Assuming total ignorance of the field (absent total ignorance, I could probably distinguish between good and poor books), I'd choose newer editions of older books.

Is this site of any use to anyone here?

I've come across it before and I found it useful. Ok, I'll be honest. It probably wasn't all that useful to me. I like this stuff because it fascinates me.

I would repost this in the next open thread, it's not like anyone would get annoyed at the double post (I think), and that site looks like it would interest a lot of people.

Regarding that test, do 'real' IQ tests consist only of pattern recognition? I quite like the cryptographic and 'if a is b and b is...'-type questions found in other online IQ tests, and do well on them. I scored a good 23 points below my average on the iqtest.dk , which made me feel sad.

http://twitter.com/CERN

It's been at this point before, before the helium leak thing. Let's see them collide beams at energies higher than 1 TeV (which is what I think the highest beam heretofore has been).

We have not yet passed the hamster point!

Unfortunately they're using toy neurons.

What I'd be excited to see is a high fidelity simulation of neurons in a petri dish, even just a few hundred. There's no problem scanning the topology here, the only problem is in accurately reproducing the biophysics. Once this has been demonstrated, human WBE is just a truckload of money away from reality.

Really, does anyone know of any groups working on something like this? I'd gladly throw away my current research agenda to work with them.

Michael Anissimov deflates hype.

Beat me to it. Here's IBM's own press release.

With unobjectionable values I mean those that would not automatically and eventually lead to one's extinction. Or more precisely: a utility function becomes irrational when it is intrinsically self limiting in the sense that it will eventually lead to ones inability to generate further utility. Thus my suggested utility function of 'ensure continued co-existence'

This utility function seems to be the only one that does not end in the inevitable termination of the maximizer.

If I were a Bayesian! Yabadibidibidibidibidibidibidum! All day long, I'd update (bi-di-bum), if I were a Bayes-i-an! I wouldn't have heuristics! Yabadibidibidibidibidibidibidum! If I were a little rational - eidlde-de-deidl Bayesian.

Absence of evidence, evidence of ab-sence! One is not the other, though - look out the door and (evidence of absence!) see the grass instead of snow!

Eliezer, we've waited all our lives for the Singularity. Wouldn't now be a good time for it to come? (We'll have to wait for it someplace else...)

Is this the prior I began from? Is this the reasoning at play?

Utility? (Util-what?) Utility... (Utility...) Well? (But our functions aren't luminous and our values do not scale! You're insane, you're confused, you're reading too much Mill!)

Not sure who the "stream-of-consciousness folk" are, but I don't see any more problem with a timeless stream (we're all timeless folk, I assume) jumping backward than sideways or forward.

Did your consciousness just jump back in time? When did that happen?

To be consistent with the 'stream' metaphor it would seem that you must say it jumped back at 8pm. It is not too much of a stretch for a metaphorical stream to diverge into two, where one branch can be transported back in time and the other end some time later. I'm not sure if 'jump' is the ideal terminology for the transition. Either way, the whole 'stream-of-consciousness' idea seems to be stretched beyond whatever usefulness it may have had.

Your consciousness (the cloned one of the two) experiences a jump back in time, but the universe history it observes between 6 and 8 for the second time diverges from what it observed the first time, because it itself now acts differently.

There's no more an actual backward jump in time than there would be in case Omega just implanted (accurate, predicted) memories of 6 through 8 pm in your brain at 6pm, without any duplications.

Force anyone to express several controversial opinions per day for several decades and you'll be able to cherry pick a list of seven hilariously wrong examples.

Also, it's a subject in which everyone is an expert simply by virtue of simply living in our culture.

One factor: it provides variable interval positive reinforcement* - those moments when you see a page which describes something you recognize happening all the time, and those moments when you see a show you recognize acknowledged on the page.

* Edit for those who don't want to follow the link: variable-interval reinforcement occurs with some set frequency (approximately, in this case), but at non-equal spacings. Other things with variable intervals are raindrops falling on a small area of pavement, cars passing on a street, and other things which are loosely modeled by Poisson processes. Any (say) ten-minute period has about the same number as any other ten-minute period, but they aren't spread out at regular intervals.

I think a fair bit of it is the silly titles. I can resist clicking on things that I can figure out what they are from what they're named (such as when I'm intimately familiar with the Trope Namer), but toss me a bewildering title and I have to know what it is and where it got that name.

