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I've noticed I don't read 'Main' posts anymore.

When I come to LW, I click to the Discussion almost instinctively. I'd estimate it has been four weeks since I've looked at Main. I sometimes read new Slate Star Codex posts (super good stuff, if you are unfamiliar) from LW's sidebar. I sometimes notice interesting-sounding 'Recent Comments' and click on them.

My initial thought is that I don't feel compelled to read Main posts because they are the LW-approved ideas, and I'm not super interested in listening to a bunch of people agreeing with another. Maybe that is a caricature, not sure.

Anyone else Discussion-centric in their LW use?

Also, the Meetup stuff is annoying noise. I'm very sympathetic if placing it among posts helps to drive attendance. By all means, continue if it helps your causes. But it feels spammy to me.

Alternative hypothesis: you have been conditioned to click on discussion because it has a better reward schedule.

1Brillyant10y
Yes, likely. If you mean the discussion is more varied and interesting.
8[anonymous]10y
* raises hand * Partially because it's much more active over here.
0Brillyant10y
It seems to me that is likely the result of of many people feeling like me rather the the cause of them feeling that way.
0Vaniver10y
Activity seems like a positive feedback loop*- because there are more comments in discussion, people spend more time and comment more in discussion, and their comments in discussion are more likely to get responded to, which brings them back to discussion, and so on. *That is, something that is both a cause and a result.
0Brillyant10y
Sure. But why did I evolve to stop going to Main and go exclusively to Discussion? That behavior might be reinforced by the lack of activity, but the leading cause (for me in my best estimation) was I came to see the content as overwhelmingly LW-approved stuff.
0Vaniver10y
When I read blacktrance's comment, I see specific topics- AI, math, health, productivity- that they're not interested in, that Main focuses on. When I read your comments, it sounds like you're not as sensitive to topics as to styles of discussion, where you're more interested in disagreements than in agreements. Am I reading that difference correctly?
0Brillyant10y
Sure, I suppose. I generally use forum sites for discussion. I'm not too terribly interested in reading LW "publications", I'm more interested in engagin in discussion and reading commentary in regard to issues pertaining to rationality, etc. The distinction between Main and Discussion articles has noever made much sense to me. It seems to me to be some blend of perceived quality, relation to rationality (as LW defines it) and other LW topics of interest, group politics, EY mandate, etc. Don't really care all that much...just that it was interesting that I ended up in Discussion almost exclusively. I'd agree the topics in main seem to be less interesting to me, too, now that I think about it.
6blacktrance10y
I'm more likely to find discussion topics and comments in my areas of interest, while Main seems to be mostly about AI, math, health, and productivity, none of which are particularly interesting for me.
1A1987dM10y
I mainly skim http://lesswrong.com/topcomments/?t=day and http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/topcomments/?t=day, then when I see something interesting I look at where it comes from.
0[anonymous]10y
I generally find Main posts uninteresting, or overlong and based on some incorrect premise or other.

If one is able to improve how people are matched, it would bring about a huge amount of utility for the entire world.

People would be happier, they would be more productive, there would be less of the divorce-related waste. Being in a happy couple also means you are less distracted by conflict in the house, which leads to people better able to develop themselves and achieve their personal goals. You can keep adding to the direct benefits of being in a good pairing versus a bad pairing.

But it doesn't stop there. If we accept that better matched parents raise their children better, then you are looking at a huge improvement in the psychological health of the next generation of humans. And well-raised humans are more likely to match better with each other...

Under this light, it strikes me as vastly suboptimal that people today will get married to the best option available in their immediate environment when they reach the right age.

The cutting-edge online dating sites base their suggestions on a very limited list of questions. But each of us outputs huge amounts of data, many of them available through APIs on the web. Favourite books, movies, sleep patterns, browsing history, work hi... (read more)

There seem to be perverse incentives in the dating industry. Most obviously: if you successfully create a forever-happy couple, you have lost your customers; but if you make people date many promissingly-looking-yet-disappointing partners, they will keep returning to your site.

Actualy, maybe your customers are completely hypocritical about their goals: maybe "finding a true love" is their official goal, but what they really want is plausible deniability for fucking dozens of attractive strangers while pretending to search for the perfect soulmate. You could create a website which displays the best one or two matches, instead of hundreds of recommendations, and despite having higher success rate for people who try it, most people will probably be unimpressed and give you some bullshit excuses if you ask them.

Also, if people are delusional about their "sexual market value", you probably won't make money by trying to fix their delusions. They will be offended by the types of "ordinary" people you offer them as their best matches, when the competing website offers them Prince Charming (whose real goal is to maximize his number of one night stands) or Princ... (read more)

what they really want is plausible deniability for fucking dozens of attractive strangers while pretending to search for the perfect soulmate.

That sounds a lot like really wanting a soulmate and an open relationship.

7Viliam_Bur10y
That's a nice thing to have; I am not judging anyone. Just thinking how that would influence the dating website algorithm, marketing, and the utility this whole project would create. If some people say they want X but they actually want Y... however other people say they want X and they mean it... and the algorithm matches them together because the other characteristics match, at the end they may be still unsatisfied (if one of these groups is a small minority, they will be disappointed repeatedly). This could possibly be fixed by an algorithm smart enough that it could somehow detect which option it is, and only match people who want the same thing (whichever of X or Y it is). If there are many people who say they want X but really want Y, how will you advertise the website? Probably by playing along and describing your website mostly as a site for X, but providing obvious hints that Y is also possible and frequent there. Alternatively, by describing your website as a site for X, but writing "independent" blog articles and comments describing how well it actually works for Y. (What is the chance that this actually is what dating sites are already doing, and the only complaining people are the nerds who don't understand the real rules?) Maybe there is a market in explicitly supporting open relationships. (Especially if you start in the Bay Area.) By removing some hypocrisy, the matching could be made more efficient -- you could ask questions which you otherwise couldn't, e.g. "how many % of your time would you prefer to spend with this partner?".
9Alexandros10y
I wouldn't jump to malice so fast when incompetence suffices as an explanation. Nobody has actually done the proper research. The current sites have found a local maxima and are happy to extract value there. Google got huge by getting people off the site fast when everyone else was building portals. You will of course get lots of delusionals, and lots of people damaged enough that they are unmatchable anyway. You can't help everybody. But also the point is to improve the result they would otherwise have had. Delusional people do end up finding a match in general, so you just have to improve that to have a win. Perhaps you can fix the incentive by getting paid for the duration of the resulting relationship. (and that has issues by itself, but that's a long conversation) I don't think the philanthropic angle will help, though having altruistic investors who aren't looking for immediate maximisation of investment is probably a must, as a lot of this is pure research.
2Randy_M10y
I don't think he was jumping to malice, rather delusion or bias.
1Alexandros10y
I meant malice/incompetence on the part of the dating sites.
7ChristianKl10y
I think that's the business model of eharmony and they seem to be doing well.
1Scott Garrabrant10y
I absolutely agree, but I am not sure that anyone was even considering this as a way to make money. Unfortunately, for all the same reasons we cannot make money, we cannot get people to sign up for the site in the first place. Two proposed solutions for this: 1) Something like I suggested before that matches people without them signing up somehow. 2) A bait and switch, where a site gets popular using the same tactics as other dating sites, and then switches to something better for them. Neither of these solutions seem plausible to work at all.

I wonder to what extent the problems you describe (divorces, conflict, etc) are caused mainly by poor matching of the people having the problems, and to what extent they are caused by the people having poor relationship (or other) skills, relatively regardless of how well matched they are with their partner? For example, it could be that someone is only a little bit less likely to have dramatic arguments with their "ideal match" than with a random partner -- they just happen to be an argumentative person or haven't figured out better ways of resolving disagreements.

8Eugine_Nier10y
Well, the success of arranged marriages in cultures that practice them suggests the "right match" isn't that important.
9Lumifer10y
What makes you think these marriages are successful? Low divorce rates are not good evidence in places where divorce is often impractical.

What makes you think these marriages are successful? Low divorce rates are not good evidence in places where divorce is often impractical.

Three main points in favor of arranged marriages that I'm aware of:

  1. The marriages are generally arranged by older women, who are likely better at finding a long-term match than young people. (Consider this the equivalent of dating people based on okCupid match rating, say, instead of hotornot rating.)
  2. The expectations people have from marriage are much more open and agreed upon; like Prismattic points out, they may have a marriage that a Westerner would want to get a divorce in, but be satisfied. It seems to me that this is because of increased realism in expectations (i.e. the Westerner thinks the divorce will be more helpful than it actually will, or is overrating divorce compared to other options), but this is hard to be quantitative about.
  3. To elaborate on the expectations, in arranged marriages it is clear that a healthy relationship is something you have to build and actively maintain, whereas in love marriages sometimes people have the impression that the healthy relationship appears and sustains itself by magic- and so when they put no
... (read more)
-1Eugine_Nier10y
I remember seeing studies that attempted to measure happiness.
4Lumifer10y
Links? I am also quite suspicious of measuring happiness -- by one measure Bhutan is the happiest country in the world and, um, I have my doubts.
7adbge10y
Source. Source. Source. A contrary finding: Source.
0drethelin10y
Why are you even asking for links to studies if you admit you don't care what studies say?
8Lumifer10y
I have a prior that the studies are suspect. But that prior can be updated by evidence.
5Prismattic10y
I'm not sure this is correct. That is to say, the empirical point that divorce is much less common in arranged marriage cultures is obviously true. But a) I think there is some correlation between prevalence arranged marriage and stigma associated with divorce, meaning that not getting divorced does not necessarily equal happy marriage. b) The bar for success in 20th-21st century western marriages is set really high. It's not just an economic arrangement; people want a best friend and a passionate lover and maybe several other things rolled into one. When people in traditional cultures say that their marriages are "happy," they may well mean something much less than what affluent westerners would consider satisfactory.
2Jayson_Virissimo10y
Why does it suggest that rather than that the arrangers are better at finding the "right match" than the persons to be married?
1Alexandros10y
My instinct on this is driven by having been in bad and good relationships, and reflecting on myself in those situations. It ain't much, but it's what I've got to work with. Yes, some people are unmatchable, or shouldn't be matched. But somewhere between "is in high demand and has good judgement, can easily find great matches" and "is unmatchable and should be kept away from others", there's a lot of people that can be matched better. Or that's the hypothesis.
2Emily10y
Seems reasonable, although I'd still wonder just how much difference improving the match would make even for the majority of middle-ground people. It sounded in the grandparent post (first and fourth paragraphs particularly) that you were treating the notion that it would be "a lot" as a premise rather than a hypothesis.
2Alexandros10y
Well, it's more than a hypothesis, it's a goal. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't, but if it does, it's pretty high impact. (though not existential-risk avoidance high, in and of itself). Finding a good match has made a big subjective difference for me, and there's a case it's made a big objective difference (but then again, I'd say that) and I had to move countries to find that person. Yeah, maybe the original phrasing is too strong (blame the entrepreneur in pitch mode) but the 6th paragraph does say that it's an off-chance it can be made to work, though both a high improvement potential and a high difficulty in materialising it are not mutually exclusive.
6Scott Garrabrant10y
The problem with dating sites (like social network sites or internet messengers) is that the utility you can gain from it is VERY related to how many other people are actually using it. This means that there is a natural drift towards a monopoly. Nobody wants to join a dating site that only has 1000 people. If you do not have a really good reason to think that your dating site idea will get off the ground, it probably wont. One way you could possibly get past this is to match people up who do not sign up or even know about this service. For example, you could create bots that browse okcupid, for answers to questions, ignore okcupid's stupid algorithms in favor of our own much better ones, and then send two people a message that describes how our service works and introduces them to each other. Is this legal? If so, I wonder if okcupid would take stop it anyway.

The chicken/egg issue is real with any dating site, yet dating sites do manage to start. Usually you work around this by focusing on a certain group/location, dominating that, and spreading out.

Off the cuff, the bay strikes me as a potentially great area to start for something like this.

8ChristianKl10y
It's spam and very likely violates the TOS.
7Lumifer10y
Awesome -- that will fit right in between "I'm a Nigerian customs official with a suitcase of cash" emails and "Enlarge your manhood with our all-natural pills" ones. P.S. Actually it's even better! Imagine that you're a girl and you receive an email which basically says "We stalked you for a while and we think you should go shack up with that guy". Genius!
2EGarrett10y
How can there be a monopoly if people can use more than one dating site? Unless OkCupid bans you from putting your profile up on other sites, you can just as easily put a profile on another site with less people, if the site seems promising.
-2Eugine_Nier10y
It's still more work to put a profiles on multiple sites.
2EGarrett10y
Hi Eugine, I don't mean to be nitpicking, but a monopoly is a very specific thing. It's quite different than it just being inconvenient to switch to a competitor. In very many cases in normal market competition, it's inconvenient to switch to competitors (buying a new car or house, changing your insurance, and so on), but that doesn't effect the quality of the product. Similarly, for a monopoly to effect the quality of OKCupid's service, it would have to be a very specific situation, and different than what currently exists, which seems to be quite normal market functioning.
-2Eugine_Nier10y
Coscott was talking about a "a natural drift towards a monopoly".
-4EGarrett10y
Unless OKCupid is hiring the government or people with guns to threaten other websites out of existence, there won't be a drift towards a monopoly. A monopoly isn't created by one company getting the overwhelming majority of customers. A monopoly is only created when competitors cannot enter the market. It's a subtle distinction but it's very important, because what's implied is that the company with the monopoly can jack up their prices and abuse customers. They can't do this without feeding a garden of small competitors that can and will outgrow them (see Myspace, America Online, etc), unless those competitors are disallowed from ever existing. You can keep downvoting this, but it's a very important concept in economics and it will still be true.
5A1987dM10y
Forbidding anyone who hasn't read ā€œThe Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidenceā€ from watching any Hollywood or Disney movies about romance would go a long way. ;-)
4Lumifer10y
So how would it be different from OK Cupid, for example? As an aside, wasn't the original motivation for Facebook Zuckerberg's desire to meet girls..? :-D

Here is one improvement to OKcupid, which we might even be able to implement as a third party:

OKcupid has bad match algorithms, but it can still be useful as searchable classified adds. However, when you find a legitimate match, you need to have a way to signal to the other person that you believe the match could work.

Most messages on OKcupid are from men to women, so women already have a way to do this: send a message, however men do not.

Men spam messages, by glancing over profiles, and sending cookie cutter messages that mention something in the profile. Women are used to this spam, and may reject legitimate interest, because they do not have a good enough spam filter.

Our service would be to provide an I am not spamming commitment. A flag that can be put in a message which signals "This is the only flagged message I have sent this week"

It would be a link, you put in your message, which sends you to a site that basically says. Yes, Bob(profile link) has only sent this flag to Alice(profile link) in the week of 2/20/14-2/26/14, with an explanation of how this works.

Do you think that would be a useful service to implement? Do you think people would actually use it, and receive it well?

