Riothamus

Karma: 56

Riothamus 8 Oct 2015 13:19 UTC
2 points
on: [Link] Tetlock on the power of precise predictions to counter political polarization
How does this idea square with elections in the United States? Consider pollsters; their job is to make specific predictions based on understood methods using data gathered with also understood methods.

Despite what was either fraud or tremendous incompetence in the last Presidential election cycle on the part of ideological pollsters, and the high degree of public attention paid to it, polarization has not meaningfully decreased in any way I can observe.

I therefore expect that making the candidates generate specific predictions would have little overall effect on polarization.

Riothamus 12 Oct 2015 21:46 UTC
4 points
on: Rationality Reading Group: Part K: Letting Go
The most interesting segment of this section was The Ritual. I find the problem of how to go about making an effective practice very interesting. I would also like to draw attention to this section:

“I concede,” Jeffreyssai said. Coming from his lips, the phrase was spoken with a commanding finality. There is no need to argue with me any further: You have won.

I experienced a phenomenon recently that trends to act as a brake on letting go: the commentary following concession. I was having a conversation with someone, and expressed an opinion. They countered, and after a few moments’ consideration I saw they had completely invalidated my premise. When I said so, the conversation came to a halt as they asked ‘Did I just win an argument?’ When I said ‘Yup,’ they said ‘Write that down!’

This speaks to the way we value how we argue. Refusing to concede is a way to demonstrate commitment and strength. I have on more than one occasion experienced a modicum of ridicule for agreeing too quickly, from the person I was agreeing with. When I was younger, I even did this myself—yet it is insane as I reflect on it. I felt argument was a competition, and winning too easily was like a sporting event where one team played abysmally; no entertainment value. I reflect that I should dedicate more effort to arguing for the sake of exploration.

The person with whom I had the exchange has no knowledge of or interest in rationality. The experience happening so soon on the heels of reading served to illustrate that while developing the field of rationality may rely on shared complex ideas and values, developing the practice of rationality may not.

Riothamus 16 Oct 2015 15:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Stupid questions thread, October 2015
You have oversimplified to uselessness.

A common counter-example is people who do not want this job, for example because it pays less than their current lifestyle costs to support. It isn’t lazy, it is making the smart economic decision.

You are also assuming that the trouble of traveling to and from an interview is where the stress and effort lies. I would only credit that as the case if they had a high-demand skill set and were traveling across the country for the in-person interview, which is highly unlikely to apply to someone drawing unemployment benefits. The stress and effort stems from preparation before and performance during an interview, neither of which apply if the goal is to fail at it.

Riothamus 16 Oct 2015 16:13 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Bound_up’s comment on: Stupid questions thread, October 2015
I find it most relevant to planning and prediction. It helps greatly with realizing that I am not an exception, and so I should take the data seriously.

In terms of things that changed when my beliefs did, I submit the criminal justice system as an example. I now firmly think about crime in terms of individuals being components of a social system, and I am exclusively interested in future prevention of crime. I am indifferent to moral punishment for it.

Riothamus 16 Oct 2015 20:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Stupid questions thread, October 2015
Ah—I appear to have misread your comment, then.

Would I be correct in limiting my reading of your remarks to rebutting the generalization you quoted?

Riothamus 19 Oct 2015 17:16 UTC
4 points
on: [Link] arguman.org, an argument analysis platform
This looks to be a very good example of the dangers of a little bit of rationality, or a little bit of intelligence. The layout encourages deploying Fully General Counter Arguments. There appears to be no mechanism to ensure the information on which the arguments are based is either good, or agreed upon.

Riothamus 30 Nov 2015 1:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: HungryHobo’s comment on: [Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS
According to historical analysis of every resolved insurgency since 1944, conducted by RAND, the best predictor of success in defeating one is achieving conventional military superiority. Details here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR291z1.html

Riothamus 12 Dec 2015 14:09 UTC
4 points
in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: [Link] Introducing OpenAI
If I am reading that right, they plan to oppose Skynet by giving everyone a Jarvis.

Does anyone know their technical people, and whether they can be profitably exposed to the latest work on safety?

Riothamus 13 Jan 2016 19:25 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016
The thing to consider about the economy is that the president is not only not responsible, but mostly irrelevant. An easy way to see this is the 2008 stimulus packages. Critics of the president frequently share the graph of national debt which grows sharply immediately after he took office—ignoring that the package was demanded by congress and supported by his predecessor, who wore a different color shirt.

A key in evaluating a president is the difference between what he did, what he could have done, and what people think about him. Consider that the parties were polarizing before he took office.

In terms of specifics, I am disappointed that he continued most of the civil rights abuses of the previous administration with regards to due process. I also oppose the employment of the drone warfare doctrine, which is minimally effective at achieving strategic goals and highly effective at generating ill will in the region.

By contrast, I am greatly pleased at the administrations’ commitment to diplomacy and improvement of our reputation among our allies. I am pleased that major combat operations were ended in two theaters, and that no new ones were launched. I applaud the Iranian nuclear agreement.

