Perplexed

• Perplexed 12 Jun 2011 16:52 UTC

  33 points

  on: How not to move the goalposts

  Good choice of topic, but …

  Unfortunately, most of the arguments I could choose for this discussion are either highly trivial or highly controversial. I’ll choose one that I hope won’t cause too much trouble.

  I think it may be the worst possible choice. First, for suggesting that the question of compensation for engineers should be approached as a moral issue. Second, for failing to make the point that differences (between the sexes) in engineering aptitude in the general population says nothing about differences in engineering skill among people who have already been hired as engineers. Third, because gender differences between groups say little about differences between individuals. Fourth, because gender is a problematic subject in this forum, even when you do everything right.

  I also second Nesov’s cringe at the implicit conflation of unpleasant and suitable-to-be-disagreed-with.

Ra­tion­al­ity Case Study—Ad-36

• Perplexed 19 May 2011 18:03 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: The Aliens have Landed!

  And you can set up a scenario without dragging in torture and extinction. Aliens from Ganymede are about to ink a contract to trade us tons of Niobium in exchange for tons of Cobalt. But then the aliens reveal that they have billions of cloned humans working as an indentured proletariat in the mines of the Trojan asteroids. These humans are generally well treated, but the aliens offer to treat them even better—feed them ice cream—if we send the Cobalt without requiring payment in Niobium.

  The central problem in all of these thought experiments is the crazy notion that we should give a shit about the welfare of other minds simply because they exist and experience things analogously to the way we experience things.

  What links here?

  • Perplexed's comment on The Aliens have Landed! by TimFreeman (20 May 2011 21:17 UTC; 0 points)

What is wrong with “Tra­di­tional Ra­tion­al­ity”?

• Perplexed 13 Dec 2010 18:10 UTC

  26 points

  on: What top­ics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?

  I would like to see sequences of top level postings providing semi-technical tutorials on topics of interest to rationalists.

  As one example of a topic: Game Theory

  Actually, there is material here for several sequences, dealing with several sub-topics. We need a sequence on games with incomplete information, on iterated games, on two-person cooperative games (we have a couple articles already, but we haven’t yet covered Nash’s 1953 paper with threats), and on multi-person cooperative games (Shapley value, Core, Nucleolus, and all that).

• Perplexed 10 Oct 2010 15:53 UTC

  26 points

  on: Strate­gies for deal­ing with emo­tional nihilism

  Are we talking about nihilism here or depression?

  Nihilism is a philosophical position.

  Depression is a mood—a physiological state which causes a psychological state.

  Nihilism is sometimes offered by depressed people as a rationalization/​justification of their behavior. It is an effect, not a cause.

  Chronic depression can be treated pharmaceutically. Episodes of depression often respond to physical activity. Running is a good suggestion for some people.

  Nihilism, as a philosophical position, can be treated by reading better philosophy. However, treating nihilism does nothing to cure depression.

• Perplexed 23 Sep 2010 4:54 UTC

  26 points

  on: (Vir­tual) Em­ploy­ment Open Thread

  As a survivor of a recent heart attack, I would like to make a rather surprising suggestion. If you live in big city, get a job as a bicycle courier. If near a college campus, get a job as a bicycle pizza delivery person. Get someone to pay you for getting healthy exercise. Then you can spend your spare time on sedentary intellectual activities without damaging your health.

  If you are like Mitchell_Porter, and wish to spend your spare time on serious math-like creativity, then you definitely need 4-6 hours of mindless physical activity in the middle of your wake cycle, with intense intellectual activity at the beginning and end of the day. No one can maintain peak intellectual productivity for long periods without some scheduled downtime.

• Perplexed 14 May 2011 14:33 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: David Althaus’s comment on: Peo­ple who want to save the world

  Alicorn, a deontologist, wishes that a certain consequence (the salvation of the world) obtain. Whether she is involved in producing that consequence or not.

  Giles, presumably a consequentialist, phrases his own wish so as to egoistically place himself at the site of the action.

  The juxtaposition carries a certain irony.

What is wrong with math­e­mat­ics ed­u­ca­tion?

