lukeprog(Luke Muehlhauser)

• lukeprog 2 Mar 2020 5:43 UTC

  LW: 9 AF: 3

  AF

  on: Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Prece­dents for Takeover

  Nice post. Were there any sources be­sides Wikipe­dia that you found es­pe­cially helpful when re­search­ing this post?

• lukeprog 16 Jan 2020 0:08 UTC

  11 points

  on: In Defense of the Arms Races… that End Arms Races

  If the U.S. kept rac­ing in its mil­i­tary ca­pac­ity af­ter WW2, the U.S. may have been able to use its ne­go­ti­at­ing lev­er­age to stop the Soviet Union from be­com­ing a nu­clear power: halt­ing pro­lifer­a­tion and pre­vent­ing the build up of world threat­en­ing num­bers of high yield weapons.

  BTW, the most thor­ough pub­lished ex­am­i­na­tion I’ve seen of whether the U.S. could’ve done this is Quester (2000). I’ve been dig­ging into the ques­tion in more de­tail and I’m still not sure whether it’s true or not (but “may” seems rea­son­able).

• lukeprog 3 Dec 2019 1:59 UTC

  12 points

  on: How com­mon is it for one en­tity to have a 3+ year tech­nolog­i­cal lead on its near­est com­peti­tor?

  I’m very in­ter­ested in this ques­tion, thanks for look­ing into it!

• lukeprog 15 Sep 2019 0:59 UTC

  12 points

  on: If you had to pick one thing you’ve read that changed the course of your life, what would it be?

  My an­swer from 2017 is here.

• lukeprog 31 Jul 2019 21:37 UTC

  17 points

  on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  In­ter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal foot­note from Louis Franc­ini:

  This is­sue of differ­ing “ca­pac­i­ties for hap­piness” was dis­cussed by the clas­si­cal util­i­tar­ian Fran­cis Edge­worth in his 1881 Math­e­mat­i­cal Psy­chics (pp 57-58, and es­pe­cially 130-131). He doesn’t go into much de­tail at all, but this is the ear­liest dis­cus­sion of which I am aware. Well, there’s also the Ben­tham-Mill de­bate about higher and lower plea­sures (“It is bet­ter to be a hu­man be­ing dis­satis­fied than a pig satis­fied”), but I think that may be a slightly differ­ent is­sue.

• lukeprog 16 May 2019 14:42 UTC

  26 points

  on: Which sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery was most ahead of its time?

  Cases where sci­en­tific knowl­edge was in fact lost and then re­dis­cov­ered provide es­pe­cially strong ev­i­dence about the dis­cov­ery coun­ter­fac­tauls, e.g. Hero’s eolipile and al-Kindi’s de­vel­op­ment of rel­a­tive fre­quency anal­y­sis for de­cod­ing mes­sages. Prob­a­bly we un­der­es­ti­mate how com­mon such cases are, be­cause the knowl­edge of the lost dis­cov­ery is it­self lost — e.g. we might eas­ily have sim­ply not re­dis­cov­ered the An­tikythera mechanism.

• lukeprog 24 Oct 2018 19:38 UTC

  6 points

  on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  Ap­par­ently Shelly Ka­gan has a book com­ing out soon that is (sort of?) about moral weight.

• lukeprog 29 Aug 2018 17:48 UTC

  15 points

  on: A Proper Scor­ing Rule for Con­fi­dence Intervals

  This scor­ing rules has some down­sides from a us­abil­ity stand­point. See Green­berg 2018, a whitepa­per pre­pared as back­ground ma­te­rial for a (forth­com­ing) cal­ibra­tion train­ing app.

• lukeprog 16 Aug 2018 2:33 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Jacy Reese's comment on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  Some other peo­ple at Open Phil have spent more time think­ing about two-en­velope effects more than I have, and fwiw some of their think­ing on the is­sue is in this post (e.g. see sec­tion 1.1.1.1).

• lukeprog 14 Aug 2018 19:03 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: TAG's comment on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  My own take on this is de­scribed briefly here, with more de­tail in var­i­ous ap­pen­dices, e.g. here.

• lukeprog 14 Aug 2018 19:02 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: ricraz's comment on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  Yes, I meant to be de­scribing ranges con­di­tional on each species be­ing moral pa­tients at all. I pre­vi­ously gave my own (very made-up) prob­a­bil­ities for that here. Another worry to con­sider, though, is that many biolog­i­cal/​cog­ni­tive and be­hav­ioral fea­tures of a species are si­mul­ta­neously (1) ev­i­dence about their like­li­hood of moral pa­tient­hood (via con­scious­ness), and (2) ev­i­dence about fea­tures that might af­fect their moral weight *given* con­scious­ness/​pa­tient­hood. So, de­pend­ing on how you use that ev­i­dence, it’s im­por­tant to watch out for dou­ble-count­ing.

  I’ll skip re­spond­ing to #2 for now.

• lukeprog 14 Aug 2018 18:57 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan's comment on: Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

  For any­one who is cu­ri­ous, I cite much of the liter­a­ture ar­gu­ing over crite­ria for moral pa­tient­hood/​weight in the foot­notes of this sec­tion of my origi­nal moral pa­tient­hood re­port. My brief com­ments on why I’ve fo­cused on con­scious­ness thus far are here.

Pre­limi­nary thoughts on moral weight

• lukeprog 15 Jan 2018 21:42 UTC

  25 points

  on: An­nounce­ment: AI al­ign­ment prize win­ners and next round

  Cool, this looks bet­ter than I’d been ex­pect­ing. Thanks for do­ing this! Look­ing for­ward to next round.

Quick thoughts on em­pathic metaethics

• lukeprog 14 Oct 2017 0:12 UTC

  17 points

  on: Oxford Pri­ori­ti­sa­tion Pro­ject Review

  Hur­rah failed pro­ject re­ports!

• lukeprog 24 Aug 2017 15:55 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ten small life improvements

  One of my most-used tools is very sim­ple: an Alfred snip­pet that lets me paste-as-plain-text us­ing Cmd+Opt+V.

• lukeprog 1 Jul 2017 21:36 UTC

  9 points

  on: Res­cu­ing the Ex­tropy Magaz­ine archives

  Thanks!

• lukeprog 1 Jul 2017 6:43 UTC

  10 points

  on: LessWrong 2.0 Fea­ture Roadmap & Fea­ture Suggestions

  From a user’s pro­file, be able to see their com­ments in ad­di­tion to their posts.

  Dunno about oth­ers, but this is ac­tu­ally one of the LW fea­tures I use the most.

  (Apolo­gies if this is listed some­where already and I missed it.)

• lukeprog 23 Jun 2017 23:37 UTC

  6 points

  on: LessWrong 2.0 Fea­ture Roadmap & Fea­ture Suggestions

  Prob­a­bly not suit­able for launch, but given that the epistemic se­ri­ous­ness of the users is the most im­por­tant “fea­ture” for me and some other peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to, I won­der if some kind of “user badges” thing might be helpful, es­pe­cially if it in­fluences the weight that up­votes and down­votes from those users have. E.g. one badge could be “has read >60% of the se­quences, as ‘ver­ified’ by one of the 150 peo­ple the LW ad­mins trust to ver­ify such a thing about some­one” and “ver­ified su­perfore­caster” and prob­a­bly some other things I’m not im­me­di­ately think­ing of.

  What links here?

  • habryka's comment on 2/​27/​08 Up­date – Front­page 3.0 by Raemon (28 Feb 2018 19:57 UTC; 6 points)