What are your contrarian views?

How is that better explained by dualism?

Wouldn't cognitive science or neuroscience be sufficient to falsify such a theory? All we really have to do is show that "good life", as seen from the inside, does not correspond to maximized happy-juice or dopamine-reward.

Awfully presumptuous of you to tell people what they should prefer.

Alright, I have a few responses to this:

1. Contra OthelloGPT, in the case of GPT-4, and the new o1-preview model, I believe that the neural networks we are focusing on are deep and sort of wide, which I suspect prevents a lot of the "just find heuristic" behavior, and I believe Chain-Of-Thought scaling is there to make the model be biased more towards algorithmic solutions and sequential computation over heuristics and parallel computation.

You even mentioned that possibility here too:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gcpNuEZnxAPayaKBY/othellogpt-learned-a-bag-of-heuristics-1#5K5wDoMD2YtSJvfw9 [LW(p) · GW(p)]

I remember at one point encountering the Open Borders site, considering that it sounded like a pretty good idea, then reading through much of the site and becoming decreasingly convinced as I read the specific arguments, which consisted of more holes than solid points.

Recently, it's come up again, specifically in an interview with Caplan which was going around (I saw it via Kaj). Again, I was initially intrigued by the idea, but the more I saw of the actual arguments, the weaker they seemed. He seems to routinely deflect the significant concerns with non-denials and never actually address the pragmatic reasoning against it.

There are many counterarguments listed on the Open Borders site, and for that I give him credit. Especially as he actually attempts to engage with racialist arguments, rather than dismissing them.

I'm not sure if it's a technique worth crediting. There are voting trend issues with Hispanic immigrants that do not boil down to paranoid delusions about the Reconquista, and there are arguments regarding crime and immigration that are strongly and obviously distinguishable from sending every African-American person -- including those innocent of any crime -- out of the country. I'm hard-pressed to believe those arguments were selected for any reason but their weakness and unpalatability.

I personally favor reduced barriers to immigration (outside of a criminal background check and unique person identification, the modern limits are counterproductive at best), but writing up the worst arguments against that belief doesn't really strengthen them.

Ebola is more an argument for colonialism than against open borders but let's not be picky.

I'm sure Bradford isn't the greatest place to live, but (1) it's better than many US inner cities, (2) the UK seems quite far from collapse, and generally (3) "such-and-such a country allows quite a lot of immigration, and there is one city there that has a lot of immigrants and isn't a very nice place" seems a very very very weak argument against liberal immigration policies.

A non-representative event happened and was blown out of proportion by media.

I suspect it isn't.

The words map and territory aren't relative terms like up and down.

I meant to communicate the latter. We share this view.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

Are you saying that the universe is built like Solomonoff induction? It randomly produces observations and eliminates possibilities that don't follow them? I'd still consider that as having a territory, but it's certainly contrarian.

At the very least, your model if the universe implies the existence of a series of maps along a timeline.

Executive summary of social constructionism: all of reality is socially agreed; nothing is objective.

Thanks for explaining, upvoted. But I still don't see how this could possibly make sense.

There is no indication that this model building will one day be exhausted. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. It has happened many times throughout human history that we thought that our knowledge was nearly complete, there was nothing more to discover, except for one or two small things here and there.

But our models have become more accurate over time. We've become, if you will, "less wrong". If there's no territory, what have we been converging to?

Have you actually seen "the territory"? Of course not.

...Yes? I see it all the time.

There are plenty of unexplained observations out there. We assume that these come from some underlying "reality" which generates them. And it's a fair assumption.

I seem to recall someone (EY?) defining "reality" as "that which generates our observations". Which seems like a fairly natural definition to me. If it's just maps generating our observations, I'd call the maps part of the territory. (Like a map with a picture of the map itself on the territory. Except, in your world, I guess, there's no territory to chart so the map is a map of itself.) This feels like arguing about definitions.

