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Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014
Haven't had one of these for awhile. This thread is for questions or comments that you've felt silly about not knowing/understanding. Let's try to exchange info that seems obvious, knowing that due to the illusion of transparency it really isn't so obvious!
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Comments (293)
Making a person and unmaking a person seem like utilitarian inverses, yet I don't think contraception is tantamount to murder. Why isn't making a person as good as killing a person is bad?
ETA: Potentially less contentious rephrase: why isn't making a life as important as saving a life?
Because killing a person deprives them of positive experiences that they otherwise would have had, and they prefer to have them. But a nonexistent being doesn't have preferences.
Once you've killed them and they've become nonexistent, then they don't have preferences either.
That's true, but they have preferences before you kill them. In the case of contraception, there is no being to have ever had preferences.
Presumably what should matter (assuming preference utilitarianism) when we evaluate an act are the preferences that exist at (or just before) the time of commission of the act. If that's right, then the non-existence of those preferences after the act is performed is irrelevant.
The Spanish Inquisition isn't exculpated because it's victims' preferences no longer exist. They existed at the time they were being tortured, and that's what should matter.
So it's fine to do as much environmental damage as we like, as long as we're confident the effects won't be felt until after everyone currently alive is dead?
I'd presume that many people's preferences include terms for the expected well-being of their descendants.
That's a get out of utilitarianism free card. Many people's preferences include terms for acting in accordance with their own nonutilitarian moral systems.
Preference utilitarianism isn't a tool for deciding what you should prefer, it's a tool for deciding how you should act. It's entirely consistent to prefer options which involve you acting according to whim or some nonutilitarian system (example: going to the pub), yet for it to dictate -- after taking into account the preferences of others -- that you should in fact do something else (example: taking care of your sick grandmother).
There may be some confusion here, though. I normally think of preferences in this context as being evaluated over future states of the world, i.e. consequences, not over possible actions; it sounds like you're thinking more in terms of the latter.
They never do "become nonexistent". You just happen to have found one of their edges.
Doesn't seem that way at all to me. A person who already exists has friends, family, social commitments, etc. Killing that person would usually effect all of these things negatively, often to a pretty huge extent. Using contraception maybe creates some amount of disutility in certain cases (for staunch Catholics, for instance) but not nearly to the degree that killing someone does. If you're only focusing on the utility for the person made or unmade, then maybe (although see blacktrance's comment on that), but as a utilitarian you have no license for doing that.
A hermit, long forgotten by the rest of the world, lives a middling life all alone on a desert island. Eve kills the hermit secretly and painlessly, sell his organs, and uses the money to change the mind of a couple who had decided against having additional children. The couple's child leads a life far longer and happier than the forgotten Hermit's ever would have been.
Eve has increased QALYs, average happiness, and total happiness. Has Eve done a good thing? If not, why not?
Sure, Eve did a good thing.
I am going to assume that opinion of the suffering hermit is irrelevant to this utility calculation.
It's specified that he was killed painlessly.
It is true, I wasn't specific enough, but I wanted to emphasize the opinion part, and the suffering part was meant to emphasize his life condition.
He was, presumably - killed without his consent, and therefore the whole affair seems so morally icky from a non-utilitarian perspective.
If your utility function does not penalize for making bad things as long as net result is correct, you are likely to end up in a world full of utility monsters.
We live in a world full of utility monsters. We call them humans.
I am assuming that all the old sad hermits are of this world are being systematically chopped for spare parts granted to deserving and happy young people, while good meaning utilitarians hide this sad truth from us, so that I don't become upset about those atrocities that are currently being committed in my name?
We are not even close to utility monster, and personally I know very few people who I would consider actual utilitarians.
No, but cows, pigs, hens and so on are being systematically chopped up for the gustatory pleasure of people who could get their protein elsewhere. For free-range, humanely slaughtered livestock you could make an argument that this is a net utility gain for them, since they wouldn't exist otherwise, but the same cannot be said for battery animals.
I didn't mean for the hermit to be sad, just less happy than the child.
Ah, must have misread your representation, but English is not my first language, so sorry about that.
I guess if I was particularly well organized ruthlessly effective utilitarian ass some people here, I could now note down in my notebook, that he is happier then I previously thought and it is moral to kill him if, and only if the couple gives birth to 3, not 2 happy children.
Does that mean we should spend more of our altruistic energies on encouraging happy productive people to have more happy productive children?
Maybe. I think the realistic problem with this strategy is that if you take an existing human and help him in some obvious way, then it's easy to see and measure the good you're doing. It sounds pretty hard to figure out how effectively or reliably you can encourage people to have happy productive children. In your thought experiment, you kill the hermit with 100% certainty, but creating a longer, happier life that didn't detract from others' was a complicated conjunction of things that worked out well.
This looks very similar to the trolley problem, specifically the your-organs-are-needed version.
I thought the same thing and went to dig up the original. Here it is:
This is from the consequentialism page on the SEP, and it goes on to discuss modifications of utilitarianism that avoid biting the bullet (scalpel?) here.
This situation seems different for me for two reason:
Off-topic way: Killing the "donor" is bad for similar reasons as 2-boxing the Newcomb problem is bad. If doctors killed random patients then patients wouldn't go to hospitals and medicine would collapse. IMO the supposedly utilitarian answer to the transplant problem is not really utilitarian.
On-topic way: The surgeons transplant organs to save lives, not to make babies. Saving lives and making lives seem very different to me, but I'm not sure why (or if) they differ from a utilitarian perspective.
Analogically, "killing a less happy person and conceiving a more happy one" may be wrong in a long term, by changing a society into one where people feel unsafe.
You're fixating on the unimportant parts.
Let me change the scenario slightly to fix your collapse-of-medicine problem: Once in a while the government consults its random number generator and selects one or more, as needed, people to be cut up for organs. The government is careful to keep the benefits (in lives or QALYs or whatever) higher than the costs. Any problems here?
Edited away an explanation so as not to take the last word
Short answer, no.
I'd like to keep this thread focused to making a life vs. saving a life, not arguments about utilitarianism in general. I realize there is much more to be said on this subject, but I propose we end discussion here.
The grounds to avoid discouraging people from walking into hospitals are way stronger than the grounds to avoid discouraging people from being hermits.
So you think that the only problem with the Transplant scenario is that it discourages people from using hospitals..?
Not the only one, but the deal-breaking one.
See this
Ah, in that specific sort of situation, I imagine hedonic (as opposed to preference) utilitarians would say that yes, Eve has done a good thing.
If you're asking me, I'd say no, but I'm not a utilitarian, partly because utilitarianism answers "yes" to questions similar to this one.
If there are a large number of "yes" replies, the hermit lfestyle becomes very unappealing.
Yes, but I wouldn't do that myself because of ethical injunctions.
This fails to fit the spirit of the problem, because it takes the preferences of currently living beings (the childless couple) into account.
A scenario that would capture the spirit of the problem is:
"Eve kills a moderately happy hermit who moderately prefers being alive, uses the money to create a child who is predisposed to be extremely happy as a hermit. She leaves the child on the island to live life as an extremely happy hermit who extremely prefers being alive." (The "hermit" portion of the problem is unnecessary now - you can replace hermit with "family" or "society" if you want.)
Compare with...
"Eve must choose between creating a moderately happy hermit who moderately prefers being alive OR an extremely happy hermit who extremely prefers being alive." (Again, hermit / family / society are interchangeable)
and
"Eve must choose between kliling a moderately happy hermit who moderately prefers being alive OR killing an extremely happy hermit who extremely prefers being alive."
From a classical utilitarian perspective, yeah, it's pretty much a wash, at least relative to non-fatal crimes that cause similar suffering.
However, around here, "utilitarian" is usually meant as "consistent consequentialism." In that frame we can appeal to motives like "I don't want to live in a society with lots of murder, so it's extra bad."
Upvoted. Remember to keep in mind the answer might be "making a person is as good as killing a person is bad.
Here's a simple argument for why we can't be indifferent to creating people. Suppose we have three worlds:
Assume we prefer Jon to have 20 utils to 10. Assume also we're indifferent between 10 utils and Jon's. Hence by transitivity we must prefer Jon exist and have 20 utils to Jon's non-existance. So we should try to create Jon, if we think he'll have over 10 utils.
Note that this kind of utilon calculation also equates your scenarios with those where, magically, a whole bunch of people came and ceased to exist a few minutes ago with lots of horrible torture, followed by amnesia, in between.
