Oh please. Two random men are more alike than a random man and a random woman, okay, but seriously, a huge difference that makes it necessary to either rewrite minds to be more alike or separate them? First, anyone who prefers to socialize with the opposite gender (ever met a tomboy?) is going to go “Ew!”. Second, I’m pretty sure there are more than two genders (if you want to say genderqueers are lying or mistaken, the burden of proof is on you). Third, neurotypicals can get along with autists just fine (when they, you know, actually try), and this makes the difference between genders look hoo-boy-tiiiiny. Fourth—hey, I like diversity! Not just just knowing there are happy different minds somewhere in the universe—actually interacting with them. I want to sample ramensubspace everyday over a cup of tea. No way I want to make people more alike.
Manon_de_Gaillande
I’m going to stick out my neck. Eliezer wants everyone to live. Most people don’t.
People care about their and their loved ones’ immediate survival. They discount heavily for long-term survival. And they don’t give a flying fuck about the life of strangers. They say “Death is bad.”, but the social norm is not “Death is bad.”, it’s “Saying “Death is bad.” is good.”.
If this is not true, then I don’t know how to explain why they dismiss cryonics out of hand with arguments about how death is not that bad that are clearly not their true rejection. The silliness heuristic explains believing it would fail, or that it’s a scam—not rejecting the principle. Status quo and naturalistic bias explain part of the rejection, but surely not the whole thing.
And it would explain why I was bewildered, thinking “Why would you want a sucker like me to live?” even though I know Eliezer truly values life.
I don’t believe you.
I don’t believe most scientists would make such huge mistakes. I don’t believe you have shown all the evidence. This is the only explaination of QM I’ve been able to understand—I would have a hard time checking. Either you are lying for some higher purpose or you’re honestly mistaken, since you’re not a physicist.
Now, if you have really presented all the relevant evidence, and you have not explained QM in a way which makes some interpretation sound more reasonable than it is (what is an amplitude exactly?), then the idea of a single world is preposterous, and I really need to work out the implications.
I’m pretty sure you’re doing it wrong here.
“What if the structure of the universe says to do something horrible? What would you have wished for the external objective morality to be instead?” Horrible? Wish? That’s certainly not according to objective morality, since we’ve just read the tablet. It’s just according to our intuitions. I have an intuition that says “Pain is bad”. If the stone tablet says “Pain in good”, I’m not going to rebel against it, I’m going to call my intuition wrong, like “Killing is good”, “I’m always right and others are wrong” and “If I believe hard enough, it will change reality”. I’d try to follow that morality and ignore my intuition—because that’s what “morality” means.
I can’t just choose to write my own tablet according to my intuitions, because so could a psychopath.
Also, it doesn’t look like you understand what Nietzsche’s abyss is. No black makeup here.
This argument sounds too good to be true—when you apply it to your own idea of “right”. It also works for, say, a psychopath unable to feel empathy who gets a tremendous kick out of killing. How is there not a problem with that?
This pressure exists once religion is already in place, but doesn’t explain why it appears and spreads.
However, selecting for cheats doesn’t matter, since they must teach their religion to their children in order to properly simulate faith. Moreover, I suspect that most people who didn’t actively choose their religion, but passively accepted it as children don’t fully believe it.
Actually, the Mystic Eyes of Depth Perception are pretty underwhelming. You can tell how far away things are with one eye most of the time. The difference is big enough to give a significant advantage, but nothing near superpower level. My own depth perception is crap (better than one eye though), and I don’t often bump into walls.
Your main argument is “Learning QM shouldn’t change your behavior”. This is false in general. If your parents own slaves and you’ve been taught that people in Africa live horrible lives and slavery saves them, and you later discover the truth, you will feel and act differently. Yet you shouldn’t expect your life far away from Africa to be affected: it still adds up to normality.
Some arguments are convincing (“you can’t do anything about it so just call it the past” and “probability”), but they may not be enough to support your conclusion on their own.
For some reason, this view of time fell nicely in place in my mind (not “Aha! So that’s how it is?” but “Yes, that’s how it is.”), so if it’s wrong, we’re a lot of people to be mistaken in the same way.
But that doesn’t dissolve the “What happened before the Big Bang?” question. I point at our world and ask “Where does this configuration come from?”, you point at the Big Bang, I ask the same question, and you say “Wrong question.”. Huh?
“My curiosity doesn’t suddenly go away just because there’s no reality, you know!” Eliezer, I want to high-five you.
Does this “Many worlds” thing imply that there exists (in some meaningful sense) other worlds alongside us where whatever quantum events didn’t happen here happened? (If not, or if this is a wrong question, disregard the following.)
