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SerialKilldeer posted:I'm imagining two enemy wizards pointing their wands at each other going "I don't care about you!" "I don't care about you MORE! Avada Kedavra!" like some weird kids' game. This is also known as every internet debate ever.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:25
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Tbf there are some scientific fields (particle physics?) that are doing pretty well working from preprint servers like arXiv. arXiv doesn't let just anyone put their work up there either though, and it's a *pre*print server, intended as a public stopping point on the way to publication.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:34
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It just occurred to me that "I don't care about you" is usually a self-defeating statement. Clearly you cared enough to feel the need to inform them you don't care.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:34
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Don Gato posted:http://dresdencodak.com/2011/04/19/dark-science-09/ Has he actually said this anywhere, or are you reading way too much into a joke in a webcomic?
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Jul 28, 2014 17:47
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Oddly enough, for all Yudkowsky's hatred of peer review I can't seem to find any articles by him addressing it. You'd think anything he hated enough to mock through My Little Pony fanfiction he'd hate enough to devote just one of his  articles to it, addressing why peer review is so awful. Maybe at some level he realizes he doesn't actually have any leg to stand on here and is just bitter that Nature won't publish his Harry Potter fanfic?razorrozar posted:It just occurred to me that "I don't care about you" is usually a self-defeating statement. Clearly you cared enough to feel the need to inform them you don't care. Yeah, which is why using your indifference to someone to power the killing curse against them makes no sense. "Who gives a poo poo about those people" doesn't argue against itself, but "I don't care about you" does. When the context is the Holocaust, it makes more sense. You have concentration camp guards just following orders they can't be arsed to question, commanders in Berlin ordering mass executions of unseen swathes of Those People, a civilian population whose majority isn't interested enough to do anything, and other countries where nobody spares a thought to what might be happening to Those People so far away because they're more concerned with their ration books. In an "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" context, indifference can clearly be deadly. But when the context is one bad guy acting alone killing individual people one by one face-to-face without acting on anybody's orders, it's absurd to pin the cause on that bad guy's indifference. The easiest real-world analogue to the lone dark AKing wizard would be a shooter going on a rampage, but nobody blames Virginia Tech on the shooter's superhuman overflowing indifference.
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Jul 28, 2014 18:00
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Besesoth posted:Has he actually said this anywhere, or are you reading way too much into a joke in a webcomic? I looked around, and apparently I'm just reading too much into it and confusing other  things he's said. He did apparently drop out from college after switching majors 4 times because while he liked the idea of being an engineer, physicist or whatever he wasn't actually happy working as any of them. So it's more like he is a science fetishist who doesn't have the personality to get a STEM degree which I can understand, and I'm surprised he actually recognized that rather than finishing the degree anyway and hating his life because he hates his work.
Don Gato fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 18:01
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Don Gato posted:Diaz fetishizes science except for when it comes to doing actual science with peer review papers and such, which he regards as a popularity contest that holds science back. Besides what Besesoth above me said, this is not necessarily false. Yes, even scientific fields will have their hot shots that get papers published in more prestigious journals that would be rejected if submitted by anyone else. However, unlike you are actually an experienced researcher it is the equivalent of going "I could totally be a millionaire if all these people weren't sending bad energy my way, man".
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Jul 28, 2014 18:04
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Oddly enough, for all Yudkowsky's hatred of peer review I can't seem to find any articles by him addressing it. You'd think anything he hated enough to mock through My Little Pony fanfiction he'd hate enough to devote just one of his Since it would look really bad for his bilking people finances to have it on record anywhere that he hates peer review he likes to hide it in metaphor, but there's plenty on the LW site about it, the entire 'bayesian conspiracy' thing is premised on peer review actively harming the advance of knowledge.
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Jul 28, 2014 18:05
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Peel posted:Tbf there are some scientific fields (particle physics?) that are doing pretty well working from preprint servers like arXiv. arXiv doesn't let just anyone put their work up there either though, and it's a *pre*print server, intended as a public stopping point on the way to publication. Bear in mind that I've seen papers for science and mathematics journals which have obviously been written in Chinese and run through Google translate with no further editing - but they were less than 20 pages long, the point was clear, and they were interesting enough to get published. Yudkowsky can manage none of that, and English is his first language. It's not like there's a shortage of templates for academic writing either - he's just too lazy to learn how to do it.
