Panic_Lobster

Karma: 162

Panic_Lobster 18 Jun 2014 12:45 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, 16-22 June 2014
So you are saying that the competition wouldn’t be any fun if everyone believed that one particular team winning was the only acceptable outcome—it would defeat the purpose of the competition (fun) and devalue it to the point that there would no longer be any difference in utility anyway. That’s basically the categorical imperative (if everyone broke their promises, there would be no such thing as promising, so the whole concept breaks down and so the rule makes no sense) Is that what you are getting at?

The problem is that not everyone does believe that Brazil should win. So I don’t think we have a good solution for an individual utilitarian reasoner in a world in which most people do not think the same way.

Panic_Lobster 18 Jun 2014 12:09 UTC
10 points
on: Open thread, 16-22 June 2014
Are utilitarians theoretically obligated to prefer that Brazil win the world cup? Consider: of the 32 participating countries, only the USA has a larger population, but the central place of soccer in Brazilian culture, and their status as hosts mean that they have more at stake in this competition. So total utility would probably be maximized by a Brazil win.

These considerations would seem to make rooting for any other team immoral from a strict utilitarian perspective. This exposes some things I find problematic about utilitarianism. For example, I also have the intuition that it is okay for people to support their own team, even if that teams victory would make hundreds of millions of Brazilians unhappy. If you are a utilitarian player playing against Brazil, are you doing something morally wrong by trying to win? This seems absurd, but I can’t see how to escape this conclusion.
What links here?
- Qiaochu_Yuan's comment on Against utility functions by Qiaochu_Yuan (20 Jun 2014 3:14 UTC; 4 points)

Panic_Lobster 13 Jan 2014 8:04 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
Why do you believe that there are god-like beings that interact with humans? How confident are you that this is the case?

Panic_Lobster 21 Oct 2013 5:19 UTC
0 points
on: The best 15 words
Positivism: “Anything that can’t be verified is meaningless”. This can’t be verified. So Positivism is meaningless / false.

Panic_Lobster 12 Oct 2013 1:21 UTC
2 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2013

The needs of the many...outweigh...the needs of the few.”

-Mr Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Panic_Lobster 10 Oct 2013 5:58 UTC
6 points
in reply to: somervta’s comment on: Rationality Quotes October 2013
There is also a fair bit of continuity between the two—he retains one of the main theses of his earlier work: that much of our confusion about so called ‘philosophical problems’ is caused by people abusing language.

Panic_Lobster 10 Oct 2013 5:35 UTC
15 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2013

The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not, and cannot be, the purpose of science. Consider an audience watching a conjuring trick. The problem facing them has much the same logic as a scientific problem. Although in nature there is no conjurer trying to deceive us intentionally, we can be mystified in both cases for essentially the same reason: appearances are not self-explanatory. If the explanation of a conjuring trick were evident in its appearance, there would be no trick. If the explanations of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true and there would be no need for science as we know it. The problem is not to predict the trick’s appearance. I may, for instance predict that if a conjurer seems to place various balls under various cups, those cups will later appear to be empty; and I may predict that if the conjurer appears to saw someone in half, that person will later appear on stage unharmed. Those are testable predictions. I may experience many conjuring shows and see my predictions vindicated every time. But that does not even address, let alone solve, the problem of how the trick works. Solving it requires an explanation: a statement of the reality which accounts for the trick’s appearance.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Panic_Lobster 10 Oct 2013 5:17 UTC
4 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2013

What makes a mind powerful—indeed, what makes a mind conscious—is not what it is made of, or how big it is, but what it can do. Can it concentrate? Can it be distracted? Can it recall earlier events? Can it keep track of several different things at once? Which features of its own current activities can it notice or monitor? When such questions as these are answered, we will know everything we need to know about those minds in order to answer the morally important questions. These answers will capture everything we want to know about the concept of consciousness, except the idea of whether, as one author has recently said, “the mental lights would be out” in such a creature. But that is just a bad idea—in spite of its popularity. (...) For suppose that we have answered all the other questions about the mind of some creature, and now some philosophers claim that we still don’t know the answer to that all-important question, Is the mental light on—yes or no? Why would either answer be important? We are owed an answer to this question, before we need to take their question seriously.

Daniel Dennet, Kinds of Minds

Panic_Lobster 8 Oct 2013 3:14 UTC
15 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2013

When philosophers use a word—”knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. You say to me: “You understand this expression, don’t you? Well then—I am using it in the sense you are familiar with.”— As if the sense were an atmosphere accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every kind of application.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 116-117

Panic_Lobster 5 Oct 2013 5:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: CoffeeStain’s comment on: October Monthly Bragging Thread
… I really don’t think my syntax is that unclear.

Panic_Lobster 5 Oct 2013 4:43 UTC
13 points
on: October Monthly Bragging Thread
Today I taught a bunch of 5th grade kids how to convert decimals into fractions and vice versa.