• Perplexed 3 Oct 2010 4:49 UTC

  23 points

  on: The Ir­ra­tional­ity Game

  Unless you are familiar with the work of a German patent attorney named Gunter Wachtershauser, just about everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong. More specifically, there was no “prebiotic soup” providing organic nutrient molecules to the first cells or proto-cells, there was no RNA world in which self-replicating molecules evolved into cells, the Miller experiment is a red herring and the chemical processes it deals with never happened on earth until Miller came along. Life didn’t invent proteins for a long time after life first originated. 500 million years or so. About as long as the time from the “Cambrian explosion” to us.

  I’m not saying Wachtershauser got it all right. But I am saying that everyone else except people inspired by Wachtershauser definitely got it all wrong. (70%)

• Perplexed 21 Feb 2011 17:43 UTC

  22 points

  on: 3 Levels of Ra­tion­al­ity Verification

  I think that the most important skill a rationalist can have is the ability to assess the quality of other rationalists, and to participate effectively in team projects. A measurement of individual rationality has to include how well a randomly selected team including that individual performs on team rationality tests.

  So, I think that a rationalist ‘decathlon’ would consist of a variety of competitions between individuals and small teams including math/​logic problems, general knowledge tests, cooperative and non-cooperative game theory games, prediction markets, and engineering challenges (egg drops, programming robots to compete in some arena, etc.)

  But then there would be a second level, in which individuals and teams would compete in a prediction market in which they observe (by video recording) the deliberations of other teams on first-level problems and bet on their relative performance.

  And even a third level, in which individuals observe the deliberations of second-level teams and bet on their performance in that second-level prediction market.

  There are a variety of other things that might be interesting to measure—for example, what team sizes perform best, whether individual rationalism and team-participant rationalism are different skills, and whether team performance is best predicted by strongest member, average member, or weakest member.

  What links here?

  • Perplexed's comment on Effec­tive Ra­tion­al­ity Outreach by paulfchristiano (19 Mar 2011 20:00 UTC; 2 points)

• Perplexed 22 Jan 2011 15:15 UTC

  22 points

  on: The Illu­sion of Sameness

  I consider it likely that among those reading this, more of you grew up in families of intelligent, educated people than the national average. It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families exceeds the norm. Not all, certainly. Quite possibly not even the majority. However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don’t think like you.

  Those of us who grew up in religious, working class families and were the first in our families to attend college also had the experience of learning that there are people who don’t think like us. We just experienced it earlier in life. And then when we went off to college, we slowly discovered that there are people who do think like us.

  My experience dictated that the conversation would start with “Isn’t this a terrible thing?” and proceed to “Oil companies shouldn’t be allowed to make a mess they can’t clean up.” or “Shouldn’t we invest in clean energy?” However, though the conversation began as I expected, I was subsequently informed that the oil companies were fully capable of cleaning it up, and that the reason it had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama.

  This was particularly shocking to me because there were no warning signs. These were people who were all educated to a Master’s Degree level. I had spoken to several on more innocuous topics, and they seemed both interesting and intelligent. …

  How could I have better predicted this?

  Why were you shocked? Unless the degrees were in Petroleum Extraction Engineering, you have no reason to expect them to be any better informed on the relevant issues than the general population. (And incidentally, unless your own degrees are in those fields, you have no particular reason to be confident about your own opinions.) On this kind of issue, we all get our opinions and factoids from the media. Our choice of which media. Fox or MSNBC. And if it shocks you that some intelligent people choose to get their news fix from conservative sources, then you really have led a sheltered life. If the thing that shocked you is that the conservative media were saying bad things about the federal regulators, then maybe you ought to sample from right wing sources more often, if only to keep your finger on the national pulse.

  I am not only confused, I am viscerally uncomfortable. How do we model for people whose cultural contexts and information delivering authorities are fundamentally different from our own, without lumping them into a faceless group?

  By getting to know those people and by becoming familiar with those cultural contexts and information delivering authorities. Duh! It is really not difficult. Actually, if you analyze, you will probably discover that you are already expending considerable effort trying to insulate yourself from those people and those sources of information. Just stop expending all that effort building walls to maintain your accustomed comfort level. And then, after a short period of discomfort, you will find that your comfort range has become extended.

