That said, if we can define the characteristics of some standard queries we would like exposed (for example, ” Top Upvoters, 30 Days” and “Top Downvoters, 30 Days” as Vaniver mentioned) Trike might be willing to expose those queries to LW admins.
Or they might not. The way to find out is to ask, but we should only bother asking if we actually want them to do so. So discussing it internally in advance of testing those limits seems sensible.
Cool. Thanks for publishing this.
Out of curiosity, does any of CFAR’s “competition” (other personal-effectiveness, productivity, growth, etc. workshops and similar things) publish any similar sort of post-workshop followup, and what sorts of tools they use/results they get if so?
So, you pick an example with no emotional valence. But let’s suppose instead that I have reason to believe that I’m perfectly safe, but find myself believing that someone is going to kill me in my sleep. This would not stop me from telling people I’m perfectly safe, or from giving the reasons that show I’m perfectly safe, or from accepting a similar $100 bet. It might, however, prevent me from getting a good night’s sleep.
Is that not a thing that matters about the belief that I’m safe?
I’m not sure what I wrote that gave you this idea.
(nods) Months later, neither am I. Perhaps I’d remember if I reread the exchange, but I’m not doing so right now.
Regardless, I appreciate the correction.
And much like Vaniver below (above? earlier!), I am unsure how to translate these sorts of claims into anything testable.
Also I’m wary of the tendency to reason as follows: “I don’t value being deaf. Therefore deafness is not valuable. Therefore when people claim to value being deaf, they are confused and mistaken. Here, let me list various reasons why they might be confused and mistaken.”
I mean, don’t get me wrong: I share this intuition. I just don’t trust it. I can’t think of anything a deaf person could possibly say to me that would convince me otherwise, even if I were wrong.
Similarly, if someone were to say ” I believe that being queer is not ego-syntonic. I know people say it is, but I believe that’s because they’re confused and mistaken, for various reasons: x, y, z” I can’t think of anything I could possibly say to them to convince them otherwise. (Nor is this a hypothetical case: many people do in fact say this.)
Well, right, that’s essentially the question I was asking the author of the piece.
This comment sure does seem to suggest that no, requesting more time and equipment is a failure… but no, I don’t know one way or the other, which is why I asked.
Hm.
So, I want to point out explicitly that in your example of ancestry, I intuitively know enough about this concept of mine to know my sister isn’t my ancestor, but I don’t know enough to know why not. (This isn’t an objection; I just want to state it explicitly so we don’t lose sight of it.)
And, OK, I do grant the legitimacy of starting with an intuitive concept and talking around it in the hopes of extracting from my own mind a clearer explicit understanding of that concept. And I’m fine with the idea of labeling that concept from the beginning of the process, just so I can be clear about when I’m referring to it, and don’t confuse myself.
So, OK. I stand corrected here; there are contexts in which I’m OK with using a label even if I don’t quite know what I mean by it.
That said… I’m not quite so sanguine about labeling it with words that have a rich history in my language when I’m not entirely sure that the thing(s) the word has historically referred to is in fact the concept in my head.
That is, if I’ve coined the word “ancestor” to refer to this fuzzy concept, and I say some things about “ancestry,” and then someone comes along “this is the brute fact from which the conundrum of ancestry start” as in your example, my reaction ought to be startlement… why is this guy talking so confidently about a term I just coined?
But of course, I didn’t just coin the word “ancestor.” It’s a perfectly common English word. So… why have I chosen that pre-existing word as a label for my fuzzy concept? At the very least, it seems I’m risking importing by reference a host of connotations that exist for that word without carefully considering whether I actually intend to mean them.
And I guess I’d ask you the same question about “conscious.” Given that there’s this concept you don’t know much about explicitly, but feel you know things about implicitly, and about which you’re trying to make your implicit knowledge explicit… how confident are you that this concept corresponds to the common English word “consciousness” (as opposed to, for example, the common English words “mind”, or “soul”, or “point of view,” or “self-image,” or “self,” or not corresponding especially well to any common English word, perhaps because the history of our language around this concept is irreversibly corrupted)?
To know what I’m referring to by a term is to know what properties something in the world would need to have to be a referent for that term.
The ability to recognize such things in the world is beside the point. When I say “my ancestors,” I know what I mean, but in most cases it’s impossible to pick that attribute out empirically—I can’t pick out most of my ancestors now, because they no longer exist to be picked out, and nobody could have picked them out back when they were alive, because the defining characteristic of the category is in terms of something that hadn’t yet been born. (Unless you want to posit atypical time-travel, of course, but that’s not my point.)
So, sure, if by “flying saucer” I refer to an alien spaceship, I don’t necessarily have any way of knowing whether something I’m observing is a flying saucer or not, but I know what I mean when I claim that it is or isn’t.
And if by “consciousness” I refer to anything sufficiently similar to what I experience when I consider my own mind, then I can’t tell whether a rock is conscious, but I know what I mean when I claim it is or isn’t.
Rereading pangel’s comment, I note that I initially understood “we don’t know actually know what those concepts refer to” to mean we don’t have the latter thing… that we don’t know what we mean to express when we claim that the concept refers to something… but it can also be interpreted as saying we don’t know in what things in the world the concept correctly refers to (as with your example of being wrong about believing something is an alien spaceship).
I’ll stand by my original statement in the original context I made it in, but sure, I also agree that just because we don’t currently know what things in the world are or aren’t conscious (or flying saucers, or accurate blueprints for anti-gravity devices, or ancestors of my great-great-grandchild, or whatever) doesn’t mean we can’t talk sensibly about the category. (Doesn’t mean we can, either.)
