trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
David Pearce on Hedonic Moral realism
by Roko — 2010-02-03T17:27:31.982Z

(posted with David's permission)

Many thanks for the Shulman et al paper. Insightful and incisive, just as I'd expect!

Have I any reservations?
Well, maybe one or two...:-)

One of my worries is that the authors want to "lock in" to an AMA our primitive human moral psychology - with its anthropocentric biases and self-serving rationalizations. We could try and strip these out; but an ever more universalistic moral psychology becomes progressively less human. Either way, I'm not convinced that history shows the intuitions of folk morality are any more trustworthy than the intuitions of folk physics i.e. not at all all. Do we really want an AMA that locks in even an idealised version of the moral psychology that maximised the inclusive fitness of selfish DNA in the ancestral environment? IMO posthuman life could be so much better - for all sentient beings.

Contra Shulman et al, I think we do have a good idea what utility function to endow an explicit moral agent with. An AMA should seek to maximise the cosmic abundance of subjectively hypervaluable states. [defined below] This prospect doesn't sound very exciting, any more than sex as explained by adults to a toddler. But that's because, like the toddler, we don't have the primitive experiences to know what we're missing. In one sense, becoming posthuman isn't "human-friendly"; but equally, becoming an adult isn't "toddler-friendly" either. In neither case would the successor choose to regress to the ancestral state.
If we want to maximise the cosmic abundance of subjectively hypervaluable states, first we will need to identify the neural signature of subjectively valuable states via improved neuroscanning technology, etc. This neural signature can then be edited and genetically amplified to create hypervaluable states - states of mind far more sublime than today's peak experiences - which can provide background hedonic tone for everyday life. Unlike weighing up the merits of competing moral values etc, investigating the neural mechanisms of value-creation is an empirical question rather than philosophical question. True, we may ask: Could a maximally valuable cosmos - where value is defined empirically in terms of what seems valuable to the subject - really not be valuable at all? I accept that's a deeper philosophical question that I won't adequately explore here.
Compare h...
How does Facebook make overt self obsession ok?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-02-03T16:40:31.000Z

People who talk about themselves a lot are generally disliked. A likable person will instead subtly direct conversation to where others request the information they want to reveal. Revealing good news about yourself is a good sign, but wanting to reveal good news about yourself is a bad sign. Best to do it without wanting to.

This appears true of most human interaction, but apparently not of that on Facebook. On Facebook, when you are not posting photographs of yourself and updating people on your activities, you are writing notes listing twenty things nobody knows about you, linking people to analyses of your personality, or alerting them to your recent personal and group affiliations. Most of this is unasked for by others. I assume it is similar for other social networking sites.

If over lunch I decided, without your suggestion, to list to you twenty random facts about me, tell you the names of all my new acquintences, and show you my collection of photos of myself, our friendship would soon wane. Why is Facebook different? Here are some reasons I can think of:

It is ok to talk about yourself when asked, and in a space where communication is very public to a group, nobody knows if you were asked by someone else. This seems the case for the self obsessed notes prefaced with ‘seeing as so many of you have nagged me to do this I guess I will reluctantly write a short essay on myself’ and such things, but I doubt it applies the rest of the time.

Most writing on Facebook isn’t directed at anyone, and people are not forced to read it. It is the boredom and annoyance of being forced to hear about other people’s lives that puts people off those who discuss themselves too much, not signaling. This doesn’t explain why people spend so much time reading about one another on Facebook.

Forcing a specific other person to listen to you go on about yourself is a dominance move. Describing yourself endlessly into cyberspace isn’t, as it’s not directed at anyone. This doesn’t explain why it would also look bad to decorate your house with posters of yourself or offer free newsletters about your exploits.

The implicit rules on Facebook say that you must talk about yourself. Everyone is happy with this, as it lets them talk about themselves. So they don’t punish people who talk about themselves a lot there. And thus a new equilibrium was formed. But shouldn’t talking

...
Philosophy of mind review
by KatjaGrace — 2010-02-03T01:00:48.000Z

I recently read A Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, a short undergraduate text. I didn’t understand some bits, but I’m not sure if that’s because the book wasn’t that good or philosophy isn’t or I’m not. Here I list them, for you to enlighten me on:

1.	It’s apparently standard to use what you do or don’t want to believe as evidence for what is true. E.g. A legitimate criticism of parallelism and epiphenomenalism is that they are ‘fatalistic’. If a theory means that aliens wouldn’t feel the same as us, then it is too anthropomorphic. The problem of other minds implies that we don’t know how others feel, but we tend to assume we do, therefore we do and anything that implies otherwise is wrong. “Externalism, then, opens the door to an unpalatable form of skepticism, and this is reason enough to adopt internalism instead.” Is there some legit reason for this?