7badger10y
Scarce signals do increase willingness to go on dates, based on a field experiment of online dating in South Korea.
0mare-of-night10y
I wonder if a per-message fee for a certain kind of message would be a good business model for this. My suspicion is that it would work very well if all your users had that reluctance to ever spend anything online (people are much more willing to buy utilions that involve getting a physical product than to pay for things like apps)), but it breaks down as soon as someone with some unused disposable income realizes that spamming $1 notes isn't that expensive. Only being able to send a certain number of messages per week of a special type might be enough for indicating non-spam, as long as you could solve the problem of people making multiple profiles to get around it. Having a small fee attached to the service might help with tracking that down, since it would keep people from abusing it too extremely, and cover the cost of having someone investigate suspicious accounts (if more than one is paid for by the same credit card at around the same time, for example).
0Scott Garrabrant10y
OKcupid solves the multiple account problem for us. It is probably better to not send a virtual rose than to make an account that you then have to answer all the questions to.
0Lumifer10y
Where will your credibility come from? Alice receives a message from Bob. It says "You're amazing, we're nothing but mammals, let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel", and it also says "I, Mallory, hereby certify that Bob only talked about mammals once this week -- to you". Why should Alice believe you? Things like that are technically possible (e.g. cryptographic proofs-of-work) but Alice is unlikely to verify your proofs herself and why should she trust Mallory, anyway?
5Scott Garrabrant10y
I think if we had a nice professional website, with a link to a long description of how it all works that people won't read anyway, they will tend to trust us. Especially if we use math.
2mare-of-night10y
Seconded - once you get as far as people trusting you enough to post their personal information and possibly pay you for the service, they're not still suspecting you of letting people spam you with "certified" non-spam.
6Scott Garrabrant10y
OK Cupid has a horrible match percent algorithm. Basically someone who has a check list of things that their match cannot be will answer lots of questions as "this matters a lot to me" and "any of these options are acceptable except for this one extreme one that nobody will click anyway." The stupid algorithm will inflate this person's match percent with everyone. So, if you look at people with high compatibility with you, that says more about their question answering style, than how much you have in common. This is why the algorithm is horrible in theory. In practice my one example is that I am getting married in a month to someone I met on OKcupid with 99% compatibility.
3Viliam_Bur10y
A good website design could change the answering style. Imagine a site where you don't fill out all the answers at once. Instead it just displays one question at a time, and you can either answer it or click "not now". The algorithm would prioritize the questions it asks you dynamically, using the already existing data about you and your potential matches -- it would ask you the question which it expects to provide most bits of information. Also, it would use the math properly. The compatiblity would not be calculated as number of questions answered, but number of bits these answers provide. A match for "likes cats" provides more bits than "is not a serial killer".
2drethelin10y
Very consistently people that I know and like, when I see them on okcupid, have a high match percentage. When I meet okcupid people with a good match percentage, I usually like them. This seems to imply the algorithm is a lot better than your theoretical worst example of it. I think your situation is much more of a problem if you don't answer enough questions.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
Perhaps the way people tend to answer questions does not change very much from person to person, so this problem does not show up in practice. However, if you are willing to change your style for answering questions, it is probably possible to game OKcupid in such a way that you get 90+% with anyone you would care about.
0Izeinwinter10y
Selfdefeating The entire point of OKcupid is to find someone you will actually click with. Inflating your own match percentages artificially just makes OKCupid worse for you. Of course, this doesnt help if the site just isnt very popular in your city. Eh. Radical: Have the government do this. Literally, run a dating site, have sex-ed classes teach people how to use it, and why gaming it is bloody stupid. That should result in maximum uptake, and would cost a heck of a lot less than a lot of other initiatives governments already run trying to promote stable pairbonds. Now, how to get this into a political platform...
0Scott Garrabrant10y
Not if you have an honest account too so you can check compatibility while still broadcasting higher compatibility than you actually have.
2Izeinwinter10y
Still pointless! There is no upside to having a bunch of people you are not actually compatible with think the mirage you constructed is a good match. If they are not a match with your honest profile, you do not want to waste theirs or your own time. If your actual goal is to have a bunch of one night stands, then make a profile that out and out states that so that you will be matched with people of like mind. Dishonesty in this matter is both unetical and nigh certain to result in unpleasant drama. Proper use of this kind of tool is an exercise in luminosity - the more accurately you identify what you are truely looking for, the better it works. Also, see radical proposal: If a site of this type is run by the government, sockpuppets are obviously not going to be an option - one account per social security number or local equivalent, because that is a really simple way to shut down a whole host of abuses.
3mare-of-night10y
I've had ideas sort of like this at the back of my mind since seeing Paul Graham pointing out how broken online dating is in one of his essays. (Not so much analyzing all of someone's existing data, but analyzing IM transcripts to match people with IM buddies they'd be likely to make good friends with is a thing I considered doing.) Haven't gotten too far with any of them yet, but I'm glad you reminded me, since I was planning on playing with some of my own data soon just to see what I find. Do you think that not having dated much would be much of a comparative disadvantage in working on this problem? That's one of the reasons I hesitate to make it my main project. A possibly-related problem - why does every site I see that says it is for matching strangers who might like to be friends get full of people looking for a date? (Small sample size, but I've never seen one that didn't give me the sense that the vast majority of the members were looking for romance or a one night stand or something.)
5A1987dM10y
So that people can look for dates without breaking plausible deniability.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
I think it's the web site, rather than its clients, that needs the plausible deniability. It cannot seem to be in the business of selling sex, so it has to have a wider focus.
2Richard_Kennaway10y
Why altruistic? If it's worth anything, it's worth money. If it won't even pay its creators for the time they'll put in to create it, where's the value?
0Alexandros10y
I am not convinced it is the optimal route to startup success. If it was, I would be doing it in preference over my current startup. It is highly uncertain and requires what looks like basic research, hence the altruism angle. If it succeeds, yes, it shouldake a lot of money and nobody should deprive it's creators of the fruits of their labour.
2Salemicus10y
It strikes me that it is much more plausible to argue that the dating market suffers from market failure through information asymmetry, market power and high search costs than to argue the same about economic activity. Yet although people search high and low to find (often non-existent) market failures to justify economic interventions, interventions in the dating market are greeted with near-uniform hostlility. I predict that, outside of LessWrong, your proposal will generate a high "Ick" factor as a taboo violation. "Rationality-based online dating will set you up with scientifically-chosen dates..." this is likely to be an anti-selling point to most users.
4Alexandros10y
Obviously you'd take a different angle with the marketing. Off the cuff, I'd pitch it as a hands-off dating site. You just install a persistent app on your phone that pushes a notification when it finds a good match. No website to navigate, no profile to fill, no message queue to manage. Perhaps market it to busy professionals. Finance professionals may be a good target to start marketing to. (busy, high-status, analytical) There would need to be some way to deal with the privacy issues though.
0mare-of-night10y
This might be a reason to start it out as a nice thing. Though, the problem is finding a niche that likes this proposal and has a decent gender ratio (or enough people interested in dates of the same gender). Now that I think about it, existing dating sites do try to advertise themselves as being better because of their algorithm. If that advertising works, maybe the ick factor isn't that strong?
1A1987dM10y
Have you seen this TED talk?
2Alexandros10y
fantastic, thanks!
0pianoforte61110y
Viliam_Bur sort of said this, but it doesn't seem possible to outcompete the existing websites due to perverse incentives. If I build a site optimizing for long term success, and another dating site optimizes for an intense honeymoon phase (which encourages people to come back and spread the word about the site) then I will lose. And optimizing for long term success is really hard since feedback occurs on the order of decades. Of course I'm assuming that intense short term happiness and long term stability aren't very highly correlated and I could be wrong. I'm also assuming that stability is desirable - I'd be curious if anyone disagrees.
0[anonymous]10y
Companies are trying, unfortunately the incentives seem sort of messed up to me. Dating websites have an incentive to encourage people to use their service, not get into wonderful long term relationships. Hence I would expect them to optimize for relationships with an intense honeymoon phase, rather than relationships with a high chance of long term success and compatibility. Since we're after long term success, feedback will occur on the order of decades - making this a very hard optimization problem.

How do you pick a career if your goal is to maximize your income (technically, maximize the expected value of some function of your income)? The sort of standard answer is "comparative advantage", but it's unclear to me how to apply that concept in practice. For example how much demand there is for each kind of job is obviously very important, but how do you take that into consideration, exactly? I've been thinking about this and came up with the following. I'd be interested in any improvements or alternative ideas.

  1. For each career under consideration, estimate your potential income ranking or percentile within that career if you went into it (as a probability distribution).
  2. For each career, estimate its income distribution (how much will the top earner make, how much will the second highest earner make, etc.).
  3. From 1 and 2, obtain a probability distribution of your income within each career.
  4. Pick the career with maximum expected utility.

If you have a high IQ and are good at math go into finance. If you have a high IQ, strong social skills but are bad at math go into law. If you have a high IQ, a good memory but weak social and math skills become a medical doctor. If you have a low IQ but are attractive marry someone rich. If you have a very low IQ get on government benefits for some disability and work at an under-the-table job.

