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Interesting article. But I do not see how the article supports the claim its title makes.
I think there's a connection between bucket errors and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Is this an admission that CFAR cannot effectively help people with problems other than AI safety?
I'm not sure what you mean and I'm not sure that I'd let a LWer falsify my hypothesis. There are clear systemic biases LWers have which are relatively apparent to outsiders. Ultimately I am not willing to pay CFAR to validate my claims and there are biases which emerge from people who are involved in CFAR whether as employees or people who take the courses (sunk cost as well as others).
I'd take your bet if it were for the general population, not LWers...
My issue with CFAR is it seems to be more focused on teaching a subset of people (LWers or people nearby in mindspace) how to communicate with each other than in teaching them how to communicate with people they are different from.
I think the Less Wrong website diminished in popularity because of the local meetups. Face to face conversation beats online conversation for most practical purposes. But many Less Wrongers have transitioned to being parents, or have found more professional success so I'm not sure how well the meetups are going now. Plus some of the meetups ban members rather than rationally explaining why they are not welcome in the group. This is a horrible tactic and causes members to limit how they express themselves... which goes against the whole purpose of rationality meetups.
How much will you bet that there aren't better strategies for resolving disagreement?
Given the complexity of this strategy it seems to me like in most cases it is more effective to do some combination of the following:
1) Agree to disagree 2) Change the subject of disagreement 3) Find new friends who agree with you 4) Change your beliefs, not because you believe they are wrong but because other people believe they are wrong. 5) Violence (I don't advocate this in general, but in practice it's what humans do when they have disagreed through history)
Since it's the conclusion I will say it's a very benevolent universe, and I love it. And any struggle was worth it, and how, and I don't regret a minute of it. What I mean that the struggle, or unhappiness, is enormously unimportant. But the positive is wonderful. And if it's the last interview of my life, I hope, I know I will be saying it at eighty. It's a benevolent universe.
Ayn Rand
The short example (from somebody who went to college with Scott and took Calc II in the same class with him) is yes. But that's an answer relative to the students of an elite college and only based on the fact that he asked me for to work on math homework with him.
I hope they've managed to advance past "if somebody criticizes your idea, ban them from the group!" because that's what happened to me after a criticized Comfort Zone Expansion.
It's not unambiguous because it doesn't take into consideration other factors. SAT scores are the only variable mentioned in your article, but they're not the only variable in whether a college accepts a student. They've become a less and less important factor over time.
At some colleges, a low SAT score would prevent you from being admitted by a high SAT score wouldn't increase your chance of getting in. Colleges value GPA, class ranking, letters of recommendation, sports participation, extra-curricular activities, personal essay etc etc. It is possible that Asians have done worse on those other areas and aren't getting screwed by quotas or affirmative action.
At that time, though I think much of hypnosis can be explained by the placebo effect.
Maybe Rand is referering to a specific situation where she knows Branden's thought processes and her statements are correct.
It was about arguing with collectivists (AKA people who were sympathetic to the USSR). Whether she was correct about communism being inferior to capitalism isn't easy to analyze objectively but in a sense history has validated her.
In that case, I wouldn't know. But if it's meant generally enough to be a rationality quote - if it's meant to explain why we get angry at dishonest people - then it's just an unsupported claim
It's supported by her personal experience. It is also largely supported by my own personal experience.
And equating dishonesty with both evil AND irrationality rubs me wrong. Rand believed that she's basically solved morality, and rationality only allowed one kind of morality, namely hers
Only partly true. Her morality acknowledges that man has the free will to think, but assumes that if he thinks honestly he'll come to many of the same conclusions that she does. The only real constraint in Objectivist morality is on the initiation of force.
I believe this is part of what locked her into an inescapable worldview, beyond correction and updating
This is an exaggeration.
(like what Branden wrote about how, once she decided that Reason's verdict on hypnosis was that it was bunk and had no foundation in reality, nothing could reach her on the subject)
This puts Rand within the general consensus of American psychologists. Branden also said that Rand updated on the effects of smoking marijuana.
I think it more useful to consider rationality (correct reading of reality and decision making) separately from values held.
Why? What if you notice patterns in values held and rationality? Should you ignore them?
I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
Ayn Rand, to a Catholic Priest.
I'm not entrenched enough in this community to know what's worthy of upvotes and what's not, so I'm selecting quotes that I personally like and seeing how they fare.
