Viliam

• Viliam 18 Mar 2019 22:00 UTC

  12 points

  on: Ask LW: Have you read Yud­kowsky’s AI to Zom­bie book?

  I read the web­site be­fore the book ex­isted. Ac­tu­ally, I ar­gued that it should be turned into a book, be­cause books in gen­eral have higher sta­tus than web­sites. Then I read the book, and trans­lated it to Slo­vak lan­guage.

  My opinion on read­ing the com­ments is… they are in­ter­est­ing, but the added value per minute spent is sig­nifi­cantly lower than read­ing the book. (Some of the com­ments are awe­some, but most are not, and there is a lot of them.) Thus, if you have any­thing use­ful to do, read­ing the com­ments af­ter you have read the book is prob­a­bly a waste of time. (Per­haps, if you have spe­cific ques­tions or ob­jec­tions to spe­cific chap­ters, you should only read the com­ments in those chap­ters.)

  Your time would prob­a­bly be bet­ter spent read­ing high-karma ar­ti­cles which are not part of the book (is there a way to see the high­est-karma ar­ti­cles? if not, look here), and… you know, go­ing out­side and ac­tu­ally do­ing things.

• Viliam 18 Mar 2019 21:44 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: DragonGod's comment on: The Im­pos­si­bil­ity of the In­tel­li­gence Ex­plo­sion

  there is no in­tel­li­gent al­gorithm that out­performs ran­dom search on most prob­lems; this profound re­sult is called the No Free Lunch The­o­rem.

  I am not fa­mil­iar with the con­text of this the­o­rem, but I be­lieve that this is a grave mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion. From a brief read­ing, my im­pres­sion is that the the­o­rem says some­thing like “you can­not find use­ful pat­terns in ran­dom data; and if you take all pos­si­ble data, most of them are (Kol­mogorov) ran­dom”.

  This is true, but it is rele­vant only for situ­a­tions where any data is equally likely. Our phys­i­cal uni­verse seems not to be that kind of place. (It is true that in a com­pletely ran­domly be­hav­ing uni­verse, in­tel­li­gence would not be pos­si­ble, be­cause any ac­tion or be­lief would have the same chance of be­ing right or wrong.)

  When I think about su­per­in­tel­li­gent ma­chines, I imag­ine ones that would out­perform hu­mans in this uni­verse. The fact that they would be equally hel­pless in a uni­verse of pure ran­dom­ness doesn’t seem rele­vant to me. Say­ing that an AI is not “truly in­tel­li­gent” un­less it can han­dle the im­pos­si­ble task of skil­lfully nav­i­gat­ing com­pletely ran­dom uni­verses… that’s try­ing to win a de­bate by us­ing silly crite­ria.

• Viliam 18 Mar 2019 21:19 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: SonnieBailey's comment on: Has “poli­tics is the mind-kil­ler” been a mind-kil­ler?

  The effec­tivity of truth and ly­ing de­pends on en­vi­ron­ment. For ex­am­ple, imag­ine a cul­ture where poli­ti­cal de­bates on TV would be im­me­di­ately fol­lowed by im­par­tial fact check­ing. Or a cul­ture where poli­ti­ci­ans have to make pre­dic­tions about fu­ture events (“I don’t know” also counts as a valid pre­dic­tion), and these are later pub­li­cly re­viewed and eval­u­ated. And, im­por­tantly, where the cit­i­zens ac­tu­ally care about the re­sults. I sup­pose such en­vi­ron­ment would bring more truth in poli­tics.

  But this is a chicken-and-egg prob­lem, be­cause chang­ing the en­vi­ron­ment, that’s kinda what poli­tics is about. Also, there are many ob­vi­ous counter-strate­gies, such as hav­ing loyal peo­ple do the “fact check­ing” in your tribe’s fa­vor. (For ex­am­ple, when a poli­ti­cian says some­thing that is ap­prox­i­mately cor­rect, like say­ing that some num­ber is 100, when in re­al­ity it is 96, it would be eval­u­ated as “a cor­rect ap­prox­i­ma­tion → TRUE” when your side does it, or as “FALSE” when your op­po­nent does it. You could eval­u­ate op­po­nent’s metaphor­i­cal state­ments liter­ally, but the other way round for your al­lies; etc.)

