Vladimir_Nesov(Vladimir Nesov)

Karma: 24,209

Vladimir_Nesov 4 Mar 2021 18:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Veganism is a moral imperative.

Labels are no substitute for arguments.

But that’s the nature of identity: a claim that’s part of identity won’t suffer insinuations that it needs any arguments behind it, let alone the existence of arguments against. Within one’s identity, labels are absolutely superior to arguments. So the disagreement is more about epistemic role of identity, not about object level claims or arguments.

Vladimir_Nesov 4 Mar 2021 17:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ruben Tinstil’s comment on: Veganism is a moral imperative.
See proving too much. In the thought experiment where you consider sapient wolves who hold violent consumption of sentient creatures as an important value, the policy of veganism is at least highly questionable. An argument for such a policy needs to distinguish humans from sapient wolves, so as to avoid arguing for veganism for sapient wolves with the same conviction as it does for humans.

Your argument mentions relevant features (taste, tradition) at the end and dismisses them as “lazy excuses”. Yet their weakness in the case of humans is necessary for the argument’s validity. Taste and tradition point to an ethical argument against veganism, that doesn’t not exist as you claim at the start of the article. Instead the argument exists and might be weak.

Vladimir_Nesov 3 Mar 2021 22:40 UTC
2 points
on: Veganism is a moral imperative.
This proves too much. Most of these arguments would profess to hold veganism as the superior policy for sapient wolves (who are sufficiently advanced to have developed cheap dietary supplementation), degrading the moral imperative of tearing living flesh from the bones.

Vladimir_Nesov 3 Mar 2021 9:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: Weighted Voting Delenda Est
This is a much clearer statement of the problem you are pointing at than the post.

(I don’t see how it’s apparent that the voting system deserves significant blame for the overall low-standard-in-your-estimation of LW posts. A more apparent effect is probably bad-in-your-estimation posts getting heavily upvoted or winning in annual reviews, but it’s less clear where to go from that observation.)

Vladimir_Nesov 2 Mar 2021 1:13 UTC
12 points
on: Takeaways from one year of lockdown
The stress of negotiation/management of COVID precautions destroyed my intellectual productivity for a couple of months at the start of the pandemic. So I rented a place to live alone, which luckily happened to be possible for me, and the resulting situation is much closer to normal than it is to the pre-move situation during the pandemic. There is no stress, as worrying things are no longer constantly trying to escape my control without my knowledge, there’s only the challenge of performing “trips to the surface” correctly that’s restricted to the time of the trips and doesn’t poison the rest of my time.

Vladimir_Nesov 2 Mar 2021 0:47 UTC
4 points
on: Subjectivism and moral authority
As I understand this, Clippy might be able to issue an authoritative moral command, “Stop!”, to the humans, provided it’s “caused” by human values, as conveyed through its correct understanding of them. The humans obey, provided they authenticate the command as channeling human values. It’s not advice, as the point of intervention is different: it’s not affecting a moral argument (decision making) within the humans, instead it’s affecting their actions more directly, with the moral argument having been computed by Clippy.

Vladimir_Nesov 28 Feb 2021 23:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: “If You’re Not a Holy Madman, You’re Not Trying”
The nice things are skills and virtues, parts of designs that might get washed away by stronger optimization. If people or truths or playing chess are not useful/valuable, agents get rid of them, while people might have a different attitude.

(Part of the motivation here is in making sense of corrigibility. Also, I guess simulacrum level 4 is agency, but humans can’t function without a design, so attempts to take advantage of the absence of a design devolve into incoherence.)

Vladimir_Nesov 28 Feb 2021 22:01 UTC
44 points
on: “If You’re Not a Holy Madman, You’re Not Trying”
It’s not clear that people should be agents. Agents are means of setting up content of the world to accord with values, they are not optimized for being the valuable content of the world. So a holy madman has a work-life balance problem, they are an instrument of their values rather than an incarnation of them.

Vladimir_Nesov 26 Feb 2021 6:43 UTC
3 points
on: What are a rationalist’s best tools for better decision making?

What are a rationalist’s best tools for better decision making?

What are a farrier’s best recipes for better pizza? Probably the same as an ophthalmologist’s. What about worse pizza, or worse recipes?

Omit needless words. Yes requires the possibility of no.

Vladimir_Nesov 25 Feb 2021 11:56 UTC
5 points
on: A No-Nonsense Guide to Early Retirement
Investing everything in a single ETF (especially at a single brokerage) is possibly fine, but seems difficult to justify. When something looks rock solid in theory, in practice there might be all sorts of black swans, especially over decades (where you lose at least a significant portion of the value held in a particular ETF at a particular brokerage, compared to its underlying basket of securities, because something has gone wrong with the brokerage, the ETF provider, the infrastructure that makes it impossible for anything to go wrong with an ETF, or something else you aren’t even aware of). Since there are many similar brokerages and ETF providers, I think it makes sense to diversify across several, which should only cost a bit of additional paperwork.

Even if in fact this activity is completely useless, obtaining knowledge of this fact at an actionable level of certainty (that outweighs the paperwork in the expected utility calculation) looks like a lot of work, much more than the paperwork. Experts might enjoy having to do less paperwork.

