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The third volume of the Less Wrong book Rationality: From AI to Zombies. This book would not have been possible without the help of our Kickstarter backers.
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Followup to: Terminal Values and Instrumental Values When I met the futurist Greg Stock some years ago, he argued that the joy of scientific discovery would s
Followup to: Fake Justification Once upon a time, I met someone who proclaimed himself to be purely selfish, and told me that I should be purely selfish as w
Followup to: Fake Selfishness God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and
Continuation of: Fake Fake Utility Functions Every now and then, you run across someone who has discovered the One Great Moral Principle, of which all other v
Followup to: Humans in Funny Suits This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable s
Followup to: Anthropomorphic Optimism, Three Fallacies of Teleology After spending a decade or two living inside a mind, you might think you knew a bit about
Followup to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind People ask me, "What will Artificial Intelligences be like? What will they do? Tell us your amazing story
Followup to: No Universally Compelling Arguments, Passing the Recursive Buck, Wrong Questions, A Priori Why do I believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow? Becau
Followup to: Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom In " Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", I concluded that it's okay to use induction to reason about the probability that induction will work in the future, given that it's worked in the past; or to use Occam's Razor to conclude that the simplest explanation for why Occam's Razor works is that the universe itself is fundamentally simple.
Followup to: The Design Space of Minds-in-General, Ghosts in the Machine, A Priori What is so terrifying about the idea that not every possible mind might agre
Followup to: No Universally Compelling Arguments, Passing the Recursive Buck Lewis Carroll, who was also a mathematician, once wrote a short dialogue called What the Tortoise said to Achilles. If you have not yet read this ancient classic, consider doing so now.
Followup to: Anthropomorphic Optimism Once upon a time there was a strange little species-that might have been biological, or might have been synthetic, and pe
Followup to: The Mind Projection Fallacy, Variable Question Fallacy I have previously spoken of the ancient, pulp-era magazine covers that showed a bug-eyed m
Followup to: No Universally Compelling Arguments To those who say "Nothing is real," I once replied, "That's great, but how does the nothing work?" Suppose you
Followup to: The Moral Void, Joy in the Merely Real, No Universally Compelling Arguments, Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, Does Your Morality Care What You Think?, Existential Angst Factory, ... If you say, "Killing people is wrong," that's morality.
Followup to: Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, Rebelling Within Nature Years ago, Eliezer1999 was convinced that he knew nothing about morality. For a
Followup to: The Meaning of Right Toby Ord commented: Eliezer, I've just reread your article and was wondering if this is a good quick summary of your positi
Followup to: Anthropomorphic Optimism, Superexponential Conceptspace, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, Unnatural Categories 'We can design intelligent machine
It occurred to me one day that the standard visualization of the Prisoner's Dilemma is fake. The core of the Prisoner's Dilemma is this symmetric payoff matrix
Followup to: Humans in Funny Suits "Mirror neurons" are neurons that are active both when performing an action and observing the same action-for example, a neuron that fires when you hold up a finger or see someone else holding up a finger.
Followup to: Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone), Existential Angst Factory There's a class of prophecy that runs: "In the Future, machines will do all the
Every Utopia ever constructed-in philosophy, fiction, or religion-has been, to one degree or another, a place where you wouldn't actually want to live. I am no
Followup to: The Fun Theory Sequence, Fake Fake Utility Functions, Joy in the Merely Good, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, No Un
Followup to: Thou Art Godshatter, Joy in the Merely Real, Is Morality Given?, Rebelling Within Nature How, oh how, did an unloving and mindless universe, coug
Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds
Followup to: Scope Insensitivity "Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he had saved the whole world." -- The Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5 It's a beautiful thou
Followup to: But There's Still A Chance Right?, Beautiful Probability Choose between the following two options:1A. $24,000, with certainty.1B. 33/34 chance
Continuation of: The Allais Paradox Huh! I was not expecting that response. Looks like I ran into an inferential distance. It probably helps in interpreting
Followup to: Circular Altruism. Response to: Knowing your argumentative limitations, OR "one [rationalist's] modus ponens is another's modus tollens." (Stil
Followup to: Tsuyoku Naritai, Circular Altruism In the gestalt of (ahem) Japanese fiction, one finds this oft-repeated motif: Power comes from having somethin
Followup to: Should We Ban Physics? It may come as a surprise to some readers of this blog, that I do not always advocate using probabilities. Or rather, I d
Followup to: Something to Protect The following may well be the most controversial dilemma in the history of decision theory: A superintelligence from another galaxy, whom we shall call Omega, comes to Earth and sets about playing a strange little game.
Followup to: Affective Death Spirals, My Wild and Reckless Youth My parents always used to downplay the value of intelligence. And play up the value of-effort
Followup to: My Childhood Death Spiral Yesterday I covered the young Eliezer's affective death spiral around something that he called "intelligence". Eliezer 1996, or even Eliezer 1999 for that matter, would have refused to try and put a mathematical definition-consciously, deliberately refused. Indeed, he would have been loath to put any definition on "intelligence" at all.
Followup to: My Best and Worst Mistake My father used to say that if the present system had been in place a hundred years ago, automobiles would have been outl
Followup to: My Childhood Death Spiral, Raised in Technophilia My Childhood Death Spiral described the core momentum carrying me into my mistake, an affective death spiral around something that Eliezer 1996 called "intelligence". I was also a technophile, pre-allergized against fearing the future.
