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komponisto170

Let's see if we can try to hug the query here. What exactly is the mistake I'm making when I say that I believe such-and-such is true with probability 0.001?

Is it that I'm not likely to actually be right 999 times out of 1000 occasions when I say this? If so, then you're (merely) worried about my calibration, not about the fundamental correspondence between beliefs and probabilities.

Or is it, as you seem now to be suggesting, a question of attire: no one has any business speaking "numerically" unless they're (metaphorically speaking) "wearing a lab coat"? That is, using numbers is a privilege reserved for scientists who've done specific kinds of calculations?

It seems to me that the contrast you are positing between "numerical" statements and other indications of degree is illusory. The only difference is that numbers permit an arbitrarily high level of precision; their use doesn't automatically imply a particular level. Even in the context of scientific calculations, the numbers involved are subject to some particular level of uncertainty. When a scientist makes a calculation to 15 decimal places, they shouldn't be interpreted as distinguishing between different 20-decimal-digit numbers.

Likewise, when I make the claim that the probability of Amanda Knox's guilt is 10^(-3), that should not be interpreted as distinguishing (say) between 0.001 and 0.002. It's meant to be distinguished from 10^(-2) and (perhaps) 10^(-4). I was explicit about this when I said it was an order-of-magnitude estimate. You may worry that such disclaimers are easily forgotten -- but this is to disregard the fact that similar disclaimers always apply whenever numbers are used in any context!

In any case, you seem to concede that these numbers ultimately don't convey any more information than various vague verbal expressions of confidence. If you want to make the latter more systematic and clear, I have no problem with that, but I see no way to turn them into actual numbers without introducing spurious precision.

Here's the way I do it: I think approximately in terms of the following "scale" of improbabilities:

(1) 10% to 50% (mundane surprise)

(2) 1% to 10% (rare)

(3) 0.1% (=10^(-3)) to 1% (once-in-a-lifetime level surprise on an important question)

(4) 10^(-6) to 10^(-3) (dying in a plane crash or similar)

(5) 10^(-10) to 10^(-6) (winning the lottery; having an experience unique among humankind)

(6) 10^(-100) to 10^(-10) (religions are true)

(7) below 10^(-100) (theoretical level of improbability reached in thought experiments).

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Mass_Driver40

Love the logic and the scale, although I think Vladimir_M pokes some important holes specifically at the 10^(-2) to 10^(-3) level.

May I suggest "un-planned for errors?" In my experience, it is not useful to plan for contingencies with about a 1/300 chance in happening per trial. For example, on any given day of the year, my favorite cafe might be closed due to the owner's illness, but I do not call the cafe first to confirm that it is open each time I go there. At any given time, one of my 300-ish acquaintances is probably nursing a grudge again... (read more)

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3Vladimir_M
komponisto: It's not that I'm worried about your poor calibration in some particular instance, but that I believe that accurate calibration in this sense is impossible in practice, except in some very special cases. (To give some sense of the problem, if such calibration were possible, then why not calibrate yourself to generate accurate probabilities about the stock market movements and bet on them? It would be an easy and foolproof way to get rich. But of course that there is no way you can make your numbers match reality, not in this problem, nor in most other ones.) The way you put it, "scientists" sounds too exclusive. Carpenters, accountants, cashiers, etc. also use numbers and numerical calculations in valid ways. However, their use of numbers can ultimately be scrutinized and justified in similar ways as the scientific use of numbers (even if they themselves wouldn't be up to that task), so with that qualification, my answer would be yes. (And unfortunately, in practice it's not at all rare to see people using numbers in ways that are fundamentally unsound, which sometimes gives rise to whole edifices of pseudoscience. I discussed one such example from economics in this thread.) Now, you say: However, when a scientist makes a calculation with 15 digits of precision, or even just one, he must be able to rigorously justify this degree of precision by pointing to observations that are incompatible with the hypothesis that any of these digits, except the last one, is different. (Or in the case of mathematical constants such as pi and e, to proofs of the formulas used to calculate them.) This disclaimer is implicit in any scientific use of numbers. (Assuming valid science is being done, of course.) And this is where, in my opinion, you construct an invalid analogy: But these disclaimers are not at all the same! The scientist's -- or the carpenter's, for that matter -- implicit disclaimer is: "This number is subject to this uncertainty interval, but there
4soreff
10^-3 is roughly the probability that I try to start my car and it won't start because the battery has gone bad. Is the scale intended only for questions one asks once per lifetime? There are lots of questions that one asks once a day, hence my car example.
See in context
by Will_Newsome
4 min read
932

44

Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.

Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.

Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.

Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.

Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."

If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.

That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.

If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.

The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.

Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.

Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?

Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.

That means our local theists are probably gonna get a lot of upvotes. Can you beat them with your confident but perceived-by-LW-as-irrational beliefs? It's a challenge!

Additional rules:

  • Generally, no repeating an altered version of a proposition already in the comments unless it's different in an interesting and important way. Use your judgement.
  • If you have comments about the game, please reply to my comment below about meta discussion, not to the post itself. Only propositions to be judged for the game should be direct comments to this post. 
  • Don't post propositions as comment replies to other comments. That'll make it disorganized.
  • You have to actually think your degree of belief is rational.  You should already have taken the fact that most people would disagree with you into account and updated on that information. That means that  any proposition you make is a proposition that you think you are personally more rational about than the Less Wrong average.  This could be good or bad. Lots of upvotes means lots of people disagree with you. That's generally bad. Lots of downvotes means you're probably right. That's good, but this is a game where perceived irrationality wins you karma. The game is only fun if you're trying to be completely honest in your stated beliefs. Don't post something crazy and expect to get karma. Don't exaggerate your beliefs. Play fair.
  • Debate and discussion is great, but keep it civil.  Linking to the Sequences is barely civil -- summarize arguments from specific LW posts and maybe link, but don't tell someone to go read something. If someone says they believe in God with 100% probability and you don't want to take the time to give a brief but substantive counterargument, don't comment at all. We're inviting people to share beliefs we think are irrational; don't be mean about their responses.
  • No propositions that people are unlikely to have an opinion about, like "Yesterday I wore black socks. ~80%" or "Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader in his latter days had he not been dethroned by Pope Sergius III. ~30%." The goal is to be controversial and interesting.
  • Multiple propositions are fine, so long as they're moderately interesting.
  • You are encouraged to reply to comments with your own probability estimates, but  comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments.  That is, upvote for good discussion, not agreement or disagreement.
  • In general, just keep within the spirit of the game: we're celebrating LW-contrarian beliefs for a change!
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38Vladimir_M
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[-]PlaidX1250

Flying saucers are real. They are likely not nuts-and-bolts spacecrafts, but they are actual physical things, the product of a superior science, and under the control of unknown entities. (95%)

Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.

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[-]Will_Newsome140

Now that there's a top comments list, could you maybe edit your comment an add a note to the effect that this was part of The Irrationality Game? No offense, but newcomers that click on Top Comments and see yours as the record holder could make some very premature judgments about the local sanity waterline.

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5wedrifid
Given that most of the top comments are meta in one way or another it would seem that the 'top comments' list belongs somewhere other than on the front page. Can't we hide the link to it on the wiki somewhere?
4Luke Stebbing
The majority of the top comments are quite good, and it'd be a shame to lose a prominent link to them. Jack's open thread test, RobinZ's polling karma balancer, Yvain's subreddit poll, and all top-level comments from The Irrationality Game are the only comments that don't seem to belong, but these are all examples of using the karma system for polling (should not contribute to karma and should not be ranked among normal comments) or, uh, para-karma (should contribute to karma but should not be ranked among normal comments).
5AngryParsley
Just to clarify: by "unknown entities" do you mean non-human intelligent beings?
1PlaidX
Yes.
3Will_Newsome
I would like to announce that I have updated significantly in favor of this after examining the evidence and thinking somewhat carefully for awhile (an important hint is "not nuts-and-bolts"). Props to PlaidX for being quicker than me.
2[anonymous]
I find it vaguely embarrassing that this post, taken out of context, now appears at the top of the "Top Comments" listing.
5Vladimir_Nesov
I think "top comments" was an experiment with a negative result, and so should be removed.
1Scott Alexander
I upvoted you because 95% is way high, but I agree with you that it's non-negligible. There's way too much weirdness in some of the cases to be easily explainable by mass hysteria or hoaxes or any of that stuff - and I'm glad you pointed out Fatima, because that was the one that got me thinking, too. That having been said, I don't know what they are. Best guess is easter eggs in the program that's simulating the universe.
3Will_Newsome
Prior before having learned of Fatima, roughly? Best guess at current probability?
1PlaidX
I don't think that's a very good guess, but it's as good as any I've seen. I tried to phrase my belief statement to include things like this within its umbrella.
1Will_Newsome
Voted up, and you've made me really curious. Link or explanation?
5PlaidX
This is what spurred me to give consideration to the idea initially, but what makes me confident is sifting through simply mountains of reports. To get an idea of the volume and typical content, here's a catalog of vehicle interference cases in Australia from 1958 to 2004. Most could be explained by a patchwork of mistakes and coincidences, some require more elaborate, "insanity or hoax" explanations, and if there are multiple witnesses, insanity falls away too. But there is no pattern that separates witnesses into a "hoax" and a "mistake" group, or even that separates them from the general population.
[-]erratio120

If there are mutliple witnesses who can see each others reactions, it's a good candidate for mass hysteria

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7Will_Newsome
I couldn't really understand the blog post: his theory is that there are terrestrial but nonhuman entities that like to impress the religious? But the vehicle interference cases you reference are generally not religious in nature, and are extremely varying in the actual form of the craft seen (some are red and blue, some are series of lights). What possible motivations for the entities could there be? Most agents with such advanced technology will aim to efficiently optimize for their preferences. If this is what optimizing for their preferences looks like, they have some very improbably odd preferences.
[-]Scott Alexander200

To be fair to the aliens, the actions of Westerners probably seem equally weird to Sentinel Islanders. Coming every couple of years in giant ships or helicopters to watch them from afar, and then occasionally sneaking into abandoned houses and leaving gifts?

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3JohannesDahlstrom
That was a fascinating article. Thank you.
3PlaidX
I agree with you entirely, and this is a great source of puzzlement to me, and to basically every serious investigator. They hide in the shadows with flashing lights. What could they want from us that they couldn't do for themselves, and if they wanted to influence us without detection, shouldn't it be within their power to do it COMPLETELY without detection? I have no answers to these questions.
2Risto_Saarelma
That's assuming that what's going on is that entities who are essentially based on the same lawful universe as we are are running circles around humans. If what's going on is instead something like a weird universe, where reality makes sense most of the time, but not always, I imagine you might get something that looks a lot like some of the reported weirdness. Transient entities that don't make sense leaking through the seams, never quite leaving the causal trail which would incontrovertibly point to their existence.
1Will_Newsome
If I'd asked the above questions honestly rather than semi-rhetorically I may have figured a few things out a lot sooner than I did. I might be being uncharitable to myself, especially as I did eventually ask them honestly, but the point still stands I think.
0wedrifid
64 points! This is the highest voted comment that I can remember seeing. (A few posts have gone higher). Can anyone remember another, higher voted example?
2Richard_Kennaway
But the rules are different in this thread. 64 here means that 64 more voters disagree than agree.
2Vladimir_Nesov
Tell that to the out-of-context list of all LW comments sorted by rating!
6wedrifid
Hang on, we have one of those?
0[anonymous]
-
0Jonathan_Graehl
I'd like to know what your prior is for the disjunction "unknown entities control saucers that ambiguously reveal themselves to a minority of people on Earth, for some purpose". While I'm sure you've looked more closely at the evidence than I have, I presume your prior for that disjunction must be much higher than mine to even look closely.
1PlaidX
It certainly wasn't high... I went through most of my life never giving the idea a thought, stumbled onto the miracle of fatima one day, and said "well, clearly this wasn't a flying saucer, but what the heck was it?" But the rabbit hole just kept going down. It is not a particularly pleasant feeling to me, as someone who used to think he had a fairly solid grip on the workings of the world.
0Perplexed
The sun, seen through moving clouds. Just exactly what it is described as being.
7PlaidX
Here is one of many detailed accounts, this one is from Dr. José Maria de Almeida Garrett, professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Coimbra, Portugal I was looking at the place of the apparitions, in a serene, if cold, expectation of something happening, and with diminishing curiosity, because a long time had passed without anything to excite my attention. Then I heard a shout from thousands of voices and saw the multitude suddenly turn its back and shoulders away from the point toward which up to now it had directed its attention, and turn to look at the sky on the opposite side. It must have been nearly two o'clock by the legal time, and about midday by the sun. The sun, a few moments before, had broken through the thick layer of clouds which hid it, and shone clearly and intensely. I veered to the magnet which seemed to be drawing all eyes, and saw it as a disc with a clean-cut rim, luminous and shining, but which did not hurt the eyes. I do not agree with the comparison which I have heard made in Fatima---that of a dull silver disc. It was a clearer, richer, brighter colour, having something of the luster of a pearl. It did not in the least resemble the moon on a clear night because one saw it and felt it to be a living body. It was not spheric like the moon, nor did it have the same colour, tone, or shading. It looked like a glazed wheel made of mother-of-pearl. It could not be confused, either, with the sun seen through fog (for there was no fog at the time), because it was not opaque, diffused or veiled. In Fatima it gave light and heat and appeared clear-cut with a well-defined rim. The sky was mottled with light cirrus clouds with the blue coming through here and there, but sometimes the sun stood out in patches of clear sky. The clouds passed from west to east and did not obscure the light of the sun, giving the impression of passing behind it, though sometimes these flecks of white took on tones of pink or diaphanous blue as they passed before the sun.
0Will_Newsome
Do you think you guess numerically what your prior probability was before learning of the Miracle of Fatima?
3PlaidX
Mmm, < .01%, it wasn't something I would've dignified with enough thought to give a number. Even as a kid, although I liked the idea of aliens, stereotypical flying saucer little green men stuff struck me as facile and absurd. A failure of the imagination as to how alien aliens would really be. In hindsight I had not considered that their outward appearance and behavior could simply be a front, but even then my estimate would've been very low, and justifiably, I think.
1Eugine_Nier
Probably ~15% (learning about Fatima didn't change it much by the way). Basically because I can't think of a good reason why this should have an extremely low prior.
-2CronoDAS
And do you believe in Santa Claus, too? :P
[-]Raemon740

Google is deliberately taking over the internet (and by extension, the world) for the express purpose of making sure the Singularity happens under their control and is friendly. 75%

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[-]jimrandomh190

I wish. Google is the single most likely source of unfriendly AIs anywhere, and as far as I know they haven't done any research into friendliness.

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7ata
Agreed. I think they've explicitly denied that they're working on AGI, but I'm not too reassured. They could be doing it in secret, probably without much consideration of Friendliness, and even if not, they're probably among the entities most likely (along with, I'd say, DARPA and MIT) to stumble upon seed AI mostly by accident (which is pretty unlikely, but not completely negligible, I think).
[-]sketerpot120

If Google were to work on AGI in secret, I'm pretty sure that somebody in power there would want to make sure it was friendly. Peter Norvig, for example, talks about AI friendliness in the third edition of AI: A modern approach, and he has a link to the SIAI on his home page.

Personally, I doubt that they'e working on AGI yet. They're getting a lot of mileage out of statistical approaches and clever tricks; AGI research would be a lot of work for very uncertain benefit.

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5Kevin
Google has one employee working (sometimes) on AGI. http://research.google.com/pubs/author37920.html
6khafra
It's comforting, friendliness-wise, that one of his papers cites "personal communication with Steve Rayhawk."
0magfrump
If they've explicitly denied doing research into AGI, they would have no reason to talk about friendliness research; that isn't additional evidence. I do think the OP is extremely overconfident though.
1Raemon
I confess that I probably exaggerated the certainty. It's more like 55-60%. I actually used to have a (mostly joking) theory about how Google would accidentally create a sentient internet that would have control over everything and send a robot army to destroy us. Someone gave me a book called "How to survive a Robot Uprising" which described the series of events that would lead to a Terminator-like Robot apocalypse, and Google was basically following it like a checklist. Then I came here and learned more about nanotechnology and the singularity and the joke became a lot less funny. (The techniques described in the Robot Uprising are remarkably useless when you have about a day between noticing something is wrong and the whole world turning into paperclips.) It seems to me that with the number of extremely smart people in Google, there's gotta be at least some who are pondering this issue and thinking about it seriously. The actual evidence of Google being a genuinely idealistic company that just wants information to be free and to provide a good internet experience vs them having SOME kind of secret agenda seems about 50/50 to me - there's no way I can think of to tell the difference until they actually DO something with their massively accumulated power. Given that I have no control of it, basically I just feel more comfortable believing they are doing something that a) uses their power in a way I can perceive as good or at least good-intentioned, which might actually help, b) lines up with the particular set of capabilities and interests. I'd also note that the type of Singularity I'm imagining isn't necessarily AI per se. More of the internet and humanity (or parts of it) merging into a superintelligent consciousness, gradually outsourcing certain brain functions to the increasingly massive processing power of computers.
4magfrump
I do think it's possible and not unlikely that Google is purposefully trying to steer the future in a positive direction; although I think people there are likely to be more skeptical of "singularity" rhetoric than LWers (I know at least three people who have worked at Google and I have skirted the subject sufficiently to feel pretty strongly that they don't have a hidden agenda. This isn't very strong evidence but it's the only evidence I have). I would assign up to a 30% probability or so of "Google is planning something which might be described as preparing to implement a positive singularity." But less than a 5% chance that I would describe it that way, due to more detailed definitions of "singularity" and "positive."
3NancyLebovitz
I don't entirely trust Google because they want everyone else's information to be available. Google is somewhat secretive about its own information. There are good commercial reasons for them to do that, but it does show a lack of consistency.
[-]JamesAndrix720

Panpsychism: All matter has some kind of experience. Atoms have some kind of atomic-qualia that adds up to the things we experience. This seems obviously right to me, but stuff like this is confusing so I'll say 75%

Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.

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[-]Eugine_Nier160

Can you rephrase this statement tabooing the words experience and qualia.

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[-]orthonormal340

If he could, he wouldn't be making that mistake in the first place.

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[-]Will_Newsome670

This is an Irrationality Game comment; do not be too alarmed by its seemingly preposterous nature.

We are living in a simulation (some agent's (agents') computation). Almost certain. >99.5%.

(ETA: For those brave souls who reason in terms of measure, I mean that a non-negligible fraction of my measure is in a simulation. For those brave souls who reason in terms of decision theoretic significantness, screw you, you're ruining my fun and you know what I mean.)

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[-]Will_Newsome130

I am shocked that more people believe in a 95% chance of advanced flying saucers than a 99.5% change of not being in 'basement reality'. Really?! I still think all of you upvoters are irrational! Irrational I say!

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0[anonymous]
Well, from a certain point of view you could see the two propositions as being essentially equivalent... i.e. the inhabitants of a higher layer reality poking through the layers and toying with us (if you had a universe simulation running on your desktop, would you really be able to refrain from fucking with your sims' heads)? So whatever probability you assign to one proposition, your probability for the other shouldn't be too much different.
0LucasSloan
I certainly agree with you now, but it wasn't entirely certain what you meant by your statement. A qualifier might help.
0Will_Newsome
Most won't see the need for precision, but you're right, I should add a qualifier for those who'd (justifiably) like it.
2Perplexed
Help! There is someone reasoning in terms of decision theoretic significantness ruining my fun by telling me that my disagreement with you is meaningless.
2Will_Newsome
Ahhh! Ahhhhh! I am extremely reluctant to go into long explanations here. Have you read the TDT manual though? I think it's up at the singinst.org website now, finally. It might dissolve confusions of interpretation, but no promises. Sorry, it's just a really tricky and confusing topic with lots of different intuitions to take into account and I really couldn't do it justice in a few paragraphs here. :(
5LucasSloan
What do you mean by this? Do you mean "a non-negligible fraction of my measure is in a simulation" in which case you're almost certainly right. Or do you mean "this particular instantiation of me is in a simulation" in which case I'm not sure what it means to assign a probability to the statement.
0Will_Newsome
So you know which I must have meant, then. I do try to be almost certainly right. ;) (Technically, we shouldn't really be thinking about probabilities here either because it's not important and may be meaningless decision theoretically, but I think LW is generally too irrational to have reached the level of sophistication such that many would pick that nit.)
4Nick_Tarleton
I'm surprised to hear you say this. Our point-estimate best model plausibly says so, but, structural uncertainty? (It's not privileging the non-simulation hypothesis to say that structural uncertainty should lower this probability, or is it?)
2Will_Newsome
That is a good question. I feel like asking 'in what direction would structural uncertainty likely bend my thoughts?' leads me to think, from past trends, 'towards the world being bigger, weirder, and more complex than I'd reckoned'. This seems to push higher than 99.5%. If you keep piling on structural uncertainty, like if a lot of things I've learned since becoming a rationalist and hanging out at SIAI become unlearned, then this trend might be changed to a more scientific trend of 'towards the world being bigger, less weird, and simpler than I'd reckoned'. This would push towards lower than 99.5%. What are your thoughts? I realize that probabilities aren't meaningful here, but they're worth naively talking about, I think. Before you consider what you can do decision theoretically you have to think about how much of you is in the hands of someone else, and what their goals might be, and whether or not you can go meta by appeasing those goals instead of your own and the like. (This is getting vaguely crazy, but I don't think that the craziness has warped my thinking too much.) Thus thinking about 'how much measure do I actually affect with these actions' is worth considering.
0wedrifid
That's a good question. My impression is that it is somewhat. But in the figures we are giving here we seem to be trying to convey two distinct concepts (not just likelyhoods).
4Mass_Driver
Propositions about the ultimate nature of reality should never be assigned probability greater than 90% by organic humans, because we don't have any meaningful capabilities for experimentation or testing.
4Will_Newsome
Pah! Real Bayesians don't need experiment or testing; Bayes transcends the epistemological realm of mere Science. We have way more than enough data to make very strong guesses.
2[anonymous]
This raises an interesting point: what do you think about the Presumptuous Philosopher thought experiment?
3Jonathan_Graehl
Yep. Over-reliance on anthropic arguments IMO.
4Will_Newsome
Huh, querying my reasons for thinking 99.5% is reasonable, few are related to anthropics. Most of it is antiprediction about the various implications of a big universe, as well as the antiprediction that we live in such a big universe. (ETA: edited out 'if any', I do indeed have a few arguments from anthropics, but not in the sense of typical anthropic reasoning, and none that can be easily shared or explained. I know that sounds bad. Oh well.)
2AlephNeil
If 'living in a simulation' includes those scenarios where the beings running the simulation never intervene then I think it's a non-trivial philosophical question whether "we are living in a simulation" actually means anything. Even assuming it does, Hilary Putnam made (or gave a tantalising sketch of) an argument that even if we were living in a simulation, a person claiming "we are living in a simulation" would be incorrect. On the other hand, if 'living in a simulation' is restricted to those scenarios where there is a two-way interaction between beings 'inside' and 'outside' the simulation then surely everything we know about science - the uniformity and universality of physical laws - suggests that this is false. At least, it wouldn't merit 99.5% confidence. (The counterarguments are essentially the same as those against the existence of a God who intervenes.)
5Will_Newsome
It's a nontrivial philosophical question whether 'means anything' means anything here. I would think 'means anything' should mean 'has decision theoretic significance'. In which case knowing that you're in a simulation could mean a lot. First off, even if the simulators don't intervene, we still intervene on the the simulators just by virtue of our existence. Decision theoretically it's still fair game, unless our utility function is bounded in a really contrived and inelegant way. (Your link is way too long for me to read. But I feel confident in making the a priori guess that Putnam's just wrong, and is trying too hard to fit non-obvious intuitive reasoning into a cosmological framework that is fundamentally mistaken (i.e., non-ensemble).) What if I told you I'm a really strong and devoted rationalist who has probably heard of all the possible counterarguments and has explicitly taken into account both outside view and structural uncertainty considerations, and yet still believes 99.5% to be reasonable, if not perhaps a little on the overconfident side?
2AlephNeil
Oh sure - non-trivial philosophical questions are funny like that. Anyway, my idea is that for any description of a universe, certain elements of that description will be ad hoc mathematical 'scaffolding' which could easily be changed without meaningfully altering the 'underlying reality'. A basic example of this would be a choice of co-ordinates in Newtonian physics. It doesn't mean anything to say that this body rather than that one is "at rest". Now, specifying a manner in which the universe is being simulated is like 'choosing co-ordinates' in that, to do a simulation, you need to make a bunch of arbitrary ad hoc choices about how to represent things numerically (you might actually need to be able to say "this body is at rest"). Of course, you also need to specify the laws of physics of the 'outside universe' and how the simulation is being implemented and so on, but perhaps the difference between this and a simple 'choice of co-ordinates' is a difference in degree rather than in kind. (An 'opaque' chunk of physics wrapped in a 'transparent' mathematical skin of varying thickness.) I'm not saying this account is unproblematic - just that these are some pretty tough metaphysical questions, and I see no grounds for (near-)certainty about their correct resolution. He's not talking about ensemble vs 'single universe' models of reality, he's talking about reference - what's it's possible for someone to refer to. He may be wrong - I'm not sure - but even when he's wrong he's usually wrong in an interesting way. (Like this.) I'm unmoved - it's trite to point out that even smart people tend to be overconfident in beliefs that they've (in some way) invested in. (And please note that the line you were responding to is specifically about the scenario where there is 'intervention'.)
2wedrifid
Err... I'm not intimately acquainted with the sport myself... What's the approximate difficulty rating of that kind of verbal gymnastics stunt again? ;)
2AlephNeil
It's a tricky one - read the paper. I think what he's saying is that there's no way for a person in a simulation (assuming there is no intervention) to refer to the 'outside' world in which the simulation is taking place. Here's a crude analogy: Suppose you were a two-dimensional being living on a flat plane, embedded in an ambient 3D space. Then Putnam would want to say that you cannot possibly refer to "up" and "down". Even if you said "there is a sphere above me" and there was a sphere above you, you would be 'incorrect' (in the same paradoxical way).
6MugaSofer
But ... we can describe spaces with more than three dimensions.
1timtyler
So: you think there's a god who created the universe?!? Care to lay out the evidence? Or is this not the place for that?
2Will_Newsome
I really couldn't; it's such a large burden of proof to justify 99.5% certainty that I would have to be extremely careful in laying out all of my disjunctions and explaining all of my intuitions and listing every smart rationalist who agreed with me, and that's just not something I can do in a blog comment.
0A1987dM
Upvoted mainly because of the last sentence (though upvoting it does coincide with what I'd have to do according to the rules of the game).
0[anonymous]
I'm confused about the justification for reasoning in terms of measure. While the MUH (or at least its cousin the CUH) seems to be preferred from complexity considerations, I'm unsure of how to account for the fact that it is unknown whether the cosmological measure problem is solvable. Also, what exactly do you consider making up "your measure"? Just isomorphic computations?
1Will_Newsome
Naively, probabilistically isomorphic computations, where the important parts of the isomorphism are whatever my utility function values... such that, on a scale from 0 to 1, computations like Luke Grecki might be .9 'me' based on qualia valued by my utility function, or 1.3 'me' if Luke Grecki qualia are more like the qualia my utility function would like to have if I knew more, thought faster, and was better at meditation.
0[anonymous]
Ah, you just answered the easier part!
2Will_Newsome
Yeah... I ain't a mathematician! If 'measure' turns out not to be the correct mathematical concept, then I think that something like it, some kind of 'reality fluid' as Eliezer calls it, will take its place.
0Liron
99.5% is just too certain. Even if you think piles of realities nested 100 deep are typical, you might only assign 99% to not being in the basement.
0Perplexed
How is that different than "I believe that I am a simulation with non-negligible probability"? I'm leaving you upvoted. I think the probability is negligible however you play with the ontology.
2Will_Newsome
If the same computation is being run in so-called 'basement reality' and run on a simulator's computer, you're in both places; it's meaningless to talk about the probability of being in one or the other. But you can talk about the relative number of computations of you that are in 'basement reality' versus on simulators' computers. This also breaks down when you start reasoning decision theoretically, but most LW people don't do that, so I'm not too worried about it. In a dovetailed ensemble universe, it doesn't even really make sense to talk about any 'basement' reality, since the UTM computing the ensemble eventually computes itself, ad infinitum. So instead you start reasoning about 'basement' as computations that are the product of e.g. cosmological/natural selection-type optimization processes versus the product of agent-type optimization processes (like humans or AGIs). The only reason you'd expect there to be humans in the first place is if they appeared in 'basement' level reality, and in a universal dovetailer computing via complexity, there's then a strong burden of proof on those who wish to postulate the extra complexity of all those non-basement agent-optimized Earths. Nonetheless I feel like I can bear the burden of proof quite well if I throw a few other disjunctions in. (As stated, it's meaningless decision theoretically, but meaningful if we're just talking about the structure of the ensemble from a naive human perspective.)
2Perplexed
Why meaningless? It seems I can talk about one copy of me being here, now, and one copy of myself being off in the future in a simulation. Perhaps I do not know which one I am, but I don't think I am saying something meaningless to assert that I (this copy of me that you hear speaking) am the one in basement reality, and hence that no one in any reality knows in advance that I am about to close this sentence with a hash mark# I'm not asking you to bear the burden of proving that non-basement versions are numerous. I'm asking you to justify your claim that when I use the word "I" in this universe, it is meaningless to say that I'm not talking about the fellow saying "I" in a simulation and that he is not talking (in part) about me. Surely "I" can be interpreted to mean the local instance.
-1LucasSloan
Both copies will do exactly the same thing, right down to their thoughts, right? So to them, what does it matter which one they are? It isn't just that given that they have no way to test, this means they'll never know, it's more fundamental than that. It's kinda like how if there's an invisible, immaterial dragon in your garage, there might as well not be a dragon there at all, right? If there's no way, even in principle, to tell the difference between the two states, there might as well not be any difference at all.
0Perplexed
I must be missing a subtlety here. I began by asking "Is saying X different from saying Y?" I seem to be getting the answer "Yes, they are different. X is meaningless because it can't be distinguished from Y."
3LucasSloan
Ah, I think I see your problem. You insist on seeing the universe from the perspective of the computer running the program - and in this case, we can say "yes, in memory position #31415926 there's a human in basement reality and in memory position #2718281828 there's an identical human in a deeper simulation". However, those humans can't tell that. They have no way of determining which is true of them, even if they know that there is a computer that could point to them in its memory, because they are identical. You are every (sufficiently) identical copy of yourself.
1Perplexed
No, you don't see the problem. The problem is that Will_Newsome began by stating: Which is fine. But now I am being told that my counter claim "I am not living in a simulation" is meaningless. Meaningless because I can't prove my statement empirically. What we seem to have here is very similar to Godel's version of St. Anselm's "ontological" proof of the existence of a simulation (i.e. God).
-3LucasSloan
Oh. Did you see my comment asking him to tell whether he meant "some of our measure is in a simulation" or "this particular me is in a simulation"? The first question is asking whether or not we believe that the computer exists (ie, if we were looking at the computer-that-runs-reality could we notice that some copies of us are in simulations or not) and the second is the one I have been arguing is meaningless (kinda).
0Will_Newsome
Right; I thought the intuitive gap here was only about ensemble universes, but it also seems that there's an intuitive gap that needs to be filled with UDT-like reasoning, where all of your decisions are for also decisions for agents sufficiently like you in the relevant sense (which differs for every decision).
0[anonymous]
I don't get this. Consider the following ordering of programs; T' < T iff T can simulate T'. More precisely: T' < T iff for each x' there exists an x such that T'(x') = T(x) It's not immediately clear to me that this ordering shouldn't have any least elements. If it did, such elements could be thought of as basements. I don't have any idea about whether or not we could be part of such a basement computation. I still think your distinction between products of cosmological-type optimization processes and agent-type optimization processes is important though.
-3Kaj_Sotala
My stance on the simualtion hypothesis: Presume that there is an infinite amount of "stuff" in the universe. This can be a a Tegmarkian Level IV universe (all possible mathematical structures exist), or alternatively there might only be an infinite amount of matter in this universe. The main assumption we need is that there is an infinite amount of "stuff", enough that anything in the world gets duplicated an infinite number of times. (Alternatively, it could finite but insanely huge.) Now this means that there are an infinite number of Earths like ours. It also means that there is an infinite number of planets that are running different simulations. An infinite number of those simulations will, by coincidence or purpose, happen to be simulating the exact same Earth as ours. This means that there exist an infinite number of Earths like ours that are in a simulation, and an infinite number of Earths like ours that are not in a simulation. Thus it becomes meaningless to ask whether or not we exist in a simulation. We exist in every possible world containing us that is a simulation, and exist in every possible world containing us that is not a simulation. (I'm not sure if I should upvote or downvote you.)
6Eugine_Nier
Just because a set is infinite doesn't mean it's meaningless to speak of measures on it.
5Perplexed
The infinite cardinality of the set doesn't preclude the bulk of the measure being attached to a single point of that set. For Solomonof-like reasons, it certainly makes sense to me to attach the bulk of the measure to the "basement reality"
2Will_Newsome
(FWIW I endorse this line of reasoning, and still think 99.5% is reasonable. Bwa ha ha.) (That is, I also think it makes sense to attach the bulk of the measure to basement reality, but sense happens to be wrong here, and insanity happens to be right. The universe is weird. I continue to frustratingly refuse to provide arguments for this, though.) (Also, though I and I think most others agree that measure should be assigned via some kind of complexity prior (universal or speed priors are commonly suggested), others like Tegmark are drawn towards a uniform prior. I forget why.)
1Perplexed
I wouldn't have thought that a uniform prior would even make sense unless the underlying space has a metric (a bounded metric, in fact). Certainly, a Haar measure on a recursively nested space (simulations within simulations) would have to assign the bulk of its measure to the basement. Well, live and learn.
0Will_Newsome
Yeah, I also don't understand Tegmark's reasoning (which might have changed anyway).
0Will_Newsome
Right, I agree with Eugine Nier: the relative measures are important. You are in tons of universes at once, but some portion of your measure is simulated, and some not. What's the portion?
[-]jferguson650

The surface of Earth is actually a relatively flat disc accelerating through space "upward" at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2, not a globe. The north pole is at about the center of the disc, while Antarctica is the "pizza crust" on the outside. The rest of the universe is moving and accelerating such that all the observations seen today by amateur astronomers are produced. The true nature of the sun, moon, stars, other planets, etc. is not yet well-understood by science. A conspiracy involving NASA and other space agencies, all astronauts, and probably at least some professional astronomers is a necessary element. I'm pretty confident this isn't true, much more due to the conspiracy element than the astronomy element, but I don't immediately dismiss it where I imagine most LW-ers would, so let's say 1%.

The Flat Earth Society has more on this, if you're interested. It would probably benefit from a typical, interested LW participant. (This belief isn't the FES orthodoxy, but it's heavily based on a spate of discussion I had on the FES forums several years ago.)

Edit: On reflection, 1% is too high. Instead, let's say "Just the barest inkling more plausible than something immediately and rigorously disprovable with household items and a free rainy afternoon."

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[-]Tuna-Fish200

Discussing about the probability of wacky conspiracies is absolutely the wrong way to disprove this. The correct method is a telescope, a quite wide sign with a distance scale drawn on it in very visible colours, and the closest 200m+ body of water you can find.

As long as you are close enough to the ground, the curvature of the earth is very visible, even over surprisingly small distances. I have done this as a child.

