Slapstick

Karma: 124

Slapstick 21 Apr 2024 22:40 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Lev Protter’s comment on: Thoughts on seed oil
I’m not sure I understand why the experience you’re describing gives an update towards these seed oil theories when it seems generally consistent with already understood health and nutrition knowledge.

Is it particularly surprising that someone experiences some health problems after switching from a diet low in refined/processed ingredients to one high in those ingredients, while also undergoing the stress of being drafted into the military? (I would be very stressed though I shouldn’t assume)

Standard nutrition might be insufficient to explain the extent and speed at which the health issues occurred, but then likewise the seed oil theories would be insufficient to explain why more drafted soldiers aren’t quickly developing those same health issues.

Slapstick 17 Mar 2024 17:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Transformative trustbuilding via advancements in decentralized lie detection
I am sceptical about the role of alcohol you describe and dynamics around it as a form of lie detector, but I know there’s a range of social dynamics I haven’t necessarily been exposed to in my culture.

I have been in various groups that heavily drink on occasion, but I’ve never seen any evidence of people being viewed as having something to hide were they not to drink.

I think alcohol might make people more honest but I think it’s usually things they already wanted to divulge but for lack of some courage or sense of emotional intimacy that alcohol can provide. It’s hard for me to imagine alcohol playing a similar role as a lie detector for significant factual information people strongly want to hide.

Could you offer any examples of where a real lie detector would be valuable in friendships or potential friendships?

A lot of the things I might want to know seem challenging to address via a lie detector. “Will you do anything violent or steal or intentionally damage my property,” People likely to do those things might honestly intend not to.

I could see it potentially being useful for people having sex more on the casual side.

Slapstick 16 Mar 2024 4:59 UTC
4 points
−1
on: Transformative trustbuilding via advancements in decentralized lie detection

high-trust friend groups

I’m having a hard time imagining a scenario in which I would find this valuable in my friend groups. If I were ever unsure whether I could trust the word of a friend on an important matter, I’d think that would represent deeper issues than a mere lack of information a scan of their brain could provide. Perhaps I’m nieve or particular in some way in how I filter people.

Do you have examples for how this would aid friendships? Or the other domains you mentioned?

I could see it being very valuable but I also find the idea very frightening, and I am not someone who lies.

Slapstick 25 Feb 2024 5:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.

And it says something about EITHER the unreliability of intuitions beyond run-of-the-mill situations, or about the insane variance in utility functions across people (and likely time)

I don’t think it’s really all that complicated, I suspect that you haven’t experienced a certain extent of negative valence which would be sufficient to update you towards understanding how bad suffering can get.

It would be like if you’ve never smelled anything worse than a fart, and you’re trying to gauge the mass of value of positive smells against the mass of value of negative smells. If you were trying to estimate what it would be like in a small room full of decaying dead animals and ammonia, or how long you’d willingly stay in that room, your intuitions would completely fail you.

but only minor changes in value toward the tails.

I have experienced qualia that is just slightly net negative, feeling like non-existence would be preferable all else equal. Then I’ve experienced states of qualia that are immensely worse than that. The distance between those two states is certainly far greater than the distance between neutral and extreme pleasure/fulfillment/euphoria etc. Suffering can just keep getting worse and worse far beyond the point at which all you can desire is to cease existing.

Slapstick 24 Feb 2024 23:20 UTC
11 points
8
on: Balancing Games
I think one reason I don’t like that sort of thing is there’s more ambiguity in “what it took to win the game”

It’s hard to know whether an artificial advantage is proportional to the skill gap. If I win, I won’t know the extent to which I should attribute that win to good play (that I ought to be proud of, and that will impress others), VS attributing the win to a potentially greater than 1/N chance of winning(that I came by artificially).

If the greater skill is the absolute advantage that leads me to a win , I will discount the achievement on account of having an absolute advantage, but I’ll still feel satisfied that I have achieved a relatively higher skill level.

