FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
This is basically Bayesian-vs-frequentist. I think the counterargument would be "the statement that X is likely to have a probability isn't even coherent, that's a type error". You can say that a class of events has an objectively true rate of occurrence, ie. if a coin will be thrown 100 times, then there will be a factual number of heads that show up, but you cannot say that any individual cointhrow has a likelihood of having a likelihood - that's just a simple likelihood. In other words, you can assign 10% probability to a model of the coin in which it has a 60% probability of landing on heads, but the word "probability" there carried two different meanings: observational credence (subjective) vs outcome ratio (objective). You can't have a credence over a credence; one is observational, the other is physical.
Not sure if that makes sense.
FeepingCreature
9mo ago
Of course, if you have time travel you certainly have FTL. (By the simple measure of "freeze everyone, drop back in time, fly there the slow way, get there five minutes after you departed if you still want to pretend like you give any hoot about causality.")
FeepingCreature
9mo ago
Game theoretic punishment of defection, in general, requires you to be willing to destroy good things and make the world worse. This is a necessary trait in order to get optimal outcomes. As they said, "unless we're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." This is bad for you, but it's good in the counterfactual case where the threat motivates cooperation.
A game theoretic agent that won't ever defect isn't a "good guy" but a "resource". I believe the lower classes understand this very well.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
I don't know if this is true, and I don't think it's very likely, but it would be hilarious to me if "jews" turned into a dogwhistle for "the cultural elite".
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
That's a misunderstanding. You're implicitly applying a virtue/signaling framing to a consequentialist policy. You should be supporting the least altruistic people iff you want to signal the depth of your commitment to altruism to your peergroup. EA isn't trying to "maximize the depth of the virtue of altruism", it's trying to "maximize the rating produced by the altruism principle." Adherence is "capped" at one - when you already do the maximum good for the greatest number, you cannot adhere even harder by diverging from this concept to avoid also benefitting non-altruist principles. That is, EA does not at all penalize you for your actions also having auxiliary benefits to yourself or your peergroup, if that happens to be the optimal path. Also, utilitarianism is in fact allowed to recognize second-order consequences. That's why "earning to give" and 80,000 Hours exist - help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.
What makes EA EA as opposed to traditional A is exactly that it's supposed to care more about outcome rating than virtuous appearance!
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Childhood as gay conversion therapy does work: some people only realize they are gay in college. They gather the usual evidence, "women don't interest me" plus "wow that man makes me feel things", but without gayness as a model it just gets lost in the evidential noise of daily life.
The problem is that once you have the model of gayness, you can't exactly erase your memory and redo childhood. So it is a viable conversion therapy, possibly the only viable one, but it is not one that can be applied to a person it has already failed for.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity? I mean conversely, if I start saying "divine-attracted" or "people who experience a religious impulse" and note that they don't have to raise their children to believe in Hell, they can't help that they perceive the divine but pushing it on others is a choice- I suspect some of the same people would become very angry at me.
Hell, being grossed out by gayness also doesn't need to be part of people's identity. As they say, "you are not immune from propaganda identifying with your impulses."
The investment and divestment of impulses from your identity is to some extent voluntary. However, it also serves as a signal as to which impulses you value the highest. To say that "SSA do not have to make that a part of their identity" is close to saying "SSA should not make that part of their identity" which is itself approximately equivalent to "society should not try to fulfill or support SSA". At which point I start disagreeing: so what if men have impulses to have sex with men? Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction. The religious impulse or the purity impulse should not get primacy over the gay impulse.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
This is also my position. It is incredibly unfortunate that this situation gives ammunition to holocaust deniers, and so if people could stop drawing from the credibility account of the Holocaust with scams, and if other people could please stop enabling them doing that with incredibly uncritical reporting, I think we'd be in a much better situation here.
If we're defending Ukraine, we'll definitely defend Poland. It's not even "pro-Poland" (though I'm not sure where you're getting 'bad blood' from; I'm not seeing that in the German media offhand). But Germany is pretty thoroughly committed to the idea of the EU and an attack on one is obviously an attack on all.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
It's nonsensical, but it's nonsense that screens off the other nonsense. You're basically double-counting criticism. If you grant that the kids return to being regular kids at the age they left, that already gives you all the nonsensicality required for the hazy memories as well.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.
