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Open Thread: October 2009
Hear ye, hear ye: commence the discussion of things which have not been discussed.
As usual, if a discussion gets particularly good, spin it off into a posting.
(For this Open Thread, I'm going to try something new: priming the pump with a few things I'd like to see discussed.)
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Comments (425)
For you non-techies who'd like to be titillated, here's a second bleg about some very speculative and fringey ideas I've been pondering:
What do you think the connection between motivation & sex/masturbation is?
Here's my thought: it's something of a mystery to me why homosexuals seem to be so well represented among the eminent geniuses of Europe & America. The suggestion I like best is that they're not intrinsically more creative thanks to 'female genes' or whatever, but that they can't/won't participate in the usual mating rat-race and so in a Freudian manner channel their extra time into their art or science.
But then I did some googling looking for research on this, and though I didn't turn up much (it's a strangely hard area to search), I ran into some interesting pages on the links between motivation & dopamine, and dopamine & sex:
Which suggest to me an entirely different mechanism: it's not that they have more time, it's that they are having much less sex (even if only with their hand), and this depletes dopamine less & leaving motivation strong to do other things they'd like to do. (Cryptonomicon readers might also be familiar with this theory from one memorable section with Randy.)
So: does anyone know any research testing this? As I said, I couldn't find much.
You can narrow that down to: Sexually frustrated people have more motivation to do other things. This makes evolutionary sense. People who are sex-starved want to raise their status to better their odds.
What suggests that homosexuals are getting less sex than heterosexuals in the first place? Naively they are probably having more sex, and more sexual partners than median heterosexual males.
Also, what suggests homosexuals are overrepresented among "eminent geniuses"? Let's use some objective benchmark - how many Nobel Prize winners were homosexuals, and how it compares with society average?
Along with what orthonormal said, I definitely think that up until ~1960, the Nobel Prize committee was very careful, in all categories, not to give the award to a person of "ill repute", which includes, among other things, being gay. So Nobel Prize winnings wouldn't be informative.
However, you could control for this by checking out how many men won the prize before 1960, and would be suspected of being gay (i.e. old and never-married).
Can you think of a better list, or is the entire question non-empirical in practice?
I would go with general metrics of 'influence' like in Murray's Human Accomplishment. It's easier to decide not to give someone a prize because you find them skeevy than it is to ignore their work and accomplishments in practice and to keep them out of the histories and reference works.
Genius being easier to claim in retrospect, I think the real claim is that until recent decades, there were plenty of nearly celibate homosexuals (for lack of public opportunities to seek out others, or from internalized stigmas).
Obvious thing to check is the contribution to science and art from other known celibates; plenty more examples (including Erdös) leap to mind.
My thought of the day: An 'Infinite Improbability Drive' is slightly less implausible than a faster than light engine.
Open threads should not be promoted, because.
Promoted articles as they are also serve a purpose: they screen low-value articles from a "feed for a busy reader". What you describe is also a good suggestion, but instead of redefining "promoted", a better way to implement it is to add a subcategory of promoted self-sufficient entry-level articles, and place them on the front page.
I have something of a technical question; on my personal wiki, I've written a few essays which might be of interest to LWers. They're in Markdown, so you would think I could just copy them straight into a post, but, AFAIK, you have to write posts in that WSYIWG editor thing. Is there any way around that? (EDIT: Turns out there's a HTML input box, so I can write locally, compile with Pandoc, and insert the results.)
The articles, in no particular order:
(If you have Gitit handy, you can run a mirror of my wiki with a command like
darcs get <http://www.gwern.net/> && cd www.gwern.net && gitit -f static/gwern.conf.)As for your claim that old is as good as new - it's not.
Yes, about half of them. Not all were actually good, IMDB has some systemic biases. Good movies are much less common than you claim.
Also you cannot just decide to skip making mediocre movies (or anything else) and only do the good ones. At best by halving number of movies made, you'll halve number of great movies made. Due to expected positive externalities (directors and so on learning from previous movies how to make better ones), it might lower number of great movies even more.
If you make the list of best movies tend to be more recent. Looking at IMDB, which I consider very strongly biased towards old movies, top 250 are from:
Which is quite strongly indicative that movie making industry is improving (and this effect is underestimated by IMDB quite considerably). On list of movies I rated 10/10 on imdb, only 1 out of 28 is not from 1990s or 2000s.
It's also true for books - progress is not that fast, but I can think of very few really great books earlier than mid 20th century. Or highly enjoyable music earlier than the last quarter of 20th century. No solid data here, it might be due to progress of technology in case of music, and better cultural match with me in case of books.
Really? Really? I would put Mozart, Bach or Verdi against absolutely anyone from 1975 to the present.
This is obviously a matter of taste. I really like Ode to Joy, but that's the only old music that has a ghost of a chance of competing for my affections on a par with my favorite show tunes or other more recent selections. If you like a lot of old music and not a lot of new music, it just means that you a) have common tastes with people who were rich music patrons in the Golden Age of your choice, or b) you're succumbing to some signaling effect having to do with the perceived absolute quality of old dead white musicians' work. If there is something like objective musical quality out there (which is a matter of open debate in aesthetics), it's probably very fuzzy. Maybe Ode to Joy is objectively better than Sk8er Boi, but the jury is out and they don't seem inclined to come back soon.
I'm trained as a classical pianist, and I still don't enjoy Mozart, Verdi, Scarlatti, or pretty much any other of the classical period composers. I love Bach, but I'm not familiar with other baroque composers.
But mainly, I really enjoy romantic and modern classical composers. I'd absolutely agree with the thesis that music has been getting better and better, even limiting oneself to classical music. (Bach is an amazing exception.)
Comparing classical to popular music is very interesting. Perhaps the difference is that classical music requires a very developed ear in order to enjoy, and so it only appeals to a much smaller subset of people--those with training or high musical talent--while still being comparable or superior in quality to popular music. I would compare it to wine, except there's strong evidence that wine appreciation is almost entirely about status. I'm not sure if there's anything else to compare it to. Programming as an art form?
I think enjoying poetry or literature is a good comparison. Both take effort and some hard work to be able to appreciate and are considered dull and boring by people with no training/study in the relevant discipline. They all also unfortunately appeal to some people's shallow sense of "high culture" and thereby encourage inauthentic signaling by lots of people that don't really enjoy them. It's easy to understand that if you had no experience yourself, and your experience with a small number of people who profess enjoyment is that they are engaged in false signaling, that you would think there is nothing more to it than that, that everybody who professes passion is just engaged in false signaling.
I'm convinced that most people who took a music appreciation class and studied music theory and ear training for a year, combined with some music lessons, would at the end of that process have a completely different reaction to classical music (assuming they did it all by choice and weren't forced into it by parents).
Mightn't that just be because those courses are specifically to teach appreciation of those kinds of music? I expect it's probably possible to teach people who don't like rap, or country, to appreciate those genres; but because rap and country don't fit the shallow sense of high culture, no one is motivated to learn to appreciate them if they don't already. There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music - there is abundant music in most genres, and one can easily fill one's ears with whatever one can most readily enjoy, so you probably don't get more total enjoyment from music by adding to your enjoyed genres. In the case of classical music, the benefit of learning to like it isn't really in the form of enjoyment of classical music; it's in the form of getting to sincerely claim to like classical music, and no longer being left out when highly cultured people discuss classical music.
That argument only works if we aren't allowed to enjoy novelty.
How would you know this given your admittedly limited experience with classical music?
Speaking for myself, there is lots of music that I love listening too, in many different genres, but nothing else has such power to move me as classical music as its best does -- for example -- the Confutatis from Mozart's Requiem, or the Bach d-minor Chaccone, or in a lighter vein that I think anybody can appreciate and feel moved by, Paganiniani or the vitali chaconne.
I love lots of popular music, and probably listen to popular music about as much as I do classical, but there is a certain kind of ecstatic -- almost mystical -- experience that some classical music triggers that I've never gotten with popular music.
Okay - so you get special, unique value from classical. Meanwhile, I get special, unique value from Phantom of the Opera. Why should I think that learning to like classical music is more worth my time - given that I'm now left bored by most classical, or think of it as pleasant background noise - than pirating more Andrew Lloyd Weber?
