jbay

Karma: 250

jbay Apr 1, 2015, 7:55 PM
0 points
on: Feedback on promoting rational thinking about one’s career choice to a broad audience
The sentence after the Mere Exposure Effect is introduced does not quite parse. Might want to double check it.

jbay Mar 31, 2015, 6:05 AM
6 points
0
on: Status—is it what we think it is?
A possible distinction between status and dominance: You are everybody’s favourite sidekick. You don’t dominate or control the group, nor do you want to, nor do you even voice any opinions about what the group should do. You find the idea of telling other people what to do to be unpleasant, and avoid doing so whenever you can. You would much rather be assigned complex tasks and then follow them through with diligence and pride. Everyone wants you in the group, they genuinely value your contribution, they care about your satisfaction with the project, and want you to be happy and well compensated.

By no means would I consider this role dominant, at least not in terms of controlling other people. (You might indeed be the decisive factor in the success of the group, or the least replaceable member). But it is certainly a high-status role; you are not deferred to but you are respected, and you are not treated as a replaceable cog. The president or boss knows your name, knows your family, and calls you first when something needs to be done.

I think many people aspire to this position and prefer it over a position of dominance.

A low-status person on this scale would be somebody ignored, disrespected, or treated as replaceable and irrelevant. You are unworthy of attention. When it is convenient others pretend you don’t exist, and your needs, desires, and goals are ignored.

I think almost everyone desires high status by this measure. It is very different than dominance.

jbay Mar 15, 2015, 5:07 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Recovering the past
Ah, hmm.… Maybe! If you include the entire history of the atom, then I’m not actually sure. That’s a tough question, and a good question =)

jbay Mar 14, 2015, 10:19 PM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Recovering the past
That is not at all true; for example, see the inverse problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_problem). Although the atom’s position is uniquely determined by the rest of the universe, the inverse is not true: Multiple different states of the universe could correspond to the same position of the atom. And as long as the atom’s position does not uniquely identify the rest of the outside universe, there is no way to infer the state of the universe from the state of the atom, no matter how much precision you can measure it with. The reason is that there are many ways that the boundary conditions of a box containing an atom could be arranged, in order to force it to any position, meaning that there is a limited amount that the atom can tell you about its box.

The atom is affected by its local conditions (electromagnetic and gravitational fields, etc), but there are innumerable ways of establishing any particular desired fields locally to the atom.

This causes challenges when, for example, you want to infer the electrical brain activity in a patient based on measurements of electromagnetic fields at the surface. Unfortunately, there are multiple ways that electrical currents could have been arranged in three-dimensional space inside the brain to create the same observed measurements at the surface, so it’s not always possible to “invert” the measurements directly without some other knowledge. This isn’t a problem of measurement precision; a finer grid of electrodes won’t solve it (although it may help rule out some possibilities).

jbay Mar 14, 2015, 10:06 PM
24 points
on: [FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122
Really good ending chapter. The presence of Hermione’s character totally changes the tone of the story, and reading this one, it became really clear how heavily the Sunshine General was missing from the last ~third or so of the story arc. Eliezer writes her very well, and seems to enjoy writing her too.

I thought Hermione was going to cast an Expecto Patronum at the end, with all the bubbling happiness, but declaring friendship works well too.

Irrelevant thought: Lasers aren’t needed to test out the strange optics of Harry’s office; positioning mirrors in known positions on the ground and viewing them through a telescope from the tower would already give intriguing results.

jbay Mar 8, 2015, 10:39 PM
25 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117
I hope that somebody (well, Harry) tells Michael MacNair that his father, alone among those summoned, died in combat with Voldemort. It seems sad for him not to know that.

jbay Jan 7, 2015, 12:20 AM
6 points
in reply to: Richard Korzekwa ’s comment on: 2014 Survey Results
According to Descartes: for any X, P(X exists | X is taking the survey) = 100%, and also that 100% certainty of anything on the part of X is only allowed in this particular case.

Therefore, if X says they are Atheist, and that P(God exists | X is taking the survey) = 100%, then X is God, God is taking the survey, and happens to be an Atheist.

jbay Jan 6, 2015, 10:05 PM
0 points
on: 2014 Survey Results
A note about calibration...

A poor showing on some questions, such as “what is the best-selling computer game”, doesn’t necessarily reflect poor calibration. It might instead simply mean that “the best-selling game is Minecraft” is a surprising fact to this particular community.

