MugaSofer

Karma: 778

MugaSofer Jan 9, 2015, 9:35 PM
2 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
I don’t know nearly as many Muslims as I do Christians, but I generally get the impression that liberal Muslims don’t have unusually strong reactions to atheism and other religions? Whereas they are, if anything, more threatened by Muslim terrorists—because of the general name-blackening, in addition to the normal fear response to your tribe being attacked.

Has this not been your experience?

MugaSofer Jan 7, 2015, 4:20 PM
2 points
on: A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies

You have noticed, he says, that the new German society also has a lot of normal, “full-strength” Nazis around. The “reformed” Nazis occasionally denounce these people, and accuse them of misinterpreting Hitler’s words, but they don’t seem nearly as offended by the “full-strength” Nazis as they are by the idea of people who reject Nazism completely.

This part of the metaphor doesn’t work.

Religious people generally condemn heretics even more strongly than nonbelievers. Liberal Christians, specifically, are generally more opposed to fundamentalist Christians’ policies than liberal atheists’ policies—for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they’re wildly misinterpreting key passages and it’s really really obvious, and the fact that there’s a readily-available blue/green divide between them.

MugaSofer Dec 25, 2014, 7:23 AM
3 points
in reply to: jdgalt’s comment on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey

The obvious next question would be to ask if you’re OK with your family being tortured under the various circumstances this would suggest you would be.

I’ve lost the context to understand this question.

How would you react to the idea of people being tortured over the cosmological horizon, outside your past or future light-cone? Or transferred to another, undetectable universe and tortured?

I mean, it’s unverifiable, but strikes me as important and not at all meaningless. (But apparently I had misinterpreted you in any case.)

The usual version of this I hear is from people who’ve read Minsky and/or Moravec, and feel we should treat any entity that can pass some reasonable Turing test as legally and morally human. I disagree because I believe a self-aware entity can be simulated—maybe not perfectly, but to an arbitrarily high difficulty of disproving it—by a program that is not self-aware. And if such a standard were enacted, interest groups would use it to manufacture a large supply of these fakes and have them vote and/or fight for their side of political questions.

Oh. That’s an important distinction, yeah, but standard Singularity arguments suggest that by the time that would come up humans would no longer be making that decision anyway.

Um, if something is smart enough to solve every problem a human can, ho relevant is the distinction? I mean, sure, it might (say) be lying about it’s preferences, but … surely it’ll have exactly the same impact on society, regardless?

On the other hand, this sounds like a tribal battle-cry rather than a rational, non-mindkilled discussion.

It is. At some point I have trouble justifying the one without invoking the other. Some things are just so obvious to me, and so senselessly not-believed by many, that I see no peaceful way out other than dismissing those people. How do you argue with someone who isn’t open to reason?

ahem … I’m … actually from the other tribe. Pretty heavily in favor of a Nanny Welfare State, and although I’m not sure I’d go quite so far as to say it’s “obvious” and anyone who disagrees must be “senseless … not open to reason”.

Care to trade chains of logic? A welfare state, in particular, seems kind of really important from here.

I think the trouble with these sort of battle-cries is that they lead to, well, assuming the other side must be evil strawmen. It’s a problem. (That’s why political discussion is unofficially banned here, unless you make an effort to be super neutral and rational about it.)

What’s that?

Ahh … “Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Sorry, that was way too opaque, I could barely parse it myself. Not sure why I thought that was a good idea to abbreviate.

MugaSofer Nov 22, 2014, 3:27 PM
7 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: xkcd on the AI box experiment
Really? I honestly found it pretty unfunny.

MugaSofer Nov 17, 2014, 7:33 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Offense versus harm minimization

Another thing I find interesting is that such a argument would never be set up using the example of piss Christ or a desecrated Talmud.

Interestingly, I have seen (less well-written) versions of this argument used for anti-Christian blasphemy, including “Piss Christ”.

I live in Ireland, which is known for it’s strong Catholic values. So … yup, this seems to fit with your theory.

MugaSofer Nov 17, 2014, 6:52 PM
2 points
in reply to: jtk3’s comment on: Offense versus harm minimization

To hold that speech is interchangeable with violence is to hold that a bullet can be the appropriate answer to an argument.

I wouldn’t consider a picture of Muhammad to be an “argument”, would you?

MugaSofer Nov 17, 2014, 4:53 PM
3 points
in reply to: jtk3’s comment on: Offense versus harm minimization
What if they claimed to experience benefits from the implants? For example, they might cure certain neurological conditions.

Would you then expect them to remove the implants or be jolted?

MugaSofer Nov 17, 2014, 4:43 PM
1 point
in reply to: Xachariah’s comment on: Offense versus harm minimization
This analysis seems be assuming that Muslims will deconvert if only they’re shown a sufficient number of pictures of Muhammad.

MugaSofer Nov 16, 2014, 11:51 AM
2 points
on: Meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup
Got another potential b) here.

MugaSofer Oct 18, 2014, 5:32 PM
7 points
in reply to: dthunt’s comment on: On Caring
That’s a good point. Humans are disturbingly good at motivated reasoning and compartmentalization on occasion.

MugaSofer Oct 18, 2014, 4:02 PM
1 point
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: On Caring
To better approximate a perfectly-rational Bayesian reasoner (with your values.)

