Liberals see the free market as a kind of optimizer run amuck, a dangerous superintelligence with simple non-human values that must be checked and constrained by the government—the friendly SI. Conservatives just reverse the narrative roles.
I like this analogy. So basically, how do you want to balance the power between your two overlords, one much much smarter than you but with non-human values, and the other much dumber than you but with human (mostly) values.
Thanks. I’d love to share this material with people but the format makes it hard as many people seem to have an aversion to a collection of blog posts. I look forward to buying the book so I can loan it to people.
Competed the survey. Thanks for doing this, the results are always interesting.
Does anyone know what happened to the version that was supposed to be reviewed/edited down by a professional so it could be publishable length? There’s so much good stuff there I’d love to be able to send to friend and family but 500k worth of blog posts is much harder to send someone than a nicely published 200k version.
Yes but as soon as you thought of it it becomes a known known :)
The “known knowns” quote got made fun of a lot, but I think it’s really good out of context:
“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
Also, every time I think of that I try to picture the elusive category of “unknown knowns” but I can’t ever think of an example.
I deconverted in large part because of Less Wrong. Looking back at it now, I hadn’t had a strong belief since I was 18 (by which I mean, if you asked most believers what the p(god) is they’d say 100% whereas I might have said 90%) but that might just be my mind going back and fixing memories so present me thinks better of past me.
I’d be happy to do an AMA (I went from Mormon to Atheist) but a couple of the main things that convinced me were:
Seeing that other apologists could make up similar arguments to make just about anything look true (for example, other religious apologists, homeopathy, anti-vaccines, etc)
Seeing the evidence for evolution and specifically, how new information supports true things. That showed me that for true things, new information doesn’t need to be explained away, but actually supports the hypothesis. For example, with evolution discoveries such as carbon dating, the fossil record, and DNA all support it. Those same discoveries have to be explained away via apologetics for religions.
Bayesian thinking. I have an econ background so kind of did this informally but the emphasis from less wrong that once you see evidence against you need to actively lower your probability a bit really helped me. Before I’d done what EY pointed out where you take all of your evidence for and stacked that against this one evidence against and then when the next evidence against comes along you take all your evidence for and stack it against that one evidence, etc.
The value that I want to believe what is true. I had this before but wasn’t as proactive about it.
Before I felt like my belief system was logical and fit the evidence and if someone didn’t believe it was because they hadn’t looked at the evidence and fairly considered it. Seeing people look at the evidence and then cogently explain why they still didn’t believe gave me a “I notice I’m confused” moment.\
etc.
My take away from this is that you need to “shut up and multiply” every single time. Looking at the math skills study, the thought was that people glance at the raw numbers (instead of looking at the ratios) and stop there if they fit their ideological beliefs. If it conflicts with your beliefs though you spend a little longer and figure out you need to look a the ratio. So if we train ourselves to always “shut up and multiply” hopefully some of this effect will go away. Maybe a follow-up study to see if people who actually do the math still get it wrong?
I’m already booked that day but if it’s a weekly thing I wouldn’t mind stopping by sometime.
Hmm, the microeconomics of outsourcing child production to countries with cheaper human-manufacturing costs… then we import them once they’re university aged? You know you’ve got a good econ paper going when it could also be part of a dystopia novel plot.
would you seriously, given the choice by Alpha, the Alien superintelligence that always carries out its threats, give up all your work, and horribly torture some innocent person, all day for fifty years in the face of the threat of a 3^^^3 insignificant dust specks barely inconveniencing sentient beings? Or be tortured for fifty years to avoid the dust specks?
Likewise, if you were faced with your Option 1: Save 400 Lives or Option 2: Save 500 Lives with 90% probability, would you seriously take option 2 if your loved ones were included in the 400? I wouldn’t. Faced with statistical people I’d take option 2 every time. But make Option 1: Save 3 lives and those three lives are your kids or option 2: Save 500 statistical lives with 90% probability I don’t think I’d hesitate to pick my kids.
In some sense, I’m already doing that. For the cost of raising three kids, I could have saved something like 250 statistical lives. So I don’t know that our unwillingness to torture a loved one is a good argument against the math of the dust specks.
Can players coordinate strategies? There’s an advantage if two or more submitter can identify themselves (in game) and cooperate.