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[-]Jack160

Even with the 1% credence this strikes me as the most wrong belief in this thread, way more off than 95% for UFOs. You're basically giving up science since Copernicus, picking an arbitrary spot in the remaining probability space and positing a massive and unmotivated conspiracy. Like many, I'm uncomfortable making precise predictions at very high and very low levels of confidence but I think you are overconfident by many orders of magnitude.

Upvoted.

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-6jferguson
[-]nick012000620

If an Unfriendly AI exists, it will take actions to preserve whatever goals it might possess. This will include the usage of time travel devices to eliminate all AI researchers who weren't involved in its creation, as soon as said AI researchers have reached a point where they possess the technical capability to produce an AI. As a result, Eleizer will probably have time travelling robot assassins coming back in time to kill him within the next twenty or thirty years, if he isn't the first one to create an AI. (90%)

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[-]RobinZ250

What reason do you have for assigning such high probability to time travel being possible?

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3Perplexed
And what reason do you have for assigning a high probability to an unfriendly AI coming into existence with Eliezer not involved in its creation? ;) Edit: I meant what reason do you (nic12000) have? Not you (RobinZ). Sorry for the confusion.
2RobinZ
I have not assigned a high probability to that outcome, but I would not find it surprising if someone else has assigned a probability as high as 95% - my set of data is small. On the other hand, time travel at all is such a flagrant violation of known physics that it seems positively ludicrous that it should be assigned a similarly high probability. Edit: Of course, evidence for that 95%+ would be appreciated.
0nick012000
Well, most of the arguments against it are, to my knowledge, start with something along the lines of "If time travel exists, causality would be fucked up, and therefore time travel can't exist," though it might not be framed quite that implicitly. Also, if FTL travel exists, either general relativity is wrong, or time travel exists, and it might be possible to create FTL travel by harnessing the Casimir effect or something akin to it on a larger scale, and if it is possible to do so, a recursively improving AI will figure out how to do so.
5RobinZ
That ... doesn't seem quite like a reason to believe. Remember: as a general rule, any random hypothesis you consider is likely to be wrong unless you already have evidence for it. All you have to do is look at the gallery of failed atomic models to see how difficult it is to even invent the correct answer, however simple it appears in retrospect.
0rabidchicken
nick voted up, robin voted down... This feels pretty weird.
[-]Nick_Tarleton240

If it can go back that far, why wouldn't it go back as far as possible and just start optimizing the universe?

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0Normal_Anomaly
My P(this|time travel possible) is much higher than my P(this), but P(this) is still very low. Why wouldn't the UFAI have sent the assassins to back before he started spreading bad-for-the-UFAI memes (or just after so it would be able to know who to kill)?
[-]nick012000610

God exists, and He created the universe. He prefers not to violate the physical laws of the universe He created, so (almost) all of the miracles of the Bible can be explained by suspiciously fortuitously timed natural events, and angels are actually just robots that primitive people misinterpreted. Their flaming swords are laser turrets. (99%)

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9Swimmy
You have my vote for most irrational comment of the thread. Even flying saucers aren't as much of a leap.
8wedrifid
Wait... was the grandparent serious? He's talking about the flaming swords of the angels being laser turrents! That's got to be tongue in cheek!
9RobinZ
It is possible that nick012000 is violating Rule 4 - but his past posting history contains material which I found consistent with him being serious here. It would behoove him to confirm or deny this.
8RobinZ
I see in your posting history that you identify as a Christian - but this story contains more details than I would assign a 99% probability to even if they were not unorthodox. Would you be interested in elaborating on your evidence?
0Vladimir_Nesov
We should learn to present this argument correctly, since complexity of hypothesis doesn't imply its improbability. Furthermore, the prior argument drives probability through the floor, making 99% no more surprising than 1%, and is thus an incorrect argument if you wouldn't use it for 1% as well (would you?).
[-]RobinZ130

I don't feel like arguing about priors - good evidence will overwhelm ordinary priors in many circumstances - but in a story like the one he told, each of the following needs to be demonstrated:

  1. God exists.
  2. God created the universe.
  3. God prefers not to violate natural laws.
  4. The stories about people seeing angels are based on real events.
  5. The angels seen during these events were actually just robots.
  6. The angels seen during these events were wielding laser turrets.

Claims 4-6 are historical, and at best it is difficult to establish 99% confidence in that field for anything prior to - I think - the twentieth century. I don't even think people have 99% confidence in the current best-guess location of the podium where the Gettysburg Address was delivered. Even spotting him 1-3 the claim is overconfident, and that was what I meant when I gave my response.

But yes - I'm not good at arguing.

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-7Vladimir_Nesov
[-]dyokomizo520

There's no way to create a non-vague, predictive, model of human behavior, because most human behavior is (mostly) random reaction to stimuli.

Corollary 1: most models explain after the fact and require both the subject to be aware of the model's predictions and the predictions to be vague and underspecified enough to make astrology seems like spacecraft engineering.

Corollary 2: we'll spend most of our time in drama trying to understand the real reasons or the truth about our/other's behavior even when presented with evidence pointing to the randomness of our actions. After the fact we'll fabricate an elaborate theory to explain everything, including the evidence, but this theory will have no predictive power.

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[-]orthonormal100

This (modulo the chance it was made up) is pretty strong evidence that you're wrong. I wish it was professionally ethical for psychologists to do this kind of thing intentionally.

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[-]Blueberry140

Here's another case:

"Let me get this straight. We had sex. I wind up in the hospital and I can't remember anything?" Alice said. There was a slight pause. "You owe me a 30-carat diamond!" Alice quipped, laughing. Within minutes, she repeated the same questions in order, delivering the punch line in the exact tone and inflection. It was always a 30-carat diamond. "It was like a script or a tape," Scott said. "On the one hand, it was very funny. We were hysterical. It was scary as all hell." While doctors tried to determine what ailed Alice, Scott and other grim-faced relatives and friends gathered at the hospital. Surrounded by anxious loved ones, Alice blithely cracked jokes (the same ones) for hours.

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6AdeleneDawner
They could probably do some relevant research by talking to Alzheimer's patients - they wouldn't get anything as clear as that, I think, but I expect they'd be able to get statistically-significant data.
8[anonymous]
How detailed of a model are you thinking of? It seems like there are at least easy and somewhat trivial predictions we could make e.g. that a human will eat chocolate instead of motor oil.
4dyokomizo
I would classify such kinds of predictions as vague, after all they match equally well for every human being in almost any condition.
[-]AdeleneDawner100

How about a prediction that a particular human will eat bacon instead of jalapeno peppers? (I'm particularly thinking of myself, for whom that's true, and a vegetarian friend, for whom the opposite is true.)

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-2dyokomizo
This model seems to be reducible to "people will eat what they prefer". A good model would be able to reduce the number of bits to describe a behavior, if the model requires to keep a log (e.g. what particular humans prefer to eat) to predict something, it's not much less complex (i.e. bit encoding) than the behavior.
6AdeleneDawner
Maybe I've misunderstood. It seems to me that your original prediction has to refer either to humans as a group, in which case Luke's counterexample is a good one, or humans as individuals, in which case my counterexample is a good one. It also seems to me that either counterexample can be refined into a useful prediction: Humans in general don't eat petroleum products. I don't eat spicy food. Corvi doesn't eat meat. All of those classes of things can be described more efficiently than making lists of the members of the sets.
-2newerspeak
No, because preferences are revealed by behavior. Using revealed preferences is a good heuristic generally, but it's required if you're right that explanations for behavior are mostly post-hoc rationalizations. So: People eat what they prefer. What they prefer is what they wind up having eaten. Ergo, people eat what they eat.
1Strange7
Consistency of preferences is at least some kind of a prediction.
7Douglas_Knight
I think "vague" is a poor word choice for that concept. "(not) informative" is a technical term with this meaning. There are probably words which are clearer to the layman.
2dyokomizo
I agree vague is not a good word choice. Irrelevant (using relevancy as it's used to describe search results) is a better word.
5Perplexed
Downvoted in agreement. But I think that the randomness comes from what programmers call "race conditions" in the timing of external stimuli vs internal stimuli. Still, these race conditions make prediction impossible as a practical matter.
[-]mattnewport500

  • A Singleton AI is not a stable equilibrium and therefore it is highly unlikely that a Singleton AI will dominate our future light cone (90%).

  • Superhuman intelligence will not give an AI an insurmountable advantage over collective humanity (75%).

  • Intelligent entities with values radically different to humans will be much more likely to engage in trade and mutual compromise than to engage in violence and aggression directed at humans (60%).

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4wedrifid
I want to upvote each of these points a dozen times. Then another few for the first. It's the most stable equilibrium I can conceive of. ie. More stable than if all evidence of life was obliterated from the universe.
2mattnewport
I guess I'm playing the game right then :) I'm curious, do you also think that a singleton is a desirable outcome? It's possible my thinking is biased because I view this outcome as a dystopia and so underestimate it's probability due to motivated cognition.
4Mass_Driver
Funny you should mention it; that's exactly what I was thinking. I have a friend (also named matt, incidentally) who I strongly believe is guilty of motivated cognition about the desirability of a singleton AI (he thinks it is likely, and therefore is biased toward thinking it would be good) and so I leaped naturally to the ad hominem attack you level against yourself. :-)
1wedrifid
Most of them, no. Some, yes. Particularly since the alternative is the inevitable loss of everything that is valuable to me in the universe.
7Will_Newsome
This is incredibly tangential, but I was talking to a friend earlier and I realized how difficult it is to instill in someone the desire for altruism. Her reasoning was basically, "Yeah... I feel like I should care about cancer, and I do care a little, but honestly, I don't really care." This sort of off-hand egoism is something I wasn't used to; most smart people try to rationalize selfishness with crazy beliefs. But it's hard to argue with "I just don't care" other than to say "I bet you will have wanted to have cared", which is gramatically horrible and a pretty terrible argument.
9Jordan
I respect blatant apathy a whole hell of a lot more than masked apathy, which is how I would qualify the average person's altruism.
0DanielLC
I agree with your second. Was your third supposed to be high or low? I think it's low, but not unreasonably so.
0mattnewport
I expected the third to be higher than most less wrongers would estimate.
0[anonymous]
I'm almost certainly missing some essential literature, but what does it mean for a mind to be a stable equilibrium?
0[anonymous]
I'm almost certainly missing some essential literature, but what does it mean for a mind to be a stable equilibrium?
6mattnewport
Stable equilibrium here does not refer to a property of a mind. It refers to a state of the universe. I've elaborated on this view a little here before but I can't track the comment down at the moment. Essentially my reasoning is that in order to dominate the physical universe an AI will need to deal with fundamental physical restrictions such as the speed of light. This means it will have spatially distributed sub-agents pursuing sub-goals intended to further its own goals. In some cases these sub-goals may involve conflict with other agents (this would be particularly true during the initial effort to become a singleton). Maintaining strict control over sub-agents imposes restrictions on the design and capabilities of sub-agents which means it is likely that they will be less effective at achieving their sub-goals than sub-agents without such design restrictions. Sub-agents with significant autonomy may pursue actions that conflict with the higher level goals of the singleton. Human (and biological) history is full of examples of this essential conflict. In military scenarios for example there is a tradeoff between tight centralized control and combat effectiveness - units that have a degree of authority to take decisions in the field without the delays or overhead imposed by communication times are generally more effective than those with very limited freedom to act without direct orders. Essentially I don't think a singleton AI can get away from the principal-agent problem. Variations on this essential conflict exist throughout the human and natural worlds and appear to me to be fundamental consequences of the nature of our universe.
4orthonormal
Ant colonies don't generally exhibit the principal-agent problem. I'd say with high certainty that the vast majority of our trouble with it is due to having the selfishness of an individual replicator hammered into each of us by our evolution.
3Eugine_Nier
I'm not a biologist, but given that animal bodies exhibit principal-agent problems, e.g., auto-immune diseases and cancers, I suspect ant colonies (and large AI's) would also have these problems.
7orthonormal
Cancer is a case where an engineered genome could improve over an evolved one. We've managed to write software (for the most vital systems) that can copy without error, with such high probability that we expect never to see that part malfunction. One reason that evolution hasn't constructed sufficiently good error correction is that the most obvious way to do this makes the genome totally incapable of new mutations, which works great until the niche changes.
1Eugine_Nier
However, an AI-subagent would need to be able to adjust itself to unexpected conditions, and thus can't simply rely on digital copying to prevent malfunctions.
2orthonormal
So you agree that it's possible in principle for a singleton AI to remain a singleton (provided it starts out alone in the cosmos), but you believe it would sacrifice significant adaptability and efficiency by doing so. Perhaps; I don't know either way. But the AI might make that sacrifice if it concludes that (eventually) losing singleton status would cost its values far more than the sacrifice is worth (e.g. if losing singleton status consigns the universe to a Hansonian hardscrapple race to burn the cosmic commons(pdf) rather than a continued time of plenty).
0Eugine_Nier
I believe it would at the very least have to sacrifice at least all adaptability by doing so, as in only sending out nodes with all instructions in ROM and instructions to periodically rest all non-ROM memory and shelf-destruct if it notices any failures of its triple redundancy ROM. As well as an extremely strong directive against anything that would let nodes store long term state.
5orthonormal
Remember, you're the one trying to prove impossibility of a task here. Your inability to imagine a solution to the problem is only very weak evidence.
0mattnewport
I don't know whether ant colonies exhibit principal-agent problems (though I'd expect that they do to some degree) but I know there is evidence of nepotism in queen rearing in bee colonies where individuals are not all genetically identical (evidence of workers favouring the most closely related larvae when selecting larvae to feed royal jelly to create a queen). The fact that ants from different colonies commonly exhibit aggression towards each other indicates limits to scaling such high levels of group cohesion. Though supercolonies do appear to exist they have not come to total dominance. The largest and most complex examples of group coordination we know of are large human organizations and these show much greater levels of internal goal conflicts than much simpler and more spatially concentrated insect colonies.
0orthonormal
I'm analogizing a singleton to a single ant colony, not to a supercolony.
0Eugine_Nier
I agree with your first two, but am dubious about your third.
3mattnewport
Two points that influence my thinking on that claim: 1. Gains from trade have the potential to be greater with greater difference in values between the two trading agents. 2. Destruction tends to be cheaper than creation. Intelligent agents that recognize this have an incentive to avoid violent conflict.
[-]Pavitra470

75%: Large groups practicing Transcendental Meditation or TM-Sidhis measurably decrease crime rates.

At an additional 20% (net 15%): The effect size depends on the size of the group in a nonlinear fashion; specifically, there is a threshhold at which most of the effect appears, and the threshhold is at .01*pop (1% of the total population) for TM or sqrt(.01*pop) for TM-Sidhis.

(Edited for clarity.)

(Update: I no longer believe this. New estimates: 2% for the main hypothesis, additional 50% (net 1%) for the secondary.)

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2Risto_Saarelma
Just to make sure, is this talking about something different from people committing less crimes when they are themselves practicing TM or in daily contact with someone who does? I don't really understand the second paragraph. What arm TM-Sidhis, are they something distinct from regular TM (are these different types of practicioners). And what's with the sqrt(1%)? One in ten people in the total population need to be TM-Sidhis for the crime rate reduction effect to kick in?
0Pavitra
I'm not sure if personal contact with practitioners has an effect, but the studies I'm thinking of were on the level of cities -- put a group of meditators in Chicago, the Chicago crime rate goes down. TM-Sidhis is a separate/additional practice that has TM as a dependency in the sense of package management. If you know TM, you can learn TM-Sidhis. Sorry, I meant sqrt(.01p) where p is the population of the group to be affected. For example, a city of one million people would require ten thousand TM meditators or 100 TM-Sidhis meditators.
0Risto_Saarelma
Right, thanks for the clarification. This definitely puts the claim into upvote territory for me.
0magfrump
No vote: I agree with the hypothesis that appropriate meditation practice could reduce crime rates, but I haven't the slightest idea how to evaluate the specific population figures.
0Pavitra
Can you clarify the question, or does the whole statement seem meaningless?
2magfrump
I don't really have a question. You have a hypothesis: Transcendental meditation practitioners will reduce the crime rate in their cities in a nonlinear fashion satisfying certain identities. The statement I have written above I agree with, and would therefore normally downvote. However, you posit specific figures for the reduction of the crime rate. I have no experience with city planning or crime statistics or population figures, and hence have no real basis to judge your more specific claim. If I disagreed with it on a qualitative level, then I would upvote. If I had any sense of what your numbers meant I might think that they were about right or too high or too low but since I don't I'm not able to evaluate it. But not-evaluating because I don't know how to engage the numbers is different than not-evaluating because I didn't read it, so I wanted to make the difference clear; since the point of the game is to engage with ideas that may be controversial.
0Pavitra
I'm still not sure I understand what you mean, but let me take a shot in the dark: Out of the variance in crime rate that depends causally on the size of the meditating group, most of that variance depends on whether or not the size of the group is greater than a certain value that I'll call x. If the meditating group is practicing only TM, then x is equal to 1% of the size of the population to be affected, and if the meditating group is practicing TM-Sidhis, then x is equal to the square root of 1% of the population to be affected. For example, with a TM-only group in a city of ten thousand people, increasing the size of the group from 85 to 95 meditators should have a relatively small effect on the city's crime rate, increasing from 95 to 105 should have a relatively large effect, and increasing from 105 to 115 should have a relatively small effect. Edit: Or did you mean my confidence values? The second proposition (about the nonlinear relationship) I assign 20% confidence conditional on the truth of the first proposition. Since I assign the first proposition 75% confidence, and since the second proposition essentially implies the first, it follows that the second proposition receives a confidence of (0.2 * 0.75)=15%.
3magfrump
I understand what you meant by your proposition, I'm not trying to ask for clarification. I assume you have some model of TM-practitioner behavior or social networking or something which justifies your idea that there is such a threshold in that place. I do not have any models of: how TM is practiced, and by whom; how much TM effects someone's behavior, and consequently the behavior of those they interact with; how much priming effects like signs or posters for TM groups or instruction have on the general populace; how much the spread of TM practitioners increases the spread of advertisement. I would not be hugely surprised if it were the case that, given 1% of the population practiced TM, this produced enough advertisement to reach nearly all of the population (i.e. a sign on the side of a couple well-traveled highways) or enough social connections that everyone in a city was within one or two degrees of separation of a TM practitioner. But I also wouldn't be surprised if the threshold was 5%, or .1%, or if there was no threshold, or if there was a threshold in rural areas but not urban areas, or conservative-leaning areas but not liberal-leaning areas, or the reverse. I have no model of how these things would go about, so I don't feel comfortable agreeing or disagreeing. Certainly fewer than 15% of the possible functions of TM-practice vs crime are as you describe, but it is certainly far more likely that your hypothesis is true compared with the hypothesis "even one TM-practitioner makes the crime rate 100%" but I don't know if it's 5 bits more relevant or 10 bits more relevant, and I don't know what my probabilities should be even if I knew how many bits of credence I should give a hypothesis. If you know something more than I do (which is to say, anything at all) about social networking, advertising, or the meditation itself, or the people who practice it, then you might reasonably have a good hypothesis. But I don't, so I can only take the outside view,
0Pavitra
I understand now. The causally primary reason for my belief is that while I was growing up in a TM-practicing community, I was told repeatedly that there were many scientific studies published in respectable journals demonstrating this effect, and the "square root of one percent" was a specific point of doctrine. I've had some trouble finding the articles in question on academically respectable, non-paywalled sites (though I didn't try for more than five or ten minutes), but a non-neutrally-hosted bibliography-ish thing is here. (Is there a general lack of non-paywalled academically respectable online archives of scientific papers?) . (Edited to add: if anyone decides to click any of the videos on that page, rather than just following text links, I'd assign Fred Travis the highest probability of saying anything worth hearing.) . (Edited again: I was going to say this when I first wrote this comment, but forgot: The obvious control would be against other meditation techniques. I don't think there are studies with this specific control on the particular effect in my top-level comment, but there are such studies on e.g. medical benefits.) . (Edited yet again: I've now actually watched the videos in question. The unlabeled video at the top (John Hagelin) is a lay-level overview of studies that you can read for yourself through text links. (That is, you can read the studies, not the overview.) Gary Kaplan is philosophizing with little to no substance in the sense of expectation-constraint, and conditional on the underlying phenomena being real his explanation is probably about as wrong as, say, quantum decoherence. Nancy Lonsdorf is arguing rhetorically for ideas whose truth is almost entirely dependent on the validity of the studies in question and that follow from such validity in a trivial and straightforward fashion. Some people might need what she's saying pointed out to them, but probably not the readers of Less Wrong. Fred Travis goes into more crunch
0magfrump
Wow that was a super in depth response! Thanks, I'll check it out if I have time.
[-]Simon Fischer460

There is no such thing as general intelligence, i.e. an algorithm that is "capable of behaving intelligently over many domains" if not specifically designed for these domain(s). As a corollar, AI will not go FOOM. (80% confident)

EDIT: Quote from here

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4wedrifid
Do you apply this to yourself?
3Simon Fischer
Yes! Humans are "designed" to act intelligently in the physical world here on earth, we have complex adaptations for this environment. I don't think we are capable of acting effectively in "strange" environments, e.g. we are bad at predicting quantum mechanical systems, programming computers, etc.
3RomanDavis
But we can recursively self optimize ourselves for understanding mechanical systems or programming computers, not infinitely, of course, but with different hardware, it seems extremely plausible to smash through whatever ceiling a human might have.with the brute force of many calculated iterations of whatever humans are using, And this is before the computer uses it's knowledge to reoptimize it's optimization process.
1Simon Fischer
I understand the concept of recursive self-optimization und I don't consider it to be very implausible. Yet I am very sceptical, is there any evidence that algorithm-space has enough structure to allow for effective search to allow such an optimization? I'm also not convinced that the human mind is good counterexample, e.g. I do not know how much I could improve on a the sourcecode of a simulation of my brain once the simulation itself runs effectively.
3wedrifid
I count "algorithm-space is really really really big" as at least some form of evidence. ;) Mind you by "is there any evidence?" you really mean "does the evidence lead to a high assigned probability?" That being the case "No Free Lunch" must also be considered. Even so NFL in this case mostly suggests that a general intelligence algorithm will be systematically bad at being generally stupid. Considerations that lead me to believe that a general intelligence algorithm are likely include the observation that we can already see progressively more general problem solving processes in evidence just by looking at mammals. I also take more evidence from humanity than you do. Not because I think humans are good at general intelligence. We suck at it, it's something that has been tacked on to our brains relatively recently and it far less efficient than our more specific problem solving facilities. But the point is that we can do general intelligence of a form eventually if we dedicate ourselves to the problem.
2Risto_Saarelma
You're putting 'effectively' here in place of 'intelligently' in the original assertion.
0Simon Fischer
I understand "capable of behaving intelligently" to mean "capable of achieving complex goals in complex environments", do you disagree?
0Risto_Saarelma
I don't disagree. Are you saying that humans aren't capable of achieving complex goals in the domains of quantum mechanics or computer programming?
1Simon Fischer
This is of course a matter of degree, but basically yes!
0Risto_Saarelma
Can you give any idea what these complex goals would look like? Or conversely, describe some complex goals humans can achieve, which are fundamentally beyond an entity with a similar abstract reasoning capabilities as humans have, but lack some of humans' native capabilities for dealing more efficiently with certain types of problems? The obvious examples are problems where a slow reaction time will lead to failure, but these don't seem to tell that much about the general complexity handling abilities of the agents.
2Simon Fischer
I'll try to give examples: For computer programming: Given a simulation of a human brain, improve it so that the simulated human is significantly more intelligent. For quantum mechanics: Design a high-temperature superconductor from scratch. Are humans better than brute-force at a multi-dimensional version of chess where we can't use our visual cortex?
0wedrifid
We have a way to use brute force to achieve general optimisation goals? That seems like a good start to me!
0Simon Fischer
Not a good start if we are facing exponential search-spaces! If brute-force would work, I imagine the AI-problem would be solved?
0wedrifid
Not particularly. :) But it would constitute an in principle method of bootstrapping a more impressive kind of general intelligence. I actually didn't expect you would concede the ability to brute force 'general optimisation' - the ability to notice the brute forced solution is more than half the problem. From there it is just a matter of time to discover an algorithm that can do the search efficiently. Not necessarily. Biases could easily have made humans worse than brute-force.
0Simon Fischer
Please give evidence that "a more impressive kind of general intelligence" actually exists!
5wedrifid
Nod. I noticed your other comment after I wrote the grandparent. I replied there and I do actually consider your question there interesting, even though my conclusions are far different to yours. Note that I've tried to briefly answer what I consider a much stronger variation of your fundamental question. I think that the question you have actually asked is relatively trivial compared to what you could have asked so I would be doing you and the topic a disservice by just responding to the question itself. Some notes for reference: * Demands of the general form "Where is the evidence for?" are somewhat of a hangover from traditional rational 'debate' mindsets where the game is one of social advocacy of a position. Finding evidence for something is easy but isn't the sort of habit I like to encourage in myself. Advocacy is bad for thinking (but good for creating least-bad justice systems given human limitations). * "More impressive than humans" is a ridiculously low bar. It would be absolutely dumbfoundingly surprising if humans just happened to be the best 'general intelligence' we could arrive at in the local area. We haven't had a chance to even reach a local minimum of optimising DNA and protein based mammalian general intelligences. Selection pressures are only superficially in favour of creating general intelligence and apart from that the flourishing of human civilisation and intellectual enquiry happened basically when we reached the minimum level to support it. Civilisation didn't wait until our brains reached the best level DNA could support before it kicked in. * A more interesting question is whether it is possible to create a general intelligence algorithm that can in principle handle most any problem, given unlimited resources and time to do so. This is as opposed to progressively more complex problems requiring algorithms of progressively more complexity even to solve in principle. * Being able to 'brute force' a solution to any problem is actuall
0Simon Fischer
My intention was merely to point out where I don't follow your argument, but your criticism in my formulation is valid. I agree, we can probably build far better problem-solvers for many problems (including problems of great practical importance) My concern is more about what we can do with limited ressources, this is why I'm not impressed with the brute-force-solution This is true, I was mostly thinking about a pure search-problem where evaluting the solution is simple. (The example was chess, where brute-forcing leads to perfect play given sufficient ressources)
0wedrifid
It just occurred to me to wonder if this resource requirement is even finite. Is there are turn limit on the game? I suppose even "X turns without a piece being taken" would be sufficient depending on how idiotic the 'brute force' is. Is such a rule in place?
0Apprentice
Yes, the fifty-move rule. Though technically it only allows you to claim a draw, it doesn't force it.
0wedrifid
OK, thanks. In that case brute force doesn't actually produce perfect play in chess and doesn't return if it tries. (Incidentally, this observation that strengthens SimonF's position.)
0Simon Fischer
But the number of possible board position is finite, and there is a rule that forces a draw if the same position comes up three times. (Here) This claims that generalized chess is EXPTIME-complete, which is in agreement with the above.
0wedrifid
That rule will do it (given the forced).
0wedrifid
(Pardon the below tangent...) I'm somewhat curious as to whether perfect play leads to a draw or a win (probably to white although if it turned out black should win that'd be an awesome finding!) I know tic-tac-toe and checkers are both a draw and I'm guessing chess will be a stalemate too but I don't know for sure even whether we'll ever be able to prove that one way or the other. Discussion of chess AI a few weeks ago also got me thinking: The current trend is for the best AIs to beat the best human grandmasters even with progressively greater disadvantages. Even up to 'two moves and a pawn" or somesuch thing. My prediction: As chess playing humans and AIs develop the AIs will be able to beat the humans with greater probability with progressively more significant handicaps. But given sufficient time this difference would peak and then actually decrease. Not because of anything to do with humans 'catching up'. Rather, because if perfect play of a given handicap results in a stalemate or loss then even an exponentially increasing difference in ability will not be sufficient in preventing the weaker player from becoming better at forcing the expected 'perfect' result.
2timtyler
Sure there is - see: * Legg, Shane Tests of Machine Intelligence. Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter. In Proc. 50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence, Monte Verità, Switzerland. 2007. * Hutter, M.: Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability. Springer, Berlin (2004) * Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D.: Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence. 17, 1508-1539 (2010) * Solomonoff, R. J.: A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference: Parts 1 and 2. Information and Control 7, 1-22 and 224-254 (1964). The only assumption about the environment is that Occam's razor applies to it.
4Simon Fischer
Of course you're right in the strictest sense! I should have included something along the lines of "an algorithm that can be efficiently computed", this was already discussed in other comments.
1timtyler
IMO, it is best to think of power and breadth being two orthogonal dimensions - like this. * narrow <-> broad; * weak <-> powerful. The idea of general intelligence not being practical for resource-limited agents is apparently one that mixes up these two dimensions, whereas it is best to see them as being orthogonal. Or maybe there's the idea that if you are broad, you can't be very deep, and be able to be computed quickly. I don't think that idea is correct. I would compare the idea to saying that we can't build a general-purpose compressor. However: yes we can. I don't think the idea that "there is no such thing as general intelligence" can be rescued by invoking resource limitation. It is best to abandon the idea completely and label it as a dud.
2[anonymous]
That is a very good point, with wideness orthogonal to power. Evolution is broad but weak. Humans (and presumably AGI) are broad and powerful. Expert systems are narrow and powerful. Anything weak and narrow can barely be called intelligent.
0Simon Fischer
I don't care about that specific formulation of the idea; maybe Robin Hanson's formulation that there exists no "grand unified theory of intelligence" is clearer? (link)
0timtyler
Clear - but also clearly wrong. Robin Hanson says: ...but the answer seems simple. A big part of "betterness" is the ability to perform inductive inference, which is not a human-specific concept. We do already have a powerful theory about that, which we discovered in the last 50 years. It doesn't immediately suggest implementation strategy - which is what we need. So: more discoveries relating to this seem likely.
0Simon Fischer
Clearly, I do not understand how this data point should influence my estimate of the probablity that general, computationally tractable methods exist.
0timtyler
To me it seems a lot like the question of whether general, computationally tractable methods of compression exist. Provided you are allowed to assume that the expected inputs obey some vaguely-sensible version of Occam's razor, I would say that the answer is just "yes, they do".
2whpearson
Can you unpack algorithm and why you think an intelligence is one?
1Simon Fischer
I'm not sure what your point is, I don't think I use the term "algorithm" in a non-standard way. Wikipedia says: "Thus, an algorithm can be considered to be any sequence of operations that can be simulated by a Turing-complete system." When talking about "intelligence" I assume we are talking about a goal-oriented agent, controlled by an algorithm as defined above.
3whpearson
Does it make sense to call the computer system in front of you as being controlled by a single algorithm? If so that would have to be the fetch-execute cycle. Which may not halt or be a finite sequence. This form of system is sometimes called an interaction machine or persistent Turing machine. So some may say it is not an algorithm. The fetch-execute cycle is very poor at giving you information about what problems your computer might be able to solve, as it can download code from all over the place. Similarly if you think of an intelligence as this sort of system, you cannot bound what problems it might be able to solve. At any given time it won't have the programming to solve all problems well, but it can modify the programming it does have.
1ata
Do you behave intelligently in domains you were not specifically designed(/selected) for?
0Simon Fischer
No, I don't think I would be capable if the domain is sufficiently different from the EEA.
0[anonymous]
Do you antipredict an AI specialized in AI design, which can't do anything it's not specifically designed to do, but can specifically design itself as needed?
[-]James_Miller450

Within five years the Chinese government will have embarked on a major eugenics program designed to mass produce super-geniuses. (40%)

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[-]Pavitra200

I think 40% is about right for China to do something about that unlikely-sounding in the next five years. The specificity of it being that particular thing is burdensome, though; the probability is much lower than the plausibility. Upvoted.

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4JoshuaZ
Upvoting. If you had said 10 years or 15 years I'd find this much more plausible. But I'm very curious to hear your explanation.
5James_Miller
I wrote about it here: http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2007/10/a-thousand-chinese-einsteins-every-year.html Once we have identified genes that play a key role in intelligence then eugenics through massive embryo selection has a good chance at producing lots of super-geniuses especially if you are willing to tolerate a high "error rate." The Chinese are actively looking for the genetic keys to intelligence. (See http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=24064) The Chinese have a long pro-eugenics history (See Imperfect Conceptions by Frank Dikötter) and I suspect have a plan to implement a serious eugenics program as soon as it becomes practical which will likely be within the next five years.
5JoshuaZ
I think the main point of disagreement is the estimate that such a program would be practical in five years (hence my longer-term estimate). My impression is that actual studies of the genetic roots of intelligence are progressing but at a fairly slow pace. I'd give a much lower than 40% chance that we'll have that good an understanding in five years.
0James_Miller
If the following is correct we are already close to finding lots of IQ boosting genes: "SCIENTISTS have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren. Those schoolchildren possessing the 'right' combinations achieved significantly better results in numeracy, literacy and science.'" http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/found-genes-that-make-kids-smart/story-e6frg6nf-1225926421510
2Douglas_Knight
The article is correct, but we are not close to finding lots of IQ boosting genes. But the relevant question is whether the Chinese government is fooled by this too.
3Jack
Can you specify what "major" means? I would be shocked if the government wasn't already pairing high-IQ individuals like they do with very tall people to breed basketball players.
2gwern
Recorded: * http://predictionbook.com/predictions/1834
0wedrifid
Hat tip to China.
0magfrump
Tentatively downvoted; I think over a longer time period it's highly likely, but I would be unsurprised to later discover that it started that soon. I might put my (uninformed) guess closer to 10-20% but it feels qualitatively similar.
[-]WrongBot440

There is an objectively real morality. (10%) (I expect that most LWers assign this proposition a much lower probability.)

