What good things can be said about G. W. Bush?

Thoughts on Democrats and Republicans?

My impression is that Democrats have much more intellectually honest, serious public discourse, although that's not saying much.

What do you think President Obama should focus on? And do you think he has been squandering the bully pulpit?

I'd prefer a top-level post. They're cheap and this could get busy.

You could literally post just this.

I recall EY commenting at some point that the way to make political progress is to convert intractable political problems into tractable technical problems. I think this kind of discussion would be more interesting and more profitable than a "traditional" mind-killing political debate.

It might be interesting, for example, to develop formal rationalist political methods. Some principles might include:

• Always conduct a comprehensive fact-gathering phase before beginning any policy discussion.
• Develop techniques to prevent people from becoming emotionally committed or status-linked to positions.
• Subject every statement to formal logical analysis; if the statement fails any obvious rule of logical inference, the statement is deleted and its author censured.
• Rigorously untangle webs of inference. A statement arguing against the death penalty should involve probability estimates of the number of crimes the penalty does (or does not) deter, the cost of administering it, etc, and connect these estimates to a global utility function. The statement must include analyses of how the argument changes in response to changes in the underlying probability estimates.

I disagree; discovering that someone holds political views opposed to yours can inhibit your ability to rational consider arguments; arguments become soldiers, etc.,

Besides, I think the survey from ages ago showed the general spread of political views, and I doubt much has changed since. For discussing particular issues, there are other places available, and it may be that only by not discussing hot topics can we keep the barriers to entry up that keep the LW membership productive.

I'd be more interested in an initial discussion of whether it is in fact rational to discuss politics (except to the extent that you gain intrinsic enjoyment from the discussion). It is clear that for most people in most elections their vote is irrelevant (the chances of it making any difference are negligible). This suggests that time spent discussing politics for the purposes of deciding how to vote is wasted and such discussion is irrational. Arguably the only people who rationally devote any significant time to thinking or talking about politics are the small group of people who actually make their living as politicians or political commentators. Robin Hanson has often made the point that politics is not about policy - it is mostly about signalling status and in-group/out-group dynamics. What would we be hoping to achieve by discussing politics at less wrong?

I think one thing we could discuss without wandering onto a minefield is political mechanisms — discussions of ways we can make the system (legislative procedures, division of power, voting systems, etc.) more rational, without discussing specific policies.

We would still have to be careful, as even this depends on certain subjective goals — what do we want the political system to do, ultimately? — but that itself could be an interesting meta-discussion. However, it's a discussion we'd probably have to have before we even start talking about ideal political mechanisms, because we need to agree on what we want a political system to accomplish (that is, what an ideal policy-making system would look like, and how it would acquire and realize values, keeping in mind that it'll have to be run mostly by humans for the time being) before we can start understanding how it might work.

And writing that paragraph made me realize a meta-meta-discussion that might also be necessary: is it even possible to separate policy goals from political structural goals? Maybe it is, but it could be difficult. The practical outcome of a direct democracy, a representative democracy, a futarchy, and a dictatorship will all be significantly different, yet in somewhat predictable directions, so even if we banish all policy discussion, we'd need to figure out how to uncover and squash any bias that could make us prefer certain abstract political systems because of actual specific policy goals.

Or maybe we're not interested in doing that in the first place — maybe you're satisfied with supporting systems of government that are simply most likely to result in your own values being fulfilled, in which case your ideal system would be a dictatorship run by you (or the system that's the best at approximating the same), unless you value democracy/pluralism itself more strongly than anything you could achieve as dictator.

And I think I'll stop musing here, before this post becomes an infinite regress of paragraphs deconstructing their predecessors. My original point was going to be that discussing rational systems of government could be less mind-killing than discussing specific policies and politicians and parties, but now it appears it might not be any less complicated.

If you actually want to debate this, we could do so in the comments section of my post, or alternatively over in the Richard Dawkins forum.

(Though since you say "my intent is merely to debunk komponisto's post rather than establish Amanda's guilt", I'm suspicious. See Against Devil's Advocacy.)

Make sure you've read my comments here in addition to my post itself.

