They’re free to quit in the sense that nobody will stop them. But they need money for food and shelter. And as far as moral compromises go, choosing to be a cog in an annoying, unfair, but not especially evil machine is a very mild one. You say you don’t expect the shouting to do any good, so what makes it appropriate? If we all go around yelling at everyone who represents something that upsets us, but who has a similar degree of culpability to the gate attendant, we’re going to cause a lot of unnecessary stress and unhappiness.
tslarm
Karma: 526
IMO it’s unclear what kind of person would be influenced by this. It requires the reader to a) be amenable to arguments based on quantitative probabilistic reasoning, but also b) overlook or be unbothered by the non sequitur at the beginning of the letter. (It’s obviously possible for the appropriate ratio of spending on causes A and B not to match the magnitude of the risks addressed by A and B.)
I also don’t understand where the numbers come from in this sentence:
In order to believe that AI risk is 8000 times less than military risk, you must believe that an AI catastrophe (killing 1 in 10 people) is less than 0.001% likely.
“If the accused is in power, increase the probability estimate” is not how good epistemics are achieved.
It is when our uncertainty is due to a lack of information, and those in power control the flow of information! If the accusations are false, the federal government has the power to convincingly prove them false; if the accusations are true, it has the power to suppress any definitive evidence. So the fact that we haven’t seen definitive evidence in favour of the allegations is only very weak evidence against their veracity, whereas the fact that we haven’t seen definitive evidence against the allegations is significant evidence in favour of their veracity.
The Krome thing is all rumor
I don’t have evidence against
If the truth is hard to determine, I think that in itself is very worrying. When you have vulnerable people imprisoned and credible fears that they are being mistreated, any response from those in power other than transparency is a bad sign. Giving them the benefit of the doubt as long as they can prevent definitive evidence from coming out is bad epistemics and IMO even worse politics (not in a party-political sense; just in a ‘how to disincentivise human rights abuses’ sense).
Can you elaborate a bit? Personally, I have intuitions on the hard problem and I think conscious experience is the only type of thing that matters intrinsically. But I don’t think that’s part of the definition of ‘conscious experience’. That phrase would still refer to the same concept as it does now if I thought that, say, beauty was intrinsically valuable—or even if I thought conscious experience was the only thing that didn’t matter.
So it doesn’t make much sense to value emotions
I think this is a non sequitur. Everything you value can be described as just <dismissive reductionist description>, so the fact that emotions can too isn’t a good argument against valuing them. And in this case, the dismissive reductionist description misses a crucial property: emotions are accompanied by (or identical with, depending on definitions) valenced qualia.
In this case, everybody seems pretty sure that the price is where it is because of the actions of a single person who’s dumped in a very large amount of money relative to the float.
I think it’s clear that he’s the reason the price blew out so dramatically. But it’s not clear why the market didn’t ‘correct’ all the way back (or at least much closer) to 50⁄50. Thirty million dollars is a lot of money, but there are plenty of smart rich people who don’t mind taking risks. So, once the identity and (apparent) motives of the Trump whale were revealed, why didn’t a handful of them mop up the free EV?
That’s not a rhetorical question; I’m interested in your answer and might be convinced by it. But right now I don’t see sufficient reason to be confident that the market is still badly distorted, rather than having legitimately settled on ~60/40.
Can’t this only be judged in retrospect, and over a decent sample size? If all the markets did was reflect the public expert consensus, they wouldn’t be very useful; the possibility that they’re doing significantly better is still open.
(I’m assuming that by “every other prediction source” you mean everything other than prediction/betting markets, because it sounds like Polymarket is no longer out of line with the other markets. Betfair is the one I keep an eye on, and that’s at 60⁄40 too.)
Code by Charles Petzold. It gives a ground-up understanding of how computers actually work, starting slowly and without assuming any knowledge on the reader’s part. It’s basically a less textbooky alternative to The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken, which is great but probably a bit much for a young kid.
Meanwhile hedonic utilitarianism fully bites the bullet, and gets rid of every aspect of life that we value except for sensory pleasure.
I think the word ‘sensory’ should be removed; hedonic utilitarianism values all pleasures, and not all pleasures are sensory.
I’m not raising this out of pure pedantry, but because I think this phrasing (unintentionally) plays into a common misconception about ethical hedonism.
Can you elaborate on why that might be the case?
It’s based on a scenario described by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons.
