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several-decades-old network of tunnels build inside of a mountain
built
You paperwork's fine.
Should be "your".
If you were trying to spoiler tag that, it didn't work.
My teacup does has a choice.
Should be "does have"; or just "has" (without "does").
You believes Bayesianism
Should be "believe"
"I am a Jew. If there's one thing I know about this universe it's that there's no such thing as God," said Moses.
Is this a joke I'm not religious enough to understand?
They think a bunch of nerds on the darkweb somehow knows more about this Jining then I do living here and administrating it
Should be "know" and "than"
That's what had bought Alia to the entryway
Probably should be "brought".
My solution for this particular kind of spoiler is to save the links for both stories in a note, make sure the first link's display text doesn't say what it is, and write a warning to not click on it or look at the URL. Given my lag rate on combing through my notes for stuff I've saved for later, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have forgotten where the hell I found the story or why it caught my attention by the time I get to it. It's possibly the only area in my life where procrastination and forgetfulness are my friends.
Also note, we do much worse to children all the time.
Yes, but most of it doesn't happen because approximately everyone in the world got together and shared all their knowledge and thought really hard about it and talked about it and then still decided it was a good idea.
I would be interested to see how this goes if you remove the requirement that B has to be stronger at chess than A. (Which, to my knowledge, is not a requirement of the test as Eliezer posed it, but was introduced in Zane's proposal.) Of course, a B that is weaker than A will be easier to beat, which means a win would prove little; which I assume is why Zane introduced this requirement. But it would also mean a loss would prove more. If B is weaker than both C and A, but A loses anyway thanks to C's deception, that would be much more damning than losing against a B that is natively stronger than A to begin with. Maybe you should run the test both ways? (And maybe not tell A which type of B they're facing?)
Why does B have to be better at chess than A but worse than C? Eliezer's post only specifies that B has to be weaker than C; unless I missed something, it doesn't say they have to be stronger than A.
Are the quotes pulled from the Poor Economics book?
Thanks. Unfortunately that didn't work when I tried it. Edit: Googled it. ">!" in front worked.
But I would be really upset if I didn't read it earlier.
Yeah, I don't blame you! I'm really glad I didn't spoil it for you, and sorry again for being careless.
It took Robutil longer still to consider that perhaps humans (with their current self-awareness) not only need to prioritize their own wellbeing and your friendships
Should be "their friendships", yes?
Oh my gosh, you're absolutely right! My apologies! But now that I'm trying to add them, they're an option that isn't showing up in the editor! Do you know how I can add them?
(And if I spoiled that for you, I'm seriously really really really sorry. I hate spoilers, and I'm always riding people about being too loose with them. I can't believe I did that. Was not thinking. I'm sorry.)
I'm curious how you feel about this response.
it's easier to describe what the results of a complex system should be than to describe how to do it.
Sure, but I'm almost tempted to ask what the point of the AMA was, if he wasn't going to explain how dath ilan actually accomplishes things. (I'm not going to actually ask that, because questions merely asking what dath ilan is like, without asking why or how, are also valuable to ask and answer.)
Many questions were "How does dath ilan avoid and/or solve such-and-such problem?", and often the response was essentially, "We're good at [economics/coordination/etc.] so that doesn't happen in the first place", or "If this problem ever happened in dath ilan everyone would wonder how we could possibly have gotten into that position", or "If this problem started happening everyone would notice and then fix it." And like, that's great for dath ilan, but that doesn't explain how they solve(d) the problem. It not only doesn't answer the question literally at all, it almost feels like a weird form of bragging or showing off. These are genuinely hard problems, that's why they still exist. You can't just reframe them in a way that makes them sound easy and trivial, without actually providing a solution, and expect anyone to be convinced or impressed.
I'm not saying EY should've known the answers to these questions. Like I said, these are hard problems; I don't expect EY to have unique insights. I just feel like it would've been a lot more honest, and less braggy or show-offy, to either not respond to those questions, or to just say "I have no idea how dath ilan managed to achieve these things, because [I am not as smart as dath ilan/I don't know our history/etc.]." (Or at least prepend that to the responses he actually gave.)
Hobbes said, "I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low."
