steven

Karma: 519

steven 14 Sep 2007 23:43 UTC
1 point
on: Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
I think the recent 1984 quotes are close to encouraging generalization from fictional evidence. Bias and totalitarianism are not more connected because Orwell wrote a work of fiction connecting them; you may understand this on a gut level, but many readers probably don’t. If there’s a duty to make history available, isn’t there a converse duty to make fiction unavailable?

Anyway, here are my thoughts on whether it’s a good idea to choose bias.

steven 15 Sep 2007 1:07 UTC
3 points
on: Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
“For example, if he used it as a way to illustrate a point, clarifying his meaning, then it was not improperly used. If he used it as evidence of Orwell’s own well-thought-out views on the subject, then again, it was not improperly used. There are many ways to use fiction that are not improper.”

What his intentions were doesn’t matter; what matters is the expected reaction of the audience, which in this case is going to see a vivid example supporting Eliezer’s claim that human evil sets out to muddle thinking. This happens to be true, but it doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with Winston Smith or O’Brien, both of whom were made up by Orwell with (I suspect) one of Orwell’s intentions being exactly that their fake historical authority would be used to support Orwell’s (true) opinions. I wish we could all just agree on a norm banning references to fiction from any serious discussion about the real world. People seem completely incapable of handling the stuff.

steven 26 Sep 2007 13:20 UTC
−1 points
on: Occam’s Razor
“Your accusation of witchcraft wouldn’t let you shorten the rest of the message; you would still have to describe, in full detail, the data which her witchery caused.”

My model of witches, if I had one, would produce a given simple sequence like 01010101 with greater probability than a given random sequence like 00011011. Wouldn’t yours? I might agree if you said “in nearly full detail”.

steven 26 Sep 2007 17:14 UTC
8 points
on: Occam’s Razor
Eliezer,

“I don’t expect my own environment to be random noise, but that has nothing to do with witchcraft...”

I think I misinterpreted the math and now see what you’re getting at. Would it be an accurate translation to human language to say, “a sequence like 10101010 may favor witchcraft over the hypothesis that nothing weird is going on (i.e. the coinflips are random), but it will never favor witchcraft over the simpler hypothesis that something weird is going on that isn’t witchcraft”?

I find it awkward to think of “witchcraft” as just a content-free word; what “witchcraft” means to me is something like the possibility that reality includes human-mind-like things with personalities and with preferences that they achieve through unknown nonstandard causal means. If you coded that up, it would probably no longer be content-free; it would allow shortening the rest of the program generating the sequences in some cases and require lengthening it in some other cases. In all realistic cases the resulting program would still be longer than necessary.

steven 26 Sep 2007 17:24 UTC
10 points
on: 9/26 is Petrov Day
Is it your actual opinion that nuclear war between the US and USSR would have destroyed the world (or human civilization), or was that just a figure of speech? The distinction seems worth upholding.

steven 27 Sep 2007 14:53 UTC
1 point
on: 9/26 is Petrov Day
Nuclear war would have been unimaginably awful, and Petrov deserves all the positive attention he’s getting and more. But there’s a distinction between destroying the world and destroying much of the world, and our descendants a millions years from now, if any, will find this distinction very significant.

steven 27 Sep 2007 14:56 UTC
0 points
on: 9/26 is Petrov Day
I don’t believe that a post-nuclear society would “have nothing in common with what was there before”, but I wouldn’t object to calling it “destroying the world as we know it”.

steven 27 Sep 2007 15:21 UTC
1 point
on: 9/26 is Petrov Day
That seems likely to me too. There wasn’t much of an internet in 1983, though.

steven 18 Oct 2007 14:00 UTC
0 points
on: “Can’t Say No” Spending
“Even if it has net zero financial effect, that doesn’t mean it isn’t amazingly efficient at health effects etc.”

Rather out of my depth in this discussion, but, wouldn’t you expect better health to cause higher incomes?

steven 21 Oct 2007 0:23 UTC
0 points
on: Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities
Eliezer, you can interpret rocks as minds if you make the interpretation complex enough. Why do you ignore these rock-minds if not because you discount them for algorithmic complexity?

steven 23 Oct 2007 1:22 UTC
2 points
on: Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities
Don’t dollars have an infinite expected value (in human lives or utility) anyway, especially if you take into account weird low-probability scenarios? Maybe the next mugger will make even bigger threats.

steven 9 Dec 2007 16:52 UTC
9 points
0
on: When None Dare Urge Restraint
I tend to agree with Eliezer-February-2007:

“If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.”

steven 10 Dec 2007 14:12 UTC
2 points
on: When None Dare Urge Restraint
Eliezer:

‘the point here was a very short distance from ones I’d already made in “Uncritical Supercriticality” and “Affective Death Spirals”’

Perhaps the main point was, but statements like this:

“If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history.”

seem to me to require another month of steps of inference even if they’re true. Tracking and comparing consequences in world politics is really really complicated.

steven 12 Dec 2007 13:27 UTC
1 point
on: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult
TGGP, Kling wasn’t calling science a religion, he was calling the anti-global-warming movement a religion, which strikes me as true regardless of whether the skeptics are right about the science (I think they’re not).

steven 13 Dec 2007 1:42 UTC
6 points
on: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
michael vassar: You’re right when you say a correlation of intelligence with liberalism is evidence for liberalism, but that’s not because the stupid people are conservative, it’s because the smart people are liberal. At least I think that’s what Eliezer meant.

steven 13 Dec 2007 1:47 UTC
0 points
on: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
Though you could see the conservativeness of stupid people as strengthening the evidence provided by smart liberal people because it points at there being more of a conservative human baseline to deviate from.

steven 13 Dec 2007 2:44 UTC
1 point
on: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
Can we agree on the following: if you pick a random stupid person and ask for an opinion on B, and the stupid person says B is false, this cannot be evidence against B unless you have background knowledge on the fraction of people who think B, in which case all the work is really being done by the indirect inference about the opinions of smarter people, so calling the stupid person’s opinion negative evidence is misleading even if strictly speaking correct?

steven 13 Dec 2007 14:09 UTC
3 points
on: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
Actually, if I’m not wrong (and it still confuses me), arguments from authority have a different conditional probability structure than “normal” arguments.

steven 16 Dec 2007 14:48 UTC
0 points
on: Hug the Query
“If you actually watch the plane fly, the calculations themselves become moot for many purposes, and Kelvin’s authority not even worth considering.”

But is that because of screening or just because the probability is so close to 100%? (Maybe this is the same point Doug S. already made.)

steven 16 Dec 2007 14:55 UTC
0 points
on: Argument Screens Off Authority
Eliezer, good reduxification. I’m still not sure about the point that Tom McCabe made about when authority stops mattering because overwhelming evidence brings the probability close to 0 or 1. Screening seems to do at least some of the work, though.

manuelg,

“The standard frequentist approaches seem like statistical theater.”

I lost any remaining respect for standard frequentist inference when I was taught a test that would sometimes “neither reject nor fail to reject” a null hypothesis. Haha.