There is one thing I agree with you about, and that is that this statement of mine

these two things constituting so far as I know the entirety of the physical "evidence" against the couple

is misleading. The misleading part is the phrase "so far as I know", which has been interpreted by people who evidently did not read my preceding survey post to mean that I had not heard about all the other alleged physical evidence. I didn't consider this interpretation because I was assuming that my readers had read both True Justice and Friends of Amanda, knew from my previous post that I had obviously read them both myself, and would understand my statement for what it was -- a dismissal of the rest of the so-called "evidence". However, in retrospect, I should have foreseen this misunderstanding, so I've now edited the sentence to read:

these two things constituting pretty much the entirety of the physical "evidence" against the couple.

ETA: At least one person has upvoted the parent without also upvoting this comment, which I interpret as an endorsement of Rolf Nelson's essay. I find this baffling. Almost every one Nelson's points (autopsy report, luminol prints, staged break-in, alleged cleanup...) was extensively discussed in comments at the time. The only one that wasn't (a supposed handprint of Knox's on a pillow in Kercher's room) is an outright falsehood -- as you will see from following Nelson's link, it's not even (close to) what that article claims. Furthermore, Nelson criticizes me for "accept[ing] propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value" while citing True Justice for an "Introduction to Logic 101".

I challenge anyone who thinks that this represents a serious challenge to my post to come out and identify themselves.

Criticizing komponisto for citing "Friends of Amanda Knox" while you yourself cite "True Justice" causes those criticisms to fall flat.

Unfortunately, I find that your essay is wading into Dark Arts territory, since its intent is to show that komponisto's original essay was "misleading", and that that would somehow give veracity to arguments of Amanda Knox's guilt. Using that same logic, one would have to consider the implications of the chief prosecutor in Amanda Knox's case being convicted of abuse of office in another murder trial.

However, I would be interested in seeing komponisto and rolf nelson discuss the actual details of the case; in particular, the points that rolf nelson brought up in the essay.

I've created a rebuttal to komponisto's misleading Amanda Knox post, but don't have enough karma to create my own top-level post. For now, I've just put it here:

I don't understand how this was worked around. It looks like (rolf's karma + karma lost by this being posted at the top level) would still have been insufficient.

The karma limit was serving the purpose for which it was intended. If, for some reason, an exception was granted I would like to see this announced.

I think I would win the bet. It wouldn't exactly be "the end of the world", but just a very strange future of the world.

You definitely win. If I say "you'll get killed doing that" and you are, I shan't expect to pay back my winnings when you're reanimated.

SIAI: Utopia or hundred times your money back!

Eliezer, would you accept a bet $100 against $10000?

Perhaps you've already defined "superintelligent" as meaning "self-directed, motivated, and recursively self-improving" rather than merely "able to provide answers to general questions faster and better than human beings"... but if you haven't, it seems to me that the latter definition of "superintelligent" would have a much higher probability of you losing the bet. (For example, a Hansonian "em" running on faster hardware and perhaps a few software upgrades might fit the latter definition.)

This is a reasonable justification for using a sockpuppet, and I'll try to keep it in mind the next time I have something to write that would not be instantaneously identifiable as me.

It has seemed to me that some of Eliezer's recent post scores have been inflated by around 5-10 points due to his being Eliezer; it would be interesting to test this hypothesis.

One questions how meaningful testing done on such a crippled AI would be.

I have had some similar thoughts.

The AI box experiment argues that a "test AI" will be able to escape even if it has no I/O (input/output) other than a channel of communication with a human. So we conclude that this is not a secure enough restraint. Eliezer seems to argue that it is best not to create an AI testbed at all - instead get it right the first time.

But I can think of other variations on an AI box that are more strict than human-communication, but less strict than no-test-AI-at-all. The strictest such example would be an AI simulation in which the input consisted of only the simulator and initial conditions, and the output consisted only of a single bit of data (you destroy the rest of the simulation after it has finished its run). The single bit could be enough to answer some interesting questions ("Did the AI expand to use more than 50% of the available resources?", "Did the AI maximize utility function F?", "Did the AI break simulated deontological rule R?").

Obviously these are still more dangerous that no-test-AI-at-all, but the information gained from such constructions might outweigh the risks. Perhaps if I/O is restricted to few enough bits, we could guarantee safety in some information-theoretic way.

What do people think of this? Any similar ideas along the same lines?

You could set up the virtual world to contain the problem you want solved. Now that I think of it, this seems a pretty safe way to use AIs for problem-solving: just give the AI a utility function expressed in terms of the virtual world and the problem. Anyone see holes in this plan?

