Why is it dark? Doesn’t it have to be a drawback in order to be dark? (agreed about pretentiousness=signal failure)
Ishaan
Karma: 2,225
I do have a parallel thought process which finds it pretentious, but I ignore it because it also said that the ice bucket was pretentious. And the ice bucket challenge was extremely effective. I think the dislike is just contrarian signalling, and is why our kind can’t cooperate. That or some kind of egalitarian instinct against boasting.
Isn’t “pretentious” just a negative way to say “signalling”? Of course that idea might not be effective signalling but abstractly, the idea is that EA is well suited for signalling so why isn’t it?
I’d consider value in doing a local hospital. Local community strengthening and good feelings is its own thing with its own benefits, and there’s a special value in the aid coming from local people who know what’s what—as a natural extension of the idea that aid is better coming from parents to children than from distant government to children. I’m talking about the global poverty crowd here.
Frankly who cares? If someone wants to signal, then fine we can work with that. Life saving is an archetypal signal of heroism. Start a trend of wearing necklaces with one bead for each life you saved to remind everyone of the significance of each life and to remind you that you’ve given back to this world. That would be pretty bad ass, I’d wear it. Imagine you feel sad, then look down and remember you’ve added more QALYs to this world than your entire natural lifespan, that you’ve added centuries of smiles. Perhaps too blatant a boast for most people’s tastes?
Point is, even if it was all signalling, you could boast more if you knew how to get qalys efficiently. (I saved 2 lives sounds way better than i spent 10000 dollars)
On the topic of popularization, I think the ratio of idealistic people interested in alleviating global poverty to people who are aware of the concept of meta-charities that determine the optimal way to do so is shockingly low.
That seems like one of those “low hanging fruits”—dropping it into casual conversations, mentioning it in high visibility comment threads, and on. There’s really no excuse for Kony to be more well known than Givewell.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you actually hold that view. What I did mean to suggest is that dualist intuitions have snuck into your ideas without announcing themselves as such to you. (Hence the holy water joke—I was trying to say that I’m being religiously paranoid about avoiding implicit dualism despite how you don’t even support that view).
Here, I’ll try to be more explicit as to why I think you’re implicitly expressing dualism:
Why not just have the organism know the objective facts of survival and reproduction, and be done with it?
What does that even mean? How can any system “access objective facts” about anything? All systems containing representations of the outside world must do so via modifications and manipulations of, and interactions between, internal components (hopefully in a manner which interacts with and corresponds to things “external” to the system). Divining the so-called “objective facts” from these internal states is a complicated and always imperfect calculation.
You’ve framed the subjective/objective dichotomy as “The water may feel very cold, but I know it’s 20C”. As you said, an error correction is being performed: “Some of my indicators are giving signals ordinarily associated with cold, but given what my other indicators say, I’ve performed error correction processes and I know it’s actually not.”
All of which is fine. The “dualist” part is where you imply that it would be in any way possible to arrive at this 20C calculation without sensing internal states, to just know the objective facts of survival and reproduction and be done with it. It’s not possible to do that without getting a philosophical zombie.
Take a simple information process, such as a light-switch. Whether or not the circuit is connected “represents” the state of the switch, the behavioral output being the light bulb turning on. The circuit never gets objective facts about the switch, all it gets is the internal state of whether or not it is connected—a “subjective” experience.
Your main point: “I value the fact that my indicators gave me signals ordinarily associated with cold and then I had to go through an error correction process, rather than just immediately know it’s 20C”, is interesting, good, and correct.
I agree, it can’t be irrational to value things—you may put your locus of valued self-identity in your information processes (the combustion), or in your biology itself (the metal), or in your behavioral output (the movement of the vehicle). I’m sympathetic to the view of valuing information processes in addition to behavioral output myself: after all, coma patients are still people if they have various types of brain activity despite comatose behavior.
She might reasonably doubt that the survivor of this process would be...human, in any sense meaningful to her.
But here again, my sense of un-ease with implicit dualism flairs up. It’s all well and good to say that the survivor of this process isn’t her (she may draw her locus of identity wherever she likes, it need not be her behavior), but if the result of an information process is behaviorally identical to a person, there’s something very off about saying that these information processes do not meaningfully contain a person.
I use “person” here in the sense as “one who’s stated thoughts and feelings and apparent preferences are morally relevant and should be considered the same way we would ideally consider a natural human.
Of course, it’s still not irrational to not value things, and you might actually say that to count as a person you need certain information processes or certain biology—I just think both of those values are wrong. I have a dream that beings are judged not by their algorithm, but by their behavior (additional terms and restrictions apply).
Is that better?
mutter mutter something something to do with parsimony/complexity/occam?
I may also simply be unaware of the possibly similar works on this problem too.
