MaoShan

Karma: 423

MaoShan Jan 29, 2013, 3:27 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
I’d at least be happy for my clone, because if I am supposed to love my family and offspring as normal people do, I should also love someone who shares 100% of my genetic plan, so I should be glad that someone on “Team MaoShan” got a good result. In fact, I used to use this argument to justify playing the lottery, in the sense that me losing meant that another version of me in the multiverse just did win, so I should be almost as happy. That was before I started using that money to purchase an equivalent amount of chocolate every week.

MaoShan Jan 28, 2013, 4:48 AM
0 points
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in reply to: someonewrongonthenet’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
I think you described it best when you said the issue was “un-asked”. Everybody here may be over it, but that is just the point when it gets the chance to creep back in. It was more like as if I was walking around with a giant “BEWARE!” sign—all the other biases seem to be countered by addressing them, and this looked like a big one that was not often talked about. I figured it would be a good addition to the bias-avoidance toolkit, because if you don’t include it specifically, the next world dictator (human or otherwise) will have a world-class rationality training, and will use that to rationalize the B.I.A.S. that they were never told to avoid.

I personally think that it’s such an ingrained thing that it probably colors my ideas in ways that I am not aware of, so hearing more about it would be helpful to me, if I’m the only one affected. I find that hearing other theories besides my own can help in this situation.

MaoShan Jan 28, 2013, 4:33 AM
0 points
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in reply to: Kingoftheinternet’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
That’s a helpful, honest answer, thanks. I have a lot of empathy, but basically no sympathy in my programming. Unfortunately this extends even to my regard for my future selves. I try to avoid death in the moment and the near future, I don’t seem even to identify with my future self. So hearing something like “Well, most other people would want so and so, now you know,” at least helps me understand humans.

MaoShan Jan 28, 2013, 4:25 AM
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in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
Thanks for the critique; the dialog format would have been much more appropriate. I am actually surprised how few karma I’ve lost over my first article. I was fully expecting a −100 or so.

MaoShan Jan 26, 2013, 4:48 PM
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in reply to: Protagoras’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
Regarding the questionable answers, I purposely got all those answers wrong to show what a “typical” guess might be, not the prevailing LessWrong opinions. I thought it was obvious enough not to point it out, and there was where I was mistaken. Sorry.

MaoShan Jan 26, 2013, 4:45 PM
1 point
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in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
I don’t fault you for your reasons, as I didn’t add enough disclaimers to earn your forgiveness. If by strange you mean “unconventional” formatting, yes, I am guilty of that. I didn’t feel that I was smart enough to get away with the rigid format usually found here without sounding pretentious. And I’ve seen articles downvoted for more petty reasons than this, so I’ll take it. And think about this:

I doubt almost anyone on LW will agree with your possible answers.

If someone got every answer on a multiple choice test wrong, that wouldn’t seem suspicious to fail better than chance? What I was trying to show was the “gut instinct” answers, which part of any human might answer before their executive functions override it. I am aware that most readers here are more advanced than me, and that there are a few things that, despite reading all the Sequences, I must still be missing. I am trying to find out what I’m wrong about.

MaoShan Jan 26, 2013, 4:32 PM
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in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
I agree. It would be easier if only it weren’t such a powerful illusion.

MaoShan Jan 26, 2013, 4:30 PM
−1 points
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in reply to: Kingoftheinternet’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
Does this mean that I should not fear death, because since I can in principle be exactly reproduced, it is not fundamentally different from sleep? In a classical sense, it is this body that I actually care about preserving, not my pattern of consciousness—that’s where the fear of death is coming from. And deeper, it is really my body that cares about preserving my body—not my consciousness pattern. So the problem that I am having trouble wrapping my head around is that statistics alone makes recreation of my pattern of consciousness likely; cryonics doesn’t really add much more likelihood to it, in my opinion. At whatever point in the future that I am recreated by mere chance or simulation, that will be the next time “I” exist, whether it’s a billion years from now, on another planet, or another universe. Neither does it stop me from dying, so what is the actual point of cryonics, since it seems to not satisfy either of its purposes?

MaoShan Jan 26, 2013, 1:12 AM
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in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
By soul in this article, I mean a supernatural extra object, but I am aware that many people here rationally reject that notion. What I was trying to get at was that even though we understand that it is not true, many hidden thought processes take the existence of a (supernatural) soul for granted.

I am curious about the opinions of other people here about what actual physical processes would comprise a non-supernatural soul. If I replaced all of my insides with such advanced electronics that nobody else would notice a difference (without a medical examination), does that mean I have the same soul? If I had to define a soul it would be “whatever it takes internally (mentally and physically) to cause an identical outward behavior as observed in a certain point in time”. That satisfies the conditions of your definition, as well, although it is not restricted to “people”, but actually comes closer to defining what qualia actually are.