If we pose the AI problems and observe its solutions, that's a communication channel through which it can persuade us. We may try to hide from it the knowledge that it is in a simulation and that we are watching it, but how can we be sure that it cannot discover that?

Persuading does not have to look like "Please let me out because of such and such." For example, we pose it a question about easy travel to other planets, and it produces a design for a spaceship that requires an AI such as itself to run it.

I guess if you have the technology for it the "AI box" could be a simulation with uploaded humans itself. If the AI does something nasty to them, then you pull the plug

(After broadcasting "neener neener" at it)

This is pretty much the plot of Grant Morrison's Zenith (Sorry for spoilers but it is a comic from the 80s after all)

I gave up on trying to make a human-blind/sandboxed AI when I realized that even if you put it in a very simple world nothing like ours, it still has access to it own source code, or even just the ability to observe and think about it's own behavior.

Presumably any AI we write is going to be a huge program. That gives it lots of potential information about how smart we are and how we think. I can't figure out how to use that information, but I can't rule out that it could, and I can't constrain it's access to that information. (Or rather, if I know how to do that, I should go ahead and make it not-hostile in the first place.)

If we were really smart, we could wake up alone in a room and infer how we evolved.

90%

Could you clarify what you mean by operate on? Or is that part of the point?

Using the definition of 'operate on' that I think is most natural, I'd say there is a .05% chance that these functions only operate on (effect) the physical brain. Unless you mean directly, and then I would assign an 80% chance.

Using the definition of 'operating on' meaning 'requiring', I'd say that there is a 90% chance (probability) that only the brain is required for 90% (fraction) of its functioning. The probabilities I assign would fall down dramatically as you try to raise the 2nd 90% (the fraction). So that I would probably only assign a 1% chance that 100% of higher functions require only the brain.

How does "operate solely on" regard distributed cognition arguments, like "creative thought is created via interaction with the remaining human culture" and "we constantly offload cognitive processes (such as memory) to external substrates (like computers and books)"?

Also, the "highest" human mental functions operate via a number of lower-level processes. Does "solely on human neurons" include e.g. possible quantum phenomena on a low level?

Around 10%.

So not the spinal cord, for example?

I am quite comfortable with the idea that I am my brain, that my brain is made of ordinary living matter (atoms making up molecules making up proteins making up cells), that this matter forms specialized structures responsible for cognition, and I would be hugely surprised if given proof that the highest mental functions cannot be explained adequately in terms of that ontology. The strangest alternative I can think of is Penrose's ENM incomputable-quantum-coherence hypothesis and I'd assign less than 5% probability to his thesis being correct.

I'm at least +70 decibans ("99.99999%") confident that mental states supervene on to physical states. Whether your exact description to do with neurons in the brain completely captures all the physical states I'm less confident of.

EDIT: updated from 30 to 70 decibans: I would more easily be convinced that I had won the lottery than that this wasn't so.

operate solely on a substrate of neurons in the physical brain.

As opposed to ...? Ion channels? Quantum phenomena? Multiple interacting brains? Non-neuronal tissue? Neuronal-but-extracranial cells? Soul? Beings outside the observable universe, running the simulator?

What is this belief supposed to be distinguished from?

Depending on the terms, something near 100% or 0%.

I offload some of my mental functions to the internet. Does that count?

<.05

I am no cognitive scientist, but I believe some of my "thinking" takes place outside of brain (elsewhere in my body) and I am almost certain some of it takes place on my paper and computer.

I'm going to take your question in the simple sense that first occurs to me, which is something like "dualism is false, and mysterious quantum effects are unnecessary. ordinary molecular chemistry only."

In that case, my probability approaches 1 that ordinary molecular chemistry is 100% sufficient to describe a system that implements reasoning and creative thought, and - heck - experiences consciousness. However, I also think that explaining how will require abstractions that are probably not yet well-understood.

Commenting before reading other replies---I'm going to give the boring, sneaky reply that the question isn't well-specified enough to have an answer; I'd need to know more about what you mean by something to operate solely on a substrate. I mean, clearly there are a lot of cognitive tasks that most people can only do given a pencil and paper, or a computer ... is that the sneaky part, that we store information in the environment, and therefore we're not solely neurons?

