steven

• stevenSep 24, 2008, 11:37 PM

  0 points

  on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?

  I suspect that anthropics is easy to solve if you think in terms of cognitive decision theory.

• stevenSep 21, 2008, 1:41 AM

  0 points

  on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?

  This remark may be somewhat premature, since I don’t think we’re yet at the point in time when the LHC would have started producing collisions if not for this malfunction. However, a few weeks(?) from now, the “Anthropic!” hypothesis will start to make sense, assuming it can make sense at all. (Does this mean we can foresee executing a future probability update, but can’t go ahead and update now?)

  I can only see this statement making any sense if you think we should behave as if nature first randomly picked a value of a global cross-world time parameter, then randomly picked an observer (in any world) alive at that time, and that observer is you. (Actually I can’t see it making any sense even then.) But that’s not thinking 4D! Choosing a random observer in all of spacetime makes much more sense.

• stevenSep 20, 2008, 11:08 PM

  5 points

  on: Say It Loud

  Nobody actually says things like “70% probability the sky is green.” It’s an inconvenient truth that tradeoffs between accurate writing and effective writing are all over the place. (I think.) I wish English had dubifiers.

• stevenSep 20, 2008, 11:02 PM

  0 points

  on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?

  Sorry, make that “happened not to build one that worked”.

• stevenSep 20, 2008, 10:57 PM

  6 points

  on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?

  IMHO if anthropics worked that way and if the LHC really were a world-killer, you’d find yourself in a world where we had the propensity not to build the LHC, not one where we happened not to build one due to a string of improbable coincidences.

• stevenSep 17, 2008, 1:17 PM

  0 points

  on: Raised in Technophilia

  If groups with MNT have first-strike capability, then you’d expect the winners of WW3 to remain standing at least. I’m not sure how much of a consolation that is.

• stevenSep 17, 2008, 1:11 PM

  0 points

  on: Raised in Technophilia

  One disturbing thing about the Petrov issue that I don’t think anyone mentioned last time, is that by praising nuclear non-retaliators we could be making future nuclear attacks more likely by undermining MAD.

• stevenSep 16, 2008, 11:45 AM

  1 point

  on: My Child­hood Death Spiral

  Richard, Openness means with respect to things (ideas/​experiences) going in, not things going out.

• stevenSep 12, 2008, 6:20 PM

  3 points

  on: Ex­clud­ing the Supernatural

  God is a shapeshifting horror from the outer beyond that constantly adapts its properties to whatever is most convenient given the argument currently being considered.

• stevenAug 31, 2008, 3:35 AM

  0 points

  on: Dreams of Friendliness

  You should call it a Brazen Head.

• stevenAug 29, 2008, 4:38 AM

  3 points

  on: Harder Choices Mat­ter Less

  I’ve seen this claim from behavioral economists before. It shouldn’t be hard to prove that the marginal expected value of information-gathering is maximal (for constant information-gathering opportunities) when two choices have equal expected value. Whatever “harder choices matter less” means, it should be consistent with that.

• stevenAug 27, 2008, 11:47 PM

  0 points

  on: Dreams of AI Design

  Interesting.

  I guess that under the plausible (?) assumption that at least one enhancement strategy in a not too huge search space reliably produces friendly superintelligences, the problem reduces from creating to recognizing friendliness? Even so I’m not sure that helps.

• stevenAug 27, 2008, 10:11 PM

  4 points

  on: Dreams of AI Design

  Someone should write a “creating friendly uploads”, but a first improvement over uploading then enhancing a single human would be uploading that human ten times and enhancing all ten copies in different ways so as to mitigate some possible insanity scenarios.

• stevenAug 24, 2008, 11:00 PM

  0 points

  on: Mag­i­cal Categories

  There’s a Hibbard piece from January 2008 in JET, but I’m not sure if it’s new or if Eliezer has seen it: http://​​jetpress.org/​​v17/​​hibbard.htm

• stevenAug 24, 2008, 4:00 AM

  3 points

  on: Un­nat­u­ral Categories

  For those of you who aren’t convinced, here’s the case of Ronald Opus.

• stevenAug 16, 2008, 11:57 PM

  0 points

  on: The Be­drock of Mo­ral­ity: Ar­bi­trary?

  Or indeed why it’s the same thing that people have traditionally meant by the word.

• stevenAug 16, 2008, 11:45 PM

  0 points

  on: The Be­drock of Mo­ral­ity: Ar­bi­trary?

  Yvain, I don’t see why I would care about this thing you would call “moral”, or refer to it often enough to justify such a short name.

• stevenAug 13, 2008, 5:35 PM

  1 point

  on: Mo­ral Er­ror and Mo­ral Disagreement

  PhD in mathematical logic != extreme polymath. I guess Dyson and Tipler come closest to refuting my position, but I wouldn’t expect their beliefs to remain constant under a few thousand years of pondering the overcoming bias archives, say.

• stevenAug 13, 2008, 3:51 PM

  0 points

  on: Mo­ral Er­ror and Mo­ral Disagreement

  If you think an IQ-200 extreme-polymath pope who pondered all current and future arguments for atheism would still remain a Christian, then maybe.

• stevenAug 13, 2008, 1:41 PM

  0 points

  on: Mo­ral Er­ror and Mo­ral Disagreement

  Roko, it doesn’t just edit incorrect factual beliefs, there’s also the “what if we thought faster, were smarter, were more like the people we wished we were”, etc.