SforSingularity

Karma: 396

SforSingularity 25 Sep 2009 19:51 UTC
47 points
on: Solutions to Political Problems As Counterfactuals

it seems to be a game in which you counterfactually propose different states of the “government policy” node and explain why these would have the best effects, and whoever can give the best explanation gets rewarded with higher status.

no, no. The game is to counterfactually propose different states of the “government policy” node that involve making the government conform more to some ideology X, and then confabulate reasons why this would result in great success. In doing this, you signal your allegiance to ideology X.

But really, the game can work with pretty much anything in the place of the “government policy” node; it can be pretty much any decisionmaking entity, including the companies or diffuse classes of individuals. E.g.

“If binge drinkers went to church more, then they would find the inner strength to overcome the addiction!” (signalling religious allegiance)

“Binge drinkers have the right to run their own lives, the government should keep its hands off them!” (signalling libertarian allegiance)

“Binge drinkers usually come from deprived families and had poor childhoods, it isn’t their fault, it’s the government’s fault for not having enough social welfare!” (signalling liberal allegiance)

“Binge drinking is caused by the breakdown of traditional family values, we need a return to the good-old-fashioned traditional family values!” (Signalling conservative allegiance)

“Binge drinking could be prevented by human neuroenhancements that prevented alcohol from being addictive, we should push for faster research into such technology!” (Signalling h+ allegiance)
What links here?

SforSingularity 20 Sep 2009 13:35 UTC
39 points
0
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder

is rationality as a failure of compartmentalization—the attempt to take everything you hear seriously.

Many people enjoy reading books and watching films where the lead characters form a small group, pitted against all the odds to try to save the world. Many people—secular people—pay lip-service to the idea that every person in the world is equally important, and that we should value the life of an African peasant farmer as equal to our own.

It seems, however, that most people don’t actually take these notions seriously, because their actions seem to have little to do with such beliefs.

One day, a bunch of nerds got together and started a project called the Singularity Institute, and they actually took seriously the notion that they should try to save the world if it really was threatened, and that the lives of others should be assigned equal weigh to their own. Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.

SforSingularity 7 Oct 2009 21:52 UTC
29 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: ‘oy, girls on lw, want to get together some time?’
Upvoted for a sensible analysis of the problem. Want girls? Go get them. My experience is that a common mistake amongst academically inclined people is to expect reality to reward them for doing the right thing—for example men on LW may (implicitly, without realizing that they are doing it) expect attractive, eligible women to be abundant in the risk-mitigation movement, because mitigating existential risks is the right* thing to do, and the universe is a just place which rewards good behavior.

The reality of the situation is that a male who spends time attempting to reduce existential risks will find himself in a community which is full of other males, which, relative to other hobbies he could have, will reduce his pool of available women.

Women who spend time attempting to reduce existential risks will find themselves surrounded by guys, who are preselected for intelligence and high ethical standards.

SforSingularity 20 Sep 2009 14:59 UTC
19 points
in reply to: SforSingularity’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder
See, e.g. Eliezer writing in 2000:

“There is no abused child, no oppressed peasant, no starving beggar, no crack-addicted infant, nocancer patient, literally no one that I cannot look squarely in the eye. I’m working to save everybody, heal the planet, solve all the problems of the world.”

SforSingularity 14 Jul 2010 23:06 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder
There is a point I am trying to make with this: the human race is a collective where the individual parts pretend to care about the whole, but actually don’t care, and we (mostly) do this the insidious way, i.e. using lots of biased thinking. In fact most people even have themselves fooled, and this is an illusion that they’re not keen on being disabused of.

The results… well, we’ll see.

SforSingularity 4 Sep 2009 14:58 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities

create 3^^^^3 units of disutility according to your utility function

For all X:

If your utility function assigns values to outcomes that differ by a factor of X, then you are vulnerable to becoming a fanatic who banks on scenarios that only occur with probability 1/X. As simple as that.

If you think that banking on scenarios that only occur with probability 1/X is silly, then you have implicitly revealed that your utility function only assigns values in the range [1,Y], where Y<X, and where 1 is the lowest utility you assign.

SforSingularity 3 Oct 2009 2:44 UTC
14 points
on: ‘oy, girls on lw, want to get together some time?’
I assign a 99.9% probability to there being more male readers than female readers of LW, The most recent LW meetup that I attended had a gender ratio of roughly 20:1 male:female.

Males who feel that they are competing for a small pool of females will attempt to gain status over each other, diminishing the amount of honest, rational dialogue, and replacing it with oneupmanship.

Hence the idea of mixing LW—in its current state—with dating may not be good.

However, there is the possibility of re-framing LW it so that it appeals more to women. Perhaps we need to re-frame saving the world as a charitable sacrifice?

I would love to know what the gender ratio looks like within the atheist movement; I think we should regard that as a bound on what is achievable.

SforSingularity 11 Aug 2009 13:45 UTC
14 points
on: Utilons vs. Hedons

Let’s try a hypothetical to illustrate the difference between experiential and value utility. An employee of Omega, LLC,1 offers you a deal to absolutely double your hedons but kill five people in, say, rural China, then wipe your memory of the deal.

This example is hardly hypothetical. According to GiveWell, you can save the life of one African person for $200 - $1000.

$200-$1,000 per life saved

Almost everyone has spent $5000 on things that they didn’t need—for example a new car as opposed to a second hand one, a refurbishment of a room in the house, a family holiday. $5000 comes nowhere close to “doubling your hedons”—in fact it probably hardly makes a dent. Furthermore, almost everyone is aware of this fact, but we conveniently don’t pay any attention to it, and our subconscious minds don’t remind us about it because the deaths in Africa are remote and impersonal.

