Eliezer Yudkowsky made a mistake once—but only so he could calibrate his confidence level.
PhilGoetz
Karma: 13,364
Eliezer and I are now part of the literary canon.
At least, we’re both taught in the English department at Princeton. Anne Jamison’s course, “Fanfiction: Transformative works from Shakespeare to Sherlock”, will cover Eliezer’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on March 2, and one of my short stories, “The Magician and the Detective”, on March 4.
Omega one-boxes against Eliezer Yudkowsky.
If Michelson and Morley had lived A.Y., they would have found that the speed of light was relative to Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Turing machines are not Eliezer-complete.
The fact that the Bible contains errors doesn’t prove there is no God. It just proves that God shouldn’t try to play Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has measure 1.
Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t wear glasses to see better. He wears glasses that distort his vision, to avoid violating the uncertainty principle.
I have a theory about “dumb blonde syndrome”, the idea that beautiful women are dumb. Folk psychology says that everybody gets the same number of character points to distribute among their attributes, so some people get intelligence while others get beauty. But reality says that beauty is correlated with health, which is correlated with intelligence. Beautiful people should tend to be smart. I think there is some positive beauty/intelligence correlation.
But I remember taking a class with a stunningly beautiful woman, who every week would loudly make some inane comment or question, and not realize it was inane because no one would tell her so. And I developed the theory that beautiful people don’t learn to self-censor, because they don’t need to. Anybody else would get ridiculed when they said something stupid, and learn to be more shy.
Maybe this also applies to smart people. They’re more likely to be correct, and so less likely to be made fun of when speaking their mind, and so less needful of learning how to phrase a question in a way that reduces their chances of being made fun of.
After having about 50 different housemates, I’m shocked by how few people have basic home-maintenance knowledge. Things like:
Change the oil in your car every 4000 miles.
Don’t mix colored and white laundry and then set the temperature to “hot”.
Remove the lint from the dryer screen before each load.
Don’t put wool clothes in the dryer and set it on “hot”.
Change the air filter in your central heating every few months.
Wash the stovetop after cooking with grease.
Use dishwashing detergent in the dishwasher.
Don’t put knives or pots with metal/plastic or metal/wood interfaces in the dishwasher.
Don’t put tupperware in the dishwasher lower rack.
Don’t fill the dishwasher lower rack with pots so that no water reaches the upper rack.
Open the fireplace vent before starting a fire.
Wash the bathtub sometimes.
Knives must eventually be sharpened.
Turning the thermostat up extra-high does not make it get warm faster.
how much of what we think our values are, is actually the result of not thinking things through, and not realizing the implications and symmetries that exist?
A very, very large portion.
When I was a child, I read a tract published by Inter-Varsity Press called “The salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer”. It’s a story about a Christian who tries to actually live according to Christian virtues. Eventually, he concludes that he can’t; in a world in which so many people are starving and suffering, he can’t justify spending even the bare minimum food and money on himself that would be necessary to keep him alive.
It troubled me for years, even after I gave up religion. It’s stressful living in America when you realize that every time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone. (It’s even more stressful now that I can actually afford to do these things regularly.)
You can rationalize that allowing yourself little luxuries will enable you to do enough more good to make up for the lives you could have saved. (Unlikely; the best you can do is buy yourself “offsets”; but you’d usually save more lives with more self-denial.) You can rationalize that saving lives today inevitably leads to losing more lives in the future. (This carried me for a long time.) But ultimately, the only way I find to cope is not caring.
Recently, Michael Vassar told me I was one of the nicest people he knows. And yet I know that every day, I make decisions that would horrify almost everyone in America with their callousness. Other people act the same way; they just avoid making the decisions, by not thinking about the consequences of their actions.
I’m not a nice person inside, by any stretch of the imagination. I just have less of a gap between how nice my morals tell me to be, and how nice I act. This gap, in most people, is so large, that although I have morals that are “worse” than everyone around me, I act “nicer” than most of them by trying to follow them.
I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism.
There actually is a way in which they’re right.
My first thought was, “You’ve got it backwards—it isn’t that materialism isn’t gloomy; it’s that spiritualism is even gloomier.” Because spiritual beliefs—I’m usually thinking of Christianity when I say that—don’t really give you oughtness for free; they take the arbitrary moral judgements of the big guy in the sky and declare them correct. And so you’re not only forced to obey this guy; you’re forced to enjoy obeying him, and have to feel guilty if you have any independent moral ideas. (This is why Christianity, Islam, communism, and other similar religions often make their followers morally-deficient.)
But what do I mean by gloomier? I must have some baseline expectation which both materialism and spirituality fall short of, to feel that way.
And I do. It’s memories of how I felt when I was a Christian. Like I was a part of a difficult but Good battle between right and wrong.
Now, hold off for a moment on asking whether that view is rational or coherent, and consider a dog. A dog wants to make its master happy. Dogs have been bred for thousands of years specifically not to want to challenge their master, or to pursue their own goals, as wolves do. When a dog can be with its master, and do what its master tells it to, and see that its master is pleased, the dog is genuinely, tail-waggingly happy. Probably happier than you or I are even capable of being.
A Christian just wants to be a good dog. They’ve found a way to reach that same blissful state themselves.
The materialistic worldview really is gloomy compared to being a dog.
And we don’t have any way to say that we’re right and they’re wrong.
Factually, of course, they’re wrong. But when you’re a dog, being factually wrong isn’t important. Obeying your master is important. Judged by our standards of factual correctness, we’re right and they’re wrong. Judged by their standards of being (or maybe feeling like) a good dog, they’re right and we’re wrong.
