guajalote
3mo ago
I think it's true that technological progress generally leads to moral progress. Here I'm defining "technological progress" as "that which lets people get more of what they value at lower cost." If you are a utilitarian it's almost a tautology that "people getting more of what they value" leads to moral progress, because increasing utility is the definition of moral progress. Even if you are not a utilitarian, I think you should agree that "people getting more of what they value" generally tends toward moral progress, because it gives people the option to choose between more alternatives and therefore more freedom to choose the morally best alternative.
This is why I often disagree with people here who see preserving one's culture as a good in and of itself. Culture is a form of technology - different cultures differ in terms of how well they enable their adherents to get what they value for a given cost in a given context. Therefore cultural progress is possible as a form of technological process. Cultural change should only be resisted to the extent it's not technological progress.
guajalote
5mo ago
And this belief comes from your observation of "free individuals" in a "free society"? If so, could you name which individuals and what society you have in mind, as an example of what these terms look like in practice?
This is a matter of degree. The US is freer than North Korea or China. And within the US, some places are clearly freer than others.
Characteristics of a free society include:
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The ability to privately own guns and other weapons sufficient to enable the violent overthrow of a tyrannical government;
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Free speech and free association;
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All adult humans are equal before the law and are entitled to due process and the presumption of criminal innocence;
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The right to engage in consensual transactions and to dispose of one's property as one chooses without permission;
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The right to bind oneself with enforceable contracts.
It is good to know that the universe has ordained that all incentives must be net-positive
Given a choice between a good thing and a bad (or less good) thing, a person with full information who is able to freely choose between them will prefer to choose the good thing. This is the definition of "good" I am operating under.
In fact, every system I've ever heard of has been pretty close to this description, but I am certainly not omniscient.
There are systems where a single central authority has a massive amount of power to make cultural decisions (e.g. North Korea, Spain in the 1500s, Iran), and there are systems where cultural authority is more distributed and less centrally powerful, e.g., the US. I would prefer even less centralized cultural power than currently exists in the US, but again it is a matter of degree.
If we wish to say that such systems "fail badly", one ought to demonstrate what "succeeds" looks like with concrete, large-scale examples.
Centrally planned economies like Soviet Russia and North Korea produce little wealth and generally cause massive amounts of starvation. They also tend to produce untrue ideas at a high rate, such as Lysenkoism. Decentralized economies like the US produce comparatively more wealth, less starvation, and more empirically correct ideas. It is a matter of degree, but the degree of difference is extremely large.
Or to put it another way, is your love for freedom and openness a means, or an end? If freedom and openness could be demonstrated to enable evil, would you still support them, or would you accept that some level of restriction was necessary?
It is a means. If you demonstrated that freedom and openness have a higher likelihood of causing bad outcomes as compared with another specific alternative system, I would change my view. However, I consider the empirical evidence in favor of freedom to be overwhelming, so I would require a considerable amount of evidence in the other direction.
This statement implies that central power structures are optional.
The degree to which power is centralized, and the kinds of power that such central structures have, clearly vary in different times and places. I don't think it's possible to eliminate central power, but I think it is possible to considerably reduce the influence of central power and to place checks on the exercise of such power (e.g. via the private ownership of the means of war).
guajalote
5mo ago
Perhaps it's not the game for you, but if you ever decide to give it another shot I highly recommend playing combat more like a "turn-based" strategy game with regular pausing to issue orders to your troops, use spells and abilities, etc. Makes the game much more enjoyable and allows you to actually formulate strategy and tactics. I probably pause less than I did when I first started, but I'd say pausing 20-50 times per combat is pretty typical.
guajalote
5mo ago
I'd be interested to hear your criticisms. Personally it's one of the top 10 games I've ever played, and my only real criticisms are: (1) it has a sort of black box complexity that creates a high barrier to entry for new players, and (2) it's a bit buggier than I'd like.
guajalote
5mo ago
I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.
guajalote
6mo ago
I haven't read the full transcript of the order so perhaps I have an incorrect impression of it, but I think it is overbroad, yes. According to the article you linked "Justice Engoron said that his statement should be considered a gag order forbidding any posts, emails or public remarks about members of his staff." Being able to speak out against government officials in a proceeding is an absolutely core aspect of what the 1st amendment protects. The right to say things like "the judge's law clerk is politically motivated and out to get me" should be inviolable, even though in this case it's an incredibly stupid thing to say. If the gag order was narrowly tailored to allow protected speech, e.g., Trump can criticize the law clerk but can't call on his followers to harass the clerk, I would feel differently.
guajalote
1yr ago
If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value.