(For example, there’s theft by malware, a particular risk that would be a subjective black swan for many people, which is more likely to affect only some of the accounts held by a given person. The damage can be further reduced by segregating access between multiple devices running different systems, so that they won’t be compromised at the same time, but the risk can’t be completely eliminated. Theoretically, malware can be slipped even into security updates to benign software by hacking its developers, if they are not implausibly careful. And in 20 years this might get worse. This is merely an example of a risk reduced by diversification between brokerages that I’m aware of, the point is that there might be other risks that I have no idea about.)

Vladimir_Nesov 17 Feb 2021 10:11 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Is the influence of money pervasive, even on LessWrong?
Identity colors the status quo in how the world is perceived, but the process of changing it is not aligned with learning (it masks the absence of attempting to substantiate its claims), thus a systematic bias resistant to observations that should change one’s mind. There are emotions involved in the tribal psychological drives responsible for maintaining identity, but they are not significant for expressing identity in everything it has a stance on, subtly (or less so) warping all cognition.

There’s some clarification of what I’m talking about in this comment and references therein.

Vladimir_Nesov 15 Feb 2021 15:06 UTC
2 points
on: How is rationalism different from utilitarianism?
Rationality is perhaps about thinking carefully about careful thinking: what it is, what it’s for, what is its value, what use is it, how to channel it more clearly. Utilitarianism is about very different things.

Vladimir_Nesov 15 Feb 2021 14:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: How is rationalism different from utilitarianism?
It’s instrumentally useful for the world to be affected according to a decision theory, but it’s not obviously a terminal value for people to act this way, especially in detail. Instrumentally useful things that people shouldn’t be doing can instead be done by tools we build.

Vladimir_Nesov 14 Feb 2021 1:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Adam Smith’s comment on: Adam Smith’s Shortform
Depends on the license.

Vladimir_Nesov 13 Feb 2021 21:30 UTC
5 points
in reply to: weft’s comment on: Your Cheerful Price
There is no fundamental reason for Cheerful Price to be higher than what you are normally paid. For example, if you’d love to do a thing even without pay, Cheerful Price would be zero (and if you can’t arbitrage by doing the thing without the transaction going through, the price moves all the way into the negatives). If you are sufficiently unusual in that attitude, the market price is going to be higher than that.

Vladimir_Nesov 3 Feb 2021 10:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Is the influence of money pervasive, even on LessWrong?

strong emotional reactions

I expect being part of one’s identity is key, and doesn’t require notable emotional reactions.

Vladimir_Nesov 1 Feb 2021 16:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: The 10,000-Hour Rule is a myth
My woefully inexpert guess is that advanced cooking should be thought of as optimization in a space of high dimension, where gradient descent will often zig-zag, making simple experiments inefficient. Then apart from knowledge of many landmarks (which is covered by cooking books), high cooking skill would involve ability to reframe recipes to reduce dimensionality, and intuition about how to change a process to make it better or to vary it without making it worse, given fine details of a particular setup and available ingredients. This probably can’t be usefully written down at all, but does admit instruction about changes in specific cases.

Vladimir_Nesov 1 Feb 2021 8:13 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AVoropaev’s comment on: What’s the big deal about Bayes’ Theorem?
Here’s an example of applying the formula (to a puzzle).

Vladimir_Nesov 1 Feb 2021 8:08 UTC
5 points
on: The Lottery Paradox
Let’s apply Bayes formula in odds form to this example. $\frac{P (x | D)}{P (y | D)} = \frac{P (x)}{P (y)} \times \frac{P (D | x)}{P (D | y)}$ Let $x$ = “Xavier won the lottery”, $y = \neg x$ , $D$ = “Yovanni says Xavier won the lottery”. We have $P (x) / P (y) \approx 1 / 1000000$ (for simplicity, let’s assume that Xavier couldn’t be someone who didn’t even enter the lottery), $P (D | x) \approx 1$ . What is $P (D | y)$ ? Given that someone other than Xavier won the lottery, what is the probability that Yovanni would claim that it was Xavier in particular who did? While Yovanni might have a reason to single out Xavier, Zenia doesn’t, so from the hypothesis $y$ they would predict that anyone could be wrongly named the winner, which gives picking Xavier one in a million chance (also, the Yovanni within the hypothesis $y$ won’t pay attention to $y$ in particular, so can’t anchor to Xavier based on that). Then, Yovanni must make a mistake or decide to lie, with probability of, say, 1%. In total, we have $P (D | y) \approx 1 / (1000000 \cdot 100)$ . Putting this in the formula, we get $P (x | D) / P (y | D) \approx 100$ , so Xavier is probably the winner after all.

(This is the same as Phil’s answer, formulated a little bit differently.)
What links here?
- What’s the big deal about Bayes’ Theorem? by AVoropaev (26 Jan 2021 6:08 UTC; 20 points)

Vladimir_Nesov 1 Feb 2021 7:04 UTC
11 points
on: The 10,000-Hour Rule is a myth

The 10,000-Hour Rule [...] popularized by Malcolm Gladwell [says that] ten thousand hours of practice is necessary and sufficient to become an expert.

Not having read the book, and from a cursory google search, I was unable to find a clear argument that Gladwell actually makes the claim about practice being sufficient. I did find his own statement that this is not a claim he made in the book. (My impression is that the book was criminally ambiguous and neither affirms nor denies the claim despite discussing related things at length.)