komponisto2

Karma: 174

komponisto2 20 Sep 2010 1:16 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Relsqui’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
While obviously the legacy of history always remains a social force to some extent, it’s open to question exactly how potent that force is. Clearly it’s less potent than it used to be—but acknowledging this is frowned upon in some circles because it sounds like a concession to the enemy.

(By the way, as this comment demonstrates, it is possible to access accounts automatically created from the importation of Overcoming Bias posts into Less Wrong. One simply uses the password reset function, checks the appropriate e-mail address, and follows the instructions in the message that is automatically sent there. A duplicate account such as “komponisto2” apparently results from a different email address being used to create the LW account “komponisto” from that associated with the OB comments from “komponisto”. Had the same e-mail address been used, old comments such as the grandparent would have been added to the new LW account when the importation took place. Let this be noted by anyone who commented on OB and has not yet created an account on LW.)

komponisto2 26 Jan 2009 20:27 UTC
15 points
on: 31 Laws of Fun
consider Christian Heaven: singing hymns doesn’t sound like loads of endless fun

Unless, perhaps, you happen to enjoy music...

(Seriously—suppose you got to compose your own hymns.)

A general comment: I am tempted to question the wisdom of tying Fun Theory so closely to the aesthetics of storytelling, by discussing the two in such proximity. As we all know, there’s not necessarily any correlation between the worlds we would want to live in and the worlds we like to read about. I’m not just talking about Dystopian stories either. I love watching House, but sure as hell would never want to actually be any of the characters on that show. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a delight to read despite being (paradoxically) a depressing tragedy. Etc.

Now there is a connection, to be sure, in that aesthetics itself (in the context of any art form, including but not limited to storytelling) is effectively a miniature, special case of Fun Theory. But this connection is more abstract, and has little to do with how closely settings and plots match up with eudaimonic scenarios. (Inhabitants of Eutopia themselves may enjoy tragic stories and the like.)

komponisto2 18 Dec 2008 21:40 UTC
1 point
on: Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
TGGP, I’m not going to argue the point that there has been moral progress. It isn’t the topic of this post.

Phil Goetz:

Everybody says that not taking the land from the Native Americans would have been the right thing to do; but nobody wants to give it back.

The whole point of my original comment was to refute this very inference. Arguing that taking land from the Native Americans was wrong is not the same as arguing that it should be “given back” now (whatever that would mean). Nor is it the same as wishing we lived in a world where it never happened.

What it means is wishing we lived in a world where the Europeans had our moral values—and thus also in all probability our science and technology—centuries ago. Before committing misdeeds against Native Americans.

Also, an argument that the actual colonization of America was “wrong” is not the same as an argument that America should never have been turned into a civilization. Surely there are ways to accomplish this without imposing so much disutility on the existing inhabitants*. Likewise for creating nice worlds with ems and AIs.

*There lies the implicit moral principle, in case you didn’t notice.

komponisto2 18 Dec 2008 12:35 UTC
−1 points
on: Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
Michael, I take the point about outliers—but claims like the one I made are inherently statistical in nature.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that (1) pre-WWI Germany would indeed have to be considered one of the more morally enlightened societies of the time; and (2) the Nazi regime ultimately proved no help to the cause of German scientific and cultural advancement—and that’s putting it way too mildly.

So perhaps this episode, rather than undermining the proposed correlation, merely illustrates the point that even advanced civilizations remain vulnerable to the occasional total disaster.

komponisto2 18 Dec 2008 7:25 UTC
2 points
on: Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
TGGP, I’m afraid you’ve committed the moral analogue of replying to some truth claim with a statement of the form: “As a non-X-ist, I don’t find the notion of truth to be meaningful”.

By “moral progress” I simply mean the sense in which Western civilization is nicer today than it used to be. E.g. we don’t keep slaves, burn live cats, etc. (If you have any doubts about whether such progress has occurred, you underestimate the nastiness of previous eras.) In particular, please note that I am not invoking any sort of fancy ontology, so let’s not get derailed that way.

