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Open Thread: June 2010
To whom it may concern:
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.
(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)
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Comments (651)
Cleaning out my computer I found some old LW-related stuff I made for graphic editing practice. Now that we have a store and all, maybe someone here will find it useful:
You are magnificent.
(Alternate title for the LW tabloid — "The Rational Enquirer"?)
That's....brilliant. I might have to do another one just for that title.
Sweet!
Yep, it was probably the first rationalist joke ever that made me laugh.
Nearly killed me.
We have a store? Where?
Roko Mijic has a Zazzle store. (See also.)
Tabloid 100% gold. Hanson slayed me.
Why is LessWrong not an Amazon affiliate? I recall buying at least one book due to it being mentioned on LessWrong, and I haven't been around here long. I can't find any reliable data on the number of active LessWrong users, but I'd guess it would number in the 1000s. Even if only 500 are active, and assuming only 1/4 buy at least one book mentioned on LessWrong, assuming a mean purchase value of $20 (books mentioned on LessWrong probably tend towards the academic, expensive side), that would work out at $375/year.
IIRC, it only took me a few minutes to sign up as an Amazon affiliate. They (stupidly) require a different account for each Amazon website, so 5*4 minutes (.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr), +20 for GeoIP database, +3-90 (wide range since coding often takes far longer than anticipated) to set up URL rewriting (and I'd be happy to code this) would give a 'worst case' scenario of $173 annualized returns per hour of work.
Now, the math is somewhat questionable, but the idea seems like a low-risk, low-investment and potentially high-return one, and I note that Metafilter and StackOverflow do this, though sadly I could not find any information on the returns they see from this. So, is there any reason why nobody has done this, or did nobody just think of it/get around to it?
From your link, a further link doesn't make it sound great at SO - 2-4x the utter failure. But they are very positive about it because the cost of implementation was very low. Just top-level posts or no geolocating would be even cheaper.
You may be amused (or something) by this search
A possibly relevant data point: I usually post any links to books I put online with my amazon affiliate link and in the last 3 months I've had around 25 clicks from links to books I believe I posted in Less Wrong comments and no conversions.
The entire world media seems to have had a mass rationality failure about the recent suicides at Foxconn. There have been 10 suicides there so far this year, at a company which employs more than 400,000 people. This is significantly lower than the base rate of suicide in China. However, everyone is up in arms about the 'rash', 'spate', 'wave'/whatever of suicides going on there.
When I first read the story I was reading a plausible explanation of what causes these suicides by a guy who's usually pretty on the ball. Partly due to the neatness of the explanation, it took me a while to realise that there was nothing to explain.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. It's even harder to achieve this when the fiction comes ready-packaged with a plausible explanation (especially one which fits neatly with your political views).
That's what I thought as well, until I read this post from "Fake Steve Jobs". Not the most reliable source, obviously, but he does seem to have a point:
Now I'm not entirely sure of the details, but if it's true that all the suicides in the recent cluster consisted of jumping off the Foxconn factory roof, that does seem to be more significant than just 15 employees committing suicide in unrelated incidents. In fact, it seems like it might even be the case that there are a lot more suicides than the ones we've heard about, and the cluster of 15 are just those who've killed themselves via this particular, highly visible, method (I'm just speculating here).
I'm not sure what to make of this - without knowing more of the details its probably impossible to say what's going on. But the basic point seems sound: that the argument about being below national average suicide rates doesn't really hold up if there's something specific about a particular group of incidents that makes them non-independent. As an example, if the members of some cult commit suicide en masse, you can't look at the region the event happened in and say "well the overall suicide rate for the region is still below the national average, so there's nothing to see here"
Suicide and methods of suicide are contagious, FWIW.
keyword = "werther effect"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werther_effect
I was surprised when I read a statistical analysis on national death rates. Whenever there was a suicide by a particular method published in newspapers or on television, deaths of that form spiked in the following weeks. This is despite the copycat deaths often being called 'accidents' (examples included crashed cars and aeroplanes). Scary stuff (or very impressive statistics-fu).
If all the members of a cult committed suicide then the local rate is 100%.
The most local rate that we so far know of is 15/400,000 which is 4x below baseline. If these 15 people worked at, say, the same plant of 1,000 workers you may have a point. But we don't know.
At this point there is nothing to explain.
Fair enough - my example was poorly thought out in retrospect.
But I don't think it's correct that there's nothing to explain. If it's true that all 15 committed suicide by the same method - a fairly rare method frequently used by people who are trying to make a public statement with their death - then there seems to be something needing to be explained. As Fake Steve Jobs points out later in the cited article, if 15 employees of Walmart committed suicide within the span of a few months, all of them by way of jumping off the roof of their Walmart, wouldn't you think that was odd? Don't you think that would be more significant, and more deserving of an explanation, than the same 15 Walmart employees committing suicide in a variety of locations, by a variety of different methods?
I'm not committing to any particular explanation here (Douglas Knight's suggestion, for one, sounds like a plausible explanation which doesn't involve any wrongdoing on Foxconn's part), I'm just saying that I do think there's "something to explain".
The first question that came to mind when I heard about this story was 'what's the base rate?'. I didn't investigate further but a quick mental estimate made me doubt that this represented a statistically significant increase above the base rate. It's disappointing yet unsurprising that few if any media reports even consider this point.
Marginal Revolution linked to A Fine Theorem, which has summaries of papers in decision theory and other relevant econ, including the classic "agreeing to disagree" results. A paper linked there claims that the probability settled on by Aumann-agreers isn't necessarily the same one as the one they'd reach if they shared their information, which is something I'd been wondering about. In retrospect this seems obvious: if Mars and Venus only both appear in the sky when the apocalypse is near, and one agent sees Mars and the other sees Venus, then they conclude the apocalypse is near if they exchange info, but if the probabilities for Mars and Venus are symmetrical, then no matter how long they exchange probabilities they'll both conclude the other one probably saw the same planet they did. The same thing should happen in practice when two agents figure out different halves of a chain of reasoning. Do I have that right?
ETA: it seems, then, that if you're actually presented with a situation where you can communicate only by repeatedly sharing probabilities, you're better off just conveying all your info by using probabilities of 0 and 1 as Morse code or whatever.
ETA: the paper works out an example in section 4.
I thought of a simple example that illustrates the point. Suppose two people each roll a die privately. Then they are asked, what is the probability that the sum of the dice is 9?
Now if one sees a 1 or 2, he knows the probability is zero. But let's suppose both see 3-6. Then there is exactly one value for the other die that will sum to 9, so the probability is 1/6. Both players exchange this first estimate. Now curiously although they agree, it is not common knowledge that this value of 1/6 is their shared estimate. After hearing 1/6, they know that the other die is one of the four values 3-6. So actually the probability is calculated by each as 1/4, and this is now common knowledge (why?).
And of course this estimate of 1/4 is not what they would come up with if they shared their die values; they would get either 0 or 1.
Here is a remarkable variation on that puzzle. A tiny change makes it work out completely differently.
Same setup as before, two private dice rolls. This time the question is, what is the probability that the sum is either 7 or 8? Again they will simultaneously exchange probability estimates until their shared estimate is common knowledge.
I will leave it as a puzzle for now in case someone wants to work it out, but it appears to me that in this case, they will eventually agree on an accurate probability of 0 or 1. And they may go through several rounds of agreement where they nevertheless change their estimates - perhaps related to the phenomenon of "violent agreement" we often see.
Strange how this small change to the conditions gives such different results. But it's a good example of how agreement is inevitable.
Observation: The may open thread, part 2, had very few posts in the last days, whereas this one has exploded within the first 24 hours of its opening. I know I deliberately withheld content from it as once it is superseded from a new thread, few would go back and look at the posts in the previous one. This would predict a slowing down of content in the open threads as the month draws to a close, and a sudden burst at the start of the next month, a distortion that is an artifact of the way we organise discussion. Does anybody else follow the same rule for their open thread postings? Is there something that should be done to solve this artificial throttling of discussion?
Some sites have gone to an every Friday open thread; maybe we should do it weekly instead of monthly, too.
I don't post in the open threads much, but if I run into a good rationality quote I tend to wait until the next rationality quotes thread is opened unless the current one is less than a week or so old.
