An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. It collapses into a gravitational singularity.
Nate_Gabriel
Karma: 219
I tried something vaguely similar with completely different assumptions. I basically ignored the number of animal deaths in favor of minimizing the amount of animal torture. The whole thing was based on how many animals it takes before empathy kicks in, rather than an actual utility comparison.
I instinctively distrust animal-to-human utility conversions, but the ideal version of your method is better than the ideal version of mine. I do recommend that meat eaters do what I did to establish an upper bound, though. It might even convince someone to change their behavior, since it’s based solely on convincing the human they already have the preference for eating less meat.
Do you think we currently need more inequality, or less?
Compared to technological progress, there has been little or no social/political progress since the mid-18th century—if anything, there has been a regression
Regression? Since the 1750s? I realize Europe may be unusually bad here (at least, I hope so), but it took until 1829 for England to abolish the husband’s right to punish his wife however he wanted.
I once walked around a university campus convincing people that it’s impossible to see the Moon during daylight hours. I think it was about 2⁄3 who believed me, at least until I pointed up.
Just that moment. I definitely didn’t follow any of its implications. (Other than “if I say this then people will react as if I said an obvious true thing.”)
I once believed that six times one is one.
I don’t remember how it came up in conversation, but for whatever reason numbers became relevant and I clearly and directly stated my false belief. It was late, we were driving back from a long hard chess tournament, and I evidently wasn’t thinking clearly. I said the words “because of course six times one is one.” Everyone thought for a second and someone said “no it’s not.” Predictable reactions occurred from there.
The reason I like the anecdote is because I reacted exactly the same way I would today if someone corrected me when I said that six times one is six. I thought the person who corrected me must be joking; he knows math and couldn’t possibly be wrong about something that obvious. A second person said that he’s definitely not joking. I thought back to the sequences, specifically the thing about evidence to convince me I’m wrong about basic arithmetic. I ran through some math terminology in my head: of course six times one is one; any number times one is one. That’s what a multiplicative identity means. In my head, it was absolutely clear that 6x1=1, this is required for what I know of math to fit together, and anything else is completely logically impossible.
It probably took a good fifteen seconds from me being called out on it before I got appropriately embarrassed.
This anecdote is now my favorite example of the important lesson that from the inside, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
The main prediction that comes to mind is that if Christianity is true, one would expect substantially more miracle claims by Christians (legitimate claims plus false ones) than by any other religion (false claims only).
This also assumes there isn’t some saturation point of people only wanting to talk about so many miracles. (Ignoring buybuydandavis’ point, which probably interacts with this one in unfortunate ways.) If people only forward X annoying chain emails per month, you’d expect X from each religion. The best we can hope for is the true religion having on average slightly more plausible claims since some of their miracles are true.
It wasn’t actually a muscular condition. My friend is surprisingly unwilling to spread this around and only told me under the extreme circumstances of me telling her I might be about to become an atheist. I wanted to change enough that if she read this on the Internet she wouldn’t know it was about her.
I have done this. The most impressive-sounding one happened to a friend of mine who had formerly been an athlete. She had to withdraw from sports for a year because of an unexpected muscular condition. (If this is obviously medically wrong, it’s probably because I changed details for privacy.) As you probably expect, that year involved plenty of spiritual growth that she attributes to having had to quit sports.
At the end of that time, a group of church people laid hands on her and prayed, she felt some extreme acceleration in her heart rate, and her endurance was back the next time she tested it. A doctor confirmed that the muscular thing was completely gone, and she’s been physically active ever since.
Now obviously this isn’t bulletproof. You just need her to spontaneously recover at some point before the laying on of hands. (I have no idea how likely this would be; probably not very.) The rest is exactly the sort of thing that might happen regardless of whether there’s a miracle. But it still sounds really impressive. If I weren’t actively trying not to spin it to sound even more miraculous, it’d sound even more impressive.
But this is just the most miraculous-sounding story I’ve heard from a source I trust. I only know so many people. This account is probably well within the distribution of how miraculous anecdotes can get. I’d feel weird saying “you spontaneously got better a few months earlier, and so did anyone else with a similar story.”
It’s appointed. Doesn’t mean the guy who did the appointing can’t make exceptions if he feels like it.
Well no, because I doubt he’d share the downvoter’s objective. (I assume. I wasn’t following the kerfuffle.) To conclude that he would, you have to transplant his methods onto a forum setting but not his goals. Which is a weird level to model at.
Anthropics fails to explain King George because it’s double-counting the evidence. The same does not apply to any extinction event, where you have not already conditioned on “I wouldn’t exist otherwise.”
If it’s a non-extinction nuclear exchange, where population would be significantly smaller but nonzero, I’m not confident enough in my understanding of anthropics to have an opinion.
I still don’t think George VI having more siblings is an observer-killing event.
Since we now know that George VI didn’t have more siblings, we obtain
Probability(You exist [and know that George VI had exactly five siblings] | George VI had more than five siblings) = 0
I assume you mean “know” the usual way. Not hundred percent certainty, just that I saw it on Wikipedia and now it’s a fact I’m aware of. Then P(I exist with this mind state | George VI had more than five siblings) isn’t zero, it’s some number based on my prior for Wikipedia being wrong.
So my mind state is more likely in a five-sibling world than a six-sibling one, but using it as anthropic evidence would just be double-counting whatever evidence left me with that mind state in the first place.
I don’t think it’s lumping everything together. It’s criticizing the rule “Act on what you feel in your heart.” That applies to a lot of people’s beliefs, but it certainly isn’t the epistemology of everyone who doesn’t agree with Penn Jillette.
The problem with “Act on what you feel in your heart” is that it’s too generalizable. It proves too much, because of course someone else might feel something different and some of those things might be horrible. But if my epistemology is an appeal to an external source (which I guess in this context would be a religious book but I’m going to use “believe whatever Rameses II believed” because I think that’s funnier), then that doesn’t necessarily have the same problem.
You can criticize my choice of Rameses II, and you probably should. But now my epistemology is based on an external source and not just my feelings. Unless you reduce me to saying I trust Rameses because I Just Feel that he’s trustworthy, this epistemology does not have the same problem as the one criticized in the quote.
All this to say, Jillette is not unfairly lumping things together and there exist types of morality/epistemology that can be wrong without having this argument apply.
What we need to do is convince Harvard to perform a double-blind test. Accept half their students as normal, and the other half at random from their applicants. We’ll have an answer within a couple decades.
I always do. Mentally but not muscularly, and I can kind of suppress it if I consciously try. It is indeed the limiting factor on my reading speed.
Is it possible for a tulpa to have skills or information that the person doing the emulating doesn’t? What happens if you play chess against your tulpa?
I just realized it’s possible to explain people picking dust in the torture vs. dust specks question using only scope insensitivity and no other mistakes. I’m sure that’s not original, but I bet this is what’s going on in the head of a normal person when they pick the specks.
The question for P(Supernatural) explicitly said “including God.” So either LW assigns a median probability of at least one in 10,000 that God created the universe and then did nothing, or there’s a bad case of conjunction fallacy.