Whether this is so or not depends on whether you are assuming hedonistic or preference utilitarianism. For a hedonistic utilitarian, contraception is, in a sense, tantamount to murder, except that as a matter of fact murder causes much more suffering than contraception does, both to the person who dies, to his or her loved ones, and to society at large (by increasing fear). By contrast, preference utilitarians can also appeal to the preferences of the individual who is killed: whereas murder causes the frustration of an existing preference, contraception doesn't, since nonexisting entities can't have preferences.
The question also turns on issues about population ethics. The previous paragraph assumes the "total view": that people who do not exist but could or will exist matter morally, and just as much. But some people reject this view. For these people, even hedonistic utilitarians can condemn murder more harshly than contraception, wholly apart from the indirect effects of murder on individuals and society. The pleasure not experienced by the person who fails to be conceived doesn't count, or counts less than the pleasure that the victim of murder is deprived of, since the latter exists but the former doesn't.
For further discussion, see Peter Singer's Practical Ethics, chap. 4 ('What's wrong with killing?").
Isn't negative utility usually more motivating to people anyway? This seems like a special case of that, if we don't count the important complications of killing a person that pragmatist pointed out.
Even within pleasure- or QALY-utilitarianism, which seems technically wrong, you can avoid this by recognizing that those possible people probably exist regardless in some timeline or other. I think. We don't understand this very well. But it looks like you want lots of people to follow the rule of making their timelines good places to live (for those who've already entered the timeline). Which does appear to save utilitarianism's use as a rule of thumb.
Cheap answer, but remember that it might be the true one: because utilitarianism doesn't accurately describe morality, and the right way to live is not by utilitarianism.
Here are two related differences between a child is and an adult. (1) It is very expensive to turn a child into an adult. (2) An adult is highly specific and not replaceable, while a fetus has a lot of subjective uncertainty and is fairly easily duplicated within that uncertainty. Uploading is relevant to both of these points.
Possibly because...
You have judged. It's possible that this is all there is to it... not killing people who do not want to die might just be a terminal value for humans, while creating people who would want to be created might not be a terminal value.
(Might. If you think that it's an instrumental value in favor of some other terminal goal, you should look for it)
It takes a lot of resources to raise someone. If you're talking about getting an abortion, it's not a big difference, but if someone has already invested enough resources to raise a child, and then you kill them, that's a lot of waste.
As far as I can tell killing/not-killing a person isn't the same not-making/make a person. I think this becomes more apparent if you consider the universe as timeless.
This is the thought experiment that comes to mind. It's worth noting that all that follows depends heavily on how one calculates things.
Comparing the universes where we choose to make Jon to the one where we choose not to:
Comparing the universes where we choose to kill an already made Jon to the one where we choose not to:
The marginal utility for Jon in Universe B vs B' is easy to calculate, (2u - u) gives a total marginal utility (i.e. gain in utility) from choosing to not kill Jon over killing him of u.
However the marginal utility for Jon in Universe A vs A' is undefined (in the same sense 1/0 is undefined). As Jon doesn't exist in universe A' it is impossible to assign a value to Utility_Jon_A', as a result our marginal (Utility_Jon_A - Utility_Jon_A') is equal to (u - [an undefined value]). As such our marginal utility lost or gained by choosing between universes A and A' is undefined.
It follows from this that the marginal utility between any universe and A' is undefined. In other words our rules for deciding which universe is better for Jon break down in this case.
I myself (probably) don't have a preference for creating universes where I exist over ones where I don't. However I'm sure that I don't want this current existence of me to terminate.
So personally I choose maximise the utility of people who already exist over creating more people.
Eliezer explains here why bringing people into existence isn't all that great even if someone existing over not existing has a defined(and positive) marginal utility.
I created a new article about this.
What motivates rationalists to have children? How much rational decision making is involved?
ETA: removed the unnecessary emotional anchor.
ETA2: I'm not asking this out of Spockness, I think I have a pretty good map of normal human drives. I'm asking because I want to know if people have actually looked into the benefits, costs and risks involved, and done explicit reasoning on the subject.
I don't consider myself an explicit rationalist, but the desire to have children stems from the desire to have someone to take care of me when I am older.
Do you see your own conception and further life as a cause for "huge heap of disutility" that can't be surpassed by the good stuff?
Not to me obviously. Not necessarily to my parents either, but I think they might have been quite lucky in addition to being good parents.
Doesn't money take care of you when old too? As a side note, if I were old, dying and in a poor enough condition that I couldn't look after myself, I'd rather sign off than make other people take care of me because I can't imagine that being an enjoyable experience.
Still, if it is possible to have a happy children (and I assume happy humans are good stuff), where does the heap of dis-utility come into play?
EDIT: It is hard to form a meaningful relationship with money, and I would reckon that teaching it to uphold values similar to yours isn't an easy task either. As for taking care I don't mean palliative care as much as simply the relationship you have with your child.
You can have relationships with other people, and I think it's easier to influence what they're like.
I'll list some forms of disutility later, but I think for now it's better not to bias the answers to the original question further. I removed the "heap of disutility" part, it was unnecessarily exaggerated anyway.
I've always been curious to see the response of someone with this view to the question:
What if you knew, as much as any things about the events of the world are known, that there will be circumstances in X years that make it impossible for any child you conceive to possibly take care of you when you are older?
In such a hypothetical, is the executive drive to have children still present, still being enforced by the programming of Azathoth, merely disconnected from the original trigger that made you specifically have this drive? Or does the desire go away? Or something else, maybe something I haven't thought of (I hope it is!)?
Am I going to have a chance to actually interact with them, see them grow, etc?
I mean, assuming hypothetical case where as soon as a child is born, nefarious agents of Population Police snatch him never to be seen or heard from again, then I don't really see the point of having children.
If on the other hand, I have a chance to actually act as a parent to him, then I guess it is worth it, after all, even if the child disappears as soon as it reaches adulthood and joins Secret Society of Ineffective Altruism never to be heard from again. I get no benefit of care, but I am happy that I introduced new human into the world (uh... I mean, I actually helped to do so, as it is a two-person exercise so to speak). It is not ideal case but I am still consider the effort well spent.
In ideal world, I still have a relation with my child, even as he/her reaches adulthood so that I can feel safer knowing that there is someone who (hopefully) considers all the generosity I have granted to him and holds me dear.
P.S. Why programing of Azathoth? In my mind it makes it sound as if desire to have children was something intristically bad.
Thanks for the response! This puts several misunderstandings I had to rest.
Programming of Azathoth because Azathoth doesn't give a shit about what you wish your own values were. Therefore what you want has no impact whatsoever on what your body and brain are programmed to do, such as make some humans want to have children even when every single aspect of it is negative (e.g. painful sex, painful pregnancy, painful birthing, hell to raise children, hellish economic conditions, absolutely horrible life for the child, etc. etc. such as we've seen some examples of in slave populations historically)
I suspect our world views might differ for a bit, as I don't wish that my values where any different than they are. Why should I?
If Azathoth decided to instill the value that having children is somehow desirable deep into my mind, than I am very happy that as a first world parent I have all the resources I need to turn it into a pleasant endeavor with a very high expected value (happy new human who hopefully likes me and hopefully shares my values, but I don't have much confidence in a second bet).
The same what motivates other people. Being rational doesn't necessarily change your values.
Clearly, some people think having children is worthwhile and others don't, so that's individual. There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don't make it though natural selection.
The amount of decision-making also obviously varies -- from multi-year deliberations to "Dear, I'm pregnant!" :-)
True, but it might make you weigh them very differently if you understand how biased your expectations are. I'm interested if people make some rational predictions about how happy having children will make them for example.
I already have a pretty good idea about how people in general make these decisions, hence the specific question.
Really? The reproductive urge in humans seems to be more centered on a desire for sex rather than on a desire for children. And, in most animals, this is sufficient; sex leads directly to reproduction without the brain having to take an active role after the exchange of genetic material takes place.
Humans, oddly enough, seem to have evolved adaptations for ensuring that people have unplanned pregnancies in spite of their big brains. Human females don't have an obvious estrus cycle, their fertile periods are often unpredictable, and each individual act of copulation has a relatively low chance of causing a pregnancy. As a result, humans are often willing to have sex when they don't want children and end up having them anyway.
These are not mutually exclusive alternatives.
Not in those animals where babies require a long period of care and protection.
Yes, you're right. I didn't think to put the "take care of your children once they're out of the uterus" programming into the same category.
Women talk to me about baby fever all the time. Lucky me, eh.