Recorded compatibalist conceptions of free will are several centuries older than academia, so I don’t think it was ever really a publishable insight. (You got it on your own, I got it on my own, and so have a lot of people throughout history—it’s just that not everyone agrees.)
I don’t know about the second question...assuming the premise is true, I suppose either they did not try or it wasn’t accepted, I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about academic philosophy to speculate!
But that’s because everyone uses glasses, as a matter of course—it’s the status quo now. The person who thought “well, and why should we have to walk around squinting all the time when we can just wear these weird contraption on our heads”, at a time when people might look at you funny having wearing glass on your face, I think that’s pretty transhuman. As is the guy who said “Let’s take it further, and put the refractive material directly on our eyeball” back when people would have looked at you real funny if you suggested they put plastic in their eyes are you crazy that sounds so uncomfortable.
Now of course, it’s easy to look at these things and say “meh”.
Edit: If you look at the history of contact lenses, though, what actually happened is less people saying “let’s improve” and more people saying “I wonder how the eye works” and doing weird experiments that probably seemed pointless at the time. Something of a case study against the “basic research isn’t useful” argument, I think, not that there are many who espouse that here.
Yes, I bite that bullet: I think “you aught to use tools to do things better” counts as foundational principle of transhuman ideology. It’s supposed to be fundamentally about being human.
NancyLebovitz didn’t imply the rugby player was showing signs of ideological transhumanism—only that they’re doing something transhumanist. Transhumanists don’t have the monopoly on self modification. It’s the same sense that Christians refer to kind acts as Christian and bad acts as un-Christian.
Transhumanists would claim the first intentional use of fire and writing and all that as transhuman-ish things. (And yes, I would consider self decoration to be a transhumanish thing too. Step into the paleolithic—what’s the very first thing you notice which is different about the humans? They have clothes and strings and beads and tattoos, which turn out to have pretty complex social functions. Adam and Eve and all that, it’s literally the stuff of myth.)
work on overcoming biases, LW’s peculiar solution to free will
None of that is novel, or even peculiar. The point of Lesswrong is to make it fresh, accessable, and well written. The bias writings are derived from academic work on biases, published by people doing experiments. The “solution to free will” is just basic clear thinking—if you were confused about free will upon entering, you’re encouraged to not read the solution and solve it yourself as an exercise, and then check to see if that solution matches your own—it’s not claiming to be novel philosophy or anything. This is primarily a hub for the dispersal of existing good ideas in a better format.
Novel ideas tend to be more narrow, more specific formulations. Timeless decision theory, for example, is specific and fairly novel, and MIRI published it.
Why would evolution build beings that sense their internal states? Why not just have the organism know the objective facts of survival and reproduction, and be done with it? One thought is that it is just easier to build a brain that does both, rather than one that focuses relentlessly on objective facts. But another is that this separation of sense-data into “subjective” and “objective” might help us learn to overcome certain sorts of perceptual illusion—as Carol does, above. And yet another is that some internal states might be extremely good indicators and promoters of survival or reproduction—like pain, or feelings of erotic love. This last hypothesis could explain why we value some subjective aspects so much, too.
NooOOoo. holds up talisman, flings holy water
I suspect this is spirit vs. matter dualism implicitly creeping up on us again. (When people start feeling antsy about uploading, I think the reason has almost always involved either dualism or continuity concerns.)
There is no dichotomy whatsoever “internal=subjective” and “external=objective” feelings. There’s no particular difference between seeing red and feeling happy- both are “qualia”. Your self perception that you then go on to process that information into other forms which you mentally label as “objective” (I see red, therefore there are probably wavelengths of a certain frequency. I feel angry, I’m probably flooded with cortisol and my amygdala is probably active) is also qualia, it’s all qualia all the way down, and the distinction between “subjective” and “objective”, while not practically meaningless, is philosophically meaningless in this context.
Evolution needs organisms to respond to internal states for precisely the same reason we need to respond to external states—because both of these represent objective facts about the world which must be responded to.
Could you create a being which was behaviorally identical while being radically different “under the hood”″? I guess that depends what you mean by radically different. The important part of cars is that they move, not that they burn fuel, and that function is fulfilled. The important part of a human isn’t the neurons, but the thinking and feeling.
To me, if an object gives behavioral indications of thinking and feeling, that’s sufficient (but not necessary) to consider it a being. Maybe not the same as a second being which behaves identically but is designed differently: but then, in some sense I’m currently a slightly different being than I was this morning anyway, the qualia from morning-me is gone forever, clinging to a sense of continuity is hopeless, etc.
At the end of the day you do have to decide which parts of the car you value. As I said in your previous post, Gasoline Gal isn’t necessarily irrational for combustion things. It’s not wrong to intrinsically value the highly specific biology that drives us, but I just personally value the computational processes implemented by those cells.
