scav

Karma: 712

scav May 29, 2013, 8:26 AM
1 point
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective
True, and I can’t see any benefit from hierarchical organisation. There isn’t a central authority of rationality any more than there is one for chemistry or calculus.

But CFAR maybe hasn’t scaled to its maximum size yet, and as it approaches it, it will probably become clearer what the ideal size is, and there will be more people with experience in training who can split off another group.

scav May 28, 2013, 2:17 PM
3 points
in reply to: elharo’s comment on: The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective
Goodness knows Microsoft could do with some more rationality, even if they have to come by it illicitly ;)

Seriously though: no, don’t trust Skype (or Dropbox, or gmail for that matter) to keep your secrets. However, most communications aren’t secret, and discussions about rationality per se probably shouldn’t be.

I can only imagine that someone spying on rationality discussions with sinister intent is doing it for really irrational reasons, so the more they hear and understand, the more the problem solves itself.

scav May 28, 2013, 2:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective
As usual it depends on the exponent.

scav May 17, 2013, 4:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
It reads like a pretty good scientist name. I have no idea how it sounds ;)

scav May 6, 2013, 11:32 AM
2 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2013
Well at least if you pull numbers out of your arse and then make a decision based explicitly on the assumption that they are valid, the decision is open to rational challenge by showing that the numbers are wrong when more evidence comes in. And who knows, the real numbers may be close enough to vindicate the decision.

If you just pull decisions out of your arse without reference to how they relate to evidence (even hypothetically), you are denying any method of improvement other than random trial and error. And when the real numbers become available, you still don’t know anything about how good the original decision was.

scav Apr 30, 2013, 4:34 PM
1 point
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Privileging the Question
Postmodernism or dogshit? ;)

scav Apr 23, 2013, 11:42 AM
1 point
in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: Can somebody explain this to me?: The computability of the laws of physics and hypercomputation
Well, an infinite memory store or an infinite energy source would have infinite mass. So it would either take up the entire universe and have nowhere external to send its results to or, if it had finite size, it would be inside its own Schwarzchild radius, and there would be no way to send a signal out through its event horizon.

So yeah, I’d call infinite storage or power sources (as politely as possible) “unphysical”.

And I don’t see why you think the halting problem goes away just because you can’t put infinite tape in your Turing machine, or because you use finite state automata instead. You still can’t set an upper bound on the size of computation needed to determine whether any algorithm in general will terminate, and I kind of thought the point of the halting problem was that it doesn’t only apply to actual Turing machines.

scav Apr 8, 2013, 9:40 AM
3 points
in reply to: Zubon’s comment on: Rationality Quotes April 2013
If it’s a frequently-occurring observation within the group then yes, there seems to be something wrong. Possibly because things are regularly proposed and acted on without considering fairness until someone has to point it out.

If it hardly ever has to be said, but when pointed out, it is often persuasive, you’re probably OK.

scav Apr 7, 2013, 9:18 PM
0 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Easier, simpler, still not a great idea, for all the reasons I gave above.

scav Apr 5, 2013, 3:28 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Agreed and voted up. Of course, you don’t get a choice about whether to have an emotion, at the base level.

Not sure “offended” is a primary emotion though. It seems to me (by introspection) to be bundled together with a lot of culture-dependent and habitual behaviours, associations and memes, all of which are sub-optimal for any given situation, and could do with being brought under conscious control before being allowed to influence my actions.

scav Apr 5, 2013, 3:16 PM
0 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Attempting to evoke sympathy by displaying distress is another kind of response I suppose. But its success depends entirely on the reactions of your onlookers and persecutors: they may be amused and encouraged, for example. And even where successful, its success still doesn’t depend on actual internal loss of emotional equilibrium.

Whereas being aware of and in charge of your emotions in a stressful situation is always a winning strategy.

Just as for an aggressive offended response, a manipulative whiny offended response can still lose you respect and social advantage if it is misjudged. And you are more likely to misjudge it if you are acting in a poorly controlled way out of emotional upset, rather than in a conscious attempt to communicate clearly.

BTW, I don’t particularly rate the argument that because you’ve seen people easily manipulated by displays of distress, it’s an advantage to be genuinely distressed by things. Obviously it stops being an advantage for the manipulator if the onlookers are able to control their own distress at seeing someone else apparently upset.

But I think we’re wandering away from the topic a little. Being offended isn’t the same as being distressed, except for pathological narcissists.

scav Apr 5, 2013, 9:35 AM
0 points
in reply to: simplicio’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Not really. There is a qualitative difference between being harmed and being offended. And as usual the word “offended” can range in meaning from a perceptual experience of distaste or dissatisfaction to a surrender to anger and outrage. It’s clear to me at least which end of that scale katydee is advising us to avoid.

Of course it wouldn’t make sense to advise people to avoid disliking things that are contrary to their values. But it makes perfect sense to advise mindfulness in the face of strong emotional responses. “Keep a cool head under fire” is uncontroversially good advice, and not equivalent to blaming people for being shot at.

