And like winning the lottery, it doesn’t provide you with a tremendous amount of status. :\
antigonus
Karma: 493
Do you know of a way where something like this could be practically done and be successful?
This is a moral question. It might be the case that we don’t have any practical ways of convincing people that death is bad, but that doesn’t mean that death isn’t bad.
If you don’t know any such way, then this is a mere distraction and diversion at best—or worse yet, an attempt to use the taboo topics of racial politics in an attempt to mind-kill.
Silas Barta introduced an anology between the deaf case and the hearing case. Atorm responded with a potential disanalogy, and I responded to him by saying that the disanalogy he provided didn’t straightforwardly work. Do you seriously think I’m trying to “mind-kill” anything? I feel you’re being unfair.
No, what you are doing is confusing a claim of moral superiority with a claim of superior ability
I don’t think I’m doing that. In the instrumental sense that “ceteris paribus, hearing people can do more than deaf people,” it’s also true that “ceteris paribus, white people can do more than black people (due to discrimination curtailing opportunities).” Both are purely instrumental claims, and both are fairly trivial in themselves. In the deaf case and in the racial case, all else is not equal. Otherwise, we’d want to specially encourage black parents to adopt white babies instead of conceiving. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, just pointing out that the reasons given are incomplete.
I don’t think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it’s more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful.
In my experience, most people who hate it do so because it’s extremely unfamiliar to them, because they’ve only experienced a handful of examples of it (often the most difficult or “shocking”), and because they mentally associate it with snobbiness.
Also (at the risk of sounding snobby!), it’s generally referred to as “contemporary art.” “Modern art” refers to a period of art history that’s been over for several decades.
They also tend to have better vision than hearing people, I believe.
In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I’m not saying they have more moral worth, I’m saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can’t.
You’re conflating being better at something with being better. “In at least one sense, white people ARE better than black people. All other things being equal, they can pursue more opportunities with less discrimination.” How is that a useful observation?
Sure there are. Use a sufficiently far out reference machine and things go haywire, and you no-longer get a useful implementaion of Occam’s razor.
Key word there being “useful.” “Useful” doesn’t translate to “objectively correct.” Lots of totally arbitrarily set priors are useful, I’m sure, so if that’s your standard, then this whole discussion is again redundant. Anyway, the fact that Occam’s razor-as-we-intuit-it falls out of one arbitrary configuration of the paramaters (reference machine, language and orthography) of the theory isn’t in itself evidence that the theory is amazingly useful, or even particularly true. It could just be evidence that the theory is particularly vulnerable to gerrymandering, and could theoretically be configured to support virtually anything. There is, I believe, a certain polynomial inequality that characterizes the set of primes. But that turns out not to be so interesting, since every set of integers corresponds to a similar such equation.
It seems like you’re saying that, pragmatically speaking, it’s not a problem if we all settle on the same set of formalisms. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to my point, which is that there’s no real objective constraints on the formalism we use, and what’s more, any given formalism could lead to virtually any prior between 0 and 1 for any proposition. So, as I said earlier, Solomonoff doesn’t help very much in objectively guiding our priors. We could just dispense with this Solomonoff business entirely and say, “The problem of priors isn’t an issue if we all just arbitrarily choose the same priors!”
Is there some reason to suspect there isn’t some crazy, gerrymandered orthography such that those facts don’t swamp the priors? Or that, in general, for any two incompatible claims X and Y together with our evidence E, there aren’t two finitely specified orthographies which 1. differ in the relative algorithmic prior probabilities of the translations of X and Y into the orthographies and 2. have this difference survive conditionalizing on E? Because if so, we’re still stuck with a really nasty relativism if Solomonoff is the last word on priors.
I definitely think it’s plausible in some cases, particularly certain mathematical ones. However, I don’t see any reason whatsoever to imagine that our meagre updates swamp the prior for something like Julia Roberts’ location across most/all languages.
I think this is an important topic. Quantum immortality is Very Bad if it turns out playing quantum Russian roulette is the right thing to do.
Although in fairness, you probably shouldn’t expect to be in agony forever. After a certain point in time, you should expect most of your surviving, conscious branches to have lost as much brain function as possible while still remaining alive and conscious. I assume that means you’d lose inessential things like sensory perception or sanity.
Solomonoff induction knows nothing of semantics—it just works on symbol sequences.
Yes, and that’s the source of the problem I was attempting to get at. Solomonoff induction works on sequences of symbols. Julia Roberts being in New York is not a sequence of symbols, although “Julia Roberts being in New York” is. The correct “epistemic” prior probability of the former is not simply synonymous with the “algorithmic” probability of generating the latter, at least not in the way that “bachelor” is synonymous with “unmarried male.” The question therefore is how the two are related, and it seems like the relationship you’re proposing is that they’re equal. But that’s a really bad rule, I think, because we don’t want the probability of Julia Roberts’ location to vary with our language or orthography. So we need something more sophisticated, which is what I’m asking you for.
I’m familiar with Solomonoff induction. I don’t think it can be used to do what you want it to do (though open to be convinced otherwise), which is why I’m trying to ask you to spell out in detail how you think the highly formal mathematical machinery could be applied in principle to a real-world case like this one. In particular, I’m trying to ascertain how exactly you bridge the gap—in a general way—between the purely syntactic algorithmic complexity of a sequence of English letters and the relative probability of the statement that sequence semantically represents.
O.K., let’s imagine I’ve enumerated all the ways E1, E2, E3, … in which I could learn about Julia Roberts’ location. What do I do now?
Could you tell me how to use Solomonoff induction to estimate the prior probability of Julia Roberts being in New York vs. LA vs America vs Paris?
I don’t know of any plausible, objective, truly general methods of calculating priors. Solomonoff induction or whatever isn’t going to help very much.
As far as I can tell, this is just the standard complaint about the (naive?) Principle of Indifference and doesn’t have much to do with decision theory per se. E.g., here’s Keynes talking about a similar case. The most plausible solutions I know of are to either 1. insist that there simply are no rational constraints besides the axioms of probability on how we should weight the various possibilities in the absence of evidence and hence the problem is underdetermined (it depends on our “arbitrary” priors), or 2. accept that this is a real problem with Bayesian epistemology and hope something better comes along that doesn’t model all doxastic attitudes as probabilities.
I don’t think italics should be thrown away, but there are so many ways of expressing contrast in written English that render the use of italics superfluous. More often than not, having decent English composition and arranging your ideas in a logical order will automatically make the contrasts evident. I guess I get peeved when an author assumes I can’t pick up on his distinctions, but maybe it doesn’t bother you.
Loving other men is no more unselfish than loving your car.
This makes little sense to me. Other people, unlike cars, have interests; and loving other people tends to have the effect of causing one to adopt those interests as one’s own. What exactly is unselfishness supposed to look like, if not that?
So it’s bad for deaf people to impair their children’s hearing abilities, because all else being equal, hearing people can do more. By the same token, is it also bad for us to create black rather than white children, since “all else being equal,” discrimination allows white people to do more?
More generally, how do we figure out what to hold fixed—that is, what precisely the “else” is to hold “equal”—when comparing the worthiness of two lives?