I’m open to changing my mind about holding end behavior as an entirely sufficient standard as to whether the the processes I value are implemented (after all, we already have human deception as an example where internal states are not what is externally represented, at least temporarily), but if I open the hood and it’s performing basically equivalent computations, I’m not going to complain whether it does so via ion influx and phosphorylation or logic gates. I don’t believe there’s a fundamental difference between creating a being that percieves red and creating a being that perceives its own emotional states, if the former doesn’t need highly specified biological processes then why should the latter? Referring to the analogy, Gasoline Gal at least doesn’t care what kind of metal the engine is made from, so if we can at least agree that computations and information processes are the important thing, then it’s just a question of figuring out which ones are important / simulating them as closely as possible just to be sure.
I’ll grant that, like Gasoline Gal, we might prefer not to use the bits and bites over something more natural seeming because the more “continuity/similarity” there is the less unsettling the whole thing is. But I don’t want to grant that a being implemented on a radically different manner which nevertheless behaves like us doesn’t feel like us.
I don’t live there anymore, sadly, but I’m glad you’re reviving it because it was really fun! (I assume you still have the old mailing list in case any of the old crowd is still in town?)
In this cases, I think “non-extreme cases” basically means “the child manages to survive until the age of psychological maturity with no debilitating injuries”. The claim is that the main role of parents is just to get the kid to adulthood in one piece, and anything else is extra and might not seriously help or harm commonly measured outcomes. One might add the assumption that the parents at least didn’t actively inhibit ordinary non-parental exposure, to rule out things such as never learning to talk or something.
(But remember, I’m not claiming this at all, just stating what I think the real claim is. I don’t even think the more conservative version is correct: even if you assume that childhood experiences with parents controlling-for-differing-non-parent-related experiences aren’t that important, how could variations in ongoing parental support in adulthood possibly not make a difference?)
just not true that if someone has substantially more trouble learning scales and chords than his or her classmates, he or she is “worse than them at music.”
Following this analogy, is it also true that almost anyone can learn scales and chords then, then? Is it true that being bad at scales and chords will not forever be a major limitation? Is this because scales and chords are not fundamental to music, or is it because anyone can learn scales and chords given enough time and effort, after which innate musicality decides the rest?
(basically, should those who previously said “aaah bad at math” shift to “aah bad at superficial trappings of math which are nevertheless deeply necessary for practical purposes” or “thank goodness, the part that I’m bad at isn’t a big deal”?)
“established specific preference” or a more “open preference”?
I’m not sure I understand the distinction. Are you saying you might pick which color you’ll wear each weekday or choose a favorite clock in advance to avoid decisions?
All day; every day of our lives we are presented with choice moments; What to eat; which way to turn; which clock to look at to best tell the time, what colour clothing to wear, where to walk; what to say, which words to say it with; how to respond.
I have a little gnome in the back of my mind that makes these very small choices for me on autopilot and my body automatically does what it says without thinking about it. The bulk of my consciousness is otherwise occupied or offline daydreaming and generally I don’t even remember making these insignificant choices or remembering which choice I made.
This usually works out fine, except for sometimes the gnome made the wrong choice and once I notice I have to correct it. Is that not the usual setup?
It’s possible that rather than something complex relating to the word “stereotype” itself or “giving people permission to stereotype” or whatever else comes to mind, that this is just due to “stereotype” being a negative word with negative associations. In contrast, saying “most people don’t stereotype” simplifies into “most people don’t do bad things” for the average study participants, and will produce positive feelings in most participants.
For example, there was hub-hub a while ago about people being more likely to stereotype if they’re in a dirty place. Maybe just being told negative things about others and experiencing negativity in general leads people be more likely to do negative things such as stereotype, lie, cheat, attribute poor intentions to others, and so on. And there’s also the thing where judges convict more when they’re hungry.
I wonder if people were less likely to hire everyone, and being a member of some stereotyped group just makes you proportionately more targeted by people who are tired and having a bad day.
Overhydration, but I’m not sure whether a sedentary person drinking it orally is at risk for that. (We know runners drinking hydration fluid and sedentary people taking hydration intravenously are at risk).
Empty calories, but you can offset that.
Excess salt (but it is now uncertain as to whether excess salt is harmful in the absence of high blood pressure).
It’s also weird, as in it’s both an evolutionary novel and culturally novel thing for you to do, and that means it’s risky until proven innocent.
The “if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together” CEV idea hopes that the disagreements are really just misunderstandings and mistakes in some sense. Otherwise, take some form of average or median, I guess?
All interactions involving people involve pushing buttons for outcomes.
Negative-connotation-Manipulation is when you do it in ways that they would not approve of it if they realized exactly what you were doing. The ice bucket challenge for example does exactly what it says on the tin—raise awareness, raise money, have social activity.