Yosarian2

Karma: 546

Yosarian2 21 Jan 2014 0:49 UTC
17 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
One thing that makes Christianity such a powerful meme is that it has specifically developed defenses that seem designed to counter this kind of argument. They’re actually written right into the Bible.

Matthew 4:7-

″ 5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6 “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

“‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’[c]”

7 Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’[d]””

Basically, the exact kind of test you’re talking about, an attempt to falsify the hypothesis that God exists and will protect you, is something that you are explicitly forbidden from trying to do in the Bible. Even the act of suggesting it as a course of action is associated with the Devil.

The fact that Christianity has such well-developed internal defenses against being challenged is one reason it’s been such an effective meme. Also, perhaps more interesting, I would say that the fact that it was felt that they needed to do so proves that even at the time the Bible was written there were rationalists (or at least proto-rationalists) challenging religion on rational grounds, and the early religious leaders felt the need to counter those kinds of arguments.

Yosarian2 24 Jul 2013 14:20 UTC
15 points
on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
People who think that automation is currently increasing unemployment don’t generally just talk about jobs lost during the Great Recession. They see an overall trend of reduction in employment and wages since at least 2000.

You’re absolutely right that the recession was caused by a financial shock. The thing is, a normal effect of recessions is for productivity to increase; businesses lay off workers and then try to figure out how to run their operation more efficiently with less workers, that happens in every recession. The difference might be that this time, it is easier then ever in the past for employers to figure out how to do more with less workers (because of the internet, and automation, and computers, ect), and so even when demand starts to come back up as the GDP grows again, they apparently still don’t need to hire many workers.

The economists making the automation argument aren’t saying that automation caused the great recession or the loss of jobs that happened then; they tend to think that it’s a long ongoing trend that’s been going for quite a while, that it was partly hidden for a few years by the housing bubble, but that the great recession has accelerated that trend by increasing the need for employers to find ways to be more cost-effective.

Edit: the main assumption EY is making in this article seems to be here:

Since it should take advanced general AI to automate away most or all humanly possible labor

and I don’t think that’s true. I think that a majority of labor done today, either physical or intellectual, is basically a series of routine or repeatable tasks, and I think that a big chunk of it could be done by either narrow AI software or robotics or internet-based logistics.

Anyway, you wouldn’t really have to automate most or all of human labor to create an unemployment crises; if we hit long-term unemployment levels of 20%-30% that would probably not be sustainable without some fairly significant social and economic changes.

Yosarian2 2 Jan 2013 23:05 UTC
14 points
in reply to: TuviaDulin’s comment on: Failed Utopia #4-2
Corollary: you haven’t thought of every last thing.

Yosarian2 4 Feb 2014 21:47 UTC
13 points
on: Mind Hacks
This probably falls under the category of “too obvious to be worth mentioning”, but I’ll mention them anyway, because they’re all probably more significant then anything on your list. I would say that the biggest things a person today can do to upgrade his mind are:
1. Education (including self-education)
2. Exercise:
There’s a lot of evidence accumulating that regular exercise significantly improves intelligence, memory, and learning, in the short-term, medium term, and long term, in a wide variety of ways, and that it also delays cognitive decline and memory loss later in life.

Actually, that’s probably true of anything that improves your heart and lung health, by improving your brain’s supply of oxygen. I know that there’s been recent a study that people in their 40′s who smoke tend to have worse memories then people the same age who never smoked.

-3. Getting enough sleep.

Yosarian2 18 Sep 2013 22:30 UTC
12 points
in reply to: DanielVarga’s comment on: [LINK] Larry = Harry sans magic? Google vs. Death
Anyway, the only reason that we lose “only 3 years” to cancer is that something else is going to kill us not long after if cancer doesn’t. However, if we were able to prevent all other forms of death, cancer would still kill all of us eventually.

I tend to think of curing cancer as not just “adding 3 years of life”, but as a small but vital part of developing extreme medical (that is, organic) longevity.

Yosarian2 30 Dec 2012 19:11 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Nebu’s comment on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong
It’s not necessarily an excuse for failure.

If, on some level, you are looking to demonstrate fitness (perhaps as a signaling methods to potential mates), then if you visibly handicap yourself and STILL win, you have demonstrated MORE fitness then if you had won normally. If you expect to win even with the self-handicap, then it’s not just a matter of making excuses.

I think this is similar to how very often a chess master when playing against a weaker player will “give them rook odds”, start with only one rook instead of two. They still expect to win, but they know that if they can still win in that circumstance, then they have demonstrated what a strong player you are.

