Posts

[LINK] Erotic fiction about clippy, fresh off the press 2015-03-14T08:38:24.542Z
Money threshold Trigger Action Patterns 2015-02-20T04:56:55.499Z
Strategic Bestseller: Taking the Blog Path (4HS002) 2013-07-08T21:44:42.052Z
How can I strategically write a complex bestseller? (4HS001) 2013-06-12T08:47:17.128Z
A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach 2013-04-01T00:42:58.954Z
Caring about possible people in far Worlds 2013-03-18T14:49:06.729Z
Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds 2013-03-12T02:18:52.957Z
Cognitive Load and Effective Donation 2013-03-10T03:11:14.161Z

Comments

Comment by Neotenic on On not getting a job as an option · 2014-03-11T11:57:15.127Z · LW · GW

Well, that at least part of the way into freedom.

Comment by Neotenic on On not getting a job as an option · 2014-03-11T11:28:26.417Z · LW · GW

That depends on your stance on many things: First of all having children or not. Second of all population ethics. Third of all if you think it is worth it to have a child whose life is better than neutral, or even than average, but not better than your own. Existentialism and First Mover Advantage are also related concepts.

I feel your pain though, and my life would have been much worse if my Father had not been an instrumental Flower for part of his life.

But if you consider your life worth living, there are several philosophical paths that do not consider your parent's actions to be unworthy of moral appreciation. Check Toby Ord on population ethics for deeper insight.

Comment by Neotenic on How Not to Make Money · 2014-01-25T02:27:01.099Z · LW · GW

Yeah.

Comment by Neotenic on Strategic Bestseller: Taking the Blog Path (4HS002) · 2013-07-09T04:46:05.187Z · LW · GW

Yes, but I don't think it happened for good reasons. Maybe it was just the feeling of something floating from the unknown unknowns category to the mildly known unknown. Maybe it was the feeling that only if you have the courage to try impossible things you can succeed in this kicking in.
But I take it that it was just an emotion that didn't correctly implement decision theoretic cascades of neurotransmitters according to what would have been desirable in a homo economicus perspective. So do many of our less rational emotions. In other words, it is not a feeling I feel responsible for justifying, I just took it at face value.

Comment by Neotenic on Curriculum suggestions for someone looking to teach themselves contemporary philosophy · 2013-05-31T04:56:20.295Z · LW · GW

You may want to change the title to "Analytic Philosophy" or "Contemporary Philosophy" since Modern Philosophy usually refers to something far removed from anything related to "Good and Real" by Drescher.

Comment by Neotenic on On moving posts from Main to Discussion · 2013-04-15T05:48:56.603Z · LW · GW

I know my question sounded like "I doubt you read all posts", and I do, but regardless of that irrelevance, the important meaning should be: "Someone over 18 whose IQ looms large reads all posts?"

Isn't it a terrible use of your time?

Comment by Neotenic on On moving posts from Main to Discussion · 2013-04-10T00:13:06.711Z · LW · GW

you read all posts?

Comment by Neotenic on On moving posts from Main to Discussion · 2013-04-09T22:30:55.656Z · LW · GW

What about the reverse? Moving from discussion to Main once the author notices that not only his introspective evidence says the text is good, but also others?

Comment by Neotenic on A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach · 2013-04-03T10:40:45.703Z · LW · GW

I have some trouble conceiving of what would beat a consistent argument a googol fold.
Now I don't anymore.

I stand corrected.

Thank you Gwern.

Comment by Neotenic on The Unintuitive Power Laws of Giving · 2013-04-02T19:44:32.506Z · LW · GW

I think he meant unintuitive in the sense of "not accessible by human intuition, type 1, fast thinking" not "hard to grasp upon reflection by my intended audience"

Comment by Neotenic on A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach · 2013-04-02T13:27:09.649Z · LW · GW

That is unreasonable because we have more access to means of helping the poor today. If you expect the trend to go on into the future, than 2 million tomorrow is always better than a thousand today, which approximates maximal 3 lives on AMF of SCI

Comment by Neotenic on Caring about possible people in far Worlds · 2013-03-20T14:25:15.904Z · LW · GW

That is the first time I see you saying something that doesn't strike me as reasonable, and I've been a lurker for a long time.

Which indicates that I didn't understand you.

Could you please clarify what do you mean by "is" when you say "how the multiverse is"?

For me it seems that we (humans) can talk about this multiverse thing. We can say stuff about other universes, like "they are epiphenomenal" or "they matter". It is hard for me to just say "they are" or "they exist" and truly think that I know what I mean by that. It feels like I'm saying "they emerge" or "they magic".

Comment by Neotenic on Caring about possible people in far Worlds · 2013-03-18T20:54:24.217Z · LW · GW

You should say you are following David Lewis I suppose.

Comment by Neotenic on Caring about possible people in far Worlds · 2013-03-18T18:46:17.501Z · LW · GW

The latter, which I was clarifying in an edit to the original post as you asked.