I'm not so much arguing for learning to like classical music as for learning to understand classical music. I think most people would enjoy it more if they had greater understanding. Classical music is especially rewarding with greater appreciation/understanding, and especially difficult to enjoy with less appreciation/understanding. Perhaps an analogy will convey my point better.
You write fiction, yes? Have you ever studied creative writing, taken a class, read a book on creative writing? Have you ever had an English class with a skilled and passionate teacher that involved analysis of texts that you gained more and more appreciation for after really careful reading and study? Do you feel that the process of becoming a better writer and/or learning to analyze fiction has increased your appreciation and enjoyment of fiction? Most people find that going through those sorts of processes results in much greater enjoyment and appreciation, and they are also able to enjoy fiction that they formerly would have found boring. I think the process is the same for classical music (and jazz as well, for that matter [it's true of any art/music/etc., but to different degrees]).
Expecting to either just "like it" or "find it boring" and thinking of it as being just another genre like rock or pop is like approaching Dostoevsky with the same background/expectations/skills/patience as you would a Tom Clancy novel. The fact that Dostoevsky is more difficult than Clancy, that most people find Dostoevsky boring and Clancy (or an equivalent easy read) engaging, doesn't mean that it's just a matter of taste which you happen to enjoy more. Some things require considerable experience and skill before it is possible to have an informed judgment about them: the literature classics, for example, and classical music.
As for whether it's worth anybody's while to do so, that's an individual choice.
Yes. No. No. No.
Hell no. I have a completely unbroken track record of hating every single book that I have ever read for the first time as a class assignment, and have never found that a book I already liked was improved by this kind of dissection.
Not one bit! I have mostly become a better writer by learning related skills (I was allowed to make up my own second major in undergrad, and therefore literally have a degree in worldbuilding), practicing, and emulating the good parts of what I read. I now have to turn off my critical faculties entirely to enjoy any works of fiction at all, even those that are overall very good, because detecting small flaws in their settings, characterization, handling of social issues, dialogue, use of artistic license, etc. will throw off my ability to not fling the book at a wall. Works that aren't overall good turn on said critical faculty in spite of my best efforts. I can barely have a conversation about a work of fiction anymore without starting to hate it unless I'm just having a completely content-free squee session with an equally enthusiastic friend!
I guess I'm a mutant?
Although I have never read an entire Dostoevsky novel (my reading list is enormous and I haven't gotten around to it), I have really liked the excerpts I've read - immediately, without having to work for it. This is why I plan to read more of his stuff when I get around to it. I've never tried any Tom Clancy. Is he worth reading?
Maybe this is just my idiosyncrasy, but I think making the reader work hard when this isn't absolutely necessary - in fiction, nonfiction, or anything else - is a failure of clarity, not a masterstroke of subtlety. This isn't to say that you can't still have a good work that makes the reader do some digging to find all the content, but that's true of any flaw - you can also have a good work with a kinda stupid premise, or with a cardboard secondary character, or that completely omits female characters for no good reason, or has any of a myriad of bad but not absolutely damning awfulnesses.
As Technologos points out, # of movies made per year seems to have increased considerably, so the fraction of good movies made could have dropped but your numbers be accurate. (eg. the 1930s saw 15, so 15 * 3 = 45, not too far from the 2000s's 56)
Average doesn't seem important at all. Also systemic bias - would you seriously argue that if a top rated movie from 1930s came out today (with just refurbished technology and such trivia) it would still be a hit? I find this nearly impossible.
A dropping average suggests (massively) diminishing returns.
And as far as remakes and sequels go? Well, you tell me...
I doubt computational power of an average chip is much higher than in 1970s. Ones on the top are ridiculously better, but at the same time we had explosion in number of really simple chips, so quite likely average isn't much better. Or at least median isn't much better. Does it imply lack of progress? (don't try to find numbers, I might be very well proven wrong, it's just a hypothetical scenario)
I think that analogy would be more insightful if you replaced the entries with 'supercomputers' and 'the TOP500'.
Random thoughts:
Values Dissonance is a real problem, even when applied over the scale of 50 years. Also, ScienceMarchesOn and even History Marches On. The more things we learn, the more things we can tell stories about.
I've found that, by reading an awful lot of books, I feel like I understand literature and storytelling. On the other hand, I really don't understand music very well. I can't tell what qualities make one piece of music good and another not as good. I can play the piano pretty well, but I can't really improvise or compose. My taste in music (or complete lack thereof) seems to have a great deal to do with the mere exposure effect; I like the kinds of music that I hear a lot and don't like the kinds of music that I hear less of.
Also, one other big difference between much contemporary popular music and much classical music is that a lot of contemporary popular music has lyrics that listeners can understand, and a lot of classical music is entirely instrumental or in foreign languages.
Obviously, if we were actually going to work through this data we would want to know the rate of best-movie-ranking rather than the absolute numbers. Just as importantly, we'd want to know the frequency of best-movie-ranking relative to the number of movies watched from each decade, such that best-movie-rankings aren't simply dependent on availability.
In my experience, of the older movies I have watched, a greater fraction were strongly memorable than of the newer movies I have watched. In part, I suspect this is because I watch older movies intentionally, knowing that they are reputed to be good, where I watch newer movies with a somewhat lower bar for putting in the effort (because they are available in theaters, are easier to talk about, etc.).
Assuming the best old movies don't get filtered out and stay available, this data is accurate for our purpose.
IMDB top list is based on Bayes-filtered ratings, it says what proportion of people watching the movie loved it, not how many people watched it. It will be automatically biased towards intentional watching (therefore old movies), and the bias is in my opinion fairly strong. Still, in spite of this new movies win.
To be clear, I agree that the list should be biased towards old movies in the manner you describe.
The total number of films created has been rising for a while, however (under the "Theatrical Statistics" report here, for instance). It's not entirely unreasonable to believe that over 3x as many films were made in the 2000s as in the 1930s, though; compare Wikipedia's lists of 1930s films and 2000s films. The latter is dramatically longer.
Like I said, we would want to know the fraction of films making the Top 250 list, not the absolute numbers.
On the subject of banning new books, this objection to the proposal crystallized in my head yesterday evening: Fiction, like society, is capable of social progress. This isn't a completed project. Stopping the production of fiction in its tracks now would leave us with a corpus of stories that under- and misrepresents many groups, and this would become even more of a problem than it already is as those groups gain broader acceptance, rights, and numbers (assuming the population keeps trending up and policy keeps trending socially liberal worldwide).
Translation: we shouldn't discourage new fiction, because we need more fiction that supports my worldview (which by the way happens to be good and true).
Alicorn, no offense intended, but your rationality just seems to switch off when you start talking about your politics. This isn't the first time I notice that.
Thats a highly ungenerous interpretation of alicorn's argument. Her argument holds up no matter what the underrepresented group is. It could be men's right activists or Ron Paul activists– all the argument requires is that previously small, unpopular and underrepresented groups become larger, more popular and better represented. If the world gets more racist we're going to need more white power books, as much as I would hate such a world. An evaluation of the groups that become popular isn't suggested by the argument.
The concept of "underrepresentation" itself is politically motivated, not just the choice of particular groups.
I guess. And maybe there is a political critique to be made of Alicorn's argument. But then it needs to be more developed then a snarky translation. There are no obvious ideological blinders in alicorn's comment and it certainly doesn't reduce to you translation.
Edit: removed screaming. Disregard this comment.
Group underrepresenatation isn't even necessary, either. A more general form of the argument carries as long as you agree that "[fiction] isn't a completed project[;] [s]topping the production of fiction in its tracks now would leave us with a corpus of stories that" is suboptimal in some way.
Cf. DH7
Nope, doesn't work. Why do you think new fiction would make the corpus more optimal in any way?
Because the criteria of optimality change over time. If civilization ever becomes so static (or so cyclic) that I agree with people 50 years ago about what makes for a good story, then you can stop writing new fiction. As is, there certainly are some old works that were so good for their own time that they're still worth reading now, despite the differences in values. But I can't fail to notice those differences, and they do detract from my enjoyment unless I'm specifically in the mood for something alien.
If the criteria are always changing & devaluing old works, why do we read things like Gilgamesh or the Iliad or Odyssey? Did they have nigh-infinite value, that they could survive 3k+ years?
As far as I can tell this is just the "spirit of the times" point restated by people who can't be bothered to read our long-winded exchange.