If an improperly calibrated handicap is the absolute advantage that leads me to a win, it’s a win I’d discount on account of there being an absolute advantage, but in this case I’d garner no satisfaction from having an (artificial) absolute advantage.

Morestill the win might feel insulting or condescending if I was given a disproportionately large advantage due to my friends/competitors underestimation of my expected quality of play.

My win will also not necessarily give my competitors an update as to whether they underestimated my expected quality of play.

If the expectation is that I will win 1/N times, they won’t update on my skill level if I win. (Maybe very slightly, and eventually as you play more games)

If I win when the odds are against me, people update significantly on my expected quality of play.

It feels good to know people are updating favourably on my expected quality of play.

Slapstick 24 Feb 2024 21:39 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.
Interesting. It is an abstract hypothetical, but I do think it’s useful, and it reveals something about how far apart we are in our intuitions/priors.

I wouldn’t choose to live a year in the worst possible hell for 1000 years in the greatest possible heaven. I don’t think I would even take the deal in exchange for an infinite amount of time in the greatest possible heaven.

I would conclude that the experience of certain kinds of suffering reveals something significant about the nature of consciousness that can’t be easily inferred, if it can be inferred at all.

I’m more confident that I’d spend a year as a bottom-5% happy human in order to get a year in the top-5%

I would guess that the difference between .001 percentile happy and 5th percentile happy is larger than the difference between the 5th percentile and 100th percentile. So in that sense it’s difficult for me to consider that question.

None of these are actual choices, of course. So I’m skeptical of using these guesses for anything important

I think even if they’re abstract semi-coherant questions they’re very revealing, and I think they’re very relevant to prioritization of s-risks, allocating resources, and issues such as animal welfare.

It makes it easier for me to understand how otherwise reasonable seeming people can display a kind of indifference to the state of animal agriculture. If someone isn’t aware of the extent of possible suffering, I can see why they might not view the issue with the same urgency.

Slapstick 24 Feb 2024 6:05 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.
Would you spend a year in the worst possible hell in exchange for a year in the greatest possible heaven?

Slapstick 24 Feb 2024 0:23 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
I think this is a good summary of a lot of the arguments for increased population, even if my view is different.

I think most of the benefits you’re describing flow from a very tiny fraction of all humans.

Given the returns to specialization, traditionally populations must grow in order to support the efforts of that tiny fraction. However it’s not necessarily the case that in the coming years increasing population is the only way to increase the amount of specialized individuals producing massive value.

Automation will make it easier to specialize.

Slapstick 23 Feb 2024 23:48 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.

The rate of suicide is really quite low. You ARE being offered the choice between an unknown length of continued experiences, and cessation of such.

I think the expected value of the rest of my life is positive (I am currently pretty happy), especially considering impacts external to my own consciousness. If that stops being the case, I have the option.

There’s also strong evolutionary reasons to expect suicide rates to not properly reflect the balance of qualia.

As embedded agents, our views are contingent on our experiences, and there is no single truth to this question.

It’s hard to know exactly what this is implying. Sure it’s based on personal experience that’s difficult to extrapolate and aggregate etc. But I think it’s a very important question. Potentially the most important question. Worth some serious consideration.

People are constantly making decisions based on the their marginal valuations of suffering and wellbeing, and the respective depths and heights of each end of the spectrum. These decisions can/do have massive ramifications.

So I can try to understand your view better, would you choose to spend one year in the worst possible hell if it meant you got to spend the next year in the greatest possible heaven?

Given my understanding of your expressed views, you would accept this offer. If I’m wrong about that, knowing that would help with my understanding of the topic. If you think it’s an incoherent question, that would also improve my understanding.

Feel free to disengage, I just find limited opportunities to discuss this. If anyone else has anything to contribute I’d be happy to hear it.

Slapstick 23 Feb 2024 22:31 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.
Thanks for answering. I would personally expect this intuition and introspection to be sensitive to contingent factors like the range of experiences you’ve had, would you agree?

Personally my view leans more in the other direction, although it’s possible I’m losing something in misunderstanding the complexity variable.

