I don’t think this answer meets the standards of rigour that you set above, but I’m increasingly convinced that the idea of free will arises out of punishment. Punishment plays a central role in relations among apes, but once you reach the level of sophistication where you can ask “are we machines”, the answer “no” gives the most straightforward philosophical path to justifying your punishing behaviour.
Paul_Crowley2
Karma: 132
“The old political syllogism “something must be done: this is something: therefore this will be done” appears to be at work here, in spades.” —Charlie Stross
Charlie is quoting the classic BBC TV series “Yes Minister” here.
“I assign higher credibility to an institution if liberals accuse it of being conservative and conservatives accuse it of being liberal.” —Alex F. Bokov
Surprised to see that one there—the world is full of people desperate to ensure that there is a stool either side of them, and that seems like a process very far from hugging the query.
The large sums of money make a big difference here. If it were for dollars, rather than thousands of dollars, I’d do what utility theory told me to do, and if that meant I missed out on $27 due to a very unlucky chance then so be it. But I don’t think I could bring myself to do the same for life-changing amounts like those set out above; I would kick myself so hard if I took the very slightly riskier bet and didn’t get the money.
Probabilities of 0 and 1 are perhaps more like the perfectly massless, perfectly inelastic rods we learn about in high school physics—they are useful as part of an idealized model which is often sufficient to accurately predict real-world events, but we know that they are idealizations that will never be seen in real life.
However, I think we can assign the primeness of 7 a value of “so close to 1 that there’s no point in worrying about it”.
Practically all words (eg “dead”) actually cut across a continuum; maybe we should reclaim the word “certainty”. We are certain that evolution is how life got to be what it is, because the level of doubt is so low you can pretty much forget about it. Any other meaning you could assign to the word “certain” makes it useless because everything falls on one side.
If you’d like someone to try the random jury approach, you need to think about how to turn it into good TV.
The video notes that when the subject is instructed to write their answers, conformity drops enormously. That suggests we can set aside the hypothesis that they conform for the rational reason you set out.
Recovering irrationalist: I feel the same way. The most interesting book I’ve read about this is George Ainslie’s “Breakdown of Will”. Ainslie uses the experimentally verified theory of hyperbolic discounting to build a model of why we do things like make promises to ourselves that we then fail to keep, and othe rforms of behaviour related to “akrasia”.
“No. The “unless” clause is still incorrect. We can know a great deal about the fraction of people who think B, and it still cannot serve even as meta-evidence for or against B.”
This can’t be right. I have a hundred measuring devices. Ninety are broken and give a random answer with an unknown distribution, while ten give an answer that strongly correlates with the truth. Ninety say A and ten say B. If I examine a random meter that says B and find that it is broken, then surely that has to count as strong evidence against B.
This is probably an unnecessarily subtle point, of course; the overall thrust of the argument is of course correct.
I don’t want to say what it is for fear of spoilering it, but is anyone else thinking of the same groundbreaking comic book I am? Perhaps that’s the supervillain Eliezer is thinking of...
So the point is that the idiots who are directly useless—make no useful contributions, have no ideas, spark nothing good—may be useful because they give shelter for others who want to raise controversial ideas?
I’d want to see a group not already mad that suffered for not having an idiot in their number before I believed it...
Which paper was Merkle talking about, if I may ask?
How do you apply this approach to questions like “to what extent was underconsumption the cause of the Great Depression?” No conceivable experiment could answer such a question, even given a time machine (unlike, say, “Who shot JFK?”) but I think such questions are nevertheless important to our understanding of what to do next.
The best answer I have to such questions is to posit experiments in which we rewind history to a particular date, and re-run it a million times, performing some specific miracle (such as putting money into a billion carefully-chosen wallets) on half a million of those occasions, and gather statistics on how the miracle affects economic indicators.