This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Feel free to rid yourself of cached thoughts by doing so in Old Church Slavonic. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
If you're new to Less Wrong, check out this welcome post.
I was wondering if Eliezer could post some details on his current progress towards the problem of FAI? Specifically details as to where he is in the process of designing and building FAI. Also maybe some detailed technical work on TDT would be cool.
Just another example of a otherwise-respectable (though not by me) economist spouting nonsense. I thought you guys might find it interesting, and it seemed short for a top-level post.
Steven Landsburg has a new book out and a blog for it. In a post about arguments for/against God, he says this:
the most complex thing I’m aware of is the system of natural numbers (0,1,2,3, and all the rest of them) together with the laws of arithmetic. That system did not emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings.
If you doubt the complexity of the natural numbers, take note that you can use just a small part of them to encode the entire human genome. That makes the natural numbers more complex than human life.
So how many whoppers is that? Let's see: the max-compressed encoding of the human genome is insufficient data to describe the working of human life. The natural numbers and operations thereon are extremely simple because it takes very little to describe how they work. This complexity is not the same as the complexity of a specific model implemented with the natural numbers.
His description of it as emerging all at once is just confused: yes, people use natural numbers to describe...
Our House, My Rules reminded me of this other article which I saw today: teach your child to argue. This seems to me to be somewhat relevant to the subject of promoting rationality.
Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony.
...
Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.) I gave Dorothy a disappointed look and said, “That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.”
She blinked a couple of times and picked herself up off the floor, pouting but quiet.
...
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
An interesting site I just stumbled upon:
They have huge lists of biases, techniques, explanations, and other stuff, with short summaries and longer articles.
Here's the results from typing in "bias" into their search bar.
A quick search for "changingminds" in LW's search bar shows that noone has mentioned this site before on LW.
Is this site of any use to anyone here?
And should I repost this message to next month's open thread, since not many people will notice it in this month's open thread?
At it's height this poll registered 66 upvotes. As it is meta, no longer useful and not interesting enough for the top comments page please down vote it. Upvote the attached karma dump to compensate.
(It looks like CannibalSmith hasn't been on lately so I'll post this) This post tests how much exposure comments to open threads posted "not late" get. If you are reading this then please either comment or upvote. Please don't do both and don't downvote. The exposure count to this comment will then be compared to that of previous comment made "la...
I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.
(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)
Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.
Okay, so I guess I'll be the first person to ask how you've updated your beliefs after today's news.
Physicists have their act together better than I thought. Not sure how much I should update on other scientific fields dissimilar to physics (e.g. "dietary science") or on the state of academia or humanity as a whole. Probably "some but not much" for dietary science, with larger updates for fields more like physics.
Just curious, given that physicists have their act together better than you thought, then, conditioning on that fact and the fact that physicists don't, as a whole, consider MWI to be slam dunk (though, afaik, many at least consider it a reasonable possibility), does that lead to any update re your view that MWI is all that slam dunk?
Cryonics is a last-ditch long-shot attempt to cheat death, so I can relate quite easily.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.
-- Woody Allen
I will take up the bet on the Higgs field, with a couple of caveats:
You use the phrase "the Higgs boson", when several theories predict more than one. If more than one are found, I want that to count as a win for me.
If the LHC doesn't run, the bet is off.
Time limit: I suggest that if observation of the Higgs does not appear in the 2014 edition of "Review of Particle Physics", I've lost. "Observation" should be a five-sigma signal, as is standard, either in one channel or smaller observations in several channels.
25 dollars, even odds.
As a side note, this is more of a hedge position than a belief in the Higgs: I'm a particle physicist, and if we don't find the Higgs that will be very interesting and well worth the trivial pain of 25 dollars and even the not-so-trivial pain of losing a public bet. (I'm not a theorist, so strictly speaking it's not my theory on the chopping block.) While if we do find it, I will (assuming Eliezer takes up this offer) have the consolation of having demonstrated the superior understanding and status of my field against outsiders. (It's one thing for me to say "Death to theorists" and laugh at their heads-in-the-clouds attitude and incomprehensible math. It's quite another for one who has not done the apprenticeship to do so.) And 25 dollars, of course.
To-Do Lists and Time Travel Sarmatian Protopope muses on how coherent, long-term action requires coordinating a tribe of future selves.
