Said Achmiz

Karma: 10,965

Said Achmiz 17 Oct 2021 4:31 UTC
6 points
in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Interesting, thanks—I will read this ASAP!

Said Achmiz 17 Oct 2021 3:47 UTC
18 points
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)

One point I strongly agree with you on is that rationalists should pay more attention to philosophy.

Yes, I’ve definitely noticed a trend where rationalists are mostly continuing from Hume and Turing, neglecting e.g. Kant as a response to Hume.

I’ve yet to see a readable explanation of what Kant had to say (in response to Hume or otherwise) that’s particularly worth paying attention to (despite my philosophy classes in college having covered Kant, and making some attempts later to read him). If you (or someone else) were to write an LW post about this, I think this might be of great benefit to everyone here.

Said Achmiz 16 Oct 2021 8:54 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Zoe Curzi’s Experience with Leverage Research
What are “intense” and/or “moral” communities? And, why is it (or is it?) a good thing for a community to be “moral” and/or “intense”?

Said Achmiz 15 Oct 2021 21:45 UTC
6 points
in reply to: ThurstonBT’s comment on: How to respond to a series of defiantly persistent evidence-free claims?
I’ve never even heard of this Discord channel (server?) before, so it can’t be very important to “the rationalist community”. Therefore, you can’t conclude anything about what is, or is not, near and dear to said community, from—what, one conversation on this one obscure Discord server?

(I mean, really. “Certain recent events”! Talk about blowing things out of proportion…)

Said Achmiz 14 Oct 2021 20:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: Value is Fragile
If you construct a scenario where an “octopus” is actually just a “human in a funny suit”, then sure, you can draw all sorts of unintuitive conclusions. I don’t consider this to be informative.

Said Achmiz 12 Oct 2021 15:33 UTC
2 points
on: Without a phone for 10 days
Like some others here, I do not own a smartphone (nor ever have). I have a cheap (~$15) flip phone. (I also don’t use Facebook or any other social media.)

I recommend this to almost everyone.

Said Achmiz 11 Oct 2021 21:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Book Review: Free Will
As far as accountability for criminal actions goes, OP says that Harris’s stance is consequentialist, but it seems to me that it’s not nearly consequentialist enough.

After all, surely the question is whether holding people accountable for their actions—that is, treating them as if they had free will—does, or does not, deter crime, and otherwise reduce the negative consequences of criminal behavior (by curbing incidence, severity, or both)?

If the answer is “yes”, then we should treat criminals as if they had free will. Otherwise, not. (Setting aside, for the moment, questions of the moral permissibility, or even imperative, of retribution per se.)

That would be the true consequentialist position, I think. Harris’s view, on the other hand, seems to be rooted in a sort of naive or folk-philosophical sense of fairness, where, if you’re not “responsible” for your actions, in some (again, naively conceived) sense of the word, then you shouldn’t be punished for them. But I don’t see that this should be an axiom of our approach to justice; at best, a desideratum…

The famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quote on the matter:

If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged … I should say, I don’t doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the law must keep its promises.

Said Achmiz 11 Oct 2021 21:47 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Logan Zoellner’s comment on: Book Review: Free Will

But if there’s no such thing as free will, then it’s impossible to be “for” or “against” anything, since our own actions are just as constrained as the criminal’s. What exists simply exists, no more, no less.

Similarly:

“It’s my fate to steal,” pleaded the man who had been caught red-handed by Diogenes.

“Then it is also your fate to be beaten,” said Diogenes, hitting him across the head with his staff.

(https://sofoarchon.com/the-philosophy-of-diogenes/)

Said Achmiz 9 Oct 2021 0:56 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬
Even taking everything else you write here for granted (which I wouldn’t normally, but let’s go with it for now)… the question in your last sentence seems easy to answer: we’re not in that period right now, because right now, by construction, whales are more landmammals in 85% of ways, so if you classify them as mammals, and then use that to make predictions about heretofore-unobserved traits, you will be right 85 / 15 = ~5.67 times more often than if you had classified them as fish.

Said Achmiz 3 Oct 2021 18:11 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: What do determinists here think about free will and Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness?
Irresistable pedantry:

Can my green be your red?

It can’t, incidentally, but that is due to peculiarities of human color vision, and is not of any deep philosophical interest.

Said Achmiz 3 Oct 2021 5:38 UTC
15 points
in reply to: River’s comment on: What do determinists here think about free will and Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness?
Obvious questions for anyone who espouses this view:
1. Why should any given computation feel like that from the inside, instead of feeling some different way from the inside?
2. Why should any given computation feel any way from the inside? (Indeed, why should any computation feel any way from the inside?)
3. Why should there be any “inside” for things to feel some way from?
Unless you can answer these questions, or else explain in detail why they are confused (i.e., “provide a reduction”, in Eliezer’s terms), you have made absolutely no progress on solving the Hard Problem.

Said Achmiz 26 Sep 2021 18:15 UTC
LW: 3 AF: 2
AF
on: Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models
It’s “Novaya Zemlya” (“New Land”), not “Zovaya”.

Said Achmiz 13 Sep 2021 11:03 UTC
20 points
on: How factories were made safe

In 1907, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall fatality rate in the iron and steel industry was about 220 per 100,000 full-time workers. By 2019, however, that rate had fallen to only 26.3 per 100,000, a reduction of almost 90%.

