Z_M_Davis

Karma: 1,147

Z_M_Davis 16 Oct 2009 19:58 UTC
0 points
on: Open Thread: October 2009
On reflection, I’m actually going to start spelling my first name again.
What links here?
- Zack_M_Davis's comment on Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal by Zack_M_Davis (2 Apr 2022 21:36 UTC; 3 points)

Z_M_Davis 29 Sep 2009 5:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma

which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position

See Furcas’s comment.

that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself

I never said it was no different. Elsewhere in the thread, I had argued that selfishness is entirely compatible with biting the third bullet. Egan’s Law.

And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words “very roughly the same reason” instead of “exactly the same reason”.

I disagree; if it had been obvious, I wouldn’t have had to point it out explicitly. Maybe the cognitive history would help? I had originally typed “the same reason,” but added “very roughly” before posting because I anticipated your objection. I think the original was slightly funnier, but I thought it was worth trading off a little of the humor value in exchange for making the statement more defensible when taken literally.

I’m sorry, but that’s just not “how it works”. [...] your full explanation [looks] blatantly ad hoc.

I’m curious. If what actually happened looks ad hoc to you, what’s your alternative theory? If you don’t trust what I say about what I was thinking, then what do you believe instead? You seem to think I’ve committed some error other than writing two admittedly somewhat opaque comments, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be.

Z_M_Davis 29 Sep 2009 2:37 UTC
4 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma
Oops. I goofed.
What links here?

Z_M_Davis 29 Sep 2009 0:23 UTC
5 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma
Right, so of course I’m rather selfish in the sense of valuing things-like-myself, and so of course I buy more things for myself than I do for random strangers, and so forth. But I also know that I’m not ontologically fundamental; I’m just a conjunction of traits that can be shared by other observers to various degrees. So “I don’t throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don’t throw other people off cliffs” is this humorously terse and indirect way of saying that identity is a scalar, not a binary attribute. (Notice that I said “very roughly the same reason” and not “exactly the same reason”; that was intentional.)
What links here?
- SilasBarta's comment on The Anthropic Trilemma by Eliezer Yudkowsky (29 Sep 2009 3:11 UTC; -3 points)

Z_M_Davis 28 Sep 2009 20:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma
I was trying to be cute.

Z_M_Davis 28 Sep 2009 3:36 UTC
5 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma
I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn’t a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for “your own” future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for “your own” future in situations where you expect to be copied and merged depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience. For myself, I don’t know how I would go about forming such preferences, because I don’t understand consciousness.

Z_M_Davis 27 Sep 2009 4:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma
But all the resulting observers who see the coin come up tails aren’t you. You just specified that they weren’t. Who cares what they think?

Z_M_Davis 27 Sep 2009 4:41 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Johnicholas’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma
I don’t throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don’t throw other people off cliffs.
What links here?
- Douglas_Knight's comment on Why the beliefs/values dichotomy? by Wei Dai (27 Oct 2009 18:20 UTC; 0 points)

Z_M_Davis 27 Sep 2009 4:39 UTC
13 points
on: The Anthropic Trilemma
Following Nominull and Furcas, I bite the third bullet without qualms for the perfectly ordinary obvious reasons. Once we know how much of what kinds of experiences will occur at different times, there’s nothing left to be confused about. Subjective selfishness is still coherent because you’re not just an arbitrary observer with no distinguishing characteristics at all; you’re a very specific bundle of personality traits, memories, tendencies of thought, and so forth. Subjective selfishness corresponds to only caring about this one highly specific bundle: only caring about whether someone falls off a cliff if this person identifies as such-and-such and has such-and-these specific memories and such-and-those personality traits: however close a correspondence you need to match whatever you define as personal identity.

The popular concepts of altruism and selfishness weren’t designed for people who understand materialism. Once you realize this, you can just recast whatever it was you were already trying to do in terms of preferences over histories of the universe. It all adds up to, &c., &c.
What links here?
- Z_M_Davis's comment on The Anthropic Trilemma by Eliezer Yudkowsky (29 Sep 2009 5:31 UTC; 1 point)

Z_M_Davis 23 Sep 2009 16:14 UTC
13 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Absent-Minded Driver

I count 6+ comments from others on meta-talk, 8+ down-mods, and 0 [sic] explanations for the errors in my solution. Nice work, guys.

If it is in fact the case that your complaints are legitimately judged a negative contribution, then you should expect to be downvoted and criticized on those particular comments, regardless of whether or not your solution is correct. There’s nothing contradictory about simultaneously believing both that your proposed solution is correct, and that your subsequent complaints are a negative contribution.

I don’t feel like taking the time to look over your solution. Maybe it’s perfect. Wonderful! Spectacular! This world becomes a little brighter every time someone solves a math problem. But could you please, please consider toning down the hostility just a bit? These swipes at other commenters’ competence and integrity are really unpleasant to read.

ADDENDUM: Re tone, consider the difference between “I wonder why this was downvoted, could someone please explain?” (which is polite) and “What a crock,” followed by shaming a counterfactual Wei Dai (which is rude).

Z_M_Davis 23 Sep 2009 3:38 UTC
5 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Absent-Minded Driver

Okay, so far that’s 3-4 people willing to mod me down, zero people willing to point out the errors in a clearly articulated post.

