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Open Thread: February 2010, part 2
The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
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Comments (857)
Geek rapture naysaying:
"Jaron Lanier: Alan Turing and the Tech World's New Religion"
Pointing people to Lanier as a naysayer isn't playing fair; it just makes the opposition look crazy.
Alas, Turing's Nazi fascism and "death denial" doesn't seem to appeal much to people around here. I figured that the residents would enjoy watching this sort of material.
I think that cryonics will be achieved by genetically modifying the person to be frozen so that they produce many of the same responses to freezing that animals which can be frozen/chilled and thawed (like wood frogs) do.
Once many people are frozen using this method, there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of freezing and thawing an unmodified person.
So I think people frozen using today's techniques may never be revived.
ADDED: That's "may never" as in "might never", not "will never".
You've been in the transhumanist community for, what, at least 10 years?
I honestly have no clue what could possibly be going wrong in your mind at this moment. I do not understand what general category of malfunction corresponds to this particular mistake.
20, my young friend.
And that should suggest to you that the mistake may be yours.
It's certainly evidence in favour of that position, but not enough...
Seems to me it's implicitly an example of the common category "assuming that charity (or FAI) will not be an important factor in revival".
There are many possible future worlds. Obviously I'm not speaking of possible futures in which a magical FAI can do anything you ask of it.
A sizable fraction of possible futures may contain AIs for which solving these problems are trivial, or societies with so much wealth that they can mount massive research projects for charity or fun. But the fraction of those possible futures in which reviving frozen humans is thought of as an admirable goal might not be large.
My point estimate is that, if you wanna get revived, you have to get revived before the singularity, because you're not going to have much value afterwards.
I don't understand your logic. Genetic modification to allow a person to survive freezing and thawing would be great ... but what has that to do with current cryonics patients?
It sounds rather like claiming that "flight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to fly, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of flying an unmodified person". Or, to take a metaphor that suggests work already happening, "sight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to see, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of sight-enabling an unmodified person".
Yes. And that's what I would say, if we didn't have airplanes, and I thought that modifying people to fly would be easier than building airplanes, regardless of the performance desired. None of those things are true.
You're right - bad metaphor. What about the vision one?
UFO sightings revealed in UK archive files from 1990s
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8520486.stm
I've been trying to find the original post to explain why it allegedly is so very likely that we live in a simulation, but I've had little luck. Does anyone have a link handy?
An inquiry regarding my posting frequency:
While I'm at the SIAI house, I'm trying to orient towards the local priorities so as to be useful. Among the priorities is building community via Less Wrong, specifically by writing posts. Historically, the limiting factor on how much I post has been a desire not to flood the place - if I started posting as fast as I can write up my ideas, I'd get three or four posts out a week with (I think) no discernible decrease in quality. I have the following questions about this course of action:
Will it annoy people? Building community by being annoying seems very unlikely to work.
Will it affect voting behavior noticeably? I rely on my post's karma scores to determine what to do and not do in the future, and SIAI people who decide whether I'm useful enough to keep use it as a rough metric too. I'd rather post one post that gets 40 karma in a week than two that get 20, and so on.
It seems to me that any strategy that does not end up with three posts by you on "Recent Posts" seems fine, as a rule of thumb.
Respondents, please upvote thomblake's comment if this seems like an acceptable rule of thumb.
Edit: And likewise for other things people say if those seem like good ideas.
I'd say damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If people are annoyed, let them downvote. If posts start getting downvoted, slow down.
Your posts have generally been voted up. If now is the golden moment of time where you can get everything said, then for the love of Cthulhu, say it now!
I don't anticipate being so obnoxiously prolific that people collectively start voting my posts negative such that they stay that way. But people already sometimes register individual downvotes on posts that I make, and I don't want that to happen on a larger fraction of posts due to increased frequency, because I can't reliably distinguish between "you must have had an off day, this post is not up to scratch" and "please, please, please shut up".
Post away.
The best signal to anticipate from the audience in this case is "how many votes in total do I expect if I post at full speed vs how many votes I expect if I posted less frequently and so ended up writing less posts overall". Increased frequency may give you less votes per post. Frequent posts from the same author may be less desired and if you post less you may only be giving the best posts. But if the net expectation is higher for more prolific posting then that can be interpreted as "the lesswrong.com community would prefer you to post faster than a spambot".
Even if you expected a total of less karma for more posts I wouldn't say that means you ought not post more. So long as your posts are still breaking the 10 mark we clearly don't mind your contribution. There are probably other benefits to you from posting than maximising the benefit to lesswrong. I find writing helps clarify my thinking for example. So as long as you are still being received somewhat positively you are free to type away.
Post as much as you like, if you think it's good quality; I promise to say if I start to think slowing down would be a good idea.
I don't mean "downvoted negative" just "downvoted relative to other posters".
one obvious idea that I didn't notice anyone else mention:
Another option is to go ahead and write the posts as fast as you think is optimal, but if you think this is too fast to actually post the stuff you've written, then you can wait a few days after you wrote it before posting.
LW has a handy "drafts" feature that you can use for that.
This also has the advantage that you have more time to improve the article before you post it, but the disadvantage that you may be tempted to spend too much time making minor, unimportant improvements. Another disadvantage is that feedback gets delayed.
If I sit on posts for too long, I start second-guessing myself and often wind up deleting them.
A related question: If I have a large topic to cover, should I cover it in one post, or split it up along convenient cleavage planes and make it a sequence? (If I make sequences, I think I'll learn my lesson from the last one I tried and write it all before posting anything, so I don't post 2/3 of it and then stop.)
Posting 2/3 of a sequence and stopping is fine if people turn out not to be interested. I recommend fast posting and fast feedback.
I really like the "sequences" approach - it's easier to read and digest a chunk at a time, and it focusses discussion well, too.
Long posts are more offputting than short ones, and individual steps are more likely to be correct than entire theorems - both of these points would suggest posting sequences preferentially.
As for a specific reference on length: thirty-three hundred words sharply focused on a single, vivid subject is pushing the upper limit of what I find comfortable to attack in a single sitting.
As your goal is to build community, I would time new posts based on posting and commenting activity. For example, whenever there is a lull, this would be an excellent time to make a new post. (I noticed over the weekend there were some times when 45 minutes would pass between subsequent comments and wished for a new post to jazz things up.)
On the other hand, if there are several new posts already, then it would be nice to wait until their activity has waned a bit.
I think that it is optimal to have 1 or 2 posts 'going on' at a time. I prefer the second post when one of them is technical and/or of focused interest to a smaller subset of Less Wrongers.
(But otherwise no limit on the rate of posts.)
This comment is a response to the claim that Gould's separate magesteria idea is not conceptually coherent. While I don't view reality parsed this way, I thought I would make an effort to establish its coherence and self-consistency (and relevance under certain conditions).
In this comment, by dualism, I'll mean the world view of two separate magisteria; one for science and one for faith. There are other, related meanings of dualism but I do not intend them here.
Physical materialism assumes monism -- there is a single, external reality that we have a limited knowledge and awareness of. Awareness and knowledge of this reality come through our senses, by interaction with reality. Dualism is rejected with a straight-forward argument: you cannot have awareness of something without interaction with it. If you interact with it, then it is part of the one reality we were already talking about.