Which, presumably, would be able to model the universe correctly complete with large numbers.

That’s the theory, anyway. Y’know, the same way you’d switch in a Monty Haul problem even if you don’t understand it intuitively.

MugaSofer Oct 10, 2014, 1:57 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: On Caring
I think this is the OP’s point—there is no (human) mind capable of caring, because human brains aren’t capable of modelling numbers that large properly. If you can’t contain a mind, you can’t use your usual “imaginary person” modules to shift your brain into that “gear”.

So—until you find a better way! - you have to sort of act as if your brain was screaming that loudly even when your brain doesn’t have a voice that loud.

MugaSofer Oct 10, 2014, 1:47 PM
9 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: On Caring

I’m not a vegetarian, it would be quite hypocritical for me to invest resources in saving one bird for “care” reasons and then going to eat a chicken at dinner.

This strikes me as backward reasoning—if your moral intuitions about large numbers of animals dying are broken, isn’t it much more likely that you made a mistake about vegetarianism?

(Also, three dollars isn’t that high a value to place on something. I can definitely believe you get more than $3 worth of utility from eating a chicken. Heck, the chicken probably cost a good bit more than $3.)

MugaSofer Sep 27, 2014, 11:33 AM
3 points
in reply to: Adele_L’s comment on: Open thread, September 22-28, 2014
Thank you!

MugaSofer Sep 26, 2014, 3:24 PM
6 points
on: Open thread, September 22-28, 2014
So … I suspect someone might be doing that mass-downvote thing again. (To me, at least.)

Where do I go to inform a moderator so they can check?

MugaSofer Sep 26, 2014, 3:13 PM
3 points
on: I may have just had a dangerous thought.
Hey, I’ve listened to a lot of ideas labelled “dangerous”, some of which were labeled “extremely dangerous”. Haven’t gone crazy yet.

I’d definitely like to discuss it with you privately, if only to compare your idea to what I already know.

MugaSofer Sep 7, 2014, 4:56 PM
2 points
in reply to: KnaveOfAllTrades’s comment on: Anthropics doesn’t explain why the Cold War stayed Cold
I’m saying that if Sleeping Beauty’s goal is to better understand the world, by performing a Bayesian update on evidence, then I think this is a form of “payoff” that gives Thirder results.

From If a tree falls on Sleeping Beauty...:

Each interview consists of one question, “What is your credence now for the proposition that our coin landed heads?”, and the answer given will be scored according to a logarithmic scoring rule, with the aggregate result corresponding to the number of utilons (converted to dollars, let’s say) she will be penalized after the experiment.

In this case it is optimal to bet ¹⁄₃ that the coin came up heads, ²⁄₃ that it came up tails: [snip table]

MugaSofer Sep 6, 2014, 7:10 PM
2 points
in reply to: KnaveOfAllTrades’s comment on: Anthropics doesn’t explain why the Cold War stayed Cold

I don’t understand the first part of your comment. Different anthropic principles give different answers to e.g. Sleeping Beauty, and the type of dissolution that seems most promising for that problem doesn’t feel like what I’d call ‘using anthropic evidence’. (The post I just linked to in particular seems like a conceptual precursor to updateless thinking, which seems to me like the obviously correct perfect-logically-omniscient-reasoner solution to anthropics.)

OK, well by analogy, what’s the “payoff structure” for nuclear anthropics?

Obviously, we can’t prevent it after the fact. The payoff we get for being right is in the form of information; a better model of the world.

It isn’t perfectly analogous, but it seems to me that “be right” is most analogous to the Thirder payoff matrix for Sleeping-Beauty-like problems.

MugaSofer Sep 6, 2014, 6:54 PM
4 points
in reply to: MarkL’s comment on: [LINK] Speed superintelligence?
So do regular playthroughs, though; it’s a video game. The first paragraph still remarks on “how different optimal play can be from normal play.”

MugaSofer Sep 6, 2014, 5:59 PM
4 points
on: Anthropics doesn’t explain why the Cold War stayed Cold
The trouble is, anthropic evidence works. I wish it didn’t, because I wish the nuclear arms race hadn’t come so close to killing us (and may well have killed others), and was instead prevented by some sort of hard-to-observe cooperation.

But it works. Witness the Sleeping Beauty Problem, for example. Or the Sailor’s Child, a modified Sleeping Beauty that I could go outside and play a version of right now if I wished.

The winning solution, that gives the right answer, is to use “anthropic” evidence.

If this confuses you, then I (seriously) suggest you re-examine your understanding of how to perform anthropic calculations.

In fact, what you are describing is not “anthropic” evidence, but just ordinary evidence.

I (think I) know that George VI had five siblings (because you told me so.) That observation is more likely in a world where he did have five siblings (because I guessed your line of argument pretty early in the post, so I know you have no reason to trick me.) Therefore, updating on this observation, it is probable that George VI had five siblings.

Is this an explanation? Sort of.

There might be some special reason why George VI had only five siblings—maybe his parents decided to stop after five, say.

More likely, the true “explanation” is that he just happened to have five siblings, randomly. It wasn’t unusually probable, it just happened by chance that it was that number.

And if that is the true explanation, then that is what I desire to believe.