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Comment by Taurus_Londono on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-02-22T00:43:42.705Z · LW · GW

I selected to cooperate.

If I'd thought the financial incentive to defect was greater, I may have been tempted to do so... ...but isn't it interesting that even a modest material reward didn't have the same effect as the incentive to lie about IQ?

Comment by Taurus_Londono on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-02-22T00:27:23.889Z · LW · GW

Have you read Correspondence Bias?

Comment by Taurus_Londono on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-20T20:00:44.555Z · LW · GW

"People were really really bad at giving their answers in millions. I got numbers anywhere from 3 (really? three million people in Europe?) to 3 billion (3 million billion people = 3 quadrillion)."

Two-thirds have a college degree and roughly one third are European citizens. Does this bode well for the affirmation about self-reported IQ?

"...so it was probably some kind of data entry error..." "Computers (practical): 505, 30.9%"

If people lie about IQ, why not just check Wikipedia and cheat on the Europe question? I lied about IQ, but I did not cheat for the Europe question. I suspect that I am not alone.

IQ is arguably as direct a challenge to self-appraisal as you can put to anyone who would self-select for an LW survey. Because mean for HBD was 2.7, many of the respondents may feel that IQ does not fall into predictable heritability patterns by adulthood (say, 27.4 years old). Could it be intertwined with self-attribution bias and social identity within a community devoted to rational thinking? Perhaps they don't realize that rational decision-making =/= improved performance on Raven's Progressive Matrices.

If I was a member of a health club for 2.62 years, ipso facto, would I be inclined to self-report as physically fit/strong/healthy (especially if I thought I had control over said variable, and that it wasn't largely the result of inheritance and environmental factors in a seemingly distant childhood)?

Self-reported IQ data via an online survey: robust? C'mon, you're smarter than that...

Comment by Taurus_Londono on Circular Altruism · 2013-11-29T16:28:43.601Z · LW · GW

Raise your hand if you (yes you, the person reading this) will submit to 50 years of torture in order to avert "least bad" dust speck momentarily finding its way into the eyes of an unimaginably large number of people.

Why was it not written "I, Eliezer Yudkowsky, should choose to submit to 50 years of torture in place of a googolplex people getting dust specks in their eyes"?

Why restrict yourself to the comforting distance of omniscience?

Did Miyamoto Musashi ever exhort the reader to ask his sword what he should want? Why is this not a case of using a tool as an end in and of itself rather than as a means to achieve a desired end?

Are you irrational if your something to protect is yourself...from torture?

Has anyone ever addressed whether or not this applies to the AGI Utility Monster whose experiential capacity would presumably exceed the ~7 billion humans who should rationally subserve Its interests (whatever they may be)?

Comment by Taurus_Londono on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2013-11-22T18:49:20.043Z · LW · GW

Feedback, FWIW:

  • Can you not infer "relationship status" from "number of current partners"?
  • Profession: No "Chemistry"?? ... three choices for "computers," you nicely distinguish finance/economics as separate from "business," and the same for the "statistics" and "mathematics" people, but the central science has to fall under "other hard science"?
Comment by Taurus_Londono on [deleted post] 2013-06-30T14:16:55.141Z

Comment by Taurus_Londono on Variable Question Fallacies · 2013-04-12T17:15:00.061Z · LW · GW

"Oh my gosh! 'The Sun goes around the Earth' is true for Hunga Huntergatherer, but for Amara Astronomer, 'The Sun goes around the Earth' is false! There is no fixed truth!" The deconstruction of this sophomoric nitwittery is left as an exercise to the reader.

An apt way to put it. That this worthless dimestore philosophy so often underlies contemporary contemplative discourse by relatively intelligent people never ceases to bewilder and sadden me. (see example below)

Comment by Taurus_Londono on Fallacies of Compression · 2013-04-08T21:22:53.608Z · LW · GW

...a team of neurologists investigated a 40Hz electrical rhythm...

For the sake of the blook; neuroscientists, not neurologists. Words can be wrong.