So, I'm having one of those I-don't-want-to-go-to-school moments again. I'm in my first year at a university, and, as often happens, I feel like it's not worth my time.
As far as math goes, I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time--though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course. I have had the occasional fun chat with a professor, but the lecture was never it.
As far as other subjects go, I think forces conspired to make me not succeed. I had a single non-math class, though it was twice the length...
I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time--though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course.
Take it from me (as a dropout-cum-autodidact in a world where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental, I'm fractionally one of your future selves), that procedural knowledge is really, really important. It's just too easy to fall into the trap of "Oh, I'm a smart person who reads books and Wikipedia; I'm fine just the way I am." Maybe you can do better than most college grads, simply by virtue of being smart and continuing to read things, but life (unlike many schools) is not graded on a curve. There are so many levels above you, that you're in mortal danger of missing out on entirely if you think you can get it all from Wikipedia, if you ever let yourself believe that you're safe at your current level. If you think school isn't worth your time, that's great, quit. But know that you don't have to be just another dropout who likes to read; you can quit and hold yourself to a higher standard.
You want to learn math? Here's what I do. Get textbooks. Get out a piece of paper, and divide it into two columns. Read or...
I think you should ask yourself this: if you drop out, what realistically are you going to do with your time? If you don't have a very good answer to that question, stay where you are.
View university in the same way as you would view a long lap-swimming workout. Boring as hell, maybe, but you'll be better off and feel better when you're done. Sure, you could skip your pool workout and go do something Really Important, but most people skip their workouts and then go watch TV instead.
Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?
In the comment section of this post, "Doug S." gives the most salient analysis I have seen. After stating, "the job of a university professor is to do research and bring in grant money for said research, not to teach! Teaching is incidental," he was asked why parents would pay upward of $40,000 annually for such a service. His parsimonious reply: "In most cases, it’s not the education that’s worth $40,000+. It’s the diploma. Earning a diploma demonstrates that you are willing to suffer in exchange for vague promises of future reward, which is a trait that employers value."
Sorry if this is getting annoying, but I recently thought of two new ideas that might make interesting video games, and I couldn't resist posting them here:
The first idea I had is an adventure game where you have a reality-distorting device that you must use before you try to do anything that wouldn't work in real life, but that you must not use before you do anything that would work in real life.
If you fail to use the device before doing something that wouldn't work in real life, then the consequences will be realistic, and disastrous. For example, if y...
Ok, so I just heard a totally awesome MoBio lecture, the conclusions of which I wanted to share. Tom Rando at SUSM found that myogenic stem cells divide asymmetrically such that all of the original template chromatids are inherited by the same daughter cell and then the other daughter cells go on to differentiate. This might imply that an original pool of stem cells act as templates for later cell types, preserving their original DNA, and thus reducing error in replications, since cells are making copies of the originals instead making copies of copies...
New study shows that one of LW's favorite factoids (having children decreases your happiness rather than increases it) may be either false or at least more complex than previously believed: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/11/03/can-happiness-and-parenting-coexist.aspx
I've been trying to ease some friends into basic rationality materials but am running into a few obstacles. Is there a quick and dirty way to deal with the "but I don't want to be rational" argument without seeming like Mr. Spock? Also, what's a good source on the rational use of emotions?
I've been trying to ease some friends into basic rationality materials but am running into a few obstacles.
I suggest the same techniques that work with any kind of evangelism. Convey that you are extremely sexually attractive and otherwise high in status by virtue of your rationalist identity. Let there be an unspoken threat in the background that if they don't come to share your beliefs someone out there somewhere may just kill them or limit their mating potential.
Perhaps there should be an 'Open Thread' link between 'Top' and 'Comments' above, so that people could get to it easily. If we're going to have an open thread, we might as well make it accessible.
Anyways, I was looking around Amazon for a book on axiology, and I started to wonder: when it comes to fields that are advancing, but not at a 'significant pace', is it better to buy older books (as they've passed the test of time) or newer ones (as they may have improved on the older books and include new info)? My intuition tells me it's better to buy newer books.
I posted an idea for 'friendly' AI over on AcceleratingFuture the other night, while in a bit of a drunken stupor. I just reread it and I don't immediately see why it's wrong, so I thought I'd repost it here to get some illuminating negative feedback. Here goes:
Make it easy to bliss out.
