Sophronius

• Sophronius 27 Mar 2016 15:18 UTC

  47 points

  in reply to: Huluk’s comment on: Less­wrong 2016 Survey

  RE: The survey: I have taken it.

  I assume the salary question was meant to be filled in as Bruto, not netto. However that could result in some big differences depending on the country’s tax code...

  Btw, I liked the professional format of the test itself. Looked very neat.

• Sophronius 23 Nov 2013 22:53 UTC

  33 points

  on: 2013 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I just took the survey. Thanks for spending time on making and evaluating it! A few questions/​comments:

  When you asked for time spent on less wrong, did you mean mean time or median time? I assumed mean, which resulted in a higher number since I occasionally come here to procrastinate and spend way too much time in a single sitting...

  Am I interpreting the agathics question correctly in that a person dying, getting frozen cryonically, and then being unfrozen and living for a 1000 years would count?

  Singularity question, which starts by asking when the Singularity (with capital letter S) will occur seems a bit leading to me. I’d expect that if you asked “Do you think a singularity will occur, and if so, when?” that people would give lower probabilities.

The con­se­quen­tial­ist case for so­cial con­ser­vatism, or “Against Cul­tural Su­per­stim­uli”

Trans­lat­ing bad advice

• Sophronius 5 Jul 2014 16:01 UTC

  24 points

  on: [LINK] Claus­trum Stim­u­la­tion Tem­porar­ily Turns Off Con­scious­ness in an oth­er­wise Awake Patient

  Personally I have never understood why people keep acting and talking as if consciousness were binary. I mean, no other human trait works that way. People don’t pretend that you either have intelligence or you don’t, or that you are either nice or you are mean. Heck, the article even literally states that the woman started out normal and gradually lost consciousness, which seems to very clearly imply that her consciousness level was gradually decreasing from whatever her normal level was to 0. Yet people keep asking things like “do animals have consciousness?” and I keep wondering if I’m missing something or if the answer is just really obviously “yes to varying degrees depending on the animal but almost always less than humans do.”

In favour of terseness

• Sophronius 30 Aug 2014 11:57 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: The Oc­to­pus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale

  Can somebody explain to me why people generally assume that the great filter has a single cause? My gut says it’s most likely a dozen one-in-a-million chances that all have to turn out just right for intelligent life to colonize the universe. So the total chance would be 1/​1000000^12. Yet everyone talks of a single ‘great filter’ and I don’t get why.

• Sophronius 14 Jul 2014 18:43 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: Why I Am Not a Ra­tion­al­ist, or, why sev­eral of my friends warned me that this is a cult

  To clarify what I mean, take the following imaginary conversation:

  Less Wronger: Hey! You seem smart. You should consider joining the Less Wrong community and learn to become more rational like us!
  Normal: (using definition: Rationality means using cold logic and abstract reasoning to solve problems) I don’t know, rationality seems overrated to me. I mean, all the people I know who are best at using cold logic and abstract reasoning to solve problems tend to be nerdy guys who never accomplish much in life.
  Less Wronger: Actually, we’ve defined rationality to mean “winning”, or “winning on purpose” so more rationality is always good. You don’t want be like those crazy normals who lose on purpose, do you?
  Normal: No, of course I want to succeed at the things I do.
  Less Wronger: Great! Then since you agree that more rationality is always good you should join our community of nerdy guys who obsessively use cold logic and abstract reasoning in an attempt to solve their problems.

  As usual with the motte and bailey, only the desired definition is used explicitly. However, the connotations with the second mundane use of the word slip in.

• Sophronius 25 Oct 2013 18:41 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Less Wrong’s poli­ti­cal bias

  Ok, here are my reasons:

  1) I would like to be able to talk about politics with rational people
  2) Understanding more of how the world works could be useful in other areas.
  3) I want to be able to make references to things that might be construed as political without having the entire post downvoted to −6 because I’m not allowed to talk about politics.
  4) I am increasingly worried about the radicalisation (Assuming it really is increasing) of Less Wrong and I think the problem is that crazy views get too much credence here, due to an unwillingness to criticize by more rational people. (Biggest issue for me)

  Edit: I don’t get why I receive so many downvotes in a matter of minutes for answering a question as honestly and helpfully as I can manage. I see the same in some of my other posts. I somewhat suspect this is entirely based on party politics, where I am perceived to be criticizing party X in the original post, and so have unrelated posts downvoted by angry people. But maybe I’m missing something.

  What links here?

  • satt's comment on Ter­minol­ogy Thread (or “name that pat­tern”) by sixes_and_sevens (12 Jul 2014 18:28 UTC; 0 points)

• Sophronius 15 Jul 2013 13:37 UTC

  15 points

  on: How I Be­came More Ambitious

  I hate to focus on the negative, but a couple of things in your post made me go “ugh”. The first is talking about taking over the world: It’s funny when Harry Potter says it, grating when people on Less Wrong do it. Don’t talk about conquering the world unless you actually have realistic plans to conquer at least a small part of it, otherwise it just comes off to me as trying to look cool in an awkward way.