This seems like an admission that qualia in fact exist, which would refute your claim that it's "not real." Whether it has value is a different question.
The experience of reading is inherent when you read.
What is your evidence for this claim? If I ask a human to read and summarize some text, the human will have the experience of reading. If I ask Chat GPT to read and summarize some text, it's unclear whether it will have any experience at all, and I think most people assume it does not. A cleaner example: a human has the experience of adding numbers whereas a simple digital calculator does not.
People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures!
If the video game NPC had the subjective experience of being shot and dying, it would be immoral to kill the NPC. The moral weight of killing the NPC does not depend on how many lines of code are involved, but rather whether qualia are involved. This refutes your claim that qualia has "zero value."
guajalote
1yr ago
Surprised how low you rank Pet Sounds and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Both would make top 5 for me. You explained the ranking for Pet Sounds, but I'm curious what it is about ITAOTS that keeps it out of the top echelons for you.
guajalote
1yr ago
If you literally have no clue how to do it, then I can see how more time would not be helpful. But I wouldn't consider that being a "fast test taker" I would consider that simply being unprepared for the test.
In my experience as someone who majored in physics and minored in math, there is almost always some way to use additional time productively on math tests, even if you're stumped by a problem. Re-write the problem in a different form and see if it looks more familiar. Change the coordinate system and see if it makes things easier. Try out various mathematical tools/techniques and see if they work.
guajalote
1yr ago
Maybe it's because I've literally never used the block feature on any website, but I agree. What value is blocking adding in a place like this? If someone is harassing/insulting you then they are breaking the rules and should be banned. If they are not violating the rules, what valid reason could you possibly have for blocking them? Disagreeing with someone or finding them annoying is not a good enough reason, IMO, since this site is supposed to be about open debate where all perspectives are welcome.
guajalote
12hr ago
I've met bears on a number of occasions while hiking, hunting, or berry picking in places like Tahoe, Colorado, and Minnesota. In my mind, meeting bears is a normal thing that happens from time to time, but I suppose that just shows how out of touch I am with normal peoples' lives. I think you're right that the bear is not "real" in the minds of most people answering the question.
guajalote
1mo ago
If the only problem is anxiety, just expose yourself to these kinds of situations until you're no longer afraid. Sufficient amounts of repetition will make anything stop feeling scary.
guajalote
2mo ago
"Structure" as in logical structure. If you argue "Polygamy's practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore polygamy is bound to die out," then you've made an argument with the following logical structure: "[Thing]'s practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore [thing] is bound to die out." If someone can find a value of [thing] that falsifies the claim, it implies that there is something wrong (incorrect or incomplete) about the logical structure of the argument presented.
guajalote
5mo ago
Ah yes, the famously unprincipled and animalistic act of not killing one's own children.
guajalote
5mo ago
Amazing how the human race has managed to survive so long despite our inexorable intrinsic urge to kill everyone but ourselves.
guajalote
5mo ago
In the right time and place one of those would be the most useful with an extreme margin.
I assert that those beliefs can only be useful in a context where challenging them is not allowed. But the inability to challenge cultural beliefs is exactly what I am arguing against. Give me an example where those beliefs can be freely challenged and yet they are still "useful with an extreme margin."
guajalote
6mo ago
It seems like everything is political if the standard is "can be interpreted as related to a political issue." Posting a picture of yourself wearing Nikes would be political because Nikes are made in sweatshops. Posting a picture with your kids is political because the decision to have or not have kids is politically salient. Etc.
guajalote
10mo ago
I don't think it's offensive because it's a stereotype, it's offensive because it's using the word "girl" as an insult.
If you're saying that we always have to take into account that we exist, we can't think about cases where that's not true, how does it not follow that you can't imagine worlds where you don't exist?
You can imagine worlds where you don't exist, but imagining such worlds doesn't tell you anything about how likely they are.
And worlds with observers will look more like multiverses, there is some reason why the universe's fine-tuning is necessary, or theism, because in our ideas of the possibilities, observers are relatively more likely to occur in worlds of those varieties, as compared to one-shot worlds that require high degrees of fine-tuning.
This is the claim I am pushing back against. We have, broadly, three categories of possibilities:
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God created universe(s)
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Natural processes created multiverses
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Natural processes created a one-shot universe
We have no information about which of these scenarios are even possible to begin with. Even if each is possible, we don't know which one is more likely to create observers. So let's naively assign a 33% probability to each. Now we are going to make empirical observations and see if that moves our priors.
Given that you (an observer) exist, what is the chance that you will empirically observe a universe with observers in scenario 1? Answer: 100%.
