Chrysophylax

• Chrysophylax 2 May 2021 14:40 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Strong Ev­i­dence is Common

  You seem to have made two logical errors here. First, “This belief is extreme” does not imply “This belief is true”, but neither does it imply “This belief is false”. You shouldn’t divide beliefs into “extreme” and “non-extreme” buckets and treat them differently.

  Second, you seem to be using “extreme” to mean both “involving very high confidence” and “seen as radical”, the latter of which you might mean to be “in favour of a proposition I assign a very low prior probability”.

  Restating my first objection, “This belief has prior odds of 1:1024” is exactly 10 bits of evidence against the belief. You can’t use that information to update the probability downward, because −10 bits is “extreme”, any more than you can update the probability upward because −10 bits is “extreme”. If you could do that, you would have a prior that immediately requires updating based on its own content (so it’s not your real prior), and I’m pretty sure you would either get stuck in infinite loops of lowering and raising the probability of some particular belief (based on whether it is “extreme” or not), or else be able to pump out infinite evidence for or against some belief.

• Chrysophylax 27 Mar 2014 1:56 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

  Look at what warfare was like in China or Japan before major Western influences (not that is was much better after Western influences).

  Vastly inferior to, say, warfare as practiced by 14th-century England, I’m sure. I also point you towards the Rape of Nanking.

  Compare that with any group besides “The West”. They would do much worse things and not even bother angsting about it.

  You are comparing modern westerners with historical Buddhists. Try considering contemporary Buddhists (the group it is blindingly obvious I was referring to, given that the discussion was about the present and whether contempary non-western groups all lack moral qualms about torture).

  I observe that you are being defensive.

• Chrysophylax 27 Mar 2014 0:48 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Lavender’s comment on: Con­ver­sa­tion Halters

  Read the linked post. The main reasons we can’t define words however we like are because that leads to not cutting reality at the joints and because humans are bad at avoiding hidden inferences. Not being a biologist, I can’t assign an ideal definition to “duck”, but I do know that calling lobsters ducks is clearly unhelpful to reasoning. For a more realistic example, note the way Reactionaries (Michael Anissimov, Mencius Moldbug and such) use “demotist” to associate things that are clearly not similar.

• Chrysophylax 27 Mar 2014 0:44 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Stranger Than History

  Firstly, that explanation has a very low probability of being true. Even if we assume that important systematic differences in IQ existed for the relevant period, we are making a very strong claim when we say that slavery is a direct result of lower IQ. As you yourself point out, Arabs also historically enslaved Europeans; one might also observe that the Vikings did an awful lot of enslaving. Should we therefore conclude that the Nordic peoples are more intelligent than the Slavs and Anglo-Saxons?

  Secondly, your objection now reduces to “other people in history were predjudiced against blacks, so modern prejudice is probably not a consequence of slavery”. Obviously it reduces the probability, but by a very small amount. Other people have also been angry with Bob; nevertheless, it remains extremely probable that I am angry because he just punched me.

  Are you seriously trying to argue that the prejudice against blacks in Europe and the USA is not a consequence of the slave trade?

• Chrysophylax 27 Mar 2014 0:08 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Stranger Than History

  I’ve read it. Views about black people in the Islamic Golden Age were not the cause of views about black people in the nations participating in the transatlantic slave trade; a quick check of Wikipedia confirms that slavery as a formal institution had to redevelop in the English colonies, as chattel slavery had virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest and villeinage was largely gone by the beginning of the 17th century. One might as well argue that the ethic of recipricocity in modern Europe owes its origin to Confucian ren.

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 19:06 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

  If we define all deliberate infliction of pain as torture then we lose the use of a useful concept. You are not cutting reality at the joint.

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 19:01 UTC

  −2 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

  But the big jump was in karma, not karma-for-the-month. My karma-for-the-month went down by two and my karma went down by 25. I’m now on {20, 5}, which is inconsistent with the {12, −2} and {16, 2} from earlier today.