Yosarian2 27 Jan 2016 23:43 UTC
10 points
on: Beware surprising and suspicious convergence
As a meta-level version of this, I have to admit that I find it a little concerning that this site was created in the first place partly because Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to convince people that funding safe AI research was the best possible use of resources, and that much of the logic on this site seems to come to that conclusion, irrespective of which direction the logic goes in to get to that point.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but it is a surprising and suspicious convergence nonetheless.

Yosarian2 25 Jul 2013 2:22 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
The explanation that the people like Erik Brynjolfsson make for why the gap between productivity and wages is growing larger is that, as it becomes easier to automate more and more parts of production, the relative importance of capital (money to invest in automation) grows, while the relative importance of labor declines. So as automation advances, more of the profit goes to those with the capital to invest in automation while less of it goes to the worker.

Paul Krugman wrote an article about 6 months ago discussing in economic terms how it can be possible for certain types of technological advance to benefit capital at the expense of workers, it was pretty interesting, let me find it.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-wages-the-analytics-wonkish/

Yosarian2 17 Jul 2013 2:10 UTC
10 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
I’m not sure that being a rationalist gives you a significant advantage in interpersonal relationships. A lot of our brain seems to be specifically designed for social interactions; trying to use the rational part of your brain to do social interactions is like using a CPU chip to do graphics instead of a GPU; you can do it, but it’ll be slower and less efficient and effective then using the hardware that’s designed for that.

Yosarian2 31 Oct 2014 9:29 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Wikipedia articles from the future
I don’t think that’s what happened in Detroit either.

Really, what happened was that most of the auto jobs left, and much of the population with it. It’s a city that’s had a shrinking population for 4 decades now. That means a huge amount of abandoned houses, whole city blocks with only one or two people living on them. Because of that, you have a dramatically reduced tax revenue that’s no longer able to cover the costs of adequate services, and you have all the social problems of abandoned housing (increased crime and fire risk) without the resources to deal with it. We’ve never had to deal with a shrinking city in the US before, and we really haven’t figured out how to deal with it.

I do agree with you, though, that it clearly has nothing to do with “gender politics” or whatever bizzare explanation the person you’re responding to was referencing.

Yosarian2 21 Jan 2014 2:26 UTC
9 points
in reply to: L._Zoel’s comment on: Leave a Line of Retreat
That’s not the idea that really scares Less Wrong people.

Here’s a more disturbing one; try to picture a world where all the rational skills you’re learning on Less Wrong are actually somehow flawed, and actually make it less likely that you’ll discover the truth or made you correct less often, for whatever reason? What would that look like? Would you be able to tell the difference.

I must say, I have trouble picturing that, but I can’t prove it’s not true (we are basically tinkering with the way our mind works without a software manual, after all).

Yosarian2 24 Jul 2013 14:25 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
The big thing here is that as we had the massive productivity increases of the industrial revolution and the second industrial revolution, we had a corresponding dramatic increase in consumption to match the productivity increase, which kept employment steady; even if productivity increases by a factor of 20, it doesn’t cause unemployment if consumption also increases by a factor of 20, which is basically what happened over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I’m not sure that’s going to happen again, though. It might, of course, but if productivity increases and (for whatever reason) consumption doesn’t continue to increase by the same factor, it would tend to cause unemployment.

Yosarian2 6 Apr 2017 10:11 UTC
8 points
on: Brief update on the consequences of my “Two arguments for not thinking about ethics” (2014) article
I’ve heard a number of people say the same thing about utilitarianism. It’s interesting, because learning about it had almost the exact opposite effect on me.

One thing that struck me about utilitarianism right away is that your own utility matters as well as other people’s; not only is it ok to do something that makes you happy if it doesn’t harm anyone else and to take care of yourself, it’s actually the morally correct thing to do, all else being equal. In a utilitarian morality you should help other people, but at the same time everyone should take care of themselves and make their own lives better as well; making sure your own life is tolerable is actually a moral imperative, so long as you’re also trying to make the world a better place at the same time (especially since everyone probably has more control over their own happiness and quality of life then over anyone else’s.)

Maybe it’s because I was raised in a Catholic background and had previously been ingrained with the attitude that doing anything for yourself is selfish and unethical, but the idea that it’s actually morally correct to let yourself be happy was a big shock to me, in a positive way.

Which isn’t to say that people should waste a lot of money buying themselves useless things when that money could go to better uses, but I never liked doing that anyway, so that didn’t really affect me. Just the revelation that on some level taking care of yourself and letting yourself be happy is the morally correct thing to do was a very helpful concept to me.

