You’re right. My mistake. The standard “that doesn’t really apply for real world situations” argument of course applies, with the circular preferences and so on.
Solvent
Karma: 1,425
I just read some of your comment history, and it looks like I wrote that a bit below your level. No offense intended. I’ll leave what I wrote above there for reference of people who don’t know.
In case you’re wondering why everyone is downvoting you, it’s because pretty much everyone here disagrees with you. Most LWers are consequentialist. As one result of this, we don’t think there’s much of a difference between killing someone and letting them die. See this fantastic essay on the topic.
(Some of the more pedantic people here will pick me up on some inaccuracies in my previous sentence. Read the link above, and you’ll get a more nuanced view.)
Do these systems avoid the strategic voting that plagues American elections? No. For example, both Single Transferable Vote and Condorcet voting sometimes provide incentives to rank a candidate with a greater chance of winning higher than a candidate you prefer—that is, the same “vote Gore instead of Nader” dilemma you get in traditional first-past-the-post.
In the case of the Single Transferable Vote, this is simply wrong. If my preferences are Nader > Gore > Bush, I should vote that way. If neither Bush nor Gore have a majority, and Nader has the least number of first preferences, my vote contributes towards Gore’s total. In no way does voting Gore > Nader > Bush instead help Gore (in the case where Nader obviously has a small number of votes), but it does make it less likely that Nader will get elected, which I presumably don’t want.
The link describes how if your preferences are A > B > C > D, it is sometimes best to vote C > A > B > D because this will help get A elected, which is different to voting Gore ahead of Nader to get Gore elected.
You’re confusing a few different issues here.
So your utility decreases when theirs increases. Say that your love or hate for the adult is L1, and your love or hate for the kid is L2. Utility change for each as a result of the adult hitting the kid is U1 for him and U2 for the kid.
If your utility decreases when he hits the kid, then all we’ve established is that -L2U2 > L1U1. You may love them both equally, but think that hitting the kid messes him up more than it makes the adult happy, you’d still be unhappy when the guy hits a kid. But we haven’t established that you hate the adult.
If the only thing that makes Person X happy is hitting kids, and you somehow find out that his utility function has increased directly, then you can infer from that that he’s hit a kid, and that makes you sad. However, this can happen even if you have a positive multiplier for his utility function in yours.
So I think your mistake is saying “I hate Person X, because I know they like to hit kids.” You might hate them, but the given definitions don’t force you to hate them just because they hit kids.
Put another way, you might not be happy if you heard that they had horrible back pain. You can care for someone, but not like what they’re doing.
(Your comment still deserves commendation for presenting an argument in that form.)
What are you trying to do with these definitions? The first three do a reasonable job of providing some explanation of what love means on a slightly simpler level than most people understand it.
However, the “love=good, hate=evil” can’t really be used like that. I don’t really see what you’re trying to say with that.
Also, I’d argue that love has more to do with signalling than your definition seems to imply.
He used the opening paragraph as one of the example strings for something you were testing your regular expressions on.
This might be a really good idea.
I don’t mean attractiveness just in the sense of physical looks. I mean the whole thing of my social standing, confidence and perceived coolness.
But thanks for the advice.
Young adult male here.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m nowhere near as attractive or good with girls as I thought I was.
I got my first girlfriend pretty much by accident last year. It was so incredibly amazing that I decided that romantic success was something I needed to become very good at. I spent quite a while reading about it, and thinking about how to be attractive and successful with women. I broke up with my girlfriend as I moved to a small town for two months at the beginning of this year, during which time I practiced approaching girls and flirting with them.
Then I moved to college, and the first attractive, smart girl I saw, I went up to her and got her as a girlfriend pretty much immediately. I thought that I must have been very good and attractive to have gotten such a gorgeous girlfriend so quickly. She broke up with me after a month or two. She immediately moved through two or three boyfriends over the space of a month or two. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking for a new girlfriend, but haven’t had any success.
So I thought I was attractive and good with girls, and then it turned out that I just had a wild stroke of luck. So it goes.
I’m suspicious that I was simply arrogant about how good I was, and if I had thought more dispassionately, I wouldn’t have been so wrong in my assessment of my own attractiveness.
Yep, thanks for that.
Why is Eliezer-time measured in months, and Luke-time in hours?
That’s a good question, especially considering that 250 hours is on the order of months (6 weeks at 40 hours/week, or 4 weeks at 60 hours/week).
EDIT: Units confusion
Yeah, I don’t think it actually works. But thanks for the data point.
That’s a pretty good idea.
Good question. I suspect the former, but I’m not sure.
I really should have done this. I have done so now. Sorry.
And yeah, the presentation is lousy. Do you have any particular complaints?
An extremely intelligent friend of mine who is studying physics as an undergraduate read the quantum physics sequence for me. He said that it’s an alright explanation of the physics, in an extremely qualitative way. He said that he would personally prefer to learn QM properly via a textbook with more math.
He says that the argument given for many-worlds is valid iff you’re a scientific realist, which not all scientists are.
(it’s a little annoying to not be able to debug by putting a print anywhere, or read user input wherever you want)
I agree.
I recommend articles by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain). Some of my favorites of his:
Dead children as unit of currency
Really, just read everything from his blog, it’s all amazing.
I wonder why it is that so many people get here from TV Tropes.
Also, you’re not the only one to give up on their first LW account.