I still think it is productive to instrumentally talk of Many Worlds, to see which concepts break.

Comment by Neotenic on Caring about possible people in far Worlds · 2013-03-18T18:26:23.459Z · LW · GW

Fair enough. So basically if my post was trying to immunize readers, you'd be immune already.

I agree that people should refrain from using the word 'existence'. If they are many worlds supporters, I think they still need some work done, that the concept of existence was attempting to do, but I claimed here fails to.

If, like you, they are not many-world supporters, then 'existence' only means causally connected to me. And the word can be avoided without paying any price by saying its equivalent.

Comment by Neotenic on Caring about possible people in far Worlds · 2013-03-18T18:17:24.829Z · LW · GW

Indeed we could get more information if we knew that ratio. The assumption here though is that World three is a future stage of worlds 1 and 2, but these two bear no relationship in that way. The three are intervals/stages of a different histories.

So actually that ratio is not defined.

The trouble I'm trying to point out is that if the FSM created the Tegmark4 multiverse, he'd still have to do more work to relate all these world stages that are disconnected by ascribing each pair a reality-fluid ratio. He would not need to do further work to get kilograms or daltons.

The function that connects two words W1 and W2 to a percentage has to be added. The same problem arises for personal identity as naively conceived. There are functions that will tell you, about any two agent intervals their: 1)Level of psychological/functional similarity 2)Will respond 1 if they are causally connected, and 0 otherwise and 3)If you are a phenomenalist - level of phenomenal consciousness interrelatedness.
There is no further fact about personal identity, that is all we mean by Personal Identity. If another function was required determining 1 or 0 for each pair of agents and with the name "Personal Identity" it would be very suspicious.

Comment by Neotenic on Caring about possible people in far Worlds · 2013-03-18T17:57:50.224Z · LW · GW

Thank you. That is the exact kind of nausea I was expecting to cause. The post works.

Still, it seems that you remain secure about the concepts that I'm doubting play a role under some considerations do play a role.

If you are secure about the role that "existence" plays in moral discussion, please clarify it. One way of doing that is by describing a function where on one axis you have different theories about many-worlds as the ones I described in my previous post, and in the other axis you have what exists given our epistemic evidence if that theory turns out to be correct.

Comment by Neotenic on Imposing conditions that would have been evidence about optimal behaviour in the EEA · 2013-03-17T18:05:58.611Z · LW · GW

Once I decided to undereat while travelling. The result was that for the first month I was in hypomania almost, very excited about things and places. I also slept much less and kept away from easy pleasures. At some point, at the end of the month, this hyper-functional system broke down, and I realized that though I thought I was dancing, in a club, I was actually not taking my feet of the ground. I suspected I might be tired, and went to bed. 17 hours later I woke up. I interpreted that as "I put myself in emergency mode and became more interested and productive, still this nitro didn't get me the nourishment I needed after a month, so the body gave up and sent a message to the mind (or the medial prefrontal cortex) saying - That was all you had. Give up now, hope for a better crop tomorrow."

Comment by Neotenic on Imposing conditions that would have been evidence about optimal behaviour in the EEA · 2013-03-17T17:45:58.840Z · LW · GW

The curve will be particularly complex. When there's no one. No curve. Very few, then it's worth to collaborate even when they backstab you. Specially if the environment is super-dangerous. You want to create a story according to which they didn't betray you at all. Anything, as long as the mutual knowledge is still on the friends side. Bigger numbers: Something close to Dunbar number would probably be where you most need to signal trustworthiness, and from then on, the more there are, the lowest is the cost of free-riding.

Comment by Neotenic on Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds · 2013-03-17T15:00:21.109Z · LW · GW

It is less crazy than it sounds the more you study philosophy of physics I suppose. It basically depends on accepting or not that matter could be just relational properties, with nothing intrinsic.

Comment by Neotenic on Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds · 2013-03-16T17:56:37.012Z · LW · GW

Some interesting stuff about our conceptions of the world might fall apart if you adopt the mathematical universe. If you think that the entirety of mathematical structures exists in the same way, than it is hard to think what happens when you decide to do good to someone with the entire structure. The whole thing just "is there". Your decision could be thought of as a computational process that takes place in many different subsets. But the exact opposite decision still takes place where it takes place. Then you get something complicated in which your decision ends up conflates with self location in the near future. As if you deciding something doesn't change the whole, but only where in the whole are things of the "you" kind to be found.

