When I was younger...
MrMind
Karma: 3,300
Cooperator here.
Upvote post for those who have been hit by collateral damage in the Elo / Nier war, as it happened to me. I promise to upvote everyone who writes under this something that is not controversial.
If the problem is the sockpuppet army, while coders create a systematic solution, the community can help and show that the army of goodwilling men and women are stronger than any puppet master.
Survey taken.
One thing to remember when talking about distinction/defusion is that it’s not a free operation: if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before. That is something that demands effort and energy. Sometimes, you need to store a lot more bits. You cannot simply become superintelligent by defusing everything in sight.
Sometimes, making a distinction is important, but some other times, erasing distinctions is more important. Rationality is about creating and erasing distinctions to achieve a more truthful or more useful model.
This is also why I vowed to never object that something is “more complicated” if I cannot offer a better model, because it’s always very easy to inject distinctions, the harder part is to make those distinctions matter.
To improve my position in the male hierarchy
To add the experience
To start the process of developing
Farther down the line
To me all of these seems rationalizazions.
I feel there’s nothing wrong in wanting to satisfy your impulse, sex is a need and should not be disregarded. No need to label it Dark Side, there’s nothing dark in it.
PlusMy current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,”
I don’t think is inexperience that gives off uncomfortable vibes, I would bet that it’s rather anxiety and repressed desire.
There is the possibility that the other party is able and willing to punish you for refusing to engage. Aside from promoting them from “treat as Hostile Arguer” to “treat as hostile, period”, I’m not sure what to do about this.
It’s a situation akin, in form if not in degree, to those of hostages in a prison camp. The usual suggestions indeed apply:
1 - submit and cooperate;
2 - study the environment;
3 - try to gain small victories;
4 - as soon as it’s feasible, get out.
In a weird dance of references, I found myself briefly researching the “Sun Miracle” of Fatima.
From a point of view of a mildly skeptic rationalitist, it’s already bad that almost anything written that we have comes from a single biased source (the writings of De Marchi), but also bad is that some witnesses, believer and not, reported not having seen any miracle. But what arose my curiosity is another: if you skim witnesses accounts, they tell the most divers(e) things. If you OR the accounts, what comes out is really a freak show: the sun revolving, emitting strobo lights, dancing in the sky, coming close to the earth drying up the soaking wet attendants.
If you otherwise AND the accounts, the only consistent element is this: the ‘sun’ was spinning. To which I say: what? How can something that has rotational symmetry be seen spinning? The only possible answer is that there was an optical element that broke the symmetry, but I have been unable to find out what was this element. Do you know anything about it?
… demonstrably friendly dictatorship? :)
Here you can find a mind map aggregating the opinions of every commenter up until the time of this comment.
I will further edit it as comments are added. If you want to make it editable from the community let me know (and suggest a service that does so!). If you think I have misrepresented your opinions let me know and I’ll fix it.
My analysis:LW is perceived badly for two reasons: low quality and obscurity to newcomers;
LW is perceived as a good thing on at least on three axis: as an archive for the Sequence and the Wiki; as a community aggregators for different movements / sources (EA, HPMOR, sporadic contributors, etc.); for its live services (sharing academic articles, chat, stupid questions thread, etc.);
the vast majority of people are in favor of keeping it open;
the highest value LW offers is as an aggregator of the Diasporists, and the main problem is the sharing of comments;
the most frequently proposed solutions include RSS feeds, subreddits and removing the distinction between Main and Discussion.
I like those suggestions too, I’m in favor of keeping it open.
The most important quality for a rationalist is to admit that you were wrong and change your mind accordingly: so I will say, as an excercise in strength and calibration, that I was totally wrong.
I thought, with a high degree of probability, that Clinton was going to be the next POTUS. Instead it’s Trump. My model of the world was wrong, and I’ll adjust accordingly.
We won the war against Eugene… for a brief instant.
I’m keeping score and calculating the number of downvotes/upvotes on the comment where I requested help against Eugene Nier downvotes campaign.
Well, there was a moment where 14 people upvoted and 20 puppets downvoted. Now we are at a point where 21 people upvoted and 30 puppets downvoted. This means that at least we forced Eugene to increase the count of his puppets to fight back. I count this as score for LW :)
#makelwniceagain
Yeah I do volunteer to, although it’s not clear to me how I could be of help.
The fact that Adam committed a crime is not unfalsifiable, it’s simply unfalsfied. There’s just not enough probability weight for her to change her mind, she even admitted that with evidence strong enough she would otherwise change her mind.
Eve is being rational in retaining her current prior in the lack of evidence: it’s not that she is assigning 0 to the probability of Adam being the killer, it’s just that in the face of uncertainty there’s no reason to update.
