sark

• sarkApr 29, 2011, 5:05 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Con­se­quen­tial­ism FAQ

  I have compressed an essay’s worth of arguments into a few sentences, but I hope the main point is clear.

  I unfortunately don’t get the main point :(

  Could you elaborate on or at least provide a reference for how a consideration of Schelling points would suggest that we shouldn’t push the fat man?

• sarkApr 28, 2011, 5:09 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: prase’s comment on: What are the lef­tover ques­tions of metaethics?

  The point was that we have reason why we don’t want contradictions: we want our inferences to be correct. So logic is instrumental there. Morality on the other hand seems to be something we wish to be a certain way, for its own sake.

  Modus ponens works better than appeal to inappropriate authority wrt. making correct inferences. In the case of morality, what works better than what wrt. doing what?

  You could ask why we would want correct inferences. But I don’t see a point in reducing further.

  The analogy to morality would make sense if say we already made up our minds to ‘maximize happiness for the greatest number’, for then we can check that utilitarianism would do this, and hence is correct. But morality seems to be more complex than that.

  I’m agreeing with Marius in thinking that ethics is about achieving some sort of reflective equilibrium. I’m just rejecting the analogy with logic there.

  To summarize, with logic, we already know what we want. With morality, we don’t.

• sarkApr 28, 2011, 2:27 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Marius’s comment on: What are the lef­tover ques­tions of metaethics?

  But logic works! For example, establishing a non-contradictory axiom system, then observing how no contradictions seem to occur as we make deductions within the system. Appeal to inappropriate authority does not work! (Except when authority correlates with truth, and when it’s not screened off). On the other hand, I don’t see how morality can be said to work or not.

  There may be a branch of logic which is a science of persuasion, but what it endorses and prescribes relies much on logic as a science of correct inference.

• sarkApr 25, 2011, 3:33 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: FAWS’s comment on: Be­ing Wrong about Your Own Sub­jec­tive Experience

  “some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue...

  Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself. There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.

  There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/​mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.

• sarkApr 25, 2011, 2:50 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: shokwave’s comment on: Be­ing Wrong about Your Own Sub­jec­tive Experience

  Perhaps it’s simply my lack of experience with philosophy, but I fail to see any qualitative distinction between common perceptual failures like optical illusions, versus those examples given by lukeprog in the OP. I’m sure lukeprog is setting this up to do some work in one of his later posts in the series. But at this point given no particular reason to draw a boundary anywhere except at the tautology, I draw it at the tautology.

• sarkApr 25, 2011, 10:20 AM

  3 points

  on: Be­ing Wrong about Your Own Sub­jec­tive Experience

  Having read your post, and asking myself “Can I be wrong about my own subjective experience?”, I find myself wondering why I’m even asking such a question. The answer seems to depend on what I want to achieve with it. Perhaps I should wait for your later posts in this series before I begin really answering. With an endgame in mind, the OP’s question would be more productively and fruitfully answered.

• sarkApr 25, 2011, 9:38 AM

  8 points

  in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: Be­ing Wrong about Your Own Sub­jec­tive Experience

  In those examples, it seems to me they were mistaken about how they perceived something rather than what they perceive, the ‘implementation detail’ of the experience, rather than its content.

  Most of the time we just experience things, and we don’t think about via which modality we do so. This is not surprising, as unless when explicitly called for most of the time such knowledge would be quite useless. When you are blind, it’s likely there comes a time you wonder, or were asked, how you managed to navigate as well as you do. Here you will apply some lousy introspection and your brain will serve up some lousy post-hoc ‘explanation’. Thereafter, that hypothesis will just become an additional belief you have about what is going on with your perception.

  Of course, modality seems quite intrinsic to various qualia. ‘Red’ is obviously a visual thing. ‘Birds chirping’ obviously an auditory thing. But the understanding of ‘red’ as visual is a meta cognitive process separate from the visual experience of ‘red’ itself. For example you expect ‘red’ to be amenable to being painted on the surface of an object, when the same is not possible for ‘chirping’. So no, the modality is not part of the content of the subjective experience.

  I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.

Ed­in­burgh LW Meetup Satur­day April 30th

• sarkApr 22, 2011, 7:29 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: CuSithBell’s comment on: an­chor­ing for coordination

  Apologies for not being clear.

  Yes, heads is supposed to be obvious/​prominent/​conventional/​canonical.

  Schelling actually did a small scale experiment (though with $2 instead of $1). His results: 16 out of 22 A’s and 15 out of 22 B’s chose heads.

  If heads vs. tails seems too balanced to you, try this (from the book verbatim):

  You and your two partners or rivals each have one of the letters A, B, and C. Each of you is to write these three letters. A, B, and C, in any order. If the order is the same on all three of your lists, you get prizes totaling $6, of which $3 goes to the one whose letter is first on all three lists, $2 to the one whose letter is second, and $1 to the person whose letter is third. If the letters are not in identical order on all three lists, none of you gets anything. Your letter is A/​B/​C.

  Results:

  9 out of 12 A’s, 10 out of 12 B’s, and 14 out of 16 C’s, successfully co-ordinating on ABC.

an­chor­ing for coordination

• sarkApr 20, 2011, 9:00 AM

  2 points

  on: Genes are overrated

  We seem to care most about fitness related traits, and fitness related traits usually have a decent genetic component. However, what makes a trait a good indicator of genetic quality is that it has a large mutational target size, hence most traits we would care for to know which genes affect them are highly polygenic and not under the straightforward influence of only a few genes.

  This seems to be the general finding of recent genetic association studies. They find many genes of low effect, but no single ones which could serve as the target for identification or intervention or even designer babies. This seems to be where a lot of disappointment in genetics is coming from.

  This doesn’t apply to non-fitness related traits of course, though they could be highly polygenic for other reasons.

• sarkApr 11, 2011, 11:28 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: MC_Escherichia’s comment on: Ed­in­burgh LW Meetup Satur­day April 16th

  I’m sorry for your loss. But I’m happy you’ll attend.

• sarkApr 9, 2011, 11:38 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: What is wrong with “Tra­di­tional Ra­tion­al­ity”?

  Excellent summary. This goes really well with Oscar_Cunningham’s list in his comment to this post.

• sarkApr 9, 2011, 10:49 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: Are Func­tional lan­guages the fu­ture of pro­gram­ming?

  I think charitably interpreted, it means “the future of most real world application/​non-specialist programming”. Pretty much like how object oriented is “most of real world application/​non-specialist programming” today.

• sarkApr 9, 2011, 9:22 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: bentarm’s comment on: Ed­in­burgh LW Meetup Satur­day April 16th

  Cool. Hope to see you there!

• sarkApr 9, 2011, 9:22 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: AlanCrowe’s comment on: Ed­in­burgh LW Meetup Satur­day April 16th

  See you there!

• sarkApr 9, 2011, 9:21 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: cabalamat’s comment on: Ed­in­burgh LW Meetup Satur­day April 16th

  See you there!

Ed­in­burgh LW Meetup Satur­day April 16th

• sarkApr 6, 2011, 5:32 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: Ed­in­burgh Less­wrong meetup

  I think Elias intended to just fix those times and locations. But yeah this should be clearer in the post.

• sarkApr 6, 2011, 5:21 PM

  0 points

  on: Ed­in­burgh Less­wrong meetup

  I’m almost certain to attend.

  Unfortunately I can’t improve on the suggested location, as my knowledge of such places are horrible.