LessWrong 2.0 Reader

When this article came out, I put a bit of money into alternate cryptocurrencies that I thought might have upside. They are now worth less than I invested.

I think it's good to review how you did in the past, but it's important not to overlearn specific lessons. In retrospect, I think that this article should have put more emphasis on that point.

I thought Bitcoin, specifically, was a bubble/pyramid scheme. I still think so, as well as thinking it's a colossal waste of energy.

Obviously, that doesn't mean I couldn't have gotten rich by buying it, or that I wouldn't want to do so. And I've also adjusted my beliefs; I think I understand how it has failed to crash, and so I could imagine it continuing to have something like its current value for even 5 or 10 years more.

But it is very, very hard for me to imagine a world in which I am able to make a large pile dollars from something I so deeply distrust and dislike. And I don't think "I coulda been rich" is an outstandingly compelling reason to radically update my values and/or epistemology.

That depends on how strict your criteria are for evaluating “similarity”. Often concepts that intuitively evoke a similar “feel” can differ in important ways, or even fail to be talking about the same type of thing, much less the same thing.

In any case, how do you feel law thinking (as characterized by Eliezer) relates to the momentum-fitness distinction (as characterized by ricraz)? It may turn out that those two concepts are in fact linked, but in such a case it would nonetheless be helpful to make the linking explicit.

Another relativistic argument against time flowing is thatsimultaneity is only defined relative to a reference frame. Therefore,there is no unified present which is supposed to be what is flowing.

Relativity does not make the arrow of time relative to observer. Events in one's future light cone remain in their future light cone also from a perspective of someone else.

To summarize my confusion, does CDT require that the agent unconditionally believe in perfect free will independent of history (and, ironically, with no causality for the exercise of will)? If so, that should be the main topic of dispute - the frequency of actual case where it makes bad predictions, not that it makes bad decisions in ludicrously-unlikely-and-perhaps-impossible situations.

Sorta, yes. CDT requires that you choose actions not by thinking "conditional on my doing A, what happens?" but rather by some other method (there are different variants) such as "For each causal graph that I think could represent the world, what happens when I intervene (in Pearl's sense) on the node that is my action, to set it to A?)" or "Holding fixed the probability of all variables not causally downstream of my action, what happens if I do A?"

In the first version, notice that you are choosing actions by imagining a Pearl-style intervention into the world--but this is not something that actually happens; the world doesn't actually contain such interventions.

In the second version, well, notice that you are choosing actions by imagining possible scenarios that aren't actually possible--or at least, you are assigning the wrong probabilities to them. ("holding fixed the probability of all variables not causally downstream of my action...")

So one way to interpret CDT is that it believes in crazy stuff like hardcore incompatibilist free will. But the more charitable way to interpret it is that it doesn't believe in that stuff, it just acts as if it does, because it thinks that's the rational way to act. (And they have plenty of arguments for why CDT is the rational way to act, e.g. the intuition pump "If the box is already either full or empty and you can't change that no matter what you do, then no matter what you do you'll get more money by two-boxing, so..."

My economics department is hiring a macroeconomist this year.A huge number of applicants are submitting statements of teaching and diversity in which they describe how if hired they will promote diversity in their teaching.

Even if most people on LW are probably familiar with the abbreviation, someone may come here following a link from elsewhere.

Have a look at www.blinkist.com, it sounds like what you're looking for, there's a website and a phone app. "Founded in 2012 by four friends, Blinkist now connects 6-million readers worldwide to the biggest ideas from bestselling nonfiction via 15-minute audio and text."

Also, this Atlantic article had a good comparison of Blinkist vs Wikipedia vs Reading The Book:www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/please-be-brief/417894/

FYI, the date on the website and the email are different because of time zone differences. This may be confusing for new members not used the the schedule.

I don't think backwards causation is absurd, more or less for the reasons you sketch. Another minor reason: Some philosophers like "effective strategy" accounts of causation, according to which we define causation via its usefulness for agents trying to achieve goals. On these accounts, backwards causation is pretty trivial--just suppose you live in a deterministic universe and your goal is to "make the state of the universe at the Big Bang such that I eat breakfast tomorrow." The philosopher Gary Drescher argues something similar in Good and Real if I recall correctly.

That said, I don't think we are really explaining or de-confusing anything if we appeal to backwards causation to understand Newcomb's Problem or argue for a particular solution to it.