Upvoted for successfully correcting my confusion about this example and helping me get updating a little better.
Edit: wow, this was a really old comment reply. How did I just notice it...
GDC3
Karma: 199
I think it’s important to try to convert the reason to a consequentialist reason every time actually; it’s just that one isn’t done at that point, you have to step back and decide if the reason is enough. Like the murder example one needs to avoid dismissing reasons for being in the wrong format.
“I don’t want to tell my boyfriend because he should already know” translates to: in the universe in which I tell my boyfriend he learns to rely on me to tell him these things a little more and his chance of doing this sort of thing without my asking decreases in the future. You then have to ask if this supposed effect is really true and if the negative consequence is strong enough, which depends on things like the chances that he’ll eventually figure it out. But converting the reason gets you answering the right questions.
Sunk cost fallacy could be a sign that you don’t trust your present judgement compared to when you made the original decision to put the resources in. The right question is to ask why you changed your mind so strongly that the degree isn’t worth it even at significantly less additional cost. It is because of new information, new values, new rationality skills or just being in a bad mood right now.
An advantage is that you feel just as clever for coming up with the right questions whatever you decide, which out to make this a bit easy to motivate yourself to implement.
I have the same 5, except in place of 1 I have something linguistic but not auditory. I can break it down into a stream of “words” in an order but there isn’t sound (nor visible words). The stream follows English grammar basically, and the “words” have English parts of speech but do not always correspond easily to English (or any other language I know) words. Sometimes there’s a translation but it’s not obvious to me, nor do my thoughts slow down thinking of it.
I can usually convert most of these thoughts into words by a paraphrase or translation, but I remember when I was a kid having many thoughts that I could memorize and repeat to myself but not successfully express in external language. A few of the most important ones I can remember now and translate.
What if I have a strong emotional response to the existence of a creature that would make up such a thing as a religion? I suppose it feels more poignant than transcendant, but I’ve always had strong tender feelings about other peoples religious beliefs.
If the original mistake was never made it would not be referenced as a meme in fiction, but given that it is mightn’t I just as well enjoy God as a fictional character or a cultural tradition to reference but not believe?
I agree that hymns to the nonexistence of God are bad, but that’s indeed because they’re imitative and not genuinely expressive. But there are genuine emotional expressions to the very real existence of the idea of God. And I think they prove that the “would not exist without the underlying mistake” is too broad.
I think that there is a use of the negative emotion of disillusionment that you are missing. When you switch to a more negative belief about a person based on new information for example, simply thinking about them differently in the future is not enough to adjust your emotional relationship to what you now think is appropriate. The time you spent believing the positive lie still counts in their favor instinctually. The pain of disillusion corrects for that.
If Santa isn’t real I want to retroactively cancel all of my fondness for him so that my history of believing in him can no longer influence me. That happening all at once hurts a lot. The motivating to face this pain is not just the desire for more knowledge. It has to be balanced by feeling an appropriate amount of fuzzies if my belief in Santa is confirmed by the experiment of pointing a hidden web cam at the fireplace. If we weren’t loss averse they would cancel for the same reason you can only try to test hypotheses rather than to confirm them.
You can’t try to be legitimately disillusioned or the opposite. You can only try to gain knowledge. So satisfied curiosity breaks the tie rather than replaces disillusionment.
Isn’t the problem more like: they are ignoring the huge number of bits of evidence that say that cells in fact exist. They aren’t comparing between hypotheses that say cells exist. They are comparing the uniform prior for cells existing to a the prior for only random proteins existing. They sound more like they are trying to argue that all our experiences cannot be enough evidence that there are cells, which seems weird.
HI, I’m GDC3. Those are my initials. I’m a little nervous about giving my full name on the internet, especially because my dad is googlible and I’m named after him. (Actually we’re both named after my grandfather, hence the 3) But I go by G.D. in real life anyway so its not exactly not my name. I’m primarily working on learning math in advance of returning to college right now.
Sorry if this is TMI but you asked: I became an aspiring rationalist because I was molested as a kid and I knew that something was wrong, but not what it was or how to stop it, and I figure that if I didn’t learn how the world really worked instead of what people told me, stuff like that might keep happening to me. So I guess my something to protect was me.
My something to protect is still mostly me, because most of my life is still dealing with the consequences of that. My limbic system learned all sorts of distorted and crazy things about how the world works that my neocortex has to spend all of its time trying to compensate for. Trying to be a functional human being is sort of hard enough goal for now. I also value and care about eventually using this information to help other people who’ve had similar stuff happen to them. I value this primarily because I’ve pre-committed to valuing that so that the narrative would motivate me emotionally when I hate myself too much to motivate myself selfishly.
So I guess I self-modified my utility function. I actually was pretty willing to hurt other people to protect myself as a kid. I’ve made myself more altruistic not to feel less guilty (which would mean that I wasn’t really as selfish as I thought I was), but to feel less alone. Which is plausible I guess, because I wasn’t exactly a standard moral specimen as a kid.
I hope that was more interesting than upsetting. I think I can learn a lot from you guys if I can speak freely. I hope that I can contribute or at least constitute good outreach.
1 and 2 together are pretty convincing to me. The intuition runs like this: it seems pretty hard to construct anything like an observer without probabilities, so there are only observers in as much as one is looking at the world according to the Born Rule view. So an easy anthropic argument says that we should not be surprised to find ourselves within that interpretation.