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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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.
Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway. It's trivially true that anyone can file suit for anything, but the plaintiff isn't going to recover any money unless they have evidence of causation and damages.
Also, my thought experiment notwithstanding, it's already totally possible to sue self-driving car manufacturers for causing accidents, yet these companies are not only in business but doing better than ever.
guajalote
8mo ago
It seems like one of those situations where people go through a superficially logical chain of thought but commit a bunch of fallacies along the way without noticing.
- For a woman to be attracted to a man he must be a good person.
- Women are not attracted to incels.
- Therefore if a man is an incel he must be a bad person (fallacy of denying the antecedent).
- Therefore if a man is a bad person he must be an incel (fallacy of affirming the consequent)
guajalote
11mo ago
That may be true, but I'm not trying to argue the object level point. I'm just saying that there exist definitions "trans" that wouldn't run afoul of ymeskhout's objections.
guajalote
2mo ago
Why do you care if Bob screws up? Obviously Charlie doesn't care, at least not enough to do anything. Just let Bob screw up. If it's clear that Bob "owns" a different set of responsibilities than you do, his screw ups should only reflect badly on him and might even make you look good by comparison. Either Charlie will wise up and do something about it or he won't. Either way not your problem.
Also I would consider looking for a new place to work, since poorly managed businesses usually don't do well in the long run.
guajalote
5mo ago
Identical twins (genetic clones) are perfectly capable of disagreeing or even hating or killing one another.
guajalote
5mo ago
And yet Freud and Marx are far less influential than they were 100 years ago. Even people who purport to be Freudians or Marxists today will readily admit these people got things wrong, because the countervailing evidence is so overwhelming.
"Free Speech" is not a stable ideal, and whenever implemented it rapidly decays into "Free Speech so long as most people are okay with what you say", at best.
No system of organizing society is stable. The tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time.
It's not clear to me why you think any of those beliefs would be useful. It is almost never the case that an empirically untrue belief (e.g. sun won't rise without human sacrifice) is useful, particularly in an open society where untrue beliefs can be challenged and proven wrong. The only context where a belief like that would be useful would be a closed culture where competing values are not allowed to challenge dogma and orthodoxy. Cultural mixing in a free society brings about the destruction of such beliefs.
guajalote
8mo ago
But even this "unjust" world is ultimately just in their belief system. Otherwise the concept of being "on the right side of history" would be incoherent. The good guys are destined to prevail in their eschatology.
guajalote
11mo ago
Have you played any of the early access for BG3? I have been holding off but a couple of my friends have told me they're unimpressed with it. I'm trying to reserve judgment.
I have. It's an extremely limited amount of content so it's hard to judge; I assume it's around 5% of what the final game will be. It reminds me of Divinity visually and in terms of gameplay. I really enjoy the DnD 5e rules system so I like that aspect of it as well.
guajalote
13d ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
Let's say society is worried about accidents caused by self-driving cars and wants to allocate some amount of resources to fixing the problem. There are two straightforward ways to structure the resource allocation:
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Pass a law specifying that victims of accidents caused by self-driving cars can sue the manufacturer for damages, or;
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Pass a set of safety regulations that self driving car companies have to comply with, and if a compliant self-driving car nevertheless causes an accident, the government compensates the victim.
In scenario 1 we are causing the cost of accidents to be carried by the car company, who is in the best position to figure out how to prevent accidents. So we have given them a monetary incentive to devote a rational amount of resources to fixing or improving the problem. This is the opposite of a reverse lottery because the car company is in the best position out of anyone to try to predict and prevent accidents.
Scenario 2 creates a situation where car companies are only encouraged to comply with regulations, rather than try to figure out the best way to prevent accidents. The regulator is in a much worse position to know what regulations will actually be effective at preventing accidents, and the regulator has no direct monetary incentive to care about preventing accidents. Simultaneously, they also have no monetary incentive to care about over-preventing accidents either. So we will almost necessarily get an inefficient set of regulations that devote an incorrect amount of resources to the problem.
guajalote
11mo ago
I had the extremely good luck of being born as a middle-class American and therefore enjoy a level of privilege that most people at most places and times could only dream of. I grew up with all my necessities taken care of, I got a higher education and postgraduate degree, I had access to all the fruits of modern technology - antibiotics, air conditioning, the internet. I have daily use of things that many kings of old would have traded half their kingdoms for. That I would have all the privileges I enjoy is exceedingly unlikely, I am among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived on earth.
Not only that, but most members of this very forum are similarly privileged. The majority of users here are middle class or higher, educated, and live in conditions that most human beings could have never even dreamed of. What are the odds that hundreds of people, all from among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged humans in history, would all find themselves here at some random obscure internet forum? We are talking about a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, repeated hundreds of times. We're talking about odds of some miniscule fraction like 0.0000....0001%.
Therefore, I submit that The Motte was created by Jesus Christ himself. The odds that a place like this could arise by the chance congregating of individuals is so astronomically unlikely that we can dismiss such a hypothesis as ludicrous. Only the guiding hand of our Lord and Savior could have created such a rare and perfectly fine-tuned set of conditions.
guajalote
26d ago
It blows my mind how often smart people with STEM backgrounds assume the legal system can be hacked like a computer. Federal judges are smart people who have discretion over how they handle their docket. If the city has 60 similar laws, the judge is going to tell the city to pick the one (or maybe two or three if he's generous) laws that they believe to be on the strongest constitutional footing and treat that law as representative.
"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.
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