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Jul 28, 2014 18:06
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Don Gato posted:He did apparently drop out from college after switching majors 4 times because while he liked the idea of being an engineer, physicist or whatever he wasn't actually happy working as any of them. So it's more like he is a science fetishist who doesn't have the personality to get a STEM degree lol
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Jul 28, 2014 18:10
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Besesoth posted:Has he actually said this anywhere, or are you reading way too much into a joke in a webcomic? If it was just that one page, it'd be reading too much into it. But given the context of the rest of the comic, an ostensibly transhumanist tale of how science is blind to the ~~true nature of reality~~, and featuring a cyborg mad scientist mary sue of a main character, it becomes pretty clear that Diaz intended that page in an "it's funny because it's true" sort of way.
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Jul 28, 2014 19:11
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potatocubed posted:Bear in mind that I've seen papers for science and mathematics journals which have obviously been written in Chinese and run through Google translate with no further editing - but they were less than 20 pages long, the point was clear, and they were interesting enough to get published. Yudkowsky can manage none of that, and English is his first language. That's not his whole problem, though. The thing is, AI reviewers specifically have a finely-tuned quack sense. There are a lot of Big Yuds out there, submitting their brilliant crayon-scribble masterpieces for peer review. There is a lot of sifting to do, because there is a lot of garbage out there. To get an AI paper published, it really helps to have *built* something, and even Big Yud won't lie about having implemented his latest crazy nonsense idea for a system. He's just the ideas guy.
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Jul 28, 2014 23:15
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Moddington posted:If it was just that one page, it'd be reading too much into it. But given the context of the rest of the comic, an ostensibly transhumanist tale of how science is blind to the ~~true nature of reality~~, and featuring a cyborg mad scientist mary sue of a main character, it becomes pretty clear that Diaz intended that page in an "it's funny because it's true" sort of way. You're familiar with the concept of "fiction", right?
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Jul 29, 2014 00:03
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SerialKilldeer posted:I'm imagining two enemy wizards pointing their wands at each other going "I don't care about you!" "I don't care about you MORE! Avada Kedavra!" like some weird kids' game. To be fair, this is pretty close to how it works in the original books, just with "I don't care about you!"/"I don't care about you MORE!" replaced with "I hate you!"/"I hate you MORE!"
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Jul 29, 2014 00:08
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Besesoth posted:You're familiar with the concept of "fiction", right? Alright, fine, I dug through his tweets, and you're right. Poe's Law, etc. etc.
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Jul 29, 2014 01:26
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Moddington posted:Alright, fine, I dug through his tweets, and you're right. Poe's Law, etc. etc. In fairness, the thread's discussing a work of fiction that is transparently a vehicle for the author's agenda and biases, so it's not too big a leap.
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Jul 29, 2014 01:48
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Besesoth posted:In fairness, the thread's discussing a work of fiction that is transparently a vehicle for the author's agenda and biases, so it's not too big a leap. There ought to be a rule regarding using fiction as a vehicle for your philosophy, that there's a point where an author can't hide behind "it's just a cute story, why are you mad?" I mean the tradition goes all the way back to Plato.
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Jul 29, 2014 16:40
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That point is the starting line, if you have a problem with discussing the philosophy of a text you're a huge baby.
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Jul 29, 2014 17:22
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It's probably a good barometer to know if you're looking at some real Over the Rainbow poo poo like Objectivism, or The Turner Diaries, if the "philosophy" is couched in a juvenile fantasy that says more about how the author sees the world than real life. one of the funniest things to me is how Yudkowski obviously processes the world through this lense where childrens' cartoons like Gurren Lagann are equal to actual lived experience in how he perceives his fellow human beings, indicating someone either truly looney tens or just astronomically sheltered.
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Jul 29, 2014 18:17
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Finally finished reading the thread. What a ride! As someone who has actually worked with Bayesian probability, I can tell you right now why precisely Yudkowsky is full of crap. The basic idea in Bayesian probability is that it is meaningless to talk about probability in isolation. Probability is always conditional. You always write P(B|A), meaning "probability of B given A". Even when you have P(A), it just means P(A|I), where I embodies your assumptions about the system you are dealing with. Why is this important? Because P(B|A) and P(B|C) need not be the same at all. Now let's say we have: P("this person is serious"|"he says he is going to torture 1 person if I don't give him $10") There is no reason to think that this is equal to: P("this person is serious"|"he says he is going to torture 10 people if I don't give him $10") In fact, I would be willing to bet that it is more than 10 times smaller. And similarly for 100. So if you look at: nP("this person is serious"|"he says he is going to torture n people if I don't give him $10") which is the expected number of tortured people by this person, assuming we don't have any other evidence other than his bald statement, this value is going to go to zero as n goes to infinity, rather than any finite number. There. That's it. All of this guy's arguments are rubbish. drat him for sullying Bayesian probability/statistics/data analysis.