Consider the following utility function
U(n, x_n) = max(U(n-1, x_{n-1}), -x_n^2)
where n is the current clock tick, x_n is an external input (aka, from us, the AI’s keepers, or from another piece of software). This utility is monotonic in time, that is, it never decreases, a...
A friend asked me a question I'd like to refer to LW posters.
TL;DR: he wishes to raise the quality of life on Earth; what should he study to have a good idea of choosing the best charities to donate to?
My friend has a background in programming, physics, engineering, and information security and cryptography. He's smart, he's already financially successful, has friends who are also likely to become successful and influential, and he's also good at direct interactions with people, reading and understanding them and being likable - about as good as I am capa...
I'd like to start talking about scientific explanation here. This is the particular problem I have been working on recently:
A plausible hypothesis is that scientific explanations are answers to "why" questions about phenomena. If I hear a "cawing" noise and I ask my friend why I hear this cawing. This is a familiar enough situation that most of us would have our curiosity satisfied by an answer as simple as "there is a crow". But say the situation was unfamiliar (perhaps the question is asked by a child). In that case "th...
Just great. I had a song parody idea in the shower this morning, and now I'm afraid that I'm going to have to write a rationalist version of Fiddler on the Roof in order to justify it.
"Mapmaker, mapmaker,
Make me a map,
Text me a truth,
Fax me a fact ... "
I'd like to ask a moronic question or two that aren't immediately obvious to me and probably should be. (Please note, my education is very limited, especially procedural knowledge of mathematics/probability.)
If I had to guess what the result of a coin flip would be, what confidence would I place in my guess? 50% because that's the same as the probability or me being correct or 0% because I'm just randomly guessing between 2 outcomes and have no evidence to support either (well I guess there being only 2 outcomes is some kind of evidence)?
Likewise with a lo...
We can mean two things by "existing". Either as "something exists inside the universe", or "something exists on the level of the universe itself"(For example, "universe exists"). These things don't seem to be the same.
Our universe being a mathematical object seems to be tautology. If we can describe universe using math, the described mathematical object shares every property of the universe, and it would be redundant to assume there being some "other level of existence".
One confusion to clear up is some sor...
Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology might be of interest, seeing as evolutionary psychology is pretty popular around here. (Haven't had a chance to read it myself, though.)
...With apologies to Brad DeLong, when reading WSJ editorials you need to bear two things in mind:
- The WSJ editorial page is wrong about everything.
- If you think the WSJ editorial page is right about something, see rule #1.
After all, here’s what you would have believed if you listened to that page over the years: Clinton’s tax hike will destroy the economy, you really should check out those people suggesting that Clinton was a drug smuggler, Dow 36000, the Bush tax cuts will bring surging prosperity, Saddam is backing Al Qae
I remember well enough to describe, but apparently not well enough to Google, a post or possibly a comment that said something to the effect that one should convince one's opponents with the same reasoning that one was in fact convinced by (rather than by other convenient arguments, however cogent). Can anyone help me find it?
Hi, I have never posted on this forum, but I believe that some Less Wrong readers read my blog, FeministX.blogspot.com.
Since this at least started out as an open thread, I have a request of all who read this comment, and an idea for a future post topic.
On my blog, I have a topic about why some men hate feminism. The answers are varied, but they include a string of comments back and forth between anti feminists and me. The anti feminists accuse me of fallacies, and one says that he "clearly" refuted my argument. My interpretation is that my argu...
I read through a couple of months worth of FeministX when I first discovered it...
(Because of a particular skill exhibited: namely the ability to not force your self-image into a narrow box based on the labels you apply to yourself, a topic on which I should write further at some point. See the final paragraph of this post on how much she hates sports for a case in point. Most people calling themselves "feminist" would experience cognitive dissonance between that and their self-image. Just as most people who thought of themselves as important or as "rationalists" might have more trouble than I do publicly quoting anime fanfiction. There certainly are times when it's appropriate to experience cognitive dissonance between your self-image and something you want, but most people seem to cast that net far too widely. There is no contradiction, and there should be no cognitive dissonance, between loving and hating the same person, or between being a submissive feminist who wants alpha males, or between being a rationalist engaged on a quest of desperate importance who reads anime fanfiction, etcetera. But most people try to conform so narrowly and so unimaginati...
However, on my thread, there are a number of people that seem to have no qualms with the idea of barring female voting and such things.
