PZ Meyers' comments on Kurzweil generated some controversy here recently on LW--see here. Apparently PZ doesn't agree with some of Kurzweil's assumptions about the human mind. But that's besides the point--what I want want to discuss is this: according to another blog, Kurzweil has been selling bogus nutritional supplements. What does everyone think of this?

It might be useful to have a short list of English words that indicate logical relationships or concepts often used in debates and arguments, so as to enable people who are arguing about controversial topics to speak more precisely.

Has anyone encountered such a list? Does anyone know of previous attempts to create such lists?

Followup to: Making Beliefs Pay Rent in Anticipated Experiences

In the comments section of Making Beliefs Pay Rent, Eliezer wrote:

I follow a correspondence theory of truth. I am also a Bayesian and a believer in Occam's Razor. If a belief has no empirical consequences then it could receive no Bayesian confirmation and could not rise to my subjective attention. In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.

If I am interpreting this correctly, Eliezer is saying that there is a nearly infinite space of unfalsifiable hypotheses, and so our priors for each individual hypothesis should be very close to zero. I agree with this statement, but I think it raises a philosophical problem: doesn't this same reasoning apply to any factual question? Given a set of data D, there must be an nearly infinite space of hypotheses that (a) explain D and (b) make predictions (fulfilling the criteria discussed in Making Beliefs Pay Rent). Though Occam's Razor can help us to weed out a large number of these possible hypotheses, a mind-bogglingly large number would still remain, forcing us to have a low prior for each individual hypothesis. (In philosophy of science, this is known as "underdetermination.") Or is there a flaw in my reasoning somewhere?

Here's a thought experiment that's been confusing me for a long time, and I have no idea whether it is even possible to resolve the issues it raises. It assumes that a reality which was entirely simulated on a computer is indistinguishable from the "real" one, at least until some external force alters it. So... the question is, assuming that such a program exists, what happens to the simulated universe when it is executed?

In accordance with the arguments that Pavirta gives below me, redundant computation is not the same as additional computation. Executing the same program twice (with the same inputs each time) is equivalent to executing it once, which is equivalent to executing it five times, ten times, or a million. You are just simulating the same universe over and over, not a different one each time.

But is running the simulation once equivalent to running it ZERO times?

The obvious answer seems to be "no", but bear with me here. There is nothing special about the quarks and leptons that make up a physical computer. If you could make a Turing machine out of light, or more exotic matter, you would still be able to execute the same program on it. And if you could make such a computer in any other universe (whatever that might mean), you would still be able to run the program on it. But in such considerations, the computer used is immaterial. A physical computer is not a perfect Turing machine - it has finite memory space and is vulnerable to physical defects which introduce errors into the program. What matters is the program itself, which exists regardless of the computer it is on. A program is a Platonic ideal, a mathematical object which cannot exist in this universe. We can make a representation of that program on a computer, but the representation is not perfect, and it is not the program itself. In the same way, a perfect equilateral triangle cannot actually be constructed in this universe; even if you use materials whose length is measured down to the atom, its sides will not be perfectly straight and its angles will not be perfectly equal. More importantly, if you then alter the representation to make one of the angles bigger, it does not change the fact that equilateral triangles have 60° angles, it simply makes your representation less accurate. In the same way, executing a program on a computer will not alter the program itself. If there are conscious beings simulated on your computer, they existed before you ran the program, and they will exist even if you unplug the computer and throw it into a hole - because what you have in your computer is not the conscious beings, but a representation of them. And they will still exist even if you never run the program, or even if it never occurs to anyone on Earth that such a program could be made.

The problem is, this same argument could be used to justify the existence of literally everything, everywhere. So we are left with several possible conclusions: (1)Everything is "real" in some universe, and we have no way of ever finding such universes. This cannot ever be proved or falsified, and also leads to problems with the definition of "everything" and "real". (2)The initial premise is false, and only physical objects are real: simulations, thoughts and constructs are not. I think there is a philosophical school of thought that believes this to be true, though I have no idea what its name is. Regardless, there are still a lot of holes in this answer. (3)I have made a logical mistake somewhere, or I am operating from an incorrect definition of "real". It happens.

It is also worth pointing out that both (1) and (2) invalidate every ethical truth in the book, since in (1) there is always a universe in which I just caused the death of a trillion people, and in (2) there is no such thing as "ethics" - ideas aren't real, and that includes philosophical ideas.

