Troubling Charity

Chappell has some good points to make about charity.

But...is there a charity that gives out responsibility and initiative? Is there a charity that people would give to if they couldn't tell anyone else that they gave to it? Is there a charity that willfully self-destructs by trying to solve the underlying cause, rather than treating symptoms?

The actual underlying fact is that I can't feel good about giving to any charity I know, which makes me wonder if a product model (warm fuzzies) might be optimal for charities, rather than my naive former understanding. (See also: lotteries. They sell dreams, not odds at cash.)

Having said that explicitly, it makes my former analysis seem so incidental...(Below; possible rationalization warning)

That first one is my biggie. If you're truly committed to utilitarian stranger-welfare ends, in the long term, then the current underclasses will have to support themselves, partly because charity is capricious and unstable, and partly because humans crave independence. Under what conditions is it better to start learning responsibility at a later point than right now?

Oops You Exist

I was thinking about error, and trying to pin down my intuitions on how often humans have succeeded at Y by getting X wrong, when I realized that, you know, natural selection.
Humans per se are just really really really bad non-nuclear mono-cellular proto-life. Literally, physics took a cell, tried to copy it, made a crapton of errors, and ended up with the human species.
Uh...oops you exist.

Just think about that next time you're embarrassed about making a mistake.

Meta-science Dismissed

I was reading about some reasons to distrust meta-analysis, and when I went to evaluate the ideas' merits, I remembered a source of error that I'd read about recently. I enjoy Eades' epistemological takedowns, but this one basically amounts to, "Meta-analyses are usually done wrong."

Eades is correct to dismiss meta-analyses, though perhaps not for the reasons he thinks. (I suspect experience guided him.) Although he has good reasons; a meta-study including methodologically poor studies is going to be a poor meta-study, and a meta-study has to be very careful to include data fairly. If it fails to do either, I would call it a mistake, not a study; it's quite possible for a meta-analysis to do both properly.

This mainly impacts journalistic writing, as they'll happily write on any study that fits their agenda, and generally forget caveats and other subtleties. If you're in a position to read the actual paper, you're in a position to tell if they're cherry-picking data.

However, how many meta-studies do you suppose correct for the fact that neutral or negative studies don't result in papers? I'm not sure how I would check, but I'm going with negative zero. They can't even try to deal with cherry-picking that occurred before the paper is published.

It's a shame. Yesterday, the meta-study was my favourite kind of statistical study.

Flynn Effect vs. Retards?

The clinical cutoff for the mental cripple is an IQ of 70. Flynn noticed that the average - normed to IQ 100 - is getting smarter. There's a qualitative cutoff at the mental cripple stage. Such a person is literally too stupid to support themselves, and require lifelong care. Basically, childcare extends across adulthood.

Setting aside edge cases (which can be statistically smoothed out) is the cutoff actually dropping, as the Flynn effect would predict?

Bayesian 'Reasoning' vs. Judgment

Right, so what is the prior probability that a baby dying is worse than an adult woman dying?

How would you even start to collect such a statistic?

The purpose of Bayesian Reasoning is, ultimately, to make decisions. Beyond even its issues coming from being derived from an existing framework, the problem is that, even if priors can be calculated, all reasoning begins and ends at human judgment and human values. Bayesian calculations are just something that can make the middle part easier. I strongly suspect Reverend Bayes would have been the first one to tell the modern Bayesian this. (Would have replaced the concept 'human values' with 'divinity,' though.)

References to Hume's Ought

My youngest memory of the phenomenon:

"Our form of government and efforts at "emancipation" cannot change the fundamental fact of their existence (there is no way to get to "ought".)"

I often see similar constructions, all error. My apologies, but Hume never proved his is-ought distinction, he simply pointed out many instances of people failing to derive is from ought.

Additionally, it turns out I have a counter-proof.

Assume something has value. Intrinsically, avoiding or preventing this thing results in a less valuable world.

Actually that's a false start, which I'm leaving in to help steer you into the right frame of mind.

Imagine the world has no intrinsic value - that the world 'value' is actually meaningless. (Nihilism is true.)

Imagine the world does in fact have some contingent quantity of value in it - positive or negative.

We must prefer the latter world. The former world renders even our preferences meaningless; it cannot be preferred (or preferred against). In other words, this is another species of Cogito: by our having values, the world is imbued has value...even if our values somehow turn out to be inconsistent.

'Ought' is defined thusly; it is better to do what we ought to do, than not. The world we ought to work toward is more valuable than the world we ought not to.

The problem is not that 'oughts' may not be refined from 'is,' but only in defining 'value' and working out what it picks out.