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 determined by AI's decisions). When you say "x_n" in AI's utility function, it means some condition on that, and this condition is no simpler than defining what the AI's box is. By x_n you have to name "only this input device, and nothing else". And by x_n=0 you also have to refer some exact condition on the state of the world, one that it won't necessarily be possible to meet precisely. So the AI may just go on developing infrastructure for better understanding of the ultimate meaning of its values and finer and finer implementation of them. It has no motive to actually stop.

Even when AI's utility function happens to be exactly maxed out, the AI is still there: what does implementation of an arbitrary plan look like, I wonder? Maybe just like the work of an AI arbitrarily pulled from mind design space, a paperclip maximizer of sorts. Utility is for selecting plans, and since all plans are equally preferable, an arbitrary plan gets selected, but this plan may involve a lot of heavy-duty creative restructuring of the world. Think of utility as a constructor for AI's algorithm: there will still be some algorithm even if you produce it from "trivial" input.

And finally, you assume AI's decision theory to be causal. Even after actually maxing out its utility, it may spend long nights contemplating various counterfactual opportunities it still has at increasing its expected utility using possibilities that weren't realized in reality... (See on the wiki: counterfactual mugging, Newcomb's problem, TDT, UDT; I also recommend Drescher's talk on SS09).

Expected utility is not something that "goes up", as the AI develops. It's utility of all it expects to achieve, ever. It may obtain more information about what the outcome will be, but each piece of evidence is necessarily expected to bring the outcome either up or down, with no way to know in advance which way it'll be.

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?

Not directed at me, but since this is a common view... I don't think you're question takes an argument as its answer.

This is why. If you don't want to protect people you don't know then you and I have different amygdalas.

Whpearson can come up with reasons why we're all the same but if you don't feel it those reasons won't be compelling.

There are two possible answers to this.

One is the raw emotion, it seems right in a wordless fashion. Why do people risk their lives to save an unrelated child, as fire fighters do? Saving the human race from extinction seems like the epitome of this ethic.

Then there is the attempt to find a rationale for this feeling, the number of arguments I have had with myself to give some reason to why I might feel this way. Or at least why it is not a very bad idea to feel this way.

My view of identity is something like the idea of genetic relatedness. If someone made an atom level copy of you, that'd be the same person pretty much right? Because it shares the same beliefs, desires and view point on the world. But most humans share some beliefs and desires. From my point of view, that you share some interest or way of thinking with me, makes you a bit of me and vice versa, not a large amount but some. We are identity kin as well as all sharing lots of the same genetic code (as we do with animals). So even if I die parts of me are in everyone even if not as obvious as they are with my friends. We are all mental descendants of Newton and Einstein and share that heritage. Not all things about humanity (or about me) are to be cherished, so I do not preach universal love and peace. But wiping out humanity would remove all of those spread out bits of me.

Making self-sacrifice easier is the fact I'm not sure that me surviving as a post human will preserve much of my current identity. In some way I hope it doesn't as I am not psychologically ready for grown up (on the cosmic scale) choices but I wish to be. In other ways I am afraid that things of value will be lost that don't need to be. But from any view I don't think it matters that much who will become the grown ups. So my own personal continuity through the ages does not seem as important as the survival.

I think my friends would also share the same word less emotion to save humanity, but not the odd wordy view of identity I have.

I hope I'm not misinterpreting again, but this is a Giant cheesecake fallacy. The problem is that AI's decisions depend on its motive. "An AI, upon realizing that it's programmed in a way its designer didn't intend to, would try to convince the programmer that what the AI turned out to be is exactly what he intended in the first place", "An AI, upon realizing that it's programmed in a way its designer didn't intend to, would print a string "Styggron" to the console".

How about: an AI can be smart enough to realize all of those things, and it still won't change its utility function. Then link Eliezer's short story about that exact scenario. (Can't find it in two minutes, but it's the one where the dude wakes up with a construct designed to be his perfect mate, and he rejects her because she's not his wife.)

In the context of most discussions on this site, "confidence" is the probability that a guess is correct. For example:

• I guess that a flipped coin will land heads. My confidence is 1/2, because I have arbitrarily picked 1 out of 2 possible outcomes.
• I guess that, when a coin is flipped repeatedly, the ratio of heads will be close to half. My confidence is close to 1, because I know from experience that most coins are fair (and the law of large numbers).

