LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes, I didn't say "they are not considering that hypothesis", I am saying "they don't want to consider that hypothesis". Those do indeed imply very different actions. I think one gives very naturally rise to producing counterarguments, the other one does not. 

I am not really sure what you mean by the second paragraph. AI is being actively regulated, and there are very active lobbying efforts on behalf of the big technology companies, producing large volumes of arguments for why AI is nothing you have to worry about. 

Making factory farmed eggs available to customers isn't objectively ethical. An appeal to choice only works if the choice decreased the amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Since that appears to not be the case, then you need to find another angle. Maybe factory farmed eggs decrease the amount of suffering in the world because egg eaters can eat more eggs for less money? Even if that were the case, that's only a small amount of suffering that was removed from the world that is outweighed by the suffering of factory farmed chickens. Moreover, egg eaters can still explore other foods. So you'd need to do show the data.

Basing morality off choice in and of itself isn't viable. Just because something causes a decision state does not magically make that thing moral or immoral. You also run into problems when basing morality off of choice like the libertarians who want to destroy the government because regulations technically cause more harm today than ever before. Basing morality off of choice is a moralistic fallacy and frankly dualistic.

Taking choice into account does matter though since choice affects the amount of suffering there is in the world. For example, you can choose to avoid causing agony. But that doesn't make the choice good in and of itself, only good instrumentally so, since it has caused a decrease in the amount of suffering.

Social Entropy as a measure of a society's moral status.

A society with a high social entropy is where indistinguishability is high. As in, no matter what you can do, things remain the same. You can be physically or mentally limited from doing the things that will cause a difference. For example, a tribe ten thousand years ago, or an isolated poor community today.

A society with a low social entropy is where distinguishability is high. As in, you have the physical and mental capability to cause a difference. For example, a university where methods are found and practiced, or a bustling city with many risk-hungry investors looking for someone like you.

What's great is that this method is quantitative. We can actually measure whether a new policy or person has increased or decreased the number of possibilities there are. We can measure Social Entropy. It's good to lower Social Entropy.

My gut reaction to this post is that it's importantly wrong. This is just my babbled response, and I don't have time to engage in a back-and-forth. Hope you find it valuable though!

My issue is with the idea that any of your examples have successfully tabooed "should."

In fact, what's happening here is that the idea that we "should taboo 'should'" is being used to advocate for a different policy conclusion.

Let's use Toxoplasma Memes as an example. Well, just for starters, framing Jihad vs. War on Terror as "toxoplasma" works by choosing a concept handle that evokes a disgust reaction to affect an ethical reframing of the issue. Both Jihad/War on Terror theorists and "Toxoplasma" theorists have causal models that are inseparable from their ethical models. To deny that is not to accomplish a cleaner separation between epistemology and ethics, it's to disguise reality to give cover to one's own ethical/epistemic combination. You can do it, sure, it's the oldest trick in the book. If I were to say you shouldn't, "because it disguises the truth," I'm just being a hypocrite.

Likewise, the fact that "tabooing 'should'" makes the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics seem silly also illustrates how "tabooing 'should'" is a moral as much as an epistemic move. The point is to make an idea and its advocates look silly. It's to manipulate their social status and tickle people's jimmies until they agree with you. It might not work, but that's the intent.

Yglesias simply misrepresented the claim made by at least the snippet of the PS5 review that you cite.

The review said:

a lot of people simply won’t be able to buy a PlayStation 5, regardless of supply. Or if they can, concerns over increasing austerity in the United States and the growing threat of widespread political violence supersede any enthusiasm

Yglesias said:

the sales outlook for a new video game console system is very good.

"Regardless of supply" is a colloquialism. I think a more charitable reading of this statement, which obviously isn't meant primarily as a projection of console sales, would be that there will be people who want a PS5 who can't afford it, and that we have bigger issues in the world than being excited about the PS5. This is obviously true.