Yosarian2 24 Jan 2013 23:56 UTC
8 points
in reply to: lucidfox’s comment on: The Fear of Common Knowledge
I think the point in the story was that everyone assumed “I must be too sinful to see the emperor’s cloths. Everyone else clearly can see them. There must be something wrong with me, so I should pretend I can see them too.” Everyone, including the emperor himself, was burdened by the same self-doubt.

It was only when someone who was clearly without sin or guile said that he couldn’t see the cloths that everyone else realized the truth.

(Unfortunately, in reality, I suspect the ending of the story really would have been “The child is a sinner and a heretic, or he would see the clothing just like all the rest of us CLEARLY do. Quick, burn the child!”)

Yosarian2 8 Oct 2017 15:58 UTC
7 points
on: HOWTO: Screw Up The LessWrong Survey and Bring Great Shame To Your Family
I didn’t even know that the survey was happening, sorry.

If you do decide to keep running the survey for a little longer, I’d take it, if that data point helps.

Yosarian2 16 Sep 2017 21:00 UTC
7 points
on: LW 2.0 Strategic Overview
My concern around the writing portion of your idea is this: from my point of view, the biggest problem with lesswrong is that the sheer quantity of new content is extremely low. In order for a LessWrong 2.0 to succeed, you absolutly have to get more people spending the time and effort to create great content. Anything you do to make it harder for people to contribute new content will make that problem worse. Especially anything that creates a barrier for new people who want to post something in discussion. People will not want to write content that nobody might see unless it happens to get promoted.

Once you get a constant stream of content on a daily basis, then maybe you can find a way to curate it to highlight the best content. But you need that stream of content and engagement first and foremost or I worry the whole thing may be stillborn.

Yosarian2 19 Sep 2013 0:18 UTC
7 points
on: What did governments get right? Gotta list them all!
We can argue about it’s long-term sustainability because of the baby boomers retiring and all that, but just in terms of administration and execution, the social security program is incredibly well-run and effective. According to internal reviews, the error rate is amazingly low:

The FY 2011 error rates for RSDI overpayments and underpayments were 0.32 percent and 0.13 percent, respectively

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/improperpayments/documents/AO_Report_2013.pdf

And the administration overhead cost of the program is relatively low as well, considering it’s very high accuracy rate. It looks like the overhead and administrative costs of the program has been less then 1% of the total cost of the program every year since 1989.

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

Yosarian2 29 Dec 2012 20:17 UTC
7 points
on: Helpless Individuals
This kind of thing is often considered one of the main roles of government: funding important projects on a constant basis over a long period of time. It’s hard to fund those with charity; charity funding tends to be inconsistent over time, and people who do give to charity are likely to give to whatever cause is “popular” that year. I wouldn’t want to try to fund “maintenance of one specific bridge every year over the next 50 years” with just charitable contributions from people who use that bridge and benefit from it, because some years they might donate more then enough to maintain the bridge, but some years they might not. Taxation and a constant revenue stream are just a more efficient and consistent solution to the problem. That’s likely true in funding long-term science as well.

In fact, this is a historical theory for how the first large governments formed. In both ancient Egypt and ancient China, the large central governments were able to build massive canal systems that dramatically improved farming and therefore the quality of life of everyone. It would have been pretty unlikely to create those through just the voluntary contribution (either in money or in labor) of people; too many people would have defected to make that a practical solution, at least over the long term.

That being said, if you’re relying on governments for that, there’s always the risk that the government will decide to take your tax money and spend it on something useless (in the case of Egypt, that would be the pyramids), so some kind of auditing of the government’s spending and feedback to improve it is fairly important.

Yosarian2 4 Oct 2017 23:01 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: [Slashdot] We’re Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows
To take this a step farther; while this doesn’t prove we’re not in a simulation, I think if you accept that our universe can’t be simulated from a universe that looks like ours, it destroys the whole anthro/ probability argument in favor of simulations, because that argument seems to rely on the claim that we will eventually create a singularity which will simulate a lot of universes like ours. If that’s not possible, then the main positive argument for the simulation hypothesis gets a lot weaker, I think.

Maybe there’s a higher level universe with more permissive computational constraints, maybe not, but either way I’m not sure I see how you can make a probability argument for or against it.

Yosarian2 20 Jul 2015 21:22 UTC
6 points
in reply to: V_V’s comment on: I have just donated $10,000 to the Immortality Bus, which was the most rational decision of my life
Not necessarily. I’ve heard some people describe the effort to end aging like this: “The goal isn’t to live forever. The goal is to live to the age of 250 with the body of a 25 year old and then die in a freak skydiving accident.”