selylindi

Karma: 640

selylindi 10 Sep 2011 20:39 UTC
2 points
on: Meetup : Austin, TX
Hi, I’ve newly decided to drop in on you all. Will this be happening September 10th? There are no obvious groups of people here and the staff had never heard of the group.

selylindi 8 Oct 2011 23:32 UTC
4 points
on: Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta
I’d like to give this a try on a specific topic.

I’m Catholic and of late not particularly happy about it. Through reading much of the LessWrong material and noticing the ubiquity of atheists here, my confidence estimates in the relevant religious questions have declined. In response, I spent a few days searching online for pro-atheist or at least pro-agnostic-versus-Catholic evidence and ended up very disappointed in what Google turned up. It’s an amusing and puzzling experience to be disappointed about one’s own deconversion failure.

I don’t want book recommendations unless they’re damn good. Almost invariably they’re not aimed at me anyway, but at fundamentalist-types: my religious education was actually pretty decent quality, so such books have so far ended up being a waste of time.

Ideally, what I want is somebody who can present a case for atheism adapted for a non-fundy Catholic, take my objections seriously, and not give up for a while until we reach some conclusion. Almost as a separate issue, I’m curious whether it would resolve to a change of mind or halt at incompatible priors.

Any takers?

selylindi 9 Oct 2011 21:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: pedanterrific’s comment on: Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta
Hi pedanterrific, Yes, the Pope would agree that I’m a Catholic, although that’s hardly an essential feature. For specificity, I’m a practicing Roman Catholic who can recite the Nicene Creed in good faith. PMs/emails preferred.

selylindi 9 Oct 2011 22:03 UTC
3 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta
Hi TheOtherDave,

Shortly after I was introduced to LessWrong, a local philosophy meetup that I sporadically attended held a meeting on the topic, “What would it take to convince you of God’s existence?”. Given my background on the other side of the question, I naturally prepared a lengthy list of the sorts of evidences I would look for to convince me that God doesn’t exist. (Sadly, no one else at the meetup seemed interested in an evidential approach and just answered “absolutely nothing” to the original question or maundered on about supposed past lives, so I didn’t get any critiques there.)

Nevertheless, it’s quite plausible I missed some important possible tests or mistook the data, and that’s where a chavruta would fit in.

selylindi 9 Oct 2011 22:24 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Mass_Driver’s comment on: Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta

ultimately my partner and I realized that we had a fundamental disagreement about epistemology—he was willing to accept arguments with even minimal plausibility as long as they made him feel good, whereas I required significant plausibility. We parted ways with good will, but not mutual respect—he saw my insistence on evidence as stingy, and I saw his openness to unsupported traditional claims as irresponsible.

I’d say this reduction of the issues to a disagreement about epistemology is precisely the sort of thing we would expect based on Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. Did you happen to try discussing the means by which the priors originated, a la Robin Hanson’s argument? If so, what went wrong?

selylindi 9 Oct 2011 22:38 UTC
9 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Calibrate your self-assessments
One valuable insight from OkCupid is that, “the more men as a group disagree about a woman’s looks, the more they end up liking her”. For what it’s worth, I can add one data point to that as a man. My HotOrNot pictures earned a measly 4.3 rating, which rather hurt my self-image for a while. But in more practical terms, I get asked out multiple times a night at bars. For anyone else who lacks self-esteem about their looks, I’d like to reiterate the usual advice, now backed with OkCupid data: get out there and let other people do the judging of your looks instead of you, because it’s quite likely that someone in a crowd will have eyes for you!

selylindi 9 Oct 2011 22:51 UTC
2 points
on: A few analogies to illustrate key rationality points

It’s an analogy used to answer to the “But, what’s before the Big Bang ?” question. … so I just answer “What’s north of the North Pole ?”.

As an analogy for one view of the how the Big Bang might have worked, that’s quite a good analogy. It isn’t totally fair, though, since that exact question is an active area of research by theoretical physicists, and there has even already been one observational test of a particular version of multiverse cosmology that would imply other universes existing before our Big Bang.

selylindi 11 Oct 2011 2:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta

You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level.

Eh, I’m fine with analytic philosophy. It seems like an essential toolset. The only sense in which an evidential approach seemed superior to me was that it felt less like cheating. I’ve encountered dozens of definitions of “God”, and it’s easy to pick a definition such that the entity necessarily exists or necessarily doesn’t exist. Doing that and stopping there is cheating, I think, because it’s not the sensus fidelium regarding what and who God is. Plainly Catholicism does use (by habit, not dogma) a small set of definitions of necessarily existing entities, but it’s far from obvious that they are (or can be) the same entity, and quite dubious that those entities have much in common with Yahweh.

selylindi 11 Oct 2011 2:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta

Would you agree?

With every word.

selylindi 14 Oct 2011 5:05 UTC
12 points
on: Open thread, October 2011
On the Freakonomics blog, Steven Pinker had this to say:

There are many statistical predictors of violence that we choose not to use in our decision-making for moral and political reasons, because the ideal of fairness trumps the ideal of cost-effectiveness. A rational decision-maker using Bayes’ theorem would say, for example, that one should convict a black defendant with less evidence than one needs with a white defendant, because these days the base rates for violence among blacks is higher. Thankfully, this rational policy would be seen as a moral abomination.