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Aug 2, 2014 05:59
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Absurd Alhazred posted:this value is going to go to zero as n goes to infinity Z-z-z-zero? We don't take kindly to that sort of talk 'round these parts.
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Aug 2, 2014 06:08
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Z-z-z-zero? We don't take kindly to that sort of talk 'round these parts. Oh, but you see, it is not a probability; it's an expected value. 
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Aug 2, 2014 06:12
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Z-z-z-zero? We don't take kindly to that sort of talk 'round these parts. Anyone who gets passionate about the differences between literal probabilities and reasonable probabilities isn't going to be getting any papers published in any field because the vast majority of academic researchers don't bicker over such pointless poo poo.
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Aug 2, 2014 07:02
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pentyne posted:Anyone who gets passionate about the differences between literal probabilities and reasonable probabilities isn't going to be getting any papers published in any field because the vast majority of academic researchers don't bicker over such pointless poo poo. Given the kinds of things academics bicker over, that's genuinely impressive.
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Aug 2, 2014 07:40
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Hate Fibration posted:Given the kinds of things academics bicker over, that's genuinely impressive. I once tried to explain to a poly sci major how one of the biggest differences in the soft sciences compared to hard sciences is things like "schools of thought" in the economic and philosophy disciplines. The major opinions in those fields are usually someone who wrote/created a seminal work that people follow religiously and dismiss all criticism as "narrow minded" because its not an evidence based discipline. Basically the response I got back was "No its exactly the same" and I tried to patiently explain that no, not really, competing theories produce research to back up their claims and faulty ones eventually get discredited, whereas there isn't any amount of data you could show to an Austrian Economist that would convince them that "gently caress you got mine" isn't a good economic policy. As any reasonable person can imagine, I was dismissed as "blind to my field" and said person continued to form elaborate opinions on matters of science and math based on what they believed they could logically extrapolate from their non-math non-science education. As an "autodidact" Yudkowsky sounds exactly like a liberal arts major trying to smugly lecture math/physics/engineering graduates with how little they know based on his interpretation of their entire discipline. I don't know how he lives, where his money comes from, and what else he does besides write smug blog posts and Harry Potter fanfiction, but he probably enjoys a lifestyle of an upper-middle class person and contributes nothing of value to the world other then the group of adherents he's convinced that he's Aristotle reborn. Wait, found it. quote:MIRI uses its funds to recompense its officers (Yudkowsky makes about $80,000 per annum) and fund research I bet Big Yud uses his income as proof of how broken and inefficient colleges are since he as a drop-out can self educate himself to the point where he makes 2x the average college grad.
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Aug 2, 2014 08:54
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So what the hell kind of research do Yud and co even do? Theoretical naval gazing?
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Aug 2, 2014 09:29
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pentyne posted:I once tried to explain to a poly sci major how one of the biggest differences in the soft sciences compared to hard sciences is things like "schools of thought" in the economic and philosophy disciplines. The major opinions in those fields are usually someone who wrote/created a seminal work that people follow religiously and dismiss all criticism as "narrow minded" because its not an evidence based discipline. This isn't really true when it comes to economics though. Literally no real economist will say they follow Keynes or Austrian Economics or the Chicago school or whatever. If anyone says they does you can safely discount them as having nothing worthwhile to say. There are different schools of economic thought and they've all brought different things to the table that have value. Even conservatives will acknowledge that Marxist Economics have produced revolutionary findings that everyone - even Say's Law hands off types - will use. And same goes vice versa. Your point is true for everything else but economics isn't quite like polysci or philosophy in that regard.
