Raelifin
Be aware that having tried and failed at something does not mean it does not work. That’s generalizing from a single example. Remember: “The apprentice laments ‘My art has failed me’, while the master says ‘I have failed my art’”. This is not to say you’re necessarily wrong, just that we need to take a data-based approach, rather than rely on anecdotes.
Hello northern Ohio! My name is Max, and I recently moved up here from Columbus. I’ve attended a few LW meetups before, and would enjoy getting a regular thing happening in Cleveland. ^_^
voting is rational if you...
This is a minor objection, but voting can’t be rational and it can’t be irrational. Voting isn’t a system of thinking. You may want to rephrase your argument as “voting is optimal if you...”
And as a followup, even if you’re correct about the probabilities (which I’m not sure you are), it’s not intrinsically optimal to vote, even if you care about the outcome. One must always weigh the opportunity cost of an action, and the opportunity cost depends on the person.
If a superintelligent AI is being built and an equal amount of Yudkowsky’s time will decrease the extinction probability by the same amount as voting would increase candidate X’s election probability, then it’s clearly not optimal for Yudkowsky to vote, because the neg-utility of extinction far outweighs the neg-utility of an unfortunate election.
(Primary author, here.)
This is a good point, and obviously there’s a lot of tension between phyggish meme-sharing/codewords and a desire to be more inclusive and not so scary. An earlier draft actually made it an explicit point to talk about the perception of phyg, as I think it’s one of the biggest PR issues we have.
The pamphlet was written to try and help people not feel so overwhelmed by coming into a space so loaded down with jargon, but you’re right that it perpetuates the problem. I encourage people to copy and edit this, perhaps tailoring it to the level of jargon and the specific goals of your group.
This meetup was canceled due to people being sick and busy.
The Cleveland meetup was canceled due to people being busy and sick.
Survey completed! Making a note here: Huge success!
These are great suggestions! (As are others, suggested in other comments.) Thank you!
When I gave my presentation last night I made sure that people knew that it was called the ITT by others and that was what to search for (I also pointed them to UnEY). I’m still on the fence about pushing the name (ITT is really hard to say) but I’ll keep your reservations in mind.
I’ll keep you informed of the details moving forward. :-)
Yikes. If all responses are this good, I’m sure the judges will have a rough time! Thanks so much for your words. At some point you’ll need to PM me with a description of your actual beliefs so I can give feedback to the judges and see how you do.
I really like this entry. Don’t forget to PM me your actual opinion so I can give feedback to the judges and see how you do. ^_^
They already did. I encourage you to make your prediction, however (the full judging round will start on Monday or Tuesday depending on my schedule).
Yes. I’ll be providing the answer key in the stats post.
I pretty much agree with you. I think it’ll be interesting to get the data out of this and see how competent the judges are compared to Leah’s Christianity tests. A few people in my local group thought this would be a good topic.
Great job, you two! Don’t forget to give your elephant and rider some time to “discuss” the findings internally before making the final judgment. I find that my elephant will slowly come around unless there’s something important I’ve overlooked, which is a major risk when doing explicit calculations. For instance, I notice there’s no representation of location, which tends to be a very important factor in deciding where to live.
This is a very good point, and I ought to have mentioned it in the post. The point remains about overconfidence, however. Those who did decide to try (even given that it was hard) didn’t have the mental red-flag that perhaps their best try should be saying “I don’t know” with or without walking away.
Every judge being close to 50% would be bizarre. If I flip 13 coins 53 times I would expect that many of those sets of 13 will stray from the 6.5/13 expected ratio. The big question is whether anyone scored high enough or low enough that we can say “this wasn’t just pure chance”.
In retrospect I ought to have included options closer to 50%. I didn’t expect that they’d be so necessary! You are absolutely right, though.
A big part of LessWrong, I think, is learning to overcome our mental failings. Perhaps we can use this as a lesson that the best judge writes down their credence before seeing the options, then picks the option that is the best match to what they wrote. I know that I, personally, try (and often fail) to use this technique when doing multiple-choice tests.
As Douglas_Knight points out, it’s only 10⁄12, a probability of ~0.016. In a sample of ~50 we should see about one person at that level of accuracy or inaccuracy, which is exactly what we see. I’m no more inclined to give #14 a medal than I am to call #43 a dunce. See the histogram I stuck on to the end of the post for more intuition about why I see these extreme results as normal.
I absolutely will fess up to exaggerating in that sentence for the sake of dramatic effect. Some judges, such as yourself, were MUCH less wrong. I hope you don’t mind me outing you as one of the people who got a positive score, and that’s a reflection of you being better calibrated. That said, if you say “I’m 70% confident” four times, and only get it right twice, that’s evidence that you were still (slightly) overconfident when you thought “decently able to discern genuine writing from fakery”.
The elevator pitch that got me most excited about rationality is from Raising the Sanity Waterline. It only deals with epistemic rationality, which is an issue, and it, admittedly, is best fit towards people who belong to a sanity-focused minority, like atheism or something political. It was phrased with regard to religion originally, so I’ll keep it this way here, but it can easily be tailored.
“What is rationality?”
“Why is rationality important? Shouldn’t we focus on religion first?”