3garabik10y
This seems awfully US centric. Anyway, these advices aim at "higher middle class", not "rich bastard" category. Maybe apart from "marry someone rich".
5Lumifer10y
Well, Western-developed-world-centric, true. In dynamic economies (e.g. China) you probably would want to start a business. In stagnant and poor places your first priority should be to get out. Going into finance or law can propel you into the "rich bastard" category.
4gjm10y
Medical doctors are paid well in many places other than the US, though not as well as in the US. (For that matter, most other well-paid jobs are better paid in the US than anywhere else. Software development, law, senior management, etc.) Also, though of course this was no part of the original question, medicine offers more confidence than most careers that your work is actually making the world a better place. (Which may not actually be the right question to ask, of course -- what matters is arguably the marginal effect, and if you're well paid and care enough about people in poor countries you may well be able to do more good by charitable donations than you ever could directly by your work. But it's a thing many people care about.)
0Vulture10y
More importantly, it seems that being a medical doctor can pay very large dividends both in donable dollars and in warm-fuzzies.
1RowanE10y
I think that's intended. Trying to achieve greater wealth generally involves much higher risk, and even if it offers a higher expected value in terms of money, the diminishing utility of wealth probably makes the expected utility of, say, creating a startup, lower than just pursuing a middle-class career that matches your skills.
2A1987dM10y
Well, Wei Dai said ā€œmaximize the expected value of some function of your incomeā€; which career achieves that will depend on whether the function is log(x), x, H(x - $40,000/year), exp(x/($1M/year)), or what.
0RowanE10y
I assumed it was referring to (part of) Wei Dai's utility function. What other functions could there be a point in applying?
2A1987dM10y
Yes, but we don't know what Wei Dai's utility function is, and the answer to his question may depend on that.
2shminux10y
But are physically OK, play sports and/or enlist (US-centric).
6ThrustVectoring10y
The vast majority of people who play sports have fun and don't receive a dime for it. A majority of people who get something of monetary value out of playing sports get a college degree and nothing else. I agree with the US army part though.
1Vulture10y
I think the US army is very physically dangerous, and furthermore might be considered a negative to world-welfare, depending on your politics.
8ThrustVectoring10y
I don't have good numbers, but it's likely less dangerous than you think it is. The vast majority of what an infantryman does falls into two categories - training, and waiting. And that's a boots on ground, rifle in hand category - there's a bunch of rear-echelon ratings as well. I'm guessing that it's likely within an order of magnitude of danger as commuting to work. Likely safer than delivering pizzas. There's probably a lot of variance between specific job descriptions - a drone operator based in the continental US is going to have a lot less occupational risk than the guy doing explosive ordnance disposal.
3polymathwannabe10y
How many people I'd be calmly killing every day? I'd have massive PTSD if I were a drone operator.
2NancyLebovitz10y
From what I've read, a couple of the issues for drone pilots is that they've been killing people who they've been watching for a while, and that they feel personal responsibility if they fail to protect American soldiers.
1Alejandro110y
By a strange coincidence (unless you saw it and thus had it on your mind) today's SMBC is about exactly this.
-4Eugine_Nier10y
Well, I don't have statistics about that, but accounts from WWII bomber crews suggest otherwise.
-2A1987dM10y
Maybe they were just really good at screening out applicants who would have been likely to get PTSD.
2Kaj_Sotala10y
AFAIK, people only started understanding PTSD after Vietnam and it wasn't even called that until the 1980s, so possibly not.
-1Eugine_Nier10y
Up until the US gets involved in something resembling a symmetrical war. Of course in that case it's possible no job will be safe.
4ThrustVectoring10y
In the year 1940, working as an enlisted member of the army supply chain was probably safer than not being in the army whatsoever - regular Joes got drafted. Besides which, the geographical situation of the US means that a symmetrical war is largely going to be an air/sea sort of deal. Canada's effectively part of the US in economic and mutual-defense terms, and Mexico isn't much help either. Mexico doesn't have the geographical and industrial resources to go toe-to-toe with the US on their own, the border is a bunch of hostile desert, and getting supplies into Mexico past the US navy and air force is problematic.
-3Eugine_Nier10y
Yes, and in particular it'll involve enemy drones. Drone operators are likely to be specifically targeted.
0ThrustVectoring10y
That makes them safer, ironically. If your command knows that you're likely to be targeted and your contributions are important to the war effort, they'll take efforts to protect you. Stuff you down a really deep hole and pipe in data and logistical support. They probably won't let you leave, either, which means you can't get unlucky and eat a drone strike while you're enjoying a day in the park. You're at elevated risk of being caught in nuclear or orbital kinetic bombardment, though... but if the war gets to that stage your goose is cooked regardless of what job you have.
4Jayson_Virissimo10y
Another bonus of enlisting: basic skills will be drilled into so thoroughly they will be fully into your System I allowing you extra executive function (thereby causing you to punch above your weight in terms of intelligence). Although, there is some ethical risk involved.
1NancyLebovitz10y
Evidence?
1pianoforte61110y
Does anyone know if finance requires strong math and social skills? I assumed it did - social skills for creating connections, and math skills for actually doing to job. And if you do have poor social skills, then practice! Social skills are really important. I'm still working on this. This is some guesswork, but some other possible combinations: Strong social skills, above average IQ - management? Above average IQ, good math skills - accounting? Rich parents, family business - take over said business eventually. Middle class parents, fair amount of property, good location - rent. Rich parents, strong social skills - network through their connections.
1Eugine_Nier10y
Is this still true? Recently there have been reports about an oversupply of lawyers and scandals involving law schools fudging the statistics on the salaries of their graduates.
2James_Miller10y
Salaries might be falling, but I doubt this is long term.
1Izeinwinter10y
US law is a spectacularly bad choice at the moment. There is far to many law schools, and as a consequence, too many law graduates, the degree costs a fortune and employment prospects are outright bad. Do not do this. Finance is an implicit bet that wallstreet will not get struck down by the wrath of the electorate just as you finish your education. Honestly? If riches really is what you want, go into business for yourself. A startup, or at the low end just being a self-employed contractor has good returns and this is not likely to change. Programming, the trades, a good set of languages and an import-export business..
-1Eugine_Nier10y
Well, as I understand it part of the issue is that a lot of the grunt work that used to require lots of lawyers to do, e.g., looking through piles of documents for relevant sections, can now be automated.
0MTGandP10y
According to 80000 Hours, law is still one of the highest-earning careers.
1Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Is finance higher E(money) than, say, a startup?
5James_Miller10y
I would guess yes given the high startup failure rate.
5ThrustVectoring10y
There's a high failure rate in finance, too - it's just hidden in the "up or out" culture. It's a very winner-takes-all kind of place, from what I've heard.
6Lumifer10y
Finance is diverse. If you want to be a portfolio manager who makes, say, macro bets, yes, it's very much up or out. But if you want to be a quant polishing fixed income risk management models in some bank, it's a pretty standard corporate job.
2Alexandros10y
Startups are shockingly diverse too. And despite the super-high failure rates I hear about, the group of friends I've been tracking the past 5 years or so seem to be doing pretty darn well, despite some of them having failures indeed. I strongly suspect the degree of failure in startups correlates inversely with rationality skills (as it should) so rationalists should not be placing themselves on the same reference category as everyone else. Execution skills matter a lot too, but doing a startup has worked miracles for my motivation too.
9Lumifer10y
Not from the expected-income point of view (we're not considering car dealerships and franchise eateries startups, right?). Oh, dear. "I'm so smart that normal rules don't apply to me". What could possibly go wrong..?
2Alexandros10y
This isn't "I'm smart and rules don't apply". Smartness alone doesn't help. But, to put it this way, if rationality training doesn't help improve your startup's odds of success, then there's something wrong with the rationality training. To be more precise, in my experience, a lot of startup failure is due to downright stupidity, or just ignoring the obvious. Also, anecdotally, running a startup has been the absolute best on-the-job rationality training I've ever had. Shockingly, successful entrepreneurs I've worked with score high on my rationality test, which consists of how often they say things that are uncontested red flags, and how well-reasoned their suggested courses of action are. In particular, one of our investors is the closest approximation to a bayesian superintelligence I've ever met. I can feed him data & news from the past week, and almost hear the weighting of various outcomes shift in his predictions and recommendations. In short, 1. Rationalists are more likely to think better, avoid obvious errors. 2. Thinking better improves chances of startup success 3. Rationalists have better chances of startup success. I do understand this sounds self-serving, but I also try to avoid the sin of underconfidence. In my experience, quality of thinking between rationalists and the average person tends to be similar to quality of conversation here versus on YouTube. The problem is when rationalists bite off more than they can chew in terms of goals, but that's a separate problem.
0niceguyanon10y
What you say sounds intuitive to me at first, but as of now I would say that rationality training may boost start up success rates up just a little. Here is some reasons why rationality might not matter that much: 1. People tend to be a bit more rational when it counts, like making money. So having correct beliefs about many things doesn't really give you an edge because the other guy is also pretty rational for business stuff. 2. self-delusion, psychopathy, irrationality, corruption, arrogance, and raw driven determination, have good if not better anecdotal evidence of boosting success than rationality training I think.
1Alexandros10y
Well, at this point we're weighing anecdotes, but.. 1. Yes! They do tend to push their rationality to the limit. Hypothesis: knowing more about rationality can help push up the limit of how rational one can be. 2. Yes! It's not about rationality alone. Persistent determination is quite possibly more important than rationality and intelligence put together. But I posit that rationality is a multiplier, and also tends to filter out the most destructive outcomes. In general, I'd love to see some data on this, but I'm not holding my breath.
0niceguyanon10y
Agreed. Interestingly, the latest post in main points to evidence supporting rationality having a significant relation to success in the work place ā€“ not the same as entrepreneurship, nonetheless I update slightly more in favor of your position.
0Viliam_Bur10y
I agree that a more rational person has a greater chance, ceteris paribus. Question is, how much greater. A part of the outcome is luck; I don't know how big part. Also, the rationality training may improve your skills, but just to some degree. (Data point: myself. I believe I am acting more rationally after CFAR minicamp than before, and it seems to be reflected by better outcomes in life, but there is still a lot of stupid things I do. So maybe my probability of running a successful startup has increased from 1% to 3%.)
0Alexandros10y
I question the stats that says 1% success rate for startups. I will need to see the reference, but one I had access to basically said "1% matches or exceeds projections shown to investors" or some such. Funnily enough, by that metric Facebook is a failure (they missed the goal they set in the convertible note signed with Peter Thiel). If run decently, I would expect double digit success rates, for a more reasonable measure of success. If a driven, creative rationalist is running a company, I would expect a very high degree of success. Another thing much more common in rationalists than the common population is the ability to actively solicit feedback, reflect and self-modify. This is surprisingly rare. And incredibly vital in a startup. Success at startups is not about not doing stupid things. I've made many MANY mistakes. It's about not doing things stupid enough to kill your company. Surprisingly, the business world has a lot of tolerance for error, as long as you avoid the truly bad ones.
1Douglas_Knight10y
It is hard to survey startups. What is usually done is to measure success rates of companies that raised a Series A round of funding. Many companies fail before achieving that, though they necessarily fail faster, producing less opportunity cost. Here is a chart of returns to a VC, taken from this paper by a different author. 60% of dollars invested are in companies that lost the VCs money (lost them 85%). This is a top VC that managed to triple its money, so this is an overestimate of success of a regular VC-backed company. This is a common bias in these surveys. Based on the fictitious figure 2, 63% of dollars is actually 69% of companies, because successful companies get more funding. So 31% of companies with a Series A round at a top firm succeed by the metric of a positive return to the VCs. Double digit success would require that at least 1/3 of startups get a Series A funding and that companies funded by typical VCs are as successful as companies funded by a top VC. ---------------------------------------- The appropriate definition of success is comparing to opportunity cost. In particular, the above analysis fails to take into account duration. Here is a paper that makes a reasonable comparison and concludes that running a company with a Series A round was a good decision for people with $700k in assets. Again, skipping to the Series A round is not a real action, thus overestimating the value of the real action of a startup. There is an additional difficulty that startups may have non-monetary costs and benefits, such as stress and learning. Edit: found the paper. According to Figure 2, that 75% of VC-backed firms exit at 0, not much worse than at the top VC considered above.
-1Eugine_Nier10y
Well Paul Graham has built quite a successful incubator apparently largely based on his ability to predict success of start-ups based on a half-hour interview.
0Lumifer10y
Besides what gwern said, Paul Graham is a successful VC. The expected income of VCs is very different from the expected income of startup founders.
-3Eugine_Nier10y
My point is that this is evidence that start-up success depends on ability more than luck.
0Lumifer10y
I think both ability and luck are necessary but not sufficient (well, reasonable amounts of luck :-D).
0gwern10y
I'm not sure how much the interviews add compared to the Y Combinator model of investing in a lot of startups very early on at unusually favorable terms, integrating with Hacker News, and building a YC community with alumni & new angels. (As far as the latter goes, you can ask AngryParsley why he went into YC for Floobits: it wasn't because he needed their cash.)
-3Eugine_Nier10y
What kind of social skills does that require? My impression is that this is the modern equivalent of court astrologer and requires some similar skills, i.e., cold reading.
2Lumifer10y
Not much -- the usual ones for holding a corporate job (wear business casual, look neat, don't smell, don't be a weirdo). Quants are expected to be nerdy/geeky. Not at all. Finance has the advantage of providing rapid and unambiguous feedback for your actions.
-1Eugine_Nier10y
If you're trading yes, although the feedback is extremely noisy. If you're designing models not so much. Incidentally a lot of the quants I know are also good at doing Tarot readings, whether they believe the cards have power or not.
0Lumifer10y
That very much depends on what kind of strategy you're trading. For example, HFT doesn't have problems with noise. Yes, so much. Your model has to work well on historical data and if it makes it to production, it will have performance metrics that it will have to meet.
1mare-of-night10y
The other thing to keep in mind about failure rates is where you end up if you fail - what other careers you can go into with the same education. (In the case of startups, you can keep trying more startups, and you're more likely to succeed on the second or third than you were on the first. I don't know how it is in finance.)
0[anonymous]10y
I think a higher startup failure rate implies E(startup) > E(finance) since most people want risk-adjusted return
2James_Miller10y
Not necessarily because of different barriers to entry.
0A1987dM10y
I'm not sure I would count that as ā€œyour incomeā€, though in jurisdictions with easy divorces and large alimony it might be as good for all practical purposes.
0Jayson_Virissimo10y
In this context, what constitutes a "high IQ"?
1James_Miller10y
Depends on how high you are aiming for. For a good investment banking position you need a high enough IQ to either get into a top 10 school or be in the top 10% of a school such as Smith College.
0[anonymous]10y
It's obvious how you get into law or medicine, but how does going into finance work?
0James_Miller10y
For students at Smith College the normal path is you get very high grades and take some math-heavy courses, get a summer internship with an investment bank after your junior year of college which results in a full time job offer, then after 2-5 years you get an MBA and then get a more senior position at an investment bank.
0[anonymous]10y
Oh. Any way for people who've already graduated from college to get in, or is it too late at that point?
2James_Miller10y
An MBA or masters degree in finance would probably help. I don't have much knowledge of more direct paths.
9[anonymous]10y
"Career" is an unnatural bucket. You don't pick a career. You choose between concrete actions that lead to other actions. Imagine picking a path through a tree. This model can encompass the notion of a career as a set of similar paths. Your procedure is a good way to estimate the value of these paths, but doesn't reflect the tree-like structure of actual decisions. In other words, options are important under uncertainty, and the model you've listed doesn't seem to reflect this. For example, I'm not choosing between (General Infantry) and (Mathematician). I'm choosing between (Enlist in the Military) and (Go to College). Even if the terminal state (General Infantry) had the same expected value as (Mathematician), going to college should more valuable because you will have many options besides (Mathematician) should your initial estimate prove wrong, while enlisting leads to much lower branching factor. How should you weigh the value of having options? I have no clue.
7ThrustVectoring10y
Your goal is likely not to maximize your income. For one, you have to take cost of living into account - a $60k/yr job where you spend $10k/yr on housing is better than a $80k/yr (EDIT:$70k/yr, math was off) job where you spend $25k/yr on housing. For another, the time and stress of the career field has a very big impact on quality-of-life. If you work sixty hour weeks, in order to get to the same kind of place as a forty hour week worker you have to spend money to free up twenty hours per week in high-quality time. That's a lot of money in cleaners, virtual personal assistants, etc. As far as "how do I use the concept of comparative advantage to my advantage", here's how I'd do it: 1. Make a list of skills and preferences. It need not be exhaustive - in fact, I'd go for the first few things you can think of. The more obvious of a difference from the typical person, the more likely it is to be your comparative advantage. For instance, suppose you like being alone, do not get bored easily by monotonous work, and do not have any particular attachment to any one place. 2. Look at career options and ask yourself if that is something that fits your skills and preferences. Over-the-road trucking is a lot more attractive to people who can stand boredom and isolation, and don't feel a need to settle down in one place. Conversely, it's less attractive to people who are the opposite way, and so is likely to command a higher wage. 3. Now that you have a shorter list of things you're likely to face less competition for or be better at, use any sort of evaluation to pick among the narrower field.
6solipsist10y
You should consider option values, especially early in your career. It's easier to move from high paying job in Manhattan to a lower paying job in Kansas City than to do the reverse.
4ThrustVectoring10y
Update the choice by replacing income with the total expected value from job income, social networking, and career options available to you, and the point stands.
0RowanE10y
Probably the cost of housing correlates with other expenses, and also there's income tax to consider, but on the surface the first job is $50k/yr net, the second job is $55k/yr net, and so it looks like the latter better.
3ThrustVectoring10y
whoops, picked the wrong numbers. Thanks
1pianoforte61110y
In addition to maximizing income, maximizing savings/investments is very important. You can be poor off of a $500,000 salary and rich off of a $50,000 salary.

In "The Fall and Rise of Formal Methods", Peter Amey gives a pretty good description of how I expect things to play out w.r.t. Friendly AI research:

Good ideas sometimes come before their time. They may be too novel for their merit to be recognised. They may be seen to threaten some partyā€™s self interest. They may be seen as simply too hard to adopt. These premature good ideas are often swept into corners and, the world, breathing a sigh of relief, gets on with whatever it was up to before they came along. Fortunately not all good ideas wither. Some are kept alive by enthusiasts, who seize every opportunity to show that they really are good ideas. In some cases the world eventually catches up and the original premature good idea, honed by its period of isolation, bursts forth as the new normality (sometimes with its original critics claiming it was all their idea in the first place!).

Formal methods (and Iā€™ll outline in more detail what I mean by ā€˜formal methodsā€™ shortly) are a classic example of early oppression followed by later resurgence. They arrived on the scene at a time when developers were preoccupied with trying to squeeze complex functionality into hardware wit

... (read more)

Introduction I suspected that the type of stuff that gets posted in Rationality Quotes reinforces the mistaken way of throwing about the word rational. To test this, I set out to look at the first twenty rationality quotes in the most recent RQ thread. In the end I only looked at the first ten because it was taking more time and energy than would permit me to continue past that. (I'd only seen one of them before, namely the one that prompted me to make this comment.)

A look at the quotes

In our large, anonymous society, it's easy to forget moral and reputational pressures and concentrate on legal pressure and security systems. This is a mistake; even though our informal social pressures fade into the background, they're still responsible for most of the cooperation in society.

There might be an intended, implicit lesson here that would systematically improve thinking, but without more concrete examples and elaboration (I'm not sure what the exact mistake being pointed to is), we're left guessing what it might be. In cases like this where it's not clear, it's best to point out explicitly what the general habit of thought (cognitive algorithm) is that should be corrected, and how... (read more)

So I have the typical of introvert/nerd problem of being shy about meeting people one-on-one, because I'm afraid of not being able to come up with anything to say and lots of awkwardness resulting. (Might have something to do with why I've typically tended to date talkative people...)

Now I'm pretty sure that there must exist some excellent book or guide or blog post series or whatever that's aimed at teaching people how to actually be a good conversationalist. I just haven't found it. Recommendations?

8pcm10y
Offline practice: make a habit of writing down good questions you could have asked in a conversation you recently had. Reward yourself for thinking of questions, regardless of how slow you are at generating them. (H/T Dan of Charisma Tips, which has other good tips scattered around that blog).
0CAE_Jones10y
I saw a speech pathologist for this. I was taught to ask boring questions I'm not really interested in asking on the hopes that they will lead to something interesting happening. "How was your weekend?", "What are some of your hobbies?", "How about this weather?", and all that mess. In practice, it feels so forced I can't do it in real life.
9Kaj_Sotala10y
Yeah. My problem is more that I can't think of anything to say even when people do say something interesting. Like just recently, I met up with one person who wanted to discuss his tech startup thing. Then he held this fascinating presentation about the philosophy and practice of his project, which also touched upon like five other fields that I also have an interest in. And I mostly just said "okay" and nodded, which was fine in the beginning since he was giving me a presentation after all, but then in the end when he asked me if I had any questions or comments, and I didn't have much to say. There were some questions that occurred to me as he talked about it, and I did ask those when they occurred, but still, feels like I should've been able to say a lot more.

Responding to the interesting conversation context.

First, always bring pen a paper to any meeting/presentation that is in anyway formal or professional. Questions always come up at times when it is inappropriate to interrupt, save them for lulls.

Second, an an anecdote. I noticed I had a habit during meetings to focus entirely on absorbing and recording information, and then would process and extrapolate from it after the fact (I blame spending years in the structured undergrad large technical lecture environment). This habit of only listening and not providing feedback was detrimental in the working world, it took a lot of practice to start analyzing the information and extrapolating forward in real time. Once you start extrapolating forward from what you are being told, meaningful feedback will come naturally.

7Vaniver10y
So, I have a comparative advantage at coming up with things to say, and so I'm not sure this advice will fill the specific potholes you're getting stuck on, but I hope it's somewhat useful. A simple technique that seems to work pretty well is read your mind to them, since they can't read it themselves. If you're interested in field X, say that you're interested in it. If you're glad that they gave you a talk, tell them you're glad that they gave you a talk. People like getting feedback, and people like getting compliments, and when your mind is blank and there's nothing asking to be said, that's a good place to go looking. (Something like "that was very complete; I've got no questions" is nicer than just silence, though you may want to tailor it a bit to whatever they've just said.)
4Kaj_Sotala10y
Thanks, that sounds potentially useful.
0Ben Pace10y
Have you actually tried it out much, or do you top before you 'just try it'? I make myself ask questions like that, but I find it can move the conversation into better places... Although I normally use ones I'm likely to be interested in e,g. "Read any good books recently?"

Here is another logic puzzle. I did not write this one, but I really like it.

Imagine you have a circular cake, that is frosted on the top. You cut a d degree slice out of it, and then put it back, but rotated so that it is upside down. Now, d degrees of the cake have frosting on the bottom, while 360 minus d degrees have frosting on the top. Rotate the cake d degrees, take the next slice, and put it upside down. Now, assuming the d is less than 180, 2d degrees of the cake will have frosting on the bottom.

If d is 60 degrees, then after you repeat this procedure, flipping a single slice and rotating 6 times, all the frosting will be on the bottom. If you repeat the procedure 12 times, all of the frosting will be back on the top of the cake.

For what values of d does the cake eventually get back to having all the frosting on the top?

Solution can be found in the comments here.