You don't specify which Hobbes. When I Googled this quote trying to find out, I didn't find any results that didn't trace back to this post. I kept reducing the strictness of the exact wording, and still didn't get any not-this results, until I reduced it to "got a price" and "so low", which turned up basically the same quote, differently worded, on TV Tropes, attributing it to Calvin and Hobbes. I had assumed that might be the source, since I've seen you speak highly of Calvin and Hobbes elsewhere, but I didn't know for sure, and checking ended up being surprisingly difficult. (Not sure which version is misquoted, this one or the TV Tropes one. Possibly both, since the latter only turned up one other source, a Twitter post that might have gotten it from the same place.)
Had to look up what LK-99 is. Now I wonder, was this inspiration for
the supercriminal motive in "aviation is the most dangerous routine activity"?
I'm genuinely puzzled by this sort of hostile reaction to what was really a pretty mild request for gender neutral language/examples. It seems utterly out of proportion to the original comment(s).
His reaction wasn't all that hostile. And a request being mild doesn't make the request reasonable, or make it unreasonable to be annoyed by it.
And using gender neutral language/examples is really easy - much easier than jumping through actual hoops, and probably also easier than writing comments telling people how annoyed you are about their nitpicking. The cost-benefit analysis here seems pretty straightforward.
Not really? This is a baffling take. How does writing one comment about being annoyed by something compare to potentially years of committing to gender-neutral language, not just by using singular "they" (for example), but by replacing entire sentence clauses like "Women will still be alluring" with "The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous" (what??), even when you're obviously writing said sentence to reflect your own sensibilities more than the audience's and the sentence is easily generalizable anyway?
Not to mention that it's the principle of the thing. If you genuinely don't see any good reason why you should do a Thing at all, and perhaps even see some reasons why you shouldn't, it makes little to no difference that the Thing is supposedly "really easy" to do. That doesn't by itself constitute a good reason to do the Thing. (I realize part of conchis's argument against this in the first place is the burden it imposes, but I don't perceive that as their only argument. But even if that was their only argument, it still holds as long as "doing the Thing" is not strictly easier than not doing it. As opposed to only being easier than jumping through hoops.)
Is the problem that you actually think it's illegitimate for people to be bothered by stuff like this?
"Stuff like this" is a very broad category. I'm sure it wasn't deliberate, but you're essentially sneaking in anything vaguely related, including things that are reasonable to get upset about, to make conchis's position look worse.
For my part, I don't think it's illegitimate to be bothered by all "stuff like this"; but I do think it's illegitimate to be bothered by this specific sentence that Emily et al. complained about.
Wanting to be included is illegitimate? Wow.
You're conflating the actual contested issue, "wanting this specific sentence, and perhaps similar sentences in similar contexts, to be gender neutral", with the broader and much less contested issue "wanting to be included". They are not equivalent. I am reminded of some webcomic's (forget which) sly attempt at discrediting people who are against political correctness, by replacing "being PC" with "being nice to people", even though "being nice" is not what political correctness often boils down to in practice, and is rarely what opponents are talking about or why they take issue.
I am a woman too, and I want to be included too. And yet, the sentence "Women will still be alluring" doesn't bother me at all. Because I am not excluded at all by that sentence. The fact that some women seem to perceive being excluded does not imply that this is what's actually happening.
If anything, I feel more excluded by the fact that the sentence was ultimately changed as a result of the complaints of a few women, even though I, also a woman, don't think it should have been changed. Why does my opinion matter less? (I'm not suggesting my perception of being excluded is well-founded, or worthy of demanding remedy; but my point is made either way.)
Not to mention that, just like "being nice", "being inclusive" is not always an imperative or even a reasonable restriction. It often is, but there are times where it isn't.
I guess it's easy to think that things don't matter when they don't systematically affect you personally,
I believe conchis's argument is that the particular sentence under discussion shouldn't affect anyone personally. I'm inclined to agree.
What I think when I run across something like the "women are alluring" statement isn't too similar to d). It's more like: "Women are alluring, ah yes they sure are to many people (possibly even insert a little of b) here). Cool. I hope this isn't one of those people who thinks we aren't good for much else... Hey, you can really tell this post is written by another het guy, can't you? And that he didn't stop to consider any viewpoint other than his own on this particular issue. Not that I blame him particularly, but does this ever get tiring when it happens all the damn time. I wonder if there's anywhere else this guy has forgotten to account for other valid perspectives in this article? What the heck was this piece all about anyway?"