"Confidence interval" is just confidence that something is within a certain range.

You should also be aware that in the context of frequentism (most scientific papers), these terms have different and somewhat confusing technical definitions.

You might want to look at Dempster-Shafer theory, which is a generalisation of Bayesian reasoning that distinguishes belief from probability. It is possible to have a belief of 0 in heads, 0 in tails, and 1 in {heads,tails}.

It may be that, when looked at properly, DS theory turns out to be Bayesian reasoning in disguise, but a brief google didn't turn up anything definitive. Is anyone here more informed on the matter?

Think of the probability you assign as a measure of how "not surprised" you would be at seeing a certain outcome.

Total probability of all mutually exclusive possibilities has to add up to 1, right?

So if you would be equally surprised at heads or tails coming up, and you consider all other possibilities to be negligible (Or you state your prediction in terms of "given that the coin lands such that one face is clearly the 'face up' face....") then you ought assign a probability of 1/2 to each. (Again, slightly less to account for various "out of bounds" options, but in the abstract, considered on its own, 1/2)

ie, the same probability ought be assigned to each, since you'd be (reasonably) equally surprised at each outcome. So if the two have to also sum to 1 (100%), then 1/2 (50%) is the correct amount of belief to assign.

I don't believe he'd be satisfied with any conclusion resting purely on thinking ("un-Friendly AI is an imminent existential risk, therefore FAI research is an overriding priority"); I think he needs something that also feels emotionally right through seeing people who are hurting and in need (or, at least, reading well-written stories about them).

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?

He could start with shut up and multiply. (Or, perhaps he could just change 'best' to 'most appealing'.)

Wait, I think I know what the question is, now. Yes, this thing seems to suggest that human thinking is well-approximated as deterministic - a hypothesis which matches what I've heard elsewhere. Off the top of my head:

• I once read a story about a guy being offered lunch several times in a row and accepting again and again and again in similar terms until his stomach felt "tightish".

• There was a family friend taking sleeping medication which was known to cause sleepwalking, and she had an entire phone conversation with her friend in her sleep - and then called the same friend after waking up planning to discuss the same things.

Of course, the typical quantum-mechanical stories of consciousness are far too vague to be falsified by this or any other evidence.

Edit: As Nick Tarleton cogently points out, this is an exaggeration - it is certainly falsifiable in the way phlogiston or elan vital is falsifiable, by the production of a complete correct theory, and it is further so by e.g. uploading.

Thermal noise dominates quantum noise anyway. I suppose it argues that if you don't depend on thermal noise then you don't depend on quantum noise either, but the Penrosian types claim it's not really random anyway.

I don't think anyone holds that human behavior is always undetermined in the way particles are. The reason no one holds that view is that it would contradict the work of neuroscientists, the people, you know, actually making progress on these questions.

There are examples of people having exactly the same conversation repeatedly (e.g. due to transient global amnesia).

Citations?

I'm surprised to hear this question from you. Does this comment mean that you seriously consider this quantum consciousness woo? Why on Earth?

It's evidence against chaotic or random processes being important, but quantum computing needn't mean random (i.e. high variance) results; AFAIK, it can in principle be made highly predictable.

You're probably thinking of "A Rational Argument" or "Back Up and Ask Whether, Not Why".

Already are! http://vimeo.com/siai

What did she she say it was about?

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 unimaginatively to their own self-image that there is little point in reading anything else they say, because it is all predictable once you know what "role" they're trying to play in their own minds. And among people who are unusually good at not conforming to their own images, their blogs often make for good reading because it is often surprising reading.)

...and I still don't know what is meant by the "feminist" in the title, so I have to agree with all the commenters who asked for a definition of "feminism". Definitions are oft overrated but in this case I literally do not know what is being talked about.

If it were me, I'd probably be saying something to myself along the lines of: "So long as such a large flaw exists in my own work, which I can correct myself without waiting for permission from anyone else, there is no point in asking whether others have done worse." This is by way of encouraging myself to do better, for which purpose it is unwise to focus on other people's flaws as consolation.

