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The Irrationality Game
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.
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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Comments (910)
Metadiscussion: Reply to this comment to discuss the game itself, or anything else that's not a proposition for upvotes/downvotes.
How about replying to posts with what you think the probability should be.
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.
Different in either direction, I'll note that in the post.
At first I didn't think this was a good idea, but now I think it is brilliant. Bravo!
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.
Right, damn, I forgot about that since I deactivated it. Thanks!
Or just click on the "negative voted" comments to see what they are...
This post makes the recent comments thread look seriously messed up!
Sorry! Couldn't think of any other way to provide good incentives for organized insanity.
It wasn't a complaint. :)
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.
The karma scores seem to have gotten closer to what I would have expected. Agree with your point though.
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.
Good suggestion, thank you.
This sub-thread needs the word "META" in it somewhere! Incidentally, interesting game!
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.
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.
I meant diet, exercise, and perhaps supplements; liposuction is trivially true.
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.
For example... just about any stimulant you can get your hands on.
But there were others, I think? User:taw talked about one that you take with caffeine. It might have been a stimulant, though.
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
ephedrine. It's called ECA, including aspirin, but that wasn't used in the studies.
Short term or long term? If long, how long?
voted up because 60% seems WAAAAAYYYY underconfident to me.
Now that we're up-voting underconfidence I changed my vote.
From the OP:
Likewise. My p: 99.5%
shoot... I'm just scared to bet, is all. You can tell I'm no fun at Casino Night.
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.
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.)
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.
I sympathize with this. But I also upvoted the original comment because of it (i.e. I also think you're underconfident).
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.)
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.
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.
This raises an interesting point: what do you think about the Presumptuous Philosopher thought experiment?
Yep. Over-reliance on anthropic arguments IMO.
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.)
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!
I certainly agree with you now, but it wasn't entirely certain what you meant by your statement. A qualifier might help.
Most won't see the need for precision, but you're right, I should add a qualifier for those who'd (justifiably) like it.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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%).
I think this is ambiguous. It might be interpreted as
Which of these do you mean?
I'd change this one to:
~62%
~69%
~58%
Edit: I case it wasn't clear the 70% refers to the disjunction of the above 3.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
I downvoted this, and consider the artistic and cultural contributions of religion to society to alone warrant this assertion.
My personal degree of belief is extremely sensitive to the definition of religion you are using here. I would appreciate some elaboration.
When it is technologically feasible for our descendants to simulate our world, they will not because it will seem cruel (conditional on friendly descendants, such as FAI or successful uploads with gradual adjustments to architecture.) I would be surprised if it were different, but not THAT surprised. (~70%)
Up voted because I disagree with your first statement.
Assuming reasonably complex values of stimulate, i.e., second life doesn't count.
Upvoted for disagreement: postulating that most of my measure comes from simulations helps resolve a host of otherwise incredibly confusing anthropic questions.
I'm sure there's more to it than came across in that sentence, but that sounds like shaky grounds for belief.
Scientifically it's bunk but Bayesically it seems sound to me. A simple hypothesis that explains many otherwise unlikely pieces of evidence.
That said, I do have other reasons, but explaining the intuitions would not fit within the margins of my time.
I like thinking about being in a simulation, and since it makes no practical difference (except if you go crazy and think it's a good idea to test every possible means of 'praying' to any possible interested and intervening simulator god), I don't think we need to agree on the odds that we are simulated.
However, I'd say that it seems impossible to me to defend any particular choice of prior probability for the simulation vs. non-simulation cases. So while it matters how well such a hypothesis explains the data, I have no idea if I should be raising p(simulation) by 1000db from -10db or from -10000000db. If you have 1000db worth of predictions following from a disjunction over possible simulations, then that's of course super interesting and amusing even if I can't decide what my prior belief is.
I agree with you up 'til the first comma.
ETA: ... the only comma, I guess.
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%)
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.)
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! ;)
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.
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%.
Errh. If you are disagreeing with me, doesn't that mean you should upvote?
Sorry, I got confused. Duly changed.
Then you should upvote, not downvote!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that this is plausible. I haven't investigated, so I don't know if 70% is reasonable or not.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Voted up, and you've made me really curious. Link or explanation?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If there are mutliple witnesses who can see each others reactions, it's a good candidate for mass hysteria
Just to clarify: by "unknown entities" do you mean non-human intelligent beings?
Yes.
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.
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.
Do you think you guess numerically what your prior probability was before learning of the Miracle of Fatima?
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.
The sun, seen through moving clouds. Just exactly what it is described as being.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is what I was trying to say but much better.
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.
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.
Sorry to be unclear, I meant the video game industry. Thanks though for the book reference, looks like a fun read :-)
It does not all add up to normality. We are living in a weird universe. (75%)
Downvoted in agreement (I happen to know generally what Kevin's talking about here, but it's really hard to concisely explain the intuition).
Please specify what you mean by a weird universe.
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.
Would "Fortean phenomena really do occur, and some type of anthropic effect keeps them from being verifiable by scientific observers" fit under this statement?
That sounds weird to me.
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.
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.)
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.
Upvoted. Definitely can't back you on this one.
Are you sure you're not just worried about poor calibration?
Another upvote. That's crazy talk.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Upvoted, because I think you're only probably right. And you not only stole my thunder, you made it more thunderous :(
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.
Upvote for disagreements of overconfidence OR underconfidence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would classify such kinds of predictions as vague, after all they match equally well for every human being in almost any condition.