I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Always the question, categories for what purpose? Whether adoptive mothers and mothers are the same or different categories will depend on whether you're a woman trying to commiserate about pregnancy (obviously different) or a child classifying their experience of motherhood (usually indistinguishable). Without clarifying what task we are trying to differentiate, the question is unanswerable; when clarifying, the categories almost disappear.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
It's not like other European states are more good and wise, these days. For goodness sake, look at France. Generally, the bigger, the more ruinous: scale creates margin, margin creates weirdness. We just happen to be the one in a position to ruin things.
(At least, the contemporary level of ruin. WW2 was its own level.)
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
As a doomer safety tribe person, I'm broadly in favor of catgirls, so long as they can reliably avoid taking over the planet and exterminating humanity. There are ethical concerns around abuse and dependency in relations where one party has absolute control over the other's mindstate, but they can probably be resolved, and probably don't really apply to today's models anyways - and anyways they pale in comparison to total human genocide.
But IMO this is the difference: whether safe catgirls are in the limit possible and desirable. And I don't think that's a small difference either!
Note: if you grew up in East Germany, Signalis is going to be a headfuck. This game is "DDR in space" through and through. It's actually painful how familiar it feels.
Pretty fun though. In downside, I'd say it feels like it's designed "to imitate RE" more than "to be good" at some points. Some puzzles are very much for the sake of puzzles. But RE is a good design anyways, so it mostly works, and it's short enough that it doesn't end up overstaying its welcome too badly.
Also, lesbian robots.
I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.
Speculation, but I find it suggestive: Strong men increase variation, weak men reduce it. ("Strong men explore, weak men exploit"?) So when things are going bad, you want a certain level of strong men to have a chance to hit a fix; when things are going about as good as can be expected, you want to reduce your strongman:weakman ratio to avoid breaking things. Such a model would also result in the observed men/times cycle if you selected for successful countries.
Phrased like that it sounds suspiciously like "thrive vs survive", which would fit with the "right = strong, left = weak" framing.
Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms via the presidency?
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
since there's no vetting system, you can't even claim that people attracted this way are going to do a worse job.
Sure you can, if you think the populations selected by either will be different. You don't need vetting; effort acts as a filter as well.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
I think one more aspect is reflectivity: the degree to which a system integrates knowledge of its own operation into its schema. For instance, a search engine that can show a "Google is down" page, or that lists the number of results, or that finds Google help pages on search as search results, has (basic) reflectivity. It seems plausible to me that a lack of reflectivity is a big part of what's holding LLMs back and causing hallucinations and the like: they may be confident or uncertain, but they cannot condition on their confidence.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
From the fact that you are allowing @foreverlurker to walk
Was the parent comment edited...?
First, @foreverlurker [...] you are banned
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
If I had two sons, and one son got drunk and punched someone at a bar while another got drunk and was punched by someone at a bar. I would not want to live in a world where the former was killed and the latter killed their assaulter. I'd much rather live in the alternative world where no one died. Which would you rather live in?
I think this is an instance of causal decision theory in the wild, in that you're holding the punch stable when there's no reason to expect that to be the case. What if it being "the sort of world where people who throw punches are killed" means that instead you get to pick between the world where your sons punch and are punched, and the world where nobody is even punched? Then the question would be to what extent punch-kill actually allows acausal flow, right? Ie. we may imagine a world where some people just, out of the blue, are struck by the urge to punch and otherwise-agentically seek out a target to punch. In that case, the kill-branch obviously would only worsen the situation. So the question comes down to if the punch urge is such that the kill branch can successfully shift the incentives enough to suppress the punch branch enough to make up for the QALY loss.
Because at the end of the day, we'd at least somewhat prefer that the least people die. Right?
FeepingCreature
19d ago
I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Not 'acting white' is a matter of survival for the genes associated with melanin and other visible traits that define the 'African-American' phenotype.
Doesn't the same go for white people in America? By that logic, "whiteness" - ie. not even being able to specify a fractional non-white ancestor on a college entry form - really does provide evidence for inherent racism. (Though admittedly with lower probability.)
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
Thanks for the writeup! I was wondering what was happening with that since I only caught the edge of the drama.
Some points:
More options
Context Copy link