I see how this might sorta make sense if we postulate that the Simulator Gods are trying really hard to fuck with us. Though still, in that case, I think the simulating world can be called a territory.

I didn't interpret shminux's statement as being about realism. There is also the theory that as we move into higher and higher energy we will cover more and more and more specific rules and never reach the terminal fundamental rule set. in other words the fundamental rules of the universe are fractally complex with the fractal function being unknowable.

Can you give me an example of something that is neither desert nor luck?

Being 5% of the group doesn't mean they are 5% of the influence. The loudest 5% may get to set the agenda of the remaining 95% if the remaining ones are willing to go along with things they don't particularly care about, but don't oppose enough to make these things deal-breakers either.

Fortunately, LW is not an appropriate forum for argument on this subject

Why? Because people are likely to disagree with you?

So would you describe someone tall as having "height privilege" because they're better at basketball?

You really need riders to the effect that privilege of an objectionable kind is unrelated to achievement or intrinsic abilities,

Why the "majority group" qualifier? Privilege has been historically associated with minorities, like aristocracy.

Anti-oppressionists use "privilege" to describe a set of advantages (or lack of disadvantages) enjoyed by a majority group

Does it have to be a majority group? For example, does this compared with this count as an example of "black privilege"? Would you describe the fact that some people are smarter (or stronger) than others as "intelligence privilege" (or "strength privilege")?

That's in the bailey, because of "enjoyed by a majority group."

Why focus only specific majority groups and thereby ignore things like men in domestic violence issues getting a lot less help from society than women?

Nearly everyone has some advantages and disadvantages. It's often not helpful to conflate that huge back of advantages and disadvantages into a single variable.

OK, those things have indeed happened, to some degree. Above comment corrected.

I still don't understand what is uncharitable about the Wordsx3 post specifically. It accurately describes the behavior of a number of people I know (as in, have met, in person, and interacted with socially, in several cases extensively in a friendly manner), and I have no reason to consider them weak examples of feminist advocacy and every reason to consider typical (their demographics match the stereotype). I have carefully avoided catching the receiving end of it, because friends of mine have honestly challenged aspects of this kind of thing and been ostracized for their trouble.

There's something wrong with the first link (I guess you typed the URL on a smartphone autocorrecting keyboard or similar).

EDIT: I think this is the correct link.

Imo this quote from her response is a pretty weak argument:

"The concept of female privilege is, AFAICT, looking at the disadvantages gender-non-conforming men face, noticing that women with similar traits don’t face those disadvantages, and concluding that this is because women are advantaged in society. "

In order for this to be a sensible counterpoint you would need to either say "gender conforming male privilege" or you would need to show that there are few men who mind conforming to gender roles. I don't really see why anyone believes most men are fine with living out standard gender norms and I certainly don't see how anyone has evidence for this.

If a high percentage fo men are gender non-conforming and such men are at a disdadvantage in society then the concept of male privilege is seriously weakened. And using it is dangerous as it might harm those men to here that they are "privileged" when this is not the case (at least in terms of gender, maybe they are rich etc).

I think that if you actually can defend them, it might be worth it to go through the canyon. Inferential canyons are a lot easier to cross when your targets are aware of their existence and are willing and able to discuss responsibly.

("worth it" is of course relative to other ways you discuss with strangers on the internet}

So buying one ticket is "infinitely" better than buying no tickets.

So your utility function is nonlinear with respect to probability. You don't use expected utility. It results in certain inconsistencies. This is discussed in the article the allais paradox, but I'll give a lottery example here.

Suppose I offer you a choice between paying one dollar and getting a one in a million chance of winning $500,000, and paying two dollars and getting a one in one million chance of winning $500,000 and a one in two million chance of winning $500,001. You figure that what's basically a 0.00015% chance of winning vs. a 0.0001% chance isn't worth paying another dollar for, so you just pay the one dollar.