Panic_Lobster 30 Aug 2013 6:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013
Thanks! I’ve read some of the stuff by Yvain but not these posts.

Panic_Lobster 29 Aug 2013 23:05 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Panic_Lobster’s comment on: Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013
Let me see if I can unpack this idea a bit more.

CEV is based on the idea that there is an algorithm that can look at the state of my brain, filter out various kinds of noise, and extrapolate what sort of desires and values I’d want to have if I lived in a kinder more benevolent society, wasn’t subject to nearly as many serious cognitive biases, etc.

The problem I’m seeing is that the origin and meaning of terms like ‘desire’ and ‘value’ are in prescientific culture—folk psychology. they were created by people in absolute ignorance about how brains work, and it seems increasingly plausible that these concepts will be totally inadequate for any accurate scientific explanation of how brains produce human behaviour.

It seems to be common sense that desires and values and the like are indispensable theoretical posits simply because they are all we have. Our brains’ extremely limited metacogntive abilities prevent us from modelling ourselves as brains, so our brains invent a kind of mythology to explain their behaviour, which is pure confabulation.

If these ideas are right, by asking CEV to consider folk psychological ideas like desires and values, we would be committing it to the existence of things that just aren’t really present in our brain states in any objective sense.

In the worst case, running CEV might be somewhat analogous to asking the AI to use Aristotelian physics to build a better airplane.

What we perceive as the fragility and complexity of human based values might not map onto brain states at all - ‘values’ as we wish to conceive of them may not exist outside of narrative fiction and philosophy papers.

My recent thinking on these topics has been heavily influenced by the writings of Scott Bakker , Daniel Hutto and Peter Watts’ Blindsight

I hope I’m wrong about this stuff, but I don’t have the training to fully analyze and debunk these ideas by myself—if it’s even possible. I hope LW and MIRI have some insights about these issues, because I am seriously troubled by the apparent implications for the future of humanity.

Panic_Lobster 29 Aug 2013 14:59 UTC
2 points
on: Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013
Is Friendly AI or more specifically CEV predicated on Eliminative Materialism being false? To what extent is FAI predicated on folk psychological theories of mental content turning out to accurately reflect human neurobiology?

From the article:

Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and accurate account of the mind. In other words, it is the view that certain common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist.

Panic_Lobster 23 Aug 2013 6:41 UTC
2 points
on: Rationality Quotes August 2013

Faced with the task of extracting useful future out of our personal pasts, we organisms try to get something for free (or at least at bargain price): to find the laws of the world—and if there aren’t any, to find approximate laws of the world—anything at all that will give us an edge. From some perspectives it appears utterly remarkable that we organisms get any purchase on nature at all. Is there any deep reason why nature should tip its hand, or reveal its regularities to casual inspection? Any useful future-producer is apt to be something of a trick—a makeshift system that happens to work, more often than not, a lucky hit on a regularity in the world that can be tracked. Any such lucky anticipators Mother Nature stumbles over are bound to be prized, of course, if they improve an organism’s edge.

--Daniel Dennet Consciousness Explained

Panic_Lobster 14 Aug 2013 6:28 UTC
23 points
on: Rationality Quotes August 2013

Karl Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to ‘observe’. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. [...] So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Panic_Lobster 13 Aug 2013 5:07 UTC
7 points
on: Who are some of the best writers in history?
Cervantes, the author of the first modern novel, widely regarded as one of the best books ever written

It’s worth emphasizing just how modern and readable this book is, especially considering it is contemporaneous with Shakespeare. If you get a modern English translation, you will be delighted. Cervantes really invented modern literature.

Panic_Lobster 31 Jul 2013 22:26 UTC
11 points
on: More “Stupid” Questions
How do you pronounce 3^^^3?

Panic_Lobster 26 Jul 2013 0:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Open thread, July 23-29, 2013
Okay, I did it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/hvc/july_2013_media_thread/9glb

Panic_Lobster 26 Jul 2013 0:14 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: July 2013 Media Thread
I don’t read very much fiction, but recently I’ve read
- The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan—book two of his Orthogonal series, where he imagines life in a universe with different spacetime symmetries, where the velocity of light is a function of its wavelength. In this instalment, alien scientists on a generation ship try to discover the secrets of matter, and of their own biology, which will allow them to return home. There is a lot of focus on the scientific method and the character of physical law, and the treatment of the (made up) physics is much, much more rigorous and principled than earlier physics-centric Egan books like Schilds Ladder, Diaspora, or the dreadful Distress
- Neuropath by Scott Bakker—a disturbing psychological thriller that explores a radical reductionistic view of the mind and consciousness. If you still think that consciousness is a some sort of unique, special phenomenon, an inevitable byproduct of intelligence, than this book may be for you.
What links here?
- Panic_Lobster's comment on Open thread, July 23-29, 2013 by David_Gerard (26 Jul 2013 0:17 UTC; 0 points)