. The closest experience I have to this is the Santa Claus thing, but I was such a young child that I only have confuse memory about how I started to doubt. But the process looks similar : there is nice Santa Claus person that gives me present, I start to doubt it’s real and feel bad because I don’t want the “magic of chirstmas” to go away, and then I realize that it’s something even more “magical” than elves and flying Santa Claus going faster than light : it’s the love of my parents, who spent days going from shop to shop to find the silly present I asked for in my letter to Santa Claus that the teacher gave them… it has the three phases : belief in something supernatural that makes you happy, doubt and feeling sad, and then realizing that reality makes you even more happy. But it’s so lost in the mist of early childhood that it doesn’t have the potency you describe.

Oh, on other topic, I’m still doubtful about “Singularity”, « an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’» sounds a logical jump with no foundation to me, let me try to explain : let’s assume we have a measure of intelligence into a single real number, I(M). An intelligent machine can design a better version of itself, so we have I(M_n+1) > I(M_n). That’s a strictly monotonically increasing sequence. That’s all we know. A strictly monotonically increasing sequence can have a finite limit (like 1+1/2+1/4+1/8+… has a limit of 2), or can grow towards infinity very slowly (like log(n)). How do we know that designing a better intelligence is not an exponentially difficult task ? How do we know that above a given level, the formula doesn’t look like I(M_n+1) = I(M_n) + 1/n, because every increase in intelligence is so much harder to make ? I guess there is an answer to that, but I couldn’t find it in siginst FAQ… does any of you have a pointer to an answer to that question ?

kilobug 10 Sep 2011 16:09 UTC
5 points
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: A Rationalist’s Tale
It seems to me that I’m both pessimistic and optimisc (or anyway, not well calibrated). I got :
- Catastrophe by 2070 : 65.75%
- AI by 2070 : 98.3%
I would have given much less to both (around 25%-33% for catastrophe, and around 50-75% for AI) if you directly asked me… so I’m badly calibrated, either in the way I answered to the individual questions, or to my final estimate (most likely to both...). I’ll have to read the FOOM debate and think more about the issue. Thanks for the pointers anyway.

(Btw, it’s painful, the applet doesn’t support copy/paste...)

kilobug 10 Sep 2011 17:21 UTC
6 points
on: Tool ideology
I’ve fallen to it myself, but mostly to the reverse version of it : not saying “this feature is obviously required” and then when learning that my favorite tool (shell, text editor, language, web browser, version control, whatever) doesn’t have it saying “oh but it’s useless”, but the reverse : someone tells me “you should try tool X, it has that great feature” and then I answer “I don’t see the point of that feature, it’s just that your tool X is bloatware, I’ll still to my tool Y” and when a later version of my tool Y implements the said feature I then switched and said to everyone “you should use tool Y, it has that great feature”.

It’s very similar (and since I became aware I’ve a tendency to this bias, I try to force myself to not fall to it again, but not totally successfully...) but it’s somehow more understandable : you very often see the point of a feature/tool/… once you started using it regularly in your own use cases.

I don’t think I did the direct version of it since the time where I was a teenager. At least, I hope I didn’t...

kilobug 11 Sep 2011 17:04 UTC
3 points
on: The Cognitive Science of Rationality
Interesting post, but I think there is a typo : « Type 1 processes are computationally expensive » Shouldn’t it be type 2 ?

Also, for the Concorde story, what I always heard (being a french citizen) is that « Yes, we know, Concorde was losing money, but it is great for the image, it’s just a form of advertising. It gives a good image of France (and UK) aerospatial industry, and therefore makes it easier for Airbus to sell normal planes, or for companies like Air France to sell tickets on normal planes. » Now, how much of it is about a posterior rationalization of why they felled to the sunk cost fallacy (because they couldn’t admit to public opinion they did it), and how they really decided to continue the program for that effect, I’ve no idea...

kilobug 12 Sep 2011 18:08 UTC
11 points
0
on: When None Dare Urge Restraint
Interesting article, and I agree with most of it, but there is a point in which I fail to understand your reasoning, and which seems to contradict the rest of the article.

It’s the « “We have forgotten that the first purpose of government is not the economy, it is not health care, it is defending the country from attack.” » part. How is that not an applause light ? And how is that real ? When the country was just attacked, like after 9/11 or after Pearl Harbor, when everyone has in mind the fact the country is attacked and the horrors of violent death, but everyone forgets about the horror of diseases and the fact that half a million die from cancer in the US each year (according to cancer.gov), that is, one 9-11 every 3 days, that’s definitely an applause light.

The first purpose of government is to maximize a very complex utility function, that contains factors about protecting people’s life, factors about their (average, median, …) economical well-being, factors about protecting personal freedom and safety, … Maximizing this utility function requires investing resources into defending the country against external aggression—because external aggression comes with a very high cost in all those factors. But protecting the country against external aggression is not a goal in itself, it is only a secondary goal, because not doing so will lead to horrible things—death, lost of freedom, rapes, plunders, …

What would have been saying something that was real, and not an applause light, would have been saying « yes, 9-11 is horrible and we need to keep some ways to defend ourselves, but much more people die from cancer than from terrorism, we should still, like before, invest much less in weapons and much more in cancer research ». Or, if you are libertarian, « yes, 9-11 is horrible and we need to keep some ways to defend ourselves, but much more people die from cancer than from terrorism, we should still, like before, give tax cuts and let the market assign those resources to what is more important. »

If you think government is bad at assigning resources, then arguing for tax cuts and shrinking the government can be a way to maximize the utility function. We can argue for long about how efficient is the government and the market for a given purpose and in a given situation. But whatever we think about that issue, it doesn’t change the government purpose is to maximize that complex utility function—by investing in cancer research or by giving tax cuts, but not by focusing on defense and military as it did after 9-11. But that wouldn’t get applause in the post-9-11 traumatic context. Which is why I really don’t get that last part, because it goes totally to the opposite of the rest of the post.

Or maybe I misunderstood something ?

Signup to wiki broken ?

kilobug12 Sep 2011 18:52 UTC

4 points

2 comments1 min readLW link

kilobug 12 Sep 2011 19:06 UTC
4 points
on: [Help]: Social cost of cryonics?
As I’m thinking more and more about cyronics (I didn’t gave it a serious thought before reading LW) I ended up into a similar, but also quite different temporary conclusion : I value my life a lot, but a huge part of that value comes from my relationships with family and friends. So… if all of them would be taken away from me suddenly, my pain would be terrible and my life would lose of its value, and I might even end up committing suicide (I don’t really know how badly I’ll take it, but I know it’ll be very, very hard).

So signing to cyronics alone, to be awaken in a world in which I know no one, all my friends and family lost forever in one blow, and in addition a world that will be totally alien to me, sounds like a nightmare, that is probably above my forces… I’m not sure its worth it. That’s my preliminary thoughts on the issue, but I’m still thinking, I gave cryonics a serious consideration only since a few months, I can’t make up a final decision on it just now.

kilobug 12 Sep 2011 19:22 UTC
13 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9
I’ve been searching a bit, but didn’t find any “process” for translation of HP:MoR. Being a native french, I can offer a bit of my time to translate part of it, but :
1. I would like to know what’s the standard process, since a translation can at some points alter the meaning, is there any review or agreement from Eliezer required ?
2. There seems to be two french translations already started. I don’t want to conflict with other persons. Are the current translators still active ? If so, do they require help, or do they prefer to work alone ?
3. Do you think it would be a good idea to setup a discussion on LW or a wiki page about translation in general, with the process, the status of the current translations (if the translator(s) are still active or not, …) ?

kilobug

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