On the other hand, suppose I only offer you the first option, but, once you see if you've won, you get another chance. If you win, you don't really want another lottery ticket, since it's not a big deal anymore. So you buy a ticket, and if you lose, you buy another ticket. This results in a 0.0001% chance of ending up with $499,999, a 0.00005% chance of ending up with $499,998, and a 99.99985% chance of ending up with -2$. This is exactly the same set of probabilities as you had for the second option before.

The one dollar spent on the ticket, in comparison, would have had a totally negligible impact.

No it would not. Or at least, it's highly unlikely for you to know that.

Suppose MIRI has their probability of success increased by 50 percentage points if they get a 100 million dollar donation. This means that, if 100 million people all donate a dollar, their probability of success goes up by 50 percentage points. Each successive one will change the probability by a different amount, but on average, each donation will increase the chance of success by one in 200 million. Furthermore, it's expected that the earlier donations would make a bigger difference, due to the law if diminishing returns. This means that donating one dollar improves MIRI's probability of success by more than one in 200 million, and is therefore better than getting a one in 100 million chance of donating 100 million dollars.

Even if MIRI does end up needing a minimum amount of money or something and becomes an exception to the law of diminishing returns, they know more about their financial situation, and since they're dealing with large amounts of money all at once, they can be more efficient about it. They can make a bet precisely tailored to their interests and with odds that are more fair.

So buying one ticket is "infinitely" better than buying no tickets.

You're looking at the (potential) benefits and ignoring the costs. The costs are not negligible: "Thirteen percent of US citizens play the lottery every week. The average household spends around $540 annually on lotteries and poor households spend considerably more than the average." (source).

Buying more than one ticket, comparably, doesn't make a difference.

Buying a second ticket doubles your chances, obviously.

A LessWrong reader buys a lottery ticket ... in at least one worldline, somewhere, they win a half a billion dollars

For each timeline where you buy a lottery ticket there is one where you don't. Under MWI you don't make any choices -- you choose everything, always.

the marginal utility of one extra dollar is basically zero

You've never been poor, have you? :-/

It is trivial to show that buying a lottery ticket is rational in this scenario

It is just as trivial to show that you should spend all your disposable income and maybe more on lottery tickets in this scenario.

Buying one $1 lottery ticket earns you a tiny chance - 1 in 175,000,000 for the Powerball - of becoming absurdly wealthy. NOT buying that one ticket gives you a chance of zero.

There are ways to win a lottery without buying a ticket. For example, someone may buy you a ticket as a present, without your knowledge, which then wins.

So buying one ticket is "infinitely" better than buying no tickets.

No, it is much more likely that you'll win the lottery by buying tickets than by not buying tickets (assuming it's unlikely to be gifted a ticket), but the cost of being gifted a ticket is zero, which makes not buying tickets an "infinitely" better return on investment.

What about “smart people”? IQ > 100? IQ > 115? IQ > 130? IQ > 145?

It sure isn't great for the smart people.

Yes, I think that's pretty trivially true. Academia functions monastically: the academic accepts relatively worse material income in order to have the opportunity to donate large sums of value to society.

I disagree, but my reasons are a little intricate. I apologize, therefore, for the length of what follows.

There are at least three sorts of questions you might want to use a moral system to answer. (1) "Which possible world is better?", (2) "Which possible action is better?", (3) "Which kind of person is better?". Many moral systems take one of these as fundamental (#1 for consequentialist systems, #2 for deontological systems, #3 for virtue ethics) but in practice you are going to be interested in answers to all of them, and the actual choices you need to make are between actions, not between possible worlds or characters.

Suppose you have a system for answering question 1, and on a given occasion you need to decide what to do. One way to do this is by choosing the action that produces the best possible world (making whatever assumptions about the future you need to), but it isn't the only way. There is no inconsistency in saying "Doing X will lead to a better world, but I care about my own happiness as well as about optimizing the world so I'm going to do Y instead"; that just means that you care about other things besides morality. Which pretty much everyone does.