  And you may discover something else by occasionally placing yourself in the ‘silent minority’ position. Which is that some of the people in your own select group of friends may secretly harbor unorthodox positions on some political issues, but keep their mouths shut to avoid trouble. There is no way the opinions you encountered upstate could have been “shocking” to you unless your usual circle practices a particularly powerful kind of censorship-by-exclusion.

  What links here?

  • prase's comment on The Illu­sion of Sameness by Elizabeth (23 Jan 2011 10:18 UTC; 0 points)

• Perplexed 26 Mar 2011 18:23 UTC

  20 points

  on: Ver­ify­ing Ra­tion­al­ity via Ra­tion­alPoker.com

  Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.

  Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/​Singularity Institute. That way, the more poker you play after you sign up, the more money you direct towards raising the sanity waterline and creating provably friendly artificial intelligence.

  This all sounds great, but there is a nearly complete absence of numbers in this posting or at your site. Here are some estimates I came up with that may provide a more complete picture.

  Suppose you sign up to play using one of their affiliate links, and then become very good at poker. Good enough to win (on average) $50/​hr playing. If you play 20 hrs/​week and 50 weeks/​year, that gives you a comfortable $50K/​year income (before taxes) and plenty of time for outside interests. So far, so good.

  Next, I’m going to assume that you make that $50/​hr by playing in 5 person games in which each of you bets about $2000 per hour. You win back a collection of pots totalling $2050 each hour—hence your $50 ‘earnings’. What happens to the other interested parties?

  Well, the total ‘action’ is $10000 per hour. From this, the ‘house’ rakes its cut of 5% or 500 dollars. $100 of that is attributable to you, one of the five players at the table. Of that $100 gross revenue, the house is going to claim ‘administrative expenses’ of about $75, leaving $25 of net revenue. The affiliate’s cut of that is 20% leaving a payment to the affiliate (SIAI) of $5/​hr. That is about $5K/​year toward raising waterlines and constructing FAI. Cool!

  But what about the 4 less rational people sitting there at the virtual poker table with you ( the ‘fish’). Since poker is a zero sum game, and you are winning $50, and the house is raking $500, that is $550, or $137.50 each /​ hr that the fish are losing. If they play poker as much as you, they are losing $137.5K/​yr. Luckily for them, they are probably not irrational enough to keep doing this for long. Instead, for the sake of your own moral peace of mind, imagine that you have 40 victims, each playing poker against you for only 2 hrs/​week. So each of your 40 victims loses only $13,750/​yr. They can afford it. right?

  So here is the bottom line. SIAI gets $5K. You get $50K, having spent 1000 hours that could have been spent actually creating something useful. The house rakes $500,000 of which they call $375,000 ‘administrative costs’. Of the $125,000 ‘net’, $25K gets distributed to the affiliates - $5K to SIAI (who recruited you) and $20K to the less virtuous websites that recruited the ‘fish’.

  And the fish? Each of these 40 fools is soon separated from $13,750 of his or her money—an amount that will hurt (a lot) but which they can probably afford. Think of it as a semi-voluntary lesson in rationality.

  Who knew that making the world a better place could be so … exciting?

• Perplexed 20 Mar 2011 3:11 UTC

  20 points

  on: A Ra­tion­al­ist’s Ac­count of Ob­jec­tifi­ca­tion?

  I think that objectification of people is kind of like defecation or masturbation. I do it sometimes, I’m pretty sure everyone else does it too, I don’t think it is particularly unhealthy, but for some reason people object when you do it publicly.

  So I don’t.

• Perplexed 20 Jan 2011 16:31 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Theists are wrong; is the­ism?

  You seem to be dictating that theist beliefs and simulationist beliefs should not be collected together into the same reference class. (The reason for this dictat seems to be that you disrespect the one and are intrigued by the other—but never mind that.)

  However, this does not seem to address the point which I think the OP was making. Which seems to be that arguments for (against) theism and arguments for (against) simulationism should be collected together in the same reference class. That if we do so, we discover that many of the counter-arguments that we advance against theist apologetics are (objectively speaking) equally effective against simulationist speculation. Yet (subjectively speaking) we don’t feel they have the same force.

