Why is rationalization of one’s child-having status an issue for estimating their happiness? People are as happy as they are. Part of what determines that happiness is their rationalization of events and choices they’ve encountered. If childless people rationalize their situation and are just as happy as child-having people (with their own rationalizations), that looks like an answer, not a problem.
tim
Karma: 624
If your problem is along the lines of treating debates as competitions and getting caught up in winning the argument rather than finding the truth, I can completely relate. What I’ve found extremely helpful is trying to be mindful of that hazard when debating. If you notice yourself, say, tearing down your opponent’s argument over what you know to be an easily fixed flaw, give yourself a bit of negative feedback (no! bad!). On the other hand if you notice yourself acknowledging a flaw in your argument, publicly renouncing a previously held position or otherwise changing your mind, give yourself a mental pat on the head (nice! good job!).
It took me a long time but if I notice myself weaseling around and subtly changing my argument to avoid being wrong I get an instant, intense sinking feeling in my stomach. Likewise, if I say something like, “Wow, yeah good point, I was definitely wrong there,” I get a blossoming glow that spreads up my chest. These physical reminders are extremely reinforcing and I’ve completely flipped from hating to admit fault to really appreciating the experience.
Of course, its still reeeeally easy to push these cues out of your head if you’re emotionally invested in a debate even a small amount. Constant vigilance!
The absence of 747s spontaneously assembling is evidence for their impossibility. Its just that evidence is completely overwhelmed by all the additional evidence we have indicating that it is possible—evidence which appears lacking from this particular case.
Just because the expected values are equal doesn’t mean the expected utilities are equal. For example, if you are choosing between a 100% chance of $400 and an 80% chance of $500 but you need $500 to make the rent and not get evicted, it would be stupid not to try for the additional $100 since it has a disproportionately high value in that particular context. That is, while the expected value of the choices are identical, the expected utilities are not. Conversely, if you have zero money, the expected utility of a sure $400 far outweighs risking it all for an additional $100.
Basically you need an external context and a value system that assigns utilities to the possible outcomes to discriminate between the two. And if the expected utilities come back equal then you have no preference.
In addition to the points already raised, you are completely ignoring the many changes that have resulted from LW users raising ideas and/or concerns. Briefly, off the top of my head, the front page and upper menus were redone for more intuitive use, new comments added to a previously viewed thread now have a pink border, links to the latest open thread/rationality diary were added to the sidebar, and the karma display for posts and comments now allows you to see the percent of positive votes.
Your picture of a terrible, stagnant optimization process is inaccurate.
Wow, I hadn’t previously read the RichardKennaway comment you linked. I think internalizing that idea would be massively helpful in combating the tendency to view disagreement as inherently combative rather than a difference between priors.
(something I need to work on)
Why are you assuming that we would be more likely to notice an unfriendly SI than a friendly SI? If anything, it seems that an intelligence we would consider friendly is more likely to cause us to observe life than one maximizing something completely orthogonal to our values.
(I don’t buy the argument that an unfriendly SI would propagate throughout the universe to a greater degree than a friendly SI. Fully maximizing happiness/consciousness/etc also requires colonizing the galaxy.)
I am almost always aware if the author is someone with a distinct name that posts a fair amount. Otherwise it doesn’t really register.
(its almost impossible for me not to read the username before the comment unless I put real effort into it)
I bet tabooing/rigorously defining “subject” and “everyone” in the context of the first line of the wikipedia summary would do it. At least to the extent that the position would become either incoherent or tautological.
Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of personal identity, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, which is everyone.
So according to this article a large factor in rising tuition costs in American universities is attributable to increases in administration and overhead costs. For example,
Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.
Certainly some of these increases are attributable to the need for more staff supporting new technological infrastructure such as network/computer administration but those needs don’t explain the magnitude of the increases seen.
The author also highlights examples of excess and waste in administrative spending such as large pay hikes for top administrators in the face of budget cuts and the creation of pointless committees. How much these incidents contribute to the cost of tuition is somewhat questionable as the evidence is essentially a large list of anecdotes.