What are the moral implications? If some dictator says “If this photon passes through this filter (which it can do with probability 0.5), I will torture you all; if it is absorbed, I will do something vaguely nice.”, and the photon if absorbed, should we rejoice, or should we grieve for those people in another world who are tortured?
Should we try quantum suicide? I think I’m willing to die (at least once, but maybe not in a lot of worlds, my poor little brain can’t grasp the concept of multiple deaths) to let one world know whether the MWI is true.
What about other events? A coinflip isn’t really a quantum random event (and may even be not random at all if you know enough), but the coin is made out of amplitudes—are there worlds where the coin lands on the other side? We won WW2 by the skin of the teeth, are there any worlds where the Earth is ruled by Nazi Germany?
You lost me there.
1) If Alice and Bob observe the system in your first example, and Alice decides to keep track precisely of X’s possile states while Bob just says “2-8”, the entropy of X+Y is 2 bits for Alice and 2.8 for Bob. Isn’t entropy a property of the system, not the observer? (This is the problem with “subjectivity”: of course knowledge is physical, it’s just that it depends on the observer and the observed system instead of just the system.)
2) If Alice knows all the molecules’ positions and velocities, a thermometer will still display the same number; if she calculates the average speed of the molecules, she will find this same number; if she sticks her finger in the water at a random moment, she should expect to feel the same thing Bob, who just knows the water’s temparature, does. How is the water colder? Admittedly, Alice could make it colder (and extract electricity), but she doesn’t have to.
I don’t see how removing getting-used-to is close to removing boredom. IANAneurologist, but on a surface level, they do seem to work differently—boredom is reading the same book everyday and getting tired of it, habituation is getting a new book everyday and not thinking “Yay, new fun” anymore.
I’m reluctant to keep habituation because, at least in some cases, it is evil. When the emotion is appropriate to the event, it’s wrong for it to disminish—you have a duty to rage against the dying of the light. (Of course we need it for survival, we can’t be mourning all the time.) It also looks linked to status quo bias.
Maybe, like boredom, habituation is an incentive to make life better; but it’s certainly not optimal.
Caledonian: 1) Why is it laughable? 2) If hemlines mattered to you as badly as a moral dilemma, would you still hold this view?
What’s the bad thing that happens if I do 35? It’s a mistake, but how will it prevent me from using words correctly? I’d still be able to imagine a triangular lightbulb.
I find this harder to read. The arguments are obscured. The structure sucks; claims are not isolated into neat little paragraphs so that I can stop and think “Is this claim actually true?”. It’s about you (why you aren’t Wise) rather than about the world (how Wisdom works).
Folks, we covered that already! “You should open the door before you walk trough it.” means “Your utility function ranks ‘Open the door then walk through it’ above ‘Walk through the door without opening it’”. YOUR utility function. “You should not murder.” is not just reminding you of your own preferences. It’s more like “(The ‘morality’ term of) my utility function ranks ‘You murder’ below ‘you don’t murder’.”, and most “sane” moralities tend to regard “this morality is universal” as a good thing.
I am not smarter than that. But you might (just might) be. “Eliezer says so” is strong evidence for anything. I’m too stupid to use the full power of Bayes, and I should defer to Science, but Eliezer is one of the few best Bayesian wannabes—he may be mistaken, but he isn’t crazily refusing to let go of his pet theory. Still not enough to make me accept MWI, but a major change in my estimate nonetheless.
As a side note, what actually happens in a true libertarian system is Europe during the Industrial Revolution.
“Sure, someone else knows the answer—but back in the hunter-gatherer days, someone else in an alternate Earth, or for that matter, someone else in the future, knew what the answer was.”
I think the difference is that someone else knows the answer and can tell you.
Actually, the last statement (about spankings instead of jails) doesn’t sound foolish at all. We abolished torture and slavery, we have replaced a lot of punishments with softer ones, we are trying to make executions painless and more and more people are against death penalty, we are more and more concerned about the well-being of ever larger groups (white men, then women, then other “races”, then children), we pay attention to personal freedom, we think inmates are entitled to human rights, and if we care more about preventing further misdeeds than punishing the culprit, jails may not be efficient. I doubt spanking will replace jail, but I’d bet on something along these lines.
Wait. Aren’t they right? I don’t like that they don’t terminally value sympathy (though they’re pretty close), but that’s beside the point. Why keep the children suffering? If there is a good reason—that humans need a painful childhood to explore, learn and develop properly, for example—shouldn’t the Super Happy be conviced by that? They value other things than a big orgasm—they grow and learn—they even tried to forsake some happiness for more accurate beliefs—if, despite this, they end up preferring stupid happy superbabies to painful growth, it’s likely we agree. I don’t want to just tile the galaxy with happiness counters—but if collapsing into orgasmium means the Supper Happy, sign me up.