Riothamus 21 Apr 2016 16:10 UTC
2 points
on: “3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism”
Until someone demonstrates the utility of engaging in criticism of particular political groups, I will continue to treat it as noise.

We already know out groups don’t use the word rationality the way we do. We also know that assuming others share our information and frame of reference is an error. There is no new information here.

Riothamus 21 Apr 2016 16:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
A correct analogy between records and books would be the phonograph and the text of the book written in ASCII hexadecimal. Both are designed to be interpreted by a machine for presentation to humans.

Riothamus 21 Apr 2016 20:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: sight’s comment on: Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016
As compared to what alternative? There is no success condition for large scale ground operations in the region. If the criticism of the current administration is “failed to correct the lack of strategic acumen in the Pentagon” then I would agree, but I wonder what basis we have for expecting an improvement.

It seems to me we can identify problems, but have no available solutions to implement.

Riothamus 21 Apr 2016 21:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
I would also have an easier time with ASCII, but that’s because I (and presumably you also) have been trained in how to produce instructions for machines. This is a negligible chunk of humanity, so I thought it was equally discountable.

I suppose the spiritual analogy would be an ordained priest praying on behalf of another person!

Riothamus 22 Apr 2016 16:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: sight’s comment on: Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016
What are your criteria for good foreign policy choices then? You have conveyed that you want Iraq to be occupied, but Libya to be neglected, so non-intervention clearly is not the standard.

My current best guess is ‘whatever promotes maximum stability’. Also, how do you expect these decisions are currently made?

Riothamus 1 Jul 2016 17:27 UTC
1 point
on: Meme: Valuable Vulnerability
Military bonding is an interesting comparison. Training in a professional military relies on shared suffering to build a strong bond between the members of a unit. If we model combat as an environment so extreme that vulnerability is inescapable, the function of vulnerability as a bonding trait makes sense.

It also occurs to me that we almost universally have more control over how we signal emotions than how we feel them. The norm would therefore be that we feel more emotions than we show; by being vulnerable and signaling our emotions, other people can empathize instinctively and may feel greater security as a result.

Riothamus 1 Jul 2016 18:03 UTC
0 points
on: Powering Through vs Working Around
It is worth keeping in mind that how to defeat X is not well-defined. The usual method for circumventing the planning fallacy is to use whatever the final cost was last time. What about cases where there isn’t a body of evidence for the costs? Rationality is just such a case; while we have many well-defined biases, we have few methods for overcoming them.

As a consequence, I determine whether to workaround or defeat X primarily based on how frequently I expect it to come up. The cost of X I find less relevant for two reasons: one, I have a preference against being mugged by Pascal’s Wager into spending all my effort on low-likelihood events; two, high cost cases often have a well developed System 2 methodology to resolve them.

A benefit is that frequent cases benefit more easily from spaced repetition and habit forming. In this way, I hope to develop a body of past cases to refer to when trying to plan for how long defeating future X will take.

Examples of frequent cases: exercise, amazon purchases, reading articles. Examples of rare cases: job benefits, housing costs, vehicle purchases.

Riothamus 1 Jul 2016 20:27 UTC
0 points
on: Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
This looks like an information problem.

It is useful to remember that the market is an abstraction of aggregated transactions. The basic supply and demand graphs they teach us in early econ rely on two assumptions: rational agents, and perfect information.

I expect the imperfect information problem dominates in cases of new products, because producers have a hard time estimating return, and customers don’t even know it exists. VCs are largely about developing a marginal information advantage in this space. Interestingly, all of the VCs I have personally interacted with (sample size: 5) say they pick teams over ideas.

When the people at Thinx were asked why the dominant companies hadn’t done it already, what was their answer? If they couldn’t answer, that would indicate to the VC the team didn’t gather enough information to justify their claims (and thus were unprepared). I would expect the answer is some combination of competing with their own products, and demand is not big enough to be profitable with their scaled manufacturing methods.

On the subject of Tums: what is the socially optimal point for sugar-free Tums? How do we know the socially optimal outcome isn’t regular Tums and mouthwash?

Riothamus 8 Jul 2016 18:58 UTC
0 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Zombies Redacted
I do not think we need to go as far as i-zombies. We can take two people, show them the same object under arbitrarily close conditions, and get the answer of ‘green’ out of both of them while one does not experience green on account of being color-blind.

Riothamus 8 Jul 2016 20:21 UTC
0 points
on: Zombies Redacted
What do people in Chalmer’s vein of belief think of the simulation argument?

If a person is plugged into an otherwise simulated reality, do all the simulations count as p-zombies, since they match all the input-output and lack-of-qualia criteria?

Riothamus 12 Jul 2016 15:23 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Zombies Redacted
They are meant to be arbitrarily accurate, and so we would expect them to include qualia.

However, in the Chalmers vein consciousness is non-physical, which suggests it cannot be simulated through physical means. This yields a scenario very similar to the identical-yet-not-conscious p-zombie.