  The second is your overuse and misuse of jargon. The concept of comparative advantage for instance describes how it may be efficient for you to do X even though you may be worse at X than others, yet you call “looking better than average” a comparative advantage, when it really is just an advantage. “I suppose I can leverage it into a comparative advantage for getting high-status men to pay attention to me long enough for me to explain the merits of an idea I have.” This should be: “I can use this to my advantage”.

  Your post isn’t bad but things like this make it harder for me to draw use from it.

  What links here?

  • Mak­ing Ra­tion­al­ity Gen­eral-Interest by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) (24 Jul 2013 22:02 UTC; 45 points)

• Sophronius 30 Aug 2014 13:18 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Oc­to­pus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale

  Maybe not explicitly, but I keep seeing people refer to “the great filter” as if it was a single thing. But maybe you’re right and I’m reading too much into this.

• Sophronius 26 Dec 2013 11:43 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Randaly’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2013

  I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/​severely eye-rolled at. He says that:

  -Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
  -only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
  -lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
  -While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
  -particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
  -and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.

• Sophronius 17 Nov 2013 12:37 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Self-serv­ing meta: Who­ever keeps block-down­vot­ing me, is there some way to ne­go­ti­ate peace?

  Huh? That’s a strangely hostile thing to say. Surely if I repeatedly experience my posts getting gradually upvoted only to then having them all suddenly downvoted so i go from +40 to −60 karma and all my positive posts are now negative… Then that’s exactly what the OP is about? The only signal I get from that is that a couple people really dislike me/​ my style of writing, and I don’t think it makes sense to change entirely or go away purely because of that. That does not mean that I ignore what information each individual post’s karma provides, however.

• Sophronius 4 Jul 2014 20:34 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Self-Con­grat­u­la­tory Rationalism

  Okay, you’re doing precisely the thing I hate and which I am criticizing about Less Wrong. Allow me to illustrate:

  LW1: Guys, it seems to me that Less Wrong is not very rational. What do you think?
  LW2: What makes you think Less Wrong isn’t rational?
  LW1: Well if you take a step back and use the outside view, Less Wrong seems to be optimizing for being clever rather than optimizing for being rational. That’s a pretty decent indicator.
  LW3: Well, the outside view has theoretical limitations, you know. Eliezer wrote a post about how it is possible to misuse the outside point of view as a conversation stopper.
  LW1: Uh, well unless I actually made a mistake in applying the outside view I don’t see why that’s relevant? And if I did make a mistake in applying it it would be more helpful to say what it was I specifically did wrong in my inference.
  LW4: You are misusing the term inference! Here, someone wrote a post about this at some point.
  LW5: Yea but that post has theoretical limitations.
  LW1: I don’t care about any of that, I want to know whether or not Less Wrong is succeeding at being rational. Stop making needlessly theoretical abstract arguments and talk about the actual thing we were actually talking about.
  LW6: I agree, people here use LW jargon as as a form of applause light!
  LW1: Uh...
  LW7: You know, accusing others of using applause lights is a fully generalized counter argument!
  LW6: Oh yea? Well fully generalized counter arguments are fully generalized counter arguments themselves, so there!

  We’re only at LW3 right now so maybe this conversation can still be saved from becoming typical Less Wrong-style meta screwery. Or to make my point more politely: Please tell me whether or not you think Less Wrong is rational and whether or not something should be done, because that’s the thing we’re actually talking about.

• Sophronius 20 Jan 2014 10:55 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: 2013 Sur­vey Results

  Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.

  With only 500 people responding to the IQ question, it is entirely possible that this is simply a selection effect. I.e. only people with high IQ test themselves or report their score while lower IQ people keep quiet.

  Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/​feminism/​etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one’s values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/​Green.

  There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. You are assuming that feminism is purely a matter of personal preference, incorrectly I feel. If you reduce feminism to simply asking “should women have the right to vote” then you should in fact find a correlation between that and “is there such a thing as global warming”, because the correct answer in each case is yes.

  Not saying I am necessarily in favour of modern day feminism, but it does bother me that people simply assume that social issues are independent of fact. This sounds like “everyone is entitled to their opinion” nonsense to me.

  What I find more surprising is that there is no correlation between IQ and political beliefs whatsoever. I suspect that this is simply because the significance level is too strict to find anything.

  Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

  With this, on the other hand, I agree completely.

• Sophronius 14 Apr 2015 16:43 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: KnaveOfAllTrades’s comment on: Trans­lat­ing bad advice

  Hm, okay, let me try to make it more concrete.