It makes the corpus more complete, if nothing else. Of course we don't want to write all possible books; that's just the useless Library of Babel. But that's physically impossible anyway; within the range that we can apprehend, I'm inclined to say that more books about more topics is better.
Progress is quite a loaded word, and if you assume fiction will progress, then you are almost assuming your conclusion.
Let's make 'progress' concrete. Perhaps progress means that 'the fiction produced every year will feature characters that will statistically ever more closely match current demographics in the United States'.
Why is fiction mirroring demographics important?
Think of science-fiction; should Accelerando feature a carefully balanced cast with a few African-American men & women, 3 or 4 Hispanics of various ethnicities & nationalities, and a number of South-East Asians and old sansei? How would it be improved by such mimicking?
Or think of regular fiction - When William Shakespeare was writing Othello, the number of blacks in England must've been a rounding error; would he have done better to reflect the 100% white composition of England and make Othello an Arab or just a regular white northern European? When David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, would it be somehow more just or better, and not just more "progressive", if he had randomly noted that Michael Pemulis was of Chinese descent?
Fiction has never mirrored society even crudely, not in racial composition of characters, socio-economic status, career, religious or philosophical beliefs, or any distinction that you would like to honor with the title 'group'. That's the whole point: it's fiction. Not real. To make it ever more accurate this way would be to turn it into journalism, or render it as pointless as Borges's 1:1 map from "Of Exactitude in Science".
I am not qualified to teach this subject, not even on the 101 "the stuff you are saying appears on bingo cards that anti-bigotry activists use to summarize common ignorance for crying out loud" level it seems to be on. Trying would be unpleasant, probably would have no positive effects on anyone, and would doubtless solidify the reputation I seem to have accumulated as a usually sane person who mysteriously loses her mind when bringing up "politics".
I will, however, note that Othello took place in Italy, not England, and it would be bizarre if it reflected England's demographics.
I think the two of you may be talking past each other here, namely that gwern overlooked the phrase "corpus of stories". What gwern seems to be attacking is the thesis that every individual story should have a racial/cultural balance of characters that mirrors the general population. Your argument that the corpus as a whole should contain a reasonable balance is not one which I think gwern would refute.
Obviously every story need not be balanced. But it's not obvious to me why the corpus should be balanced, and I can think of reasons why it either doesn't matter or is a good thing (half the attraction of anime for people is, I think, that it borrows enough Western material to be relatively easy to understand, but the overall corpus is still very 'unbalanced' from a US perspective).
Arguments for either position would be good, but Alicorn's original post just says being unbalanced is a problem and anything perpetuating the problem is bad, thus bans/taxes/withdrawal-of-subsidies is bad; I have no positive arguments in favor of new works from her, so I have to content myself with offering criticism and negative arguments in the hopes that she'll offer back.
(Or I could just drop this whole thread, but then I'd leave unsatisfied because I wouldn't know all the flaws with my approach, like the argument about works being enjoyable in different ways like being contemporary.)
If you're interested in continuing this conversation with me in particular, I'd prefer to move to a private venue. I really don't like the "mysteriously loses her mind over politics" thing, or the karma nosedive that comes with it, but I'm willing to assume that you as an individual won't interpret me that way.
I'd really prefer not to. I've made a point of conducting all of my Wikipedia business on the wiki itself, and similarly for mailing lists. There seems to be only one person downvoting you in this thread, and that's easy enough for me to cancel out.
The karma is only a secondary concern. It bothers me more than I would like it to that I am seen as suddenly and inexplicably turning irrational whenever stuff about -isms comes up. This is germane here in particular since to continue this conversation, I'd have to talk about (gasp) feeeeeeeeelings.
The comment that claimed you turn irrational has zero karma. My response that it was an ungenerous interpretation is +2. So I'm not sure you should conclude that a significant number of people see you as turning uniquely irrational, but obviously there is no need for you to say anything you don't want to.
What's inexplicable about it? We all turn at least somewhat irrational whenever stuff about -isms comes up. It's human nature. Politics is the mind killer and all. That's why discussion of contemporary politics is discouraged here, or at least was last I heard.
It may have been small, but I severely doubt "rounding error" is accurate. Do we have a historian in the house?
Edit: In light of Alicorn's remarks, it would be good to have both Italy and England.
Everything I've read has said that England had, at least until the 1800s, a minuscule black population, and particularly before and during Shakespeare.
Here are some random links on the topic since I don't remember where I read that blacks were exotic & unpopular rareties in England and next to none of the slaves passing through British hands came to the home isles:
This book Black Breeding Machines mentions that blacks were such a small minority in England that when their presence began to bother the Londoners, Queen Elizabeth could simply order them out of the country. And it's worth noting that one of the few mentioned blacks in England is a 'blackamoor' in the Queen's service - reinforcing my rare, exotic characterization.
(And the general lack of material itself argues that there just weren't that many. It's hard to research what didn't exist.)
EDIT: As for Italy, I can only point to a similar sporadic appearance of black servants in Roman and medieval Italian sources, and links like http://www.blackpast.org/?q=perspectives/africa-and-africans-imagination-renaissance-italians-1450-1630 which make me think that if the medieval Italians could have such strange beliefs about Africa and its inhabitants, there couldn't've been very many actual Africans/blacks among them; and if that's true about Italy, which is right there above Africa, what about England, a continent away (so to speak)?
I already mentioned Values Dissonance as a reason to prefer new fiction to old.
I personally ran into this effect with a work written in 1981 - the song "Same Old Lang Syne" has a casual reference to people driving away after splitting a six-pack of beer...
Re the culture piece: you make some important points, but the "Let's ban new books" thing seems rather self-undermining. If you're going to ban new books, why not ban new blog comments, too? The observation that we have more culture than anyone can know what to do with is hardly original, and your phrasing can't have been the best, so why did you spend all that time writing this piece, when you could have been making money?
My answer to this entire dilemma is just to say that culture isn't about economic consumption: I guess that was entirely your point , but I'm taking a different attitude about it. Writing has been made into a commodity, but writing as such is a means of communication between people. To say that I should not write is to say that I should not speak, and even the least educated and cultured among us says something now and again, so to say that I should not speak is to say that I should not live. Why should I live, when we already have billions of people already?---because I want to. I don't care if nothing I do has global, world-shaking effects; I don't care it's all been known and done before (if not here then somewhere across the many worlds); I want to know; I want to do---this particular conjunction of traits and ideas wants to know and do, even if lots of other superficially similar conjunctions have already known and done many superficially similar things.
I think that society ought not discourage the production of new novels, not because we need more novels around (you're right; we don't), but because I want to live in a world where everyone writes a good novel. No one's life is exactly bitwise identical to someone else's (or they'd really be the same person anyway), so everyone must have something to say that hasn't already been said in exactly the same way. So let's explore the space; the project is by no means complete. Yes, this means that a lot of crap will get written, but I still think it's more fun this way than tiling the galaxy with James Joyce. But de gustibus non est.
Yeah, it is undermining. But it's funny! You're reading along and then you see "Let's ban new books", which although a fairly logical extrapolation, is still something that no one would expect to be seriously suggested.
More seriously, as I think I've already argued here, blog comments (and most websites in general) don't affect the weakened argument about removing subsidies. Less Wrong receives no government support (if anyone mirrored us, would we actually sue them or even bother with DMCA takedowns? I note that we don't work under any CC licenses, but that seems more like an omission than anything).
Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. (Oops.) But it seems to've been novel enough to most of the people who read it, and it's not like non-philosophers read Schopenhauer any more.
As a student, my time is worthless! Essays like this may be useful as advertising, or spinning off into assignments; and they're much better than playing Geometry Wars. (Also, is my phrasing that bad? I thought I wrote it pretty well. :()
I was also trying to show that it's 'not about Esthetics' too: if it were, we would expect there to be a lifetime-length canon optimizing your esthetics-per-work count, with occasional tweaks (deletions & additions) by specialists when some work is realized to not be very good or just exceeded by some unincluded work. But that is manifestly not the case.
So this would fall under the 'externalities' category - people writing novels become better people for it?
Well, I'm glad you wrote it, but I'm not the one complaining that we produce too much text.