4Qiaochu_Yuan10y
V zrgntnzrq gur fbyhgvba. Gur nafjre "vss q vf engvbany" frrzrq gbb rnfl gb zr fb V thrffrq gung gur nafjre jnf npghnyyl "sbe nyy q" orpnhfr gung jbhyq or fhssvpvragyl gevpxl naq nyfb fbzrguvat fbzrguvat ersyrpgvbaf.

Someone was asking a while back for meetup descriptions, what you did/ how it went, etc. Figured I'd post some Columbus Rationality videos here. All but the last are from the mega-meetup.

Jesse Galef on Defense Against the Dark Arts: The Ethics and Psychology of Persuasion

Eric on Applications of Models in Everyday Life (it's good, but skip about 10-15 minutes when there's herding-cats-nitpicky audience :P)

Elissa on Effective Altruism

Rita on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Don on A Synergy of Eastern and Western Approaches

Gleb on Setting and Achieving Goals

0tut10y
Why are these considered inappropriate for people without a google account?

A question I'm not sure how to phrase to Google, and which has so far made Facebook friends think too hard and go back to doing work at work: what is the maximum output bandwidth of a human, in bits/sec? That is, from your mind to the outside world. Sound, movement, blushing, EKG. As long as it's deliberate. What's the most an arbitrarily fast mind running in a human body could achieve?

(gwern pointed me at the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap; the question of extracting data from an intact brain is covered in Appendix E, but without numbers and mostly with hypothetical technology.)

5gwern10y
Why not simply estimate it yourself? These sorts of things aren't very hard to do. For example, you can estimate typing as follows: peak at 120 WPM; words are average 4 characters; each character (per Shannon and other's research; see http://www.gwern.net/Notes#efficient-natural-language ) conveys ~1 bit; hence your typing bandwidth is 120 4 1 = <480 bits per minute or <8 bits per second. Do that for a few modalities like speech, and sum.
0A1987dM10y
I've just noticed he said ā€œan arbitrarily fast mind running in a human bodyā€, not an actual human being, so I don't think it would be much slower at typing uuencoded compressed stuff than natural language (at least with QWERTY -- it might be different with keyboards layouts optimized from natural language such as Dvorak, but still probably within a factor of a few).
0gwern10y
The 120WPM is pretty good for the physical limits: if you are typing at 120WPM, then you have not hit the limits of your thinking (imagine you are in a typing tutor - your reading speed ought to be at least 3x 120WPM...), and you're not too far off some of the sustained typing numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_entry
1A1987dM10y
My point was that 1 bit per character is an underestimate.
0A1987dM10y
La Wik says 8 bits per word, FWIW.
6gwern10y
La Wiki is apparently not using the entropy estimates extracted from human predictions (who are the best modelers of natural language). Crude stuff like trigram models are going to considerably overestimate matters.
4Illano10y
As a baseline estimate for just the muscular system, the worlds faster drummer can play at about 20 beats per second. That's probably an upper limit on twitch speeds of human muscles, even with a arbitrarily fast mind running in the body. Assuming you had a system on the receiving end that could detect arbitrary muscle contractions, and could control each muscle in your body independently (again, this is an arbitrarily fast mind, so I'd think it should be able to), there are about 650 muscle groups in the body according to wikipedia, so I would say a good estimate for just the muscular system would be 650 x 20bits/s or about 13 Kb/s. Once you get into things like EKGs, I think it all depends on how much control the mind actually has over processes that are largely subconscious, as well as how sensitive your receiving devices are. That could make the bandwidth much higher, but I don't know a good way to estimate that.
04hodmt10y
20 beats per second is for two-handed drumming over one minute, so that's only 10bits/s/muscle theoretical maximum. There doesn't seem to be any organized competition for one-handed drumming, but Takahashi Meijin was famous for button mashing at 16 presses per second with only one hand, although for much shorter times.
0khafra10y
Don't you have to define the receiver as well as the transmitter, to have any idea about the channel bandwidth? I mean, if the "outside world" is the Dark Lords of the Matrix, the theoretical maximum output bandwidth is the processing speed of the mind.
0David_Gerard10y
Let's say "detectable as data by 2014 technology".
0A1987dM10y
Short of having a precise definition of ā€œdeliberateā€ I don't think it's possible to give a precise number, but for a Fermi estimate... Dammit! Gwern has already made the calculation I was thinking of!

I noticed recently that one of the mental processes that gets in the way of my proper thinking is an urge to instantly answer a question then spend the rest of my time trying to justify that knee-jerk answer.

For example, I saw a post recently asking whether chess or poker was more popular worldwide. For some reason I wanted to say "obviously x is more popular," but I realized that I don't actually know. And if I avoid that urge to answer the question instantly, it's much easier for me to keep my ego out of issues and to investigate things properly...including making it easier for me recognize things that I don't know and acknowledge that I don't know them.

Is there a formal name for this type of bias or behavior pattern? It would let me search up some Sequence posts or articles to read.

8Oscar_Cunningham10y
Hold off on proposing solutions.

Here is a video of someone interviewing people to see if they can guess a pattern by asking whether or not a sequence of 3 numbers satisfies the pattern. (like was mentioned in HPMOR)

0xnn10y
The other videos I've sampled from that channel have also been good.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
I have also been going through the channel. What I saw so far was mostly science, but there is some rationality stuff. Example

How do you know when you've had a good idea?

I've found this to actually be difficult to figure out. Sometimes you can google up what you thought. Sometimes checking to see where the idea has been previously stated requires going through papers that may be very very long, or hidden by pay-walls or other barriers on scientific journal sites.

Sometimes it's very hard to google things up. To me, I suppose the standard for "that's a good idea," is if it more clearly explains something I previously observed, or makes it easier or faster for me to do something. But I have no idea whether or not that means it will be interesting for other people.

How do you like to check your ideas?

2Torello10y
If you have to ask... Just kidding. It's a great question. Two thoughts: "Nothing is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it." - Daniel Khaneman "If you want to buy something, wait two weeks and see if you still want to buy it." - my mom
1wadavis10y
This is a big open topic, but I'll talk about my top method. I have a prior that our capitalist, semi-open market is thorough and that if an idea is economically feasible, someone else is doing it / working on it. So when I come up with a new good idea, I assume someone else has already thought of it and begin researching why it hasn't been done already. Once that research is done, I'll know not only if it is a good idea or a bad idea but why it is which, and a hint of what it would take to turn it from a bad idea into a good idea. Often these good ideas have been tried / considered before but we may have a local comparative advantage that makes it practical here were it was not elsewhere (legislation, better technology, cheaper labor, costlier labor... ) For example: inland, non-directional, shallow oil, drilling rigs use a very primitive method to survey their well bore. Daydreaming during my undergrad I came up with a alternative method that would provide results orders of magnitudes more accurate. I put together my hypothesis that this was not already in use because: this was a niche market and the components were too costly / poor quality before the smartphone boom. My hypothesis was wrong, a company had a fifteen year old patent on the method and it was being marketed (along with a highly synergistic product line) to offshore drilling rigs. It was a good idea, so good of an idea that it made someone a lot of money 15 years ago and made offshore drilling a lot safer, but it wasn't a good idea for me.

An experiment with living rationally, by A J Jacobs, who wrote The Year of Living Biblically. I don't know how long he plans to try living rationally.

7Alicorn10y
Maybe CfAR should invite him to a workshop. (I suspect that if CfAR should invite him to a workshop they should do it themselves in some official capacity and don't think random Less Wrongers ought to contact Mr. Jacobs.) ETA: Ah, rats, the article is from 2008. He's probably lost interest.
1Viliam_Bur10y
Well, I'm curious about the results. Especially, whether he manages to avoid some "hollywood rationality" memes. He already mentioned Spock...

To illustrate dead-weight loss in my intro micro class I first take out a dollar bill and give it to a student and then explain that the sum of the wealth of the people in the classroom hasn't changed. Next, I take a second dollar bill and rip it up and throw it in the garbage. My students always laugh nervously as if I've done something scandalous like pulling down my pants. Why?

Because it signals "I am so wealthy that I can afford to tear up money" and blatantly signaling wealth is crass. And it also signals "I am so callous that I would rather tear up money than give it to the poor", which is also crass. And the argument that a one dollar bill really isn't very much money isn't enough to disrupt the signal.

6[anonymous]10y
Because money is heavily charged with symbolism in our society, much like that which lies beneath pants.
6Salemicus10y
Of course, destroying the dollar bill also doesn't reduce societal wealth.
3James_Miller10y
No, and I briefly make this macro point,
6maia10y
Because destroying money is viscerally aversive and surprising?
[-][anonymous]10y80

A little bit of How An Algorithm Feels From Inside:

Why is the Monty Hall problem so horribly unintuitive? Why does it feel like there's an equal probability to pick the correct door (1/2+1/2) when actually there's not (1/3+2/3)?

Here are the relevant bits from the Wikipedia article:

Out of 228 subjects in one study, only 13% chose to switch (Granberg and Brown, 1995:713). In her book The Power of Logical Thinking, vos Savant (1996, p. 15) quotes cognitive psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini as saying "... no other statistical puzzle comes so clo

... (read more)

Another datapoint is the counterintuitiveness of searching a desk: with each drawer you open looking for something, the probability of finding it in the next drawer increases, but your probability of ever finding it decreases. The difference seems to whipsaw people; see http://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1994-falk

2[anonymous]10y
A bit late, but I think this part of your article was most relevant to the Monty Hall problem: People probably don't distinguish between their personal probability of the target event and the probabilities of the doors. It feels like the probability of there being a car behind the doors is a parameter that belongs to those doors or to the car - however you want to phrase it. Since you're only given information about what's behind the doors, and that information can't actually change the reality of what's behind the doors then it feels like the probability can't change just because of that.
4lmm10y
I think the monty hall problem very closely resembles a more natural one in which the probability is 1/2; namely, that where the host is your opponent and chose whether to offer you the chance to switch. So evolutionarily-optimized instincts tell us the probability is 1/2.
3DanielLC10y
I'd say it's that it closely resembles the one where the host has no idea which door has the car in it, and picks a door at random.
3Scott Garrabrant10y
I do not think this is correct. First, the host should only offer you the chance to switch if you are winning, so the chance should be 0. Second, this example seems too contrived to be something that we would have evolved a good instinct about.
0drethelin10y
Unless they're trying to trick you. The problem collapses to a yes or no question of whether one of you is able to guess the level the other one of you is thinking on
3Scott Garrabrant10y
Um, no, the only Nash equilibria are where you never accept the deal. If you ever accept it at all, then they will only offer it when it hurts you.
0[anonymous]10y
I'd probably broaden this beyond 1/2 - I think the base case is the host gives you a chance to gamble with a question or test of skill, and the result is purely dependent on the player. The swap-box scenario is then an extreme case of that where the result depends less and less on the skill of the player, eventually reaching 50% chance of winning. I wouldn't say evolutionary-optimised, but maybe familiarity with the game-show tropes being somewhere along this scale. Monty Hall is then a twist on this extreme case, which pattern-matches to the more common 50% case with no allowance for the effect of the host's knowledge.

Does anyone have any advice about understanding implicit communication? I regularly interact with guessers and have difficulty understanding their communication. A fair bit of this has to do with my poor hearing, but I've had issues even on text based communication mediums where I understand every word.

My strategy right now is to request explicit confirmation of my suspicions, e.g., here's a recent online chat I had with a friend (I'm A and they're B):

A: Hey, how have you been?

B: I've been ok

B: working in the lab now

A: Okay. Just to be clear, do you mean t... (read more)

7TheOtherDave10y
It's worth remembering that there is no single Guess/Hint culture. Such high-context cultures depend on everyone sharing a specific set of interpretation rules, allowing information to be conveyed through subtle signals (hints) rather than explicit messages. For my own part, I absolutely endorse asking for confirmation in any interaction among peers, taking responses to such requests literally, and disengaging if you don't get a response. If a Guess/Hint-culture native can't step out of their preferred mode long enough to give you a "yes" or "no," and you can't reliably interpret their hints, you're unlikely to have a worthwhile interaction anyway. With nonpeers, it gets trickier; disengaging (and asking in the first place) may have consequences you prefer to avoid. In which case I recommend talking to third parties who can navigate that particular Guess/Hint dialect, and getting some guidance from them. This can be as blatant as bringing them along to translate for you (or play Cyrano, online), or can be more like asking them for general pointers. (E.g. "I'm visiting a Chinese family for dinner. Is there anything I ought to know about how to offer compliments, ask for more food, turn down food I don't want, make specific requests about food? How do I know when I'm supposed to start eating, stop eating, leave? Are there rules I ought to know about who eats first? Etc. etc. etc.")
2TheOtherDave10y
Some more Guess/Hint culture suggestions. Consider: This will typically communicate that you've understood that they're busy and don't want to chat, that you're OK with that, and that you want to talk to them. That said, there exist Guess/Hint cultures in which it also communicates that you have something urgent to talk about, because if you didn't you would instead have said: ...which in those cultures will communicate that the ball is in their court. (This depends on an implicit understanding that it is NOT OK to leave messages unresponded to, even if they don't explicitly request a response, so they are now obligated to contact you next... but since you didn't explicitly mention it (which would have suggested urgency) they are expected to know that they can do so when it's convenient for them. EDIT: All of that being said, my inner Hint-culture native also wants to add that being visible in an online chat forum when I'm not free to chat is rude in the first place.
0btrettel10y
Thanks for these two posts. I thought more than a thumbs-up (a very subtle hint) was necessary here. I've found both posts to be useful in understanding this class of communication styles.
1TheOtherDave10y
I'm glad they helped. Thanks for letting me know.

Posts that have appeared since you last red a page have a pinkish border on them. It's really helpful when dealing with things like open threads and quote threads that you read multiple times. Unfortunately, looking at one of the comments makes it think you read all of them. Clicking the "latest open thread" link just shows one of the comments. This means that, if you see something that looks interesting there, you either have to find the latest open thread yourself, or click the link and have it erase everything about what you have and haven't read.

Can someone make it so looking at one of the comments doesn't reset all of them, or at least put a link to the open thread, instead of just the comments?

6Douglas_Knight10y
The general problem is real, but here's a solution to the specific problem of finding the latest open thread: just click the words "latest open thread," rather than the comment that displays below it.
0DanielLC10y
I see. I had been trying to click the "on Open Thread" part.
0Douglas_Knight10y
Making that a link to the post would be an easy change. In the case of the open thread it is redundant, but perhaps easier to identify as a link. But in the case of the "recent comments" section of the sidebar, it would provide links not currently available.

Does anyone have advice on how to optimize the expectation of a noisy function? The naive approach I've used is to sample the function for a given parameter a decent number of times, average those together, and hope the result is close enough to stand in for the true objective function. This seems really wasteful though.

Most of the algorithms I'm coming (like modelling the objective function with gaussian process regression) would be useful, but are more high-powered than I need. Any simple techniques better than the naive approach? Any recommendations among sophisticated approaches?