I think my only other comment here has been "Hi." But, the webcomic SMBC has a treatment of the prisoner's dilemma today and I thought of you guys.
http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2010/05/eric-boyd-and-his-haptic-compa.php
The technology itself is pretty interesting; see also http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html
To the powers that be: Is there a way for the community to have some insight into the analytics of LW? That could range from periodic reports, to selective access, to open access. There may be a good reason why not, but I can't think of it. Beyond generic transparency brownie points, since we are a community interested in popularising the website, access to analytics may produce good, unforeseen insights. Also, authors would be able to see viewership of their articles, and related keyword searches, and so be better able to adapt their writing to the audience. For me, a downside of posting here instead of my own blog is the inability to access analytics. Obviously i still post here, but this is a downside that may not have to exist.
So I've started drafting the very beginnings of a business plan for a Less Wrong (book) store-ish type thingy. If anybody else is already working on something like this and is advanced enough that I should not spend my time on this mini-project, please reply to this comment or PM me. However, I would rather not be inundated with ideas as to how to operate such a store yet: I may make a Less Wrong post in the future to gather ideas. Thanks!
My theory of happiness.
How does this make sense exactly? A happy person, with more resources, would be better off not taking risks that could result in him losing what he has. On the other hand, a sad person with few resources, would need to take more risks then the happy person to get the same results. If you told a rich person, jump off that cliff and I'll give you a million dollars, they probably wouldn't do it. On the other hand, if you told a poor person the same thing, they might do it as long as there was a chance they could survive.
My idea of why people were happy wasn't a static value of how many resources they had, but a comparative value. A rich person thrown into poverty would be very unhappy, but the poor person might be happy.
Kaj's hypothesis is a bit off: what he's actually talking about is the explore/exploit tradeoff. An animal in a bad (but not-yet catastrophic) situation is better off exploiting available resources than scouting new ones, since in the EEA, any "bad" situation is likely to be temporary (winter, immediate presence of a predator, etc.) and it's better to ride out the situation.
OTOH, when resources are widely available, exploring is more likely to be fruitful and worthwhile.
The connection to happiness and risk-taking is more tenuous.
I'd be interested in seeing the results of that experiment. But "rich" and "poor" are even more loosely correlated with the variables in question - there are unhappy "rich" people and unhappy "poor" people, after all.
(In other words, this is all about internal, intuitive perceptions of resource availability, not rational assessments of actual resource availability.)
If I were to wager a guess, the people who would accept the deal are those who feel they are in a catastrophic situation.
Speaking of catastrophic situations, have you seen The Wages of Fear or any of the remakes? I've only seen Sorcerer, but it was quite good. It's a rather more realistic situation that jumping off a cliff, but the structure is the same: a group of desperate people driving cases of nitroglycerin-sweating dynamite across rough terrain to get enough money that they can escape.
Hi Kaj, I really liked the article. I had a relevant theory to explain the perceived difference of attitudes of north Europeans versus south Europeans. I guess you could call it a theory of unhappiness. Here goes:
I take as granted that mildly depressed people tend to make more accurate depictions of reality, that north Europeans have higher incidence of depression and also much better functioning economies and democracies. Given a low resource environment, one needs to plan further, and make more rational projections of the future. If being on the depressive side makes one more introspective and thoughtful, then it would be conducive to having better long-term plans. In a sense, happiness could be greed-inducing, in a greedy algorithm sense. This more or less agrees with kaj's theory. OTOH, not-happiness would encourage long-term planning and even more co-operative behaviour.
In the current environment, resources may not be scarce, but our world has become much more complex, actions having much deeper consequences than in the ancestral environment (Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes this point in Black Swan) therefore also needing better thought out courses of action. So northern Europeans have lucked out where their adaptation to climate has been useful for the current reality. If one sees corruption as a local-greedy behaviour as opposed to lawfulness as a global-cooperative behaviour, this would also explain why going closer to the equator you generally see an increase in corruption and also failures in democratic government. Taken further, it would imply that near-equator peoples are simply not well-adapted to democratic rule, which demands a certain limiting of short-term individual freedom for the longer-term common good, and a more distributed/localised form of governance would do much better. I think this (rambling) theory can more or less be pieced together with kaj's, adding long-term planning as a second dimension.
Disclaimer: Before anyone accuses me of discrimination, I am in fact a south European (Greek), living in north Europe (the UK), and while this does not absolve me of all possibility of racism against my own, this theory has formed from my effort to explain the cultural differences I experience on a daily basis. Take it for what it's worth.
If any given instance of discrimination increases the degree of correspondence between your map and the territory, then there is no need for apology. Are these sorts of disclaimers really necessary here?
Relevant to your interests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg&feature=channel
Searle has some weird beliefs about consciousness. Here is his description of a "Fading Qualia" thought experiment, where your neurons are replaced, one by one, with electronics:
(J.R. Searle, The rediscovery of the mind, 1992, p. 66, quoted by Nick Bostrom here.)
This nightmarish passage made me really understand why the more imaginative people who do not subscribe to a computational theory of mind are afraid of uploading.
My main criticism of this story would be: What does Searle think is the physical manifestation of those panicked, helpless thoughts?
I don't have Searle's book, and may be missing some relevant context. Does Searle believe normal humans with unmodified brains can consciously affect their external behavior?
If yes, then there's a simple solution to this fear: do the experiment he describes, and then gradually return the test subject to his original, all-biological condition. Ask him to describe his experience. If he reports (now that he's free of non-biological computing substrate) that he actually lost his sight and then regained it, then we'll know Searle is right, and we won't upload. Nothing for Searle to fear.
But if, as I gather, Searle believes that our "consciousness" only experiences things and is never a cause of external behavior, then this is subject to the same criticism as Searle's support of zombies.
Namely: if Searle is right, then the reason he is giving us this warning isn't because he is conscious. Maybe in fact his consciousness is screaming inside his head, knowing that his thesis is false, but is unable to stop him from publishing his books. Maybe his consciousness is already blind, and has been blind from birth due to a rare developmental accident, and it doesn't know what words he types in his books at all. Why should we listen to him, if his words about conscious experience are not caused by conscious experience?
Searle thinks that consciousness does cause behavior. In the scary story, the normal cause of behavior is supplanted, causing the outward appearance of normality. Thus, it's not that consciousness doesn't affect things, but just that its effects can be mimicked.
Nisan's criticism is devastating, and has the advantage of not requiring technological marvels to assess. I do like the elegance of your simple solution, though.
David Chalmers discusses this particular passage by Searle extensively in his paper "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia":
http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html
He demonstrates very convincingly that Searle's view is incoherent except under the assumption of strong dualism, using an argument based on more or less the same basic idea as your objection.
LW too focused on verbalizable rationality
This comment got me thinking about it. Of course LW being a website can only deal with verbalizable information(rationality). So what are we missing? Skillsets that are not and have to be learned in other ways(practical ways): interpersonal relationships being just one of many. I also think the emotional brain is part of it. There might me people here who are brilliant thinkers yet emotionally miserable because of their personal context or upbringing, and I think dealing with that would be important. I think a hollistic approach is required. Eliezer had already suggested the idea of a rationality dojo. What do you think?
I've been talking to various people about the idea of a Rationality Foundation (working title) which might end up sponsoring or facilitating something like rationality dojos. Needless to say this idea is in its infancy.
The example of coding dojos for programmers might be relevant, and not just for the coincidence in metaphors.
I'm a draftsman and it always struck me how absolutely terrible the English language is for talking about ludicrously simple visual concepts precisely. Words like parallel and perpendicular should be one syllable long.
I wonder if there's a way to apply rationality/ mathematical think beyond geometry and to the world of art.
I have a theory: Super-smart people don't exist, it's all due to selection bias.
It's easy to think someone is extremely smart if you've only seen the sample of their most insightful thinking. But every time that happened to me, and I found that such a promising person had a blog or something like that, it universally took very little time to find something terribly brain-hurtful they've written there.
So the null hypothesis is: there's a large population of fairly-smart-but-nothing-special people, who think and publish their thought a lot. Because the best thoughts get distributed, and average and worse thoughts don't, it's very easy from such small biased samples to believe some of them are far smarter than the rest, but their averages are pretty much the same.
(feel free to replace "smart" by "rational", the result is identical)
I was thinking something similar just today:
Some people think out loud. Some people don't. Smart people who think out loud are perceived as "witty" or "clever." You learn a lot from being around them; you can even imitate them a little bit. They're a lot of fun. Smart people who don't think out loud are perceived as "geniuses." You only ever see the finished product, never their thought processes. Everything they produce is handed down complete as if from God. They seem dumber than they are when they're quiet, and smarter than they are when you see their work, because you have no window into the way they think.
