Stupid Questions February 2017

I try to always include an extra option which is just "everything I haven't thought of yet", and the prior for that option reflects how confident you feel about your mastery of the domain. Even a medical expert must always admit some small likelihood that the true cause is neither a tumor nor a cold, because medical experts know that medical science evolves over time.

I don't think you're missing anything. Bayesian reasoning allows you to treat your data without introducing errors, but the results you come up with are a product of the available data and the prior model.
This is a point that is often overlooked: if you start with a completely false model, even with Bayesian reasoning the data will get you further away from the truth (case in point: someone who believes in an invisible dragon which has to invent more and more complicated explanation for the lack of evidence). Bayesian probability is just the way of reasoning that introduces the least amount of error.
To counter at least partially our fallibility, it's considered good practice to:

• never put any assumption at precisely 0 or 1 probability;
• leave always a reservoir of probability mass in your model to unknown unknows.

Other than that, findind the truth is a quest that needs creativity, ingenuity and a good dose of luck.

This is dealt with in science by not accepting explanations as truths until they are confirmed experimentally

A lot of people say that and go on to give a specific example, that Science did not accept general relativity on the basis that it explained the precession of Mercury, but rather on the novel prediction of solar lensing. But this is historically false. Scientists were much more impressed with the precession than the eclipse (even leaving aside Eddington's reliability).

Note that experimental confirmation isn't really the thing here; experiments just give you data and the problem here is conceptual (the actual truth isn't in the hypothesis space).

Most Bayes is "small world" Bayes, where you have conceptual and logical omniscience, which is possible only because of how small the problem is. "Big world" Bayes has universal priors that give you that conceptual omniscience.

In order to make a real agent, you need a language of conceptual uncertainty, logical uncertainty, and naturalization. (Most of these frameworks are dualistic, in that they have a principled separation between agent and environment, but in fact real agents exist in their environments and use those environments to run themselves.)

Seems like under that system, some headaches would just go away on their own, without symptoms of cold appearing later, which would mean the probability of cancer goes up. The patient panics, gets checked for cancer (since a recurring headache would hardly be the only symptom), no such disease is found, so there apparently has to be a new category for non-cancer, non-cold headaches.

So usually, the evidence soup has pieces that don't conform to a theory, and if the stakes are high enough, people will go looking for them and maybe use the BR for it.

I don't think you're missing anything, no.

Standardization is the core word. Institutions like ISO exist to create common standards. Jounals can then force scientists to actually follow standards.

Controlled vocabularies and applied ontology seem other key words.

How useful standardization happens to be depends a lot on the quality of the standard. The DSM-V for example seems to be a standard that holds science back and as a result there are calls for funding research that tries to use new standards.

But the evidence you have is, there's 2 people who you don't know that are saying "the clothes exist and they have a property that if you cannot see them you are dumb and/or unfit", and there's 2 people who you really really trust that are saying "look at these fine fine clothes, they really do exist".

Collect more evidence.

If possible, find a person who never heard about the supposed properties of the clothes, and ask them to describe them to you. If they can't, maybe they are stupid, but then find another one and... uhm, if everyone who didn't hear about the supposed properties of the clothes is stupid, that's suspicious.

Unexpectedly invite a few painters, put them in different corners of the room, and ask them to paint you in the clothes.

Alternatively, test your ministers. First, meet them with the clothes; next, without them. If they see the clothes both times...

Put the clothes in a bag. Add a few empty bags. Ask your ministers which bag contains the clothes. If all of them failed, ask the tailors.

Interesting questions to think about. Seeing if everyone independently describes the clothes the same way (as suggested by others) might work, unless the information is leaked. Personally, my mind went straight to the physics of the thing, 'going all science on it' as you say - as emperor, I'd claim that the clothes should have some minimum strength, lest I rip them the moment I put them on. If a piece of the fabric, stretched by the two tailors, can at least support the weight of my hand (or some other light object if you're not too paranoid about the tailor's abilities as illusionists), then it should be suitable.

