It reminded me of that as well. Here is the full article; I’m glad it’s online, because the errors he (and Yudkowsky, above) clears up are astonishingly prevalent. I’ve had cause to link to it many times.
Hul-Gil
What do you think about Kabbalah?
40 is sometimes used, in the Torah, to indicate a general large quantity—according to Google. It also has associations with purification and/or wisdom, according to my interpretation of the various places it appears in the Bible as a whole. (There are a lot of them.)
I would have liked some thoughts on/insight into the data posted as well; but all the same, summaries like this, that gather a lot of related but widely-dispersed information together, are very useful (especially as a quick reference or overview, or, as Jonathan says below, as a starting point for further research), and I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more of them.
This suggests measuring posts for comment EV.
Now that is an interesting concept. I like where this subthread is going.
Interesting comparisons to other systems involving currency come to mind.
EV-analysis is the more intellectually interesting proposition, but it has me thinking. Next up: black-market karma services. I will facilitate karma-parties… for a nominal (karma) fee, of course. If you want to maintain the pretense of legitimacy, we will need to do some karma-laundering, ensuring that your posts appear that they could be worth the amount of karma they have received. Sock-puppet accounts to provide awful arguments that you can quickly demolish? Karma mines. And then, we begin to sell LW karma for Bitcoins, and--
...okay, perhaps some sleep is in order first.
(Since you two seem to be mostly using the mentioned IQ scores as a way to indicate relative intelligence, rather than speaking of anything directly related to IQ and IQ tests, this is somewhat tangential; however, Mr. Newsome does mention some actual scores below, and I think it’s always good to be mindful when throwing IQ scores around. So when speaking of IQ specifically, I find it helpful to keep in mind the following.
There are many different tests, which value scores differently. In some tests, scores higher than about 150 are impossible or meaningless; and in all tests, the higher the numbers go the less reliable [more fuzzy] they are. One reason for this, IIRC, is that smaller and smaller differences in performance will impact the result more, on the extreme ends of the curve; so the difference in score between two people with genius IQs could be a bad day that resulted in a poorer performance on a single question. [There is another reason, the same reason that high enough scores can be meaningless; I believe this is due to the scarcity of data/people on those extreme ends, making it difficult or impossible to normalize the test for them, but I’m not certain I have the explanation right. I’m sure someone else here knows more.])
The heuristic I generally use is “use parentheses as needed, but rewrite if you find that you’re needing to use square brackets.” Why? Thinking about it, I believe this is because I see parentheses all the time in professional texts, but almost never parentheticals inside parentheticals.
But as I verbalize this heuristic, I suddenly feel like it might lend the writing a certain charm or desirable style to defy convention and double-bag some asides. Hmm.
No, that time passed when you merely had a single parenthetical inside a parenthetical. But when you have a further parenthetical inside the former two, is it then time to break out the curly brackets?
I have found entirely the opposite; it’s very strongly correlated with spelling ability—or so it seems from my necessarily few observations, of course. I know some excellent mathematicians who write very stilted prose, and a few make more grammatical errors than I’d have expected, but they can all at least spell well.
Not only this, but you can be obviously wrong. We look at people trusting in spontaneous generation, or a spirit theory of disease, and mock them—rightfully. They took “reasonable” explanations of ideas, tested them as best they could, and ended up with unreasonable confidence in utterly illogical ideas.
I don’t believe most of the old “obviously wrong” beliefs, like a spirit theory of disease, were ever actually systematically tested. Experimentation doesn’t prevent you from coming to silly conclusions, but it can throw out a lot of them.
(A nitpick: Either these things are only obviously wrong in retrospect, or they did not start with reasonable explanations. That is, either we cannot rightfully mock them, or the ideas were ridiculous from the beginning.)
As for the rest, I don’t disagree with your assertions—only the (implied) view we should take of them. It is certainly true that science can be slow, and true that you can’t ever really know if your explanation is the right one. But I think that emphasis on knowing “the real truth”, the really right explanation, is missing the point a little; or, in fact, the idea of the One True Explanation itself is unproductive at best and incoherent at worst. After all, even if we eventually have such an understanding of the universe that we can predict the future in its entirety to the finest level of detail theoretically possible, our understanding could still be totally wrong as to what is “actually” happening. Think of Descartes’ Evil Genius, for example. We could be very, very confident we had it right… but not totally sure.
But—once you are at this point, does it matter? The power of science and rationality lies in their predictive ability. Whether our understanding is the real deal or simply an “[apparently] perfect model” becomes immaterial. So I think yes, science can lead you to the right conclusion, if by “right” we mean “applicable to the observed world” and not The Undoubtable Truth. No such thing exists, after all.
The slowness is a disappointment, though. But it’s accelerating!
I was thinking of that; maybe some people equate leisure time with being directionless, and thus need externally-imposed goals?
I was hoping someone would bring that up. You’ve already given the same answer I would, though: it’s not necessarily an either/or scenario like Nozick’s “experience machine” concept, so it’s possible to have both heroin and pictures, in theory.