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Aug 2, 2014 09:56
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Cat Army 
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The Iron Rose posted:This isn't really true when it comes to economics though. Literally no real economist will say they follow Keynes or Austrian Economics or the Chicago school or whatever. If anyone says they does you can safely discount them as having nothing worthwhile to say. There are different schools of economic thought and they've all brought different things to the table that have value. Even conservatives will acknowledge that Marxist Economics have produced revolutionary findings that everyone - even Say's Law hands off types - will use. And same goes vice versa. My bad, the most encounters I've had with amateur economists are "free market always works" usually consist of me asking them if they read Rothbard (the guy who actually advocated for letting people sell children because the free market would give them a better life) and getting back "Yeah, that guy is so smart he knew how capitalism really worked I don't see why all countries don't follow him." That and the vast majority of political economic "discourse" in the US coming from the GOP is "disgusting poors leeching off noble tax-payers" and then "honest, upright corporations shifting their legal HQ to pay minimal tax is as responsible and righteous as you can get how could you ask them to do anything else?" The whole "corporate inversion" thing I heard about recently has bothered me quite a bit in addition to Fox News bringing on economists left and right saying its a good thing.
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Aug 2, 2014 11:20
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The other key thing with social sciences is that you often times don't have nearly as much data as the hard sciences. If someone's theory in physics predicts the wrong velocity of a projectile, you can run a controlled experiment as many times as you want to until they finally admit they're wrong. Most social sciences don't really have the same kind of easily repeatable and tightly controlled experiments, giving people a lot of room to make excuses about how haven't REALLY disproved their theory.
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Aug 2, 2014 15:19
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Anticheese posted:So what the hell kind of research do Yud and co even do? Theoretical naval gazing? loving a Cortana blow-up doll.
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Aug 2, 2014 19:33
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pentyne posted:My bad, the most encounters I've had with amateur economists are "free market always works" usually consist of me asking them if they read Rothbard (the guy who actually advocated for letting people sell children because the free market would give them a better life) and getting back "Yeah, that guy is so smart he knew how capitalism really worked I don't see why all countries don't follow him." quote:As any reasonable person can imagine, I was dismissed as "blind to my field" and said person continued to form elaborate opinions on matters of economics and philosophy based on what they believed they could logically extrapolate from their non-economics and non-philosophy education. There's idiots and bandwagoning purists in every field, it doesn't mean you should listen to what they say.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:20
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Aerial Tollhouse posted:Most social sciences don't really have the same kind of easily repeatable and tightly controlled experiments, giving people a lot of room to make excuses about how haven't REALLY disproved their theory. And there's also a long history of experiments that seemed easily repeatable and tightly controlled, but really were about as scientific as a homeopathy and crystal healing expo due to unexamined assumptions on the part of the experimenter. The social sciences are science on hard-mode, seriously. 
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Aug 4, 2014 10:39
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pentyne posted:I bet Big Yud uses his income as proof of how broken and inefficient colleges are since he as a drop-out can self educate himself to the point where he makes 2x the average college grad. Hey man, I don't need a college education to make bank. I just need to convince a bunch of college educated people to give me money
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Aug 5, 2014 07:40
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In my stupidly limited experience "soft sciences" are super-anal about the bits they can quantify. Hard sciences are reductionistic in a "I manipulated a thing and that did a thing" but in psychology the brain is almost a black box. A biologist gets a headline for "we did inception on mice" while psych people would argue about the p-values and effect sizes in a table or w/e. It's really cool to find this thread. I read "Three Worlds Collide" years ago and knew LessWrong as insular super-utilitarian CS guys (eg talking about Nozick) but that poo poo was too dense skim over. A few months ago I looked them up again and discovered the crazy on Rationalwiki; Roko's Basilisk being the jewel in the crown. I interpreted "Timeless Decision Theory" as "preparing for future events is logically equivalent to reacting to past events, because events are causing an action." That's weird because it makes causality dependent on human foresight (and maybe a logical fallacy besides.) If you buy it then it would follow an AI would do things we could anticipate. Simple things, like setting up a reward/punishment structure. And since the LW people did anticipate it, the AI would do it. So Roko hosed things up for all the kool-aid drinkers. You beat the system by not giving a poo poo. Which makes it the best thing. Then the thread shows me all the half-understood cargo cult futurology bullshit and that's the icing on the cake. Thanks for existing, thread.