And then, citing Lewis becomes helpful to find out about the minimal levels of complexity we are dealing with: As suggested above, let us call an individual which is wholly part of one world a possible individual." If a possible individual X is part of a trans-world individual Y, and X is not a proper part of any other possible individual that is part of Y, let us call X a stage of Y. The stages of a trans-world individual are its maximal possible parts; they are the intersections of it with the worlds which it overlaps. It has at most one stage per world, and it is the mereological sum of its stages. Sometimes one stage of a trans-world individual will be a counterpart of another. If all stages of a trans-world individual Y are counterparts of one another, let us call Y counterpart-interrelated. If Y is counterpart-interrelated, and not a proper part of any other counterpart-interrelated trans-world individual (that is, if Y is maximal counterpart-interrelated), then let us call Y a -possible individual. Given any predicate that applies to possible individuals, we can define a corresponding starred predicate that applies to -possible individuals relative to worlds. A -possible individual is a -man at W iff it has a stage at W that is a man; it -wins the presidency at W iff it has a stage at W that wins the presidency; it is a -ordinary individual at W iff it has a stage at W that is an ordinary individual. It -exists at world W iff it has a stage at W that exists; likewise it -exists in its entirety at world W iff it has a stage at W that exists its entirety, so - since any stage at any world does exist in its entirety - a -possible individual -exists in its entirety at any world where it -exists at all. (Even though it does not exist in its entirety at any world.) It -is not a trans-world individual at W iff it has a stage at W that is not a trans-world individual, so every -possible individual (although it is a trans-world individual) also -is not a trans-world individual at any world. It is a -possible individual at W iff it has a stage at W that is a possible individual, so something is a -possible individual simpliciter iff it is a -possible individual at every world where it -exists. Likewise for relations. One -possible individual -kicks another at world W iff a stage at W of the first kicks a stage at W of the second; two -possible individuals are -identical at W iff a stage at W of the first is identical to a stage at W of the second; and so on.

Comment by Neotenic on Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds · 2013-03-12T23:54:23.150Z · LW · GW

So the reason is that Tegmarks claim is that the the mathematical properties not only define the Multiverse, but also that they constitute the entire extension of it. If there were substances, properties, or objects, that behaved mathematically well, that would still falsify his claim.

Comment by Neotenic on Thoughts on the frame problem and moral symbol grounding · 2013-03-11T19:40:05.430Z · LW · GW

The fewer symbols you have, the more meanings they can have.

Interestingly, in human language, the more a particular symbol is used, the more meanings it ends up having. (Pinker 2007)

Might be the case that even after the plethora of symbols is very large, they still don't 'touch' 'reach' 'track' the world the right way. So instead of keeping in mind the one world, and seeing whether a more complex and full map is better or worse at representing it, could be useful to keep in mind for each particular map structure, the infinitely many different worlds it represents. Just as a heuristic.

Comment by Neotenic on Cognitive Load and Effective Donation · 2013-03-10T15:45:16.921Z · LW · GW

I think Tegmark's claim is unequivocally that we should endorse Dark Artsy subsets of scientific knowledge to promote science and whatever needs promotion (rationality perhaps). So yes, the thing being claimed is the thing you are emotionally inclined to fear/dislike. By him and by me.

Though just to be 100% sure, I'd like to have a brief description of your meaning of "dark arts" to avoid the double transparency fallacy.

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-10T03:01:52.627Z · LW · GW

That is a very important subset of what I had in mind. So I`m glad you made that subset salient, as it seems independently important.

You could think more generally that if the world is more altruistic, morally enhanced, etc... there will be less externalities of bad kinds operating, and the instruments we use to understand the world would become more effective at so doing. A very simplified version is that because this would be a richer world, more institutions would have spare resources to grasp it.

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-04T03:07:50.090Z · LW · GW

If the only way to get a clearer picture of the world - to enhance it epistemically, as it were - were to make it much better to start with, would the Utilitarians finally have found an argument that convinces any epistemic rationalist?

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-04T03:04:06.769Z · LW · GW

When Lennon remarked that "Ignorance is bliss", should he have said "Unknown unknowns, except for knightian uncertainty, are bliss"?

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-04T03:01:12.873Z · LW · GW

Isn't a Bucket List, literally, the list of things you want to do before dying but were unlikely to do prior to establishing your bucket list? (regardless of whether you became likely to now)

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-04T02:58:12.339Z · LW · GW

The error was epiphenomenal.

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-04T02:52:03.534Z · LW · GW

Socially a higher threshold should play a role than the above epsilon. There are things that are so low in probability (though much higher than epsilon) that establishing a contract/agreement on what should both of you do if they happen is deleterious for the relationship. Such as when a couple who thinks they disagree about abortion asks: What should we do if the condom and pill don't work?

The probability is not so low. But the fight is too costly.

Comment by Neotenic on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-04T02:45:01.542Z · LW · GW

Could we use "threshold for letting someone else take credit" as a signal for altruism?

Comment by Neotenic on Giving in to small vices · 2013-03-04T02:41:58.272Z · LW · GW

I felt the exact same.

Decreasing cognitive load in general makes people more rational. Joshua Greene cites that under a cognitive task, people are more likely to eat cake than an apple. There is less resource left for high-order cognitive tasks, like 'avoid cake'.

Meaning that hurrying Koreans are dedicating less cognition to "to litter or not to litter" and if bins were around, they simply wouldn't have to do that.