fmaa
5mo ago
It mostly strikes me as incoherent, no number of d20s can implement computation and self_made_human's output is easily distinguishable from random strings.
fmaa
1yr ago
Fairly sure this was not an uncommon topic in the Less Wrong of 10 years ago. How do you have a functional military in your rationalist utopia when it is always rational for the individual to flee and/or surrender? Except if everyone does that, your utopia gets conquered by the nearest group of marginally less 'rational' barbarians.
There's nothing strange or unreasonable about history being full of groups of people willing to risk their lives for the abstract concepts of their group. Because groups without such memes generally don't last long enough to leave a mark on history.
And from a game theory perspective, the credible pre-commitments of MAD are how all military defense functions, really. If you attack us, we commit to fighting a bloody war instead of rolling over. Even though the cost for the defender will be greater, the cost for the attacker will be much greater. And the only way to make that pre-commitment credible is to follow through even after the deterrence has failed. Because it is an iterated game, both from the defenders perspective, assuming they survive, and evolutionarily - "fuck with me and we'll both end up worse" is credible coming from humans because humans have evolved to follow through often enough.
fmaa
7mo ago
Literally the single actual point anywhere in this article is that the very vague and informal metric that is Moore's law is slowing down. It doesn't even attempt arguing for the past's importance, letting alone doing a great job at it. It just lists off a series of applause lights and hopes you don't notice it never puts forth any actual arguments.
fmaa
1yr ago
The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.
Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.
fmaa
1yr ago
The first analogy doesn't really work, the fire is entirely separate from the clown's job or attire. Whereas to a modern atheist, the christian faith (among others) is the circus, and there's no fire. Or, if the fire is some modern moral failing, any theological arguments on preventing it are like the clown, instead of breaking character and pleading for help, hoping that if he's just funny enough the people will do what he says. Whether or not you also dress up in millennia of navel gazing is secondary to that base disagreement.
fmaa
1yr ago
The problem, insofar as there is one, is that Elo is a metric, not a target. And like all metrics measuring things people want, it immediately gets treated like a target. Which doesn't really make it lose its value as a metric because it's very hard to fake, but it does make people miserable.
Past the first handful of games in a Trueskill style system (where your rating has both an expected value and a variance, and when the system has little knowledge of your skill the variance is huge), the yo-yo effect isn't very real. If the matchmaker is actually matching people close in ranking (a big issue in many games is prioritizing queue times over match quality), it should take extremely improbable streaks to get matched significantly outside your skill range. Realistically, the gap between you at your peak and you on an off day is much bigger than random Elo fluctuations. It's just that when you're treating ranking as a target, not a metric, any random upswings feel like long deserved gains and random downswings feel like the matchmaker is out to get you.
I'd like to play against people whom I feel challenge me when I'm playing at my general 'best' without exerting myself to try to keep pace.
Your level of exertion can't help but be factored into you ranking. If you do ever exert yourself to keep pace, you'll be ranked higher than your general 'best' without exertion. So you're explicitly asking to be matched against people worse than you.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
fmaa
5mo ago
I can just paste my reply to the previous post here I saw that used solipsism to defend religion: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.
To actually require that clarification in front of every single statement made by everyone is meaningless pedantry in the same category as requiring every subjective statement to start with "in my opinion".
fmaa
1yr ago
I get that. I'm saying that the analogy doesn't work because their beliefs and theology are directly linked, unlike the fire and the circus in the analogy. Not relating to the specific theological trappings isn't the fundamental cause of not being taken seriously by nonbelievers. They might be if the analogy is to converting non-catholic christians (back) to catholicism, though.
fmaa
1yr ago
The problem with this narrative is that McFaul and Person omit crucial context about those statements that totally undermines the conclusion they draw from them. First, while the statements they quote make it sound as if Putin had no problem with NATO expansion, he made it very clear even at the time that he thought it was a bad idea. For instance, in the same November 2001 interview they quote, Putin also said that he didn’t think that expanding NATO “[made] any sense” because NATO had been created to deal with the threat posed by the Soviet Union and “there [was] no Soviet Union anymore”, so NATO expansion wouldn’t increase anyone’s security. Similarly, during a press conference in 2004 with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then Secretary General of NATO, he stated that “Russia's position toward the enlargement of NATO is well known and has not changed” and repeated his view that it wouldn’t increase anyone’s security, but strangely those statements and many others like them didn’t make it into McFaul and Person’s article.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single person in the Baltics who thinks joining NATO didn't increase their country's security. The only difference of opinion is that some soviet Russians living in the Baltics think this is a bad thing, stopping Putin from restoring their rightful place as part of the Russian Empire.