(The same actually applies to systems that handle question 2 more directly. There is no inconsistency in saying "The gods have commanded that we do X, but I am going to do Y instead because it's easier". Though there might be danger in it, if the gods are real.)

Many moral systems have the property that if you follow them and care about nothing but morality then your life ends up entirely governed by that system, and your own welfare ends up getting (by everyday standards) badly neglected. If this is a problem, it is a problem with caring about nothing but morality, not a problem with utilitarianism or (some sorts of) divine command theory or whatever.

A moral system can explicitly allow for this; e.g., a rule-based system that tells you what you may and must do can simply leave a lot of actions neither forbidden nor compulsory, or can command you to take some care of your own welfare. A consequentialist system can't do this directly -- what sort of world is better shouldn't depend on who's asking, so if you decide your actions solely by asking "what world is best?" you can't make special allowances for your own interest -- but so what? You can take utilitarianism as your source of answers to moral questions, and then explicitly trade off moral considerations against your own interests in whatever way you please. (And utilitarianism doesn't tell you you mustn't. It only tells you that if you do that you will end up with a less-than-optimal world, but you knew that already.)

A utilitarian doesn't have to see their job as being a cog in the Great Utility Machine of the world. They can see their job however they please. All that being a utilitarian means is that when they come to ask a moral question, looking at the consequences and comparing utility is how they do it. Whether they then go ahead and maximize utility is a separate matter.

So, how should a utilitarian look at someone who cares about nothing but (utilitarian) morality -- as a "moral ideal" or a grotesquely subjugated slave or what? That's up to them, and utilitarianism doesn't answer the question. (In particular, I'm not aware of any reason to think that considering such a person a "moral ideal" is a necessary part of maximizing utility.) It might, I suppose, be nice to have a moral system with the property that a life that's best-according-to-that-system is attractive and nice to think about; but it would also be nice to have a physical theory with the property that if it's true then we all get to live happily for ever, and a metaphysics with the property that it confirms all our intuitions about the universe; and, in each case, so we can but adopting those theories probably won't work out well. Likewise, I suggest, for morality.

As for your rhetoric about machines and industrial processes: I don't think "large-scale" is at all the same thing as "industrial". Imagine, if you will, someone who would by admired by the Buddhist or Christian moral traditions, who is filled with love and compassion for everyone s/he sees and works hard to make their lives better even at great personal cost. Now expand this person's awareness and compassion to encompass everyone in the world. What you get is pretty close to the "grotesquely subjugated" utilitarian saint, but there's nothing machine-like or industrial about them: they do what they do out of an intensely personal awareness of everyone's welfare or suffering. Their life might still be subjugated or grotesque, but that has nothing to do with industrial machinery.

You might want to protest that I'm cheating: that it's wrong to call someone a utilitarian if they consider anything other than utility when making decisions. I think this would be a bit like some theists' insistence that no one can properly be called an "atheist" if they admit that slightest smidgeon of doubt about the existence of deities. And I respond in roughly the same way in this case as in the other: You may use the words however you please, but if you restrict the word "utilitarian" to those who are completely singleminded about morality, you end up with hardly anyone coming under that description, and for consistency you should do the same for every other moral system out there, and you end up having a single big bucket of not-completely-singleminded people into which just about everyone goes. Isn't it better to classify people in a way that better matches the actual distribution of beliefs and attitudes, and say that someone is a utilitarian if they answer "what's morally better?" questions by some kind of consideration of overall utility?

Seconding the question "What moral theory do you espouse?"

That was beautiful.

Also there is no way to compare interpersonal utility. There is a sense in which I might prefer A to B, but there is no sense in which I can prefer A more than you prefer B. We could vote, or bid money but neither of these results in a satisfactory ethical theory.

Perhaps not with utility theory's usual definition of "prefer", but in practice there is a commonsense way in which I can prefer A more than you prefer B, since we're both humans with almost identical brain architecture.

I find it difficult to believe that houseboats are inherently less expensive. It seems more likely that there's some reason house boats cannot be made as large and expensive as regular houses, so the average houseboat is much cheaper than the average house, even if it's more expensive than a house of the same quality.