Anyway, just bear this in mind when you think about a universe being simulated on a computer.

There's an idea I've seen around here on occasion to the effect that creating and then killing people is bad, so that for example you should be careful that when modeling human behavior your models don't become people in their own right.

I think this is bunk. Consider the following:

--

Suppose you have an uploaded human, and fork the process. If I understand the meme correctly, this creates an additional person, such that killing the second process counts as murder.

Does this still hold if the two processes are not made to diverge; that is, if they are deterministic (or use the same pseudorandom seed) and are never given differing inputs?

Suppose that instead of forking the process in software, we constructed an additional identical computer, set it on the table next to the first one, and copied the program state over. Suppose further that the computers were cued up to each other so that they were not only performing the same computation, but executing the steps at the same time as each other. (We won't readjust the sync on an ongoing basis; it's just part of the initial conditions, and the deterministic nature of the algorithm ensures that they stay in step after that.)

Suppose that the computers were not electronic, but insanely complex mechanical arrays of gears and pulleys performing the same computation -- emulating the electronic computers at reduced speed, perhaps. Let us further specify that the computers occupy one fewer spatial dimension than the space they're embedded in, such as flat computers in 3-space, and that the computers are pressed flush up against each other, corresponding gears moving together in unison.

What if the corresponding parts (which must be staying in synch with each other anyway) are superglued together? What if we simply build a single computer twice as thick? Do we still have two people?

--

No, of course not. And, on reflection, it's obvious that we never did: redundant computation is not additional computation.

So what if we cause the ems to diverge slightly? Let us stipulate that we give them some trivial differences, such as the millisecond timing of when they receive their emails. If they are not actively trying to diverge, I anticipate that this would not have much difference to them in the long term -- the ems would still be, for the most part, the same person. Do we have two distinct people, or two mostly redundant people -- perhaps one and a tiny fraction, on aggregate? I think a lot of people will be tempted to answer that we have two.

But consider, for a moment, if we were not talking about people but -- say -- works of literature. Two very similar stories, even if by a raw diff they share almost no words, are of not much more value than only one of them.

The attitude I've seen seems to treat people as a special case -- as a separate magisterium.

--

I wish to assert that this value system is best modeled as a belief in souls. Not immortal souls with an afterlife, you understand, but mortal souls, that are created and destroyed. And the world simply does not work that way.

If you really believed that, you'd try to cause global thermonuclear war, in order to prevent the birth of billions or more of people who will inevitably be killed. It might take the heat death of the universe, but they will die.

Some hobby Bayesianism. A typical challenge for a rationalist is that there is some claim X to be evaluated, it seems preposterous, but many people believe it. How should you take account of this when considering how likely X is to be true? I'm going to propose a mathematical model of this situation and discuss two of it's features.

This is based on a continuing discussion with Unknowns, who I think disagrees with what I'm going to present, or with its relevance to the "typical challenge."

Summary: If you learn that a preposterous hypothesis X is believed by many people, you should not correct your prior probability P(X) by a factor larger than the reciprocal of P(Y), your prior probability for the hypothesis Y = "X is believed by many people." One can deduce an estimate of P(Y) from an estimate of the quantity "if I already knew that at least n people believed X, how likely it would be that n+1 people believed X" as a function of n. It is not clear how useful this method of estimating P(Y) is.

The right way to unpack "X seems preposterous, but many believe it" mathematically is as follows. We have a very low prior probability P(X), and then we have new evidence Y = "many people believe X". The problem is to evaluate P(X|Y).

One way to phrase the typical challenge is "How much larger than P(X) should P(X|Y) be?" In other words, how large is the ratio P(X|Y)/P(X)? Bayes formula immediately says something interesting about this:

P(X|Y)/P(X) = P(Y|X)/P(Y)

Moreover, since P(Y|X) < 1, the right-hand side of that equation is less than 1/P(Y). My interpretation of this: if you want to know how seriously to take the fact that many people believe something, you should consider how likely you find it that many people would believe it absent any evidence. Or a little more precisely, how likely you find it that many people would believe it if the amount of evidence available to them was unknown to you. You should not correct your prior for X by more than the reciprocal of this probability.

