Jiro

Karma: 4,744

Jiro 18 Nov 2024 2:00 UTC
2 points
0
on: Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences
My own heresy is that I don’t have a true rejection. Many ideas are things which I believe by accumulation of evidence and there’s no single item which would disprove my position. And talking about a “true rejection” is really trying to create a gotcha to force someone to change their position without allowing for things such as accumulation of evidence or even misphrasing the rejection.

I also think rationalists shouldn’t bet, but that probably deserves its own post.

Jiro 12 Nov 2024 1:24 UTC
15 points
8
on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed

This is the core reason why it is so difficult for ordinary people to pay their bills or raise families, despite earnings that would make them rich elsewhere or elsewhen. These productive actions are severely restricted, because if you are going to be productive then you have to do so ‘correctly’ and obey all sorts of rules and requirements.

There are plenty of good things that aren’t restricted and bad things that are. But elites are human and aren’t going to get it right every time, and you’ll notice most the cases where they got it wrong.

Jiro 2 Nov 2024 5:30 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: codyz’s comment on: Another UFO Bet
No, because I have no way to improve my ability to see loopholes and flaws, so there’s always going to be residual uncertainty that can’t be reduced. Risk aversion does the rest.

Jiro 1 Nov 2024 19:22 UTC
6 points
1
on: Another UFO Bet
Sorry, risk aversion.

Also, the usual situation of “if I think the main proposition is unlikely, bad outcomes will be dominated by cases where I miss loopholes in the bet or otherwise lose the bet for reasons unrelated to the truth of the proposition”.

Jiro 25 Sep 2024 9:43 UTC
5 points
0
on: Automatic Rate Limiting on LessWrong
- 1 comment / hour
- i.e slow down a little, you may be getting into a heated exchange.
I just got screwed over by this, It strikes me as insane to be rate-limited to “slow down” and not get into a “heated exchange” when the limit is done by checking the user’s karma for the last 20 comments from any time period. 20 comments from me go back months, I can’t get all that much slower. And 3 downvoters and −1 is an awfully small limit, and easy to hit just out of bad luck.
Also, if you post from greaterwrong, and you hit the limit, your comment and the effort spent writing it is just lost.

Jiro 25 Sep 2024 8:22 UTC
2 points
0
on: In Praise of the Beatitudes

But some of the writing in those old sacred texts is actually really good.

The Halo Effect (pun not intended) is very strong here.

I seldom see people who say thibnngs like this also say that the writing in the Koran is actually really good, for some reason. And not because there’s some difference in how good the writing in the Koran and in the Bible is.

Jiro 16 Sep 2024 23:51 UTC
0 points
0
on: What’s the Deal with Logical Uncertainty?
If you make a lot of educated guesses about the googolth digit of pi based on chains of reasoning that are actually possible for humans, around 50% of them will get its parity right.

(Of course that’s reversed, in a way, since it isn’t stating that the digit is uncertain.)

Jiro 4 Sep 2024 17:50 UTC
5 points
3
on: Book Review: What Even Is Gender?

Reviewing WEIG on this blog provides another interesting point of contrast in The Categories Were Made for Man.

which in turn contrasts with Zack Davis’ posts including The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions.

Jiro 2 Sep 2024 8:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Hudjefa’s comment on: On Nothing
That statement is not nonsensical, but “nothing” is not being compared as a quantity either.

Jiro 31 Aug 2024 4:49 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Hudjefa’s comment on: On Nothing

There must be some quality (in this case quantity :puzzled:) on the basis of which a comparison (here quantitative) can be made.

There is sometimes a quantity on the basis of which a comparison can be made.

This quantity exists in 0 < 3. It doesn’t in “nothing is bigger than X”.

Jiro 30 Aug 2024 5:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Hudjefa’s comment on: On Nothing

Am I not doing the same when I say …

No.

“0 < 0.5 is a statement about the numerical value indicating nothing. “Nothing is greater than X” is a statement about the size of the set containing things greater than X. You are using “nothing” with two different meanings.

Jiro 28 Aug 2024 23:02 UTC
3 points
0
on: On Nothing
This is absurd. “Nothing is bigger than X” doesn’t mean “there’s a thing which is bigger than X”. It means “the set of things bigger than X is empty”.

