You may not engage in homosexual activity because of the externality of God smiting the city and/or sending a hurricane.
Well the problem is god isn’t real.
You may not eat hamburgers because of the externality of catastrophic climate collapse.
Your hamburger becomes slightly more expensive because there is a carbon tax.
I would say your examples are abusing the concept (And I have seen them before because people make trashy arguments all the time). The concept itself makes lots of sense.
Thank you for writing this post. This gave me the framework and motivation to overcome the trivial inconveniences of reading a wiki and writing an email to sign up for the free gym room in my dorm. Another inconvenience that had scared me away was an appointment to get introduced to how to use the gym. I will start learning to use the barbell there rather than just using the dumbbell I own. Now that I am writing this it sounds quite insane that I didn’t take advantage of this for 3 years.
Ups. Yeah I forgot to address that one. I was just astonished to hear no one knows the answer to that one.
we still can’t even define “life” in a reasonable way, or answer basic questions like “why do arms come out basically the same size?”
Such a definition seems futile (I recommend the rest of the word sequence also). Biology already does a great job explaining what and why some things are alive. We are not going around thinking a rock is “alive”. Or what exactly did you have in mind there?
I mean that my end goals point towards a vague prospering of human-like minds, with a special preference for people close to me. It aligns with morality often, but not always.
What remains? I think this is basically what I usually think of as my own (it just happens to contain a term with everyone else’s). Are you sacrificing what other people think ‘the right thing to do’ is? What future you think what the right thing to do would have been? What future uplifted Koi think what the right thing to do would have been?
I agree. I think for me, the intuition mostly stems from neuron count. I also agree, with the authors of the sequence, that neuron counts are not an ideal metric. What confuses me is that instead these estimates seem to simply take biologic “individuals” as a basic unit for moral weight and then adjust with uncertainty from there. I think that seems even more misguided than neuron count. Bees and Ants are hacking the “individual”-metric just by having small brains spread over lots of individual bees/ants. Beehive > Human seems absurd.
There is no possible way for a real coin to have that distribution.
Unless the person throwing read Jaynes:
a person familiar with the laws of mechanics can toss a biased coin so that it will produce predominantly either heads or tails, at will. [...] From the fact that we have seen a strong preponderance of heads, we cannot conclude legitimately that the coin is biased; it may be biased, or it may have been tossed in a way that systematically favors heads. Likewise, from the fact that we have seen equal numbers of heads and tails, we cannot conclude legitimately that the coin is ‘honest’. It may be honest, or it may have been tossed in a way that nullifies the effect of its bias.
More on how:
An important feature of this tumbling motion is conservation of angular momentum;
during its flight the angular momentum of the coin maintains a fixed direction in space (but
the angular velocity does not; and so the tumbling may appear chaotic to the eye). Let us
denote this fixed direction by the unit vector n; it can be any direction you choose, and it
is determined by the particular kind of twist you give the coin at the instant of launching.
Whether the coin is biased or not, it will show the same face throughout the motion if viewed
from this direction (unless, of course, n is exactly perpendicular to the axis of the coin, in
which case it shows no face at all).
Therefore, in order to know which face will be uppermost in your hand, you have only
to carry out the following procedure. Denote by k a unit vector passing through the coin
along its axis, with its point on the ‘heads’ side. Now toss the coin with a twist so that k and
n make an acute angle, then catch it with your palm held flat, in a plane normal to n. On
successive tosses, you can let the direction of n, the magnitude of the angular momentum,
and the angle between n and k, vary widely; the tumbling motion will then appear entirely
different to the eye on different tosses, and it would require almost superhuman powers of
observation to discover your strategy.
Thus, anyone familiar with the law of conservation of angular momentum can, after some
practice, cheat at the usual coin-toss game and call his shots with 100% accuracy. You can
obtain any frequency of heads you want – and the bias of the coin has no influence at all
on the results!
I agree with the first, but not the second sentence. (Although I am not sure what it is supposed to imply. I can imagine being convinced Shrimps are more important, but the bar for evidence is pretty high)
If I said [to him] “You’re wrong; is true”, then—even if he listened to me—he wouldn’t have thought through it. He’d just be copying my ideas. Which isn’t what I want. I don’t want people to copy my beliefs. I want people to think sensibly.
For a long time, when I’m walking people through this, they won’t even know what my beliefs are. Usually they’ll think I agree with them. But if they think about it hard, they’ll realize that they have no idea what I believe, because I have to clean up their idea to reason before that is even relevant.
I watched the rest of that video (the person was telling their story of asking pointed questions to a “socialist” about their policy of funding college education). I think the problem with this is that while this might marginally move a person closer to actually thinking, it is unclear to me to which degree this is a symmetric weapon.
Asking the “right” open ended questions seems pretty powerful in leading someone astray.
Ah I see:
Note that I sent out the second follow-up message in batches, and some people responded to the first message after the last batch, and they did not get this opportunity.
Was everyone supposed to receive the second message? I only got the poll and not the second message with the unilateralist link.
I just realized you’d expect your blood sugar to go down or at least move a little.
I’d always avoided diet soda on the belief that no-calorie sweeteners spiked your insulin and this led to sugar cravings that left you worse off. But when I tried stevia-sweeted Zevia with the GCM my blood glucose levels didn’t move at all, and I didn’t feel any additional drive to eat sugar
Maybe I am missing something, but why would a spike in your insulin be visible on a glucose monitor? If it wouldn’t then perhaps your previous stance on the sweeteners was right?