In my experience, there are far more people who don't think out loud in math than in less quantitative fields. This may be part of why math is perceived as so hard; there are all these smart people who are hard to learn from, because they only reveal the finished product and not the rough draft. Rough drafts make things look feasible. Regular smart people look like geniuses if they leave no rough drafts. There may really be people who don't need rough drafts in the way that we mundanes do -- I've heard of historical figures like that, and those really are savants -- but it's possible that some people's "genius" is overstated just because they're cagey about expressing half-formed ideas.
You may be right about math. Reading the Polymath research threads (like this one) made me aware that even Terry Tao thinks in small and well-understood steps that are just slightly better informed than those of the average mathematician.
I Am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter may be of interest-- it's got a lot about how he thinks as well as his conclusions.
I'm not a psychologist but I thought I could improve on the vagueness of the original discussion.
There are a few factors which determine "smartness" (or potential for success):
Speed. Having faster hardware.
Pattern Recognition. Being better at "chunking".
Memory.
Creativity. (="divergent" thinking.)
Detail-awareness.
Experience. Having incorporated many routines into the subconscious thanks to extensive practice.
Knowledge. (Quality is more important than quantity.)
The first five traits might be considered part of someone's "talent." Experience and knowledge, which I'll group together as "training", must be gained through hard work. Potential for success is determined by a geometric (rather than additive) combination of talent and training: that is, roughly,
potential for success=talent * training
All this math, of course, is not remotely intended to be taken at face value, but it's merely the most efficient way to make my point.
The "super-smart" start life with more talent than average. The rule of the bell curve holds, so they generally do not have an overwhelming cognitive advantage over the average person. But they have enough talent to justify investing much more of their resources into training. This is because a person with 15 talent will gain 15 success for every unit of time they put into training, while a unit of training is worth 17 success for a person with 17 talent. The less time you have to spend, the more time costs, so all other things being equal, the person with more talent will put more time into training. Suppose the person with 15 talent puts 100 units of time into training, and the person with 17 talent puts 110 units of time into training. Then:
person with 15 talent * 100 training => 15000 success
person with 17 talent * 110 training => 18700 success
Which is 25% more success for only 13% more talent.
There's probably some more formal work done along these lines, I'm not an economist either.
If you're interpreting "super-smart" to mean always right, or at least reasonable, and thus never severely wrong-headed, I think you're correct that no one like that exists, but it seems like a rather comic bookish idea of super-smartness.
Also, I have no idea how good your judgment is about whether what you call brain-hurtful is actually ideas I'd think were egregiously wrong.
I think there are a lot of folks smart enough to be special people-- those who come up with worthwhile insights frequently.
And even if it's just a matter of generating lots of ideas and then publishing the best, recognizing the best is a worthwhile skill. It's conceivable that idea-generation and idea-recognizing are done by two people who together give the impression of one person who's smarter than either of them.
How would you describe the writing patterns of super-smart people? Similarly, how would meeting/talking/debating them would feel like?
I think my comment was rather vague, and people aren't sure what I meant.
This is all my impressions, as far as I can tell evidence of all that is rather underwhelming; I'm writing this more to explain my thought than to "prove" anything.
It seems to me that people come in different level of smartness. There are some people with all sort of problems that make them incapable of even human normal, but let's ignore them entirely here.
Then, there are normal people who are pretty much incapable of original highly insightful thought, critical thinking, rationality etc. They can usually do OK in normal life, and can even be quite capable in their narrow area of expertise and that's about it. They often make the most basic logic mistakes etc.
Then there are "smart" people who are capable of original insight, and don't get too stupid too often. They're not measuring example the same thing, but IQ tests are capable of distinguishing between those and the normal people reasonably well. With smart people both their top performance and their average performance is a lot better than with average people. In spite of that, all of them very often fail basic rationality for some particular domains they feel too strongly about.
Now I'm conflicted if people who are so much above "smart" as "smart" is above normal really exists. A canonical example of such person would be Feynman - from my limited information he seems to be just so ridiculously smart. Eliezer seems to believe Einstein is like that, but I have even less information about him. You can probably think of a few such other people.
Unfortunately there's a second observation - there's no reason to believe such people existed only in the past, or would have aversion to blogging - so if super-smart people exist, it's fairly certain that some blogs of such people exist. And if such blogs existed, I would expect to have found a few by now.
And yet, every time it seemed to me that someone might just be that smart and I started reading their blog - it turned out very quickly that my estimate of their smartness suffered from rapid regression to the mean. All my super-smart candidates managed to say such horrible things, and be deaf to such obvious arguments that I doubt any of them really qualifies.
So here's an alternative theory. No human alive is much smarter than the "normally smart". Of population of normally smart people, thanks to domain expertise, wit and writing skill, compatibility with my beliefs (or at least happening to avoid my red flags), higher productivity, luck etc. some people simply seem much smarter than that.
I'm not trolling here, but consider Eliezer - I've picked the example because it's well known here. For some time he was exactly such a candidate, however:
On the other hand, and this provides some counter-evidence to my theory - let's look at myself. I publish anything on my blog and in comments everywhere that seems to have expected public value higher than zero, and very often I'm in hurry / sleep-depraved, or otherwise far below my top performance. I exaggerate to get the point across very often. I write outside my area of expertise a lot, not uncommonly making severe mistakes. I'm not that good at writing (not to mention that English is not my first language) so things I say may be very unclear.
Unfortunately a normally smart person with my behaviour patterns, and a super-smart person with my behaviour patterns, would probably both fail my super-smartness test.
As you can see, I'm not even terribly convinced that my "super-smart people don't exist" theory is true. I would love to see if other people have good evidence or insight one way or the other.
Another by-the-way: Very often blatantly wrong belief might still be the least-wrong belief given someone's web of beliefs. Often it's easier to believe some minor wrong than to rebuild your whole belief system risking far more damage just to make something small come out correct. So perhaps even my test for being really really wrong is not really all that useful.
A few people who blog frequently and fit my criteria for "super-smart": Terence Tao, Cosma Shalizi, John Baez.
I was thinking of Tao as well. Also, Oleg Kiselyov for programming/computer science.
I think you're giving the "normal person" too little credit.
Agreed. If nothing else, refugee situations aren't that uncommon in human history, and the majority are able to migrate and adapt if they're physically permitted to do so.
It doesn't seem to me that you have an accurate description of what a super-smart person would do/say other than match your beliefs and providing insightful thought. For example, do you expect super-smart people to be proficient in most areas of knowledge or even able to quickly grasp the foundations of different areas through super-abstraction? Would you expect them to be mostly unbiased? Your definition needs to be more objective and predictive, instead of descriptive.
I don't know what's the correct super-smartness cluster, so I cannot make objective predictive definition, at least yet. There's no need to suffer from physics envy here - a lot of useful knowledge has this kind of vagueness. Nobody managed to define "pornography" yet, and it's far easier concept than "super-smartness". This kind of speculation might end up with something useful with some luck (or not).
Even defining by example would be difficult. My canonical examples would be Feynman and Einstein - they seem far smarter than the "normally smart" people.
Let's say I collected a sufficiently large sample of "people who seem super-smart", got as accurate information about them as possible, and did a proper comparison between them and background of normally smart people (it's pretty easy to get good data on those, even by generic proxies like education - so I'm least worried about that) in a way that would be robust against even large number of data errors. That's about the best I can think of.
Unfortunately it will be of no use as my sample will be not random super-smart people but those super-smart people who are also sufficiently famous for me to know about them and be aware of their super-smartness. This isn't what I want to measure at all. And I cannot think of any reasonable way to separate these.
So the project is most likely doomed. It was interesting to think about this anyway.
I'm not sure that the ability to have original thoughts is at all closely connected to the ability to think rationally. What makes you reach that conclusion?
Have you tried looking at Terence Tao's blog? I think he fits your model, but it may be that many of his posts will be too technical for a non-mathematician. I'm not sure in general if blogging is a good medium for actually finding this sort of thing. It is easy to see if a blogger isn't very smart. it isn't clear to me that it is a medium that allows one to easily tell if someone is very smart.
I doubt your disproof of super-smart people, for the very same reasons you do, perhaps with a greater weight assigned to those reasons.
