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Pretty sure this is the question underlying https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/disagree_with_s.html
Similarly, an even more defensible position might be Buddhist one, or that happiness is transitory and mostly a construction of the mind, and virtually always attached to suffering, but suffering is real and worth minimizing.
This post is generalizable, even if you don’t think that it’s wrong to kill people as a general rule there’s probably some other moral act #G_30429 that you probably don’t think that it would be appropriate and the point still holds: Rowhammering the bit that says “Don’t do #G_30429” is probably not as impossible as it seems in the long run.
(Meta: when thinking about this I found it difficult to recall all of the arguments I’ve learned in moral philosophy over the past 16 years of trying that would have been applicable. I knew where you were going, roughly, but it was like traveling through a city I haven’t been to in years in terms of whether or not I recognized the territory. This gave me an extra impression of ‘this bit could be easily flipped’)
This assumes that the people around you generally do the right thing. If you operate under the alternative assumption (which is much more reasonable) you would likely still be alive.
Modernized version as of 2017, of the first part of this post : http://82.221.128.217/trolley-lw.png
More serious reply: depending when you encountered me, I’d be more boring in some ways, since a lot of what I spend my time doing is towards a moral end. All the things I’ve learned in life I learned from trying to live in a moral universe. I would never have gotten a degree, I did that virtually entirely for what I perceived to be reasons of altruism. Since I’m assuming here that everyone else will continue to live under the illusion that they are in such a universe, and that only I leave it...even it were merely 2008 when I encountered this revelation, I would have not donated so much to charity, I would have not gone into teaching children science...my whole of my thereafter short life would have been hedonism, torture, probably serial rape/murder and hard drugs. I wouldn’t have lived with decent, hardworking people—I’d probably have been kidnapped by gangsters or something and OD’d on heroin by now. I sure wouldn’t care about the state of my country, my family, or mathematics or anything like that.
This brings up the Sapir Worf hypothesis, or the newspeak for it, “Linguistic Relativity”. After all, memes must be expressible, musn’t they? If they are then if it were true, then the memes that you have bound the memes that you can espouse—linguistic relativity in a nutshell.
Many memes these days come in picture form, but for that you need a medium capable of showing pictures, and the culture that places value in making such media universally available. Without that culture, and without the apparatus to share picture-memes those memes would quickly die out, though some abstract notion of some of them, perhaps carried along the linguistic pathway in the same way that even though we don’t use floppy disks for anything everyone uses them to ‘save’. So in a sense not only is it the media and its memes that has to be prior to memes expressed via it, but also the language memes have to be there in order for them to be used. Language might as well just be thought as the structure and set of of meme universals.
Looks like there’s been activity on Wikipedia since I’ve dug up this issue last suggesting that at least since the 1980′s there’s been recent research on how language, and memes influence thought/future use of memes/language. Reddit in particular has some really good data on this that they last I heard were not sharing with the world.
The big question is if memes are different, which evidence suggests, why is this so?
Here’s what you actually wanted to link to for “looking back”
(edit: search ‘looking back’, i used to have it indexed with hyperlinks, but I lost that copy)
My concern isn’t with the interview per se(everything I would add would best be put in another thread). It’s with the reaction here in the comments here.
That 90% wasn’t a waste anymore than overcomingbias as a blog is a waste. Horgan is hardly alone in remembering the Fifth Generation Project and it was worth it to get Yudkowsky to hammer out, once more, to a new audience why what happened in the 80′s was not representative of what is to come in the 10ky timeframe. Those of you who are hard on Horgan he is not one of you. You cannot hold him to LW standards. Yudkowsky has spent a lot of time and effort trying to get other people to not make mistakes, for example mislabeling broad singulitarian thought on him as if he’s kurzweil, vinge, the entirety of MIRI and whatnot personified and so it’s understandable why he might be annoyed, but at the same time...the average person is not going to bother with the finer details. He probably put in about as much or more journalistic work as the average topic requires. This just goes to really drive home how different intelligence is from other fields, how hard science journalism in a world with AI research can be.
