Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 12,843
Sure. There’s lots of things that aren’t yet possible to collect evidence about. No given conception of God or afterlife options has been disproven. However, there are lots of competing, incompatible theories, none of which have any evidence for or against. Assigning any significant probability (more than a percent, say) to any of them is unjustified. Even if you want to say 50⁄50 that some form of deism will be revealed after death, there are literally thousands of incompatible conceptions of how that works. And near-infininte possibilities that haven’t become popular. Note that if it turns out that consciousness is physical and just ends when the physical support for it terminates, then nobody will be able to observe that. It’s a permanent “no evidence” situation.
All that said, it’s hard to argue against someone else’s choice of priors (what they believe before evidence becomes available). Maybe they have access to experiences you don’t. Maybe they weight some kinds of social evidence more heavily (the ‘prophets’ theory that there are historical or current people with more direct connections). Maybe they’re even right—you don’t have access to any counterevidence, right? By “hard to argue”, I mostly mean “hard to be sure yourself”, but also literally “not worth arguing”. We’ll all find out soon enough, right?
Or maybe it’s all relative—it’s true for them, and not for you. Or maybe it’s weirder than we can imagine.
I didn’t downvote this, because it seems good-faith and isn’t harmful. But I really dislike this “friendly” style of writing, and it doesn’t fit well on lesswrong. It’s very hard to find things that are concrete enough to understand whether I disagree or not. Rhetorical questions (especially that you don’t answer) really detract from understanding your POV. Some specifics:
But most of us patch together a little of this and a little of that and try to muddle through with a philosophy that’s something of a crazy quilt.
Citation needed. In fact, purpose of statement needed—what does this actually assert, and how does it help in understanding … anything?
In either case you are asked whether you will sacrifice one life to save many, and so from one perspective the two story variants seem to be essentially identical, only differing in inessential details.
But only a TINY bit of reflection indicates that the differences are nowhere near inessential. Choosing between 5 people who’ve gotten themselves tied to the railroad tracks vs 1 person who has is simply a different situation than pushing an innocent bystander off a bridge. You don’t need to resort to a sledgehammer of different fundamental structures.
And you desperately want to be able to tell the next-of-kin “It wasn’t me—I had no choice!”
Not even close. It was me; I made the choice, and I understand that it sucks. For those who did not pull the lever/push the innocent, they ALSO made the choice, and it sucks.
This would be a lot stronger if it acknowledged how few lies have the convenient fatal flaw of a chocolate allergy. Many do, and it’s a good overall process, but it’s nowhere near as robust as implied.
Note that I disagree that it’s not applicable when you don’t already suspect deception—it’s useful to look for details and inconsistency when dealing with any fallible source of information—doesn’t matter whether it’s an intentional lie, or a confused reporter, or an inapplicable model, truth the only thing that’s consistent with itself and with observations.
This is a fundamental truth for all commodities and valuable things. They’re fungible, but not positionally identical, and not linearly aggregable. This is why we prefer to talk about “utility” over “quantity” in game theory discussions.
Market cap is meaningful in some sense—the price in a liquid market isn’t just randomly the last price used, it’s the equilibrium price of a marginal share. That’s the price that current holders don’t want to sell for less, and people with money don’t want to buy or more. That equilibrium is real information.
But it’s still only for the marginal share (or block). We don’t know what the value/quantity curve looks like, or how it will change if demand changes. A thing is worth what it will bring. We just don’t know what the total mass of shares will bring.
“something like that” isn’t open enough. “or something else entirely” seems more likely than “something like that”. Many more than 2 groups (family-sized coalitions) is an obvious possibility, but there are plenty of other strategies used by primitive malthusian societies—infanticide being a big one, and ritual killings being another. According to Wikipedia, Jared Diamond suggests cannibalism for Rapa Nui.
Looking at Wikipedia (which I should have done earlier), there’s very little evidence for what specific things changed during the collapse.
In any case, it’s tenuous enough that one shouldn’t take any lessons or update your models based on this.
In the medium-term reduced-scarcity future, the answer is: lock them into a VR/experience-machine pod.
edit: sorry, misspoke. In this future, humans are ALREADY mostly in these pods. Criminals or individuals who can’t behave in a shared virtual space simply get firewalled into their own sandbox by the AI. Or those behaviors are shadowbanned—the perpetrator experiences them, the victim doesn’t.
I nominate NYC, and I assert that LA is an inferior choice for this. Source: John Carpenter/Kurt Russel movies.
In a sufficiently wealthy society we would never kill anyone for their crimes.
In a sufficiently wealthy society, there’re far fewer forgivable/tolerable crimes. I’m opposed to the death penalty in current US situation, mostly for knowledge and incentive reasons (too easy to abuse, too hard to be sure). All of the arguments shift in weight by a lot if the situation changes. If the equilibrium shifts significantly so that there are fewer economic reasons for crimes, and fewer economic reasons not to investigate very deeply, and fewer economic reasons not to have good advice and oversight, there may well be a place for it.
This was my thinking as well. On further reflection, and based on OP’s response, I realize there IS a balance that’s unclear. The list contains some false-positives. This is very likely just by the nature of things—some are trolls, some are pure fantasy, some will have moved on, and only a very few are real threats.
So the harm of making a public, anonymous, accusation and warning is definitely nonzero—it escalates tension for a situation that has passed. The harm of failing to do so in the real cases is also nonzero, but I expect many of the putative victims know they have a stalker or deranged enemy who’d wish them dead, and the information is “just” that this particular avenue has been explored.