I am also not sure about your definition of super-smart. Is idiot savant (in math, say) super-smart? If you mean super-smart=consistently rational, I suspect nothing prevents people of normal-smart IQ from scoring (super) well there, trading off quantity of ideas for quality. There is a ceiling there as good ideas get more complex and require more processing power, but I suspect given how crazy this world is Norm Smart the Rationalist can score surprisingly highly on relative basis.
As a data point you might want to look at "Monster Minds" chapter of Feynman's "Surely you're joking". Since you mentioned Feynman. The chapter is about Einstein.
Finally, where is your blog? ;)
My blog is here.
You can set that in "preferences".
Why would they blog? They would already know that most people have nothing of interest to tell them; and if they want to tell other people something, they can do it through other channels. If such a person had a blog, it might be for a very narrow reason, and they would simply refrain from talking about matters guaranteed to produce nothing but time-consuming stupidity in response.
Reminds me of 'My Childhood Role Model'.
As for the actual meat of your comment, I don't have much to add. 'Smart' is a slippery enough word that I'd guess one's belief in 'super-smart people' depends on how one defines 'smart.'
Forgive me if this is beating a dead horse, or if someone brought up an equivalent problem before; I didn't see such a thing.
I went through a lot of comments on dust specks vs. torture. (It seems to me like the two sides were miscommunicating in a very specific way, which I may attempt to make clear at some point.) But now I have an example that seems to be equivalent to DSvs.T, easily understandable via my moral intuition and give the "wrong" (i.e., not purely utilitarian) answer.
Suppose I have ten people and a stick. The appropriate infinitely powerful theoretical being offers me a choice. I can hit all ten of them with a stick, or I can hit one of them nine times. "Hitting with a stick" has some constant negative utility for all the people. What do I do?
This seems to me to be exactly dust specks vs. torture scaled down to humanly intuitable scales. I think the obvious answer is to hit all the people once. Examining my intuition tells me that this is because I think the aggregation function for utility is different across different people than across one person's possible futures. Specifically, my intuition tells me to maximize across people the minimum expected utilty across an individual's future.
So, is there a name for this position?
Do people think my example is equivalent to DSvsT?
Do people get the same or different answer with this question as they do with DSvsT?
DSvsT was not directly an argument for utilitarianism, it was an argument for tradeoffs and quantitative thinking and against any kind of rigid rules, sacred values, or qualitative thinking which prevents tradeoffs. For any two things, both of which have some nonzero value, there should be some point where you are willing to trade off one for the other - even if one seems wildly less important than the other (like dust specks compared to torture). Utilitarianism provides a specific answer for where that point is, but the DSvsT post didn't argue for the utilitarian answer, just that the point had to be at less than 3^^^3 dust specks. You would probably have to be convinced of utilitarianism as a theory before accepting its exact answer in this particular case.
The stick-hitting example doesn't challenge the claim about tradeoffs, since most people are willing to trade off one person getting hit multiple times with many people each getting hit once, with their choice depending on the numbers. In a stadium full of 100,000 people, for instance, it seems better for one person to get hit twice than for everyone to get hit once. Your alternative rule (maximin) doesn't allow some tradeoffs, so it leads to implausible conclusions in cases like this 100,000x1 vs. 1x2 example.
I don't think you can justifiably expect to be able to tell your brain something this self-evidently unrealistic, and have it update its intuitions accordingly.
Oh, and I'd love to hear what you mean about this.
I don't think maximising the minima is what you want. Suppose your choice is to hit one person 20 times, or five people 19 times each. Unless your intuition is different from mine, you'll prefer the first option.
There's one difference, which is that the inequality of the distribution is much more apparent in your example, because one of the options distributes the pain perfectly evenly. If you value equality of distribution as worth more than one unit of pain, it makes sense to choose the equal distribution of pain. This is similar to economic discussions about policies that lead to greater wealth, but greater economic inequality.
New papers from Nick Bostrom's site.
Good article on the abuse of p-values: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong
I winced.
I would like to see a top-level link post and discussion of this article (and maybe other related papers).
I'm slightly tempted to, because that article is sloppy and unfocused enough that it annoys me, even though it's broadly accurate. (I mean, 'the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical'? Really?) But I don't know what I'd have to add to it, really, other than basically whining 'it is so unfair!'
I've been reading the Quantum Mechanics sequence, and I have a question about Many-Worlds. My understanding of MWI and the rest of QM is pretty much limited to the LW sequence and a bit of Wikipedia, so I'm sure there will be no shortage of people here who have a better knowledge of it and can help me.
My question is this: why are the Born Probabilites a problem for MWI?
I'm sure it's a very difficult problem, I think I just fail to understand the implications of some step along the way. FWIW, my understanding of the Born Probabilities mainly clicks here:
Firstly, I know probability is the wrong word, but I'm going to use it here, insufficiently, in the same way that it's normally insufficiently used to talk about QM. I sure hope that's okay because it is a pain to nail down in English.
So... If a quantum event has a 30% chance of going LEFT and a 70% chance of going right (which you could observe without entangling yourself, for example by blasting a whole bunch of photons through slits and seeing the overall density pattern without measuring individual photons) (I think), then if you entangle yourself with a single instance of it, you'll have a 30% probability of observing LEFT and a 70% probability of observing RIGHT.
So why is this surprising? Obviously if we're just counting observers then we would expect a 50/50 probability spread, but I assume the problem isn't that naive. Obviously if the particles themselves exhibit a 30/70 preference, then we, being made of particles, should expect to do the same. Or... if the particles themselves can exist along a (psuedo)probability continuum, then why should we, the entagled, not expect to do the same? If those quarks are 70/30, then why aren't yours? Why should MWI necessarily imply the sudden creation of exactly 2 worlds with equal weight, as opposed to just dividing experience, locally and where necessary, into a weighted continuum?
I think I'll try this from another angle. MWI gets points for treating people/observers as particles, governed by the same laws as everything else. But are we really treating ourselves equally if we don't assume that we too follow this 30/70 split? It seems like this should be the default assumption, the one requiring no extra postulates, that we divide up not into discrete worlds but along a weighted continuum. Obviously it's easier on our typical conception of conciousness if we can just have the whole universe split neatly in two, but that feels to me like putting the weirdness where it logically belongs (on our comparatively weak understanding of concious experience).
Hope this makes at least some since to someone who can steer me in the right direction. I'd appreciate responses as to where specifically I've erred, as this will continue to bug me until I see where exactly I went wrong. Thanks in advance.
The surprising (or confusing, mysterious, what have you) thing is that quantum theory doesn't talk about a 30% probability of LEFT and a 70% probability of RIGHT; what it talks about is how LEFT ends up with an "amplitude" of 0.548 and RIGHT with an "amplitude" of 0.837. We know that the observed probability ends up being the square of the absolute value of the amplitude, but we don't know why, or how this even makes sense as a law of physics.
Ah. So it's not the idea that it's weighted so much as the specific act of squaring the amplitude. "Why squaring the amplitude, why not something else?".
I suppose the way I had been reading, I thought that the problem came from expecting a different result given the squared amplitude probability thing, not from the thing itself.
That is helpful, many thanks.
That's one issue, but as Warrigal said, the other issue is "how this even makes sense." it seems to say that the amplitude is a measure of how real the configuration is.
This might be old news to everyone "in", or just plain obvious, but a couple days ago I got Vladimir Nesov to admit he doesn't actually know what he would do if faced with his Counterfactual Mugging scenario in real life. The reason: if today (before having seen any supernatural creatures) we intend to reward Omegas, we will lose for certain in the No-mega scenario, and vice versa. But we don't know whether Omegas outnumber No-megas in our universe, so the question "do you intend to reward Omega if/when it appears" is a bead jar guess.
The caveat is of course that Counterfactual Mugging or Newcomb Problem are not to be analyzed as situations you encounter in real life: the artificial elements that get introduced are specified explicitly, not by an update from surprising observation. For example, the condition that Omega is trustworthy can't be credibly expected to be observed.
The thought experiments explicitly describe the environment you play your part in, and your knowledge about it, the state of things that is much harder to achieve through a sequence of real-life observations, by updating your current knowledge.
Surely the last thing on anyone's mind, having been persuaded they're in the presence of Omega in real life, is whether or not to give $100 :)
I like the No-mega idea (it's similar to a refutation of Pascal's wager by invoking contrary gods), but I wouldn't raise my expectation for the number of No-mega encounters I'll have by very much upon encountering a solitary Omega.