  My main example is one where people (more than once, in fact) told me that “I might have my own truth, but other people have their truth as well”. This was incredibly easy to dismiss as people being unable to tell map from territory, but after the third time I started to wonder why people were telling me this. So I asked them what made them bring it up in the first place, and they replied that they felt uncomfortable when I was stating facts with the confidence they warranted. I was reminded of something Richard Dawkins said: “clarity is often seen as offensive.” I asked some other people if they felt the same way, and a helpful people-person told me that the reason for this is that those people felt threatened by my intelligence (they were HR) and my stating things with confidence reminded them of this. So I got the advice to phrase my statements of belief in a more friendly way. I hated this because it felt dishonest, having to use weasel words to hide the fact that I felt confident, but I could no longer deny that my current method wasn’t working.

  The meta-level I learned was the one presented in the OP: When people give you advice/​objections, they almost never say what they mean or what the actual problem is. They substitute something that sounds nice and not-offensive sounding, making it easy to dismiss their advice as nonsense. So what you are supposed to do is find out what they originally meant and draw a lesson from that instead.

  Another example: My father often tells me not to be cynical, but this doesn’t make much sense to me because he is very cynical himself. It turns out that what he actually means is that I should be more upbeat, or as Scott Adams would put it: “Be a huge phony.” The reason my father does not state this outright is because he is following his own rule even while giving the advice: he is rephrasing “be a huge phony” as “don’t be cynical”, because “be a huge phony” sounds cynical.

• Sophronius 18 Nov 2013 11:39 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Self-serv­ing meta: Who­ever keeps block-down­vot­ing me, is there some way to ne­go­ti­ate peace?

  This doesn’t explain why all of my posts get downvoted at the same time, including posts that are entirely unrelated. A 100 point karma drop where before my posts were contentious but still mostly positive is an anomaly that should not be explained away so easily. Bear in mind that it’s not an either/​or thing: people can downvote and upvote my posts for legitimate reasons, which is fine, while others block downvote, which is not fine. You can acknowledge the existence of block downvoting while still disliking my posts, that’s totally ok.

• Sophronius 25 Oct 2013 19:33 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Less Wrong’s poli­ti­cal bias

  Literally speaking not at all, since it was an exaggeration. 10 pages of praise is clearly not necessary.

  That said, I strongly believe that posts containing criticism of Less Wrong on average get many more downvotes (and less upvotes) than posts which remark on how great Less Wrong is. For example, I have seen “joke” posts on how Yudkowski is god that get about +50 points (was a while ago, would need to check to confirm memory). On the other hand, every time I post a criticism of Less Wrong, it gets a lot of downvotes (though usually some upvotes as well), and as for criticism posted by other people.… well I don’t see a lot of that, do you?

• Sophronius 13 Jul 2014 18:45 UTC

  9 points

  on: Why I Am Not a Ra­tion­al­ist, or, why sev­eral of my friends warned me that this is a cult

  Your criticism of rationality for not guaranteeing correctness is unfair because nothing can do that. Your criticism that rationality still requires action is equivalent to saying that a driver’s license does not replace driving, though many less wrongers do overvalue rationality so I guess I agree with that bit. You do however seem to make a big mistake in buying into the whole fact- value dichotomy, which is a fallacy since at the fundamental level only objective reality exists. Everything is objectively true or false, and the fact that rationality cannot dictate terminal values does not contradict this.

  I do agree with the general sense that less wrong is subject to a lot of group think however, and agree that this is a big issue.

• Sophronius 8 Mar 2014 22:59 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: whales’s comment on: In favour of terseness

  You’re right, there’s multiple related points to be made here. So, let me try to clarify the issue a bit.

  If I write a post with specific examples, people will get too hung up on the examples and the main point is lost.
  if I don’t post examples, people will comment that I am not specific enough.
  If I state very clearly and succinctly what I mean, there’s the risk that I come across as arrogant.
  If I quantify everything with disclaimers, the post becomes less readable and people won’t know what I think.
  If I don’t anticipate every possible counter-argument, people will assume I haven’t thought of those arguments.
  If I do anticipate and counter every counter-argument, the post becomes less readable again.

  It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. It really is hard, as you say. I originally included in the text that I was thinking about the meta-ethics sequence specifically: I feel that by attempting to include every possible concern, every possible argument and counter-argument, the sequence became way too long and unreadable. At no point does Yudkowsky clearly and succinctly state what his position is. As a result, I think the point of the sequence was lost on people.

  Yet there’s a reason for this. Eliezer isn’t stupid: I think he wrote the sequence that way precisely because he feared that if he did state clearly what he meant right of the bat, people would instantly reject it based on trivial arguments. However, I think that the solution is for the reader-base to appreciate frankness and terseness more, and demand argumentation and qualification less. Not to demand that people like Yudkowsky write perfect posts that cannot possibly be misinterpreted and cover everything without being too long.