MaoShan Jan 26, 2013, 12:55 AM
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in reply to: Kingoftheinternet’s comment on: The Hidden B.I.A.S.
I had read that article, which this one was supposed to be a sort of follow-up to. Many people here may disagree with my example answers intellectually, but like the Zombie article points out, that doesn’t stop the false intuition that it is so.

Which brings me to the very subject that I hoped to discuss: Why would you or I care whether we get revived one hundred years from now? Reading on this forum, I feel like I should care, but for some reason I don’t. Reproducing a similar version of my wavefunction from second to second takes considerably less effort and resources, and I think that’s the process that we intuitively care about. That’s an easy place for me to draw the line between what I consider “me” and “not-me”. What are your personal feelings about identity?

The Hidden B.I.A.S.

MaoShanJan 25, 2013, 3:49 AM

−8 points

56 comments3 min readLW link

MaoShan Jan 25, 2013, 12:51 AM
3 points
−1
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Value-Focused Thinking: a chapter-by-chapter summary
A serendipitous discovery nonetheless. :)

MaoShan Jan 24, 2013, 2:45 AM
5 points
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on: Value-Focused Thinking: a chapter-by-chapter summary

practicularly (adv.) in the most practical instance of a set of several instances.

This could be a handy word; I’ll have to try using it in a sentence sometime.

MaoShan Jan 9, 2013, 2:40 AM
4 points
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in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Don’t Build Fallout Shelters
Would the best way be, then, to scale the effort as resources allow? Learning to make your own fire is much cheaper than building a fallout shelter—next in line might be a survival kit (including matches, lighter, and flint, in case you find that you are incompetent at producing fire—like me). I’ve grown the opinion that all people should have a basic survival skill-set; it would be pitiful to have to rediscover animal trapping and such.

MaoShan Jan 8, 2013, 4:11 AM
12 points
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in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Don’t Build Fallout Shelters
There’s also the happiness caused by imagining oneself being well-off compared to the rest of society, whether that means someone buying a lottery ticket to live like a king among commoners, or someone building a fallout shelter to live like a commoner among wretches; it’s essentially the same wish, but the disaster scenario is actually statistically much more likely. So wouldn’t building a fallout shelter be more rational than buying a lottery ticket?

MaoShan Jan 3, 2013, 6:09 PM
2 points
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in reply to: simplicio’s comment on: Rationality Quotes January 2013
I thought the most truthful answer for me would be “Rarely”, given all possible interpretations of the question. I think that it should have been qualified “within the past year”, to eliminate the follies of truth-seeking in one’s youth. Someone who answers “Never” cannot be considering when they were a five-year-old. I have believed or wanted to believe a lot of crazy things. Even right now, thinking as an atheist, I rarely have those moods, and only rarely due to my recognized (and combated) tendency toward magical thinking. However, right now, thinking as a Christian, I would have doubts constantly, because no matter how much I would like to believe, it is plain to see that most of what I am expected to have faith in as a Christian is complete crap. I am capable of adopting either mode of thinking, as is anyone else here. We’re just better at one mode than others.

MaoShan Dec 30, 2012, 6:38 AM
2 points
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in reply to: ThisDan’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
Okay, I guess that makes you the first member of the Vocal Opposition.

I am not going to try to deny your subjective assessment of your own mental processes, but even in the event that you are capable of judging a situation from the ground up every moment of your life, surely you must be aware that very few other current humans share this ability.

The only reason that I can see for your opposing this idea would be to maintain your superiority by preventing access to a simpler method which would work nearly as well. I suspect that the favorable traits in your personality as your independent research has reported would disappear with a larger sampling size, as well.

MaoShan Dec 22, 2012, 3:29 AM
3 points
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in reply to: ThisDan’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
What the narratives would do would be to give you time to consider those situations and resolutions without actually being forced to do so on the spot. If you read it and understand that it is what you would want yourself to do in that situation, then you will have that solution on hand without your extensive on-the-spot calculations. If you think the resolution you just read in the Least Wrong was complete crap, then you would try to figure out what a better solution would be, again without the time-pressure. DO question the status quo, if you disagree with it. The point is to make them so good that you wouldn’t disagree to begin with, and would be happy to have the help that (mortals not blessed with infinite and instantaneous cognitive resources) could use in uncommon but important decisions.

MaoShan Dec 21, 2012, 4:00 AM
6 points
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in reply to: ThisDan’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
Yes, that would be ideal, but a current human brain is not going to work for that. Until there is practical brain augmentation or otherwise accessible advanced AI, a set of role-models would help.

MaoShan Dec 21, 2012, 3:51 AM
3 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
Kohath! His eyes wide open!

MaoShan

The Hid­den B.I.A.S.

The Hidden B.I.A.S.