As for why we should expect moral progress to correlate with other kinds: well, maybe for arbitrary minds we shouldn’t. But we humans keep trying to become both smarter and nicer, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we succeed in both dimensions more and more over time.

komponisto2 18 Dec 2008 4:14 UTC
1 point
on: Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
Slightly tangential, but I think this needs addressing:

What is the moral argument for not colonizing America?

Literally interpreted, that’s a meaningless question. We can’t change history by moral argument. What we can do is point to past deeds and say, “let’s not do things like that anymore”.

If European civilization circa 1500 had been morally advanced enough to say, “let’s not trample upon the rights of other peoples”, chances are they would already have been significantly more advanced in other ways too. Moral progress takes work, just like technological and intellectual progress. Indeed we should expect some correlation among these modes of progress, should we not? And isn’t that largely what we find?

By critiquing the errors of the past, we may hope to speed up our own progress on all fronts. This is (or should be) the point of labeling the colonization of America (in the way it happened) as “wrong”.

komponisto2 12 Dec 2008 21:04 UTC
19 points
0
on: You Only Live Twice
Eliezer, although you and Robin agree on the general principle, Robin has signed up with Alcor, while you have signed up with CI. (Despite the fact that you say you could afford Alcor also.) How much of a disagreement is this, and what does it reflect?

More generally, how should one rationally approach this decision?

komponisto2 29 Nov 2008 20:25 UTC
0 points
on: Thanksgiving Prayer
Unknown:

Komponisto: that definition includes human beings

No it doesn’t. I said controlling the weather, not affecting it or influencing it.

komponisto2 29 Nov 2008 11:16 UTC
2 points
on: Thanksgiving Prayer
Unknown, how about this:

God: a conscious entity capable of controlling the weather.

(At least, I propose these as necessary attributes of a deity.)

Under this definition, I’m pretty sure Eliezer is an atheist. On the other hand, do you dare assert that a typical theist doesn’t believe their god could make it rain tomorrow?

komponisto2 10 Nov 2008 8:11 UTC
5 points
on: Lawful Creativity
To all defending Modern Art: Please point to at least one item available online which exemplifies that which you think I’m ignoring or missing.

Funny—I didn’t actually read the post as an attack on Modern Art. The point seemed to be that, appearances to the contrary, Modern Artists are in fact trying to hit a narrow target, albeit not the one you might at first think. It is presumably this attempted optimization that makes Modern Art (to the extent such a thing does in fact exist) a worthwhile or interesting activity to those who practice it.

komponisto2 6 Oct 2008 7:24 UTC
4 points
on: My Bayesian Enlightenment
Larry D’Anna on Jaynes:

I found the first two chapters of PT:TLOS to be absolutely, wretchedly awful. It’s full of technical mistakes, crazy mischaracterizations of other people’s opinions, hidden assumptions and skipped steps (that he tries to justify with handwaving nonsense), and even a discussion of Godel’s theorems that mixes meta levels and completly misses the point.

Not to mention the totally unnecessary and irrelevant screeds against mainstream pure mathematics in general, which can only serve to alienate potential converts in that discipline (they sure alienated the hell out of me).

komponisto2 5 Oct 2008 20:08 UTC
2 points
on: My Bayesian Enlightenment
Also do we really want to assign a prior probability of 0 that the mathematician is a liar! :)

That’s not the point I was making.

I’m not attacking unrealistic idealization. I’m willing to stipulate that the mathematician tells the truth. What I’m questioning is the “naturalness” of Eliezer’s interpretation. The interpretation that I find “common-sensical” would be the following:

Let A = both boys, B = at least one boy. The prior P(B) is ³⁄₄, while P(A) = ¹⁄₄. The mathematician’s statement instructs us to find P(A|B), which by Bayes is equal to ¹⁄₃.

Under Eliezer’s interpretation, however, the question is to find P(A|C), where C = the mathematician says at least one boy (as opposed to saying at least one girl).

So if anyone is attacking the premises of the question, it is Eliezer, by introducing the quantity P(C) (which strikes me as contrived) and assigning it a value less than 1.

komponisto2 5 Oct 2008 18:18 UTC
2 points
on: My Bayesian Enlightenment
No, wait—my question stands!