I think you're underestimating long tail effects. There is a sense in which we can say that some authors are much better than some others, but people have extremely specific tastes, too: no one canon will suffice, not even canons for particular genres and subgenres. Consider that I like the particular philosophical style of Greg Egan; giving me a list of top "hard science fiction" won't help me. Or consider that one of my favorite short stories ever is Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality." Now, Scott Aaronson isn't a professional fiction writer; I don't even think that story was even conventionally published in an official fiction venue; it's not going in any accepted canon. But why should I care? It's going in my canon. Or consider that there's a lot of work on very specific topics that I have reason to believe doesn't exist. So I'll have to create it. Even if most of you wouldn't understand or wouldn't care; well, I'm not living for your sake. Some clever person updated Warhol, you know: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people."
Um, sure, although I'd phrase it differently. It's not so much "doing this stuff will make you a better person" as much as, "the entire point of this being-a-person business is doing stuff, and it might as well be this as not."
This sounds like an acquired taste; if you only came to like Egan's style because it exists, and you would've come to like some style even if Egan had never been...
Well, OK. If writing books are leisure activities, then why does it need any protection or subsidies? You don't hear many panicked cries that there is a papier-mâché deficiency which needs state intervention.
(Edit to say that this is in response to the culture and aesthetics article)
I take there to be a number of different things we want out of an piece of cultural production.
Expression of universal aspects of human nature, emotions.
Sensory stimuli (why old horror movies aren't scary, older movies have longer shots, and Michael Bay has a career).
Shared cultural experience- (we like to consume works that are already cultural embedded, we want to share in something nearly everyone experiences- this is why it is worth reading Homer, seeing Star Wars and listening to the Beatles).
Capturing the spirit of the times (we like it when works express what is unique in us, works that capture our sense of place and time, how we're different from our parents, etc. this is why punk music wouldn't have worked in the 18th century, why we have shows like the Wire, and why Rambo's motivations are really confusing for people born after 1980 who never took a modern history course.).
Your argument seems to turn on saying that whatever piece of culture you're consuming now you could be equally satisfied with something older. This seems to be the case with regard to the first criterion but once one admits the second and the fourth new production is essential.
The first essay was the best IMO. What do you think about banning net-unproductive websites?
It would be tremendously difficult, as we can generally agree whether a book is fiction or nonfiction, but 'net-unproductive websites' is unclear, and what subsidies are websites in general receiving that we could scrap? (An actual ban or tax obviously would be even more difficult to implement in a usefully Pigovian way.)
Books have copyrights, universities, direct government grants, etc.; but the Internet is famously disdainful of the former, and the mechanisms like the latter 2 are very rare indeed. (Quick: name an American poet or novelist who took a foundation or university-sponsored sabbatical to work on their website!)
I recently thought of something else related to why one would prefer a "new" book to an old one. There's a certain suspense involved in reading a work in progress. Waiting for the next installment, making guesses at what's going to happen next, discussing your theories with your friends who are all at the same place in the story as you are, and so on, are all things that rarely, if ever, happen with old stories as intensely as they do with new stories. A message board I used to frequent had an extremely long-running discussion of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series that died shortly after the final book was published.
In other words, with new stories, you can give someone something to anticipate. Old stories tend to be well-known to the point where everybody already knows what happens, and the anticipation only lasts as long as it takes you to get from the beginning to the end.
Well, being a (former) Dark Tower fan myself, I think that's not necessarily related to the bald fact that the series ended so much as how it ended...
How much of this, do you think, is due simply to the fact that everyone is coordinated & equally ignorant due to sheer temporal necessity, and how much to the actual 'new' nature of releases?
I remember as a child I loved The Wizard of Oz, but I hadn't the slightest idea that there were sequels. One day, browsing through the very disorganized school library, I found one. I was shocked, and from then on, every few weeks or months as I rummaged, I would find another one. I recall being as thrilled to find one (though out of order) as I think I would have if they were freshly released & bought by the librarian, though they were, gosh, at least 80 years old by this point?
I haven't seen people talking about the new Battlestar Galactica series after it ended, either. Often, once "the answer" exists, people stop wondering what it is.
Yeah, I think that's what I'm getting at - you almost never get that kind of coordination when it comes to "old" works.
I don't think most people care so much about the suspense and discussing the next episode. People do discuss one-shot movies. But it's important that they all watch them at the same time, so that they can time the discussion. Before about 1970 movies were re-released in the theaters and I think this was adequate coordination. I'm not sure why it stopped. VCRs are an obvious answer, but I think they stopped rather earlier. And movies get remade today, which I think it greatly inferior to re-release.
This point is surely correct, but you again pick an unfortunate example - I've heard the ending of BSG was even worse then DT's...
Which is interesting, since there's nothing stopping a group from just not reading each & every book after a set period, thereby reaping the same gains but without issues like, I dunno, the author dying after 20 years & leaving it incomplete. (cough Wheel of Time cough)
The fact that people never do this, even in private, but rather prefer to tear through the entire series at once, suggests to me that this communality isn't worth much. (Aren't book clubs famous for falling apart after a little while?)
Perhaps the fans are just distracting themselves from the agony of waiting for something they love so much & killing time; I knew, before & during the prequels, more than one Star Wars fan who just tried to ignore anything they saw related to SW so they couldn't be bothered by the multi-year waits (out of sight, out of mind...) - they felt the itch you get when pausing a movie or show, or stopping in the middle of a book, but this itch would last for more than just a few minutes.
Yeah... Maybe Harry Potter is a better one?
Brandon Sanderson is finishing up the series based on Jordan's notes and other unpublished information he left behind.
Thanks, it's been a while since I wasted a whole morning on TvTropes. Please link responsibly, people!
You're welcome.
I plan to develop this into a top level post, and it expands on my ideas in this comment, this comment, and the end of this comment. I'm interested in what LWers have to say about it.
Basically, I think the concept of intelligence is somewhere between a category error and a fallacy of compression. For example Marcus Hutter's AIXI purports to identify the inferences a maximally-intelligent being would make, yet it (and efficient approximations) does not have practical application. The reason (I think) is that it works by finding the shortest hypothesis that fits any data given to it. This means it makes the best inference, on average, over all conceivable worlds it could be placed in. But the No Free Lunch theorems suggest that this means it will be suboptimal compared to any algorithm tailored to any specific world. At the very least, having to be optimal for the all of the random worlds and anti-inductive worlds, should imply poor performance in this world.
The point is that I think "intelligence" can refer to two useful but very distinct attributes: 1) the ability to find the shortest hypothesis fitting the available data, and 2) having beliefs (a prior probability distribution) about one's world that are closest to (have the smallest KL divergence from) that world. (These attributes roughly correspond to what we intuit as "book smarts" and "street smarts" respectively.) A being can "win" if it does well on 2) even if it's not good at 1), since using a prior can be more advantageous than finding short hypothesis since the prior already points you to the right hypothesis.
Making something intelligent means optimizing the combination of each that it has, given your resources. What's more, no one algorithm can be generally optimal for finding the current world's probability distribution, because that would also violate the NFL theorems.
Organisms on earth have high intelligence in the second sense. Over their evolution history they had to make use of whatever regularity they could find about their environment, and the ability to use this regularity became "built in". So the history of evolution is showing the result of one approach to finding the environment's distribution (ETC), and making an intelligent being means improving upon this method, and programming it to "springboard" from that prior with intelligence in the first sense.
Thoughts?
One pattern I have noticed: those who think the No Free Lunch theorems are interesting and important are usually the people who talk the most nonsense about them. The first thing people need to learn about those theorems is how useless and inapplicable to most of the real world they are.
I should probably give you some proper feedback, as well as caustic comments. The intelligence subdivision looks useful and interesting - though innate intelligence is usually referred to as being 'instinctual'.
However, I was less impressed with the idea that the concept of intelligence lies somewhere between a category error and a fallacy of compression.
NFL theorems are about max-entropy worlds. Solomonoff induction works on highly lawful, simplicity-biased, low-entropy worlds.
If you could actually do Solomonoff induction, you would become at least as smart as a human baby in roughly 0 seconds (some rounding error may have occurred).
The same (or a similar) point applies. If you limit yourself to the set of lawful worlds and use an Occamian prior, you will start off much worse than an algorithm that implictly assumes a prior that's close to the true distribution. As Solomonoff induction works its way up through longer algorithms, it will hit some that run into an infinite loop. Even if you program a constraint that gets it past or out of these, the optimality is only present "after a long time", which, in practice, means later than we need or want the results.
What else can you tell us about the implications of being able to compute uncomputable functions?
