I’m building a habit of going to the gym for some brief exercise every day, using a couple potential mind-hacks I’ve never used before. If I can keep up the habit for another couple weeks, I’m planning to write an LW post on what I’ve learned from the experience.
Normal_Anomaly
Karma: 4,250
But it’s irrelevant to Anubhav’s point.
What Velorien said, but also, if such a spell was implemented it would be hard to use it for law enforcement without giving away that it existed. They wouldn’t be able to use it as court evidence, and if they used it to direct law enforcement personnel to the scene they’d get found out eventually.
. . . did not notice the date-stamp. Good thing thread necros are allowed here.
That’s right. In order to track illegal or conditionally legal magic, they’d have to put the trace on everyone for their whole lives. This would be a hard law to pass.
Oh, I see. I thought you were saying an optimal decision theory stiffed the lift-giver.
Also, of course, one who at each moment makes the decision that maximises expected future utility defects against Clippy in both Prisoner’s Dilemma and Parfit’s Hitchhiker scenarios, and arguably two-boxes against Omega, and by EY’s definition that counts as “not winning” because of the negative consequences of Clippy/Omega knowing that that’s what we do.
I think I’m misunderstanding you here because this looks like a contradiction. Why does making the decision that maximizes expected utility necessarily have negative consequences? It sounds like you’re working under a decision theory that involves preference reversals.
That payoff matrix doesn’t preserve the form of the problem. One of the features of the problem is that whatever is in box B, you’re better off two-boxing than one-boxing if you ignore the influence of Omega’s prediction. A better formulation would be that box A has $1000, and Box B has $2000 iff Omega believes you will one-box. Box B has to potentially have more than box A, or there’s no point in one-boxing what ever DT you have.
Your bullet-points example doesn’t appear to match your paragraph example. “Think people ought not to be racist; observe that they are” is different from “Imagine something is true; observe that it is not.” I can imagine that people ought not be racist (they shouldn’t) but be aware that they are. Then when I observe someone being racist, there’s no conflict between my beliefs and reality. Instead, there’s a conflict between reality and how I think reality ought to be, which I attempt to resolve by calling the racist out in the hope that they’ll behave better next time.
Note that the above says nothing about whether or not I should call out the racist, just that I think epigeios’ example is bad. Also I agree that it’s a bad idea to be angry at concepts rather than the people who believe them.
I’m not sure how to interpret your comment, so I’d like you to clarify. Are you using theists who feel secure in their relationship with god as an example of a way some people avoid being offended? Are you saying you are one such theist? Are you making a recommendation of something?
Can I have a couple examples other than placebo affect? Preferably only one of which is in the class “confidence that something will work makes you better at it”? Partly because it’s useful to ask for examples, partly because it sounds useful to know about situations like this.
What does it tell about me that I immediately thought ‘what about placebo and stuff’
Your beliefs about the functionality of a “medicine,” and the parts of your physiology that make the placebo effect work, are both part of reality. Your beliefs can, in a few (really annoying!) cases, affect their own truth or falsity, but whenever this happens there’s a causal chain leading from the neural structure in your head to the part of reality in question that’s every bit as valid as the causal chain in the shoelace example.
I’ve noticed the same thing once or twice—less often than you, and far less often than EY, but my (human, therefore lousy) memory says it’s more likely for a comment of mine to go to −1 and then +1 than the reverse.
It’s possible to stop believing that you believe something while continuing to believe it. It’s rare, and you won’t notice you did so, but it can happen.
I didn’t see the old stick figures, but I think the ones that are there now are fine.
Okay, now I’m confused. When I did this question, I remember I ignored C as being strictly dominated by B and pulled out a calculator. When I saw this question in the analysis, I did the same thing before scrolling down. Here’s what I got:
Drug A saves you from 70 headaches at $350/yr, for a cost of $5 per averted headache. Drug B saves you from 50 headaches at a cost of $100/yr, for a cost of $2 per averted headache.
This seems to contradict your statement “Cost-benefit reasoning seems to favor Drug A”. Drug A has a higher cost per prevented headache according to my calculations, which would make Drug B the better one. Am I failing at basic arithmetic, or misunderstanding the question, or what? Please help.
EDIT: I was solving the wrong problem, and a bunch of people showed me why. Thanks for the explanations! I’m glad I got to learn where I was wrong.
I didn’t say I’d think God was involved. I said the deliberately vague, conjunction-fallacy-avoiding phrasing “I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.” That means I’d update P(God spoke to him OR aliens spoke to him OR he’s secretly a genius mathematician and trolling me OR he’s got serious math talent he can’t access consciously OR [more hypotheses I won’t bother generating because this didn’t happen]), with the most likely possibility being that my friend is a genius troll. Then I’d do more experiments.
Note: I didn’t downvote you.
But if my (not a mathematician) friend says that god spoke to him in a dream, and gave him a proof of the Goldbach conjecture, and he has the proof and it’s valid, then I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.
I think I see what you did there.
You may not have noticed when you posted this, but the formatting of your post didn’t show up like I think you may have wanted, with the result that it’s hard to read. (If you’re wondering, it takes 2 carriage returns to get a line break out.)
If you intended the comment to look like it does, I apologize for bothering you.