SilentCal

• SilentCal 23 Oct 2014 18:07 UTC

  86 points

  on: 2014 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Done.

  I’m a bit confused about the accuracy of my BSRI because my true answer was frequently ‘only towards my SO’, such that my score would be drastically different were I single.

• SilentCal 25 Feb 2015 20:34 UTC

  47 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, Fe­bru­ary 2015, chap­ter 111

  Or this is a big setup by Voldemort. Saying “I must make a Horcrux” out loud is the giveaway; I doubt even Harry’s fantasy of a beatable Voldemort would be that stupid.

  My guess (conditioned on this not being the mirror) is that Voldemort gave Harry his pouch and wand and then faked weakness to trick Harry into attacking him so that he could kill Harry without violating his prior promise. He resurrected a nearly-immortal Hermione to dissuade Harry from ripping the stars apart in case killing him failed, as part of his defense-in-depth strategy against the prophecy. Since he could have tricked Harry by much simpler means if that were the only goal, he can say in Parseltongue that restoring her counsel is the greater part of his motivation.

  What links here?

  • MathMage's comment on Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, Fe­bru­ary 2015, chap­ter 112 by Gondolinian (25 Feb 2015 21:14 UTC; 2 points)

• SilentCal 18 Oct 2018 20:32 UTC

  44 points

  in reply to: tenthkrige’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  FWIW I first read this post before this comment was written, then happened to think about it again today and had this idea, and came here to post it.

  I do think it’s a dangerous fallacy to assume mutually-altruistic equilibria are optimal—‘I take care of me, you take care of you’ is sometimes more efficient than ‘you take care of me, I take care of you’.

  Maybe someone needs to study whether Western countries ever exhibit “antisocial cooperation,” that is, an equilibrium of enforced public contributions in an “inefficient public goods game” where each of four players gets 20% of the central pool. Might be more likely if you structure it as tokens starting out in the center and players have the option to take them? (Call it the ‘enclosure game’, perhaps)

• SilentCal 21 Nov 2017 19:19 UTC

  41 points

  on: Hero Licensing

  Okay, I was kinda bored while reading this, but after reading it I asked myself how much modest epistomology I used in my life. I realized I wasn’t even at the level of ignoring my immodest inside-view estimates —I wasn’t generating them!

  I’m now in the process of seriously evaluating the success chances of the creative ideas I’ve had over the years, which I’m realizing I never actually did. I put real (though hobby-level) work into one once, and I’ve long regarded quitting my day job someday as “a serious possibility”, but I just felt not allowed to generate an honest answer to “how likely would this be to succeed”.

  And guess what, this evaluation shows I’m an idiot for keeping my ideas on the back burner as much as I have.

The Cor­rect Use of Analogy

• SilentCal 4 Mar 2015 22:28 UTC

  38 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, March 2015, chap­ter 116

  Any volunteers to tell invincible resurrected Dark-Lord-slayer Hermione what grade she got in Defense Against the Dark Arts?

• SilentCal 9 Dec 2014 18:05 UTC

  33 points

  on: Does util­i­tar­i­anism “re­quire” ex­treme self sac­ri­fice? If not why do peo­ple com­monly say it does?

  My view, and a lot of other people here seem to also be getting at this, is that the demandingness objection comes from a misuse of utilitarianism. People want their morality to label things ‘permissible’ and ‘impermissible’, and utilitarianism doesn’t natively do that. That is, we want boolean-valued morality. The trouble is, Bentham went and gave us a real-valued one. The most common way to get a bool out of that is to label the maximum ‘true’ and everything else false, but that doesn’t give a realistically human-followable result. Some philosophers have worked on ‘satisficing consequentialism’, which is a project to design a better real-to-bool conversion, but I think the correct answer is to learn to use real-valued morality.

  There’s some oversimplification above (I suspect people have always understood non-boolean morality in some cases), but I think it captures the essential problem.