Discounting the indication of sneakiness, which looks like it would change the probability if properly taken into account: 65% I wouldn't out of hand dismiss the possibility that parts of the physical body other than neurons in the brain are involved. For instance I wouldn't be terribly surprised if sub-vocalization of verbal thoughts played an important (albeit probably not irreplaceable) role. Confidence that no such thing as a metaphysical soul is involved: 99.9%

Given a specific set of inputs/outputs (i.e. the virtual reality of existing as a human in a world with consistent computers, pencils and paper, teachers, students, etc.), and assuming that I intuitively understand what a "substrate of neurons" is, extremely certain (see ciphergoth).

Without a set of inputs or outputs, the question is a tree falling in a forest. A Turing machine doesn't perform computation if it doesn't have inputs.

To get nitpicky, the brain is made of both neurons and glial cells - and the glial cells also seem to play a role in cognition.

"Highest" confidence is 100%, when the brain does not implement any consideration of failure.

Next highest increment is over 99%, I suspect. Call that my guess.

Edit: I'm an idiot - ignore this response. I thought it was asking "what is the highest confidence level that the brain implements in considering the probability of a proposition", which is different and interesting.

Like others, I see some ambiguity here. Let me assume that the substrate includes not just the neurons, but the glial and other support cells and structures; and that there needs to be blood or equivalent to supply fuel, energy and other stuff. Then the question is whether this brain as a physical entity can function as the substrate, by itself, for high level mental functions.

I would give this 95%.

That is low for me, a year ago I would probably have said 98 or 99%. But I have been learning more about the nervous system these past few months. The brain's workings seem sufficiently mysterious and counter-intuitive that I wonder if maybe there is something fundamental we are missing. And I don't mean consciousness at all, I just mean the brain's extraordinary speed and robustness.

One minus epsilon.

My answer ranges from arbitrarily close to 0 and arbitrarily close to 1 depending on how I define the terms. The definitions I like have P very high.

With a straightforward interpretation of your question, I'd answer "95%".

But since you made special mention of being "sneaky", I'll assume you've attempted to trick me into misunderstanding the question, and so I'll lower my probability estimate to 75%, with the missing twenty points accounting for you tricking me by your phrasing of the question.

I'm going to say 98%, and not account for fun/sneakiness, because I don't know whether you're expecting people to underestimate or overestimate it. And because if the trick is in the wording of the proposition, I don't care enough to try to figure it out.

Non-Born rules give us anthropic superpowers. It is plausibly the case that the laws of reality are such that no anthropic superpowers are ever possible, and that this is a quickie explanation for why the laws of reality give rise to the Born rules. One would still like to know what, exactly, these laws are.

To put it another way, the universe runs on causality, not modus tollens. Causality is rules like "and then, gravity accelerates the bowling ball downward". Saying, "Well, if the bowling ball stayed up, we could have too much fun by hanging off it, and the universe won't let us have that much fun, so modus tollens makes the ball fall downward" isn't very causal.

For this specific case, you could try asking the analogous question with a higher probability value. E.g. "if you’ve got a one-in-two DNA match on a suspect, does that mean it’s one-in-two that you’ve got that dude’s DNA?". Maybe you can have some graphic that's meant to represent a several million people, with half of the folks colored as positive matches. When they say "no, it's not one-in-two", you can work your way up to the three million case by showing pictures displaying what the estimated amount of hits would be for a 1 to 3, 1 to 5, 1 to 10, 1 to 100, 1 to 1000 etc. case.

In general, try to use examples that are familiar from everyday life (and thus don't feel like math). For the Bayes' theorem introduction, you could try "a man comes to a doctor complaining about a headache. The doctor knows that both the flu and brain cancer can cause headaches. If you knew nothing else about the case, which one would you think was more likely?" Then, after they've (hopefully) said that the man is more likely to be suffering of a flu, you can mention that brain cancer is much more likely to cause a headache than a flu is, but because flu is so much more common, their answer was nevertheless the correct one.

You have to explain that Steve was chosen randomly for your example to be right.

If you're using Powerpoint, you might want to make a slide that says something like:

2,999 negatives -> 1% test positive -> 30 false positives

1 positive -> 99% test positive -> 1 true positive

So out of 31 positive tests, only 1 person has SDS.

People understand counting better than probability. Talk about a group of people and how many of them match. (Starting with smaller numbers might help too.)

I take it you've already looked at Eliezer's "Intuitive Explanation"?