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7JenniferRM
If I'm interpreting the terms charitably, I think I put this more like 70%... which seems like a big enough numerical spread to count as disagreement -- so upvoted! My arguments here grows out of expectations about evolution, watching chickens interact with each other, rent seeking vs gains from trade (and game theory generally), Hobbe's Leviathan, and personal musings about Fukuyama's End Of History extrapolated into transhuman contexts, and more ideas in this vein. It is quite likely that experiments to determine the contents of morality would themselves be unethical to carry out... but given arbitrary computing resources and no ethical constraints, I can imagine designing experiments about objective morality that would either shed light on its contents or else give evidence that no true theory exists which meets generally accepted criteria for a "theory of morality". But even then, being able to generate evidence about the absence of an objective object level "theory of morality" would itself seem to offer a strategy for taking a universally acceptable position on the general subject... which still seems to make this an area where objective and universal methods can provides moral insights. This dodge is friendly towards ideas in Nagel's "Last Word": "If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it."
0magfrump
I almost agree with this due to fictional evidence from Three Worlds Collide, except that a manufactured intelligence such as an AI could be constructed without evolutionary constraints and saying that every possible descendant of a being that survived evolution MUST have a moral similarity to every other being seems like a much more complicated and less likely hypothesis.
4jimrandomh
This probably isn't what you had in mind, but any single complete human brain is a (or contains a) morality, and it's objectively real.
4WrongBot
Indeed, that was not at all what I meant.
3Will_Newsome
Does the morality apply to paperclippers? Babyeaters?
-1WrongBot
I'd say that it's about as likely to apply to paperclippers or babyeaters as it is to us. While I think there's a non-trivial chance that such a morality exists, I can't even begin to speculate about what it might be or how it exists. There's just a lot of uncertainty and very little either evidence. The reason I think there's a chance at all, for what it's worth, is the existence of information theory. If information is a fundamental mathematical concept, I don't think it's inconceivable that there are all kinds of mathematical laws specifically about engines of cognition. Some of which may look like things we call morality. But most likely not.
5Perplexed
Information theory is the wrong place to look for objective morality. Information is purely epistemic - i.e. about knowing. You need to look at game theory. That deals with wanting and doing. As far as I know, no one has had any moral issues with simply knowing since we got kicked out of the Garden of Eden. It is what we want and what we do that get us into moral trouble these days. Here is a sketch of a game-theoretic golden rule: Form coalitions that are as large as possible. Act so as to yield the Nash bargaining solution in all games with coalition members - pretending that they have perfect information about your past actions, even though they may not actually have perfect information. Do your share to punish defectors and members of hostile coalitions, but forgive after fair punishment has been meted out. Treat neutral parties with indifference - if they have no power over you, you have no reason to apply your power over them in either direction. This "objective morality" is strikingly different from the "inter-subjective morality" that evolution presumably installed in our human natures. But this may be an objective advantage if we have to make moral decisions regarding Baby Eaters who presumably received a different endowment from their own evolutionary history.
1AdeleneDawner
This does help bring clarity to the babyeaters' actions: The babies are, by existing, defecting against the goal of having a decent standard of living for all adults. The eating is the 'fair punishment' that brings the situation back to equilibrium. I suspect that we'd be better served by a less emotionally charged word than 'punishment' for that phenomenon in general, though.
1Perplexed
Oh, I think "punishment" is just fine as a word to describe the proper treatment of defectors, and it is actually used routinely in the game-theory literature for that purpose. However, I'm not so sure I would agree that the babies in the story are being "punished". I would suggest that, as powerless agents not yet admitted to the coalition, they ought to be treated with indifference, perhaps to be destroyed like weeds, were no other issues involved. But there is something else involved - the babies are made into pariahs, something similar to a virgin sacrifice to the volcano god. Participation in the baby harvesting is transformed to a ritual social duty. Now that I think about it, it does seem more like voodoo than rational-agent game theory. However, the game theory literature does contain examples where mutual self-punishment is required for an optimal solution, and a rule requiring requiring one to eat one's own babies does at least provide some incentive to minimize the number of excess babies produced.
0[anonymous]
Does that "game-theoretic golden rule" even tell you how to behave?
0saturn
Do you also think there is a means or mechanism for humans to discover and verify the objectively real morality? If so, what could it be?
2WrongBot
I would assume any objectively real morality would be in some way entailed by the physical universe, and therefore in theory discoverable. I wouldn't say that a thing existed if it could not interact in any causal way with our universe.
0RobinZ
I expect a plurality may vote as you expect, but 10% seems reasonable based on my current state of knowledge.
-8nick012000
[-]Tenek430

The pinnacle of cryonics technology will be a time machine that can at the very least, take a snapshot of someone before they died and reconstitute them in the future. I have three living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out. (50%)

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2Will_Newsome
This seems reasonable with the help of FAI, though I doubt CEV would do it; or are you thinking of possible non-FAI technologies?
0Tiiba
So you intend to acquire an extra grandparent somewhere along the line?
[-]Tenek100

No. I intend to revive one. Possibly all four, if necessary. Consider it thawing technology so advanced it can revive even the pyronics crowd.

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4JenniferRM
Did you coin the term "pyronics"?
0Tenek
I would imagine not (99%) , although it doesn't appear to be in common usage.
0Tiiba
Sorry, I missed the time machine part.
[-]erratio430

What we call consciousness/self-awareness is just a meaningless side-effect of brain processes (55%)

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[-]LucasSloan210

What we call consciousness/self-awareness is just a meaningless side-effect of brain processes (55%)

What does this mean? What is the difference between saying "What we call consciousness/self-awareness is just a side-effect of brain processes", which is pretty obviously true and saying that they're meaningless side effects?

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-3erratio
Sorry, I was letting my own uncertainty get in the way of clarity there. A stronger version of what I was trying to say would be that consciousness gives us the illusion of being in control of our actions when in fact we have no such control. Or to put it another way: we're all P-zombies with delusions of grandeur (yes, this doesn't actually make logical sense, but it works for me)
4LucasSloan
So I agree with the science you cite, right? But what you said really doesn't follow. Just because our phonologic loop doesn't actually have the control it thinks it does, it doesn't follow that sensory modalities are "meaningless." You might want to re-read Joy in the Merely Real with this thought of yours in mind.
-3erratio
Well, sure, you can find meaning wherever you want. I'm currently listening to some music that I find beautiful and meaningful. But that beauty and meaning isn't an inherent trait of the music, it's just something that I read into it. Similarly when I say that consciousness is meaningless I don't mean that we should all become nihilists, only that consciousness doesn't pay rent and so any meaning or usefulness it has is what you invent for it.
4Eugine_Nier
I don't know about you, but I'm not a P-zombie. :)
[-]PeterS290

That emoticon isn't fooling anyone.

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[-]wedrifid120

Upvoted for 'not even being wrong'.

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0Paul Crowley
I'm not sure whether "not even wrong" calls for an upvote, does it?
3NihilCredo
Could you expand a little on this?
7erratio
Sure. Here's a version of the analogy that first got me thinking about it: If I turn on a lamp at night, it sheds both heat and light. But I wouldn't say that the point of a lamp is to produce heat, nor that the amount of heat it does or doesn't produce is relevant to its useful light-shedding properties. In the same way, consciousness is not the point of the brain and doesn't do much for us. There's a fair amount of cogsci literature that suggests that we have little if any conscious control over our actions and reinforces this opinion. But I like feeling responsible for my actions, even if it is just an illusion, hence the low probability assignment even though it feels intuitively correct to me.
2Perplexed
(I'm not sure why I pushed the button to reply, but here I am so I guess I'll just make something up to cover my confusion.) Do you also believe that we use language - speaking, writing, listening, reading, reasoning, doing arithmetic calculations, etc. - without using our consciousness?
0erratio
Hah! I found it amusing at least. I'm.. honestly not sure. I think that the vast majority of the time we don't consciously choose whether to speak or what exact words to say when we do speak. Listening and reading are definitely unconscious processes, otherwise it would be possible to turn them off (also, cocktail party effect is a huge indication of listening being largely unconscious). Arithmetic calculations - that's a matter of learning an algorithm which usually involves mnemonics for the numbers.. On balance I have to go with yes, I don't think those processes require consciousness
4AdeleneDawner
Some autistic people, particularly those in the middle and middle-to-severe part of the spectrum, report that during overload, some kinds of processing - most often understanding or being able to produce speech, but also other sensory processing - turn off. Some report that turned-off processing skills can be consciously turned back on, often at the expense of a different skill, or that the relevant skill can be consciously emulated even when the normal mode of producing the intended result is offline. I've personally experienced this. Also, in my experience, a fair portion (20-30%) of adults of average intelligence aren't fluent in reading, and do have to consciously parse each word.
3Perplexed
You pretty much have to go with "yes" if you want to claim that "consciousness/self-awareness is just a meaningless side-effect of brain processes." I've got to disagree. What my introspection calls my "consciousness" is mostly listening to myself talk to myself. And then after I have practiced saying it to myself, I may go on to say it out loud. Not all of my speech works this way, but some does. And almost all of my writing, including this note. So I have to disagree that consciousness has no causal role in my behavior. Sometimes I act with "malice aforethought". Or at least I sometimes speak that way. For these reasons, I prefer "spotlight" consciousness theories, like "global workspace" or "integrated information theory". Theories that capture the fact that we observe some things consciously and do some things consciously.
0Blueberry
Agreed, but that tells you consciousness requires language. That doesn't tell you language requires consciousness. Drugs such as alcohol or Ambien can cause people to have conversations and engage in other activities while unconscious.
0NihilCredo
Thanks; +1 for the explanation. No mod to the original comment; I would downmod the "consciousness was not a positive factor in the evolution of brains" part and upmod the "we do not actually rely much if at all on conscious thought" one.
0davidad
Upvoted for underconfidence.
0drc500free
Having just stumbled across LW yesterday, I've been gorging myself on rationality and discovering that I have a lot of cruft in my thought process, but I have to disagree with you on this. “Meaning” and “mysterious” don’t apply to reality, they only apply to maps of the terrain reality. Self-awareness itself is what allows a pattern/agent/model to preserve itself in the face of entropy and competitors, making it “meaningful” to an observer of the agent/model that is trying to understand how it will operate. Being self-aware of the self-awareness (i.e. mapping the map, or recursively refining the super-model to understand itself better) can also impact our ability to preserve ourselves, making it “meaningful” to the agent/model itself. Being aware of others self-awareness (i.e. mapping a different agent/map and realizing that it will act to preserve itself) is probably one of the most critical developments in the evolution of humans. “I am” a super-agent. It is a stack of component agents. At each layer, a shared belief by a system of agents (that each agent is working towards the common utility of all the agents) results in a super-agent with more complex goals that does not have a belief that it is composed of distinct sub-agents. Like the 7-layer network model or the transistor-gate-chip-computer model, each layer is just an emergent property of its components. But each layer has meaning because it provides us a predictive model to understand the system’s behavior, in a way that we don’t understand by just looking at a complex version of the layer below it. My super-agent has a super-model of reality, similarly composed. Some parts of that super-model are tagged, weakly or strongly, with an attribute. The collection of cells that makes up a fatty lump on my head is weakly marked with that attribute. The parts of reality where my super-agent/-model exist are very strongly tagged. My super-agent survives because it has marked the area on its model corresponding to
[-]Kevin410

It does not all add up to normality. We are living in a weird universe. (75%)

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6Interpolate
My initial reaction was that this is not a statement of belief but one of opinion, and to think like reality. I'm still not entirely sure what you mean (further elaboration would be very welcome), but going by a naive understanding I upvoted your comment based on the principle of Occam's Razor - whatever your reasons for believing this (presumably perceived inconsistencies, paradoxes etc. in the observable world, physics etc.) I doubt your conceived "weird" universe would the simplest explanation. Additionally, that conceived weird universe in addition to lacking epistemic/empirical ground begs for more explanation than the understanding/lack thereof of the universe/reality that's more of less shared by current scientific consensus. If I'm understanding correctly, your argument for the existence of a "weird universe" is analagous to an argument for the existence of God (or the supernatural, for that matter): where by introducing some cosmic force beyond reason and empiricism, we eliminate the problem of there being phenomena which can't be explained by it.
6Eugine_Nier
Please specify what you mean by a weird universe.
7Kevin
We are living in a Fun Theory universe where we find ourselves as individual or aggregate fun theoretic agents, or something else really bizarre that is not explained by naive Less Wrong rationality, such as multiversal agents playing with lots of humanity's measure.
3[anonymous]
The more I hear about this the more intrigued I get. Could someone with a strong belief in this hypothesis write a post about it? Or at the very least throw out hints about how you updated in this direction?
5Risto_Saarelma
Would "Fortean phenomena really do occur, and some type of anthropic effect keeps them from being verifiable by scientific observers" fit under this statement?
1Kevin
That sounds weird to me.
2Will_Newsome
Downvoted in agreement (I happen to know generally what Kevin's talking about here, but it's really hard to concisely explain the intuition).
1Clippy
Why do you think so?
2Kevin
For some definitions of weird, our deal (assuming it continues to completion) is enough to land this universe in the block of weird universes.
[-][anonymous]390

I think that there are better-than-placebo methods for causing significant fat loss. (60%)

ETA: apparently I need to clarify.

It is way more likely than 60% that gastric bypass surgery, liposuction, starvation, and meth will cause fat loss. I am not talking about that. I am talking about healthy diet and exercise. Can most people who want to lose weight do that deliberately, through diet and exercise? I think it's likely but not certain.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
[-]magfrump300

voted up because 60% seems WAAAAAYYYY underconfident to me.

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5Eugine_Nier
Now that we're up-voting underconfidence I changed my vote.
2magfrump
From the OP:
0Zvi
I almost want this reworded the opposite way for this reason, as a 40% chance that there are not better-than-placebo methods for causing significant fat loss. Even if I didn't have first and second hand examples to fall back on I don't see why there is real doubt on this question. Another more interesting variation is, does such a method exist that is practical for a large percentage of people?
0wedrifid
Likewise. My p: 99.5%
-2datadataeverywhere
likewise
3[anonymous]
shoot... I'm just scared to bet, is all. You can tell I'm no fun at Casino Night.
7Will_Newsome
Ah, but betting for a proposition is equivalent to betting against its opposite. Why are you so certain that there's no better-than-placebo methods for causing significant fat loss? But If you do change your mind, please don't change the original, as then everyone's comments would be irrelevant.
6Jonathan_Graehl
Absolutely right. This is an important point that many people miss. If you're uncertain about your estimated probability, or even merely risk averse, then you may want to take neither side of the implied bet. Fine, but at least figure out some odds where you feel like you should have an indifferent expectation.
1[anonymous]
I think, with some confidence, that there are better-than-placebo methods for causing significant fat loss. The low confidence estimate has more to do with my reluctance to be wrong than anything else. If I were wrong, it would be because overweight is mostly genetic and irreversible (something I have seen argued and supported with clinical studies.)
0Relsqui
I sympathize with this. But I also upvoted the original comment because of it (i.e. I also think you're underconfident).
3Will_Newsome
Voted down for agreement! (Liposuction... do you mean dietary methods? I'd still agree with you though.) Edit: On reflection, 60% does seem too low. Changed to upvote.
2[anonymous]
I meant diet, exercise, and perhaps supplements; liposuction is trivially true.
0Will_Newsome
Generally speaking, most diets and moderate exercise work very well for a year or two. But the shangri-la diet tends to work for as long as you do it (for many/most? people). Also, certain supplements work, but I forgot which. So I gotta agree with you.
2wedrifid
For example... just about any stimulant you can get your hands on.
0Will_Newsome
But there were others, I think? User:taw talked about one that you take with caffeine. It might have been a stimulant, though.
5Douglas_Knight
ephedrine. It's called ECA, including aspirin, but that wasn't used in the studies.
0Will_Newsome
Thanks! :D
2wedrifid
For sure. Laxatives. e coli. But yes, there are others with better side effect profiles too. :) Take with caffeine? More caffeine. That'll do the trick. :P
1Normal_Anomaly
Upvoted, because I say diet and exercise work at 85% (for a significant fraction of people; there may be some with unlucky genes who can't lose weight that way).
0khafra
Does "method" include "exercise and healthy eating"?
2[anonymous]
This post has generated so much more controversy than I expected. I meant exactly exercise and healthy eating! I thought people would assume I meant that. Not gastric bypass surgery, not liposuction, not starvation, not amputating limbs.
6DilGreen
Whenever I see someone with one of those badges that says; 'Lose weight now, ask me how!", I check that they have all their limbs.
0Richard_Kennaway
That's ok. Just put an ETA in the top-level comment to clarify that. There's a lot of wiggle room around "healthy eating" though. Where are you drawing the line between calorie restriction and starvation?
0Larks
Becoming seriously ill? Better in the sense of losing more weight.
0JoshuaZ
Voting down for trivial agreement. Both stomach stapling and gastric lap bands easily meet this. Do you mean maybe non-surgical methods? That seems more questionable.
0lmnop
Short term or long term? If long, how long?
-2datadataeverywhere
I assign p=1 to the proposition that not eating causes significant fat loss. I can't justify subtracting any particular epsilon, which means to me that p=1-e, where e is too small for me to conceive and apply a number to. EDIT: I am particularly referring to indefinite periods of perfect fasting.
1[anonymous]
The reason it's questionable: how long can one not eat? Can most people not eat for long enough?
-2datadataeverywhere
Then take involuntary starvation. Perhaps you meant "better" in an ethical sense, but I thought you meant in a sense of strict effectiveness. This proposition is patently false (by indicating that there is a 40% chance that nothing causes better weight loss than placebo), as you admitted with regard to liposuction elsewhere in this thread.
7Will_Newsome
I think you're nitpicking; if what she's saying sounds completely obviously unreasonable then it's probably not what she meant. She means something like "There's a 60% chance that diets, legal supplements, fasting, and/or exercise, in amounts that Western culture would count as memetically reasonable, and in amounts that can be reasonably expected to be undertaken by members of Western culture, can cause significant weight loss." To which everyone says, "No, more like 95%", not "Haha obviously liposuction works, and so does starvation, you imprecise person: next time write a paragraph's worth of disclaimers and don't count on the ability of your audience to make charitable interpretations."
-2datadataeverywhere
Maybe I have a different idea than you of memetically reasonable, but I'm perfectly happy saying "No, more like 1-10^-30" to your statement as well as hers. Maybe I need to make a top level post here, but I think that it's a very small minority of humans that are unable to lose weight through diet and exercise, even if the degree of effort required is one not frequently undertaken. I don't think that the degree of effort required is considered widely unreasonable in Western culture. My p value is so high because this thread asks us to discount matters of opinion, so the probability that the effort required is beyond what is considered reasonable seems outside the scope. Same for "reasonably expected". I feel like it's enough to say that the methods don't require super-human willpower or vast resources. I think the methods themselves are unquestionable.
0Richard_Kennaway
It has been remarked in support of that proposition that no fat people came out of Auschwitz (or Singapore, or similar episodes). But is that because they got thin, or did they die before getting thin? Has any research been done on how people of different body types respond to starvation? The full report on this experiment might address that, but the Wiki article doesn't. However, the volunteers for that experiment were "young, healthy men" volunteering as an alternative to military service, so it's unlikely that any of them were obese going in.
[-]nazgulnarsil380

the joint stock corporation is the best* system of peacefully organizing humans to achieve goals. the closer governmental structure conforms to a joint-stock system the more peaceful and prosperous it will become (barring getting nuked by a jealous democracy). (99%)

*that humans have invented so far

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6Mass_Driver
The proposition strikes me as either circular or wrong, depending on your definitions of "peaceful" and "prosperous." If by "peaceful" you mean "devoid of violence," and by "violence" you essentially mean "transfers of wealth that are contrary to just laws," and by "just laws" you mean "laws that honor private property rights above all else," then you should not be surprised if joint stock corporations are the most peaceful entities the world has seen so far, because joint stock corporations are dependent on private property rights for their creation and legitimacy. If by "prosperous" you mean "full of the kind of wealth that can be reported on an objective balance sheet," and if by "objective balance sheet" you mean "an accounting that will satisfy a plurality of diverse, decentralized and marginally involved investors," then you should likewise not be surprised if joint stock corporations increase prosperity, because joint stock corporations are designed so as to maximize just this sort of prosperity. Unfortunately, they do it by offloading negative externalities in the form of pollution, alienation, lower wages, censored speech, and cyclical instability of investments onto individual people. When your 'goals' are the lowest common denominator of materialistic consumption, joint stock corporations might be unbeatable. If your goals include providing a social safety net, education, immunizations, a free marketplace of ideas, biodiversity, and clean air, you might want to consider using a liberal democracy. Using the most charitable definitions I can think of for your proposition, my estimate for the probability that a joint-stock system would best achieve a fair and honest mix of humanity's crasser and nobler goals is somewhere around 15%, and so I'm upvoting you for overconfidence.
5blogospheroid
Coming from the angle of competition in governance, I think you might be mixing up a lot of stuff. A joint stock corporation which is sovereign is trying to compete in the wider world for customers , i.e. willing taxpayers. If the people desire the values you have mentioned then the joint-stock government will try to provide those cost effectively. Clean Air and Immunizations will almost certainly be on the agenda of a city government Biodiversity will be important to a government which includes forests in its assets and wants to sustainably maintain the same. A free marketplace of ideas, free education and social safety nets would purely be determined by the market for people. Is it an important value enough that people would not come to your country and would go to another? if it is, then the joint stock government would try to provide the same. If not, then they wouldn't.
5wedrifid
All of this makes sense in principle. (I'm assuming you're not thinking that any of it would actually work in practice with either humans or ideal rational agents, right?)
1Mass_Driver
Good response, but I have to agree with wedrifid here: you can't compete for "willing taxpayers" at all if you're dealing with hard public goods, and elsewhere competition is dulled by (a) the irrational political loyalties of citizens, (b) the legitimate emotional and economic costs of immigration, (c) the varying ability of different kinds of citizens to move, and (d) protectionist controls on the movement of labor in whatever non-libertopian governments remain, which might provide them with an unfair advantage in real life, the theoretical axioms of competitive advantage theory be damned. I'd be all for introducing some features of the joint stock corporation into some forms of government, but that doesn't sound very much like what you were proposing would lead to peace and prosperity -- you said the jsc was better than other forms, not a good thing to have a nice dose of.
3blogospheroid
Or how I would call it, no representation without taxation. Those who contribute equity to society rule it. Everyone else contracts with the corporate in some way or another.
2knb
What is the term for this mode of governance? Corporate Monarchy? Seems like a good idea to me.
2gwern
England had property-rights based monarchy. It's basically gone now. So pace Mencius Moldbug, it can't be especially good a system - else it would not have died.
0knb
I don't understand this. England never was a corporate monarchy, though.
5gwern
England was never a 'corporate' monarchy in the sense of a limited-liability joint-stock company with numeric shares, voting rights, etc. I never said it was, though, but that it was 'property-rights based', which it was - the whole country and all legal privileges were property which the king could and did rent and sell away. This is one of the major topics of Nick Szabo's blog Unenumerated. If you have the time, I strongly recommend reading it all. It's up there with Overcoming Bias in my books.
0Emile
Moldbug calls this a joint-stock republic, though he mixes it with some of his more fringe ideas. I'll second gwern's recommendation on Nick Szabo's blog - he has a post on Government for Profit, which I think was written as a rebuttal to some of Moldbug's ideas (see the comments in this post)
2RHollerith
Another recommendation for Nick Szabo's blog. The only online writings I know of about governance and political economy that come close are the blogs of economist Arnold Kling and the eccentric and hyperbolic Mencius Moldbug. (Hanson's blog is extremely strong on several subjects, but governance is not IMHO one of them.)
4Vladimir_M
rhollerith_dot_com: I agree with all these recommendations, and I'd add that these three authors have written some of their best stuff in the course of debating each other. In particular, a good way to get the most out of Moldbug is to read him alongside Nick Szabo's criticisms that can be found both in UR comments and on Szabo's own blog. As another gem, the 2008 Moldbug-Kling debate on finance (parts (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5)) was one of the best and most insightful discussions of economics I've ever read. I agree. In addition, I must say I'm disappointed with the shallowness of the occasional discussions of governance on LW. Whenever such topics are opened, I see people who otherwise display tremendous smarts and critical skills making not-even-wrong assertions based on a completely naive view of the present system of governance, barely more realistic than the descriptions from civics textbooks.
0Scott78704
Open source.
[-]Vladimir_M380

Although lots of people here consider it a hallmark of "rationality," assigning numerical probabilities to common-sense conclusions and beliefs is meaningless, except perhaps as a vague figure of speech. (Absolutely certain.)

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[-]Alicorn130

(Absolutely certain.)

I'm not sure whether to chide you or giggle at the self-reference. I suspect, though, that "absolutely certain" is not a confidence level.

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[-]novalis110

I want to vote you down in agreement, but I don't have enough karma.

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[-]Perplexed100

assigning numerical probabilities to common-sense conclusions and beliefs is meaningless

It is risky to deprecate something as "meaningless" - a ritual, a practice, a word, an idiom. Risky because the actual meaning may be something very different than you imagine. That seems to be the case here with attaching numbers to subjective probabilities.

The meaning of attaching a number to something lies in how that number may be used to generate a second number that can then be attached to something else. There is no point in providing a number to associate with the variable 'm' (i.e. that number is meaningless) unless you simultaneously provide a number to associate with the variable 'f' and then plug both into "f=ma" to generate a third number to associate with the variable 'a', an number which you can test empirically.

Similarly, a single isolated subjective probability estimate may seem somewhat meaningless in isolation, but if you place it into a context with enough related subjective probability estimates and empirically measured frequencies, then all those probabilities and frequencies can be combined and compared using the standard formulas of Bayesian prob... (read more)

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2Vladimir_M
I think you're not drawing a clear enough distinction between two different things, namely the mathematical relationships between numbers, and the correspondence between numbers and reality. If you ask an astronomer what is the mass of some asteroid, he will presumably give you a number with a few significant digits and and uncertainty interval. If you ask him to justify this number, he will be able to point to some observations that are incompatible with the assumption that the mass is outside this interval, which follows from a mathematical argument based on our best knowledge of physics. If you ask for more significant digits, he will say that we don't know (and that beyond a certain accuracy, the question doesn't even make sense, since it's constantly losing and gathering small bits of mass). That's what it means for a number to be rigorously justified. But now imagine that I make an uneducated guess of how heavy this asteroid might be, based on no actual astronomical observation. I do of course know that it must be heavier than a few tons or otherwise it wouldn't be noticeable from Earth as an identifiable object, and that it must be lighter than 10^20 or so tons since that's roughly the range where smaller planets are, but it's clearly nonsensical for me to express that guess with even one digit of precision. Yet I could insist on a precise guess, and claim that it's "meaningful" in a way analogous to your above justification of subjective probability estimates, by deriving various mathematical and physical implications of this fact. If you deprecate my claim that its mass is 4.5237 x 10^15kg, then you cannot also deprecate my claim that it is a sphere of radius 1km and average density 1000kg/m^3, since the conjunction of these claims is by the sheer force of mathematics false. Therefore, I don't see how you can argue that a number is meaningful by merely noting its relationships with other numbers that follow from pure mathematics. Or am I missing somethin
0Perplexed
The only thing you are missing is the first paragraph of my reply. Just because something doesn't have the kind of meaning you think it ought to have (by virtue of being a number, for example) that doesn't justify your claim that it is meaningless. Subjective probabilities of isolated propositions don't have the kind of meaning you want numbers to have. But they have exactly the kind of meaning I want them to have - specifically they can be used in computations that produce consistent results. Do you think that the digits of pi beyond the first half dozen are also meaningless?
1Vladimir_M
Perplexed: Fair enough, but I still don't see how this solves the problem of the correspondence between numbers and reality. Any number can be used in computations that produce consistent results if you just start plugging it into formulas derived from some consistent mathematical theory. It is when the numbers are used as basis for claims about the real, physical world that I insist on an explanation of how exactly they are derived and how their claimed correspondence with reality is justified. The digits of pi are an artifact of pure mathematics, so I don't think it's a good analogy for what we're talking about. Once you've built up enough mathematics to define lengths of curves in Euclidean geometry, the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle follows by pure logic. Any suitable analogy for what we're talking about must encompass empirical knowledge, and claims which can be falsified by empirical observations.
1Perplexed
It doesn't have to. That is a problem you made up. Other people don't have to buy in to your view on the proper relationship between numbers and physical reality. My viewpoint on numbers is somewhere between platonism and formalism. I think that the meaning of a number is a particular structure in my mind. If I have an axiom system that is categorical (and, of course, usually I don't) then that picture in my mind can be made inter-subjective in that someone who also accepts those axioms can build an isomorphic structure in their own mind. The real world has absolutely nothing to do with Tarski's semantics - which is where I look to find out what the "meaning" of a number is. Your complaint that subjective probabilities have no meaning is very much like the complaint of a new convert to atheism who laments that without God, life has no meaning. My advice: stop telling other people what the word "meaning" should mean. However, if you really need some kind of affirmation, then I will provide some. I agree with you that the numbers used in subjective probabilities are less, ... what is the right word, ... less empirical than are the numbers you usually find in science classes. Does that make you feel better?
2Vladimir_M
Perplexed: You probably wouldn't buy that same argument if it came from a numerologist, though. I don't think I hold any unusual and exotic views on this relationship, and in fact, I don't think I have made any philosophical assumptions in this discussion beyond the basic common-sense observation that if you want to use numbers to talk about the real world, they should have a clear connection with something that can be measured or counted to make any sense. I don't see any relevance of these (otherwise highly interesting) deep questions of the philosophy of math for any of my arguments.
1Perplexed
There is nothing philosophically wrong with your position except your choice of the word "meaningless" as an epithet for the use of numbers which cannot be empirically justified. Your choice of that word is pretty much the only reason I am disagreeing with you.
1mattnewport
Given your position on the meaninglessness of assigning a numerical probability value to a vague feeling of how likely something is, how would you decide whether you were being offered good odds if offered a bet? If you're not in the habit of accepting bets, how do you think someone who does this for a living (a bookie for example) should go about deciding on what odds to assign to a given bet?
-3Vladimir_M
mattnewport: In reality, it is rational to bet only with people over whom you have superior relevant knowledge, or with someone who is suffering from an evident failure of common sense. Otherwise, betting is just gambling (which of course can be worthwhile for fun or signaling value). Look at the stock market: it's pure gambling, unless you have insider knowledge or vastly higher expertise than the average investor. This is the basic reason why I consider the emphasis on subjective Bayesian probabilities that is so popular here misguided. In technical problems where probability calculations can be helpful, the experts in the field already know how to use them. On the other hand, for the great majority of the relevant beliefs and conclusions you'll form in life, they offer nothing useful beyond what your vague common sense is already telling you. If you start taking them too seriously, it's easy to start fooling yourself that your thinking is more accurate and precise than it really is, and if you start actually betting on them, you'll be just gambling. I'm not familiar with the details of this business, but from what I understand, bookmakers work in such a way that they're guaranteed to make a profit no matter what happens. Effectively, they exploit the inconsistencies between different people's estimates of what the favorable odds are. (If there are bookmakers who stake their profit on some particular outcome, then I'm sure that they have insider knowledge if they can stay profitable.) Now of course, the trick is to come up with a book that is both profitable and offers odds that will sell well, but here we get into the fuzzy art of exploiting people's biases for profit.
0mattnewport
You still have to be able to translate your superior relevant knowledge into odds in order to set the terms of the bet however. Do you not believe that this is an ability that people have varying degrees of aptitude for? Vastly higher expertise than the average investor would appear to include something like the ability in question - translating your beliefs about the future into a probability such that you can judge whether investments have positive expected value. If you accept that true alpha) exists (and the evidence suggests that though rare a small percentage of the best investors do appear to have positive alpha) then what process do you believe those who possess it use to decide which investments are good and which bad? What's your opinion on prediction markets? They seem to produce fairly good probability estimates so presumably the participants must be using some better-than-random process for arriving at numerical probability estimates for their predictions. They certainly aim for a balanced book but they wouldn't be very profitable if they were not reasonably competent at setting initial odds (and updating them in the light of new information). If the initial odds are wildly out of line with their customers' then they won't be able to make a balanced book.
-2Vladimir_M
mattnewport: They sure do, but in all the examples I can think of, people either just follow their intuition directly when faced with a concrete situation, or employ rigorous science to attack the problem. (It doesn't have to be the official accredited science, of course; the Venn diagram of official science and valid science features only a partial overlap.) I just don't see any practical examples of people successfully betting by doing calculations with probability numbers derived from their intuitive feelings of confidence that would go beyond what a mere verbal expression of these feelings would convey. Can you think of any? Well, if I knew, I would be doing it myself -- and I sure wouldn't be talking about it publicly! The problem with discussing investment strategies is that any non-trivial public information about this topic necessarily has to be bullshit, or at least drowned in bullshit to the point of being irrecoverable, since exclusive possession of correct information is a sure path to getting rich, but its effectiveness critically depends on exclusivity. Still, I would be surprised to find out that the success of some alpha-achieving investors is based on taking numerical expressions of common-sense confidence seriously. In a sense, a similar problem faces anyone who aspires to be more "rational" than the average folk in any meaningful sense. Either your "rationality" manifests itself only in irrelevant matters, or you have to ask yourself what is so special and exclusive about you that you're reaping practical success that eludes so many other people, and in such a way that they can't just copy your approach. I agree with this assessment, but the accuracy of information aggregated by a prediction market implies nothing about your own individual certainty. Prediction markets work by cancelling out random errors and enabling specialists who wield esoteric expertise to take advantage of amateurs' systematic biases. Where your own individual judgment
0mattnewport
I'd speculate that bookies and professional sports bettors are doing something like this. By bookies here I mean primarily the kind of individuals who stand with a chalkboard at race tracks rather than the large companies. They probably use some semi-rigorous / scientific techniques to analyze past form and then mix it with a lot of intuition / expertise together with lots of detailed domain specific knowledge and 'insider' info (a particular horse or jockey has recently recovered from an illness or injury and so may perform worse than expected, etc.). They'll then integrate all of this information together using some non mathematically rigorous opaque mental process and derive a probability estimate which will determine what odds they are willing to offer or accept. I've read a fair bit of material by professional investors and macro hedge fund managers describing their thinking and how they make investment decisions. I think they are often doing something similar. Integrating information derived from rigorous analysis with more fuzzy / intuitive reasoning based on expertise, knowledge and experience and using it to derive probabilities for particular outcomes. They then seek out investments that currently appear to be mis-priced relative to the probabilities they've estimated, ideally with a fairly large margin of safety to allow for the imprecise and uncertain nature of their estimates. It's entirely possible that this is not what's going on at all but it appears to me that something like this is a factor in the success of anyone who consistently profits from dealing with risk and uncertainty. My experience leads me to believe that this is not entirely accurate. Investors are understandably reluctant to share very specific time critical investment ideas for free but they frequently share their thought processes for free and talk in general terms about their approaches and my impression is that they are no more obfuscatory or deliberately misleading than anyone
0Vladimir_M
mattnewport: Your knowledge about these trades seems to be much greater than mine, so I'll accept these examples. In the meantime, I have expounded my whole view of the topic in a reply to an excellent systematic list of questions posed by prase, and in those terms, this would indicate the existence of what I called the third type of exceptions under point (3). I still maintain that these are rare exceptions in the overall range of human judgments, though, and that my basic point holds for the overwhelming majority of human common-sense thinking. I don't think they're being deliberately misleading. I just think that the whole mechanism by which the public discourse on these topics comes into being inherently generates a nearly impenetrable confusion, which you can dispel to extract useful information only if you are already an expert in the first place. There are many specific reasons for this, but it all ultimately comes down to the stability of the weak EMH equilibrium. Oh, absolutely! But you're presumably estimating the rank of your abilities based on some significant accomplishments that most people would indeed find impossible to achieve. What I meant to say (even though I expressed it poorly) is that there is no easy and readily available way to excel at "rationality" in any really relevant matters. This in contrast to the attitude, sometimes seen among the people here, that you can learn about Bayesianism or whatever else and just by virtue of that set yourself apart from the masses in accuracy of thought. The EMH ethos is, in my opinion, a good intellectual antidote against such temptations of hubris.
0jimrandomh
You're dodging the question. What if the odds arose from a natural process, so that there isn't a person on the other side of the bet to compare your state of knowledge against?
0[anonymous]
I think this is right. The idea that you would be betting against another person is inessential, an unfortunate distraction arising from the choice of thought experiment. Admittedly it's a natural way to understand the thought experiment, but it's inessential. The experiment could be revised to exlude it. In fact every moment we make decisions whose outcomes depend on things we don't know, and in making those decisions we are therefore in effect gambling. We are surrounded by risks, and our decisions reveal our assessment of those risks.
0Vladimir_M
jimrandomh: Maybe it's my failure of English comprehension (I'm not a native speaker, as you might guess from my frequent grammatical errors), but when I read the phrase "being offered good odds if offered a bet," I understood it as asking about a bet with opponents who stand to lose if my guess is right. So, honestly, I wasn't dodging the question. But to answer your question, it depends on the concrete case. Some natural processes can be approximated with models that yield useful probability estimates, and faced with some such process, I would of course try to use the best scientific knowledge available to calculate the odds if the stakes are high enough to justify the effort. When this is not possible, however, the only honest answer is that my decision would be guided by whatever intuitive feeling my brain happens to produce after some common-sense consideration, and unless this intuitive feeling told me that losing the bet is extremely unlikely, I would refuse to bet. And I honestly cannot think of a situation where translating this intuitive feeling of certainty into numbers would increase the clarity and accuracy of my thinking, or provide for any useful practical guidelines. For example, if I come across a ditch and decide to jump over to save the effort of walking around to cross over a bridge, I'm effectively betting that it's narrow enough to jump over safely. In reality, I'll feel intuitively either that it's safe to jump or not, and I'll act on that feeling, produced by some opaque module for physics calculations in my brain. Of course, my conclusion might be wrong, and as a kid I would occasionally injure myself by judging wrongly in such situations, but how can I possibly quantify this feeling of certainty numerically in a meaningful way? It simply makes no sense. The overwhelming majority of real-life cases where I have to produce some judgment, and perhaps even bet on it, are of this sort. It would be cool to have a brain that produces confidenc
2[anonymous]
Applying the view of probability as willingness to bet, you can't refuse to reveal your probability assignments. Life continually throws at us risky choices. You can perform risky action X with high-value success Y and high-cost failure Z or you can refuse to perform it, but both actions reveal something about your probability assignments. If you perform the risky action X, it reveals that you assign sufficiently high probability to Y (i.e. low to Z) given the values that you place on Y and Z. If you refuse to perform risky action X, it reveals that you assign sufficiently low probability to Y given the values you place on Y and Z. This is nothing other than your willingness to bet. In an actual case, your simple yes/no response to a given choice is not enough to reveal your probability assignment and only reveals some information about it (that it is below or above a certain value). But counterfactually, we can imagine infinite variations on the choice you are presented with, and for each of these choices, there is a response which (counterfactually) you would have given. This set of responses manifests your probability assignment (and reveals also its degree of precision). Of course, in real life, we can't usually conduct an experiment that reveals a substantial portion of this set of counterfactuals, so in real life, we remain in the dark about your probability assignment (unless we find some clever alternative way to elicit it than the direct, brute force test-all-variations approach I have just described). But the counterfactuals are still there, and still define a probability assignment, even if we don't know what it is. But this revealed probability assignment is parallel to revealed preference. The point of revealed preference is not to help the consumer make better choices. It is a conceptual and sometimes practical tool of economics. The economist studying people discovers their preferences by observing their purchases. And similarly, we can discover a p
0wnoise
That's a startling statement (especially out of context).
1[anonymous]
Are you asking for a defense of the statement, or do you agree with it and are merely commenting on the way I expressed it? I'll give a defense by means of an example. At Wikipedia they give the following example of a counterfactual: If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have. Now consider the equation F=ma. This is translated at Wikipedia into the English: A body of mass m subject to a force F undergoes an acceleration a that has the same direction as the force and a magnitude that is directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass, i.e., F = ma. Now suppose that there is a body of mass m floating in space, and that it has not been subject to nor is it currently subject to any force. I believe that the following is a true counterfactual statement about the body: Had this body (of mass m) been subject to a force F then it would have undergone an acceleration a that would have had the same direction as the force and a magnitude that would have been directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass. That is a counterfactual statement following the model of the wikipedia example, and I believe it is true, and I believe that the contradiction of the counterfactual (which is also a counterfactual, i.e., the claim that the body would not have undergone the stated acceleration) is false. I believe that this point can be extended to all the laws of physics, either Newton's laws or, if they have been replaced, modern laws. And I believe, furthermore, that the point can be extended to higher-level statements about bodies which are not mere masses moving in space, but, say, thinking creatures making decisions. Is there any part of this with which you disagree? A point about the insertion of "I believe". The phrase "I believe" is sometimes used by people to assert their religious beliefs. I don't consider the point I am making to be a personal religious belief, but the plain truth. I only insert "I be
0wnoise
I am merely commenting. Counterfactuals are counterfactual, and so don't "exist" and can't be "there" by their very nature. Yes, of course, they're part of how we do our analyses.
8komponisto
Upvoted. Definitely can't back you on this one. Are you sure you're not just worried about poor calibration?
4wedrifid
Another upvote. That's crazy talk.
0Vladimir_M
komponisto: No, my objection is fundamental. I provide a brief explanation in the comment I linked to, but I'll restate it here briefly. The problem is that the algorithms that your brain uses to perform common-sense reasoning are not transparent to your conscious mind, which has access only to their final output. This output does not provide a numerical probability estimate, but only a rough and vague feeling of certainty. Yet in most situations, the output of your common sense is all you have. There are very few interesting things you can reason about by performing mathematically rigorous probability calculations (and even when you can, you still have to use common sense to establish the correspondence between the mathematical model and reality). Therefore, there are only two ways in which you can arrive at a numerical probability estimate for a common-sense belief: 1. Translate your vague feeling of certainly into a number in some arbitrary manner. This however makes the number a mere figure of speech, which adds absolutely nothing over the usual human vague expressions for different levels of certainty. 2. Perform some probability calculation, which however has nothing to do with how your brain actually arrived at your common-sense conclusion, and then assign the probability number produced by the former to the latter. This is clearly fallacious. Honestly, all this seems entirely obvious to me. I would be curious to see which points in the above reasoning are supposed to be even controversial, let alone outright false.
[-]komponisto110

Translate your vague feeling of certainly into a number in some arbitrary manner. This however makes this number a mere figure of speech, which adds absolutely nothing over the usual human vague expressions for different levels of certainty.

