Far from being a negative aspect of the post, the self-linking is a key element of Eliezer’s effort to build a common vocabulary for rationalists. I’ve personally found them extremely helpful for reminding myself of the context of the words, when I’ve forgotten. They’re basically footnotes.
How can we cooperate if we don’t even speak the same language?
I disagree with your conclusion on the grounds that I think you’re interpreting the passage in a different way than the author intended it.
My interpretation is more along the lines of “Steve Jobs, on seeing the profound economic destitution in the East, examined his beliefs about human utility functions. Finding that Western values/practices seemed to promote utility better than Eastern values/practices in developing countries (and perhaps that they do even in developed countries), he decided that the East should adopt the West’s values/practices.”
I loved the dissection into multiple biases, and I agree with your dissection based on your reading of the passage, but I think the author is saying something different and more in line with the prevalent beliefs on Less Wrong.
As Napoleon reportedly said, P(incompetence was the cause | bad things happen) > P(conspiracy was the cause | bad things happen).
If making a major contribution seemed so easy, and would be harder in some other field, it sure would suggest that his comparative advantage in the easy field is much greater; would not that suggest that he ought to devote his efforts there, since other people have proven relatively capable in the harder fields?
In my experience at least:
Thousands of hours invested in directly providing care, travel, and other services
Hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in education, food, clothing, etc.
The sacrifice of one parent’s career
Choosing housing locations based primarily on educational and social opportunities for the children, rather than convenience for employment or entertainment
Are these similar to dying for a child? I don’t know. It’s possible that the sum of the financial equivalent of the above is comparable to a statistical life, but I’m just giving rough estimates.
Unless we expand fashion to include technology accessories. I gather there are a lot more early adopters in Tech/Science.
My emotional stability has noticeably increased since I left Catholicism. Realizing that I was responsible for any outcome I achieved or failed to achieve left me with no choice but to focus on winning and to shut up and multiply.
This was, of course, long before I learned of those particular concepts. The effect has significantly amplified since then. It is now very difficult to make me unhappy, for essentially that reason.
This is essentially the AI box experiment. Check out the link to see how even an AI that can only communicate with its handler(s) might be lethal without guaranteed Friendliness.
I think the trick is that prestige is never composed solely of quality-assessing measures. If nothing else, prestige is path-dependent: it takes a lot of work for a new university to prove itself.
Even if all relevant quality metrics are included in prestige, additional lower-correlation components can make prestige correlate worse than any of the individual quality metrics.
Even if I distrust that you have a broken radio, as long as I prefer going to meet you (accepting the additional cost therein entailed) to never meeting you or meeting after an indefinitely long time, I will still go to wherever you say you are. If both people’s radios are unbroken after the crash, whoever transmits the “receiver broken” signal probably gets the easier time of it.
This game is essentially the (repeated?) game of chicken, as long as “claim broken receiver and other person capitulates” > “both players admit unbroken” > “capitulate to other person’s claim” > “neither player capitulates while both claim broken receivers”.
Conveniently, this appears to be the broader point Schelling was trying to make. Flamboyant disabling of one’s options often puts one in a better negotiating position. Hence, the American garrison in West Berlin.
Who said he was? If Eliezer can convince somebody to let him out of the box—for a financial loss no less—then certainly a transhuman AI can, right?
I propose a further hypothesis: high-status people have internalized Laws 4, 5, and 46 of the 48 Laws of Power, but especially Law 1: Never Outshine the Master.
After years of practice in switching between seeming competent relative to underlings and less so relative to superiors, they develop the ability to segregate audiences as you described.
I strongly second Snow Crash. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Ha, touche. Now there would be quite the prospiracy-Truther position—advocating the view that it was all just an accident...
Before I started college, I read this professor’s speech, which attempted to explain, given your concerns, why an education may nevertheless be valuable. It’s biased towards its audience (UChicago students) but I think its relevant point can be summarized as: few jobs allow you to continue practicing the diversity of skills employed by academic work, and having a degree keeps your options wide open for a longer period. However, the real thesis of the speech is that university is uniquely a place to devote oneself to practicing the Art, broadly construed, of generating knowledge and beauty from everything.
Other considerations:
Becoming an academic is very hard without an undergraduate degree, so if you want that life, stick with it.
It takes a great deal of luck to pull a Bill Gates. It is otherwise hard to convince people that your reasons for not having a degree are genuine and not ex post.
At least in my case, it has been hard to find anywhere near as high a concentration of intelligent and interesting people outside the university as in the one I attended.
Hope something in there helps!
Are any sacrifices provably made “for the recipient” rather than “because the sacrificer gains some (intangible) value from having made it?”
Fascinating idea. Only question I’d have relates to the game theory involved—if both parents want to disconnect (or suspect that they might want to in the future) there is an incentive to be the first to do so, as the first does not have to deal with the swapping requirements. Thus, there is some potential for pre-emptive swapping in order to avoid being left in a degrading situation. This problem only gets steeper as the situation becomes less pleasant.
An interesting extension: would children be able to add additional parents, with their current parents’ consent?
Indeed, the difference between Winning and “win-win” is important. Rationality wouldn’t be much of a martial art if we limited the acceptable results to those in which all parties win.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has counted to Aleph 3^^^3.
The payoff to defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma against Eliezer Yudkowsky is a paperclip. In the eye.
The Peano axioms are complete and consistent for Eliezer Yudkowsky.
In an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma between Chuck Norris and Eliezer Yudkowsky, Chuck always cooperates and Eliezer defects. Chuck knows not to mess with his superiors.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s brain actually exists in a Hilbert space.
In Japan, it is common to hear the phrase Eliezer naritai!