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 15:43 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

  Thank you. I’m still confused, though, because I started out at 0 karma for the month, making the changes in the numbers non-equal. I’m now on {16, 2}, which is consistent with {12,-2}, though.

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 10:10 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

  Counterexample: most Buddhists.

  Your enemies (and, you know, the rest of humanity) are not innately evil: there are very few people who will willingly torture people. There are quite a lot of people who will torture horrible mockeries of humanity /​ the Enemy, and an awful lot of people who will torture people because someone in authority told them to, but very few people who feel comfortable with torturing things they consider people. The Chinese governement does some pretty vile things; I nevertheless doubt that every Party bureaucrat would be happy to be involved in them.

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 9:43 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Stranger Than History

  Are there any countries that allow gay marriage that don’t have a longish history of Christianity?

  No. There are 17 countries that allow it and 2 that allow it in some jurisdictions. A list may be found here: http://​​www.pewforum.org/​​2013/​​12/​​19/​​gay-marriage-around-the-world-2013/​​

  There have been plenty of cultures where homosexuality was accepted; classical Greece and Rome, for example. Cultures where marriage is predominantly a governmental matter rather than a religious one are all, as far as I am aware, heavily influenced by the cultures of western Europe. One might also observe that all of these countries are industrial or post-industrial, and have large populations of young people with vastly more economic and sexual freedom than occured before the middle of the 20th century. One might also observe that China, Japan and South Korea seem to be the only countries at this level of economic development that were not culturally dominated by colonial states.

  The fact that a history of Christianity is positively correlated with approval for gay marriage does not imply that Christian memes directly influence stances on homosexuality. Christianity spread around the world alongside other memes (such as democracy and case law). Those countries where European colonies were culturally dominant also received the industrial revolution and the immense increases in personal rights that came as a consequence of the increased economic and political power of the working class. One might also point out that thinking black people are inferior is a meme that arose from the slave trade in Christian semi-democracies.

  There seems to be abundant evidence that the Abrahamic religions have strongly influenced societal views worldwide with regard to sexual morals; indeed, I cannot imagine a remotely plausible argument for this being untrue. I also wish to observe that Eastern Orthodox Christianity survived the USSR and still affects cultural values in Russia; it seems highly improbable that it did not influence Russian culture in the 1930s.

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 8:49 UTC

  3 points

  on: Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

  Yet another karma query: yesterday my karma was 37. Today my karma is 12 and I am at −2 karma for the last 30 days. What’s going on here?

• Chrysophylax 24 Mar 2014 0:08 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Stranger Than History

  I agree with the statements of fact but not with the inference drawn from them. While Jiro’s argument is poorly expressed, I think it is reasonable to say that opposition to homosexuality would not have been the default stance of the cultures of or derived from Europe if not for Christianity being the dominant religion in previous years. While the Communists rejected religion, they did not fully update on this rejection, but rather continued in many of the beliefs that religion had caused to be part of their culture.

  I am not sure that “the atheists actually thought gay marriage was a sane idea but didn’t say so for fear of how they’d look to their religious neighbors” was Jiro’s position, but I think that it is a straw man.

• Chrysophylax 23 Mar 2014 23:57 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Stranger Than History

  An argument is valid if, given true premises, it always and exclusively produces true conclusions. A valid argument in this context might therefore be “given that we wish to maximise social welfare (A) and that allowing gay marriage increases social welfare (B), we should allow gay marriage (C)”. A and B really do imply C. Some people contend that the argument is not sound (that is, that its conclusion is false) because at least one of its premises is not true (reflecting reality); I am not aware of anyone who contends that it is invalid.

  Jiro is contending that people who oppose gay marriage do not do so because they have valid arguments for doing so; if we were to refute their arguments they would not change their minds. Xe has argued above that people (as a group) did not stop being anti-homosexuality for rational reasons, i.e. because the state of the evidence changed in important ways or because new valid arguments were brought to bear, but rather for irrational reasons, such as old people dying.