If there is an ‘m’ reward, you get the same reward whether or not you choose to hunt? I’m confused how this adds incentive to hunt when your goal is to “get more food than other players,” not “get food.”
Are the sequences still going to be made into a publishable book? If so, how is that process coming along?
Is there a thread somewhere about effective ways to plant the ‘rationalist seed’ in your children? I’d like to see something other than anecdotes ideally. But just ideas about books to read, shows to watch, or places to visit for different ages of children would be useful to me. For example,
My 2 and 4 year old both love Introductory Calculus For Infants
And a couple of years ago I got the the Star War ABC which lead to a HUGE love of Star Wars. I’m hoping that turns into a love of Science Fiction...
Maybe it’s just where my mind was when I read it but I interpreted the quote as meaning something more like:
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
Tim Harford has some relevant comments:
What does that tell us – that prisoners take care of each other? Or that they fear reprisals?
Probably not reprisals: they were promised anonymity. It’s really not clear what this result tells us. We knew already that people often co-operate, contradicting the theoretical prediction. We also know, for instance, that economics students co-operate more rarely than non-economists – perhaps because they’ve been socialised to be selfish people, or perhaps because they just understand the dilemma better.
You think the prisoners just didn’t understand the nature of the dilemma?
That’s possible. The students were much better educated and most students had played laboratory games before. Maybe the prisoners co-operated because they were too confused to betray each other.
That seems speculative.
It is speculative, but consider this: the researchers also looked at a variant game in which one player has to decide whether to stay silent or confess, and then the other player decides how to respond. If you play first in this game you would be well-advised to stay silent, because people typically reward you for that. In this sequential game, it was the students, not the prisoners, who were more likely to co-operate with each other by staying silent. So the students were just as co-operative as prisoners but their choice of when to co-operate with each other made more logical sense.
This is what I was trying to avoid with my asterisk, i.e., just talking about stealing candy does raise the probability they stole the candy. But once they’re talking, confessing raises the probability they did it so not confessing should lower it.
On reflection, when my original question was designed to help make situations clearer, using an example that I felt I had to asterisk probably wasn’t wise.
How would I update my probabilities if I saw the opposite piece of evidence? What I’m trying to get at here is that “A” and “not A” can’t really be evidences for the same thing. And often it’s more obvious which way “not A” is pointing. A couple of examples:
I saw someone suggesting that maybe a certain Mr. Far Wright was secretly gay because, when the subject was broached, he had publicly expressed his dislike of homosexuality. There was even a wiki page (that I now can’t find) laying out the “law” that the more a person sounds like they hate gays the more likely they are to be gay. At first this sounded appealing*, but then I applied the “not A” test: “if Mr. Far Wright’s sexual orientation is unknown and I heard him publicly declare that he loved homosexual behavior, how would I update the probability that he is gay?” In that case, it seems clear that I’d update it towards him being gay. Therefore, it doesn’t really make sense that when Mr. Wright does that opposite—publicly declaring that he hates homosexual behavior—I also update my probability that he is gay.
Or another recent example I had from talking with someone about Mormonism. Someone said that not having the golden plates available for inspection wasn’t really evidence against Joseph Smith’s story because there were several good reasons why they weren’t available. I was about to concede when I realized that a world where the golden plates were observable would be strong evidence for Joseph Smith’s story so a world where they aren’t has to be at least weak evidence against his story. If A moves the probability quite a bit one way, not A has to at least minimally move the probability the other way.
*Sometimes, if all I can observe, is a denial, it is evidence that the person is guilty. For example, if I walked through the door and the first thing I heard was my toddler denying to my wife that he took the candy, it increases my probability that he did take candy. But too my wife—who already has the evidence that led her to make the accusation—a denial is evidence against him taking the candy (it increases the relative odds that his brother did it instead).
Did I keep all of my reasoning here correct? If not, there might be a better way to express the idea with a Bayesian network.
Typically, as long as the expense is deemed prudent by regulators, utilities are permitted to ‘rate base’ the expense and earn a return on investment. If PG&E think it’s politically possible to increase expenses by $20-30B because there’s a good narrative to offset complaints of rising utility prices, it’s the selfish thing to do. The times that require strict scrutiny for investor-owned utilities is when they jump on the bandwagon of a politically popular spending proposal (wise infrastructure investments comes from experts getting the politicians on board, not politicians getting the experts on board).