Effective Altruism says that all humans have roughly equal intrinsic value and takes necessary steps to gather evidence and quantify the degree to which humans are helped.
Short, but pretty much summarizes the entirety of the appeal for me. Is there even a name for the two perspectives contained in that sentence?
The way that I’ve phrased this outside of lesswrong (where people don’t typically know what priors are) is: “In the absence of empirical data, things which are evolutionarily novel should be treated as guilty until evidence proves them innocent, whereas things which are evolutionarily familiar should be treated as innocent until evidence proves them guilty.”
“Prior” captures the connotation that this is only a provisionary belief until more evidence surfaces in one neat word.
I understand that what you’re really complaining about is that some people are overconfident in their speculations (which is a fine and good thing to complain about) but the way you’ve phrased that objection here is a general counterargument against pretty much any statement that doesn’t fall within mathematics, including all heuristics, priors, educated guesses, and parsimony intself.
(And the literal meaning of “I know nothing about this but here’s my pontification” is very similar to “I have no evidence, but here is my prior assumption”. You’re just rewording it so it’s a low status thing.)
Might be helpful to narrow down the objection a little, to explain where precisely you feel people are commonly overreaching?
While this is obviously true and correct, I find it’s too often trotted out as a counterargument against (what seems to me to be) sensible claims about how we should, in the absence of evidence, hold a prior that mimicking what we approximate to be the ancestral environment will generally lead to better results. Too often there is unproductive back-and-forth between the “nature!” and the “naturalistic fallacy!” crowds.
it is foolish to therefore refuse to fly because it is unnatural
It’s foolish to refuse altogether of course. Yet, as flying is not ancestral to humans (for which we do have “strong evidence”), you should have a prior expectation for risks and drawbacks—which as it turns out are many: air pressure and quality differences, circadian rhythm disruption, etc. While gene therapy isperhaps going a bit far, you should certainly use pressurized cabins and melatonin, and perhaps make a conscious effort to avoid sitting in your seat for longer than 45 minutes at a stretch.
Right—and you should avoid relationships where both people aren’t on net gaining energy and time.
Extrovert/introvert “recharching” works because extroverts/introverts by definition like social activities/solitude. The general principle here is that people are recharged by spending time in a manner which they find simultaneously comfortable and engaging (“flow”?). An intellectual is recharged by thinking, an artist is recharged by creating, a romantic by romance, etc.
Beyond the obvious foundation of mutual love and affection, a good relationship is somehow creating or enhancing these dimension of life that you are energized by. On top of that it should ideally actually seem to free up time, as cooperating with a partner to tackle things generally cuts down work load, but even if it doesn’t, if you’ve got the mutual love and mutual energizing in place I’d count it as a win.
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“I want to do a list of things” includes “I want the people around me to perceive me in a certain way” and “I want to perceive myself a certain way”- which is generally a big drive for clothing, adornments, and body-modification in general.
I chose a bad example to illustrate my point. What I wanted to say is that it seems there are plenty of people who say and do absolutely atrocious things and nothing ever happens to them… and then some random well intentioned person wears a t-shirt or makes a joke in poor taste and is eviscerated. My intuition says that it might be a bad strategy for these very minor offenders to back down and submit immediately (which they do presumably because they themselves agree with the steelman of the criticism) rather than going on the offence concerning how they are being treated for a relatively minor indiscretion.
If I were Hunt and a reporter had published a bad joke as though it were a serious comment, I’d be denouncing the reporter for libel. Whereas Hunt just kept digging himself deeper into a hole, apologizing for the comment, and even attempting to defend the comment, rather than attacking the premise of it even being news.
Oh. good catch, didn’t read that far. Still though, that’s already the fifth political correctness controversy he was in (though one might argue the underlying factor is PC-ness increasing, or something)
That’s a common trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist argument. Wrong because:
1) Would you feel uncomfortable wearing a swastika? Would that send the right message about you? In India swastika is a holy symbol, not a Nazi symbol, the meaning is arbitrary. “Dress” means “I’m feminine” in our culture. It’s part of our language.
Suppose in Atlantis, the mouth-sound “love” happens to mean hate and the mouth sound “hate” happens to mean love. It’s still acceptable for an English speaking person to want to mouth-sound “I love you” and not “I hate you” even though the meanings of the mouth-sounds are cultural.