Do you remember what you liked about Ayn Rand? I've found that people like her for very different reasons.
You lost me at "junk heap."
Sorry you're so averse to negative descriptions of the average person's philosophy.
There is no conscious choice available to a layperson ignorant of philosophy and logic
Yes there is, they can choose what music, TV, movies, videos etc to buy/view/play.
and such ways of life are perfectly copacetic with small-enough communities
Do you mean communities where the leader knows about philosophy and can order people around?
If anything, it is the careful thinker who is more shackled by self-doubt
It's reasonable to doubt certain things, but if learning increases your self doubt than you're doing it wrong.
better understood as the Dunning-Kruger effect, but Ayn Rand has made it obvious she never picked up any primary literature on cognitive science
She was associated with Nathaniel Branden, a well regarded psychologist. Cognitive Science is a relatively new field.
so it's not surprising to see her confusion here.
I don't think she's confused, she's saying something you disagree with. If you think you've refuted it, I think you're the confused one.
Anger is a form of recognition. It amounts to admitting that those people are important to you and they have the power to hurt you. Actually they haven't.
You get angry when your opponents begin to be dishonest. Your anger comes from two reasons; anger at yourself for having been fooled, for having accepted them as honest, and your fear of the evil represented by any human being acting irrationally -- which is the one essential evil.
Ayn Rand, in a letter to Nathaniel Branden
Would you consider having Less Wrong members record the sequences or do you already have people you've promised to give the job to?
Trying to overcome biases takes effort. Wasted effort is bad. It's better to pursue mixed strategies that aim at instrumental rationality
I think you are assuming hyperbolic discounting/short time preference. It requires a lot of effort to overcome bias, perhaps years. But there are times when it is worth it.
than to aim at the perfection described in the Rand quotation
What perfection? Choosing philosophy? You can always update your philosophy.
This quote was from a speech given to West Point cadets. By no means are they identical but it would be relatively hard to find a group of people more identical (from the perspective of being of the same gender, same age (within a few years) same nationality, and same general ideology).
A. How would you implement that choice?
B. We is a loaded term, speak for yourself. There's benefit to realizing that as a human you have bias. There's no benefit to declaring that you can't overcome some of this bias.
C Wouldn't that depend on your philosophy?
This argument has gone far away from the original quote. I'm not going to argue about the details. If you want to try to disprove your ability to become successful by using your intelligence, go ahead.
It's very difficult to make economic comparisons between countries while simultaneously acknowledging all of the cultural differences between countries. You can do it, but the results aren't necessarily meaningful.
Thanks for the information. My point is that money is a poor predictor of happiness and success.
You just spent half this thread claiming that success is subjective
Really? I'm pretty sure I didn't. Success is hard to define, but that doesn't mean it's subjective.
Bill Gates and James Harrison are going by their own ideas of altruistic success, not yours.
Oh really? Can you read their minds? I've read about Bill Gates motivations and I didn't see the word altruism once. It's all good and well to claim Bill Gates is part of your movement but for all you know he's never heard of it.
Why don't you call Jesus an altruist? Or some other religious figure?
Malnutrition and Starvation are different things. It's much better to be malnourished than to starve. And it's much harder to feed people the optimal food than to just feed them some food...
But you're missing the point. There are successful people in Somalia, if you manage to not be malnourished in Somalia then you are successful (unless you value eating bad food for religious reasons...).
Please tell us more about your inside information on the psychology of Bill and Melinda Gates
I have none. Just an opinion that given my posts downvote counts suggests that I shouldn't share.
Ayn Rand did not invent the term "altruism"?
Neither did the Effective Altruism people. But Ayn Rand's books have sold a lot and are read by influential people, so I'll use her definition until I have a reason not to.
I hadn't heard of James Harrison before. I would consider him successful, of course that doesn't mean that he considers himself successful or that you consider him successful.
I wouldn't view donating blood as inherently good either. There have been times when people were given money to donate blood, but then AIDS came about...
When blind luck can put some random guy in the same league as the world's top altruist
Ahh... you think the world's top altruist is successful... That's what we disagree about. I think the world's top altruist is the person who desires the image of success the most.
FWIW the definition of Altruism I am using is NOT the same as the EA people... they've culturally appropriated that term and made it mean something very different from what Ayn Rand meant when she used it.
The annual US GDP per capita is $55,036. For Somalia, it's $145
This is availability bias. There are clearly other factors differentiating Somalia and the US. If there weren't, there would be massive starvation in Somalia because you can't get by on $145 a year in the US.