Since I know of very few people who spend literally all their spare money on saving lives at $1000 per life, and almost everyone would honestly claim that they would pay $200 − 1000 to save someone from a painful death, it is fair to say that people pretty universally don’t maximize “utilons”.

SforSingularity 14 Jul 2010 22:42 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder
Look, maybe it does sound kooky, but people who really genuinely cared might at least invest more time in finding out how good its pedigree was. On the other hand, people who just wanted an excuse to ignore it would say “it’s kooky, I’m going to ignore it”.

But one could look at other cases, for example direct donation of money to the future (Robin has done this).

Or the relative lack of attention to more scientifically respectable existential risks, or even existential risks in general. (Human extinction risk, etc).

SforSingularity 25 Sep 2009 23:35 UTC
9 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Solutions to Political Problems As Counterfactuals
A priori we should expect children to be genuine knowledge seekers, because in our EEA there would have been facts of life (such as which plants we poisonous) that were important to know early on. Our EEA was probably sufficiently simple and unchanging that once you were an adult there were few new abstract facts to know.

This “story” explains why children ask adults awkward questions about politics, often displaying a wisdom apparently beyond their age. In reality, they just haven’t traded in their curiosity for signalling yet.

At least, that is one possible hypothesis.

SforSingularity 13 Aug 2009 20:14 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Dreams with Damaged Priors

most people don’t spend a lot of time wondering, after they fully wake up, whether the pink elephant might really be hidden inside their pillow.

Yes, most people have a “that’s clearly ridiculous” filter that emulates the work that a complexity prior should do. It seems to work much like the way modern antivirus works—there’s a blacklist of “ridiculous” ideas that you reject out of hand, and popular culture acts like the “update virus database” function. Simple hypotheses like evolution often end up on this blacklist, and horrifically complex ones like the Abrahamic God often end up off it.

SforSingularity 7 Sep 2009 23:21 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Peter_Twieg’s comment on: Why I’m Staying On Bloggingheads.tv

they just can’t stand the thought of being within 300 internet meters of Creationists

this is not their stated position

SforSingularity 4 Sep 2009 15:56 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities
When I said “Silly” I meant from an axiological point of view, i.e. you think the scenario over, and you still think that you would be doing something that made you win less.

Of course in any such case, there are likely to be conflicting intuitions: one to behave as an aggregative consequentialist, and the another to behave like a sane human being.

SforSingularity 11 Aug 2009 20:30 UTC
7 points
in reply to: snarles’s comment on: Utilons vs. Hedons

If there is evidence that there are ways to permanently improve conditions to that extent for that cheap

This is intriguing, but what if the main indirect cause of death in Africa is overpopulation?

I am not an expert on development in Africa, but my guess is that there is no single cause to the overall problem. Africa’s population density is 26 people per km^2 source, whereas the EU’s population density is 114 people per km^2 Source. Thus it is probably the case that Africa could easily sustain its current population if it were more economically developed.

Reducing the population artificially, whether by force or by education wouldn’t make the problem magically go away, though it may help as part of an overall strategy.

If one is interested in charitable projects to improve overall African standards of living, take a look at the Copenhagen Consensus. Improvements in infrastructure, peacekeeping, health and womens’ education are all needed.

SforSingularity 25 Sep 2009 22:21 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Solutions to Political Problems As Counterfactuals
I do sometimes wonder what proportion of people who think about political matters are asking questions with genuine curiosity, versus engaging in praise for the idea that they and their group have gone into a happy death spiral about.

I suspect that those who ask with genuine curiosity are overwhelmingly chlidren.

EDIT: Others disagree that children are more genuinely curious. Perhaps it’s just the nerds who ask genuine questions then?

SforSingularity 26 Jul 2010 21:57 UTC
5 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

1) if something very bad is about to happen to you, what’s your credence that you’re in a rescue sim and have nothing to fear?

I’d give that some credence, though note that we’ve talking about subjective anticipation, which is a piece of humanly-compelling nonsense.

SforSingularity 3 Apr 2010 15:51 UTC
5 points
on: Open Thread: April 2010
As you grow up, you start to see that the world is full of waste, injustice and bad incentives. You try frantically to tell people about this, and it always seems to go badly for you.

Then you grow up a bit more, get a bit wise, and realize that the mother-of-all-bad-incentives, the worst injustice, and the greatest meta-cause of waste … is that people who point out such problems get punished, (especially) including pointing out this problem. If you are wise, you then become an initiate of the secret conspiracy of the successful.

Discuss.

SforSingularity 27 Aug 2009 12:23 UTC
5 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Mathematical simplicity bias and exponential functions
False. What you mean is “any differentiable function is approximately linear over a small enough scale”.

See this

SforSingularity 1 Jan 2010 14:28 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom
Think about it in evolutionary terms. Roughly speaking, taking the action of attempting to kill someone is risky. An attractive female body is pretty much a guaranteed win for the genes concerned, so it’s pointless taking risks. [Note: I just made this up, it might be wrong, but definitely look for an evo-psych explanation]

This explanation also accounts for the lower violent crime rate amongst women, since women are, from a gene’s point of view, a low risk strategy, whereas violence is a risky business: you might win, but then again, you might die.

It would also predict, other things equal, lower crime rates amongst physically attractive men.

SforSingularity 25 Nov 2009 1:19 UTC
4 points
on: Agree, Retort, or Ignore? A Post From the Future
I think that this is a great idea. I often find myself ending a debate with someone important and rational without the sense that our disagreement has been made explicit, and without a good reason for why we still disagree.

I suspect that if we imposed a norm on LW that said: every time two people disagree, they have to write down, at the end, why they disagree, we would do better.