4: Also relevant: checking HP:MoR for updates is variable interval reinforcement. You never know when an update’s coming, but it doesn’t come faster the more times you reload fanfiction.net. As predicted, even when Eliezer goes weeks without updating, the behavior continues to persist.
This type of situation was one of the main reasons I started using an rss feed reader to do almost all of my internet browsing.
Man will you look silly if Barack Obama nukes Toronto today.
I believe that one is supposed to complete a singing quest so as to gain access to flutes.
It seems to me that the differences you measure between different theories here are entirely subsumed under N, the number of trials we have. For the Martin Luther theory, N=1 - Martin nailed up the theses twice. N=4 for Robin Hanson. I’m not sure how to measure N for Ray Kurzweil, but N for Moore’s Law is close to 25. Your argument for Moore’s Law seems mainly reliant on that: “robust for moves to very different technologies, and has spanned cultural transformations and changes in the purpose and uses of computers”—if any of the others had 25 examples, they would seem robust to all those things!
A more charitable explanation is that people accurately estimate the total complexity and then apportion it among the known unknowns, thus creating an overestimate.
The evidence here isn’t actually negligible, I don’t think. It’s just that the posterior probability is negligible.
If I go around saying “This belief is wrong! Hey everyone, did you know that this belief is wrong?” and it’s a low-status belief, high-status people are likely to ask “What’s the harm?” If it’s a high-status belief, due to correctness of the Titanic analogy, very few high-status people will ask that. They are much more likely, instead, to criticize your argument that the belief is wrong.
What’s The Harm is not an introduction to the practice of rationality. It is a response to a specific argument. It makes that counter-argument best and most clearly by only including beliefs that are almost never held by high-status individuals.
(In addition, the whole methodology of collecting individual examples works well for distributed mistakes like the passengers’, but not for large, single mistakes like the captain’s.)
As a young person, I am shocked and horrified by the idea of being 70.
Yet I suspect that when I am 70, I will want to live one more day.
Certain people are very smart and understand why many of the things normal people do are silly in some ways. For instance, judging people based on their fashion sense rather than actual behavior is noisy, or believing that you can do anything you want to do is inaccurate.
But these silly behaviors exist for a reason. Such people, to be successful in life, need to be reminded that just because something is silly from a certain analytical perspective doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, or some variation on it.
Many lesswrong posts fit into this template. They seem useful, and I enjoy them. Such points made in rationalist language cannot be found in many other places.
If you believe we live in a universe where most things are possible, you will focus on the best things and how to achieve them, and the worst things and how to avoid them.
Separately, if you want to construct a highly viral religion meme, you will focus on the best things and how to achieve them, and the worst things and how to avoid them.
Taking the really awesome ideas of religions (God, afterlife) and figuring out the most plausible scientific explanation for them is exactly what we should be doing, since we want to maximize the probability of God and afterlife.
Genuinely nice people who still prevent people who, like me and (presumably) you, are cognitively atypical, from finding similar people across the world to socialize with.
and the thousand other awesome things about the world we have created for ourselves.
and the thousand other awesome things about the world we will create.
I don’t want to tile the world with tiny genuinely nice people.
Arguably trying for apostasy, failing due to motivated cognition, and producing only nudging is a good strategy that should be applied more broadly.
Seems correct to me. Judging agents with a different utility function than they use to decide will lead to them looking stupid.
That seems accurate. Remember that a single person can hallucinate that someone else verified something, but this has low prior probability.
Which is more likely “God exists” or “I just hallucinated that” For the third one, probably that He exists, for the second one, definitely hallucination, for the first, I’m not sure.
No. One model that could produce that prediction for next year is that one is 89% confident that GAI is impossible, and 90% confident that if possible, it will be discovered next year. Strange beliefs, yes.
But they give 10% chance this year and 11% in the next ten.
Clippy is an agent defined by a certain inhuman ethics. Therefore, your test distinguishes ethical questions from non-ethical questions.
There are meaningless non-ethical questions: “What’s a froob?” Human: “I don’t know.” Clippy: “I don’t know.”
There are only non-meaningless ethical questions with some kind of assumed axiom that allows us to cross the fact-value distinction, such as Eliezer’s meta-ethics or “one should always act so as to maximize paperclips.”
In general: Positivism teaches us to ignore many things we should not ignore. Rationalism, however, teaches us to ignore some things, but it does not teach us to ignore ethical questions.
Experiment: ask Clippy a question about decision theory.
Hey Clippy. What decision theory do you use to determine how your actions produce paperclips?
Seems so surprising I would guess that it was apocryphal, not knowing the context.
Reading this, I had a brilliant idea. Similar to taking a break from dieting one day a week, I could take a break from working (or from having to work—I can still be productive if I feel like it) one day a week. This seemed like an excellent hack to conserve willpower and reduce procrastination or, at the very lest, make my procrastination more fun because I didn’t have to feel bad about not working during it.
Then I realized that I had reinvented the weekend or, more prosaically, Shabat.