I can assure you that successful people are not born in the US by chance.
Really? Do you think successful people don't have children? And that they don't try to make these children US citizens by 'immigrating' (often illegally) to the USA? I can assure you this happens frequently.
As of 2005, there were 2.6 billion people who lived on the equivalent of under $2 per day
Yes, but most of those people live in areas where $2 goes a long way.
What possible values could they have where that could be considered success?
That's up for them to define, not for you to define. Why should they care about your standards? Let them say they are successful if they believe they are successful. You lose nothing but your ego by acknowledging somebody else's success.
Is that supposed to be funny? The fact that you have a computer means you have won something. I'd be willing to guess that more technologies will emerge and you'll use them. That's like winning a lottery. But you don't get more successful unless you make intelligent decisions. Stupid decisions are punished, there are exceptions to this...
But seriously, lottery is a loaded term. It's often used as a metaphor for 'capitalist trick' (which smart people avoid).
The counterexample is the many people who have succeeded through luck
That's not an example, it's a claim with no evidence to support it. Give me an example of a person who has succeeded with only luck. There are about seven billion candidates so it shouldn't be hard to select one.
Everybody gets lucky sometimes, but they might not get lucky on the really important things
What is really important is subjective.
If you're born to a poor family in Africa, the law of large numbers is not going to make up for this setback.
Time will tell. African people often have different values than non-African people. Their value of success probably isn't the same as your's.
Given what I know if Ayn Rand
It seems like what you know about Ayn Rand comes from textbook propaganda. Nothing you've said has convinced me you've read thousands of pages of what she wrote.
I'm inclined to think that the quote is suggesting that successful people deserve to be successful, so you shouldn't take their money and give it to unsuccessful people.
This isn't an unreasonable assumption. But it's incorrect. Money is just one factor in success. Ayn Rand realized that, which is why her books are still read today and why most authors of her day (all of whom are now dead) don't have books which sell in large numbers.
Did you read what you linked to?
"No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim ("no Scotsman would do such a thing"), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule ("no true Scotsman would do such a thing")"
Where is the counterexample? Success refers to an abstract concept. Luck and success are different things. Luck usually contributes to success, but luck usually implies undeserved success. So successful people get lucky, but on average everybody gets lucky sometimes. The quote encourages people to focus on the things in which luck plays a minor factor. That's what intelligence is for, intelligence is not for optimizing luck.
And yes, that does make it tautological. So what?
Primarily, by pretending that a "usually" is an "always". "Real success is never accidental" is, empirically, definitely false. "Real success is almost never accidental" would be the less strong, but more correct, version.
That would depend on what you mean by success now wouldn't it? If you believe people who take calculated risks and get unlucky aren't successful, then perhaps you're right. But you can't claim you can make a statement more correct by assuming you know what every word means. Parsing ambiguity is part of rationality. (Though my downvotes would indicate it's not...)
Too strong.
Ahh, nothing like discussing the value of strength with somebody named Weedlayer. Seriously, how can a quote be too strong?
Only if you're using some definition of happiness that includes a term like "Philosophical fulfillment" or some such, which makes the issue tautological.
No, if you define happiness internally (ie something that you feel but others cannot observe) then you can justify the statement based on personal experience and relationship to the person the quote is addressed to.
How do you define happiness? Are you willing to argue about the definition of happiness just so you end up not being happy?
"Don’t let anybody discourage you or tell you that intelligence doesn’t pay or that success in life has to be achieved through dishonesty or through sheer blind luck. That is not true. Real success is never accidental and real happiness cannot be found except by the honest use of your intelligence."
Ayn Rand
(Note I had to pay 5 Karma to post this)
It's funny to a relatively small group of people. If you don't know what dementors are, it's not funny. If you do know what dementors are and haven't read HPMOR, it's probably not funny. Even if you have read HPMOR it's not necessarily funny.
So... as I see it it fails to be funny for about 95% of people and is confusing for about 25% of people.
"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown."
Ayn Rand
There will be campfire and chocolates (in case of dementors).
Is this supposed to be funny?
Or is it because you are actually so afraid that if you don't imitate the holiday of the dominant religion of the USA something bad will happen to you?
The only part I object to what you wrote is emotions shouldn't interfere with cognition.
