This link isn’t working for me.
Pascal’s Wager and the AI/acausal trade thought experiments are related conceptually, in that they reason about entities arbitrarily more powerful than humans, but they are not intended to prove or discuss similar claims and are subject to very different counterarguments. Your very brief posts do not make me think otherwise. I think you need to make your premises and inferential steps explicit, for our benefit and for yours.
Confusion removed; you were using “counterfactual” in a way I had never seen here or anywhere else. (Is that the best word, though?)
Is the Many Gods refutation written down somewhere in a rigorous way?
I’m having trouble defining your definition of counterfactual. In “Information is a Counterfactual...”, you define a counterfactual property as one which only conveys information if the property could have been in a different state. This makes sense relative to the previous uses of “counterfactual” I’m familiar with.
In this piece, you introduce the category of “counterfactual law in physics” including the one “that says ‘it is impossible to build a perpetual motion machine’.” Are these two different uses of the word ‘counterfactual’, in which case can you explain what a counterfactual law is?
Or (more likely) is the connection obvious and I’m too dense to see it, in which case, can you explain what the lamp’s lightedness-status (first post) and the physics law (this post) have in common that makes them counterfactual?
People I know in their 70s are traveling by plane to a large event that requires a negative test on arrival. Based on your previous posts’ data, I pointed them to P100 masks and the studies on in-cabin air-filtering. This was to encourage them to wear the mask on the plane (since we do have some apparent cases of adjacent passenger transmission) but especially to wear the mask in the airport despite passive (and possibly active) social pressure. They are smart and motivated and will wear the masks.
I know “Winning” is a word-concept we probably owe to the Yud, but when I told them, “If you want to Win at not getting covid, P100 gives you the best chance,” I was basically quoting you. So, thanks.
this is your second great response to a question on my shortform!
My brain continues to internalize rationality strategies. One thing I’ve noticed is that any time I hear that the average blah is n, my brain immediately says, <who fucking cares, find me the histogram>.
That’s good, but does anyone have tips for finding the histogram/chart/etc in everyday Internet life? I know “find the article on Pubmed” is good, but often, the data-meat is hidden behind a paywall.
A question that sounds combative on the Internet but which I’m asking honestly.
Why did you think this post was appropriate for LessWrong?
I did this about 8 years ago and had some of these benefits—especially the superpower of afternoon power naps—along with one other very interesting one: I started having vivid, specific dreams and remembering them in the morning for longer. I ended up keeping a dream journal by my bed—I would half wake-up and scrawl a few key words, then go back to bed, then flesh them out in the morning immediately after waking and reviewing my notes.
Then I had a two-week trial, and, well, yanno.
I strongly downvoted this post. This post fits a subgenre I’ve recently noticed at LW in which the author seems to be using writing style to say something about the substance being communicated. I guess I’ve been here too long and have gotten tired of people trying to persuade me with style, which I consider to be, at best, a waste of my time.
This post also did not explain why I should care that mesaoptimizer systems are kind of like Lacan’s theory. I had to read some Lacan in college, putatively a chunk that was especially influential on the continental philosophers we were studying. Foucault seems like Hemingway by comparison. If Lacan was right about anything, it’s not because he followed anything like the epistemic standards we value here. Or if he did, he did so illegibly, which is as valuable as not doing it at all.
If you can see the game that someone is playing with themselves, if you can get underneath the lies they tell themselves and access their desires directly, you can play them like an instrument and they will have no idea how you’re doing it.
This seems important, so I ask you to provide evidence supporting it.
If you can get work done while having Wikipedia not-blocked, you are a better worker than I am. I will absolutely read about irrelevant, flagrantly not-even-wrong Medieval scholastic philosophers instead of doing chores.
Fukuyama’s End bothers me. Certainly it was very influential. But it seems difficult to debate around in a rigorous way. Like, if I were to say, “What about communist China?” I would expect objections like, “Well, they’re just a market economy with political repression on top,” and “The Social Credit System is just American credit ratings taken to a logical extreme.”