Comment: how much less than 1 P(Y|X) is depends on the nature of X. For instance, if X is the claim "the Riemann hypothesis is false" then it is unclear to me how to estimate P(Y|X), but (since it is conceivable to me that RH is false, but still it is widely believed) it might be quite small. If X is an everyday claim like "it's a full moon tomorrow", or a spectacular claim like "Jesus rose from the dead", it seems like P(Y|X) is very close to 1. So sometimes 1/P(Y) is a good approximation to P(X|Y)/P(X), but maybe sometimes it is a big overestimation.

What about P(Y)? Is there a way to estimate it, or at least approach its estimation? Let's give ourselves a little more to work with, by quantifying "many people" in "many people believe X". Let Y(n) be the assertion "at least n people believe X." Note that this model doesn't specify what "believe" means -- in particular it does not specify how strongly n people believe X, nor how smart or expert those n people are, nor where in the world they are located... if there is a serious weakness in this model it might be found here.

Another application of Bayes theorem gives us

P(Y(n+1))/P(Y(n)) = P(Y(n+1)|Y(n))

(Since P(Y(n)|Y(n+1)) = 1, i.e. if we know n+1 people believe X, then of course n people believe X). Squinting a little, this gives us a formula for the derivative of the logarithm of P(Y(n)). Yudkowsky has suggested naming the log of a probability an "absurdity," let's write A(Y(n)) for the absurdity of Y(n).

d/dn A(Y(n)) = A(Y(n+1)|Y(n))

So up to an additive constant A(Y(n)) is the integral from 1 to n of A(Y(m+1)|Y(m))dm. So an ansatz for P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) = exp(A(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) will allow us to say something about P(Y(n)), up to a multiplicative constant.

The shape of P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) seems like it could have a lot to do with what kind of statement X is, but there is one thing that seems likely to be true no matter what X is: if N is the total population of the world and n/N is close to zero, then P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) is also close to zero, and if n/N is close to one then P(Y(n+1)|Y(n)) is also close to one. I might work out an example ansatz like this in a future comment, if this one stands up to scrutiny.

Eliezer has written a post (ages ago) which discussed a bias when it comes to contributions to charities. Fragments that I can recall include considering the motivation for participating in altruistic efforts in a tribal situation, where having your opinion taking seriously is half the point of participation. This is in contrast to donating 'just because you want thing X to happen'. There is a preference to 'start your own effort, do it yourself' even when that would be less efficient than donating to an existing charity.

I am unable to find the post in question - I think it is distinct from 'the unit of caring'. It would be much appreciated if someone who knows the right keywords could throw me a link!

Alright, I've lost track of the bookmark and my google-fu is not strong enough with the few bits and pieces I remember. I remember seeing a link to a story in a lesswrong article. The story was about a group of scientists who figured out how to scan a brain, so they did it to one of them, and then he wakes up in a strange place and then has a series of experiences/dreams which recount history leading up to where he currently is, including a civilization of uploads, and he's currently living with the last humans around... something like that. Can anybody help me out? Online story, 20 something chapters I think... this is driving me nuts.

Not that many will care, but I should get a brief appearance on Dateline NBC Friday, Aug. 20, at 10 p.m. Eastern/Pacific. A case I prosecuted is getting the Dateline treatment.

Elderly atheist farmer dead; his friend the popular preacher's the suspect.

--JRM

The visual guide to a PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Nice map–territory perspective.

John Baez This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics has its 300th and last entry. He is moving to wordpress and Azimuth. He states he wants to concentrate on futures, and has upcoming interviews with:

Tim Palmer on climate modeling and predictability, Thomas Fischbacher on sustainability and permaculture, and Eliezer Yudkowsky on artificial intelligence and the art of rationality. A Google search returns no matches for Fischbacher + site:lesswrong.com and no hits for Palmer +.

That link to Fischbacher that Baez gives has a presentation on cognitive distortions and public policy which I found quite good.

Where should the line be drawn regarding the status of animals as moral objects/entities? E.G Do you think it is ethical to boil lobsters alive? It seems to me there is a full spectrum of possible answers: at one extreme only humans are valued, or only primates, only mammals, only veterbrates, or at the other extreme, any organism with even a rudimentary nervous system (or any computational, digital isomorphism thereof), could be seen as a moral object/entity.

