PeerGynt
I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted and I want to go on record to say it wasn’t me. I appreciate when people tell me why they downvote my posts.
I definitely did expect mixed reactions to the original post. I’ll be honest and say that I’m surprised that people keep downvoting it to levels that I associate with malicious trolls, rather than let it stay hidden at −5 which seems appropriate for a failed attempt at humor. But it doesn’t really matter, it would take much more than negative reactions to a joke to stop me from making Less Wrong great again :)
Hi there, Mac. I’m a Matrix overlord. Can I have my 10 dollars, please?
Could you specify whether you want answers as percentage probability, probabilities, odds, or expected number of launches? My answer was intended as a percentage
So there is free money to be had by posing as a rabbi and offering a bet to Robert Aumann?
Using OxyContin(tm) for a job interview seems like a distinctly bad idea. Particularly if the employer asks for drug screening.. If you absolutely have to, I suggest sticking with Oxytocin.
Why do you care about the ‘original’ meaning of the word?
Let’s imagine we are arguing about trees falling in the forest. You are a lumberjack who relies on a piece of fancy expensive equipment that unfortunately tends to break if subjected to accoustic vibrations. You therefore create a map where the word “sound” means accoustic vibrations. This map works well for you and helps you resolve most disguised queries you could be interested in
Then you meet me. i make a living producing cochlear implants. My livelihood depends on making implants that reliably generate the qualia of sound. I therefore have a different map from you, where the word ‘sound’ means the subjective experience in a person’s brain. This works well for the disguised queries that I care about.
If we meet at a cocktail party and you try to convince me that the ‘original’ meaning of sound is accoustic vibrations, this is not a dispute about the territory. What is happening is that you are arguing the primacy of your map over mine, which is a pure status challenge.
The purpose of categories in this context is to facilitate communication, ie transfer of information about the territory from one mind to another. Agreeing on a definition is sometimes important to avoid confusion over what is being said. However, if there is no such confusion, insisting on one definition over another is a pure monkey status game
What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?
The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is “It depends on what your disguised query is”.
If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don’t see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of “defecting by accident”.
I can see why this would look strange to a German speaker. It was just intended as a joke/reference to the Wikipedia article on the Vienna Circle. I’ve fixed the grammar
Less Wrong
Less Wrong (German: Weniger Falsch) was an association of philosophers gathered on the internet in 2007, chaired by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Among its members were Yvain, Lukeprog, Michael Vassar, Will Newsome and Gwern. PeerGynt was an eminent student at the time. He was allowed to participate in meetings, but was not a member of Less Wrong.
Members of Less Wrong had a common attitude towards philosophy, consisting of an applied rationalism drawn from Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose Sequences formed the basis for the group’s philosophy. Less Wrong’s influence on 21st century philosophy was immense, and much later work was in response to the group’s thoughts.
The pre-history of Less Wrong began with blog posts on the philosophy of science and epistemology from 2006, promoted by Robin Hanson on Overcoming Bias.
(This is only half joking. If you want the rest of the future history of Less Wrong, it is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle . )
(Edited to fix Google Translate’s German grammar)
But some fences were created to serve interests that no longer exist: Hadrian’s Wall, for one. The fact that someone >centuries ago built a fence to keep the northern barbarians out of Roman Britain does not mean that it presently >serves that purpose. Someone who observed Hadrian’s Wall without knowledge of the Roman Empire, and thus the >wall’s original purpose, might correctly conclude that it serves no current military purpose to England.
At the risk of generalizing from fictional evidence: This line of reasoning falls apart when it turns out that the true reason for the wall is to keep Ice Zombies out of your kingdom. Chesterton would surely have seen the need be damn sure that the true purpose is to keep the wildlings out, before agreeing to reduce the defense at the wall.
You don’t succeed in avoiding getting mind killed yourself. You switch for no reason towards real life.
Discussing the issue in terms of real life does not itself imply that I’ve been mindkilled (though it may increase the chance that the discussion ends up being subject to mindkill). If you think I have been mindkilled, please show me a specific instance where I used arguments as soldiers, or where I failed to update in response to a properly made argument.
General ethical consideration suggest that you only inflict pain on other humans if they consent.
That is a totally acceptable ethical view that is fully consistent with my parable. At no stage did I assert “Since we only care about Martians, it is acceptable for them to do anything they want to the Earthlings”. Instead, I invited you to have discussion about what actions are ethical and which actions are not ethical. In such a discussion, one of the possible sides you can take is that the Martians should never tickle anyone without consent.
However, the real world implication of this assertion of it is that no man should attempt to interact with women unless they are certain that they are sufficiently high status to avoid seeming creepy.
(Note that I probably shouldn’t have used “stinging pain” as an analogy for creepiness and social awkwardness. This was an overcompensation in order to avoid seeming biased in favor of men).