It’s frustrating because it’s hard. It’s hard for many reasons, but one reason is because the layman’s priors are very wrong. This it shares in common(for good reason) with economics and psychology more generally that people who are not in the field bring to the table a lot of preconceptions that have to be dismantled. Dismantling them all is a lot of work for a 1 hour podcast. Like those who answer Yahoo Answers! questions, Horgan is a critical point needed to convince on his own terms between Yudkowsky & a substantial chunk of a billion+ people who lived in the 80′s who are not following where Science is being taken here.
The parent made 3 claims(the 3rd one was snuck into the conclusion). I only addressed 2 and 3. 1 is a credible point that stands on its own merit. Without points 2 and 3 however with 1 it’s no longer a sound argument.
edit PaleMoon lost original reply. I will try to recreate it :(
Not saying you’re incorrect in criticizing the above(the two claims do seem incompatible), but isn’t it the case that algorithms are just structures and that only they take time only to run? What I mean is that within the block-universe view there would be structures that we would be in ignorance of their nature and in order for us to learn about them we might have to count them (and since we are living in a timeline with computers that operate per cycle our accounting of them would take some time to complete), but that it’s only ignorance to an observer like us that necessitates this? That if you knew some property of some local region of the block-universe you could use it to estimate some other property via the algorithm that represents their (mutual) structure, but that the algorithm describing their structure merely is. There’s plenty of times when choosing algorithms to describe mathematical objects that we choose algorithms that fall along a space-time tradeoff, so it stands to reason that there should be a ‘all-space’ choice that only encodes the answer we seek in structure alone.
Our children will look back at the fact that we were STILL ARGUING about this in the early 21st-century, and correctly deduce that we were nuts.
We’re still arguing whether or not the world is flat, whether the zodiac should be used to predict near-term fate and whether we should be building stockpiles of nuclear weapons. There’s billions left to connect to the internet, and most extant human languages to this day have no written form. Basic literacy and mathematics is still something much of the world struggles with. This is going to go on for awhile: the future will not be surprised that the finer details of after the 20th decimal point were being debated when we can’t even agree on whether intelligent design is the best approach to cell biology or not.
(this is the second copy of this comment, the first was regrettably lost in a browser crash. Use systems that back up your comments automatically)
This advice seems to fly in the face of Richard Hamming’s advice to keep an open door. However perhaps the difference is subtle: Hamming suggested to have an open door but not necessarily to share your secrets, so perhaps there is room for a big science mystery cult to retain its own mysteries at every level of initiation. Perhaps there is a middle ground[1] to be found between this and current ‘open science’ wherein secrets and ritual are more emphasized, but where the public has the ability to always query deep into the bureaucracy of the science temple/university.
More likely, however the best approach is all of the above, some kinds of thinking are enhanced by a certain size of a team, and there may be some problems that require an open-science sized ‘ingroup’, and some problems that are more tractable with an ingroup the size of a mystery cult.
1 (keep in mind the middle ground is not necessarily the best path—it’s just a path)
The question may have once been which poet gets quoted when rainbows are brought up. If Keats isn’t adding to the discussion in a meaningful way anymore since his metaphors will play second fiddle to the ones that of Newton, which were wonderful and exciting enough that Newton was driven to poking himself in the eye with a needle over them. I don’t know if Keats even in his heyday could have claimed that. It may have been that his views on rainbows were propagated in some ingroup, until someone from that ingroup quoted them to someone in an ingroup with exposure to Newton’s ideas on the same. They would have looked bad when that happened, but they would likely bring up the same thing to a person who might quote Keats to them, and so on until Keats himself was bested at his own game.
The problem isn’t that Science is taking away from Rainbows, the problem is that Science is taking the power of controlling perception and justifying belief (mostly in other people) from Keats. No kidding he’s going to be unhappy about it.
