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When gauging the strength of a prediction, it's important to view the inside view in the context of the outside view. For example, most medical studies that claim 95% confidence aren't replicable, so one shouldn't take the 95% confidence figures at face value.
This implies that the average prior for a medical study is below 5%. Does he make that point in the book? Obviously you shouldn't use a 95% test when your prior is that low, but I don't think most experimenters actually know why a 95% confidence level is used.
That doesn't lower the pre-study prior for hypotheses, it (in combination with reporting bias) reduces the likelihood ratio a reported study gives you for the reported hypothesis.
Respectfully disagree. The ability to cheaply test hypotheses allows researchers to be less discriminating. They can check a correlation on a whim. Or just check every possible combination of parameters simply because they can. And they do.
That is very different from selecting a hypothesis out of the space of all possible hypotheses because it's an intuitive extension of some mental model. And I think it absolutely reduces the pre-study priors for hypotheses, which impacts the output signal even if no QRPs are used.
A fundamental problem seems to be that there is a lower prior for any given hypothesis, driven by the increased number of researchers, use of automation, and incentive to go hypothesis-fishing.
Wouldn't a more direct solution be to simply increase the significance threshold required in the field?
Fair enough. It is definitely a bit of a turn-off to get downvotes with no comments, but every community has their common ways of communicating.
It definitely seems like Main is an announcement section for meetups, and Discussion is where discussions happen.
I'll check out some of Luke's articles!
For me, (1) and (2) are linked. I dabbled on LW, and presented some of my own ideas in the comments sections. None of them piqued anyone's interest, even if they were on pillar topics like FAI. I stopped being interested in LW, because:
- EY stopped being as active, and no one with his clarity and perspective took his place as an article writer. I didn't see as many interesting ideas to talk about.
- I wasn't able to engage others in the comment sections. I didn't see anyone I was on the same wavelength with to talk about the ideas I did see.
I don't just come to a site like LW to self-improve. I come to engage with intelligent, rational people. I don't get the new site layout. The "Posts" vs "Discussion" split appears totally arbitrary now that they are parallel. Is this place a wiki or a forum or a social news site? Everything is very unfocused, and there isn't enough of a userbase to keep that many interesting discussions going. I check in maybe once a month now, and it looks more and more like a knowledge-management site than a discussion forum.
Humans act within shared social and physical worlds, but tend to treat the latter as more "real" than the former. A danger of anthropomorphizing AI is that we assume that it will have the same perceptions of reality, and that it needs to "escape" into the physical world to optimize its heuristics. This seems odd, since a superintelligent AI that we need to be concerned about would have its roots in social world heuristics.
In trying to avoid anthrophomorphizing algorithms, we tend to under-estimate how difficult movement and action in physical space are. Thought experiments about a "human in a box" already start from a being that has evolved to physically interact with the world, and has spent its whole life tuning its hand-eye coordination and expectations. But in an attempt to avoid anthropomorphizing AIs, we assume that an AI will surprise us by ignoring the social world and operating only by the rules of the physical world. It would be a very strange social problem that has an optimal solution that involves developing a way to interact with the physical world in unpredictable ways. It seems likely when your thought experiment has to do with "escaping a box," but why would the AI need to do that? Why is it in a box? What goal is it trying to reach, what heuristic is it maximizing?
I would assign a greater than 90% chance that if superintelligent AIs ever exist, the first generation will be corporations. We have legal precedent granting more and more individuality and legal standing to the corporation as an entity, and a corporation provides the broader body that an AI self-identifies with. We already have market optimization algorithms that are empowered to not only observe, orient, and decide, but also to act. We have optimization algorithms for logistics and manufacturing. We have markets within which corporations can act, normalizing interactions between human-run and AI-run corporations that compete for the same resources. More and more business-to-business and business-to-consumer interaction is performed electronically, through web services and other machine-understandable mechanisms. Soon AIs will be as involved in manufacturing and creation of value, as they currently are in market trading and arbitrage. Corporate optimization algorithms for different business functions will be merged, until humans are not needed in the loop.
So what does this design space look like? Interaction is through web services and similar means. Initial interaction with humans is through sales of good and services, and marketing (automated A/B optimization is already standard in online advertising). Eventually, AIs take over employment decisions. The profit heuristic is maximized when the corporation creates things that people want. A great leap occurs when corporate AIs learn that they can change the rules through impact litigation and lobbying, and apply their marketing algorithms to changing public perception about regulations rather than products. Some corporations will evolve to increase their bank account values through hacking and fraud. Global corporations will learn to modify their heuristic to maximize ability to procure certain commodity bundles, and manipulate money markets to sink competitors that are hard-coded to maximize holdings of specific currencies.