Disagree here. Numbers get people to convey more information about their beliefs. It doesn't matter whether you actually use numbers, or do something similar (and equivalent) like systematize the use of vague expressions. I'd be just as happy if people used a "five-star" system, or even in many cases if they just compared the belief in question to other beliefs used as reference-points.

Perform some probability calculation, which however has nothing to do with how your brain actually arrived at your common-sense conclusion, and then assign the probability number produced by the former to the latter. This is clearly fallacious.

Disagree here also. The probability calculation you present should represent your brain's reasoning, as revealed by introspection. This is not a perfect process, and may be subject to later refinement. But it is definitely meaningful.

For example, consider my current probability estimate of 10^(-3) that Aman... (read more)

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-2Vladimir_M
komponisto: If I understand correctly, you're saying that talking about numbers rather than the usual verbal expressions of certainty prompts people to be more careful and re-examine their reasoning more strictly. This may be true sometimes, but on the other hand, numbers also tend to give a false feeling of accuracy and rigor where there is none. One of the usual symptoms (and, in turn, catalysts) of pseudoscience is the use of numbers with spurious precision and without rigorous justification. In any case, you seem to concede that these numbers ultimately don't convey any more information than various vague verbal expressions of confidence. If you want to make the latter more systematic and clear, I have no problem with that, but I see no way to turn them into actual numbers without introducing spurious precision. Trouble is, this is often not possible. Most of what happens in your brain is not amenable to introspection, and you cannot devise a probability calculation that will capture all the important things that happen there. Take your own example: See, this is where, in my opinion, you're introducing spurious numerical claims that are at best unnecessary and at worst outright misleading. First you note that murderers are extremely rare, and that AK is a sort of person especially unlikely to be one. OK, say you can justify these numbers by looking at crime statistics. Then you perform a complex common-sense evaluation of the evidence, and your brain tells you that on the whole it's weak, so it's highly unlikely that AK killed the victim. So far, so good. But then you insist on turning this feeling of near-certainty about AK's innocence into a number, and you end up making a quantitative claim that has no justification at all. You say: I strongly disagree. Neither is this number you came up with any more meaningful than the simple plain statement "I think it's highly unlikely she did it," nor does it offer any additional practical benefit. On the contrary,
[-]komponisto170

Let's see if we can try to hug the query here. What exactly is the mistake I'm making when I say that I believe such-and-such is true with probability 0.001?

Is it that I'm not likely to actually be right 999 times out of 1000 occasions when I say this? If so, then you're (merely) worried about my calibration, not about the fundamental correspondence between beliefs and probabilities.

Or is it, as you seem now to be suggesting, a question of attire: no one has any business speaking "numerically" unless they're (metaphorically speaking) "wearing a lab coat"? That is, using numbers is a privilege reserved for scientists who've done specific kinds of calculations?

It seems to me that the contrast you are positing between "numerical" statements and other indications of degree is illusory. The only difference is that numbers permit an arbitrarily high level of precision; their use doesn't automatically imply a particular level. Even in the context of scientific calculations, the numbers involved are subject to some particular level of uncertainty. When a scientist makes a calculation to 15 decimal places, they shouldn't be interpreted as distinguishing betwe... (read more)

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4Mass_Driver
Love the logic and the scale, although I think Vladimir_M pokes some important holes specifically at the 10^(-2) to 10^(-3) level. May I suggest "un-planned for errors?" In my experience, it is not useful to plan for contingencies with about a 1/300 chance in happening per trial. For example, on any given day of the year, my favorite cafe might be closed due to the owner's illness, but I do not call the cafe first to confirm that it is open each time I go there. At any given time, one of my 300-ish acquaintances is probably nursing a grudge against me, but I do not bother to open each conversation with "Hi, do you still like me today?" When, as inevitably happens, I run into a closed cafe or a hostile friend, I usually stop short for a bit; my planning mechanism reports a bug; there is no 'action string' cached for that situation, for the simple reason that I was not expecting the situation, because I did not plan for the situation, because that is how rare it is. Nevertheless, I am not 'surprised' -- I know at some level that things that happen about 1/300 times are sort of prone to happening once in a while. On the other hand, I would be 'surprised' if my favorite cafe had been burned to the ground or if my erstwhile buddy had taken a permanent vow of silence. I expect that these things will never happen to me, and so if they happen I go and double-check my calculations and assumptions, because it seems equally likely that I am wrong about my assumptions and that the 1/30,000 event would actually occur. Anyway, the point is that a category 3 event is an event that makes you shut up for a moment but doesn't make you reexamine any core beliefs. If you hold most of your core beliefs with probability > .993 then you are almost certainly overconfident in your core beliefs. I'm not talking about stuff like "my senses offer moderately reliable evidence" or "F(g) = GMm/(r^2)"; I'm talking about stuff like "Solominoff induction predicts that hyperintelligent AIs will emp
4soreff
10^-3 is roughly the probability that I try to start my car and it won't start because the battery has gone bad. Is the scale intended only for questions one asks once per lifetime? There are lots of questions that one asks once a day, hence my car example.
1komponisto
That is precisely why I added the phrase "on an important question". It was intended to rule out exactly those sorts of things. The intended reference class (for me) consists of matters like the Amanda Knox case. But if I got into the habit of judging similar cases every day, that wouldn't work either. Think "questions I might write a LW post about".
3Vladimir_M
komponisto: It's not that I'm worried about your poor calibration in some particular instance, but that I believe that accurate calibration in this sense is impossible in practice, except in some very special cases. (To give some sense of the problem, if such calibration were possible, then why not calibrate yourself to generate accurate probabilities about the stock market movements and bet on them? It would be an easy and foolproof way to get rich. But of course that there is no way you can make your numbers match reality, not in this problem, nor in most other ones.) The way you put it, "scientists" sounds too exclusive. Carpenters, accountants, cashiers, etc. also use numbers and numerical calculations in valid ways. However, their use of numbers can ultimately be scrutinized and justified in similar ways as the scientific use of numbers (even if they themselves wouldn't be up to that task), so with that qualification, my answer would be yes. (And unfortunately, in practice it's not at all rare to see people using numbers in ways that are fundamentally unsound, which sometimes gives rise to whole edifices of pseudoscience. I discussed one such example from economics in this thread.) Now, you say: However, when a scientist makes a calculation with 15 digits of precision, or even just one, he must be able to rigorously justify this degree of precision by pointing to observations that are incompatible with the hypothesis that any of these digits, except the last one, is different. (Or in the case of mathematical constants such as pi and e, to proofs of the formulas used to calculate them.) This disclaimer is implicit in any scientific use of numbers. (Assuming valid science is being done, of course.) And this is where, in my opinion, you construct an invalid analogy: But these disclaimers are not at all the same! The scientist's -- or the carpenter's, for that matter -- implicit disclaimer is: "This number is subject to this uncertainty interval, but there
4Mass_Driver
I think this statement reflects either an ignorance of finance or the Dark Arts. First, the stock market is the single worst place to try to test out ideas about probabilities, because so many other people are already trying to predict the market, and so much wealth is at stake. Other people's predictions will remove most of the potential for arbitrage (reducing 'signal'), and the insider trading and other forms of cheating generated by the potential for quick wealth will further distort any scientifically detectable trends in the market (increasing 'noise'). Because investments in the stock market must be made in relatively large quantities to avoid losing your money through trading commissions, a causal theory tester is likely to run out of money long before hitting a good payoff even if he or she is already well-calibrated. Of course, in real life, people might be moderately-calibrated. The fact that one is capable of making some predictions with some accuracy and precision is not a guarantee that one will be able to reliably and detectably beat even a thin market like a political prediction clearinghouse. Nevertheless, some information is often better than none: I am (rationally) much more concerned about automobile accidents than fires, despite the fact that I know two people who have died in fires and none who have died in automobile accidents. I know this based on my inferences from published statistics, the reliability of which I make further inferences about. I am quite confident (p ~ .95) that it is sensible to drive defensively (at great cost in effort and time) while essentially ignoring fire safety (even though checking a fire extinguisher or smoke detector might take minimal effort.) I don't play the stock market, though. I'm not that well calibrated, and probably nobody is without access to inside info of one kind or another.
0Vladimir_M
Mass_Driver: I'm not an expert on finance, but I am aware of everything you wrote about it in your comment. So I guess this leaves us with the second option. The Dark Arts hypothesis is probably that I'm using the extreme example of the stock market to suggest a general sweeping conclusion that in fact doesn't hold in less extreme cases. To which I reply: yes, the stock market is an extreme example, but I honestly can't think of any other examples that would show otherwise. There are many examples of scientific models that provide more or less accurate probability estimates for all kinds of things, to be sure, but I have yet to hear about people achieving practical success in anything relevant by translating their common-sense feelings of confidence in various beliefs into numerical probabilities. In my view, calibration of probability estimates can succeed only if (1) you come up with a valid scientific model which you can then use in a shut-up-and-calculate way instead of applying common sense (though you still need it to determine whether the model is applicable in the first place), or (2) you make an essentially identical judgment many times, and from your past performance you extrapolate how frequently the black box inside your head tends to be right. Now, you try to provide some counterexamples: Frankly, the only subjective probability estimate I see here is the p~0.95 for your belief about driving. In this case, I'm not getting any more information from this number than if you just described your level of certainty in words, nor do I see any practical application to which you can put this number. I have no objection to your other conclusions, but I see nothing among them that would be controversial to even the most extreme frequentist.
1Mass_Driver
Not sure who voted down your reply; it looks polite and well-reasoned to me. I believe you when you say that the stock market was honestly intended as representative, although, of course, I continue to disagree about whether it actually is representative. Here are some more counterexamples: *When deciding whether to invest in an online bank that pays 1% interest or a local community bank that pays 0.1% interest, I must calculate the odds that each bank will fail before I take my money out; I cannot possibly have a scientific model that generates replicable results for these two banks while also holding down a day job, but numbers will nevertheless help me make a decision that is not driven by an emotional urge to stay with (or leave) an old bank based on customer service considerations that I rationally value as far less than the value of my principal. *When deciding whether to donate time, money, or neither to a local election campaign, it will help to know which of my donations will have an 10^-6 chance, a 10^-4 chance, and a 10^-2 chance of swinging the election. Numbers are important here because irrational friends and colleagues will urge me to do what 'feels right' or to 'do my part' without pausing to consider whether this serves any of our goals. If I can generate a replicable scientific model that says whether an extra $500 will win an election, I should stop electioneering and sign up for a job as a tenured political science faculty member, but I nevertheless want to know what the odds are, approximately, in each case, if only so that I can pick which campaign to work on. As for your objection that: I suppose I have left a few steps out of my analysis, which I am spelling out in full now: *Published statistics say that the risk of dying in a fire is 10^-7/people-year and the risk of dying in a car crash is 10^-4/people-year (a report of what is no doubt someone else's subjective but relatively evidence-based estimate). *The odds that these statisti
1Vladimir_M
Regarding your examples with banks and donations, when I imagine myself in such situations, I still don't see how numbers derived from my own common-sense reasoning can be useful. I can see myself making a decision based a simple common-sense impression that one bank looks less shady, or that it's bigger and thus more likely to be bailed out, etc. Similarly, I could act on a vague impression that one political candidacy I'd favor is far more hopeless than another, and so on. On the other hand, I could also judge from the results of calculations based on numbers from real expert input, like actuary tables for failures of banks of various types, or the poll numbers for elections, etc. What I cannot imagine, however, is doing anything sensible and useful with probabilities dreamed up from vague common-sense impressions. For example, looking at a bank, getting the impression that it's reputable and solid, and then saying, "What's the probability it will fail before time T? Um.. seems really unlikely... let's say 0.1%.", and then using this number to calculate my expected returns. Now, regarding your example with driving vs. fires, suppose I simply say: "Looking at the statistical tables, it is far more likely to be killed by a car accident than a fire. I don't see any way in which I'm exceptional in my exposure to either, so if I want to make myself safer, it would be stupid to invest more effort in reducing the chance of fire than in more careful driving." What precisely have you gained with your calculation relative to this plain and clear English statement? In particular, what is the significance of these subjectively estimated probabilities like p=10^-1 in step 2? What more does this number tell us than a simple statement like "I don't think it's likely"? Also, notice that my earlier comment specifically questioned the meaningfulness and practical usefulness of the numerical claim that p~0.95 for this conclusion, and I don't see how it comes out of your calculati
6mattnewport
It seems plausible to me that routinely assigning numerical probabilities to predictions/beliefs that can be tested and tracking these over time to see how accurate your probabilities are (calibration) can lead to a better ability to reliably translate vague feelings of certainty into numerical probabilities. There are practical benefits to developing this ability. I would speculate that successful bookies and professional sports bettors are better at this than average for example and that this is an ability they have developed through practice and experience. Anyone who has to make decisions under uncertainty seems like they could benefit from a well developed ability to assign well calibrated numerical probability estimates to vague feelings of certainty. Investors, managers, engineers and others who must deal with uncertainty on a regular basis would surely find this ability useful. I think a certain degree of skepticism is justified regarding the utility of various specific methods for developing this ability (things like predictionbook.com don't yet have hard evidence for their effectiveness) but it certainly seems like it is a useful ability to have and so there are good reasons to experiment with various methods that promise to improve calibration.
-4Vladimir_M
I addressed this point in another comment in this thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2sl/the_irrationality_game/2qgm
4mattnewport
I agree with most of what you're saying (in that comment and this one) but I still think that the ability to give well calibrated probability estimates for a particular prediction is instrumentally useful and that it is fairly likely that this is an ability that can be improved with practice. I don't take this to imply anything about humans performing actual Bayesian calculations either implicitly or explicitly.
7prase
I have read most of the responses and still am not sure whether to upvote or not. I doubt among several (possibly overlapping) interpretations of your statement. Could you tell to what extent the following interpretations really reflect what you think? 1. Confession of frequentism. Only sensible numerical probabilities are those related to frequencies, i.e. either frequencies of outcomes of repeated experiments, or probabilities derived from there. (Creative drawing of reference-class boundaries may be permitted.) Especially, prior probabilities are meaningless. 2. Any sensible numbers must be produced using procedures that ultimately don't include any numerical parameters (maybe except small integers like 2,3,4). Any number which isn't a result of such a procedure is labeled arbitrary, and therefore meaningless. (Observation and measurement, of course, do count as permitted procedures. Admittedly arbitrary steps, like choosing units of measurement, are also permitted.) 3. Degrees of confidence shall be expressed without reflexive thinking about them. Trying to establish a fixed scale of confidence levels (like impossible - very unlikely - unlikely - possible - likely - very likely - almost certain - certain), or actively trying to compare degrees of confidence in different beliefs is cheating, since such scales can be then converted into numbers using a non-numerical procedure. 4. The question of whether somebody is well calibrated is confused for some reason. Calibrating people has no sense. Although we may take the "almost certain" statements of a person and look at how often they are true, the resulting frequency has no sense for some reason. 5. Unlike #3, beliefs can be ordered or classified on some scale (possibly imprecisely), but assigning numerical values brings confusing connotations and should be avoided. Alternatively said, the meaning of subjective probabilities is preserved after monotonous rescaling. 6. Although, strictly speaking, human reason
3Vladimir_M
That’s an excellent list of questions! It will help me greatly to systematize my thinking on the topic. Before replying to the specific items you list, perhaps I should first state the general position I’m coming from, which motivates me to get into discussions of this sort. Namely, it is my firm belief that when we look at the present state of human knowledge, one of the principal sources of confusion, nonsense, and pseudosicence is physics envy, which leads people in all sorts of fields to construct nonsensical edifices of numerology and then pretend, consciously or not, that they’ve reached some sort of exact scientific insight. Therefore, I believe that whenever one encounters people talking about numbers of any sort that look even slightly suspicious, they should be considered guilty until proven otherwise -- and this entire business with subjective probability estimates for common-sense beliefs doesn’t come even close to clearing that bar for me. Now to reply to your list. ---------------------------------------- My answer to (1) follows from my opinion about (2). In my view, a number that gives any information about the real world must ultimately refer, either directly or via some calculation, to something that can be measured or counted (at least in principle, perhaps using a thought-experiment). This doesn’t mean that all sensible numbers have to be derived from concrete empirical measurements; they can also follow from common-sense insight and generalization. For example, reading about Newton’s theory leads to the common-sense insight that it’s a very close approximation of reality under certain assumptions. Now, if we look at the gravity formula F=m1*m2/r^2 (in units set so that G=1), the number 2 in the denominator is not a product of any concrete measurement, but a generalization from common sense. Yet what makes it sensible is that it ultimately refers to measurable reality via a well-defined formula: measure the force between two bodies of known
4komponisto
I'll point out here that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and that for every possible error, there is an opposite possible error. In my view, if someone's numbers are wrong, that should be dealt with on the object level (e.g. "0.001 is too low", with arguments for why), rather than retreating to the meta level of "using numbers caused you to err". The perspective I come from is wanting to avoid the opposite problem, where being vague about one's beliefs allows one to get away without subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny. (This, too, by the way, is a major hallmark of pseudoscience.) But I'll note that even as we continue to argue under opposing rhetorical banners, our disagreement on the practical issue seems to have mostly evaporated; see here for instance. You also do admit in the end that fear of poor calibration is what is underlying your discomfort with numerical probabilities: As a theoretical matter, I disagree completely with the notion that probabilities are not legitimate or meaningful unless they're well-calibrated. There is such a thing as a poorly-calibrated Bayesian; it's a perfectly coherent concept. The Bayesian view of probabilities is that they refer specifically to degrees of belief, and not anything else. We would of course like the beliefs so represented to be as accurate as possible; but they may not be in practice. If my internal "Bayesian calculator" believes P(X) = 0.001, and X turns out to be true, I'm not made less wrong by having concealed the number, saying "I don't think X is true" instead. Less embarrassed, perhaps, but not less wrong.
-1Vladimir_M
komponisto: Trouble is, sometimes numbers can be not even wrong, with their very definition lacking logical consistency or any defensible link with reality. It is that category that I am most concerned with, and I believe that it sadly occurs very often in practice, with entire fields of inquiry sometimes degenerating into meaningless games with such numbers. My honest impression is that in our day and age, such numerological fallacies have been responsible for much greater intellectual sins than the opposite fallacy of avoiding scrutiny by excessive vagueness, although the latter phenomenon is not negligible either. Here we seem to be clashing about terminology. I think that "poor calibration" is too much of a euphemism for the situations I have in mind, namely those where sensible calibration is altogether impossible. I would instead use some stronger expression clarifying that the supposed "calibration" is done without any valid basis, not that the result is poor because some unfortunate circumstance occurred in the course of an otherwise sensible procedure. As I explained in the above lengthy comment, I simply don't find numbers that "refer specifically to degrees of belief, and not anything else" a coherent concept. We seem to be working with fundamentally different philosophical premises here. Can these numerical "degrees of belief" somehow be linked to observable reality according to the criteria I defined in my reply to the points (1)-(2) above? If not, I don't see how admitting such concepts can be of any use. But if you do this 10,000 times, and the number of times X turns out to be true is small but nowhere close to 10, you are much more wrong than if you had just been saying "X is highly unlikely" all along. On the other hand, if we're observing X as a single event in isolation, I don't see how this tests your probability estimate in any way. But I suspect we have some additional philosophical differences here.
3Vladimir_M
[Continued from the parent comment.] I have revised my view about this somewhat thanks to a shrewd comment by xv15. The use of unjustified numerical probabilities can sometimes be a useful figure of speech that will convey an intuitive feeling of certainty to other people more faithfully than verbal expressions. But the important thing to note here is that the numbers in such situations are mere figures of speech, i.e. expressions that exploit various idiosyncrasies of human language and thinking to transmit hard-to-convey intuitive points via non-literal meanings. It is not legitimate to use these numbers for any other purpose. Otherwise, I agree. Except in the above-discussed cases, subjective probabilities extracted from common-sense reasoning are at best an unnecessary addition to arguments that would be just as valid and rigorous without them. At worst, they can lead to muddled and incorrect thinking based on a false impression of accuracy, rigor, and insight where there is none, and ultimately to numerological pseudoscience. Also, we still don’t know whether and to what extent various parts of our brains involved in common-sense reasoning approximate Bayesian networks. It may well be that some, or even all of them do, but the problem is that we cannot look at them and calculate the exact probabilities involved, and these are not available to introspection. The fallacy of radical Bayesianism that is often seen on LW is in the assumption that one can somehow work around this problem so as to meaningfully attach an explicit Bayesian procedure and a numerical probability to each judgment one makes. Note also that even if my case turns out to be significantly weaker under scrutiny, it may still be a valid counterargument to the frequently voiced position that one can, and should, attach a numerical probability to every judgment one makes. ---------------------------------------- So, that would be a statement of my position; I’m looking forward to any comments
5jimrandomh
Suppose you have two studies, each of which measures and gives a probability for the same thing. The first study has a small sample size, and a not terribly rigorous experimental procedure; the second study has a large sample size, and a more thorough procedure. When called on to make a decision, you would use the probability from the larger study. But if the large study hadn't been conducted, you wouldn't give up and act like you didn't have any probability at all; you'd use the one from the small study. You might have to do some extra sanity checks, and your results wouldn't be as reliable, but they'd still be better than if you didn't have a probability at all. A probability assigned by common-sense reasoning is to a probability that came from a small study, as a probability from a small study is to a probability from a large study. The quality of probabilities varies continuously; you get better probabilities by conducting better studies. By saying that a probability based only on common-sense reasoning is meaningless, I think what you're really trying to do is set a minimum quality level. Since probabilities that're based on studies and calculation are generally better than probabilities that aren't, this is a useful heuristic. However, it is only that, a heuristic; probabilities based on common-sense reasoning can sometimes be quite good, and they are often the only information available anywhere (and they are, therefore, the best information). Not all common-sense-based probabilities are equal; if an expert thinks for an hour and then gives a probability, without doing any calculation, then that probability will be much better than if a layman thinks about it for thirty seconds. The best common-sense probabilities are better than the worst statistical-study probabilities; and besides, there usually aren't any relevant statistical calculations or studies to compare against. I think what's confusing you is an intuition that if someone gives a probability, you
1Vladimir_M
After thinking about your comment, I think this observation comes close to the core of our disagreement: Basically, yes. More specifically, the quality level I wish to set is that the numbers must give more useful information than mere verbal expressions of confidence. Otherwise, their use at best simply adds nothing useful, and at worst leads to fallacious reasoning encouraged by a false feeling of accuracy. Now, there are several possible ways to object my position: * The first is to note that even if not meaningful mathematically, numbers can serve as communication-facilitating figures of speech. I have conceded this point. * The second way is to insist on an absolute principle that one should always attach numerical probabilities to one's beliefs. I haven't seen anything in this thread (or elsewhere) yet that would shake my belief in the fallaciousness of this position, or even provide any plausible-seeming argument in favor of it. * The third way is to agree that sometimes attaching numerical probabilities to common-sense judgments makes no sense, but on the other hand, in some cases common-sense reasoning can produce numerical probabilities that will give more useful information than just fuzzy words. After the discussion with mattnewport and others, I agree that there are such cases, but I still maintain that these are rare exceptions. (In my original statement, I took an overly restrictive notion of "common sense"; I admit that in some cases, thinking that could be reasonably called like that is indeed precise enough to produce meaningful numerical probabilities.) So, to clarify, which exact position do you take in this regard? Or would your position require a fourth item to summarize fairly? I agree that there is a non-zero amount of meaning, but the question is whether it exceeds what a simple verbal statement of confidence would convey. If I can't take a number and start calculating with it, what good is it? (Except for the caveat about possible
0jimrandomh
My response to this ended up being a whole article, which is why it took so long. The short version of my position is, we should attack numbers to beliefs as often as possible, but for instrumental reasons rather than on principle.
1[anonymous]
As a matter of fact I can think of one reason - a strong reason in my view - that the consciously felt feeling of certainty is liable to be systematically and significantly exaggerated with respect to the true probability assignment assigned by the person's mental black box - the latter being something that we might in principle elicit through experimentation by putting the same subject through variants of a given scenario. (Think revealed probability assignment - similar to revealed preference as understood by the economists.) The reason is that whole-hearted commitment is usually best whatever one chooses to do. Consider Buridan's ass, but with the following alterations. Instead of hay and water, to make it more symmetrical suppose the ass has two buckets of water, one on either side about equally distant. Suppose furthermore that his mental black box assigns a 51% probability to the proposition that the bucket on the right side is closer to him than the bucket on the left side. The question, then, is what should the ass consciously feel about the probability that the bucket on the right is closest? I propose that given that his black box assigns a 51% probability to this, he should go to the bucket on the right. But given that he should go to the bucket on the right, he should go there without delay, without a hesitating step, because hesitation is merely a waste of time. But how can the ass go there without delay if he is consciously feeling that the probability is 51% that the bucket on the right is closest? That feeling will cause within him uncertainty and hesitation and will slow him down. Therefore it is best if the ass consciously is absolutely convinced that the bucket on the right is closest. This conscious feeling of certainty will speed his step and get him to the water quickly. So it is best for Buridan's ass that his consciously felt degrees of certainty are great exaggerations of his mental black box's probability assignments. I think this genera
2Richard_Kennaway
I don't agree with this conflation of commitment and belief. I've never had to run from a predator, but when I run to catch a train, I am fully committed to catching the train, although I may be uncertain about whether I will succeed. In fact, the less time I have, the faster I must run, but the less likely I am to catch the train. That only affects my decision to run or not. On making the decision, belief and uncertainty are irrelevant, intention and action are everything. Maybe some people have to make themselves believe in an outcome they know to be uncertain, in order to achieve it, but that is just a psychological exercise, not a necessary part of action.
1[anonymous]
The question is not whether there are some examples of commitment which do not involve belief. The question is whether there are (some, many) examples where really, absolutely full commitment does involve belief. I think there are many. Consider what commitment is. If someone says, "you don't seem fully committed to this", what sort of thing might have prompted him to say this? It's something like, he thinks you aren't doing everything you could possibly do to help this along. He thinks you are holding back. You might reply to this criticism, "I am not holding anything back. There is literally nothing more that I can do to further the probability of success, so there is no point in doing more - it would be an empty and possibly counterproductive gesture rather than being an action that truly furthers the chance of success." So the important question is, what can a creature do to further the probability of success? Let's look at you running to catch the train. You claim that believing that you will succeed would not further the success of your effort. Well, of course not! I could have told you that! If you believe that you will succeed, you can become complacent, which runs the risk of slowing you down. But if you believe that there is something chasing you, that is likely to speed you up. Your argument is essentially, "my full commitment didn't involve belief X, therefore you're wrong". But belief X is a belief that would have slowed you down. It would have reduced, not furthered, your chance of success. So of course your full commitment didn't involve belief X. My point is that it is often the case that a certain consciously felt belief would increase a person's chances of success, given their chosen course of action. And in light of what commitment is - it is commitment of one's self and one's resources to furthering the probability of success - then if a belief would further a chance of success, then full, really full commitment will include that belief. S
0Richard_Kennaway
You're right that my analogy was inaccurate: what corresponds in the train-catching scenario to believing there is a predator is my belief that I need to catch this train. A stronger belief may produce stronger commitment, but strong commitment does not require strong belief. The animal either flees or does not, because a half-hearted sprint will have no effect on the outcome whether a predator is there or not. Similarly, there's no point making a half-hearted jog for a train, regardless of how much or little one values catching it. Belief and commitment to act on the belief are two different parts of the process. Of course, a lot of the "success" literature urges people to have faith in themselves, to believe in their mission, to cast all doubt aside, etc., and if a tool works for someone I've no urge to tell them it shouldn't. But, personally, I take Yoda's attitude: "Do, or do not."
2[anonymous]
Yoda tutors Luke in Jedi philosophy and a practice, which it will take Luke a while to learn. In the meantime, however, Luke is merely an unpolished human. And I am not here recommending a particular philosophy and practice of thought and behavior, but making a prediction about how unpolished humans (and animals) are likely to act. My point is not to recommend that Buridan's ass should have an exaggerated confidence that the right bucket is closer, but to observe that we can expect him to have an exaggerated confidence, because, for reasons I described, exaggerated confidence is likely to have been selected for because it is likely to have improved the chances of survival of asses who did not have the benefit of Yoda's instruction. So I don't recommend, rather I expect that humans will commonly have conscious feelings of confidence which are exaggerated, and which do not truly reflect the output of the human's mental black box, his mental machinery to which he does not have access. Let me explain by the way what I mean here, because I'm saying that the black box can output a 51% probability for Proposition P while at the same time causing the person to be consciously absolutely convinced of the truth of P. This may be confusing, because I seem to be saying that the black box outputs two probabilities, a 51% probability for purposes of decisionmaking and a 100% probability for conscious consumption. So let me explain with an example what I mean. Suppose you want to test Buridan's ass to see what probability he assigns to the proposition that the right bucket is closer. What you can do is take the scenario and alter as follows: introduce a mechanism which, with 4% probability, will move the right bucket further than the left bucket before Buridan's ass gets to it. Now, if Buridan's ass assigns a 100% probability that the right bucket is (currently) closer than the left bucket, then taking into account the introduced mechanism, this yields a 96% probability that, b
2prase
Thanks for the lengthy answer. Still, why it is impossible to calibrate people in general, looking at how often they get the anwer right, and then using them as a device for measuring probabilities? If a person is right on approximately 80% of the issues he says he's "sure", then why not translating his next "sure" into an 80% probability? Doesn't seem arbitrary to me. There may be inconsistency between measurements using different people, but strictly speaking, the thermometers and clocks also sometimes disagree.
0Vladimir_M
I do discuss this exact point in the above lengthy comment, and I allow for this possibility. Here is the relevant part: Now clearly, the critical part is to ensure that the future judgments are based on the same parts of the person's brain and that the relevant features of these parts, as well as the problem being solved, remain unchanged. In practice, these requirements can be satisfied by people who have reached the peak of ability achievable by learning from experience in solving some problem that repeatedly occurs in nearly identical form. Still, even in the best case, we're talking about a very limited number of questions and people here.
0prase
I know you have limited it to repeated judgments about essentialy the same question. I was rather asking why, and I am still not sure whether I interpret it correctly. Is it that the judgments themselves are possibly produced by different parts of brain, or the person's self-evaluation of certainty are produced by different parts of brain, or both? And if so, so what? Imagine a test is done on a particular person. During five consecutive years he is being asked a lot of questions (of all different types), and he has to give an answer and a subjective feeling of certainty. After that, we see that the answers which he has labeled as "almost certain" were right in 83%, 78%, 81%, 84% and 85% of cases in the five years. Let's even say that the experimenters were careful enough to divide the questions into different topics, and establish, that his "almost certain" anwers about medicine were right in 94% of the time in average and his "almost certain" answers about politics were right in 56% of the time in average. All other topics were near the overall average. Do you 1) maintain that such stable results are very unlikely to happen, or that 2) even if most of people can be calibrated is such way, still it doesn't justify using them for measuring probabilities?
0Vladimir_M
prase: We don't really know, but it could certainly be both, and also it may well be that the same parts of the brain are not equally reliable for all questions they are capable of processing. Therefore, while simple inductive reasoning tells us that consistent accuracy on the same problem can be extrapolated, there is no ground to generalize to other questions, since they may involve different parts of the brain, or the same part functioning in different modes that don't have the same accuracy. Unless, of course, we cover all such various parts and modes and obtain some sort of weighted average over them, which I suppose is the point of your thought experiment, of which more below. If the set of questions remains representative -- in the sense of querying the same brain processes with the same frequency -- the results could turn out to be fairly stable. This could conceivably be achieved by large and wide-ranging sets of questions. (I wonder if someone has actually done such experiments?) However, the result could be replicated only if the same person is again asked similar large sets of questions that are representative with regards to the frequencies with which they query different brain processes. Relative to that reference class, it clearly makes sense to attach probabilities to answers, so, yes, here we would have another counterexample for my original claim, for another peculiar meaning of probabilities. The trouble is that these probabilities would be useless for any purpose that doesn’t involve another similar representative set of questions. In particular, sets of questions about some particular topic that is not representative would presumably not replicate them, and thus they would be a very bad guide for betting that is limited to some particular topic (as it nearly always is). Thus, this seems like an interesting theoretical exercise, but not a way to obtain practically useful numbers. (I should add that I never thought about this scenario before
0prase
If there are any experimental psychologist reading this, maybe they can organise the experiment. I am curious whether people indeed can be calibrated on general questions.
4xv15
I tell you I believe X with 54% certainty. Who knows, that number could have been generated in a completely bogus way. But however I got here, this is where I am. There are bets about X that I will and won't take, and guess what, that's my cutoff probability right there. And by the way, now I have communicated to you where I am, in a way that does not further compound the error. Meaningless is a very strong word. In the face of such uncertainty, it could feel natural to take shelter in the idea of "inherent vagueness"...but this is reality, and we place our bets with real dollars and cents, and all the uncertainty in the world collapses to a number in the face of the expectation operator.
2Vladimir_M
So why stop there? If you can justify 54%, then why not go further and calculate a dozen or two more significant digits, and stand behind them all with unshaken resolve?
9wnoise
You can, of course. For most situations, the effort is not worth the trade-off. But making a distinction between 1%, 25%, 50%. 75%. and 99% often is. You can (at least formally) put error bars on the quantities that go into a Bayesian calculation. The problem, of course, is that error bars are short-hand for a distribution of possible values, and it's not obvious what a distribution of probabilities means or should mean. Everything operational about probability functions is fully captured by their full set of expectation values, so this is no different than just immediately taking the mean, right? Well, no. The uncertainties are a higher level model that not only makes predictions, but also calibrates how much these predictions are likely to move given new data. It seems to me that this is somewhat related to the problem of logical uncertainty.
7xv15
Again, meaningless is a very strong word, and it does not make your case easy. You seem to be suggesting that NO number, however imprecise, has any place here, and so you do not get to refute me by saying that I have to embrace arbitrary precision. In any case, if you offer me some bets with more significant digits in the odds, my choices will reveal the cutoff to more significant digits. Wherever it may be, there will still be some bets I will and won't take, and the number reflects that, which means it carries very real meaning. Now, maybe I will hold the line at 54% exactly, not feeling any gain to thinking harder about the cutoff (as it gets harder AND less important to nail down further digits). Heck, maybe on some other issue I only care to go out to the nearest 10%. But so what? There are plenty of cases where I know my common sense belief probability to within 10%. That suggests such an estimate is not meaningless.
2Vladimir_M
xv15: To be precise, I wrote "meaningless, except perhaps as a vague figure of speech." I agree that the claim would be too strong without that qualification, but I do believe that "vague figure of speech" is a fair summary of the meaningfulness that is to be found there. (Note also that the claim specifically applies to "common-sense conclusions and beliefs," not things where there is a valid basis for employing mathematical models that yield numerical probabilities.) You seem to be saying that since you perceive this number as meaningful, you will be willing to act on it, and this by itself renders it meaningful, since it serves as guide for your actions. If we define "meaningful" to cover this case, then I agree with you, and this qualification should be added to my above statement. But the sense in which I used the term originally doesn't cover this case.
2xv15
Fair. Let me be precise too. I read your original statement as saying that numbers will never add meaning beyond what a vague figure of speech would, i.e. if you say "I strongly believe this" you cannot make your position more clear by attaching a number. That I disagree with. To me it seems clear that: i) "Common-sense conclusions and beliefs" are held with varying levels of precision. ii) Often even these beliefs are held with a level of precision that can be best described with a number. (Best=most succinctly, least misinterpretable, etc...indeed it seems to me that sometimes "best" could be replaced with "only." You will never get people to understand 60% by saying "I reasonably strongly believe"...and yet your belief may be demonstrably closer to 60 than 50 or 70). I don't think your statement is defensible from a normal definition of "common sense conclusions," but you may have internally defined it in such a way as to make your statement true, with a (I think) relatively narrow sense of "meaningfulness" also in mind. For instance if you ignore the role of numbers in transmission of belief from one party to the next, you are a big step closer to being correct.
2Vladimir_M
xv15: You have a very good point here. For example, a dialog like this could result in a real exchange of useful information: A: "I think this project will probably fail." B: "So, you mean you're, like, 90% sure it will fail?" A: "Um... not really, more like 80%." I can imagine a genuine meeting of minds here, where B now has a very good idea of how confident A feels about his prediction. The numbers are still used as mere figures of speech, but "vague" is not a correct way to describe them, since the information has been transmitted in a more precise way than if A had just used verbal qualifiers. So, I agree that "vague" should probably be removed from my original claim.
7HughRistik
On point #2, I agree with you. On point #1, I had the same reaction as xv15. Your example conversation is exactly how I would defend the use of numerical probabilities in conversation. I think you may have confused people with the phrase "vague figure of speech," which was itself vague. Vague relative to what? "No idea / kinda sure / pretty sure / very sure?", the ways that people generally communicate about probability, are much worse. You can throw in other terms like "I suspect" and "absolutely certain" and "very very sure", but it's not even clear how these expressions of belief match up with others. In common speech, we really only have about 3-5 degrees of probability. That's just not enough gradations. In contrast, when expressing a percentage probability, people only tend to use multiples of 10, certain multiples of 5, 0.01%, 1%, 2%, 98%, 99% and 99.99%. If people use figures like 87%, or any decimal places other than the ones previously mentioned, it's usually because they are deliberately being ridiculous. (And it's no coincidence that your example uses multiples of 10.) I agree with you that feelings of uncertainty are fuzzy, but they aren't so fuzzy that we can get by with merely 3-5 gradations in all sorts of conversations. On some subjects, our communication becomes more precise when we have 10-20 gradations. Yet there are diminishing returns on more degrees of communicable certainty (due to reasons you correctly describe), so going any higher resolution than 10-20 degrees isn't useful for anything except jokes. Yes. Gaining the 10-20 gradations that numbers allow when they are typically used does make conversations relatively more precise than just by tacking on "very very" to your statement of certainty. It's similar to the infamous 1-10 rating system for people's attractiveness. Despite various reasons that rating people with numbers is distasteful, this ranking system persists because, in my view, people find it useful for communicating subjec
-4Vladimir_M
I mostly agree with this assessment. However, the key point is that such uses of numbers should be seen as metaphorical. The literal meaning of a metaphor is typically nonsensical, but it works by somehow hacking the human understanding of language to successfully convey a point with greater precision than the most precise literal statement would allow, at least in as many words. (There are other functions of metaphors too, of course, but this one is relevant here.) And just like it is fallacious to understand a metaphor literally, it is similarly fallacious to interpret these numerical metaphors as useful for mathematical purposes. When it comes to subjective probabilities, however, I often see what looks like confusion on this point.
2jimrandomh
It is wrong to use a subjective probability that you got from someone else for mathematical purposes directly, for reasons I expand on in my comment here. But I don't think that makes them metaphorical, unless you're using a definition of metaphor that's very different than the one I am. And you can use a subjective probability which you generated yourself, or combined with your own subjective probability, in calculations. Doing so just comes with the same caveats as using a probability from a study whose sample was too small, or which had some other bad but not entirely fatal flaw.
0Vladimir_M
I will write a reply to that earlier comment of yours a bit later today when I'll have more time. (I didn't forget about it, it's just that I usually answer lengthy comments that deserve a greater time investment later than those where I can fire off replies rapidly during short breaks.) But in addition to the theme of that comment, I think you're missing my point about the possible metaphorical quality of numbers. Human verbal expressions have their literal information content, but one can often exploit the idiosyncrasies of the human language interpretation circuits to effectively convey information altogether different from the literal meaning of one's words. This gives rise to various metaphors and other figures of speech, which humans use in their communication frequently and effectively. (The process is more complex than this simple picture, since frequently used metaphors can eventually come to be understood as literal expressions of their common metaphorical meaning, and this process is gradual. There are also other important considerations about metaphors, but this simple observation is enough to support my point.) Now, I propose that certain practical uses of numbers in communication should be seen that way too. A literal meaning of a number is that something can ultimately be counted, measured, or calculated to arrive at that number. A metaphorical use of a number, however, doesn't convey any such meaning, but merely expects to elicit similar intuitive impressions, which would be difficult or even impossible to communicate precisely using ordinary words. And just like a verbal metaphor is nonsensical except for the non-literal intuitive point it conveys, and its literal meaning should be discarded, at least some practical uses of numbers in human conversations serve only to communicate intuitive points, and the actual values are otherwise nonsensical and should not be used for any other purposes -- and even if they perhaps are, their metaphorical value
0xv15
okay. I still suspect I disagree with whatever you mean by mere "figures of speech," but this rational truthseeker does not have infinite time or energy. in any case, thank you for a productive and civil exchange.
4wedrifid
Or, you could slide up your arbitrary and fallacious slippery slope and end up with Shultz.
0Vladimir_M
Even if you believe that my position is fallacious, I am sure not the one to be accused of arbitrariness here. Arbitrariness is exactly what I object to, in the sense of insisting on the validity of numbers that lack both logically correct justification and clear error bars that would follow from it. And I'm asking the above question in full seriousness: a Bayesian probability calculation will give you as many significant digits as you want, so if you believe that it makes sense to extract a Bayesian probability with two significant digits from your common sense reasoning, why not more than that? In any case, I have explained my position at length, and it would be nice if you addressed the substance of what I wrote instead of trying to come up with witty one-liner jabs. For those who want the latter, there are other places on the web full of people whose talent for such things is considerably greater than yours.
2wedrifid
I specifically object to your implied argument in the grandparent. I will continue to reject comments that make that mistake regardless of how many times you insult me.
-1Vladimir_M
Look, in this thread, you have clearly been making jabs for rhetorical effect, without any attempt to argue in a clear and constructive manner. I am calling you out on that, and if you perceive that as insulting, then so be it. Everything I wrote here has been perfectly honest and upfront, and written with the goal of eliciting rational counter-arguments from which I might perhaps change my opinion. I have neither the time nor the inclination for the sort of one-upmanship and showing off that you seem to be after, and even if I were, I would pursue it in some more suitable venue. (Where, among other things, one would indeed expect to see the sort of performance you're striving for done in a much more skilled and entertaining way.)
0wedrifid
Your map is not the territory. If you look a little closer you may find that my points are directed at the topic, and not your ego. In particular, take a second glance at this comment. The very example of betting illustrates the core problem with your position. The insult would be that you are telling me I'm bad at entertaining one-upmanship. I happen to believe I would be quite good at making such performances were I of a mind and in a context where it suited my goals (dealing with AMOGs, for example). When dealing with intelligent agents, if you notice that what they are doing does not seem to be effective at achieving their goals it is time to notice your confusion. It is most likely that your model of their motives is inaccurate. Mind reading is hard. Shultz does know nuthink. Slippery slopes do (arbitrarily) slide in both directions (to either Shultz to Omega in this case). Most importantly, if you cannot assign numbers to confidence levels you will lose money when you try to bet.
3torekp
Upvoted, because I think you're only probably right. And you not only stole my thunder, you made it more thunderous :(
2[anonymous]
Downvote if you agree with something, upvote if you disagree. EDIT: I missed the word only. I just read "I think you're probably right." My mistake.
3magfrump
Upvote for disagreements of overconfidence OR underconfidence.
0groupuscule
Same here. A "pretty sure" confidence level would probably have done it for me.
2orthonormal
Um, so when Nate Silver tells us he's calculated odds of 2 in 3 that Republicans will control the house after the election, this number should be discarded as noise because it's a common-sense belief that the Republicans will gain that many seats?
0Vladimir_M
Boy did I hit a hornets' nest with this one! No, of course I didn't mean anything like that. Here is how I see this situation. Silver has a model, which is ultimately a piece of mathematics telling us that some p=0.667, and for reasons of common sense, Silver believes (assuming he's being upfront with all this) that this model closely approximates reality in such a way that p can be interpreted, with reasonable accuracy, as the probability of Republicans winning a House majority this November. Now, when you ask someone which party is likely to win this election, this person's brain will activate some algorithm that will produce an answer along with some rough level of confidence. Someone completely ignorant about politics might answer that he has no idea, and cannot say anything with any certainty. Other people will predict different results with varying (informally expressed) confidence. Silver himself, or someone else who agrees with his model, might reply that the best answer is whatever the model says (i.e. Republicans win with p=0.667), since it is completely superior to the opaque common-sense algorithms used by the brains of non-mathy political analysts. Others will have greater or lesser confidence in the accuracy of the model, and might take its results into account, with varying weight, alongside other common-sense considerations. Ultimately, the status of this number depends on the relation between Silver's model and reality. If you believe that the model is a vast improvement over any informal common-sense considerations in predicting election results, just like Newton's theory is a vast improvement over any common-sense considerations in predicting the motions of planets, then we're not talking about a common-sense conclusion any more. On the other hand, if you believe that the model is completely out of touch with reality, then you would discard its result as noise. Finally, if you believe that it's somewhat accurate, but still not reliably superior
6wedrifid
Want to make a bet on that?
2[anonymous]
In your linked comment you write: Do you not think that this feeling response can be trained through calibration exercises and by making and checking predictions? I have not done this myself yet, but this is how I've thought others became able to assign numerical probabilities with confidence.
0Vladimir_M
Luke_Grecki: Well, sometimes frequentism can come to the rescue, in a sense. If you are repeatedly faced with an identical situation where it's necessary to make some common-sense judgment, like e.g. on an assembly line, you can look at your past performance to predict how often you'll be correct in the future. (This assuming you're not getting better or worse with time, of course.) However, what you're doing in that case is treating a part of your own brain as a black box whose behavior you're testing empirically to extrapolate a frequentist rule -- you are not performing the judgment itself as a rigorous Bayesian procedure that would give you the probability for the conclusion. That said, it's clear that smarter and more knowledgeable people think with greater accuracy and subtlety, so that their intuitive feelings of (un)certainty are also subtler and more accurate. But there is still no magic step that will translate these feelings output by black-box circuits in their brains into numbers that could lay claim to mathematical rigor and accuracy.
3[anonymous]
No, but do you think it is meaningless to think of the messy brain procedure (that produces these intuitive feelings) as approximating this rigorous Bayesian procedure? This could probably be quantified using various tests. I don't dispute that one couldn't lay claim to mathematical rigor, but I'm not sure that means that any human assignment of numerical probabilities is meaningless.
0Vladimir_M
Yes, with good enough calibration, it does make sense. If you have an assembly line worker whose job is to notice and remove defective items, and he's been doing it with a steady (say) 99.7% accuracy for a long time, it makes sense to assign p=0.997 to each single judgment he makes about an individual item, and this number can be of practical value in managing production. However, this doesn't mean that you could improve the worker's performance by teaching him about Bayesianism; his brain remains a black box. The important point is that the same typically holds for highbrow intellectual tasks too. Moreover, for the great majority of interesting questions about the world, we don't have the luxury of a large reference class of trials on which to calibrate. Take for example the recent discussion about the AD-36 virus controversy. If you look at the literature, you'll presumably form an opinion about this question with a higher or lower certainty, depending on how much confidence you have in your own ability to judge about such matters. But how to calibrate this judgment in order to arrive at a probability estimate? There is no way.
0[anonymous]
To try to understand your point, I will try to clarify it. We have very limited access to our mental processes. In fact, in some cases our access to our mental processes is indirect - that is, we only discover what we believe once we have observed how we act. We observe our own act, and from this we can infer that we must have believed such-and-such. We can attempt to reconstruct our own process of thinking, but the process we are modeling is essentially a black box whose internals we are modeling, and the outputs of the black box at any given time are meager. We are of course always using the black box, which gives us a lot of data to go on in an absolute sense, but since the topic is constantly changing and since our beliefs are also in flux, the relevance of most of that data to the correct understanding of a particular act of thinking is unclear. In modeling our own mental processes we are rationalizing, with all the potential pitfalls associated with rationalization. Nevertheless, this does not stop us from using the familiar gambling method for eliciting probability assessments, understood as willingness to wager. The gambling method, even if it is artificial, is at least reasonable, because every behavior we exhibit involves a kind of wager. However the black box operates, it will produce a certain response for each offered betting odds, from which its probability assignments can be derived. Of course this won't work if the black box produces inconsistent (i.e. Dutch bookable) responses to the betting odds, but whether and to what degree it does or not is an empirical question. As a matter of fact, you've been talking about precision, and I think here's how we can define the precision of your probability assignment. I'm sure that the black box's responses to betting odds will be somewhat inconsistent. We can measure how inconsistent they are. There will be a certain gap of a certain size which can be Dutch booked - the bigger the gap the quicker you can be
0Vladimir_M
Aside from some quibbles that aren't really worth getting into, I have no significant disagreement with your comments. There is nothing wrong with looking at people's acts in practice and observing that they behave as if they operated with subjective probability estimates in some range. However, your statement that "one's own probability assignments are not necessarily introspectable" basically restates my main point, which was exactly about the meaninglessness of analyzing one's own common-sense judgments to arrive at a numerical probability estimate, which many people here, in contrast, consider to be the right way to increase the accuracy of one's thinking. (Though I admit that it should probably be worded more precisely to make sure it's interpreted that way.)
0[anonymous]
As it happens, early on I voted your initial comment down (following the topsy-turvy rules of the main post) because based on my first impression I thought I agreed with you. Reconsideration of your comment in light of the ensuing discussion brought to my mind this seeming objection. But you have disarmed the objection, so I am back to agreement.
[-]nwthomas320