Dualists persist: The empirical reality X that physical materialists recognize is only part of everything that matters. There is also a dual reality -- X', which is in some way independent of (or outside of) X. The rules in X' are different than the rules in X. For example, epistemology (and sometimes even logic) appears to work differently, or less directly.
Some immediate questions in response to dualism are:
(1) If we are located in X, how does interaction with X' work?
(2) Is it actually coherent to think of some component X' being outside of X? Why don't we just have X expand to absorb it?
Relation to the Simulation Hypothesis
An immediate, possibly too-quick answer to the second question is 'yes, dualism is coherent because it is structurally isomorphic to the simulation hypothesis'. If we were in a simulation, X and X' would be a natural way to parse reality. X would be the simulation and X' would be the reality outside the simulation. Clearly, the rules could be different within X compared to within X'. People simulated in X could deduce the existence of X' in a variety ways:
(a) by observing the incompleteness of X (for example, the inexplicable deus ex machina appearance of random numbers)
(b) by observing temporal, spatial or logical inconsistencies in X
(c) Privileged information given to them directly about X', built into the simulation in ways that don't need to be consistent with other rules in X
While dualists aren't claiming that empirical reality is a simulation, by analogy we could consider that (a), (b) or (c) would be cause for deducing X' and having a dualistic world view. I will visit each of these in reverse order.
Re: (c) Privileged information given to them directly about X', built into the simulation in ways that don't need to be consistent with other rules in X
Many (most?) religions are based on elements of divine revelation; special ways that God has of communicating directly to us in some way separate and independent of ordinary empirical experience. Being saved, speaking in tongues, visions, etc. I've heard it argued here on LW that this sort of experience would be the most rational reason for theism; they might be delusional but at least they are basing their beliefs on empirical sense experience. They would be justified in having a dualistic world view if they perceived their visions as distinct from (for example, having different rules than or existing in a different plane than) empirical reality. However, many theists (including myself) do not claim experience of divine revelation.
Re: (b) by observing temporal, spatial or logical inconsistencies in X
I think that in the past, this was a big reason for belief in the spiritual realm. However, the success of the scientific world view has shot this completely out of the water. No one believes that X is inconsistent; while there are 'gaps' in our knowledge, we have limitless faith in science to resolve everything in X that can be resolved, one way or another. Outside X is another matter of course, which brings us to (a). I proceed to (a) with the counter-argument to (b) firmly in hand: reality is explainable and whether we know the rules are not, there are rules for the phenomena in X, and rules for the rules in X and, if not rules, than a necessary logical deduction that can be made.
Re: (a) by observing the incompleteness of X
Can everything in X, in theory, be explained within X? If you believe this, then you have no reason to be dis-satisfied with monism. (It happens that I am a monist.) But what if we could point to just one thing that could not be explained in X? Just one thing that could not even be explained in theory because to do so would result in some contradiction in X? Would that give us cause to deduce X'?
Example 1: True Randomness
There are many processes that are approximated as random. The diffusion of a dye in a liquid, the search path of an amoeba looking for food, the collapse of a symmetric structure to one direction or another. However, all of these processes are considered deterministic -- if we knew all the relevant states of the system and had sufficient computing power we could accurately predict the outcome via simulation; no random numbers needed.
Nevertheless, there are some processes that appear as though they could be truly "random". That is, occurring spontaneously independent of any mechanism determining the outcome. For example, the 'spontaneous' creation of particles in a vacuum, or any other phenomenon described in an advanced physical journal with 'spontaneous' in the title. I think that you are a self-consistent physical materialist, you should deny the possibility of random or spontaneous events. I do: I think there must be a mechanism for everything, whether we have access to knowledge of it or not.
To the best of my knowledge, our understanding of these 'spontaneous' phenomena leaves room for mechanical explanations. Maybe this and that are involved, we just don't know.
Yet quantum mechanics is beginning to reveal ways in which a scientific theory could predict the inconsistency of non-randomness. Bell's theorem is close, proving that information in some cases is exchanged without a local mechanism. Fortunately, there is still room for other interpretations, including non-local mechanisms and many-worlds.
Example 2: Objective Value
Of any kind, including objective morality. This remains an unsolved problem in physical materialism, if you insist upon it, because it's existence seems dependent upon some authority (e.g., a book) that we have no evidence of in X. If a person believes in objective morality a priori, they may be a dualist since they deduce the existence of such an authority, embedded within X, but distinct from X in that it cannot be directly observed or interacted with. (Its existence is only inferred.)
Example 3: Consciousness
Another unsolved problem in physical materialism. I'm not familiar with them, but I understand that some dualists have arguments for why consciousness could not be explained within X.
My Position
It is often logistically difficult to defend a position you don't represent. The reason for this is that criticisms against the position will be directed at you personally, even though you hold you do not hold the position, and then further you might be tempted to continue defending the position with counter-arguments, which further confuses your identity. I am sympathetic to the dualist worldview as coherent and rational, but not globally scientific. I greatly prefer the physical materialist, scientific worldview. I have a very strong faith that everything in X can be explained within X; this faith is so strong that I consider it theistic, and call myself a theist.
Re: Your definitions.
You appear to be conflating ontological views (physicalism and dualism usually refer to these sorts of views, views about what kinds of things exist) with epistemological views. There is nothing in the definition of physicalism that requires us to have knowledge of the external world and nothing in dualism that requires us to give up rationality or science. You can be a physicalist and still think someone is deceiving your senses, for example. Also, this might just be me but 'materialism' should be jettisoned as outdated. "Materialism" means that you believe everything that exists is matter. But there is no reason to think that word is even meaningful in our fundamental physics. Thus I prefer "physicalism" the belief that what exists is what physics tells us exists.
Re: the relation to the simulation hypothesis
If you haven't you ought to read "Brains in a vat" by Hilary Putnam. It's just twenty pages or so. He argues that we cannot claim to be brains in vats (or in any kind of extreme skeptical scenario) because our language does not have the ability to refer to vats and computers outside our level of reality. When a brain in a vat says "vat" he is referring to some feature of the computer program that is being run for his brain. Thus he cannot refer to what we call the vat (the thing that holds his brain). I can explain further if that isn't clear. But one thing I got from the article is that we can understand the bizarre, muddled writings of substance dualists as trying to describe the vat! If you don't have any language that lets you refer to the vats you're going to sound pretty confusing. I find this pretty funny because the way Descarte's supposedly gets out of extreme skepticism is partly by trying to prove substance dualism! Irony!
Anyway, I'm a little confused by the invocation of the simulation hypothesis because while I'm willing to look at it as kind of metaphysical dualist hypothesis I can't see how our tools for learning the answer to this question would be in anyway different from our general scientific tools. Metaphysics, such as we can say anything at all about it, is just an extension of science.
Why not just assume these were features of X to begin with? If I see an temporal, spatial or logical inconsistency I'm going to revise my understanding of space, time and logic in X. Not posit X'.
We would revise our theory of X to remove the contradiction. I know you know this happens all the time in science.