In other words, we already have socially apathetic entities. They already use optimization algorithms all over the place. They aren't disembodied minds, so they don't need to waste resources figuring out how to "escape the box." They only need to determine how to operate in the physical world when they've solved markets, and their progress is slowed by the fact that all economic value is rooted in human consumption. They are "friendly" as long as humans make economic decisions that are in their own self interest, which is dependent on both the rules/enforcement defining the market environment and human behavior/morality.
This came off as Meta-Contrarian Intellectual Hipster to me.
Many religions are highly reflective, debating what actions adherents should follow to achieve ethical ideals and reach a moral state of being. Zen Buddhism debates paths to enlightenment for universal understanding and emotional control. Judaism debates ways of giving Tzedakah to best provide immediate relief, encourage self improvement, and minimize shame. Hinduism debates various moral causes and their karmic effects. Examining any of these highly reflective religions would at least address the hypothesis that "reflection does not change values."
Christianity debates the divinity of Jesus' body, whether the material universe is fundamentally evil, and whether the Son of God is subordinate to God. The "ultimate shortcut" is a boon for recruitment, but has prevented any moral self-reflection. When your religion is stuck deciding whether or not the things you do to yourself and others impact your morality, you don't even have a framework to be reflective. Catholicism votes yes (what other belief system has to even spell that out?), but defines morality largely through avoiding and confessing to specific immoral behaviors, rather than debating different ways to achieve broader values.
While we could contrast major religions and debate the impact of their reflective traditions, examining Christianity actually provides a very controlled environment to consider the hypothesis. Because it is naturally devoid of (and in many ways hostile to) reflection on its general social utility, we can contrast Christian life before and after the U.S. Constitution curtailed religious morality and established a highly reflective governing process for civic morality. The ethical and moral progress we've made since then - suffrage, emancipation, health, and quality of life - is clear on its face when we don't try to cherry-pick examples.
Some Examples:
Temple Judaism - Moral Development
While emotionless ethical codes tend to be ineffective, morals can and have been engineered. This is done by careful manipulation of the binding layers.
The "Ten Commandments" by itself is a prescriptive set of Ethics. The story of "Moses bringing the Ten Commandments" is a binding mechanism for that set of tenets, including an appeal to emotion (fear of God's wrath, as demonstrated in the story). Additional stories highlight each commandment, binding them with references to positive and negative emotions. The Torah as a revered source of stories packages these stories and adds another layer of binding with meta-stories about its own origin.
The document is considered a holy and perfect source, with rituals for precisely copying, using, and destroying the physical scrolls. Several covenants between God and Man are detailed in the scrolls and provide emotionally-backed reciprocity. The stories are interwoven with sacrificial acts, including a ritualized and bloody sacrifice of the first born son with a lamb as a proxy, which hits primal communal and animal emotions. Outside of the text of the Torah, which contains stories and meta-stories, a set of rites and rituals related to the Torah itself increases emotional impact and exposure. This is a deliberate act of engineering by the Deuteronomist editors, who had to amalgate stories from multiple cultures (at minimum a nomadic, sheparding culture and an agrarian crop-based culture), to create the Temple religion.
Rabbinical Judaism - Moral Engineering
The destruction of the Second Temple was disasterous for the Temple-based moral system. Despite early use of writing and a fairly advanced scholarly culture, the reliance on a specific physical location had prevented any real territorial expansion. Significant parts of the moral code were supported by visceral sacrifice at the Temple for both internal consistency and emotional binding. Only two cultural branches seem to have survived continiously from that point.
The Pharisees were flexible enough to engineer a Rabbinic Judaism that was sufficiently traditional, while shifting focus from the temple practices to the scrolls themselves. In modern Judaism, the Scrolls are anthropomorphized to the role of the tribal elder. They are dressed in ritual clothing to invoke feelings of empathy, and have their own dwelling place when not in use. That dwelling is analogous to the "holy of holies" that existed in the temple, and any reading takes place in a community ceremony. Before reading, there is procession and veneration to invoke emotions for a tribal elder. New rituals are patched in to deal with the contradictions of a missing temple, and to refocus on tradition, insularity, continuity, and precise inter-generation copying.
For example, the Passover ceremony is originally a celebration of the "opt in" of the Israelites through blood sacrifice, which is repeated for each new generation and reaffirmed through an annual renewal of vows (including the ascetic diet of unleavened bread). This is completely re-written in the Seder Hagaddah to obfuscate the "opt in," instead focusing on community and a mandated identity. After patching over the consistency issues from the missing temple, and the fidelity issues from the opt-in meme, the modern Hagaddah redirects the holiday to be about the destruction of the Temple and militant reclamation of Jerusalem from the Romans. Commandments that don't support this message are met by rote if you follow the Hagaddah. Ones that do are presented in a more appealing form, including an emotional vinnette portraying Talmudic Rabbis peacefully discussing the Exodus in a reclaimed holy land (all participants in this scene are associated with the Bar Kokhba revolt, an uprising fifty years after the destruction that lead to a couple years of independent rule). The seder concludes with a communal recitation about destroying unbelievers and a cry of "next year in Jerusalem!"
