Custers & Aarts have a paper in the July 2 Science called "The Unconscious Will: How the pursuit of goals operates outside of conscious awareness".  It reviews work indicating that people's brains make decisions and set goals without the brains' "owners" ever being consciously aware of them.

A famous early study is Libet et al. 1983, which claimed to find signals being sent to the fingers before people were aware of deciding to move them.  This is a dubious study; it assumes that our perception of time is accurate, whereas in fact our brains shuffle our percept timeline around in our heads before presenting it to us, in order to provide us with a sequence of events that is useful to us (see Dennett's Consciousness Explained).  Also, Trevina & Miller repeated the test, and also looked at cases where people did not move their fingers; and found that the signal measured by Libet et al. could not predict whether the fingers would move.

Fortunately, the flaws of Libet et al. were not discovered before it spawned many studies showing that unconscious priming of concepts related to goals causes people to spend more effort pursuing those goals; and those are what Custers & Aarts review.  In brief:  If you expose someone, even using subliminal messages, to pictures, words, etc., closely-connected to some goals and not to others, people will work harder towards those goals without being aware of it.

We’re holding the Chicago meetup discussed here on Sunday, August 1, 2010 at 2:00 pm. The tentative location is the Corner Bakery at the corner of State and Cedar (1121 N. State St.), but we’re also happy to move the meetup further up to the North side as has been previously discussed, if anyone has a suggestion for a good venue.

We will post any updates here as well as to our Chicago LW meetup Google group. Please comment here if you plan to attend. We'll have a table-top sign to help you identify us.

We’re looking forward to a second successful Chicago meetup and hope to see some old and new faces!

Creating Friendly AI seems to require us humans to either solve most of the outstanding problems in philosophy, or to solve meta-philosophy (i.e., what is the nature of philosophy, how do we practice it, and how should we program an AI to do it?), and to do that in an amount of time measured in decades. I'm not optimistic about our chances of success, but out of these two approaches, the latter seems slightly easier, or at least less effort has already been spent on it. This post tries to take a small step in that direction, by asking a few questions that I think are worth investigating or keeping in the back of our minds, and generally raising awareness and interest in the topic.

We are holding a Less Wrong meetup at Indie Coffee this Wednesday the 28th at 6PM. Wednesday is waffle day at Indie.

Confirmed attendees include me, Will_Newsome, fiddlemath, and orthonormal. Expect a casual, friendly conversation. All are welcome. Really, everyone is welcome, please don't be intimidated because you don't have enough Less Wrong karma. I'll be on the road until I get to Madison and may not be checking Less Wrong regularly, so feel free to give me a call/text: 412-480-4060. Cheers.

This Saturday (i.e., the 24th, that is, tomorrow) is the peak of the Floating Festival.

Michael Vassar says:  "I'm going to be speaking tomorrow (= Saturday July 24th) at 4PM at Bay Area Mensa, in Mountain View, on the scientific method, the history of science, and how to think rationally about most scientific controversies including the Singularity.  Less Wrongers are invited to attend.  Interested people should email David Verdirame."

The Open Science Summit is July 29-31, in Berkeley.

And as ever, the Singularity Summit approaches on August 14-15 in San Francisco.  Now featuring James Randi, Irene Pepperberg, and John Tooby.

Related to: Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons!

I can't really recommend Andrew Koob's The Root of Thought. It's poorly written, poorly proofread, lacking much more information than is in the Scientific American review, and comes across as about one part neuroscience to three parts angry rant. But it does present an interesting hypothesis and an interesting case study on a major failure of rationality.

Only about ten percent of the brain is made of neurons; the rest is a diverse group of cells called "glia". "Glia" is Greek for glue, because the scientists who discovered them decided that, since they were in the brain and they weren't neurons, they must just be there to glue the neurons together. Since then, new discoveries have assigned glial cells functions like myelination, injury repair, immune defense, and regulation of blood flow: all important, but mostly things only a biologist could love. The Root of Thought argues that glial cells, especially a kind called astrocytes, are also important in some of the higher functions of thought, including memory, cognition, and maybe even creativity. This is interesting to neuroscientists, and the story of how it was discovered is also interesting to us as aspiring rationalists.

This is the first part of a mini-sequence of posts on zero-sum bias and the role that it plays in our world today.

One of the most pernicious of all human biases is zero-sum bias. A situation involving a collection of entities is zero-sum if one entity's gain is another's loss, whereas a situation is positive-sum if the entities involved can each achieve the best possible outcome by cooperating with one another. Zero-sum bias is the tendency to systematically assume that positive-sum situations are zero-sum situations. This bias is arguably the major obstacle to a Pareto-efficient society. As such, it's very important that we work to overcome this bias (both in ourselves and in broader society).

Here I'll place this bias in context and speculate on its origin.

Related to: The Conjunction Fallacy, Conjunction Controversy

The heuristics and biases research program in psychology has discovered many different ways that humans fail to reason correctly under uncertainty.  In experiment after experiment, they show that we use heuristics to approximate probabilities rather than making the appropriate calculation, and that these heuristics are systematically biased. However, a tweak in the experiment protocols seems to remove the biases altogether and shed doubt on whether we are actually using heuristics. Instead, it appears that the errors are simply an artifact of how our brains internally store information about uncertainty. Theoretical considerations support this view.