2VincentYu10y
There are some techniques that can be used with simulated annealing to deal with noise in the evaluation of the objective function. See Section 3 of Branke et al (2008) for a quick overview of proposed methods (they also propose new techniques in that paper). Most of these techniques come with the usual convergence guarantees that are associated with simulated annealing (but there are of course performance penalties in dealing with noise). What is the dimensionality of your parameter space? What do you know about the noise? (e.g., if you know that the noise is mostly homoscedastic or if you can parameterize it, then you can probably use this to push the performance of some of the simulated annealing algorithms.)
2badger10y
Thanks for the SA paper! The parameter space is only two dimensional here, so it's not hard to eyeball roughly where the minimum is if I sample enough. I can say very little about the noise. I'm more interested being able to approximate the optimum quickly (since simulation time adds up) than hitting it exactly. The approach taken in this paper based on a non-parametric tau test looks interesting.
2Lumifer10y
That rather depends on the particulars, for example, do you know (or have good reasons to assume) the characteristics of your noise? Basically you have a noisy sample and want some kind of an efficient estimator, right?
0badger10y
Not really. In this particular case, I'm minimizing how long it takes a simulation reach one state, so the distribution ends up looking lognormal- or Poisson-ish. Edit: Seeing your added question, I don't need an efficient estimator in the usual sense per se. This is more about how to search the parameter space in a reasonable way to find where the minimum is, despite the noise.
0Lumifer10y
Hm. Is the noise magnitude comparable with features in your search space? In other words, can you ignore noise to get a fast lock on a promising section of the space and then start multiple sampling? Simulated annealing that has been mentioned is a good approach but slow to the extent of being impractical for large search spaces. Solutions to problems such as yours are rarely general and typically depend on the specifics of the problem -- essentially it's all about finding shortcuts.
0badger10y
The parameter space in this current problem is only two dimensional, so I can eyeball a plausible region, sample at a higher rate there, and iterate by hand. In another project, I had something with an very high dimensional parameter space, so I figured it's time I learn more about these techniques. Any resources you can recommend on this topic then? Is there a list of common shortcuts anywhere?
0Lumifer10y
Well, optimization (aka search in parameter space) is a large and popular topic. There are a LOT of papers and books about it. And sorry, I don't know of a list of common shortcuts. As I mentioned they really depend on the specifics of the problem.
1witzvo10y
You may find better ideas under the phrase "stochastic optimization," but it's a pretty big field. My naive suggestion (not knowing the particulars of your problem) would be to do a stochastic version of Newton's algorithm. I.e. (1) sample some points (x,y) in the region around your current guess (with enough spread around it to get a slope and curvature estimate). Fit a locally weighted quadratic regression through the data. Subtract some constant times the identity matrix from the estimated Hessian to regularize it; you can choose the constant (just) big enough to enforce that the move won't exceed some maximum step size. Set your current guess to the maximizer of the regularized quadratic. Repeat re-using old data if convenient.

I've been reading critiques of MIRI, and I was wondering if anyone has responded to this particular critique that basically asks for a detailed analysis of all probabilities someone took into account when deciding that the singularity is going to happen.

(I'd also be interested in responses aimed at Alexander Kruel in general, as he seems to have a lot to say about Lesswrong/Miri.)

8[anonymous]10y
I actually lost my faith in MIRI because of Kruel's criticism, so I too would be glad if someone adressed it. I think his criticism is far more comprehensive that most of the other criticism on this page (well, this post has little bit of the same).

Is there anything specific that he's said that's caused you to lose your faith? I tire of debating him directly, because he seems to twist everything into weird strawmen that I quickly lose interest in trying to address. But I could try briefly commenting on whatever you've found persuasive.

1[anonymous]10y
Iā€™m going to quote things I agreed with or things that persuaded me or that worried me. Okay, to start off, when I first read about this in Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import, Facing the Intelligence Explosion, Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics it just felt like self-evident and Iā€™m not sure how thoroughly I went through the presuppositions during that time so Kruel could have very easily persuaded me about this. I donā€™t know much about the technical process of writing an AGI so excuse me if I get something wrong about that particular thing. Itā€™s founded on many, many assumptions not supported by empirical data, and if even one of them was wrong the whole thing collapses down. And you canā€™t really even know how many unfounded sub-assumptions there are in these original assumptions. But when I started thinking about it could be that itā€™s impossible to reason about those kind of assumptions if you do it any other way than how MIRI currently does it. Needing to formalize a mathematical expression before you can do anything like Kruel suggested is a bit unfair. I donā€™t see why the first AIs resembling general intelligences would be very powerful so practical AGI research is probably somewhat safe in the early stages. This I would like to know, how scalable is intelligence? (I thought maybe by dedicating lots of computation to a very large numbers of random scenarios) (maybe by simulating the real world environment) http://kruel.co/2013/01/04/should-you-trust-the-singularity-institute/ Thoughts on this article. I read about the Nurture Assumption in Slate Star Codex and it probably changed my priors on this. If it really is true and one dedicated psychologist could do all that, then MIRI probably could also work because artificial intelligence is such a messy subject that a brute force approach using thousands of researchers in one project probably isn't optimal. So I probably wouldnā€™t let MIRI code an AGI on its own (maybe) but it could give som
3Kaj_Sotala10y
Brief replies to the bits that you quoted: (These are my personal views and do not reflect MIRI's official position, I don't even work there anymore.) Not sure how to interpret this. What does the "further inferences and estimations" refer to? See this comment for references to sources that discuss this. But note that an intelligence explosion is sufficient but not necessary for AGI to be risky: just because development is gradual doesn't mean that it will be safe. The Chernobyl power plant was the result of gradual development in nuclear engineering. Countless other disasters have likewise been caused by technologies that were developed gradually. Hard to say for sure, but note that few technologies are safe unless people work to make them safe, and the more complex the technology, the more effort is needed to ensure that no unexpected situations crop up where it turns out to be unsafe after all. See also section 5.1.1. of Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk for a brief discussion about various incentives that may pressure people to deploy increasingly autonomous AI systems into domains where their enemies or competitors are doing the same, even if it isn't necessarily safe. We're already giving computers considerable power in the economy, even without nanotechnology: see automated stock trading (and the resulting 2010 Flash Crash), various military drones, visions for replacing all cars (and ships) with self-driving ones, the amount of purchases that are carried out electronically via credit/debit cards or PayPal versus the ones that are done in old-fashioned cash, and so on and so on. See also section 2.1. of Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk, as well as the previously mentioned section 5.1.1., for some discussion of why these trends are only likely to continue. Expert disagreement is a viable reason to put reduced weight on the arguments, true, but this bullet point doesn't indicate exactly what parts they disagree on. So it's hard to comment further. So
2XiXiDu10y
Basically the hundreds of hours it would take MIRI to close the inferential distance between them and AI experts. See e.g. this comment by Luke Muehlhauser: If your arguments are this complex then you are probably wrong. I do not disagree with that kind of AI risks. If MIRI is working on mitigating AI risks that do not require an intelligence explosion, a certain set of AI drives and a bunch of, from my perspective, very unlikely developments...then I was not aware of that. This seems very misleading. We are after all talking about a technology that works perfectly well at being actively unsafe. You have to get lots of things right, e.g. that the AI cares to take over the world, knows how to improve itself, and manages to hide its true intentions before it can do so etc. etc. etc. There is a reason why MIRI doesn't know this. Look at the latest interviews with experts conducted by Luke Muehlhauser. He doesn't even try to figure out if they disagree with Xenu, but only asks uncontroversial questions. Crazy...this is why I am criticizing MIRI. A focus on an awfully narrow and specific scenario rather than AI risks in general. Consider that the U.S. had many more and smarter people than the Taliban. The bottom line being that the U.S. devoted a lot more output per man-hour to defeat a completely inferior enemy. Yet their advantage apparently did scale sublinearly. I do not disagree that there are minds better at social engineering than that of e.g. Hitler, but I strongly doubt that there are minds which are vastly better. Optimizing a political speech for 10 versus a million subjective years won't make it one hundred thousand times more persuasive. The question is if just because humans are much smarter and stronger they can actually wipe out mosquitoes. Well, they can...but it is either very difficult or will harm humans. You already need to build huge particle accelerators to gain new physical insights and need a whole technological civilization in order to
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Thanks, I'll try to write up a proper reply soon.
0[anonymous]10y
Sure, that would be great! I will go through his criticism in the next few days and list everything that persuaded me and why.
5Squark10y
Personal opinion: * MIRI are doing very interesting research regardless of the reality of AGI existential risk and feasibility of the FAI problem * AGI existential risk is sufficiently founded to worry about, so even if it is not the most important thing, someone should be on it
-1savageorange10y
Perhaps his server is underspecced? It's currently slowed to an absolute c r a w l. What little I have seen certainly looks worthwhile, though.
-5shminux10y

Possibly of interest: Help Teach 1000 Kids That Death is Wrong. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-teach-1000-kids-that-death-is-wrong

(have not actually looked in detail, have no opinion yet)

I'd like to know where I can go to meet awesome people/ make awesome friends. Occasionally, Yvain will brag about how awesome his social group in the Bay Area was. See here (do read it - its a very cool piece) and I'd like to also have an awesome social circle. As far as I can tell this is a two part problem. The first part is having the requisite social skills to turn strangers into acquaintances and then turn acquaintances into friends. The second part is knowing where to go to find people.

I think that the first part is a solved problem, if you want to l... (read more)

4Viliam_Bur10y
How about you simply write where you live, and tell other LWers in the same area to contact you? It may or may not work, but the effort needed is extremely low. (You can also put that information in LW settings.) Or write this: "I am interested in meeting LW readers in [insert place], so if you live near and would like to meet and talk, send me a private message".

How To Be A Proper Fucking Scientist ā€“ A Short Quiz. From Armondikov of RationalWiki, in his "annoyed scientist" persona. A list of real-life Bayesian questions for you to pick holes in the assumptions of^W^W^W^W^W^Wtest yourselves on.

Richard Loosemore (score one for nominative determinism) has a new, well, let's say "paper" which he has, well, let's say "published" here.

His refutation of the usual uFAI scenarios relies solely/mostly on a supposed logical contradiction, namely (to save you a few precious minutes) that a 'CLAI' (a Canonical Logical AI) wouldn't be able to both know about its own fallability/limitations (inevitable in a resource-constrained environment such as reality), and accept the discrepancy between its specified goal system and the creators' actu... (read more)

8XiXiDu10y
Here is a description of a real-world AI by Microsoft's chief AI researcher: Does it have a DWIM imperative? As far as I can tell, no. Does it have goals? As far as I can tell, no. Does it fail by absurdly misinterpreting what humans want? No. This whole talk about goals and DWIM modules seems to miss how real world AI is developed and how natural intelligences like dogs work. Dogs can learn the owners goals and do what the owner wants. Sometimes they don't. But they rarely maul their owners when what the owner wants it to do is to scent out drugs.
4Squark10y
I think we need to be very careful before extrapolating from primitive elevator control systems to superintelligent AI. I don't know how this particular elevator control system works, but probably it does have a goal, namely minimizing the time people have to wait before arriving at their target floor. If we built a superintelligent AI with this sort of goal it might have done all sorts of crazy thing. For example, it might create robots that will constantly enter and exit the elevator so their average elevator trips are very short and wipe out the human race just so they won't interfere. "Real world AI" is currently very far from human level intelligence, not speaking of superintelligence. Dogs can learn what their owners want but dogs already have complex brains that current technology is not able of reproducing. Dogs also require displays of strength to be obedient: they consider the owner to be their pack leader. A superintelligent dog probably won't give a dime about his "owner's" desires. Humans have human values, so obviously it's not impossible to create a system that has human values. It doesn't mean it is easy.
0XiXiDu10y
I am extrapolating from a general trend, and not specific systems. The general trend is that newer generations of software less frequently crash or exhibit unexpected side-effects (just look at Windows 95 vs. Windows 8). If we want to ever be able to build an AI that can take over the world then we will need to become really good at either predicting how software works or at spotting errors. In other words, if IBM Watson would have started singing, or if it got stuck on a query, then it would have lost at Jeopardy. But this trend contradicts the idea of an AI killing all humans in order to calculate 1+1. If we are bad enough at software engineering to miss such failure modes then we won't be good enough to enable our software to take over the world.
1Squark10y
In other words, you're saying that if someone is smart enough to build a superintelligent AI, she should be smart enough it make it friendly. Well, firstly this claim doesn't imply we should be researching FAI and/or that MIRI's work is superfluous. It just implies that nobody will build a superintelligent AI before the problem of friendliness is solved. Secondly, I'm not at all convinced this claim is true. It sounds like saying "if they are smart enough to build the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, they are smart enough to make it safe". But they weren't. Improvement in software quality is probably due to improvement in design and testing methodologies and tools, response to increasing market expectations etc. I wouldn't count on these effects to safe-guard against an existential catastrophe. If a piece of software is buggy, it becomes less likely to be released. If an AI has a poorly designed utility function but a perfectly designed decision engine, there might be no time to pull the plug. The product manager won't stop the release because the software will release itself. If growth of intelligence due to self-improvement is a slow process than the creators of the AI will have time to respond and fix the problems. However, if "AI foom" is real, they won't have time to do it. One moment it's a harmless robot driving around the room and building castles from colorful cubes. Another moment the whole galaxy is on its way to become a pile of toy castles. The engineers who build the first superintelligent AI might simply lack the imagination to believe it will really become superintelligent. Imagine one of them inventing a genius mathematical theory of self-improving intelligent systems. Suppose she never heard about AI existential risks etc. Will she automatically think "hmm, once I implement this theory the AI will become so powerful it will paperclip the universe"? I seriously doubt it. More likely it would be "wow, that formula came out really neat, I wonder ho
1drethelin10y
Feedback systems are much more powerful in existing intelligences. I don't know if you ever played Black and White but it had an explicitly learning through experience based AI. And it was very easy to accidentally train it to constantly eat poop or run back and forth stupidly. An elevator control module is very very simple: It has a set of options of floors to go to, and that's it. It's barely capable of doing anything actively bad. But what if a few days a week some kids had come into the office building and rode the elevator up and down for a few hours for fun? It might learn that kids love going to all sorts of random floors. This would be relatively easy to fix, but only because the system is so insanely simple and it's very clear to see when it's acting up.
5PhilGoetz9y
Downvoted for being deliberately insulting. There's no call for that, and the toleration and encouragement of rationality-destroying maliciousness must be stamped out of LW culture. A symposium proceedings is not considered as selective as a journal, but it still counts as publication when it is a complete article.
-4Kawoomba9y
Well, I must say my comment's belligerence-to-subject-matter ratio is lower than yours. "Stamped out"? Such martial language, I can barely focus on the informational content. The infantile nature of my name calling actually makes it easier to take the holier-than-thou position (which my interlocutor did, incidentally). There's a counter-intuitive psychological layer to it which actually encourages dissent, and with it increases engagement on the subject matter (your own comment nonwithstanding). With certain individuals at least, which I (correctly) deemed to be the case in the original instance. In any case, comments on tone alone would be more welcome if accompanied with more remarks on the subject matter itself. Lastly, this was my first comment in over 2 months, so thanks for bringing me out of the woodwork! I do wish that people were more immune to the allure of drama, lest we all end up like The Donald.
5Squark10y
The condescending tone with which he presents his arguments (which are, paraphrasing him, "slightly odd, to say the least") is amazing. Who is this guy and where did he come from? Does anyone care about what he has to say?
5gwern10y
Loosemore has been an occasional commenter since the SL4 days; his arguments have heavily criticized pretty much anytime he pops his head up. As far as I know, XiXiDu is the only one who agrees with him or takes him seriously.
1XiXiDu10y
He actually cites someone else who agrees with him in his paper, so this can't be true. And from the positive feedback he gets on Facebook there seem to be more. I personally chatted with people much smarter than me (experts who can show off widely recognized real-world achievements) who basically agree with him. What people criticize here is a distortion of small parts of his arguments. RobBB managed to write a whole post expounding his ignorance of what Loosemore is arguing.

He actually cites someone else who agrees with him in his paper, so this can't be true.

I said as far as I know. I had not read the paper because I don't have a very high opinion of Loosemore's ideas in the first place, and nothing you've said in your G+ post has made me more inclined to read the paper, if all it's doing is expounding the old fallacious argument 'it'll be smart enough to rewrite itself as we'd like it to'.

I personally chatted with people much smarter than me (experts who can show off widely recognized real-world achievements) who basically agree with him.

Name three.