I don’t have the book handy so I’m relying on a random pdf here, but I think this is an accurate quote from the original:
Suppose that I am driving at midnight through some desert. My car breaks down. You are a stranger, and the only other driver near. I manage to stop you, and I offer you a great reward if you rescue me. I cannot reward you now, but I promise to do so when we reach my home. Suppose next that I am transparent, unable to deceive others. I cannot lie convincingly. Either a blush, or my tone of voice, always gives me away. Suppose, finally, that I know myself to be never self-denying. If you drive me to my home, it would be worse for me if I gave you the promised reward. Since I know that I never do what will be worse for me, I know that I shall break my promise. Given my inability to lie convincingly, you know this too. You do not believe my promise, and therefore leave me stranded in the desert. This happens to me because I am never self-denying. It would have been better for me if I had been trustworthy, disposed to keep my promises even when doing so would be worse for me. You would then have rescued me.
(It may be objected that, even if I am never self-denying, I could decide to keep my promise, since making this decision would be better for me. If I decided to keep my promise, you would trust me, and would rescue me. This objection can be answered. I know that, after you have driven me home, it would be worse for me if I gave you the promised reward. If I know that I am never self-denying, I know that I shall not keep my promise. And, if I know this, I cannot decide to keep my promise. I cannot decide to do what I know that I shall not do. If I can decide to keep my promise, this must be because I believe that I shall not be never self-denying. We can add the assumption that I would not believe this unless it was true. It would then be true that it would be worse for me if I was, and would remain, never self-denying. It would be better for me if I was trustworthy.)
Got it, thanks! For what it’s worth, doing it your way would probably have improved my experience, but impatience always won. (I didn’t mind the coldness, but it was a bit annoying having to effortfully hack out chunks of hard ice cream rather than smoothly scooping it, and I imagine the texture would have been nicer after a little bit of thawing. On the other hand, softer ice cream is probably easier to unwittingly overeat, if only because you can serve up larger amounts more quickly.)
I think two-axis voting is a huge improvement over one-axis voting, but in this case it’s hard to know whether people are mostly disagreeing with you on the necessary prep time, or the conclusions you drew from it.
If eating ice cream at home, you need to take it out of the freezer at least a few minutes before eating it
I’m curious whether this is true for most people. (I don’t eat ice cream any more, but back when I occasionally did, I don’t think I ever made a point of taking it out early and letting it sit. Is the point that it’s initially too hard to scoop?)
Pretty sure it’s “super awesome”. That’s one of the common slang meanings, and it fits with the paragraphs that follow.
Individual letters aren’t semantically meaningful, whereas (as far as I can tell) the meaning of a Toki Pona multi-word phrase is always at least partially determined by the meanings of its constituent words. So knowing the basic words would allow you to have some understanding of any text, which isn’t true of English letters.
As a fellow incompabitilist, I’ve always thought of it this way:
There are two possibilities: you have free will, or you don’t. If you do, then you should exercise your free will in the direction of believing, or at least acting on the assumption, that you have it. If you don’t, then you have no choice in the matter. So there’s no scenario in which it makes sense to choose to disbelieve in free will.
That might sound glib, but I mean it sincerely and I think it is sound.
It does require you to reject the notion that libertarian free will is an inherently incoherent concept, as some people argue. I’ve never found those arguments very convincing, and from what you’ve written it doesn’t sound like you do either. In any case, you only need to have some doubt about their correctness, which you should on grounds of epistemic humility alone.
(Technically you only need >0 credence in the existence of free will for the argument to go through, but of course it helps psychologically if you think the chance is non-trivial. To me, the inexplicable existence of qualia is a handy reminder that the world is fundamentally mysterious and the most confidently reductive worldviews always turn out to be ignoring something important or defining it out of existence.)
To link this more directly to your question --
Why bother with effort and hardship if, at the end of the day, I will always do the one and only thing I was predetermined to do anyway?
-- it’s a mistake to treat the effort and hardship as optional and your action at the end of the day as inevitable. If you have a choice whether to bother with the effort and hardship, it isn’t futile. (At least not due to hard determinism; obviously it could be a waste of time for other reasons!)
Why not post your response the same way you posted this? It’s on my front page and has attracted plenty of votes and comments, so you’re not exactly being silenced.
So far you’ve made a big claim with high confidence based on fairly limited evidence and minimal consideration of counter-arguments. When commenters pointed out that there had recently been a serious, evidence-dense public debate on this question which had shifted many people’s beliefs toward zoonosis, you ‘skimmed the comments section on Manifold’ and offered to watch the debate in exchange for $5000.
I don’t know whether your conclusion is right or wrong, but it honestly doesn’t look like you’re committed to finding the truth and convincing thoughtful people of it.
Out of curiosity (and I understand if you’d prefer not to answer) -- do you think the same technique(s) would work on you a second time, if you were to play again with full knowledge of what happened in this game and time to plan accordingly?
Forgive the nitpick, but I think the standard definition of “weakly solved” requires known-optimal strategies from the starting position, which don’t exist for chess. It’s still not known for sure that chess is a draw—it just looks very likely.