  Could some­one be com­pletely hon­est and still be effec­tive?

  That mostly de­pends on other peo­ple. Such as vot­ers (whether they bother to check facts) and me­dia (whether they re­port on the fact that your state­ments are more likely to be true). If in­stead the me­dia de­cide to pub­lish a com­pletely made up story about you, and most read­ers ac­cept the story un­crit­i­cally, you are screwed.

  (There are also ways to hurt 100% hon­est peo­ple with­out ly­ing about them, such as mak­ing them pub­li­cly an­swer a ques­tion where the ma­jor­ity of the pop­u­la­tion be­lieves a wrong an­swer and gets offended by hear­ing the cor­rect one. “Is God real?“)

• Viliam 17 Mar 2019 21:54 UTC

  10 points

  on: Has “poli­tics is the mind-kil­ler” been a mind-kil­ler?

  I agree with your dis­claimers that not all peo­ple go crazy when they start talk­ing poli­tics, and not always the pre­dicted bad things hap­pen. Prob­lem is, I already see how most peo­ple would re­act to a text say­ing that some­times, some peo­ple go crazy when talk­ing poli­tics: “Meh, ‘some peo­ple’, that definitely doesn’t ap­ply to me. Now let me start scream­ing about why un­con­di­tion­ally sup­port­ing my fac­tion is the most im­por­tant thing ever, and why ev­ery­one who doesn’t join us is in­her­ently evil and de­serves to die painfully.” Or just keep in­sert­ing their poli­ti­cal be­liefs in ev­ery other dis­cus­sion end­lessly, be­cause “hey, my poli­ti­cal be­liefs are ra­tio­nal (un­like poli­ti­cal be­liefs of those idiots who dis­agree with me), and this is a web­site about ra­tio­nal­ity, there­fore it is im­por­tant for peo­ple here to dis­cuss and ac­cept my poli­ti­cal be­liefs. If they dis­agree with me, they fail at ra­tio­nal­ity for­ever.”

  We tried to de­bate poli­tics here; it usu­ally failed. Ap­par­ently, be­liev­ing in one’s own ra­tio­nal­ity is not enough.

  (There is also an­other way how poli­ti­cal top­ics can de­stroy ra­tio­nal de­bate: they at­tract peo­ple who don’t re­ally care about the main topic of this web­site, but only came here to fight for a spe­cific poli­ti­cal be­lief.)

  From my per­spec­tive, the main prob­lem of “ra­tio­nal­ity vs poli­tics” is that in a poli­ti­cal fight, be­ing trans­par­ent about your be­liefs is usu­ally not a win­ning strat­egy. (Say­ing “I am 80% sure I am right” is not go­ing to bring masses to your side. Nei­ther is re­ply­ing to slo­gans and tweets by peer-re­viewed ar­ti­cles full of num­bers.) If you had a com­pletely hon­est de­bate about poli­tics, it would have to be done in pri­vate, be­cause the par­ti­ci­pants would have to write things that could ruin their poli­ti­cal ca­reers if quoted pub­li­cly. (Imag­ine things like: “Yeah, I know that this spe­cific im­por­tant per­son in our party is a crim­i­nal, or that this spe­cific pop­u­lar ar­gu­ment is ac­tu­ally a lie, but I still sup­port them be­cause the fu­ture where they pre­vail seems like a lesser evil com­pared to the al­ter­na­tives, for the fol­low­ing rea­sons: …“) So you get the mul­ti­player Pri­son­ers’ Dilemma with high mo­ti­va­tion to defect, be­cause break­ing the rules of the game in fa­vor of do­ing the right thing (which is how act­ing on a strong poli­ti­cal be­lief feels from in­side) seems like the right thing to do.

• Viliam 17 Mar 2019 16:33 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: DanielFilan's comment on: Privacy

  The LW karma ob­vi­ously has its flaws, per Good­hart’s law. It is used any­way, be­cause the al­ter­na­tive is hav­ing other prob­lems, and for the mo­ment this seems like a rea­son­able trade-off.