Generalizing No-mega to include all sorts of variants that reward stupid or perverse behavior (are there more possible God-likes that reward things strange and alien to us?), I'm not in the least bit concerned.
I suppose it's just a good argument not to make plans for your life on the basis of imagined God-like beings. There should be as many gods who, when pleased with your action, intervene in your life in a way you would not consider pleasant, and are pleased at things you'd consider arbitrary, as those who have similar values they'd like us to express, and/or actually reward us copacetically.
You don't have to. Both Omega and No-mega decide based on what your intentions were before seeing any supernatural creatures. If right now you say "I would give money to Omega if I met one" - factoring in all belief adjustments you would make upon seeing it - then you should say the reverse about No-mega, and vice versa.
ETA: Listen, I just had a funny idea. Now that we have this nifty weapon of "exploding counterfactuals", why not apply it to Newcomb's Problem too? It's an improbable enough scenario that we can make up a similarly improbable No-mega that would reward you for counterfactual two-boxing. Damn, this technique is too powerful!
Whatever our prior for encountering No-mega, it should be counterbalanced by our prior for encountering Yes-mega (who rewards you if you are counterfactually-muggable).
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of My Self-Exploration by Seth Roberts.
This is an overview of his self-experiments (to improve his mood and sleep, and to lose weight), with arguments that self-experimentation, especially on the brain, is remarkably effective in finding useful, implausible, low-cost improvements in quality of life, while institutional science is not.
There's a lot about status and science (it took Roberts 10 years to start getting results, and it's just to risky to careers for scientists to take on projects which last that long), and some intriguing theory at the end that activities can be classified into exploitation (low risk, low reward) and exploration (high risk, high reward), and that people aren't apt to want to do exploration full time, so, if given a job that's full-time exploration (like institutional science), they'll turn most of it into exploitation.
After more-or-less successfully avoiding it for most of LW's history, we've plunged headlong into mind-killer territory. I'm a little bit worried, and I'm intrigued to find out what long-time LWers, especially those who've been hesitant about venturing that direction, expect to see as a result over the next month or two.
It doesn't look encouraging. The discussions just don't converge, they meander all over the place and leave no crystalline residue of correct answers. (Achievement unlocked: Mixed Metaphor)
It is problematic but necessary, in my opinion. Politics IS the mind-killer, but politics DOES matter. Avoiding the topic would seem to be an admission that this rationality thing is really just a pretty toy.
But it would be nice to lay down some ground-rules.
I don't think anyone has mentioned a political party or a specific current policy debate yet. That's when things really go downhill.
I think a current policy debate has potential for better results, since it would offer the potential for betting, and avoid some of the self-identification and loyalty that's hard to avoid when applying a model as simple as a political philosophy to something as complex as human culture.
Are there any rationalist psychologists?
Also, more specifically but less generally relevant to LW; as a person being pressured to make use of psychological services, are there any rationalist psychologists in the Denver, CO area?
As a start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy is a branch of psychotherapy with some respect around here because of the evidence that it sometimes works, compared to the other fields of psychotherapy with no evidence.
Do they really have such a poor track record? I know some scientists have very little respect for the "soft" sciences, but sociologist can at least make generalizations from studies done on large scales. Psychotherapy makes a lot of people incredulous, but iis it really fair to say that most methods in practice today are ~0% effective?
Yes this is essentially a post stating my incredulity. Would you mind quelling it?
It's not that they're 0% effective, it's that they're not much more effective than placebo therapy (i.e. being put on a waiting list for therapy), or keeping a journal.
CBT is somewhat more effective, but I've also heard that it's not as effective for high-ruminators... i.e., people who already obsess about their thinking.
Scientific medicine is difficult and expensive. I worry that the apparent success of CBT may be because methodological compromises needed to make the research practical happen to flatter CBT more than they flatter other approaches.
I might be worrying about the wrong thing. Do we know anything about the usefulness of Prozac in treating depression? Since we turn a blind eye to the unblinding of all our studies by the sexual side-effects of Prozac, and also refuse to consider the direct impact of those side-effects it could be argued that we don't actually have any scientific knowledge of the effectiveness of the drug.
It's not that other forms of psychotherapy are scientifically shown to be 0% effective; it's just that evidence-based psychotherapy is a surprisingly recent field. Psychotherapy can still work even if some fields of it have not had rigorous studies showing their effectiveness... but you might as well go with a therapist that has training in a field of psychotherapy that has some scientific method behind it.
http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=13023&cn=5
I can't help you with the Denver area in particular, but the general answer is a definite yes. In an interesting juxtaposition, American Psychologist magazine had a recent issue prominently featuring discussion of how to get past the misuse of statistics discussed in this very LW open thread. And it's not the first time the magazine addressed the point.
http://fora.tv/2010/05/22/Adam_Savage_Presents_Problem_Solving_How_I_Do_It
This post is about the distinctions between Traditional and Bayesian Rationality, specifically the difference between refusing to hold a position on an idea until a burden of proof is met versus Bayesian updating.
Good quality government policy is an important issue to me (it's my Something to Protect, or the closest I have to one), and I tend to approach rationality from that perspective. This gives me a different perspective from many of my fellow aspiring rationalists here at Less Wrong.
There are two major epistemological challenges in policy advice, in addition to the normal difficulties we all have to deal with: 1) Policy questions fall almost entirely within the social sciences. That means the quality of evidence is much lower than it is in the physical sciences. Uncontrolled observations, analysed with statistical techniques, are generally the strongest possible evidence, and sometimes you have nothing but theory or professional instinct to work with.
2) You have a very limited time in which to find an answer. Cabinet Ministers often want an answer within weeks, a timeframe measured in months is luxurious. And often a policy proposal is too sensitive to discuss with the general public, or sometimes with anyone outside your team.
By the standards of Traditional Rationality, policy advice is often made without meeting a burden of proof. Best guesses and theoretical considerations are too weak to reach conclusions. A proper practitioner of Traditional Rationality wouldn't be able to make any kind of recommendation, one could identify some promising initial hypotheses, but that's it.
But Just because you didn't have time to come up with a good answer doesn't mean that Ministers don't expect an answer. And a practitioner of Bayesian Rationality always has a best guess as to what is true, even if the evidence base is non-existent you can fall back on your prior. You don't want to be overconfident in stating your position, assumptions must be outlined and sensitivities should be explored. But you still need to give an answer and that's what attracts me to Bayesian approaches: you don't have to be officially agnostic until being presented with a level of evidence that is unrealistically high for policy work.
It seems to me that if you have very good quality evidence then Bayesian and Traditional Rationality are very similar. Good evidence either proves or disproves a proposition for a Traditional Rationalist, and for a Bayesian Rationalist it will shift their probability estimate, as well as increasing their confidence a lot. The biggest difference seem to me to be that Bayesian Rationality seems is able to make use of weak evidence in a way Traditional Rationality can't.
Guided by Parasites: Toxoplasma Modified Humans
a ~20 minute (absolutely worth every minute) interview with, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a leading researcher in the study of Toxoplasma & its effects on humans. This is a must see. Also, towards the end there is discussion of the effect of stress on telomere shortening. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks for the link.
If people's desires are influenced by parasites, what does that do to CEV?
If your desires are influenced by parasites, then the parasites are part of what makes you you. You may as well ask "If people's desires are influenced by their past experience, what does that do to CEV?" or "If people's desires are influenced by their brain chemistry, what does that do to CEV?"
So what if Dr. Evil releases a parasite that rewires humanity's brains in a predetermined manner? Should CEV take that into account or should it aim to become Coherent Extrapolated Disinfected Volition?
What if Dr. Evil publishes a book or makes a movie that rewires humanity's brains in a predetermined manner?
Yep, I made a reference to cultural influence here. That's why I suspect CEV should be applied uniformly to the identity-space of all possible humans rather than the subset of humans that happen to exist when it gets applied. In that case defining humanity becomes very, very important.
Of course, perhaps the current formulation of CEV covers the entire identity-space equally and treats the living population as a sample, and I have misunderstood. But if that is the case, Wei Dai's last article is also bunk, and I trust him to have better understanding of all things FAI than myself.
Heh - my first instinct is to bite the bullet and apply CEV to existing humans only. I couldn't give a strong argument for that, though; I just can't immediately think of a reason to exclude non-culturally influenced humans while including culturally influenced humans.