Sure. The point I was trying to make is that, while I see females as agents in real life, in this analogy I am discussing the ethics of a choice that is only made by men. The analogy therefore did not require a fully specified model of females as agents.
There are many true things in the world that I chose not to specify in the analogy. For any of those things, if you give me a specific reason why it is relevant to the choice made by the Green Martians, then it certainly should have been part of the analogy. However, there is no law of nature that says “females should always be fully specified as agents in any analogy”
It is true that some participants in the analogy are “non-player characters”. That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be “playable” in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions.
It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a single axis, and that in real life, they also have preferences on other axes. I did not specify those preferences in the analogy, because I did not see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the resolution of the ethical question, which is a choice faced only by Martians.
If you feel that there is an additional axis which has important implications for the ethical choice that the Green Martians are facing, please specify what that axis is and why it is important. This would be an important contribution to the discussion. Otherwise, this comes across as saying “you should have added additional complications that were not relevant, in order to sufficiently signal that women are important ethical agents and not objects”.
The fact that women are important ethical agents is so obvious that it is not even worth debating. However, I shouldn’t have to signal this at every opportunity as a precondition for taking part in the discussion, especially not when this would require me to add unnecessary information to the story.
As for why the women don’t express their preference not to be tickled by green martians, this is simply because I took this preference to be obvious and common knowledge to all participants in the analogy.
I’m fairly sure this comment was not exactly intended as a compliment, but I can think of worse insults than having my writing put in the same category as Nick Bostrom. As the author of the first of these parables, even I recognize that these two stories differ very significantly in quality
The Blue and Green Martians parable was an attempt to discuss a question of ethics that is important to many members of this community, and which it is almost impossible to discuss elsewhere. The decision to use an analogy was an attempt to minimize mindkill. This did not succeed. However, I am fairly sure that if I had chosen not to use an analogy, the resulting flamewar would have been immense. This probably means that there are certain topics we just can’t discuss, which feels distinctly suboptimal, but I’m not sure I have a better solution.
It’s been a day since this discussion peaked, and I’ve had a chance to think a little bit more about this on a meta-level:
First of all, having a community built around epistemic hygiene is extremely valuable. Discussions about topics that involve mindkill are incredibly unpleasant, and may make it impossible for such a community to be successful. I therefore fully understand people who want to keep these discussions away from Less Wrong, and I won’t post again on this topic or any other mindkilling topic.
That said, I think the inability to discuss this rationally and dispassionately is a major problem for society in general, which may contribute to some individuals with abnormal psychology reacting in unpredictable ways. My only view on the object-level question is that low status men get a raw deal, that there is no good solution to the problem, and that PUA is probably very bad ethically. I have natural sympathy for low-status men, but I recognize that I may be biased because I have no experience seeing the situation from a female perspective. The post was an attempt to invite people to help me update my moral beliefs, by hearing from people who do not have those biases. Importantly, this could not have been done on any other website, because they would have been unable to convince me that their moral framework was coherent, that they are being honest about their ethical beliefs, or that they have made a good-faith effort to model low status males as relevant participants in the moral calculus.
There was some really good discussion in this thread, particularly Skeptical Lurker’s comment, which may have made me aware of a contradiction in my worldview. I will keep thinking about what updates may be necessary. This is exactly the kind of feedback that I was hoping for—changing your mind is a good thing, and it is only possible if we can gave a genuine discussion as rationalists.
That said, for the Less Wrong community, the cost of these discussions probably outweighs the benefits.
This is possible. Could someone please explain the important aspects of the PUA worldview that are being misrepresented? Particularly if they are relevant to the ethical question I am interested in? This would certainly help me clear up some confusion.
Fair point—I should have phrased that differently. I think I intended that both in the weak sense “Our prior on moral statements should never be 0 or 1” and also in the slightly stronger sense “Ethics is difficult, so our priors should have high variance”
I want to point out that I, perhaps incorrectly, assumed this thought experiment could be interesting even to the anti-PUA crowd, because it would help them distill their thinking about whether they object to PUA on epistemic grounds (“they have incorrect beliefs about female psychology”) or if they object on moral grounds (“they draw incorrect / evil conclusions about the ethical implications of the theory”)
From the reactions, it is tempting to conclude that most people object to PUA partially on epistemic grounds. However, it is hard for me to understand why a disagreement about facts would lead to such heated debate in a community based around the Litany of Tarski.
Seriously, who are these tech support people? Clearly this database belongs to the owner of less wrong (whoever that is). As far as I can tell, when moderators ask for data, they ask on behalf of the owners of that data. What is going on here? Has tech support gone rogue ? Why do they then get their contract renewed? Are they taking orders from some secret deep owners of LW that outrank the moderators ?