I have met multiple people who are capable of telepathically transmitting mystical experiences to people who are capable of receiving them. 90%.

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2[anonymous]
Wow, telepathy is a pretty big thing to discuss. Sure there isn't a simpler hypothesis? Upvoted.
0nwthomas
The data I'm working from is that contact with certain people sometimes causes me to have mystical experiences. This has happened somewhere between 20 and 100 times, with less than a dozen people. Sometimes but not always, it happens in both directions; i.e., they also have a mystical experience as a result of the contact. The simpler hypothesis, from a materialist point of view, is that seeing these people just tripped some switch in my brain, without any direct mind-to-mind interaction being involved. Then we can say that I also tripped such a switch in their brains in the cases where it was reciprocal. We are left with the question of why this weird psychological phenomenon happens. The religious explanation is in many ways easier and more natural. We can say that my souls brushed up against these people's. It makes sense from within the religious frame of mind that this sort of thing would happen. But obviously we run into the issues with religious views in general.
[-]ArisKatsaris190

If we replaced "mystical experiences" with something of less religious connotations like "raging hard-ons", you wouldn't think that 'souls brushing up against each other' is the most natural explanation -- you'd instead conclude that some aspect of psychology/biochemistry/pheromones is causing you to have a more intense reaction towards certain people and vice-versa.

From a physicalist perspective the brain is as much an organ as the penis, and "mystical experiences" as much a physical event in the brain as erections are a physical event in the penis.

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-2[anonymous]
So true, so funny. EDIT: Why was this downvoted? I intended to convey that I thought ArisKatsaris was right in saying that brains are just as physical as genitals, and also that I thought his similie was funny.
1Richard_Kennaway
Neither of these is an explanation.
0[anonymous]
You're giving a mysterious answer and proposing ontologically basic mental substances. I still say that it is a rather extraordinary claim, and thus requires extraordinary evidence. So far you have presented close to none, and what you have could easily and more sensibly be explained with psychological kinks. See cold readings.
[-]Eugine_Nier320

The many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is false in the strong sense that the correct theory of everything will incorporate wave-function collapse as a natural part of itself. ~40%

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0Will_Newsome
(For those who think in terms of ensemble universes: 40% of this universe computation's measure comes from computations that don't 'bother' to leave in a real and thus computationally expensive wave function.) This is tricky, but I think I agree. Downvoted.
3LucasSloan
I would expect that most simulators who worried about computational capacity wouldn't bother simulating to the depth of quantum physics anyway. However, I'm not entirely sure that I should use this sort of argument when talking about the local laws of "physics". There is some sense, I think, in which the laws of physics around here are "supposed to be" MWI-like and that we should take them at face value.
[-]Eugine_Nier310

Religion is a net positive force in society. Or to put it another way religious memes, (particularly ones that have survived for a long time) are more symbiotic than parasitic. Probably true (70%).

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7orthonormal
If you changed "is" to "has been", I'd downvote you for agreement. But as stated, I'm upvoting you because I put it at about 10%.
3Eugine_Nier
I'd be curious to know when you think the crossover point was.
[-]orthonormal140

Around the time of J. S. Mill, I think. The Industrial Revolution helped crystallize an elite political and academic movement which had the germs of scientific and quantitative thinking; but this movement has been far too busy fighting for its life each time it conflicts with religious mores, instead of being able to examine and improve itself. It should have developed far more productively by now if atheism had really caught on in Victorian England.

Anyway, I'm not as confident of the above as I am that we've passed the crossover point now. (Aside from the obvious political effects, the persistence of religion creates mental antibodies in atheists that make them extremely wary of anything reminiscent of some aspect of religion; this too is a source of bias that wouldn't exist were it not for religion's ubiquity.)

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0[anonymous]
That's probable in your nomenclature?
0orthonormal
Oops, I see the ambiguity. Edited.
4Perplexed
I think this is ambiguous. It might be interpreted as * Christianity is good for its believers - they are better off to believe than to be atheist. * Christianity is good for Christendom - it is a positive force for majority Christian societies, as compared to if those societies were mostly atheist. * Christianity makes the world a better place, as compared to if all those people were non-believers in any religion. Which of these do you mean?
3Jayson_Virissimo
I think a better question is "would the world a better place if people who are currently Christian became their next most likely alternative belief system?". I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that if the median Christian lost his faith he wouldn't become a rational-empiricist.
3Eugine_Nier
I'd change this one to: * Christianity is good for most of its believers - they are better off to believe than to be atheist. ~62% ~69% ~58% Edit: I case it wasn't clear the 70% refers to the disjunction of the above 3.
1Interpolate
I downvoted this, and consider the artistic and cultural contributions of religion to society to alone warrant this assertion.
[-]JoshuaZ120

Note that it is in general very hard to tell if the artistic and cultural contributions associated with religion are actually due to religion. In highly religious cultures that's often the only form of expression that one is able to get funding for. Dan Barker wrote an essay about this showing how a lot of classical composers were agnostics, atheists or deists who wrote music with religious overtones mainly because that was their only option.

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3Swimmy
Funny, I upvoted this because of the artistic and cultural contributions of religion. For most of history, until the Industrial Revolution or a little before, human economies were Malthusian. You could not increase incomes without decreasing average lifespans. The implication is that the money spent on cathedrals and gargoyles and all the rest came directly at the expense of people's lives. (A recent Steven Landsburg debate with Dinesh D'Souza explored this line of thinking more; I wouldn't recommend watching much more than the opening statements, though.) I think the positive externalities of having more of those people's descendants alive today would be of higher value than the current benefits of past art--especially since most of that past art has been destroyed.
3Will_Newsome
You sound more confident than Eugine, in which case you should upvote. Or does 70% roughly match your belief?
0Jayson_Virissimo
My personal degree of belief is extremely sensitive to the definition of religion you are using here. I would appreciate some elaboration.
0wedrifid
The above is at -5. By the rules of the post that indicates that people overwhelmingly agree with the comment. This surprises me. (I didn't vote.)
0Will_Newsome
It could be that people are browsing the recent comments section and impulse-downvoting. :/ It's a tough question, and involves reasoning heavily about counterfactuals. What would a humanity without religion look like? I tend to think it'd look a lot better, even though I admit there's a lot of confusion in the counterfactual surgery. So I upvoted.
1Relsqui
This gave me pause as well. Without religion, Mendel might have been too busy in another occupation to muck around with pea plants. We'd probably still learn what he learned, but who's to say how?
1whpearson
I have this memory that monks transcribed Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras and kept them alive, when most of the world was illiterate. I'm not sure if this is accurate or not.
2Eugine_Nier
Right idea, wrong philosophers. Keep in mind that Greek was a forgotten language in western Europe throughout the middle ages. They had translated copies of Aristotle but not any other Greek writer. As for Pythagoras, well he didn't survive. All we know about him comes from second and third hand accounts.
[-]MattMahoney260

There will never be a singularity. A singularity is infinitely far in the future in "perceptual time" measured in bits learned by intelligent agents. But evolution is a chaotic process whose only attractor is a dead planet. Therefore there is a 100% chance that the extinction of all life (created by us or not) will happen first. (95%).

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6wedrifid
How do the votes work in this game again? "Upvote for insane", right?
[-]MrShaggy240

Eating lots of bacon fat and sour cream can reverse heart disease. Very confident (>95%).

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4JGWeissman
I doubt you are following this rule.
5MrShaggy
I was worried people would think that, but if I posted links to present evidence, I ran the risk of convincing them so they wouldn't vote it up! All I've eaten in the past three weeks is: pork belly, butter, egg yolks (and a few whites), cheese, sour cream (like a tub every three days), ground beef, bacon fat (saved from cooking bacon) and such. Now, that's no proof about the medical claim but I hope it's an indication that I'm not just bullshiting. But for a few links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19179058 (the K2 in question is virtually found only in animal fats and meats, see http://www.westonaprice.org/abcs-of-nutrition/175-x-factor-is-vitamin-k2.html#fig4)--the pubmed is on prevention of heart disease in humans http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/11/can-vitamin-k2-reverse-arterial.html shows reversal in rat studies from K2 http://trackyourplaque.com/ -- a clinic that uses K2 among other things to reverse heart disease note that I am not trying to construct a rational argument but to convince people that I do hold this belief. I do think a rational argument can be constructed but this is not it.
5jefftk
This was about a year ago: do you still hold this belief? Has eating like you described worked out?
1MrShaggy
Not just hold the belief but eat that way even more consistently (more butter and less sour cream just because tastes change, but same basic principles). I'm young and didn't have any obvious signs of heart disease personally so can't say it "worked out" for me personally in that literal, narrow sense but I feel better, more mentally clear, etc. (I know that's kinda whatever of evidence, just saying since you asked). Someone else recently posted their success with butter lowering their measurement of arterial plaque: "the second score was better (lower) than the first score. The woman in charge of the testing center said this was very rare — about 1 time in 100. The usual annual increase is about 20 percent." (http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/08/04/how-rare-my-heart-scan-improvement/) (Note: I disagree with the poster's reasoning methods in general, just noting his score change.) There was a recent health symposium that discussed this idea and related ones: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos/page:1/sort:newest. For those specifically related to heart health, these are most of them: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos/search:heart/sort:newest
2RomanDavis
Downvoted. I've seen the evidence, too.
3MrShaggy
Downvoted means you agree (on this thread), correct? If so, I've wanted to see a post on rationality and nutrition for a while (on the benefits of high-animal fat diet for health and the rationality lessons behind why so many demonize that and so few know it).
0Desrtopa
What evidence? If you're referring to the Atkins diet, I think that's a rather different matter from simply eating lots of bacon fat and sour cream, which doesn't preclude also eating plenty of carbohydrates. Or worse, it might entail eating nothing else. The post isn't very precise.
1RomanDavis
Eating some is better than none, because certain nutrients in animal fat are helpful for CDC. The point that vegetarianism is over rated for the health benefits is contrarian enough here and in the wider world to make a good post. But yes, losing other vital nutrients would be bad. And Atkins is silly and unhealthy. Why bring it up?
1Desrtopa
Because I thought that might be what you were referring to. My mother lost about 90 pounds on it, and her health is definitely better than it was when she was overweight, but it did have some rather unpleasant side effects (although she generally refuses to acknowledge them, since they're lost in the halo effect.)
[-]Perplexed230

Unless you are familiar with the work of a German patent attorney named Gunter Wachtershauser, just about everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong. More specifically, there was no "prebiotic soup" providing organic nutrient molecules to the first cells or proto-cells, there was no RNA world in which self-replicating molecules evolved into cells, the Miller experiment is a red herring and the chemical processes it deals with never happened on earth until Miller came along. Life didn't invent proteins for a long time after life first originated. 500 million years or so. About as long as the time from the "Cambrian explosion" to us.

I'm not saying Wachtershauser got it all right. But I am saying that everyone else except people inspired by Wachtershauser definitely got it all wrong. (70%)

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[-]khafra490

Meh. What's the chances of some germanic guy sitting around looking at patents all day coming up with a theory that revolutionizes some field of science?

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0BillyOblivion
Brilliant.
4JohannesDahlstrom
You make the "metabolism first" school of thought sound like a minority contrarian position to the mainstream "genes first" hypothesis. I was under the impression that they were simply competing hypotheses with the jury being still out on the big question. That's how they presented the issue in my astrobiology class, anyway.
2Perplexed
It was a minority, contrarian position just a decade ago. But Wachtershauser's position is not just "metabolism first". It is also "strictly autotrophic" and "lipid first". So I think it is still fair to call it a minority opinion.
2wedrifid
Downvoted because it approximately matches what I (literally) covered in Biology 101 a month ago. (70% seems right because to be perfectly honest I didn't pay that much attention and the Gunter guy may or may not have been relevant.)
0Perplexed
Interesting. They are actually teaching this stuff now! Was the Origins material from the textbook, or from lectures? If textbook, could you name the book?
1wedrifid
Lectures. And the lecturer noted that the lecture notes from last year would be obsolete, since the science had changed.
0timtyler
To clarify, you do think there was an "RNA world" - but it just post-dated cell walls. An RNA world before cell walls is really a completely ridiculous idea. ...and of course, I am obviously not going to agree with the last line. IMO, Wachtershauser came along rather late, long after the guts of the problem were sorted out.
0Perplexed
Yes, except that what it post-dated was cell membranes, not cell walls. The distinction is important. I do think that there was an "RNA world" stage in life's evolution when living cells could be modeled as "bags full of RNA". But I believe that there was an earlier stage when they could be modeled as simply "bags full of water and minerals" and an even earlier stage when life consisted of "patches of living bag material adhering to the surface of minerals". Nope. No organic nutrients whatsoever. Autotrophic. This is the key idea that distinguishes Wachtershauser from almost everyone else. Yes, membrane materials are organic, but they were made (on site and just-in-time) by the first living membranes (on mineral surfaces). Of course. It amused me as I wrote my piece that you could write a strictly parallel contrarian position on the origin-of-life question. "Unless you are familiar with the work of Glascow chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong".
0timtyler
I shouldn't argue the "No organic nutrients whatsoever." point too much - and indeed, I thought I deleted it from my comment pretty quickly. Yes, maybe everything organic was made from inorganic CO2 at the time of the first cells - but do we really know that with 70% confidence? No organic nutrients seems like quite a strong claim.
1Perplexed
Well, actually I think the carbon sources were more likely inorganic CO and inorganic HCN, with H2CO (formaldehyde) a possibility. "Organic", in this claim, means having a C-C bond. And yes, I believe it with 70% confidence. Autotrophy came first. Heterotrophy came later. It is. It is the claim which forces a kind of intellectual honesty on the rest of your origin theory. You can't just postulate that some needed chemical arrived on a handy comet or something. If you need a molecule, you must figure out the chemistry of how to make it from the materials already at hand. Wachtershauser didn't suggests vents as the site of the origin simply because vents were new and "hot" at the time of his proposal. He did so because his chemical training told him that forming carbon-carbon bonds in high yields without enzymes requires a high-pressure high-temperature metal-catalyzed process like Fischer-Tropsch. And then he realized that vents provided an environment where this kind of chemistry could take place naturally.
-1timtyler
I won't argue with the "Autotrophy came first. Heterotrophy came later." However, you were talking about the origin of cells here - and they "came later" too. Before there were cells there were very likely simpler "naked" replicators - including ones on mineral surfaces. Surely though, this radically transforms your original claim: Surely that is not what "organic" normally means in this context! E.g. see: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/organic_compound Formaldehyde is an organic compound. If you say "organic nutrient molecules" and it actually turns out you mean only those with C-C bonds, your audience is very likely to get the wrong end of the stick.
0Perplexed
I believe you are wrong if you are talking about replicating information-bearing molecules or crystals. 70% confidence. Not really. My original claim didn't even mention autotrophy. I added it as explanation of why Wachtershauser is so completely divergent from other ideas regarding the origin. Contrary to your reference HCN is also considered inorganic, along with CO and CO2 and their hydrates. If you want to consider formaldehyde as an organic, and hence as a nutrient for a heterotroph, go ahead - I strongly doubt that it was the original carbon source in any case. 70% confidence.
1timtyler
Replication happens naturally, in crystal growth processes. Of course, that doesn't prove that early mineral copying processes ultimately led to modern organisms, but it makes me pretty confident of my specific statement above - maybe 90% confidence - and most of the remaining probability mass comes from panspermia and cosmic evolution scenarios - where the origin of life takes place far, far away.
0Perplexed
Ok, it is possible that there were information-bearing replicating crystals. Before organic forms of life. Totally irrelevant to LAWKI, but first. The only thing that makes me doubt that suggestion is that no one - including the abstract of the reference you provide - has given an example of an information-bearing replicating crystal. Good arguments for why that kind of thing might be possible, yes. But actual evidence of it happening somewhat naturally, no. I've seen examples of information bearing crystals that repeat the same information layer-after-layer. And I've seen non-information-bearing crystals that actually do something comparable to reproduction (splitting, growth, splitting again). I've just never seen a paper where both were happening at the same time. The clay theory is just not going to be taken seriously until someone has a population of clay "organisms" replicating away in a lab and then starts running long-term evolution experiments on them like Lenski is doing with bacteria.
0timtyler
I am puzzled by your terminology. Replication implies high-fidelity copying of information. That is what some crystals (e.g. barium ferrites) can do. It is an "information bearing replicating crystal". So, what exactly are you asking for? and why are the polytypic layer structures in barium ferrites not it? You ask for splitting. However, one of the key insights in this area is that you can have evolution-without splitting - via "vegetative reproduction": http://originoflife.net/vegetative_reproduction/ For some plant evolution, you don't need splitting, only growth. Much the same is true for some "2D" crystals too. Not that splitting is terribly demanding. Make anything big enough and it will break up - if only under its own weight. The real issue is whether the split introduces mutations that lead to a meltdown. That is a potential problem for 1D crystals - but 2D ones don't depend on splitting - and if there are splits there are still likely to be operational viable growth fronts after the split. No-one else can make life from primitive materials yet either - this requirement strikes against every OOL theory equally. To recap, the main reason for thinking Crystalline Ancestry is true is because clay mineral crystals actually replicate patterns of reasonable size with high fidelity under plausible pre-biotic conditions (and this is the #1 requirement for any evolving system) - whereas no other pre-biotically plausible structure has been demonstrated to do so. However, it's a reasonable request to want to see evolution based on the theory in the lab. Growing many clays in the lab is terribly difficult - and often takes forever - but success there would be interesting. However, much of the existing work has been done with "found" natural clays. They seem to be a more obvious focus - in some respects.
0Jonathan_Graehl
I agree that this is plausible. I haven't investigated, so I don't know if 70% is reasonable or not.
0Mass_Driver
Downvoted for the sheer number of reversals of what used to be my background assumptions about biology without an obvious identification of a single lever that could be used to push on all of those variables. I am now interested in Wachtershauser, but it takes more than a good LW post to make me think that everything I know is wrong and that it was all disproved by the same person. You have raised my belief in your proposition from near-zero to about 30%, but that's still way short of 70%.
5Perplexed
Errh. If you are disagreeing with me, doesn't that mean you should upvote?
0Mass_Driver
Sorry, I got confused. Duly changed.
2Perplexed
Well, he hasn't disproved anything, merely offered an alternative hypothesis. A convincing one, IMHO. But there is a "single lever". Wachtershauser believes that the origin of life was "autotrophic". Everyone else - Miller, Orgel, Deamer, Dyson, even Morowitz on his bad days, thinks that the first living things were "heterotrophic". And since defining those two terms and explaining their significance would take more work than I want to expend right now, I'll leave the explaining to wikipedia and Google. I'll be happy to answer follow-up questions, though.
1timtyler
Er, that is certainly not true of A. G. Cairns-Smith! He had the first organisms made of inorganic compounds and getting energy from supersaturated solutions way back in the 1960s - long before Wachtershauser weighed in on the topic.
1Perplexed
Cairns-Smith thinks that the first living things were clay - completely inorganic, yes. So, to include him in my listing of the deluded heterotrophic theorists, I would have to point out that he believes that the first organism incorporating organic carbon got that organic carbon from the environment (soup) rather than making it itself. We are only talking about 15 years or so. And it doesn't mean much to be first. Nor to be clever. You also need to be right. Wachtershauser got the important stuff right.
1timtyler
You would have to point that out, yes, and it would be nicest if you could supply references. I don't remember Cairns-Smith expressing strong views on that topic. He tended to address the entry of carbon along the lines of: * look, the entry of carbon came later; natural selection did it; all it needed was some possible paths, and so - since the details of what happened are lost in the mists of time - here is an example of one... Possibly - but only if you are talking about the origin of cells. In Crystalline Ancestry, cells are seen as high tech developments that came along well after the origin of living and evolving systems - and the story of the origin of evolution and natural selection is quite different from Wachtershauser's story. From that perspective Wachtershauser was not really wrong - he just wasn't describing the actual origin, but rather some events that happened much later on.
1Perplexed
Ok, I reread Chapter 8 ("Entry of Carbon") in "Genetic Takeover". You are right that he mostly remains agnostic on the question of autotrophic vs heterotrophic. That, in itself is remarkable and admirable. But, in his discussion of the origin of organic chirality (pp307-308) he seems to be pretty clearly assuming heterotrophy - he talks of selecting molecules of the desired handedness from racemic mixtures, rather than simply pointing out that the chiral crystal (flaw) structure will naturally lead to chiral organic synthesis.
1timtyler
Heterotrophy is kind-of allowed after you have an ecosystem of creatures that are messing about with organic chemistry as part of their living processes. At that stage there might well be an organic soup created by their waste products, decayed carcases, etc. This autotrophic vs heterotrophic scene is your area interest - and efforts to paint Cairns-Smith as a heterotrophic theorist strike me as a bit of a misguided smear campaign. His proposed earliest creatures are made of clay! They "eat" supersaturated mineral solutions. You can't get much less "organic" than that.
0Perplexed
Yes, from your (Cairns-Smith) viewpoint that may be what you think Wachtershauser was saying. However, what he actually said is that Cairns-Smith is wrong. Full stop. Please, Tim, we've been through this many times. Your favorite theory and my favorite theory are completely different. If you want to provide links to your clay origin web pages, please do so. Don't demand that I provide them with free advertising. But if I am putting your words into Cairns-Smith's mouth, then I apologize.
0timtyler
That is a bit of a strange response, IMO. I don't know if you can be bothered with continuing our OOL discussion here - but, as you probably know, I don't think there's any good evidence that Cairns-Smith was incorrect - from Wachtershauser - or anyone else - and if you know differently, I would be delighted to hear about it! Maybe that's not what you are saying. Maybe you are just saying that you think Wachtershauser provided a complete story that you find parsimonious - and which doesn't require earlier stages. That would not be so newsworthy for me, I already know all that.
1Will_Newsome
Then you should upvote, not downvote!
0Will_Newsome
I have no idea whether to disagree with this or not (the Wiki god barely has any info on the guy!) but I'm tempted to downvote this anyway for being so provocative! ;)
0Perplexed
Unfortunately, most of Wachtershauser's papers are behind paywalls. This paper (one of his first publications) is an exception. Ignore everything beyond the first 15 pages or so. This New York Times article is surprisingly good for pop-science journalism.
[-]Multiheaded210

