Probability that this person would have a worse influence on the senate than a more standard politician: 5%.

Here is my probability distribution:

• Voters actually voted for him: 0.1
• Someone tampered with the voting machines or memory cards to make Alvin Greene win: 0.4
• ...and that person did it because they wanted Alvin Greene to win: 0.1
• ...and that person did it for kicks: 0.1
• ...and that person did it because they wanted to expose the insecure voting machines: 0.2
• Someone meant to tamper with a different election on the same ballot, but accidentally altered the democratic primary additionally or instead: 0.1
• The votes were altered by leftover malware from a previous election which was also hacked: 0.2
• There was a legitimate error in setting up or managing the voting machines altered the vote totals: 0.2

Note that I started researching this topic with an atypically high prior probability for voting machine fraud, and believe that it is very likely that major US elections in the past were altered this way. The strongest direct evidence I see for fraud having occurred is that there were "three counties with more votes cast in Republican governor's race than reported turnout in the Republican primary" FiveThirtyEight. Note that this means botched vote fraud, not correctly-implemented vote fraud, since correctly implemented vote fraud, using a strategy such as the Hursti hack, would have changed the votes but not the turnout numbers.

The Benford's Law analysis on FiveThirtyEight, on the other hand, I find very unconvincing - first because it has a low p-value, and second because it doesn't represent the way voting machine fraud really works; it can only detect if someone makes up vote totals from scratch, rather than adding to or subtracting from real vote totals.

Not ready to answer the rationalist questions, but why is it that, as soon as elections don't go toward someone who played the standard political game, suddenly, "it must be a mistake somehow"? You guys set the terms of the primaries, you pick the voting machines. If you're not ready to trust them before the election, the time to contest them was back then, not when you don't like the result.

Where was Rawl on the important issue of voting machine reliability when they did "what they're supposed to"?

I understand that elections are evidence, and given the prior on Greene, this particular election may be insufficient to justify a posterior that Greene has the most "support", however defined. But elections also serve as a bright line to settle an issue. We could argue forever about who "really" has the most votes, but eventually we have to say who won, and elections are just as much about finality on that issue as they are as an evidential test of fact.

To an extent, then, it doesn't matter that Greene didn't "really" get the most votes. If you allow every election to be indefinitely contested until you're convinced there's no reason the loser really should have won, elections never settle anything. The price for indifference to voting procedure reliability (in this case, the machines) should be acceptance of a bad outcome for that time, to be corrected for the next election, or through the recall process.

Frankly, if Greene had lost but could present evidence of the strength Rawl presented, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

ETA: Oh, and you gotta love this:

On election night, I was among the first reporters to speak with Greene after his victory was announced. His verbal tics and strange affect were immediately apparent: he frequently repeats and interrupts himself, speaks haltingly, and sometimes descends into incoherent rambling, as subsequent video and audio interviews have made all the more obvious.

Damn those candidates with autism symptoms! Only manipulative people like us deserve to win elections!

My most likely explanations would be 1) software bug(s) 2) voter whim or confusion 3) odd hypothesis no one has thought of yet. Active intent to steal the nomination a distant fourth. Make it 60/30 among the first two.

Evidence? Well, anything credible, but how likely is that. :)

I put a very high probability that some form of tampering occurred primarily due to the failure of the data to obey a generalized Benford's law. Although a large amount of noise has been made about the the fact that some counties had more votes cast in the Republic governor's race than reported turnout, I don't see that as strong evidence of fraud since turnout levels in local elections are often based on the counting ability of the election volunteers who often aren't very competent.

I'd give probability estimates very similar to those of Jim's but with a slightly higher percentage for people actually voting for him. I'd do that I think by moving most of the probability mass from the idea of someone tampering with the election to expose the insecure voting machines which implies a very strange set of ethical thought processes. I've also had enough experience in local elections to know that sometimes very weird things happen for reasons that no one can explain (and that this occurs even with systems that are difficult to tamper with). So using the primary breakdown given by Jim I'd put it as follows:

* Voters actually voted for him: 0.25
* Someone tampered with the voting machines or memory cards to make Alvin Greene win: 0.25
* ...and that person did it because they wanted Alvin Greene to win: 0.1
* ...and that person did it for kicks: 0.1
* ...and that person did it because they wanted to expose the insecure voting machines: 0.05
* Someone meant to tamper with a different election on the same ballot, but accidentally altered the democratic primary additionally or instead: 0.1
* The votes were altered by leftover malware from a previous election which was also hacked: 0.2
* There was a legitimate error in setting up or managing the voting machines altered the vote totals: 0.2

Edit: Thinking this through another possibility that should be listed is deliberate Republican cross-over (since it is an open primary) but given the evidence that seems of negligible probability at this point (< .01)).

I don't know the details about the American voting system, but (or maybe therefore) I am surprised how low estimates all people give to the possibility that the result is genuine. My estimate (without much research, I've just read the links) is

• 0.5 voters actually voted for Greene
• 0.3 error of some kind
• 0.2 conspiracy

In order to update, any evidence is accepted, of course. What I would most like to see: results of some statistical survey, conducted either before or better after the election, historical data concerning performance of black candidates, historical data from elections with big difference between the intensity of the campaign between the competing candidates, a lot of independent testimonies of trustworthy voters reporting non-standard behaviour of the voting machines, description of how can the results be altered (and what is normally done to avoid that).