The internet gets much more difficult if you don't live in cities. While it mitigates the costs of people not living near each other, it does not remove them. There are still lots of people putting large amounts of time into physically commuting.

Why not use mobile homes? They can't be stacked in three dimensions like apartments, but at least you can put them in two-dimensional grids.

(2) the internet makes it less necessary for most people to live in cities.

Your mileage may vary. Getting internet made me yearn to move to a larger city where I could meet more interesting people and do more interesting stuff---which in the end I did.

If you don't want much cost of moving you can simply rent a flat.

A houseboat is rather less expensive

I am pretty sure that out of two equivalent houses the one which floats would be noticeably more expensive, and more expensive to maintain, too. Houseboats are typically less expensive than houses because they are smaller and less convenient.

Where I live there is an abundance of canals.

Sounds like a Dutch city.

(2) the internet makes it less necessary for most people to live in cities.

But, it seems, no less desired. See e.g. LW meetups.

A houseboat is rather less expensive, which frees up capital for other purposes.

Aren't RVs even cheaper?

I looked through the numbers and the trend line. I updated in your direction. Even nuclear can't make a big dent without true mass production of reactors, which almost certainly will not happen.

I hear them saying things about how a small increase in solar panel efficiency is going to completely and rapidly "cure us of our fossil fuel addiction."

We have roughly doubling in solar panel efficiency every 7 years. That's not what I would call "small increase".

Also, your figure only reflects electricity generation, not total energy consumption which is a much higher figure.

From what I remember, transportation's responsible for about a third of CO2 emissions, a bit less than electricity generation. (Various other sources make up the remaining third, most not involving direct energy consumption.) I'm not sure exactly how that translates to energy consumption, but given the economies of scale involved, I suspect the power grid would end up dominating total energy consumption.

Censoring substantial references to the basilisk was partly done in the name of protecting the people affected. This requires that there be a significant number of people, not just that there be the normal number of people who can be affected by any unusual idea.

Curiously, it is not necessary. For example, it would suffice that people who do the censoring overestimate the number of people that might need protection. Or consider PR explanation that I gave in another comment which similarly does not require a large number of people affected. Some other parts of your comment are also addressed there.

Which things are so important to EY that he feels it necessary to intervene directly and in a massively controversial way? By their actions we can conclude that the Basilisk is much more important to the LW leadership than e.g. the illegitimate downvoting that drove danerys away.

At the time the Basilisk episode happened Eliezer was a lot more active in general then when the illegitimate downvoting happened.

If you're saying that danger is an unavoidable cost of being able to generate interesting ideas, then the large number of other groups who seem to come up with interesting ideas without ideas that present a danger to them seems like a counterexample.

If you look at the self professed skeptic community there are episodes such as elevator gate.

If you go a bit further back and look at what Stalin did, I would call the ideas on which he acted dangerous.

The general population of atheists does not have problems with basilisks, and laughs them off when you describe them to them.

It's pretty easy to speak about a lot of topics in a way that the people you are talking to laugh and don't take the idea seriously. A bunch of that atheist population also treats their new atheism like a religion and closes itself from alternative ideas that sound weird. For practical purposes they are religious and do have a fence against taking new ideas seriously.

It's whatever makes LW different from the wider population, even the wider nerdy-western-liberal-college-educated cluster. The general population of atheists does not have problems with basilisks, and laughs them off when you describe them to them.

What ideas does the general population of atheists have in common besides the lack of belief in God? And what interesting ideas can you derive from that? F.Dostoevsky (who wasn't even an atheist) seems to have thought that from this one could derive that everything is morally permitted. Maybe some atheistic ideas seemed new, interesting and outlandish in the past when there were few atheists (e.g. separation of church and state), but nowadays they are part of common sense.

