Are you aware of the busy beaver function? Read this.
Basically, it’s impossible to write down numbers large enough for that to work.
Solvent
Karma: 1,425
The most upvoted post of all time on LW is Holden’s criticism of SI. How many pageviews has that gotten?
It’s a kind of utilitarianism. I’m including act utilitarianism and desire utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism and whatever in utilitarianism.
What do you mean by “utilitarianism”? The word has two different common meanings around here: any type of consequentialism, and the specific type of consequentialism that uses “total happiness” as a utility function. This sentence appears to be designed to confuse the two meanings.
Yeah, my mistake. I’d never run across any other versions of consequentialism apart from utilitarianism (except for Clippy, of course). I suppose caring only for yourself might count? But do you seriously think that the majority of those consequentialists aren’t utilitarian?
I edited my comment to include a tiny bit more evidence.
This seems like it has makings of an interesting poll question.
I agree. Let’s do that. You’re consequentialist, right?
I’d phrase my opinion as “I have terminal value for people not suffering, including people who have done something wrong. I acknowledge that sometimes causing suffering might have instrumental value, such as imprisonment for crimes.”
How do you phrase yours? If I were to guess, it would be “I have a terminal value which says that people who have caused suffering should suffer themselves.”
I’ll make a Discussion post about this after I get your refinement of the question?
Here’s an old Eliezer quote on this:
4.5.2: Doesn’t that screw up the whole concept of moral responsibility?
Honestly? Well, yeah. Moral responsibility doesn’t exist as a physical object. Moral responsibility—the idea that choosing evil causes you to deserve pain—is fundamentally a human idea that we’ve all adopted for convenience’s sake. (23).
The truth is, there is absolutely nothing you can do that will make you deserve pain. Saddam Hussein doesn’t deserve so much as a stubbed toe. Pain is never a good thing, no matter who it happens to, even Adolf Hitler. Pain is bad; if it’s ultimately meaningful, it’s almost certainly as a negative goal. Nothing any human being can do will flip that sign from negative to positive.
So why do we throw people in jail? To discourage crime. Choosing evil doesn’t make a person deserve anything wrong, but it makes ver targetable, so that if something bad has to happen to someone, it may as well happen to ver. Adolf Hitler, for example, is so targetable that we could shoot him on the off-chance that it would save someone a stubbed toe. There’s never a point where we can morally take pleasure in someone else’s pain. But human society doesn’t require hatred to function—just law.
Besides which, my mind feels a lot cleaner now that I’ve totally renounced all hatred.
It’s pretty hard to argue about this if our moral intuitions disagree. But at least, you should know that most people on LW disagree with you on this intuition.
EDIT: As ArisKatsaris points out, I don’t actually have any source for the “most people on LW disagree with you” bit. I’ve always thought that not wanting harm to come to anyone as an instrumental value was a pretty obvious, standard part of utilitarianism, and 62% of LWers are consequentialist, according to the 2012 survey. The post “Policy Debates Should Not Appear One Sided” is fairly highly regarded, and it esposes a related view, that people don’t deserve harm for their stupidity.
Also, what those people would prefer isn’t nessecarily what our moral system should prefer- humans are petty and short-sighted.
Harry’s failing pretty badly to update sufficiently on available evidence. He already knows that there are a lot of aspects of magic that seemed nonsensical to him: McGonagall turning into a cat, the way broomsticks work, etc. Harry’s dominant hypothesis about this is that magic was intelligently designed (by the Atlanteans?) and so he should expect magic to work the way neurotypical humans expect it to work, not the way he expects it to work.
I disagree. It seems to me that individual spells and magical items work in the way neurotypical humans expect them to work. However, I don’t think that we have any evidence that the process of creating new magic or making magical discoveries works in an intuitive way.
Consider by analogy the Internet. It’s not surprising that there exist sites such as Facebook which are really well designed and easy to use for humans, rendering in pretty colors instead of being plain HTML. However, these websites were created painstakingly by experts dealing with irritating low level stuff. It would be surprising that the same website had a surpassingly brilliant data storage system as well as an ingenius algorithm for something else.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I (and most LWers) don’t agree with you on that one, at least in the way you phrased it.
The author doesn’t want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don’t get comic stories about Quidditch.
This is a very good point. As a reader, I think those ‘silly young boy’ conversations would probably get old for me faster than the girl ones.
I’m pretty sure we exactly agree on this. Just out of curiosity, what did you think I meant?
I mostly agree with ShardPhoenix. Actually learning a language is essential to learning the mindset which programming teaches you.
I find it’s easiest to learn programming when I have a specific problem I need to solve, and I’m just looking up the concepts I need for that. However, that approach only really works when you’ve learned a bit of coding already, so you know what specific problems are reasonable to solve.
Examples of things I did when I was learning to program: I wrote programs to do lots of basic math things, such as testing primality and approximating integrals. I wrote a program to insert “literally” into sentences everywhere where it made grammatical sense. I used regular expressions to search through a massive text file for the names of people who were doing the same course as me. Having the goal made it easier to learn the syntax and concepts.
It depends on how much programming knowledge you currently have. If you want to just learn how to program, I recommend starting with Python, or Haskell if you really like math, or the particular language which lets you do something you want to be able to do (eg Java for making simple games, JavaScript for web stuff). Erlang is a cool language, but it’s an odd choice for a first language.
In my opinion as a CS student, Python and Haskell are glorious, C is interesting to learn but irritating to use too much, and Java is godawful but sometimes necessary. The other advantage of Python is that it has a massive user base, so finding help for it is easier than for Erlang.
If I were you, I’d read Learn Python the Hard Way or Learn You a Haskell For Great Good- the second of those is how I started learning Haskell.
Done.
I love what this poll reveals about LW readers. Many sympathise with Batman, because of his tech/intellectual angle. The same with Iron Man, but he’s a bit less cool. Then two have heard of superman, and most LWers are male. And most of us don’t care.
It would be lovely if you’d point that kind of thing out to the nerdy guy. One problem with being a nerdy guy is that a lack of romantic experience creates a positive feedback loop.
So yeah, it’s great to point out what mistakes the guy made. See Epiphany’s comment here.
(I have no doubt that you personally would do this, I’m just pointing this out for future reference. You might not remember, but I’ve actually talked to you about this positive feedback loop over IM before. I complimented you for doing something which would go towards breaking the cycle.)
How many people actually have that?
Wouldn’t that be a lack of regulation on emigration, not immigration?
How do you mean?
Basically, the busy beaver function tells us the maximum number of steps that a Turing machine with a given number of states and symbols can run for. If we know the busy beaver of, for example, 5 states and 5 symbols, then we can tell you if any 5 state 5 symbol Turing machine will eventually halt.
However, you can see why it’s impossible to in general find the busy beaver function- you’d have to know which Turing machines of a given size halted, which is in general impossible.