Now this is not necessarily a binary distinction, if shrimp have intrinsic moral value it does not follow that they must have a equal value to humans or other 'higher' animals. As I see it, there are two possibilities; either we come to a point where the moral value drops to zero, or else we decide that entities approach zero to some arbitrary limit: e.g. a c. elegans roundworm with its 300 neurons might have a 'hedonic coefficient' of 3x10^-9. I personally favor the former, the latter just seems absurd to me, but I am open to arguments or any comments/criticisms.

I've written a post for consolidating book recommendations, and the links don't have hidden urls. These are links which were cut and pasted from a comment-- the formatting worked there.

Posting (including to my drafts) mysteriously doubles the spaces between the words in one of my link texts, but not the others. I tried taking that link out in case it was making the whole thing weird, but it didn't help.

I've tried using the pop-up menu for links that's available for writing posts, but that didn't change the results.

What might be wrong with the formatting?

Say a "catalytic pattern" is something like scaffolding, an entity that makes it easier to create (or otherwise obtain) another entity. An "autocatalytic pattern" is a sort of circular version of that, where the existence of an instance of the pattern acts as scaffolding for creating or otherwise obtaining another entity.

Autocatalysis is normally mentioned in the "origin of life" scientific field, but it also applies to cultural ratchets. An autocatalytic social structure will catalyze a few more instances of itself (frequently not expanding without end - rather, a niche is filled), and then the population has some redundancy and recoverability, acting as a ratchet.

For example, driving on the right(left) in one region catalyzes driving on the right(left) in an adjacent region.

Designing circular or self-applicable entities is kindof tricky, but it's not as tricky as it might be - often, theres an attraction basin around a hypothesized circular entity, where X catalyzes Y which is very similar to X, and Y catalyzes Z which is very similar to Y, and so focusing your search sufficiently, and then iterating or iterating-and-tweaking can often get the last, trickiest steps.

Douglas Hofstadter catalyzed the creation (by Lee Sallows) of a "Pangram Machine" that exploits this attraction basin to create a self-describing sentence that starts "This Pangram contains four as, [...]" - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram

Has there been any work on measuring, studying attraction basins around autocatalytic entities?

"The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top."

"Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine" http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_stress_cure/all/1

With regard to the recent proof of P!=NP: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/1588

LW database download?

I was wondering if it would be a good idea to offer a download of LW or at least the sequences and Wiki. In the manner that Wikipedia is providing it.

The idea behind it is to have a redundant backup in case of some catastrophe, for example if the same happens to EY that happened to John C. Wright. It could also provide the option to read LW offline.

Would people be interested in a place on LW for collecting book recommendations?

I'm reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard of it here, and I found Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn't crossed my path before.

There's a recent thread about books for a gifted young tween which might or might not get found by someone looking for good books..... and so on.

Would it make more sense to have a top level article for book recommendations or put it in the wiki? Or both?

I think I may have artificially induced an Ugh Field in myself.

A little over a week ago it occurred to me that perhaps I was thinking too much about X, and that this was distracting me from more important things. So I resolved to not think about X for the next week.

Of course, I could not stop X from crossing my mind, but as soon as I noticed it, I would sternly think to myself, "No. Shut up. Think about something else."

Now that the week's over, I don't even want to think about X any more. It just feels too weird.

And maybe that's a good thing.

P ≠ NP : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850

What simple rationality techniques give the most bang for the buck? I'm talking about techniques you might be able to explain to a reasonably smart person in five minutes or less: really the basics. If part of the goal here is to raise the sanity waterline in the general populace, not just among scientists, then it would be nice to have some rationality techniques that someone can use without much study.

Carl Sagan had a slogan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." He would say this phrase and then explain how, when someone claims something extraordinary (i.e. something for which we have a very low probability estimate), they need correspondingly stronger evidence than if they'd made a higher-likelihood claim, like "I had a sandwich for lunch." Now, I'm sure everybody here can talk about this very precisely, in terms of Bayesian updating and odds ratios, but Sagan was able to get a lot of this across to random laypeople in about a minute. Maybe two minutes.

What techniques for rationality can be explained to a normal person in under five minutes? I'm looking for small and simple memes that will make people more rational, on average. I'll try a few candidates, to get the discussion started.