Then, when your hand (or whatever) goes straight through, either they'll admit that the clothes aren't real, or they'll come up with some excuse about the cloth being so fine that it ripped or things go straight through, at which point you can say that these clothes are useless to you if they'll rip at the slightest movement or somehow phase through flesh, etc.

Incidentally, that's one of my approaches to other things invisible to me that others believe in. Does it have practical uses or create a physical effect in the world? If not, then even if it's really there, there's not much point in acknowledging it...

The irony of the situation is that some fancy closes that are today worn in Milan leave a large part of the person naked.

Anyway, my other question - how would you gather extra evidence as a citizen?

As different people for the color of the clothes and for more details. If the people really can see the clothes they should be able to describe the clothes in the same way.

If there already common knowledge about the color of the clothes or details then it would be required to see the clothes in a new context. How do the clothes look like when they get wet? If two people agree how the clothes look under a completely new context it's more likely that they don't just tell you the answer they learned by heart.

I make no claim to know what you should do, but what I would do in that situation is: wait at least a month; then email them again saying: no obligation to reply or anything, just wanted to make sure emails aren't going astray. If still no reply, assume that either they aren't interested or they're spam-binning your emails and you'll never reach them by email anyway.

Shouldn't a lack of belief in god imply:

P(not("God exists")) = 0.5

P("God exists") = 0.5

(I am completely ignoring the very important part of defining God in the sentence as I take the question to be asking of a way to express 'not knowing' in probabilistic terms. This can be applied to any subject really.)

You're right about the probabilistic statements, with a potentially tangential elaboration. There are nonsense sentences--not contradictions ("A and not A") but things that fail to parse ("A and")--and it doesn't make sense to assign probabilities to those. One might claim that "God exists" is a nonsense sentence in that way, but I think most New Atheists don't take that approach.

The distinction that people are drawing is basically which framing should have the benefit of the doubt, since not believing a new statement is the default. This is much more important for social rationality / human psychology than it is for Bayesianism, where you just assign a prior and then start calculating likelihood ratios.

From my perspective, a belief needs to be about empiric facts to have a probability attached to it. I need to be able to clearly describe how the belief could be tested in principle.

In addition to beliefs about empiric facts there are also beliefs like "Nobody loves me." that aren't about specific empiric facts but that still matter a great deal.

I cannot speak for other atheists, but as far as I'm concerned I agree with you.
Since we have a hard time defining even a human being, I accept that "God" cannot be clearly defined in any model, but I accept that there are narrations that points to some being of divine nature, and I accept that as a valid 'reference' to God(s). To those, I give a very low probability, with very little Knightian uncertainty (meaning that I also give very little probability to future evidence that would raise this probability, and high probability to evidence that will lower this value). For that account of the divine, I consider myself a full fledged atheist.
There are other narrations though, and I've heard of definitions that basically reduce to "the law of physics", to which I give obviously very high probability with very high meta-certainty.
There might be definitions or narrations that are in the middle, though. On that account, I cannot say precisely what my probabilities are, and thus would be appropriate to say that I lack a belief in this kind of god, more than a definite belief in the non-existence.

It seems to me that someone could quite consistently hold the following position:

"Atheist" means "lacking positive belief in any god or gods". You can be an atheist without thinking the existence of gods is vanishingly improbable, or indeed without giving any thought at all to probabilities. I, as it happens, do prefer to think in probabilities when possible. Exactly what I think about the existence of God depends a great deal on how you define God, and it might be anywhere from "vanishingly unlikely" to "somewhat unlikely", or in many cases "I can't answer that question because it's not clear enough what it means". But, whatever way you pose the question, I don't positively believe in any sort of god, and it's therefore appropriate to call me an atheist.

couldn't the money spent on cryopreserving oneself be better spend on, say, AI safety research?