A developmentally complex species needs a drive to care for offspring. A simple species just needs a drive to reproduce.
ETA: What Lumifer said
I wouldn't dream of speaking for rationalists generally, but in order to provide a data point I'll answer for myself. I have one child; my wife and I were ~35 years old when we decided to have one. I am by any reasonable definition a rationalist; my wife is intelligent and quite rational but not in any very strong sense a rationalist. Introspection is unreliable but is all I have. I think my motivations were something like the following.
Having children as a terminal value, presumably programmed in by Azathoth and the culture I'm immersed in. This shows up subjectively as a few different things: liking the idea of a dependent small person to love, wanting one's family line to continue, etc.
Having children as a terminal value for other people I care about (notably spouse and parents).
I think I think it's best for the fertility rate to be close to the replacement rate (i.e., about 2 in a prosperous modern society with low infant mortality), and I think I've got pretty good genes; overall fertility rate in the country I'm in is a little below replacement and while it's fairly densely populated I don't think it's pathologically so, so for me to have at least one child and probably two is probably beneficial for society overall.
I expected any child I might have to have a net-positive-utility life (for themselves, not only for society at large) and indeed probably an above-average-utility life.
I expected having a child to be a net positive thing for marital harmony and happiness (I wouldn't expect that for every couple and am not making any grand general claim here).
I don't recall thinking much about the benefits of children in providing care when I'm old and decrepit, though I suppose there probably is some such benefit.
So far (~7.5 years in), we love our daughter to bits and so do others in our family (so #1,#2,#5 seem to be working as planned), she seems mostly very happy (so #4 seems OK so far), it's obviously early days but my prediction is still that she'll likely have a happy life overall (so #4 looks promising for the future) and I don't know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.
(This might seem obviously stupid to someone who's thought about the issue more in-depth, but if so there's no better place for it than the Stupid Questions Thread, is there?):
I think some tangential evidence could be gleaned, as long as it's understood as a very noisy signal, from what other humans in your society consider as signals of social involvement and productivity. Namely, how well your daughter is doing at school, how engaged she gets with her peers, her results in tests, etc. These things are known, or at least thought, to be correlated with social 'success' and 'benefit'.
Basically, if your daughter is raising the averages or other scores that comprise the yardsticks of teachers and other institutions, then this is information correlated with what others consider being beneficial to society later in life. (the exact details of the correlation, including its direction, depend on the specific environment she lives in)
That would be evidence (albeit, as you say, not very strong evidence) that my daughter's contribution to net utility is above average. That doesn't seem enough to guarantee it's positive.
Good catch. Didn't notice that one sneaking in there. That kind of invalidates most of my reasoning, so I'll retract it willingly unless someone has an insight that saves the idea.
I first wanted to comment on 5, because I had previously read that having children reduces happiness. Interestingly, when searching a link (because I couldn't remember where I had read it), I found this source (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf) that corrobates your specific expectation: children lead to higher happiness for older, better educated parents.
How excellent! It's nice to be statistically typical :-).
Having children is an example where two methodologies in happiness research dramatically diverge. One method is asking people in the moment how happy they are; the other is asking how they happy they generally feel about their lives. The first method finds that people really hate child care and is probably what you remembered.
I think the paper you're thinking of is Kahneman et al's A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method.
Notably,
On the other hand, having children also harms marital satisfaction. See, for example, here.
Disclaimer: I don't have kids, won't have them anytime soon (i.e. not in the next 5 years), and until relatively recently didn't want them at all.
The best comparison I can make is that raising a child is like making a painting. It's work, but it's rewarding if done well. You create a human being, and hopefully impart them with good values and set them on a path to a happy life, and it's a very personal experience.
Personally, I don't have any drive to have kids, not one that's comparable to hunger or sexual attraction.
I'd like that personal painting experience if it went well and I have experienced glimpses of it with some kids not of my own.
Unfortunately it's not clear to me at all how much success of the project could be of my own doing, and I've seen enough examples of when things go horribly wrong despite of optimally seeming conditions. I wonder what kinds of studies could be done on the subject of parenting skills and parental satisfaction on the results of upbringing that aren't hugely biased.
ETA: my five year old step brother just barged into my room (holiday at my folks). "You always get new knowledge in this room.", he said, and I was compelled to pour that little vessel full again.
One more point that I haven't seen brought up -- listen to Queen:
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
Each morning I get up I die a little
Can barely stand on my feet
Take a look in the mirror and cry
Lord what you're doing to me
I have spent all my years in believing you
But I just can't get no relief,
Lord!
Somebody, somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
Children as match makers when you're too old to stand on your feet? ;)
That's an interesting interpretation :-) it was also fun to watch it evolve :-D
I was calibrating political correctness.
Entirely within your own mind? I don't think you got any external feedback to base calibration on :-)
I got plenty of feedback from the intensive simulations I ran.
Personally, I'd recommend a dog or cat to this person.
I think you mean "humans"?
With respect to adoption vs. biological children, having your own child allows you more control over the circumstances and also means the child will probably share a some facets of your / your mate's personality, in ways that are often surprising and pleasurable.
With respect to raising children in general, it's intrinsically rewarding, like a mix of writing a book and being in love. Also, if you're assuming the environment won't radically change, having youth probably makes aging easier.
(I don't have children, but have watched them being raised. Unsure of my own plans.)
Nope, not planning to go Spock. I also edited the original question now for clarification.
I'd like to see some evidence how much control I can have. You're describing just the best case scenario, but having a child can also be incredibly exhausting if things go wrong.
Oh, okay. Sorry to misunderstand. (Also, I meant "control" as compared to the control one has when adopting.)
In that case, I have insufficient research for a meaningful answer. I guess one aught to start here or there or there, to get a rough idea?
If it turns out that the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is massively confused, what would that look like?
Note that in the late 19th century, many leading intellectuals followed a scientific/rationalist/atheist/utopian philosophy, socialism, which later turned out to be a horrible way to arrange society. See my article on this. (And it's not good enough to say that we're really rational, scientific, altruist, utilitarian, etc, in contrast to those people -- they thought the same.)
So, how might we find that all these ideas are massively wrong?
We might find out by trying to apply them to the real world and seeing that they don't work.
Well, it is less common now, but I think a slow retreat of the community from the position that instrumental rationality is applied science of winning at life is one of the cases when the beliefs had to be corrected to better match evidence.
Is it? I mean, I'd happily say that the LW crowd as a whole does not seem particularly good at winning at life, but that is and should be our goal.
Speaking broadly, the desire to lead happy / successful / interesting life (however winning is defined) it is a laudable goal shared by wast majority of humans. The problem was that some people took the idea further and decided that winning is a good qualification measure as to weather someone is a good rationalist or not, as debunked by Luke here. There are better examples, but I can't find them now.
Also, my two cents are that while rational agent may have some advantage over irrational one in a perfect universe, real world is so fuzzy and full of noisy information that if superior reasoning decision making skill really improves your life, improvements are likely to be not as impressive as advertised by hopeful proponents of systematized winning theory.
I think that post is wrong as a description of the LW crowd's goals. That post talks as if one's akrasia were a fixed fact that had nothing to do with rationality, but in fact a lot of the site is about reducing or avoiding it. Likewise intelligence; that post seems to assume that your intelligence is fixed and independent of your rationality, but in reality this site is very interested in methods of increasing intelligence. I don't think anyone on this site is just interested in making consistent choices.
We should be wary of ideologies that involve one massive failure point....crap.
Could you elaborate/give-some-examples?
What are some ideologies that do/don't have (one massive failure point)/(Lots of small failure points)?
The one I was thinking of was capitalism vs communism. I have had many communists tell me that communism only works if we make the whole world do it. A single point of failure.
That's kind of surprising to me. A lot of systems have proportional tipping points, where a change is unstable up to a certain proportion of the sample but suddenly turns stable after that point. Herd immunity, traffic congestion, that sort of thing. If the assumptions of communism hold, that seems like a natural way of looking at it.
A structurally unstable social system just seems so obviously bad to me that I can't imagine it being modeled as such by its proponents. Suppose Marx didn't have access to dynamical systems theory, though.
This is what some modern communists say, and it is just an excuse (and in fact wrong, it will not work even in that case). Early communists actually believed the opposite thing: an example of one communitst nation would be enough to convert the whole world.
It's been a while since I read Marx and Engels, but I'm not sure they would have been speaking in terms of conversion by example. IIRC, they thought of communism as a more-or-less inevitable development from capitalism, and that it would develop somewhat orthogonally to nation-state boundaries but establish itself first in those nations that were most industrialized (and therefore had progressed the furthest in Marx's future-historical timeline). At the time they were writing, that would probably have meant Britain.