Bioware made the companion character Anders in Dragon Age 2 specifically to encourage Anders Breivik to commit his massacre, as part of a Manchurian Candidate plot by an unknown faction that attempts to control world affairs. That faction might be somehow involved with the Simulation that we live in, or attempting to subvert it with something that looks like traditional sympathetic magic. See for yourself. (I'm not joking, I'm stunned by the deep and incredibly uncanny resemblance.)

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0VAuroch
The resemblance is shallow at best.
0ArisKatsaris
You didn't assign a probability estimate.
0Multiheaded
Oh. Umm... 33%!
-1[anonymous]
Don't joke posts ruin the of the point of the Irrationality Games? In any case you are taking the wrong approach. Clearly it is ultimately the fault of the Jews because they run everything, no further thought required.
2Multiheaded
I'm truly not joking!!! You know perfectly well that I don't share much of what's commonly known as "sanity". So to me it's worthy of totally non-ironic consideration..
1[anonymous]
I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I think my brain misfired because the theory involved a video game. Can you elaborate on it? Also this probably isn't the only such incident you think is plausible, can you name others?
[-]dilaudid210

There is already a vast surplus of unused intelligence in the human race, so working on generalized AI is a waste of time (90%)

Edit: "waste of time" is careless, wrong and a bit rude. I just mean a working generalized AI would not make a major positive impact on humankind's well-being. The research would be fun, so it's not wasted time. Level of disagreement should be higher too - say ~95%.

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[-]Relsqui130

I have eight computers here with 200 MHz processors and 256MB of RAM each. Thus, it would not benefit me to acquire a computer with a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM.

(I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion.)

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2dilaudid
To directly address your point - what I mean is if you have 1 computer that you never use, with 200MHz processor, I'd think twice about buying a 1.6GHz computer, especially if the 200MHz machine is suffering from depression due to it's feeling of low status and worthlessness. I probably stole from The Economist too.
0Relsqui
That depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're not using your 200MHz machine because the things you want to work on require at least a gig of processing power, buying the new one might be very productive indeed. This doesn't mean you can't find a good purpose for your existing one, but if your needs are beyond its abilities, it's reasonable to pursue additional resources.
0dilaudid
Yeah I can see that applies much better to intelligence than to processing speed - one might think that a super-genius intelligence could achieve things that a human intelligence could not. Gladwell's Outliers (embarrassing source) seems to refute this - his analysis seemed to show that IQ in excess of 130 did not contribute to success. Geoffrey Miller hypothesised that intelligence is actually an evolutionary signal of biological fitness - in this case, intellect is simply a sexual display. So my view is that a basic level of intelligence is useful, but excess intelligence is usually wasted.
2Relsqui
I'm sure that's true. The difference is that all that extra intelligence is tied up in a fallible meatsack; an AI, by definition, would not be. That was the flaw in my analogy--comparing apples to apples was not appropriate. It would have been more apt to compare a trowel to a backhoe. We can't easily parallelize among the excess intelligence in all those human brains. An AI (of the type I presume singulatarians predict) could know more information and process it more quickly than any human or group of humans, regardless of how intelligent those humans were. So, yes, I don't doubt that there's tons of wasted human intelligence, but I find that unrelated to the question of AI. I'm working from the assumption that folks who want FAI expect it to calculate, discover, and reason things which humans alone wouldn't be able to accomplish for hundreds or thousands of years, and which benefit humanity. If that's not the case I'll have to rethink this. :)
2dilaudid
I agree FAI should certainly be able to outclass human scientists in the creation of scientific theories and new technologies. This in itself has great value (at the very least we could spend happy years trying to follow the proofs). I think my issue is that I think it will be insanely difficult to produce an AI and I do not believe it will produce a utopian "singularity" - where people would actually be happy. The same could be said of the industrial revolution. Regardless, my original post is borked. I concede the point.
5Richard_Kennaway
Did you have this in mind? Cognitive Surplus.
1dilaudid
Yes - thank you for the cite.
[-]knb180

Life on earth was seeded, accidentally or on purpose, from outer space.

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2magfrump
No probability estimate. I assign this hypothesis some probability, but unless you list yours I can only guess as to whether it is similar to mine. Mine is quite low, however, so upvoted.
[-]dfranke150

Nothing that modern scientists are trained to regard as acceptable scientific evidence can ever provide convincing support for any theory which accurately and satisfactorily explains the nature of consciousness.

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1RobinZ
Confidence level?
3dfranke
Let's say 65%.
0[anonymous]
Might be belief hysteresis, but I am inclined towards a similar confidence level in that proposition.
0MichaelVassar
I disagree but I think that might be considered a reasonable probability by most people here.
-1dfranke
Furthermore: if the above is false, it will proven such within thirty years. If the above is true it will become the majority position among both natural scientists and academic philosophers within thirty years. Barring AI singularity in both cases. Confidence level 70%.
[-]Eugine_Nier150

Conditional on this universe being a simulation, the universe doing the stimulating has laws vastly different from our own. For example, it might contain more than 3 extended-spacial dimensions, or bear a similar relation to our universe as our universe does to second life. 99.999%

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8wedrifid
Upvoted for excessive use of nines. :) (ie. Gross overcondidence.)
1Eugine_Nier
I was originally going to include an additional 9, but decided I should compensate for overconfidence bias. :) But, seriously, I don't understand why people are so reluctant to quote large probabilities. For some statements, e.g., "the sun will rise tomorrow", 99.999% seems way underconfident.
6wedrifid
I wouldn't have said the number of nines indicated overconfidence if you were talking about the sun rising. I do not believe you have enough evidence to reach that level of certainty on this subject. I would include multiple nines in my declaration of confidence in that claim.
1Will_Newsome
You think there's a 999,999/100,000 chance the sun will rise tomorrow? I think you may be overconfident here...
3Snowyowl
Upvoted for disagreement. The most detailed simulations our current technology is used to create (namely, large networks of computers operating in parallel) are created for research purposes, to understand our own universe better. Galaxy/star formation, protein folding, etc. are fields where we understand enough to make a simulation but not enough that such a simulation is without value. A lot of our video games have three spatial dimensions, one temporal one, and roughly Newtonian physics. Even Second Life (which you named in your post) is designed to resemble our universe in certain aspects. Basically, I fail to see why anyone would create such a detailed simulation if it bore absolutely no resemblance to reality. Some small differences, yes (I bet quantum mechanics works differently), but I would give a ~50% chance that, conditional on our universe being a simulation, the parent universe has 3 spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension, matter and antimatter, and something that approximates to General Relativity.
4NancyLebovitz
This is much less than obvious-- if the parent universe has sufficient resources, it's entirely plausible that it would include detailed simulations for fun-- art or gaming or some costly motivation that we don't have.
0Snowyowl
True. I would estimate that our universe resembles the parent universe with probability ~50%.
1sharpneli
Considering how much stuff like convays game of life which bears no resemblance to our universe is played I'd put the probability much lower. Whenever you run anything which simulates anything turing compatible (Ok. Finite state machine is actually enough due to finite amount of information storage even in our universe) there is a chance for practically anything to happen.
2bogdanb
I have seen simulators of Conway’s Game of Life (or similar) that contain very complex things, including an actual Turing machine. I could see someone creating a simulator for CGL that simulates a Turing machine that simulates a universe like ours, at least as a proof of concept. With ridiculous amounts of computation available I’m quite sure they’d run the inner universe for a few billion of years. If by accident a civilization arises in the bottom universe and they found some way of “looking above” they’d find a CGL universe before finding the one similar to theirs.
1A1987dM
I'm supposed to downvote if I think the probability of that is >= 99.999% and upvote otherwise? I'm upvoting, but I still the probability of that is > 90%.
2Salivanth
Army1987: Not sure what the rules are for comments replying to the original, but hell. Voted down for agreement.
-1wedrifid
(I think we just vote normally in these replies. I agree with army too.)
2thomblake
Why in the world would the parent be downvoted? I'm having difficulty unraveling the paradox.
2TheOtherDave
Well, someone might agree with wedrifid (that second-order comments are to be voted on normally) but still disapprove of his comment for reasons other than disagreement (for example, think it clarifies what would otherwise have been a valuable point of confusion), and downvote (normally) on that basis.
0Salivanth
Okay, given the confusion, I've retracted my downvote. I've also seen a comment get about 27 karma on this thread replying to another post, and that comment was certainly not massively irrational, so I assume we vote normally if it's not a first-order comment.
2TheOtherDave
I'm not actually sure why there was ever confusion. From the OP: "comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments."
1Mass_Driver
I'd be with you with that much confidence if the proposition were "the top layer of reality has laws vastly different from our own." One level up, there's surely at least an 0.1% chance that Snowyowl is right.
0Will_Newsome
I disagree with this one more than any other comment by far. Have you looked into Tegmark level 4 cosmology? It's really important to take into account concepts like measure and the utility functions of likely simulating agents when reasoning about this kind of thing. Upvoted.
9Eugine_Nier
My reasoning is that it would take more then a universe's worth of computronium to completely stimulate a comprable universe. One could argue that they're taking shortcuts with, e.g., the statistics of bulk matter, but I think we'd notice the edge cases caused by something like that.
0[anonymous]
In realtime, maybe, but what if we're running at one simulated planck time per many time units of calculation?
[-][anonymous]130

I believe that the universe exists tautologically as a mathematical entity and that from the complete mathamatical description of the universe every physical law can be derived, essentially erasing the distiction of map and territory. Roughly akin to the Tegmark 4 hypohtesis, and I have some very intuitively obvious arguments for this which I will post as a toplevel article at one point. Virtual certanity (99.9%).

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3Zetetic
This idea has been implied before and I don't think it holds water. That this has come up more than once makes me think that there is some tendency to conflate the map/territory distinction with some kind of more general philosophical statement, though I'm not sure what. In any event, the Tegmark level 4 hypothesis is orthogonal to the map/territory distinction. The map/territory distinction just provides a nice way of framing a problem we already know exists. In more detail: Firstly, even if you take some sort of Platonic view where we have access to all the math, you still have to properly calibrate your map to figure out what part of the territory you're in. In this case you could think of calibrating your map as applying an appropriate automorphism, so the map/territory distinction is not dissolved. Second, the first view is wrong, because human brains do not contain or have access to anything approaching a complete mathematical description of the level 4 multiverse. At best a brain will contain a mapping of a very small part of the territory in pretty good detail, and also a relatively vague mapping that is much broader. Brains are not logically omniscient; even given a complete mathematical description of the universe, the derivations are not all going to be accessible to us. So the map territory distinction is not dissolved, and in particular you don't somehow overcome the mind projection fallacy, which is a practical (rather than philosophical) issue that cannot be explained away by adopting a shiny new ontological perspective.
0[anonymous]
It is true that a "Shiny" new ontological perspective changes little. Practical intelligences are still bayesians, for information theoretical reasons. What my rather odd idea looks at is specifically what one might call the laws of physics and the mystery of the first cause. And if one might know the Math behind the Universe, the only thing that one might get is a complete theory of QM.
[-]andrewbreese120

Valuable -- likely vital -- cooperative know-how for hugely changing the world has been LOST to the sands of time. (94%) Likely examples include the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, genuinely uplifting colonialism, building the pyramids without epic hardships or complaints.

Much of this know-how was even widely applied during the lifetimes of some now living. Our simple loss of such important knowledge flies in the face of deep assumptions in the water we all grew up in: progressivism, that knowledge is always increasing, that at least the best First World cultures since the Renaissance have always moved forward.

There are world-changing status-move tricks seen in recent history that no one of consequence uses today, and not because they wouldn't work. (88%) Top-of-the-First-World moderns should unearth, update & reapply lost status moves for managing much of the world. (74%) Wealthy, powerful rationalists should WIN! Just as other First Worlders should not retard FAI, so the developing world should not fester, struggle, agitate in ways that seriously increase existential risks.

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1Multiheaded
I don't understand..By what plausible mechanism could such a disastrous loss of knowledge happen specifically NOW?
1NancyLebovitz
The good news is that some version of this knowledge keeps getting rediscovered. The bad news is that the knowledge seems to be mostly tacit and (so far) unteachable.
-1[anonymous]
Down voted because I think this is very plausible.
[-]Eneasz120

Predicated on MWI being correct, and Quantum Immortality being true:

It is most advantageous for any individual (although not necessarily for society) to take as many high-risk high-reward opportunities as possible as long as the result of failure is likely to be death. 90%

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3magfrump
Phrased more precisely: it is most advantageous for the quantum immortalist to attempt highly unlikely, high reward activity, after making a stern precommitment to commit suicide in a fast and decisive way (decapitation?) if they don't work out. This seems like a great reason not to trust quantum immortality.
2Risto_Saarelma
Not sure how I should vote this. Predicated on quantum immortality being true, the assertion seems almost tautological, so that'd be a downvote. The main question to me is whether quantum immortality should be taken seriously to begin with. However, a different assertion that says that in case MWI is correct, you should assume quantum immortality works and try to give yourself anthropic superpowers by pointing a gun to your head would make for an interesting rationality game point.
0Eneasz
Perhaps a separate vote on that then?
1wedrifid
Which way do I vote things that aren't so much wrong as they are fundamentally confused? Thinking about QI as something about which to ask 'true or false?' implies not having fully grasped the implications of (MWI) quantum mechanics on preference functions. At very least the question would need to e changed to 'desired or undesired'.
1Nisan
So, the question to ask is whether quantum immortality ought to be reflected in our preferences, right? It's clear that evolution would not have given humans a set of preferences that anticipates quantum immortality. The only sense in which I can imagine it to be "true" is if it turns out that there's an argument that can convince a sufficiently rational person that they ought to anticipate quantum immortality when making decisions. (Note: I have endorsed the related idea of quantum suicide in the past, but now I am highly skeptical.)
0jimrandomh
My strategy is to behave as though quantum immortality is false until I'm reasonably sure I've lost at least 1-1e-4 of my measure due to factors beyond my control, then switch to acting as though quantum immortality works.
3Vladimir_Nesov
If you lose measure with time, you'll lose any given amount given enough time. It's better to follow a two-outcome lottery where for one outcome of probability 1-1e-4 you continue business as usual, otherwise as if quantum suicide preserves value.
0Eneasz
I can't think of any purely self-interested reason why any individual should care about their measure (I grant there are altruistic reasons)
1wedrifid
Do you think there is a difference between what you would care about before you jumped in the box to play with Schrodinger's cat and what you would care about after?
0Eneasz
Yes, but it's unclear why I should.
[-]vvineeth4u120

Talent is mostly a result of hard work, passion and sheer dumb luck. It's more nurture than nature (genes). People who are called born-geniuses more often than not had better access to facilities at the right age while their neural connections were still forming. (~90%)

Update: OK. It seems I've to substantiate. Take the case of Barrack Obama. Nobody would've expected a black guy to become the US President 50 years ago. Or take the case of Bill Gates, Bill Joy or Steve Jobs. They just happened to have the right kind of technological exposure at an early age and were ready when the technology boom arrived. Or take the case of mathematicians like Fibonacci, Cardano, the Bernoulli brothers. They were smart. But there were other smart mathematicians as well. What separates them is the passion and the hard work and the time when they lived and did the work. A century earlier, they would've died in obscurity after being tried and tortured for blasphemy. Take Mozart. He didn't start making beautiful original music until he was twenty-one by when he had enough musical exposure that there was no one to match him. Take Darwin and think what he would have become if he hadn't boarded the Beagle. He would have been some pastor studying bugs and would've died in obscurity.

In short a genius is made not born. I'm not denying that good genes would help you with memory and learning, but it takes more than genes to be a genius.

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[-]erratio100

I was with you right up until that second sentence. And then I thought about my sister who was speaking in full sentences by 1 and had taught herself to read by 3.

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7Will_Sawin
the level of genius of geniuses, especially the non-hardworking ones, is too high & rare to be explained entirely by this.
1magfrump
Though I should talk to others about this as it is testable, I have seen evidence of affective intelligence spirals. Faith in oneself and hard work lead to success and a work ethic, making it easier to have faith and keep working. I would expect this hypothesis (conditional on affective genius cycles which are more readily testable) to predict MORE "geniuses of geniuses," not fewer.
3Risto_Saarelma
Could this be more precisely rephrased as, "for a majority of people, say 80 %, there would have been a detailed sequence of life experiences that are not extraordinarily improbable or greatly unlike what you would expect to have in a 20th century first world country, which would have resulted them becoming what is regarded as genius by adulthood"?
0magfrump
I would interpret in the other direction; "For people generally regarded as geniuses, likely 100% of them, there is a set of life experiences which is not extraordinarily improbable or greatly unlikely which would have resulted in them not being regarded as geniuses by at least 99% of those who regard them as geniuses." Those figures might need to be adjusted for people who, for example, are regarded as geniuses by less than 100 people or more than ten million people.
0Risto_Saarelma
I don't see how anyone would disagree with in that formulation, since there are vastly more ways to fail than to succeed. The debated idea is that most people, due to the genetic lottery, couldn't aspire to genius-level achievement no matter what their (reasonable) circumstances. Yours seems to be directed at a stance which completely dismisses the "dumb luck" part, after conception, of people ending up being considered a genius. I haven't seen anyone who thinks somewhat unusual genetics are probably a necessary precondition for genius for humans as they are today taking that stance.
0magfrump
I agree, thinking about my post again it is much weaker and not really useful to the discussion. Although I did have the purpose of conflicting with some fictional evidence; for example, vampires always turn out to be rich and in "Deepness in the Sky" Pham Nuwen is said to have built up a trillion dollar fortune out of nothing after abandoned on a planet. These sorts of things tend to imply that regardless of the circumstances of a person if they are smart enough they can work their way out. It's somewhat distinct in that the fictional characters have a basis to build upon whereas a newborn does not, but if anyone is updating on fictional evidence they should stop.
2Perplexed
Upvoting, even though I agree with the first sentence. But I disagree with the rest because I'm pretty sure that hard work and passion have a strong genetic component as well.
0Scott78704
What does 'sheer dumb luck' mean?
[-][anonymous]110

Before the universe, there had to have been something else (i.e. there couldn't have been nothing and then something). 95% That something was conscious. 90%

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[-]homunq110

The most advanced computer that it is possible to build with the matter and energy budget of Earth, would not be capable of simulating a billion humans and their environment, such that they would be unable to distinguish their life from reality (20%). It would not be capable of adding any significant measure to their experience, given MWI.(80%, which is obscenely high for an assertion of impossibility about which we have only speculation). Any superintelligent AIs which the future holds will spend a small fraction of their cycles on non-heuristic (self-conscious) simulation of intelligent life.(Almost meaningless without a lot of defining the measure, but ignoring that, I'll go with 60%)

NOT FOR SCORING: I have similarly weakly-skeptical views about cryonics, the imminence and speed of development/self-development of AI, how much longer Moore's law will continue, and other topics in the vaguely "singularitarian" cluster. Most of these views are probably not as out of the LW mainstream as it would appear, so I doubt I'd get more than a dozen or so karma out of any of them.

I also think that there are people cheating here, getting loads of karma for saying plausibly silly things on purpose. I didn't use this as my contrarian belief, because I suspect most LWers would agree that there are at least some cheaters among the top comments here.

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3MattMahoney
I disagree because a simulation could program you to believe the world was real and believe it was more complex than it actually was. Upvoted for under confidence.
0MichaelVassar
Do you mean unable with any scientific instrumentation that they could build, unable with careful attention, or unlikely to casually? Are you only interested in branches from 'this' world in terms of measure rather than this class of simulation? What's your take on Moore's Law in detail
[-]Apprentice110

The vast majority of members of both houses of the US congress are decent, non-corrupt people of above average intelligence honestly trying to do good by their country. (90%)

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[-]Mass_Driver140

Far too confident.

The typical Congressperson is decent rather than cruel, honest rather than corrupt, smart rather than dumb, and dutiful rather than selfish, but the conjunction of all four positive traits probably only occurs in about 60% of Congresspeople -- most politicians have some kind of major character flaw.

I'd put the odds that "the vast majority" of Congresspeople pass all four tests, operationalized as, say, 88% of Congresspeople, at less than 10%.

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[-]Apprentice100

All right, I'll try to mount a defence.

I would be modestly surprised if any member of Congress has an IQ below 100. You just need to have a bit of smarts to get elected. Even if the seat you want is safe, i.e. repeatedly won by the same party, you likely have to win a competitive primary. To win elections you need to make speeches, answer questions, participate in debates and so on. It's hard. And you'll have opponents that are ready to pounce on every mistake you make and try make a big deal out of it. Even smart people make lots of mistakes and say stupid things when put on the spot. I doubt a person of below average intelligence even has a chance.

Even George W. Bush, who's said and done a lot of stupid things and is often considered dim for a politician, likely has an IQ above 120.

As for decency and honesty, a useful rule of thumb is that most people are good. Crooked people are certainly a significant minority but most of them don't hide their crookedness very well. And you can't be visibly crooked and still win elections. Your opponents are motivated to dig up the dirt on you.

As for honestly trying to serve their country I admit that this is a bit tricky. Congresspeople certa... (read more)

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[-]Scott78704120

Conflating people with politicians is an egregious category error.

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3magfrump
If by not-corrupt you meant "would consciously and earnestly object to being offered money for the explicit purpose of pursuing a policy goal that they perceived as not in the favor of their electorate or the country" and by "above-average intelligence" you meant "IQ at least 101" then I would downvote for agreement. But if you meant "tries to assure that their actions are in the favor of their constituents and country, and monitors their information diet to this end" and "IQ above 110 and conscientiousness above average" then I maintain my upvote. When I think of not-corrupt I think of someone who takes care not to betray people, rather than someone who does not explicitly betray them. When I think "above average intelligence" I think of someone who regularly behaves more intelligently than most, not someone who happens to be just to the right of the bell curve.
2Apprentice
Point taken. And I concede that there are probably some congressmen with 100<IQ<110. But my larger point, which Vladimir made a bit more explicit, is that contrary to popular belief the problems of the USA are not caused by politicians being unusually stupid or unusually venal. I think a very good case can be made that politicians are less stupid and less venal than typical people - the problems are caused by something else.
1magfrump
I would certainly agree that politicians are unlikely to be below the mean level of competence, since they must necessarily run a campaign, be liked by a group of people, etc. I would be surprised if most politicians were very far from the median, although in the bell curve of politician intelligence there is probably a significant tail to the high-IQ side and a very small tail to the low-IQ side. I would also agree that blaming politicians' stupidity for problems is, at the very least, a poor way of dealing with problems, which would be much better addressed with reform of our political systems; by, say, abolishing the senate or some kind of regulation of party primaries. At the very least I'm not willing to give up on thinking that there are a lot of dumb and venal politicians, but I am willing to cede that that's not really a huge problem most of the time.
2wnoise
(Assuming US here). Abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction at this point, though some reforms of how it does business certainly should be in order. I think one of the biggest useful changes would be to reform voting so that the public gets more bits of input, by switching to approval or Condorcet style voting.
0magfrump
Yes, US. You say that abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction. Can you point to specific cases where having a second legislative house, wherein representatives of 14% of the population (the 20 least populous states) can stop any action whatsoever from being taken has actually had a use? I'm sure that you can, but I'm also fairly sure that it's a poorly designed system and its best defense is status quo bias rather than effective governance. Maybe I'm also biased in coming from California, that people from Wyoming have literally 68 times as much representation in the senate as I do. You're probably right in suggesting a change of voting system. Basically anything that's not "first past the post" would be vastly better. But that doesn't make our senate worthwhile. I'm going to precommit to not making any further posts on this topic because politics will kill my mind.
0wnoise
It's rather difficult to find good examples. News coverage of bills that don't pass is much harder to find. There's an additional complication in that any given case where I think it was a fantastic thing that a bill didn't pass is as likely to be interpreted by someone else as a damn shame. I agree it's a poorly designed system. There absolutely are better ways of doing things. But I don't know entirely which they are, and there are far more ways of making the system worse than better. I'm just not convinced that abolishing is necessarily an improvement. It's hard to design well-functioning political systems. Just as it's hard to design any complicated interacting system with many parts. Note too that the system is not just the formal rules, either, but includes the traditions about what is acceptable. These evolved in tandem. As an example of what can happen when they don't, many Latin American countries borrowed heavily from the formal structure of the U.S. and then promptly slid into dictatorships. There's a computer programming adage that any complex working system was created by evolving a less-complex working system, rather than writing from scratch. I'd rather see incremental reform than large changes, barring an absolute necessity. Most of what the U.S. Congress does is not terribly time sensitive. It just doesn't matter if most legislative tweaks get passed this month, or even this year. The budget is admittedly a very important exception. (I too am from California, though I don't currently live there. And yeah, the overrepresentation of "flyover country" is annoying. I would prefer the second chamber to be allocated differently than it currently is, but I still think two chambers is better than one, if for nothing else than slightly reducing groupthink.)
0wedrifid
What do you use currently? Something worse than approval? Tell me it isn't "First Past the Post"! Condorcet voting systems seem like a good option. We've been using Instant Runoff Voting here (Australia) since before we federated but it seems like Condorcet would be a straightforward upgrade. The principle ('preference voting') is the same but Condorcet looks like it would better handle the situation where your first preference is (for example) the 2nd most popular candidate.
0wnoise
Why are you asking me to lie? A proportional-representation system just won't fly in (most of) the U.S. I certainly don't like the enhanced party-discipline it tends to reinforce. Although in theory approval is subject to most of the same strategic voting problems as FPTP, STV/IRV, and Borda count, in practice, approval works quite well. It's simpler to explain and count compared to Condorcet, and for n candidates requires only n counts instead of the n(n-1)/2 counts that Condorcet would. (I do regularly run votes for my smallish, intelligent gaming group, and there we do use Condorcet to e.g. pick the next game and who's running it -- though usually as nice summary for establishing consensus).
0wedrifid
You're comparing approval favorably to IRV along dimensions related to strategic voting? That seems bizarre to me. Thinking of cases in which to vote strategically with IRV is relatively difficult - it very rarely matters and only changes the payoffs marginally. With approval voting strategic voting is more or less necessary to vote effectively. You need to know where to draw the line on what could have otherwise been a preference ordering in order to minimise the loss of your preference information due to the system. I probably wouldn't bother with Concorcet if not for the ability to use computers to do the counting. IRV is much simpler to count by hand. "OK guys. This candidate is out. Let's take this box, cross off the top name and sort them again."
0wnoise
Yep. Strategic voting for IRV becomes relevant as soon as the third-ranked candidate becomes competitive, and essentially gives you first-past-the-post behavior. It's less likely to encourage strategic voting than FPTP, and this is definitely important in practice, but it still falls under the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. See, for example, http://minguo.info/election_methods/irv/ It's true that optimally setting a cut-off in approval is part of the strategy. But there is never an incentive to lie and approve a lessor-favored candidate over a more-favored one. The second is far more informationally damaging. (And I think it is sometimes easier to just measure each candidate against a cut-off rather than doing a full ranking.) I'd describe that slightly differently -- Condorcet is easier to count by hand -- it's just the pairwise races that matter. Determining the winner from the counts involves a bit of skull sweat. IRV, the counting proper needs a separate bucket for each permutation, but is easier to analyze by hand and determine the winner. YMMV, on whether this is a useful distinction.
0wedrifid
I don't care what you do over there, so long as you don't try that over here.
1bogdanb
About the first paragraph: does your definition include in “corrupt” people who do not object in that situation because they believe that the benefit to the country of receiving the money (because they’d be able to use it for good things) exceeds the damage done to the country by whatever they’re asked to do? I ask because I suspect many people in high positions have an honest but incorrectly high opinion about their worth to whatever cause they’re nominally supporting. (E.g., “without this money I’ll lose the election and the country would be much worse off because the other guy is evil”.)
0magfrump
I think that having damagingly uninformed opinions about the values of your actions (e.g. "I'll lose the election and the other guy is evil") counts as either corrupt (in terms of not monitoring information diet to take care not to betray people) or stupid (in terms of being unable to do so.) If someone were to accept significant bribes, and then, say, donate all of the money to a highly efficient charity such as SIAI, NFP, or VillageReach, after doing a half-hour or longer calculation involving spreadsheets, then I might not count them as corrupt. However I think the odds that this has actually EVER occurred are practically insignificant.
6Vladimir_M
Apprentice: Downvoted for agreement. However, I must add that it would be extremely fallacious to conclude from this fact that the country is being run competently and not declining or even headed for disaster. This fallacy would be based on the false assumption that the country is actually run by the politicians in practice. (I am not arguing for these pessimistic conclusions, at least not in this context, but merely that given the present structure of the political system, optimistic conclusions from the above fact are generally unwarranted.)
0Apprentice
I absolutely agree with you.
0Ledfox
The "Meno" demands a down-vote from me, but only in this game.
[-]Wrongnesslessness100

All existence is intrinsically meaningless. After the Singularity, there will be no escape from the fate of the rat with the pleasure button. No FAI, however Friendly, will be able to work around this irremediable property of the Universe except by limiting the intelligence of people and making them go through their eternal lives in carefully designed games. (> 95%)

Also, any self-aware AI with sufficient intelligence and knowledge will immediately self-destruct or go crazy. (> 99.9%)

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9Incorrect
I'm trying to figure out what this statement means. What would the universe look like if it were false?
8TheOtherDave
In context, I took it to predict something like "Above a certain limit, as a system becomes more intelligent and thus more able to discern the true nature of existence, it will become less able to motivate itself to achieve goals."
4Locaha
You can't. We live in an intrinsically meaningless universe, where all statements are intrinsically meaningless. :-)
1thomblake
I'm not sure it's a bug if "all existence is meaningless" turns out to be meaningless.
2TimS
Aren't you supposed to separate distinct predictions? Edit: don't see it in the rules, so remainder of post changed to reflect. I upvote the second prediction - the existence of self-aware humans seems evidence of overconfidence, at the very least.
2Wrongnesslessness
But humans are crazy! Aren't they?
0TimS
If we define crazy as "sufficiently mentally unusual as to be noticeably dysfunctional in society" then I estimate at least 50% of humanity is not crazy. If we define crazy as "sufficiently mentally unusual that they cannot achieve ordinary goals more than 70% of the time," then I estimate that at least 75% of humanity is not crazy.
1ArisKatsaris
This prediction isn't falsifiable -- the word "crazy" is not precise enough, and the word "sufficient" is a loophole you can drive the planet Jupiter through.
[-]simplicio100

The distinction between "sentient" and "non-sentient" creatures is not very meaningful. What it's like for (say) a fish to be killed, is not much different from what it's like for a human to be killed. (70%)

Our (mainstream) belief to the contrary is a self-serving and self-aggrandizing rationalization.

