randallsquared

• randallsquaredJul 14, 2012, 6:10 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Moder­ate al­co­hol con­sump­tion in­versely cor­re­lated with all-cause mortality

  Me, too, but about two years ago. Unfortunately, I’ve had a hard time liking wine, so I’m hoping that moderate amounts of scotch and/​or rum have a similar effect.

• randallsquaredMay 16, 2012, 1:09 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: A wild the­ist pla­ton­ist ap­pears, to ask about the path

  There are (at least) two meaning for “why ought we be moral”:

  • “Why should an entity without goals choose to follow goals”, or, more generally, “Why should an entity without goals choose [anything]”,

  • and, “Why should an entity with a top level goal of X discard this in favor of a top level goal of Y.”

  I can imagine answers to the second question (it could be that explicitly replacing X with Y results in achieving X better than if you don’t; this is one driver of extremism in many areas), but it seems clear that the first question admits of no attack.

• randallsquaredMay 9, 2012, 4:57 PM

  20 points

  in reply to: thelittledoctor’s comment on: The ethics of break­ing belief

  Unless J is much, much less intelligent than you, or you’ve spent a lot of time planning different scenarios, it seems like any one of J’s answers might well require too much thought for a quick response. For example,

  tld: Well, God was there, and now he's left that world behind. So it's a world without God - what changes, what would be different about the world if God weren't in it?
  
  J: I can't imagine a world without God in it.
  

  Lots of theists might answer this in a much more specific fashion. “Well, I suppose the world would cease to exist, wouldn’t it?”, “Anything could happen, since God wouldn’t be holding it together anymore!”, or “People would all turn evil immediately, since God is the source of conscience.” all seem like plausible responses. “I can’t imagine a world without God in it” might literally be true, but even if it is, J’s response might be something entirely different, or even something that isn’t really even a response to the question (try writing down a real-life conversation some time, without cleaning it up into what was really meant. People you know probably very often say things that are both surprising and utterly pointless).

• randallsquaredMay 9, 2012, 3:24 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: A wild the­ist pla­ton­ist ap­pears, to ask about the path

  Morality consists of courses of action to achieve a goal or goals, and the goal or goals themselves. Game theory, evolutionary biology, and other areas of study can help choose courses of action, and they can explain why we have the goals we have, but they can’t explain why we “ought” to have a given goal or goals. If you believe that a god created everything except itself, but including morality, then said god presumably can ground morality simply by virtue of having created it.

• randallsquaredMar 7, 2012, 1:58 PM

  0 points

  on: How to Fix Science

  Also this year,

  Nitpick: actually last year (March 2011, per http://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pubmed/​​21280961 ).

• randallsquaredFeb 2, 2012, 2:16 PM

  17 points

  0

  on: On Say­ing the Obvious

  This is not (to paraphrase Eliezer) a thunderbolt of insight. [...]

  This sentence seems exactly the same to me as saying, “This was obvious, but, [...]”.

  Sometimes, people assert obviousness as a self-deprecating maneuver or to preempt criticism, rather than because they believe that everyone would consider the statement in question obvious.

• randallsquaredJan 10, 2012, 2:30 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: sketerpot’s comment on: Non-the­ist cin­ema?

  SG-1 usually had a very anti-theist message, as long as you group all gods together, but the writers went out of their way at least once to exempt the Christian God when the earthborn characters wondered if God might be a goa’uld: “Teal’c: I know of no Goa’uld capable of showing the necessary compassion or benevolence that I’ve read of in your bible.”

  However, the overall thrust of the show was pretty anti-diety, and the big bads of the last few seasons were very, very medieval-priestish.

• randallsquaredNov 1, 2011, 1:31 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Things you are sup­posed to like

  I like Pandora enough that I pay for it. That said, there are some issues with it:

  • a given station seems to be limited to 20-30 songs, with a very occasional other song tossed in, so if you listen to it throughout a workday, you’ll have heard the same song repeatedly. This can be ideal, however, for worktime music, where repetitive enjoyability is more important that novelty.

  • Pandora doesn’t have some artists, especially (I think) those not completely representable with ASCII, like Alizée.

  • If you upvote everything you like, and downvote things you don’t like regularly, and if your tastes are quite broad across genres, it’s easy for stations to drift from their seed song or artist so far that it mostly plays things not really representative of the name you gave it originally. Additionally, multiple stations can converge so that they mostly play the same songs, except for the original song you started each station with, which are quite different.

