taw

Karma: 2,535

taw Sep 29, 2012, 10:08 AM
0 points
on: The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?
Your argument depends on choosing what’s “central” or “archetypal” example, and that’s completely arbitrary, since this doesn’t seem to mean “most common” or anything else objective.

It really falls apart on that.

taw Sep 4, 2012, 1:47 AM
1 point
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
Some counterpoints:
- “Behavioural modernity” is a hypothesis which is very far from being universally accepted. Many features supposedly of behavioural modernity have some reasonable evidence of existence far earlier.
- Any hypothesis linking behavioral modernity with language (the only plausible common cause) is on extremely shaky grounds since as far as we know Neanderthals had language just as well, and that pushes language to nearly 1mya.
- Behavioural modernity without common cause like language, and without any definite characteristics that weren’t present earlier in some form is far less plausible, and pretty much falls apart.
- Migration out of Africa is dated at anywhere between 125kya and 60kya, not 50kya.
- Even starting count at 60kya, agriculture being invested 10kya multiple times independently is still extremely surprising.
- Even disregarding admixtures with Neanderthals, Denisovans etc. most recent common ancestor is more like 140kya-200kya by mitochondrial and Y chromosome dating. Dating anything here is very dubious, so you can find a number that fits your hypothesis whatever your hypothesis might be.
- At each point of history vast majority of humans lived in places very far from those covered by ice, or particularly cold. Agriculture was invented only in places far from ice. These are still climatic effects like rainfall that depend on glaciations, but these are much more tenuous links.
- Modern attempts at domesticating plants and animals show it takes a few decades, not tens of thousands of years. Now these are done with benefit of modern science and technology, but still it doesn’t imply tens of thousands of years.
- Agriculture developed in some places very soon after human settlement, like maize and potato agriculture, so that’s another argument against requiring thousands of years of plant evolution.
- If it took plants and animals tens of thousands of years on average, then surely there would be a huge spread in time of domestication. Instead we have an extremely quick succession of domestication events even more ridiculous than the original coincidence (since now number of events is not 7+, it’s 100+).

taw Sep 1, 2012, 9:42 AM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other’s technology if it wasn’t already similar to what they’ve been doing.

See this for example:

Agriculture probably initially expanded because farmers pressed north through the continent, not because hunter-gatherers adopted the practice on their own, Scandinavian scientists say.

If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn’t spread, it’s a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.

taw Aug 31, 2012, 10:38 AM
−1 points
in reply to: DaFranker’s comment on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
All theories of emergence of agriculture I’m aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.

Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn’t develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?

Any explanation involving “selection effects” is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule—it’s second coming of “scientific racism”).

taw Aug 31, 2012, 10:28 AM
0 points
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
How does that reinforce Robin’s model? It goes against it if anything. Imagine if humans, dolphins, bats, bears, and penguins nearly simultaneously developed language on separate continents. It would be a major unexplained WTF.

You can start here, but Wikipedia has pretty bad coverage of that.

taw Aug 31, 2012, 10:22 AM
−1 points
in reply to: endoself’s comment on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
Agriculture developed very far from regions most affected by glaciation, and in very diverse climates, so any climatic common cause is pretty dubious.

taw Aug 30, 2012, 6:54 PM
16 points
on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models

It seems rather easy to mess with the inputs T. Weather conditions or continental drifts could confine pre-agricultural humans to hunting essentially indefinitely

This is sort of amazing, but after a couple million years of hunting and gathering humans developed agriculture independently within a few thousand years in multiple locations (the count is at least 7, possibly more).

This really doesn’t have a good explanation, it’s too ridiculous to be a coincidence, and there’s nothing remotely like a plausible common cause.

taw Aug 14, 2012, 8:03 PM
2 points
on: AI timeline predictions: are we getting better?

But in a field like AI prediction, where experts lack feed back for their pronouncements, we should expect them to perform poorly, and for biases to dominate their thinking.

And that’s pretty much the key sentence.

There is little difference between experts and non-experts.

Except there’s no such thing as AGI expert.

Wellcome Collection in London has exhibition on human augmentation

tawAug 3, 2012, 8:02 AM

5 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

taw Jul 19, 2012, 2:13 PM
1 point
in reply to: satt’s comment on: Kurzweil’s predictions: good accuracy, poor self-calibration
This is far more sensible judgement of Kurzweil’s prediction than OP’s.

taw Jul 12, 2012, 3:48 PM
1 point
on: Kurzweil’s predictions: good accuracy, poor self-calibration
Your judgment on all of these is ridiculously positive. Just about everything you claim as true or partly true seems to be mostly false to totally false to me.

taw Jul 9, 2012, 11:49 AM
−3 points
on: An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
… and then it becomes incomputable in both theory perfectly (even given unbounded resources) and in practice via any kind of realistic approximation.