Now I'm going to perform a check. Famous, prestigious philosopher, John Searle also tackles the is-ought problem. Can he (by proxy) refute my analysis?

Searle says that institutions, which require rules to exist at all, bind the participants by the rules. (Elaborated here, as Searle is not part of the internet generation and hasn't spoken for himself online.)

"For example, when it is my turn to bat I am obligated to step up to the plate." Or, you could fail to continue to play baseball by violating this rule. This is the twofold problem with Searle's analysis. Yes, to perpetuate the baseball game, one is required to adhere to the rules of baseball, but at no point is one obligated, by this analysis, to perpetuate baseball.

In one situation, baseball continues - the bat is swung, the ball is hit or not. In the other, baseball ceases, at least momentarily, perhaps people are angry, or confused. So what? Can we really say, objectively, that one is better than the other? (Hint: maybe.) Let's say you choose not to step up to the plate, for no reason other than that you just realized there's no ought here, and people are angry. Even on pure intuition, is that really so bad? Again: so what?

There will be consequences to each action, and again, so what? Say they find your behaviour so contrary you're off the team, despite it being a casual league. It's not important; baseball is not something anyone can prove you ought to do, nor is it necessary to define pissing people off as 'wrong' to persuade an agent to avoid doing it.

I will ignore the second problem - that from this account, there is no direct link between institutional rules and the definition of 'ought.' Even without this, the oughtness of baseball must be inherited from the more fundamental level, which Searle attempted to circumvent.

"Don't be Evil"

A promise made in ignorance.

I wistfully imagine a day when it's just known that our present companies are evil due to institutional evils, due to emergent evils, and not because some cackling bastard plans to take over the world.

Google can no more avoid these institutional situations than any other corporation. It was never possible that they'd follow their motto. We should let the journalists alone with their fauxtrage when we or they see Google's latest fall from grace.

Still, this site is called Accepting Ignorance, which includes me accepting that of course Google's "Don't Be Evil" will be taken seriously.

Atheists on Consciousness

"But defenders of religion like [Kathryn] Lofton and Karen Armstrong and the not-quite-pro-religion-but-getting-there types like Terry Eagleton invariably attack atheists for their lack of charm, style, empathy and another nebulous quality (I think of it as *mysterianism*) which keeps them from fully appreciating the true nature of religion."

Mysterianism, eh?

Only problem is that this 'nebulous quality,' does, in fact, exist. I think that confirms it; these atheists have the mental equivalent to colourblindness. Indeed, why would their from-scratch philosophy have to account for all facets of my experience?

Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

Ah, a professional saying their profession is the most noble. But when a philosopher says it, it's reliable. Right? Right?

Insert laughter here...

However, philosophy is the best trade for the dilettante. If you want to walk into any workplace and immediately have something worthwhile to say, first learn philosophy. Then you'll know better than to try it.

Black Holes versus Big Bang

The Schwartzchild radius for a mass equal to the entire universe is, I estimate without calculation, larger than one metre.

If the Big Bang theory is true, then the entire universe was once inside its own Schwartzchild radius.

Inside the Schwartzchild radius, colliding with the singularity within finite proper time is inevitable.

The universe is not a singularity.

Conclusion:

Big Bang theory is false.

OR

Black holes do not exist.

QED.

Obviously, objects very similar to black holes exist, as attested by accretion rings and gravitational lenses. The Big Bang may be allowed to be singular because the first event is in many ways special - as long as after any finite time, it is no longer singular, everything is fine.

Ergo, most likely, black holes do not exist. When our physics tells us there is a singularity in nature, we're wrong.

Quick Note on Money as Value

The marginal value of a dollar is smaller for a rich person than a poor person. The fact that rich people will pay more for a good than a poor person is a problem for using money as a measure of things people really value, but socially it is an excellent thing. It is essentially a low-resistance pathway for poor people to extract dollars from rich people.

People making a low wage producing luxury goods they cannot themselves afford is, contra Marx, a social good, in fact nearly a necessity for upward mobility. Simply put, the poor can produce things by inputting their 'true' value, and then selling these things to the rich for an inflated value produced by the rich discounting dollars.

In the end it's another way wealth violates conservation. The dollars the rich part with are, just by virtue of ownership, worth more once the poor have them.

My Bias Versus A Good Idea; Censorship by Glut

This is enormously good for my ego.

Which sadly means I have to be extremely skeptical of it.

It would be nice to hear any comments you might have on the relationship between this idea and this blog, though.

I have a couple comments that I hope are orthogonal to the issue.

"The authors summed it up: "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible.""

