Not having read the other comments, I’d say Eliezer is being tedious.
I’d do whatever the hell I want, which is what I am already doing.
denis_bider
Karma: 92
Interesting stuff about the preservation of phase space volume, though. I appreciate it, I previously knew nothing about that.
Reading today’s fare is a bit like eating unflavored oatmeal. :-)
It seems to me that the person who can read this and understand it, already knows it.
But the person who does not know it, cannot understand it and will be frustrated by reading it.
I’m not sure what your intention is with the whole series of posts, but if you’d like to enligthen the muggles, the trick is to explain it in a concise, striking, unusual, easily understood, entertaining manner.
Of course, that takes genius. :-)
But otherwise you are writing primarily for people who already know it.
In yet other words: some of your posts, I will forward to my wife. Others, I won’t. This one is one of the latter.
I should however note that one of the last mathy posts (Mutual Information) struck a chord with me and caused an “Aha!” moment for which I am grateful.
Specifically, it was this:
I digress here to remark that the symmetry of the expression for the mutual information shows that Y must tell us as much about Z, on average, as Z tells us about Y. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to reconcile this with anything they were taught in logic class about how, if all ravens are black, being allowed to reason Raven(x)->Black(x) doesn’t mean you’re allowed to reason Black(x)->Raven(x). How different seem the symmetrical probability flows of the Bayesian, from the sharp lurches of logic—even though the latter is just a degenerate case of the former.
Insightful!
I think you should go with the advice and post something fun. Especially so if you have “much important material” to cover in following months. No need for a big hurry to lose readers. ;)
Eliezer—the way question #1 is phrased, it is basically a choice between the following:
Be perceived as a hero, with certainty.
Be perceived as a hero with 90% probability, and continue not to be noticed with 10% probability.
This choice will be easy for most people. The expected 50 extra deaths are a reasonable sacrifice for the certainty of being perceived as a hero.
The way question #2 is phrased, it is similarly a choice between the following:
Be perceived as a villain, with certainty.
Not be noticed with 90% probability, and be perceived as a villain with 10% probability.
Again, the choice is obvious. Choose #2 to avoid being perceived as a villain.
If you argue that the above interpretations are then not altruistic, I think the “Repugnant Conclusion” link shows how futile it is to try to make actual “altruistic decisions”.
Not sure if anyone pointed this out, but in a situation where you don’t trust the organizer, the proper execution of 1A is a lot easier to verify than the proper execution of 1B, 2A and 2B.
1A minimizes your risk of being fooled by some hidden cleverness or violation of the contract. In 1B, 2A and 2B, if you lose, you have to verify that the random number generator is truly random. This can be extremely costly.
In option 1A, verification consists of checking your bank account and seeing that you gained $24,000. Straightforward and simple. Hardly any risk of being deceived.
For all your talk about The One, I’m going to start to call you Morpheus.
Eliezer—who is this “the one” you keep talking about? Do you mean Neo? ;)
Joseph—well, people like you aren’t the ones who need to be accompanied to the stadium by the police.
I agree with Eliezer that it seems to be the in-group/out-group dynamic that drives the popularity of sports. The popularity in turn drive the ads, the ads provide a revenue opportunity, and the revenue opportunity drives the high salaries of popular players.
The dynamic seems ridiculous to those of us who find the in-group/out-group dynamic silly. Then again, those of us who find that silly, and so do not contribute to the salaries of football players, still support the high salaries for superstars in other roles. Jerry Seinfeld and Ray Romano probably made more money than most football players delivering a one-to-many service based on humor rather than on identification with a group. Maybe someone who doesn’t understand their humor finds it ridiculous how these guys make so much money pandering to an audience so inept as to enjoy these guys’ unfunniness?
And yet the audience laughs, enjoys it, and pays for a service they perceive as well performed.
I wonder whether people, at some level, might be aware of the silliness of their group identification, but enjoy it nevertheless, just like most of us enjoy sex, even after taking actions to prevent it leading to reproduction, which is its whole evolutionary point.
If that is the case, then those of us who cannot bring ourselves to identify with a group, might be handicapped in a similar sense as a person who doesn’t see the humor in comedy, or a person who derives no joy from sex.
Politics, meanwhile, is tough. I think it’s more productive to provide constructive arguments why a certain policy is sensible, and try to spread support for that policy, than to try a meta-analysis of why existing policies are ineffective, and trying to get people to understand that.
Nature abhors a vacuum: if you have a room filled with ineffective thoughts, concepts, ideas, and you try to take them out, this will create a vacuum which will cause more ineffective ideas to flood in through the cracks in the walls. But if, instead, you fill the room with effective ideas, they will displace the ineffective ones.
Telling people what does not work is much less useful than showing them what does.
Eli: great posts, but you are continuously abusing “the one”, “the one”, “the one”. That’s not how the word “one” is used in the way you are trying to use it. Proper usage is “one”, without “the”.
Furthermore, when the pronoun needs to be repeated, the nicer and more traditional usage is “one … one’s … to one”, and not “one … their … to them”.
See Usage Note here.
In the Verizon case, George can apply the modesty argument and still come up with the conclusion that he is almost certainly right.