Here comes another "stupid question" from this one.

Couldn't the money spent on AI safety research be better spend on, say, AI research?

Isn't cryonics extremely selfish?

If we are talking about "extremes", what is the base set here: people's usual spending habits? Because I don't think cryonics is more selfish than e.g. buying an expensive car.

I mean, couldn't the money spent on cryopreserving oneself be better spend on, say, AI safety research?

Well, 'better' here does all the work. It depends on your model and ethics: for example if you think that resuscitation is probably nearer then full AGI, then it's better to be frozen.

2) Would the human race be eradicated if there is a worst-possible-scenario nuclear incident? Or merely a lot of people?

This question I couldn't parse correctly. A nuclear war is improbable to wipe out humanity in its entirety, whereby a lot of people is th exact opposite of extinction, so...?

3) Is the study linking nut consumption to longevity found in the link below convincing?

This is far from a stupid question. The sample sizes are at least large, but it has the usual problem of using p-values, which are notoriously very fragile. It would require someone acquainted with statistics to judge better the thing, if it can be done at all.

That sounds like Aella, who wrote about taking acid every week for a year. Here's her reddit post about it; it includes some art she made, and one poem.

The original purpose of downvoting was to allow community moderation. Here, "moderation" means two things: (1) Giving higher visibility to high-quality content. This functionality we still have, it's the upvotes. (2) Removing low-quality content. Comments with karma below -5 and their whole subthreads are collapsed by default. This is especially important when some newcomers start spamming LW with a lot of low-quality comments. It happened more frequently in the past when LW was more popular.

And the "community" aspect means that these decisions about what to show prominently and what to hide are done by the local "hive mind", i.e. everyone, more precisely anyone above some amount of karma. This is good for several reasons: "wisdom of the crowds", preventing a few people from getting disproportional power, but most practically because moderators are busy and unable to review everything.

Why was it disabled:

The previous political debates on LW attracted one very persistent and very "mind-killed" person, known as Eugine. This guy made it his personal mission to promote neoreactionary politics on LW, and to harass away everyone who disagrees (because people who disagree with him or with neoreaction are by definition irrational people and don't belong here). To achieve this, he abused the downvoting system.

The first form of abuse was punishing everyone who disagreed with him by going through their comment history and downvoting all their previous comments. That means, one day you wrote a comment he didn't like, and the next day you lost hundreds of karma points. And afterwards, any comment you wrote, immediately had one downvote.

This was against how the karma system was supposed to be used (you were supposed to vote on specific comments, not users), and pretty much ruined our important feedback system. Eugine was asked to stop doing this, he didn't give a fuck. So his account was banned, but he created another one, and then another. So it became a game of whack-a-mole, where Eugine created hundreds of accounts, and moderators tried to find and remove them. Even worse, with multiple accounts Eugine started multiple voting, which means that if he disliked a comment, he downvoted it from dozen accounts, immeditely moving its karma into negative numbers. He typically downvoted all comments that disagreed with neoreactionary politics, or which mentioned Eugine.

LessWrong code is a clone of Reddit; it is not an elegant code, and the database is even less elegant. A few professional web developers tried to implement a few changes; most of them left crying, and the few changes that were successfully implemented took a lot of time. Fighting with Eugine was a huge drain of resources, and one of the main reasons why currently LW is "dead".

What now:

The short-term solution was to disable downvotes, thus removing from Eugine his ability to censor comments he doesn't like. Yeah, it has a few negative side-effects.

A long-term solution is to move the whole website to a completely different codebase, which will be easier to maintain. This is a work in progress. Respectful of the planning fallacy I will not give any estimates, except "it will be done when it will be done". On the new software, downvoting (or some other method of removing low-quality content) will presumably exist.

I am very new here but my impression from reading around is that people were taking advantage of the system by creating multiple accounts and downvoting comments that opposed them in order to appear to be right. I am not sure though.