If my life experience leads me the view that ‘suffering is worse than wellbeing is good’, and your life experiences lend towards the opposite view, should those two data points be given equal weight? I personally would give more weight to accounts of the badness of suffering, because I see a fundamental asymmetry there, but would you say that’s a product of bias given to my set of experiences?

If I were to be offered 300 years of overwhelmingly positive complex life in exchange for another ten years of severe anhedonic depression, I would not accept that offer. It wouldn’t even be a difficult choice.

Assuming you would accept that offer for yourself, would you accept that offer on behalf of someone else?

Slapstick 23 Feb 2024 17:26 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Complexity of value but not disvalue implies more focus on s-risk. Moral uncertainty and preference utilitarianism also do.
Why do you think/suspect that?

Slapstick 24 Nov 2023 18:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: A Question For People Who Believe In God
I think I agree with this, but I also think it’s really important to avoid making too many assumptions about what people believe when they say they’re religious or practice religion . People often use similar language and labels to signify a very broad range of beliefs and views.

Slapstick 24 Nov 2023 16:50 UTC
1 point
0
on: A Question For People Who Believe In God
I have a very religious background but currently I’m not sure whether you would consider me religious. (Also to be clear I watched most of the video but I don’t know much about him otherwise)

I think when hearing people share about personal things in the category of religion, it’s important to try to be careful when pattern matching or when making assumptions about what beliefs people hold. People can use very similar words to refer to vastly different metaphysical beliefs. Two people could also have very similar metaphysical priors, and one might use more religious coded language due to their cultural background, whereas the other might not.

When he says that prayer works, I don’t think you should necessarily take him to mean that he is communicating with an omni*** being who is making changes to our reality based on that communication.

For all intents and purposes he would probably concede to reducing prayer to a form of psychologically theraputic meditation. However, I think part of adopting a religious attitude is a hesitancy towards being reductive in that way.

Anyway, it got me thinking, when someone says they “believe in God” does this mean something like “I assign a ≥ 50% probability to there being an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient intelligence?”

This is a good question, but how someone responds will vary a lot person to person, and it will be very difficult to converge on a common enough understanding of the meaning of words sufficient to get a clear answer.

For many people, it’s more about adopting a kind of mental attitude, rather than something that can easily be understood by trying to clarify a probability.

Then, many people would just unequivocally answer that they assign a greater than 50% probability. Many of those people would go further to say that they’d assign a 100% probability. There’s certain kinds of experiences that have a sort of self evident transcendent seeming quality to them, I’ve had these experiences, so it’s easy for me to understand why some religious people would interpret that as a kind of ontological evidence for their own specific views. I just think they’re making an error.

Slapstick 14 Nov 2023 21:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: It’s OK to eat shrimp: EAs Make Invalid Inferences About Fish Qualia and Moral Patienthood
I don’t think the title of this post is consistent with your self professed epistemic status, or the general claims you make.

You seem to be stating that in your (non expert) opinion, some EA’s are overconfident in the probabilities they’d assign to shrimp having the capacity to experience qualia?

If we assumed that’s correct, that doesn’t imply that it’s okay to eat shrimp. It just means there’s more uncertainty.

Slapstick 13 Nov 2023 1:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: It’s OK to be biased towards humans
I don’t think the thermometer is suffering.

I think it’s not necessarily easy to know when something is suffering from the outside, but I still think it’s the best standard.

most multicellular animals clearly have, but still we don’t give them the right to copyright

I possibly should have clarified I’m moreso talking about the standard for moral consideration, I think if we ever created an AI entity capable of making art that also has the capacity for qualia states, I don’t think copyright rights will be relevant anymore.

We raise and kill certain animals for their meat, in large numbers

We shouldn’t be doing this.

we just require that this is done without unnecessary cruelty.

This isn’t true for the vast majority of industrial agriculture. In practice there are virtually no restraints for the treatment of most animals.