What about, “What about the Taliban?” Is the response, “It’s not successful”? How successful does an idea have to be before we count it as a “credible vision”? “They’re just gangsters”? Is gangster heroin capitalism not a credible vision?
What about, “What about Juche?” 25 million people live in DPRK, under a system that’s been remarkably stable through three dictators and extreme international sanctions.
What about, “What about Mormon dominance of Utah politics?”
Most importantly for our purposes here, what about, “What about an AGI that takes a strategically decisive action?”
Your sources confirm that corruption is a problem, and it’s plausible that corruption is a factor in how poorly the war has gone (which I note is the strongest claim, i.e. “plausible”, in the Politico article), but your original claim, in the context of the OP you responded to, seemed to be that underestimation of corruption is [a huge part of? perhaps a majority of?] what caused everyone to be mistaken about Russian military power, and I definitely don’t think these sources add up to that conclusion. 7 billion rubles of corruption in the military (Moscow Times article) is a drop in the bucket compared to a total budget of at least 2.5 trillion rubles, even if the corruption estimate is off by an order of magnitude.
the rot of pervasive graft, corruption and theft
This is intriguing, but I haven’t seen any reporting on it. What are your sources? (That sounds combative on the Internet but is just me being curious.)
It seems to me that providing a confidence level is mainly beneficial in allowing you and me to see how well calibrated your predictions are.
Providing a confidence level for counterfactual statements about history gives me virtually no information unless I already have a well-formed prior about your skill at historical counterfactual analysis, which, for the same reasons, I can’t really have.
I guess it could provide a very small amount of information if I think historical knowledge and historical counterfactual analysis are correlated, but I don’t have much reason to think that, especially for giant claims like whether Rome would have been Rome but for some factor.
So providing confidence levels seems to add little substantive here while making me feel like it does add something.
I would be interested in updates re your personal experience as often as you’re willing.
lsusr has elsewhere stated and revealed an aesthetic/didactic/philosophical preference for ambiguity and spareness in zir prose, especially in fiction; I think the idea is that the reader should be able to infer the entire underlying story from the bits (literally) disclosed by the words, and also that the words have been stripped of non-informative stuff to the greatest extent possible without making the story unreadable.
The watercolor of the post made the first part of this dramatically more readable. Humans be liking pictures.
The infographics were also useful, but the text inside was too small.
The site’s default text size for image subheads may also be too small. I would prefer if it were the same size as body text.
What is a post? How do I know if I’m near one? What’s it like to recognize one? How can I tell what I do by default in the presence of posts? How can I tell if someone is or isn’t attempting to manage my interactions with posts? How can I tell if I’m running or walking or crawling? When does it matter? How can I tell if it might matter in a particular moment? How can I tell if I’m trying to manage someone else’s interactions with a post? What would I look for in the motions of my own mind and in my perceptions of their responses and in the features of the situation we’re both inhabiting? And if you were wrong that meadows and posts is really a good way for me to think about the kinds of situations you want me to care about in this essay, how would I look where to find that out and build a better concept for myself? Grump.
I didn’t have the same “yanked” response as you did—if anything, I find Duncan usually takes too long to get to the point—but I concur with the quoted bit. I would read a follow-up post with some thoughts on that.
Softening comment for Duncan: I almost always agree with your eventual point to some extent, or can at least respect how you came to hold it, which is like 95% of the regard you could possibly gain from me re a particular claim.
I’m bothered by something else now: the great variety of things that would fit in your category of counterfactual laws (as I understand it). The form of a counterfactual law (“your perpetual motion machine won’t work even if you make that screw longer or do anything else different”) seems to be “A, no matter which parameter you change”. But isn’t that equivalent to “A”, in which case what makes it a counterfactual law instead of just a law? Don’t all things we consider laws of physics fit that set? F=ma even if the frictionless sphere is blue? E=mc^2 even if it’s near a black hole that used to be Gouda cheese?