The idea of socialism in one country was a development of the Russian Revolution, and is something of a departure from Marxism as originally formulated.
I wouldn't call that a single point of failure, I'd call that a refusal to test it and an admission of extreme fragility.
It could be that it's just impossible to build a safe FAI under the utilitarian framework and all AGI's are UFAIs.
Otherwise the LessWrong memeplex has the advantage of being very diverse. When it comes to a subject like politics we do have people with mainstream views but we also have people who think that democracy is wrong. Having such a diversity of ideas makes it difficult for all of LessWrong to be wrong.
Some people paint a picture of LessWrong as a crowd of people who believe that everyone should do cryonics. In reality most the the participants aren't signed up for cryonics.
Take a figure like Nassim Taleb. He's frequently quoted on LessWrong so he's not really outside the LessWrong memeplex. But he's also a Christian.
There are a lot memes around flooting in the LessWrong memeplex that are there in a basic level but that most people don't take to their full conclusion.
It's a topic that's very difficult to talk about. Basically you try out different ideas and look at the effects of those ideas in the real world. Mainly because of QS data I delved into the system of Somato-Psychoeducation. The data I measured was improvement in a health variable. It was enough to get over the initial barrier to go inside the system. But know I can think inside the system and there a lot going on which I can't put into good metrics.
There however no way to explain the framework in an article. Most people who read the introductory book don't get the point before they spent years experiencing the system from the inside.
It's the very nature of those really things outside the memeplex that there not easily expressible by ideas inside the memeplex in a way that won't be misunderstood.
That's not LW-memeplex being wrong, that's just a LW-meme which is slightly more pessimistic than the more customary "the vast majority of all UFAI's are unfriendly but we might be able to make this work" view. I don't think any high profile LWers who believed this would be absolutely shocked at finding out that it was too optimistic.
MIRI-LW being plausibly wrong about AI friendliness is more like, "Actually, all the fears about unfriendly AI were completely overblown. Self-improving AI don't actually "FOOM" dramatically ... they simply get smarter at the same exponential rate that the rest of the humans+tech system has been getting smarter all this time. There isn't much practical danger of them rapidly outracing the rest of the system and seizing power and turning us all into paperclips, or anything like that."
If that sort of thing were true, it would imply that a lot of prominent rationalists have been wasting time (or at least, doing things which end up being useful for reasons entirely different than the reasons that they were supposed to be useful for)
If it's impossible to build FAI that might mean that one should in general discourage technological development to prevent AGI from being build.
It might building moral framework that allow for effective prevention of technological development. I do think that's significantly differs from the current LW-memeplex.
What I mean is...the difference between "FAI is possible but difficult" and "FAI is impossible and all AI are uFAI" is like the difference between "A narrow subset of people go to heaven instead of hell" and " and "every human goes to hell". Those two beliefs are mostly identical
Whereas "FOOM doesn't happen and there is no reason to worry about AI so much" is analogous to "belief in afterlife is unfounded in the first place". That''s a massively different idea.
In one case, you're committing a little heresy within a belief system. In the other, the entire theoretical paradigm was flawed to begin with. If it turns out that "all AI are UFAI" is true, then Lesswrong/MIRI would still be a lot more correct about things than most other people interested in futurology / transhumanism because they got the basic theoretical paradigm right. (Just like, if it turned out hell existed but not heaven, religionists of many stripes would still have reason to be fairly smug about the accuracy of their predictions even if none of the actions they advocated made a difference)
Well, why do you think socialism is so horribly wrong? During the 20th century socialists more or less won and got what they wanted. Things like social security, govermental control over business and redistribution of wealth in general are all socialist. This all may be bad from some point of view, but it is in no way mainstream opinion.
Then, those guys whom you mention in your article called themselves communists and marxists. At most, they considered socialism as some intermediate stage for building communism. And communism went bad because it was founded on wrong assumptions about how both economy and human psychology work. So, which MIRI/Lesswrong assumptions can be wrong and cause a lot of harm? Well, here are some examples.
1) Building FAI is possible, and there is a reliable way to tell if it is truly FAI before launching it. Result if wrong: paperclips.
2) Building FAI is much more difficult than AI. Launching a random AI is civilization-level suicide. Result if this idea becomes widespread: we don't launch any AI before civilization runs out of resources or collapses for some other reason.
3) Consciousness is sort of optional feature, intelligence can work just well without it. We can reliably say if given intelligence is a person. In other words, real world works the same way as in Peter Watts "Blindsight". Results if wrong: many, among them classic sci-fi AI rebellion.
4) Subscribing for cryonics is generally a good idea. Result if widespread: these costs significantly contribute to worldwide economic collapse.
Under the assumption that cryonics patients will never be unfrozen, cryonics has two effects. Firstly, resources are spent on freezing people, keeping them frozen and researching how to improve cryonics. There may be fringe benefits to this (for example, researching how to freeze people more efficiently might lead to improvements in cold chains, which would be pretty snazzy). There would certainly be real resource wastage.
The second effect is in increasing the rate of circulation of the currency; freezing corpses that will never be revived is pretty close to burying money, as Keynes suggested. Widespread, sustained cryonic freezing would certainly have stimulatory, and thus inflationary, effects; I would anticipate a slightly higher inflation rate and an ambiguous effect on economic growth. The effects would be very small, however, as cryonics is relatively cheap and would presumably grow cheaper. The average US household wastes far more money and real resources by not recycling or closing curtains and by allowing food to spoil.
How does this connect with the funding process of cryonics? When someone signs up and buys life insurance, they are eliminating consumption during their lifetime of the premiums and in effect investing it in the wider economy via the insurance company's investment in bonds etc; when they die and the insurance is cashed in for cryonics, some of it gets used on the process itself, but a lot goes into the trust fund where again it is invested in the wider economy. The trust fund uses the return for expenses like liquid nitrogen but it's supposed to be using only part of the return (so the endowment builds up and there's protection against disasters) and in any case, society's gain from the extra investment should exceed the fund's return (since why would anyone offer the fund investments on which they would take a loss and overpay the fund?). And this gain ought to compound over the long run.
So it seems to me that the main effect of cryonics on the economy is to increase long-term growth.
Money circulates more when used for short-term consumption, than long-term investment, no? So I'd expect a shift from the former to the latter to slow economic growth.
I don't follow. How can consumption increase economic growth when it comes at the cost of investment? Investment is what creates economic output.
There is such a thing as overinvestment. There is also such a thing as underconsumption, which is what we have right now.
Economic activity, i.e. positive-sum trades, are what generate economic output (that and direct labour). Investment and consumption demand can both lead to economic activity. AIUI the available evidence is that with the current economy a marginal dollar will produce a greater increase in economic activity in consumption than in investment.
It would look like a failure to adequately discount for inferential chain length.
Define "massively wrong". My personal opinions (stated w/o motivation for brevity):
Infeasibility of "classical" AGI and feasibility of mind uploading should be scientifically provable.
So: My position is very different from MIRI's. Nevertheless I think LessWrong is very interesting and useful (in particular I'm all for promoting rationality) and MIRI is doing very interesting and useful research. Does it count as "massively wrong"?
A few that come to mind:
I think the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is not massively confused.
But conditional on it turning out to be very very wrong, here is my answer:
A. MIRI
The future does indeed take radical new directions, but these directions are nothing remotely like the hard-takeoff de-novo-AI intelligence explosion which MIRI now treats as the max-prob scenario. Any sci-fi fan can imagine lots of weird futures, and maybe some other one will actually emerge.
MIRI's AI work turns out to trigger a massive negative outcome -- either the UFAI explosion they are trying to avoid, or something else almost as bad. This may result from fundamental mistakes in understanding, or because of some minor bug.
It turns out that the UFAI explosion really is the risk, but that MIRI's AI work is just the wrong direction; e.g., it turns out that that building a community of AIs in rough power balance; or experimenting by trial-and-error with nascent AGIs is the right solution.
B. CfAR
It turns out that the whole CfAR methodology is far inferior to instrumental outcomes than, say, Mormonism. Of course, CfAR would say that if another approach is instrumentally better, they would adopt it. But if they only find this out years down the road, this could be a massive failure scenario.
It turns out that epistemologically non-rational techniques are instrumentally valuable. Cf. Mormonism. Again, CfAR knows this, but in this failure scenario, they fail to reconcile the differences between the two types of rationality they are trying for.