  The pun­ish­ment for “here­sies” is ac­tu­ally very mild. As long as one posts re­spected con­tent in gen­eral, post­ing a “hereti­cal” com­ment ev­ery now and then does not ruin their karma. (Com­pare to peo­ple hav­ing their lives changed dra­mat­i­cally be­cause of one tweet.) The pun­ish­ment ac­cu­mu­lates mostly for peo­ple whose only pur­pose here is to post “here­sies”. Also, LW karma does not pre­vent any­one from post­ing “here­sies” on a differ­ent web­site. Thus, peo­ple can keep pos­i­tive LW karma even if their main topic is talk­ing how LW is fun­da­men­tally wrong as long as they can avoid be­ing an­noy­ing (for ex­am­ple by post­ing hun­dred LW-crit­i­cal posts on their per­sonal web­site, post­ing a short sum­mary with hy­per­links on LW, and af­ter­wards us­ing LW mostly to de­bate other top­ics).

  Black­mail typ­i­cally at­tacks you in real life, i.e. you can’t limit the scope of im­pact. If los­ing an on­line ac­count on a web­site X would be the worst pos­si­ble out­come of one’s be­hav­ior at the web­site X, life would be easy. (You would only need to keep your ac­counts on differ­ent web­sites sep­a­rated from each other.) It was already men­tioned some­where in this de­bate that black­mail of­ten uses the differ­ence be­tween norms in differ­ent com­mu­ni­ties, i.e. that your lo­cal-norm-fol­low­ing be­hav­ior in one con­text can be lo­cal-norm-break­ing in an­other con­text. This is quite un­like LW karma.

• Viliam 17 Mar 2019 0:59 UTC

  31 points

  in reply to: jessicata's comment on: Privacy

  > If oth­ers know ex­actly what re­sources we have, they can and will take all of them.

  Im­pli­ca­tion: the bad guys won; we have rule by gang­sters, who aren’t con­cerned with sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion, and just take as much stuff as pos­si­ble in the short term.

  To me this feels like Zvi is talk­ing about some im­per­sonal uni­ver­sal law of eco­nomics (whether such law re­ally ex­ists or not, we may de­bate), and you are mak­ing it about peo­ple (“the bad guys”, “gang­sters”) and their in­ten­tions, like we could get a bet­ter out­come in­stead by sim­ply re­plac­ing the gov­ern­ment or some­thing.

  I see it as some­thing similar to Moloch. If you have re­sources, it cre­ates a temp­ta­tion for oth­ers to try tak­ing it. Nice peo­ple will re­sist the temp­ta­tion… but in a pris­on­ers’ dilemma with suffi­cient num­ber of play­ers, sooner or later some­one will choose to defect, and it only takes one such per­son for you to get hurt. You can defend against an at­tempt to steal your re­sources, but the defense also costs you some re­sources. And per­haps… in the hy­po­thet­i­cal state of perfect in­for­ma­tion… the only sta­ble equil­ibrium is when you spend so much on defense that there is al­most noth­ing left to steal from you.

  And there is noth­ing spe­cial about the “bad guys” other than the fact that, statis­ti­cally, they ex­ist. Ac­tu­ally, if the hy­poth­e­sis is cor­rect, then… in the hy­po­thet­i­cal state of perfect in­for­ma­tion… the bad guys would them­selves end up in the very same situ­a­tion, hav­ing to spend al­most all suc­cess­fully stolen re­sources to defend them­selves against theft by other bad guys.

  To defend your­self from the or­di­nary thieves, you need po­lice. The po­lice needs some money to be able to do their job. But what pre­vents them from abus­ing their power to take more from you? So you have the gov­ern­ment to pro­tect you from the po­lice, but the gov­ern­ment also needs money to do their job, and it is also tempted to take more. In the demo­cratic gov­ern­ment, poli­ti­ci­ans com­pete against each other… and the good guy who doesn’t want to take more of your money than he ac­tu­ally needs to do his job, may be out­com­peted by a bad guy who takes more of your re­sources and uses the sur­plus to defeat the good guy. Also, differ­ent coun­tries ex­pend re­sources on defend­ing against each other. And you have cor­rup­tion in­side all or­ga­ni­za­tions, in­clud­ing the gov­ern­ment, the po­lice, the army. The cor­rup­tion costs re­sources, and so does fight­ing against it. It is a frac­tal of burn­ing re­sources.