I'm having a hard time dealing with the rest given the conflation between epistemology and ontology. Yes, if there are properties (like value and consciousness) that cannot be reduced to the fundamental entities of physics, then physicalism is wrong. However, it does not follow that Bayesianism is wrong, that empiricism is wrong or that the scientific method is invalid in certain magesteria.
I don't understand why true randomness is a problem. Is there something so wrong with probabilistic determinism?
Suppose I wanted to convince someone that signing up for cryonics was a good idea, but I had little confidence in my ability to persuade them in a face-to-face conversation (or didn't want to drag another discussion too far off-topic) - what is the one link you would give someone that is most likely to save their life? I find the pro-cryonics arguments given by Eliezer and others on this site + Overcoming Bias to be persuasive (I'm convinced that if you don't want to die, it's a good idea to sign up) but all the arguments are in pieces and in different places. There's no one, single, "This is why you should sign up for cryonics" persuasive essay that I've found here that I've found that I can simply link someone to and hope for the best. Can you direct me to one?
It's tricky. As Socrates noted in the Apology, it's much easier to convince someone in a one-on-one conversation than to have a general argument to convince anyone in general.
Oh, look honey: more proof wine tasting is a crock:
A French court has convicted 12 local winemakers of passing off cheap merlot and shiraz as more expensive pinot noir and selling it to undiscerning Americans, including E&J Gallo, one of the United States' top wineries.
Cue the folks claiming they can really tell the difference...
If "top winery" means "largest winery", as it does in this story, I don't see how it says anything about the ability of tasters to tell the difference. Those who made such claims probably weren't drinking Gallo in the first place.
I think it's closer to say they were passing off as cheap, something that's actually even cheaper.
Switch the food item and see if your criticism holds:
Wonderbread, America's top bread maker, was conned into selling inferior bread. So-called "gourmets" never noticed the difference! Bread tasting is a crock.
If people made such a huge deal about the nuances in the taste of bread, while it also "happened" to have psychoactive effects that, gosh, always have to be present for the bread to be "good enough" for them, and cheap breads were still normally several times the cost of comparable-nutrition food, then yes, the cases would be parallel.
(Before anyone says it: Yes, I know bread as trace quantities of alcohol, we're all proud of what you learned in chemistry.)
There's plenty of hard evidence that people are vulnerable to priming effects and other biases when tasting wine.
There's also plenty of hard evidence that people can tell the difference between wine A and wine B, under controlled (blinded) conditions. Note that "tell the difference" isn't the same as "identify which would be preferred by experts".
So, while the link is factually interesting, and evidence that some large-scale deception is going on, aided by such priming effects as label, marketing campaigns and popular movies can have, it seems a stretch to call it "proof" that people in general can't tell wine A from wine B.
Rather, this strikes me as a combination of trolling and boo lights: cheaply testing who appears to be "on your side" in a pet controversy. How well do you expect that to work out for you, in the sense of "reliably entangling your beliefs with reality"?
I think I'm entangling my beliefs with reality very well, by virtue of extracting all available information from phenomena rather than retreat to evidence that agrees with me. (Let's not forget, I didn't start out thinking that it was all BS.)
For example, did you stop to notice the implications of this:
How does that compare to the priming effects for other drinks? Does it matter?
But what would be the appropriate comparison? They were passing of as expensive, something that's actually cheap. Where else would that work so easily, for so long? Normally, if you tried that, it would be noticed quickly, if not immediately, by virtually everyone.
What if you tried to pass off 16 oz of milk as 128? Or spoiled milk as milk expiring in a week?
Then, factor in how much difference is claimed to exist in wine vs. milks.
Who's optimally using evidence here?
Art forgeries. (Which shows that the value of the painting is determined by the status of the artist and not the quality of the art.)
If I can paint a painting that convinces experts that it was painted by [insert expert painter here], does that mean I'm as good an artist as said painter? (Assuming that my painting isn't a literal copy of someone else's.)
Which, like wine, is another example of a path-dependent collective delusion that's not Truly Part of our values. (That is, our valuation of the work wouldn't survive deletion of the history that led to such a valuation.)
Very nearly yes, it does, modulo a few factors. If you produced it after the artist, then you are benefiting from the artist's already having identified a region of conceptspace that you did not find yourself. (If the art is revered because of the artist's social status, that it wasn't even much of an accomplishment to begin with.) To put it another way, you produced the work after "supervised learning", while the artist didn't need that particular training.
If you can pass off a previous work of yours as being one of the artist's, that definitely makes you better.
Who is "we", here?
The problem I have is not that you're wrong, for the people you're talking about; it's that you (probably) overestimate the size and/or importance of that population. You're not telling the whole truth, in effect. There are plenty of people who like paintings for the way they look, and would happily buy the work of a lesser-known artist at a cheap price if they liked it. Yes, some people use art to status-signal, but some people also actually like art. (There may even be a nonempty intersection!)
You seem to want a contest. The other option, where we are both "on the side of truth", appeals to me more.
We're fortunate in having different experiences in the domain of taste. I'm one of those people who like wine, and I'm confident I can identify some of its taste characteristics in blind tests. So, predictably I resent language which implies I'm an idiot, but I'm open to inquiry.
Our investigation should probably begin "at the crime scene", that is, close to what evidence we can gather about the sense of taste. So, yes, we could examine similar priming effects on other drinks.
I have a candidate in mind, but what I'd like to ask you first is, suppose I name the drink I have in mind and we then go look for evidence of fraud in its commerce. What would it count as evidence of if we found no fraud? If we did find it? Which one would you say counts as evidence that "people can't tell the difference" between wines?
You can easily test yourself if you have a confederate. I recommend a triangle test.
I've been wondering what the existance of Gene Networks tells us about recursively self improving systems. Edit: Not that self-modifying gene networks are RSIS, but the question is "Why aren't they?" In the same way that failed attempts at flying machines tell us something, but not much, about what flying machines are not. End Edit
They are the equivalent of logic gates and have the potential for self-modification and reflection, what with DNAs ability to make enzymes that chop itself up and do so selectively.
So you can possibly use them as evidence that low-complexity, low-memory systems are unlikely to RSI. How complex they get and how much memory they have, I am not sure.
I wonder if the distinction between self-modification and recursive self-improvement is one of those things that requires a magic gear to get, and otherwise can't be explained by any amount of effort.
Such things probably happen because effort spent on explaining quickly hits diminishing returns if the other person spends no effort on understanding.
Just a general comment about this site: it seems to be biased in favor of human values at the expense of values held by other sentient beings. It's all about "how can we make sure an FAI shares our [i.e. human] values?" How do you know human values are better? Or from the other direction: if you say, "because I'm human", then why don't you talk about doing things to favor e.g. "white people's values"?
I wish the site were more inclusive of other value systems ...
Your comment only shows that this community has such a blatant sentient-being-bias.
Seriously, what is your decision procedure to decide the sentience of something? What exactly are the objects that you deem valuable enough to care about their value system? I don't think you will be able to answer these questions from a point of view totally detached from humanness. If you try to answer my second question, you will probably end up with something related to cooperation/trustworthiness. Note that cooperation doesn't have anything to do with sentience. Sentience is overrated (as a source of value).