Again, I think that the above scenarios are not likely, but they're my best guess at what "massively wrong" would look like.
MIRI failure modes that all seem likely to me:
They talk about AGI a bunch and end up triggering an AGI arms race.
AI doesn't explode the way they talk about, causing them to lose credibility on the importance of AI safety as well. (Relatively slow-moving) disaster ensues.
The future is just way harder to predict than everyone thought it would be... we're cavemen trying to envision the information age and all of our guesses are way off the mark in ways we couldn't have possibly forseen.
Uploads come first.
By their degree of similarity to ancient religious mythological and sympathetic magic forms with the nouns swapped out.
Should I not be using my real name?
Do you want to have a career at a conservative institution such a bank or a career in politics? If so, it's probably a bad idea to have too much attack surface by using your real name.
Do you want to make as many connections with other people as possible? If so, using your real name helps. It increases the attention that other people pay yourself. If you are smart and write insightful stuff that can mean job offers, speaking and speaking gigs.
If you meet people in real life might already know you from your online commentary that they have read and you don't have to start introducing yourself.
It's really a question of whether you think strangers are more likely to hurt or help you.
I think the best long-term strategy would be to invent a different name and use the other name consistently, even in the real life. With everyone, except the government. Of course your family and some close friends would know your real name, but you would tell them that you prefer to be called by that other name, especially in public.
So, you have one identity, you make it famous and everyone knows you. Only when you want to get anonymous, you use your real name. And the advantage is that you have papers for it. So your employer will likely not notice. You just have to be careful never to use your real name together with your fake name.
Unless your first name is unusual, you can probably re-use your first name, which is how most people will call you anyway, so if you meet people who know your true name and people who know your fake name at the same time, the fact that you use two names will not be exposed.
What threat do you want to protect against? If you fear the NSA, they have probably have no trouble linking your real name to your alias.
They know where the person with your real name lives and they know what web addresses get browsed from that location.
I could not do that. I study in university under my real name and my identity as a university student is linked to my public identity. The link is strong enough that a journalist who didn't contact me via a social network called my university to get in touch with me.
On LessWrong I write under my firstname plus the first two letters of my lastname. That means that anyone who recognises my identity from somewhere else can recognize me but if someone Google's for me he can't find me easily.
I have no trouble having to stand up for write I write on Lesswrong to people I meet in real life but having a discussion with one of my aunts about it wouldn't be fun, so I don't make it too easy. I also wouldn't want the writing to be quoted out of context in other places. I would survive it but given the low level of filtering on what I write on LW it would be annoying.
As far as self censoring goes I feel safe to say one of my aunts given that I have multiple of them. Anybody reading couldn't reduce who I mean. Whenever else I write something about someone I know I think twice whether someone could identify the person and if so I wouldn't write it publicly under this identity. Asking about relationship advice and flashing out specific a problem would be a no-go for me because it might make details public that the other person didn't want to have public. Everything I say in that regard is supposed to be general enough that no harm will come from it to other people I know personally.
A conservative employer, less skilled than NSA.
For example I want to write blogs against religion or against some political party, and yet not be at a disadvantage when applying for a job in a company where the boss suports them. Also to avoid conflicts with colleagues.
Good point. In such case I would put the university in the same category as an employer. Generally, all institutions that have power over me at some point of my life.
This. The face one presents to one's peers is justifiably different from the face one presents to amoral, potentially dangerous organizations. Probably the first thing that, say, a job interviewer will do with a potential candidate is Google their name. Unless the interviewer is exceptionally open minded, it is critical to your livelihood that they not find the Harry Potter erotica you wrote when you were fifteen.
I have both a handle and a legal name. The handle is as much "me" as the legal one (more so, in some ways). I don't hesitate to give out my real name to people I know online, but I won't give my handle out to any organizational representative. I fear the bureaucracy more than random Internet kooks. It's not about evading the NSA; it's about keeping personal and professional life safely separated.
It depending on how vocal and how controversial you are being with your internet persona. There is always the chance that you'll acquire the ire of an angry mob...and if so, you've effectively doxxed yourself for them.
Being open with your name doesn't automatically mean that phone numbers and your address is also public.
For most people I don't think the risk is significant compared to other risks such as getting hit by a car. I would expect it to be one of those risks that's easy to visualize but that has a rather low probability.
Being open with your name does mean that your phone numbers and address are likely to be public. Saarelma is a little more protected than the average, since Finland's equivalent to WhitePages is not freely available world-wide, but those in the United States with an unusual name can be found for free.
That's separate from the "ire of an angry mob" risk, which seems more likely to occur primarily for people who have a large enough profile that they'd have to have outed themselves anyway, though.
How about a publicly accessible collection of everything you did or said online that is unerasable and lasts forever?
"I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record"
You don't name a threat.
If you think that the work you produce online is crap and people you care about will dislike you for it, than having a permanent record of it is bad. If you think that the work that you produce online is good than having a permanent record of it is good.
You might say that some people might not hire me when they read that I expressed some controversial view years ago in an online forum. I would say that I don't want to increase the power of those organisations by working for them anyway.
I rather want to get hired by someone who likes me and values my public record.
There a bit of stoicism involved but I don't think that it's useful to live while hiding yourself. I rather fear having a lived a life where I leave no meaningful record than living a life that leaves a record.
No, I name a capability to misrepresent and hurt you.
If I do most of my public activity under identity Bob but the government knows me as Dave, someone can still misrepresent me as I'm acting as Bob by misquoting things written under the Bob identity in the past.
If I want to prevent permanent records I would have to switch identities every so often which is hard to do without losing something if you have anything attached to those identities that you don't want to lose.
How far from the normal are you? You may quickly find your feelings change drastically as your positions become more opposed. I don't want to work for organizations that would not hire me due to controversial views, but depending on the view and on my employment prospects, my choices may be heavily constrained. I'd rather know which organizations I can choose to avoid, rather than be forced out of organizations. ((There are also time-costs involved with doing it this way: it a company says it hates X in the news, and I like X, I can not send them a resume. But I send them a resume and then discover than they don't want to hire me due to my positions on X during an interview, it's a lot of lost energy.))
Conversely, writing under my own name would incentive avoiding topics that are or are likely to become controversial enough.
This seems to be what Gwern has done.
Exactly! He is so good example that it is easy to not even notice him being a good example.
There is no "Gwern has an identity he is trying to hide" thought running in my mind when I think about him (unlike with Yvain). It's just "Gwern is Gwern", nothing more. Instead of a link pointing to the darkness, there is simply no link there. It's not like I am trying to respect his privacy; I feel free to do anything I want and yet his privacy remains safe. (I mean, maybe if someone tried hard... but there is nothing reminding people that they could.) It's like an invisible fortress.
But if instead he called himself Arthur Gwernach (abbreviated to Gwern), that would be even better.
On the Neil Degrasse Tyson Q&A on reddit, someone asked: "Since time slows relative to the speed of light, does this mean that photons are essentially not moving through time at all?"
Tyson responded "yes. Precisely. Which means ----- are you seated?Photons have no ticking time at all, which means, as far as they are concerned, they are absorbed the instant they are emitted, even if the distance traveled is across the universe itself."
Is this true? I find it confusing. Does this mean that a photon emitted at location A at t0 is absorbed at location B at t0, such that it's at two places at once? In what sense does the photon 'travel' then? Or is the thought that the distance traveled, as well as the time, goes to zero?
The Lorentz factor diverges when the speed approaches c. Because of Length contraction and time dilation, both the distance and the time will appear to be 0, from the "point of view of the photon".
(the photon is "in 2 places at once" only from the point of view of the photon, and it doesn't think these places are different, after all they are in the same place! This among other things is why the notion of an observer traveling at c, rather than close to c, is problematic)
Not quite either of those.
The first thing to say is that "at t0" means different things to different observers. Observers moving in different ways experience time differently and, e.g., count different sets of spacetime points as simultaneous.
There is a relativistic notion of "interval" which generalizes the conventional notions of distance and time-interval between two points of spacetime. It's actually more convenient to work with the square of the interval. Let's call this I.
If you pick two points that are spatially separated but "simultaneous" according to some observer, then I>0 and sqrt(I) is the shortest possible distance between those points for an observer who sees them as simultaneous. The separation between the points is said to be "spacelike". Nothing that happens at one of these points can influence what happens at the other; they're "too far away in space and too close in time" for anything to get between them.