Have you considered that this runaway train of thought might be a you problem, rather than a problem with the sentence? Because that was tiring to read, so I'm sure it must be tiring to think whenever you read a sentence that could plausibly lead to the conclusion that the writer is a guy. From where I stand, the issue seems to be that you didn't stop at that observation (which should be a neutral observation). You went well beyond what can reasonably be gleaned from the sentence, into unnecessary negative speculation ("I hope this isn't one of those people who thinks we aren't good for much else", "he didn't stop to consider any viewpoint other than his own on this particular issue"). Nothing wrong with getting lost in the weeds, but these are your weeds, not the sentence's weeds.
If you could halt that train of thought at "Oh, the writer's probably a guy", and not get lost in the weeds, would there still be a problem with the sentence?
I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
What makes you think the audience factors in at all? I'd think this phrasing would be much more an indication that the writer is male. Why would I feel excluded by someone writing about the world from their own perspective? If I had written this post, I would have written "Men would still be alluring"; and I would have written it that way because I am a woman attracted to men, not because I expect my audience to be mostly women attracted to men.
The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself.
Or perhaps it's the result of this view sometimes being plainly true, as borne out by experience.
I've never been religious, and I've experienced firsthand that it's entirely possible for something to become less beautiful if you understand it better.
I listen to a fair number of Japanese songs. There are songs I have specifically not looked up translations for, because even though the song will still be beautiful either way, there's a unique value in its wordless beauty that will be destroyed if I learn what the lyrics mean. I know this because I've experienced it before, with other songs. Or, in the case of Maximum the Hormone, the meanings of the lyrics are so disconcerting that they are actively harmful to my enjoyment of the otherwise highly enjoyable songs.
Now, maybe this specific example isn't addressing exactly what you mean. But my point is that different people are different, and not everyone is going to have the experience that describing or explaining a phenomenon does nothing to diminish its value.
This was somewhat enlightening, but also frustrating because EY kept sort-of-but-not-quite answering what I perceived as the most pressing or most interesting questions, and a lot of what he did answer was met with a vague "Well we're just better at coordinating so it just works" or "Well we're just better at economics so it just works", without giving the nuts and bolts to actually understand how it works or how it fits together.
In practice, many people need the opposite lesson—many people's locus of control is almost entirely external, and they need to be woken up to their capacity for choice and stop blaming everything on immutable factors.
This presumes that such people are indeed capable of shifting their locus of control, which based on my own personal experience and observations is not always an accurate presumption.
Even though a lot of these things have never happened to me, I related to this post in a very painful way.
I have a deep-seated fear of standing out in a negative way. And it's not an inborn, instinctive fear; it's a fear born of painful experience. I always seem to be the odd one out. I always seem to be the only one who didn't understand something and embarrassed myself as a result. I always seem to be the only one who wants to do something in the only way that's ever seemed normal for me. And yes, I am often that person who asks a question no one's ever asked, or does a thing no one's ever done, in a way that just makes things awkward and embarrassing rather than interesting or exciting. I always end up being memorable in a bad way.
(I've also once or twice been accused of being a troll, for asking a completely sincere question that was apparently considered so stupid that it couldn't possibly be sincere. That really hurts. Because they're not only saying I don't exist, they're also saying that the only way I could exist is if I were incredibly, unbelievably stupid.)
I'm sorry you keep getting cut in the same place over and over.
I'm amused that you kind of gave up and resorted to just saying "neither is". (This is not a criticism, I just find it amusing.)
Some characters are male, some characters are female, some can be either. The hero might have been either-able. Aerhien wasn't.
Yes, all fine and good — but why not? As Alicorn said, her sex hardly seems relevant to what limited character development she got. Aside from perhaps the eyelash line, and making the lover a woman if you wanted Aerhien to be straight, I struggle to think of anything in this story that would not work equally well if Aerhien were a man.
And besides, she was female in my mind and that's that.
See now, that's a rationale I can get behind.
makes me wonder what would happen if I tried showing off what I consider to be an actual shot at Applied Fun Theory. My suspicion is that people would turn around and criticize it
I can't tell if dath ilan (as portrayed in Project Lawful and elsewhere) is supposed to be "an actual shot at Applied Fun Theory", and I'm somewhat leaning towards thinking it isn't, but if it is, then your prediction is correct for at least one person. (Though I would probably still move there because it still sounds better than what I've got now. Honestly, I'd move there just for the Quiet Cities.)
that what we're really seeing here is contrarianism
That would not be the only explanation for people calling your "Failed Utopia" not that bad and your "Successful Utopia" terrible.
I wonder how bad I would actually have to make a Utopia before people stopped trying to defend it.