I’ve seen a common theme on LW that is more or less “if the consequences are awful, the reasoning probably wasn’t rational”. Where do you think Pinker’s analysis went wrong, if it did go wrong?

One possibility is that the utility function to be optimized in Pinker’s example amounts to “convict the guilty and acquit the innocent”, whereas we probably want to give weight to another consideration as well, such as “promote the kind of society I’d wish to live in”.

selylindi 15 Oct 2011 21:34 UTC
5 points
in reply to: ahartell’s comment on: Open thread, October 2011

without enhancement some problems are just to hard for humans.

Without the enhancement of a computer or at least external memory like pen and paper, can you compute the n-th roots of pi to arbitrary decimal places? I can’t, so it seems plain that Dawkins was correct. But it’s a mighty big jump from there to “and there are processes in the universe which no constructible tools could ever let us explain, even in principle”.

Humans with our enhancements haven’t yet found any aspect of the universe which we have good reason to believe will always continue to escape explanation. That lack of evidence is weak evidence in favor of nothing remaining permanently and necessarily mysterious.

selylindi 17 Oct 2011 5:18 UTC
4 points
in reply to: pedanterrific’s comment on: Open thread, October 2011
It’s not clear that “the base rates for violence among blacks is higher” is meant to be measured by convictions. I interpreted it to be based on sociological data, for example, and in that case there would be no feedback loop. Pinker didn’t cite a source, unfortunately. A very quick stroll past Google Scholar 1 2 shows that a common source used is arrest data in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Plainly there are also important ways in which arrest data may be biased against blacks, but I’m hesitant to simply dismiss a finding based on that difficulty as I’m willing to bet that researchers in the field would have attempted to account for the difficulty.

selylindi 17 Oct 2011 5:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: Open thread, October 2011
The conviction rate for black defendents is sometimes much higher than the conviction rate for whites, so the solution you’ve suggested here would intensify the racial disparity.

selylindi 17 Oct 2011 5:29 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Open thread, October 2011
Do you care to elaborate? The interpretation of your response that comes to my mind is that you dissent from the moral viewpoint that Pinker expresses.

selylindi 17 Oct 2011 5:36 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Open thread, October 2011
I can imagine encountering a living organism composed of “subtle matter” not reducible to molecular machinery, or a fundamental particle that spontaneously and stochastically changed its velocity, or an Oracle that announced the solution to the halting problem for any given piece of code.

selylindi 3 Nov 2011 4:27 UTC
3 points
in reply to: rntz’s comment on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
If there is a political self-description category in future surveys, another option possibly worth adding is “anarchist”. Yeah, it’s rare, but the closest option available was “socialist”, which is still very dissimilar.

Incidentally, for those who are interested in political categorizations that might translate better across countries (and who have an OkCupid account), check out the Political Objectives test. A caveat is that, as the test itself notes, it is still specific to the countries and centuries that constitute the modern world, as “The assumption behind this test is that the three most important objectives of all-issues political movements in the modern era have been Equality and Liberty and Stability.”

selylindi 3 Nov 2011 4:35 UTC
0 points
in reply to: homunq’s comment on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
If I expect that my estimate will change in the future, why not change it now? I grant that it is highly likely that my estimates will change, but I don’t know whether any particular estimate will change upward or downward, so for now they stay put.

I suppose what anticipation of change in a probability estimate practically means is that you expect new pieces of evidence to come in and that you have a fairly good idea what the magnitude of evidence will be, just not the sign.

selylindi 3 Nov 2011 5:08 UTC
9 points
on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
Survey taken.

I had fun doing the background research to be able to give a number to the P(Aliens) questions. :) The topic has, of course, come up many times, but never before for me in association with a community where the social norms favored a careful, quantitative answer.

When answering the Newton question, I was surprised at the shape of my probability distribution for the answer. It definitely wasn’t a gaussian, a uniform distribution, or other form that I’ve worked with. This was simply due to the knowledge I started with, which was vague propositions rather than measurements. (i.e. I knew the right century and had a good idea when Newton was born, but didn’t know when he died.) I’m quite curious what the distribution of responses will be for the year, since a historical date is the sort of thing we’d expect humans to make errors on, but not gaussian errors.

selylindi 5 Dec 2011 19:37 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: 2011 Survey Results
Yet another alternate, culture-neutral way of asking about politics:

Q: How involved are you in your region’s politics compared to other people in your region?
A: [choose one]
() I’m among the most involved
() I’m more involved than average
() I’m about as involved as average
() I’m less involved than average
() I’m among the least involved

selylindi 5 Dec 2011 19:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: 2011 Survey Results
Demographically, there is one huge cluster of Less Wrongers: 389 (42%) straight white (including Hispanics) atheist males (including FTM) under 48 who are in STEM. I don’t actually know if that characterizes Eliezer.

It’s slightly comforting to me to know that a majority of LWers are outside that cluster in one way or another.