gelisam

Karma: 185

gelisam Feb 6, 2010, 1:02 AM
9 points
on: Debate tools: an experience report
Reading that Argunet was both open source and flawed, I decided to download the code (signals geekiness) in order to fix the problem you have encountered (signals generosity). I didn’t have to change anything: it took me a while (signals perseverance) but I finally figured out how to move a box in Argunet (signals superior problem-solving abilities).

It turns out that the result of dragging a box depends on whether the box was selected prior to dragging it. If the box was selected, it is moved, otherwise, an arrow is created. So, before you move a box, select it by clicking on it.

gelisam Jan 18, 2010, 7:27 PM
8 points
in reply to: Nanani’s comment on: The Wannabe Rational

You can’t maximize truth.

I think it’s fairly obvious that “maximizing truth” meant “maximizing the correlation between my beliefs and truth”.

Having accurate beliefs is an incredibly useful thing. You may well find it serves your utility better.

Truth is overrated. My prior was heavily biased toward truth, but then a brief and unpleasant encounter with nihilism caused me to lower my estimate.

And before you complain that this doesn’t make any sense either, let me spell out that is an estimate of the probability that the strategy “pursue truth first, happiness second” yields, on average, more hedons than “pursue happiness using the current set of beliefs”.

gelisam Jan 18, 2010, 7:01 PM
1 point
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: The Wannabe Rational
Ah, so that’s why people downvoted my comment! Thanks for explaining. I thought it was only because I appeared to be confusing utilons with hedons.

Regarding the doublethink post, I agree that I couldn’t rationally assign myself false but beneficial beliefs, and I feel silly for writing that I could. On the other hand, sometimes I want to believe in false but beneficial beliefs, and that’s why I can’t pretend to be an aspiring rationalist.

gelisam Jan 17, 2010, 5:15 PM
5 points
in reply to: mathemajician’s comment on: The Wannabe Rational
Uh-oh.

I… I don’t think I do want to believe in things due to evidence. Not deep down inside.

When choosing my beliefs, I use a more important criterion than mere truth. I’d rather believe, quite simply, in whatever I need to believe in order to be happiest. I maximize utility, not truth.

I am a huge fan of lesswrong, quoting it almost every day to increasingly annoyed friends and relatives, but I am not putting much of what I read there into practice, I must admit. I read it more for entertainment than enlightenment.

And I take notes, for those rare cases in my life where truth actually is more important to my happiness than social conventions: when I encounter a real-world problem that I actually want to solve. This happens less often than you might think.

gelisam Jan 7, 2010, 9:11 PM
6 points
on: Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Video Answers
Oh, so that’s what Eliezer looks like! I had imagined him as a wise old man with long white hair and beard. Like Tellah the sage, in Final Fantasy IV.

gelisam Dec 13, 2009, 5:56 PM
0 points
in reply to: Torben’s comment on: The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom

Everybody seemed to be going backward from assuming AK’s guilt at 50-50, whereas komponisto went forward from the background probability.

I think I can see why. komponisto pretended to be a juror following the “innocent unless proven otherwise” mantra and updating on the evidence presented in the court. We, on the other hand, did what komponisto challenged us to do: figure out the answer to his riddle using the two websites he gave us. This being a riddle, not a court, we had no reason to favour one hypothesis over the other, hence the 50-50.

That being said, I did favour one hypothesis over the other (my stated priors were 75/75/25) because at the moment I paused to write down an approximation of my current beliefs, I had already updated on the evidence presented by komponisto himself in his post, namely, that there was a trial against AK and RS.

Maybe the reason why many of us gave so much importance to the fact that those particular individuals were on trial for murder was because it was our very first piece of information; and I don’t think it’s right for rationalists to do that.

gelisam Dec 10, 2009, 1:10 AM
12 points
on: You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event
priors

Amanda Knox is guilty: 75%, Raffaele Sollecito: 75%, Rudy Guede: 25%. I shall abbreviate future percentage triples as 75/75/25.

No knowledge of the case before reading this post. My prior is due to my assumption that trial people know what they are doing, and on the fact that I imagined that the trial was trying to show that the guilty were K+S instead of G.

acquiring information

Reading about G’s DNA, which should be rather good evidence: switching to 50/50/75. I contemplated switching all the way to 25/25/75, but I figured there had to be some reason for the new trial.

Reading about the police’s claim that the murder was linked to a group sex game; thinking that this would be a ridiculous motive. This made me think that maybe the trial people didn’t knew what they were doing after all. Switching to 25/25/80.

Finally realized that the trial was in fact trying to show that the guilty were K+S+G instead of just G, not K+S instead of G. Stopped keeping track of percentages for some reason.

Reading about the police switching from K+S+L to K+S+G, which lowered my esteem of the police even more.

Reading about the DNA of K+S, figured it was natural for a woman and her boyfriend to have DNA all over the woman’s own house.

Still trying to understand who was G relative to the others. I think he’s a robber now. Definitely not part of the group sex thing. Even worse feelings toward the police.

Over all, the truejustice website seems more emotional than the friends of K website, which surprises me. I would have expected the family of the victim to have calmed down after the original G trial, yet truejustice still seemed angry; and doesn’t even seem to be ran by the victim’s family at all. They should be a lot less emotional about this than K’s friend, which seem to be a lot more clearheaded than truejustice is.

I’m now quite convinced of the innocence of K+S, although I’m too shy to give an actual percentage. 5/5/95, if not more extreme.
What links here?
- Amanda Knox: post mortem by gwern (Oct 20, 2011, 4:10 PM; 48 points)

gelisam Sep 30, 2009, 2:03 AM
0 points
on: Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree

theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.

I happen to be studying conflicts in a completely different domain, in which I claim the solution is to ensure the events shape identical result no matter in which order they are applied. I briefly wondered whether my result could be useful in other domains, and I thought of lesswrong: perhaps we should advocate update strategies which don’t depend on the order in which the evidence is encountered.

And then your post came up! Nice timing.

gelisam 9 Sep 2009 4:01 UTC
1 point
on: Outlawing Anthropics: An Updateless Dilemma
The reason we shouldn’t update on the “room color” evidence has nothing to do with the fact that it constitutes anthropic evidence. The reason we shouldn’t update is that we’re told, albeit indirectly, that we shouldn’t update (because if we do then some of our copies will update differently and we will be penalized for our disagreement).

In the real world, there is no incentive for all the copies of ourselves in all universes to agree, so it’s all right to update on anthropic evidence.

gelisam

priors

acquiring information