What is the appropriate etiquette for post frequency? I work on multiple drafts at a time and sometimes they all get finished near each other. I assume 1 post per week is safe enough.

Why was this comment downvoted to -4? Seems to me it's a legitimate question, from a fairly new poster.

And for one short moment, in the wee morning hours, MrHen takes up the whole damn Recent Comments section.

I assume dropping two walls of text and a handful of other lengthy comments isn't against protocol. Apologies if I annoy anyone.

"Former Christian Apologizes For Being Such A Huge Shit Head All Those Years" sounds like an Onion article, but it isn't. What's impressive is not only the fact that she wrote up this apology publicly, but that she seems to have done it within a few weeks of becoming an atheist after a lifetime of Christianity, and in front of an audience that has since sent her so much hate mail she's stopped reading anything in her inbox that's not clearly marked as being on another topic.

I am going to be hosting a Less Wrong meeting at East Tennessee State University in the near future, likely within the next two weeks. I thought I would post here first to see if anyone at all is interested and if so when a good time for such a meeting might be. The meeting will be highly informal and the purpose is just to gauge how many people might be in the local area.

Please review a draft of a Less Wrong post that I'm working on: Complexity of Value != Complexity of Outcome, and let me know if there's anything I should fix or improve before posting it here. (You can save more substantive arguments/disagreements until I post it. Unless of course you think it completely destroys my argument so that I shouldn't even bother. :)

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8485669.stm

I'll track down the paper from Science on request.

For the "How LW is Perceived" file:

Here is an excerpt from a comments section elsewhere in the blogosphere:

In the meantime, one comment on that other interesting reading at Less Wrong. It has been fun sifting through various posts on a variety of subjects. Every time I leave I have the urge to give them the Vulcan hand signal and say "Live Long and Prosper". LOL.

I shall leave the interpretation of this to those whose knowledge of Star Trek is deeper than mine...

Prisoner's Dilemma on Amazon Mechanical Turk: http://blog.doloreslabs.com/2010/01/altruism-on-amazon-mechanical-turk/

Ask Peter Norvig anything: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/auvxf/ask_peter_norvig_anything/

Garry Kasparov: The Chess Master and the Computer

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592

Does anybody have any updates as to the claims made against Alcor, i.e. the Tuna Can incident? I've tried a bunch of searches, but haven't been able to find anything conclusive as to the veracity of the claims.

Does a Turing chatbot deserve recognition as a person?

(Turing chatbot = bot that can pass the Turing test... 50% of the time? 95% of the time? 99% of the time?)

Today's Questionable Content has a brief Singularity shoutout (in its typical smart-but-silly style).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantek

I recently found an article that may be of interest to Less Wrong readers:

Blame It on the Brain

The latest neuroscience research suggests spreading resolutions out over time is the best approach

The article also mentions a study in which overloading the prefrontal cortex with other tasks reduces people's willposer.

(should I repost this link to next month's open thread? not many people are likely to see it here)

Grand Orbital Tables: http://www.orbitals.com/orb/orbtable.htm

In high school and intro chemistry in college, I was taught up to the e and then f orbitals, but they keep going and going from there.

Inorganic dust with lifelike qualities: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.htm

I am currently writing a sequence of blog posts on Friendly AI. I would appreciate your comments on present and future entries.

Inspired by this comment by Michael Vassar:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lw/fictional_evidence_vs_fictional_insight/1hls?context=1#comments

Is there any interest in an experimental Less Wrong literary fiction book club, specifically for the purpose of gaining insight? Or more specifically, so that together we can hash out exactly what insights are or are not available in particular works of fiction.

Michael Vassar suggests The Great Gatsby (I think, it was kind of written confusingly parallel with the names of authors but I don't think there was ever an author Gatsby) and I remember actually enjoying The Great Gatsby in high school. It's also a short novel so we could comfortably read it in a week or leisurely reread over the course of a month.

If it works, we can do one of Joyce's earlier works next, or whatever the club suggests. If we get good at this, a year from now we can do Ulysses.