Candidate 1: Carl Sagan's concise explanation of how evidence works, as mentioned above.

Candidate 2: Everything that has an effect in the real world is part of the domain of science (and, more broadly, rationality). A lot of people have the truly bizarre idea that some theories are special, immune to whatever standards of evidence they may apply to any other theory. My favorite example is people who believe that prayers for healing actually make people who are prayed for more likely to recover, but that this cannot be scientifically tested. This is an obvious contradiction: they're claiming a measurable effect on the world and then pretending that it can't possibly be measured. I think that if you pointed out a few examples of this kind of special pleading to people, they might start to realize when they're doing it.

Candidate 3: Admitting that you were wrong is a way of winning an argument. There's a saying that "It takes a big man to admit he's wrong," and when people say this, they don't seem to realize that it's a huge problem! It shouldn't be hard to admit that you were wrong about something! It shouldn't feel like defeat; it should feel like victory. When you lose an argument with someone, it should be time for high fives and mutual jubilation, not shame and anger. I know that it's possible to retrain yourself to feel this way, because I've done it. This wasn't even too difficult; it was more a matter of just realizing that feeling good about conceding an argument was even an option.

Anti-candidate: "Just because something feels good doesn't make it true." I call this an anti-candidate because, while it's true, it's seldom helpful. People trot out this line as an argument against other people's ideas, but rarely apply it to their own. I want memes that will make people actually be more rational, instead of just feeling that way.

Any ideas? I know that the main goal of this community is to strive for rationality far beyond such low-hanging fruit, but if we can come up with simple and easy techniques that actually help people be more rational, there's a lot of value in that. You could use it as rationalist propaganda, or something.

EDIT: I've expanded this into a top-level post.

Scenario: A life insurance salesman, who happens to be a trusted friend of a relatively-new-but-so-far-trustworthy friend of yours, is trying to sell you a life insurance policy. He makes the surprising claim that after 20 years of selling life insurance, none of his clients have died. He seems to want you to think that buying a life insurance policy from him will somehow make you less likely to die.

How do you respond?

edit: to make this question more interesting: you also really don't want to offend any of the people involved.

Goodhart sighting? Misunderstanding of causality sighting? Check out this recent economic analysis on Slate.com (emphasis added):

For much of the modern American era, inflation has been viewed as an evil demon to be exorcised, ideally before it even rears its head. This makes sense: Inflation robs people of their savings, and the many Americans who have lived through periods of double-digit inflation know how miserable it is. But sometimes a little bit of inflation is valuable. During the Great Depression, government policies deliberately tried to create inflation. Rising prices are a sign of rising output, something that would be welcome in the current slow-motion recovery.

(He then quotes an economist that says inflation would also prop up home values and prevent foreclosures.)

Did I get that right? Because inflation has traditionally been a sign of (caused by) rising output, you should directly cause inflation, in order to cause higher output. (Note: in order to complete the case for inflation, you arguably have to do the same thing again, but replacing inflation with output, and output with reduced unemployment.)

A usual, I'm not trying to start a political debate about whether inflation is good or bad, or what should be done to increase/decrease inflation. I'm interested in this particular way of arguing for pro-inflation policies, which seems to even recognize which way the causality flows, but still argue as if it runs the opposite direction.

Am I misunderstanding it?

LW Goodhart article

Last night I introduced a couple of friends to Newcomb's Problem/Counterfactual Mugging, and we discussed it at some length. At some point, we somehow stumbled across the question "how do you picture Omega?"

Friend A pictures Omega as a large (~8 feet) humanoid with a deep voice and a wide stone block for a head.

When Friend B hears Omega, he imagines Darmani from Majora's mask (http://www.kasuto.net/image/officialart/majora_darmani.jpg)

And for my part, I've always pictured him a humanoid with paper-white skin in a red jumpsuit with a cape (the cape, I think, comes from hearing him described as "flying off" after he's confounded you).

So it seemed worth asking LW just for the amusement: how do you picture Omega?

As people are probably aware, Hitchens has cancer, which is likely to kill him in the not-too-distant future. There does not seem to be much to be done about this; but I wonder if it's possible to pass the hat to pay for cryonics for him? Apart from the fuzzies of saving a life with X percent probability, which can be had much cheaper by sending food to Africa, it might serve as marketing for cryonics, causing others to sign up. Of course, this assumes that he would accept, and also that there wouldn't be a perception that he was just grasping at any straw available.