• randallsquaredOct 17, 2011, 9:58 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: advancedatheist’s comment on: Cu­ri­os­ity, Adam Sav­age, and Life-Extension

  [...] or thwarting “the single best invention of life,” according to Steve Jobs.

  Which was even more odd given that it immediately followed a worshipful Jobs documentary featuring Adam Savage and Jamie, which contained that very quote.

• randallsquaredOct 7, 2011, 6:00 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: jsalvatier’s comment on: Should I play World of War­craft?

  Or, you know, approving.

• randallsquaredSep 17, 2011, 2:54 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Watts, son

  I already made exactly the same comments you have in the OP

  Yeah, I read them at different times, and missed that.

• randallsquaredSep 16, 2011, 6:28 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Watts, son

  Invest time into figuring out how to answer natural language questions on a desktop PC with 12GB RAM.

  “Solve the hard problem before the easy precursor problem.”

  If that wasn’t what you meant, I may have misunderstood you.

  Evolution could only pull that lever a certain amount, which is why brain software is so impressive.

  But we aren’t even up to using the kind of processing power that evolution used. Human-level reasoning in a machine will be impressive without regard to the physical characteristics of the machine it runs on. Once the problem is well-understood, we’ll get smaller and cheaper versions.

• randallsquaredSep 16, 2011, 6:22 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Watts, son

  When I’m writing code in an area which I don’t really understand, I often write exploratory code that uses way more resources than a polished solution would, but it’s not code I’m writing instead of polished code—I’m writing that code because it will help me learn enough to write polished, elegant code later.

  Solving a problem with brute force is usually a faster path toward a clean solution than refusing to implement any solution until you’ve thought of the best one.

• randallsquaredSep 8, 2011, 12:45 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Is That Your True Re­jec­tion? by Eliezer Yud­kowsky @ Cato Unbound

  It usually goes without saying, but we assume for such examples that the aggregate harm done over all parties is higher than the aggregate good.

  The problem here is that the expected utility of acting against coal plants is too small to be worth doing at all. That is, once we solve microtransactions (in practice, rather than in theory), this problem may be much more tractable.

• randallsquaredAug 11, 2011, 4:57 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: atucker’s comment on: Strate­gic ig­no­rance and plau­si­ble deniability

  From the outside, it’s not clear that we can do any better than saying that someone’s intentions are nearly always lined up with their actions. Or, to do better than that, we have to side with a part of them as their “true self”. But the idea that someone else’s goals are aligned with yours is nearly always going to be false except for some very limited set of goals.

• randallsquaredAug 5, 2011, 10:29 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  “Embracing taxes as good” is a confusing phrase, one with which I think you are intentionally confusing others or have accidentally confused yourself. Yes, he was “embracing” at least some amount of tax on some things some of the time as good. This is a very modest claim.

  I accept that you found it confusing, though I’m not sure that the analogy with the phrase “embracing killing as good” is on target. I certainly had no intention of meaning anything other than “embracing some level of taxation as acceptable”.

  I don’t really want to have an argument about whether some taxes are good, so I’m willing to stipulate for this conversation that it may be that some are, but I did find this interesting:

  As it doesn’t naturally occur to people to apply their pro-tax (which means pro-some tax, some of the time) outlook to endorse actually harmful slavery, it is invalid to raise the consistency argument as a reason to abolish taxation.

  I note that the only way to make this sentence true was to include “actually harmful”, a phrase which handily excludes any types of slavery it naturally occurs to people to argue for, such as the draft or prison labor.

• randallsquaredAug 5, 2011, 1:59 PM

  −1 points

  in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  Eliezer has said something wise on exactly this point...somewhere. It is somewhat in contention with what you say here, or at least how you say it.

  If your foundational principle that you program into in AI is that slavery is bad, taxes become impossible to collect.

  Was Eliezer really embracing taxes as good, here, as you imply? Seems like more of a consistency argument against taxes.

• randallsquaredJul 28, 2011, 1:25 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Bayesian justice

  Jurors sometimes have to rule based on how the law ought to be, rather than how it is.

• randallsquaredJul 28, 2011, 1:11 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: New Post ver­sion 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name be­ings with l–z)

  Oh, I did indeed misunderstand you. Whoops.

• randallsquaredJul 28, 2011, 1:04 AM

  0 points

  on: New Post ver­sion 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name be­ings with l–z)

  I didn’t upvote or downvote (and haven’t yet read the other article), because I generally don’t unless I feel strongly about the content of a post, one way or another, and I didn’t, aside from wanting to argue about polyamory and such.