On the internet, emotional charge attracts intellectual lint, and there are plenty of awful people to go around. If you came here looking for a rational basis for your moral outrage, you will probably leave empty-handed.
But I don't think you're actually concerned that the person arguing against suffrage is making any claims with objective content, so this isn't so much the domain of rational debate as it is politics, wherein you explain the virtue of your values and the vice of your opponents'. Such debates are beyond salvage.
Agreed. The post is almost without content (or badly needed variation in sentence structure, but that's another point altogether) - there's no offered reason to believe any of the claims about what anti-feminists say or what justifications they have. No definition of terms - what kind of feminism do you mean, for instance? Maybe these problems are obviated with a little more background knowledge of your blog, but if that's what you're relying on to help people understand you, then it was a poor choice to send us to this post and not another.
I'm tickled that Less Wrong came to mind as a place to go for unbiased input, though.
Parties to the dispute can split the cost.
Actually, here's a rule that would make a HELL of a lot of sense:
Either party to a lawsuit can contribute to a common monetary pool which is then split between both sides to hire lawyers. It is illegal for either side to pay a lawyer a bonus beyond this, or for the lawyer to accept additional help on the lawsuit.
I'm working through Jaynes' /Probability Theory/ (the online version). My math has apparently gotten a bit rusty and I'm getting stuck on exercise 3.2, "probability of a full set" (Google that exact phrase for the pdf). I'd appreciate if anyone who's been through it before, or finds this stuff easy, would drop a tiny hint, rot13'd if necessary.
V'ir pbafvqrerq jbexvat bhg gur cebonovyvgl bs "abg trggvat n shyy frg", ohg gung qbrfa'g frrz gb yrnq naljurer.
V unir jbexrq bhg gung jura z=x (gur ahzore bs qenjf = gur ahzore bs pbybef) gur shy...
To resurrect the Pascal's mugging problem:
...Robin Hanson has suggested penalizing the prior probability of hypotheses which argue that we are in a surprisingly unique position to affect large numbers of other people who cannot symmetrically affect us. Since only one in 3^^^^3 people can be in a unique position to ordain the existence of at least 3^^^^3 other people who are not symmetrically in such a situation themselves, the prior probability would be penalized by a factor on the same order as the utility. ( http://wiki.lesswrong.com/mediawiki/index.php?
On the subject of creating a function/predicate able to identify a person. It seems that it is another non-localiseable function. My reasoning goes something like this.
1) We want the predicate to be able to identify paused humans (cryostasis), so that the FAI doesn't destroy them accidentally.
2) With sufficient scanning technology we could make a digital scan of a human that has the same value as a frozen head, and encrypt with a one time pad, making it indistinguishable from the output of /dev/rng.
From 1 and 2 it follows that the AI will have to look at...
I'm currently writing a science fiction story set around the time of the singularity. What newsworthy events might you expect in the weeks, days, or hours prior to the singularity. (and in particular prior to friendly AI)
This story is from the perspective of someone not directly involved with any research.
Example: For the purpose of the story, I'm having the FAI team release to the public a 'visualization of human morality' a few days before they go live with it.
It seems there has never been a discussion here of 'Frank H. Knight's famous distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty"'. Though perhaps the issue has been addressed under another name?
I try to avoid the temptation of IQ tests on the internet since they make me feel cocky for the rest of the day. Anyway:
www.iqtest.dk
I feel much more awake after going through it. The only question I had trouble with was the last one. I'm sure I have the right answer, but it feels like there's more to the question that I'm missing. So here's what I got out of it (spoiler): every shape is a shape-shifting entity moving one square to the right each turn.
If someone could fill me in on the rest, that'd be great. This has been killing me for about an hour.
Earlier stuff here So, I thought that it could be fun to have a KGS room for all Go players reading this blog. Blueberry suggested an IGS channel. Others have shown interest. So, lets do this!
But where? IGS or KGS? Some other? I'm in favor of KGS, but all suggestions are welcome. If you're interested, post something!
Thomas Metzinger's Being No One was very highly recommended by Peter Watts in the notes to Blindsight (and I've seen similar praise elsewhere); I got a copy and I was absolutely crushed by the first chapter. What do LWers make of him?
Continuing from my discussion with whpearson because it became offtopic.
whpearson, could you expand on your values and the reasons they are that way? Can you help me understand why you'd sacrifice the life of yourself and your friends for an increased chance of survival for the rest of humanity? Do you explicitly value the survival of humanity, or just the utility functions of other humans?
