It’s not actually an article, rather a structured debate formatted after a wiki, so that particular problem is kind of inherent.
RowanE
Karma: 1,045
I didn’t click-through and there might be more context than this, but “chances only increase by 2 to 5 percent” is ambiguous between “percent (as an absolute probability)” and “percent (of the chance it was before)”. I’m not sure if it qualifies as an “irrationality quote”, it’s just unclear and could be confusing, but /u/PhilGoetz’s version is a step up.
(I’d maybe not use “odds ratio multiplier”, because we’re not just concerned about clarity, but clarity to people who might be statistically illiterate)
The way the problem reads to me, choosing dust specks means I live in a universe where 3^^^3 of me exist, and choosing torture means 1 of me exist. I prefer that more of myself exist than not, so I should choose specks in this case.
In a choice between “torture for everyone in the universe” and “specks for everyone in the universe”, the negative utility of the former obviously outweighs that of the latter, so I should choose specks.
I don’t see any incongruity or reason to question my beliefs? I suppose it’s meant to be implied that it’s other selves that exist because of the size of the universe, so there’s either one of “everyone in the universe” or 3^^^3 copies of everyone, but in that case my other selves are too far outside my light-cone for “iff you are alone” to be a prediction that makes sense.
It sounds like you expect it to be obvious, but nothing springs to mind. Perhaps you should actually describe the insane reasoning or conclusion that you believe follows from the premise.
I unironically love how highly upvoted this post is—it’s just so much my tribe, bonobo rationalist tumblr notwithstanding.
Guy who doesn’t know much about startups here—“launched the first version” and “want [it] to become” sound indicative of something more “outline of a novel”—can you elaborate on how big of an accomplishment it was to get it off the ground in the first place?
I’ll come in to say yes I agree these problems are confusing, although my ethics are weird and I’m only kind if a consequentialist.
(I identify as amoral, in practice what it means is I act like an egoist but give consequentialist answers to ethical questions)
She fangirls over the remake? I’ve never heard the remake described as anything other than some variant of “lifeless”, especially from fans of classic Sailor Moon.
EDIT: Forgot it was the positivity thread for a second, let me have another go at that: So I guess maybe I should have another go at the remake! I actually really like being convinced to like a show I was previously “meh” about. Some shows it’s more fun to get a hateboner/kismesis thing going for, but Sailor Moon Crystal isn’t one of them.
The problem is that ethics can work with other axioms. Someone might be a deontologist, and define ethics around bad actions e.g. “murder is bad”, not because the suffering of the victim and their bereaved loved ones is bad but because murder is bad. Such a set of axioms results in a different ethical system than one rooted in consequentialist axioms such as “suffering is bad”, but by what measure can you say that the one system is better than the other? The difference is hardly the same as between attempting rationality with empiricism vs without.
Well, I don’t think “a bit of a middle-ground” justifies taking a stance calling full-on moral relativism “immoral, pointless & counterproductive”.
“Suffering is bad” seems a lot easier to agree on as a premise than it actually is—taken by itself, just about anyone will agree, but taken as a premise for a system it implies a harm-minimising consequentialist ethical framework, which is a minority view.
And it’s simple enough to consistently be pro-life but also support the death penalty: if one believes a fetus at whatever stage of development is a human life and killing it is equivalent to murder, as many pro-lifers ostensibly do, one must simply have consistent standards for when killing is okay, that include a government convicting someone of a capital crime but exclude a mother not wanting to drop out of college.
We use analogies and the occasional bit of mysticism often enough that I think references are consistent, although the term has entered the popular consciousness and become divorced enough from the original religious concept that worrying about its origins seems to be mostly an ideological purity issue, a kind of worrying that’s itself pretty irrational to engage in.
You could probably have just covered Ubuntu with “I’m not talking about the OS, I’m talking about a philosophy/ideology used used by Mugabe”.
Although as formoral relativism… bad idea by whose standard? By what logic? If it’s irrational nonsense to be a moral relativist, do you have a rational argument for moral realism?
I have taken the survey.
I see 20-30 (didn’t count) comments in the thread so far, probably people are too lazy to upvote every one more than they vet who they upvote here, I think.
Downvoted for the kind of attitude actually described in Politics Is The Mind-Killer, the NRxs historically tending v to be the worst offenders is irrelevant.
I didn’t downvote because it was already at minus one, but it seemed to apply mainly to government policies rather than private donations and be missing the point because of it, and “miss the point so as to bring up politics in your response” is not good.
The statements being believed in don’t have to be on continuums (continui?) for belief in them to be represented as probabilities on a continuum; “I am X% certain that Y is always true”.
If they know that few names from my era, they probably know similarly little about each one. I play “Albert Einstein”, but it’s obvious to any popsicles from the same era that I’m actually Rick Sanchez. This develops into an in-joke where basically every “Albert Einstein” is really playing Rick Sanchez. We ruin everything with drunken debauchery, then ???, profit, take over the degenerate binge-drinking wasteland society becomes.
If you think this has non-negligible negativity*probability, you’ve got the conjunction fallacy up the wazoo. Although what it actually reads as is finding a LessWrong framing and context to post the kind of furry hate you’d see in any other web forum, not very constructive.
So I’ll respond at the same level of discourse to the scenario: “Bitch, I watched Monster Musume. My anaconda don’t want none unless she’s part anaconda. Your furfags are tame. Didn’t you at least bring back any pegasisters? IWTCIRD!”
Now, not so much being inclined towards those fetishes as simply not being so stupidly fussy about it that I’d rather kill myself, I have a less immediate reaction that’s more about dismantling the scenario: When I’m emulated, I’ll ask about their criteria for printing me out into meatspace, and point out “if it’s an interesting challenge you want and resurrections are conditional on that, why not just get creative and weird with the internal biology but challenge yourself to keep the exterior looking as human as possible? Like, what if you make my bones out of an entirely different material?”
I mean, if I didn’t make an argument like that, wouldn’t I either be woken up in an anthropomorphic animal body or not be woken up at all, in this scenario?
“So, specifically my generation, not my parents’ or Queen Victoria’s or… yours? That’s a bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off.”
Maybe I have to spend a thousand years entertaining myself by making up total bullshit about my culture to troll the scientists, but eventually some group with completely different political beliefs will takeover, and maybe I’ll share the same fate as the zookeepers but I’ll damn sure be beaming the smuggest shiteating I-told-you-so grin at the zookeeper while the 41st-century neonazis hang us both in their day of the rope.
But ok, sure, maybe it’d really suck, but the plausibility? Future generations collectively decide that punishing individuals for the crimes of the generation they were born in makes sense, future generations believe my generation committed crimes worth being that harsh in punishing, future generations think it’s plausible they might accidentally commit said crimes but still find members of past generations culpable, criminals don’t have rights in the future, future generations fail at between-generations prisoner’s dilemmas, somehow the best way to learn about a previous generation is to examine in vitro an extremely eccentric sample of said generation… there could be more, but that’s already enough conjunctions to flush the probability down the wazoo.
I accept that meat is more environmentally damaging per calorie (or similar such measures), and with the scale of the meat and dairy industry I’d accept saying it has a huge effect on the environment, but there are several steps between that and “if humanity doesn’t go vegan soon, we will probably go extinct”.