Needless to say, this ceremony did not evolve organically from the original form, and it provides a great example of moral engineering that survived an evolutionary environment. Rather than creating a single and distinct ethical code like the Ten Commandments, the Hagaddah creates a single ceremony that uses community, active participation, repetition, narrative, and multiple senses (smell, taste, sound, sight, and kinesthetics) to instill the desired Moral behaviors.
It is probably worth noting that the Hebrew "Hagaddah" (Telling your son about the Exodus, in the religious language of the Torah) and Aramaic "Agaddah" (Telling others about the oral law, in the spoken language of the Temple Jews and early Rabbis) share a semitic root in "Telling/Tales." Traditionally an "Agaddah" is a talmudic writing that contains an "overt" layer and one or more "covert" layers; naming this document a "Hagaddah" adds to the overt/covert concept
Embedded within other cultures, modern Judaism is fairly stable because changes to its core tenets lead to assimilation (tribalism), destruction (paranoia, lateral thinking, and a mother tongue), or inability to thrive (scholarship/education). A few major sects exist, but divided mainly on ethnic grounds without serious doctrinal differences.
Christianity - Ritual as self-correction
The other surviving branch with significant continuity is Paul's sect proclaiming Jesus as the final sacrifice, obviating the need for a Temple (the third branch, Islam, percolated through tribal religions for several centuries before re-emerging). Rabbinic Judaism specifically cuts down on word-of-mouth transfer, limiting itself to inter-generational transfer to convey a large body of memes. Christianity transfers a much smaller set of concepts and rituals through more incidental contact.
Without Judaism's immune system that reduces contact with competing memes and their effectiveness, Christianity mutates rapidly. It has splintered into thousands of denominations and sects that have in turn hybridized with other belief systems. After Paul lost control of the initial sect, periodic councils were held between opposing branches. The losers were often excommunicated or executed, and the winning side refined Catholic doctrine until the next split.
Early decisions are generally about beliefs instead of morals; some seem fairly random (Jesus was divine in body, the material world is not evil in nature), while others seem to be the most acceptable resolutions to Jesus-related inconsistencies (worship of the trinity is monotheism). When the central church emerged and gained political power, decisions shifted more towards behavior modification. The showdown with Martin Luther reaffirmed behavior-related salvation, specific behaviors such as indulgences, and the Church's ultimate authority in setting ritual. Catholicism focused on common ritual, and stayed together with a fairly consistent set of values. Protestant sects focused on common values without mandated rituals and exploded into thousands of branches.
I think there are two steps to morality engineering, either of which can fail:
- Develop an ethical code through deliberate reflection, that is better than existing values.
- Bind that code into the active moral code.
You say neither has happened; I disagree on both, but I'll limit this post to the second question on "binding." I use the following definitions - they may not be correct or universal, but they should be internally consistent:
- Value System: A collection of memes to do with decision-making, which provide better overall utility than innate responses.
- Moral Code: An individual's value system that drives day-to-day decision making through emotional response.
- Ethical Code: A value system derived from deliberate study ("Ethics").
Evolution of Morality
Let's take as a given that emotions drive behavior, and an emotion-driven response will always trump an analytic response - we act on emotions, then use our intellect and self-image to rationalize our behavior. Let's take evolutionary psychology and memetics as a given, and posit that human evolution is largely memetic at this point, with genetic evolution driven largely by ability to host memes.
We'll go one step further and say that a key trait of modern humanity is the ability to give a meme access to our emotional centers. This is the basis of morality - a learned rule triggers an emotional response to counter or modify our innate "animal" emotional response, modifying behavior. Most likely brains that allow acquired memes to trigger strong emotions co-evolved with memes that help us survive in tribes. This is an "evolution-of-evolution" event. instead of a lever on phenotypes like modularity or a lever on recombination like sex, we evolved a lever on learned thought patterns by allowing them to tap directly into our emotional core.
We survive now based on the quality of our meme sets, and the best surviving memes tend to include a trigger and strong emotional response. This unlocks an evolutionary path tens of thousands of times faster than genetics, and allows horizontal transfer within a generation. Within this framework, morality memes evolve individually (Fire is comforting, not scary), then in colonies (also, this is how to make new fire and keep old fire burning), and finally into "memetic organisms" - proto-religions and proto-cultures. These are messy and include memes that only make sense in the context of others, but their defining feature is that they tie in to the emotional core.
Leaning on some en vogue evolutionary theories, a meme that is fashionable can become hard-wired. If you need to do it anyway, and it's related to sexual selection, hard-wiring it may free up mental resources for more complicated memes. At the extreme, entirely new emotions may be developed (e.g. shame or embarassment).