Do we really want to assign a prior of 0 to the mathematician saying “I have two children, one boy and one girl”?

komponisto2 5 Oct 2008 18:11 UTC
0 points
on: My Bayesian Enlightenment
Never mind—missed the “If” clause. (Sorry!)

komponisto2 5 Oct 2008 18:07 UTC
0 points
on: My Bayesian Enlightenment
If the mathematician has one boy and one girl, then my prior probability for her saying ‘at least one of them is a boy’ is ¹⁄₂ and my prior probability for her saying ‘at least one of them is a girl’ is ¹⁄₂

Why isn’t it ³⁄₄ for both? Why are these scenarios mutually exclusive?

komponisto2 27 Sep 2008 19:33 UTC
1 point
on: The Level Above Mine
Lara, I don’t think they value it “for its own sake” as opposed to as a means to an end; rather, they see it as a necessary condition for achieving their ends, and are worried they don’t have what it takes. Nothing but an anxiety trip.

And of course, there’s also the ego thing—when people build superiority over others into their self-image. This is counterproductive, of course. When someone else demonstrates that they’re “smarter” than you by offering unexpected insight, you don’t fatalistically wallow in jealous misery; you listen to the content of what they say, in the hope of becoming as smart as they are.

Eliezer of all people ought to realize this (actually I suspect he does).

FWIW, I’ve met both Eliezer and John Conway, and have spent approximately the same total amount of time with both of them (on the order of 10 hours). I don’t know which of them is smarter. Yet I suspect neither is too far above my own level for me to be able to e.g. benefit from listening to a conversation between them.

komponisto2 21 Sep 2008 0:29 UTC
1 point
on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?
At the risk of asking the obvious:

Does the fact that no one has yet succeeded in constructing transhuman AI imply that doing so would necessarily wipe out humanity?

komponisto2 4 Sep 2008 0:05 UTC
1 point
on: Rationality Quotes 13
Robin, the underlying point of the soldier quote (and others like it) is that the liberal society we enjoy comes at a (military) cost. Freedom, as the saying goes, isn’t free. If we really want freedom of speech and the like, we had better be prepared to enforce it (ironic though that may seem).

komponisto2 24 Aug 2008 1:07 UTC
4 points
on: Mirrors and Paintings
Eliezer, while I think that Caledonian (and perhaps also Richard Hollerith) has apparently missed the whole point of a number of your posts (in particular the recent ones on Löb’s theorem, etc), I’m not sure why you are so concerned about people being “fooled”. These are comments, which happen to be clearly labeled as not being authored by you. Would anyone really assume that a particular commenter, be it Caledonian or anyone else, has necessarily summarized your views accurately?

Furthermore, for every one such “misrepresentative” comment, there are undoubtedly several lurkers suffering from an honest misunderstanding similar to the one being articulated (whether in good faith or not) by the commenter. It may be worthwhile to simply correct these misunderstandings as often as possible, even at the risk of repetition. These are, after all, subtle points, and it may take time (and reinforcement) for people to understand them.

komponisto2 19 Aug 2008 3:36 UTC
2 points
on: Dumb Deplaning
The flipside of this is the inanity of Southwest Airlines employees with respect to boarding the plane:

As is well known, Southwest doesn’t have assigned seats, so the choice of seating is determined by boarding order, with earlier people getting more choices. People want to avoid middle seats, so the natural tendency of later boarders on crowded flights is to keep walking as far as necessary toward the back of the cabin in the hope of finding and empty aisle or window seat. For some inexplicable reason, however, Southwest flight attendants and gate managers actively discourage this, wanting people instead to take the first middle seat they find. The all-too-predictable result is a traffic jam in the aisle and the jetway, as the line continually stops to wait for the leading person to stow their luggage and take their seat.

It should be obvious that, regardless of how crowded the flight is, boarding efficiency is maximized by having each passenger go as far to the back of the cabin as possible, to allow the line to keep moving forward. Is this goal somehow less important than that of teaching people not to vainly expect aisle or window seats?