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. It’s your comment of 22 September 2009 09:56:05PM that’s sitting at −4; none of your clear and articulate responses to Dai have negative scores anymore.

Z_M_Davis 22 Sep 2009 23:03 UTC
7 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Absent-Minded Driver
Downvoted for complaining about being downvoted and for needless speculation about the integrity of other commenters. (Some other contributions to this thread have been upvoted.)

Z_M_Davis 21 Sep 2009 19:27 UTC
33 points
1
in reply to: MineCanary’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder

I lean toward the politically correct side because it’s the side that [...]

Taboo side. Complex empirical issues do not have sides. Humans, for their own non-truth-tracking reasons, group into sides, but it’s not Bayesian, and it has never been Bayesian.

Or we think we group up into sides, but I’m not even sure that’s true. You write that the egalitarians are nuanced and present evidence, whereas the human biodiversity crowd (or whatever words you want to use) are just apologists for their favorite narrative, but there are a lot of people who have the exact opposite perspective: that the hbd-ers are honest and nuanced and the egalitarians are blinded by ideology. But in fact, there are no sides physically out there: rather, there are only various people who have studied various facets of the topic to various degrees and who believe and profess various things for various reasons. And this question of what various people believe is distinct from the question of what’s actually true.

I realize that this kind of aggressive reductionism isn’t very predictively useful—that indeed, I’m probably just a few steps above saying, “Well it’s all just quarks and leptons anyway.” But sometimes it is worth saying just that, if only to wrench ourselves free of this adversarial framing so that we can actually look at the data.

It’s [...] humane to assume

Humaneness is central to policy, but it should have nothing to do with our beliefs.

Z_M_Davis 14 Sep 2009 15:28 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Aurini’s comment on: The Lifespan Dilemma
It just seems kind of oddly discontinuous to care about what happens to your analogues except death. I mention comas only in an attempt to construct a least convenient possible world with which to challenge your quantum immortalist position. I mean—are you okay with your scientist-stage-magician wiping out 99.999% of your analogues, as long as one copy of you exists somewhere? But decoherence is continuous: what does it even mean, to speak of exactly one copy of you? Cf. Nick Bostrom’s “Quantity of Experience” (PDF).

Z_M_Davis 14 Sep 2009 6:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Aurini’s comment on: The Lifespan Dilemma

could you explain how measure in the mathematical sense relates to moral value in unknowable realites

Well, I know that different things are going to happen to different future versions of me across the many worlds. I don’t want to say that I only care about some versions of me, because I anticipate being all of them. I would seem to need some sort of weighing scheme. You’ve said you don’t want your analogues to suffer, but you don’t mind them ceasing to exist, but I don’t think you can do that consistently. The real world is continuous and messy: there’s no single bright line between life and death, between person and not-a-person. If you’re okay with half of your selves across the many worlds suddenly dying, are you okay with them gradually dropping into a coma? &c.

Z_M_Davis 14 Sep 2009 4:41 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Aurini’s comment on: The Lifespan Dilemma
I think this depends on the answers to problems in anthropics and consciousness (the subjects that no one understands). The aptness of your thought experiment depends on Everett branching being like creating a duplicate of yourself, rather than dividing your measure) or “degree-of-consciousness” in half. Now, since I only have the semipopular (i.e., still fake) version of QM, there’s a substantial probability that everything I believe is nonsense, but I was given to understand that Everett branching divides up your measure, rather than duplicating you: decoherence is a thermodynamic process occuring in the universal wavefunction; it’s not really about new parallel universes being created. Somewhat disturbingly, if I’m understanding it correctly, this seems to suggest that people in the past have more measure than we do, simply by virtue of being in the past …

But again, I could just be talking nonsense.

Z_M_Davis 12 Sep 2009 2:48 UTC
4 points
in reply to: RickJS’s comment on: Righting a Wrong Question
Eliezer’s posts (including comments) from before March were ported from the old, nonthreaded Overcoming Bias: that’s why there are no threads and no sorting option.

Z_M_Davis 5 Sep 2009 21:34 UTC
5 points
in reply to: DS3618’s comment on: The Sword of Good
I don’t think there’s actually any substantive disagreement here. “Good,” “bad,” “adequate,” “inadequate”—these are all just words. The empirical facts are what they are, and we can only call them good or bad relative to some specific standard. Part of Eliezer’s endearing writing style is holding things to ridiculously impossibly high standards, and so he has a tendency to mouth off about how the human brain is poorly designed, human lifespans are ridiculously short and poor, evolutions are stupid, and so forth. But it’s just a cute way of talking about things; we can easily imagine someone with the same anticipations of experience but less ambition (or less hubris, if you prefer to say that) who says, “The human brain is amazing; human lives are long and rich; evolution is a wonder!” It’s not a disagreement in the rationalist’s sense, because it’s not about the facts. It’s not about neuroscience; it’s about attitude.

Z_M_Davis 1 Sep 2009 0:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Cookies vs Existential Risk
NormalHumanHeroes

Z_M_Davis 20 Aug 2009 18:34 UTC
3 points
in reply to: DS3618’s comment on: Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory

[Has Eliezer] ever published a paper in a peer-review journal?

“Levels of Organization in General Intelligence” appeared in the Springer volume Artificial General Intelligence. “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risks” (PDF) and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” (PDF) appeared in the Oxford University Press volume Global Catastrophic Risks. They’re not mathy papers, though.