White people value the values of non-white people. We know that non-white people exist, and we care about them. That's why the United States is not constantly fighting to disenfranchise non-whites. If you do it right, white people's values are identical to humans' values.
Hi there. It looks like you're speaking out of ignorance regarding the historical treatment of non-whites by whites. Please choose the country you're from:
United Kingdom
United States
Australia
Canada
South Africa
Germ... nah, you can figure that one out for yourself.
The way they were historically treated is irrelevant to how they are treated now. Sure, white people were wrong. They changed their minds. We could at any time in the future decide that any non-human people we come across are equal to us.
You have updated too far based on limited information.
We more or less do. Or rather we favour values of a distinct subset humanity and not the whole.
Hi there. It looks like you're trying to promote white supremacism. Would you like to join the KKK?
Yes.
No thanks, I'll learn tolerance.
How do I turn this off?
Are you sure you want to turn this feature off?
We don't favor those values because they are the values of that subset — which is what "doing things to favor white people's values" would mean — but because we think they're right. (No License To Be Human, on a smaller scale.) This is a huge difference.
Well, you shouldn't.
Do you think there is no simple procedure that would find roughly the same "should function" hidden somewhere in the brain of a brain-washed blood-thirsty religious zealot? It doesn't need to be what the person believes, what the person would recognize as valuable, etc., just something extractable from the person, according to a criterion that might be very alien to their conscious mind. Not all opinions (beliefs/likes) are equal, and I wouldn't want to get stuck with wrong optimization-criterion just because I happened to be born in the wrong place and didn't (yet!) get the chance to learn more about the world.
(I'm avoiding the term 'preference' to remove connotations I expect it to have for you, for what I consider the wrong reasons.)
Haidt just claims that the relative balance of those five clusters differ across cultures, they're present in all.
On one hand, using preference-aggregation is supposed to give you the outcome preferred by you to a lesser extent than if you just started from yourself. On the other hand, CEV is not "morally neutral". (Or at least, the extent to which preference is given in CEV implicitly has nothing to do with preference-aggregation.)
We have a tradeoff between the number of people to include in preference-aggregation and value-to-you of the outcome. So, this is a situation to use the reversal test. If you consider only including the smart sane westerners as preferable to including all presently alive folks, then you need to have a good argument why you won't want to exclude some of the smart sane westerners as well, up to a point of only leaving yourself.
I hope you realize that you are in flat disagreement with Eliezer about this. He explicitly affirmed that running CEV on himself alone, if he had the chance to do it, would be wrong.
Eliezer quite possibly does believe that. That he can make that claim with some credibility is one of the reasons I am less inclined to use my resources to thwart Eliezer's plans for future light cone domination.
Nevertheless, Roko is right more or less by definition and I lend my own flat disagreement to his.
Confirmed.
"Low probability of success" should of course include game-theoretic considerations where people are more willing to help you if you give more weight to their preference (and should refuse to help you if you give them too little, even if it's much more than status quo, as in Ultimatum game). As a rule, in Ultimatum game you should give away more if you lose from giving it away less. When you lose value to other people in exchange to their help, having compatible preferences doesn't necessarily significantly alleviate this loss.
Again, not all beliefs are equal. You don't want to use the procedure that'll find a murderer in yourself, you want to use the procedure that'll find a nice fellow in a murderer. And given such a procedure, you won't need to exclude murderers from extrapolated volition.
Okay. Then why don't you apply that same standard to "human values"?
Did you read No License To Be Human? No? Go do that.
I have no idea if this is a serious question, but....
"Better"? See Invisible Frameworks.
We don't say that. See No License To Be Human.
This site does tend to implicitly favour a subset of human values, specifically what might be described as 'enlightenment values'. I'm quite happy to come out and explicitly state that we should do things that favour my values, which are largely western/enlightenment values, over other conflicting human values.
And I think we should pursue values that aren't so apey.
Now what?
I say again, if you're being serious, read Invisible Frameworks.
You're outnumbered.
Only by apes.
And not for long.
If we're voting on it, the only question is whether to use viral values or bacterial values.
Too long has the bacteriophage menace oppressed its prokaryotic brethren! It's time for an algaeocracy!
True, outnumbered was the wrong word. Outgunned might have been a better choice.
Seth Roberts makes an intriguing observation about North Korea and Penn State. Teaser:
I had previously no idea that half of the North Koreans who cross the border never return. If it is so, it is an extremely strong indicator that the life in the DPRK is very unpleasant for its own citizens. To imply that this piece of data is in fact evidence for the contrary is absurd.
To emigrate from DPRK to China means that you lose your home, your family, your friends, your job. You have to start from scratch, from the lowest levels in social hierarchy, capable of doing only the worst available jobs, without knowledge of local language (which is not easy to learn, given that the destination country is China), probably facing xenophobia. If you are 40 or older, there is almost no chance that your situation will improve significantly.
The North Koreans who actually travel abroad are probably not the poorest. They have to afford a ticket, at least. They have something to lose. In North-Korean style of tyrannies, families are often persecuted because of emigration of their members. In spite of all that, half of the North Koreans never return (if the linked post tells the truth) and the author says about it that "the North Korean government [does] such a good job under such difficult circumstances", and then needs to explain that "success" by group identity. Thats an absurdity.
So the rate of returning emigrants strikes you as incredibly high, and strikes Roberts as incredibly low (and I uncritically adopted what I read, foolishly). I think what's really needed here is more data -- a comparative analysis of rates of return that takes into important covariates into account.
After thinking about it for a while, rate of return may not be a good indicator, at least for comparative analyses. Imagine two countries A and K. 10% of citizens of both these countries would prefer to live somewhere else.
In country A, the government doesn't care a bit about emigration (if government exists in that country at all). The country is mainly producer of agricultural goods, with minimal international trade. Nearest country with substantially better living conditions, country X, is 3000 km away.
In country K, the government is afraid of all its citizens emigrating, and tries to make it as difficult as possible, by issuing passports only to loyal people, for instance. Emigration is portrayed as treason. X is a neigbour country.
Now, in country A (African type) there is no need for people to travel abroad, except emigration. Business travelers are rare, since there are almost no businesses owned by A's citizens, and to travel 3000 km for pleasure is out of reach for almost all of A's inhabitants. Therefore, meeting A's citizen in X, we can expect that he is an emigrant with 99% probability, and the return rate would be in order of 1%.
In country K (Korean type) the people who can travel abroad are workers of government organisations sent on business trips, people from border areas coming to X to do some private business (if there are private businesses in K) and the K's elite on vacations. Now, meeting K's citizen in X, the probability that he is an emigrant is much lower.
So we have expected high return rate for A and low for K, whereas the average desire to emigrate can be the same.
This may be the reason of disagreement. Roberts has probably compared North Korea to African countries, and was surprised that not all travellers are emigrants. I have compared it to East European communist regimes and concluded that if half of the travellers never return, certainly even much of the loyal supporters of the regime betray it when they have an opportunity.
To make sensible analysis, we should take into account rather the ratio of emigration to overall population. Of course, such analysis would be distorted due to different difficulty of emigration from different countries. The return rate seems to overcome this distortion, but it probably brings at least as big own problems.