Yglesias's rhetoric isn't just meant to refocus the discussion on the sales outlook for the PS5. It's to smack down the status of the author of the PS5 review and those in the same camp, as thoughtless nincompoops who don't understand reality and therefore aren't qualified to be moral authorities either.

Now, that's all fine, because it's really all there is to do once you're getting into the realm of policy. If your goals and values aren't axiomatic, but if instead you're debating some conjunction of epistemics, values, and goals, as we usually are, then it might be a great rhetorical move to pretend like you're just having a "facts and logic and predictive abilities" debate, but that's rarely true.

Like, if Yglesias really was interested in that, then why would he ever, ever pick out such an obviously stupid piece of writing to address in the first place? He has the greatest thinkers and writers available to him to engage with! Why pick out the dumbest thing anybody ever wrote about the PS5?

Well, you know why already. There is a contest over facts/status/virtue/goals going on known as the "Culture Wars," and he's participating in it while pretending like he's not.

And maybe this is a culture war that needs to be fought. Maybe we really are ruled by the dumbest things anybody ever wrote on Medium and social media, and it's time to change that. And maybe there's value in pretending like you're performing a purely technical analysis when considering economics or the war on terror or how to address homelessness. I'm not a subjectivist. I do think that, although it may be impossible to prove what the truth is in some perfectly self-satisfying fashion, there's such a thing as being "more wrong" and "less wrong," and that it's virtuous to strive for the latter.

But I think that here, in our community of practice where we strive for the latter, we should strive to be skeptical about claims to objectivity. It's not that it's impossible. It's that it's a great rhetorical move to advance a subjective position, and how would you tell the difference?

Making factory farmed eggs available to customers is objectively ethical. An appeal to suffering only works if the suffering decreased the number of choices that there are in the world.

Since that appears to not be the case, then you need to find another angle. Maybe factory farmed eggs decrease the number of choices in the world because small-time farmers can no longer afford to be in the business of pasture-raised eggs? Even if that were the case, that's only a few decisions that were removed from the world that were outweighed by the decisions of big-time farmers. Moreover, small-time farmers can still explore other decisions. So you'd need to do show the data.

Basing morality off suffering in and of itself isn't viable. Just because something causes an emotional state does not magically make that thing moral or immoral. You also run into problems when basing morality off of emotions like the negative-utilitarians who want to destroy the world because there's technically more human suffering today than ever before. Basing morality off of feeling is a naturalistic fallacy and frankly animalistic.

Taking pain and suffering into account does matter though since emotional states affect the number of possibilities/choices there are in the world. For example, you can't solve a math problem if you're in agony. But that doesn't make the agony bad in and of itself, only bad instrumentally so, since it has caused a decrease in the number of possibilities.

It's both rational and moral to play the lottery a bit.

First, even if the payout is only a portion of the payin, the marginal value of the prize is still more than the ticket price times the number of tickets. Two dollars has virtually 0 marginal utility to almost anyone in America. Whereas the prize is a qualitative change to the winner's life. The total number of possibilities in society goes up since a loser doesn't lose any possibilities buy losing two dollars. The winner can also marshal the funds for projects that would go unfunded otherwise, so the lottery is actually moral to play since it benefits society as a whole.

Also consider time-preference. The value of the prize today is worth almost infinitely more than the ticket price slowly saved away and accumulated over centuries. Even if the prize is only a portion of the payin, by the time you take into account all the accrued interest and the marginal utility difference, the difference is absurd. In fact, the prize can be a mere 1% of the total payin and still be rational to play as long as the prize money is a qualitative difference. This means always go for the jackpot, and not the silly small prizes that won't change your life.

However there's a limit. Any prize amount above the amount that will make a qualitative difference is irrational to play since by the time you can expect to win it the interest accrued on just investing the two dollars a week will have become a vertical curve of capital gains. It seems that 200 years is the limit. If it takes longer than 200 years to win the lottery, then the qualitative benefit switches to interest accrual off the ticket prices. A qualitative jackpot that you can expect to win sometime in your life seems to be ideal since that's not enough time for interest off tickets to become qualitative.