EDIT: The view presented here is controversial in the heuristics and biases literature; see Unnamed's comment on this post below.

EDIT 2: The author no longer holds the views presented in this post. See this comment.

A common example of the failure of humans to reason correctly under uncertainty is the conjunction fallacy. Consider the following question:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

What is the probability that Linda is:

(a) a bank teller

(b) a bank teller and active in the feminist movement

In a replication by Gigerenzer, 91% of subjects rank (b) as more probable than (a), saying that it is more likely that Linda is active in the feminist movement AND a bank teller than that Linda is simply a bank teller (1993). The conjunction rule of probability states that the probability of two things being true is less than or equal to the probability of one of those things being true. Formally, P(A & B) ≤ P(A). So this experiment shows that people violate the conjunction rule, and thus fail to reason correctly under uncertainty. The representative heuristic has been proposed as an explanation for this phenomenon. To use this heuristic, you evaluate the probability of a hypothesis by comparing how "alike" it is to the data. Someone using the representative heuristic looks at the Linda question and sees that Linda's characteristics resemble those of a feminist bank teller much more closely than that of just a bank teller, and so they conclude that Linda is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller.

This is the standard story, but are people really using the representative heuristic in the Linda problem? Consider the following rewording of the question:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

There are 100 people who fit the description above. How many of them are:

(a) bank tellers

(b) bank tellers and active in the feminist movement

Notice that the question is now strictly in terms of frequencies. Under this version, only 22% of subjects rank (b) as more probable than (a) (Gigerenzer, 1993). The only thing that changed is the question that is asked; the description of Linda (and the 100 people) remains unchanged, so the representativeness of the description for the two groups should remain unchanged. Thus people are not using the representative heuristic - at least not in general.

What is your time worth? Economists generally assume that your time is accurately valued by the market, because time can be converted into money (via wage labor) and back again (by hiring people to, e.g, do your chores for you).  In this article, I argue that the economists are wrong, and that, as a result, we have some important questions to ask ourselves about the value of time:

(1) How would a rational person measure the value of an hour of her time?

(2) Can time invested now be meaningfully traded off against time available later?

(3) How much of your time should be spent assessing whether you are spending your time well?

Executive Summary (tl;dr)

The economists are wrong because, on the supply side, it's difficult to supply extra paid labor on a timescale of weeks or months; and, on the demand side, there are practical and aesthetic limits to how much extra time you can buy for yourself.  Thus, a rational person will not assume that her time is worth what the market says it is worth; your time is usually more valuable (to you) than it is to the market, because there is a market failure for medium-sized chunks of your time.  One way to get a sense of what your time is worth to you is to measure your ability to achieve goals or satisfy desires, but not all time is created equal -- an hour that you spend programming code may be implicitly supported by several hours of sleeping, eating, desk-cleaning, and other homeostatic tasks. Attempting to normalize the value of your time against a hypothetical "maximum productivity" level might yield more accurate information than simply checking your brain's cached value for how satisfying an experience was in hindsight, because memory focuses on events associated with intense emotions and thus often fails to adequately account for the cost of wasted time. People who spend essentially no time computing their ability to achieve their ultimate goals are probably wasting a lot of time, but the cost (in time) of evaluating your own productivity is computationally intractable; ignorance about ignorance is recursive and cannot easily be eliminated from complex chaotic systems like your life.

Followup to: The Many Faces of Status (This post co-authored by Morendil and Kaj Sotala - see note at end of post.)

In brief: status is a measure of general purpose optimization power in complex social domains, mediated by "power conversions" or "status conversions".

What is status?

Kaj previously proposed a definition of status as "the ability to control (or influence) the group", but several people pointed out shortcomings in that. One can influence a group without having status, or have status without having influence. As a glaring counterexample, planting a bomb is definitely a way of influencing a group's behavior, but few would consider it to be a sign of status.

But the argument of status as optimization power can be made to work with a couple of additional assumptions. By "optimization power", recall that we mean "the ability to steer the future in a preferred direction". In general, we recognize optimization power after the fact by looking at outcomes. Improbable outcomes that rank high in an agent's preferences attest to that agent's power. For the purposes of this post, we can in fact use "status" and "power" interchangeably.

In the most general sense, status is the general purpose ability to influence a group. An analogy to intelligence is useful here. A chess computer is very skilled at the domain of chess, but has no skill in any other domain. Intuitively, we feel like a chess computer is not intelligent, because it has no cross-domain intelligence. Likewise, while planting bombs is a very effective way of causing certain kinds of behavior in groups, intuitively it doesn't feel like status because it can only be effectively applied to a very narrow set of goals. In contrast, someone with high status in a social group can push the group towards a variety of different goals. We call a certain type of general purpose optimization power "intelligence", and another type of general purpose optimization power "status". Yet the ability to make excellent chess moves is still a form of intelligence, but only a very narrow one.