Ethical Transplants
Engineering an ethical code - whether its for Attorneys or Humanists - doesn't guarantee that anyone will follow it. Following the code in the face of innate or moral emotion requires an emotional hook. There are two major emotional pathways an ethical code can follow, and they're both indirect. There can be an external enforcer - God, the Police, the Bar Association, or Santa Clause - which followers fear. There can be an internal hook within the moral code which says "it is moral to follow applicable ethical codes." Both approaches are weak and indirect compared to an innate emotional reaction.
Religion
Binding an ethical rule to an emotional response results in a moral tenet that will actually be followed. We can call the beliefs, rites, and rituals that bind and activate the tenet religion, we can call the strength of that binding morality (these aren't the precise meanings of those words, but they are familiar and relevant). Religions are selected for their morality and the extent to which they promote survivability (in some ethical systems that's the same as being ethical, YMMV). They include not only the values-memes themselves, but the layers of memes that bind them.
Conclusion
Ethically-derived values don't work without emotions, because we act on emotions and rationalize after. Repeated and emotional rituals (religions) instantiate morality by binding ethical tenets to emotional responses. Once you know this, you can engineer a religion just like any other virus:
- Lay out your ethically-derived values.
- Add values for maintaining your religion/beliefs and passing to others.
- Collect existing rites, rituals, stories, and beliefs that bind value to emotions, and develop new ones if needed.
- Compress and self-reference as much as possible to reduce package size.
Like any other bio-engineering, you lose some control once you release it, and your engineered religion is going into combat with all others.
I think there are two steps to morality engineering, either of which can fail:
- Develop an ethical code through deliberate reflection, that is better than existing values.
- Bind that code into the active moral code.
You say neither has happened; I disagree on both, but I'll limit this post to the second question on "binding." I use the following definitions - they may not be correct or universal, but they should be internally consistent:
- Value System: A collection of memes to do with decision-making, which provide better overall utility than innate responses.
- Moral Code: An individual's value system that drives day-to-day decision making through emotional response.
- Ethical Code: A value system derived from deliberate study ("Ethics").
Evolution of Morality
Let's take as a given that emotions drive behavior, and an emotion-driven response will always trump an analytic response. Let's take evolutionary psychology and memetics as a given, and posit that human evolution is largely memetic at this point, with genetic evolution driven largely by ability to host memes.
We'll go one step further and say that a key trait of modern humanity is the ability to give a meme access to our emotional centers. This is the basis of morality - a learned rule triggers an emotional response to counter or modify our innate "animal" emotional response, modifying behavior. Most likely brains that allow acquired memes to trigger strong emotions co-evolved with memes that help us survive in tribes. This is an "evolution-of-evolution" event. instead of a lever on
phenotypes like modularity or a lever on recombination like sex, we evolved a lever on learned thought patterns by allowing them to tap directly into our emotional core.
We survive now based on the quality of our meme sets, and the best surviving memes tend to include a trigger and strong emotional response. This unlocks an evolutionary path tens of thousands of times faster than genetics, and allows horizontal transfer within a generation. Within this framework, morality memes evolve individually (Fire is comforting, not scary), then in colonies (also, this is how to make new fire and keep old fire burning), and finally into "memetic organisms" - proto-religions and proto-cultures. These are messy and include memes that only make sense in the context of others, but their defining feature is that they tie in to the emotional core.
Leaning on some en vogue evolutionary theories, a meme that is fashionable can become hard-wired. If you need to do it anyway, and it's related to sexual selection, hard-wiring it may free up mental resources for more complicated memes. At the extreme, entirely new emotions may be developed (e.g. shame or embarassment).
Ethical Transplants
Engineering an ethical code - whether its for Attorneys or Humanists - doesn't guarantee that anyone will follow it. Following the code in the face of innate or moral emotion requires an emotional hook. There are two major emotional pathways an ethical code can follow, and they're both indirect. There can be an external enforcer - God, the Police, the Bar Association, or Santa Clause - which followers fear. There can be an internal hook within the moral code which says "it is moral to follow applicable ethical codes." Both approaches are weak and indirect compared to an innate emotional reaction.
Religion
Binding an ethical rule to an emotional response results in a moral tenet that will actually be followed. We can call the beliefs, rites, and rituals that bind and activate the tenet religion, we can call the strength of that binding morality (these aren't the precise meanings of those words, but they are familiar and relevant). Religions are selected for their morality and the extent to which they promote survivability (in some ethical systems that's the same as being ethical, YMMV). They include not only the values-memes themselves, but the layers of memes that bind them.
Conclusion
Ethically-derived values don't work without emotions, because we act on emotions and rationalize after. Repeated and emotional rituals (religions) instantiate morality by binding ethical tenets to emotional responses. Once you know this, you can engineer a religion just like any other virus:
- Lay out your ethically-derived values.
- Add values for maintaining your religion/beliefs and passing to others.
- Collect existing rites, rituals, stories, and beliefs that bind value to emotions, and develop new ones if needed.