Given that you (an observer) exist, what is the chance that you will empirically observe a universe with observers in scenario 2? Answer: 100%.
Given that you (an observer) exist, what is the chance that you will empirically observe a universe with observers in scenario 3? Answer: 100%.
So after making the observation, our priors should remain the same, 33% for each scenario, because our observation is equally likely to occur in each scenario.
No, it isn't 100%. You're ignoring all the scenarios where you don't exist. Yes, you won't be around in those worlds to decrease your estimate of the probability of life existing, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take them into account.
You're ignoring what I said: "the odds that you will observe a universe with observers is equal to 100%." There may be some probability of a universe without observers existing, but you can never actually observe this, and you therefore have no information about how likely it is to occur. You have no way to "take this into account" because you don't know if this scenario can even exist, or how likely it is.
And we've estalished that we're talking about a one-shot universe, so there's definitely a good chance that there is no observer, in which case the odds taht you will observe a universe is less than 100%, because in some of those worlds you don't observe anything at all.
First of all, it's not a given that the odds of observers are less than 100%. They are less than or equal to 100%. It's possible that a one-shot universe must necessarily create observers. We have no clue about the underlying physical process that would create such a universe and therefore we have no clue about the likelihoods. There may be no randomness involved.
Second, the odds that you will observe a universe with observers is 100% because the word "you" in that sentence necessarily implies the existence of at least one observer. The statement "in some of those worlds you don't observe anything at all" is incoherent, because there is no "you" in such worlds. The statement "you will always observe observers" is a tautology, it is necessarily true based on the definition of the word "you."
To check that that makes sense, we indeed find that 89% of rational agents who thought this way and woke up had surgery that worked.
My point is that here, in the universe scenario, we have no way of testing whether the agents are correct or wrong. In the surgery scenario we can look back and ask the doctor "did the surgery work" and find out whether the agents' guesses were right or wrong. Here, there is no way to check the truth value of the agents' guesses, and therefore no way to find out if their priors are correct or way off.
A better analogy would be: suppose you go in for surgery, and no one has any clue about the likelihood of success or the likelihood you will wake up. So let's say the odds of success are x%, the odds of failure are (100-x)%, the odds you will wake up if the surgery's successful are y%, and the odds you will wake up if the surgery's a failure are z%. You're a Bayesian so you assign arbitrary probabilities to x, y, and z, say 50% for each. You go in for the surgery and you wake up after. You are provided no additional information. How, if at all, should you adjust your priors?
And since inhospitable planets are so much more common overall, I would think, shouldn't you be shocked that we're on a hospitable one? You clearly don't actually think that, but I don't see how that's different from the case that we're arguing over.
The difference is, we know that hospitable planets are relatively rare. We have external knowledge about how planets form and can observe both planets with and without life. We didn't come to this conclusion based on the fact of our existence. We came to this conclusion by observing the external universe.
Imagine we had zero information about the universe beyond planet earth. Should we assume that planets with life are rare based on the fact that humans exist? Should we assume that earth is especially hospitable for life? Should we assume other planets even exist at all? In the absence of any external information, it's totally possible that planets with life are common and that earth is uniquely hostile to life compared with those other planets. Or it's possible that earth is the only planet. We would have no way of knowing, based merely on the observation that we exist.
All these are to the one-shot, heavy-fine-tuning-required-that-we'll-just-have-to-luck-into world what Earth is to Pluto.
No, because we have no idea how "unlikely" the fine-tuning of our universe is. We have no reason to think that dice were rolled. It's possible that what seems to us like fine-tuning is actually just some necessary constraint of an underlying physical system that created the universe, such that the odds of fine-tuning were 100%. Or its possible that a fine-tuned universe was super unlikely and we just got lucky. We have no way of knowing.
Likewise, there's no reason to assume that God likes creating fine-tuned universes. He might love rolling dice and creating trillions and trillions of dead universes for every living one. After all, he seems to love creating uninhabited planets, so why not uninhabited universes?
guajalote
10mo ago
Why can't we start there? Isn't that equivalent to stating that you can't think about universes where life doesn't exist? That's transparently false. Working out what our beliefs should be if we ignore a piece of information is something we're allowed to do.
I'm saying we literally can't start there. We can't go back and observe before the beginning of the universe. We don't have any information about what was happening then, or what the dynamics of the situation looked like. We only have information about the universe we currently inhabit.
We can certainly think about it, but we don't know anything about it, so it doesn't do us much good.
No, that statement isn't always true. It's only always true for observers. That means that you should shift your probability mass from what they would be if you ignored which worlds you're more likely to exist in as an observer, to what they should be after taking that into account.