For example, I may have never heard of Minecraft, but had a large amount of exposure to evidence that “the best-selling game is Starcraft”, or “the best-selling game is Tetris”. During the time when I did play computer games, which was before the era of Minecraft, this maybe would have been true (or maybe it would have been a misperception even then). But when I look at the evidence that I have mentally available to recall, all of it might point to Starcraft.

Probability calibration can only be based on prior probabilties and available evidence. If I start with something like a max-entropy prior (assigning all computer games an equal probability of having been the best-selling ones) and then update it based on every time I remember hearing the popularity of game X discussed in the media, then the resulting sharpness of my probability distribution (my certainty) will depend on how much evidence I have, and how sharply it favours game X over others.

If I happened to have obtained my evidence during a time when Starcraft really was the best-selling computer game, my evidence will be sharply peaked around Starcraft, leading me (even as a perfect Bayesian) to conclude that Starcraft is the answer with high probability. Minecraft wouldn’t even make runner-up, especially if I haven’t heard of it.

When I learn afterward that the answer is Minecraft, that is a “surprising result”, because I was confident and wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean I had false confidence or updated poorly, just that I had updated well on misleading evidence. However, we can’t have ‘evidence’ available that says our body of evidence is dubious.

If the whole community is likewise surprised that Minecraft is the right answer, that doesn’t necessarily indicate overconfidence in the community… it might instead indicate that our evidence was strongly and systematically biased, perhaps because most of us are not of the Minecraft generation ( not sure if 27 is too old for inecraft or not?).

Similarly, if the world’s scholars were all wrong and (somehow), in reality, the Norse God known as the All-Father was not called Odin but rather “Nido”, but this fact had been secretly concealed, then learning this fact would surprise everyone (including the authors of this survey). Our calibration results would suddenly look very bad on this question. We would all appear to be grossly overconfident. And yet, there would be no difference in the available evidence we’d had at hand (which all said “Odin” was the right answer).

jbay Dec 24, 2014, 2:30 AM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Entropy and Temperature
A tennis ball is a multi-particle system; however, all of the particles are accelerating more or less in unison while the ball free-falls. Nonetheless, it isn’t usually considered to be increasing in temperature, because the entropy isn’t increasing much as it falls.

jbay Nov 23, 2014, 1:10 AM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014
Oh good point! And if you don’t know the context when performing the translation (perhaps it’s an announcement at an all-girls or an all-boys school?), then the translation will be incorrect.

The ambiguity in the original sentence may be impossible to preserve in the translation process, which doesn’t mean that translation is impossible, but it does mean that information must be added by the translator to the sentence that wasn’t present in the original sentence.

Sometimes I do small contract translation jobs as a side activity, but it’s very frustrating when a client sends me snippets of text to be translated without the full context.

jbay Jul 29, 2014, 2:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: Illano’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
Yes..… you may be right, and it is a compelling reason, for example, not to admit terrorists into a country.

I suppose that if a particular individual’s admission into the country would depress the entire country by a sufficient amount, then that’s a fair reason to keep them out, without worrying about valuing different peoples’ utilities unequally.

jbay Jul 29, 2014, 2:30 PM
1 point
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
That’s fine. Do you consider yourself a utilitarian? Many people do not.

For that matter, following Illano’s line of thought, it’s not clear that the amount that poor people would appreciate receiving all of my possessions is greater than the amount of sadness I would suffer from losing everything I own. (Although if I was giving it away out of a feeling of moral inclination to do so, I would presumably be happy with my choice). I’m not sure what George Price was thinking exactly.

jbay Jul 29, 2014, 11:44 AM
3 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
Yes, of course. But the net average quality of life is increased overall. Please examine the posts that I’m replying to here, for the context of the point I am making. For convenience I’ve copied it below:

How many billion people would be better off if allowed to immigrate to GB? Utilitarianism is about counting everyone’s utility the same...

You can’t fit billions of people in the UK.