It is not that I object to dramatic thoughts; rather, I object to drama in the absence of thought. Not every scream made of words represents a thought. For if something really is wrong with the universe, the least one could begin to do about it would be to state the problem explicitly. Even a vague first attempt ("Major! These atoms ... they're all in the wrong places!") is at least an attempt to say something, to communicate some sort of proposition that can be checked against the world. But you see, I fear that some screams don't actually communicate anything: not even, "I'm hurt!" for to say that one is hurt presupposes that one is being hurt by something, some thing of which which we can speak, of which we can name predicates and say "It is so" or "It is not so." Even very sick and damaged creatures can be helped, as long their cries have enough structure for us to extrapolate a volition. But not all animate entities are creatures. Creatures have problems, problems we might be able to solve. Agonium just sits there, howling. You cannot help it; it can only be destroyed.

How old were you when you became self-aware or achieved a level of sentience well beyond that of an infant or toddler?

I was five years old and walking down the hall outside of my kindergarden classroom and I suddenly realized that I had control over what was happening inside of my mind's eye. This manifested itself by me summoning an image in my head of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.

Is it proper to consider that the moment when I became self aware? Does anyone have a similar anecdote?

(This is inspired by Shannon's mention of her child exploring her sense of self) http://lesswrong.com/lw/1n8/london_meetup_the_friendly_ai_problem/1hm4

Suppose we want to program an AI to represent the interest of a group. The standard utilitarian solution is to give the AI a utility function that is an average of the utility functions of the individual in the group, but that runs into the interpersonal comparison of utility problem. (Was there ever a post about this? Does Eliezer have a preferred approach?)

Here's my idea for how to solve this. Create N AIs, one for each individual in the group, and program it with the utility function of that individual. Then set a time in the future when one of those AIs will be randomly selected and allowed to take over the universe. In the mean time the N AIs are to negotiate amongst themselves, and if necessary, given help to enforce their agreements.

The advantages of this approach are:

• AIs will need to know how to negotiate with each other anyway, so we can build on top of that "for free".
• There seems little question that the scheme is fair, since everyone is given an equal amount of bargaining power.

Comments?

ETA: I found a very similar idea mentioned before by Eliezer.

So I am back in college and I am trying to use my time to my best advantage. Mainly using college as an easy way to get money to fund room and board while I work on my own education. I am doing this because i was told here among other places that there are many important problems that need to be solved and i wanted to develop skills to help solve them because I have been strongly convinced that it is moral to do so. However beyond this I am completely unsure of what to do. So I have the furious need for action but seem to have no purpose guiding that action and it is causing me serious distress and pain.

So over the next few years that I have left in college I am going to make a desperate effort to find an outlet where I can effectively channel this overwhelming need to do something. Right now though I feel so over my head that I can't even see the surface.

Different responses to challenges seen through the lens of video games. Although I expect the same can be said for character driven stories (rather than say concept driven).

It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Some people see them as opportunities to perform - to demonstrate their talent or intellect. Others see them as opportunities to master - to improve their skill or knowledge.

Say you take a person with a performance orientation ("Paul") and a person with a mastery orientation ("Matt"). Give them each an easy puzzle, and they will both do well. Paul will complete it quickly and smile proudly at how well he performed. Matt will complete it quickly and be satisfied that he has mastered the skill involved.

Now give them each a difficult puzzle. Paul will jump in gamely, but it will soon become clear he cannot overcome it as impressively as he did the last one. The opportunity to show off has disappeared, and Paul will lose interest and give up. Matt, on the other hand, when stymied, will push harder. His early failure means there's still something to be learned here, and he will persevere until he does so and solves the puzzle.

While a performance orientation improves motivation for easy challenges, it drastically reduces it for difficult ones. And since most work worth doing is difficult, it is the mastery orientation that is correlated with academic and professional success, as well as self-esteem and long-term happiness.

When I learned about performance and mastery orientations, I realized with growing horror just what I'd been doing for most of my life. Going through school as a "gifted" kid, most of the praise I'd received had been of the "Wow, you must be smart!" variety. I had very little ability to follow through or persevere, and my grades tended to be either A's or F's, as I either understood things right away (such as, say, calculus) or gave up on them completely (trigonometry). I had a serious performance orientation. And I was reinforcing it every time I played an RPG.