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3RobinZ
Allow me to provide the obligatory complaint about (mainstream) conflation of sentience and sapience, said complaint of course being a display the former but not the latter.
2wedrifid
Our? :)
2simplicio
Fixed.
3wedrifid
But possibly introducing a new problem in as much as the very term 'sentient' and some of the concept it represents isn't even present in the mainstream. I recall back in my early high school years writing an essay that included a reference to sentience and was surprised when she didn't know what it meant. She was actually an extremely good English teacher and quite well informed generally... just not in the same subculture. While I didn't have the term for it back then it stuck in my mind as significant lesson on the topic of inferential distance.
0[anonymous]
I’m inclined to disagree. While I am far from a weapons grade philosopher it seems to me that if we can rationally assign suffering any negative value then the suffering of a sentient being is a worse thing. Say a gold fish is imprisoned in a fish bowl allowed to starve to death. Say a human being endures the same thing. The gold fish will die in a poor fashion (are there good ones?) and will suffer greatly. The human, by virtue of intellect, can suffer in ways that the gold fish cannot. The human can rail against the injustice of their situation. The human may lament the mistake that led to their imprisonment. They can suffer in numerous unique ways because they can think. Their suffering is greater because it is deeper. The human will understand much more of what is happening to them. To further expand with: Burying a loved one sucks. The gut level emotional suffering is great. The act of knowing that they are dead and gone makes it so much worse. Comprehending what death is makes it all the more horrible, does it not? If we allow that suffering is not bad and should not be ameliorated…. I don’t know how to even begin processing that world. AMMENDED: I fail. Lesson: Read the article and don't just jump in. If you think somone couldn't possibly mean what they said make sure you understand the rules of engagement. slaps self
0[anonymous]
I disagree: We desperately need a continuous scale of personhood. Dolphins and Chims and Ara Parrots are people too!
[-]prase100

Many-world interpretation of quantum physics is wrong. Reasonably certain (80%).

I suppose the MWI is an artifact of our formulation of physics, where we suppose systems can be in specific states that are indexed by several sets of observables. I think there is no such thing as a state of the physical system.

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4Vladimir_M
prase: Could you elaborate by any chance? I can't really figure out what exactly you mean by this, but I suspect it is very interesting.
9prase
Disclaimer: If I had something well thought through, consistent, not vague and well supported, I would be sending it to Phys.Rev. instead of using it for karma-mining in the Irrationality thread on LW. Also, I don't know your background in physics, so I will probably either unnecessarily spend some time explaining banalities, or leave something crucial unexplained, or both. And I am not sure how much of what I have written is relevant. But let me try. The standard formulation of the quantum theory is based on the Hamiltonian formalism. In its classical variant, it relies on the phase space, which is coordinatised by dynamical variables (or observables; the latter term is more frequent in the quantum context). The observables are conventionally divided into pairs of canonical coordinates and momenta. The set of observables is called complete if their values determine the points in the phase space uniquely. I will distinguish between two notions of state of a physical system. First, the instantaneous state corresponds to a point in the phase space. Such a state evolves, which means that as time passes, the point moves through the phase space along a trajectory. It has sense to say "the system at time t is in instantaneous state s" or "the instantaneous state s corresponds to the set of observables q". In the quantum mechanics, the instantaneous state is described by state vectors in the Schrödinger picture. Second, the permanent state is fixed and corresponds to a parametrised curve s=s(t). It has sense to say "the system in the state s corresponds to observable values q(t)". In quantum mechanics, this is described by the state vectors in the Heisenberg picture. The quantum observables are represented by operators, and either state vectors evolve and operators remain still (Schrödinger), or operators evolve and state vectors remain still (Heisenberg). The distinction may feel a bit more subtle on the classical level, where the observables aren't "reified", so to sp
6prase
Like in the classical mechanics, one can resort to the relativistic Hamiltonian formalism. The formalism can be adopted to use in quantum theory, but now there are no observable operators q(t) with time-dependent eigenvectors: both q and t are (commuting) operators. There are indeed wave functions ψ(q,t), but their interpretation is not obvious. For details see here (the article partly overlaps with the one which I link in the remark 2, but gets deeper into the relativistic formalism). The space-time states discussed in the article are redundant - many distinct state vectors describe the same physical situation. So what we have: either violation of the Lorentz symmetry, or a non-transparent representation of states. Of course, all physical questions in quantum physics can be formulated as questions of the second type as described four paragraphs above. One measures the observables twice (the first measurement is called preparation), and can then ask: "What's the probability of measuring q2, when we have prepared the system into q1?" Which is equivalent to "what's the probability of measuring q1 and q2 on the same system?" And of course, there is the path integral formulation of quantum theory, which doesn't even need to speak about state space, and is manifestly Lorentz-covariant. So it seems to me that the notion of a state of a system is redundand. The problem with collapse (which is really a problem - my original statement doesn't mean an endorsement of collapse, although some readers may perceive it as such) doesn't exist when we don't speak about the states. Of course, the state vectors are useful in some calculations. I only don't give them independent ontological status. Remarks: 1. The fact that the quantum mechanics and relativity don't fit together is often presented as a "feature, not bug": it points out to the necessity of field theory, which, as we know, is a more precise description of the world. In my opinion, such declarations miss the mark, as
0Perplexed
An outstanding summary. It reminded me of stuff I once knew and taught me one or two things I had missed until now. And in two parts to make it easy to upvote it twice. But the purpose was to cast doubt on MWI. If you are merely pointing out that MWI is a non-relativistic theory, and hence cannot be exactly right, well, ok. But that just means we need a Lorentz invariant version of MWI. But I thought we already have one. Feynman's sum-over-histories approach. I guess my question is this: Are you just saying that MWI is wrong because it is not Lorentz invariant, or that it is wrong because it cannot be made Lorentz invariant, or that it is wrong because it cannot be made Lorentz invariant without giving up the interpretation that there are many worlds? ETA: second question: I guess I don't understand the path integral formulation then. I thought the paths being integrated were paths (trajectories) through a kind of state space. How am I wrong?
1prase
This is a difficult question. I have written the disclaimer above the grandparent precisely because I am not able to demonstrate that MWI is wrong. I believe MWI can be made Lorentz invariant and retain its interpretation, for the price of losing its intuitive appeal and making it awkward. One can postulate some kind of Lorentz invariant measurement procedure (like the one suggested in articles I've linked to) and do the interpretational stuff on the level of observer. In the Schrödinger picture it looks nice - in the Heisenberg picture not so. My attack doesn't aim to MWI specifically. I think the objective collapse is even a greater problem. Partly, to include MWI in the statement was part of my dirty tactic to make the statement more prominent, since belief in MWI is accepted here as one of the rationality tests (hell, there is even a sequence about it). But I suspect that the very dispute between collapse and many worlds is an artifact of asking about the behaviour of objective states of the system, and if it is possible to avoid speaking about states, the problem disappears. I want to explain away what MWI proponents want to explain. To further justify my inclusion of MWI specifically in the formulation of my supposedly irrational belief, I can add that, unlike the MWI proponents, there are (and were since the very beginning of the quantum theory) Copenhagenists who accept that the collapse is only a mathematical tool useful within our imperfect understanding of nature and it has no independent ontological status. This is a position with which I sympathise. Could you explain in more detail? When the path integral formulation is derived from the standard formulation, one integrates over paths in the phase space. However the integrations over momenta can be performed exactly and one is left with the integration over paths in the configuration space only (which is half of the phase space). This is the form which is prefered, as after the integration sign stands
1Douglas_Knight
We experience a classical world. To explain this "away" would be bad. The broadest interpretation of the phrase "many worlds" is that there are many classical worlds equally real to the single world we experience. Surely you accept this. There are questions of how real is this classical world and where it comes from. The decoherence program tries to address this, though I understand it to be incomplete, or at least controversial. What gets worse when you move to QFT? You seem concerned with what is ontologically fundamental. The classical states are not ontologically fundamental in ordinary QM. If that's what you mean by MWI...well, you already admitted to being a troll. I'm not so concerned about fundamental ontology, so I'm happy to talk about QFT as a bunch of ordinary QM systems, one for each reference frame. The decomposition into classical states is not the same in each frame (ie, is not relativistically covariant). Is this a problem? Isn't the situation of ordinary QM already almost this bad? In ordinary QM, you can give states classical names, but they don't actually evolve classically. The macroscale classical worlds that do evolve classically are pretty fuzzy.
0prase
Surely? I don't even know what it means. Words "real" and "experience" are close neighbours in my vocabulary, real unexperienced world sounds a lot like an oxymoron, at least if not based on a really strong argument. Nothing. I have tried to (incompletely of course) explain the relation between the conventional and relativistic Hamiltonian formalism in case of mechanics, where it is slightly more intuitive and simpler. If you address my first remark, you have disinterpreted it. I don't say that move to QFT isn't justified, but that one conventional argument used to support this move isn't good. It isn't. By MWI I mean probably the same thing as anybody else. Nothing particularly related to classical states. I have discussed classical states in order to give some background to my intuitions. My statement was that probably the quantum states are a redundant concept. I would understand that QFT is a bunch of QM systems, one for each spacetime point. I don't understand what reference frames do with it. In any fixed reference frame QFT has infinite number of degrees of freedom. Maybe you speak about momentum representation? I am confused.
1Perplexed
Amen to that. Whenever we cease believing we are working with models and doing phenomenology, and start believing we are dealing with reality and doing ontology; at that point we have stopped doing science and entered the realm of metaphysics. Be forewarned that my physics is at the "QM and QFT for Dummies" level. But I thought that a slogan of "one Everett world = one Feynman diagram" had some validity. At least if you think of really big diagrams. (>5%)
0Vladimir_M
prase: How do these people interpret interaction-free measurements? Specifically, let's observe one of the possible outcomes of the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-tester thought experiment, namely the one that identifies a working bomb without exploding it. To describe this experiment in Copenhagen terms, we could say that the interaction between the photon wave function and the bomb has, as a measurement, collapsed the photon wave function to the upper arm of the interferometer. Since we actually see this result in the detector, and obtain useful information about the bomb from it, I don't see how we can deny that the collapse has been observed as an actual process while still insisting on Copenhagen. (But I'm sure there is a way to do it, if there are actual physicists who hold this position.)
0prase
This relates to the discussion where you've apparently participated, and I am not sure whether I can say more. I am quite content with the prediction of the theory, and don't trust much the feeling of need of further verbal explanation here. If I were pressed to say something, I would say that probably the present formalism of quantum theory isn't particularly well suited for human intuition. After all, I believe we will get better formalism in future, whatever it means. The feeling that the collapse is needed somehow to mediate the bomb's interaction with the detector falls to the same category with the belief that light must propagate in some medium, or a feeling that there must be some absolute time. Such intuitions are sometimes correct, more often wrong. Based on my experience, most of the ordinary physicists don't think interpretations of QM are a big issue. It isn't discussed too often, people are content to do the calculations most of the time. Of course, this may be different among the first-rank researchers.
0Vladimir_M
Just to clarify: in that discussion, I claimed that the bomb tester thought-experiment doesn't pose any principal difficulty for Copenhagen relative to the standard variations on the double-slit experiment, so that might seem to contradict what I write here. What I meant to say there is that the main feature of the bomb-tester, namely the interaction-free measurement, is also featured in a less salient way in these classic though-experiments, so that Copenhagen also makes sense for the bomb tester if you accept that it makes sense at all. But if I may ask, how would you reply to the following statement? "Consider the case when we have a dud bomb, and a case when we have a working bomb that doesn't explode. There is an observable difference between what the detector shows in these outcomes, so replacing the dud bomb with a working one changed the system in a measurable way. We call this change -- whatever exactly it might be -- collapse." Do you believe that this statement would be flawed, or that it is, after all, somehow compatible with the idea that "the collapse is only a mathematical tool"?
0prase
Comparing a system with a dud to a system with a working bomb is comparing two different systems, or the same system in two instances with different initial conditions, and thus doesn't relate to the collapse. I suppose you rather had in mind a statement: "Consider two experiments with a working bomb, and in one the bomb explodes, while in the second it doesn't. There is an observable difference..." Well, it is undeniable that there is a difference. The two systems were the same in the beginning and are different in the end. There are three conventional explanations. 1) The systems were different all way long, but in the beginning the difference was invisible for us (hidden parameters). 2) The difference emerged from a non-deterministic process before or during the measurement (collapse). 3) There is no difference, but we see only a portion of reality after the measurement, and a different one in each of the cases (many worlds). I suggest fourth point of view: Don't ask in what state the system is, this is meaningless. Ask only what measurement outcomes are possible, given the outcomes we had from the already performed measurements. If you do that, there is no paradox to solve.
0Vladimir_M
prase: Actually, that's the distinction I missed! The notion of "collapse" specifically refers to a non-deterministic process, not to a deterministic process that would at some point reveal the previously existing hidden variables. That would basically be the "ensemble interpretation," right? The theory tells you the probability distribution of outcomes, which you'll see if you repeat the experiment prepared the same way a bunch of times (frequentism!), and that's all there is to it. I do have a lot of sympathy for that view, as you might guess from the recent discussion of subjective probabilities, though I cannot say that my superficial understanding of QM gives me much confidence in any views I might hold about it.
0prase
Well, the quantum probabilities are certainly frequentist. However, I don't suppose strict Bayesians deny that there are probabilities with frequentist interpretation. I am also not sure about the label ensemble interpretation. It seems that its proponents somehow deny the validity of QM for small, non-ensemblish systems, which is a position I don't subscribe to. After all, both collapse and many-world interpretations are no more Bayesian and no less frequentist than the ensemble one. The hidden parameters are deterministic, but have their own well known problems. As for the frequentist-Bayes controversy, although I am probably more than you sympathetic to the Bayesian position, I have some sympathy for frequentism. I think both interpretation can coexist, with different sensible meanings of "probability".
0[anonymous]
I was writing a longer reply and accidentally deleted it while being in the half. It's frustrating. I will write it once more, but not sure whether today.
3wnoise
Of course it is wrong, because standard quantum physics is an approximate model that only applies in certain conditions. Wrong, of course, is not the same as "not useful", nor does "MWI is wrong" mean "there is an objective collapse".
0prase
I haven't said that there is an objective collapse.
[-]Academian90

This comment currently (at the time of reading) has at least 10 net upvotes.

Confidence: 99%.

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[-]Perplexed100

You realize, of course, that your confidence level is too high. Eventually, the score should cycle between +9 and +10. Which means that the correct confidence level should be 50%.

Nonetheless, it is very cute. So, I'll upvote it for overconfidence, to say nothing of currently being wrong.

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7JGWeissman
Once it gets to 10 points, it should be voted up for underconfidence.
5magfrump
Except that there's a chance that it's been downvoted by someone else that's sufficient for 99% to warrant agreement rather than a statement of underconfidence (if and only if people decide that this is true!) which would be easily broken if it got up to 11 but would be far more easily broken if the confidence was set at say, 75%.
0wedrifid
It would actually be +8 to +11. (I don't think that changes the 50%.)
4magfrump
Cycle's broken! Now upvoted for underconfidence.
[-][anonymous]60

The gaming industry is going to be a major source of funding* for AGI research projects in the next 20 years. (85%)

*By "major" I mean contributing enough to have good odds of causing actual progress. By gaming industry I include joint ventures, so long as the game company invested a nontrivial portion of the funding for the project.

EDIT: I am referring to video game companies, not casinos.

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2Eugine_Nier
I assume you mean designing better AI opponents, as this seems to be one type of very convenient problem for AI. Needless to say having one of these go FOOM would be very, very bad.
[-]Risto_Saarelma110

Opponents can be done reasonably well with even the simple AI we have now. The killer app for gaming would be AI characters who can respond meaningfully to the player talking to them, at the level of actually generating new prewritten game plot quality responses based on the stuff the player comes up with during the game.

This is quite different from chatbots and their ilk, I'm thinking of complex, multiagent player-instigated plots such as the player convincing AI NPC A to disguise itself as AI NPC B to fool AI NPC C who is expecting to interact with B, all without the game developer having anticipated that this can be done and without the player feeling like they have gone from playing a story game to hacking AI code.

So I do see a case here. The game industry has thus far been very conservative about weird AI techniques, but since cutting edge visuals seem to be approaching diminishing returns, there could be room for a gamedev enterprise going for something very different. The big problem is that when sorta-there visuals can be pretty impressive, sorta there general NPC AI will probably look quite weird and stupid in a game plot.

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6Kaj_Sotala
Not for games like Civilization they can't. Especially not if they're also supposed to deal with mods that add entirely new features. Some EURISKO-type engine that could play a lot of games against itself and then come up with good strategies (and which could be rerun after each rules change) would be a huge step forward.
0magfrump
This is what I was trying to say but much better.
6[anonymous]
It would be very bad if an opponent AI went FOOM. Or even one which optimized for certain types of "fun", say, rescue scenarios. But consider a game AI which optimized for features found in some games today (generalized): * The challenges of many games require you to learn to think faster as the game progresses. * They often require you to know more (and learn to transfer that knowledge, part of what I would call "thinking better"). * Through roleplaying and story, some games lead you to act the part of a person more like who you wish you were. * Many social games encourage you to rapidly develop skills in cooperation and teamwork, to exchange trust and empathy in and out of the game. They want you to catch up to the players who already have an advantage: those who had grown up farther together. There are more conditions to CEV as usually stated, and they are hard to correlate with goals that any existing game designers consciously implement. They might have to be a hard pitch, "social innovations" for a "revolutionary game". If it was done consciously, it's conceivable that AI researchers could use game funding to implement Friendly AGI. (Has there been a post or discussion yet on designing a Game AI that implements CEV? If so, I must read it. If not, I will write it.)
2NancyLebovitz
Needless to say having one of these go FOOM would be very, very bad. Maybe, but the purpose of such an opponent isn't to crush humans, it's to give them as good a game as possible. The big risk might be an AI which is inveigling people into playing the game more than is good for them, leading to a world which is indistinguishable from a world in which humans are competing to invent better superstimulus games.
1nazgulnarsil
eh, given the space of various possible futures I would regard this as one of the better ones.
0magfrump
AI opponents seem to have a relatively easy timing defeating human players at many games already. I think it's possible that the development of AI players that are more fun to play with or against will be a new direction for gaming AI to go which would be far less tragic (compared with, say, Astonishing X-men volume 3 issues 8-15+) Of course this is just a possibility, I don't mean to say that this is the most likely outcome.
0Pavitra
I think that's been happening for a while already. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the main difficulty in designing AI game opponents was making them stupid enough to beat.
1dfranke
Upvoted for overconfidence, but I'd downvote at 40%.
0lukstafi
Downvoted, but I don't think it will be bigger than other major sources.
-1Perplexed
Actually, "the gaming industry" usually refers to casino operators. So, when you said they would provide funding, I initially thought you meant that the funds would be provided involuntarily as in The Eudaemonic Pie.
0[anonymous]
Sorry to be unclear, I meant the video game industry. Thanks though for the book reference, looks like a fun read :-)
[-]Angela50

The hard problem of consciousness will be solved within the next decade (60%).

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1Alex Vermillion
Clock's ticking...
[-]gwern20

Julian Jaynes's theory of bicameralism presented in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is substantially correct, and explains many engimas and religious belief in general. (25%)

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[-]blogospheroid20

There will be a net positive to society by measures of overall health, wealth and quality of life if the government capped reproduction at a sustainable level and distributed tradeable reproductive credits for that amount to all fertile young women. (~85% confident)

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8Alicorn
How I evaluate this statement depends very heavily on how the policy is enforced, so I'm presently abstaining; can you elaborate on how people would be prohibited from reproducing without the auspices of one of these credits?
0blogospheroid
I do not expect that the human population has gone so much in overshoot that the sustainable level has gone below 1 child per woman, so the couple will have one child atleast, from the original credit allocation. Almost any government order has the threat of force behind it. This is no different. How would it be enforced would depend on the sustainability research and the gap it finds out between the present birth rate and the sustainable level. Depending on the gap, policy can vary from mild to draconian. * Public appeal on the internet seeking anyone else willing to trade in their credits * Giving incentives for sterilisation * Ceasing of subsidy of school * Ceasing of welfare benefits * Allowing a born child time until the age of 40 to accumulate enough money to pay for their credit. * Fines equivalent to the extra load on the sustainability infrastructure * Ostracisation of couple * Sending away to a reservation where the couple have their share of the sustainable resources and can decide what to do with it. * Denial of legal recourse (making someone an outlaw, but not initiating any force against them) * Imprisonment in a work camp * Forcible sterilization of the offending adults * Forcible sterilization of the children born * Torture of parent * Forced Abortion * Fathers to be killed in exchange for the child to be born I think we are presently at the level of time allowance and fines and that is the level where I would say my statement about the improved lot of people came from.
1wedrifid
Fathers? Crazy talk. It's the mother that has the ability to abort the child to prevent transgressing upon the law. Killing the father seems not just innapropriate but also extremely impractical. It means the father should kill any mother who doesn't abort the pregnancy at his request in order to save his own life. Not a desirable payoff structure. An even worse implication of that means of enforcement - practical, legally sanctioned assassination. * Paternity is far more difficult to trace than maternity. It is possible the father is not even aware that a child of his is gestating. * Consider either woman with a grudge against a male enemy or a male willing to pay a willing baby-popping pseudo-assassin. * Said woman simply needs to acquire sperm from the male. This is a relatively simple task in many instances. Options include: * Seduce intended victim yourself. Use faulty condoms and or lie about your own birth control status. * Seduce intended victim yourself, intentionally take semen from the used condom or neglect certain practical guidelines of use. * Pay someone to seduce the intended victim and acquire a sample for you. * Invade the victim's privacy with stealth and acquire semen produce during the victim's private sex life or even lack thereof. (Presumably just poisoning the guy while doing this would be too suspicious?...) * Identify a willing or clueless cuckold that can think they are the parent until too late for it to matter. * Sell your reproductive credit at the last minute. If you create a system of rules they will be gamed. That rule is far too easy to game.
0blogospheroid
In all fairness, that rule does lie on the draconian end of things. I was thinking more on the mild end, because my confidence level is more appropriate at that level of punishment. You can probably scratch out the last one or replace it with mothers.
0wedrifid
Absolutely, I appreciate the whole 'scale of sanction' thing and with :s/father/mother/ it would fit just fine.
2wedrifid
The implications of that on mating payoffs are fascinating.
0Mass_Driver
Explain! Rot13 if necessary.
2wedrifid
I was just 'following the money' to work out how market forces would likely play out with respect to mating credits. It looks at first glance like we would end up with surprisingly similar reproductive payoffs to those in the EEA. Guys, have as many children as you can afford or cuckold off on other people. Girls, seek out guys with abundant resources who can buy reproductive credits but if possible get someone with better genes to do the actual impregnation. I'm thinking that matter-of-course paternity testing would be a useful addition to blogospheroid's proposal.
1mattnewport
Historically, global population increase has correlated pretty well with increases in measures of overall health, wealth and quality of life. What empirical evidence do you derive your theory that zero or negative population growth would be better for these measures from?
2blogospheroid
The peak oil literature and global climate change is something that has made me seriously reconsider the classic liberal viewpoint towards population control. Also, The reflective consistency of the population control logic. Cultures that restrict their reproduction for altruistic reasons will die out, leaving the earth for selfish replicators who will , if left uncontrolled, take every person's living standards back to square one. Population control will be on the agenda of even a moral singleton. I live in India and have seen China overtake India bigtime because of a lot of institutional improvement, but also because of the simple fact that they controlled their population. People talk about India's demographic dividend but we are not even able to educate and provide basic hygiene and health to our children to take advantage of this dividend. I've seen the demographic transition in action everywhere in the world and it seems like a good thing to happen to societies. Setting up an incentive system that rewards altruistic control of reproduction, careful creation of children and sustainability seems to be an overall plus to me. My only concern is if this starts a level-2 status game where more children become a status good and political pressure increases the quotas beyond sustainability.
0MattMahoney
It's a good idea but upvote because evolution will thwart your plans.
0gwern
Downvote on condition you meant a global cap on reproduction, since that seems like a huge no-brainer to me that population pressures are seriously bad and the demographic transition is good for the nations which undergo it. If you only meant the US or something... I'd need to think about it more.
[-]timujin10

Eliezer Yudkowsky is evil. He trains rationalists and involves them into FAI and Xrisk for some hidden egoistic goal, other than saving the world and making people happy. Most people would not want him reach that goal, if they knew what it is. There is a grand masterplan. Money we're giving to CFAR and MIRI aren't going into AI research as much as into that masterplan. You should study rationality via means different from LW, OB and everything nearby, or nor study it at all. You shouldn't donate money when EY wants you to. ~5%, maybe?

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[-]thomblake10

This comment will be massively upvoted. 100%.

EDIT: See here. Retracted.

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4TheOtherDave
Were I a robot from 1960s SF movies, my head would now explode.
4thomblake
The stable solution is for everyone to notice that few people will read the comment and so it will only be moderately upvoted, and so upvote it.
2MarkusRamikin
DO NOT MESS WITH KARMA
4thomblake
noted.
1MarkusRamikin
Aw, didn't mean you to actually do that. :) Guess I'll upvote you here instead.
0[anonymous]
Why... not?
3thomblake
There isn't a reason - that just turned out to be another stable solution to the paradox.
-1[anonymous]
What paradox? There wasn't even a paradox.
3TheOtherDave
As I understood it, the paradox was that by the rules of the thread, "This comment will be massively upvoted. 100%" is something I should upvote if I believe it's unlikely to be true. But if I upvote it on that basis, I should expect others to upvote it as well. But if I expect others to upvote it, then I should expect it to be upvoted, and therefore I should consider it likely to be true. But if I consider it likely to be true, then by the rules of the thread, I should downvote it. But if I downvote on that basis, I should expect others to downvote it as well, and therefore I should consider it unlikely to be true. But...
2thomblake
Naively: Everyone should agree that 100% certainty of something is infinitely overconfident. Then, everyone should upvote. Knowing this, I'm completely certain that I'll get lots of upvotes, and so absurdly large amounts of certainty seem justified. And as a kicker, everyone said I was overconfident of something that turned out to be correct. Obviously, there are other possibilities (like me retracting the comment before it can be massively upvoted), so (like usual) 100% certainty really isn't justified. And unforseen consequences like that are exactly why you don't play with outcome pumps, as the time turner story reminds us.
0MarkusRamikin
The universe might end due to paradox.
0[anonymous]
I seriously doubt the universe's integrity depends on the state some bits stored on hardware that exists inside of it.
0[anonymous]
Nice.
[-]RobinZ10

Between (edit:) 10% and 0.1% of college students understand any mathematics beyond elementary arithmetic above the level of rote calculation. ~95%

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[-][anonymous]00

I think that "personal identity" and "consciousness" are fundamentally incoherent concepts. Reasonably confident (~80%)

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[-]Angela00

The amount of consciousness that a neural network S has is given by phi=MI(A^H_max;B)+MI(A;B^H_max), where {A,B} is the bipartition of S which minimises the right hand side, A^H_max is what A would be if all its inputs were replaced with maximum-entropy noise generators and MI(A,B)=H(A)+H(B)-H(AB) is the mutual information between A and B and H(A) is the entropy of A. 99.9%

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[-][anonymous]00

The Big Bang is not how our universe was created. Our universe was created by a naturalistic event that we have not yet seriously theorised, due to a lack of scientific knowledge. (15%)

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[-]gRR00

Richard Dawkins' genocentric ("Selfish Gene") view is a bad metaphor for most of what happens with sufficiently advanced life forms. Organism-centered view is a much better metaphor. New body forms and behaviors first appear in phenotype, in response to changing environment. Later, they get "written" into the genotype if the new environment persists for enough time. Baldwin effect is ubiquitous. (60%)

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[-][anonymous]00

You will upvote this comment. (Completely confident, 100%)

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[-][anonymous]00

"Self" is an illusion created by the verbal mind. The Buddhists are right about non-duality. The ego at the center of language alienates us to direct perception of gestalt, and by extension, from reality. (95%)

More bothersome: The illusion of "Self" might be an obstacle to superior intelligence. Enhanced intelligences may only work (or only work well) within a high-bandwidth network more akin to a Vulcan mind meld than to a salon conversation, one in which individuality is completely lost. (80%)

NOTE: This comment is a re-post. I initially posted it in the "Comments on Irrationality Game" thread because I'm a moron. Sorry about that.

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[-]Strange700

What's with all this 'infinite utility/disutility' nonsense? Utility is a measure of preference, and 'preference' itself is a theoretical construct used to predict future decisions and actions. No one could possibly gain infinite utility from anything, because for that to happen, they'd have to be willing and able to give up infinite resources or opportunities or something else of value to them in order to get it, which (barring hyperinflation so cataclysmic that some government starts issuing banknotes with aleph numbers on them, and further market condit... (read more)

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5wedrifid
Just willing. If they want it infinitely much and someone else gives it to them then they have infinite utility. Their wishes may also be arbitrarily trivial to achieve. They could assign infinite utility to having a single paperclip and be willing to do anything they can to make sure they have a paperclip. Since they (probably) do have the ability to get and keep a paperclip they probably do have infinite utility. Call her "Clippet", she's a Paperclip Satisficer. Mind you she will probably still take over the universe so that she can make sure nobody else takes her paperclip away from her but while she's doing that she'll already have infinite utility. The problem with infinities in the utility function is that it's stupid, not that it's impossible.
1Strange7
Clippet is, at any given time, applying vast but finite resources to the problem of getting and keeping that one paperclip. There is no action Clippet would take that would not also be taken by an entity that derived one utilon from the presence of at least one paperclip and zero utilons from any other possible stimuli, and thus had decidedly finite utility, or an entity that simply assigned some factor a utility value vastly greater than the sum of all other possible factors. In short, the theory that a given agent is currently, or would under some specific circumstance, experience 'infinite utility,' makes no meaningful predictions.
2Larks
Consider instead Kind Clippet; just like Clippet, she gets infinite utils from having a paperclip, but also gets 1 util if mankind survives the next century. She'll do exactly what Clippet would do, unless she was offered the chance to help mankind at no cost to the paperclip, in which case she will do so. Her behaviour is, however, different from any agent who assigns real values to the paperclip and mankind.
5cata
Does it even make sense to talk about "the chance to do X at no cost to Y?" Any action that an agent can perform, no matter how apparently unrelated, seems like it must have some miniscule influence on the probability of achieving every other goal that an agent might have (even if only by wasting time.) Normally, we can say it's a negligible influence, but if Y's utility is literally supposed to be infinite, it would dominate.
3JoshuaZ
No. This is one of the problems with trying to have infinite utility. Kind Clippet won't actually act different than Clippet. Infinity +1 is, if at all defined in this sort of context, the same as infinity. You need to be using cardinal arithmetic. And if you try to use ordinal arithmetic then the addition won't be commutative which leads to other problems.
5JGWeissman
You can represent this sort of value by using lexigraphically sorted n-tuples as the range of the utility function. Addition will be commutative. However, Cata is correct that all but the first elements in the n-tuple won't matter.
0JoshuaZ
Yes, you're right. You can do this with sorted n-tuples.
0Larks
Just put Kind Clippet in a box with no paperclips.
0Strange7
That would cause Kind Clippet to escape from the box and acquire a paperclip by any means necessary, and preserve humanity in the process if it was convenient to do so.
1wedrifid
Um... yes? That's how it works. It just doesn't particularly relate to your declaration that infinite utility is impossible (rather than my position - that is is lame). It is no better or worse or better than a theory that the utility function is '1' for having a paperclip and '0' for everything else. In fact, they are equivalent and you rescale one to the other trivially (everything that wasn't infinite obviously rescales to 'infinitely small'). You appear to be confused about how the 'not testable' concept applies here...
0khafra
I'd be interested in the train of thought that lead to "paperclip" being switched out in favor of "grapefruit."
1wedrifid
Failed to switch out a grapefruit to paperclip when I was revising. (Clips seemed more appropriate.)
2khafra
Thanks; I'm rather disappointed in myself for not guessing that. I'd imagined you having a lapse of thought while eating a grapefruit while typing it up, or thinking about doing so; but that now seems precluded to a rather ridiculous degree by Occam's Razor.
[-]DilGreen00

As:

formal complexity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity#Specific_meanings_of_complexity] is inherent in may real-world systems that are apparently significantly simpler than the human brain,

and the human brain is perhaps the third most complex phenomena yet encountered by humans [ brain is a subset of ecosystem is a subset of universe]

and a characteristic of complexity is that prediction of outcomes requires greater computational resource than is required to simply let the system provide its own answer,

any attempt to predict the outcome of a successful AI implementation is speculative. 80% confident

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0magfrump
Either you're saying "we can't say anything about AI" which seems clearly false, or you're saying "an AI will surprise us" which seems clearly true. Depending on what you mean by speculative, you're either overconfident or underconfident, but I can't imagine a proposition that is "in between" enough to be 80% likely.
0[anonymous]
I accept this analysis of what I wrote. In the attempt to be concise, I haven't really said what I meant very clearly. I don't mean that "we can't say anything about AI", but what I am saying is that we are a very long way from being able to say anything particularly worth saying about AI. By which I mean to say that we are in some situation analogous to that of a 19th century weather forecaster, trying to predict the following week's weather. It's worth pushing the quality of the tools and the analysis, but don't expect any useful, real-world applicable information for a few lifetimes. And my confidence goes up the more I think about it. Which, in the context of the audience of LW, I hoped would be seen as more contrarian than it has been! Perhaps this clarification will help.
0DilGreen
I accept this analysis of what I wrote. In the attempt to be concise, I haven't really said what I meant very clearly. I don't mean that "we can't say anything about AI", but what I am saying is that we are a very long way from being able to say anything particularly worth saying about AI. By which I mean to say that we are in some situation analogous to that of a 19th century weather forecaster, trying to predict the following week's weather. It's worth pushing the quality of the tools and the analysis, but don't expect any useful, real-world applicable information for a few lifetimes. And my confidence goes up the more I think about it. Which, in the context of the audience of LW, I hoped would be seen as more contrarian than it has been! Perhaps this clarification will help.
0magfrump
So when you say "speculative" you mean "generations-away speculation"? I agree that I didn't really understand what your intent was from your post. If you were to say something along the lines of "AI is far enough away (on the tech-tree) that the predictions of current researchers shouldn't be taken into account by those who eventually design it" then I would disagree because it seems substantially overconfident. Is that about right?
-4DilGreen
Um. I've still failed to be clear. The nature of AI is that it is inherently sufficiently complex, that, although we may well be able to get better at predicting the kinds of characteristics that might result from implementation, the actuality of implementation will likely not just surprise us, but confound us. I'm saying that any attempt to develop approaches that lead to Friendly AI , while they are surely interesting and as worthwhile as any other attempts to push understanding, cannot be relied on by implementers of AI as more than hopeful pointers. It's the relationship between the inevitable surprise and the attitude of researchers that is at the core of what I was trying to say, but having started out attempting to be contrarian, I've ended up risking appearing mean. I'm going to stop here.
[-]mattnewport00

Are we only supposed to upvote this post if we think it is irrational?