This is an ideal which Objectivists believe in, but it is difficult/impossible to actually achieve. I've noticed that as I've gotten older, emotions interfere with my cognition less and less and I am happy about that. You can define cognition how you wish, but given the number of people who see it as separate from emotion it's probably worth having a backup definition in case you want to talk to those people.
RE: emotions, affect, moods. I do think that emotions should be considered when making rational decisions, but they are not the tools by which we come to decisions, here's an example.
If you want to build a house to shelter your family, your emotional connection to your family is not a tool you will use to build the house. It's important to have a strong motivation to do something, but that motivation is not a tool. You'll still need hammers, drills, etc to build the house.
I believe we can and should use drugs (I include naturally occurring hormones) to modify our emotions in order to better achieve our goals.
If your hunches have a bad track record, then you should learn to ignore them, but if they do work, then ignoring them is irrational.
If your hunches have a good track record, I think you should explore that and come up with a rational explanation, and make sure it's not just a coincidence. Additionally, while following your hunches isn't inherently bad, rational people shouldn't be convinced of an argument merely based on somebody else's hunch.
Even if emotions are suboptimal tools in virtually all cases (which I find unlikely), that doesn't mean that ignoring them is a good idea.
Nobody is suggesting we ignore emotions, merely that we don't let them interfere with rational thought (in practice this is very difficult).
It's like how getting rid of overconfidence bias and risk aversion is good, but getting rid of overconfidence bias OR risk aversion is a terrible idea. .
I don't follow this argument. Your biases can be evaluated absolutely, or relative to the general population. If everybody is biased underconfidence, the being biased in towards overconfidence can be an advantage. There's a similar argument for risk aversion.
Everything we've added since emotion was built around emotion. If emotion will give you an irrational bias, then you'll evolve a counter bias elsewhere
I'm not sure I agree with this, do you think that The Big Bang Theory is based on emotion? You can draw a path from emotion to the people who came up with the Big Bang Theory, but you can do that with things other than emotion as well.
My issue with emotions is only partly that they cause biases, it's also that you can't rely on other people having the same emotions as you. So you can use emotions to better understand your own goals. But you won't be able to convince people who don't know your emotions that your goals are worth achieving.
Very interesting... it would seem that Rand doesn't actually define emotion consistently, that was not the definition I was using. But the Ayn Rand Lexicon has 11 different passages related to emotions.
Rand doesn't deny that emotions are part of rationality, she denies that they are tools of rationality. It is rational to try to make yourself experience positive emotions, but to say "I have a good feeling about this" is not a rational statement, it's an emotional statement. It isn't something that should interfere with cognition.
As for emotions affecting humans behavior, I think all mammals have emotions, so it's not easy for humans to discard them over a few generations of technological evolution. Emotions were useful in the ancestral environment, they are no longer as useful as they once were.
How does the definition you link to contradict Rand's statement? You can acknowledge emotions as real while denying their usefulness in your cognitive process.
"Emotions are not tools of cognition"
Ayn Rand
I don't know, but if you ask intelligent people what they think about x-risk related to AI it's unlikely they'll come to the exact same conclusions that MIRI etc have.
If you present the ideas of MIRI to intelligent people, some of them will be excited and want to help with donations or volunteering. Others will dismiss you and think you are wrong/crazy.
So to expand on my question... if you find intelligent people who disagree with MIRI on significant things, will you work with them?
OK, so it seems like FLI promotes the conclusions of other x-risk organizations, but doesn't do any actual research itself.
Do you think it's not worth questioning the conclusions that other organizations have come to? Seems to me that if there are four xrisk organizations (each with reasonably strong connections to each other) there should be some debate between them.
I cringe at the term x-risk.
Can you think of another five letter description? The shorter the term, the easier of a time people will have remembering it and thus the meme will spread faster than a longer term.
We consider ourselves a sister organization to FHI, CSER and MIRI, and touch base with them often
How would you differentiate yourself from those organizations?
What makes facts surprising and is it the same for you and your conversation partner? If they take your question as an insult, you probably have different knowledge of the field in question (they could be completely wrong, or you could be ignorant of something that is well known to some).
I think it's a better idea to explain why you're surprised.
Does CFAR feel developed enough that it would prefer money to feedback?
I.E, I presume there are many people out there who could help CFAR either by dedicating a few hours of there time thinking about how to improve CFAR or earning money to donate to CFAR.
The problem is that (according to Kahneman and Tverksy) losses are felt more strongly than gains. So it requires a good deal of effort to not be offended.