How about Scooby Doo?
It’s elementary, but I spent a lot of time on it back when I was 3-4 and would have continued watching for somewhat longer if they hadn’t started introducing stories where the magic WAS real.
The moral “it’s ALWAYS natural” and the extremely repetitive plots (repetition is, I suspect, very good for kids) are basic but definitely positive.
Only saw one or two episodes, but I think Kimba the White Lion may also have had positive but elementary rationalist messages.
MichaelVassar
Karma: 4,503
For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
I honestly think that this is a very good reality check. I don’t think that most people should do it, as I think that there are many better options in the US, but I definitely think that anyone who doesn’t feel that they have better options than the one Louie is describing, for instance, anyone who thinks that they are trying to make money but doesn’t find that they can save $20K in a year, really should do it or ask themselves some serious questions about why they don’t.
I don’t expect anyone to do this, because I think people including people here have almost no tendency to actually act in ways that are theoretically more rational. I hope that rather than confabulating reasons whey they don’t though, people reading this can at least acknowledge the size of the gulf between their actual motivational structure and their story about it.
1) Almost everyone really is better than average at something. People massively overrate that something. We imagine intelligence to be useful largely due to this bias. The really useful thing would have been to build a FAS, or Friendly Artificial Strong. Only someone who could do hundreds of 100 kilogram curls with either hand could possible create such a thing however. (Zuckerberg already created a Friendly Artificial Popular)
2) Luck, an invisible, morally charged and slightly agenty but basically non-anthropomorphic tendency for things to go well for some people in some domains of varying generality and badly for other people in various domains really does dominate our lives. People can learn to be lucky, and almost everything else they can learn is fairly useless by comparison.
3) Everyone hallucinates a large portion of their experienced reality. Most irrationality can be more usefully interpreted from outside as flat-out hallucination. That’s why you (for every given you) seem so rational and no-one else does.
4) The human brain has many millions of idiosyncratic failure modes. We all display hundreds of them. The psychological disorders that we know of are all extremely rare and extremely precise, so if you ever met two people with the same disorder it would be obvious. Named psychological disorders are the result of people with degrees noticing two people who actually have the same disorder and other people reading their descriptions and pattern-matching noise against it. There are, for instance, 1300 bipolar people (based on the actual precise pattern which inspired the invention of the term) in the world but hundreds of thousands of people have disorders which if you squint hard look slightly like bipolar.
5) It’s easy to become immortal or to acquire “super powers” via a few minutes a day of the right sort of exercise and trivial tweaks to your diet if you do both for a few decades. It’s also introspectively obvious how to do so if you think about the question but due to subtle social pressures against it no-one overcomes akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, etc in this domain.
6) All medicines and psychoactive substances are purely placebos.
7) Pleasure is a confusion in a different way from the obvious, specifically, everything said to be pleasurable is actually something painful but necessary that we convince ourselves to do via propaganda because there is no other way to overcome the akrasia that would result if we did not or a lost purpose descended from some such propaganda. Things we are actually motivated to do without propaganda, we do without thinking about it, feel no need to name, would endorse tiling the universe with without hesitation if it occurred to us to do so.
I wouldn’t believe
8) The cheap rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager, the god of punishing saints, actually exists except it’s actually the Zeus of punishing virtuous Greek Pagans, rewarding hubristic Greek Pagans, and ignoring us infidels who ignore it despite the ubiquitous evidence all around us. I would believe that the AGI had a good reason for wanting to tell me that the above was the case if it told me though.
9) Most of Eliezer’s examples. To be credible they should be disturbing, not merely improbable. Our beliefs aren’t shown to be massively invalid with respect to non-disturbing data. The one about animals probably qualifies as credible though.
10) Uh, oh, Cyc will hard take-off if one more fact is programmed into it. I’m not sure I can stop it in time.
Bonus belief
This question has doomed us. People who could possibly program a FAI will, once thinking about this question in a semi-humorous manner, invariably spread the meme to all their friends and be distracted from future progress.
How traditional? 1600s Japan? Hopi? Dravidian? Surely it would be quite a coincidence if precisely the norms prevalent in the youth and culture of the poster or his or her parents were optimal for human flourishing.