If you are entering the argument with a claim that the UK’s current inhabitants can be utilitarian and simultaneously weigh their own utility higher than those of other humans, then you should be directing your argument toward buybuydanddavis’ post, since ze’s the one who said “That weighting factor should be 1 for all”. I am merely noting that not being able to fit billions of people in the UK is not a valid counterargument; net utility will still be increased by such a policy no matter what the UK’s population carrying capacity is.

jbay Jul 29, 2014, 7:33 AM
5 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

You can’t fit billions of people in the UK. ( I guess that’s not what you meant, but that’s what it sounds like)

The gain in quality of life from moving to the UK would gradually diminish as the island became overcrowded, until there was no net utility gain from people moving there anymore. Unrestricted immigration is not the same thing as inviting all seven billion humans to the UK. People will only keep immigrating until the average quality of life is the same in the UK as it is anywhere else; then there will be an equilibrium.

jbay Jul 28, 2014, 5:30 AM
2 points
in reply to: duckduckMOO’s comment on: Interlude with the Confessor (4/8)
I admit that I found this really disturbing too.

I think that it is intended as an exercise. Put yourself in the mindset of an average 18th or 19th-century individual, and imagine the 21st century as an idealized future. Things seem pretty wonderful; machines do most of the work, medicines cure disease, air travel lets you get anywhere on the planet in a single day.

But then, what?! Women can vote, and run businesses? And legalized gay marriage?!! How shocking and disturbing.

It’s almost a given that the future’s values will drift apart from ours, although we can’t be sure how and in which direction they will go. So something about this idealized future would be likely to seem abhorrent to us, even if normal and natural to the people of that time.

I think—and this seems to be the part that people don’t understand at first—EY is not suggesting that rape should be legalized, or painting this as his ideal values of the future. EY is saying something about the way that values change over time; the future is bound to embrace some values we find abhorrent, and the way that he can convey that feeling to us is by picking some abhorrent thing that pretty much everybody would agree is bad, and depicting it being normal and acceptable in a future society.

That’s the only way that we can experience the feeling of how someone from the past would feel about modern culture.

jbay Jul 26, 2014, 6:47 AM
1 point
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Alpha Mail
Aside from the fact that having godly power doesn’t necessarily correlate well with an ease of understanding life-forms...

The universe less like a carefully painted mural in which humans and other life forms were mapped out in exquisite and intricate detail, and more like a big empty petri dish set in a warm spot billions of years ago. The underlying specifications for creating the universe seem to be pretty simple mathematically (a few laws and some low-entropy initial conditions). The complex part is just the intricate structures that have arisen over time.

jbay Jul 26, 2014, 6:33 AM
1 point
on: Gauging interest for a Tokyo area meetup group
Ah, too bad! I’m just about to move out of Tokyo. I would have loved to participate in a LW gathering here otherwise.

There’s a ~20% chance that I will be back in Tokyo next year, for a period of a few years. So you can count me as 1/5th of an ‘interested’ response

jbay Jul 21, 2014, 4:26 AM
0 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: A simple game that has no solution
Player 2 observes “not A” as a choice. Doesn’t player 2 still need to estimate the relative probabilities that B was chosen vs. that C was chosen?

Of course Player 2 doesn’t have access to Player 1′s source code, but that’s not an excuse to set those probabilities in a completely arbitrary manner. Player 2 has to decide the probability of B in a rational way, given the available (albeit scarce) evidence, which is the payoff matrix and the fact that A was not chosen.

It seems reasonable to imagine a space of strategies which would lead player 1 to not choose A, and assign probabilities to which strategy player 1 is using. Player 1 is probably making a shot for 6 points, meaning they are trying to tempt player 2 into choosing Y. Player 2 has to decide the probability that (Player 1 is using a strategy which results in [probability of B > 0]), in order to make that choice.

jbay Jul 17, 2014, 12:39 PM
2 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Too good to be true
How does this work for a binary quantity?

If your experiment tells you that [x > 45] with 99% confidence, you may in certain cases be able to confidently transform that to [x > 60] with 95% confidence.

For example, if your experiment tells you that the mass of the Q particle is 1.5034(42) with 99% confidence, maybe you can say instead that it’s 1.50344(2) with 95% confidence.

If your experiment happens to tell you that [particle Q exists] is true with 99% confidence, what kind of transformation can you apply to get 95% confidence instead? Discard some of your evidence? Add noise into your sensor readings?

Roll dice before reporting the answer?

jbay Jul 15, 2014, 1:19 PM
1 point
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Confused as to usefulness of ‘consciousness’ as a concept
I think my opinion is the same as yours, but I’m curious about whether anybody else has different answers.