You are arguing against a strawman: it's not obvious that there are no algorithms that approximate Solomonoff induction well enough in practical cases. Of course there are silly implementations that are way worse than magical oracles.
This is a subtle point. The NFL theorem does prohibit any algorithm from doing well over all possible worlds. But Solomonoff induction does well on any world that has any kind of computable regularity. If there is no computable regularity, then no prior can do well. In fact, the Solomonoff prior does just as well asymptotically as any computable prior.
As is often the case, thinking in terms of codes can clear up the issue. A world is a big data file. Certainly, an Earth-specific algorithm can get good compression rates if it is fed data that comes from Earth. But as the data file gets large, the Solomonoff general-purpose compression algorithm will achieve compression rates that are nearly as good; in the worst case, just has to prepend the code of the Earth-specific algorithm to its encoded data stream, and it only underperforms by that program size.
The reason AIXI doesn't work in practice is that the "efficient approximations" aren't really efficient, or aren't good approximations.
This seems to be a common belief. But see this discussion I had with Eliezer where I offered some good arguments and counterexamples against it.
The link goes to the middle, most relevant part of the discussion. But if you look at the top of it, I'm not arguing against the Solomonoff approach, but instead trying to find a generalization of it that makes more sense.
I've linked to that discussion several times in my comments here, but I guess many people still haven't seen it. Maybe I should make a top-level post about it?
This may be tangential to your point, but it's worth remembering that human intelligence has a very special property, which is that it is strongly domain-independent. A person's ability to solve word puzzles correlates with her ability to solve math puzzles. So you can measure someone's IQ by giving her a logic puzzle test, and the score will tell you a lot about the person's general mental capabilities.
Because of that very special property, people feel more or less comfortable referring to "intelligence" as a tangible thing that impacts the real world. If you had to pick between two doctors to perform a life-or-death operation, and you knew that one had an IQ of 100 and the other an IQ of 160, you would probably go with the latter. Most people would feel comfortable with the statement "Harvard students are smarter than high school dropouts", and make real-world predictions based on it (e.g a Harvard student is more likely to be able to write a good computer program than a high school dropout, even if the former didn't study computer science).
The point is that there's no reason this special domain-independence property of human intelligence should hold for non-human reasoning machines. So while it makes sense to score humans based on this "intelligence" quantity, it might be totally meaningless to attempt to do so for machines.
Not so fast. Human intelligence is relatively domain independent. But human minds are constantly exploiting known regularities of the environment (by making assumptions) to make better inferences. These reguarities make up a tiny sliver of the Platonic space of generating functions. By (correctly) assuming we're in that sliver, we vastly improve our capabilities compared to if we were AIXIs lacking that knowledge.
Human intelligence appears strongly domain-indepdent because it generalizes to all the domains that we see. It does not generalize to the full set of computable environments -- no intelligence can do that while still performing as well in each as we do in this environment.
Non-human animals are likewise "domain-independently intelligent" for the domains that they exist in. Most humans would die, for example, if dropped in the middle of the desert, ocean, or arctic.
This post tests how much exposure comments to open threads posted "late" get. If you are reading this then please either comment or upvote. Please don't do both and don't downvote. When the next open thread comes, I'll post another test comment as soon as possible with the same instructions. Then I'll compare the scores.
If the difference is insignificant, a LW forum is not warranted, and open threads are entirely sufficient.
PS: If you don't see a test comment in the next open thread (e.g. I've gone missing), please do post one in my stead. Thank you.
Edit: Remember that if you don't think I deserve the karma, but still don't want to comment, you can upvote this comment and downvote any one or more of my other comments.
Or I could ignore this, for obscurity of purpose.
I am replying to this because I saw Nick Tarleton's comment in the recent comments panel, which Nick made because he saw ThomBlake's comment.
Of course, that sort of thing can in fact happen to a normal open thread comment, so it may still be a reasonable test.
I saw thomblake's comment, not this one.
It seems to me that forums provide a better experience for very long-running threads (though such discussions would often warrant top-level posts) (being able to re-root a comment thread under a new post would be a nice feature), and better indexing (ditto both parentheticals).
(FWIW, I tried to establish an unofficial forum for OB in 2008; a maximum of about five people ever used it.)
I not only read it, I spotted a typo. I am the most awesome person ever.
I don't think this is true. One reason to want a forum is to maximize the total views of more narrowly focused posts. If I post a comment in an open thread and it is only of interest to a handful of people on here they might never see it. But if I post in a forum where the post is on the page longer and in a place on the forum indexed such that people with my interests can find it there is a greater likelihood that someone will respond. The proper comparison is between the views a forum post gets and the views an open thread comment gets- not between two open thread comments at different times of the month. Plus some people would like a space where they can post less complete ideas without worrying about getting hit with downvotes.
The way to decide this issue is really simple. Start a forum and see what happens.
(Edit: Also, this is my notice that I read the comment)
One reason against a forum that I can think of is that we'd rather we not say low quality things at all. Maybe we want to force us to put our karma on the line at all times. Maybe we want to deny all opportunity for chatting. Enforce high standards. Discipline ourselves.
I'm reluctant to upvote you for making this test without a karma-equalizing mechanism in place. At the same time, I don't want to mess up your test by failing to reply at all when I did see this comment. So I'm writing this. I feel a little like my good nature has been abused.
Downvote one or more random comments of mine to balance things out.
I read the comments feed (and am annoyed that it regularly overflows the only-20-comments limit between checks).
There is a "Next" button. Also, this counts as my comment.
There is no "Next" button on the comments feed; while there is IIRC a RFC for a formalized "Next page" function, it is not widely implemented.
I'm commenting only because I saw the comment in the sidebar and wondered who would be posting to a nigh-dead open thread.
I wonder if anyone else is reading this...
You should probably make an explicit karma balance post for this.
Wow, there are a lot of people watching the "Recent Comments".
I saw the above quoted request (today, two weeks after it was made) because I saw RobinZ's reply to it (which was made today) at lesswrong.com/comments, got curious about the context of RobinZ's comment, then clicked on its "Parent" link.
Parenthetically, I do not like the idea of running part of this community on "web forum" software (e.g., phpBB) and will not participate unless I have to participate to continue to be part of the community.
i just crossed rhollerith's comment.
I read this comment. You may like to note that it was the first comment I saw (I always have my sort set to "Top") and it was quoted in the Google result for this thread, so I couldn't help but do so.
Check
I saw this comment show up in the Recent Comments bar.
Ack.
I do check 'recent comments'. Is this supposed to be creating a feedback loop?
We could see this as the upper bound on comments posted to an old open thread; it's possible that a comment be posted that is really good and invites comment, so logically you'd need to take into account the feedback loop it might cause (if you want to make any generalization about open threads).
I noticed Vlad's comment in the recent comments sidebar, and was curious. Make of that what you will.
This is just a comment I can edit to let people elsewhere on the Net know that I am the real Eliezer Yudkowsky.
10/30/09: Ari N. Schulman: You are not being hoaxed.
I'm Spartacus!
I apologize if this is blunt or already addressed but it seems to me that the voting system here has a large user based problem. It seems to me that the karma system has become nothing more then a popularity indicator.
It seems to me that many here vote up or down based on some gut-level agreement or disagreement with the comment or post. For example it is very troubling that some single line comments of agreement that should have 0 karma in my opinion end up with massive amounts and comments that may be in opposition to the popular beliefs here are voted down despite being important to the pursuit of rationality.
It was my understanding that karma should be an indicator of importance and a way of eliminating useless information not just a way of indicating that a post is popular. The popularity of a post is nearly meaningless when you have such a range of experience and inexperience on a blog such as this.
Just a thought feel free to disagree...
I think you're on to something - many commenters (myself included) probably vote based more on agreement or disagreement than on anything else, and this necessarily reinforces the groupthink. If we wanted to fix it, the way to go would be to define standard rules for upvoting and downvoting which reduced the impact of opinion. It cannot be eliminated - if someone says something stupid, for example, saying it should not be rewarded - but a set of clear guidelines could change the karma meter from a popularity score to a filter sorting out the material worth paying attention to.
I think a well-thought-out proposal of such a method could make a reasonable top-level post.
Henry Markram's recent TED talk on cortical column simulation. Features philosophical drivel of appalling incoherence.
True but the Blue Brain project is still very interesting and is and hopefully will continue to provide interesting results. Whether you agree with his theory or not the technical side of what they are doing is very interesting.
