My belief system about the nature of the universe may be in crisis

[okosut]

Two posts in two days. Try not to faint.

My provocative subject, while definitely true, is true only in the most literal sense; not perhaps in the way it sounds like it is. Let me explain.

Worldview Manager is a program based on an idea by Scott Aaronson. The idea is that it asks you a bunch of questions about your opinion on a variety of topics

Comments

[thegreatgonz]

I hit a similar issue when I took the strong AI quiz. I didn't chase it all the way down, but the issue seemed to be that it was simultaneously interpreting "It is possible for one's mind to exist outside of one's material body" in two different ways:

• It is possible for a mind to exist outside the body it was born in
  
• It is possible for a mind to exist with no physical substrate at all
  

Since I have different levels of agreement with those two statements, it kept insisting I had a contradiction.

I also had exactly the same situation with children voting. My overall impression is that this tool can't teach me anything interesting about my views, because the conflicts all arise from semantic quibbles and ambiguous meanings, not genuine logical contradiction.

[okosut]

It seems to me that, at least in principle, you can design a version of this thing that resolves the semantic quibbles and ambiguous meanings, and that would perhaps be useful. I've no doubt that they're still improving it, and my quantum problem may be a version of the two different meanings thing which they'll eventually fix.

I mean, I actually think the point about children voting is a fair one. I think it's reasonable to say that if you believe that children should not be able to vote, then you believe that, in at least one circumstance, different groups should be given different rights. Maybe that's okay though, and this is one of these general principles, like free speech, that we should maintain as much as we can, but still restrict on rare occasions. But I do find that most arguments I can come up with for denying children the right to vote apply equally well to misinformed, exploitable adults.

[thegreatgonz]

But I do find that most arguments I can come up with for denying children the right to vote apply equally well to misinformed, exploitable adults.

FWIW, I support withholding the right to vote from only two classes of people: noncitizens and people under the age of majority. I support the latter restriction because children are unique in being a large, objectively-defined group whose votes could easily be coerced or suborned, and used to manipulate an election. I don't know of any other group that answers to that description.

[okosut]

Yeah, I guess I basically agree with that argument, but there's still some aspect of it that bothers me. Pretty much any group is going to have individuals whose votes could be easily coerced or suborned. I certainly agree that this fraction is larger for children than adults. But say 70% of those under the age of 18 could be easily coerced (assuming that someone is either "easily" or "hardly", I guess). That still means that there's the 30% who would be entirely responsible voters who we're denying the right to. Which is okay, perhaps, because we're aiding democracy by keeping the 70% away. But, then, where do you draw the line? If 70% of a group is too much, how about 60%? Of course, this all comes down to lines that you have to draw somewhere, and anywhere you draw them is going to be fairly arbitrary and imperfect (mystery_fish makes this point well). Plus, you have the problem that those outside the group in question have an incentive to overestimate the fraction of easily coerced people in the target group. This, I take it, is one of the

[vfish]

Your confusion arises from the assumption that each of the statements is true (|T>) xor false (|F>). However, these are quantum mechanics statements, so you have to allow for the possibility that the two eigenstates are actually 1/sqrt(2) (|T> +/- |F>).

[okosut]

Hehehe. Sadly, this may be true. I think statement D, for example, is neither true nor false. It's just nonsensical.

[mollishka]

My problem with this is, I think, the definition of "quantum mechanics." It's a mathematically sound (and elegant) description of the observations. The entire universe as a single wave function is also a nice description, but C is tricky in that it doesn't distinguish between the description and the being.

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