I was surprised by this reduction number—it seems lower than I expected! If you’d asked me by how much the fatality rate in such an industry had fallen 1907–2019, I would’ve predicted a reduction closer to 99% than 90%.

Why is this? What things kill people in this industry today? And why cannot these causes of workplace fatalities be reduced further?

Said Achmiz 4 Sep 2021 14:48 UTC
4 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Value is Fragile
One can construct all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, but I am far from convinced of their usefulness in teasing out our “true” values (as contrasted with “confabulating some plausible-sounding, but not reflectively stable, set of values”). That said, it seems to me that how much I value (and should value) any given future depends on the degree of that future’s resemblance to my current values. So, to take the examples:

1: Humanity continues for millions of years, substantially unchanged from how we are now. (I take it we agree that in this case the future universe contains much of value.)

Indeed, we agree.

2: Humanity continues for millions of years, gradually evolving (in the Darwinian sense or otherwise) but always somewhat resembling us, and always retaining something like our values. It seems to me that here, too, the future universe contains much of value.

Well, it depends: it seems to me that the further from my current values this future humanity drifts, the less I value this future.

Crucially, it seems to me that the degree of difference (at any given future time period) will depend (and how can it not?) on the starting point. Start with current humans, and you get one degree of resemblance; start with octopuses, on the other hand…

Possible future 3: at some point in that future history of humanity, our descendants decide to upload themselves into computers and continue their lives virtually.

I would not like for this to happen, personally. I value this future substantially less, thereby.

Possible future 4: at some point in that virtual existence they decide they’d like to be embodied again, and arrange for it to happen. Their new bodies are enough like original-human bodies for them to feel at home in them, but they use some freshly-invented genetic material rather than DNA, and many of the internal organs are differently designed.

The impact of this biological re-invention on how valuable the future is, will depend on what impact it has on observable and experiential traits of this new humanity—I care about the interface, so to speak, not the implementation details. (After all, suppose that, while I slept, you replaced my liver, kidneys, pancreas, and some other internal organs with a different set of organs—which, however, performed all the same functions, allowing me to continue living my life as before. I do not see what difference this would make to… well, almost anything, really. Perhaps I couldn’t even tell that this had been done! Would this matter in any moral calculus? I think not…)

So if I should care much less about the octopuses, what matters must be some more generalized sort of continuity: the future-kinda-humans are our “causal descendants” or something, even if not our biological descendants.

Causal descendancy is something, certainly; but, again, for me it is a question of degree of resemblance. Perhaps another way of putting it is: could I inhabit this future? Would I, personally, find it… fun? Would I, living inside it, consider it to be awesome, amazing, wonderful? Or would I find it to be alien and bizarre? It is all well and good to “expect weirdtopia”, but there is no law of morality that says I have to want weirdtopia…

Said Achmiz 4 Sep 2021 10:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Value is Fragile
Suppose that (evolved/uplifted/otherwise-advanced-enough-for-sapience) octopuses share some of our values. Now suppose that humans go extinct, and these Octopus sapiens create an advanced civilization, whose products instantiate some values we would recognize, like art, music, science, etc.

Does this future contain anything of value? I say it does not, because there are no humans around to value it. There are octopuses, and that’s great for the octopuses, but as far as human values go, this future ended with humanity’s extinction. Whatever happens afterwards is irrelevant.

EDIT: Mind you—this is not quite the point Eliezer was making, I don’t think; I am responding to gjm’s comment, here. This comment should not necessarily be taken to constitute part of a defense of the point made in the OP (and quoted by Zack upthread).

Said Achmiz 4 Sep 2021 10:18 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Value is Fragile
How do you get from:

the lives of octopuses mean much less to me than human lives, but more than tiny molecular paperclips

to:

it seems like worlds shaped by the goal systems of other evolved biological creatures probably don’t “contain almost nothing of worth”

…?

Because it sure seems to me that a future shaped by the goal systems of octopuses will, indeed, contain almost nothing of worth. (And I do not see what the heck “feel[ing] pleasure and pain” has to do with anything…)

(And, yeah, other animals are close to being as valueless as paperclips. [EDIT: In the sense of “value as a moral subject”, of course; in terms of instrumental value, well, paperclips aren’t valueless either—not regular ones, anyhow.] I like octopuses, but tiling the universe with them doesn’t constitute the creation of a huge amount of value, that’s for sure.)

Said Achmiz 4 Sep 2021 6:09 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Value is Fragile
No, I think this post is right as-is. As you say, Three Worlds Collide was fiction. There is no “but”. It’s fictional evidence, and so it should update us not at all.

Said Achmiz 1 Sep 2021 14:27 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: We Live in an Era of Unprecedented World Peace
The term “genocide” is not appropriate for describing the killing of any number of animals.

Said Achmiz 1 Sep 2021 8:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Horatio Von Becker’s comment on: Rationality Is Expertise With Reality
Seconding that this post seems incoherent, kind of like a half-baked shower thought.

Said Achmiz 30 Aug 2021 23:07 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Anon User’s comment on: Realism about rationality
You have entirely missed the point I was making in that comment.

Of course I am aware of the standard form of the joke. I presented my modified form of the joke in the linked comment, as a deliberate contrast with the standard form, to illustrate the point I was making.