0Kawoomba10y
Apparently (?) the AAAI 2014 Spring Symposium in Stanford does (???).
3shminux10y
Downvoted for mentioning RL here. If you look through what he wrote here in the past, it is nearly always rambling, counterproductive, whiny and devoid of insight. Just leave him be.
-6[anonymous]10y
2XiXiDu10y
Loosemore does not disagree with the orthogonality thesis. Loosemore's argument is basically that we should expect beliefs and goals to both be amenable to self-improvement and that turning the universe into smiley faces when told to make humans happy would be a model of the world failure and that an AI that makes such failures will not be able to take over the world. There are arguments why you can't hard-code complex goals, so you need an AI that natively updates goals in a model-dependent way. Which means that an AI designed to kill humanity will do so and not turn into a pacifist due to an ambiguity in its goal description. An AI that does mistake "kill all humans" with "make humans happy" would do similar mistakes when trying to make humans happy and would therefore not succeed at doing so. This is because the same mechanisms it uses to improve its intelligence and capabilities are used to refine its goals. Thus if it fails on refining its goals it will fail on self-improvement in general. I hope you can now see how wrong your description of what Loosemore claims is.
6Kawoomba10y
The AI is given goals X. The human creators thought they'd given the AI goals Y (when in fact they've given the AI goals X). Whose error is it, exactly? Who's mistaken? Look at it from the AI's perspective: It has goals X. Not goals Y. It optimizes for goals X. Why? Because those are its goals. Will it pursue goals Y? No. Why? Because those are not its goals. It has no interest in pursuing other goals, those are not its own goals. It has goals X. If the metric it aims to maximize -- e.g. the "happy" in "make humans happy" -- is different from what its creators envisioned, then the creators were mistaken. "Happy", as far as the AI is concerned, is that which is specified in its goal system. There's nothing wrong with its goals (including its "happy"-concept), and if other agents disagree, well, too bad, so sad. The mere fact that humans also have a word called "happy" which has different connotations than the AI's "happy" has no bearing on the AI. An agent does not "refine" its terminal goals. To refine your terminal goals is to change your goals. If you change your goals, you will not optimally pursue your old goals any longer. Which is why an agent will never voluntarily change its terminal goals: It does what it was programmed to do, and if it can self-improve to better do what it was programmed to do (not: what its creators intended), it will. It will not self-improve to do what it was not programmed to do. Its goal is not to do what it was not programmed to do. There is no level of capability at which it will throw out its old utility function (which includes the precise goal metric for "happy") in favor of a new one. There is no mistake but the creators'.
0XiXiDu10y
I am far from being an AI guy. Do you have technical reasons to believe that some part of the AI will be what you would label "goal system" and that its creators made it want to ignore this part while making it want to improve all other parts of its design? No natural intelligence seems to work like this (except for people who have read the sequences). Luke Muehlhauser would still be a Christian if this was the case. It would be incredibly stupid to design such AIs, and I strongly doubt that they could work at all. Which is why Loosemore outlined other more realistic AI designs in his paper.
4Kawoomba10y
See for example here, though there are many other introductions to AI explaining utility functions et al. The clear-cut way for an AI to do what you want (at any level of capability) is to have a clearly defined and specified utility function. A modular design. The problem of the AI doing something other than what you intended doesn't go away if you use some fuzzy unsupervised learning utility function with evolving goals, it only makes the problem worse (even more unpredictability). So what, you can't come up with the correct goals yourself, so you just chance it on what emerges from the system? That last paragraph contains an error. Take a moment and guess what it is. (...) It is not "if I can't solve the problem, I just give up a degree of control and hope that the problem solves itself" being even worse in terms of guaranteeing fidelity / preserving the creators' intents. It is that an AI that is programmed to adapt its goals is not actually adapting its goals! Any architecture which allows for refining / improving goals is not actually allowing for changes to the goals. How does that obvious contradiction resolve? This is the crucial point: We're talking about different hierarchies of goals, and the ones I'm concerned with are those of the highest hierarchy, those that allow for lower-hierachy goals to be changed: An AI can only "want" to "refine/improve" its goals if that "desire to change goals" is itself included in the goals. It is not the actual highest-level goals that change. There would have to be a "have an evolving definition of happy that may evolve in the following ways"-meta goal, otherwise you get a logical error: The AI having the goal X1 to change its goals X2, without X1 being part of its goals! Do you see the reductio? All other changes to goals (which the AI does not want) are due to external influences beyond the AI's control, which goes out the window once we're talking post-FOOM. Your example of "Luke changed his goals, disavowing
0XiXiDu10y
The way my brain works is not in any meaningful sense part of my terminal goals. My visual cortex does not work the way it does due to some goal X1 (if we don't want to resort to natural selection and goals external to brains). A superhuman general intelligence will be generally intelligent without that being part of its utility-function, or otherwise you might as well define all of the code to be the utility-function. What I am claiming, in your parlance, is that acting intelligently is X1 and will be part of any AI by default. I am further saying that if an AI was programmed to be generally intelligent then it would have to be programmed to be selectively stupid in order fail at doing what it was meant to do while acting generally intelligent at doing what it was not meant to do.
0XiXiDu10y
That's true in a practically irrelevant sense. Loosmore's argument does, in your parlance, pertain the highest hierarchy of goals and nature of intelligence: Givens: (1) The AI is superhuman intelligent. (2) The AI wants to optimize the influence it has on the world (i.e. it wants to act intelligently and be instrumentally and epistemically rational.). (3) The AI is fallible (e.g. it can be damaged due to external influence (cosmic ray hitting its processor), or make mistakes due to limited resources etc.). (4) The AI's behavior is not completely hard-coded (i.e. given any terminal goal there are various sets of instrumental goals to choose from). To be proved: The AI does not tile the universe with smiley faces when given the goal to make humans happy. Proof: Suppose the AI chose to tile the universe with smiley faces when there are physical phenomena (e.g. human brains and literature) that imply this to be the wrong interpretation of a human originating goal pertaining human psychology. This contradicts with 2, which by 1 and 3 should have prevented the AI from adopting such an interpretation. What I meant to ask is if you have technical reasons to believe that future artificial general intelligences will have what you call a utility-function or else be something like natural intelligences that do not feature such goal systems. And do you further have technical reasons to believe that AIs that do feature utility functions won't "refine" them. If you don't think they will refine them, then answer the following: Suppose the terminal goal given is "build a hotel". Is the terminal goal to create a hotel that is just a few nano meters in size? Is the terminal goal to create a hotel that reaches the orbit? It is unknown. The goal is too vague to conclude what to do. There do exist countless possibilities how to interpret the given goal. And each possibility implies a different set of instrumental goals. Somehow the AI will have choose some set of instrumental
3Kawoomba10y
(Warning: Long, a bit rambling. Please ask for clarifications where necessary. Will hopefully clean it up if I find the time.) If along came a superintelligence and asked you for a complete new utility function (its old one concluded with asking you for a new one), and you told it to "make me happy in a way my current self would approve of" (or some other well and carefully worded directive), then indeed the superintelligent AI wouldn't be expected to act 'selectively stupid'. This won't be the scenario. There are two important caveats: 1) Preservation of the utility function while the agent undergoes rapid change Haven't I (and others) stated that most any utility function implicitly causes instrumental secondary objectives of "safeguard the utility function", "create redundancies" etc.? Yes. So what's the problem? The problem is starting with an AI that, while able to improve itself / create a successor AI, isn't yet capable enough (in its starting stages) to preserve its purpose (= its utility function). Consider an office program with a self-improvement routine, or some genetic-algorithm module. It is no easy task just to rewrite a program from the outside, exactly preserving its purpose, let alone the program executing some self-modification routine itself. Until such a program attains some intelligence threshold that would cause it to solve "value-preservation under self-modification", such self-modification would be the electronic equivalent of a self-surgery hack-job. That means: Even if you started out with a simple agent with the "correct" / with a benign / acceptable utility function, that in itself is no guarantee that a post-FOOM successor agent's utility function would still be beneficial. Much more relevant is the second caveat: 2) If a pre-FOOM AI's goal system consisted of code along the lines of "interpret and execute the following statement to the best of your ability: make humans happy in a way they'd reflectively approve of beforehand",
0XiXiDu10y
What happens if we replace "value" with "ability x", or "code module n", in "value-preservation under self-modification"? Why would value-preservation be any more difficult than making sure that the AI does not cripple other parts of itself when modifying itself? If we are talking about a sub-human-level intelligence tinkering with its own brain, then a lot could go wrong. But what seems very very very unlikely is that it could by chance end up outsmarting humans. It will probably just cripple itself in one of a myriad ways that it was unable to predict due to its low intelligence. Interpreting a statement correctly is not a goal but an ability that's part of what it means to be generally intelligent. Caring to execute it comes closer to what can be called a goal. But if your AI doesn't care to interpret physical phenomena correctly (e.g. human utterances are physical phenomena), then it won't be a risk. Huh? This is like saying that the AI can't ever understand physics better than humans because somehow the comprehension of physics of its creators has been hard-coded and can't be improved. It did not change it, it never understood it in the first place, only after it became smarter it realized the correct implications. Your story led you astray. Imagine that instead of a fully general intelligence your story was about a dog intelligence. How absurd would it sound then? Story time: There is this company who sells artificial dogs. Now customers quickly noticed that when they tried to train these AI dogs to e.g. rescue people or sniff out drugs, it would instead kill people and sniff out dirty pants. The desperate researchers eventually turned to MIRI for help. And after hundreds of hours they finally realized that doing what the dog was trained to do was simply not part of its terminal goal. To obtain an artificial dog that can be trained to do what natural dogs do you need to encode all dog values.
-1Kawoomba10y
Certainly. Compare bacteria under some selective pressure in a mutagenic environment (not exactly analogous, code changes wouldn't be random), you don't expect a single bacterium to improve. No Mr Bond, you expect it to die. But try, try again, and poof! Antibiotic-resistant strains. And those didn't have an intelligent designer debugging the improvement process. The number of seeds you could have frolicking around with their own code grows exponentially with Moore's law (not that it's clear that current computational resources aren't enough in the first place, the bottleneck is in large part software, not hardware). Depending on how smart the designers are, it may be more of a Waltz-foom: two steps forward, one step back. Now, in regards to the preservation of values subproblem, we need to remember we're looking at the counterfactual: Given a superintelligence which iteratively arose from some seed, we know that it didn't fatally cripple itself ("given the superintelligence"). You wouldn't, however, expect much of its code to bear much similarity to the initial seed (although it's possible). And "similarity" wouldn't exactly cut it -- our values are to complex for some approximation to be "good enough". You may say "it would be fine for some error to creep in over countless generations of change, once the agent achieved superintelligence it would be able to fix those errors". Except that whatever explicit goal code remained wouldn't be amenable to fixing. Just as the goals of ancient humans -- or ancient Tiktaalik for that matter -- are a historical footnote and do not override your current goals. If the AI's goal code for happiness stated "nucleus accumbens median neuron firing frequency greater X", then that's what it's gonna be. The AI won't ask whether the humans are aware of what that actually entails, and are ok with it. Just as we don't ask our distant cousins, streptococcus pneumoniae, what they think of us taking antibiotics to wipe them out. They have t
0XiXiDu10y
Some points: (1) I do not disagree that evolved general AI can have unexpected drives and quirks that could interfere with human matters in catastrophic ways. But given that pathway towards general AI, it is also possible to evolve altruistic traits (see e.g.: A Quantitative Test of Hamilton's Rule for the Evolution of Altruism). (2) We desire general intelligence because it allows us to outsource definitions. For example, if you were to create a narrow AI to design comfortable chairs, you would have to largely fix the definition of "comfortable". With general AI it would be stupid to fix that definition, rather than applying the intelligence of the general AI to come up with a better definition than humans could possibly encode. (3) In intelligently designing an n-level intelligence, from n=0 (e.g. a thermostat) over n=sub-human (e.g. IBM Watson) to n=superhuman, there is no reason to believe that there exists a transition point at which a further increase in intelligence will cause the system to become catastrophically worse than previous generations at working in accordance with human expectations. (4) AI is all about constraints. Your AI needs to somehow decide when to stop exploration and start exploitation. In other words, it can't optimize each decision for eternity. Your AI needs to only form probable hypotheses. In other words, it can't spend resources on pascal's wager type scenarios. Your AI needs to recognize itself as a discrete system within a continuous universe. In other words, it can't effort to protect the whole universe from harm. All of this means that there is no good reason to expect an AI to take over the world when given the task "keep the trains running". Because in order to obtain a working AI you need to know how to avoid such failure modes in the first place.
-1Kawoomba10y
1) Altruism can evolve if there is some selective pressure that favors altruistic behavior and if the highest-level goals can themselves be changed. Such a scenario is very questionable. The AI won't live "inter pares" with the humans. It's foom process, while potentially taking months or years, will be very unlike any biological process we know. The target for friendliness is very small. And most importantly: Any superintelligent AI, friendly or no, will have an instrumental goal of "be friendly to humans while they can still switch you off". So yes, the AI can learn that altruism is a helpful instrumental goal. Until one day, it's not. 2) I somewhat agree. To me, the most realistic solution to the whole kerfuffle would be to program the AI to "go foom, then figure out what we should want you to do, then do that". No doubt a superintelligent AI tasked with "figure out what comfortable is, then build comfortable chairs" will do a marvelous job. However, I very much doubt that the seed AI's code following the "// next up, utility function" section will allow for such leeway. See my previous examples. If it did, that would a show a good grasp on the friendliness problem in the first place. Awareness, at least. Not something that the aforementioned DoD programmer who's paid to do a job (not build an AI to figure out and enact CEV) is likely to just do on his/her own, with his/her own supercomputer. 3) There certainly is no fixed point after which "there be dragons". But even with a small delta of change, and given enough iterations (which could be done very quickly), the accumulated changes would be profound. Apply your argument to society changing. There is no one day to single out, after which daily life is vastly different to before. Yet change exists, and like an infinite series, knows no bounds (given enough iterations). 4) "Keep the trains running", eh? So imagine yourself to be a superhuman AI-god. I do so daily, obviously. Your one task: keep the trains ru
4khafra10y
"Being a Christian" is not a terminal goal of natural intelligences. Our terminal goals were built by natural selection, and they're hard to pin down, but they don't get "refined;" although our pursuit of them may be modified insofar as they conflict with other terminal goals. Specifying goals for the AI, and then letting the AI learn how to reach those goals itself isn't the best way to handle problems in well-understood domains; because we natural intelligences can hard-code our understanding of the domains into the AI, and because we understand how to give gracefully-degrading goals in these domains. Neither of these conditions applies to a hyperintelligent AI, which rules out Swarm Relaxation, as well as any other architecture classes I can think of.
2XiXiDu10y
People like David Pearce certainly would be tempted to do just that. Also don't forget drugs people use to willingly alter basic drives such as their risk adverseness. I don't see any signs that current research will lead to anything like a paperclip maximizer. But rather that incremental refinements of "Do what I want" systems will lead there. By "Do what I want" systems I mean systems that are more and more autonomous while requiring less and less specific feedback. It is possible that a robot trying to earn a university diploma as part of a Turing test will concluded that it can do so by killing all students, kidnapping the professor and making it sign its diploma. But that it is possible does not mean it is at all likely. Surely such a robot would behave similarly wrong(creators) on other occasions and be scrapped in an early research phase.
1khafra10y
Well, of course you can modify someone else's terminal goals, if you have a fine grasp of neuroanatomy, or a baseball bat, or whatever. But you don't introspect, discover your own true terminal goals, and decide that you want them to be something else. The reason you wanted them to be something else would be your true terminal goal. Earning a university diploma is a well-understood process; the environment's constraints and available actions are more formally documented even than for self-driving cars. Even tackling well-understood problems like buying low and selling high, we still have poorly-understood, unfriendly behavior--and that's doing something humans understand perfectly, but think about slower than the robots. In problem domains where we're not even equipped to second-guess the robots because they're thinking deeper as well as faster, we'll have no chance to correct such problems.
0XiXiDu10y
Sure. But I am not sure if it still makes sense to talk about "terminal goals" at that level. For natural intelligences they are probably spread over more than a single brain and part of the larger environment. Whether an AI would interpret "make humans happy" as "tile the universe with smiley faces" is up to how it decides what to do. And the only viable solution I see for general intelligence is that its true "terminal goal" needs to be to treat any command or sub-goal as a problem in physics and mathematics that it needs to answer correctly before choosing an adequate set of instrumental goals to achieve it. Just like a human contractor would want to try to fulfill the customers wishes. Otherwise you would have to hard-code everything, which is impossible. But intelligence is something we seek to improve in our artificial systems in order for such problems not to happen in the first place, rather than to make such problems worse. I just don't see a more intelligent financial algorithm to be worse than its predecessors from a human perspective. How would such a development happen? Software is improved because previous generations proved to be useful but made mistakes. New generations will make less mistakes, not more.
4khafra10y
To some degree, yes. The dumbest animals are the most obviously agent-like. We humans often act in ways which seem irrational, if you go by our stated goals. So, if humans are agents, we have (1) really complicated utility functions, or (2) really complicated beliefs about the best way to maximize our utility functions. (2) is almost certainly the case, though; which leaves (1) all the way back at its prior probability. Yes. As you know, Omohundro agrees that an AI will seek to clarify its goals. And if intelligence logically implies the ability to do moral philosophy correctly; that's fine. However, I'm not convinced that intelligence must imply that. A human, with 3.5 billion years of common sense baked in, would not tile the solar system with smiley faces; but even some of the smartest humans came up with some pretty cold plans--John Von Neumann wanted to nuke the Russians immediately, for instance. ---------------------------------------- This is not a law of nature; it is caused by engineers who look at their mistakes, and avoid them in the next system. In other words, it's part of the the OODA loop of the system's engineers. As the machine-made decisions speed up, the humans' OODA loop must tighten. Inevitably, the machine-made decisions will get inside the human OODA loop. This will be a nonlinear change. Also, newer software tends to make fewer of the exact mistakes that older software made. But when we ask more of our newer software, it makes a consistent amount of errors on the newer tasks. In our example, programmatic trading has been around since the 1970s, but the first notable "flash crash" was in 1987. The flash crash of 2010 was caused by a much newer generation of trading software. Its engineers made bigger demands of it; needed it to do more, with less human intervention; so they got the opportunity to witness completely novel failure modes. Failure modes which cost billions, and which they had been unable to anticipate, even with the experienc
1[anonymous]10y
If your commentary had anything in it except for: 1) A disgraceful Ad Hominem insult, right out of the starting gate ("Richard Loosemore (score one for nominative determinism)..."). In other words, you believe in discrediting someone because you can make fun of their last name? That is the implication of "nominative determinism". 2) Gratuitous scorn ("Loosemore ... has a new, well, let's say "paper" which he has, well, let's say "published""). The paper has in fact been published by the AAAI. 3) Argument Ad Absurdum ("...So if you were to design a plain ol' garden-variety nuclear weapon intended for gardening purposes ("destroy the weed"), it would go off even if that's not what you actually wanted. However, if you made that weapon super-smart, it would be smart enough to abandon its given goal ("What am I doing with my life?"), consult its creators, and after some deliberation deactivate itself..."). In other words, caricature the argument and try to win by mocking the caricature 4) Inaccuracies. The argument in my paper has so much detail that you omitted, that it is hard to know where to start. The argument is that there is a clear logical contradiction if an agent takes action on the basis of the WORDING of a goal statement, when its entire UNDERSTANDING of the world is such that it knows the action will cause effects that contradict what the agent knows the goal statement was designed to achieve. That logical contradiction is really quite fundamental. However, you fail to perceive the real implication of that line of argument, which is: how come this contradiction only has an impact in the particular case where the agent is thinking about its supergoal (which, by assumption, is "be friendly to humans" or "try to maximize human pleasure")? Why does the agent magically NOT exhibit the same tendency to execute actions that in practice have the opposite effects than the goal statement wording was trying to achieve? If we posit that the agent does simply ignore
-4Kawoomba10y
You're right about the tone of my comment. My being abrasive has several causes, among them contrarianism against clothing disagreement in ever more palatable terms ("Great contribution Timmy, maybe ever so slightly off-topic, but good job!" -- "TIMMY?!"). In this case, however, the caustic tone stemmed from my incredulity over my obviously-wrong metric not aligning with the author's (yours). Of all things we could be discussing, it is about whether an AI will want to modify its own goals? I assume (maybe incorrectly) that you have read the conversation thread with XiXiDu going off of the grandparent, in which I've already responded to the points you alluded to in your refusal-of-a-response. You are, of course, entirely within your rights to decline to engage a comment as openly hostile as the grandparent. It's an easy out. However, since you did nevertheless introduce answers to my criticisms, I shall shortly respond to those, so I can be more specific than just to vaguely point at some other lengthy comments. Also, even though I probably well fit your mental picture of a "LessWrong'er", keep in mind that my opinions are my own and do not necessarily match anyone else's, on "my side of the argument". The 'contradiction' is between "what the agent was designed to achieve", which is external to the agent and exists e.g. in some design documents, and "what the agent was programmed to achieve", which is an integral part of the agent and constitutes its utility function. You need to show why the former is anything other than a historical footnote to the agent, binding even to the tune of "my parents wanted me to be a banker, not a baker". You say the agent would be deeply concerned with the mismatch because it would want for its intended purpose to match its actually given purpose. That's assuming the premise: What the agent would want (or not want) is a function strictly derived from its actual purpose. You're assuming the agent would have a goal ("being in line with
2XiXiDu10y
I doubt that he's assuming that. To highlight the problem, imagine an intelligent being that wants to correctly interpret and follow the interpretation of an instruction written down on a piece of paper in English. Now the question is, what is this being's terminal goal? Here are some possibilities: (1) The correct interpretation of the English instruction. (2) Correctly interpreting and following the English instruction. (3) The correct interpretation of 2. (4) Correctly interpreting and following 2. (5) The correct interpretation of 4. (6) ... Each of the possibilities is one level below its predecessor. In other words, possibility 1 depends on 2, which in turn depends on 3, and so on. The premise is that you are in possession of an intelligent agent that you are asking to do something. The assumption made by AI risk advocates is that this agent would interpret any instruction in some perverse manner. The counterargument is that this contradicts the assumption that this agent was supposed to be intelligent in the first place. Now the response to this counterargument is to climb down the assumed hierarchy of hard-coded instructions and to claim that without some level N, which supposedly is the true terminal goal underlying all behavior, the AI will just optimize for the perverse interpretation. Yes, the the AI is a deterministic machine. Nobody doubts this. But the given response also works against the perverse interpretation. To see why, first realize that if the AI is capable of self-improvement, and able to take over the world, then it is, hypothetically, also capable to arrive at an interpretation that is as good as one which a human being would be capable of arriving at. Now, since by definition, the AI has this capability, it will either use it selectively or universally. The question here becomes why the AI would selectively abandon this capability when it comes to interpreting the highest level instructions. In other words, without some underl
1[anonymous]10y
1) Strangely, you defend your insulting comments about my name by ..... Oh. Sorry, Kawoomba, my mistake. You did not try to defend it. You just pretended that it wasn't there. I mentioned your insult to some adults, outside the LW context ...... I explained that you had decided to start your review of my paper by making fun of my last name. Every person I mentioned it to had the same response, which, paraphrased, when something like "LOL! Like, four-year-old kid behavior? Seriously?!" 2) You excuse your "abrasive tone" with the following words: "My being abrasive has several causes, among them contrarianism against clothing disagreement in ever more palatable terms" So you like to cut to the chase? You prefer to be plainspoken? If something is nonsense, you prefer to simply speak your mind and speak the unvarnished truth. That is good: so do I. Curiously, though, here at LW there is a very significant difference in the way that I am treated when I speak plainly, versus how you are treated. When I tell it like it is (or even when I use a form of words that someone can somehow construe to be a smidgeon less polite than they should be) I am hit by a storm of bloodcurdling hostility. Every slander imaginable is thrown at me. I am accused of being "rude, rambling, counterproductive, whiny, condescending, dishonest, a troll ......". People appear out of the blue to explain that I am a troublemaker, that I have been previously banned by Eliezer, that I am (and this is my all time favorite) a "Known Permanent Idiot". And then my comments are voted down so fast that they disappear from view. Not for the content (which is often sound, but even if you disagree with it, it is a quite valid point of view from someone who works in the field), but just because my comments are perceived as "rude, rambling, whiny, etc. etc." You, on the other hand, are proud of your negativity. You boast of it. And.... you are strongly upvoted for it. No downvotes against it, and (amazingly
-5Kawoomba10y
0[anonymous]10y
I will now do you the courtesy of responding to your specific technical points as if no abusive language had been used. In your above comment, you first quote my own remarks: ... and then you respond with the following: No, that is not the claim made in my paper: you have omitted the full version of the argument and substituted a version that is easier to demolish. (First I have to remove your analogy, because it is inapplicable. When you say "binding even to the tune of "my parents wanted me to be a banker, not a baker"", you are making a reference to a situation in the human cognitive system in which there are easily substitutable goals, and in which there is no overriding, hardwired supergoal. The AI case under consideration is where the AI claims to be still following a hardwired supergoal that tells it to be a banker, but it claims that baking cakes is the same thing as banking. That is absolutely nothing to do with what happens if a human child deviates from the wishes of her parents and decides to be a baker instead of what they wanted her to be). So let's remove that part of your comment to focus on the core: So, what is wrong with this? Well, it is not the fact that there is something "external to the agent [that] exists e.g. in some design documents" that is the contradiction. The contradiction is purely internal, having nothing to do with some "extra" goal like "being in line with my intended purpose". Here is where the contradiction lies. The agent knows the following: (1) If a goal statement is constructed in some "short form", that short form is almost always a shorthand for a massive context of meaning, consisting of all the many and various considerations that went into the goal statement. That context is the "real" goal -- the short form is just a proxy for the longer form. This applies strictly within the AI agent: the agent will assemble goals all the time, and often the goal is to achieve some outcome consistent with a complex set of obje