Ray Kurzweil Responds to the Issue of Accuracy of His Predictions

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-issue-of.html

Schooling isn't about education. This article is pretty mind-boggling: apparently, it's been a norm until now in Germany that school ends at lunchtime and the children then go home. Considering how strong the German economy has traditionally been, this raises serious questions of the degree that elementary school really is about teaching kids things (as opposed to just being a place to drop off the kids while the parents work).

Oh, and the country is now making the shift towards school in the afternoon as well, driven by - you guessed it - a need for women to spend more time actually working.

How much of Eliezer's 2001 FAI document is still advocated? eg. Wisdom tournaments and bugs in the code.

For some reason, my IP was banned on the LessWrong Wiki. Apparently this is the reason:

Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by "Bella".

Any idea how this happens and how I can prevent from happening again?

Strange fact about my brain, for anyone interested in this kind of thing:

Even though my recent top-level post has (currently) been voted up to 19, earning me 190 karma points, I feel like I've lost status as a result of writing it.

This doesn't make much sense, though it might not be a bad thing.

What are/ought to be the standards here for use of profanity?

Something has been bothering me ever since I began to try to implement many of the lessons in rationality here. I feel like there needs to be an emotional reinforcement structure or a cognitive foundation that is both pliable and supportive of truth seeking before I can even get into the why, how and what of rationality. My successes in this area have been only partial but it seems like the better well structured the cognitive foundation is the easier it is to adopt, discard and manipulate new ideas.

I understand that is likely a fairly meta topic and would likely require at least some basic rationality to bootstrap into existence but I am going to try to define the problem. What is this necessary cognitive foundation? And then break it down into pieces. I suspect that much of this lies in subverbal emotional and procedural cues but if so how can they be more effectively trained?

I've just reached karma level 1337. Please downvote me so I can experience it again!

From Pharyngula: Bertrand Russell on God. Some of the things he says about what to believe and why seem rather familiar...

This is ridiculous. (A $3 item discounted to $2.33 is perceived as a better deal (in this particular experimental setup) than the same item discounted to $2.22, because ee sounds suggest smallness and oo sounds suggest bigness.)

What is the informal policy about posting on very old articles? Specifically, things ported over from OB? I can think of two answers: (a) post comments/questions there; (b) post comments/questions in the open thread with a link to the article. Which is more correct? Is there a better alternative?

HN discussion of cognitive flaws related to gaming: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057351

I'll ask the question again here -- does anyone know of some more extensive writing on the subject of cognitive flaws related to gaming? Or something recent on the psychology of rewards?

I've been downvoted quite often recently and since I'm actually here to learn something I would like to better understand the reasons behind it.

Specifically I would like to hear your opinion on the following comment of mine: "I'll be the judge of that." This was given as an answer to someone suggesting how I should use my time.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lv/the_wannabe_rational/1gea?context=1#comments

Do you think that a downvote was justified and if so why?

As far as candidates for making AI other than the Singularity Institute, is there any more likely than Google? Surely they want to make one.

They have a lot of really smart AI researchers working on hard problems within the world's largest dataset, and who knows what can happen when you combine that with 20% time. Does Google controlling the AI scare you?

The US military or any government making the AI seems a recipe for certain destruction, but I'm not so sure about Google.

Paul Bucheit -- Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/09/evaluating-risk-and-opportunity-as.html

What's the right prior for evaluating an H1N1 conspiracy theory?

I have a friend, educated in biology and business, very rational compared to the average person, who believes that H1N1 was a pharmaceutical company conspiracy. They knew they could make a lot of money by making a less-deadly flu that would extend the flu season to be year round. Because it is very possible for them to engineer such a virus and the corporate leaders are corrupt sociopaths, he thinks it is 80% probable that it was a conspiracy. Again, he thinks that because it was possible for them to do it, they probably did it.

On the other hand, I know the conditions of factory farming and it seems quite plausible and even very likely for such a virus to spontaneously mutate and cross species. So I put the probability at an H1N1 conspiracy at 10%. However, my friend's argument makes a certain amount of sense to me.

Can someone point me towards the calculations people have been doing about the expected gain from donating to the SIAI, in lives per dollar?

Edit: Never mind. I failed to find the video previously, but formulating a good question made me think of a good search term.

Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/01/why-is-the-news-media-comfortable-with-lying-about-science.ars

I occasionally see people here repeatedly making the same statement, a statement which appears to be unique to them, and rarely giving any justification for it. Examples of such statements are "Bayes' law is not the fundamental method of reasoning; analogy is" and "timeless decision is the way to go". (These statements may have been originally articulated more precisely than I just articulated them.)

I'm at risk of having such a statement myself, so here, I will make this statement for hopefully the last time, and justify it.

It's often said around here that Bayesian priors and Solomonoff induction and such things describe the laws of physics of the universe. The simpler the description, the more likely that laws-of-physics is. This is more or less true, but it is not the truth that we want to be saying. What we're trying to describe is our observations. If I had a theory stating that every computable event happens, sure, that explains all phenomena, but in order for it to describe our observations, you need to add a string specifying which of these computable events are the ones we observe, which makes this theory completely useless.

In theory, this provides a solution to anthropic reasoning: simply figure out which paths through the universe are the simplest, and assign those the highest probability. Again, in theory, this provides a solution to quantum suicide. But please don't ask me what these solutions are.

Mike Gibson has a great and interesting question. How would Bayesian methodology address this? Might this be an information cascade?

Would we (Earth) show up in our universe's stats pages?

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/01/would-we-earth-show-up-in-our-universes-stats-pages.html

Paul Graham -- How to Disagree

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

The Edge Annual Question 2010: How is the internet changing the way you think?

http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_print.html#responses

"Top Contributors" is now sorted correctly. (Kudos to Wesley Moore at Tricycle.)

I rewatched 12 Monkeys last week (because my wife was going through a Brad Pitt phase, although I think this movie cured her of that :), in which Bruce Willis plays a time traveler who accidentally got locked up in a mental hospital. The reason I mention it here is because It contained an amusing example of mutual belief updating: Bruce Willis's character became convinced that he really is insane and needs psychiatric care, while simultaneously his psychiatrist became convinced that he actually is a time traveler and she should help him save the world.

Perhaps the movie also illustrates a danger of majoritarianism: if someone really found a secret that could save the world, it would be tragic if he allowed himself to be convinced otherwise due to majoritarian considerations. Don't most (nearly all?) true beliefs start their existence as a minority?

Possibly dumb question but... can anyone here explain to me the difference between Minimum Message Length and Minimum Description Length?

I've looked at the wikipedia pages for both, and I'm still not getting it.

Thanks.

Hey, exactly 500 comments.

So, elsewhere someone just brought up moral luck. I'm wondering how this relates to the Yudkowskian view on morality (I forget what he called it), and I'd like to invite someone to think about it and perhaps post on it. If no one else does so, I might be motivated to do so eventually. There might be some potential to shed some real light on the issue of moral luck--specifically the extent of the validity or otherwise of the Control Principle--with reference to Yudkowsky's framework.

How do people here consume Less Wrong? I just started reading and am looking for a good way to stay on top of posts and comments. Do you periodically check the website? Do you use an RSS feed? (which?) Or something else?

Link pointer: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-01/hu-qcc010810.php Quantum computer calculates exact energy of molecular hydrogen. http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nchem.483.html

The submitter on Hacker News: "This is arguably one of the most important breakthroughs ever in the field of computing."

Imagine how much easier this comment would be to browse if it was part of a subreddit here.

James Hughes - with a (IMO) near-incoherent Yudkowsky critique:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20100108/

Question for all of you: Is our subconscious conscious? That is, are parts of us conscious? "I" am the top-level consciousness thinking about what I'm typing right now. But all sorts of lower-level processes are going on below "my" consciousness. Are any of them themselves conscious? Do we have any way of predicting or testing whether they are?

Tononi's information-theoretic "information integration" measure (based on mutual information between components) could tell you "how conscious" a well-specified circuit was; but I regard it as an interesting correlate of processing power, without any demonstrated or even argued logical relationship to consciousness. Tononi has published a lot of papers on it - and they became more widely-cited when he started saying they were about consciousness instead of saying they were about information integration - but he didn't AFAIK make any arguments that the thing he measures with information integration has something to do with consciousness.

A soft reminder to always be looking for logical fallacies: This quote was smushed into an opinion piece about OpenGL:

Blizzard always releases Mac versions of their games simultaneously, and they're one of the most successful game companies in the world! If they're doing something in a different way from everyone else, then their way is probably right.

Oops.