Also, katydee’s advice works when applied to itself, because clearly too there would be nothing useful about being emotionally outraged at the idea of advice-as-victim-blaming, and none of the reasonable critical comments here seem to be couched in the form of incoherently angry rants.

scav Apr 5, 2013, 9:16 AM
1 point
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Responding firmly and effectively to actual attacks may preserve status and discourage others from abusing or taking advantage of you. Being emotionally upset is not an important part of that response.

In fact, responding excessively or inappropriately to perceived but unintended attacks loses you some respect and can discourage others from involving you in social activities or cooperative tasks. We may respect a badass, but we don’t like an arsehole.

Getting angry is easy because we have neural circuitry dedicated to it, whereas thinking clearly under stress is difficult. It’s commonplace, however absurd, to rationalise a failure to think clearly under stress as a wise social signalling strategy :)

scav Mar 15, 2013, 5:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Decision Theory FAQ
Yes, it is your mind going through a decision making process. But most people feel that their conscious mind is the part making decisions and for humans, that isn’t actually true, although attention seems to be part of consciousness and attention to different parts of the input probably influences what happens. I would call that feeling of making a decision consciously when that isn’t really happening somewhat illusory.

The decision making process is real, but my feeling of there being an alternative I could have chosen instead (even though in this universe that isn’t true) is inaccurate. Taboo “illusion” too if you like, but we can probably agree to call that a different preference for usage of the words and move on.

Incidentally, I don’t think Newcomb’s problem changes dramatically as Omega’s success rate varies. You just get different expected values for one-boxing and two-boxing on a continuous scale, don’t you?

scav Mar 15, 2013, 3:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Decision Theory FAQ
The knowledge of your future action is only knowledge if it has a probability of 1. Omega acquiring that knowledge by calculation or otherwise does not affect your choice, but it is a consequence of that knowledge being able to exist (whether Omega has it or not) that means your choice is determined absolutely.

What happens next is exactly the everyday meaning of “choosing”. Signals zap around your brain in accordance with the laws of physics and evaluate courses of action according to some neural representation of your preferences, and one course of action is the one you will “decide” to do. Soon afterwards, your conscious mind becomes aware of the decision and feels like it made it. That’s one part of the illusion of choice.

EDIT: I’m assuming you’re a human. A rational agent need not have this incredibly clunky architecture.

The second part of the illusion is specific to this very artificial problem. The counterfactual (you choose the opposite of what Omega predicted) just DOESN’T EXIST. It has probability 0. It’s not even that it could have happened in another branch of the multiverse—it is logically precluded by the condition of Omega being able to know with probability 1 what you will choose. 1 − 1 = 0.

scav Mar 8, 2013, 9:19 AM
0 points
in reply to: simplicio’s comment on: Rationality Quotes March 2013
Well, you can calculate expected values without asserting that the probabilities used in your calculations correspond to either subjective belief or some objective truth. You can just do the maths and note that when you do it a certain way, your predictions are more useful.

I think it’s fair to say that humans doing this will form beliefs about the correspondence between their model and “real life”.

scav Mar 7, 2013, 11:52 AM
9 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Rationality Quotes March 2013
Then what are you risking?

scav Mar 7, 2013, 11:21 AM
2 points
in reply to: linas’s comment on: Decision Theory FAQ
Newcomb’s problem makes the stronger precondition that the agent is both predictable and that in fact one action has been predicted. In that specific situation, it would be hard to argue against that one action being determined and immutable, even if in general there is debate about the relationship between determinism and predictability.

scav Mar 7, 2013, 11:15 AM
1 point
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: Decision Theory FAQ
I don’t think compatibilist means that you can pretend two logically mutually exclusive propositions can both be true. If it is accepted as a true proposition that Omega has predicted your actions, then your actions are decided before you experience the illusion of “choosing” them. Actually, whether or not there is an Omega predicting your actions, this may still be true.

Accepting the predictive power of Omega, it logically follows that when you one-box you will get the $1M. A CDT-rational agent only fails on this if it fails to accept the prediction and constructs a (false) causal model that includes the incoherent idea of “choosing” something other than what must happen according to the laws of physics. Does CDT require such a false model to be constructed? I dunno. I’m no expert.

The real causal model is that some set of circumstances decided what you were going to “choose” when presented with Omega’s deal, and those circumstances also led to Omega’s 100% accurate prediction.

If being a compatibilist leads you to reject the possibility of such a scenario, then it also logically excludes the perfect predictive power of Omega and Newcomb’s problem disappears.

But in the problem as stated, you will only two-box if you get confused about the situation or you don’t want $1M for some reason.

scav Feb 19, 2013, 12:22 PM
0 points
on: Are coin flips quantum random to my conscious brain-parts?
Like Mark Twain, I am happy to be able to answer this question without any hesitation: I don’t know.

But I’m sceptical that we can observe superposition of quantum states on that kind of macroscopic scale.

Also, the universe may be a fixed 4-dimensional shape, part of which includes the past and future states of you and the coin, and the illusion of different possible futures for you or the coin is just that. I have no evidence for or against this, though.