Multiple possible effects here. One is that there is a principled threshold below which certain people will never download a song, no matter how popular. A second is that it's all probabilistic, where the goodness of a song is simply one factor among many.

"Since the definition is circular, the premise could never be disproved by any amount of counter-evidence -- even if an act that used to be popular, suddenly falls under the radar, that could be seen as "proof" that they lost whatever magic touch they used to have, not as evidence of the arbitrariness of the market!"

This stinks of anti-market bias. He clearly doesn't realize that any mechanism to improve the situation would simply become part of the market, like the stock market. And I agree; such a service would greatly improve efficiency.

There is one counterfactual, and that is using pure violence; penalties for not sitting on some independent media-judging panel, for example. This would not be part of the market, but simply a distortion.

Personally, for the purpose of essay-like information, I still want Uberfact, but it doesn't look like people actually have the motivation for it. Perhaps I should just write out a full spec just to give it the best chance possible...

Deception, a Few Notes

As I just mentioned on Enigman's blog, it's trivially easy to deceive without lying, especially if you really commit to not lying. (Except, as per usual, in self-defence.)

For personal growth; if you really insist on not lying, your brain eventually learns and adapts. The urge to lie disappears, but is replaced by self-deception; it activates your hypocrisy circuits and simply prevents you from thinking what you actually believe. Hence, I sometimes say some very stupid but very self-serving things.

Deception is wrong because it's hypocritical. Unless you want to be deceived, you cannot morally deceive others. Moreover, since you want your values respected, if they value not being deceived, you cannot deceive them, even if you personally do value being deceived.

The Essential Difference of Consciousness

Reading this. Have to just say something...

Look, the difference between everything that science has been so successful at explaining, and consciousness, is that we know all of science indirectly whereas consciousness is the one thing we know directly. While many properties and processes of consciousness are indeed mostly physical, the fact itself is a different kind of fact than any other fact of which we are aware.

I suppose it may turn out that directness is an irrelevant property, epistemologically. It seems unlikely. It seems rather more likely that the tools that are useful for studying indirectly are completely pointless when trying to study directness, as such tools are themselves a form of indirectness.

This is the distinction the whole zombie debacle is trying to get at.

Cranial Repairs

In the last several years I've been doing repairs on my brain.

I brought down a bunch of functions so I could work on them, but this was at the start of the period, and I quickly found that I couldn't bring them back up again. This was pretty worrying.

It turns out well, in that the reason I couldn't bring them back up was because they really were that badly damaged. Now I've made sufficient progress that I'm getting some of the status lights to flicker green again.

This is trivially good because repairs were made...but the fact that I can make repairs is much more profoundly awesome. It means I can self-diagnose, self-test, and self-repair, without any training or indeed anyone even suggesting that I needed repair.

This likely means that you, (as in you personally) can also do this, if you want.

Do be advised that since my brain was in the same state as Voyager under heavy fire, it's likely that yours is also has serious scars. Don't bring down systems you're critically relying on, even if it looks like they're failing, because you might not be able to bring them back up.

Actually, on second thought, do. The reason you're not allowed to bring them back up is it would only cause more damage. The brain, as brains are, is self-aware, and so if it's not letting you bring stuff back up, this isn't because it's not aware of possible external failures. It's because its assessment showed that the internal damage is too excessive to justify saving whatever it is externally.

Quick Justification of Sensation and Decision

Formally they are called something else, but my email asking if I could call them sensation and decision, (because it rhymes) has not been answered. I therefore conclude there is no known reason for me not to carry on.

Sensation and decision are the two necessary (and probably sufficient) conditions for consciousness. While I refined this out by studying my mind node, I can now see that it can be derived a priori.

With sensation you aren't conscious; the fundamental mysterious property of our lives is sensation itself. Any concept or framework that does not include sensation is irrelevant or at least orthogonal to consciousness. Without decision sensation is pointless; it exists, but cannot act or affect anything. Without decision, sensation would be pure magic, unverifiable at the very conceptual level. It would only arise in cases where the physical costs of maintaining it were zero, and even then we have the problem of having an interaction without physical consequences.

I don't see any particular property of consciousness that is necessary outside of these two. Memory, for instance, is an add-on, as we can see (we think) that people with no short-term memory are still conscious people.

Therefore, I conclude the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness are sensation and decision.

Wittgenstein L-space of the Mind

Pratchett's L-space library metaphor is extremely apt for describing the mind when added to Wittgenstein's.

I scan across the bookshelf, I notice that the dimensionality changes depending on how I look at it. The ways things can connect is different depending on which idea, and often also in what perspective I look at that idea.

There are rules, of course, and these rules are the same everywhere. The number of dimensions simply isn't one of them.