If you pick two points that are "in the same place but at different times" for some observer, then I<0 and sqrt(-I) is the minimum time that such an observer can experience between visiting them. The separation between the points is said to be "timelike". An influence can propagate, slower than the speed of light, from one to the other. They're "too far away in time and too close in space" for any observer to see them as simultaneous.
And, finally, exactly on the edge between these you have the case where I=0. That means that light can travel from one of the spacetime points to the other. In this case, an observer travelling slower than light can get from one to the other, but can do so arbitrarily quickly (from their point of view) by travelling very fast; and while no observer can see the two points as simultaneous, you can get arbitrarily close to that by (again) travelling very fast.
Light, of course, only ever travels at the speed of light (you might have heard something different about light travelling through a medium such as glass, but ignore that), which means that it travels along paths where I=0 everywhere. To an (impossible) observer sitting on a photon, no time ever passes; every spacetime point the photon passes through is simultaneous.
So: does the distance as well as the time go to 0? Not quite. Neither distance nor time makes sense on its own in a relativistic universe. The thing that does make sense is kinda-sorta a bit like "distance minus time" (and more like sqrt(distance-squared minus time-squared)), and that is 0 for any two points in spacetime that are visited by the same photon.
(Pedantic notes: 1. There are two possible sign conventions for the square of the interval. You can say that I>0 for spacelike separations, or say that I>0 for timelike separations. I arbitrarily chose the first of these. 2. There may be multiple paths that light can take between two spacetime points. They need not actually have the same "length" (i.e., interval). Strictly, "interval" is defined only locally; then, for a particular path, you can integrate it up to get the overall interval. 3. In the case of light propagating through a medium other than vacuum, what actually happens involves electrons as well as photons and it isn't just a matter of a photon going from A to B. Whenever a photon goes from A to B it does it, by whatever path it does, at the speed of light.)
Thanks, that was very helpful, especially the explanation of timelike and spacelike relations.
Assume there are observers at A and B, sitting at rest relative to each other. The distance between them as seen by them is X. Their watches are synchronized. Alice, sitting at A, emits a particle when her watch says t0; Bob, sitting at B, receives it when his watch says t1. Define T = t1-t0. The speed of the particle is V = X/T.
If the particle is massive, then V is always smaller than c (the speed of light). We can imagine attaching a clock to the particle and starting it when it is emitted. When Bob receives it, the clock's time would read a time t smaller than T, given by the equation:
t = T (1 - V^2/c^2)^(1/2) (this is the Lorentz factor equation mentioned by Plasmon).
As the speed V of the particle gets closer and closer to c, you can see that the time t that has passed "for the particle" gets closer and closer to 0. One cannot attach a clock to a photon, so the statement that "photons are not moving through time" is somewhat metaphoric and its real meaning is the limiting statement I just mentioned. The photon is not "at two places at once" from the point of view of any physical observer, be it Alice and Bob (for whom the travel took a time T = X/c) or any other moving with a speed smaller than c (for whom the time taken may be different but is never 0).
Thanks, it sounds like Tyson just said something very misleading. I looked up the Lorentz factor equation on Wiki, and I got this:
gamma = 1/[(1 - V^2/c^2)^(1/2)]
Is that right? If that's right, then the Lorentz transformation (I'm just guessing here) for a photon would return an undefined result. Was Tyson just conflating that result with a result of 'zero'?
Your equation for the gamma factor is correct. You are also correct in saying that they Lorentz transformation becomes undefined. The significance of this is that it makes no sense to talk about the "frame of reference of photon". Lorentz transformation equations allow us to switch from some set of time and space coordinates to another one moving at speed V < c relative to the first one. They make no sense for V = c or V > c.
I think that what Tyson meant by his somewhat imprecise answer was what I said in my comment above: if you take the equation t *gamma = T (that relates the time t that passes between two events for an object that moves with V from one to the other, with the time T that passes between between the events on a rest frame) and take the limit V approaching c for finite T, you get t = 0. If you want to keep the meaning of the equation in this limit, you have then to say that "no time passes for a photon". The issue is that the equation is just a consequence of the Lorentz transformations, which are inapplicable for V = c, and as a consequence the words "no time passes for a photon" do not have any clear, operational meaning attached to them.
I think I understand. Thanks very much for taking the time.
There are no photons. There, you see? Problem solved.
(no, the author of the article is not a crank; he's a Nobel physicist, and everything he says about the laws of physics is mainstream)
Oh. Great!
Problem evaded. Banning a word fails to resolve the underlying physical question. Substitute "wavepackets of light" for "photons"; what then?
I know, I was joking. And it was a good opportunity to link to this (genuinely interesting) paper.
... well, mostly joking. There's a kernel of truth there. "There are no photons" says more than just banning a word. "Wavepackets of light" don't exist either. There's just the electromagnetic field, its intensity changes with time, and the change propagates in space. Looking at it like this may help understand the other responses to the question (which are all correct).
When you think of a photon as a particle flying in space, it's hard to shake off the feeling that you somehow ought to be able to attach yourself to it and come along for the ride, or to imagine how the particle itself "feels" about its existence, how its inner time passes. And then the answer that for a photon, time doesn't pass at all, feels weird and counter-intuitive. If you tell yourself there's no particle, just a bunch of numbers everywhere in space (expressing the EM field) and a slight change in those numbers travels down the line, it may be easier to process. A change is not an object to strap yourself to. It doesn't have "inner time".
I feel I should let this go, and yet...
But we can make them! On demand, even.
By this argument, ocean waves don't exist either. There's only the sea, its height changes with time, and the change propagates in space.
You say that as a reductio ad absurdum, but it is good for some purposes. Anatoly didn't claim that one should deny photons for all purposes, but only for the purpose of unasking the original question.
You can't build a clock with a photon.
You can't build a clock with an electron either. You can build one with a muon though, since it will decay after some interval. It's not very accurate, but it's something.
In general, you cannot build a clock moving at light speed. You could build a clock with two photons. Measure the time by how close they are together. But if you look at the center of mass of this clock, it moves slower than light. If it didn't, the photons would have to move parallel to each other, but then they can't be moving away from each other, so you can't measure time.
I'm not sure what the significance of building a clock is...but then, I'm not sure I understand what clocks are. Anyway, isn't 'you can't build a clock on a photon' just what Tyson meant by 'Photons have no ticking time at all'?
Yes. I meant that he meant that.
In the photon's own subjective experience? Yes. (Not that that's possible, so this statement might not make sense). But as another commenter said, certainly the limit of this statement is true: as your speed moving from point A to point B approaches the speed of light, the subjective time you experience between the time when you're at A and the time when you're at B approaches 0. And the distance does indeed shrink, due to the Lorentz length contraction.
It travels in the sense that an external observer observes it in different places at different times. For a subjective observer on the photon... I don't know. No time passes, and the universe shrinks to a flat plane. Maybe the takeaway here is just that observers can't reach the speed of light.
Other people have explained this pretty well already, but here's a non-rigorous heuristic that might help. What follows is not technically precise, but I think it captures an important and helpful intuition.
In relativity, space and time are replaced by a single four-dimensional space-time. Instead of thinking of things moving through space and moving through time separately, think of them as moving through space-time. And it turns out that every single (non-accelerated) object travels through space-time at the exact same rate, call it c.
Now, when you construct a frame of reference, you're essentially separating out space and time artificially. Consequently, you're also separating an object's motion through space-time into motion through space and motion through time. Since every object moves through space-time at the same rate, when we separate out spatial and temporal motion, the faster the object travels through space the slower it will be traveling through time. The total speed, adding up speed through space and speed through time, has to equal the constant c.
So an object at rest in a particular frame of reference has all its motion along the temporal axis, and no motion at all along the spatial axes. It's traveling through time at speed c and it isn't traveling through space at all. If this object starts moving, then some of the temporal motion is converted to spatial motion. It's speed through space increases, and its speed through time decreases correspondingly, so that the motion through space-time as a whole remains constant at c. This is the source of time dilation in relativity (as seen in the twin paradox) - moving objects move through time more slowly than stationary objects, or to put it another way, time flows slower for moving objects.
Of course, the limit of this is when the object's entire motion through space-time is directed along the spatial axes, and none of it is directed along the temporal axes. In this case, the object will move through space at c, which turns out to be the speed of light, and it won't move through time at all. Time will stand still for the object. This is what's going on with photons.
From this point of view, there's nothing all that weird about a photon's motion. From the space-time perspective, which after all is the fundamental perspective in relativity, it is moving pretty much exactly like any other object. It's only our weird habit of treating space and time as extremely different that makes the entirely spatial motion of a photon seem so bizarre.