AI development in the real world?

As a result, a lot of programmers at HFT firms spend most of their time trying to keep the software from running away. They create elaborate safeguard systems to form a walled garden around the traders but, exactly like a human trader, the programs know that they make money by being novel, doing things that other traders haven't thought of. These gatekeeper programs are therefore under constant, hectic development as new algorithms are rolled out. The development pace necessitates that they implement only the most important safeguards, which means that certain types of algorithmic behavior can easily pass through. As has been pointed out by others, these were "quotes" not "trades", and they were far away from the inside price - therefore not something the risk management software would be necessarily be looking for. -- comment from gameDevNYC

I can't evaluate whether what he's saying is plausible enough for science fiction-- it's certainly that-- or likely to be true.

Interesting SF by Robert Charles Wilson!

I normally stay away from posting news to lesswrong.com - although I think an Open Thread for relevant news items would be a good idea - but this one sounds especially good and might be of interest for people visiting this site...

Many-Worlds in Fiction: "Divided by Infinity"

In the year after Lorraine's death I contemplated suicide six times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat bottle of Clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my own weakness.

I can't say I wish I had succeeded, because in all likelihood I did succeed, on each and every occasion. Six deaths. No, not just six. An infinite number.

Times six.

There are greater and lesser infinities.

But I didn't know that then.

Wired - We Are All Talk Radio Hosts

I found TobyBartels's recent explanation of why he doesn't want to sign up for cryonics a useful lesson in how different people's goals in living a long time (or not) can be from mine. Now I am wondering if maybe it would be a good idea to state some of the reasons people would want to wake up 100 years later if hit by a bus. Can't say I've been around here very long but it seems to me it's been assumed as some sort of "common sense" - is that accurate? I was wondering if other people's reasons for signing up / intending to sign up (I am not currently signed up and probably will not get around to such for several years) also differed interestingly from mine. Or is this too off topic?

As for me, I would think the obvious reason is what Hilbert said: "If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?" Finding yourself in the future means you now have the answers to a lot of previously open problems! As well as getting to learn the history of what happened after you were frozen. I have for a long time found not getting to learn the future history of the world to be the most troubling aspect of dying.

(Posting this here as it seems a bit off-topic under The Threat of Cryonics.)

Does anyone have any book recommendations for a gifted young teen? My nephew is 13, and he recently blew the lid off of a school-administered IQ test.

For his birthday, I want to give him some books that will inspire him to achieve great things and live a happy life full of hard work. At the very least, I want to give him some good math and science books. He has already has taken algebra, geometry and introductory calculus, so he knows some math already.

Does anyone know where the page that used to live here can be found?

It was an experiment where two economists were asked to play 100 turn asymmetric prisoners dilemma with communication on each turn to the experimenters, but not each other.

It was quite amusing in that even though they were both economists and should have known better, the guy on the 'disadvantaged' side was attempting to have the other guy let him defect once in a while to make it "fair".

One little anti-akrasia thing I'm trying is editing my crontab to periodically pop up an xmessage with a memento mori phrase. It checks that my laptop lid is open, gets a random integer and occasionally pops up the # of seconds to my actuarial death (gotten from Death Clock; accurate enough, I figure):

 1,16,31,46 * * * * if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then if [ $((`date \+\%\s` % 6)) = 1 ]; then xmessage "$(((`date --date="9 August 2074" \+\%\s` - `date \+\%\s`) / 60)) minutes left to live. Is what you are doing important?"; fi; fi

(I figure it's stupid enough a tactic and cheap enough to be worth trying. This shell stuff works in both bash and dash/sh, however, you probably want to edit the first conditional, since I'm not sure Linux puts the lid data at the same place in /proc/acpi in every system.)

Knowing that medicine is often more about signaling care than improving health, it's hard for me to make a big fuss over some minor ailment of a friend or family member. Consciously trying to signal care seems too fake and manipulative. Unfortunately, others then interpret my lack of fuss-making as not caring. Has anyone else run into this problem, and if so, how did you deal with it?

