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rolfmoo


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 14:13:28 UTC

				

User ID: 585

rolfmoo


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 14:13:28 UTC

					

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User ID: 585

His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance.

Not at all - he points out that in the past it was even worse. But somehow there are still some people in something the ancients would still recognise as a kind of poverty, which is really weird considering how rich we are.

Epistemic status total raging speculation, but I wonder if there's a significant effect of how exactly you drink (average less than 2 drinks per day, but in reality that's getting pretty drunk at 2 or 3 social events per month? A glass of wine or two with dinner with your loved ones? Or a stiff double just to get to sleep each night?) and/or of who exactly you are. Some research suggests alcohol might be beneficial for heart health but harmful to other organs systems - maybe if you're predisposed to heart problems you're better off drinking a little, but not otherwise.

That's the whole point of being a good high-stakes risk-taker. If I challenge you to a game where you bet $6 and win $10 if you correctly guess whether I roll even on a d6, the correct high-stakes risk-taker answer is "lmao, no bet".

Some things just are pretty close, odds-wise.

But even nuclear disasters aren't that bad. Chernobyl killed a number of people somewhere in the double digits - easily within the bounds of disasters people consider perfectly tolerable for other things.

Nuclear power is the victim of bad vibes, not of anything so legible as its downside risks being localized rather than diffuse. Those bad vibes lead to insanity like the Linear No Threshold model of radiation injury that get you the "thousands dead" headlines - even though that model is, frankly, utter bollocks.

The human, because we have weapons and advanced societies to coordinate effort and now have to make an actual effort not to incidentally kill all the gorillas.

A theoretical straight-up fight for dominance is a weird fake aberration; society with all its nuance is the state of Nature.

For similar reasons, weaker, smarter, more socially adept humans are fitter. That's why humans evolved to be so much weaker than other apes in the first place.

it just doesn't even care about our problems. How much time do we spend worrying about ant habitats?

Not much, but we also don't especially trouble ourselves not to destroy them incidentally if, say, we want to build a road over them. And there's instrumental convergence to worry about - for most possible goals, you can do a lot better if you use the atoms in the apes for something else.

The key is that it's cancel culture. It's not a specific definable process, it's just the general cultural trend, suddenly much more prevalent, where if someone says something naughty it's appropriate not only to take it personally, not only to tell everyone how upset you are, but to try to visit consequences on them for it. There's no precise definition, it's just a vibe shift.

Something that seems to be neglected in NIMBY discourse: there's no reason beauty and building have to be mutually exclusive!

We are a far richer and mightier civilisation than the one that actually built all the pleasant Cotswolds stone villages and so on! There is absolutely no reason we couldn't build enough housing in a way that was actively aesthetically pleasing - possibly at greater cost than horrible concrete, but nothing compared to the effective cost of building being mostly illegal - if we wanted to.

Of course, we'd have to turn the architectural establishment on its head, but we should do that anyway. I propose an Ugly Tax.

Plea bargaining constitutes something like 98% of convictions, even though it's a hilariously flagrant infringement of the Sixth Amendment. America mostly doesn't have trials.

Is there anything more to your point here than "AI currently exists and may have military applications, therefore there will never be a dangerous superhuman AI", which is an obvious non sequitur?

Are you trying to vaguely imply that reality is only allowed to have appropriately gritty and cynically-themed things in it like War And Commerce, as shown by this development, and therefore superintelligence is impossible because it would be inappropriate for the genre? Because weird implausible flight-of-fancy sci-fi stuff actually happens all the time and then rapidly becomes normal. You're currently on the global pocket supercomputer network, for example.

Most people do care about their tribe, but it's really historically weird for your "tribe" to be "a population of millions of people who happen to share some genes in common with you".

I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken

I technically agree, but there's such a huge difference between even the least intelligent 1% of humans and chickens that it doesn't matter. Everest is a lot higher than Ben Nevis, but they're both obviously mountains and not molehills.

Large-scale medicine is a good example of anarcho-tyranny. Malaria vaccine to save untold thousands from a painful death? Not without years and years of exhaustive development and trials and the WHO sitting with its thumb up its arse for no reason! Fuck around with lethal untested experimental viruses? Why, of course, no problem there.

Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda in American, possibly?), not baking powder.

Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.

If it destroys countries or even the whole humanity, then it should be destroyed, right? The cold truth is defined as the highest value so what is the problem.

I think you either misunderstand or are deliberately misrepresenting the point to dunk on the nerds here. Obviously you shouldn't post nuclear codes on Twitter just because they're true - we're talking about the nature of beliefs. "Dangerous information exists" isn't incompatible with the idea that you should try to believe true things, and not random shit that would be convenient. That's just common sense!

