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Comment author: army1987 10 November 2012 07:56:21PM *  0 points [-]

So why is this down voted?

No comma between “of” and “Earth”? ;-) (Just kidding. I didn't downvote.)

More seriously, it looks like someone's downvoting the entire thread. (I'm upvoting most of it back to 0.)

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 07:52:02PM -1 points [-]

I downvoted because it implies moral progress is meaningless, rather than nonexistant.

Of course, I would probably downvote a bald claim that moral progress doesn't hapen anyway.

Comment author: army1987 10 November 2012 07:50:31PM *  0 points [-]

IIRC, elections in Italy are usually Sunday all day (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) plus Monday morning (from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.), or Saturday afternoon plus Sunday all day. I think the main group of people it biases against is those who like to go to the seaside for the weekend as soon as they can -- almost all people who stay in town could find some time to vote if they want to. OTOH, plenty of people (including) don't switch their legal residence when they rent an apartment to study in another town, so they'd have to go back to their parents' in order to vote. I study relatively close to where I grew up and my parents live so I go back home most weekends anyway, but students living further away from their home towns might be under-represented among voters. (I hear they can get free train tickets for that, though. I've never bothered to do that because train tickets from my home town to my university town and back are so cheap anyway.)

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 07:47:50PM 0 points [-]

Average utilitarianism implies that a world in which lots and lots of people suffer a lot is better than a world in which a single individual suffers just a little bit more.

While I am not an average utilititarian, (I think,) A world containing only one person suffering horribly does seem kinda worse.

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 07:38:49PM 0 points [-]

I find just saying "and?" has a similar effect without requiring explanations.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 10 November 2012 07:34:30PM 0 points [-]

Looks like a very useful list. One comment: I found the example in 2(a) a bit complicated and very difficult to parse.

Comment author: army1987 10 November 2012 07:32:46PM 0 points [-]

Average utilitarianism implies that a world in which lots and lots of people suffer a lot is better than a world in which a single individual suffers just a little bit more. If you don't think that such a world would be better, then you must agree that average utilitarianism is false.

I do think that the former is better (to the extent that I can trust my intuitions in a case that different from those in their training set).

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 07:22:23PM 1 point [-]

I believe we better understand our utility function and how to implement it than most civilizations have historically.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 November 2012 07:20:51PM 1 point [-]

sqrt(x^2)=5 or -5, along with an infinite number of complex values

No. Even in the complex plane there are only two possible square roots. Moreover, if one wants to sqrt to be a function one needs a convention, hence we definite sqrt to be the non-negative square root when it exists.

Comment author: Konkvistador 10 November 2012 07:08:14PM *  1 point [-]

Ok. In the context of the question I assumed you believed in moral progress. Do you?

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 07:03:27PM 0 points [-]

You asked. I answered. Whether it is correct is one thing, but you asked what it meant.

Comment author: Steven_Bukal 10 November 2012 07:02:40PM 0 points [-]

Took the whole survey. My preferred political label of (Radical) Centrist survived all explicit radio buttons.

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 06:55:04PM 1 point [-]

ignoring social consequences of passing off fake money

Why?

Comment author: gwern 10 November 2012 06:54:48PM 2 points [-]

other data-based analysts like Sam Wang and Josh Putnam made essentially the same predictions

A dataset including Wang & Putnam, with scoring of accuracy:

Comment author: Konkvistador 10 November 2012 06:54:11PM *  0 points [-]

Eh, no we don't.

See how easy it is to simply assert something? Let's now try actual arguments. First read the comments I linked to in the daughter comment, also feel free to provide links and references to material you think I should read. Then once we've closed the inferential gap and after we restate the other's case without straw manning it we can really start talking.

Comment author: gwern 10 November 2012 06:53:11PM 1 point [-]

If any man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him … immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it .. For to say that God … hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spoke to him.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 06:49:06PM *  -1 points [-]

It usually means we now have a greater understanding of what we value.

[edited for clarity.]

Comment author: Konkvistador 10 November 2012 06:44:30PM 0 points [-]

Is this accurate? Isn't it better to say they wanted representative governance while at first denouncing democracy as a horrid system (at least the US founding fathers did) but found themselves on a slippery slope.

Related to: Schelling fences on slippery slopes

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 November 2012 06:43:06PM 0 points [-]

Presumably they think it would work.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 November 2012 06:39:33PM 0 points [-]

You take some random 20 bit number and say that you will flip the equipment 20 times and if the outcome is the same as the predetermined number, then you will take it as a one to million evidence that the Multiple World theory works as expected.

That doesn't convince anyone else; from their perspective, in Bayesian terms, the experiment has the same million-to-one improbability of producing this result, regardless of whether QTI is true, since they're not dying in the other worlds. From your perspective, you've ended up in a world where you experienced what feels like strong evidence of QTI being true, but you can never communicate this evidence to anyone else. If we hook up a doomsday device to the coinflipper, then in worlds where we survive, we can never convince aliens.

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