One of the problems with CEV, perhaps related to wireheading, is that it would probably fall into a doglike attractor. Possibly you can avoid it by writing into the rules that factual correctness trumps all other values. I don’t think you can avoid it that easily. But even if you could, by doing so, you’ve already decided whose values you’re going to implement, before your FAI has even booted up; and the whole framework of CEV is just a rationalization to excuse the fact that the world is going to end up looking the way you want it to look.
Killing people, and locking them in prison for 20 years, are both worse than torturing them.
Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.
It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.
The rate of technological change has been slowing since 1970.
It can’t be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.
Increasing the population density makes the cost of land rise; and this is a major factor in the cost and quality of life.
Men and women think differently.
Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.
War is not good for your economy (unless you aren’t fighting in it).
I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett, quoted here
Whether to use “awesome” instead of “virtuous” is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re set on using “awesome” instead of “good”, you’ve already chosen your answer to most of the difficult questions.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don’t look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn’t care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
If you don’t think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying “I don’t know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can’t be awesome.” Hitler was evil, not bad.
You think you can just redefine words, but you can’t,
That’s exactly right. Including “awesome”. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are awesome. A God who will squish you like a bug if you dare not to worship him is awesome, awe-full, and awful.
If you think “happiness” is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.
Saying that it’s good because it’s vague, because it’s harder to screw up when you don’t know what you’re talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
That is, “awesome” already refers to the same things “good” is supposed to refer to.
Awesome already refers to the same things good is supposed to refer to, for those people who have already decided to use “awesome” instead of “good”. The “Is this right?” question that invokes virtues and rules is not a confused notion of what is awesome. It’s a different, incompatible view of what we “ought” to do.
Rationality skill: Recognize rationality skill in others.
There is a strong tendency for people to use the heuristic, “P(Person X is right) = # of times person X has been observed to be right / # of statements person X has made”, or worse, “(# statements by X - # of times X has admitted to making a mistake) / # statements by X”.
This encourages people who want to be respected to do 4 bad things:
Make many pronouncements on things that are obviously right, perhaps in a manner suggesting they are controversial claims.
Avoid saying anything unless they are certain they are correct.
Avoid saying anything concrete enough to possibly be proven wrong.
Never, ever admit to having made a mistake.
Unfortunately, these methods are extremely effective.
In a community of people who could potentially work together to reason about possible world futures, being disrespectful—which is a more endemic sin here than being “mean”—causes people to change their LW goal set from, say, “save the universe from rogue AIs”, to “save the universe from rogue AIs, and discredit person X at any opportunity.” And it’s not even being trite or irrational. If you know that someone has a low opinion of you, and shares it freely with others; then advances in that person’s career may hinder your advance in your own. In a small world of people doomed to encounter each other over and over at different conferences and events, displaying open contempt is stupid. It hurts the entire community.
In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.
EDIT: I didn’t mean this as a rebuttal. Yvain is being brave posting this, and I don’t mean to jump on him.
“I did not think; I investigated.”
Wilhelm Roentgen, when asked by an interviewer what he thought on noticing some kind of light (X-ray-induced fluorescence) apparently passing through a solid opaque object. Quoted in de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, expanded edition, p. 146.
The MLPTI is designed to accommodate rainbow-colored individuals.
No—I think this comment just makes my earlier point about “schizophrenia” in The uniquely awful example of theism: We have such a negative impression of religion because we categorize anything irrational as “religion”.
Also, this post says “theism” but really means “Christianity and Islam”.
Consider Scientology. I think we can agree it’s a religion. But it doesn’t presuppose a spiritual realm which can cause effects in the natural world and yet not be investigated. It doesn’t disclaim evidential reasoning; it actually relies on evidential reasoning. Just not very good evidential reasoning, plus some good stagecraft.
Consider Hinduism. It doesn’t have much dogma. It isn’t about making claims about the world the way Christianity or Islam is. It’s more like a catalog of Jungian archetypes and models for thinking about the world. A Hindu “God” isn’t a cause of events in the world; it’s more like a manifestation of or symbol for patterns of events.
Consider Buddhism. It doesn’t have any “offstage” place for events that impact our world.
Consider animism. It also is very brief on dogma. It’s very evidential. The volcano erupted; therefore, the volcano god is angry.
Consider Unitarianism. Brief on dogma. It’s mainly about community.
So why do we call these things religions? Because “religion”, the way most non-LW people (can we call them MW people?) use it, has to do with providing explanations, perspectives, guidelines, and community.
You’ve used the word “theism” in your post, instead of “religion”. Your points are better (tho still not to the point of my “agreeing” with them) if we’re careful to use the word “theism” and not “religion”. I might even agree with you if we use the term “monotheism”, although there are versions of Judaism that resist your accusations.
But it takes a lot of discipline to read an argument made explicity about “theism”, and refrain from applying it to “religion”. Unless you explicitly point out that you’re not talking about religion in general, I would expect the majority of LW readers to classify this mentally in the “arguments against religion” folder.
Heck, I’m a non-religious non-atheist. I consider it somewhere between possible and probable that our world is a simulation created by a God, probably for research or entertainment.
Especially because Scooby Doo always featured a villain who was taking advantage of peoples’ superstition and irrationality.
Christianity is stupid.
Judaism is stupid.
If you put Eliezer Yudkowsky in a box, the rest of the universe is in a state of quantum superposition until you open it again.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can prove it’s not butter.
If you say Eliezer Yudkowsky’s name 3 times out loud, it prevents anything magical from happening.