You are an observer, so it's always subjectively true for you 100% of the time.
Assuming our thinking is at all Bayesian, shouldn't we have some sort of probability distribution? Not sure exactly what one should look like, but that should exist.
Yes, so start with whatever your Bayesian priors are. You think there's an x% chance that the universe would contain observers. For every possible value of x other than x=0, the odds that you will observe a universe with observers is equal to 100%. So there is no basis to either raise or lower your prior based on this observation, because the odds of it being true are exactly the same in every possible scenario other than x=0.
In any case, did you miss what I said about how it should always be the case, whatever that probability distribution is, that you should update (ignoring other post-waking-up information, on your existence alone) towards the chance of your survival having been higher than you thought it was before your surgery?
Assuming you have no outside information about the surgery, there is no basis to update your priors. This is true for the same reason I explained above. For any prior other than x=0, the chance that you will observe you survived the surgery is exactly equal to 100%. If you did not survive, you would not make any observation, so the only possible observation you can make is "I survived."
guajalote
10mo ago
Starting from an objective not-taking-into-account-yet-that-you-exist estimate of likelihood that a random universe would be able to contain life, you should have some estimate of a likelihood that a universe could contain life.
If we could start there then we would gain some information from the later observation that the universe contains life. But we cannot start there. We start in a universe where the existence of life is a given, with 100% probability.
But now that there's some agent, that's data! That's information!
It's not. You can only observe a universe with agents because you are an agent. That statement is always true, no matter the prior probabilities, so you cannot draw any conclusion about prior probabilities from the fact that it happened.
what I just said requires knowing how often other people survive surgery
Right, if we could bring in outside information about how likely a universe is to contain life and what factors influence that, then we might be able to draw some conclusions from the fact of our existence, but we have no such outside information, so we cannot draw such conclusions.
You, the observer, notice, hey, I'm a rational being who came into existence! I'm saying that it's rational to think that this should update your priors towards hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2. But only if there's a one-shot or few-shot universe.
No, it shouldn't change your priors, irrespective of whether there's a one-shot or multi-shot universe.
Given that you are a rational being, the odds that you will observe a universe where a rational being came into existence are exactly 100%. This is true regardless of whether hypothesis 1 or hypothesis 2 is true, and therefore it tells you no additional information about which hypothesis is correct.
You wake up. Assuming there's not going to be any distinguishing sensation between the two ways you could wake up, which should you think is more likely? I would think you should think that there's a 50:1 chance that it worked.
That's true, because this situation is materially different from the one we are talking about above. Here, we know two sets of probabilities ex ante (both of which can occur), and are now trying to decide, ex post, which is more likely to have occurred. Given two different possibilites, the one with the higher probability is, by definition, the one that was more likely to occur (this is true whether the surgery is one-shot or many-shot, by the way).
In the situation we are discussing, we don't know anything about the probabilities ex ante, and we are trying to derive those probabilities based on our ex post observations.
A better analogy would be: you go into a surgery and nobody knows your odds of survival. You wake up after the surgery. What, if anything, does this tell you about your ex ante odds of surviving the surgery? The answer is, it tells you nothing about those odds. It just tells you that you survived. Your odds of survival could have been 0.001% or 99.9%, but since you can only observe outcomes in which you survive, that fact that you observe your own survival gives you no additional information about the ex ante likelihood of that outcome.
Another example to illustrate the point. Suppose an alien hands you a black box with a screen and a button on it. You push the button, and the number "21" appears on the screen. Pushing the button again does nothing and you cannot disassemble the box to learn how it works. What are the odds that the box was going to display the number "21" when you pushed the button? The answer is, you have no idea (except you know the odds are not 0%). It might have been a 100% chance, it might have been a 0.000000001% chance. You have no way of knowing based on your single ex ante observation.
guajalote
1yr ago
Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.
What's missing from your argument is an explanation of why Trump engenders unprecedented "hatred and revulsion." The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.
The standard pro-Trump explanation for why he's hated is something like "he's the only one who isn't corrupt and won't do what the deep state wants." The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."
It seems like the whole argument pivots around this "why is he hated" question. If Trump is in fact uniquely willing to violate democratic norms, it seems reasonable for his opponents to take issue with that and to argue he has forfeited the right to avail himself of those norms for protection. You and VDH raise good arguments for why the norm of "don't prosecute former presidents" exists, but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists. In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.
I think he is wrong about net tax revenue as well. Something like 60% of Americans receive more in transfers than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes, i.e. they are a net drain on government revenue. Plus, I would wager that lower income people are more likely to not wear seatbelts (and drive less safe cars in general) which would skew this even further.
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