No, the claim of this hypothetical Chesterton would not be that atheism creates new weird ideas. It would be that by rejecting god you lose the defense against various weird ideas ("It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." - G.K.Chesterton). It is not general atheism, it is specific atheist groups. And in the history of the world, there were a lot of atheists who believed in strange things. E.g. some atheists believe in reincarnation or spiritism. Some believe that the Earth is a zoo kept by aliens. In previous times, some revolutionaries (led not by their atheism, but by other ideologies) believed that just because the social order is not god given it could be easily changed into basically anything. The hypothetical Chesterton would probably claim that had all these people closely followed church's teachings they would not have believed in these follies since the common sense provided by the traditional christianity would have prevented them. And he would probably be right. The hypthetical Chesterton would probably think that the basilisk is yet another thing in the long list of things some atheists stupidly believe.

Yes, on LessWrong the weirdness heuristic is used less than in more general atheist/skeptic community (in my previous post I have already mentioned why I think it is often useful), and it is considered bad to dismiss the idea if the only counterargument to it is that is weird. Difference in acceptance of weirdness heuristic probably comes from different mentalities: trying to become more rational vs. a more conservative strategy of trying to avoid being wrong (e.g. accepting epistemic learned helplessness when faced with weird and complicated arguments and defaulting to the mainstream position). This difference may reduce a person's defenses against various new and strange ideas. But even then, one of the most upvoted LW posts of all times already talks about this danger.

Nevertheless, while you claim that general population of atheists "laughs them off when you describe them to them.", it is my impression that the same is true here, on LessWrong, as absolute majority of LWers do not consider it as a serious thing (sadly, I do not recall any survey asking about that). It is just a small proportion of LWers that believe in this idea. Thus it cannot be "whatever makes LW different from the wider population", it must be whatever makes that small group different from the wider LW population, because even after rejecting following tradition (which would be the hypothetical Chesterton's explanation) and diminished usage of weirdness heuristic (which would be average skeptic's explanation) majority of LWers still do not believe it. And the reasons why some LWers become defensive when someone brings it up are probably very similar to those described in a blog post "Weak Men Are Superweapons" by Yvain.

One could argue that LessWrong thought made it possible to formulate such an idea. Which I had already addressed in my previous post. Once you have a wide vocabulary of ideas you can come up with many things. It is important to be able to find out if the thing you came up with is true.

If these ideas are dangerous to us then we are doing something wrong. If you're saying that danger is an unavoidable cost of being able to generate interesting ideas, then the large number of other groups who seem to come up with interesting ideas without ideas that present a danger to them seems like a counterexample.

I do not think that thinking about basilisk is dangerous to us. Maybe it is to some people with OCD or something similar, I do not know. I talked about absurdity, not danger. It seems to me that instead of restricting our imagination (so as to avoid coming up with absurd things), we should let it run free and try improve our ability to recognize which of these imagined ideas are actually true.

It also received a disproportionate amount of ex cathedra moderator action. Which things are so important to EY that he feels it necessary to intervene directly and in a massively controversial way? By their actions we can conclude that the Basilisk is much more important to the LW leadership than e.g. the illegitimate downvoting that drove danerys away.

I do not know what exactly did Eliezer think when he decided. I am not him. In fact, I wasn't even there when it happened. I have no way of knowing whether he had actually had a clear reason at the time or simply freaked out and made an impulsive decision, or actually believed it at that moment (at least to the extent of being unable to immediately rule it out completely, which might have led to censor that post in order to postpone the argument). However, I have an idea which I find at least somewhat plausible. This is a guess.

Suppose even a very small number of people (let's say 2-4 people) were affected (again, let's remember that they would be very atypical, I doubt that having, e.g. OCD would be enough) in a way that instead of only worrying about this idea, they would actually take action and e.g. sell the large part of their possessions and donate it to (what was then known as) SIAI, leave their jobs to work on FAI or start donating all their income (neglecting their families) out of fear of this hypothetical torture. Now that would be a PR disaster many orders of magnitude larger than anything basilisk related we have now. Now, when people use the word "cult", they seem to seem to use it figuratively, as a hyperbole (e.g.), in that case people and organizations who monitor real cults would actually label SIAI as a literal one (whether SIAI likes it or not). Now that would be a disaster both for SIAI and the whole friendly AI project, possibly burying it forever. Considering that Eliezer worried about such things even before this whole debacle, it must have crossed his mind and this possibility must have looked very scary leading to the impulsive decision and what we can now see as improper handling of the situation.