If your graph is right about your sugar intake, another hypothesis for the cravings would be your total sugar intake. It seems you are consuming less sugar in the winter.
Epistemic Status: Anecdote
Two weeks ago, I’ve been dissatisfied with the amount of workouts I do. When I considered how to solve the issue, my brain generated the excuse that while I like running outside, I really don’t like doing workouts with my dumbbells in my room even though that would be a more intense and therefore more useful workout. Somehow I ended up actually thinking and asked myself why I don’t just take the dumbbells with me outside. Which was of course met by resistance because it looks weird. It’s even worse! I don’t know how to “properly” do curls or whatnot, and other people would judge me on that. I noticed that I don’t actually care that much about people in my dorm judging me. These weirdness points have low cost. In addition, this muscle of rebellion seems useful to train, as I suspect it to be one of the bottlenecks that hinders me from writing posts like this one.
Inspired by this idea from Alex Turner’s shortform, I tried to figure out which facts are truth or fiction based on prompting gpt-4 to mess with a Wikipedia article on Developmental Psychology. (First I let GPT-4 munch a big chunk of the article, and then I chose the first chunk I saw that contained lots of concrete claims.)
Crecedences are 0% if claim false, and 100% if the text written by gpt-4 is true/reflects the original article. Outcomes are on the line afterwards. Written more as personal notes (very rough).
Vision is sharper in infants than in older children.
Vision is probably not sharper for infants, but the opposite! (10%)
false
Infant sight tends to remain stable with little improvement over time.
Infant sight should rapidly improve! (at least at some point it has too!) (10%)
false
Color perception is limited in the first year, with infants primarily seeing in shades of gray [79]. Infants only begin to develop adult-like vision at about twelve months.[72]
is no color perception plausible? (70%)
false, In fact they learn it at 4 months!
Hearing is still evolving at the time of birth.
Accidentally skipped this claim
Newborns show no distinct preference for human speech over other sounds, and they can’t distinguish their mother’s voice from others’.
Newborns should probably pay more attention to their mother’s voice! (It seems that this makes more sense if the latter parts are true. Not sure though!) (40%)
false
The belief that these features are learned in the womb has been debunked.
the debunking this seems pretty plausible! (70%) (on reflection that is not super sure that this is how it would be written on wikipedia)
false
By 18 months, infants’ hearing ability is still not on par with adults.
not hearing on par is plausible. On the other hand, the opposite seems more likely to be mentioned? (30%) (seems plausible, at that time some babies start talking right?)
false
Smell and taste are rudimentary, with infants often unable to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant odors and tastes
The smell seems very implausible to me! Especially for some of the more toxic things, I would expect them to be very ingrained. It seems like valence for a lot of the strongest smells is preprogrammed! (10%) (I give not 5%, because it could be for substances that are not really dangerous? In that case rudimentary would make sense as a description)
false
Newborns do not show a clear preference for the smell of human milk over that of formula.[72]: 150 Older infants, interestingly, do not show a preference for their mother’s scent.[79] Human milk over formula? Seems like that could go either way with underpowered studies? 55%
true (Huh first positive result … somehow I now want to see how well powered these actually were, or how you detect which smell a baby “likes” at all and whether that’s a strong signal)
Touch and feel, while being one of the first senses to develop in the womb, are not as refined in infants as previously thought.[84] This contradicts the idea of primitive reflexes, which were believed to demonstrate advanced touch capabilities.
This section seemes perhaps a bit weird? Why would primitive reflexes be rather advanced? Is this saying that a baby needs to figure out most motor control and most is not preprogrammed? Seems plausible, I give (40%) that none of the claims above have been altered.
false (In hindsight of course a baby can figure out a lot of motor control before leaving the womb)
Pain perception in infants is believed to be less intense than in older children, indicating that they may not feel pain as acutely.
Not sure how long something is an infant. It seems like a plausible claim if a lot of pain is sorta more of a social thing and babies haven’t developed that so much yet? On the other hand babies seems like they are crying a lot and that they are constantly suffereing. (30%)
false
There is also no substantial evidence that glucose can relieve pain in newborns.[87]
The glucose thing seems like a cointoss? Seems marginally more plausible to be mentioned if true so (45%)
false Wow a lot of these are giving across higher confidence than I would have expected. The sucrose thing is apparently a common thing and the randomized control trial doesn’t seem to have too bad numbers (although I should at some point figure out how to get a useful estimate of the effect-size out of statistics like that). It seems plausible that blinding might be a bit hard.
It also gives me more confidence that Wikipedia is not listing lots of common misconceptions it wants to crush.
Overall, this whole field seems interesting! I think I also underestimated this field because it has psychology in its name (Yeah, I know that sounds dumb). I was not reflecting on my probabilities for long, and now feel like I could have done a lot better if I had (feedback and knowing how wrong my first impressions are is also valuable). Also reminds me of some section of hpmor where harry thinks about how it took a very long time until some human came up with the idea to investigate when children learn what. It also seems like a lot of the problems with testing that you would usually have in psychology studies, especially around surveys and self-report, is that you can’t do that with infants, so you get higher quality data. You also wouldn’t get infants that are trying to figure out what your experimental design is and whether they want to prove you right, wrong etc.
Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are “safe” to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn’t previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.
Why does it have to be niche? Haven’t met many nonrationalists who’s mind doesn’t go haywire once you start on Politics or Religion. Where did these EAs/Rats grow up if they weren’t exposed to that?
My problem is you are mixing up real and not real things. They are different. The whole post above assumes a civilization of way more sanity from people in power and the people watching them than the one we live in.