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Aug 5, 2014 08:20
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pentyne posted:I once tried to explain to a poly sci major how one of the biggest differences in the soft sciences compared to hard sciences is things like "schools of thought" in the economic and philosophy disciplines. The major opinions in those fields are usually someone who wrote/created a seminal work that people follow religiously and dismiss all criticism as "narrow minded" because its not an evidence based discipline. The positivist/post-positivist debate that dominates the study of politics just basically reaffirms your position in my opinion. My degree is in International Politics and one of the big debates that's been raging around the study of International Systems is whether it is really a discipline at all or rather an un-discipline as each school of thought is by this point so distinct and based on so many different initial presuppositions that you can't really analyse a subject using a mixture of two different school of thoughts. Each school of thought by this point pretty much gives you a framework through which to view your subject but those frameworks are incompatible with each other for the most part. The conclusion from some people has been you really can't treat Politics, particularly International Politics as a science at all; not even a soft one and instead you have to take treat it more like a humanity such as History; I know in America they seem to be clinging much more to the positivist scientific interpretation of the study of politics, but in Europe the non-positivist or post-positivist viewpoints as become pretty dominant inside academic circles at least. d3c0y2 fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 15:14
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d3c0y2 posted:The conclusion from some people has been you really can't treat Politics, particularly International Politics as a science at all; not even a soft one and instead you have to take treat it more like a humanity such as History; I know in America they seem to be clinging much more to the positivist scientific interpretation of the study of politics, but in Europe the non-positivist or post-positivist viewpoints as become pretty dominant inside academic circles at least.
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Aug 5, 2014 16:00
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SubG posted:Positivism in the sense you mean is still pretty big among shitheads like Yudkowsky who have read the Foundation books and are pretty sure they're Hari Seldon.  Actually, timeless decision theory reminds me about the "proof" that the future and the past are the same that I read in a Metaphysics textbook. So it's ironic for it to come from a positivist.
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Aug 5, 2014 16:11
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SerialKilldeer posted:I'm imagining two enemy wizards pointing their wands at each other going "I don't care about you!" "I don't care about you MORE! Avada Kedavra!" like some weird kids' game. You know, I remember there was something about Harry "believing in the value of human life" at one point; So when I read that chapter I got the sense Yud was going for a "indifference towards this person's right to exist" type thing. Like, to use the hate method you at least have to realize they're important enough to hate on a personal level, while with the indifference one you have to disregard that then even have any worth as a human being. That would mean in hpmor land to cast avada kedavra whenever you want you have to be a literal sociopath. Which is... actually kind of thematic, and would be a decent plot point if Yudkowsky knew how to actually explain it coherently or with any narrative timing.
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Aug 6, 2014 05:16
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I just have to take a moment to reconcile what this thread is about. A high school drop-out does a lot of self education. That's admirable, many people have the resources open to them with libraries and the internet to teach themselves advance topics. The autodidact (sounds like an enemy from Halo) discovers a type of statistics/philosophy that he thinks can explain all of life's questions and proceed to misinterpret it and use it as the be all end all reason for all his beliefs. He then starts a blog, Less Wrong, where he posts a bunch of fictional stories and articles using his brand of rational atheism philosophy. Pretty much every thing he writes is constructed to agree with his ideals. Slowly a cult starts building up around him, people start treating him like an internet Kant or Heidegger. People are drawn to his arguments, start donating money to his foundations, and reaffirm his beliefs by unquestioningly agreeing with everything he says. After a few years, a shitload of money is flowing into his constantly name changing foundation, Less Wrong gives speeches and attend conferences, has become the focus an a massive internet wiki, and is more or less solidifed as an internet philosopher/genius. This...self educated "genius" now decides to write Harry Potter fanfiction, having never read the books and using the story as a vehicle for his ideas and coming off as more clunky then Ayn Rand. This expands his fanbase drastically, bring in more money and believers, to the point where as of his last update someone is offering a cabin/winter home for him to stay in for free to finish on his "great work". This is a cult. There's no mystical worship, no offerings to a supreme being, but by all definitions this is a cult. Given how prolific it is, either LW will prosper for decades from donations from an ever expanding crowd of pretentious white libertarians, or the well runs dry, he starts getting desperate and sooner or later he's a crazy bearded guy carrying a huge sign out of ACS conventions sayings "AI'S WILL KILL YOU ONLY I CAN HELP".
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Aug 8, 2014 05:37
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There are very much offerings to supreme beings. Every donation lessens the chance that you will be sent into the deepest depths of hell by a wrathful God. Excuse me, be simulated by an advanced AI so it can torture you.
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Aug 8, 2014 07:08
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