I wish I knew how to politely and nicely end conversations, either with friends, strangers, whatever.
I agree that evolutionary psychology is very prone to abuse and should probably usually be avoided, but this seems like a terrible example to me. The hypothesis that cuteness is our evolved response to baby-like features does NOT predict that babies will be the cutest thing.
I’m pretty sure that I endorse the same method you do, and that the “EEV” approach is a straw man.
It’s also the case that while I can endorse “being hesitant to embrace arguments that seem to have anti-common-sense implications (unless the evidence behind these arguments is strong) ”, I can’t endorse treating the parts of an argument that lack strong evidence (e.g. funding SIAI is the best way to help FAI) as justifications for ignoring the parts that have strong evidence (e.g. FAI is the highest EV priority around). In a case like that, the rational thing to do is to investigate more or find a third alternative, not to go on with business as usual.
New Year’s Predictions Thread
Sadly, the unexpected frequently gets translated into the expected, even to the point of explicit denials of a position being ignored repeatedly in a single conversation.
If you aren’t afraid of making mistakes you can learn and grow MUCH faster than if you are.
If you aren’t afraid of noticing when you have made mistakes you can learn and grow MUCH MUCH faster than if you are.
The main thing though is that once you have learned an average amount the more you learn the less typical your thought patterns will be. If you bother to learn a lot your thought patterns will be VERY atypical. Once this happens, it becomes wildly unlikely that anyone talking with you for more than a minute without feedback will still be saying anything useful. Only conversation provides rapid enough feedback to make most of what the other person says relevant. (think how irrelevant most of the info in a typical pop-science book is because you can’t indicate to the author every ten seconds that you understand and that they can move on to the next point)
It seems to me that groups who can signal within-group status unambiguously will tend to downplay fashion.
Examples. Tech/Science smart people don’t bother much with it, as it’s not possible to fake it in their world, while humanities ‘intellectuals’ have to play a role, as their intelligence can’t be casually observed by outsiders. Ditto for Athletes, or really anyone who gains substantial status from visible muscles or visible grace.
I would expect this to also be the case for people who engage in any sort of formal contests, e.g. poker players.
I’m curious as to why me in particular, but I’m happy to hear from you privately. In general, I go with radical transparency. I think that the truth is that so long as you don’t show shame, guilt or malice you win. Summers screwed up by accepting that his thoughts were shameful and then asserting that they were forced by reason and that others were so forced as well. This is both low-status and aggressive, a bad combination and a classic nerdy failure mode.
I flat-out disagree that power corrupts as the phrase is usually understood, but that’s a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that’s simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word ‘benevolent’ and for meanings of ‘dictator’ which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
I’m seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won’t, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim. How many people would have jumped in against the claim that without belief in god there can be no morality or public order, that the moral behavior of secular people is just a habit or hold-over from Christian times, and that thus that all secular societies are doomed? To me it’s about equally credible.
BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.
Of course, in any domain, whether, music, dance, attracting mates, or practicing medicine or law, those who have valuable skills may wish to prevent others from acquiring or using such skills in order to preserve a monopoly and one convenient way to do so is to declare the process of acquiring such skills to be immoral or illegal.
I tend to think that the hazard of perverse response to materialism has been fairly adequately dealt with in this community. OTOH, the perverse response to psychology has not. The fact that something is grounded in “status seeking”, “conditioning”, or “evolutionary motives” generally no more deprives the higher or more naive levels of validity or reality than does materialism, hence my quip that “I believe exactly what Robin Hanson believes, except that I’m not cynical”
The great majority of people do nothing in any event.
This is simply not what I observe to be the case from my experience with politicians and high-level business people.
People quite consciously play and want to play varied parts in life, some of which are villain parts.
Randi’s speaking at the Summit. I’ll talk with him.
And yet, it seems to me that those Chinese who don’t know that it’s safe to go around the government firewall may have no good way of finding out that it’s safe.
Paranoia about how if they do they will get caught may be cultivated in them. How do they know what methods the government has.
Also, they may be made to think that there is something dirty or illicit, wrong or ugly about going outside official sources.
I am reminded of how effectively government propaganda in the US works on those teenagers who least need it and how ineffectively on those who most need it.