Science changes the poetry dynamic Keats’ is used to because suddenly there’s competition for what gets associated with what idea in such a way that poets don’t necessarily get first dibs in the minds of people that they care about. Similar to how Galileo got in trouble for changing the scope of mathematicians from strictly below philosophers, this may be another instance of Newton changing how we view things by raising the social position of those who participate in science to where it is acceptable to challenge the status of a poet. Poets were important enough in Keats’ day that the heads of governments had their own poet on staff.
Keats just could not keep up with what was actually still wonderful to the people he would have seduced with his ideas: Darwin came later, and found wonder still left:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ”—Charles Darwin
Of course this dynamic may be changing yet. This framing of the problem leaves open the possibility that our personal ability to perceive wonder can get very broken when our computer systems produce the models for us, as described by radiolab (tl; dr when you have computer systems that can derive laws describing phenomena better than we can understand the reason behind those laws, but which nevertheless describe those systems that generate the phenomena, we may be at something of a loss when it comes to our ‘right’ to perceive wonder). Being unable to physically train your brain to assign wonder to wonderful thing seems to be a different problem than this one, more of a disability rather than anything.
This seems to me more evidence that intelligence is in part a social/familial thing: that like human beings that have to be embedded in a society in order to develop a certain level of intelligence, a certain level of an intuition for “don’t do this it will kill you” informed by the nuance that is only possible with a wide array of individual failures informing group success or otherwise: it might be a prerequisite for higher level reasoning beyond a certain level (and might constrain the ultimate levels upon which intelligence can rest).
I’ve seen more than enough children try to do things that would be similar enough to dropping an anvil on their head to consider this ‘no worse than human’ (in fact our hackerspace even has an anvil, and one kid has ha ha only serious even suggested dropping said anvil on his own head). If AIXI/AIXItl can reach this level, at the very least it should be capable of oh-so-human level reasoning(up to and including the kinds of risky behaviour that we all probably would like to pretend we never engaged in), and could possibly transcend it in the same way that humans do: by trial and error, by limiting potential damage to individuals, or groups, and fighting the neverending battle against ecological harms on its own terms on the time schedule of ‘let it go until it is necessary to address the possible existential threat’.
Of course it may be that the human way of avoiding species self-destruction is fatally flawed, including but not limited to creating something like AIXI/AIXItl. But it seems to me that is a limiting, rather than a fatal flaw. And it may yet be that the way out of our own fatal flaws, and the way out of AIXI/AIXItl’s fatal flaws are only possible by some kind of mutual dependence, like the mutual dependence of two sides of a bridge. I don’t know.
Either way, the question is guaranteed to have an answer. You even have a nice, concrete place to begin tracing—your belief, sitting there solidly in your mind.
In retrospect this seems like an obvious implication of belief in belief. I would have probably never figured it out on my own, but now that I’ve seen both, I can’t unsee the connection.
No one has complicated thoughts about several dreams from totally different genres while experiencing that one is unable to move a muscle without being awake.
...I’ve had some pretty complicated dreams, where I’ve woken up from a dream(!), gone to work, made coffee, had discussions about the previous dream, had thoughts about the morality or immorality of the dream, then sometime later come to a conclusion that something was out of place(I’m not wearing pants?!) then woken up to realize that I was dreaming. I’ve had nested dreams a good couple of layers deep with this sort of thing going on.
That said I think you have something there, though. Sometimes I wake up (Dream or otherwise) and I remember my dream really vividly, especially when I awake suddenly, due to an alarm clock or something
But I’ve never had a dream that I struggled to remember what was in my dream inside of my dream. At the least, such an activity should really raise my priors that I’m toplevel.
Looks like somewhere along the transition to lesswrong, the trackback to this related OB post appears to have been lost. It’s worth digging a step deeper for the context, here.
Including: “twitter”, “altruism”, “trust”, “start” and “curiosity” apparently?
Clearly. But whatever they are, they should still be represented, and there may be similarly wild things in the outlying areas of their worldview—and if I can help them reach it I will. In my experience it’s the ideas in the hinterlands that are the way out of the problems of our time, regardless what our time is—merely seeing that our worldview has outliers, and the overton window is limiting us in one area is usually enough to see that we’re limited elsewhere, too.