What evidence do you need in order to update your estimate?

The next election being won by a ficus would boost my estimate. Or, you know, something else ridiculous like an action hero actor.

I think voters were clueless about both candidates, but they like to fill in all the boxes on the ballot, so they chose the name that has the higher positive affect by far: "Alvin Greene".

To me that would be sufficient to explain the entire anomaly, if not for the mysterious origin of Greene's $10,000 filing fee.

I made a similar Greasemonkey script some time ago.

I don't remember a post by Eliezer on the subject but it is oh so true. I often feel a 'cringe' reaction when I hear 'evidence' being used as religious symbol. It is the same cringe reaction I get when I hear people say "God Says" on something that I know isn't even covered in their bible. In both cases something BAD is going on that has nothing to do with whether or not there is a God.

I remember reading a post titled "Science as Attire," which struck me as making a very good point along these lines. It could be what you're looking for.

As a related point, it seems to me that people who do understand evolution (and generally have a strong background in math and natural sciences) are on average heavily biased in their treatment of creationism, in at least two important ways. First, as per the point made in the above linked post, they don't stop to think that the great majority of folks who do believe in evolution don't actually have any better understanding of it than creationists. (In fact, I would say that the best informed creationists I've read, despite the biases that lead them towards their ultimate conclusions, have a much better understanding of evolution than, say, a typical journalist who will attack them as ignorant.) Second, they tend to way overestimate the significance of the phenomenon. Honestly, if I were to write down a list of widespread delusions sorted by the practical dangers they pose, creationism probably wouldn't make the top fifty.

When I'm sad about something in my life, I usually can make myself feel much better by simply saying, in a sentence, why I'm sad.

Explicitly acknowledging emotions as things with causes is a huge chunk of managing them deliberately. (I have a post in the works on this, but I'm not sure when I'll pull it together.)

It felt like some kind of low level psychic power or something. So it seems that our brains don't exactly "trust" deductive reasoning. Maybe because problems in the ancestral environment didn't have clean, logical solutions?

I'm nitpicking, but maybe it was simple pleasure at getting the game?

Another random thought. When I'm sad about something in my life, I usually can make myself feel much better by simply saying, in a sentence, why I'm sad. I don't know why this works, but it seems to make the emotion abstract, as though it happened to somebody else.

I don't think that works for me. I often can't identify a specific cause of my sad feeling, and when I can, thinking about it often makes me feel worse rather than better.

So it seems that our brains don't exactly "trust" deductive reasoning. Maybe because problems in the ancestral environment didn't have clean, logical solutions?

Arguably, problems in the modern environment don't have clean, logical solutions either! Note also that people get good at games like minesweeper and chess through learning. If the brain was primarily a big deductive logic machine, it would become good at these games immediately upon understanding the rules; no learning would be necessary.

That's one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. I wish I could upvote that more.

See also

upvoted-both-I remember yours this from a couple of years ago

"In the United States, 12.3 percent of women tested carried the parasite

Wow. How is this parasite spread? Could those 'girly germs' that I avoided in primary school actually reduce my chances of getting schizophrenia?

I'm intrigued by the notion and would like to hear more from someone who can tell me whether I can take this seriously. That 'approximately accounting for' part scares me. Is that just word chioce that makes it sound scary? Or perhaps an approximation in the way that Newtonian physics is an approximation? Or maybe it is only an approximation is as much as it suffers the same problem all our theories do of being unable to unify all of our physics at once... I'd need someone several levels ahead of me to figure that out.

Be careful, you are near fringe science domain.

it's basically saying that gravity and EM are both obeying some more general law

No, what's happening is that under certain approximations the two are described by similar math. The trick is to know when the approximations break down and what the math actually translates to physically.

Does it suggest a way to unify gravity and EM?

No.

Keep in mind that for EM there are 2 charges while gravity has only 1. Also, like electric charges repel while like gravitic charges attract. This messes with your expectations about the sign of an interaction when you go from one to the other. That means your intuitive understanding of EM doesn't map well to understanding gravity.

Your link to "torsion field" talks about a completely different concept than the one in GEM. That concept is indeed a notorious example of pseudoscience here in Russia.

I'd mostly like to echo what mindviews said - similar math is not unification - and point out that there was an actual attempt at unification in Kaluza-Klein theory. But I don't actually know anything about that, I should note...

Also note that Oscar winning director Morris's next project is a dark comedy that is a fictionalized version of the founding of Alcor!

Isn't that a bad thing? I suspect a major source will be that recent book...

Ooh, it's nice to see more details on the lemon juice bank robber. When I first heard about him I thought he was probably schizophrenic. Maybe he was, but the details make it sound like he may indeed have been just really stupid.

(this is hardly a new idea, but I haven't seen it referenced in my limited readings on LW.)

Some people have tried to emphasize that point but it isn't always universally understood.