Anyway, this was surprising to me because I would naively predict that, if we were talking about almost any other product, we would begin to see less bureaucratically bloated competitors offering it for cheaper and driving the price down. What’s unique about university that stops this from happening?
Possible explanations (based on an extremely basic understanding of economics, please correct),
The author notes that the boards of trustees tend to be ill-prepared for making the kinds of decisions that might lead to a trimming of the fat. However, for this to be the reason (or at least a large part of the reason) boards would have to be almost universally incompetent else the few universities that take such action would have a market advantage over those that don’t.
Maybe, for whatever reason, its difficult for universities to grow past a certain point. If the market is already saturated with demand and universities are unable to expand in accommodation then they have no incentive to lower tuition. However, you would still expect lots of new universities to pop up as a result of this (which may or may not be the case as I couldn’t find good statistics for this).
The situation we find ourselves in appears to fit well with the signaling model of education. That is, college isn’t about learning, it’s about signaling your worth to potential employers via an expensive piece of paper. If this were the case it would be hard for a new or non-prestigious institution to break into the market or increase their market share even if the actual education was of high quality and inexpensive relative to competitors. In fact, under this model, more expensive schools may be preferred simply because they signal a higher level of prestige.
Maybe I have been fooled by a misleading article that overblows the level of waste and inefficiency in American universities and that it would actually be quite difficult to run a modern educational institution without a comparable level of bureaucratic expenditure. There are parts of the article that do strike me as hyperbolic, but I’ve yet to come across a coherent argument that contends the current tuition levels are necessary and several that posit the opposite.
I think three years is too long. I would imagine that there are a large number of useful quotes that are novel to many users that are much less than three years old.
Personally I would say we should just let it ride as is with no restrictions. If redundancy and thread bloat become noticeable issues then yeah, we might want to set up a minimum age for contributions.
My gym has spray bottles filled with some sort of cleaner for wiping down equipment which probably leads to a lot fewer people getting sick than what you’re suggesting. I propose spreading my norm instead.
It would not have the same rights as a natural human. Presumably, if such a line were drawn, there would be a good reason for not recognizing a below 70% pass rate rather than arbitrarily choosing that number.
This is a more general problem with any sort of cutoff that segregate a continuous quantity into separate groups. (Should someone who is 20.9 years old be legally recognized as an adult? Is there really a difference between the mentally retarded person with a 69.9 IQ and the person who scored a 70.1?)
Good point. They are generally useful heuristics that sometimes lead to unnecessary conflicts.
While I don’t know what animal altruists think, these statistics might give an (extremely) rough idea of the numbers.
(the second one is only cattle and doesn’t distinguish between human/inhuman conditions though 80-90% of cattle are in feedlots with >1000 heads, so you could draw some order-of-magnitude comparisons)
Is there a (more well-known/mainstream) name for arguments-as-soldiers-bias?
More specifically, interpreting an explanation of why or how an event happened as approval of that event. Or claiming that someone who points out a flaw in an argument against X is a supporter of X. (maybe these have separate names?)
Aren’t horcruxs supposed to be incredibly costly to create? Like, they use a piece of your soul (or diminish you in a way that has been described as losing a piece of your soul). I don’t think Voldemort would shrug and go, “well, I may as well perform an incredibly costly ritual and make this baby into horcrux” on a whim.
Given that the original submission is a year and half old, its likely that enough people are unfamiliar with it that its worth keeping up. (afaik, resubmission isn’t a big enough problem in discussion to enact a delete-all-duplicates policy)
Is there a way to sticky the current open thread to the top of discussion? (and if not, would it be difficult to implement?)
That would be an ideal solution for a person with similar LW browsing habits to me.
Just spitballing, but I would guess that this type of coverage is a net benefit due to the level of exposure and subsequent curiosity generated by “holy crap what is this thing that could spell doom for us all?” That is, it seems like singularitarian ideas need as much exposure as possible (any press is good press) and are a long way away from worrying about anti-AI picketers. Am I off here?