It’s not a relationship that can be directly described using the symbol “<”. If you tried using similar reasoning to this post, the closest you’d get is “every member of the empty set is smaller than every member of the empty set”. This is of course true.

Jiro 21 Aug 2024 2:10 UTC
2 points
0
on: Caring only about your child may increase human suffering
Why can’t you equally argue “caring for oneself may increase human suffering”, and thus demand that you never favor yourself over other people?

Jiro 21 Aug 2024 2:00 UTC
4 points
2
on: You’re a Space Wizard, Luke

“Of course not,” said Obi-Wan, “I mean, it’s theoretically possible. But I advise against it. The reflexes necessary to do so reliably are beyond the limits of human biology.”

In a world where you have some sort of precognition, no, the reflexes needed to do it are not beyond the limits of human biology.

Jiro 3 Aug 2024 19:46 UTC
5 points
7
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: Dragon Agnosticism
I don’t see why it should be limited to false beliefs.

Note that even if X is true, X->Y need not be true, and it can still be harmful to not be able to question X->Y.

Jiro 28 Jul 2024 15:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
Focusing on the “central point” in the midst of a lot of other “unimportant” points is a recipe for Gish gallops because you can claim that any point which has been refuted is an unimportant one. This forces your questioner to keep refuting point after point until you run out of them. That amounts to a Gish gallop.

If the point was important enough to strengthen your argument—and presumably it was or you wouldn’t have used it—it’s important enough that refuting it weakens the argument.

Jiro 27 Jul 2024 9:14 UTC
2 points
0
on: The AI Driver’s Licence—A Policy Proposal
Any time you demand a license for something, that amounts to “if you don’t do as demanded, men with guns will come and if you continue to disobey, will kill you or lock you in a cage”. That should be enough to oppose this proposal. We’ve been through this before with cryptography rules, and even those were only about export.

Not to mention that even that assumes that the people handing out the licenses will be good at their job. If you actually implement this, you’re not going to get licenses that require expertise; you’re going to get licenses that require that you follow whatever arbitrary rule some committee and pressure groups have cooked up. The AI license is far more likely to be used to prevent business competition and to sound good in a political speech than to promote AI safety.

And using an international organization is even worse. The last thing I want is China and Russia getting a vote on what software I’m allowed to have.

Jiro 27 Jul 2024 8:59 UTC
2 points
−11
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty

In particular, I like to focus pretty hard on the central point (DH6) rather than supporting and tangential points.

This is a recipe for Gish gallops.

It also leads to Schrodinger’s importance, where a point is important right up until someone looks at it and shows that it’s poorly supported, whereupon it’s suddenly unimportant. If it’s important enough to use, it’s important enough to be refuted.

Jiro 26 Jul 2024 16:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: DiamondSolstice’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too

Say I go swimming in a place where the lifeguard can’t see me. Is it my fault I drowned or the lifeguards?

The issue is not whose fault it is for the crime, but whose fault it is for the using up the extra resources to prevent the crime, which is not an issue in the lifeguard example. And that itself is a specific case of “how much more than average do you have to use the commons before you can be blamed for overusing the commons”. Which is partly a matter of degree and depends on things like how much you use it, what people’s expectations are, what reasonable expectations are, and what the intentions are of the people providing the resources.

My family doesn’t go to these casinos, we just travel to Vegas because we have friends nearby. We’re benefiting but not contributing.

I’ve done that myself (for busses to Atlantic City). Since the owner can change the price freely, and can change it incrementally or for specific customers, I’d generally not consider it to be overusing the commons if there is a price. In the case of loss-leader trips, it’s also very hard to overuse the trips anyway, as opposed to just using them more than average—you probably couldn’t use more than one trip every couple of days.

If stores in Taiwan charged for use of bathrooms, and the government rented out spaces for homeless on the ground, and charged a “homeless stay tax” which covers the costs of police and such, I would agree that it would be okay to go homeless and use them at the given prices. (If there is a two tier price where the homeless are charged more, the homeless tourist would have to pay the homeless tier price, and not cheat even if it isn’t enforced well.)

Jiro 22 Jul 2024 1:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: Yet Another Critique of “Luxury Beliefs”
I don’t have to make up things after the fact to say “he probably chose the polygamy example because polygamy is weird”. It’s obvious.