The more decisions available to members, the more ethical that society is.

When I go to the grocery store, a decision is available to me to purchase factory farmed eggs or pasture-raised eggs. Let's consider this from exclusively the issue of animal suffering.

• If our society started with only factory farmed eggs, then added pasture-raised eggs, it has given me the opportunity to make another decision and has also become more ethical.
• By contrast, if our society started with only pasture-raised eggs, then added factory farmed eggs, it has given me the opportunity to make another decision and has also become less ethical.

In general, it doesn't seem like giving people more decisions makes a society inherently better or worse. Maybe as a rule of thumb, more options is better? But mostly it just seems irrelevant to the ethical level of a society.

Note: I don't have time to continue this discussion further, but I thought you might find this useful as you continue to explore this line of thinking.

Actually the Schwartz–Zippel algorithm can easily be adapted to this case (just imagine that types are variables over $Q$, and start from testing the identity of the types appearing inside parentheses), so we can validate expressions in randomized polynomial time (and, given standard conjectures, in deterministic polynomial time as well).

Not the OP, but got a few opinions there:

1. Algorithms can be Ankified with the same strategies that work for other subjects: chunk the basic intuition into a short overview card, use diagrams, and hit the "basic idea" of how it works before adding more details cards for particular tricks & minutia.  As always, most cards should take <15 seconds to review (including time spent reading the card).
2. Personally, I avoid burnout a few ways: 
   A) pair Anki with activities like taking a daily 1-mile walk or doing dishes (iOS voice commands help with the latter, so you can review hands-free),
   B) don't be shy about reviewing my professional development cards during work hours,
   C) deleting social media from my phone, so Anki is the go-to gap-filler app,
   D) always be learning a few new cards in each deck (since decks with 100% old material are less fun to review),
   E) refactoring: I set a reminder to work on marked cards every few days, so I can break down difficult cards into higher-quality material.  A little maintenance goes a long way.
   F) card design, card design, card design.  Well-designed cards are far less fatiguing to review than hastily made ones.
3. Not sure I understand.  Anki kind of abolishes the line between reviewing and learning: you do both with the same system.  If you mean motivating yourself to study old material---my trick is to review from large, combined superdecks, so there is no pause between "Oh, I finished my learning decks, time to move on to old decks."  If I give myself that break, I'm more likely to procrastinate, but if I treat it all as one big deck there's motivation to finish it all in one go.
4. I actually find it motivating.  Learning complex subjects is usually hard, because when you hit something hard there's an urge to procrastinate rather than figure out what's blocking you.  Anki removes these energy barriers for me: I can always learn a little more about quantum mechanics or whatever by adding a card or two.  It makes hard subjects easy, and makes it possible to say "I'll just study a little topology for 10 minutes" and actually make progress (which is usually impossible outside of SRS).
5. I very rarely try to tweak the algorithm.  90% of the usefulness of SRS is just being able to handle the spacing schedule for you.  Tweaking it doesn't lead to much gain in efficiency (with a few exceptions: adding learning stages to avoid ease hell, and changing the reset interval to something like 20% or 50% instead of 0% both help avoid a lot of unnecessary reviews).
6. Voice commands for everything, and audio cards for languages.  Hands-free, eyes-free reviews!

Anki's value depends a lot on how you use it.

If you use it for rote memorization, without grokking concepts deeply---then what you get is rote memorization.  Think of memorizing capitals without learning anything else about states and nations.

But if you work hard to identify conceptual landmarks and add good questions to tie it all together (more like a high quality PowerPoint presentation), then it can be amazing and facilitate retention of rich intuitions for years.  Think of memorizing major topographic landmarks on a map and a bit of history, so that you have something to relate capitals to in context.

Incidentally, rote-memorization cards are actually harder to review with Anki: the "glue" holding them in memory starts to fade after a month or so, so eventually the drift toward "ease hell" and otherwise become unpleasant to review.