  So… per­haps there is an eco­nom­i­cal law say­ing that this pro­cess con­tinues un­til the available re­sources are ex­hausted (be­cause oth­er­wise, some­one would be tempted to take some of the re­main­ing re­sources, and then more re­sources would have to be spent to stop them). Un­less there is some kind of “fric­tion”, such as peo­ple not know­ing ex­actly how much money you have, or how ex­actly would you re­act if pushed fur­ther (where ex­actly is your “now I have noth­ing to lose any­more” point, when in­stead of pro­vid­ing the re­quested re­sources you start do­ing some­thing un­de­sired, even if do­ing so is likely to hurt you more); or when it be­comes too difficult for the gov­ern­ment to co­or­di­nate to take each available penny (be­cause their over­sight and money ex­trac­tion also have a cost). And mak­ing the situ­a­tion more trans­par­ent re­duces this “fric­tion”.

  It this model, the differ­ence be­tween the “good guy” and the “bad guy” be­comes smaller than you might ex­pect, sim­ply be­cause the good guy still needs (your) re­sources to fight against the bad guy, so he can’t leave you alone ei­ther.

• Viliam 16 Feb 2019 23:57 UTC

  12 points

  on: Ped­a­gogy as Struggle

  The idea of “pur­pose­fully tel­ling peo­ple in­cor­rect in­for­ma­tion to make them learn even faster than by giv­ing them cor­rect in­for­ma­tion” feels like ra­tio­nal­iza­tion. I strongly doubt that peo­ple who claim to use this method ac­tu­ally bother mea­sur­ing its effi­ciency. It is prob­a­bly more like: “I gave them wrong in­for­ma­tion, some stu­dents came to the right con­clu­sion any­way, which proves that I am a fan­tas­tic teacher, and other stu­dents came to a wrong con­clu­sion, which proves that those stu­dents were stupid and un­wor­thy of my time.” Con­grat­u­la­tions, now the teacher can do noth­ing wrong!

  The goal of ab­struse writ­ing (if done in­ten­tion­ally, as op­posed to merely lack­ing the skill to write clearly) is to avoid falsifi­ca­tion. If my be­lief is never stated ex­plic­itly, and I only give you vague hints, you can never prove me wrong. Even if you guess cor­rectly that I be­lieve X, and then you write an ar­gu­ment about why X is false, I still have an op­tion to deny be­liev­ing X, and can in turn ac­cuse you of straw­man­ing me (and be­ing too stupid to un­der­stand the true depths of my think­ing). If my writ­ing be­comes pop­u­lar, I can let other peo­ple steel­man my ideas, and then wisely smile and say “yes, that was a part of the deep wis­dom I wanted to con­vey, but it goes even deeper than that”, tak­ing credit for their work and mak­ing them happy by do­ing so.

• Viliam 12 Feb 2019 22:46 UTC

  2 points

  on: It’s com­mon knowl­edge that tau­tolog­i­cally ev­ery­one’s top prefer­ence is to prop­a­gate their own cor­rectly gen­er­al­ized val­ues through the uni­verse at the sin­gu­lar­ity.

  Even peo­ple who don’t be­lieve in sin­gu­lar­ity?

• Viliam 9 Feb 2019 16:38 UTC

  26 points

  on: The Case for a Big­ger Audience

  More ar­ti­cles, fewer com­ments per ar­ti­cle—per­haps these two are con­nected. ;)

  In gen­eral, I agree that I would also pre­fer deeper de­bates be­low the ar­ti­cles, and more smart peo­ple to par­ti­ci­pate at them. How­ever, I am afraid that the num­ber of smart peo­ple on in­ter­net is quite limited (per­haps more than even the most pes­simistic of us would imag­ine), and they usu­ally have other things to do with higher pri­or­ity than com­ment­ing on LW.

  Also, LW is no longer new and ex­cit­ing—the peo­ple who wanted to say some­thing, of­ten already said it; the peo­ple who would be at­tracted to LW prob­a­bly already found it; the peo­ple able and will­ing to write high-qual­ity con­tent typ­i­cally already have their per­sonal blogs. Of course this does not stop the dis­cus­sion here com­pletely; it just slows it down.