It's hard to tell what counts as an influence and what doesn't.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the effects of parasites could be identified and reversed. The results wouldn't necessarily all be good, though.
You may as well ask: "What if Dr. Evil kills every other living organism? Should CEV take that into account or should it aim to become Coherent Extrapolated Resurrected Volition?"
Of course, if someone modifies or kills all the other humans, that will change the result of CEV. Garbage in, garbage out.
I would have thought everyone here would have seen this by now, but I hadn't until today so it may be new to someone else as well:
Charlie Munger on the 24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment
http://freebsd.zaks.com/news/msg-1151459306-41182-0/
The blog of Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) is generally quite awesome from a rationalist perspective, but one recent post really stood out for me: Happiness Button.
We already have these buttons on LessWrong... ;)
Karma does make me feel important, but when it comes to happiness karma can't hold a candle to loud music, alcohol and girls (preferably in combination). I wish more people recognized these for the eternal universal values they are. If only someone invented a button to send me some loud music, alcohol and girls, that would be the ultimate startup ever.
A social custom would be established that buttons are only to be pressed by knocking foreheads together. Offering to press a button in a fashion that doesn't ensure mutuality is seen as a pathetic display of low status.
Pushing someone's happiness button is like doing them a favor, or giving them a gift. Do we have social customs that demand favors and gifts always be exchanged simultaneously? Well, there are some customs like that, but in general no, because we have memory and can keep mental score.
Hah. Status is relative, remember? Your setup just ensures that "dodging" at the last moment, getting your button pressed without pressing theirs, is seen as a glorious display of high status.
Classical game theorists establish a scientific consensus that the only rational course of action is not to push the buttons. Anyone who does is regarded with contempt or pity and gets lowered in the social stratum, before finally managing to rationalize the idea out of conscious attention, with the help of the instinct to conformity. A few free-riders smugly teach the remaining naive pushers a bitter lesson, only to stop receiving the benefit. Everyone gets back to business as usual, crazy people spinning the wheels of a mad world.
Are you saying that classical game theorists would model the button-pushing game as one-shot PD? Why would they fail to notice the repetitive nature of the game?
I'd be far more willing to believe in game theorists calling for defection on the iterated PD than in mathematicians steering mainstream culture.
However, with the positive-sum nature of this game, I'd expect theorists to go with Schelling instead of Nash; and then be completely disregarded by the general public who categorize it under "physical ways of causing pleasure" and put sexual taboos on it.
William Saletan at Slate is writing a series of articles on the history and uses of memory falsification, dealing mainly with Elizabeth Loftus and the ethics of her work. Quote from the latest article:
(This topic has, of course, been done to death around these parts.)
Should we buy insurance at all?
There is a small remark in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making about insurance saying that all insurance has negative expected utility, we pay too high a price for too little a risk, otherwise insurance companies would go bankrupt. If this is the case should we get rid of all our insurances? If not, why not?
No -- Insurance has negative expected monetary return, which is not the same as expected utility. If your utility function obeys the law of diminishing marginal utility, then it also obeys the law of increasing marginal disutility. So, for example, losing 10x will be more than ten times as bad as losing x. (Just as gaining 10x is less than ten times as good as gaining x.)
Therefore, on your utility curve, a guaranteed loss of x can be better than a 1/1000 chance of losing 1000x.
ETA: If it helps, look at a logarithmic curve and treat it as your utility as a function of some quantity. Such a curve obeys diminishing marginal utility. At any given point, your utility increases less than proportionally going up, but more than proportionally going down.
(Incidentally, I acutally wrote an embarrasing article arguing in favor of the thesis roland presents, and you can still probably find on it the internet. That exchange is also an example of someone being bad at explaining. If my opponent had simply stated the equivalence between DMU and IMD, I would have understood why that argument about insurance is wrong. Instead, he just resorted to lots of examples of when people buy insurance that are totally unconvincing if you accept the quoted argument.)
I voted this up, but I want to comment to point out that this is a really important point. Don't be tricked into not getting insurance just because it has a negative expected monetary value.
I voted Silas up as well because it's an important point but it shouldn't be taken as a general reason to buy as much insurance as possible (I doubt Silas intended it that way either). Jonathan_Graehl's point that you should self-insure if you can afford to and only take insurance for risks you cannot afford to self-insure is probably the right balance.
Personally I don't directly pay for any insurance. I live in Canada (universal health coverage) and have extended health insurance through work (much to my dismay I cannot decline it in favor of cash) which means I have far more health insurance than I would purchase with my own money. Given my aversion to paperwork I don't even fully use what I have. I do not own a house or a car which are the other two areas arguably worth insuring. I don't have dependents so have no need for life or disability coverage. All other forms of insurance fall into the 'self-insure' category for me given my relatively low risk aversion.
Risk is more expensive when you have a smaller bankroll. Many slot machines actually offer positive expected value payouts - they make their return on people plowing their winnings back in until they go broke.
Citation please? A cursory search suggests that machines go through +EV phases, just like blackjack, but that individual machines are -EV. It's not just that they expect people to plow the money back in, but that pros have to wait for fish to plow money in to get to the +EV situation.
The difference with blackjack is that you can (in theory) adjust your bet to take advantage of the different phases of blackjack. Your first sentence seems to match Roland's comment about the Kelly criterion (you lose betting against snake eyes if you bet your whole bankroll every time), but that doesn't make sense with fixed-bet slots. There, if it made sense to make the first bet, it makes sense to continuing betting after a jackpot.
This comes up frequently in gambling and statistics circles. "Citation please" is the correct response - casinos do NOT expect to make a profit by offering losing (for them) bets and letting "gambler's ruin" pay them off. It just doesn't work that way.
The fact that a +moneyEV bet can be -utilityEV for a gambler does NOT imply that a -moneyEV bet can be +utilityEV for the casino. It's -utility for both participants.
The only reason casinos offer such bets ever is for promotional reasons, and they hope to make the money back on different wagers the gambler will make while there.
The Kelly calculations work just fine for all these bets - for cyclic bets, it ends up you should bet 0 when -EV. When +EV, bet some fraction of your bankroll that maximizes mean-log-outcome for each wager.
Ahh, Kelly criterion, correct?
I'd like to pose a related question. Why is insurance structured as up-front payments and unlimited coverage, and not as conditional loans?
For example, one could imagine car insurance as a options contract (or perhaps a futures) where if your car is totaled, you get a loan sufficient for replacement. One then pays off the loan with interest.
The person buying this form of insurance makes fewer payments upfront, reducing their opportunity costs and also the risk of letting nsurance lapse due to random fluctuations. The entity selling this form of insurance reduces the risk of moral hazard (ie. someone taking out insurance, torching their car, and then letting insurance lapse the next month).
Except in assuming strange consumer preferences or irrationality, I don't see any obvious reason why this form of insurance isn't superior to the usual kind.
Well, look at a more extreme example. Imagine an accident in which you not just total a car, but you're also on the hook for a large bill in medical costs, and there's no way you can afford to pay this bill even if it's transmuted into a loan with very favorable terms. With ordinary insurance, you're off the hook even in this situation -- except possibly for the increased future insurance costs now that the accident is on your record, which you'll still likely be able to afford.
The goal of insurance is to transfer money from a large mass of people to a minority that happens to be struck by an improbable catastrophic event (with the insurer taking a share as the transaction-facilitating middleman, of course). Thus a small possibility of a catastrophic cost is transmuted into the certainty of a bearable cost. This wouldn't be possible if instead of getting you off the hook, the insurer burdened you with an immense debt in case of disaster.
(A corollary of this observation is that the notion of "health insurance" is one of the worst misnomers to ever enter public circulation.)
Alright, so this might not work for medical disasters late in life, things that directly affect future earning power. (Some of those could be handled by savings made possible by not having to make insurance payments.)
But that's just one small area of insurance. You've got housing, cars, unemployment, and this is just what comes to mind for consumers, never mind all the corporate or business need for insurance. Are all of those entities buying insurance really not in a position to repay a loan after a catastrophe's occurrence? Even nigh-immortal institutions?
I wouldn't say that the scenarios I described are "just one small area of insurance." Most things for which people buy insurance fit under that pattern -- for a small to moderate price, you buy the right to claim a large sum that saves you, or at least alleviates your position, if an improbable ruinous event occurs. (Or, in the specific case of life insurance, that sum is supposed to alleviate the position of others you care about who would suffer if you die unexpectedly.)
