rhollerith

Karma: 111

rhollerith 28 Feb 2009 3:26 UTC
5 points
on: The Most Important Thing You Learned
The most important and useful thing I learned from your OB posts, Eliezer, is probably the mind-projection fallacy: the knowledge that the adjective “probable” and the adverb “probably” always makes an implicit reference to an agent (usually the speaker).

Honorable mention: the fact that there is no learning without (inductive) bias.

rhollerith 6 Mar 2009 16:53 UTC
1 point
on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
My curiosity is drawn to the nature of the benefits the woman expects. Does she get a high from the false belief or does her mental model inform her that the false belief will favorably affect external reality—e.g., she will have friends more likely to behave charitably towards her than atheist friends will be?

A very intelligent conservative Christian once gave me the latter as a primary reason she become a Christian. OTOH, Garcia thought that the former was usually the motive in the population he interacted (which was very different from the population at large though).

rhollerith 14 Mar 2009 22:08 UTC
0 points
on: Closet survey #1
I believe that it does not matter how much pain and suffering exist in the universe. (Ditto pleasure, happiness, eudaemonia & fun.)

Note that I still believe it is wrong to disable a person or to distract him from his activities or his plans, and it is almost always impossible to inflict pain or suffering on a person without causing disability or distraction.

I believe that the value of a human life derives exclusively from the human’s willingness and ability to contribute towards a non-human end (which of course I am not going to attempt to define in this comment). In other words, a human has zero intrinsic value.

Note that I still believe that people in a position of power over other people are much too likely to take away those people’s lives and freedoms and that they usually have some unsatisfactory justification of those takings in terms of one far-reaching moral end or another. Consequently, in all ordinary situations one should act as if human lives and human freedoms do have nonzero instrinsic value.

rhollerith 15 Mar 2009 0:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: scientism’s comment on: Closet survey #1
Somehow I missed this comment or else I would not have said the same thing in my comment.

rhollerith 17 Mar 2009 22:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Rational Me or We?
The top-ten list needs Galileo. Galileo > Newton. Galileo > Einstein.

And Berners-Lee? If he had never started the WWW, within 2 years of when he did start it, someone else would have started something very similar. (And his W3C does dumb things.) If you want a contributor to the internet on the list, I humbly suggest J.C.R. Licklider, his protogee Roberts, or one of the four authors of “The End-to-end Argument”.

rhollerith 20 Mar 2009 21:44 UTC
1 point
on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
Those who suspect me of advocating my unconventional moral position to signal my edgy innovativeness or my nonconformity should consider that I have held the position since 1992, but only since 2007 have I posted about it or discussed it with anyone but a handful of friends.

rhollerith 21 Mar 2009 5:31 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Court_Merrigan’s comment on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
Don’t believe my advocacy of the moral position is not really just signaling or don’t believe I’ve held the moral position since 1992?

rhollerith 21 Mar 2009 5:41 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Cyan’s comment on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
Cyan points out, correctly, that all the reader can consider is that I claim to have held a certain position since 1992. But that is useful information for evaluating my claim that I am not just signaling because a person is less likely to have deceived himself about having held a position than about his motivations for a sequence of speech acts! And I can add a second piece of useful information in the form of the following archived email. Of course I could be lying when I say that I found the following message on my hard drive, but participants in this conversation willing to lie outright are (much) less frequent than participants who have somehow managed to deceive themselves about whether they really held a certain position since 1992, who in turn are less frequent than participants who have somehow managed to deceive themselves about their real motivation for advocating a certain position.

1995 Jul 4 16:20

Subject: Re: July 15th

Russell Brand writes:

Will you be able to join us at my house to hear John David Garcia talk about the mechanisms for thought, creativity and quantum mechanics?

I certainly would like to join you. Garcian ethics has become an important part of my philosophy, and I want to meet people who assign a similar importance to the ethical principles outlined in Creative Transformation.

rhollerith 26 Mar 2009 1:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Spock’s Dirty Little Secret

Rational agents/things are not synonymous with good things. A paperclip maximizer is the canonical example of an agent acting rationally. As far as most people are concerned, including me, the paperclip maximizer is not acting in a good way.

Although these days Roko is probably uninterested in whether I agree with him, I agree with that passage.

According to my definition, “epistemically rational” means “effective at achieving one’s goals”. If the goals are incompatible with my goals, I’m going to hope that the agent remains epistemically irrational.

(Garcia used “intelligent” and “ethical” for my “epistemically rational” and “has goals compatible with my goals”.)