  The fact that Jiro considers it rational to believe that gay marriage is a good thing, and thus that people’s beliefs are now in better accord with an ideal reasoner’s beliefs (“are more rational”), does not contradict Jiro’s belief that popular opinion changed for reasons other than those that would affect a Bayesian. Eugine_Nier appears to be conflating two senses of “rational”.

  As RichardKennaway observes, we ought to ask why Jiro believes that we should allow gay marriage. I suspect the answer will be close to “because it increases social welfare”, which seems to be a well-founded claim.

Democ­racy and in­di­vi­d­ual liberty; de­cen­tral­ised pre­dic­tion markets

• Chrysophylax 28 Jan 2014 19:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: VincentYu’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Upvoted.

  To clarify: VNM-utility is a decision utility, while utilitarianism-utility is an experiential utility. The former describes how a rational agent behaves (a rational agent always maximises VNM-utility) and is therefore ordinal, as it doesn’t matter what values we assign to different outcomes as long as the preference order does not change. The latter describes what values should be ascribed to different experiences and is therefore cardinal, as changing the numbers matters even when decisions don’t change.

• Chrysophylax 28 Jan 2014 18:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: On Vot­ing for Third Parties

  Really? By whose definition of “bad laws”? There are an awful lot of laws that I don’t like (for exaple, ones mandating death for homosexual sex) but that doesn’t mean I’d like to screw up the governance of an entire country by not allowing any bills whatsoever to pass until a reform bill passed. That’s a pretty good way to get a civil war. Look, for example, at Thailand, which is close to separating into two states because the parties are so opposed. Add two years of legislative gridlock and they’d hate each other even more; I am reasonably confident that gridlock in Thailand would lead to mass civil unrest and a potential secession of the northeast, which might well be violent.

• Chrysophylax 16 Jan 2014 21:33 UTC

  −2 points

  in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: Stupid Ques­tions Thread—Jan­uary 2014

  Yes, due to those being standard terms in economics. Overinvestment occurs when investment is poorly allocated due to overly-cheap credit and is a key concept of the Austrian school. Underconsumption is the key concept of Keynesian economics and the economic views of every non-idiot since Keynes; even Friedman openly declared that “we are all Keynesians now”. Keynesian thought, which centres on the possibility of prolonged deficient demand (like what caused the recession), wasn’t wrong, it was incomplete; the reason fine-tuning by demand management doesn’t work simply wasn’t known until we had the concept of the vertical long-run Phillips curve. Both of these ideas are currently being taught to first-year undergraduates.

• Chrysophylax 15 Jan 2014 17:02 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Stupid Ques­tions Thread—Jan­uary 2014

  Robert Nozick:

  Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose . . . the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster’s maw, in order to increase total utility.

  My point is that humans mostly act as though they are utility monsters with respect to non-humans (and possibly humans they don’t identify with); they act as though the utility of non-sapient animal is vastly smaller than the utility of a human and so making the humans happy is always the best option. Some people put a much higher value on animal welfare than others, but there are few environmentalists willing to say that there is some number of hamsters (or whatever you assign minimal moral value to) worth killing a child to protect.

• Chrysophylax 14 Jan 2014 21:45 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: pnrjulius’s comment on: Se­ri­ous Stories

  Because a child who doesn’t find pain unpleasant is really, really handicapped, even in the modern world. The people who founded A Gift of Pain had a daughter with pain asymbolia who is now mostly blind, amongst other disabilities, through self-inflicted damage. I’m not sure whether leprosy sufferers have the no-pain or no-suffering version of pain insensitivity (I think the former) but apparently it’s the reason they suffer such damage.

  This book seems to be a useful source for people considering the question of whether pain could be improved.

• Chrysophylax 14 Jan 2014 12:06 UTC

  9 points

  on: What ra­tio­nal­ity ma­te­rial should I teach in my game the­ory course

  Newcombe-style problems, including the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the difference between rationality-as-winning and rationality-as-rituals-of-cognition.