Then why not claim that you do this for PR reasons instead of caring about psychological harm of those people? Firstly, one may actually care about those people, especially if one knows one of them personally (which seems to be the case from the screenshot provided by XiXiDu and linked by Jiro). And even in more general case, talking about caring usually looks better than talking about PR. Secondly, "stop it, it is for your own safety" probably stops more people from looking than "stop it, it might give us a bad PR" (as we can see from the recent media attention, the second reason stops basically nobody). Thirdly, even if Eliezer personally met all those people (once again, remember that they would be very atypical) affected and explicitly asked not to do anything, they would understand that he has SIAI PR at stake and thus an incentive to lie to them about what they should do, and they wouldn't want to listen to him (as even remote possibility of torture might seem scary) and, e.g. donate via another person. Or find their own ways of trying to create fAI. Or whatever they can come up with. Or find their ways to fight the possible creation of AI. Or maybe even something like this. I don't know, this idea did not cause me nightmares therefore I do not claim to understand the mindset of those people. Here I must note that in no way I am claiming that because a person has an OCD they would actually do that.

Nowadays, however, what most people seem to want to talk about is not the idea of a basilisk itself, but rather the drama surrounding it. As it is sometimes used to dismiss all LW (again, for reasons similar to this), many people get very defensive and pattern match those who bring this topic up with an intent of potentially discussing it (and related events) to trolls who do it just for the sake of trolling. Therefore this situation might feel worse for some people, especially those who are not targeted by the mass downvoting or have so much karma they can't realistically be significantly affected by it.

I feel like I am putting a lot of effort to steelman everything. I guess I, too, got very defensive, potentially for the reasons mentioned in that SlateStarCodex post. Well, maybe everything was just a combination of many stupid decisions, impulsive behaviour and after-the-fact rationalizations, which, after all, might be the simplest explanation. I don't know. Well, as I wasn't even there, there must people who would be better informed about the events and better suited to argue.

I don't think you could get enough of humanity to agree on what should be considered "deviant" to make that value cohere.

What cross-section of humanity are you familiar with?

This is frustrating: I think I can argue against the standard argument of he incoherence of FW...but you haven't given it...or any other,

To make sure I'm getting this right: is this the school of anti-freedom where the notion of moral responsibility is also deemed incoherent?

Yes, they are aware of this, but there are many examples of physicists failing to grasp the full significance of this fact. There is a difference between physicists acknowledging the CPT-invariance of fundamental laws, and fully embracing the philosophical consequences of this invariance. Huw Price's Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point documents a number of cases of physicists failing to do the latter.

For further examples, see the mess of a priori causality conditions and chronology protection conjectures in GR, largely motivated by a desire to avoid "causal paradoxes". Tachyons are declared unphysical for similar reasons. So-called retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics, a very promising research topic IMO, are largely unexplored. Advanced (as opposed to retarded) solutions to differential equations are ruled unphysical. I could go on.

There is still a big unwritten assumption in theoretical physics that proper scientific explanations must account for things that happen now in terms of things that happened earlier. I can't think of any reason for this bias beyond an attachment to causal narratives.

Oh, that's a good point. I wonder whether pragmatist really meant to make such a strong statement there.

That was historically true, but many women and nonbinary people disagree with the statement that it is still true. And it was never neuter; it used to be the case that using male pronouns for an unspecified person was grammatically valid.

How about "every married person should love his husband or wife"?