Holy shit, what utter raving idiocy. The author has obviously never emigrated from anywhere nor seriously talked with anyone who did. People return because they miss their families, friends, native language and habits... I know a fair number of people who returned from Western countries to Russia and that's the only reason they cite.
And living conditions in Russia aren't anywhere near to North Korean standard.
Hwæt. I've been thinking about humor, why humor exists, and what things we find humorous. I've come up with a proto-theory that seems to work more often than not, and a somewhat reasonable evolutionary justification. This makes it better than any theory you can find on Wikipedia, as none of those theories work even half the time, and their evolutionary justifications are all weak or absent. I think.
So here are four model jokes that are kind of representative of the space of all funny things:
"Why did Jeremy sit on the television? He wanted to be on TV." (from a children's joke book)
"Muffins? Who falls for those? A muffin is a bald cupcake!" (from Jim Gaffigan)
"It's next Wednesday." "The day after tomorrow?" "No, NEXT Wednesday." "The day after tomorrow IS next Wednesday!" "Well, if I meant that, I would have said THIS Wednesday!" (from Seinfeld)
"A minister, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says, 'Is this some kind of joke?'" (a traditional joke)
It may be noting that this "sample" lacks any overtly political jokes; I couldn't think of any.
The proto-theory I have is that a joke is something that points out reasonable behavior and then lets the audience conclude that it's the wrong behavior. This seems to explain the first three perfectly, but it doesn't explain the last one at all; the only thing special about the last joke is that the bartender has impossible insight into the nature of the situation (that it's a joke).
The supposed evolutionary utility of this is that it lets members of a tribe know what behavior is wrong within the tribe, thereby helping it recognize outsiders. The problem with this is that outsiders' behavior isn't always funny. If the new student asks for both cream and lemon in their tea, that's funny. If the new employee swears and makes racist comments all the time, that's offensive. If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, that's worrying. What's the difference? Why is this difference useful?
—Dave Barry
I believe that humor requires harmless surprise, Harmlessness and surprise are both highly contextual, so what people find funny can vary quite a bit.
One category of humor (or possibly an element for building humor) is things which are obviously members of a class, but which are very far from the prototype. Thus, an ostrich is funny while a robin isn't. This may not apply if you live in ostrich country-- see above about context.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.400-the-comedy-circuit-when-your-brain-gets-the-joke.html?full=true&print=true
New findings in the neurology of humor, and who finds what sort of jokes funny
Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a "topping" variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding "muffin-roll sushi", "next Wednesday" is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.
I wish that we had a "Less Wrong Community" blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an "instrumental rationality" blog for "self help" subject matter.
Yes and yes.
I'm taking a software-enforced three-month hiatus from Less Wrong effective immediately. I can be reached at zackmdavis ATT yahoo fullstahp kahm. I thought it might be polite to post this note in Open Thread, but maybe it's just obnoxious and self-important; please downvote if the latter is the case thx
Great plugin. In case you have a linux dev (virtual) machine I also recommend:
sudo iptables -A INPUT -d lesswrong.com -j DROP
It does wonders for productivity!
This is to confess that I cheated several times by reading the Google cache.
Turning the siteblocker back on (including the Google cache, thank you). Two months, possibly more. Love &c.
Tsk, tsk. You can block the Google cache too.
So, I walked into my room, and within two seconds, I saw my laptop's desktop background change. I had the laptop set to change backgrounds every 30 minutes, so I did some calculation, and then thought, "Huh, I just consciously experienced a 1-in-1000 event."
Then the background changed again, and I realized I was looking at a screen saver that changed every five seconds.
Moral of the story: 1 in 1000 is rare enough that even if you see it, you shouldn't believe it without further investigation.
There are a lot of opportunities in the day for something to happen that might prompt you to think "wow, that's one in a thousand", though. It wouldn't have been worth wasting a moment wondering if it was coincidence unless you had some reason to suspect an alternative hypothesis, like that it changed because the mouse moved.
bit that makes no sense deleted
Recently posted to Reddit.
(Edit: About three days later I realized that that's a 1/100 and not a 1/1000 chance; my bad.)
Just saw this over at Not Exactly Rocket Science: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/quicker_feedback_for_better_performance.php
Quick summary: They asked a bunch of people to give a 4-minute presentation, had people judging, and told the presenter how long it would be before they heard their assessment. Anticipating quicker feedback resulted in better performance, but predictions of worse performance, and anticipating slower feedback had the reverse effect.
This is pretty self-important of me but I'd just like to warn people here that someone is posting at OB under "Jack" that isn't me so if anyone is forming a negative opinion of me on the basis of those comments- don't! Future OB comments will be under the name Jack (LW). The recent string of comments about METI are mine though.
This is what I get for choosing such a common name for my handle.
Apologies to those who have read this whole comment and don't care.
Here's a question that I sure hope someone here knows the answer to:
What do you call it when someone, in an argument, tries to cast two different things as having equal standing, even though they are hardly even comparable? Very common example: in an atheism debate, the believer says "atheism takes just as much faith as religion does!"
It seems like there must be a word for this, but I can't think what it is. ??
This is a great example of a "pitch". I've added it just now to the database of pitches:
http://www.takeonit.com/pitch/the_equivalence_pitch.aspx
Fair and balanced reporting.
False equivalence?
Aha! I think this one is closest to what I have in mind. Thanks.
It's interesting to me that "false equivalence" doesn't seem to have nearly as much discussion around it (at least, based on a cursory google survey) as most of the other fallacies. I seem to see this used for rhetorical mischief all the time!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/feb/23/flat-earth-society
Yeah, so... I'm betting if we could hook this guy up to a perfect lie detector, it would turn out to be a conscious scam. Or am I still underestimating human insanity by that much?
Yes.
People dismiss the scientific evidence weighing similarly against them on many issues in the news every day. There's nothing spectacular about finding someone who does it regarding the Earth being flat, especially given that an entire society has existed for hundreds of years to promote the idea.
That you see this as a particularly extreme case of insanity (even in an apparently intelligent, lucid, fully-functioning person) is far more shocking to me than this guy.
Maybe I've just seen too many Louis Theroux documentaries.
The prosecutor's fallacy is aptly named:
I just failed the Wason selection task. Does anyone know any other similarly devilish problems?
Here's a classic:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
Answer here.
One thing that I got from the Sequences is that you can't just not assign a probability to an event - I think of this as a core insight of Bayesian rationality. I seem to remember an article in the Sequences about this where Eliezer describes a conversation in which he is challenged to assign a probability to the number of leaves on a particular tree, or the surname of the person walking past the window. But I can't find this article now - can anyone point me to it? Thanks!
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gs/i_dont_know/
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/I_don%27t_know
That's exactly it - thanks!
How do people decide what comments to upvote? I see two kinds of possible strategies:
My own initial approach belonged to the first class. However, looking at votes on my own comments, I get the impression most people use the second approach. I haven't checked this with enough data to be really certain, so would value more opinions & data.
Here's what I found: I summed the votes from the last 4 pages of my own comments (skipping the most recent page because recent comments may yet be voted on):
35% of my comments are voted 0, and 52% are voted 1 or 2. There are significantly more than 1 or 2 people participating in the same threads as me. It is not likely that for each of these comments, just one or two people happened to like it, and the rest didn't. It is even less likely that for each of these comments, up- and down-votes balanced so as to leave +1 or +2.
