What could be more deadly than being unable to die?
Anything. Quite literally, anything at all. All of the things are more deadly than being unable to die.
shokwave
Karma: 5,538
The TV show version of the anthropic principle: all the episodes where the Enterprise does blow up aren’t made.
I made a $150 donation. I particularly like that effort has gone into making the workshops more accessible. I’m suggesting to my father that he should apply for the February workshop (I am very surprised to have ended up believing it will be worthwhile for him).
Person: “It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.”
Robot: ” … Paranoia is such a childish emotion. You’re an adult. Why aren’t all your enemies dead by now?”-- RStevens
The powerful or elite are: fast-planning abstract thinkers who take action (1) in order to pursue single/minimal objectives, are in favor of strict rules for their stereotyped out-group underlings (2) but are rationalizing (3) & hypocritical when it serves their interests (4), especially when they feel secure in their power. They break social norms (5, 6) or ignore context (1) which turns out to be worsened by disclosure of conflicts of interest (7), and lie fluently without mental or physiological stress (6).
What are powerful members good for? They can help in shifting among equilibria: solving coordination problems or inducing contributions towards public goods (8), and their abstracted Far perspective can be better than the concrete Near of the weak (9).
Galinsky et al 2003; Guinote, 2007; Lammers et al 2008; Smith & Bargh, 2008
Eyal & Liberman
Rustichini & Villeval 2012
Lammers et al 2010
Kleef et al 2011
Carney et al 2010
Cain et al 2005; Cain et al 2011
Eckel et al 2010
Slabu et al; Smith & Trope 2006; Smith et al 2008
There are limited categories for groups to be placed in by the media: we scored ‘risque’ instead of ‘nutjob’, so this piece is a victory, I’d say.
Data point: during the Melbourne LessWrong meetups, discussion of politics proved (a large fraction would say significant) net negative.
For what it’s worth, I read Politics is the Mind-Killer as almost the opposite of your interpretation: that politics is a mind-killer, so why would you want to drag that awful mess into examples that could otherwise be clean. ie, avoid politics at significant cost, and this includes in otherwise sterile examples.
To some extent I wonder why we’d need to avoid politically-charged examples if we were capable of actually talking about politics; I feel like if that was the case it would be Politics is the Comment-Thread-Exploder, and we’d only avoid it because a throwaway example would case a huge, well-reasoned, rational but off-topic discussion.
That is an interesting and concerning view. Cryonics makes the usual argument:
You want to live forever
Cryonics has a chance of working
Therefore, you should take out a cryonics policy,
And the average person does not agree with the conclusion. They might not be consciously aware of why they don’t want to live forever, but they damn well know that idea doesn’t appeal to them. The cryonics advocate presses them for a reason, and the average person unknowingly rationalises when they give their reason—they refuse the second premise on some grounds—scam, won’t work, evil future empire, whatever. The cryonics advocate resolves that concern, demonstrates that cryonics does have a chance of working, and the person continues to refuse.
Cryonics advocate checks if they refuse premise 1 - person emphatically responds that they love life not because they actually do, but because it is a huge status hit / social faux pas / Bad Thing (tm) to admit they don’t. Actually, their life sucks, and dragging it out forever will make it worse, but they can’t say this out loud—they probably can’t even think it to themselves.
Wow. It’s kinda scary to think that people refusing cryonics is a case of revealed preferences, and that revealed preference is that they don’t like life. Actually, it might not be scary, it might just be against social norms. But I’d like to think I genuinely like life and want life to be worth living for everyone. Of course, I’d say that if it was a social norm to say that. Damn.
My go-to reductio is “Olympic sprinters have lots of gold medals; I should wear lots of gold medals to run faster!”
how many licks does it take to get to the center of Hermione?
I’m sure there are other authors on fanfiction.net who could answer this for us.
I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.
The LW version:
Friendliness of AGI is impossible; this is because Coherent Extrapolated Volition is impossible; our volitions are in part determined by opposing others’ so any extrapolation will produce a contradiction (a la once disease is gone, food is plentiful, hangovers don’t exist, and you can have sex with anyone you like, the only thing that Palestinians and Israelis care about is denying the others’ desires). Any optimisation process applied to human desires will necessarily make things subjectively and objectively worse. We are, in effect, falling down stairs at the speed of our optimising, and more optimisation of any kind will only make us fall faster and deadlier. There was no guarantee that the blind process of evolution would produce agents that form a consistent or positive-sum system, and indeed, it did not produce such agents. The future is unchangeably bleak and necessarily bad.
The Western memeplex version:
Humans are not essentially good-natured beings. The so-called moral progress of the recent era is no such thing—severe oppression of the minority has been swapped for a larger amount of minor oppression of the majority, abject slavery of some has been swapped for an equivalent amount of wage slavery for many, rape and physical coercion of sex has been reduced with a much larger increase in use of non-physical coercion with alcohol or money, and so on. We might alter the concentrations of suffering, spreading it out over many, but we can only increase the total levels of suffering because a large part of how we actually feel content or happy is based on relatives—that is, the pursuit of happiness ruins the world.
The seeds of our own hellish existences are planted within us from birth, they are irrevocable, and the only thing we can do about it is miserably fail to realise their deadly potential. Any kind of hopeful attitude, any kind of optimisation, any attempt to improve the world, is a guaranteed net negative because that is just how humans are.
This bedroom’s over in that guy’s house! Sir, you have one of my bedrooms, are you aware? Do not decorate it!
