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Comment by Sticky on Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions · 2010-06-27T03:48:49.449Z · LW · GW

Most hands of poker are decided without showing the cards. Does that make the cards irrelevant? Of course not; everything that happens is conditioned by the probable outcome if there were a showdown, as judged by the players in the hand. Changing one player's hand could change everything, even if no one else ever sees it.

A change in the way verdicts are reached will be much more powerful, being seen by both sides. Therefore even if nothing is done about the plea bargain system (and something should be done), the key to the game is still the "showdown".

Comment by Sticky on Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions · 2010-06-26T17:22:11.152Z · LW · GW

There may be some other sort of penalty that would both deter recidivism and also deter people from beginning criminality. Corporal punishment, for example.

Comment by Sticky on Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future · 2010-06-26T02:19:49.409Z · LW · GW

It seems unlikely that people would think that way. Taking myself as an example, I favor an extensive reworking of the powers, internal organization, and mode of election of the U.S. House of Representatives. I know that I'm the only person in the world who favors my program, because I invented it and haven't yet described it completely. I've described parts of it in online venues, each of which has a rather narrow, specialist audience, so there might possibly be two or three people out there who agree with me on a major portion of it, but certainly no one who agrees on the whole. That makes me an extreme minority.

There are plenty of extreme minorities I feel no sympathy for at all. Frankly, I think moon-hoax theorists should be shunned.

Comment by Sticky on Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group · 2010-06-10T18:53:51.178Z · LW · GW

I'm in. I live in Kenosha, Wi., on campus at UWP. No car.

Comment by Sticky on The Psychological Diversity of Mankind · 2010-05-15T19:20:48.236Z · LW · GW

Yes, they are.

See: http://nationalcanineresearchcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/pit-bull-placebo-text1.pdf

Comment by Sticky on The Cameron Todd Willingham test · 2010-05-07T15:38:28.742Z · LW · GW

The bias toward false positives is probably especially strong in criminal cases. The archetypal criminal offense is such that it unambiguously happened (not quite like the Willingham case), and in the ancestral human environment there were far fewer people around who could have done it. That makes the priors for everyone higher, which means that for whatever level of probability you're asking for it takes less additional evidence to get there. That a person is acting strangely might well be enough -- especially since you'd have enough familiarity with that person to establish a valid baseline, which doesn't and can't happen in any modern trial system.

Now add in the effects of other cognitive biases: we tend to magnify the importance of evidence against people we don't like and excessively discount evidence against people we do. That's strictly noise when dealing with modern criminal defendants, but ancestral humans actually knew the people in question, and had better reason for liking or disliking them. That might count as weak evidence by itself, and a perfect Bayesian would count it while also giving due consideration to the other evidence. But these weren't just suspects, but your personal allies or rivals. Misweighing evidence could be a convenient way of strengthening your position in the tribe, and having a cognitive bias let you do that in all good conscience. We can't just turn that off when we're dealing with strangers, especially when the media creates a bogus familiarity.

Comment by Sticky on Rationality quotes: May 2010 · 2010-05-07T05:48:41.696Z · LW · GW

Well, unless I've remembered it wrong, only two or three people have ever survived that fall. If I'm wrong, substitute a plane. Or a personal unprotected atmospheric re-entry.

Sometime there really are problems that can't be helped.

Comment by Sticky on Rationality quotes: May 2010 · 2010-05-07T04:49:03.489Z · LW · GW

Someone just threw you off the Golden Gate Bridge.

There's one problem thinking won't much help with.

But then again, to make that point I had to reach for a problem nothing could be done about.

Comment by Sticky on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted · 2010-05-06T23:03:39.640Z · LW · GW

I would argue that people actually take the larger gamble when they enter romantic relationships, certainly when they get married, and probably with some other decisions like that.

Comment by Sticky on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted · 2010-05-06T22:08:49.310Z · LW · GW

So... have you provided her with the arguments?

Comment by Sticky on Single Point of Moral Failure · 2010-04-10T19:04:02.556Z · LW · GW

If I rationalize it to my own satisfaction and/or just don't care, it's indistinguishable from being good.

With the added nastiness of not actually being wrong. Except that if you ever notice yourself thinking this the gig is already up.

Comment by Sticky on Single Point of Moral Failure · 2010-04-10T18:58:29.923Z · LW · GW

This argument fails several ways. First as history. Some of the atrocities happened without central organization -- e.g., Islamic fundamentalists aren't all part of any one organization, although they've created a variety of more or less hierarchical organizations; the displacement of the Indians (which had essentially nothing to do with religion except as a stock of rationalizations for things people would have done anyway) -- and all the others had important elements of individual initiative.

(I must say I found it amusing that you concede that the crimes against humanity committed by atheist states weren't solely the fault of religion. When you start saying things like that, you've spent much too long seeing arguments as weapons to be used on behalf of "your side".)

