You need to distinguish between errors that are of no significance and errors that are significant. Although Bob’s words were not literally true, the error is not relevant to the proposition for which the statement was used as evidence. (That’s what a nitpick means: caring about an error that is not relevant to the associated proposition.)
Jiro
Karma: 5,088
It’s true that people in some obscure small town may not be aware of online stereotypes, but the stereotype isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s the result. People already notice that wearing a suit or fedora is weird behavior, and they already understand the signal sent out by it. If they see many occurrences of the same weird behavior, they will notice the trend and put a label on it, but the label is not the cause of their disdain.
you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them
Knowing little isn’t the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don’t know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.
teased … means full acceptance and not just toleration
I think you are off base here.
It means “you’ve spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship”.
What strikes me about this framework is that if evolution of life has a competitive component—which seems likely given finite resources—then it’s logical that competitive behaviors or similar analogues would develop. These patterns would actually be helpful for pre-technological civilizations, enhancing survival and group coordination.
I think this reasoning too fails. If life naturally and easily evolves towards intelligence, I’d expect that in the 165 million years that dinosaurs were around, they would have developed intelligence.
The “intelligence is rare” hypothesis commits what amounts to base rate neglect—it fails to account for the sheer scale of our sample size. When you’re dealing with trillions of opportunities across billions of years, even extraordinarily improbable events become virtually certain.
This is not true. “Trillions and billions” is not “every number”. Something can be possible, yet be so unlikely that even with such a huge sample size it’s still pretty unlikely.
You are confusing “extraordinarily improbable” and “somewhat extraordinary improbable but not too much”. Just because trillions and billions sound like big numbers doesn’t mean that something can’t be smaller than they are big.
Not one stray communication has leaked into space and traveled the cosmos for millions of years. Nothing.
A stray communication of the type which we produce on Earth now that leaked into space and travelled for millions of years wouldn’t be detectable.
And this whole post seems like one of those Sherlock Holmes deductions. Where Holmes strings together so many things that are plausible but not certain that in real life his deduction would be nonsense, as the uncertainty builds up through the chain.
What if the authors weren’t a subset of the community at all? What if they’d never heard of LessWrong, somehow?
Wouldn’t that not change it very much, because the community signal-boosting a claim from outside the community still fits the pattern?
People subconsciously assess others’ appearance without consciously and explicitly pointing to particular traits. Just because they wouldn’t look at someone and say “long-shinned freak” doesn’t mean the long shins wouldn’t reduce their perceived attractiveness anyway. They’d look at the person and have a hunch that something is a little weird without being able to pin it down.
And all this comes at a time when more and more research is confirming that black soldier flies feel pain just like larger and more charismatic animals.
I thought a couple of posts ago you were arguing that even with a small chance that insects are sentient we have to save them. Now suddenly your small chance has grown to 100%?
In addition, it might make your legs more fragile when doing squats or deadlifts.
There’s actually no reason to believe it’ll help. Increasing your height this way doesn’t make your body proportionately taller, and being out of proportion is unattractive.
This is just another case of geeks carrying ideas to weird conclusions without doing sanity checks.
Then unless we are *extremely confident *that there is no imminent doom, we should still be scaring people. Scaring people is bad and we want to avoid it, but we want to avoid extinction a whole lot more. Given that, I think it makes the most sense to go with something like a 99th percentile date.
This sort of reasoning leads to Pascal’s Mugging and lots of weirdness like concern for the welfare of insects or electrons.
We should not be acting on the basis of extremely unlikely events because the events lead to a very large change in utility.
Number of deaths is misleading because of the higher world population.
By this reasoning, we should treat the chance of AI killing half the world as 50%, and the chance of AI killing 1⁄4 the world as 50%, the chance of either AI or a meteor killing the world as 50%, etc.
And you then have to estimate the chances of electrons or video game characters being sentient. It’s nonzero, right? Maybe electrons only have a 10^-20 chance of being sentient.
Rethink Priorities does calculations using made up numbers which, of course, have the same problem. 1% for the likelihood that insects are sentient is absurdly generous.
what numbers do you think they should pick instead
I have no idea. But I know that the ones you have aren’t it.
OK, then why was the test timed in the first place? You don’t care about speed, remember?
Someone who takes a very long time to get answers may be more likely to completely forget the information in the future, may be less able to use the information in real world situations, etc. even though he eventually managed to write the answer on the test. Someone who takes a long time to write the answer down because he has a disability may not have these problems.
So while we don’t care about speed by itself, we care about problems that are correlated with speed, and they may be less so for the disabled.
The Dunning-Krueger effect doesn’t mean that you should think all propositions you aren’t expert in are false. It means you should reduce credence in them. There’s no law of mathematics which implies that after you reduce credence in them, your credence in them will be so low that it counts as “not believing in it confidently”.
Churches could ask you for your Facebook passwords now, and they don’t. So could employers, and while this has been an occasional problem, most of them still don’t. This theory seems to imply that they would.
Also Hades in DC comics.
What is a stereotypical male action hero?
Tough. Stiff upper lip. Never cries, never loses his cool, never loses his temper. Never has mental illness, never suffers mental trauma. Handles everything. Knows how to do everything. Never gets in over his head. Never relies on others for help.
The answer to this problem is that few action heroes have all of these traits, but a fair number of them have most of those traits. When people think of an average action hero, the fact that each individual hero lacks a small portion of the traits is going to get averaged out, so the “average” hero has all the traits even though each particular hero only has most.
As for the Death example,
I’m sure there are occasional negative portrayals … but those seldom qualify as “characters.”
basically defines away the counterexamples. People saying that death is normally portrayed as cruel and evil probably are thinking of those examples, even if they don’t count as “characters”. Furthermore, excluding examples that aren’t “characters” inherently stacks the deck towards happy Deaths because making Death have feelings is characterization, so the same example wouldn’t count if Death is evil but would count if Death is affable.
If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work?
Because your “foundational questions” are not the type of questions that describe what it is. They are the type of questions whose answers depend on whether we can make it work. The answers to your questions would be something like:
Why haven’t we noticed that we’ve been trying to achieve fairness and prosperity on the basis of such a perverse principle?
Because if other principles don’t work, picking the one that does work, even if it has problems, isn’t perverse.
How could we be so naive as to think that we can make anything work until we figure out what went wrong with our thinking?
Because if getting rid of property doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise—there isn’t actually anything wrong with our thinking.
What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?
People are repulsed by running society based on something that doesn’t work.
If you can’t even get people to think about an idea rationally, openly, and honestly, how the heck are they ever going to experiment with it properly to gain an intelligent basis for answering the “make it work” question?
If it doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise, because if it doesn’t work, they have in fact answered the question intelligently.
Your upshot was that I wasn’t very nice to ownership because I said negative things about it that, according to you, don’t apply. That’s so vague it’s worthless.
No it isn’t, I gave a specific example.
If you are not Scott, remember “the purpose of a system is what it does”. Someone may not say outright “I want you to feel pain”, yet may still treat people’s pain as very unimportant when implementing policy.