The Bayesian Conspiracy

Alonzo blogs at The Atheist Ethicist Common Sense Atheism’s ULTIMATE Desirism FAQ Link to The Atheist Ethicist’s overview of Desirism Wikia page on Desirism    

Doing the Right Thing Wikipedia on: Consequentialism Ethical Egoism Deontology Divine Command Theory Moral Relativism Virtue Ethics Care Ethics Euthyphro’s Dilemma Objectivism Katrina mentioned that she’d read that the impact of child rape is less severe on cultures where this practice is typical. It turns out is was a comment on this LessWrong post and the validity of this statement i...

The conspirators discuss a minor setback. The Safety Pin movement Scott Alexander on your model of the electorate A slightly-more-articulate version of Eneasz’s  decision to change the deep past now Eliezer Yudkowsky on the optimism of Trump voters  

Considerations on Procreation Not having kids – is it like drinking unicorn blood, in that you’ll lead a cursed life, a half-life ? How The Woman Got Her Period (“The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hun...

Subjects the politicians aren’t talking about, that they really should be talking about. Links! UN resolution on antibiotics US banning of antibiotics in soap Guy with potentially antibiotic resistant tuberculosis (that ended up not so dangerous) sued CDC . More drug resistant tuberculosis! I nternet access in prison is pretty limited . :/ Mortality rate for people infected with ebola . Up t...

Note: Oops! We accidentally used a crummy laptop microphone. Audio is lower quality for this episode.  Links: Politics is the Mind Killer  on Less Wrong “ Chimpanzee Politics “: A book about two chimpanzees competing to run the “club of chimpanzees” featured on HPMoR Predictive power of party politics: one position can predict 85% of other, unrelated positions. Elizabeth Edwards , a Ne...

We speak with GMU economist Robin Hanson. (note that the audio improves significantly when we switch mics at ~20min) Robin blogs at Overcoming Bias We discuss his recent book,  The Age of Em Robin Hanson discusses prediction markets in greater length at Sintetia Nate Silver & co. predict elections (among other things) at FiveThirtyEight Wikipedia’s summary of The Malthusian Trap Scott Al...

Feelings – should we have them? The Conspiracy decides! This American Life episode about Testosterone Julia Galef’s presentation on The Straw Vulcan . Also – a text summary of same Less Wrong article: “ Feeling Rational ” Steven Universe is  The Best! Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom against empathy Less Wrong article: “ Scope Insensitivity ” “One death is a Tr...

We addressed a couple things that we missed last time, and got carried away. Katrina referenced the book “ Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? ” Chimps have amazing flash-memory AIs can  fly our fighter jets better than we can A partial list of animals by neuron-count . OpenWorm – Building the First Digital Lifeform The Valley of Bad Rationality Ozy re: Rationalist...

Katrina referenced the book “ Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? ” Wiki page about the author . See also, wikipedia on animal cognition . About the crow facial recognition and warning study . Prairie dog language study . The thought experiment of Torture vs Dust Specks . The Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis . Also, like most good things, discussed in Harry Potter a...

Steve ( @youngidealist on twitter) talks to us about Street Epistemology The Street Epistemology website , which has been significantly updated and expanded since we recorded this episode. Looking nice! The Street Epistemology book – A Manual For Creating Atheists Short text interview  with Peter Boghossian by Sam Harris Practice and/or learn at blab.im  (none of the Conspirators have used t...

It’s about modeling agents making decisions, not game design. – EB …but you can also apply game theory to game design. – KS Yvain’s sequence of posts introducing Game Theory Defecting is MADE OF FIRE Wikipedia on Dr. Axelrod’s Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament Over the years the Less Wrong community has run a few PD tournaments of their own, with some...

We covered ten episodes of feedback in one hour (and a half)! After this, we’ll reply to comments regularly at the end of episodes. Comment either at the website (www.thebayesianconspiracy.com)?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss or at the subreddit ( www.reddit.com/r/thebayesianconspiracy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss ). Or email us – bayesianconspiracypodcast at gmail. TONS of links this...

Is it rational to vote? We realize the audio quality when we have live guests is terrible, we’re working to fix that now, hopefully things will start sounding better very soon. Thanks for bearing with us! Eneasz wants to say that his understanding of Timeless Decision Theory is likely flawed, because it is big and complicated and he is small and simple. His interpretation of it in this episo...

The second half of our conversation on polyamory, because we talked and talked and the episode went long. As with Part 1, positions of other parties, including current and former partners, are very likely misrepresented in this episode. Links: More Than Two – An excellent online resource to ethical non-monogamy. It is also the title of a book by the creator of the website, Franklin Veaux along wit...

What’s Polyamory got to do with Rationalism anyway? Be Advised : 1.) This episode contains curse words. 2.) Always, but especially when talking about sensitive, nuanced issues like human relationships, it’s important to note that we are only speaking for ourselves. Positions of other parties, including current and former partners, may be misrepresented in this episode. Links! More Than...

We speak with Brian Dunning, best known as the host/creator of the Skeptoid podcast. He has also created Here Be Dragons , a 40-minute introduction to critical thinking. Mentioned in this episode: The Vanishing Village of Angikuni Lake Chris Hallquist on Trusting Expert Consensus The unusual story of the discovery that H. Pylori causes ulcers  (and a different take on why the establishment was so...

[ content warning:  suicide, human extinction. Might be a bad idea to listen to if you suffer suicidal tendencies.] We speak to Jason, who would take extreme measures to end all suffering.  However, lacking extreme powers, he recommends doing good as efficiently as possible, and offers these resources: Givewell  – researches charities for effectiveness. 80,000 hours – Have a greater so...

The Conspirators talk cryonics. Spoiler alert, they are signed up (and signing up soon) for the big freeze. Katrina is a cryocrastinator. The in-depth cryonics article that sparked this conversation, “ Why Cryonics Makes Sense ” by Tim :  Wait But Why Essay Steven mentioned the agent he went through:  Rudi Hoffman’s Website The two major US companies:  Cryonics Institute FAQ Page...

An ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) episode. Our answers when someone asks “What is Rationality anyway?” and they have a bit of time. (If they don’t have time, Eneasz’s Elevator Pitch is “Rationality is a systematized method of making your beliefs more closely match reality”) Eliezer’s Sequences of Blog Posts on Rationality In ebook form – Rationality...

Patrick Chapin (of Top Level Podcast ) joins us as a guest-host to talk about AlphaGo’s recent victory over Go master Lee Sedol . We get a primer on how AlphaGo works, a recap of all five games in the match, and thoughts on what this means. (The airing of this episode was pushed up, so we can pretend to be sorta-timely) Links: Wikipedia Bots John Henry The NSA’s Skynet Program A tribe...

We welcomed the one , the only , Eliezer Yudkowsky  to the Bayesian Conspiracy for a quick chat. His latest project is Arbital , an ambitious effort to solve online discussion . It is focusing on solving online explanation.  They want to do for difficult explanations – and someday, complicated arguments in general – what Wikipedia did for centralizing humanity’s recounting of agr...

Can the Sanity Waterline be raised? Should it be? And just what does that mean anyway? Based on the post “ Raising The Sanity Waterline ” Also relevant to today’s discussion: Joy In The Merely Real , Christian Bale Did Nothing Wrong , and  You Kant Dismiss Universalizability  (particularly section III) Link to the TAM discussion panel .

We spent the hour trying to answer a question posed to Eneasz regarding his work with the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Podcast. Here is the query (with pleasantries removed): Is there evidence that a rational approach to decision making, either on the personal or institutional level, will be more likely to achieve desired outcomes? For example, HPMOR implies that a perfectly rationa...