That is helpful, and interesting, though I think I remain a bit confused about the idea of 'moving through time' and especially 'moving through time quickly/slowly'. Does this imply some sort of meta-time, in which we can measure the speed at which one travels through time?
And I think I still have my original question: if a photon travels through space at c, and therefore doesn't travel through time at all, is the photon at its starting and its final position at the same moment? If so, in what sense did it travel through space at all?
At the same moment with respect to whom? That is the question one must always ask in relativity.
The answer is: no, emission and arrival do not occur at the same moment with respect to any actual reference frame. However, as we consider an abstract sequence of reference frames that move faster and faster approaching speed c in the same direction as the photon, we find that the time between the emission and the reception is shorter and shorter.
No it doesn't. Remember, in relativity, time is relative to a frame of reference. So when I talk about a moving object traveling slowly through time, I'm not relativizing its time to some meta-time, I'm relativizing time as measured by that object (say by a clock carried by the object) to time as measured by me (someone who is stationary in the relevant frame of reference). So an object moving slowly through time (relative to my frame of reference) is simply an object whose clock ticks appear to me to be more widely spaced than my clock ticks. In the limit, if a photon could carry a clock, there would appear to me to be an infinite amount of time between its ticks.
I will admit that I was using a bit of expository license when I talked about all objects "moving through space-time" at the constant rate c. While one can make sense of moving through space and moving through time, moving through space-time doesn't exactly make sense. You can replace it with this slightly less attractive paraphrase, if you like: "If you add up a non-accelerating object's velocity through space and its (appropriately defined) rate of motion through time, for any inertial frame of reference, you will get a constant."
Again, it's important to realize there are many different "time" parameters in relativity, one for each differently moving object. Also, whether two events are simultaneous is relative to a frame of reference.
Relative to my time parameter (the parameter for the frame in which I am at rest), the photon is moving through space, and it takes some amount of (my) time to get from point A to point B. Relative to its own time parameter, though, the photon is at point A and point B (and every other point on its path) simultaneously. Since I'll never travel as fast as a photon, it's kind of pointless for me to use its frame of reference. I should use a frame adapted to my state of motion, according to which the photon does indeed travel in non-zero time from place to place.
Again, this is all pretty non-technical and not entirely precise, but I think it's good enough to get an intuitive sense of what's going on. If you're interested in developing a more technical understanding without having to trudge through a mathy textbook, I recommend John Norton's Einstein for Everyone, especially chapters 10-12. One significant simplification I have been employing is talking about a photon's frame of reference. There is actually no such thing. One can't construct an ordinary frame of reference adapted to a photon's motion (partly because there is no meaningful distinction between space and time for a photon).
Getting this property for electromagnetic waves was one of the main things that led Einstein to develop Special Relativity: he looked at waves and thought, "If we do a Galileian transform so that light is standing still, the resulting field is an invalid electrostatic field"
When non utilitarian rationalists consider big life changes, it seems to me that they don't do it based on how happy that will make them, Why?
Utilitarians could say they are trying to maximize the World's something.
But non utiltarians, like I used to be, and like most here still are, are just... doing it like everyone else does it! "Oh, that seems like a cool change, I'll do it! yay!" then two weeks later that particular thing has none of the coolness effect it had before, but they are stuck with the decision for years....... (in case of decisions like job, partner, quitting, smoking, big travels, big decisions, not ice cream flavour stuff)
So, why don't rationalists use data driven happiness research, and reasoning in the happiness spectrum, to decide their stuff?
I know a lot of LW-ish people in the Bay Area and I see them explicitly thinking carefully about a lot of big life changes (e.g. moving, relationships, jobs, what habits to have) in just the way you recommended. I don't know if it has something to do with utilitarianism or not.
I'm personally more inclined to think in that way than I was a few years ago, and I think it's mostly because of the social effects of from hanging out with & looking up to a bunch of other people who do so.
I don't think the predictive power of models build from data driven happiness research is very high. I wouldn't ignore the research completely but there nothing rational about using a model just because it's data based if nobody showed that the model is useful for prediction in the relevant domain.
I don't know the extent to which this applies to other people, but for me (a non-utilitarian) it does, so here's my data point which may or may not give you some insight into how other non-utilitarians judge these things.
I can't really say I value my own happiness much. Contentment / peace of mind (=/= happiness!) and meaningfulness are more like what I aim for; happiness is too fleeting, too momentary to seek it out all the time. I'm also naturally gloomy, and overt displays of cheerfulness just don't hold much appeal for me, in an aesthetic sense. (They get me thinking of those fake ad people and their fake smiles. Nobody can look that happy all the time without getting paid for it!) There simply are more important things in life than my own happiness; that one can be sacrificed, if need be, for the sake of a higher value. I suppose it's just like those utilitarians you're talking about which are "trying to maximize the world's something" rather than their own pleasure, only we don't think of it in a quantitative way.
Well... that's a rather unflattering way of putting it. You don't have to compute utilities in order for your decision-making process to look a wee little more elaborate than that.
"Non-utilitarian" doesn't equate to "ethical egoist". I'm not a utilitarian, but I still think my big life decisions are subject to ethical constraints beyond what will make me happy. It's just that the constraint isn't always (or even usually) the maximization of some aggregate utility function.
Doesn't cryonics (and subsequent rebooting of a person) seem obviously too difficult? People can't keep cars running indefinitely, wouldn't keeping a particular consciousness running be much harder?
I hinted at this in another discussion and got downvoted, but it seems obvious to me that the brain is the most complex machine around, so wouldn't it be tough to fix? Or does it all hinge on the "foom" idea where every problem is essentially trivial?
Most of the explanations found on cryonics site, do indeed seem to base their arguments around the hopeful explanation that given nanotechnology and science of the future every problem connected to as you say rebooting would become essentially trivial.
error checking on solid state silicon is much easier than error checking neurons.
There are oldtimer cars that seem to have no problem with running "indefinitely" provided you fix parts here and there.
This is sort of my point--wouldn't it be hard to keep a consciousness continually running (to avoid the death we feared in the first place) by fixing or replacing parts?
Continuity of consciousness very quickly becomes a hard word to define : not only do you interrupt consciousness for several hours on a nightly basis, you actually can go into reduced awareness modes on a regular basis even when 'awake'.
Moreover, it might not be necessary to interrupt continuity of consciousness in order to "replace parts" in the brain. Hemispherectomies demonstrate that large portions of the brain can be removed at once without causing death, for example.
Too difficult for whom? Us, now? Obviously. Later? Well, how much progress are you willing to allow for 'too difficult' to become 'just doable'?
How much does a genius cost? MIRI seems intent on hiring a team of geniuses. I’m curious about what the payroll would look like. One of the conditions of Thiel’s donations was that no one employed by MIRI can make more than one-hundred thousand a year. Is this high enough? One of the reasons I ask is I just read a story about how Google pays an extremely talented programmer over 3 million dollars per year - doesn't MIRI also need extremely talented programmers? Do they expect the most talented to be more likely to accept a lower salary for a good cause?
Two notes: First, the term "genius" is difficult to define. Someone may be a "genius" at understanding the sociology of sub-Saharan African tribes, but this skill will obviously command a much lower market value compared to someone who is a "genius" as a chief executive officer of a large company. A more precise definition of genius will narrow the range of costs per year.
Second, and related to the first, MIRI is (to the extent of my knowledge) currently focusing on mathematics and formal logic research rather than programming. This makes recruiting a team of "geniuses" much cheaper. While skilled mathematicians can attract quite strong salaries, highly skilled programmers can demand significantly more. It seems the most common competing job for MIRI's researchers would be that of a mathematics professor (which have a median salary ~88,000$). Based on this, MIRI could likely hire high quality mathematicians while offering them relatively competitive salaries.
Yes. Any one with the necessary mindset of thinking that AI is the most important issue in the world will accept a lower salary than what's possible in the market elsewhere.
I don't know whether MIRI has an interest in hiring people who don't have that moral framework.
Eliezer once tried to auction a day of his time but I can't find it on ebay by Googling.
On an unrelated note, the top Google result for "eliezer yudkowsky " (note the space) is "eliezer yudkowsky okcupid". "eliezer yudkowsky harry potter" is ninth, while HPMOR, LessWrong, CFAR and MIRI don't make the top ten.
I believe eliezer started the bidding at something like 4000 dollars
I suspect more of the price comes from his reputation than his intelligence.