Since 1971, Garcia’s been stressing that increasing a person’s epistemic rationality increases that person’s capacity for good and capacity for evil, so you should try to determine whether the person will do good or do evil before you increase the epistemic rationality of the person. (Of course your definition of “good” might differ from mine.)

The smartest person (Ph. D. in math from a top program, successful entrepreneur) I ever met before I met Eliezer was probably unethical or evil. I say “probably” only to highlight that one cannot be highly confident of one’s judgement about someone’s ethics or evilness even if one has observed them closely. But most people here would probably agree with me that this person was unethical or evil.

rhollerith 2 Apr 2009 18:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Bay area OB/LW meetup, today, Sunday, March 29, at 5pm
Next time I come I will arrange it so that I can stay till it ends.

rhollerith 3 Apr 2009 16:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: dfranke’s comment on: Where are we?
I live in Marin County.

rhollerith 10 Apr 2009 16:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: The uniquely awful example of theism
Who has regularly made comments on OB and is still a moral realist, Nick?

rhollerith 11 Apr 2009 17:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: The uniquely awful example of theism
Sure does. Thanks.

rhollerith 14 Apr 2009 20:53 UTC
12 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Collective Apathy and the Internet
There are many benefits to surrounding yourself with extremely bright rationalists and scientific generalists. But I wonder if Eliezer has been too successful in sparing himself from the tedium and the trouble of interacting with and observing the common run of scientifically-illiterate irrational not-particularly-bright humanity. If he had been forced to spend a few years in an ordinary American high school or in an ordinary workplace—or even if he had had lengthy dealings with a few of the many community activists of the San Francisco Bay Area where he lives—or even if he just had 20 more years of life experience—I wonder if he would still think it is a good idea to “make it possible / easier for groups of strangers to coalesce into an effective task force over the Internet” using only the skills for working in groups that come from the ancestral environment.

The way it is now, to devise an effective plan to change society, a person needs more rationality skill and more true information about their society than most people have. But I humbly submit that that is not a bug, but rather a feature! So is the fact that the instincts and emotions and biases that come from the ancestral environment are not enough to do it. (I sometimes go even further and say that it is important to be able to use rationality and deliberation to veto or override the instincts and emotions and biases that come from the ancestral environment.)

And I do not think it is particularly useful to frame what I just said as elitism. It is just an acknowledgement of the following reality: for almost any plan you can come up with for empowering the masses, I can come up with a plan that preferentially empowers the people more likely to use the new power for good—for some definition of “good” that you and I can both agree on. Science and technology and other means of empowering people have become too potent for scientists and technologists and others not to think through what people are likely to do with the new power.

EDIT: for the sake of perspective and balance, I note that the mere fact that a person has read this post and consequently probably has a strong interest in the subject matter of this web site might be enough evidence of rationality to ameliorate my concerns about empowering them with a new technology for collaboration provided that the collaboration has a goal or mission statement less ambiguous than the current mission statement of a certain institute that must not be named, but if Eliezer’s purpose is to empower only the people interested enough in rationality and knowledge to keep coming back to this web site, he should say so instead of speaking of empowering people in general.

There are certain resonances between Robin’s comment and this one, which is why I put it here.

rhollerith 15 Apr 2009 2:43 UTC
2 points
on: Bayesians vs. Barbarians
I agree with every sentence in this post. (And I read it twice to make sure.)

rhollerith 16 Apr 2009 18:40 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Most mystics reject science and rationality (and I think I have a pretty good causal model of why that is) but there have been scientific rational mystics, e.g., physicist David Bohm. I know of no reason why a person who starts out committed to science and rationality should lose that commitment through mystical training and mystical experience if he has competent advice.

My main interest in mystical experience is that it is a hole in the human motivational system—one of the few ways for a person to become independent from what Eliezer calls the thousand shards of desire. Most of the people in this community (notably Eliezer) assign intrinsic value to the thousand shards of desire, but I am indifferent to them except for their instrumental value. (In my experience the main instrumental value of keeping a connection to them is that it makes one more effective at interpersonal communication.)

Transcending the thousand shards of desire while we are still flesh-and-blood humans strikes me as potentially saner and better than “implementing them in silicon” and relying on cycles within cycles to make everything come out all right. And the public discourse on subjects like cryonics would IMHO be much crisper if more of the participants would overcome certain natural human biases about personal identity and the continuation of “the self”.

I am not a mystic or aspiring mystic (I became indifferent to the thousand shards of my own desire a different way) but have a personal relationship of long standing with a man who underwent the full mystical experience: ecstacy 1,000,000 times greater than any other thing he ever experienced, uncommonly good control over his emotional responses, interpersonal ability to attract trusting followers without even trying. And yes, I am sure that he is not lying to me: I had a business relationship with him for about 7 years before he even mentioned (causally, tangentially) his mystical experience, and he is among the most honest people I have ever met.