Followup to: My Childhood Death Spiral, My Best and Worst Mistake, A Prodigy of Refutation "There speaks the sheer folly of callow youth; the rashness of an ignorance so abysmal as to be possible only to one of your ephemeral race..."
Followup to: The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth When we last left Eliezer1997, he believed that any superintelligence would automatically do what was "right", and
Followup to: That Tiny Note of Discord, The Importance of Saying "Oops" When we last left Eliezer 2000, he was just beginning to investigate the question of how to inscribe a morality into an AI. His reasons for doing this don't matter at all, except insofar as they happen to historically demonstrate the importance of perfectionism.
Followup to: Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth In yesterday's episode, Eliezer2001 is fighting a rearguard action against the truth. Only graduall
Followup to: The Proper Use of Humility, Tsuyoku Naritai (At this point, I fear that I must recurse into a subsequence; but if all goes as planned, it really w
Followup to: My Naturalistic Awakening, Above-Average AI Scientists In the years before I met that would-be creator of Artificial General Intelligence (with a
Followup to: The Magnitude of His Own Folly Today's post is a tad gloomier than usual, as I measure such things. It deals with a thought experiment I invented to smash my own optimism, after I realized that optimism had misled me.
Followup to: The Magnitude of His Own Folly I remember (dimly, as human memories go) the first time I self-identified as a "Bayesian". Someone had just asked
In Orthodox Judaism there is a saying: "The previous generation is to the next one as angels are to men; the next generation is to the previous one as donkeys
Hunter-gatherer tribes are usually highly egalitarian (at least if you're male)-the all-powerful tribal chieftain is found mostly in agricultural societies, rarely in the ancestral environment. Among most hunter-gatherer tribes, a hunter who brings in a spectacular kill will carefully downplay the accomplishment to avoid envy.
"No! Try not! Do, or do not. There is no try." -Yoda Years ago, I thought this was yet another example of Deep Wisdom that is actually quite stupid.
Followup to: Trying to Try "When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found." -John McCarthy I first watched Star Wars IV-VI when I was very young. Se
Followup to: Use the Try Harder, Luke "Persevere." It's a piece of advice you'll get from a whole lot of high achievers in a whole lot of disciplines. I didn
Followup to: Trying to Try, Tsuyoku Naritai "It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the
Followup to: Make An Extraordinary Effort, On Doing the Impossible, Beyond the Reach of God The virtue of tsuyoku naritai, "I want to become stronger", is to a
Sunlight enriched air already alive with curiosity, as dawn rose on Brennan and his fellow students in the place to which Jeffreyssai had summoned them. They sa
To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian: Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that m
Previously in series: Raising the Sanity WaterlineFollowup to: Teaching the Unteachable To teach people about a topic you've labeled "rationality", it helps f
Previously in series: A Sense That More Is Possible Someone deserves a large hattip for this, but I'm having trouble remembering who; my records don't seem to
Previously in series: Epistemic Viciousness Robyn Dawes, author of one of the original papers from Judgment Under Uncertainty and of the book Rational Choice i
Previously in series: Schools Proliferating Without EvidenceFollowup to: A Sense That More Is Possible I strongly suspect that there is a possible art of rati
Previously in series: Rationality Verification From when I was still forced to attend, I remember our synagogue's annual fundraising appeal. It was a simple en
Followup to: Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for f
Previously in series: Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate In the Ultimatum Game, the first player chooses how to split $10 between themselves and the second player, a
Previously in series: Your Price for Joining Perhaps the single largest voluntary institution of our modern world-bound together not by police and taxation, no
Previously in series: Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?Followup to: Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute? I am generally suspicious of envying crazy groups o
Previously in series: Church vs. Taskforce It is a non-so-hidden agenda of this site, Less Wrong, that there are many causes which benefit from the spread of r
Previously in series: Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes When you consider that our grouping instincts are optimized for 50-person hunter-gatherer ban
Previously in series: Helpless Individuals Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational,
Previously in series: Money: The Unit of Caring Yesterday: There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour vo
The bystander effect, also known as bystander apathy, is that larger groups are less likely to act in emergencies - not just individually, but collectively. Put an experimental subject alone in a room and let smoke start coming up from under the door. 75% of the subjects will leave to report it.
Previously in series: Beware of Other-Optimizing Followup to: Bystander Apathy Yesterday I convered the bystander effect, aka bystander apathy: given a fixed problem situation, a group of bystanders is actually less likely to act than a single bystander.
Followup to: Rationality is Systematized Winning Yesterday I said: "Rationality is systematized winning." "But," you protest, "the reasonable person doesn't a
Previously in series: Collective Apathy and the InternetFollowup to: Helpless Individuals Previously: Let's say we have two groups of soldiers. In group 1,
Previously in series: Mandatory Secret Identities I've noticed a serious problem in which aspiring rationalists vastly overestimate their ability to optimize o
Once upon a time, Seth Roberts took a European vacation and found that he started losing weight while drinking unfamiliar-tasting caloric fruit juices. Now supp
There are three great besetting sins of rationalists in particular, and the third of these is underconfidence. Michael Vassar regularly accuses me of this sin,
Previously in series: Well-Kept Gardens Die By PacifismFollowup to: My Way I have said a thing or two about rationality, these past months. I have said a thi
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