• Viliam 8 Feb 2019 20:50 UTC

  6 points

  on: What is learn­ing?

  Learn­ing = chang­ing in a way that al­lows you to solve (a cer­tain class of) prob­lems more effi­ciently (on av­er­age).

  Not learn­ing = ei­ther not chang­ing, or chang­ing in a way that does not make you more effi­cient at solv­ing prob­lems.

  (Note: I am say­ing “on av­er­age”, be­cause… sup­pose your origi­nal al­gorithm for solv­ing math prob­lems is sim­ply yel­ling “five!” re­gard­less of the prob­lem. Now you learn math, and it makes you bet­ter at solv­ing math prob­lems in gen­eral… but it makes you slower at solv­ing those prob­lems where “five” ac­tu­ally hap­pens to be the cor­rect an­swer.)

• Viliam 7 Feb 2019 10:28 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: redlizard's comment on: Thoughts on Ben Garfinkel’s “How sure are we about this AI stuff?”

  I feel it’s like “A → likely B” be­ing an ev­i­dence for “B → likely A”; gen­er­ally true, but it could be ei­ther very strong or very weak ev­i­dence de­pend­ing on the base rates of A and B.

  Not hav­ing knowl­edge­able crit­i­cism against po­si­tion “2 + 2 = 4” is strong ev­i­dence, be­cause many peo­ple are fa­mil­iar with the state­ment, many use it in their life or work, so if it is wrong, it would be likely some­one would already offer some solid crit­i­cism.

  But for state­ments that are less known or less cared about, it be­comes more likely that there are good ar­gu­ments against them, but no one no­ticed them yet, or no one both­ered to write a solid pa­per about them.

• Viliam 7 Feb 2019 10:03 UTC

  4 points

  on: X-risks are a tragedies of the commons

  An im­por­tant as­pect is that peo­ple dis­agree about which (if any) X-risks are real.

  That makes it quite differ­ent from the usual sce­nario, where peo­ple agree that situ­a­tion sucks but each of them has in­di­vi­d­ual in­cen­tives to con­tribute to mak­ing it worse. Such situ­a­tion al­lows solu­tions like col­lec­tively agree­ing to im­pose a penalty on peo­ple who make things worse (thus chang­ing their in­di­vi­d­ual in­cen­tive gra­di­ent). But if peo­ple dis­agree, im­pos­ing the penalty is poli­ti­cally not pos­si­ble.

• Viliam 6 Feb 2019 2:05 UTC

  2 points

  on: How to no­tice be­ing mind-hacked

  Another fre­quent fea­ture of a mind hack is that sud­denly there is an im­por­tant au­thor­ity, which wasn’t im­por­tant be­fore (prob­a­bly be­cause you were not even aware of its ex­is­tence).

  In case of ma­nipu­la­tion, the new au­thor­ity would be your new guru, etc.

  But in case of healthy growth, for ex­am­ple if you start study­ing math­e­mat­ics or some­thing, it would be the ex­perts in given area.

• Viliam 6 Feb 2019 1:59 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Pattern's comment on: How to no­tice be­ing mind-hacked

  It doesn’t have to be always like this, but it seems to me that the pro­cess of con­ver­sion of­ten in­cludes in­stal­ling some kind of threat. “If you stop fol­low­ing the rules, all these won­der­ful and friendly peo­ple will sud­denly leave you alone, and also you will suffer hor­rible pain in the hell.” So a mind of a con­verted per­son au­to­mat­i­cally adds a feel­ing of dan­ger to sin­ful thoughts.

  The pro­cess of de­con­ver­sion would then mean re­mov­ing those threats. For ex­am­ple, by be­ing grad­u­ally ex­posed to sin­ful thoughts and see­ing that there is no hor­rible con­se­quence. Real­iz­ing that you have close friends out­side the re­li­gious com­mu­nity who won’t leave you if you stop go­ing to the church, etc.

  More gen­er­ally: less free­dom vs more free­dom. (An athe­ist is free to pray or visit a church, they just see it as a waste of time. A re­li­gious per­son can skip pray­ing or church, but it comes with a feel­ing of fear or guilt.)

• Viliam 6 Feb 2019 1:42 UTC

  6 points

  on: What makes a good cul­ture?