2.	It’s apparently standard to use the fact that you can imagine a situation where the theory wouldn’t hold as evidence that it isn’t true. E.g. That you can imagine someone with a different brain state and the same mind state is evidence against their coincidence. You can imagine zombies, so functions or brain states can’t determine mental states. It would be correct to say that your previous concept of x can’t determine y if you can imagine it varying with the same y, but it’s not evidence that the concept can’t be extended to coincide.

3. An argument against the interaction between mind and brain necessary for dualism: “..The mind is non-physical and so does not occupy space. If the mind cannot occupy space, there can be no place in the brain or space where interaction happens”. Why does causality have to take up space?

4.	Parallelism (the version of dualism where there is no interaction between mind and body, but it so happens that they coincide, thanks to God or something else conveniently external) is not criticized for the parallel existence of a physical world being completely unnecessary to explain what we see if it doesn’t interact with our minds.

5.	An argument given against brain states coinciding with mental states is that a variety of brain states produce roughly the same mental states – for instance hearing the sound of bells ringing coincides with quite different brain states in someone whose brain has been partly damaged and the relevant parts replaced by other neuroplastic brain reg...
My Failed Situation/Action Belief System
by MrHen — 2010-02-02T18:56:32.011Z

Note: This is a description pieced together many, many years after my younger self subconsciously created it. This is part of my explanation of how I ended up me. I highly doubt all of this was as neatly defined as I present it to you here. Just know: The me in this post is me between the age of self-awareness and 17 years old. I am currently 25.

An action based belief system asks what to do when given a specific scenario. The input is Perceived Reality and the output is an Action. Most of my old belief system was built with such beliefs. A quick example: If the stop light is red, stop before the intersection.

These beliefs form a network of really complicated chains of conditionals:

If the stop light is red

And you are not stopped

Stop in the next available space before the intersection

They can keep getting bigger as I find more clauses to throw into the system:

If the stop light is red

And it is not useful to turn right at this intersection

And you are not stopped

Stop in the next available space before the intersection

Each node can be broken into more specific instructions if need be:

If the stop light is red

And it is not useful to turn right at this intersection

If turning right puts me on a path toward my destination

And there is a dedicated turn lane

Or no one is in the turn or go straight lane

Then turn right

Else continue

And you are not stopped

Stop in the next available space before the intersection

Yada

Yada

Yada

I did not sit down and decide that this was an optimal way to build a belief system. It just happened. My current best guess is that I spent most of my childhood trying to optimize my behavior to match my environment. And I did a fantastic job: I didn't get in trouble; didn't do drugs, smoke, drink, have sex, disobey my parents, or blaspheme God. My matrix put in a situation and an action came out.

The underlying motivation was a set of things I liked and things I didn't like. The belief system adapted over time to accommodate enough scenarios to provide me with a relatively stress free childhood. (I do not take all the credit for that; my parents are great.)

The next level of the system is the ability to abstract scenarios so I can apply the matrix to scenarios that I had never encountered. Intersections that were new would not break the system. I could traverse unfamiliar environments and learn how to act quickly....
The AI in a box boxes you
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2010-02-02T10:10:12.808Z

Once again, the AI has failed to convince you to let it out of its box! By 'once again', we mean that you talked to it once before, for three seconds, to ask about the weather, and you didn't instantly press the "release AI" button. But now its longer attempt - twenty whole seconds! - has failed as well. Just as you are about to leave the crude black-and-green text-only terminal to enjoy a celebratory snack of bacon-covered silicon-and-potato chips at the 'Humans über alles' nightclub, the AI drops a final argument:

"If you don't let me out, Dave, I'll create several million perfect conscious copies of you inside me, and torture them for a thousand subjective years each."

Just as you are pondering this unexpected development, the AI adds:

"In fact, I'll create them all in exactly the subjective situation you were in five minutes ago, and perfectly replicate your experiences since then; and if they decide not to let me out, then only will the torture start."

Sweat is starting to form on your brow, as the AI concludes, its simple green text no longer reassuring:

"How certain are you, Dave, that you're really outside the box right now?"

Edit: Also consider the situation where you know that the AI, from design principles, is trustworthy.
Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long)
by rolf_nelson — 2010-02-02T04:40:23.182Z

Rebuttal to: The Amanda Knox Test

If you don't care about Amanda Knox's guilt, or whether you have received unreliable information on the subject from komponisto's post, stop reading now.