My proposal is that it should be a combination of a) being the outcome of Darwinian evolution that makes not getting your preferences into ‘suffering’, and b) the capacity for sufficient intelligence (over some threshold) that entitles you to related full legal rights

Why Darwinian evolution? Because it’s hard to know if it’s suffering otherwise?

I think rights should be based on capacity for intelligence in certain circumstances where it’s relevant. I don’t think a pig should be able to vote in an election, because it wouldn’t be able to comprehend that, but it should have the right not to be tortured and exploited.

Slapstick 12 Nov 2023 16:45 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: It’s OK to be biased towards humans

But very few people seem to go along the principle of “granting privileges to humans is fine, actually”.

Because you’re using “it’s fine to arbitrarily prioritize humans morally” as the justification for this privilege. At least that’s how I’m understanding you.

If you told me it’s okay to smash a statue in the shape of a human, because “it’s okay to arbitrarily grant humans the privilege of not being smashed, on account of their essence of humanness, and although this statue has some human qualities, it’s okay to smash it because it doesn’t have the essence of humanness”

I would take issue with your reasoning, even though I wouldn’t necessarily have a moral problem with you smashing the statue. I would also just be very confused about why that type of reasoning would be relevant in this case. I would take issue with you smashing an elephant because it isn’t a human.

I disagree, I can imagine entities who experience such states and that I still cannot possibly coexist with. And if it’s me or them, I’d rather me survive.

I’m sure there are also humans that you cannot possibly coexist with.

I’m also just saying that’s the point at which it would make sense to start morally considering an art generator. But even so, I reject the idea that the moral permissibility of creating art is based on some privilege granted to those containing some essential trait.

I don’t think the moral status of a process will ever be relevant to the question of whether art made from that process meets some standard of originality sufficient to repel accusations of copyright infringement.

Slapstick 12 Nov 2023 15:25 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: It’s OK to be biased towards humans
We shouldn’t create it, and if we do, we should end it’s existence. Or reprogram it if possible. I don’t think any of those things are inconsistent with centering moral consideration around the capacity to experience suffering and wellbeing.

Slapstick 12 Nov 2023 1:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: It’s OK to be biased towards humans

Well, the distinction never mattered until now, so we can’t really say what have we been doing. Now it matters how we interpret our previous intent, because these two things have suddenly become distinct

Even if we assume that this is some privilege granted to humans because they’re human, it doesn’t make sense to debate whether a human-like process should be granted the same privilege on account of the similar process. Humans would be granted the privilege because they have an interest in what the privilege grants. An algorithmic process doesn’t necessarily have an interest no matter how similar the process is to a human process, so it doesn’t make sense to grant it the privilege.

If the algorithmic process does have an interest, then it might make sense to grant it the privilege. At that point though it would seem like such a convoluted means of adjudicating copyright laws. Also, If we’ve advanced to the point at which AI’s have actual subjective interests, I don’t think copyright laws will matter much.

What moral consideration isn’t on some level arbitrary? Why is this or that value a better inherent indicator of worth than just being human at all? I think even if your goal is to just understand better and formalize human moral intuitions, then obviously something like “intelligence” simply doesn’t cut it.

I think the capacity to experience qualitative states of consciousness, (e.g. suffering, wellbeing) is what should be considered when allocating moral consideration.

Slapstick 11 Nov 2023 22:08 UTC
10 points
10
on: It’s OK to be biased towards humans

AIs have some property that is “human-like”, therefore, they must be treated exactly as humans

Humans aren’t permitted to make inspired art because they’re human, we’ve just decided not to consider art as plagiarized beyond a certain threshold of abstraction and inspiration.

The argument isn’t that the AI is sufficiently “human-like”, it’s just that the process by which AI makes art is considered sufficiently similar to a process we already consider permissible.

I disagree that arbitrary moral consideration is okay, but I just don’t think that issue is really that relevant here.

Slapstick 11 Nov 2023 21:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: waterlubber’s comment on: It’s OK to be biased towards humans
Why not capacity to suffer?