  Seems to me that an im­por­tant as­pect of cul­ture is how it or­ga­nizes “zero-sum” games be­tween its mem­bers. I am us­ing scare quotes be­cause a game which is zero-sum (or nega­tive-sum) for its two ac­tive play­ers can still gen­er­ate pos­i­tive or nega­tive ex­ter­nal­ities for the rest of the tribe. And be­cause some re­sources are scarce, and there will be a com­pe­ti­tion for them, it is nice when the en­ergy of the com­pe­ti­tion can be chan­neled into some benefit for the rest of the tribe.

  For ex­am­ple, in the hacker cul­ture, one gains sta­tus by con­tribut­ing qual­ity code, so who­ever wins more imag­i­nary “most awe­some coder” point, billions of peo­ple will get free soft­ware. Or there are cul­tures where the tra­di­tional way to sig­nal wealth is to donate stuff to other mem­bers. An op­po­site would be a cul­ture where peo­ple sig­nal wealth e.g. by wear­ing ex­pen­sive watches. (Although it could be ar­gued that this cre­ates some pos­i­tive ex­ter­nal­ities too, e.g. job op­por­tu­ni­ties for the watch­mak­ers.)

  I am not sure about this, but I have a feel­ing that if you want to de­sign a cul­ture that is a nice place to live in, you should en­courage pro-so­cial ac­tivi­ties as the recom­mended way to do costly sig­nal­ing.

  Sports are prob­a­bly also an ex­am­ple of this, when peo­ple trans­late their de­sire to win (as in­di­vi­d­u­als or teams) into en­ter­tain­ment for oth­ers. As op­posed to e.g. street fight­ing which would put lives and prop­erty of oth­ers in risk. (But peo­ple are already aware that sports are “vi­o­lence made harm­less”; my sug­ges­tion is to fo­cus on com­pe­ti­tion in ab­stract, not only phys­i­cal vi­o­lence as its one spe­cific form.)

• Viliam 5 Feb 2019 14:21 UTC

  11 points

  on: My athe­ism story

  Con­grat­u­la­tions!

  Now be care­ful, and don’t get kil­led by stupid peo­ple.

  I no­tice some similar­i­ties be­tween what you wrote, and what other peo­ple wrote about similar ex­pe­riences. You fo­cus on tech­ni­cal de­tails that don’t fit. It makes sense, of course, if the dis­cussed text is sup­posed to be flawless. But it means that you are still at the be­gin­ning on the long way out of re­li­gion. You don’t be­lieve it, but you still kinda re­spect it. I mean, you con­sider those tech­ni­cal de­tails wor­thy of your time and at­ten­tion.

  Imag­ine that we would be dis­cussing some other re­li­gion, e.g. Hin­duism. And I would say that the 1234th word in the What­ever Veda could not be origi­nal, be­cause it con­tains a con­so­nant that didn’t ex­ist thou­sands of years ago. You would prob­a­bly feel like “yeah, what­ever, who cares about a con­so­nant; the whole story about blue peo­ple with four arms lead­ing armies of 10^10 mon­keys from other planets is com­pletely ridicu­lous!” At the end of the road, you may feel the same about the re­li­gion you grew up with. The tech­ni­cal de­tails that now seem im­por­tant to you will feel unim­por­tant com­pared with the ut­ter false­ness of the whole thing.

  *

  I think that the im­por­tant thing to see the big pic­ture is re­duc­tion­ism. Like, let’s not talk about the holy texts and ev­i­dence; in­stead tell me what is your God com­posed of. Is it build of atoms? Of some­thing else, e.g. some mys­te­ri­ous “spiritual atoms”? When it be­comes an­gry or happy, does it liter­ally have such hor­mones in its blood­stream? When it thinks or re­mem­bers, are its “spiritual neu­rons” ex­chang­ing the “spiritual atoms”? Hey, I am not deny­ing your God, I am ac­tu­ally ea­ger to listen to your story about it… as long as you can fo­cus on the tech­ni­cal de­tails and keep mak­ing sense. I want to have a suffi­ciently good model of your God so that I could build one in my lab­o­ra­tory (given enough re­sources, hy­po­thet­i­cally).