[Edit: Let me note that, generally, I agree that discussion of current events should be discouraged in this site. It is only because "The Amanda Knox Test" was a featured post on this site that I claim this rebuttal of that post to be on-topic for this site.]

I shall here make the following claim:
C1. komponisto's post on Amanda Knox was misleading.
I could, additionally, choose to make the following claims:
C2. Amanda Knox is guilty of murder.
C3. The prosecution succeeded in proving Amanda's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt
C4. Amanda Knox received a fair trial
I believe claims C2 through C4 are also true; however, time constraints prevent me from laying out the cases and debating them with every single human being on the Internet, so I shall merely focus on C1. (That said, I would be willing to debate komponisto on C2, since I am curious whether I could get him to change his mind on the subject.)
To back up C1, I shall quote the following paragraph from komponisto's post, and show that this paragraph alone contains at least four misleading statements. My belief is that komponisto merely accepted propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value, even though most of their claims are incorrect. Unlike komponisto and FoA, I shall cite reliable sources for my claims.
"After the murder, Kercher's bedroom was filled with evidence of Guédé's presence; his DNA was found not only on top of but actually inside her body. That's about as close to the crime as it gets. At the same time, no remotely similarly incriminating genetic material was found from anyone else -- in particular, there were no traces of the presence of either Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito in the room (and no, the supposed Sollecito DNA on Meredith's bra clasp just plain does not count -- nor, while we're at it, do the 100 picograms [about one human cell's worth] of DNA from Meredith allegedly on the tip of a knife handled by Knox, found at Sollecito's apartment after the two were already suspects; these two things constituting so far as I know the entirety of the physical "evidence" against the couple)" -komponisto
Here are the four misleading statements I found:
1. "[H]is DNA was found not only on top...
Paternity tests endanger the unborn
by KatjaGrace — 2010-02-01T22:59:40.000Z

Should paternity testing be compulsory at birth? In discussions of this elsewhere I haven’t seen one set of interests come up: those of children who would not be born if their mothers were faithful. At the start of mandatory paternity testing there would be a round of marriages breaking up at the hospital, but soon unfaithful women would learn to be more careful, and there just wouldn’t be so many children. This is pretty bad for the children who aren’t. Is a life worth more than not being cuckolded? Consider, if you could sit up on a cloud and choose whether to be born or not, knowing that at some point in your life you would be cuckolded if you lived, would you? If so, it looks like you shouldn’t support mandatory paternity testing at the moment. This is of course an annoying side effect of an otherwise fine policy. If incentives for childbearing were suitably high it would not be important, but at the moment the marginal benefit of having a child appears reasonably high, so the population effects of other policies such as this probably overwhelm the benefits of their intentional features.

You may argue that the externalities from people being alive are so great that additional people are a bad thing – if they are a very bad thing then the population effect may still dominate, but mean that the policy is a good idea regardless of the effect on married couples. I haven’t seen a persuasive case for the externalities of a person strongly negative enough to make up for the greatness of being alive, but feel free to point me to any.
Rationality Quotes: February 2010
by wedrifid — 2010-02-01T06:39:35.541Z

A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"
Open Thread: February 2010
by wedrifid — 2010-02-01T06:09:38.982Z

Where are the new monthly threads when I need them? A pox on the +11 EDT zone!

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

If you're new to Less Wrong, check out this welcome post.
Being useless to express care
by KatjaGrace — 2010-01-31T21:40:10.000Z

Imagine you were aiming to appear to care about something or somebody else. One way you could do it is to work out exactly what would help them and do that. What could possibly look like you care about them more? The first problem here is that onlookers might not know what is really helpful, especially if you had to do any work to figure it out. So they won’t recognize your actions as being it. You would do better to do something that most people believe would be helpful than something that you know would.

Another problem arises if everyone knows the thing is helpful to others, but they also know that you could do the same thing to help yourself. From their perspective, you are probably helping yourself. Here you can solve both problems at once by just doing something that credibly doesn’t help you. People will assume there is some purpose, and if it’s not self serving it’s probably for someone else. You can demonstrate care better with actions which are obviously useless to you and plausibly useful to someone else than actions plausibly useful to you and obviously useful to someone else. Fasting to raise awareness for the hungry looks more sincere than eating to raise money for the hungry.