Yes - this talk is truly appalling.
For them's what are following LW comments but not current OB activity, Eliezer and Robin are getting into it about the necessity of Friendliness in future agents of superhuman intelligence right now.
Morpheus is fighting Neo!
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Andrew Gelman on Bloggingheads: Percontations: The Nature of Probability
I haven't watched it yet, but the set-up suggests it could focus a discussion, so should probably be given a top-level post.
We need a snappy name like "analysis paralysis" that is focused on people who spend all their time studying rather than doing. They (we) intend to do, but never fell like they know enough to start.
I came up with the following while pondering the various probability puzzles of recent weeks, and I found it clarified some of my confusion about the issues, so I thought I'd post it here to see if anyone else liked it:
Consider an experiment in which we toss a coin, to chose whether a person is placed into a one room hotel or duplicated and placed into a two room hotel. For each resulting instance of the person, we repeat the procedure. And so forth, repeatedly. The graph of this would be a tree in which the persons were edges and the hotels nodes. Each layer of the tree (each generation) would have equal numbers of 1-nodes and 2-nodes (on average, when numerous). So each layer would have 1.5 times as many outgoing edges as incoming, with 2/3 of the outgoing being from 2-nodes. If we pick a path away from the root, representing the person's future, in each layer we are going to have an even chance of arriving at a 1- or 2- node, so our future will contain equal numbers of 1- and 2- hotels. If we pick a path towards the root, representing the person's past, in each layer we have a 2/3 chance of arriving at a 2-node, meaning that our past contained twice as many 2-hotels as 1-hotels.
I recently realized that I don't remember seeing any LW posts questioning if it's ever rational to give up on getting better at rationality, or at least on one aspect of rationality that a person is just having too much trouble with.
There have been posts questioning the value of x-rationality, and posts examining the possibility of deliberately being irrational, but I don't remember seeing any posts examining if it's ever best to just give up and stop trying to learn a particular skill of rationality.
For example, someone who is extremely risk-averse, and experiences severe psychological discomfort in situations involving risk, and who has spent years trying to overcome this problem with no success. Should this person keep trying to overcome the risk aversion, or just give up and never leave their comfort zone, focusing instead on strategies for avoiding situations involving risk?
yes, the "someone" I mention above is myself.
and yes, I am asking this hoping that the answer gives me an excuse to be lazy.
I'm surprised that noone gave the obvious answer yet, which is:
If overcoming the problem really is hopeless, then give up and focus on more productive things, otherwise keep trying.
If it isn't obvious whether it's hopeless or not, then do a more detailed cost/benefit analysis.
Still, I don't remember seeing any LW post that even mentioned that sometimes giving up is an acceptable option. Or maybe I just forgot, or didn't notice.
This is random and for all sorts of reasons possibly a bad idea- but have you ever thought about anti-anxiety medication? It might have side effects that turn you off of it but it could help you deal with high risk situations.
(I should disclaim: I'm not a doctor, my knowledge doesn't extend past personal experience and a cog sci minor. Obviously, not medical advice, etc.)
I personally didn't suggest it because it seemed like it's obvious to you, so the only interesting response would be to deny it for some good reason.
I would note that you shouldn't give up permanently. Maybe wait a year or a few, then see if you've grown in other ways that would make a new attempt more fruitful.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/ ?
I was hoping this would get more of a response - Peer and I have spent a considerable bit of time talking about this, and it's gotten to the point where other perspectives would be useful.
My opinion is that it is, at a minimum, appropriate for someone in Peer's situation to accept the fact that they are nearly guaranteed to be overwhelmed by emotion, to the point of becoming dangerously irrational, in certain situations, and to take that fact into account in deciding what problems to try to tackle. And, I see it as irrational to feel guilty or panicky about not being able to do more.
Part of the problem, though, is that the risky situations Peer mentioned are SIAI-related, and he seems to see doing anything less than his theoretical best (without taking psychological issues into account) in that context as not just lazy but immoral in some sense.
Peer's comment is too vague and general for any meaningful response, and your comment doesn't add clarity ("Risky situations Peer mentioned are SIAI-related"?).
"Risk aversion"? In one interpretation it's a perfectly valid aspect of preference, not something that needs overcoming. For example, one can value sure-thing $1000 more than 11% probability at $10000.
I'm trying not to say anything here that's more Peer's business than mine, so I don't want to use real examples, and I'm not certain enough that I know the details of what's going on in Peer's head to make up examples, but it doesn't appear to be risk-aversion by that definition that's the problem. It's that when he's in what appears to him to be a high-stakes situation (and 'what appears to him to be' is very relevant there - this isn't a calculated response as far as I can tell, and being told by, for example, Michael Vassar that the risk in some situation is worth the reward is nearly useless), he panics, and winds up doing things that make the issue worse in some way - usually in the form of wasting a lot of energy by going around in circles and then eventually backing out of dealing with the situation at all.
Dual n-back is a game that's supposed to increase your IQ up to 40%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_n_back#Dual_n-back
Some think the effect is temporary, long-term studies underway. Still, I wouldn't mind having to practice periodically. I've been at it for a few days, might retry the Mensa test in a while. (I washed out at 113 a few years ago) Download link: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
It seems to make sense. Instead of getting a faster CPU, a cheap and easy fix is get more RAM. In a brain analogy, I've often thought of the "magic number seven," isn't there any way to up that number, have more working memory? Nicholas Negroponte said something like "Perspective is worth 50 IQ points." I think that's a scope fail, but good perspective, being able to hold more of the problem in your head, might be worth about 30 IQ points.
So it's been almost 2 years. Have you taken any IQ tests after practicing?
Sorry, hiatus. No haven't been tested recently, and slacked off on the DNB, it starts to feel monotonous, and frustrating, I couldn't break through D3B. I'll try and pick it up again when I figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu.
Any progress since? (It seems to work fine for me on Debian.)
Took a crack at it again, just now worked out how to change directories in a terminal.
To shill my DNB FAQ: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ
As to temporary: if it's temporary, it's a very long temporary. From personal experience it takes months for my scores to begin to decay more than a few percent, and other people have reported scores unaffected by breaks of weeks or months as well.
The more serious concern for people who want big boosts is that looking over the multiple IQ before-after reports I've collated, I have 2 general impressions: that DNB helps you think quicker, but not better, and that the benefit is limited to around +10-15 points max.
(On a personal note, ZoneSeek, if after a few weeks or months of N-backing you've risen at least 4 levels and you retake the Mensa test, I would be quite interested to know what your new score is.)
Mini heuristic that seems useful but not big enough for a post.
To combat ingroup bias: before deciding which experts to believe, first mentally sort the list of experts by topical qualifications. Allow autodidact skills to count if they have been recognized by peers (publication, citing, collaboration, etc).
I never see discussion on what the goals of the AI should be. To me this is far more important than any of the things discussed on a day to day basis.
If there is not a competent theory on what the goals of an intelligent system will be, then how can we expect to build it correctly?
Ostensibly, the goal is to make the correct decision. Yet there is nearly no discussion on what constitutes a correct decision. I see lot's of contributors talking about calculating utilons so that demonstrates that most contributors are hedonistic consequentialist utilitarians.
Am I correct then to assume that the implicit goal of the AI for the majority in the community is to aid in the maximization of human happiness?
If so I think there are serious problems that would be encountered and I think that the goal of maximizing happiness would not be accomplished.
"Utilons" are a stand-in for "whatever it is you actually value". The psychological state of happiness is one that people value, but not the only thing. So, yes, we tend to support decision making based on consequentialist utilitarianism, but not hedonistic consequentialist utilitarianism.
See also: Coherent Extrapolated Volition
Of course - which makes them useless as a metric.
Since you seem to speak for everyone in this category - how did you come to the conclusion that this is the optimal philosophy?
Thanks for the link.
Bayesian reasoning spotted in the wild at Language Log
Eliezer and Robin argue passionately for cyronics. Whatever you might think of the chances of some future civilization having the technical ability, the wealth, and the desire to revive each of us -- and how that compares to the current cost of signing up -- one thing that needs to be considered is whether your head will actually make it to that future time.
Ted Williams seems to be having a tough time of it.
Alcor has posted a response to Larry Johnson's allegations.