EDIT: Finished reading through the comments. Some commenters did better than you, some commenters did worse, e.g. Aretae's separate post gave you good advice. Definitely you've got more to learn about which arguments and evidence license which conclusions at what strength. None of the arguments including yours were noticeably up to LW standards and so there's not much point in trying to figure out who "won". The winners were the commenters who said "I don't know what is meant by 'feminism' here, please define". Some of the others could have carried part of their argument if they had been a bit more careful to say, "Here is something that 'feminism' could be taken to mean, or that many/most men take the label 'feminism' to mean, now I am going to talk about how many/most men react to this particular thing regardless of whether it is what you call 'feminism', and if it isn't, please go ahead and define what you mean by it." That would have been Step One.

Now, the issue is that when there is an argument between feminists and anti feminists on the internet, the feminists will believe that other feminists arguments include more truth and reason while anti-feminists will believe that anti-feminist arguments include more truth and reason.

What exactly is an anti-feminist? I've never actually met someone who identified as one. Is this more of a label that others apply to them and if so, what do you mean when you apply it? Is it a manner of 'Feminism, Boo!' vs 'Yay! Feminism!' or is it the objection to one (or more) ideals that are of particular import?

Does 'anti-feminist' apply to beliefs about the objective state of the universe, such as the impact of certain biological differences on psychology or social dynamics? Or is it more suitably applied to normative claims about how things should be, including those about the relative status of groups or individuals?

Hi! Feel free to introduce yourself here.

There are a couple general reasons for disagreement.

1. Two parties disagree on terminal values (if someone genuinely believes that women are inherently less valuable than men there is no reason to keep talking about gender politics)
2. Two parties disagree on intermediate values (both might value happiness but a feminist might believe gender equality to be central to attaining happiness while the anti-feminist thinks gender equality is counter productive to this goal. It might be difficult for parties to explain their reasoning in these matters but it is possible). 3.Two parties disagree about the means to the end (an anti-feminist might think that feminism as a movement doesn't do a good job promoting gender equality)
3. Two parties disagree about the intent of one or more parties (a lot of anti-feminists think feminism is a tool for advancing interests of women exclusively and that feminists aren't really concerned with gender equality. I don't think you can say much to such people though it is worth asking yourself why they have that impression... calling yourself a female supremacist will not help matters.)
4. Two parties disagree about the facts of the status quo (if someone thinks that women aren't more oppressed than men or that feminists exaggerate the problem they may have exactly the same view of an ideal world as you do but have very different means for getting there. This is a tricker issue than it looks because facts about oppression are really difficult to quantify. There is a common practice in anti-subordination theory of treating claims of oppression at face value but this only works if one trusts the intentions of the person claiming to be oppressed.)
5. One of more parties have incoherent views (you can point out incoherence, not much else).

I think that is more or less complete. As you can see, some disagreements can be resolved, others can't. Talk to the people you can make progress with but don't go in assuming that you're going to convince everyone of your view.

Edit: Formating.

Let me be the first to say: welcome to Less Wrong! Please explore the site and stay with us - we need more girls.

The discussion here helped me reanalyze my own attitude towards this kind of issue.

I don't think I ever had a serious intention to back up my arguments or win a debate when I posted on the issue of why men hate feminism. I am not sure what to do when faced the extreme anti feminism that I commonly find on the internet. I have a number of readers on my blog who will make totalizing comments about all women or all feminists. Ex, one commenter said that women have no ability to sustain interest in topics that don't pertain to relationships between individuals. Other commenters say that feminsm will lead to the downfall of civilization for reasons including that it lets women pursue their fleeting sexual impulses, which are destructive.

i suppose I do not really know how to handle this attitude. Ordinarily, I ignore them since I operate under the assumption that people that expouse such viewpoints are not prone to being swayed by any argument. They are attached to their bias, in a sense. I am not sure if it is possible for a feminist to have a reasonable discussion with a person that is anti feminist and that hates nearly all aspects of feminism in the western world.

Everyone has a gender, and gender affects a person's thinking style, desires and determination of fairness in assessing behaviors between genders.

*winces* So, I agree that no one is competent and everyone has an agenda, but it's not as if everyone sides with "their" sex.

Well, I am not sure if unbiased people can exist regarding the issue but the closest thing I could think of was Less Wrong.

No, historically we suck at this, too. Got any decision theory questions?

I hate to say it, but your analysis seems rather thin. I think a productive discussion of social attitudes toward feminism would have to start with a more comprehensive survey of the facts of the matter on the ground - discussion of poll results, interviews, and the like. Even if the conclusion is correct, it is not supported in your post, and there are no clues in your post as to where to find evidence either way.