However, it should also be noted that the role of insurance companies is not limited to risk pooling. Since in case of disaster the burden falls on them, they also specialize in specific forms of damage control (e.g. by aggressive lawyering, and generally by having non-trivial knowledge on how to make the best out specific bad situations). Therefore, the expected benefit from insurance might actually be higher than the cost even regardless of risk aversion. Of course, insurers could play the same role within your proposed emergency loan scheme.
It could also be that certain forms of insurance are mandated by regulations even when it comes to institutions large enough that they'd be better off pooling their own risk, or that you're not allowed to do certain types of transactions except under the official guise of "insurance." I'd be surprised if the modern infinitely complex mazes of business regulation don't give rise to at least some such situations.
Moreover, there is also the confusion caused by the fact that governments like to give the name of "insurance" to various programs that have little or nothing to do with actuarial risk, and in fact represent more or less pure transfer schemes. (I'm not trying to open a discussion about the merits of such schemes; I'm merely noting that they, as a matter of fact, aren't based on risk pooling that is the basis of insurance in the true sense of the term.)
Intrinsically, the average person must pay in more than they get out. Otherwise the insurance company would go bankrupt.
No reason a loan style insurance company couldn't do the exact same thing.
'Rent-seeking' and 'regulatory capture' are certainly good answers to the question why doesn't this exist.
For one thing, insurance makes expenses more predictable; though the desire for predictability (in order to budget, or the like) does probably indicate irrationality and/or bounded rationality.
Thought I might pass this along and file it under "failure of rationality". Sadly, this kind of thing is increasingly common -- getting deep in education debt, but not having increased earning power to service the debt, even with a degree from a respected university.
Summary: Cortney Munna, 26, went $100K into debt to get worthless degrees and is deferring payment even longer, making interest pile up further. She works in an unrelated area (photography) for $22/hour, and it doesn't sound like she has a lot of job security.
We don't find out until the end of the article that her degrees are in women's studies and religious studies.
There are much better ways to spend $100K. Twentysomethings like her are filling up the workforce. I'm worried about the future implications.
I thank my lucky stars I'm not in such a position (in the respects listed in the article -- Munna's probably better off in other respects). I didn't handle college planning as well as I could have, and I regret it to this day. But at least I didn't go deep into debt for a worthless degree.
In A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, Eliezer writes,
So I have a question. Is this not an endorsement of frequentism? I don't think I understand fully, but isn't counting the instances of the event exactly frequentist methodology? How could this be Bayesian?
As I understand it, frequentism requires large numbers of events for its interpretation of probability, whereas the bayesian interpretation allows the convergence of relative frequencies with probabilities but claims that probability is a meaningful concept when applied to unique events, as a "degree of plausibility".
Do you (or anyone else reading this) know of any attempts to give a precise non-frequentist interpretation of the exact numerical values of Bayesian probabilities? What I mean is someone trying to give a precise meaning to the claim that the "degree of plausibility" of a hypothesis (or prediction or whatever) is, say, 0.98, which wouldn't boil down to the frequentist observation that relative to some reference class, it would be right 98/100 of the time, as in the above quoted example.
Or to put it in a way that might perhaps be clearer, suppose we're dealing with the claim that the "degree of plausibility" of a hypothesis is 0.2. Not 0.19, or 0.21, or even 0.1999 or 0.2001, but exactly that specific value. Now, I have no intuition whatsoever for what it might mean that the "degree of plausibility" I assign to some proposition is equal to one of these numbers and not any of the other mentioned ones -- except if I can conceive of an experiment or observation (or at least a thought-experiment) that would yield that particular exact number via a frequentist ratio.
I'm not trying to open the whole Bayesian vs. frequentist can of worms at this moment; I'd just like to find out if I've missed any significant references that discuss this particular question.
Have you seen my What Are Probabilities, Anyway? post?
Yes, I remember reading that post a while ago when I was still just lurking here. But I forgot about it in the meantime, so thanks for bringing it to my attention again. It's something I'll definitely need to think about more.
Morendil's explanation is, as far as I can tell, correct. What's much more interesting is that examples given in terms of frequencies is required to engage our normal intuitions about probability. There's at least some research that indicates that when questions of estimation and probability are given in terms of frequencies (ie: asking 'how many problems do you think you got correct?' instead of 'what is your confidence for this answer?'), many biases disappear completely.
Here's an interesting video.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
(Wherein I seek advice on what may be a fairly important decision.)
Within the next week, I'll most likely be offered a summer job where the primary project will be porting a space weather modeling group's simulation code to the GPU platform. (This would enable them to start doing predictive modeling of solar storms, which are increasingly having a big economic impact via disruptions to power grids and communications systems.) If I don't take the job, the group's efforts to take advantage of GPU computing will likely be delayed by another year or two. This would be a valuable educational opportunity for me in terms of learning about scientific computing and gaining general programming/design skill; as I hope to start contributing to FAI research within 5-10 years, this has potentially big instrumental value.
In "Why We Need Friendly AI", Eliezer discussed Moore's Law as a source of existential risk:
Due to the quality of the models used by the aforementioned research group and the prevailing level of interest in more accurate models of solar weather, successful completion of this summer project will probably result in a nontrivial increase in demand for GPUs. It seems that the next best use of my time this summer would be to work full time on the expression-simplification abilities of a computer algebra system.
Given all this information and the goal of reducing existential risk from unFriendly AI, should I take the job with the space weather research group, or not? (To avoid anchoring on other people's opinions, I'm hoping to get input from at least a couple of LW readers before mentioning the tentative conclusion I've reached.)
ETA: I finally got an e-mail response from the research group's point of contact and she said all their student slots have been taken up for this summer, so that basically takes care of the decision problem. But I might be faced with a similar choice next summer, so I'd still like to hear thoughts on this.
Uninformed opinion: space weather modelling doesn't seem like a huge market, especially when you compare it to the truly massive gaming market. I doubt the increase in demand would be significant, and if what you're worried about is rate of growth, it seems like delaying it a couple of years would be wholly insignificant.
The amount you could slow down Moore's Law by any strategy is minuscule compared to the amount you can contribute to FAI progress if you choose. It's like feeling guilty over not recycling a paper cup, when you're planning to become a lobbyist for an environmentalist group later.
I would say that there seem to be a lot of companies that are in one way or another trying to advance Moore's law. For as long as it doesn't seem like the one you're working on has a truly revolutionary advantage as compared to the other companies, just taking the money but donating a large portion of it to existential risk reduction is probably an okay move.
(Full disclosure: I'm an SIAI Visiting Fellow so they're paying my upkeep right now.)
What's the deal with female nymphomaniacs? Their existence seems a priori unlikely.
Why?
And they are accordingly rare, are they not?
No, women with a high sex drive are not rare.
Then your priors are wrong. Adjust accordingly.
"What's the deal with" means "What model would have generated a higher prior probability for". Noticing your confusion isn't the entire solution.
If the existing model is sexual dimorphism, with high sexual desire a male trait, you could simply suppose that it's a "leaky" dimorphism, in which the sex-linked traits nonetheless show up in the other sex with some frequency. In humans this should especially be possible with male traits which depend not on the Y chromosome, but rather on having one X chromosome rather than two. That means that there is only one copy, rather than two, of the relevant gene, which means trait variance can be greater - in a woman, an unusual allele on one X chromosome may be diluted by a normal allele on the other X, whereas a man with an unusual X allele has no such counterbalance. But it would still be easy enough for a woman to end up with an unusual allele on both her Xs.
Also, regardless of the specific genetic mechanism, human dimorphism is just not very extreme or absolute (compared to many other species), and forms intermediate between stereotypical male and female extremes are quite common.
I thought it was pretty clear. Sexual Dimorphism doesn't operate the way you think it does. Women with high sex drives aren't rare at all.
I have heard that, for most men and most women, the time of highest sex drive happens at very different times (much younger for men than women). This might account for the entire difference, especially if your'e getting most of your information from the culture at large. As TVTropes will tell you, Most Writers Are Male.
This question reads to me like it's out of the middle of some discussion I didn't hear the beginning of. Why were "nymphomaniacs" on your mind in the first place? What do you mean by the word? I don't think I've heard it in many years, and I associate it with the sexual superstitions of a former age.