  And here is when peo­ple jump to some bul­lshit. The Chris­tian ver­sion is like “He is not made of or­di­nary mat­ter; He is out­side of the uni­verse”, and I am like: okay, let’s talk about the non-or­di­nary mat­ter that His non-or­di­nary neu­rons and non-or­di­nary brain are built of, in His re­al­ity-out­side-the-uni­verse. But, you know, to be able to think or feel, there needs to be some kind of metabolism—even if it’s a 13-di­men­sional metabolism built from dark mat­ter—right? Then the more so­phis­ti­cated crap is like “but ac­tu­ally God is the most sim­ple pos­si­ble thing” or some­thing like that, and I am like: dude, just read some­thing about Kol­mogorov kom­plex­ity, and come back when you re­al­ize how ridicu­lous you sound.

  Of course, such com­pli­cated di­alogs only hap­pen in my imag­i­na­tion :D be­cause… in real life, when you start ask­ing ques­tions, the typ­i­cal an­swer is just “this is all very mys­te­ri­ous stuff that hu­mans like us can’t even be­gin to un­der­stand”, and it doesn’t go far be­yond that. Also “read these thou­sand books, they con­tain an­swers to all your ques­tions” (spoiler: they don’t; this is just an at­tempt to make you tired and give up).

  *

  For most peo­ple, how­ever, re­li­gion is not about mak­ing sense. It is about be­long­ing to a com­mu­nity. If they start doubt­ing it, they will feel alone. Hu­mans have a de­sire to as­so­ci­ate with those who “be­lieve” the same things. It is un­for­tu­nate that some­times the fairy tales they as­so­ci­ate around com­pel them to do hor­rible things...

• Viliam 31 Jan 2019 23:45 UTC

  7 points

  on: Book Tril­ogy Re­view: Re­mem­brance of Earth’s Past (The Three Body Prob­lem)

  I have read the tril­ogy, I en­joyed it a lot, and I have only two ob­jec­tions: the happy end­ing, and the lack of se­ri­ous effort to kill Luo Ji. The lat­ter is es­pe­cially weird com­ing from aliens who would have no prob­lem with ex­ter­mi­nat­ing half of the hu­man pop­u­la­tion.

  My im­pres­sion is that the Three Body tril­ogy is es­sen­tially a uni­verse-sized med­i­ta­tion on Moloch.

  I am how­ever com­pletely sur­prised at your in­dig­na­tion at how the book de­picts hu­mans. Be­cause I find it quite plau­si­ble, at least the parts about how “no good deed goes un­pun­ished”. Do we live in so differ­ent bub­bles?

  I see poli­ti­ci­ans gain­ing votes for pop­ulism, and los­ing votes for solv­ing difficult prob­lems. I see click­bait mak­ing tons of money, and sci­en­tists des­per­ately fight­ing for fund­ing. There was a guy who landed a rocket on a comet, or some­thing like that, and then a mob of in­ter­net ass­holes brought him to tears be­cause he had a tacky shirt. There are sci­en­tists who write books ex­plain­ing psy­cho­me­t­ric re­search, and end up phys­i­cally at­tacked and called Nazis. With hu­mans like this, what is so im­plau­si­ble about a per­son who would liter­ally save hu­man­ity from an­nihila­tion, be­ing sen­tenced to death? Just imag­ine that it brings ad clicks or votes from idiots or what­ever is the mob cur­rency of the fu­ture, and that’s all the in­cen­tive you need for this to hap­pen.

  As the be­gin­ning of the tril­ogy shows, we do not need to imag­ine a fic­tion­ally evil or fic­tion­ally stupid hu­man­ity to ac­com­plish this. We just need to imag­ine ex­actly the same hu­man­ity that brought us the won­ders of Nazism and Com­mu­nism. The bell curve where the peo­ple on one end wear Che shirts and cry “but so­cial­ism has never been tried”, and on the other end we have Noam “Pol Pot did noth­ing wrong” Chom­sky in academia. Do you feel safe liv­ing on the same planet as these peo­ple? Do you trust them to han­dle the fu­ture x-threats in a sane way? I definitely don’t.