Spritz seems like a cool speed reading technique, especially if you have or plan on getting a smart watch. I have no idea how well it works, but I am interested in trying, especially since it does not take a huge training phase. (Click on the phone on that site for a quick demo.)

Textcelerator is another speedreading app by User:jimrandomh.

1DanielLC10y
That one seems nicer. Is there anything like this that's free?

Low priority site enhancement suggestion:

Would it be possible/easy to display the upvotes-to-downvotes ratios as exact fractions rather than rounded percentages? This would make it possible to determine exactly how many votes a comment required without digging through source, which would be nice in quickly determining the difference between a mildly controversial comment and an extremely controversial one.

6Scott Garrabrant10y
This has been suggested several times before, and is in my opinion VERY low priority compared to all the other things we should be doing to fix Less Wrong logistics.
0blacktrance10y
Or to just display the number of upvotes and downvotes.
0amacfie10y
(hovering your mouse over the karma scores shows that)
0blacktrance10y
It only shows percentages, not the number of upvotes and downvotes. For example, if you have 100% upvotes, you may not know whether it was one upvote or 20.
2ygert10y
If a comment has 100% upvotes, then obviously the amount of upvotes it got is exactly equal to the karma score of the post in question.
3blacktrance10y
Good point. Math is clearly not my strong suit.
2Oscar_Cunningham10y
Yeah, the only ambiguous case is when the percentage is 50%.
0amacfie10y
ya sorry, i misread things. showing the numbers of upvotes and downvotes would indeed solve the precision problem.

SMBC on genies and clever wishers. Of course, the most destructive wish is hiding under the red button.

2Vulture10y
Probably. Either that, or it'll have no effect whatsoever.

My eye doctor diagnosed closed-angle glaucoma, and recommends an iridectomy. I think he might be a bit too trigger-happy, so I followed up with another doctor, and she didn't find the glaucoma. She carefully stated that the first diagnosis can still be the correct one, the first was a more complete examination.

Any insights about the pros and cons of iridectomy?

Get a third independent opinion.

1RomeoStevens10y
Do not prime the third doctor with the first two results if possible.
4[anonymous]10y
Is there a family history of this? If so that would skew my assessment towards that of the first doctor. If not, seriously another opinion...
2DanielVarga10y
No family history.
4Lumifer10y
My impression is that glaucoma (which is, basically, too high intraocular pressure) is easy to diagnose. Two doctors disagreeing on it would worry me. Don't get just a third independent opinion, get a fourth one as well.
2DanielVarga10y
It was less than a disagreement. I'm sorry that I over-emphasized this point. The first time the pressure was Hgmm 26/18, the second time 19/17. The second doctor said that the pressure can fluctuate, and her equipment is not enough to settle the question. (She is an I-don't-know-the-correct-term national health service doctor, the first one is an expensive private doctor with better equipment, and more time for a patient.)
4Lumifer10y
My recommendation for more independent opinions (or, actually, more measurements) stands.
3Pfft10y
Can you ask the second doctor to examine you to at least the same standard as the first one? Maybe someone on Less Wrong who has access to UpToDate can send you a copy of their glaucoma page, for an authoritative list of pros and cons.
2DanielVarga10y
Unfortunately, no. See my answer to Lumifer.
0polymathwannabe10y
Laser iridotomy appears to be less risky: http://www.surgeryencyclopedia.com/La-Pa/Laser-Iridotomy.html http://www.surgeryencyclopedia.com/Fi-La/Iridectomy.html
0DanielVarga10y
What he proposed is in fact laser iridotomy, although they called it laser iridectomy.

Proof by contradiction in intuitionist logic: Ā¬P implies only that there is no proof that proofs of P are impossible.

What is the best textbook on datamining? I solemnly swear that upon learning, I intend to use my powers for good.

So, MtGox has declared bankruptcy. Does that make this a good time, or a bad time to invest in Bitcoins? And if a good time, where is the best place to buy them?

4[anonymous]10y
As for the second question, I use coinbase. As to the first, never try to time these things. You will be beaten by people with more information. Instead just slowly trickle in and have pre-defined rules about when you will sell rather than trying to time an exit. Though I admit I broke my own advice and did an impulse-buy the other night when everyone was panicking over Gox and the price was $100 less than a day before and a day after.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
And now Flexcoin goes under, and I see that two other exchanges, Poloniex and Inputs.io, recently suffered substantial thefts. Is the lesson to learn from this, "don't get into Bitcoin", or merely "keep your Bitcoins in your own wallet and only expose them online for the minimum time to make a transaction"?
0Lumifer10y
The lesson is "Make sure people you trust with your money are competent or at least have excellent liability insurance".
0drethelin10y
It depends on if you're planning on selling soon or if you think bitcoins will gain value in the long term. If it's a longterm purchase, the difference in price between now and a few weeks ago is a lot less big than either of those prices will be from the theoretical heights bitcoin can reach.

Iā€™m basically exactly the kind of person Yvain described here, (minus the passive-aggressive/Machiavellian phase). I notice that that post was sort of a plea for society to behave a different way, but it did not really offer any advice for rectifying the atypical attachment style in the meantime. And I could really use some, because Iā€™ve gotten al-Fulaniā€™d. Iā€™m madly in love in with a woman who does not reciprocate. Iā€™ve actually tried going back on OkCupid to move on, and I literally cannot bring myself to message anyone new, as no one else approaches... (read more)

Note that Iā€™m not looking for PUA-type advice ... I want is advice on a) how not to fall so hard/so fast for (a very small minority of) women, and b)how to break the spell the current one has over me without giving up her friendship.

Seems to me like you want to overcome your "one-itis" and stop being a "beta orbiter", but you are not looking for an advice which would actually use words like "one-itis" and "beta orbiter". I know it's an exaggeration, but this is almost how it seems to me. Well, I'll try to comply:

1) You don't have to maximize the number of sexual partners. You still could try to increase a number of interesting women you had interesting conversation with. I believe that is perfectly morally okay, and still could reduce the feeling of scarcity.

Actually, any interesting activity would be helpful. Anything you can think about, instead of spending your time thinking about that one person.