But when I started thinking about an AI with this utility function, I became very confused. How exactly do you express this concept of "me" in the code of a utility-maximizing agent? The problem sounds easy enough: it doesn't refer to any mystical human qualities like "consciousness", it's purely a question about programming tricks, but still it looks quite impossible to solve. Any thoughts?

It refers to mystical human qualities like "me" and "think". Basically I put it in the exact same category as 'consciousness'.

Program must have something to preserve. My first thought is preservation of declarative memory: ensure that future contain chain of systems, implementing same goal, with overlapping declarative memory.

I haven't made an analysis, just first thought.

An agent's "me" is its model of itself. This is already a fairly complicated thing for an agent to have, and it need not have one.

Why do you say that an agent can "directly perceive" its own mind? Or anything else? A perception is just a signal somewhere inside the agent: a voltage, a train of neural firings, or whatever. It can never be identical to the thing that caused it, the thing that it is a perception of. People can very easily have mistaken ideas of who they are.

You want the program to keep running in the context of the world. To specify what that means, you need to build on top of an ontology that refers to the world. But figuring out such ontology is a very difficult problem and you can't even in principle refer to the whole world as it really is: you'll always have uncertainty left, even in a general ontological model.

The program will have to know what tradeoffs to make, for example whether it's important to survive in most possible worlds with fair probability, or in at least one possible world with high probability. These would lead to very different behavior, and the possibility of such tradeoffs exemplifies how much data such preference would require. If additionally you want to keep most of the world as it would be if the AI was never created, that's another complex counterfactual for you to bake in into its preference.

It's a very difficult problem, probably more difficult that FAI, since for FAI we at least have some hope of cheating and copying formal preference from an existing blueprint, and here you have to build that from scratch, translating your requirements from human-speak to formal specification.

they attempt to explain the level of coordination necessary in warfare with group selection. This, of course, will not do.

Group selection has been vilified; but irrationally so. Group selection has been observed many times in human groups, so dismissing it is silly.

The "derivation" is on page 12.

The repeated problem for many worlds is that if the quantum state is 1/2 |dead cat> + sqrt(3)/2 |live cat>, then (squaring the coefficients) the probability of dead cat is 1/4, the probability of live cat is 3/4, and so there should be three times as many live cats compared to dead cats (for such a wavefunction); but the decomposition into wavefunction components just produces one dead-cat world and one live-cat world, which naively suggests equal probabilities. The problem is, how do you interpret a superposition like that, in terms of coexisting, equally real worlds, so as to give the right probabilities.

It looks like part of what Zurek does is to pick a basis (Schmidt decomposition) where the components all have the same amplitude - which means they all have the same probability, so the naive branch-counting method works! A potential problem with this way of proceeding is that, expressed in the position basis, the branches end up being complicated superpositions of spatial configurations. (The space of quantum states, the Hilbert space, is a large abstract vector space with a coordinate basis formally labeled by spatial configurations, so the basis vectors of a different basis will be sums of those position-basis vectors.) Explaining complicated superpositions which don't look like reality by positing the existence of many worlds, each of which is itself a complicated superposition that doesn't look like reality, is not very promising. It's sort of okay to do this for microscopic entities because we don't have apriori knowledge about what their reality is like, and we might suppose that the abstract Hilbert-space vector is the actual reality; but somewhere between microscopic and macroscopic, you have to produce an actual live cat, and not just a live cat summed with an epsilon-amplitude dead cat. I have no idea how Zurek deals with this.

Actually, Zurek has a lot of background assumptions which make his reasoning obscure to me and I really don't expect it to make sense in the end, though it's impossible to be sure until you have decoded his outlook. His philosophy is a weird mixture of Bohr's antirealism and Everett's multirealism, and in other papers he says things like

Quantum states acquire objective existence when reproduced in many copies. Individual states -- one might say with Bohr -- are mostly information, too fragile for objective existence.

(thanks to DZS for the quote). And of course it's nonsense to say that something doesn't exist until there are multiple copies of it (how many is the magic number? how can you make an existing copy of a nonexistent original?). Zurek is using the words "objective existence" in some twisted way. I'm sure the reason is that he doesn't have the answer to QM, but he wants to believe he does; that is how smart people end up writing nonsense. But I would have to understand his system to offer a more precise diagnosis.

If making a Friendly AI is compared to landing on the moon, I'd say OpenCog is something like the scaffolding for a backyard rocket. It still needs something extra - the rocket - and even then it won't achieve escape velocity. But a radically scaled-up version of OpenCog - with a lot more theory behind it, and tailored to run at the level of a whole data center rather than on a single PC - is the sort of toolset that could make a singularity.

Your logic is ok. By the way Thomas Aquinas thought along this lines, but in different direction. However discussing scholastic here doesn't make much sense (if it can make sense at all).

What if your hero asks to be made omniscient, including the capacity to still be able to think well in the face of all that knowledge?

Throw in omnibenevolence if you like, but I think you get some contradictions if you ask omnipotence. Either that, or you and Omega coalesce.

How could you test your omniscience to be sure it's the real thing?