And more Mitch Hedburg, illustrating how redrawing the map won’t alter the territory.
This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. (I agree denotatively, but...)
It took me almost six months from meeting a particular Guess person to realise this: the times I offended them clustered according to whether I was a soldier in their war, not by my actual actions.[0]
Lots of things, maybe most things you can do in a conversation are horrible things to do to a Guesser. I’m well above average for social skills plus a few points above LW average IQ and even I find it hard to navigate conversations with a Guesser (I swear I have better social skills than that previous arrogant statement implies). The way I have found to not constantly insult and offend them is to take a lot of time to learn their particular ‘dialect’ of Guess.
I didn’t grow up in a Guess culture, so at my first exposure to it I was already a mind that could think for itself—and my thought was “Guess culture is manipulative.” It stacks up complicated laws, some of which are enforced ridiculously strictly[1] and others that are loosely enforced, if at all[2], so a skilled Guesser has both a minefield of rules, and an arsenal of selectively enforced rules, to use in conversation.
This is scary. If I walk into a conversation with a Guesser and I have something at stake, I am likely to lose that stake. Dealing with them feels like dealing with a negative utility monster; I must sacrifice too much to avoid offending.
(Please don’t vote this post up because it bashes the hateful Guess enemy; evaluate it on its merits.)
0: I could use ableist slurs (insane; crazy) freely to deride people, institutions, papers etc that argued for no gendered pay gap, for biological difference between race, etc. But it was a serious transgression to use the same slurs to describe people, institutions, or papers that argued for parapsychology, telepathy, etc. Once I noticed this, I tested it experimentally—even when you know you’re doing it for science, it hurts to offend a Guesser.
1: “Giving a negative response when someone asks for evaluations on their appearance / idea / whatever” is banned. (The only way you can provide that information is to guess at their personal evaluation, and then give the least warm approval you think has a plausible interpretation that agrees with their actual personal evaluation, which will be revealed only after you’ve made your social move. Yech.)
2: Gossip is frowned on. You can gossip all you like until you say something they don’t like hearing, at which point you’ve offended them by gossiping.
April Fools—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Joke Chapter
This feels like Main material, both in the “well written and based on collected data” sense and the “something the whole community benefits from reading” sense.
I would like to point out that you’re probably replying to your past self. This gives me significant amusement.
I discovered that one of my friends has something similar—perhaps the same thing—going on in her brain, such that she doesn’t rationalise. What we managed to sort out, sort of, was that anything was a justification for her: so when she doesn’t eat cookies because it would make her gain weight, and also when she doesn’t like Brad Pitt “because he’s ugly”, and also when she doesn’t like a book series because it’s chauvinistic, and also when she “doesn’t like babies”, but her friend’s baby “is an exception because it’s [friend]’s”, these all feel like the same thing to her; she can’t or won’t tell the difference between what I see as a strong reason or a weak reason or a made-up flimsy reason.
A wild theory appears! In probably the deepest moment of introspection for her in that discussion, she said she thinks she might be like this because it gives her 100% confidence in whatever she’s doing. Thinking on that, I’m in the mind of the “70% blue, 30% red balls in the urn” game where some human guessers approximate a 7:3 ratio of blue/red guesses, whereas the best strategy is to guess blue all the time. There might be two kinds of people in this sense: “modellers”, who try to accurately mirror reality as much as possible in order to have good predictive skills, and “one-guessers” who commit to the best pure strategy in order to gain the most reward.
Under this wild theory, the one-guessers would have no reason or need to distinguish between the strength of justifications; they’d simply change their behaviour when a better strategy is offered.
HBD Human Biodiversity
Also known as race-realism, commonly associated with politically-incorrect but factually-supported statements like “blacks have lower IQs than whites”, often found making the point that everybody accepts human biodiversity when it doesn’t offend a minority—ie, recognising that West African heritage is advantageous for short-distance sprint running. 99% confident this is what was being hinted at.
If you want impact, use the narrative fallacy. What I mean is, use all of the other biases and fallacies you listed—tell a story about John, the guy who met a cool scientist guy when he was in primary school and now his life goal is to be a scientist. He decides to do work on global warming because ‘what could be more important than this issue?’ He expects to live in the city, be the head of a big lab… But he’s not very good at global warming science (maybe he’s not very good at research?), and he doesn’t seem to notice that the advice his colleagues give him isn’t helping. So he sticks to his guns because he’s already got a degree in global warming, but he’s always stressing about not having a job...
And so on.
And then rewind. John discovers rationality when he’s a young adult, and becomes John-prime. Compare John to John-prime, whose rationality training allows him to recognise the availability bias at work on his dream of being a scientist, and since scholarship is a virtue, he researches, interviews… discovers that politics is a much better fit! His rationality informs him that the most important thing is improving quality of life, not global warming or power, so he donates to third-world charities and ensures when he runs for political positions he does so on a platform of improving social welfare and medical access. His rationality lets him evaluate advice-givers, and he manages to see through most of the self-serving advice—and when he finds a mentor who seems genuine, he sticks to that mentor, improving his success in politics...
And so on.
(And then the punchline: explain why this story makes the audience feel like rationality is important with a description of the narrative bias!)
It’s evidence that Guess is the Nash equilibrium that human cultures find. Consider that the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with known fixed length) is both defect. It’s a common theme in game theory that the Nash equilibrium is not always the best place to be.