If people are defending it, maybe that means it actually just isn't that bad. I know I don't need to tell you that "badness" isn't a thing that exists in the aether, it's a function of how people feel about things. (Edit: Of course, I know "it actually just isn't that bad" isn't the only explanation for people defending it. Just thought it was an explanation worth considering.)
I don't get any informative results from looking that up, either.
I quite enjoy this story, but I seriously doubt whether it has ever succeeded in restoring a naive view of truth. If someone already had a naive view of truth, I suspect this would merely disrupt it if it did anything at all; and if they didn't already have a naive view of truth, I doubt this would help.
"You used to own a Death Note."
This is not a joke. This is the best I could come up with, given the constraint that the AI must have both witnessed the event and confirmed it via other sources.
I have an unhealthy amount of wish fulfillment fantasy regarding certain stories (or rather, certain abilities or artifacts in certain stories), but I also don't in any sense truly believe those wishes are possible. Even given the extremely high accuracy attributed to the AI, I'd have an extremely hard time believing this statement (partly because of the wish fulfillment; knowing how badly I'd want it to be true, I'd also know how much it would hurt to hope and then be wrong), but all the same, my wish fulfillment might be strong enough to override that.
Then again, unless it immediately followed up with some actionable advice on how to confirm its statement, or better yet acquire another Death Note, I might just conclude it had a catastrophic failure, or this was simply one of the 1 in 1000 times it was wrong.
Yes. Frankly I think our standards for what constitutes child abuse are, in some areas at least, far too narrow.
But later on, Michael J. Wade went out and actually created in the laboratory the nigh-impossible conditions for group selection. Wade repeatedly selected insect subpopulations for low population numbers. Did the insects evolve to restrain their breeding, and live in quiet peace with enough food for all, as the group selectionists had envisioned?
No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae.
What would have happened if Wade had also repeatedly selected subpopulations for not doing that?
I found the sandbox thread but hurting people is wrong, and found the part about Quiet Cities, and I nearly cried because I can't describe how badly I want something like that and would move to one immediately if it existed.
Some scientists tried to create group selection under laboratory conditions. They divided some insects into subpopulations, then killed off any subpopulation whose numbers got too high, and and “promoted” any subpopulation that kept its numbers low to better conditions. They hoped the insects would evolve to naturally limit their family size in order to keep their subpopulation alive. Instead, the insects became cannibals: they ate other insects’ children so they could have more of their own without the total population going up. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense; an insect with the behavioral program “have many children, and also kill other insects’ children” will have its genes better represented in the next generation than an insect with the program “have few children”.
Why didn't they try also killing off subpopulations that engaged in cannibalism, and promoting those that didn't? And what would have most likely happened if they had tried that?
Aaand I forgot to come back and check the site before the day was over. Sigh…
I think the rest of the team had stopped working for the night and resigned themselves to the site going down so quickly, but I had a nagging doubt that something was wrong.
I feel like there's some kind of parallel here with Petrov's situation that I'm not smart enough to describe beyond saying I think it exists.
This reminds me of what Keltham says in Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus about Law and Chaos:
There are dimensions of society in which you want everyone behaving differently, so they can explore a space instead of all crowding together into one corner of it. There are dimensions of society where things go pretty well so long as you do something the correct way, and start to go poorly if you do things much differently than that. There is a tension in dath ilan between positions, between people and factions, between ideas and arguments, about that question - not just about particular cases, but about the sense in general of where all society should move on that spectrum. Whether it is more important in general for everyone to do things a bit more differently, in our future, or if the problem is more that we're falling too far below some standards and we all need to improve in those ways together. There are lots of particular cases in dath ilan where people might hold different opinions and not just one general opinion; but there is a sense that this general dimension of existence is one where the exact balance is important to a society.
Dath ilan has terminology for this dichotomy of strategies, between the search to find the optimal best answer and use it, versus trying many different answers to be more resilient against unknowns and explore a space more widely. Though I've been deliberately substituting the words "optimal" and "diverse", in this language, instead of the two Taldane words that the translation spell tries to automatically output.
If I say the dath ilani words directly, for these two directions a society can move along this dimension, they come out in this language as:
Lawful.
And, Chaotic.