I do think its useful to use what we know about simulations to inform whether or not we live in one. As I said in my other comment, I don't think a finite speed of light, etc., says much either way, but I do want to note a few things that I think would be suggestive.

If time was discrete and the time step appeared to be a function of known time step limits (e.g., the CFL condition), I would consider that to be good evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis.

The jury is still out whether time is discrete, so we can't evaluate the second necessary condition. If time were discrete, this would be interesting and could be evidence for the simulation hypothesis, but it'd be pretty weak. You'd need something further that indicates something how the algorithm, like the time step limit, to make a stronger conclusion.

Another possibility is if some conservation principle were violated in a way that would reduce computational complexity. In the water sprinkler simulations I've run, droplets are removed from the simulation when their size drops below a certain (arbitrary) limit as these droplets have little impact on the physics, and mostly serve to slow down the computation. Strictly speaking, this violates conservation of mass. I haven't seen anything like this in physics, but its existence could be evidence for the simulation hypothesis.

For example, speed is absolutely bounded at c. If I were designing an actual universe (not a model), I wouldn't enforce upper bounds--what purpose would they serve? If I were designing a model, however, boundaries of this sort would be critical to reducing the complexity of the model universe to the realm of tractable computability.

This is not true in general. I've considered a similar idea before, but as a reason to believe we don't live in a simulation (not that I think this is a very convincing argument). I work in computational fluid dynamics. "Low-Mach"/incompressible fluid simulations where the speed of sound is assumed infinite are much more easily tractable than the same situation run on a "high Mach" code, even if the actual fluid speeds are very subsonic. The difference of running time is at least an order of magnitude.

To be fair, it can go either way. The speed of the fluid is not "absolutely bounded" in these simulations. These simulations are not relativistic, and treating them as that would make things more complicated. The speed of acoustic waves, however, is treated infinite in the low Mach limit. I imagine there are situations in other branches of mathematical physics where treating a speed as infinite (as in the case of acoustic waves) or zero (as in the non-relativistic case) simplifies certain situations. In the end, it seems like a wash to me, and this offers little evidence in favor or against the simulation hypothesis.

See my earlier comment on this.

A big pie, rotating in the sky, should have apparently shorter circumference than a non-rotating one, and both with the same radii.

I can't swallow this. Not because it is weird, but because it is inconsistent.

There is no inconsistency. In one case you are measuring the circumference with moving rulers, while in the other case you are measuring the circumference with stationary rulers. It's not inconsistent for these two different measurements to give different results.

Why is it inconsistent?

There's a reason it's called special relativity. It only works in special cases. Eucludian geometry and Newtonian mechanics are inconsistent, btw. Special relativity solves these inconsistencies in the special contexts where they originally came up (predicting the Lorentz contraction and time dilation which is experimentally observed). It wasn't until the curved space of general relativity was discovered that we had a fully consistent model.

And yes, curved space of general relativity fully explains the rotating disc in a way that is self-consistent in in agreement with observed results (as proven by Gravity Probe B, among other things).

That is not in the rules for the thread. Given the karma toll (and the fact that sufficiently downvoted comment threads get collapsed), it would be a bad idea to make it one of the rules. I think you should simply not vote on comments you agree with, and I suggest reversing any downvotes you've made for this reason.

I do agree that without downvoting it is hard to differentiate between views the community agrees with and views the community has no real opinion about, but I don't think adding this information is worth the disadvantages of downvoting for agreement.

In the typical Western-European country, the leftmost of the two parties has abandoned Socialism and instead espouses the politics of Social Democracy or the Third Way.

I also have the general impression that in the past few months there has been an uptick of uncharitable tinman-attacks on progressivism by libertarians in the LW comment threads. Curiously, there seems to be less overt hostility between reactionaries and progressives, even though they're much further apart than libertarians and progressives (although this might be because the more hostile Nrx were more likely to exit after the creation of Moreright).

I've had the same feeling. I suspect there are loud reactionary and libertarian minorities and a large number of liberal quiet people

What kind of social science do you do?