I'm not sure what to think of Larry Johnson. Some of his claims are normal parts of Alcor's cryopreservation process, but dressed up to sound bad to the layperson. Other parts just seem so outrageous. A monkey wrench? An empty tuna can? Really? He claims that conditions were terrible, which is also unlikely. Alcor is a business and gets inspected by OSHA, the fire department, etc. They even offer free tours to the public. If conditions were so terrible, you'd think they'd have some environmental or safety violations. At the very least, some people who toured the facility would speak up.
The article also claims that Ted Williams was cryopreserved against his will, which is almost certainly not true. Alcor requires that you sign and notarize a last will and testament with two witnesses who are not relatives.
A link you might find interesting:
The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief
Summary:
Religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks, scientists at UCLA and other universities have found. They used fMRI to measure signal changes in the brains of committed Christians and nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, belief (judgments of "true" vs "false") was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behavior. "While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent," the study concluded. "Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world."
XKCD visits human enhancement.
What's the best way to follow the new comments on a thread you've already read through? How do you keep up with which ones are new? It'd be nice if there were a non-threaded view. RSS feed?
Scanning through the new comments page is probably your best bet, though I wish there was a better solution.
I'll make my more wrong confession here in this thread: I'm a multiple worlds skeptic. Or at least I'm deeply skeptical of Egan's law. I won't pretend I'm arguing from any sort of deep QM understanding. I just mean in my sci-fi, what-if, thinking about what the implications would be. I truly believe there would be more wacky outcomes in an MWI setting than we see. And I don't mean violations of physical laws; I'm hung up on having to give up the idea of cause and effect in psychology. In MWI, I don't see how it's possible to think there would be cause and effect behind conversations, personal identity, etc. Literally every word, every vocalization, is determined solely by quantum interactions, unless I'm deeply misunderstanding something. This goes against the determinism I hold to be true. I don't see how my next words won't be French, Arabic, Klingon, etc, and I don't see how what I consider to be normally isn't vanishingly unlikely to continue for an indefinite period of time.
I'll admit that works been busy, so I haven't worked through EY's latest posts, so if there's been some resolution in this in the anthropic threads, I'd appreciate a quick summary. Sorry if this is more of a question than answer; it's for that reason that I second a forum. I like blogs for articles, but they don't work for discussion as well as forums do, and forums better allow people to post questions.
Your claim is that MWI predicts things we don't see. If this is true then it is a really big deal- you'd be able to show that MWI was not just falsifiable (which is still a contentious issue) but already falsified. Suffice to say someone would have noticed this.
Anyway it is true that MWI does entail that there is some non-zero possibility that your next words will be in Klingon. But the possibility is so small that the universe is likely to end many, many times over before it ever happens. Unfortunately, this does suggest you have to give up your notion of robust, metaphysical causation since (1) shit ain't determined and (2) there are no objects (the usual units of causation) just overlapping fields. There are some efforts to maintain serious causal stories despite this but since no one really knew what was meant by causation before quantum mechanics this doesn't seem like that big a loss.
In any case, these sacrifices are purely philosophical, MWI changes nothing about what experiences you should expect (except possibly in regards to anthropic issues) and makes no new predictions about run of the mill everyday physics.
This is a confusion about free will, not many-worlds.
So, I'm reading A Fire Upon The Deep. It features books that instruct you how to speedrun your technological progress all the way from sticks and stones to interstellar space flight. Does anything like that exist in reality? If not, it's high time we start a project to make one.
Edit (10 October 2009): This is encouraging.
What for? There aren't any stick-and-stones cultures around.
Do you assign significant probability to the need for such a book in humanity's future? I don't. It would require that:
But also that:
There's a huge different between having the raw knowledge available and simple step by step instructions.
A book created for this express purpose would be an order of magnitude more useful than any number of encyclopedias or even entire libraries. A big challenge would be even knowing what to research--if you don't have the next technology, you may not even know what it will be.
The biggest obstacle is really distribution. What you'd need its a government, church, or NGO to put a copy in every branch or something.
Maybe you could donate a copy to every prison library. Prisons would actually be a really defensible location to stay post-societal collapse . . .
We can imagine a handbook that is written to be useful for a broad spectrum of possible disastrous situations.
The handbook could be written for post-disaster survivors finding themselves in many possible situations. For example, your first bullet "No technological human societies survive" could be expanded to "(No|Few|Distant|Hostile) technological human societies survive". Indeed, uncertainty about which of the aforementioned possibilities actually hold might be quite probable, given both a civilization-destroying disaster and some survivors.
To some extent, the Long Now's Rosetta project (to build sturdy discs inscribed with examples of many languages) is an example of this sort of handbook.
http://rosettaproject.org/
There's a time-traveler's cheat sheet that covers a lot of the basics. (Credit goes to Ryan North. )
http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemist-Circumstances-Achievements-Publication/dp/0841217874
http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Production/dp/1581125666/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
This reminds me of an episode of Mythbusters where the crew set up a bunch of of MacGyver puzzles for the two hosts - pick a lock with a lightbulb filament, develop film with common household chemicals, and signal a helicopter with a tent and camping supplies.
In all seriousness though, Philisophical Materialism and the Scientific Method are probably the most important things; three years ago I bought my first car for a pack of cigarettes, and a $20 Hayes manual. At the time I didn't even know what an alternator was; three months later I'd diagnosed a major electrical problem, and performed an engine swap. The manual helped (obviously), but for the most part it was the knowledge that any mechanical device could be reduced to simple causal patterns which allowed me to do this (incidentally, this is a hobby that I strongly recommend to other LW members - you get to put the scientific method into practice in a hands-on manner, and at the end of it you get a car which is slightly less crappy).
I tend to think that the mere knowledge that flying machines are possible will allow the survivors of WWIII to redevelop the prewar tech within a century.
I tried this with one of my first cars back in the early 90s. It turns out that there are a very large number of things that can go wrong with essentially every step of repairing a car, and I didn't have the money or time to continue replacing parts I'd destroyed or troubleshooting problems I'd caused while trying to fix another problem.
I like programming because it has the same features of tracking down problems, but almost entirely without the autocommit feature of physical reality, as long as you choose to back up and test.
Also, even in the 90s, a computer was far cheaper than a good set of tools.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_forever_boo.php ?
A lot of stick and stones civilizations that can read, are there?
Agree that it is a cool idea though, does Vinge give more details?
It strikes me that the most crucial aspects of such a book would probably be mechanical engineering (wheels, mills, ship construction, levers and pullies) and chemical identification (where to find and how to identify loadstones, peat, saltpeater, tungsten) things no one here is going to have much experience with.
What I'd like to know is what the ideal order of scientific discoveries would be. Like what would have been possible earlier in retrospect, what later inventions could have been invented earlier and sped up subsequent innovation the most. Could you teach a sticks and stones civilization calculus? What is the earliest you could build a computer? Many countries went skipped building phone infrastructure and have gone straight to cellular. What technologies were necessary intermediate steps and which could be skipped?
Any hypotheses for these questions?
Not yet.
Is the likelihood that future sticks and stones civilizations will know how to read such that the first chapter doesn't need to be teaching them how to read the rest of the book? It seems to me that the probability a collapsed civilization is mostly illiterate is high enough to justify some kind of lexical key.
One of the old standard topics of OB was cryogenics; why it's great even thought it's incredibly speculative & relatively expensive, and how we're all fools for not signing up. (I jest, but still.)
Why is there so much less interest in things like caloric restriction? Or even better, intermittent fasting, which doesn't even require cuts in calories? If we're at all optimistic about the Singularity or cryogenic-revival-level-technology being reached by 2100, then aren't those way superior options? They deliver concrete benefits now, for a price that can't be beat, and on the right time-scale*.
Yet I don't think I've seen Robin or Eliezer even once say something like "and if you don't buy the benefits of cryogenic preservation, why on earth aren't you at least doing CR?".
* Assume we're in or close to our teens - as many of the readers are, and would live to to 80 or 90 due to our family background; that pushes our death date out to ~2080; assume CR/IF deliver less benefits in humans than in lower organism, say, 20%; that gets us another 18 years, or to 2098, which is close enough to 2100 as to make no difference.
One of my videos is about the topic. See:
"Tim Tyler: Why dietary energy restriction works"
1) I can't work and starve at the same time.