fmaa
5mo ago
Memory and response to inputs both mean the actual number of outputs would be infinite if not for mortality. As is, it's probably only one of those meaninglessly large journalist numbers like the number of atoms in the solar system or something. Not that you could in any way generate such a list of outputs without fully understanding and simulating my brain in the first place, even discounting the impossible time/space requirements of such a task.
More importantly, the computation is the entire fucking point. That this post could technically just be a meaningless random string of characters doesn't mean it is one, and you will not perceive it as one. It is very clearly chosen in a nonrandom process. Getting from your post to this reply required processing in my brain, something you can in no way skip by randomly picking one out of a list of all the possible outputs of my brain.
fmaa
9mo ago
That's not "the same for Black girls as for the White population", it's the same for black women and white women, the white male curve is noticeably higher. And on a meta level, it's always suspicious when a paper drops categories midway through. Whatever conclusions you want to infer from this graph, they would be much firmer if it also had asians.
fmaa
1yr ago
This is a terrible solution. A punishment can't really be embarrassing unless the one doing the punishing is higher status, and I don't think bullies generally respect teachers. A teacher spanking a bully wouldn't lead to him being bullied by his former friends, it would lead to him and his friends beating up the previous victim for snitching to outsider authority.
fmaa
1yr ago
If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)
As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.
fmaa
1yr ago
My point is, if you prefer that level of challenge, but will pull out all the stops if challenged more, you're explicitly saying that you'd prefer to not be matched against yourself, but someone worse. The way to get that level of challenge more consistently then is to not tryhard when challenged more, but take the loss and drop in ranking.
The beauty of going off pure Elo is that it doesn't care why you're performing at your level. Whether you're talented but goofing around, or terrible but trying your best, all it does is match you against someone performing at the level you've recently been performing at.
Yeah. But we can surely design algorithms that consider ELO but also consider, I guess, the fact that ELO doesn't capture all the factors that might go into the outcome. In some games, weird random factors can impact who wins, or certain particularly cheesy strategies work really well unless you specifically counter them.
Elo is that algorithm. Trueskill if you want to add in the factor of uncertainty. As a metric, it doesn't matter if your rank jumps around +-100 due to random factors, they'll even out in the long run and are not a precise enough measure that these jumps matter that much. Any consistent change will still only come with an actual change in player skill. It is only as a target where these random jumps leading to losing 200 from where people feel the 'deserve' to be (which is nearly always their peak, though of course the peak is also a random jump ahead) are a problem.
Cheesy strategies are a separate design issue, a match can be perfectly balanced 50/50 but be a boring blowout either way depending on random rock-paper-scissors.
fmaa
5mo ago
We get sick much less often and die much later than ever. Hate is hard to measure but death by violence is also rarer than ever. Coveting and lusting are possibly as popular as ever but much less clearly bad. Theft and rape are both, again, rarer than ever. As in that previous post, you're just going on about how the lack of perfect solutions means everything is exactly the same as centuries ago.
I didn't make any claims about how strong the evidence is in any of the cases, just that it's there and newer than a fucking millennium. It also goes the other way, every religious person expressing a personal experience of miracle is also new evidence in favor of there being a god. I think the overall evidence is absurdly in favor of there not being one, but it's even more absurd to claim this question has stayed unchanged in centuries. And by simple statistics, for e.g. novel false religions to not be evidence against christianity, a lack of such would also have to not be evidence for it. Would you honestly not take "novel false religions stopped popping up after the spread of christianity" as evidence for it?
For the mind, we can insert electrodes into to the brain to make the housed consciousness go through various experiences. We can affect it much more strongly in predictable ways with various chemicals, for which we know which specific receptors they bind to. We have numerous studies of various forms of brain damage to see how they affect the conscious experience. None of these are things that would have made any sense a 1000 years ago. And yet you claim they don't impact our understanding of consciousness any because Disney hasn't invented mind control rays, again the insane binary worldview.