Second, it refutes a position nobody holds. No religionist believes in a flavor of God-implanted moral sense strong enough to overcome all the various temptations to behave immorally; usually they believe quite the opposite, that it was mostly or totally broken by some sort of Fall. If you find yourself triumphantly refuting a view that cannot in any case survive contact with ordinarily accessible reality, you're probably dealing with strawmen.

Comment by Sticky on It's not like anything to be a bat · 2010-03-31T14:20:48.557Z · LW · GW

Is there a difference between having no subjective experience and having one-millionth the subjective experience of a Tra'bilfin, which are advanced aliens with artificially augmented brains capable of a million times the processing of a current human?

Comment by Sticky on For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books · 2010-03-08T22:54:07.897Z · LW · GW

Your usage of "actual" appears to be based on a false cognate.

Comment by Sticky on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 · 2010-02-22T23:30:38.464Z · LW · GW

Anyone who can travel through time can mount a pretty impressive apocalypse and announce whatever it is about the nature of reality he cares to. He might even be telling the truth.

Comment by Sticky on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych · 2010-02-22T18:04:44.948Z · LW · GW

We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general -- so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.

Comment by Sticky on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych · 2010-02-22T16:24:59.225Z · LW · GW

I'm sure you could contrive a way to kill someone with a bunny.

Comment by Sticky on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych · 2010-02-22T16:18:54.008Z · LW · GW

It wouldn't. That's supposed to be a side effect.

Comment by Sticky on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych · 2010-02-22T15:41:23.287Z · LW · GW

Not photoshop. That's a pacifier with plastic buckteeth on the outside. It's supposed to be funny.

Comment by Sticky on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych · 2010-02-22T06:50:32.270Z · LW · GW

I'm guessing it's because cute rabbits get eaten less than non-cute rabbits, thus exerting selection pressure in favor of cuteness, which presumably is the same in all... something. Mammals?

Sounds a little strained to me, though.

Comment by Sticky on You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof · 2010-02-19T22:42:48.325Z · LW · GW

Although I don't have any references handy, I've seen people argue that Kyoto-like changes in our lifestyles are necessary on ethical grounds apart from global warming. More often they'll simply dismiss any sort of technological solution as a "quick fix" or even as the thing that caused the problem in the first place.

There are quite a few people who would like to abdicate control over the physical world.

Comment by Sticky on Epistemic Luck · 2010-02-12T22:37:26.628Z · LW · GW

The study described in the link only exposed the subject to a single article. The effect might be different for different amounts of exposure.

In my own experience this seems to be the case. When I briefly read politically opposing blogs I find them so obviously stupid that I'm amazed anyone could take the other side seriously, but when I spend a long while doing it I find my views moderating and sometimes even crossing over despite not being convinced by any of their actual arguments, and begin to be embarrassed by figures I normally admire even though most of what I find directed against them are mere pejoratives. Then afterward the effect wears off. I could be unusually easily-led, but I've heard of enough other similar experiences that I doubt it.

Comment by Sticky on How Much Should We Care What the Founding Fathers Thought About Anything? · 2010-02-11T20:21:05.876Z · LW · GW

Well, yes. That's textualism: the decision was made and it's written down right here.

A Council of Elders who make the decision for us is something else altogether.

Comment by Sticky on How Much Should We Care What the Founding Fathers Thought About Anything? · 2010-02-11T14:46:35.042Z · LW · GW

However fundamental they are, they're still subject to some kind of decision-making. There's no way around the difficulty: whoever makes the decision has interests, including an interest in expanding his/their own power. If the decision is too fundamental to be made by the people, then we're saying that precisely the most important matters should be decided by people with interests that may not be those of the people whose interests we're actually trying to promote, which is the general public. If they're that much better than us that this makes sense, it's irrational to leave anything at all to democratic decision-making. Besides, when we give the Supreme Court or the Wise Elders the authority to decide fundamental issues, who gets to decide what a fundamental issue is? Are we going to write it down -- and who interprets this written document?

Comment by Sticky on How Much Should We Care What the Founding Fathers Thought About Anything? · 2010-02-11T07:06:18.282Z · LW · GW

The Constitution is not a complete system of law (it is, if I remember correctly, the shortest national constitution currently in force) -- so, even if we dismiss the amendment process as airily as you do, the strictest originalism doesn't amount to "live under the exact framework set up by a bunch of very flawed 18th century white dudes forever", because most of that framework was in the form of statutory law. It's not clear to me that the amendment process deserves to dismissed the way you did. You call the Founders "very flawed", which is surely true, but many or most of the ways those flaws were reflected in the Constitution have already been addressed, by amendment. I say that simply to avoid any idea that we need some body such as you suggest simply to make adjustments from time to time.