• SilentCal 14 Jul 2014 21:05 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: This is why we can’t have so­cial science

  I read it. He has a section titled “The asymmetry between positive and negative evidence”.

  His argument is that a positive result is like seeing a black swan, and a null result is like seeing a white swan, and once you see a black swan, then no matter how many white swans you see it doesn’t prove that all swans are white.

  He addresses the objection that this leaves us unable to ever reject a spurious claim. His answer is that, since negative evidence is always meaningless, we should get positive evidence that the experimenter was wrong.

  I think this is a fair summary of the section. It’s not long, so you can check for yourself. I am… not impressed.

• SilentCal 23 Feb 2015 22:59 UTC

  23 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, Fe­bru­ary 2015, chap­ter 109

  I’m having trouble making sense of the Mirror. Atlantean-MIRI built a CEV-viewer to guide the massively powerful optimization they were planning to unleash, sure.

  But it’s not just a viewing device; you can put things in and take them out. Why? Unsatisfactory answer: So you can step inside and live out your life in the room of your heart’s desire. Unsatisfactory because you might want more than one room.

  Also, every viewer doesn’t get a freshly minted instance of their CEV; it’s possible for them to see the effects of someone else’s prior interactions with the world. Why? Answer 1: Because storing things in the mirror was an intended use. But why? Answer 2: People whose CEV dictates they live together, with the real versions of one another and not convenient copies, need the same instance of the same world.

  If the Mirror is the source of phoenixes, then the mirror can be used to create things. Maybe the idea was to produce the singularity within the mirror and take it out? The world doesn’t look like this happened, and I doubt EY’s ending is that no one really wanted a singularity, but maybe there’s some limitation that prevented this. Say, the Mirror piggybacks off the user’s brainpower, so it can’t extrapolate its way to a much Friendlier singularity than the user could have designed. I do take the mirror’s performance so far as evidence it doesn’t extrapolate very aggressively.

On Ir­ra­tional The­ory of Identity

• SilentCal 5 Sep 2014 0:11 UTC

  21 points

  on: “NRx” vs. “Prog” As­sump­tions: Lo­cat­ing the Sources of Disagree­ment Between Ne­o­re­ac­tionar­ies and Pro­gres­sives (Part 1)

  Here’s a big one that’s sort of up a meta-level from a lot of the descriptive beliefs:

  Older societies/​cultures are optimized (NR) vs. older societies/​cultures are chaotic messes (prog)

  NRs expect older structures to be very well adapted to their conditions close to ideal, or at least far better than anything progressives would invent from a blank slate. Progressives tend to see older structures as arising from a very complicated, often Moloch-driven set of interactions that optimizes only very weakly for things like social stability and doesn’t optimize at all for, say, most members’ happiness. There are separate but related questions about whether history optimized societies for the right things and how effectively it optimized them.

  This is essentially summarizable as level of belief in Chesterton’s Fence. A neoreactionary thinks the fence must be there for a damn good reason, whereas a progressive figures there are lots of stupid reasons the fence could end up there.

  And when we start from the blank slate, NRs expect the right answer to look a lot like traditional societies, whereas progressives believe human cognition should be able to drastically outperform historical evolutionary forces.

• SilentCal 23 Jul 2015 16:10 UTC

  20 points

  on: Steel­man­ing AI risk critiques

  I’m sure there’s no need to point to Robin Hanson’s anti-foom writings? The best single article is IMO Irreducible Detail essentially questioning the generality of intelligence.

• SilentCal 12 Dec 2014 23:05 UTC

  19 points

  on: Harper’s Magaz­ine ar­ti­cle on LW/​MIRI/​CFAR and Ethereum

  Also, should we be doing a better job publicizing the fact that LW’s political surveys turn up plurality liberal, and about as many socialists as libertarians? Not that there’s anything wrong with being libertarian, but I’m uneasy having the site classified that way.