What does the word "nymphomaniacs" mean? How do you judge someone to be sufficiently obsessed with sex to be a nymphomaniac? I think a lot of your confusion might be coming from you tendency to label people with this word with such negative connotations.
Does the question "what is with women who want to have sex [five times a week*] and will undertake to get it?" resolve any of your confusion? You should expect that those women who have more sex to be more salient wrt people talking about them, so they would seem more prominent, even if only 2% of the population.
*not sure about this number, just picked one that seemed alright.
Five times a week wouldn't be remotely enough to diagnose. It has to be problematic and clinically significant.
I think that's kinda my point. I was attempting to point out that he's probably confusing the term "nymphomaniac" with its negative connotations, with "likes to have [vaguely defined 'a lot'] of sex."
"Nymphomaniac" hasn't been a clinical diagnosis for a long time. In my experience, the word is now most commonly used colloquially to mean "a woman who likes to have a lot of sex". Whether this has negative connotations depends on your attitude to sex, I suppose.
Picking a number for this seems like a really bad idea. For most modern clinical definitions of disorders what matters is whether it interferes with normal daily behavior. Even that is questionable since what constitutes interference is very hard to tell.
Societies have had very different notions of what is acceptable sexuality for both males and females. Until fairly recent homosexuality was considered a mental disorder in the US. And in the Victorian era, women were routinely diagnosed as nymphomaniacs for showing pretty minimal signs of sexuality.
Anyone here live in California? Specifically, San Diego county?
The judicial election on June 8th has been subject to a campaign by a Christian conservative group. You probably don't want them to win, and this election is traditionally a low turnout one, so you might want to put a higher priority on this judicial election than you normally would. In other words, get out there and vote!
I'm not certain this comment will be coherent, but I would like to compose it before I lose my train of thought. (I'm in an atypical mental state, so I easily could forget the pieces when feeling more normal.) The writing below sounds rather choppy and emphatic, but I'm actually feeling neutral and unconvinced. I wonder if anyone would be able to 'catch this train' and steer it somewhere else perhaps..?
It's an argument for dualism. Here is some background:
I've always been a monist: believing that everything should be coherent from within this reality. This is the idea that if things don't make sense, it is due to limited knowledge and a limited brain, not an incomplete universe. (Where the universe is the physical material world.)
While composing Less Wrong comments, I've often thought about what an incomplete universe would look like. (Since this is what dualists claim -- what do they mean by something existing differently or beyond material existence?)
I've written before that a simulation (a simulation is a reality S that is a subset of something larger) is just as good as (or the same as) "reality" if the simulation is complete within itself. That is, if an agent within the simulation would find that in principle everything within the simulation is coherent and can be understood from within the simulation. Importantly, there is no hint within the simulation of anything existing outside the simulation. (For example, in the multiple worlds theory, if the many worlds don't interact, each world is its own independent complete reality. The worlds are simulated within a larger entity of all the worlds.)
When physical materialists claim that the physical material world is our entire reality, they are claiming that the physical material world is a reality X, and you cannot deduce anything beyond X from within X. That is, there doesn't exist anything but X, as far as we're concerned. (We can speculate about many worlds, but unless the worlds interact, one world cannot deduce the others.) I've always found this to be obvious, because if you can deduce anything beyond X from within X, then what you've deduced is part of the physical material world (because you deduced it, through interaction) and it's part of X after all.
(end of background material)
It just occurred to me that we do have evidence that our physical material world X is incomplete. So I've stumbled on this argument for dualism. It's actually a very old one, but approached from a different angle. As I said, I stumbled upon it.
It's the problem of existence. Being a monist means believing that if things don't make sense, it is due to limited knowledge and a limited brain. But the problem of existence is such that no amount of knowledge will solve it: there's nothing we could ever learn (or even believe) within X that would solve this problem. Not a complete understanding of the physics of the beginning of the universe. Not even theism!
I cannot understand what the answer to the problem could possibly be, but I think that I can understand that there is no answer possible within X. So to the extent that I am correct that this problem is not in theory solvable in X means that X is incomplete.
I could be incorrect about whether this problem is in principle unsolvable in X. But I am relatively certain of it, on the same level as having confidence in logic. If I lose confidence in logic, I have nothing to reason with. So for now, I would find it more reasonable to guess that I'm in a simulation of some kind where this particular conundrum is embedded. X is a subset of a larger reality Y where existence is explained.
Given what we know about X, and the problem of existence, what can we deduce about the larger universe Y where existence is explained? Anything? What about deducing anything from the peculiar fact that X is missing information about existence?
I don't see where dualism comes in. Specifically what kind of dualism are you talking about?
A problem being unsolvable within some system does not imply that there is some outer system where it can be solved. Take the Halting Problem, for example: there are programs such that we cannot prove whether or not they will never halt, and this itself is provable. Yet there is a right answer in any given instance — a program will halt or it won't — but we can never know in some cases.
That you say "I cannot understand what the answer to the problem could possibly be" suggests that it is a wrong question. Ask "Why do I think the universe exists?" instead of "Why does the universe exist?". I have my tentatively preferred answer to that, but maybe you will come up with something interesting.
What is it?
In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Quirrell talks about a list of the thirty-seven things he would never do as a Dark Lord.
Eliezer, do you have a full list of 37 things you would never do as a Dark Lord and what's on it?
All of the replies to this should be in the thread for discussing HP&tMoR.
This is a reference to the Evil Overlord List. That's why Harry starts snickering. Indeed, it almost is implied that Voldemort wrote the actual evil overlord list. For the most common version of the actual Evil Overlord List see Peter's Evil Overlord List. Having such a list for Voldemort seems to be at least partially just rule of funny.
Did the evil overlord list exist publicly in 1991? I was actually a bit confused by Harry's laughter here. Eliezer seems to be working pretty hard to keep things actually in 1991 (truth and beauty, the journal of irreproducible results, etc.)
That's a good point. I'm pretty sure the Evil Overlord List didn't exist that far back, at least not publicly. It seems like for references to other fictional or nerd-culture elements he's willing to monkey around with time. Thus for example, there was a Professor Summers for Defense Against the Dark Arts which wouldn't fit with the standard chronology for Buffy at all.
Checking wikipedia, it looks possible but not likely that Harry could have seen the list in 1991.
Well, he and his father are described as being huge science fiction fans, so it's not that unlikely that they heard about the list at conventions, or had someone show them an early version of the list printed from email discussions, even if they didn't have Internet access back then.
The reason I think it might actually be plot relevant is that most people can't resist making a list that is much longer than 37 rules long. Plus most of the rules are just lampshades for tropes that show up again and again in fiction with evil overlords. They rarely are such basic, practical advice as "stop bragging so much."
Ah. I'm pretty sure it isn't a real list because of the number 37. 37 is one of the most common numbers for people to pick when they want to pick a small "random" number. Humans in general are very bad at random number generation. More specifically, they are more likely to pick an odd number, and given a specific range of the form 1 to n, they are most likely to pick a number that is around 3n/4. The really clear examples are from 1 to 4 (around 40% pick 3), 1 to 10 (I don't remember the exact number but I think it is around 30% that pick 7). and then 1 to 50 where a very large percentage will pick 37. The upshot is if you ever see an incomplete list claiming to have 37 items, you should assign a high probability that the rest of the list doesn't exist.
Ouch. I am burned.
Well, that's ok. Because I just wrote a review of Chapter 23 criticizing Harry's rush to conclude that magic is a single-allele Mendellian trait and then read your chapter notes where you say the same thing. That should make us even.
It just occurred to me that the odd/even bias applies only because we work in base ten. Humans working in a prime base (like base 11) would be much less biased. (in this respect)
What does 'consciousness' mean?
I'm having an email conversation with a friend about Nick Bostrom's simulation argument and we're now trying to figure out what the word "consciousness" means in the first place.
People here use the C-word a lot, so it must mean something important. Unfortunately I'm not convinced it means the same thing for all of us. What does the theory that "X is conscious" predict? If we encounter an alien, what would knowing that it was "conscious" or "not conscious" tell us? How about if we encountered an android that looked and behaved identically to a human, but inside its head had a very different physical implementation? What would saying it was "conscious" or "not conscious" mean?
And, what does this have to do with my personal subjective experience? It's the foundation (or medium) of everything I know or believe; but most definitions of what it is tend to be dualism-like in that, once again, saying someone else has or doesn't have subjective experience tells us nothing about the physical world.
Help appreciated!