So it's probable that many people use the second approach: they see a comment, think "that's nice, deserves +1 but no more", and then if it's already at +1, they don't vote.
How do you vote? And what do you see as the goal of the voting process?
I self-identify as using the first one, with a caveat.
The second is obviously awful for communicating any sort of information given that only the sum of votes is displayed rather than total up and total down. The second is order dependent and often means you'll want to change your vote later based purely on what others think of the post.
My "strategy" is to vote up and down based on whether I'd have wanted others with more insight than me to vote to bring my attention to or away from a comment, unless I feel I have special insight, in which case it's based on whether I want to bring others' attention to or away from a comment.
This is because I see the goal of the voting process that readers' independent opinions on how much a comment is worth readers' attention be aggregated and used to bring readers' attention to or away from a comment. As a side effect, the author of a comment can use the aggregated score to determine whether her readers felt the comment was worth their collective attention.
Furthermore since each reader's input comes in distinct chunks of exactly -1, 0, or +1, it's wildly unlikely that voting very often results in the best aggregation: instead I leave a comment alone unless I feel it was(is) significantly worth or not worth my(your) attention.
The caveat: there is a selection effect in which comments I vote on, since my attention will be drawn away from comments with very negative karma. There is also undoubtedly an unconscious bias away from voting up a comment with very high karma: since I perceive the goal to be to shift attention, once a comment has very high karma I know it's going to attract attention so my upvote is in fact worth fewer attention-shift units. But I haven't yet consciously noticed that kick in until about +10 or so.
At home I use the Anti-Kibitzer, which enforces 1. I've been on vacation for a couple days and noticed the temptation to use 2. Gave in on one occasion, I'm afraid. On balance I'll stick to 1, as 2 seems too vulnerable to information cascades.
Am I/are we assholes? I posted a link to the frequentist stats case study to reddit:
The only commenter seems to have come to a conclusion from us that Bayesians are assholes.
Is it just that commenter, or are we really that obnoxious? (now that I think about it, I think I've actually seen someone else note something similar about Bayesians.) So... have we gone into happy death spiral "we get bonus points for acting extra obnoxious about those that are not us"?
The Believable Bible
This post arose when I was pondering the Bible and how easy it is to justify. In the process of writing it, I think I've answered the question for myself. Here it is anyway, for the sake of discussion.
Suppose that there's a world very much like this one, except that it doesn't have the religions we know. Instead, there's a book, titled The Omega-Delta Project, that has been around in its current form for hundreds of years. This is known because a hundreds-of-years-old copy of it happens to exist; it has been carefully and precisely compared to other copies of the book, and they're all identical. It would be unreasonable, given the evidence, to suspect that it had been changed recently. This book is notable because it happens to be very well-written and interesting, and scholars agree it's much better than anything Shakespeare ever wrote.
This book also happens to contain 2,000 prophecies. 500 of them are very precise predictions of things that will happen in the year 2011; none of these prophecies could possibly be self-fulfilling, because they're all things that the human race could not bring about voluntarily (e.g. the discovery of a particular artifact, or the birth of a child under very specific circumstances). All of these 500 prophecies are relatively mundane, everyday sorts of things. The remaining 1,500 prophecies are predictions of things that will happen in the year 2021; unlike the first 500, these prophecies predict Book-of-Revelations-esque, magical things that could never happen in the world as we know it, essentially consisting of some sort of supreme being revealing that the world is actually entirely different from how we thought it was.
The year 2011 comes, and every single one of the 500 prophecies comes true. What is the probability that every single one of the remaining 1,500 prophecies will also come true?
For the two examples of the mundane prophecies that you gave it seems possible some on-going conspiracy could have made them true... but it sounds like you're trying to rule that out.
I understood those to be negative examples, in that the actual prophecies don't share that characteristic with those examples.
Pretty darned high, because at this point we already know that the world doesn't work the way we think it did.
So it sounds like even though there are 2,000 separate prophecies, the probability of every prophecy coming true is much greater than 2^(-2000).
Are people interested in reading an small article about a case of abuse of frequentist statistics? (In the end, the article was rejected, so the peer review process worked.) Vote this comment up if so, down if not. Karma balance below.
ETA: Here's the article.
If it's really frequentism that caused the problem, please spell this out. I find that "frequentist" is used a lot around here to mean "not correct." (but I'm interested whether or not it's about frequentism)
My understanding is that one primary issue with frequentism is that it can be so easily abused/manipulated to support preferred conclusions, and I suspect that's the subject of the article. Frequentism may not have "caused the problem," per se, but perhaps it enabled it?
Could anyone recommend an introductory or intermediate text on probability and statistics that takes a Bayesian approach from the ground up? All of the big ones I've looked at seem to take an orthodox frequentist approach, aside from being intolerably boring.
I second the question. "Elements of Statistical Learning" is Bayes-aware though not Bayesian, and quite good, but that's statistical learning which isn't the same thing at all.
(All of the below is IIRC.)
For a really basic introduction, there's Elementary Bayesian Statistics. It's not worth the listed price (it has little value as a reference text), but if you can find it in a university library, it may be what you need. It describes only the de Finetti coherence justification; on the practical side, the problems all have algebraic solutions (it's all conjugate priors, for those familiar with that jargon) so there's nothing on numerical or Monte Carlo computations.
Data Analysis: A Bayesian Approach is a slender and straighforward introduction to the Jaynesian approach. It describes only the Cox-Jaynes justification; on the practical side, it goes as far as computation of the log-posterior-density through a multivariate second-order Taylor approximation. It does not discuss Monte Carlo methods.
Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd ed. is my go-to reference text. It starts at intermediate and works its way up to early post-graduate. It describes justifications only briefly, in the first chapter; its focus is much more on "how" than "why" (at least, for philosophical "why", not methodological or statistical "why"). It covers practical numerical and Monte Carlo computations up to at least journeyman level.
I'm not intending to put this out as a satisfactory answer, but I found it with a quick search and would like to see what others think of it.
Introduction to Bayesian Statistics by William M. Bolstad
http://books.google.com/books?id=qod3Tm7d7rQC&dq=bayesian+statistics&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Good reviews on Amazon, and available from $46 + shipping... http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Bayesian-Statistics-William-Bolstad/dp/0471270202
It's hard to say from the limited preview, which only goes up to chapter 3 -- the Bayesian stuff doesn't start until chapter 4. The first three chapters cover basic statistics material -- it looks okay to my cursory overview, but will be of limited interest to people looking for specifically Bayesian material. As to the rest of the book, the section headings look about right.
The FBI released a bunch of docs about the anthrax letter investigation today. I started reading the summary since I was curious about codes used in the letters. All of a sudden on page 61 I see:
The next couple of pages talk about GEB and relate some parts of it to the code. It's really weird to see literary analysis of GEB in the middle of an investigation on anthrax attacks.
It is common practice, when debating an issue with someone, to cite examples.
Has anyone else ever noticed how your entire argument can be undermined by stating a single example or fact which is does not stand up to scrutiny, even though your argument may be valid and all other examples robust?
