Dumbledore may be able to overrule the contract, but that would do little to stop the political effects of Harry’s statement that Lucius did not kill Hermione. Since it would also reinstate the debt, it doesn’t seem like a net benefit to Dumbledore.
Watercressed
A related mistake I made was to be impressed by the cleverness of the aphorism “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.” There may be a helpful distinction between scientific evidence and Bayesian evidence. But anecdotal evidence is evidence, and it ought to sway my beliefs.
Anecdotal evidence is filtered evidence. People often cite the anecdote that supports their belief, while not remembering or not mentioning events that contradict them. You can find people saying anecdotes on any side of a debate, and I see no reason the people who are right would cite anecdotes more.
Of course, if you witness an anecdote with your own eyes, that is not filtered, and you should adjust your beliefs accordingly.
Anecdotally, I know nobody who has suffered a nutritional deficiency as lethal as zero iron, and the diets in my circle of college students are not very good. I think Soylent will be healthier than my current diet, but I also think the chance of serious nutritional deficiencies is higher.
Edit: To be clear, I’m talking about nutritional deficiencies where one’s metabolism starts to fail for want of a crucial element, not deficiencies where someone is consuming marginally less of a nutrient than the optimal amount. I think Soylent will be better than my current diet in the latter category.
I see no particular reason why someone can’t believe that healthcare consequentially saves lives and that drone warfare also consequentially saves lives.
Because if something goes wrong, the things you are breaking will be people’s well-being. There were two instances where Rob noticed that he was feeling ill and had to correct a nutritional deficiency on the fly. It’s less likely that this will happen during large-scale production, but if it does, the people consuming exclusively Soylent will not have all the knowledge Rob did wrt the formula or the symptoms of nutritional deficiency.
I think Soylent is a good idea, and ordered a week’s supply, but I’m going to try it slowly; I think the chance that they screw up the production is large enough to merit caution.
Concern trolling in the false flag political operation sense is a thing that happened
An example of this occurred in 2006 when Tad Furtado, a staffer for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH), was caught posing as a “concerned” supporter of Bass’ opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, on several liberal New Hampshire blogs, using the pseudonyms “IndieNH” or “IndyNH”. “IndyNH” expressed concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable.[37][38] Hodes eventually won the election.
I’m already taking insects or nematodes into consideration probabilistically; I think it is highly unlikely that they are sentient, and I think that even if they are sentient, their suffering might not be as intense as that of mammals, but since their numbers are so huge, the well-being of all those small creatures makes up a non-negligible term in my utility function.
A priori, it seems that the moral weight of insects would either be dominated by their massive numbers or by their tiny capacities. It’s a narrow space where the two balance and you get a non-negligible but still-not-overwhelming weight for insects in a utility function. How did you decide that this was right?
If Omega maintains a 99.9% accuracy rate against a strategy that changes its decision based on the lottery numbers, it means that Omega can predict the lottery numbers. Therefore, if the lottery number is composite, Omega has multiple choices against an agent that one-boxes when the numbers are different and two-boxes when the numbers are the same: it can pick the same composite number as the lottery, in which case the agent will two-box and earn 2,001,000, or it can pick a different prime number, and have the agent one-box and earn 3,001,000. It seems like the agent that one-boxes all the time does better by eliminating the cases where Omega selects the same number as the lottery, so I would one box.
“Move fast and break things” is not a good mantra when dealing with nutrition.
Since when did epistemic rationality demand making the truth common knowledge? It just means you should know what’s true yourself.
Isn’t there an irony in belonging to an organisation dedicated to the plight of sentient but cognitively humble beings in the imminent face of vastly superior intelligence and claiming that the plight of sentient but cognitively humble beings in the face of vastly superior intelligence is of no ethical consequence whatsoever. Insofar as we want a benign outcome for humans, I’d have thought that the computational equivalent of Godlike capacity for perspective-taking is precisely what we should be aiming for.
No. Someone who cares about human-level beings but not animals will care about the plight of humans in the face of an AI, but there’s no reason they must care about the plight of animals in the face of humans, because they didn’t care about animals to begin with.
It may be that the best construction for a friendly AI is some kind of complex perspective taking that lends itself to caring about animals, but this is a fact about the world; it falls on the is side of the is-ought divide.
It’s not really fair to call a range of .02 to 65.92 four digit precision just because the upper bound was written with four digits.
I’ve read both common health care arguments and Yvain’s post on drone warfare. While I haven’t absorbed much information about drones, and don’t have a strong opinion on them because of it, it doesn’t seem strange that someone could find both arguments convincing.
One of his “desiderata”, his principles of construction, is that the robot gives equal plausibility assignments to logically equivalent statements
I don’t see this desiderata. The consistency requirement is that if there are multiple ways of calculating something, then all of them yield the same result. A few minutes of thought didn’t lead to any way of leveraging a non 1 or zero probability for Prime(53) into two different results.
If I try to do anything with P(Prime(53)|PA), I get stuff like P(PA|Prime(53)), and I don’t have any idea how to interpret that. Since PA is a set of axioms, it doesn’t really have a truth value that we can do probability with. Technically speaking, Prime(N) means that the PA axioms imply that 53 has two factors. Since the axioms are in the predicate, any mechanism that forces P(Prime(53)) to be one must do so for all priors.
One final thing: Isn’t it wrong to assign a probability of zero to Prime(4), i.e. PA implies that 4 has two factors, since PA could be inconsistent and imply everything?
The usual formulation of Omega does not lie.
Objectivisim includes an ethic that many here dislike.
Does fundamentalist Christianity indicate that the believer would be irrational about issues other than religion?
If yes, what’s the difference?
Why should anyone expect a specific kind of word input to be capable of persuading everyone? They’re just words, not magic spells.
The specific word sequence is evidence for something or other. It’s still unreasonable to expect people to respond to evidence in every domain, but many people do respond to words, and calling them just sounds in air doesn’t capture the reasons they do so.
Above the top-level comment box, there’s an option to sort comments by date. Perhaps that should be the default.
Survey Taken