2) State of evidence in favor of CR wasn't very good last time I checked. I recall something along the lines of, "Cutting calories by 40% extends the lifespan of (some short-lived creature) by a week, and it's looking like it may extend human lifespan by a week as well."
Update: Gregory Benford (who recently founded a life extension company) says that CR slows down life processes in both flies and humans. You live longer but you're less active. Sounds plausible.
That assumes you're starving during intermittent fasting. Many practitioners actually find that they are much more clear-headed when they have not eaten recently.
My guess is that you're equating hypoglycemia with hunger. I eat a paleo diet, which has low levels of dietary carbohydrates. This forces the body to use gluconeogenesis to meet its glucose needs. Because you're producing it endogenously, your blood sugar remains completely steady. You only suffer from hypoglycemia when you're dependent upon exogenous sources of glucose, forcing you to eat every few hours. I much prefer the freedom to eat whenever I want.
I find that I'm more light-headed when I haven't eaten enough, but it's not the same as clear-headed.
The real costs of caloric restriction are very high. We experience all sorts of negative symptoms, like lack of attention/lack of sexual function and physical pain when we are hungry. I am quite certain that I couldn't achieve a true CR diet if I tried. Even if I made a strong effort, there is still a fair chance I will wind up in an unhappy medium, in which I don't achieve the benefits because I couldn't pass some threshold at which CR becomes effective.
In fact, for most people, CR is probably impossible. Most of us do not even have the willpower to keep our weights in the "acceptable" range in spite of the fact that we idealize lean, low-fat bodies. We're battling millions of years of evolutionary programming.
However, we might see some of the same benefits from taking resveratrol or the forthcoming sirtuin drugs. Resveratrol is pretty cheap, much cheaper than CR (in terms of suffering), so I bet that would be a better candidate for most people than attempting (and likely failing) CR.
knb: I found it a little hard to separate your experience from your speculations there - could you clarify the meaning of "we experience" vs "I couldn't achieve a true CR diet if I tried". I suspect that you're speculating.
CR isn't a line you need to get over - more CRON (CR with Optimal Nutrition) is better: http://www.crsociety.org/files/images/cr-youth.gif
I don't CR as much as I'd like to, but I lost about 18% of my body weight from my set point (at which point my family instructed me not to look any freakishly thinner)… and it was only hard at first. Some of what makes it easier is habit, some is clearing the high GI cycle from your system (once I stopped eating high GI foods I fairly quickly stopped craving high GI foods), but I think most of it is simple life hacking:
knb: but what about IF? You get all the calories you want there. From my college days with the buffet, I remember on more than a few occasions I would simply not eat for a day and then the next day I would gorge. (I wasn't losing weight during this time, just to be clear, and I was also more athletic than my norm.)
That's actually really interesting. When I was an undergrad, I "accidentally" used intermittent fasting as well. I was about 20 lbs overweight when I started school one year, I managed to lose 25 lbs on accident, in spite of the fact that I regularly binged after 24 hours of being to busy to eat.
My (limited) understanding implies this kind of thing is unhealthy and leads to suboptimal mental functioning.
If there's any unhealthiness to it, I didn't notice. It seemed to work out fine with my fencing & Taekwondo.
But mental functioning I really don't know. I ate pretty healthily even in the binging phase, but I know from my N-backing and polyphasic sleep experiments that one can be utterly unaware of even large deficits (or surpluses), and I was using no mental benchmark or task back then, so I would have remained unaware.
I think that's an excellent question. I would guess that it's harder to do CR/regular fasting than sign up for cryonics, and not many ppl want to preach what they don't practice. I take flaxseed oil daily, which is perhaps the easiest if not the best way to improve long-term health.
I eat between 1200 and 1500 calories a day. I found it surprisingly easy to make the transition.
I've also tried polyphasic sleep, which would be a huge tangible benefit if I could get it to work, but I simply lack the willpower to stick with it through the transition period.
In the same vein, although I fear I tread too close to 'life-hacking' territory here (and I recall the LW community had consciously decided to avoid descending down into the 'cool tips/tools' territory? or am I wrong about that?), I've noticed very little discussion of the various substances labeled 'nootropics'.
We discussed quite a bit how to motivate ourselves and increase the percentage of time spent being 'productive'; shouldn't it be equally fascinating to us that things like modafinil* can eliminate the need for sleep, gaining hours? Even if modafinil's benefits averaged out cuts the need for sleep only in half or a quarter, well, it's the rare productivity or mind technique that saves you 4 and a half or 2 and a quarter hours a day.
* which I know for a fact some LWers happily & effectively use
This is an Open Thread. No restrictions here. Though, I wish we'd replace these with a proper forum that's active throughout the month.
If the open thread were always visible somewhere in the sidebar, would that constitute "a proper forum" for you? or if there were weekly open threads?
AIUI, the forum idea was tried for Overcomingbias.com back when it was a shared-authorship blog. It didn't quite work out.
There's plenty of opportunity to hash out lower-interest points here. In addition to the monthly open threads, just clicking on "Recent posts" in the sidebar will bring up a list of posts which didn't make the front page.
What are you referring to?
Some life hacking: narrow the distance between "I wish" and "I will". Shared hosting starts in the realm of $5/month. Open source forum software is very available. With fairly basic computer skills and Google you're probably not more than 6hrs away from having the forum you want. Some early research might narrow that gap further.
Forum is people first and foremost. I see no way I could attract LWers to a forum on a separate site. Besides, that is not what I want at all. I want a forum here.
I'm not a fan of having a Less Wrong forum. One of LW's advantages is that it has low volume and high quality. It doesn't take much of my time to read and most of the posts are worth reading. Forums are the opposite: higher volume and lower quality. This makes forums a bigger time sink for everyone: moderators, posters, and readers.
I think the low volume high quality nature of the LW front page is why a forum would be a bonus. People could hash out more low to mid quality ideas without detracting from the more developed postings that the readers who want to invest less time are looking for. I'm not a fan of a forum in lieu of the current LW format, but as an idea incubator, I think it could be interesting and of use.
I think a forum here would be fantastic. I don't believe it would detract from the articles, it would just give discussions that have potentially smaller interest bases a chance to still develop.
I definitely agree that a forum would allow for more discussion, particularly of the less-momentous but still-beneficial topics. In particular, I think that discussions of actual strategies people have tried, what has worked and not worked, could actually be highly beneficial. I see them as data we need to collect in order to begin forming some kind of method for actually helping rationalists win in real world situations.
Even a general forum would be great - I wouldn't mind finding out what books and movies the rest of LW enjoys; this place is what turned me onto Torchwood. Though I could understand worries that it might distract from the core purpose of this site.
More fascinating for me is how modafinil improves my motivation.
Yes, I've noticed that too, but it's hard to say what it is: is it a simple placebo effect, or is it the miser in me saying 'you spent $1.20 on modafinil for today, and dammit you'd better get >1.20 out of it!', or is it the reduction of tiredness, or the sense of lots of time in front of one (I think of Lin Yutang's quote: "A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.")?
Or something entirely else, like that one notices the drop in motivation only when stopping modafinil, and this drop might be due just to recovery from usage? (A slow depletion of dopamine, eg.)
If it's this last suggestion, then the motivation effect is just a modest version of the amphetamine motivation-then-crash - but what makes modafinil most interesting is that it by and large seems like a 'free lunch', and those are so rare in biology/pharmaceuticals.
A lot of commenters outside America on this one? You need a prescription for Modafinil in the US.
Yes. Yes, you do.
So, there's this set, called W. The non-emptiness of W would imply that many significant and falsifiable conjectures, which we have not yet falsified, are false. What's the probability that W is empty?
(Yep, it's a bead jar guess. Show me your priors. I will not offer clarification unless I find that there's something I meant to be clearer about but wasn't.)
How many is "many"?
I say 0.9.
Movie: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs - I took the kids to see that this week-end and it struck me as a fun illustration of the UnFriendly AI problem.
On reflection, I'm actually going to start spelling my first name again.
Hence this new account.
ADDENDUM: I mean, unless we have some name-change feature that I just couldn't find.
SECOND ADDENDUM: To anyone reading this on my userpage, you might be interested in my older comments.
I guess you could implement one!
Regrettably my meager Python skills are not yet up to the task.
A welcome occasion to learn more?
Why? (If I may ask.)
I'll PM you.
I've been wishing we had one for a while -- I replicated my Reddit login without really thinking.