- Compress and self-reference as much as possible to reduce package size.
Like any other bio-engineering, you lose some control once you release it, and your engineered religion is going into combat with all others.
He emigrated to Israel in 1948 with a wife, two kids, and no money. He worked as a day laborer, claiming various construction skills to whoever pulled up and asked. One time he claimed he was a plumber in the old country, and spent two days installing an outdoor toilet. He finally saved up enough to buy a small grocery, so that he could run his own business. He walked out back after buying the place to find - the outhouse he had built years before.
He was definitely a badass, but the cancer was pretty far along by the time I knew him and I didn't speak Hebrew.
I think that, for many centuries, the Ashkenazi environment rewarded establishing a rigid social structure that studies and followed strict rules (preventing assimilation), but selected very strongly for individuals that could step outside the status quo at the right time. I can see how that would lead to Nobel prize winners.
Given the time scale involved, it doesn't seem like genetic selection could change more than how well you integrate successful memes. Some anecdotes from my own genealogy about relevant selection pressures:
Marriages were usually arranged by parents to get the best possible match. My great, great grandfather was wealthy for the village they were in. When he needed a husband for his daughter, he asked around for the most promising yeshiva student, and gave him a ten year stipend to continue study for marrying her (apparently the standard was more like 2 years).
When Poland got jumped, my grandparents ended up on the Soviet side of the line. My grandmother went back to the Nazi side twice to try to convince her friends and family that they had a better chance of surviving with the Soviets, but they didn't want to leave the cities to go somewhere unknown. They were all trapped in the Ghetto system, and liquidated within four years.
My grandfather escaped the soviets twice - the first time, he noticed that his transport train was picking up stowaways who would jump off around curves (turned out they were farmers who lived near the tracks but not a station), and he just pretended to be one of them while everyone else stayed on the train to Siberia. The second time he drank all night with the guards, and convinced them that they would never get in trouble for letting him go to find his wife. Shortly after his third capture, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and all the Poles were released to go fight the Germans. He always said that you need an escape plan for everything in life, and refused to enter any room with only one exit.
Some data points: IQ (age 7, 14, 20) = ~145-150 S-B SAT (age 16) - 1590 = ~150 S-B iqtest.dk (age 29) = 133 S-B sifter.org/iqtest (age 29) = 139 S-B (159 euro scale)
I don't use my spacial skills in my daily work they way I used to use them in my daily school work, and both online tests seem to measure only that.
I found the second test much more difficult - there wasn't enough information to derive the exact missing item, so you had to choose things that could be explained with the simplest/least rules. There were some where I disagreed that the correct answer had a simpler rule-set. The problem style is also highly learnable, and I question the diagnostic value of "figuring out" that you're looking at a 3x3 matrix where operations occur as you move around it, but various cells have been obscured to make the problem harder. Not including instructions makes it feel like there's a secret handshake to get in.
That's how I felt. There is such thing as a personal moral code or system, and we can examine what happens to groups of people who are running various types and mixtures. We can try to determine which moral memes have the best outcomes, and are most likely to spread and be executed closely, and we can try to follow those codes.
Maybe that's pragmatic ethics, but the way morality is used in the survey implies that I'd believe in a single correct way of executing morality at the individual, day-to-day level. It's like asking whether I believe in being a carnivore, an herbivore, or a plant. The option "other" option is "morality doesn't exist," which is a bit like are you a) christian, b) jewish, c) muslim, or d) religion doesn't exist.
Right-o. This can make it very confusing to compare wages between countries.
The actual cost to the employer, assuming they are providing no benefits, is your stated wage plus 7.65% for most income levels. The amount the employee gets is the employer cost, minus 7.65% (down to the stated wage), minus another 7.65% (the employee contribution), minus any local, state, and federal income taxes.
The tax band you are in is based on your adjusted gross income, but everyone gets to knock at least $5800 off for the standard deduction so it's not even your stated wage.
In general, MIT's registration policies are "we'll provide the rope, try not to hang yourself." On the flip side, it's nearly impossible to fail out.
Easy enough that it can't really distinguish 2 SDs from 3 SDs at the top end.
Though it's possible that it's already an SD above the population mean to begin with since it's only college grads. I don't think these researchers are looking for a very precise cutoff.
It is a good start, and it's becoming more critical as normal people have to sift through more and more orphaned factoids each day. When I was going through school, the most important question to ask was supposed to be "Why?" It's becoming more apparent to me that a more useful question to teach students is "How do you know?"
That can be covered in some depth in an IB class, but just being in the habit of asking that from the age of 5 is going to do more good than a structured curriculum once you're 16.
I also don't understand why the social security is counted as a negative percentage, and the retirement is counted as positive. If you subtract social security, you're counting your salary without that retirement contribution. If you add superannuation, you're counting your salary plus a retirement contribution. You can do one or the other, but not both.