One way to model someone's beliefs, at a given frozen moment of time, is as a real-valued function P on the set of all assertions. In an ideal situation, P will be subject to a lot of consistency conditions, for instance if A is a logical consequence of B, then P(A) is not smaller than P(B). This ideal P is very smart: if such a P has P(math axioms) very close to 1, then it will have P(math theorems) very close to 1 as well.

Clearly, even a Bayesian superintelligence is not going to maintain an infinitely large database of values of P, that it updates from instant to instant. Rather, it will have something like a computer program that takes as inputs assertions A, spends some time thinking, and outputs numbers P(A). I think we cannot expect the computed numbers P(A) to have the consistency property (B implies A means P(A) not smaller than P(B)). For instance it should be possible for a superintelligence to answer a math question (I don't know, Goldbach's conjecture) with "very likely true" and have Goldbach's conjecture turn out false.

(Since "A" is a logical consequence of "A and B", I guess I am accusing superintelligences of committing a souped-up form of the conjunction fallacy.)

The fact that a prior in practice won't be a set of cached numbers but instead a computer program, subject to all the attendant resource constraints, seems important to me, but I'm open to the possibility that it's a red herring. Am I making some kind of classic or easily addressed error?

"CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead":

"Burton, for example, spent years on what should’ve been a straightforward project. Some CIA analysts work with a tool, “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses,” to tease out what evidence supports (or, mostly, disproves) their theories. But the Java-based software is single-user — so there’s no ability to share theories, or add in dissenting views. Burton, working on behalf of a Washington-area consulting firm with deep ties to the CIA, helped build on spec a collaborative version of ACH. He tried it out, using the JonBenet Ramsey murder case as a test. Burton tested 51 clues — the lack of a scream, evidence of bed-wetting — against five possible culprits. “I went in, totally convinced it all pointed to the mom,” Burton says. “Turns out, that wasn’t right at all.”"

An amusing case of rationality failure: Stockwell Day, a longstanding albatross around Canada's neck, says that more prisons need to be built because of an 'increase in unreported crime.'

As my brother-in-law amusingly noted on FB, quite apart from whether the actual claim is true (no evidence is forthcoming), unless these unreported crimes are leading to unreported trials and unreported incarcerations, it's not clear why we would need more prisons.

A long time ago on Overcoming Bias, there was a thread started by Eliezer which was a link to a post on someone else's blog. The linked post posed a question, something like: "Consider two scientists. One does twenty experiments, and formulates a theory that explains all twenty results. Another does ten experiments, formulates a theory that adequately explains all ten results, does another ten experiments, and finds that eir theory correctly predicted the results. Which theory should we trust more and why?"

I remember Eliezer said he thought he had an answer to the question but was going to wait before posting it. I've since lost the post. Does anyone remember what post this is or whether anyone ever gave a really good formal answer?

"An Alien God" was recently re-posted on the stardestroyer.net "Science Logic and Morality" forum. You may find the resulting discussion interesting.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=144148&start=0

Interesting article: http://danariely.com/2010/08/02/how-we-view-people-with-medical-labels/

One reason why it's a good idea someone with OCD (or for that matter, Asperger, psychosis, autism, paranoia, schizophrenia — whatever) should make sure new acquaintances know of his/her condition:

I suppose that being presented by a third party, as in the example, should make a difference when compared to self-labeling (which may sound like excusing oneself)?

I think one of the other reasons many people are uncomfortable with cryonics is that they imagine their souls being stuck-- they aren't getting the advantages of being alive or of heaven.

In his bio over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson writes:

I am addicted to “viewquakes”, insights which dramatically change my world view.

So am I. I suspect you are too, dear reader. I asked Robin how many viewquakes he had and what caused them, but haven't gotten a response yet. But I must know! I need more viewquakes. So I propose we share our own viewquakes with each other so that we all know where to look for more.

I'll start. I've had four major viewquakes, in roughly chronological order:

• (micro)Economics - Starting with a simple approximation of how humans behave yields a startlingly effective theory in a wide range of contexts.
• Bayesianism - I learned how to think
• Yudkowskyan/Humean Metaethics - Making the move from Objective theories of morality to Subjectively Objective theories of morality cleared up a large degree of confusion in my map.
• Evolution - This is a two part quake: evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. The latter is extremely helpful for explaining some of the behavior that economic theory misses and for understanding the inputs into economic theory (i.e., preferences).