See my post below; I think this is due to a.) a misunderstanding of the nature of happiness (a thought that chemically-induced happiness is different from “regular” happiness… which is also chemical), b.) a feeling that opium is incredibly dangerous (as it can be), and c.) a misunderstanding of how opium makes you feel—people can say “I know opium makes you happy” without actually feeling/knowing that it does so. That is, their mental picture of how they’d feel if they smoked opium doesn’t correspond to the reality, which is—for most people—that it makes them feel much, much better than they would have imagined.
Most people I know believe that heroin (and similar mechanisms) get short-term happiness followed either by long-term unhappiness, or death.
That’s the long and short of it, I think. There is no reason not to use heroin to obtain maximum utility (for one’s self), if one a.) finds it pleasurable, b.) can afford it, and c.) is able to obtain pure and measured doses. (Or simply uses pharmaceuticals.) The perceived danger of heroin comes from its price and illegality (uncertain dosage + potentially dangerous impurities), which often results in penury, and overdose or illness, for the user.
People also want “real” happiness, by which I presume they mean happiness resulting from actions like painting a picture, and not happiness induced by chemical… which is silly, since the two feelings are produced by the same neurochemistry and functionally identical (i.e., all happiness is ultimately chemical). (The perceived difference may still bother someone enough that they choose a different route, though, especially if they don’t realize they can just paint a picture… on heroin.)
I have experienced the same thing. I have apparently endless capacity for leisure, possibly because I have an endless number of interests and hobbies to pursue then drop then pick back up. I’ve never understood people who don’t want this kind of life; do they really exist? Can people get bored with leisure?
Great post! I’m going to use as much of it as I can.
I think it might be difficult to apply some of these, since I notice a good deal of my unhappiness is not affected by changes in thought or outward motions, and it can be hard to translate knowing you should try something into actually applying it. (But both of these can be mitigated: smiling, for instance, really does make me feel a bit happier even if I’m forcing the smile, and I’m sure there are plenty of articles about akrasia, here on LessWrong.)
Prefer experiential purchases; avoid materialistic goals.
Indeed. You can also skip the middleman and go straight to purchasing the direct experience of euphoria. The caveat of varying your experiences applies here too, though. Especially here.
I don’t think so—acetic anhydride is really the only other reagent involved in the step we’re considering, and an excess wouldn’t be harmful in any way… except, possibly, making the product a bit uncomfortable to ingest, if too much acetic acid was left over. (An excess of acetic anhydride is commonly used so as to make sure all the morphine reacts; any excess will become acetic acid—i.e., vinegar—as well.) It’s common for a little to be left over, giving heroin its characteristic (vinegar-y) smell, but I don’t think it’s dangerous.
So I’d say that there’s no danger here… but lack of quality control in general is definitely a big problem indeed.
This is a great way to put it.
I think one reason might be that the vast majority of the decisions we make are not going to make a significant difference as to our overall success by themselves; or rather, not as significant a difference as chance or other factors (e.g., native talent) could. For example, take the example about not buying into a snake-oil health product lessdazed uses above: you’ve benefited from your rationality, but it’s still small potatoes compared to the amount of benefit you could get from being in the right place at the right time and becoming a pop star… or getting lucky with the stock market… or starting a software company at just the right time. These people, who have to have varying degrees of something besides luck and a small amount of rationality to capitalize on it, are much more visible; even if their decisions were less-than-optimal, the other factors make up for it. Nothing’s stopping them from poisoning themselves with a scam miracle-elixir, though.
This ties in with the point lessdazed was making, that the rational person most likely loses less rather than wins big—that is, makes a large number of small decisions well, rather than a single important one extremely well. That’s not to be despised; I wonder what the results if we ask about overall well-being and happiness rather than fame and fortune.
Was not my counterfactual scenario. It was someone else describing a counterfactual where ninjas are travelling by sea to a ninja-convention. My only contribution there was to (implicitly) assert that the counterfactualising operation that preserves the most probability mass to produce that scenario would not result in ninjas travelling on unarmed ships.
I edited that; I think the daimyos did have their own navies. I’m not actually certain about that, though, and I don’t feel like looking it up. Maybe someone who knows more Japanese history can contribute. In either case, I don’t think it’s possible to say which is more probable, since whether they book passage on a merchant ship, or are sent with a naval ship by a master who controls both, depends entirely on the circumstance we concoct. Historically, they could have done both, if daimyos did have navies.
I’m trying to imagine the other dimension we could add to this. If we have “more right” and “less right” along one axis, what’s orthogonal to it?
I initially felt this comment was silly (the post isn’t saying every space can be reasonably modeled as one-dimensional, is it?), but my brain is telling me we actually could come up with a more precise way to represent the article’s concept with a Cartesian plane… but I’m not actually able to think of one. False intuition based on my experience with the “Political Compass” graph, perhaps.