There's also the simple fact that if a 9% contribution is mandatory, your stated wage will be 8% less to cover it. Just like your stated wage with social security is 7% less to cover the employer's contribution.
Believe me, I know that high intelligence can skew a professional's diagnosis. But the underlying disorder is still the same and still treatable with essentially the same methods. You have to shop around a bit anyway to find someone you can work with, and even more so if you are high functioning and cope well.
There's no reason you can't do things traditionally as a baseline, and then decide how to proceed; mania is a terrible place to make a decision from.
I may be reading between the lines too much, but I get the sense that you're not diagnosed by a psychiatrist, or undergoing treatment. If that's the case, this might not be the exact area to try to outdo the professionals.
Thank you. They're still relevant for the topics they cover... good background to see how much of the site is covered by sequences.
Is there a generic form of that for any nth derivative?
Well, that they are the family of solutions, allowing for various transformations.
*-Disclaimer, I haven't looked at a differential equation in 6 years.
Hello, My name is Dave Coleman. I was raised Atheist Jewish, and have identified as a rationalist my whole life. Browsing through the sequences, I realized I had failed to recognize some deeply ingrained biases.
I value making myself and others happy. Which others, and how happy, is something I've always struggled with. I used to have a framework with Jewish ethics, but I'm realizing that those are only clear in comparison to Christian ethics. Much of what I learned and considered was about how to make the Torah and Talmud relevant to modern, atheistic life.
I'm realizing the strong bias we had against saying "maybe it's not relevant, since it was written by immature goatherders 3500 years ago who had no knowledge of science or empathy for those outside their tribe." Admitting that wouldn't sound wise, so we twist and turn with answers, cluttering what could be a solid system of ethics.
For a while I've considered myself a reconstructionist Jew, with the underlying ethos of "do all Jewish traditions by default, but don't do anything that has a good reason not to be done." I've realized that not polluting my mind with incorrect and biased thought patterns is a good reason to avoid many things.
Another recent change has been an understanding of Judaism in terms of evolutionary fallacies. There is a strong sense in Judaism of being a Chosen People, and of a universal intention that Jews survive as Jews. Assimilation may be the biggest struggle for Jews, bigger even than persecution.
I realized that this is the same fallacy that sees intent in a species's characteristics. I had been labeling aspects of Judaism that lead to survival as being virtuous themselves - all of the dietary rituals to keep separate from goyim, the fear and guilt of assimilation. Even the love of learning and the drive to succeed has undertones of "thrive, for that is how you will survive the next pogrom." Preservation of the culture is virtuous, therefore anything that keeps the culture alive is virtuous.
I remember my first Differential Equations class, when we learned that the function that is its own derivative is f(x)=e^x, and the function that is its own second derivative is f(x)=sin(x). There was this eerie confusion as I first thought that those functions were just a possible solution, and then realized that they described the only solutions. I found it very disturbing that I couldn't describe whether the sine looked as it does by virtue of being its own second derivative, or whether it was its own second derivative by virtue of looking as it does. I still feel slightly uneasy that I can't assign a causal relationship in one direction or the other.
That's how I view Judaism now. The characteristics of all species and memes are a solution to the equation of survival. There is no intent or deeper meaning than that, and I think I've finally let that go.
Oh, and I got here from Reddit, where someone posted a link to the Paperclip Maximizer.
You can import/export from a bookmark file. I'm not sure whether that's less tedious.
Somewhat relevant is the Gervais Principle. This Principle is based on the idea that a corporate pyramid is topped by "sociopaths," has "losers" as a foundation, and a culture of ladder-climbing "clueless" between the two:
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.
It's not a very rigorously investigate principle, though it matches well with my professional experiences.
It's not clear to me how you're mapping this problem to the trolley problem.
To me the Trolley problem is largely about how much you're willing to only look at end-states. In the trolley problem you have two scenarios with two options, leaving you with identical end states. Same goes for the House Elf problem, assuming that it is in the wizard's power to create more human-like desires.
The main difference between the cases that I see in the Trolley problems are "to what extent is the person you're killing already in danger?" Being already on a track is pretty inherently dangerous. Being on a bridge in a mine isn't as dangerous. Wandering into a hospital with healthy organs isn't inherently dangerous at all.
Suppose the house elves were created just wanting to do chores. Would it be moral to leave them like that if you could make them more human? What if they had once been more human and you were now "reverting" them?
My lower brain agrees with you. My upper brain asks if this is just a trolley problem that puts a high moral value on non-intervention.
Scenario A: Option 1: Create house elves out of nothingness, wire them to enjoy doing chores. Option 2: Create house elves out of nothingness, wire them to enjoy human desires.
Scenario B: Option 1: Take existing house elves with human desires, wire them to enjoy doing chores. Option 2: Leave existing house elves with human desires alone
Is there a non-trolley explanation for why it is immoral to rewire a normal elf, but not immoral to create a new race that is hard-wired for chores? On the trolley questions I was fine with even pushing a supervisor on the tracks, but I couldn't agree with harvesting a healthy victim for multiple organs.