And, yes, the fact that I don’t know how subjective experience comes to be doesn’t prevent me from recognizing subjective experience.
As for urgency… I dunno. I suspect we’ll collectively go on inferring that things have a consciousness similar to our own with a confidence proportional to how similar their external behavior is to our own for quite a long time past the development of (human) brains in vats. But sure, I can easily imagine various legal prohibitions like you describe along the way.
If I don’t know what I’m referring to when I say “consciousness,” it seems reasonable to conclude that I ought not use the term.
Agreed that statistics > anecdotes. That said, the list here leaves me wondering about the direction of causation. I’m less interested in current-net-worth than average annual-change-in-net-worth (both % and $) in the years since graduation.
No formal studies to share.
I know a lot of poly folk in N-way relationships who seem reasonably happy about it and would likely be less happy in monogamous relationships; I know a lot of monogamous folks in 2-way relationships who seem reasonably happy about it and would likely be less happy in polygamous relationships; I know a fair number of folks in 2-way relationships who would likely be happier in polygamous relationships; I know a larger number of folks who have tried polygamous relationships and decided it wasn’t for them. Mostly my conclusion from all this is that different people have different preferences.
As to whether those differing preferences are the result of genetic variation, gestational differences, early childhood experiences, lifestyle choices made as adolescents and adults, something else entirely, or some combination thereof… I haven’t a clue.
I don’t see where it matters much for practical purposes.
I mean, I recognize that there’s a social convention that we’re not permitted to condemn people for characteristics they were “born with,” but that mostly seems irrelevant to me, since I see no reason to condemn people for preferring poly relationships regardless of whether they were born that way, acquired it as learned behavior, or (as seems likeliest) some combination.
As you say, some on the left will be applying social (and economic) pressure, just as everyone else does when they’re able to. And there’s a fairly well-established rhetorical convention in my culture whereby any consistently applied social pressure is labelled “force,” “bullying,” “discrimination,” “lynching,” “intolerance,” and whatever other words can get the desired rhetorical effect.
We can get into a whole thing about what those words actually mean, but in my experience basically nobody cares. They are phatic expressions, not technical ones.
Leaving the terminology aside… I expect the refusal to perform gay weddings to become socially acceptable to fewer and fewer people, and social condemnable to more and more people. And I agree with skeptical_lurker that this process, whatever we call it, will cause some resentment among the people who are aligned with such refusal. (Far more significantly, I expect it to catalyze existing resentment.)
Those of us who endorse that social change would probably do best to accept that this is one of the consequences of that change, and plan accordingly.
I suspect that humans have evolved a better sense of the likelihood of being caught, many times. The thing is, one of the things such a sense is useful for is improving our ability to cheat with impunity. Which creates more selection pressure to get better at catching cheaters, which reduces our ability to reliably estimate the likelihood of being caught.
Right. Your reading is entirely sensible, and more likely in “the real world” (by which I mean something not-well-thought-through about how it’s easier to implement the original description as a selection effect), I merely chose to bypass that reading and go with what I suspected (perhaps incorrectly) the OP actually had in mind.
Leaving aside lexical questions about the connotations of the word “oracle”, I certainly agree that if the entity’s accuracy represents a selection effect, then my reasoning doesn’t hold.
Indeed, I at least intended to say as much explicitly (“I don’t want to fight the hypothetical here, so I’m assuming that the “overall jist” of your description applies: I’m paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle’s offer.” ) in my comment.
That said, it’s entirely possible that I misread what the point of DanielLC’s hypothetical was.
The oracle is simply saying that there are two possible futures
I think you mean “that there are only two possible futures.”
Which leaves me puzzled as to your point.
If I am confident that there are only two possible futures, one where I pay and live, and one where I don’t pay and die, how is that different from being confident that paying causes me to live, or from being confident that not-paying causes me to die? Those just seem like three different ways of describing the same situation to me.
So, as in most such problems, there’s an important difference between the epistemological question (“should I pay, given what I know?”) and the more fundamental question (“should I pay, supposing this description is accurate?”). Between expected value and actual value, in other words.
It’s easy to get those confused, and my intuitions about one muddy my thinking about the other, so I like to think about them separately.
WRT the epistemological question, that’s hard to answer without a lot of information about how likely I consider accurate oracular ability, how confident I am that the examples of accurate prediction I’m aware of are a representative sample, etc. etc. etc., all of which I think is both uncontroversial and uninteresting. Vaguely approximating all of that stuff I conclude that I shouldn’t pay the oracle, because I’m not justified in being more confident that the situation really is as the oracle describes it, than that the oracle is misrepresenting the situation in some important way. My expected value of this deal in the real world is negative.
WRT the fundamental question… of course, you leave a lot of details unspecified, but I don’t want to fight the hypothetical here, so I’m assuming that the “overall jist” of your description applies: I’m paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle’s offer. That’s a good deal for me; I’m inclined to take it. (Though I might try to negotiate the price down.)
The knock-on effect is that I encourage the oracle to keep making this offer… but that’s good too; I want the oracle to keep making the offer. QALYs for everyone!
So, yes, I should pay the oracle, though I should also implement decision procedures that will lead me to not pay the oracle.
Sure. Mostly I’m not in high school anymore, and my social circle is people I choose to be around, which makes things very different.
So, just to clarify my understanding of your claim here… if I write in my story “Peter goes left and simultaneously stands still,” is it similarly ridiculous to say that I’m wrong about my story? Are we therefore similarly committed to the idea that I have created a (fictional) being who both moves and stands still?
If I write in my story “Peter correctly adds 2 and 2 to get 5”, does the same kind of reasoning apply?
Are these things all, on your view, similarly analogous to the relationship of God to beings in the real world?