Highly variable with skills, experience, and how badly they want the job. I bet there are some brilliant adjunct professors out there effectively making minimum wage because they really wanted to be professors. OTOH, I bet that google programmer isn't just being paid for talent, but specific skills and experience.
I have tremendous trouble with hangnails. My cuticles start peeling a little bit, usually near the center of the base of my nail, and then either I remove the peeled piece (by pulling or clipping) or it starts getting bigger and I have to cut it off anyway. That leaves a small hole in my cuticle, the edges of which start to wear away and peel more, which makes me cut away more. This goes on until my fingertips are a big mess, often involving bleeding and bandages. What should I do with my damaged cuticles, and how do I stop this cycle from starting in the first place?
Nail polish base coat over the cuticle might work. Personally I just try not to pick at them. I imagine you can buy base coat at the nearest pharmaceuticals store, but asking a beautician for advice is probably a good idea; presumably there is some way that people who paint their nails prevent hangnails from spoiling the effect.
I'd be cautious about using nail polish and similar products. The solvents in them are likely to strip more oil from the nail and nail bed, which will make the problem worse, not better. +1 for asking a beautician for advice, but if you just pick a random one rather than one you personally trust, the risk is that they will give you a profit-maximising answer rather than a cheap-but-effective one.
To repair hangnails: Nail cream or nail oil. I had no idea these products existed, but they do, and they are designed specifically to deal with this problem, and do a very good job IME. Regular application for a few days fixes my problems.
To prevent it: Keep your hands protected outside (gloves). Minimise exposure of your hands to things that will strip water or oil from them (e.g. detergent, soap, solvents, nail varnish, nail varnish remover), and when you can't avoid those, use moisturiser afterwards to replace the lost oil.
(Explanation: Splitting/peeling nails is usually due to insufficient of oil or more rarely moisture. I've heard some people take a paleo line that we didn't need gloves and moisturiser and nail oil in the ancestral environment. Maybe, but we didn't wash our hands with detergent multiple times a day then either.)
Calcium Deficiency could be a possible issue.
Society, by survival, in the survival of the fittest sense, stimulates people to be of service, be interesting, useful, effective, and even altruistic.
I suspect, and would like to know your opinion, that we are, for that social and traditional reason biased against a life of personal hedonic exploration, even if for some particular kinds of minds, that means, literally, reading internet comics, downloading movies and multiplayer games for free, exercising near your home, having a minimal amount of friends and relationships, masturbating frequently, and eating unhealthy for as long as the cash lasts.
So two questions, do you think we are biased against these things, and do you think doing this is a problem?
If the rate of learning of an AGI is t then is it correct to assume that the rate of learning of a FAI would be t+x where x > 0, considering that it would have the necessary additional constraints?
If this is the case, then a non Friendly AI would eventually (possibly quite quickly) become smarter than any FAI built. Are there upper limits on intelligence, or would there be diminishing returns as intellence grows?
I’m curious, but despite a lot of time poking around Wikipedia, I don’t have the means to discriminate between the possibilities. Please help me understand. Is there reason to believe that an infinite quantity of the conditions required for life is/was/will be available in any universe or combination of universes?
What are your best arguments against the reality/validity/usefulness of IQ?
Improbable or unorthodox claims are welcome; appeals that would limit testing or research even if IQ's validity is established are not.
These are not my arguments, since I haven't thought about the issue enough. However, the anthropologist Scott Atran, in response to the latest Edge annual question, "What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?", answered "IQ". Here's his response:
Which of reality, validity, and usefulness is this an argument against? All three? None?
Added: I don't know what it would mean for IQ to be "real." Maybe this is an argument that IQ is not real. Maybe it is an argument that IQ is not ontologically fundamental. But it seems to me little different than arguing that total body weight, BMI, or digit length ratio are not "real"; or even that arguing that temperature is not "real," either temperature of the body or temperature of an ideal gas. The BQ sentence seems to assert that this kind of unreality implies that IQ is not useful, but I'd hardly call that an argument.
IQ, or intelligence as commonly understood, is a poor proxy for rationality. In many cases it simple makes people better at rationalizing beliefs they acquired irrational.
Stupid question: Wouldn't a calorie restriction diet allow Eliezer to lose weight?
Not a single person who's done calorie restriction consistently for a long period of time is overweight. Hence, it seems that the problem of losing weight is straightforward: just eat less calories than you would normally.
I posted a version of this argument on Eliezer's Facebook wall and the response, which several people 'liked', was that there is a selection effect involved. But I don't understand this response, since "calorie restriction" is defined as restricting calories below what a person would eat on an ad lib diet (as distinct from a diet that involves having a a weight that falls below what the person would weight normally).
ETA: There's now a lucid post on Eliezer's Facebook wall that answers my question very well.
Let's assume the following extremely simplified equation is true:
CALORIES_IN = WORK + FAT
Usually the conclusion is "less calories = less fat". But it also could be "less calories = less work". Not just in the sense that you consciously decide to work less, but also that your body can make you unable to work. Which means: you are extremely tired, unable to focus, in worst case you fall into coma.
The problem with calorie restriction is that it doesn't come with a switch for "please don't make me tired or falling in coma, just reduce my fat". -- Finding the switch is the whole problem.
If your metabolical switch is broken, calorie restriction can simply send you in a zombie mode, and your weight remains the same.
All the people for which the diet produces problems quit it and don't engage in it consistently. If your brain function goes down because you body downregulates your metabolism to deal with having less calories and you want to keep your brain functioning at a high level you will stop engaging consistently in the diet.
There also the issue that you deal with a hunger process that evolved over tens of millions of years and try to beat it with a cerebral decision making process that evolved over 100,000s of years.
It just like telling someone with tachycardia of 100 heart beats pro minute to switch to 80 heart beats per minute. It's just a switch. Just go and with your heart beat. If I sit down on the toilet my body has no problem to go down 20 beats per minute in a few seconds.
I however have no way to fire of the same process by a cognitive decision. Food intake seems like it should be easier to manage than blood pulse via cognitive decisions because you can do voluntary decisions over short time frames. But over long time frames that doesn't seem to be the case.
Suppose someone has a preference to have sex each evening, and is in a relationship with someone what a similar level of sexual desire. So each evening they get into bed, undress, make love, get dressed again, get out of bed. Repeat the next evening.
How is this different from having exploitable circular preferences? After all, the people involved clearly have cycles in their preferences - first they prefer getting undressed to not having sex, after which they prefer getting dressed to having (more) sex. And they're "clearly" being the victims of a Dutch Book, too - they keep repeating this set of trades every evening, and losing lots of time because of that.
To me this seems to suggest that having circular preferences isn't necessarily the bad thing that it's often made out to be - after all, the people in question probably wouldn't say that they're being exploited. But maybe I'm missing something.
The circular preferences that go against the axioms of utility theory, and which are Dutch book exploitable, are not of the kind "I prefer A to B at time t1 and B to A at time t2", like the ones of your example. They are more like "I prefer A to B and B to C and C to A, all at the same time".
The couple, if they had to pay a third party a cent to get undressed and then a cent to get dressed, would probably do it and consider it worth it---they end up two cents short but having had an enjoyable experience. Nothing irrational about that. To someone with the other "bad" kind of circular preferences, we can offer a sequence of trades (first A for B and a cent, then C for A and a cent, then B for C and a cent) after which they end up three cents short but otherwise exactly as they started (they didn't actually obtain enjoyable experiences, they made all the trades before anything happened). It is difficult to consider this rational.
Okay. But that still makes it sound like there would almost never be actual real-life cases where you could clearly say that the person exhibited circular preferences? At least I can't think of any real-life scenario that would be an example of the way you define "bad" circular preferences.
The Allais paradox is close to being one such example, though I don't know if it can be called "real-life". There may be marketing schemes that exploit the same biases.
A philosophical case where I feel my naive preferences are circular is torture vs. dust specks. As I said here:
Don't raw utilitarians mind being killed by somebody who thinks they suffer too much?
Average utilitarianism seems more plausible than total utilitarianism, as it avoids the repugnant conclusion. But what do average utilitarians have to say about animal welfare? Suppose a chicken's maximum capacity for pleasure/preference satisfaction is lower than a human's. Does this mean that creating maximally happy chickens could be less moral than non-maximally happy humans?
My intuition is that chickens are less sentient, and that is sort of like thinking slower. Perhaps a year of a chicken's life is equivalent to a day of a human's. A day of a chicken's life adds less to the numerator than a day of a human's, but it also adds less to the denominator.