In my post here you can find links to defenses of Stalin and Mao. They do not deny that both killed a huge amount of people, or that a great many of those people were completely innocent and it was tragic that they were killed. The author instead states that Stalin and Mao gave enough benefits to people, who had previously been faced with even worse rule, that those unfortunate deaths should be viewed as cons outweighed by the pros. I can’t do an effective job of presenting his case (for one thing I completely disagree with it and think the two were among the worst people in history) but I would like if he could explain more here, including why our view of them is so off.
TGGP4
Karma: 454
“believing you’re happy” and “in fact happy” strike me as distinctions without distinction. How are they falsifiable?
Eliezer, do you concede that there is no difference between “believing you’re happy” and “really being happy”?
HA, I was surprised you stumbled into that one. A good introductory example of how evolution does not optimize at the species but at the gene-level can be found here. It is by Richard Dawkins, who is also known for the term “meme”, which is an idea that can be analyzed like a gene. Unless the meme that buying lottery tickets is a good idea is beneficial for those that hold it, we should not expect it to become prevalent even it if benefits the species. You can find other good posts from Razib on “group selection” if you look for them.
I might be viewed as a right-wing extremist but I was confused by FrF’s post. Rationality and place on the “political spectrum” (whatever that means) are orthogonal. You might be want to look at Jerry Pournelle’s flawed but interesting political axis.
James Bach, if something has a frequency above 1% and has high fitness costs to those that hold it, it is probably pathogenic rather than genetic. You can find more on that from Greg Cochran at the bottom of this page.
FrF, I’m a libertarian and a fan of Max Stirner, but I think Pournelle was wrong to classify him as a rationalist like Ayn Rand. Most would likely consider him an irrationalist. I like reason, but thinks it needs to be constrained by empirical evidence to avoid spinning out into the ridiculous. I agree with Burke that drastic changes can be very harmful and I don’t want any institution to have the power to determine who is biased and what is the objective truth, but I like the goal of Overcoming Bias.
Do we consider it to be evidence in Christianity’s favor that more people believe in it than Islam? Does the average IQ of adherents of a religious belief cause it to become more plausible to us?
In the interests of disclosure, I am an agnotheist who was baptized Catholic and raised mainline Protestant, so we’re still waiting for Eliezer’s requested comment.
So the actual end result would be to convince me that the universe was in the hands of a monstrously insane and vicious God. As I noted here, that is actually pretty much what I believed in the last days of my Christianity. My perspective on ethics made it more plausible to me than I suspect it would be to most people.
The whole point of Christianity (as I grew up with it) is that by manifesting Himself on earth God realized that the whole smiting people thing was passe. I always thought the God of the New Testament was just that of the Old with better marketing, though of course I found the latter more interesting.
Eliezer, the things you are saying here about math are just the type of things I was attempting to here, but you’re much better at it.
Voting is irrational because the probability that your vote will have any effect on the outcome is about zero. I discuss that more and have a back-and-forth in the comment section here.
That doesn’t describe me at all. I was a full-bore Fred Phelps-style ultracalvinist (only an apathetic quietist rather than an activist). I was proud that my faith was so pure I could fully admit that God does this or that thing we find abhorrent because we are so pitiful in comparison to Him and His Plan that the very idea of questioning His Wisdom is laughable. I would say “You cannot question the goodness of His actions because there was no good before God defined it, whatever God does is good by virtue of His doing it and when you say one his actions is “bad” it is only a reflection of your complete inability to know what good is in comparison to Him”. I believed in evolution and like you knew the importance of not having a human-centered perception of the world. God was not merely not a 20th century American, he was not human, was not of this planet or even of this universe. He was utterly incomprehensible, and what we did know of Him was only what he had chosen to let us (whose significance in His Plan we cannot know) hear, which left room for a dishonest and misleading approach to us (though we were to think of it as being as benevolent as a parent telling their children, mentally challenged ones at that, about Santa and the Tooth Fairy). I discussed that phase of my belief here, noted one of the contradictions in my God-conception here at Gene Expression and mentioned the resemblance of the deity I was supposed to revere to H.P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth here.
I suppose in some sense I had not been a believer for some time, but my history of being a Christian had put in me a desire to be one whether or not I actually thought it was true. Like many youngsters I had started out with a primitive God-concept of the kindly old man in the sky variety who watches over us and occasionally intervenes sometimes. As I grew older and wiser I made omniscience, predeterminism and so on a more important part, so that God was now the inactive clock-maker (which seemed logical to me). The nature of God came to be shaped by what I knew about the world rather than my view of the nature of the world being affected by my concept of God. God was essentially out of the picture and the only justification I had for including him was the prime-mover argument (which I would now say brings in a conclusion inferior to maximum entropy). It wasn’t that long ago I first announced to anyone else I had stopped believing, and still haven’t told those I know personally. As I mention in the link, it was reading people like the folks at gnxp that pushed me over the edge. I was able to read them and take what they said seriously because, as I mentioned, I didn’t feel my faith was threatened. There were occasional mentions of Bayesianism, but it was mostly the notion of belief as a probabilistic guess based on evidence that got through to me. I wanted to have a more accurate view of the world and tried to adopt that standard of belief. I also knew about how most people’s religious beliefs (I did not initially think to include my own in that category) were not grounded in evidence, but group membership/arguments from authority and flawed intuition/heuristics. Eventually those concepts collided and I decided to consciously evaluate whether the evidence really suggested the existence of the judeochristian God. My conclusion was no and I had not really thought the evidence suggested it for some time but had a “preference over belief”. Once I admitted I didn’t actually believe I couldn’t make myself believe anymore whether or not I had that preference. Can anyone honestly say “I believe this even though it isn’t actually the case”? I can’t really think of any killer argument against God I hadn’t considered though.
I remember playing a game in which we would take turns punching each other in the stomach as hard as we could while trying not to flinch, but I viewed it as positive sum. Even though you get punched it’s still a lot of fun.
Generalizing from past observations to future expectations is often referred to in philosophy as the “problem of induction”. It has the same problem is that you have to accept induction working in the past to expect it to work in the future, and if Bertrand Russell is right to argue that you were created five seconds ago with false memories you can’t know it worked in the past either. Against that kind of skepticism I can only fall back on a David Stove type “common sense” position, but fortunately I am not interested in persuading others but understanding the world well enough to attain my goals.
You left the italics tag on.
A person not capable of correct deductive reasoning is insane. The people usually deemed insane are those with deviant behavior, or what Caplan calls “the extreme tails of a preference distribution with high variance”.
Does Eliezer really need to do some “real philosophy”? If he does not, will he miss out on the Singularity? Will A.I be insufficiently friendly? I don’t see any reason to think so. I say be content in utter philosophical wrongness. Shout to the heavens that our actual world is a zombie world with XYZ rather than H20 flowing in the creeks that tastes grue, all provided it has no impact on your expectations.
Adrian, priming still works even if subjects see the number came out of Wheel-of-fortune type random outcomes.
Richard, are you saying that if in this world I attempted to move around some material to produce an artificial brain, it would not work unless I also did some psycho-manipulation of some sort? Or is the psycho-stuff bound so tightly with the material that the materially-sufficient is psycho-sufficient?
I neglected to link to this before when I mentioned anticipated experiences, which is one of my favorite posts here. I am so fond of linking to it I assumed I already had.
I have heard that advertising mainly shifts consumers from one brand to another. In that sense it is wasteful and an economist could give an argument for taxing it. I happen to like the subsidy of media by advertisements, so I wouldn’t advocate it.
There isn’t much known about Hopefully Anonymous, but I’m fairly certain he does not consider himself a post-modernist.