  Contempt for those with whom you disagree is one of the most dangerous traps facing an aspiring rationalist. I think that it would be a very good idea if the OP were to produce that posting on charity-in-interpretation which he mentioned.

  Next!

• Perplexed 13 Nov 2010 22:40 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 5

  what are the beliefs that I would need to hold for this sentence [about acausal consequences] to make sense, and how would they pay their rent?

  the rent-paying thing is above my pay grade.

  Above my pay grade too, but as I am an amateur, I won’t let that deter me.

  First, you would need to believe that free will is an oversimplification. More specifically, that what may appear to be a free-will moral decision made today (about saving a murderer, say) is actually a decision the making of which is spread over your entire past life (for example, the point in your life where you formed moral opinions about murder, revenge, and so on). And not just spread over your life, but actually spread over the entire history of our species, in the course of which the genes and cultural traditions that contribute to your own moral intuitions were formed.

  Second, you would have to believe that your moral decision today is so correlated to those aspects of the past, and those aspects are so correlated in a causal and deterrent way to the past behavior of potential murderers, that your decision nominally made today about punishing a murderer is correlated “kinda-sorta-causally” with the number of past murders.

  And third, you would have to realize that if you actually refer to this as a “causal” relationship, you probably will no longer be invited to the best dinner parties, and therefore you would choose to call this relationship “acausal”. It is basically a way of signaling your own mental hygiene—scare quotes would also suffice, but the word acausal has become entrenched.

  Rent paying. Hmmm. I’m going to get cute here and say that this holding these beliefs is not not really about paying your rent. It is about paying your taxes. Your duty to society and all that.

  What links here?

  • thomblake's comment on Stupid Ques­tions Open Thread Round 2 by OpenThreadGuy (3 May 2012 18:59 UTC; 0 points)

• Perplexed 14 Apr 2011 5:11 UTC

  18 points

  on: How not to be a Naïve Computationalist

  I like the irreverent attitude exemplified by this posting. But the posting might have been improved if it had attempted to provide a short characterization of what a Naïve Computationalist believes that a wise and well-informed Computationalist does not. And vise versa.

• Perplexed 17 Feb 2011 23:35 UTC

  18 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ist Hobbies

  Human interaction—teaches human interaction.

  Many people consider this activity and skill to be valuable in themselves, but rationalists have a particular reason for pursuing this. This is because it is easier to notice that someone else is confused than to notice it about oneself. And the analysis of other people’s confusion involves skills which transfer directly to the analysis of your own confusion.

  The most important skill learned here is the identification of hidden, unshared assumptions. If you and your interlocutor each think that the other is being illogical, then the most likely explanation is not a lapse in logic, but rather an assumption that one of you is making and the other is not. Teasing out that assumption and shining a bright light on it is a necessary rationalist skill, even if you do all of your important thinking alone.

• Perplexed 13 Dec 2010 20:58 UTC

  18 points

  on: What top­ics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?

  I would like to see sequences of top level postings providing semi-technical tutorials on topics of interest to rationalists.

  As one example of a collection of related topics: Information Theory, K-complexity, and Computational Complexity

• Perplexed 5 May 2011 20:30 UTC

  17 points

  on: Your Evolved Intuitions

  Much of the commentary here has turned into yet another debate about just how useless and unscientific evolutionary psychology is. (Notice how I cleverly signaled my own viewpoint about the debate. :) But do we really need to have this debate?

  It occurs to me that Luke’s argument (about the misuse of intuitions by philosophers) really is independent of whether present-day evolutionary psychologists know what they are talking about. All Luke’s arguments, if I understand them, really need is that some intuitions are innate and derived from our evolutionary history, some are learned, and that some are generated on the spot by fallible cognitive processes. It really doesn’t matter whether an innate intuition arises as an evolutionary adaptation or an evolutionary accident—it still doesn’t provide a philosopher what he needs to ground his arguments.

  If I am right here, and the validity of evolutionary psychology is irrelevant to Luke’s arguments, then lets move on. We can debate whether the validity of evolutionary psychology is irrelevant more generally at some other time.