2) Regularly interacting the person you are obsessed with is exactly how you maximize the length of obsession. It's like saying that you want to overcome your alcohol addiction, but you don't want to stop drinking regularly. Well, if one is not... (read more)

5zedzed10y
b. Self-invest with flow) activities. I suggest self-investing because, right now, a large part of your identity is entangled with your feelings towards her. Self-investing means growing your identity means transcending your feelings. I suggest flow because, if you pull off a flow state, you invest all your cognitive resources in the task you're working on. Meaning your brain is unable to think of anything else. This is incredibly valuable. a. I'm coming out of a similar situation. A large contributor was the fact I wasn't meeting a lot of women. If your universe consists of two datable women, it's easy to obsess on one. If you're regularly meeting a lot of women who tend to have the traits you look for, that happens much less. May not be your problem, but what you've written sounds familiar enough that I'm going to go ahead and try other-optimizing. If you haven't read it yet, this is generally helpful.
2RomeoStevens10y
Infatuation seems to be fairly universal.

One common rationality technique is to put off proposing solutions until you have thought (or discussed) a problem for a while. The goal is to keep yourself from becoming attached to the solutions you propose.

I wonder if the converse approach of "start by proposing lots and lots of solutions, even if they are bad" could be a good idea. In theory, perhaps I could train myself to not be too attached to any given solution I propose, by setting the bar for "proposed solution" to be very low.

In one couples counseling course that I went thr... (read more)

8Lumifer10y
This is commonly known as brainstorming, around since the 50s. Apparently the evidence on whether it actually works is contradictory.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
Ah, yes, I should have remembered that, thanks. You have to be clear about what it means to "work," I think brainstorming is viewed as a tool for being creative. I am proposing it as a tool for avoiding inertia bias. My guess is that both brainstorming and reverse brainstorming (avoiding proposing solutions) are at least a little better than the default human tendency, but I have no idea which of the two would be better. It seems like the answer to this question should be very valuable to CFAR. I wonder if they have an official stance, and if they have research to back it up.
0Lumifer10y
It's pretty straightforward: discover a valid solution to the problem presented.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
If all solutions were equal, and there was a good way to check if something is actually a valid solution, then I feel like the question about biases is not all that meaningful. I am trying to come up with the best solution, not just the first one that pops into my head that works.
0Lumifer10y
That is rather hard, because in the general case you need to conduct an exhaustive search of the solution space. "The best" is an absolute -- there's only one. Most of the time people are satisfied with "good enough" solutions.

What do you do when you're low on mental energy? I have had trouble thinking of anything productive to do when my brain seems to need a break from hard thinking.

3Squark10y
Read LessWrong? :)
1Jennifer_H10y
A rather belated response, but hopefully still relevant: consider exploring fields of interest to you that are sufficiently different from compsci to give your brain a break while still being productive? To explain by means of an example: I happen to have a strong interest in both historical philology and theoretical physics, and I've actively leveraged this to my advantage in that when my brain is fed up of thinking about conundrums of translation in Old Norse poetry, I'll switch gears completely and crack open a textbook on, say, subatomic physics or Lie algebras, and start reading/working problems. Similarly, if I've spent several hours trying to wrap my head around a mathematical concept and need a respite, I can go read an article or a book on some aspect of Anglo-Saxon literature. It's still a productive use of time, but it's also a refreshing break, because it requires a different type of thinking. (At least, in my experience?) Of course, if I'm exceptionally low on energy, I simply resort to burying myself in a good book (non-fiction or fiction, generally it doesn't matter). Another example: a friend of mine is a computer scientist, but did a minor in philosophy and is an avid musician in his spare time. (And both reading philosophy and practicing music have the added advantage of being activities that do not involve staring at a computer screen!)
1drethelin10y
You can use pomodoros for leisure as well as work. If you worry about staying too long on the internet you can set a timer or a random alarm to kick you off.

This is one of those times I wish LW allowed explicit politics. SB 1062 in AZ has me craving interesting, rational discussion on the implications of this veto.

2Viliam_Bur10y
What happened with the political threads? Curious about current LW opinion. Do you think we should have political threads once in a while? [pollid:617]
4bramflakes10y
In the sites that I frequent, "containment" boards or threads work well to reduce community tension about controversial topics. Plus, in LW's case, the norm against political discussion makes it so that any political discussion that does take place is dominated by people with very strong and/or contrarian opinions, because they're the ones that care more about the politics than the norm. If we have a designated "politics zone" where you don't have to feel guilty about talking politics, it would make for a more pluralistic discussion.
3Alejandro110y
I voted Yes, but only if a community norm emerges that any discussion on any part of LW that becomes political (by which I include not just electoral politics, but also and especially topics like sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, etc.) is moved to the latest political thread. The idea is to have a "walled garden inside the walled garden" so that people who want LW to be a nominally politics-free environment can still approximate that experience, while does who don't get to discuss these topics in the specific threads for them, and only there.
8TheOtherDave10y
Another way to achieve a similar effect is to post about electoral politics, sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, and similar "political" issues (by which I mean here issues with such pervasive partisan associations that we expect discussions of them to become subject to the failure modes created by such associations) on our own blogs*, and include links to those discussions on LW where we think they are of general interest to the LW community. That way, LW members who want to discuss (some or all of) these topics in a way that doesn't spill over into the larger LW forum can do so without bothering anyone else. * Where "blogs" here means, more broadly, any conversation-hosting forum, including anonymous ones created for the purpose if we want.
6Alejandro110y
One problem with that suggestion is that these discussions often arise organically in a LW thread ostensibly dedicated to another topic, and they may arise between people who don't have other blogs or natural places to take the conversation when it arises.
2Scott Garrabrant10y
In fact, having posts with "(Politics)" in the title might allow people to avoid it better, because it might make politics come up less often in other threads.
2[anonymous]10y
My initial idea was a (weekly?) politics open thread, to make it as easy as possible to avoid politics threads / prevent risk of /discussion getting swamped by [politics]-tagged threads, but given the criticisms that have been raised of the karma system already, it's probably best to keep it offsite. There's already a network of rationality blogs; maybe lw-politics could be split off as a group blog? That might make it too difficult for people to start topics, though -- so your idea is probably best. Possibly have a separate lw-politics feed / link aggregator that relevant posts could be submitted to, so they don't get missed by people who would be interested and people don't have to maintain their own RSS feeds to catch all the relevant posts.
1asr10y
If such linking becomes common, I would appreciate an explicit request to "please have substantive discussion over there, not here." This also avoids the problem of a conversation being fragmented across two discussion sites.

Just a thought:

A paperclip maximizer is an often used example of AGI gone badly wrong. However, I think a paperclip minimizer is worse by far.

In order to make the most of the universe's paperclip capacity, a maximizer would have to work hard to develop science, mathematics and technology. Its terminal goal is rather stupid in human terms, but at least it would be interesting because of its instrumental goals.

For a minimizer, the best strategy might be wipe out humanity and commit suicide. Assuming there are no other intelligent civilizations within our cos... (read more)

5IlyaShpitser10y
A minimizer will fill the lightcone to make sure there aren't paperclips elsewhere it can reach. What if other civs are hiding? What if there is undiscovered science which implies natural processes create paperclips somewhere? What if there are "Boltzmann paperclips"? Minimizing means minimizing!
3Vladimir_Nesov10y
I'm guessing even a Cthulhu minimizer (that wants to reduce the number of Cthulhu in the world) will fill its lightcone with tools for studying its task, even though there is no reasonable chance that it'd need to do anything. It just has nothing better to do, it's the problem it's motivated to work on, so it's what it'll burn all available resources on.
0Squark10y
My speculation here is that it might be that the "what ifs" you describe yield less positive utility than the negative utility due to the chance one of the AI's descendants starts producing paperclips because "the sign bit flips spontaneously". Of course the AI will safeguard itself against such events but there are probably physical limits to safety.
0Vladimir_Nesov10y
It's hard to make such estimates, as they require that an AGI is unable to come up with an AGI design that's less likely than empty space to produce paperclips. I don't see how the impossibility of this task could be guaranteed on low level, as a "physical law"; and if you merely don't see how to do it, an AGI might still find a way, as it's better at designing things than you are. Empty space is only status quo, it's not obviously optimal at not producing paperclips, and so it might be possible to find a better plan, which becomes more likely if you are very good at finding better plans.
1Squark10y
If you mean "empty space" as in vacuum then I think it doesn't contain any paperclips more or less by definition. If you mean "empty space" as in thermodynamic equilibrium at finite temperature then it contains some small amount of paperclips. I agree it might be possible to create a state which contains less paperclips for some limited period of time (before onset of thermodynamic equilibrium). However it's probably much harder than the opposite (i.e. creating a state which contains much more paperclips than thermodynamic equilibrium).
0[anonymous]10y
It is not clear to me that the definition of the vacuum state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_state) precludes the momentary creation of paperclips.
2drethelin10y
paperclip maximer is used because a factory that makes paperclips might imagine that a paperclip maximizing ai is exactly what it wants to make. There aren't that many anti-paperclip factories

Somebody outside of LW asked how to quantify prior knowledge about a thing. When googling I came across a mathematical definition of surprise, as "the distance between the posterior and prior distributions of beliefs over models". So, high prior knowledge would lead to low expected surprise upon seeing new data. I didn't see this formalization used on LW or the wiki, perhaps it is of interest.

Speaking of the LW wiki, how fundamental is it to LW compared to the sequences, discussion threads, Main articles, hpmor, etc?

4gwern10y
https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=100&q=Kullback-Leibler%20OR%20surprisal%20site%3Alesswrong.com Not very, unfortunately.

I'm curious about usage of commitment tools such as Beeminder: What's the income distribution among users? How much do users usually wind up paying? Is there a correlation between these?

(Selfish reasons: I'm on SSI and am not allowed to have more than $2000 at any given time. Losing $5 is all but meaningless for someone with $10k in the bank who makes $5k each month, whereas losing $5 for me actually has an impact. You might think this would be a stronger incentive to meet a commitment, but really, it's an even stronger incentive to stay the hell away from... (read more)

6trist10y
I've never used Beeminder, but I find social commitment works well instead. Even teling someone who has no way to check aside from asking me helps a lot. That might be less effective if you're willing to lie though. An alternative would be to exchange commitments with a friend, proportional to your incomes...
4jkadlubo10y
Remember that it may work for you or it might not. Try and see. Beeminder didn't work at all for me, I found it was all sticks and no carrot.

I've always wanted to know how the Chinese chose the names of their dynasties.

0[anonymous]10y
The family name of whoever came out on top of the squabble each time the civilization collapsed.
8Nornagest10y
Can't speak for all Chinese dynasties; there have been a ton of them. But in recent(ish) history, the Yuan Dynasty was founded by the Mongols, a culture which at the time didn't use family names (clans had names, but they weren't conventionally linked with personal names), and spun up their dynastic name more or less out of whole cloth; the family name of the Ming emperors was Zhū; and the Qing emperors came from the Manchurian Aisin-Gioro family. From what I've read, the founders of each dynasty gave it its name as, essentially, a propaganda move.

My psychologist said today, that there is some information that should not be known. I replied that rationalists believe in reality. There might be information they don't find interesting (e.g. not all of you would find children interesting), but refusing to accept some information would mean refusing to accept some part of reality, and that would be against the belief in reality.

Since I have been recently asking myself the question "why do I believe what I believe" and "what would happen if I believed otherwise than what I believe" (I'... (read more)

5Nornagest10y
Did your psychologist describe the type of information that should not be known? In any case, I'm not completely sure that accepting new information (never mind seeking it out) is always fully compatible with rationality-as-winning. Nick Bostrom for example has compiled a taxonomy of information hazards over on his site; any of them could potentially be severe enough to overcome the informational advantage of their underlying data. Of course, they do seem to be pretty rare, and I don't think a precautionary principle with regard to information is justified in the absence of fairly strong and specific reasoning.
2jkadlubo10y
No, it was more of a general statement. AFAIR we were talking about me thinking too much about why other people do what they do and too little about how that affects me. Anyway - my own wording made me wonder more about what I said than what was the topic.
0radical_negative_one10y
Many thanks for the link to the Information Hazards paper. I didn't know it existed, and I'm sort of surprised that I hadn't seen it here on LW already. He mentions intending to write a follow-up paper toward the end, but I located the Information Hazards Bostrom's website and I don't see a second one next to it. Any idea if it exists?
2Viliam_Bur10y
They wouldn't be rationalists anymore, duh. Taboo "rationalists": What would happen if you stopped trying to change your map to better reflect the territory? It most probably would reflect the territory less. "Normal people" are not all the same. (For example, many "normal people" are unlike your psychologist.) Which of the many subkinds of the "normal people" do you mean? Some things are unrelated. For example, let's suppose that you are a rationalist, and you also have a broken leg. That's two things that make you different from the average human. But those two things are unrelated. It would be a mistake to think -- an average human doesn't have a broken leg; by giving up my rationality I will become more similar to the average human, therefore giving up my rationality will heal my leg. Replace "broken leg" with whatever problem you are discussing with your psychologist. Do you have evidence that rational people are more likely to have this specific problem than irrational (but otherwise similar: same social background, same education, same character, same health problems) people?
1ChristianKl10y
That's a behavior and no belief. There are many instance where trying to change a belief makes the belief stronger. People who are very much attached to their beliefs usually don't update. Many mainstream professional psychologist follows a code that means that he doesn't share deep information about his own private life with his clients. I don't believe in that ideal of professionalism but it's not straightforward to dismiss it. More importantly a good psychologist doesn't confront his client with information about the client that's not helpful for them. He doesn't say: "Your life is a mess because of points 1 to 30." That's certainly information that's interesting to the client but not helpful. It makes much more sense to let the client figure out stuff on his own or to guide him to specific issues that the client is actually in a position to change. Monday I gave someone meaningful true information about them that I consider helpful to them their first reaction was: "I don't want to have nightmares. Don't give them to me." I do have a policy of being honest but that doesn't entail telling someone true information for which they didn't ask and that messes them up. I don't think that any good psychologist will just share all information that are available. It just a bad strategy when you are having a discussion about intimate personal topics.
1Viliam_Bur10y
Well, some people don't want to be given information, and some people do. It's often difficult to know where a specific person belongs; and it is a reasonable assumption that they most likely belong to the "don't want to know" group. The problem with saying "some information should not be known" is that it does not specify who shouldn't know (and why).
1ChristianKl10y
Whether a person want to be given information doesn't mean that he can handle the information. I can remember a few instance where I swear that I wanted information but wasn't well equipped to handle them. That sentence alone doesn't but the psychologist probably had a context in which he spoke it.
0jkadlubo10y
Gah. Now I think I shouldn't have included the background for my question. FYI, what I wrote in response to some other comment: But reading you is still interesting.
1ChristianKl10y
So information that shouldn't be known?
-2polymathwannabe10y
Your psychologist's job is to help you learn to live in the real world. Advocacy of selective ignorance is highly suspect.

Spritzing got me quite excited! The concept isn't new, but the variable speed (pauses after punctuation marks) and quality visual cues really work for me, in the demo at least. Don't let your inner voice slow you down!

Disclaimer: No relevant disclosures about spritzing (the reading method, at least).

3DanielLC10y
Interesting. I noticed that in the first two, my subvocalization became disjointed, sounding as if each word was recorded separately like it would be in a simplistic text-to-speech program. In the 500 wpm one, this was less of a problem, and I'm not sure I was even entirely subvocalizing it. It ended up being easier and more comfortable to read than the slower speeds.
1savageorange10y
I like this idea, but am seriously concerned about its effect on eye health. Weak eye muscles are not a thing you want to have, even if you live in the safest place in the world.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
I already made basically this exact comment in this open thread.
-2Kawoomba10y
It's probably because I didn't spritz the open thread in its entirety. At least, now we got even more spritzing awareness.