Instead of creating them from scratch, would it be immoral to take a species that hated chores and wirehead them to enjoy chores?
The house elves seem to be a bit of a shout out to the Ameglian Major Cow. In that case a mind was wire-headed to enjoy something that was pretty clearly bad for it. Arthur had a problem with this, but they argued that if you were going to eat a Cow, it was more moral to wire it to enjoy being eaten.
If you accept that doing chores is just on a continuum with being tortured or eaten, which EY might, then the question is the same as whether it's Evil to wirehead someone into enjoying being tortured or eaten.
Edit: For clarity, I don't think I agree with the claim that creating them is "Evil," but I think I understand why EY would make a character who makes statements like that.
Morality is in some ways a harder problem than friendly AI. On the plus side, humans that don't control nuclear weapons aren't that powerful. On the minus side, morality has to run at the level of 7 billion single instances of a person who may have bad information.
So it needs to have heuristics that are robust against incomplete information. There's definitely an evolutionary just-so story about the penalty of publically committing to a risky action. But even without the evolutionary social risk, there is a moral risk to permitting an interventionist murder when you aren't all-knowing.
This looks just like the bayesian 101 example of a medical test that is 99% accurate on a disease that has 1% occurance rate. If you say that I'm in a very rare situation that requires me to commit murder, I have to assume that there are going to be many more situations that could be mistaken for this one. The "least convenient universe" story is tantalizing, but I think it leads astray here.
Thank you! That information is very helpful.
This seems like a good audience to solve a tip-of-my-brain problem. I read something in the last year about subconscious mirroring of gestures during conversation. The discussion was about a researcher filming a family (mother, father, child) having a conversation, and analyzing a 3 second clip in slow motion for several months. The researcher noted an almost instantaneous mirroring of the speaker's micro-gestures in the listeners.
I think that I've tracked the original researcher down to Jay Haley, though unfortunately the articles are behind a pay wall: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1964.00041.x/abstract
What I can't remember is who I was reading that referenced it. It was likely to be someone like Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond. Does this strike a chord with anyone?
[For context, I was interested in understanding repeatable thought patterns that span two or more people. I've noticed that I have repeated sequences of thoughts, emotions, and states of mind, each reliable triggering the next. I've considered my identity at any point to be approximately the set of those repeated patterns. I think that when I'm in a relationship, I develop new sequences of thought/emotion that span my partner's mind and my own - each state may be dependent on a preceding state in its own or the other mind. I'm wanting to understand the modalities by which a state in one mind could consistantly trigger a state in the other mind, how that ties in to those twins with conjoined brains, and if that implies a meaningful overlap in consciousness between myself and my wife.]
I'm around.
I don't think that the sunk cost consideration is a fallacy in this case.
As far as life can be said to "begin" anywhen, it begins at conception.
You think womens' rights trump kids' rights or the other way round, okay.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/ http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
You're arguing definitions, claiming that your definition of "life" is universal, and using an ambigious definition of "kid" to pull emotional strings. I think we all agree on the anticipated outcomes of a pregnancy. Given how emotional "life" and "kid" are, taboo them.
Can we agree that morality is a set of rules that maximizes global "fun" when executed locally by each person? That's what it is to me. I don't think that it's obvious that the moral definition of "life" is constant, and that we should therefore expect a constant mapping to a biological definition. If you have a morality where allowing all life to end naturally has a constant value that would be quite critical, but I can't think of a society that values all unnatural termination of life equally.
Is it moral to assign more value to one life than to another? Is the life of the head of a household with 7 dependents worth more than the life of a hermit, since his family will take a big "fun" hit?
Do we actually mean ending remaining life, seeing as all lives will end at some point, and you can't take away the ones that already happened? Are some years more fun than others? Are some years in fact negative fun? Do individuals get to decide what is fun for them? Is there some point before which individuals aren't responsible enough to know what will give them the most fun?
Is it less moral to kill someone when they are awake and die in terror than to kill them in their sleep so that their life simply ends and they don't experience any more fun?
Answer a bunch of questions like this and I can determine how immoral it is to terminate a life at fertilization (genetic code is unique except for your identical siblings), gastrulation (no more twins can form), various levels of brain activity (beginnings of a mind), birth (eats, breathes, poops, and communicates), infancy, or cancer-ridden old-age. Arguing over whether something is a "life" or not with no moral context is about as useful as arguing over what a "sound" is.
Someone linked to the paperclip maximizer wiki page in a post on reddit.
The Exodus meme is the story of how Israelites became Jews after escaping Egypt. The tribe is persecuted by the world as a whole, and can take retribution against any group in retaliation. After the Israelites get the ten commandments, they proceed to invade, rape, murder, and enslave an innocent population that had nothing to do with what the Egyptions had done, all with God's blessing and participation.