• SilentCal 11 Feb 2014 23:34 UTC

  19 points

  on: A Fer­vent Defense of Fre­quen­tist Statistics

  I don’t have a technical basis for thinking this, but I’m beginning to suspect that as time goes on, more and more frequentist methods will be proven to be equivalent or good approximations to the ideal Bayesian approach. If that happens, (Edit: Hypothetical) Bayesians who refused to use those methods on ideological grounds would look kind of silly in hindsight, as if relativistic physics came first and a bunch of engineers refused to use Newtonian equations for decades until someone proved that they approximate the truth well at low speeds.

• SilentCal 2 Jan 2014 22:58 UTC

  19 points

  on: Hand­shakes, Hi, and What’s New: What’s Go­ing On With Small Talk?

  This is very useful.

  Upon reading this, I immediately synthesized the following practical advice (with offline conversations in mind):

  1) To be a better talker, you need to know off the top of your head what to do with a “what’s new” or similar invitation. Being prepared for likely specific inquiries (e.g. “How was your weekend” on a Monday) is also wise, keeping in mind that a certain amount of redirection is acceptable (“Not too much—I was resting after [interesting intense thing] last weekend”).

  2) To be a better listener, you need to be able to ask specific questions. I, for one, would be highly interested in a list of conversation items to drill this on, since generating these on the spot has been my failure point more times than I can count. (I don’t mean trying to prepare follow-ups to everything someone might say, but rather practicing to get better at generating.)

• SilentCal 4 Sep 2014 23:45 UTC

  18 points

  on: “NRx” vs. “Prog” As­sump­tions: Lo­cat­ing the Sources of Disagree­ment Between Ne­o­re­ac­tionar­ies and Pro­gres­sives (Part 1)

  Fascinating project you’ve taken on!

  Let me try to add one, though I’m no expert:

  Domination is terrible (prog) vs. domination can be eudaimonic (NR) I often see neoreactionaries contend that dominated members of traditional societies were happy, even those progressives would identify as most oppressed. The argument goes roughly that peasants, slaves, battered wives, and so on who accepted their lot in life would mentally adapt and be able to be perfectly happy. Progressivism/​liberalism/​the Cthedral has either destroyed our capacity to thrive in these arrangements or caused us to dishonestly claim we would hate them.

  The standard modern assumption, on the other hand, is that this kind of domination is a horrible thing to inflict on any human, that peasants, slaves and battered wives suffered immensely, and that it’s essential to eradicate even the shade of this kind of treatment.

• SilentCal 4 Mar 2015 23:18 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Velorien’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, March 2015, chap­ter 116

  Yup. The fact that she defeated the Dark Lord right after the Professor who flunked her failed to do so will only serve to underscore the injustice.

• SilentCal 26 Aug 2015 16:55 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Is semiotics bul­lshit?

  I think this is the field’s key once-nontrivial insight: that symbolism is powerful and pervasive, and you can learn a lot by paying attention to how it works. This is approaching triviality today, but it sounds like in 1930 an automaker would think you were crazy if you said, “Instead of describing the objective qualities of your car, your ads should insinuate things about the kind of person who drives it”.

  I’m not convinced the impenetrable language was ever necessary or helpful to this, though.

Epiphe­nom­e­nal Or­a­cles Ig­nore Holes in the Box

• SilentCal 6 Aug 2014 19:13 UTC

  15 points

  on: Raven para­dox set­tled to my satisfaction

  If we were sampling random non-black objects and none of them were ravens, that really would be evidence that all ravens are black.

  The reason it seems silly to take a yellow banana as evidence that all ravens are black is that ‘sampling the space of nonblack things’ is not an accurate description of what we’re doing when we look at a banana. When we see a raven, we do implicitly think it’s more or less randomly drawn from the (local) population of ravens.

  If you had grown up super-goth and only ever seen black things, you would have no idea what things have nonblack versions. If you went outside one day and saw a bunch of nonblack things and none of them were ravens, you might indeed start to suspect that all ravens were black; the more nonblack things you saw, the stronger this suspicion would get.