The argument doesn’t understand what the moral uncertainty is over; it’s taking moral uncertainty over whether fetuses are people in the standard quasi-deontological framework and trying to translate it into a total utilitarian framework, which winds up with fairly silly math (what could the 70% possibly refer to? Not to the value of the future person’s life years- nobody disputes that once a person is alive, their life has normal, 100% value.)
Randaly
Karma: 2,108
No I’m not. The Fizzbuzz article cited above is a wiki article. It is not based on original research, and draws from other articles. You will find the article I linked to linked to in a quote at the top of the first article in the ‘articles’ section of the wiki article; it is indeed the original source for the claim.
The quote does not claim there has been no filtering done before the interview stage. If you read the original source it explicitly states that it is considering all aplicants, not only those who make it to the interview stage: “We get between 100 and 200 [resumes] per opening.”
You seem to be confusing applicants with people who are given interviews. Typically less than half of applicants even make it to the interview stage- sometimes much, much less than half.
There’s also enough evidence out there to say that this level of applicants is common. Starbucks had over a hundred applicants for each position it offered recently; Proctor and Gamble had around 500. This guy also says it’s common for programmers.
unless you believe more than 100 people on the average get interviewed before anyone is hired
This is accurate for the top companies- as of 2011, Google interviewed over 300 people for each spot filled. Many of these people were plausibly interviewed multiple times, or for multiple positions.
Maybe, but this is the exact opposite of polymath’s claim- not that fighting a modern state is so difficult as to be impossible, but that fighting one is sufficiently simple that starting out without any weapons is not a significant handicap.
(The proposed causal impact of gun ownership on rebellion is more guns → more willingness to actually fight against a dictator (acquiring a weapon is step that will stop many people who would otherwise rebel from doing so) → more likelihood that government allies defect → more likelihood that the government falls. I’m not sure if I endorse this, but polymath’s claim is definitely wrong.)
(As an aside, this is historically inaccurate: almost all of the weapons in Syria and Libya came either from defections from their official militaries (especially in Libya), or from foreign donors, not from private purchases. However, private purchases were important in Mexico and Ireland.)
The Syrians and Libyans seem to have done OK for themselves. Iraq and likely Afghanistan were technically wins for our nuclear and drone-armed state, but both were only marginal victories, Iraq was a fairly near run thing, and in neither case were significant defections from the US military a plausible scenario.
SlateStarCodex.
Thanks for your response!
1) Hmmm. OK, this is pretty counter-intuitive to me.
2) I’m not totally sure what you mean here. But, to give a concrete example, suppose that the most moral thing to do would be to tile the universe with very happy kittens (or something). CEV, as I understand, would create as many of these as possible, with its finite resources; whereas g/g* would try to create much more complicated structures than kittens.
3) Sorry, I don’t think I was very clear. To clarify: once you’ve specified h, a superset of human essence, why would you apply the particular functions g/g to h? Why not just directly program in ‘do not let h cease to exist’? g/g do get around the problem of specifying ‘cease to exist’, but this seems pretty insignificant compared to the difficulty of specifying h. And unlike with programming a supercontroller to preserve an entire superset of human essence, g/g* might wind up with the supercontroller focused on some parts of h that are not part of the human essence- so it doesn’t completely solve the definition of ‘cease to exist’.
(You said above that h is an improvement because it is a superset of human essence. But we can equally program a supercontroller not to let a superset of human essence cease to exist, once we’ve specified said superset.)
Note: I may have badly misunderstood this, as I am not familiar with the notion of logical depth. Sorry if I have!
I found this post’s arguments to be much more comprehensible than your previous ones; thanks so much for taking the time to rewrite them. With that said, I see three problems:
1) ‘-D(u/h)’ optimizes for human understanding of (or, more precisely, human information of) the universe, such that given humans you can efficiently get out a description of the rest of the universe. This also ensures that whatever h is defined as continues to exist. But many (indeed, even almost all) humans values aren’t about entanglement with the universe. Because h isn’t defined explicitly, it’s tough for me to state a concrete scenario where this goes wrong. (This isn’t a criticism of the definition of h, I agree with your decision not to try to tightly specify it.) But, e.g. it’s easy to imagine that humans having any degree of freedom would be inefficient, so people would end drug-addled, in pods, with videos and audio playing continuously to put lots of carefully selected information into the humans. This strikes me as a poor outcome.
2) Some people (e.g. David Pearce (?) or MTGandP) argue that the best possible outcome is essentially tiled- that rather than have large and complicated beings human-scale or larger, it would be better to have huge numbers of micro-scale happy beings. I disagree, but I’m not absolutely certain, and I don’t think we can rule out this scenario without explicitly or implicitly engaging with it.
3) As I understand it, in 3.1 you state that you aren’t claiming that g is an optimal objective function, just that it leaves humans alive. But in this case ‘h’, which was not ever explicitly defined, is doing almost all of the work: g is guaranteed to preserve ‘h’, which you verbally identified with the physical state of humanity. But because you haven’t offered a completely precise definition of humanity here, what the function as described above would preserve is ‘a representation of the physical state of humanity including its biological makeup—DNA and neural architecture—as well as its cultural and technological accomplishments’. This doesn’t strike me as a significant improvement from simply directly programming in that humans should survive, for whatever definition of humans/humanity selected; while it leaves the supercontroller with different incentives, in neither scenario are said incentives aligned with human morality.
(My intuition regarding g* is even less reliable than my intuition regarding g; but I think all 3 points above still apply.)
They are posted here.
IMHO, good starting points are ‘Definiability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic’ and ‘Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma’.
I, and presumably shminux as well, though that you were claiming that there’s actually a good chance that Obama actually does want to see the American ‘empire’ collapse, not that Putin thought that he would.
You’re taking a very inside-view approach to analyzing something that you have no direct experience with. (Assuming you don’t.) This isn’t a winning approach. Outside view predicts that 90% of startups will fail.
Startups’ high reward is associated with high risk. But most people are risk averse, and insurance schemes create moral hazard.
re: public speaking: There are in person groups like Toastmasters. Alternately, you can record yourself speaking about something and try to give yourself a self-critique.
Here’s an exercise I’ve run before: Person 1 picks a word at random; Person 2 immediately starting speaking about something relevant. At 15 second intervals for 1-2 minutes, Person 1 throws out new words; Person 2 needs to keep speaking about the new words, and to flow smoothly between topics. (You can substitute Wikipedia’s random article button for Person 1.)
Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are … well-fed
You mean well-fed in the sense of “not starving,” but that doesn’t imply “well-fed” in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There’s reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there’s good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.
The obvious way to pull the rope sideways on this issue is to advocate for replacing conventional nuclear devices with neutron bombs.
Taken.
As I understand it, the mainstream interpretation of that document is not that Bin Laden is attacking America for its freedom; rather, AQ’s war aims were the following:
End US support of Israel (also, Russia and India)
End the presence of US troops in the Middle East (especially Israel)
End US support for Muslim apostate dictators
See, e.g., this wikipedia article, or The Looming Tower. Eliezer is correct that AQ’s attacks were not caused by AQ’s hted of American freedoms.