On the other hand I don’t see how you could do this to uphold the belief in God: absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I’ve downvoted you because at the same time you manage to insult everyone still on this forum with a single sentence, including those who supposedly ran away but still read, while maintaining the exact behaviour that you say has driven valuable content away. All of this without the courage to use your real name to express a critique. A neat feat of compartimentalization, kudos (not).
Mixed-race parenting and absent or disengaged fathers seem to act as secondary causes in both Rodger’s and Mercer’s alienation
And you have evidence of this because...?
You’re lucky! If it’s only the argument from miracle keeping you from becoming a better thinker, then that’s easily solved. It’s really brittle.
First, “account of a miracle” is very, very different from “evidence of a miracle”. The only datum here is someone saying “A miracle has happened to me!”. From a Bayesian point of view, to assign a probability you must take into account all different models that could produce that statement, including:
a real, honest miracle
deception, inflicted on the witness
deception, self-inflicted
mistakenly reporting a perfectly natural phoenomenon for a miracle
etc.
Having had some experience as an amateur mentalist, I’m always amazed at the degree at which people want to believe in the supernatural. Even when you tell them explicitly that it was all a trick, they still might argue you have power you don’t know to have, and things like that.
Anyway, the simple fact that there are many ways to account for a witnessing of a miracle, automatically reduces the probability of such an event really happening.Second, as others have pointed out, a miracle might point in the direction of the divine, but which divine? Islam, Induism, Buddhism… all have instances of miracles happening. Can you remember for example the case of the hindu milk drinking statues? It was famous all over the world. It even has its own Wikipedia page.
The third point I will explain with an analogy: suppose you travel back in time bringing with you a pair of walkie-talkie. Lo and behold, miracles can happen: suddenly people are capable of talking to one another even if they are very far apart!
Simply the fact that something very unusual has happened cannot confirm or deny any model of reality per se.Bayesian statistics sum it all up pretty neatly: if you consider reporting a miracle as an outlier in an otherwise pretty standard distribution, you must decide the probability that the outlier is the indicator of some unusual model of the world by comparing it with all the other models. In math notation:
P( Christian god | miracle reported ) = P( miracle reported | Christian god ) * P( Christian god ) / P( miracle reported )
Assuming P( miracle reported | Christian god ) to be pretty much 1 and P( Christian god ) to be somewhat low but not fantastically so, the problem lies in the term P( miracle reported ), because it can be decomposed in this way:
P( miracle reported ) = P( miracle reported | Christian god ) P( Christian god ) + P( miracle reported | no Christian god ) P( no Christian god ).
Since we already estabilished that P( Christian god ) is low, then P( no Christian god ) must be high, but the real weight is in the term P( miracle reported | no Christian god ). As we already know, because of the tendency of the human mind to be deceived, this term is pretty close to unity, and so P( Christian god | miracle reported ) is pretty close to P( Christian god ).
This does not refute the existence of the Christian god, it simply says that, since witnessing can happen with equal probability whether a Christian god exists or not, then you cannot take that witnessing as evidence for a divinity.
But since you already hinge only on this for your belief, then you’re pretty solved.
I’ll try, just for fun, to summarize Eliezer’s conclusions of the pre-fun-theory and pre-community-building part of the sequence:
artificial intelligence can self-improve;
with every improvement, the rate at which it can improve increases;
AGI will therefore experience exponential improvement (AI fooms);
even if there’s a cap to this process, the resulting agent will be a very powerful agent, incomprehensibly so (singularity);
an agent effectiveness does not constrain its utility function (orthogonality thesis);
humanity’s utility function occupy a very tiny and fragmented fraction of the set of all possible utility functions (human values are fragile);
if we fail to encode the correct human utility function in a self-improving AGI, even tiny differences will results in a catastrophically unpleasant future (UFAI as x-risk);
an AGI is about to come pretty soon, so we better hurry to figure out how to do the latter point correctly.
It’s interesting to notice that there’s nothing with that type on hoogle (Haskell language search engine), so it’s not the type of any common utility.
On the other hand, you can still say quite a bit on functions of that type, drawing from type and set theory.
First, let’s name a generic function with that type . It’s possible to show that k cannot be parametric in both types. If it were, would be valid, which is absurd ( has an element!). It’ also possible to show that if k is not parametric in one type, it must have access to at least an element of that type (think about and ).
A simple cardinality argument also shows that k must be many-to-one (that is, non injective): unless B is 1 (the one element type),
There is an interesting operator that uses k, which I call interleave:
Trivially,
It’s interesting because partially applying interleave to some k has the type , which is the type of continuations, and I suspect that this is what underlies the common usage of such operators.
The first LessWrong arch-villain.
I did the survey in all its parts, and upvoted every top level comment to promote LW’s census partecipation.
It was fun and not particularly long, although I miss the ‘global prisoner dilemma’ of the last survey.