I think it's really important to get the idea of a sliding scale of evidentiary strength across to people. (This is something that has occurred to me from some of my recent attempts to explain the Knox case to people without training in Bayesianism.) One's level of confidence that something is true varies continuously with the strength of the evidence. It's like a "score" that you're keeping, with information you hear about moving the score up and down.

The abstract structure of the prosecutor's fallacy is misjudging the prior probability. People forget that you start with a handicap -- and that handicap may be quite substantial. Thus, if a piece of evidence (like a test result) is worth, say "10 points" toward guilt, hearing about that piece of evidence doesn't necessarily make the score +10 in favor of guilt; if the handicap was, say, -7, then the score is only +3. If, say, a score of +15 is needed for conviction, the prosecution still has a long way to go.

(By the way, did you see my reply to your comment about psychological evidence?)

Do it with pictures

LW ref: Privileging the hypothesis.

Suppose the universe is as we know it now, except that aliens definitely don't exist, and the only living organism in the universe is a single human named Steve. Steve really wants to create a cheesecake the size of Pluto. Apparently, the universe is more intelligent than Steve, and does not want such a cheesecake to exist.

Perhaps this "general, universal utility" is what would happen if the abilities of things we think of as intelligent were magnified.

You'd want to make the correct choice in future worlds. What are the chances of you being in that one world where that happens?

This might be easier to consider as the simpler case of "given we live in a deterministic universe, what does any choice I make matter?" I would say that I still have to make decisions of how to act and choosing not to act is also a choice, so I should do what ever it is that I want to do.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will

I want more copies of me to make the correct choice.

Cf. this thread, which is relevant here.

That doesn't just make rationality irrelevant, it makes everything irrelevant. Love doesn't matter because you don't meet that special someone in every world, and will meet them in at least one world. Education doesn't matter because guessing will get you right somewhere.

I want to be happy and right in as many worlds as possible. Rationality matters.

I'm not sure I understand the connection between truth-seeking and polling, unless the specific truth you seek is simply the percentage of people who give a particular answer to a poll. Are you simply talking about a more accurate polling company or using polling to find other truths?

I'm not interested, in particular, with polling but I'm interested in it insofar as it is a way of getting data that people don't otherwise have and thus improving our predictions. That said, LW totally is the place to create a truth-seeking business and as another broke undergrad (and putting off grad school) if you, anyone else and I can come up with a profitable venture that involves employing truth seeking I definitely want in.

The obvious way to make money with this is consulting, but I'm not sure why anyone would hire a bunch of philosophy/math/CS types to do the job.

Here's an idea for how a LW-based commercial polling website could operate. Basically it is a variation on PredictionBook with a business model similar to TopCoder.

The website has business clients, and a large number of "forecasters" who have accounts on the website. Clients pay to have their questions added to the website, and forecasters give their probability estimates for whichever questions they like. Once the answer to a question has been verified, each forecaster is financially rewarded using some proper scoring rule. The more money assigned to a question, the higher the incentive for a forecaster to have good discrimination and calibration. Some clever software would also be needed to combine and summarize data in a way that is useful to clients.

The main advantage of this over other prediction markets is that the scoring rule encourages forecasters to give accurate probability estimates.

I only have a very general feel for where that line is, so I can't help with that, but I would personally be interested in following such a diary. Perhaps you could start a blog?

You should definitely start a blog. I for one look forward to reading and commenting.

Given what you've said so far about your personal situation, I think it's appropriate to discuss your personal progress and introspection regarding rationality on this site. I think a lot of us would find it helpful and interesting to see how your thought processes and beliefs change as you reexamine them.

I'm especially curious about more details regarding your personal situation, your past history of religious beliefs, and "Event X".

A quick glance seems to indicate that they are achieving these linear time algorithms through massive parallelization. This is "cheating" because to do a linear-time sort of size n, you need O(n) processing units. While they seem to be arguing that this is acceptable because processing is becoming more and more parallel, this breaks down for large n. One can easily use traditional algorithms to sort a billion elements in O(n * log n); however for their algorithm to sort such a list in O(n) time, they need a billion (times some constant factor) times more processing units than to sort a list of size n.

I'm also vaguely perplexed by their basic argument. They want to have programming tools and computational models which are closer to the metal to take advantage of the features of new machines. This ignores the fact that the current abstractions exist, not just for historical reasons, but because they are easy to reason about.

This is all from a fairly cursory read of their paper, however, so take it with a grain of salt.