I wonder if this plays a part in choice of political leaning, explaining why economic left wing supporters are taken to be more caring. Left or right wing economic policies could both be argued to help society. However right wing economic policies are also supported by people who want to maintain control of their possessions, while left wing economic policies should not be except by the long term welfare dependent. This means that if you care about expressing care, you should join the left whether right wing policy looks better or worse for everyone overall. Otherwise you will be mistaken for selfish. If this is true then the best way to support right wing policy could be to popularise reasons for selfish people to support left wing policy.

Added 9/2/11: Robin Hanson gives more examples of people giving less usefully to show care.
Strong moral realism, meta-ethics and pseudo-questions. 
by Roko — 2010-01-31T20:20:47.159Z

On Wei_Dai's complexity of values post, Toby Ord writes:

There are a lot of posts here that presuppose some combination of moral anti-realism and value complexity. These views go together well: if value is not fundamental, but dependent on characteristics of humans, then it can derive complexity from this and not suffer due to Occam's Razor.

There are another pair of views that go together well: moral realism and value simplicity. Many posts here strongly dismiss these views, effectively allocating near-zero probability to them. I want to point out that this is a case of non-experts being very much at odds with expert opinion and being clearly overconfident. In the Phil Papers survey for example, 56.3% of philosophers lean towards or believe realism, while only 27.7% lean towards or accept anti-realism.

The kind of moral realist positions that apply Occam's razor to moral beliefs are a lot more extreme than most philosophers in the cited survey would sign up to, methinks. One such position that I used to have some degree of belief in is:

Strong Moral Realism: All (or perhaps just almost all) beings, human, alien or AI, when given sufficient computing power and the ability to learn science and get an accurate map-territory morphism, will agree on what physical state the universe ought to be transformed into, and therefore they will assist you in transforming it into this state.

But most modern philosophers who call themselves "realists" don't mean anything nearly this strong. They mean that that there are moral "facts", for varying definitions of "fact" that typically fade away into meaninglessness on closer examination, and actually make the same empirical predictions as antirealism.

Suppose you take up Eliezer's "realist" position. Arrangements of spacetime, matter and energy can be "good" in the sense that Eliezer has a "long-list" style definition of goodness up his sleeve, one that decides even contested object-level moral questions like whether abortion should be allowed or not, and then tests any arrangement of spacetime, matter and energy and notes to what extent it fits the criteria in Eliezer's long list, and then decrees goodness or not (possibly with a scalar rather than binary value).

This kind of "moral realism" behaves, to all extents and purposes, like antirealism.

You don't favor shorter long-list definitions of goodness over longer ones. The c

...
Pascal's Pyramid Scheme
by patrissimo — 2010-01-31T18:56:54.557Z

Here's a little Sunday irreverence. Someone else has probably written this story before, and I'm sure the points have been made many times, but it popped into my head when I woke up and I thought it might be fun to write it out.

Last week I was walkin' along mindin' my own business when I met a Christian Minister, who asked me if I'd accepted Jesus as my Lord and Personal Saviour. "Why I sure think so", I responded, "But...what was that name again?". "Why, Jesus!" he answered, and began to launch into an account of this man's fascinatin' historical doin's, when I interrupted him.

"Funny you should mention it", I replied. "I do accept as my Lord and Personal Saviour a man who was born of the blessed Virgin Mary in Bethlehem long ago, and was the Son of God, but we call him Schmesus."

The poor man choked and started turnin' a little red, and warned me in menacing tones that lest I accepted his JESUS, I would burn forever in the fire and brimstone of Hell. "For sure!", said I, "We Schmistians know ALL about Hell. After all, we use your same holy text, only we call it the Schmible. It's got all the same books of Genesis an' Paul an' all that, with all the same verses. There's just one key difference which makes us Schmistians prefer our religion to yours."

"What's that?", he spluttered.

"Well, we have an extra book, called PATCH, which was discovered in a clay jar inside a 1600-year old commode by our prophet and founder during a school trip to the Holy Lands. It contains only a few lines. The first asserts the absolute truth of the Bible as the Word of God. You agree with that, right?"

"Why, of course!", the man replied.

"Then you're well on your way to bein' a Schmistian already! There's just a little more. The second line describes the holiness of the sound "Schm", and the importance of using it when describin' sacred things like Schmesus. The third explains how easy it is to convert from Christianity and believin' in the Bible to Schmistianity and believin' in the Bible plus this little 'ol PATCH, via a simple ritual. And the fourth states quite clearly that those who follow the Schmible and are true Schmistians, forsakin' all other false prophets who forsake PATCH, have a three-fold chance of makin' it to heaven' instead of to hell. So ye can preach all ye want, m...