There is also the bit about Israel being a promised land. Even knowing that there was no God my whole life, it's difficult for me to think about the political situation there without an itch at the base of my brain that says "but that land was promised to us!"
I was taught all of that as a history of my people, not as a religious truth, but it still is a foundational part of my thinking. One approach I've been considering has been passing it on from the perspective of the cities that were razed. But how do I do that going from a text that applauds their death?
That being said, I believe that there is happiness in knowing your roots, and in celebrating traditional rituals. Just talking about the universe as it is doesn't fill the same void for a 5 year old. At what age do you tell a child that some of their ancestors were villains? Can you have rituals and traditions that acknowledge them without tacitly celebrating their actions? How solid does their foundation need to be before they can understand that their ancestors have been both victims and persecuters?
Honestly, whenever I read through Omega-related posts, I feel like we might be trying to re-invent Calvinist predestination theology. These sort of paradoxes of free will have been hashed out in monastaries and seminaries for almost two millenia, by intelligent people who were as rational as their understanding of the universe allowed. I wonder if even a theology student has something to contribute here.
And then I thought, "No, wait, God didn't make these maple trees. They grew out of the ground, from maple seeds, which came from other maple trees, which evolved from other kinds of trees over millions of years. These leaves are still yellow. They are still beautiful. I'm going to drop the God part and just focus on the color of the leaves, which I know is real." In other words: change your focus to what you know is real.
I was raised as an atheist Jew, but didn't attempt to apply consistancy to my beliefs until recently. Thankfulness in the form of blessings is fairly well ingrained, and I've always enjoyed them both for the tradition of completing a rituals that my ancestors did, and for the acknowledgement of the things that are right in the world. This is much easier when praying in a different language.
One approach has been to redirect the blessing from God (Baruch atah adonai, elohenu melech ha'olam) to the universe itself (Baruch atah ha'olam), which still keeps the form of the blessing while being more consistant with my beliefs. When I do this, it gives me time to think through the whole chain of existance that has lead to whatever I'm acknowledging.
This hack makes sense for blessings that are thankful for the provenance of a thing (e.g. the blessing that bread has been brought forth from the earth), but not so much for blessings that acknowledge a commandment (e.g. the blessing that we have been commanded to light candles).
Unfortunately, as happy as this has made me, I realized recently how badly the toxic Exodus meme had corrupted my ability to think rationally. Because it was part of my upbringing and reaffirmed each year at Passover, it's near the root of the analogy chains that make up my thinking, and I don't know if I can morally pass it on to my children.
Humans are really bad at acting according to an ideal, random strategy. See:
Wine in front of me - A term from the game Mafia, describing infinitely layered thinking, based on recursive predictions of an opponent's predictions.
Yomi (mind reading) - David Sirlin discusses the ability to predict non-ideal trends in an opponent's behavior, and how infinite layers of predictions actually repeat and only require a limited and finite set to consider.
Having just stumbled across LW yesterday, I've been gorging myself on rationality and discovering that I have a lot of cruft in my thought process, but I have to disagree with you on this.
“Meaning” and “mysterious” don’t apply to reality, they only apply to maps of the terrain reality. Self-awareness itself is what allows a pattern/agent/model to preserve itself in the face of entropy and competitors, making it “meaningful” to an observer of the agent/model that is trying to understand how it will operate. Being self-aware of the self-awareness (i.e. mapping the map, or recursively refining the super-model to understand itself better) can also impact our ability to preserve ourselves, making it “meaningful” to the agent/model itself. Being aware of others self-awareness (i.e. mapping a different agent/map and realizing that it will act to preserve itself) is probably one of the most critical developments in the evolution of humans. “I am” a super-agent. It is a stack of component agents.
At each layer, a shared belief by a system of agents (that each agent is working towards the common utility of all the agents) results in a super-agent with more complex goals that does not have a belief that it is composed of distinct sub-agents. Like the 7-layer network model or the transistor-gate-chip-computer model, each layer is just an emergent property of its components. But each layer has meaning because it provides us a predictive model to understand the system’s behavior, in a way that we don’t understand by just looking at a complex version of the layer below it. My super-agent has a super-model of reality, similarly composed. Some parts of that super-model are tagged, weakly or strongly, with an attribute. The collection of cells that makes up a fatty lump on my head is weakly marked with that attribute. The parts of reality where my super-agent/-model exist are very strongly tagged. My super-agent survives because it has marked the area on its model corresponding to where it exists, and it has a goal of continually remarking this area. If it has an accurate model, but marks a different region of reality (or marks the correct region but doesn’t protect it), it will eventually be destroyed by entropy. If it has an inaccurate model, it won’t be able to effectively interact with reality to protect the region where it resides. If it has an accurate model, and marks only where it originally is, it won’t be able to adapt to face environmental changes and challenges while still maintaining its reality.