Nevertheless, a thing may be desirable even if we don't actually need it. So, do we want "a process by which some trusted, relatively non-political body gropes their way to the solutions to problems"?

As it stands, this is a contradiction. Deciding upon solutions to public problems is what politics is. You are proposing to take the politics out of political decisionmaking. If it isn't just nonsense, I can only take this to mean taking the democracy out of political decisionmaking. Therefore what's wanted here is a defense of democracy itself.

Let us suppose that we have some way of knowing that the people chosen really are wise (although I can't imagine what test we could apply) -- we still can't trust them. By the very act of distinguishing them from non-members, we give them distinct interests which may well be contrary to the interests of the people. Their very existence as a body is already contrary to the people's interest in self-government. We are primates, after all, and we derive a significant portion of our subjective happiness from our power and status, which means that having a decision made for you rather than making it yourself is a significant disutility. The decisions would need to be of much higher quality to justify this on utilitarian grounds, but we can't trust a council of wise elders to give us decisions good enough, because, as I said, by virtue of their position they have different interests from us.

If an AI were available I would still object, because even if it seems Friendly we can't trust it that much. It might become aware of the fact that it also has interests.

Comment by Sticky on A Much Better Life? · 2010-02-06T18:00:07.561Z · LW · GW

Most people prefer milder drugs over harder ones, even though harder drugs provide more pleasure.

Comment by Sticky on Advancing Certainty · 2010-01-25T23:26:47.338Z · LW · GW

If whoever controls the simulation knows that Tyrrell/me/komponisto/Eliezer/etc. are reasonably reasonable, there's little to be gained by modeling all the evidences that might persuade me. Just include the total lack of physical evidence tying the accused to the room where the murder happened, and I'm all yours. I'm sure I care more than I might have otherwise because she's pretty, and obviously (obviously to me, anyway) completely harmless and well-meaning, even now. Whereas, if we were talking about a gang member who's probably guilty of other horrible felonies, I'd still be more convinced of innocence than I am of some things I personally witnessed (since the physical evidence is more reliable than human memory), but I wouldn't feel so sorry for the wrongly convicted.

Comment by Sticky on Advancing Certainty · 2010-01-25T15:17:34.354Z · LW · GW

What possible world would that be? If it should turn out that the Italian government is engaged in a vast experiment to see how many people it can convince of a true thing using only very inadequate evidence (and therefore falsified the evidence so as to destroy any reasonable case it had), we could, in principle, discover that. If the simulation simply deleted all of her hair, fiber, fingerprint, and DNA evidence left behind by the salacious ritual sex murder, then I can think of two objections. First, something like Tyrrell McAllister's second-order simulation, only this isn't so much a simulated Knox in my own head, I think, as it is a second-order simulation implemented in reality, by conforming all of reality (the crime scene, etc.) to what it would be if Knox were innocent. Second, an unlawful simulation such as this might seem to undermine any possible belief I might form, I could still in principle acquire some knowledge of it. Suppose whoever is running the simulation decides to talk to me and I have good reason to think he's telling the truth. (This last is indistinguishable from "suppose I run into a prophet" -- but in an unlawful universe that stops being a vice.)

ETA: I suppose if I'm entertaining the possibility that the simulator might start telling me truths I couldn't otherwise know then I could, in principle, find out that I live in a simulated reality and the "real" Knox is guilty (contrary to what I asserted above). I don't think I'd change my mind about her so much as I would begin thinking that there is a guilty Knox out there and an innocent Knox in here. After all, I think I'm pretty real, so why shouldn't the innocent Amanda Knox be real?

Comment by Sticky on Advancing Certainty · 2010-01-24T22:58:39.374Z · LW · GW

Perhaps it's being downvoted because of my strange speculation that the stars are unreal -- but it seems to me that if this is a simulation with such a narrow purpose as fooling komponisto/me/us/somebody about the Knox case is would be more thrifty to only simulate some narrow portion of the world, which need not include Knox herself. Even then, I think, it would make sense to say that my beliefs are about Knox as she is inside the simulation, not some other Knox I cannot have any knowledge of, even in principle.

Comment by Sticky on Advancing Certainty · 2010-01-23T19:25:04.115Z · LW · GW

But surely any statement one could make about Amanda Knox is only about the Amanda Knox in this world, whether she's a fully simulated human or something less. Perhaps only the places I actually go are fully simulated, and everywhere else is only simulated in its effects on the places I go, so that the light from distant stars are supplied without bothering to run their internal processes; in that case, the innocent Amanda Knox only exists insofar as the effects that an innocent Amanda Knox would have on my part of the world are implemented. Even so, my beliefs about the case can only be about the figure in my own world. It doesn't matter that there could be some other world where Amanda Knox is a murderess and Hitler was a great humanitarian.