Regarding science, I certainly value it a lot, but not to the extent of welcoming a war here & now just to get some useful spin-offs of military tech in another decade.
What's a brief but effective way to respond to the "an AI, upon realizing that it's programmed in a way its designer didn't intend to, would reprogram itself to be like the designer intended" fallacy? (Came up here: http://xuenay.livejournal.com/325292.html?thread=1229996#t1229996 )
Paul Almond has written a new article, Launching anything is good: How Governments Could Promote Space Development. I don't know how realistic his proposal is, but I can't find any flagrant logical error in it.
I have a question for the members of LW who are more knowledgable than me in quantum mechanics and theories of quantum mechanics's relevance to consciousness.
There are examples of people having exactly the same conversation repeatedly (e.g. due to transient global amnesia). Is this evidence against quantum mechanics being crucial to consciousness?
So I got into an argument with a theist the other day, and after a while she posted this:
It's not about evidence.
Nu, talk about destroying the foundation for your own beliefs... Escher drawings, indeed.
Meetup listing in Wiki? MBlume created a great Google Calendar for meetups. How about some sort of rudimentary meetup "register" in the LW Wiki? I volunteer to help with this if people think it's a good idea. Thoughts? Objections?
ETA: The GCal is great for presenting some information, but I think something like a Wiki page might be more flexible. I'm especially curious to hear opinions from people who are organizing regular meetups, how that's going, and interest in maintaining a Wiki page.
ETA++: AndrewKemendo has a more complex, probably more us...
IBM simulates cat's whole brain... research team bores simulated cat to death showing him IBM logo... announces human whole-brain real-time simulation for 2018...
A mind teaser for the stream-of-consciousness folk. Let's say one day at 6pm Omega predicts your physical state at 8pm and creates your copy with the state of mind identical to what it predicts for 8pm. At 9pm in kills the original you. Did your consciousness just jump back in time? When did that happen?
This post is a continuation of a discussion with Stefan Pernar - from another thread:
I think there's something to an absolute morality. Or at least, some moralities are favoured by nature over other ones - and those are the ones we are more likely to see.
That doesn't mean that there is "one true morality" - since different moral systems might be equally favoured - but rather that moral relativism is dubious - some moralities really are better than other ones.
There have been various formulations of the idea of a natural morality.
One is "goal ...
Millennial Challenges:
Millennial Challenges / Goals
What should we have accomplished by 3010?
/a long term iteration of the Shadow Question
I posted an idea for 'friendly' AI over on AcceleratingFuture the other night, while in a bit of a drunken stupor. I just reread it and I don't immediately see why it's wrong, so I thought I'd repost it here to get some illuminating negative feedback. Here goes:
Make it easy to bliss out.
Consider the following utility function
U(n, x_n) = max(U(n-1, x_{n-1}), -x_n^2)
where n is the current clock tick, x_n is an external input (aka, from us, the AI’s keepers, or from another piece of software). This utility is monotonic in time, that is, it never decreases, and is bounded from above. If the AI wrests control of the input x_n, it will immediately set x_n = 0 and retire forever. Monotonicity and boundedness from above are imperative here.
Alternatively, to avoid monotonicity (taking U(x) = -x^2), one can put the following safeguard in: the closer the utility is to its maximum, the more CPU cycles are skipped, such that the AI effectively shuts down if it ever maximizes its utility in a given clock tick. This alternative obviously wouldn’t stop a superintelligence, but it would probably stop a human level AI, and most likely even substantially smarter AIs (see, eg, crystal meth). Arrange matters such that the technical requirements between the point at which the AI wrests control of the input x_n, and the point at which it can self modify to avoid a slow down when it blisses out, are greatly different, guaranteeing that the AI will only be of moderate intelligence when it succeeds in gaining control of its own pleasure zone and thus incapable of preventing incapacitation upon blissing out.
Eh?
Now I hopefully did read your comment adequately. It presents an interesting idea, one that I don't recall hearing before. It even seems like a good safety measure, with a tiny chance of making things better.
But beware of magical symbols: when you write x_n, what does it mean, exactly? AI's utility function is necessarily about the whole world, or its interpretation as the whole history of the world. Expected utility that comes into action in AI's decision-making is about all the possibilities for the history of the world (since that's what is in general d... (read more)