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Comment by lockeandkeynes on Teachable Rationality Skills · 2011-05-29T15:40:01.196Z · LW · GW

Exercise: keep a physical stack trace on a whiteboard or something when talking

As topics become reframed for clarity, you can resolve child topics if they become irrelevant.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Teachable Rationality Skills · 2011-05-29T15:37:08.289Z · LW · GW

Skill: Compartmentalizing, or keeping track of threads and subthreads in a discussion so that it doesn't become derailed by minutiae.

This is more important in board meetings with Robert's Rules of Order in place, but it can be useful in general rational discussion. Just last night I my friend was helping me with C++ references and we got caught up over array pointers, forgetting entirely about the bug we were trying to solve.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Teachable Rationality Skills · 2011-05-29T15:28:29.642Z · LW · GW

I wouldn't call that a skill so much as a frame of mind going into a discussion. Also, they can if they start with different arbitrary priors that neither one can assign objectivity.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Rationalists lose when others choose · 2011-01-01T16:31:13.743Z · LW · GW

I think the idea is that revenge both requires time, effort, and resources, whilst breeding further malcontent between you and the person you take revenge against, causing you to have a greater field of people who would not wish to help you, or who would work against you.

Alternately, if you were to try and make the same person like you better (though that's not always possible), it would confer more advantages to you generally.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Serious Stories · 2010-12-08T20:49:49.238Z · LW · GW

There we go. Gotta know whether you cut yourself, but you don't need to know MORE about how someone broke your finger. Knowing is knowing.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Failed Utopia #4-2 · 2010-12-08T17:06:31.653Z · LW · GW

Doesn't sound bad at all.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Nonperson Predicates · 2010-12-03T02:47:45.209Z · LW · GW

I thinks that's all rather unnecessary. The only reason we don't like people to die is because of the continuous experience they enjoy. It's a consistent causal network we don't want dying on us. I've gathered from this that the AI would be producing models with enough causal complexity to match actual sentience (not saying "I am conscious" just because the AI hears that a lot). I think that, if it's only calling a given person-model to discover answers to questions, the thing isn't really feeling for long enough periods of time to mind whether it goes away. Also, for the predicate to be tested I imagine the model would have to be created first and at that point it's too late!

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Drawing Two Aces · 2010-11-15T16:23:17.021Z · LW · GW

Combination vs. permutation, right? I don't care which ace is where; I just care if, among the three cards that the other card COULD be, that card is the one ace left.

But how about this: I deal each of us two cards out of a deck of AS, AH, 2C, and 2D. I ask you if you have an ace and you say yes. Surely the odds of me having both 2C and 2D are the same as above.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory · 2010-11-15T00:28:34.157Z · LW · GW

You mean 9/11 wasn't aliens?

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts · 2010-09-16T05:03:49.786Z · LW · GW

Eliezer Yudkowsky only drinks from Klein Bottles.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on No Individual Particles · 2010-07-31T01:28:06.926Z · LW · GW

Wait, but how did they fire photons one at a time in the first experiment?

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Complex Novelty · 2010-07-28T02:26:04.502Z · LW · GW

hehehe what's BB(3^^^3)

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Does Your Morality Care What You Think? · 2010-07-23T03:29:09.298Z · LW · GW

Seems to me like these two are running circles around opposite sides of the wrong coin...

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Whither Moral Progress? · 2010-07-20T04:40:13.914Z · LW · GW

Inspired by this article http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/news-mainmenu-2/1-latest/5517-higher-intelligence-associated-with-liberalism-atheism.html I think one way of doing it might be to show directionality in terms of evolutionary novelty. That is, look at what parts of our evolutionary psychology we have rationally worked against as a culture, and why we came to those more intellectual conclusions. That way, the measure of our progress could be in how we learn to fix the mistakes of the stupid natural selection.

However, that sounds a lot to me like reversed stupidity, which I now know to be a false means of winning, but I do think it at least explains our perception of moral progress, if not progress as an absolute. If we somehow discover that when cultures step away from their evolutionary psychology that it is always for the sake of positive rational morality, then the concept might hold more weight in terms of a holistic moral progress.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Feeling Rational · 2010-07-09T00:47:12.329Z · LW · GW

Someone who takes rationality-as-attire (like Roddenberry's Spock) would avoid strong emotions because they are superficially irrational.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Torture vs. Dust Specks · 2010-07-07T19:31:12.559Z · LW · GW

I'd gladly get a speck of dust in my eye as many times as I can, and I'm sure those 3^^^3 people would join me, to keep one guy from being tortured for 50 years.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Torture vs. Dust Specks · 2010-07-07T19:29:59.461Z · LW · GW

I think you can be allowed to imagine that any ripple effect caused by someone getting a barely-noticeable dust speck in their eyes (perhaps it makes someone mad enough to beat his dog) would be about the same as that of the torture (perhaps the torturers go home and beat their dogs because they're so desensitized to torturing).

Comment by lockeandkeynes on But There's Still A Chance, Right? · 2010-07-07T07:36:50.165Z · LW · GW

This reminds me of when I was trying to see if it would be a good idea to buy a lottery ticket. Surely, I thought, I wouldn't miss the weekly dollar for a chance at living a life free of having to worry about what I do for money.

But then I thought to visualize for myself the silliness of spending even one dollar a week on the chances of the lottery. Would you ever expect, even in a hundred years, the lottery numbers of one week to be the exact same as the last week's? Then you should expect no different of your own ticket. I realized then that I would much rather have a definite candy bar instead.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on "religious experience" · 2010-07-06T07:09:53.251Z · LW · GW

Eliezer i so much younger than I expected!

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Dark Side Epistemology · 2010-07-06T07:05:36.011Z · LW · GW

Especially when it's explicitly enforced, a la death penalty for leaving Islam in Islamic countries.

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies · 2010-07-06T05:23:11.147Z · LW · GW

What's a light cone?

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Belief as Attire · 2010-06-12T01:09:21.735Z · LW · GW

Is that what extremist Americans mean when they say cowardly?

Comment by lockeandkeynes on Belief as Attire · 2010-06-12T01:07:33.184Z · LW · GW

What would falsify that model of belief as attire?