That balance is difficult. I philosophically lean toward “open is better than secret, and neither is as good as organized curation and controlled disclosure”. Since there’s no clear interest by authorities, I’d publish. And probably I’d do so anonymously as I don’t want the hassle of having potential murderers know about me.
Can you explore a bit more about why you can’t ethically dump it on the internet? From my understanding, this is information you have not broken any laws to obtain, and have made no promises as to confidentiality.
If not true publication, what keeps you from sending it to prosecutors and police? They may or may not act, but that’s true no matter who you give it to (and true NOW of you).
People who have a lot of political power or own a lot of capital, are unlikely to be adversely affected if (say) 90% of human labor becomes obsolete and replaced by AI.
That’s certainly the hope of the powerful. It’s unclear whether there is a tipping point where the 90% decide not to respect the on-paper ownership of capital.
so long as property rights are enforced, and humans retain a monopoly on decisionmaking/political power, such people are not-unlikely to benefit from the economic boost that such automation would bring.
Don’t use passive voice for this. Who is enforcing which rights, and how well can they maintain the control? This is a HUGE variable that’s hard to control in large-scale social changes.
Specifically, “So, the islanders split into two groups and went to war.” is fiction—there’s no evidence, and it doesn’t seem particularly likely.
Well, there are possible outcomes that make resources per human literally infinite. They’re not great either, by my preferences.
In less extreme cases, a lot depends on your definition of “poverty”, and the weight you put on relative poverty vs absolute poverty. Already in most parts of the world the literal starvation rate is extremely low. It can get lower, and probably will in a “useful AI” or “aligned AGI” world. A lot of capabilities and technologies have already moved from “wealthy only” to “almost everyone, including technically impoverished people”, and this can easily continue.
There’s a wide range of techniques and behaviors that can be called “hypnosis”, and an even wider range of what can be called “a real thing, right?”. Things in the realm of hypnosis (meditation, guided-meditation, self-hypnosis, daily affirmations, etc. have plenty of anecdotal support from adherents, and not a lot of RCTs or formal proof of who it will work for and who it won’t.
There’s a TON of self-help and descriptive writing on the topics of meditation and self-hypnosis. For many people, daily affirmations seem to be somewhat effective in changing their attitude over time. For many, a therapist or guide may be helpful in setting up and framing the hypnosis.
What does “unsafe” mean for this prediction/wager? I don’t expect the murder rate to go up very much, nor life expectancy to reverse it’s upward trend. “Erosion of rights” is pretty general and needs more specifics to have any idea what changes are relevant.
I think things will get a little tougher and less pleasant for some minorities, both cultural and skin-color. There will be a return of some amount of discrimination and persecution. Probably not as harsh as it was in the 70s-90s, certainly not as bad as earlier than that, but worse than the last decade. It’ll probably FEEL terrible, because it was on such a good trend recently, and the reversal (temporary and shallow, I hope) will dash hopes of the direction being strictly monotonic.
This seems like a story that’s unsupported by any evidence, and no better than fiction.
They could have fought over resources in a scramble of each against all, but anarchy isn’t stable.
This seems most likely, and “stable” isn’t a filter in this situation − 1⁄3 of the population will die, nothing is stable. It wouldn’t really be “each against all”, but “small (usually family) coalitions against some of the other small-ish coalitions”. The optimal size of coalition will be dependend on a lot of factors, including ease of defection and strength of non-economic bonds between members.
If you could greatly help her at small cost, you should do so.
This needs to be quantified to determine whether or not I agree. In most cases I imagine (and a few I’ve experienced), I would (and did) kill the animal to end it’s suffering and to prevent harm to others if the animal might be subject to death throes or other violent reactions to their fear and pain.
In other cases I imagine, I’d walk away or drive on, without a second thought. Neither the benefit nor the costs are simple, linear, measurable things.Her suffering is bad.
I don’t have an operational definition of “bad”. I prefer less suffering, all else equal. All else is never equal—I don’t know what alternatives and what suffering (or reduced joy) any given remediation would require, and only really try to estimate them when faced with a specific case.
For the aggregate case, I don’t buy into a simple or linear aggregation of suffering (or of joy or of net value of distinct parts of the universe). I care about myself perhaps two dozen orders of magnitude more than the ant I killed in my kitchen this morning. And I care about a lot of things with a non-additive function—somewhere in the realm of logarithmic. I care about the quarter-million remaining gorillas, but I care about a marginal gorilla much less than 1/250K of that caring.
One challenge I’d have for you / others who feel similar to you, is to try to get more concrete on measures like this, and then to show that they have been declining.
I’ve given some thought to this over the last few decades, and have yet to find ANY satisfying measures, let alone a good set. I reject the trap of “if it’s not objective and quantitative, it’s not important”—that’s one of the underlying attitudes causing the decline.
I definitely acknowledge that my memory of the last quarter of the previous century is fuzzy and selective, and beyond that is secondhand and not-well-supported. But I also don’t deny my own experience that the (tiny subset of humanity) people I am aware of as individuals have gotten much less hopeful and agentic over time. This may well be for reasons of media attention, but that doesn’t make it not real.
Do you think that the world is getting worse each year?
Good clarification question! My answer probably isn’t satisfying, though. “It’s complicated” (meaning: multidimensional and not ordinally comparable).On a lot of metrics, it’s better by far, for most of the distribution. On harder-to-operationally-define dimensions (sense of hope and agency for the 25th through 75th percentile of culturally normal people), it’s quite a bit worse.
Kind of unfortunate that a comms or systems latency destroys civilian airliners. But nice to live in a world where all flyers have $10B per missile/aircraft pair lying around, and everyone trusts each other enough to hand it over (and hand it back later).