And again, from simple statistics, the only way these things aren't evidence against a soul is if their negation also wouldn't be evidence for a soul. If drugs or brain damage could affect your motor control but not your conscious experience, for example, you'd also have to not count that as evidence for a soul separate from the body.
Free will is either perfectly compatible - just because my brain is deterministic doesn't mean it doesn't go through a choice-making algorithm, which is what I'm experiencing - or it is currently unfalsifiable, requiring probably impossible cloning technology or time travel.
Lastly and most importantly, I don't want to hold you to previous generations of christians or care much for the many stupid views other materialists, past or present, hold. I fact quite the opposite, I want you to acknowledge that you are vastly different from the christians of a thousand years ago, and your belief system and worldview are different from theirs, because it has been informed by an entire millennium of new evidence. Materialism can be both a breakthrough and a ideology like many others, they're not really exclusive. But unlike yours it doesn't particularly view deforming its ideology as a bad thing.
fmaa
5mo ago
I feel like putting all this together is mixing very different categories of errors.
There are errors more common with native speakers that stem from learning the language phonetically and unconsciously, without thinking about the logic or formal meaning of what you're saying, such as "should of", then/than mixups or "irregardless".
There are errors more common with ESL people that stem from English spelling and grammar being arbitrary nonsense. It is impossible to derive irregular verb forms of which there are many, and impossible to derive the spelling of a word from hearing it.
As a mix of both, many ESL people struggle with using the correct article because their language doesn't have an analogous concept of definite vs indefinite nouns.
And there are "errors" which are prescriptivist nonsense. By whose measure is "noone" not an acceptable compound but "someone" is? Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?
fmaa
5mo ago
I guess it'd be more accurate to say that I'm not assuming it's incorrect, I'm conjecturing it. So prepend every bit of communication ever (for Boltzmann brains also include thoughts as communication between different mindstates across time) with "Conditional on solipsism being false,". This doesn't actually say anything about the accuracy of solipsism.
Though, for models of solipsism weaker than Boltzmann brains it's not in the least clear that Occam's Razor even prefers them. Conditional on thoughts being real and coherent across time, there actually being an inductive external reality is the simplest explanation for me experiencing one, as the vast majority of possible mindstates would not feature such experience.
fmaa
9mo ago
I'm aware of the difference. Part of my point was that naming a specific artstyle "modern" and then sneering when people use that word to mean contemporary is just being a condescending asshole and bad at communicating.
The other, bigger part was that no, you don't need to know the jargon to complain about things being forced on you. I'm not going to find lists of NYC buildings, but I think like 90% of that Pritzker prize list is ugly and about half of it is concrete boxes. It really doesn't matter to anyone living in/near them if these particular ugly concrete boxes don't count as brutalist according to architects.
fmaa
9mo ago
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
As with all sorts of similar solipsistic arguments, my response is this: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.
fmaa
1yr ago
He literally states his goal in the article:
I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts.
His isn't talking to you and his point isn't to trust media. He's talking to people who want to ban 'disinformation' and his point is that the way media lies already precludes any simple bright lines for that.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
fmaa
1yr ago
I'm not sure a white nationalist and a classical liberal would be indistinguishable on 6.
fmaa
1yr ago
I think it's quite inevitable that when taken seriously games with more than 2 sides end up being more about politics than what the game is explicitly about (unless it is explicitly about politics). Even without throwing the game, any action or inaction can affect the balance between the top players.
The options are finding a gaming group that won't make casual games about politics, one that enjoys the politics, or playing games with 2 sides.
Pretty much the only games I can think of that people play seriously (read: professionally) with more than 2 sides are gambling games like poker and mahjong. And I'm fairly sure they are rife with collusion scandals.
This is the usual facile reply to complaints about the ugly architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Uh, you complain about the ugliness of modern brutalist buildings, but actually modernism and brutalism are separate architectural movements, and the current-year trend of ugly concrete boxes and geometric turds is called something else.
You don't need to be versed in the jargon of an insular artfield to criticize its output, especially for architecture where this output is forced upon millions of unwilling victims to suffer daily.
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