He needs to take into account two things: (1) what other people besides Verizon think about the distinction between .002 dollars and .002 cents, and (2) what is the likelihood that Verizon would admit the mistake even if they know there is one.
Admitting the mistake and refunding one customer might as well have the consequence of having to refund tens of thousands of customers and losing millions of dollars. Even if that’s the upstanding and right thing to do for the company, each individual customer support rep will fear that their admitting the facts will lead to them being fired. People whose jobs are at stake will do their best to bluff a belief that .002 == 0.00002, even if they don’t actually believe that’s the case.
Despite your post being entirely correct, if for a moment we ignore the welfare of humanity and consider the welfare of the United States alone, there is a good chance that this irrational overreaction will be remembered, and that it will serve as deterrence to any aspiring attackers for a hundred years to come.
Sometimes irrational wrath pays, especially if you can inflict pain much more effectively than you need to endure it.
The cost to humanity is probably dominated by some 1,000,000 deaths in Iraq, but the cost to the U.S. at least in terms of deaths is comparatively smaller. The Iraq deaths are an externality.
Unquestionably, things get done a lot more by groups of people who are very much alike. Differences in opinions only tend to brake things.
The question is not whether you need people who are different in order to brake the group. The question is whether you’re in the right group to begin with. As per Kuhn, things will get done faster and better if members of the group share a lot of commonalities.
If you’re in the right group, excluding dissenters will allow you to progress faster. But if you’re in the wrong group, then you’re going to be making progress towards the wrong things.
Arguing about politics is helping people. If it makes sense that “a bad argument gets a counterargument, not a bullet,” then it makes sense that frictions among people’s political beliefs should be cooled by allowing everyone to state their case. Not necessarily on this site, but as a general matter, I don’t think that talking about politics is either a mind-killer or time-wasting. For me personally it’s a motivator both to understand more about the facts, so that I can present arguments; to understand more about other people, so I know why they disagree; and to understand more about myself, so that I can make sure that my convictions are solid. I actually believe that trying to find a way to influence politics to become more sensible is the most I can do to make a positive difference in the lives of other people.
Here’s some heroism. :)
dearieme: “Given that WWII showed that race could be dynamite, it’s surely astonishing that so many rich countries have permitted mass immigration by people who are not only of different race, but often of different religion. Even more astonishing that they’ve allowed some groups to keep immigrating even after the early arrivers from those groups have proved to be failures, economically or socially. Did anyone predict that 60 years ago?”
I thought that the excessive tolerances and the aversion to distinguish groups of people based on factual differences are traits that developed as a result of oversensitization from the events of WWII. Hitler’s people engaged in cruel and unjust discrimination, so all discrimination is now cruel and unjust. Hitler’s people (and others before them) engaged in cruel and gruesome eugenics experiments, so all eugenics are cruel and gruesome.
If Hitler did cruel experiments using pasta, pasta would now be known to be bad for everyone.
Louis: “The more recent example is the TV series BattleStar Galactica. Of course it’s unrealistic and biased, but it changed my views on the issues of AGI’s rights. Can a robot be destroyed without a proper trial? Is it OK to torture it? to rape it? What about marrying one? or having children with it (or should I type ‘her’)?”
See this: http://denisbider.blogspot.com/2007/11/weak-versus-strong-law-of-strongest_15.html
You are confused because you misinterpret humanity’s traditional behavior towards other apparently sentient entities in the first place. Humanity’s traditional (and game-theoretically correct) behavior is to (1) be allies with creatures who can hurt us, (2) go to war with creatures who can hurt us and don’t want to be our allies, (3) plunder and exploit creatures that cannot hurt us, regardless of how peaceful they are or how they feel towards us.
This remains true historically whether we are talking about other people, about other nations, or about other animals. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be true for robots. We will ally with and “respect” robots that can hurt us; we will go to war with robots that can hurt us but do not want to be our allies; and we will abuse, mistreat and disrespect any creature that does not have the capacity to hurt us.
Conversely, if the robots reach or exceed human capacities, they will do the same. Whoever is the top animal will be the new “human”. That will be the new “humanity” where their will be reign of “law” among entities that have similar capacities. Entities with lower capacities, such as humans that continue to be mere humans, will be relegated to about the same level as capucin monkeys today. Some will be left “in the wild” to do as they please, some will be used in experiments, some will be hunted, some will be eaten, and so forth.
There is no morality. It is an illusion. There will be no morality in the future. But the ruthlessness of game theory will continue to hold.
mtraven: “Psychopathy is not “not believing in morality”: it entails certain kinds of behaviors, which naive analyses of attribute to “lack of morality”, but which I would argue are a result of aberrant preferences that manifest as aberrant behavior and can be explained without recourse to the concept of morality.”
Exactly. Logically, I can agree entirely with Marquis de Sade, and yet when reading Juliette, my stomach turns around about page 300, and I just can’t read any more about the raping and the burning and the torture.
It is one thing to say that we are all just competing for our desires to be realized, and that no one’s desires are above others. But it is another thing to actually desire the same things as the moralists, or the same thing as the psychos.
I don’t have to invent artificial reasons why psychos are somehow morally inferior, to justify my disliking of, and disagreement with them.