  The un­re­al­is­tic part per­haps is that these fu­ture (re­al­is­ti­cally stupid and evil) peo­ple are too con­sis­tent, and have things too much un­der con­trol. I would ex­pect more ran­dom­ness, e.g. one per­son who saves the world would be ex­e­cuted, but an­other would be cel­e­brated, for some com­pletely ran­dom rea­son un­re­lated to sav­ing the world. Also, I would ex­pect that de­spite mak­ing the suicide pact the offi­cial policy of the hu­mankind, some suffi­ciently pow­er­ful peo­ple would pre­pare an exit for them­selves any­way. (But maybe the fu­ture has bet­ter surveillance which makes go­ing against the offi­cial policy im­pos­si­ble.)

• Viliam 6 Jan 2019 21:59 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Lanrian's comment on: Does anti-malaria char­ity de­stroy the lo­cal anti-malaria in­dus­try?

  After brief read­ing, seems like the con­clu­sion is: “At mar­ket prices, most peo­ple would not use the anti-malaria nets; this is em­piri­cally ver­ified. There­fore, we provide the nets for free, and we give the nets in­stead of cash to buy the nets.”

  The ob­vi­ous ques­tion is why are peo­ple un­will­ing to buy the nets?

  Is there a ra­tio­nal rea­son, such as “the money is needed to pre­vent more im­me­di­ate dan­gers, such as star­va­tion”? Or is it an ir­ra­tional one, such as un­der­es­ti­mat­ing the dan­ger of malaria, not un­der­stand­ing how malaria spreads, or fatal­ism about dis­eases?

• Viliam 6 Jan 2019 21:45 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: paulfchristiano's comment on: Does anti-malaria char­ity de­stroy the lo­cal anti-malaria in­dus­try?

  I am skep­ti­cal about arm­chair Econ-101 rea­son­ing un­less it is also sup­ported by em­piri­cal data. Many things can go wrong. (Also, it has a fla­vor of “map over ter­ri­tory”.) For ex­am­ple:

  • The mod­els are based on some as­sump­tions, which is nec­es­sary to cre­ate mod­els, but in real life the as­sump­tions may be wrong so much that it changes the out­come. The play­ers are sup­posed to be 100% ra­tio­nal and all-know­ing; the trans­ac­tions are sup­posed to be com­pletely fric­tion-less; it is as­sumed that the mar­ket is the only game in town. So when this perfect mar­ket no­tices that e.g. there is an op­por­tu­nity to sell more food, -- POOF! -- and there is in­stantly a new farm with food to sell. In re­al­ity, peo­ple may be slow to no­tice, risk-averse in face of un­cer­tainty, they may be tons of bribes or pa­per­work nec­es­sary to start a new farm, grow­ing the food may re­quire a lot of time, and if too many food pro­duc­ers hap­pen to be­long to a minor­ity eth­nic­ity it might re­sult in their geno­cide. When Econ 101 says “there shall be a bal­ance”, it usu­ally does not spec­ify how long do we have to wait for its com­ing: days, weeks, years, or cen­turies? (“The mar­ket can stay ir­ra­tional longer than you can stay solvent.” In case of Africa, longer than you and your clan can sur­vive.)

  • It is easy to no­tice some rele­vant forces, and miss oth­ers. (The archety­pal ex­am­ple.)

  • Seems to me that some arm­chair con­clu­sions can be weak­ened or even re­verted sim­ply by rea­son­ing “one level higher”. Is in­creas­ing hu­man cap­i­tal a good thing? Sounds un­con­tro­ver­sial, ce­teris paribus, but sup­pose I wave a mag­i­cal wand and ev­ery Afri­can mag­i­cally ac­quires a PhD in anti-malaria net mak­ing. I would still sup­pose they would have a prob­lem to feed their fam­i­lies. And I wouldn’t be too sur­prised to learn af­ter­wards that there are still not enough anti-malaria nets pro­duced.

  Sorry for pro­vid­ing a fully gen­eral counter-ar­gu­ment. But this is ex­actly my point: with enough so­phis­ti­ca­tion, you can make Econ-101 ar­gu­ments ei­ther way. I have already seen a clever Econ-101 ar­gu­ment against the anti-malaria nets. What I need is a re­al­ity check.

[Question] Does anti-malaria char­ity de­stroy the lo­cal anti-malaria in­dus­try?