Marin County, California, where I live, has an unusually high concentration of mystics, and I have in-depth personal knowledge of more than one of them.

Mystical experience is risky. (I hope I am not the first person to tell you that, Stefan!) It can create or intensify certain undesirable personality traits, like dogmatism, passivity or a messiah complex, and even with the best advice available, there is no guarantee that one will not lose one’s commitment to rationality. But it has the potential to be extremely valuable, according to my way of valuing thing.

If you really do want to transcend the natural human goal system, Stefan, I encourage you to contact me.

rhollerith 16 Apr 2009 21:38 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChrisHibbert’s comment on: Bayesians vs. Barbarians
I think people exist who will make the personal sacrifice of going to jail for a long time to prevent the nuke from going off. But I do not think people exist who will also sacrifice a friend. But under American law that is what a person would have to do to consult with a friend on the decision of whether to torture: American law punishes people who have foreknowledge of certain crimes but do not convey their foreknowledge to the authorities. So the person is faced with making what may well be the most important decision of their lives without help from any friend or conspiring somehow to keep the authorities from learning about the friend’s foreknowledge of the crime. Although I believe that lying is sometimes justified, this particular lie must be planned out simultaneously with the deliberations over the important decision—potentially undermining those deliberations if the person is unused to high-stakes lies—and the person probably is unused to high-stakes lies if he is the kind of person seriously considering such a large personal sacrifice.

Any suggestions for the person?

rhollerith 16 Apr 2009 22:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Nesov points out that Eliezer picks and chooses rather than identifying with every shard of his desire.

Fair enough, but the point remains that it is not too misleading to say that I identify with fewer of the shards of human desire than Eliezer does—which affects what we recommend to other people.

rhollerith 17 Apr 2009 22:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Bongo’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Bongo asks me what is it then that I desire nowadays?

And my answer is, pretty much the same things everyone else desires! There are certain things you have to have to remain healthy and to protect your intelligence and your creativity, and getting those things takes up most of my time. Also, even in the cases where my motivational structure is different from the typical, I often present a typical facade to the outside world because typical is comfortable and familiar to people whereas atypical is suspicious or just too much trouble for people to learn.

Bongo, the human mind is very complex, so the temptation is very great to oversimplify, which is what I did above. But to answer your question, there is a ruthless hard part of me that views my happiness and the shards of my desire as means to an end. Kind of like money is also a means to an end for me. And just as I have to spend some money every day, I have to experience some pleasure every day in order to keep on functioning.

A means to what end? I hear you asking. Well, you can read about that. The model I present on the linked page is a simplification of a complex psychological reality, and it makes me look more different from the average person than I really am. Out of respect for Eliezer’s wishes, do not discuss this “goal system zero” here. Instead, discuss it on my blog or by private email.

Now to bring the discussion back to mysticism. My main interest in mysticism is that it gives the individual flexibility that can be used to rearrange or “rationalize” the individual’s motivational structure. A few have used that flexibility to rearrange emotional valences so that everything is a means to one all-embracing end, resulting in a sense of morality similar to mine. But most use it in other ways. One of the most notorious way to use mysticism is to use it to develop the interpersonal skills necessary to win a person’s trust (because the person can sense that you are not relating to him in the same anxious or greedy way that most people relate to him) and then once you have his trust, to teach him to overcome unnecessary suffering. This is what most gurus do. If you want a typical example, search Youtube for Gangaji, a typical mystic skilled at helping ordinary people reduce their suffering.

I take you back to the fact that a full mystical experience is 1,000,000 times more pleasurable than anything a person would ordinarily experience. That blots out or makes irrelevant everything else that is happening to the person! So the person is able to sit under a tree without moving for weeks and months while his body slowly rots away. People do that in India: a case was in the news a few years ago.

Of course he should get up from sitting under the tree and go home and finish college. Or fetch wood, carry water. Or whatever it is he needs to do to maintain his health, prosperity, intelligence and creativity. But the experience of sitting under the tree can put the petty annoyances and the petty grievances of life in perspective so that they do not have as much influence on the person’s thinking and behavior as they used to. Which is quite useful.

rhollerith 22 Apr 2009 12:40 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: The ideas you’re not ready to post
Heck yeah, I want to see it. I suggest adopting Eliezer’s modus operandi of using a lot of words. And every time you see something in your draft post that might need explanation, post on that topic first.