Is this a common phenomenon? Does it have a name? What is the thought process that underlies it and what can you do to rescue your position once this has occurred?
It takes effort to evaluate examples. Revealing that one example is bad raises the possibility that others are bad as well, because the methods for choosing examples are correlated with the examples chosen. The two obvious reasons for a bad example are:
More cryonics: my friend David Gerard has kicked off an expansion of the RationalWiki article on cryonics (which is strongly anti). The quality of argument is breathtakingly bad. It's not strong Bayesian evidence because it's pretty clear at this stage that if there were good arguments I hadn't found, an expert would be needed to give them, but it's not no evidence either.
I have not seen RationalWiki before. Why is it called Rational Wiki?
From http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/RationalWiki :
So it's inspired by Traditional Rationality.
A fine mission statement, but my impression from the pages I've looked at is of a bunch of nerds getting together to mock the woo. "Rationality" is their flag, not their method: "the scientific point of view means that our articles take the side of the scientific consensus on an issue."
Voted up, but calling them "nerds" in reply is equally ad-hominem, ya know. Let's just say that they don't seem to have the very high skill level required to distinguish good unusual beliefs from bad unusual beliefs, yet. (Nor even the realization that this is a hard problem, yet.)
Yes, they're pretty softcore by LessWrongian standards but places like this are where advanced rationalists are recruited from, so if someone is making a sincere effort in the direction of Traditional Rationality, it's worthwhile trying to avoid offending them when they make probability-theoretic errors. Even if they mock you first.
Also, one person on RationalWiki saying silly things is not a good reason to launch an aggressive counterattack on a whole wiki containing many potential recruits.
Point taken.
(As an extreme example, a few weeks idly checking out RationalWiki led me to the quote at the top of this page and only a few months after that I was at SIAI.)
I only just noticed this. Good Lord. (I put that quote there, so you're my fault.)
I guess I should try harder to remember this, in the context of my rather discouraging recent foray into the Richard Dawkins Forums -- which, I admit, had me thinking twice about whether affiliation with "rational" causes was at all a useful indicator of actual receptivity to argument, and wondering whether there was much more point in visiting a place like that than a generic Internet forum. (My actual interlocutors were in fact probably hopeless, but maybe I could have done a favor to a few lurkers by not giving up so quickly.)
But, you know, it really is frustrating how little of the quality of a person (like Richard Dawkins, or, say, Paul Graham) or a cause (like increasing rationality, or improving science education) actually manages to rub off or trickle down onto the legions of Internet followers of said person or cause.
You understand this is more or less exactly the problem that Less Wrong was designed to solve.
not to detract, but does Richard Dawkins really posses such 'high quality'? IMO his arguments are good as a gateway for aspiring rationalists, not that far above the sanity water line
that, or it might be a problem of forums in general ..
Dawkins is a very high-quality thinker, as his scientific writings reveal. The fact that he has also published "elementary" rationalist material in no way takes away from this.
He's way, way far above the level represented by the participants in his namesake forum.
(I'd give even odds that EY could persuade him to sign up for cryonics in an hour or less.)
Convincing Dawkins would be a great strategy for promoting cryonics... who else should the community focus on convincing?
you're absolutely right, I didn't consider his scientific writings, though my argument still weakly stands since I wasn't talking about that, he's a good scientist, but a rationalist of say Eliezer's level? I somehow doubt that.
(my bias is that he hasn't gone beyond the 'debunking the gods' phase in his not specifically scientific writings, and here I'll admit I haven't read much of him.)
Bloggingheads are exactly 60 minutes.
Here's Dawkins on some non socially-reinforced views: AI, psychometrics, and quantum mechanics (in the last 2 minutes, saying MWI is slightly less weird than Copenhagen, but that the proliferation of branches is uneconomical).
Obviously the most you could persuade him of would be that he should look into it.
Is there any information on how the design was driven by the problem?
For example, I see a karma system, a hierarchical discussion that lets me fold and unfold articles, and lots of articles by Eliezer. I've seen similar technical features elsewhere, such as Digg and SlashDot, so I'm confused about whether the claim is that this specific technology is solving the problem of having a ton of clueless followers, or the large number of articles from Eliezer, or something else.
This is actually one of Niven's Laws: "There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it."
Wait, you have a model which says it should?
You don't learn from a person merely by associating with them. And:
I would bet a fair bit that this is the source of your frustration, right there: scale. You can learn from a person by directly interacting with them, and sometimes by interacting with people who learned from them. Beyond that, it seems to me that you get "dilution effects", kicking in as soon as you grow faster than some critical pace at which newcomers have enough time to acculturate and turn into teachers.
Communities of inquiry tend to be victims of their own success. The smarter communities recognize this, anticipate the consequences, and adjust their design around them.
What's an easy way to explain the paperclip thing?
We happen to like things like ice cream and happiness. But we could have liked paperclips. We could have liked them a lot, and not liked anything else enough to have it instead of paperclips. If that had happened, we'd want to turn everything into paperclips - even ourselves and each other!
What do you have to protect?
Eliezer has stated that rationality should not be end in itself, and that to get good at it, one should be motivated by something more important. For those of you who agree with Eliezer on this, I would like to know: What is your reason? What do you have to protect?
This is a rather personal question, I know, but I'm very curious. What problem are you trying to solve or goal are you trying to reach that makes reading this blog and participating in its discourse worthwhile to you?
I'm trying to apply LW-style hyper-rationality to excelling in what I have left of grad school and to shepherding my business to success.
My mission (I have already chosen to accept it) is to make a pile of money and spend it fighting existential risk as effectively as possible. (I'm not yet certain if SIAI is the best target). The other great task I have is to persuade the people I care about to sign up for cryonics.
Strangely enough, the second task actually seems even less plausible to me, and I have no idea how to even get started since most of those people are theists.
Alcor addresses some of the 'spiritual' objections in their FAQ. ("Whenever the soul departs, it must be at a point beyond which resuscitation is impossible, either now or in the future. If resuscitation is still possible (even with technology not immediately available) then the correct theological status is coma, not death, and the soul remains.") Some of that might be helpful.
However, that depends on you being comfortable persuading people to believe what are probably lies (which might happen to follow from other lies they already believe) in the service of leading them to a probably correct conclusion, which I would normally not endorse under any circumstances, but I would personally make an exception in the interest of saving a life, assuming they can't be talked out of theism.
It also depends on their being willing to listen to any such reasoning if they know you're not a theist. (In discussions with theists, I find they often refuse to acknowledge any reasoning on my part that demonstrates that their beliefs should compel them to accept certain conclusions, on the basis that if I do not hold those beliefs, I am not qualified to reason about them, even hypothetically. Not sure if others have had that experience.)
I'm not quite sure I can answer the question. I certainly have no major, world(view)-shaking Cause which is driving me to improve my strength.
For what it's worth, I've had this general idea that being wrong is a bad idea for as long as I can remember. Suggestions like "you should hold these beliefs, they will make your life happier" always sounded just insane - as crazy as "you should drink this liquor, it will make your commute less boring". From that standpoint, it feels like what I have to protect is just the things I care about in the world - my own life, the lives of the people around me, the lives of humans in general.