2) Things need not be biological to be okay. Culture-induced preferences are valid. (Though, in this case, I think gender expression is probably biological).
I wouldn’t think about it as “dating” in general. It depends on whom you are dating. I think that if you perceive yourself as expending time and emotional energy, rather than acquiring more free time and more emotional energy, then the answer is “no” for that particular person.
This vaguely applies to any investment, doesn’t it?
Second lesson: Do not apologize, resign, and so on because it only causes the public perception to damn you further.
James Watson has said some unambiguously politically incorrect, unkind, bad and mean things. With respect to the public face, he barely even flinches at backlash: no apology, no resignations, and no real personal consequences whatsoever for his statements.
In contrast, Hunt merely made a joke in poor taste. I wish he had stood his ground and denounced the accusers. Luckily other respected figures are coming to his aid, but that doesn’t always happen.
http://marc.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=22
I’d recommend using these guided meditations. (Way easier than unguided meditation IMO)
You can use them immediately upon onset of the episode. Use the longer ones. It’s a better way to use time compared to curling up in a corner.
So if I understand this correctly, Alice and the Sovereign are identically omniscient, and the Sovereign additionally has some power and influence upon the world that Alice does not. In the case where Alice herself is the sovereign the problem is solved, right? The sovereign just has to figure out what she prefers and do that. The solution then, is to simulate the scenario where Alice has the power to make the decision herself and then match Alice’s decision. This solves both 1 and 2.
My short answer to the broader “How do we know what sacks of meat / circuits / whatever prefer” question is “you look at the behavioral output”. Here, if Alice can make the decision herself, the decision represents her behavioral output.
(I’m about halfway through writing about how to make this idea more workable without resorting to omniscient things with consistent preferences, if I still like the idea after writing it out I’ll cross post it on lw.)
This is my favorite one so far, unexpected and very practical. You quite plausibly might upgrade your meta-cognitive ability as these upgraded senses improve your ability to notice.
Noticing your body reacting to getting anxious or being able to detect certain mental processes (mind wandering, confabulation, etc) is something you’d really want on all the time, at every second.
For “high paying” I guess it depends on how much your earning potential at your current job is. Off the top of my head, there’s a few dangerous but very high-paying blue collar jobs—Crab fisherman, oil rig worker, and the like. Working with carcinogens and radiation is also a go, as mentioned elsewhere, though I’m not sure about compensation there. For “social good”, Terminally ill patients are at least eligible to volunteer to test drugs for their particular illness.
I’m still in the “spend time with your loved ones and help them come to terms with it” camp though.
I’m not limiting myself to ” high-risk activities that pay well”, I’m limiting myself to “legally feasible high risk and helpful services that also pay really well” ;)
The “helpful” is the goal, the rest are instrumental. I think most stuff leading to morally good outcomes is legal. Even illegal stuff which might be good if only it were legal turns out bad simply due to the practical realities of illegal operations.
Realistically I’d probably wrap up my affairs and prepare my loved ones, but broadly I think the comparative advantage is in performing high-risk services. The first thought that came to mind is volunteering for useful dangerous experiments that need live human subjects, but there’s probably a lot of bureaucratic barriers there.
I wonder if there are any legally feasible high risk and helpful services that also pay really well...
It’s not intended as a unit of caring—it’s a unit of achievement, a display of power, focused on outcomes. Consequences over virtue ethics, utils over fuzzies.
Don’t get me wrong, I do see the ugliness in it. I too have deeply held prejudices against materialism and vanity, and the whole thing bites against the egalitarian instinct for giving even more status to the wealthy. But helping people is something worthy of pride, unlike the mercedes or thousand dollar suits or flashy diamonds and similar trifles people use for the same purpose.
My point is, you said they were signalling. I’m not approving of signalling so much as saying, why not signal productively, in a manner that actually does what you’ve signaled to do?
I emphatically don’t, but yes, one can. The quantitative/reductionist attitude you’ve outlined here biases us towards easily measurable causes.
Some examples of difficult to measure causes include: 1) All forms of funding-hungry research, scientific or otherwise 2) most x-risks, including this forum’s favorite AI risk 3) causes which claim to influence social, economic, military, and political matters in complex but possiblyhigh impact ways 4) (Typically local and community-driven) causes which do good via subtle virtuous cycles, human connections, and various other intangibles