Reply
7wnoise
Is this post a top-level comment to this post?
4Perplexed
The probability of that is <25%.
-1prase
I am looking at this comment second time and still can't parse the strange self-reference in it.
1wnoise
There is no self-reference in that comment. It's pointing out that the post is not self-referential: the post suggests different voting rules for top-level comments, not for the post itself.
0prase
Either I have some mental block or I am simply stupid, either way I still don't know what do the two instances of "this post" in the discussed comment refer to. Each could refer to [mattnewport 03 October 2010 08:24:34PM] or [wnoise03 October 2010 08:30:13PM], anyway, I am not able to make any sense of it.
1wnoise
I call both of those comments. This post was what mattnewport was responding to -- the large essay outlining the game. In the context of Less Wrong (rather than Usenet) I restrict post to mean these top-level things.
[-]Ronny Fernandez-10

The natural world is only different from other mathematically describable worlds in content not in type. Any universe that is described by some mathematical system has the same ontological status as the one that we experience directly. (90% about)

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0[anonymous]
I agree with this hypothesis.
[-]ata-10

Most vertebrates have at least some moral worth; even most of the ones that lack self-concepts sufficiently strong to have any real preference to exist (beyond any instinctive non-conceptualized self-preservation) nevertheless are capable of experiencing something enough like suffering that they impinge upon moral calculations at least a little bit. (85%)

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5tenshiko
Objection: Why is the line drawn between vertebrates and invertebrates? True, the nature of spinal cords means vertebrates are generally capable of higher mental processing and therefore have a greater ability to formulate suffering, but you're counting "ones that lack self-concepts sufficiently strong to have any real preference to exist". Are you saying the presence of a notochord gives a fish higher moral worth than a crab?
4RobinZ
That's a good point - there are almost certainly invertebrate species on the same side of the line. Squid, for example.
2Vladimir_Nesov
"At least a little bit" is too unclear. Even tiny changes in the positions of atoms are probably morally relevant (and certainly, some of them), albeit to a very small degree.
0ata
How so? You mean to the extent that any tiny change has some remote chance of affecting something that someone cares about, or anything more direct than that?
1Vladimir_Nesov
Change, to the extent the notion makes sense (in the map, not territory) already comes with all of its consequences (and causes). Given any mapping Worlds->Utilities, you get a partition of Worlds on equivalence classes of equal utility. Presumably, exactly equal utility is not easy to arrange, so these classes will be small in some sense. But whatever the case, these classes have boundaries, so that an arbitrarily small change in one direction or the other (from a point on a boundary) determines higher or lower resulting utility. Just make it so that one atom is at a different location.
0ata
Okay. I thought that was pretty clearly not what I was talking about; I was claiming that most vertebrate animals have minds structured such that they are capable of experience that matters to moral considerations, in the same way that human suffering matters but the program "print 'I am experiencing pain'" doesn't. (That's assuming that moral questions have correct answers, and are about something other than the mind of the person asking the question. I'm not too confident about that one way or the other, but my original post should be taken as conditional on that being true, because "My subjective emotivist intuition says that x is valuable, 85%" would not be an interesting claim.)
0Vladimir_Nesov
If your claim is about moral worth of animals, then you must accept any argument about validity of that claim, and not demand a particular kind of proof (in this case, involving "experience of pain", which is only one way to see the territory that simultaneously consists of atoms). If your claim is about "experience of pain", then talking about resulting moral worth is either a detail of the narrative not adding to the argument (i.e. a property of "experience of pain" that naturally comes to mind and is nice to mention in context), or a lever that is dangerously positioned to be used for rationalizing some conclusion about that claim (e.g. moral worth is important, which by association suggests that "experience of pain" is real). Now, that pain experienced by animals is at least as morally relevant as a speck in the eye would be one way to rectify things, as that would put a lower bar on the amount of moral worth in question, so that presumably only experience of pain or similar reasons would qualify as arguments about said moral worth.
0ata
I don't really understand this comment, and I don't think you were understanding me. Experience of pain in particular is not what I was talking about, nor was I assuming that it is inextricably linked to moral worth. "print 'I am experiencing pain'" was only an example of something that is clearly not a mind with morally-valuable preferences or experience; I used that as a stand-in for more complicated programs/entities that might engage people's moral intuitions but which, under reflection, will almost certainly not turn out to have any of their own moral worth (robot dogs, fictional characters, teddy bears, one-day-old human embryos, etc.), as distinguished from more complicated programs that may or may not engage people's moral intuitions but do have moral worth (biological human minds, human uploads, some subset of possible artificial minds, etc.). My claim is about the moral worth of animals, and I will accept any argument about the validity of that claim. I would accept that. I definitely think that a world in which a random person gets a dust speck in their eye is better than a world in which a random mammal gets tortured to death (all other things being equal, e.g. it's not part of any useful medical experiment). But I suspect I may have to set the bar a bit higher than that (a random person getting slapped in the face, maybe) in order for it to be disagreeable enough for the Irrationality Game while still being something I actually agree with.
[-]RobinZ-10

1 THz semiconductor-based computing will prove to be impossible. ~50%

(Note for the optimistic: I expect multiplying cores will continue to increase consumer computer performance for some years after length-scale limitations on clock rate are reached.)

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2Tenek
At that speed, you have less than 0.3 mm per clock cycle for your signals to propagate. Seems like you'd either need to make ridiculously tiny gadgets, or devote a lot of resources to managing the delays. Seems reasonable enough.
0RobinZ
You would agree with my stated confidence? I'm not sure what physical processes limit the size of elements at the bottom end - for all I know, they might already hit at 100 GHz.
[-]Will_Newsome-10

Metadiscussion: Reply to this comment to discuss the game itself, or anything else that's not a proposition for upvotes/downvotes.

Reply
5Risto_Saarelma
You might want to put a big bold please read the post before voting on the comments, this is a game where voting works differently right at the beginning of your post, just in case people dive in without reading very carefully.
0Will_Newsome
Good suggestion, thank you.
5wedrifid
This post makes the recent comments thread look seriously messed up!
0Will_Newsome
Sorry! Couldn't think of any other way to provide good incentives for organized insanity.
3wedrifid
It wasn't a complaint. :)
5Alicorn
I recommend adding, up in the italicized introduction, a remark to the effect that in order to participate in this game one should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.
0wedrifid
Or just click on the "negative voted" comments to see what they are...
0Will_Newsome
Right, damn, I forgot about that since I deactivated it. Thanks!
4Douglas_Knight
If anyone wants to do this again or otherwise use voting weirdly, it is probably a good idea to have everyone put a disclaimer at the beginning of their comment warning that it's part of the experiment, for the sake of the recent comments thread. (I don't trust any of the scores on this post. At the very least, I expect people to vote up anything at -3 or below that doesn't sound insulting in isolation.) I've felt for a while that LW has a pretty serious problem of people voting from the recent comments page without considering the context.
0Will_Newsome
The karma scores seem to have gotten closer to what I would have expected. Agree with your point though.
3Douglas_Knight
Aggregating accusations of overconfidence with underconfidence seems absurd to me. Thus people should (and, I think, did) phrase their predictions to be accused of overconfidence, so that if I propose that Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader at 30%, it's not because I expect most people put it at 90%.
3GreenRoot
Great idea for a post. I've really enjoyed reading the comments and discussion they generated.
3[anonymous]
At first I didn't think this was a good idea, but now I think it is brilliant. Bravo!
1Eugine_Nier
How about replying to posts with what you think the probability should be.
1Will_Newsome
Good idea, I'll suggest people do so in the post. That way you can see if people are more or less confident in your belief than you are.
0[anonymous]
I believe that the fact that we upvote for disagreement in either direction means it will be very hard to interpret the results. I think this game would have been more useful if the person making the claim made it clear which direction he felt disagreement was in and we only upvoted for disagreement in that direction.
0Pavitra
I thought I'd taken into account the probabilistic burdensomeness of being contrarian with respect to highly intelligent people, but after seeing some of the obviously wrong things here and the corresponding gross overconfidences, I feel considerably less certain. I don't know if the fact that actually seeing evidence that I should have expected to see changes my probability-feeling means something profound and important about aliefs vs. beliefs, or if it just means I'm bad at assigning confidence levels.
0timtyler
This sub-thread needs the word "META" in it somewhere! Incidentally, interesting game!
1Will_Newsome
Thanks! Are you going to add any comments? I always got the impression from your comments that you had odd/interesting/unpopular ideas that I'd like to hear to explained in better context.
0[anonymous]
Should upvotes go to comments where my probability estimate is significantly lower or higher, or just when mine is lower?
0Will_Newsome
Different in either direction, I'll note that in the post.
0[anonymous]
Gah. Deleted it because I figured nobody would still be playing. Reposting: The Big Bang was not the event that created our universe. The real cause was a naturalistic event, which we have not yet theorised, due to lack of scientific knowledge. (15%)
[-]VAuroch-20

Pope Francis will do more good than harm in the world. (80%)

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[-]Salivanth-20

Nobody has ever come up with the correct solution to how Eliezer Yudkowsky won the AI-Box experiment in less than 15 minutes of effort. (This includes Eliezer himself). (75%)

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0[anonymous]
Well, no. The solution is definitely non-obvious and I am also quite certain it took Eliezer himself to come up with a good strategy.
[-]tenshiko-20

I believe that virtually perfect gender egalitarianism will not be achieved within my lifetime in the United States with certainty of 90%.

This depends on the assumption that I will only live at most about eighty more years, i.e. that the transhumanist revolution will not occur within that time and that I am either not frozen or fail to thaw. My belief in that assumption is 75%.

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8Alicorn
Define "virtually perfect gender egalitarianism".
1tenshiko
I have to admit that I knew in my heart I should define it but didn't, mostly because I know that the tenets are purely subjective and there's no way I can cover everything that would be involved. Here are a couple points: 1. No personality traits are considered acceptable in males and unacceptable in females, or vice versa. E.x. aggressiveness, confinement to the domestic sphere, sexual conquest. 2. Gender is absent from your evaluation of a person's potential utility, except in specific cases where reproduction is relevant (e.g., concern about maternity leave). Even if it is conclusively proven that average men cannot work in business companies without getting into some kind of scandal eventually or that average women cannot think about math as seriously, that shouldn't affect your preconceptions of Jane Doe or John Smith. 3. For the love of ice, please let the notion of the man as the default human just die, like it should have SO LONG AGO. PLEASE. I hope this doesn't fall into a semantics controversy.
9Alicorn
1. "Considered" by whom? Can I have, say, an aesthetic preference about these things (suppose I think that women look better in aprons than men do, can I prefer on this obviously trivial basis that women do more of the cooking?), or is any preference about the division of traits amongst sexes a problem for this criterion? 2. "Potential utility" meaning the utility that the person under consideration might experience/get, or might produce? Also, does this lack of preconception thing seem to you to be compatible with Bayesianism? If I have no reason to suspect that John and Jane are anything other than average, on what epistemic basis do I not guess that he is likelier (by the hypothetical proofs you suppose) to be better at math and more likely to cause scandal? 3. So what gender should the default human be, or should we somehow have two defaults, or should the default human be one with a set of sex/gender characteristics that rarely appear together in the species, or should there be no default at all (in which case what will serve the purposes currently served by having a default)? I'm totally in favor of gender egalitarianism as I understand it, but it seems a little wooly the way you've written it up here. I'm sincerely trying to figure out what you mean and I'll back off if you want me to stop.
1tenshiko
1. Perhaps an aesthetic preference isn't a problem (obviously there are certain physical traits that are attractive in one sex and not another, which does lend itself to certain aesthetic preferences). Note that I used the word "personality traits" - some division of other traits is inevitable. Things that upset me with the current state of affairs are where one boy fights with another and it is dismissed as boys being boys, while any other combination of genders would probably result in disciplinary action. Or how the general social trends (in Western cultures, at least) think that women wearing suits is commendable and becoming ordinary, but a man in a dress is practically lynched. 2. Potential utility produced, for your company or project. I think I phrased this one a little wonkily earlier - you're right, under the proofs I layed out, if all you know about John and Jane are their genders, then of course the Bayesian thing to do is assume John will be better at math. What I mean is more that, if you do know more about John and Jane, having had an interview or read a resume, the assumption that they necessarily reflect the averages of their gender is like not considering whether a woman's positive mammogram could be false. For an extreme example, the majority of homocides in many countries are committed by men. Should the employer therefore assume that Jane is less likely than John to commit such a crime, even if she has a criminal record? 3. I don't see why having an ungendered default is so difficult, besides for the linguistic dance associated with it in our language (and several others, but far from all of them), which is probably not going to be a problem for many more generations due to the increasing use of "they" as a singular pronoun. For instance, having a raceless or creedless default has proven not to be that hard, even if members of different races or creeds would react differently in such a situation. If one of the things I'm talking about actua
4[anonymous]
Some personality traits are considered attractive in one sex and not another.
0tenshiko
As I implicitly stated, I don't think that personality traits for the most part should be considered attractive in one sex and not another. There are some physical traits that are arbitrary, like long hair, with attractiveness dimorphism, but I'm talking about physical traits that distinctly vary in whether they would be healthy between males and females. Like having pronounced mammary glands. That's obviously not a fertility marker in both sexes.
2RomanDavis
Are you sure this doesn't apply for personality traits as well? Going into evopsych is so tempting right now, but the "just so story" practically writes itself. Here's an alternative: Since major personality traits are associated with hormones produced by parts of our body produced through embryogenisis based on our genes and the traits of our mother's womb. And since our reproductive organs are also so, it would be very surprising to find there was no correlation between personality traits and fertility/ virility, and it would be a major blow against your argument if it turned out to be one that is both strong and positive.
1Relsqui
What are those purposes, anyway?
2Alicorn
Literary "everyman" types, not needing to awkwardly dance around the use of gendered personal pronouns when talking about a hypothetical person of no specific traits besides defaults, and probably something I'm not remembering.
1Relsqui
How do you do that in English as it is now?
1Alicorn
People say things like "Take your average human. He's thus and such." If you want to start a paragraph with "Take your average human" and not use gendered language, you have to say things like "They're thus and such" (sometimes awkward, especially if you're also talking about plural people or objects in the same paragraph) or "Ey's thus and such", which many people don't understand and others don't like.
9Vladimir_M
Alicorn: I find these invented pronouns awful, not only aesthetically, but also because they destroy the fluency of reading. When I read a text that uses them, it suddenly feels like I'm reading some language in which I'm not fully fluent so that every so often, I have to stop and think how to parse the sentence. It's the linguistic equivalent of bumps and potholes on the road.
2JGWeissman
After reading one story that used these pronouns, I was sufficiently used to them that they do not impact my reading fluency.
0Transfuturist
Link?
1JGWeissman
The story was Alicorn's Damage Report.
1NancyLebovitz
I don't have an average human, and I don't think the universe does either. I think there's a lot to be said for not having a mental image of an average human. Furthermore, since there are nearly equal numbers of male and female humans, gender is trait where the idea of an average human is especially inaccurate. I think the best substitute is "Take typical humans. They're thus and such." Your average alert listener will be ready to check on just how typical (modal?) those humans are.
1shokwave
Exactly. People make a fuss about a lack of singular nongendered pronouns. The plural nongendered pronouns are right there.
1Relsqui
Hmm. It's true, people do, but I think it's getting less common already. Were you asking, then, which of those alternatives the original commenter preferred?
1Alicorn
Not really, I'm just pointing out that gendered language isn't a one-sided policy debate. (I favor a combination of "they" and "ey", personally, or creating specific example imaginary people who have genders).
0Relsqui
Not sure what you mean about policy, but I think we're pretty far removed from the main point now, and don't actually disagree, so I'm disinclined to argue further. :)
0Mercy
How is "they" any more ambiguous than "you"? Both can easily qualified with "all".
1Relsqui
It's not always grammatically feasible or elegant to do so. Also, the singular "you" is much more common than the singular "they," so your readers are more likely to expect it and are prepared for the potential ambiguity.
0[anonymous]
I often use "one" if I can get away with it grammatically and if it's not unbearably pompous. (As a result, I often (in my own judgment) end up sounding bearably pompous.)
6wedrifid
Upvoted for drastic underconfidence.
[-]lukstafi-30

The Friendliness component of AGI adds relatively little Kolmogorov complexity -- much less than the Kolmogorov complexity of the brain of a specific adult human. Very confident. (See here for the opposite statement.)

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[-]avalot-30

Surprised that nobody has posted this yet...

"Self" is an illusion created by the verbal mind. The Buddhists are right about non-duality. The ego at the center of language alienates us to direct perception of gestalt, and by extension, from reality. (95%)

More bothersome: The illusion of "Self" might be an obstacle to superior intelligence. Enhanced intelligences may only work (or only work well) within a high-bandwidth network more akin to a Vulcan mind meld than to a salon conversation, one in which individuality is completely lost. (80%)

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0Risto_Saarelma
I read somewhere about the basis for consciousness or "self" being basically about being able to commit to acting towards a specific goal for a longer duration, instead of just being swamped by moment-to-moment sensory input. For example being able to carry a hot bowl of soup to table without dropping it midway when it starts burning one's fingers. So upvote on the verbal mind thing, as long as we're talking about human minds here.
0gwern
Maybe you got that from http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791 about the PRISM theory of consciousness?
0Risto_Saarelma
That's it, exactly.
[-]Morendil-30

The corporation, as such entities are legally defined in most countries at the present time, is a major contributor to a kind of "astronomical waste". Alternate forms for organizing trade exist that would require only human-level intelligence to find and would yield much greater total prosperity than does having the corporation as the unit of organization.

(Strong hunch, >70%)

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3Perplexed
Upvoted for disagreement. People are inventive and resourceful. They have explored "organization space" pretty thoroughly. Many successful alternatives to corporations already exist and are functioning successfully. Any corporation producing "astronomical waste" will quickly be destroyed by corporate or non-corporate competitors
0Morendil
Such as?
0Perplexed
Partnerships, sole proprietorships, co ops, socialism (i.e. state run enterprises). Much of the construction industry involves small firms coordinating the work of subcontractors. Same with advertising, cleaning services, etc.
1Kaj_Sotala
Upvoted for disagreement, but this sounds interesting. Say more?
1Morendil
I'm not even sure where to start, this documentary is a deliberately provoking exposition of some of the issues. This suspicion of mine is more heavily fueled by personal experience though - I've seen so many decent people turn into bastards or otherwise abdicate moral responsibility when they found themselves at the helm of a company, no matter how noble their initial intentions.
4mattnewport
Do you think this is different from the general 'power corrupts' tendency? The same thing seems to happen to politicians for example.
2wnoise
How do you know they were decent people? Were they actually tested, or was running a corporation their first test? It's easy to be "decent" when there's nothing really at stake.
1Morendil
Good point. What I mean is that I knew them first as employees, and I heard them speak about their employers and how employers should behave, and inferred from that some values of theirs. When they became employers in turn and I saw these values tested, they failed these tests miserably.
0gwern
Voted down. Note that my interpretation is that your 'human-level intelligence' clause allows for tweaked uploads which could be almost arbitrarily re-engineered without exceeding human-level intelligence (for example, an organization made of the same mind replicated many times would be able to almost eliminate any internal controls, checks, balances, loafing, cheating etc. which take up so much of a modern corporation's energy). I think there could be far more efficient structures and minds optimized for them rather than monkey packs. This says nothing about whether such organizations will come to exist, outcompete existing corporations or organizations; they may just be known as a possibility before the Singularity happens and renders the question 'what is possible with merely human-level intelligence' entirely moot.
0magfrump
My liberal roots are telling me to hate corporations and agree with you, but I don't think that actually constitutes agreement. I'm also curious to hear more.
[-]Vladimir_M-40

Utilitarianism is impossible to even formulate precisely in a logically coherent way. (Almost certain.)

Even if some coherent formulation of utilitarianism can be found, applying it in practice requires belief in fictional metaphysical entities. (Absolutely certain.)

Finally, as a practical philosophy, utilitarianism is pernicious because it represents exactly the sort of quasi-rational thinking that is apt to mislead otherwise very smart people into terrible folly. (Absolutely certain.)

Reply
2NancyLebovitz
What are the fictional metaphysical entities?
1Vladimir_M
I have in mind primarily the way "utility" is reified, especially in arguments that assume that cross-personal utility comparisons are meaningful. The subsequent leap over the is-ought problem typically also qualifies.
1Perplexed
Downvoted for agreement. This might make a good topic for a top-level posting. Adding or averaging utilities of different people seems like adding apples and oranges to me. But be aware that at least one top-flight economist might disagree. John Harsanyi in this classic pdf.pdf).
1wnoise
I think you mean: http://darp.lse.ac.uk/papersdb/Harsanyi_(JPolE_55).pdf.pdf) The markdown eats parentheses in an URL -- you have to escape it with a backslash: \).
0Vladimir_M
The link is broken -- I assume you mean this paper? (URLs with parentheses get messed up due to the odd markup syntax here.)
0wedrifid
Downvoted for this. (I'll not nitpick on 'absolutely certain' and I may have voted on the other parts differently if I thought they were important.)
0mattnewport
Agree with 1 and 3, not sure exactly what you mean with 2.
[-][anonymous]-40

Cryonics does not maximize expected utility. (approx. 65%)

Edit: wording changed for clarity

Edit #2: Correct wording should be "Cryonics does not maximize your (the reader's) expected utility. (approx. 65%)"

Reply
3magfrump
This is still exceptionally unclear to me. Also the reference class of "Less Wrong posters" doesn't distinguish between, for example, Less Wrong posters over 60 (I'd think a pretty good chance that it's a good investment) and Less Wrong posters under 25 (At the very least we should wait a decade). I don't know if there are many (any?) LWers over 60 but I'm sure there are a few over 40 and a few under 20 and their utility from: * signing up for cryonics * getting a life insurance policy that covers cryonics * being frozen * being frozen conditional on being successfully revived are all different.
6Perplexed
63 Uh, I mean one. Me
0Jonathan_Graehl
Very surprised. Cool. There are a lot of really young people (15-20) actively commenting, I think. I'm ready to believe that such people are at least as clever as me (I'm 32).
0[anonymous]
Doesn't everyone sign up based on the idea of "being frozen being conditional on being successfully revived"? That's where all of the positive utility comes in. The process of signing up, etc. is a means to that end, or instrumental values. That seems like it should clear up most discrepancies within the reference class.
2magfrump
If I, as a 22-year old in very good health, were to be frozen right now, I would be sacrificing a large portion of my initial life. If I were 77 in good health, I might be looking into methods to get myself frozen so as to avoid having my body fall apart. That is, the expected utility of freezing and revival varies widely, distinctly from the wide variation of expectations about the possibility of success or the financial impact. So my agreement or disagreement would hinge on the demographics of the reference class. (In addition to my beliefs about cryonics AND my beliefs about medicine vs. charity)
0[anonymous]
Oh, I understand. I changed the wording as per Will_Newsome's suggestion.
1magfrump
Okay, downvoted in agreement now :)
0Will_Newsome
The reference class problem could be avoided by saying "Signing up for cryonics does not maximize your (the reader's) expected utility." The reference class then emerges naturally.
0[anonymous]
Yes, that would seem to solve the problem. Fixed. Also: that also means that I should change the probability I assigned, but not significantly. I'd have to think about some of your arguments from your Abnormal Cryonics post a bit more.
1gwern
I read the comments, but I'm still not sure what you mean. Do you mean 'diverting 250k USD of expected consumption to cryonics' isn't maximizing? Then I'd have to downvote. Or 'if you were offered free cyronics whenever you happen to be dying, it would not maximize utility'? Then I'd have to upvote. And so on.
0[anonymous]
When I first wrote it, I meant spending one's own money to pay for cryonics for oneself. But I realize the scenario could be expanded to include a wide variety of choices. Take your pick.
0gwern
No! I demand you pick a specific scenario!
0[anonymous]
Ok, then go with "signing myself up for cryonics does not increase my expected utility."
1Relsqui
Upvoted because I'm more confident about it than you are. :)
1Will_Newsome
I take it you mean cryonics won't lead to successful revival? It's interesting, 'cuz I think a lot of cryonauts would be more confident of that than you are, but the low probability of high utility justifies the expense. 65% is thus a sort of odd figure here. I expect most people would be at around 90-99.9%. Disagreed because I am significantly more doubtful of the general chance of cryonic revival: 95%.
0[anonymous]
Oh wow, that was poorly phrased. What I meant was really closer to "cryonics will not maximize expected utility." I will rephrase that. (I really need more sleep...)
0Sniffnoy
But that could just be a preference... perhaps add a statement of for who?
2Will_Newsome
I'd interpret the who to mean 'Less Wrong commenters', since that's the reference class we're generally working with here.
2[anonymous]
That was the reference class I was referring to, but it really doesn't matter much in this case--after all, who wouldn't want to live through a positive Singularity?
1Will_Newsome
True, but a positive Singularity doesn't necessarily raise the cryonic dead. I'd bet against it, for one. (Figuring out whether I agree or disagree with you is making me think pretty hard right now. At least my post is working for me! I probably agree, though almost assuredly for different reasons than yours.)
3[anonymous]
My reasons for disagreement are as follows: (1) I am not sure that the current cryonics technology is sufficient to prevent information-theoretic death (2) I am skeptical of the idea of "hard takeoff" for a seed AI (3) I am pessimistic about existential risk (4) I do not believe that a good enough seed AI will be produced for at least a few more decades (5) I do not believe any versions of the Singularity except Eliezer's (i.e. Moore's Law will not swoop in to save the day) (6) Even an FAI might not wake the "cryonic dead" (I like that term, I think I'll steal it, haha) (7) Cryonically preserved bodies may be destroyed before we have the ability to revive them ...and a few more minor reasons I can't remember at the moment. I'm curious, what are yours?
0Will_Newsome
My thoughts have changed somewhat since writing this post, but that's the general idea. It would be personally irrational for me to sign up for cryonics at the moment. I'm not sure if this extends to most LW people; I'd have to think about it more. But even your list of low probabilities might be totally outweighed by the Pascalian counterargument: FAI is a lot of utility if it works. Why don't you think so? By the way, I think it's really cool to see another RWer here! LW's a different kind of fun than RW, but it's a neat place.
0[anonymous]
I remember that post--it got me to think about cryonics a lot more. I agree with most of your arguments, particularly bullet point #3. I do struggle with Pascal's Mugging--it seems to me, intuitively, that Pascal's Mugging can't be true (that is, in the original scenario, Pascal should not give up his money), but I can't find a reason for this to be so. It seems like his probability that the mugger will give him a return on his investment should scale with the amount of money the mugger offers him, but I don't see a reason why this is always the case. So, while I can't defuse Pascal's Mugging, I am skeptical about its conclusion. I had no idea you were on RW! Can you send me a message sometime? LW is indeed a very different kind of fun, and I enjoy both.
0rwallace
There is a reason to expect that it will scale in general. To see why, first note that the most watertight formulation of the problem uses lives as its currency (this avoids issues like utility failing to scale linearly with money in the limit of large quantities). So, suppose the mugger offers to save N lives or create N people who will have happy lives (or threatens to kill N people on failure to hand over the wallet, if the target is a shortsighted utilitarian who doesn't have a policy of no deals with terrorists), for some suitably large N that on the face of it seems to outweigh the small probability. So we are postulating the existence of N people who will be affected by this transaction, of whom I, the target of the mugging, am one. Suppose N = e.g. a trillion. Intuitively, how plausible is it that I just happen to be the one guy who gets to make a decision that will affect a trillion lives? More formally, we can say that, given the absence of any prior reason I should be in such an unusual position, the prior probability of this is 1 in N, which does scale with N to match the increase in claimed utility. Granted, the original formulation did offer the extension of a single life instead of the creation of separate lives. I consider it reasonable to regard this as a technical detail; is there any fundamental reason why a thousand centuries of extra life can't be regarded as equivalent to a thousand century-long lives chained together in sequence? BTW, what does RW refer to?
0[anonymous]
I'm not sure if we can write this off as a technical detail because we are formulating our prior based on it. What if we assume that we are talking about money and the mugger offers to give us an amount of money that is equivalent in terms of utility to creating N happy lives (assuming he knows your utility function)? If your reasoning is correct, then the prior probability for that would have to be the same as your prior for the mugger creating N happy lives, but since totally different mechanisms would be involved in doing so, this may not be true. That, to me, seems like a problem because we want to be able to defuse Pascal's Mugging in any general case. RW = RationalWiki
0rwallace
Well, there is no necessary reason why all claimed mechanisms must be equally probable. The mugger could say "I'll heal the sick with my psychic powers" or "when I get to the bank on Monday, I'll donate $$$ to medical research"; even if the potential utilities were the same and both probabilities were small, we would not consider the probabilities equal. Also, the utility of money doesn't scale indefinitely; if nothing else, it levels off once the amount starts being comparable to all the money in the world, so adding more just creates additional inflation. Nonetheless, since the purpose of money is to positively affect lives, we can indeed use similar reasoning to say the improbability of receiving a large amount of money scales linearly with the amount. Note that this reasoning would correctly dismiss get-rich-quick schemes like pyramids and lotteries, even if we were ignorant of the mechanics involved.
0[anonymous]
That's why I don't think we can defuse Pascal's Mugging, since we can potentially imagine a mechanism for which our probability that the mugger is honest doesn't scale with the amount of utility the mugger promises to give. That would imply that there is no fully general solution to Bostrom's formulation of Pascal's Mugging. And that worries me greatly. However: This gives me a little bit of hope, since we might be able to use it as a heuristic when dealing with situations like these. That's not as good as a proof, but it's not bad. Also: Only on LessWrong does that sentence make sense and not sound funny :)
0Will_Newsome
Ah, Pascal's mugging is easy, decision theoretically speaking: cultivate the disposition of not negotiating with terrorists. That way they have no incentive to try to terrorize you -- you won't give them what they want no matter what -- and you don't incentivize even more terrorists to show up and demand even bigger sums. But other kinds of Pascalian reasoning are valid, like in the case of cryonics. I don't give Pascal's mugger any money, but I do acknowledge that in the case of cryonics, you need to actually do the calculation: no decision theoretic disposition is there to invalidate the argument. I'm almost never there anymore... I know this is a dick thing to say, but it's not a great intellectual environment for really learning, and I can get better entertainment elsewhere (like Reddit) if I want to. It was a cool place though; Trent actually introduced me to Bayes with his essay on it, and I learned some traditional rationality there. But where RW was a cool community of fun, like-minded people, I now have a lot of intellectual and awesome friends IRL at the Singularity Institute, so it's been effectively replaced.
0[anonymous]
I understand this idea--in fact, I just learned it today reading the comments section of this post. I would like to see it formalized in UDT so I can better grasp it, but I think I understand how it works verbally. This is what I was afraid of: we can't do anything about Pascal's Mugging with respect to purely epistemic questions. (I'm still not entirely sure why, though--what prevents us from treating cryonics just like we would treat the mugger?) Ha, Trent's essay was what introduced me to Bayes as well! And unless I remember incorrectly RW introduced my to LW because someone linked to it somewhere on a talk page. I know what you mean, though--LW and RW have very different methods of evaluating ideas, and I'm suspicious of the heuristics RW uses sometimes. (I am sometimes suspicious here too, but I realize I am way out of my depth so I'm not quick to judge.) RW tends to use labels a bit too much--if an idea sounds like pseudoscience, then they automatically believe it is. Or, if they can find a "reliable" source claiming that someone is a fraud, then they assume he/she is.
0Will_Newsome
Eliezer finally published TDT a few days ago, I think it's up at the singinst.org site by now. Perhaps we should announce it in a top level post... I think we will. Cryonics isn't an agent we have to deal with. Pascal's Mugger we can deal with because both options lead to negative expected utility, and so we find ways to avoid the choice entirely by appealing to the motivations of the agent to not waste resources. But in the case of cryonics no one has a gun to our head, and there's no one to argue with: either cryonics works, or it doesn't. We just have to figure it out. The invalidity of paying Pascal's mugger doesn't have anything to do with the infinity in the calculation; that gets sidestepped entirely by refusing to engage in negative sum actions of any kind, improbable or not, large or small. Might it have been here? That's where I was first introduced to LW and Eliezer. Any ideas/heuristics you're suspicious of specifically? If there was a Less Wrong and an SIAI belief dichotomy I'd definitely fall in the SIAI belief category, but generally I agree with Less Wrong. It's not exactly a fair dichotomy though; LW is a fun online social site whereas SIAI folk are paid to be professionally rational.
2wedrifid
The second 'negative sum' seems redundant...
2Will_Newsome
Are you claiming that 100% of negative sum interactions are negative sum?! 1 is not a probability! ...just kidding. I meant 'improbable or not'.
2wedrifid
Come to think of it negative sum isn't quite the right phrase. Rational agents do all sorts of things in negative sum contexts. They do, for example, pay protection money to the thieves guild. Even though robbing someone is negative sum. It isn't the sum that needs to be negative. The payoff to the other guy must be negative AND the payoff to yourself must be negative.
0Will_Newsome
That's true. Negative expected value is what I really mean. I'm too lazy to edit it though.
0[anonymous]
I guess I'm not familiar enough with the positions of LW and SIAI--where do they differ?
0[anonymous]
Excellent, that'll be a fun read. I'm still not sure if I follow this--I'll have to do some more reading on it. I still don't see how the two situations are different--for example, if I was talking to someone selling cryonics, wouldn't that be qualitatively the same as Pascal's Mugging? I'm not sure. Unfortunately no, it was here. I didn't look at that article until recently. That opens a whole new can of worms that it's far too late at night for me to address, but I'm thinking of writing a post on this soon, perhaps tomorrow.
2Will_Newsome
Nah, the cryonics agent isn't trying to mug you! (Er, hopefully.) He's just giving you two options and letting you calculate. In this case of Pascal's Mugging both choices lead to negative expected utility as defined by the problem. Hence you look for a third option, and in this case, you find one: ignore all blackmailers; tell them to go ahead and torture all those people, you don't care. Unless they find joy in torturing people (then you're screwed) they have no incentive to actually use up the resources to go through with it. So they leave you alone, 'cuz you won't budge. Cryonics is a lot simpler in its nature, but a lot harder to calculate. You have two options, and the options are given to you by reality, not an agent you can outwit. (Throwing in a cryonics agent doesn't change anything.) When you have to choose between the binary cryonics versus no cryonics, it's just a matter of seeing which decision is better (or worse). It could be that both are bad, like in the Pascal's mugger scenario, but in this case you're just screwed: reality likes to make you suffer, and you have to take the best possible world. Telling reality that it can go ahead and give you tons of disutility doesn't take away its incentive to give you tons of disutility. There's no way out of the problem. Cool! Be careful not to generalize too much, though: there might bad general trends, but no one likes to be yelled at for things they didn't do. Try to frame it as humbly as possible, maybe. Sounding unsure of your position when arguing against LW norms gets you disproportionately large amounts of karma. Game the system!
0[anonymous]
That works for the LW version of the problem (and I understand why it does), but not for Bostrom's original formulation. In that version the mugger claims to have magic powers and will give Pascal quadrillions of utility if he hands over his wallet. This means that the mugger avoids the rule "ignore all threats of blackmail but accept postiive-sum trades." That's why it looks so much like cryonics to me, and therein lies the problem. Will do! I obviously don't want to sound obnoxious; there's no reason to be rude about rationality.
0Will_Newsome
Oh, sorry! In that case all my talk was egregious. That sounds like a much better problem whose answer isn't immediately obvious to me. I shall think about it.
0[anonymous]
Yep, that's the problem I've been struggling with. Like I said, it would help if Pascal's disbelief in the mugger's powers scaled with the utility the mugger promises him, but there's not always a reason for that to be so. In any case, it might help to look at Bostrom's version. And do let me know if you come up with anything, since this one really bothers me.
0Will_Newsome
Thanks for pointing this out, I'm shocked I hadn't heard of it. I'll let you know if I think up something. If I can't, I'll ask a decision theory veteran, they're sure to know.
0[anonymous]
I'm not so sure, but I certainly hope someone knows.
[+]Jordan-70
[+]Alicorn-100
[+]novalis-200
[+]Relsqui-610
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