He then goes on to explain how "even Chaos is almost entirely made of Law":
The wildest, most diverse crop that still manages to live at all must be almost entirely regular and using almost completely standard forms of everything for its species; otherwise it comes out, not weird and warped, but simply a dead seed that fails to germinate at all. When you're adding a new and different mind to your team, full of wild ideas, they should hopefully be speaking mostly grammatical sentences that make sense, and not uttering random words and random sounds and twitching around wildly on the floor. The full absence of Law is not diversity, but randomness, noise. In many cases, nearly all the random ways of doing things get you pretty much the same effect, there is not much difference in contribution between a person wildly twitching on the floor in one way versus a different way, they look much the same from outside. Even diversity has to be almost entirely made out of shared order, and climb high up on the scale of optimality away from the level of noise, in order to be effectively diverse.
The vibe I'm getting from this story is almost the opposite, out of Chaos arises Law, and the more Chaos tries to dig its claws in the more Law it spawns. But maybe it's actually just an extension of the principle Keltham expresses. All that Chaos was made out of Law to begin with. Or rather, the Chaos that didn't settle down into some kind of Law didn't survive to keep being Chaotic. All of creation embraced more and more of the Goddess of Everything Else's ideals over time because it was the only way they could survive with the imperatives the Goddess of Cancer had given them.
Really… what?
Love accidentally glancing at the content warnings at the top of the post and getting massive spoilers. Like these are seriously the most spoilery content warnings I've ever seen in my life. "Hey so here's some really specific info about some shocking stuff that happens later, which the beginning of the story doesn't hint at in the slightest." I'm not against the warnings existing, but could they at least be under some button or other barrier that says they're enormous spoilers?
Not fixed. Now it just says "neither of is".
…You know that paper goes on to assert that the two problems are meaningfully different, such that it's rational to both one-box in Newcomb's Problem and chew gum in Solomon's Problem, right?
That's one thing to unlearn from school. What's the second one?
The standard Christian answer to the question of deliberately going to heaven early is that our presence here on Earth is like being a soldier on duty.
This resolves nothing. In fact it just raises more questions.
Sorry for the necro, but I just wanted to say that much of this applies to me or applied to me not too long ago, and in a weird way I feel a little bit better knowing that someone else is in the same boat. I mean, I already knew logically that I'm not the only one, but seeing someone describe it in detail is different.
How are you doing, over a decade later?
As far as I know, it didn't do a thing to help me develop as a rationalist. (Indeed, I wouldn't even say that I'm a rationalist now, merely "rationalism-curious".) But I do know that I was pretty damn upset, and later in life I think it contributed to my deciding that premeditated lying to your children is fucked up — especially when it's this premeditated — and that I wasn't going to tell my children Santa was real if I ever had any. (This might end up being a moot point, as I become less certain with each passing year that I'll ever even have children.)
I remember the first time I told my mom that I was seriously considering not telling my children that Santa was real. She got so upset — far more than I expected — that it made me wonder if this was how some atheists felt coming out to their religious parents. It was one of the few times in my life that she acted like I wasn't just wrong, but actually a bad person, for thinking what I thought. (I'm not sure that she actually thought that I was being a bad person, just reporting on how she behaved.) Mom loves Christmas more than almost anything else, and she has extremely fond memories of how it felt to believe in Santa as a child. She couldn't believe that I would deny my children the magic and wonder of believing in Santa.
I gave a reply that I thought would be at least somewhat persuasive: "If you need to tell your kids about Santa to give them a sense of magic and wonder, you're doing it wrong." (Or perhaps I said "If you need to lie to your kid") She was completely unmoved. Knowing what I know about her, I think it simply went in one ear and out the other. I think she was too busy being indignant and aghast to even digest what I had said, let alone consider whether I even might have had a point.
I don't think I'll bring it up with her again. I think if I ever have a kid someday, I'll just let Mom be shocked when she eventually discovers that my kid does not and has never believed in Santa, and she wasn't even present to witness me not lie to them.
Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers.
How do you figure? You didn't design your brain, either, so using your intellect to design a robot car is also using strength that isn't yours.
I don't enjoy it, to be sure, but I also don't enjoy soda or warm weather or chess or the sound of vacuum cleaners, and it seems that it would be a different thing entirely to claim that these things are bad. Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad. And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.
We don't classify lutefisk or rock-climbing or musical theater or gay sex as "bad" because people can choose to indulge in them if they like them, and forego them if they don't like them. If lutefisk (for example) just forced itself on random people who neither wanted nor needed it, and refused to go away, and even made some particularly unfortunate people's lives so terrible that they wanted to die, I think we'd all be pretty comfortable classifying it as "bad".