That's it.
OB then LW were the 'step beyond' to take after philosophy, not that I was seriously studying it.
to be honest I don't think there's much going on these day new-topic-wise, so I'm here less often. but I do come back whenever I'm bored, so at first "pure desire to learn" then "entertainment" would be my reasons ..
oh and a major part of my goals in life is formed by religion, ie. saving humanity from itself and whatever follows, this is more ideological than actual at this point in time, but anyway, that goal is furthered by learning more about AI/futurism, the rationality part less so, as I already had an intuitive grasp of it you could say, and really all it takes is reading the sequences with their occasional flaws/too strong assertions, the futurism part is more speculative-and interesting- so it's my main focus, along with the moral questions it brings, though there is no dichotomy to speak of if you consider this a personal blog rather than book or something similar.
hope this helped :)
Yes, this is what I was curious about, thanks. I've seen others cite humanity's existential risks as their motivations too (mostly uFAI, not as much nuclear war or super-flu or meteors). I'm like you in that for me it's definitely a mix of learning and entertainment.
first use of "shut up and calculate" ?
I liked learning about the bias called the "Matthew effect" The tendency to assign credit to the most eminent among all the plausible candidates from —Mattthew 25:29.
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_57/iss_5/10_1.shtml?bypassSSO=1
enjoy
Nice recap of psychological biases from the Charlie Munger school (of hard knocks and making a billion dollars).
http://www.capitalideasonline.com/articles/index.php?id=3251
For those Less Wrongians who watch anime/read manga, I have a question: What would you consider the top three that you watch/read and why?
Edit: Upon reading gwern's comment, I see how kinda far off topic that was, even for an open thread. So change the question to what anime/manga was most insightful into LW-style thinking and problems?
If Death Note counts, then Haruhi might count as well. Deals with anthropics and weird AIs in a tangential way. The anime is awesome, but not as good as it could have been.
Hikaru no Go, of course.
Okay, so I'm 10 episodes into HnG and...where is the "LW-style thinking and problems"?
Hence the origin of the phrase, "tsuyoku naritai".
Wow, I can't believe I missed that. Although, if that is the only thing relevant to "LW-style thinking and problems" in HnG, then Death Note compares favorably to it.
If you mean in general (ie. 'I really liked Evangelion and thought that Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei was hysterical!'), I think that's a wee bit too far off-topic. Might as well ask what's everyone's favorite poet.
If you mean, 'what anime/manga was most insightful into LW-style thinking and problems', that's a little more challenging.
Death Note comes to mind as a possible exemplar of what humans really can do in the realm of action & thought, and perhaps what an AI in a box could do. Otaku no Video is useful as a cautionary tale about geekdom. And to round it off, I have a personal theory that Aria depicts a post-Singularity sysop scenario with humans who have chosen to live a nostalgic low-tech lifestyle* because that turns out to be la dolce vita.
* The high tech is there when it's really needed. Like how the Amish make full use of modern medicine, surgery, and tech when they need to.
Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood has (SPOILER):
an almost literally unboxed unfriendly "AI" as main bad guy. Made by pseudomagical ("alchemy") means, but still.
It bugs me that people don't think of this one more often. It's basically an anime about how science affects the world and its practitioners.
(Disclaimer: Far too many convenient coincidences/idiot balls IIRC. It's a prime target for a rationalist rewrite.)
I think Death Note was a little too close to Calvinball to be truly instructive.
The second half arguably does have some fast and loose play by the writer, case in point being how Mikami was found by Near - arrgh, this has nothing to do with LW!
How about up until Y'f qrngu*, can we compromise on that?
* ROT-13 encoded to spare LW's delicate sensibilities. Here's a decoder.
Please edit above to avoid spoilers.
EDIT: Romeo and Juliet die at the end.
http://www.threadless.com/product/844/Spoilt
The manga finished nearly half a decade ago, and Y qvrq* before the half-way point. "There's a statute of limitations on this shit, man."
* ROT-13 encoded; decoder
Please edit both of the above to avoid having your comments deleted. It's great that you have that opinion, but some people may not share it, and also there's this incredible amazing technology called rot13 which is really useful for having your cake and eating it too in the case of this conflict. And we can all consider that official LW policy from this point forward.
It's all well and good to have some character of the founder rub off on the site, but not every fetish.
I don't think you understand the degree to which people who don't want spoilers, don't want to hear them.
Spoilers for a classic movie here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1s4/open_thread_february_2010_part_2/1ndd
Since the actual intent of the comment was to spoiler it can probably be deleted without further discussion.
EDIT: the edit is a big improvement. It used to be an actual spoiler.
In that case can we have a little rot-13 widget built into LW? Or is there a Firefox plugin I should be using?
(Personally I think the whole "spoilers" thing is ridiculous, but I'm fine with this as site policy if it's easy to do.)
www.rot13.com ?
Good, although having to open a new tab still seems less than maximally convenient.
(Actually, doing a hidden-text thing like TVTropes does would be pretty good, come to think of it.)
I use this “bookmarklet”:
javascript:inText=window.getSelection()+'';if(inText=='')%7Bvoid(inText=prompt('Phrase...',''))%7D;if(!inText)%7BoutText='No%20text%20selected'%7Delse%7BoutText='';for(i=0;i%3CinText.length;i++)%7Bt=inText.charCodeAt(i);if((t%3E64&&t%3C78)%7C%7C(t%3E96&&t%3C110))%7Bt+=13%7Delse%7Bif((t%3E77&&t%3C91)%7C%7C(t%3E109&&t%3C123))%7Bt-=13%7D%7DoutText+=String.fromCharCode(t)%7D%7Dalert(outText)
[Not written by me; I have no record of where I obtained it.]
Put it in your bookmarks bar in most web browsers, and when you click it it will display the rot13 of the selected text, or prompt you for text if there isn't any selection. In Safari the first entries in the bookmarks bar get shortcuts ⌘1, ⌘2, ..., so it ends up that to rot13 something on a web page I just need to select it and press ⌘3.
Excellent, thank you.
I know a couple people that claim to have unintentionally learned to read rot13 to the point where it is no longer a spoiler protection. (I can read it, but it's not automatic.)
I love that comic, but I think the statute of limitations takes more than five years to expire...
When I apply the statute, my justification is along the lines of "people usually only care about spoilers if they're watching a series or planning to watch it soon, which are unlikely given a random person and a random series". Hariant's comment could easily be interpreted as asking for recommendations of anime to watch, in which case "planning to watch (considering watching) it" would be a given.
We cannot meaningfully discuss how DN & ilk hold lessons for LW without discussing plot events; funnily enough, spoilers tend to be about plots. And as I said, applying the principal of charity means not interpreting Hariant's comment that way.
Stuff that's not really part of the mainstream popular culture is more spoilable. Cowboy Bebop came out before The Sixth Sense, but I'd still assume open spoilers for The Sixth Sense wouldn't be as bad as ones for Cowboy Bebop on an English-language forum.
I was mostly referring to how the reasoning had to deal a gradually accreting set of rules, each one constructed in the service of narrative (that is, fun) instead of being a realistic constraint. I really did mean Calvinball.