Anyways, there are many ways how one can save "belief in untruth"

Nothing you said here is even remotely like belief in untruth. Trust authority figures? Also a means of determining the truth, because the whole reason you're trusting them is that you think they're right! Be sceptical of clever-sounding arguments? Don't rush to believe weird things just because you think you have evidence? That's literally just Yudkowskian rationality stated informally! He would probably say something more like that in Bayesian terms, your odds of hearing a good argument for X are not that much higher given that X is true, and also that prior probabilities exist, but it's the same damn thing.

All it takes for me to defend any belief is to set my prior to very low value so it is incredibly hard for it to be flipped in my lifetime.

I can't find it on a cursory Google, but one of the Sequence posts on this is about how confident it's reasonable to be in your priors, and "so low no reasonable evidence could ever make a difference" is, obviously, too low. Again, common sense.

Now given the utilitarianism of rationalists I do not trust them at all, there is nothing preventing them to lie to me to reach their goals of maximizing utils or whatever.

Gosh, it sounds like being so willing to lie could have bad consequences that a consequentialist might want to avoid. Seriously though, there's whole reams of decision theory stuff about how you shouldn't lie! Partly in fact for exactly this reason. A good basic sketch from the Olden Days of why in rat terms you should not in fact abandon all ethics to be "utilitarian" is here.

which would be logical step if they really believed in the Truth of apocalypse so firmly and unshakenly.

See above. It's not actually logical.

I think dropping the guru sounding shit or weird stuff

Yeah, agreed, it bothers me a lot too. Yudkowsky in particular seems to just not have much sense of... PR, image, not seeming weird, and it's very annoying. The only thing that annoys me more than LessWrong rationality is how terrible the criticisms of it are. I'd take a hundred weird mystical descriptions of common-sense reasoning over one "these people are weird and cringey which is of course equal to 'wrong' because 'wrong' is just another word for 'bad'" dunking.

It concerns me that "believe" and "pretend to believe" aren't very obviously flagrantly different things.

It's very different. The fact that sometimes you have to take into account that people are wrong about things doesn't change a damn thing about whether or not those things are, in fact, true. You shouldn't try to argue theology with a schizophrenic who thinks they're Jesus, but they still aren't.

Rationalist credo "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is deeply abnormal for human beings.

I am a very weird human being. When I first read this stuff on LessWrong as a teenager I remember being very annoyed by how smug they seemed about "hey, breaking news, you should believe true things and not false things." As an adult, yeah, fine, if anything they were understating it. I'm not pretending to be some kind of rational agent, but I don't explicitly come out and try to believe false things, what the fuck?

But I still don't understand how people can do this and it still frightens me that it's not even uncommon. They still know on the inside that it's still not true, right?? There's no Men-in-Black neuralyzer that comes along if you pretend you don't know it long enough... right?? Why does he want to believe something that isn't true?

I don't know when the common understanding became that TTRPG rules are supposed to represent the in-world laws of physics, but that is not what they do and isn't in Pathfinder and never has been, going right back to OD&D. TTRPG rules are there to assist the DM in running the game, that's all. The rules for diseases are not necessarily reflective of what disease is actually like in the world and certainly don't exclude the possibility of things like acquired immunity.

Is germ theory true in Golarion? That's for the DM to decide if it ever comes up, not something to be gleaned from the rules.

Also, more importantly, the setting here is lintamande's fanfic Golarion, which differs in a few ways from the RPG setting.

Iomedae comes from a world where mass immigration and the state capacity to control it don't exist - of course she finds modern mores on it strange and horrible, it would be weird if she didn't.

The things you're complaining about are... The central conflict of the story. Iomedae comes from a mediaevalish world, of course she has fucked-up ideas about consent, that's the whole point! If you don't like a writing style, fair enough, if you don't want to read something before you complain about it, fine, but come on.

This Yudkowsky essay is about precisely this question.

Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.

Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.

Then why do we have the vote buttons?

It might not even be dementia. Elderly people have less physical stamina and "slack in the system" in general. A bad night's sleep (not uncommon for politicians), mild food poisoning, a dizzy spell, whatever - they're all going to hit an 80-year-old harder than a 40-year-old.

People do vary a lot, so I don't find it inconceivable that there might be some octogenarians who are perfectly fit to be senior politicians. What's eerie is the increase in politicians now being so elderly. Whether or not they're fit for the role strikes me as secondary to working out the reasons for the change. And simply banning them seems very unlikely to solve the actual core problem that's producing this phenomenon.