It’s a dead end. The only interesting thing about it is realizing why precisely it is a dead end.

taw Jul 3, 2012, 2:47 PM
2 points
in reply to: stcredzero’s comment on: Thoughts on moral intuitions
Bushmen lived in contact with pastoralist and then agricultural societies nearby for millennia. The idea that they represent some kind of pre-contact human nature is baseless.

“Industrialized” or not isn’t relevant.

taw Jul 2, 2012, 10:22 AM
1 point
in reply to: Nisan’s comment on: Thoughts on moral intuitions
People make all kinds of stuff about how humans supposedly lived in “natural state” with absolute certainty, and we know just about nothing abut it, other than some extremely dubious extrapolations.

A fairly safe extrapolation is that human were always able to live in very diverse environments, so even if we somehow find one unpolluted sample somehow (by time travel most likely...), it will give us zero knowledge of “typical” Paleolithic humans.

The label has also been used on countless modern and fairly recent historical societies which are definitely not living in any kind of Paleolithic-like conditions. Like agricultural societies in Papua New-Guinea. And banana farmers Yanomami (who are everybody’s favourite “hunter gatherers” when talking about violence in “Paleolithic”). etc. Or Inuit who had domesticated dogs, and lived in condition as climatically removed from Paleolithic humans as possible.

With pretty much 100% rate of statement being wrong when anybody says anything about “hunter gatherers” due to these reasons.

One should note, though, that studies of murder rates amongst hunter gatherer groups found that they were on the high side compared to industrialized societies.

That’s a great example of all these fallacies put together. Murder rates of some people who were actually not hunter gatherers (my bet is they refer to Yanomami), after fairly significant amount of contact with civilization (so not even in their “natural” state, whatever that might be), in one short time period when research was conducted (as we know 1939-1945 murder rates are perfectly extrapolable to entire European history), among people who are not really hunter gatherers in the first place, was found to be fairly high. This is then generalized to what all humans must have been like in prehistory.

With such a clusterfuck of fallacies happening every time anybody says anything about “hunter gatherers”, let’s just stop.

taw Jun 30, 2012, 11:37 AM
3 points
in reply to: stcredzero’s comment on: Thoughts on moral intuitions
Dear everyone, please stop talking about “hunter gatherers”. We have precisely zero samples of any real Paleolithic societies unaffected by extensive contact with Neolithic cultures.

taw Jun 30, 2012, 11:36 AM
5 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Thoughts on moral intuitions
It’s not at all obvious if they really believed it. People say stuff they don’t believe all the time.

taw Jun 30, 2012, 11:34 AM
0 points
on: Thoughts on moral intuitions
I probably have very different sense what’s moral and what isn’t from the author (who claims to be American liberal), but I agree with pretty much everything the author says about meta-morality.

taw Jun 20, 2012, 2:37 AM
2 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Local Ordinances of Fun
That’s a difficult question to answer since amount of Internet use correlated with age, wealth, education level, location, language used, employment status, and a lot of things which might have very big impact on people’s happiness.

I could give the cached answer that “if it didn’t make them happier they wouldn’t be using Internet”, but there are obvious problems with this line of reasoning.

taw Jun 20, 2012, 2:33 AM
4 points
in reply to: Gastogh’s comment on: Local Ordinances of Fun
I actually know various chans quite well, and they all pretend to be those totally ridiculous everything goes places, but when you actually look at them >90% of threads are perfectly reasonable discussions of perfectly ordinary subjects. Especially outside /b/. This generated far more interest on 4chan than all gore threads put together.

taw Jun 19, 2012, 5:00 AM
6 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Local Ordinances of Fun
Total number of hours per lifetime people in every literally utopia ever printed spend watching videos of kittens doing cute things: 0.

Total number of hours per lifetime people in any real utopia would want to spend watching videos of kittens doing cute things: 100s or more.

Anecdotal evidence: Have you seen internet?

More seriously, Internet shows a lot about what people truly like, since there’s so much choice, and it’s not constrained by issues like practicality and prices. Notice total lack of interest in realistic violence and gore and anything more than one standard deviation outside of sexual norms of the society, and none of these due to lack of availability.

When people are given choice of just about anything (to watch or read that is), they prefer to watch cute things, and funny things, and stories about real and fictional individuals, and factual information about the world (Wikipedia), and connect with people they know etc. This is all so ridiculously mundane no self-respecting utopia writer would ever get near these things.

(and by historical standard of what humans lived like for 99% of their existence, modern society counts as an Utopia already)
What links here?
- magfrump's comment on Local Ordinances of Fun by Alicorn (Jun 20, 2012, 4:35 AM; 0 points)

taw

Wel­l­come Col­lec­tion in Lon­don has ex­hi­bi­tion on hu­man augmentation

Wellcome Collection in London has exhibition on human augmentation