Can someone sketch me the Many-Worlds version of what happens in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment? Does a last-minute choice to preserve or erase the which-path information affect which "worlds" decohere "away from" the experimenter? If so, how does that go, in broad outline? If not, what?

Would anybody listen to an almost-almost-molested woman? It's not awful or something, and I do not need it, would probably feel down regardless of that thing, but still. Please.

Edit: thank you a lot. I have written to some of people who agreed to listen, and if anything rough happens to anybody here, I could listen, too.

PSA:

I just realized that /u/Elo's posts haven't been showing up in /r/Discussion because of all the downvoting from Eugene_Nier's sockpuppet accounts. So, I've gone back to read through the sequence of posts they're in the middle of. You may wish to do the same.

Meta:

I was going to leave this as a comment on Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out..., but I figured it's different enough to stand on it's own. It’s also mostly a corollary though, and just links Elo’s post to existing ideas without saying much new, and so probably isn’t worth it’s own top-level post. This isn’t likely to be actionable either, since I basically come to the conclusion that it’s ok to take down the Chesterton Fence that LW has already long ago taken down.

This might be a good comment to skim rather than read, since the examples are mostly to completely define precisely what I’m getting at, and you're likely already familiar with them. I've divided this into sections for easy skimming. I’m posting only because I thought the connections were small but interesting insights.

Also meta: this took about 2.5 hrs to write and edit.

TL;DR of Elo’s “Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out...” post:

Elo proposes that nerd culture encourages people to apply tact to anything they hear, and so it becomes less necessary to be tiptoe around sensitive issues for fear of being misunderstood. Nerds have a tact filter between their ears and brain, to soften incoming ideas.

"Normal" culture, on the other hand, encourages people to apply tact to anything they say, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly look for charitable interpretations, for fear of a misunderstanding. Non-nerds have a tact filter between their brain and mouth, to soften outgoing ideas.

They made several pretty diagrams, but they all look something like this:

speaker’s brain -> [filter] -> speaker’s mouth -> listener’s ears -> [filter] -> listener’s brain

The thing I want to expand Elo’s idea to cover:

What’s going on in someone’s head when they encounter something like the trolley problem, and say “you can’t just place a value on a human life”? EA’s sometimes get backlash for even weighing the alternatives. Why would anyone refuse to even engage with the problem, and merely empathize with the victims? After all, the analytic half of our brains, not the emotional parts, are what solves such problems.

I propose that this can be thought of as a tact filter for one’s own thoughts. If that’s not clear, let me give a couple rationalist examples of the sort of thing I think is going on in people’s heads, to help triangulate meaning:

• HPMOR touches on this a couple times with McGonagall. She avoids even thinking of disturbing topics.

• Some curiosity stoppers/semantic stopsigns are due to avoiding asking one’s self unpleasant questions.

• The idea of separate magisteria comes from an aversion to thinking critically about religion.

• Several biases and fallacies. The just world fallacy is result of an aversion to more accurate mental models.

• Politics is the mindkiller, so I’ll leave you to come up with your own examples from that domain. Identity politics is especially ripe with examples.

Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out, Filter while in, Filter while out:

So, I propose that Elo’s model can be expanded by adding this:

Some subcultures encourage people to apply tact to anything they think, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly filter what we say, for fear of a misunderstanding. Such people have a tact filter between different parts of their brain, to filter the internal monologue.

That corollary doesn’t add much that hasn’t already been discussed to death on LW. However, we can phrase things in such a way as to put people at ease, and encourage them to relax their internal and/or outgoing filters, while maintaining their ingoing filter. Adapting Elo's model to capture this, we get this:

future speaker’s thought -> [filter] -> speaker’s cashed thoughts -> [filter] -> speaker’s mouth -> listener’s ears -> [filter] -> listener’s thoughts -> [filter] -> past listener’s cashed thoughts

Note that both the speaker and the listener have internal filters. We can think or hear something, and then immediately reject it for being horrible, even if it’s true.

Ideally, everyone would avoid filtering their own ideas internally, but apply tact when speaking and listening, and then strip any filters from memes they encounter while unpacking them. Without this model, perhaps us endorsing removing the 2 internal filters was a bit of a Chesterton Fence.

However, with the other 2 filters firmly in place, we should be able to safely remove the internal filters in both the thoughts of the speaker and listener. If the listener believes the filter between the speaker and their mouth is clouding information transfer, they might even ask for Crocker's rules. This is dangerous though, since removing redundant backup leaves only their own ear->brain filter as a single point of failure.

Practical applications:

To encourage unconstrained thinking in others, perhaps we can vocally strip memes passed to us of obfuscating tact if there is a backup filter in place and if we’ve already shown that we agree with the ideas. (If we don’t agree, obviously this would look like an attack on their argument, and would backfire.)

That sounds like something out of the boring advice repository, but providing social proof is probably much more powerful than merely telling people that they shouldn’t filter their internal monologue. It probably doesn’t feel like censorship from the inside. If we want to raise the sanity waterline, we’ll have to foster cultures where we all provide positive reinforcement for each other’s good epistemic hygiene.

Just a note, posting here because some people might have participated in something similar (if so, what were your impressions?):

...Unfortunately, at the all-Soviet [mathematics] Olympiads they failed to implement another idea, which A. N. Kolmogorov put forward more than once: to begin one of the days of the contest with a lecture on a previously unfamiliar, to the participants, topic and then offer several problems which would build on the ones considered during the lecture. (Such an experiment was successfully carried out only once […] in 1985 […] the lecture was on geometric probabilities.)

N.Vasilyev, A.A.Yegorov. Problems of All-Soviet mathematical olympiads. - Moscow, 1988. - p. 14 of 286.

Applying probabilistic thinking to fears about terrorism in this piece for the 16th largest newspaper in the US, reaching over 320K with its printed version and over 5 million hits on its website per month. The title was chosen by the newspaper, and somewhat occludes the points. The article is written from a liberal perspective to play into the newspaper's general bent, and its main point was to convey the benefits of applying probabilistic thinking to evaluating political reality.

Edit Updated somewhat based on conversation with James Miller here

Is anyone in a position to offer some criticism (or endorsement) of the work produced at Gerwin Schalk's lab?

http://www.schalklab.org/

I attended a talk given by Dr. Schalk in April 2015, where he described a new method of imaging the brain, which appeared to be a better-resolution fMRI (the image in the talk was a more precise image of motor control of the arm, showing the path of neural activity over time). I was reminded of it because Dr. Schalk spent quite a bit of time emphasizing doing the probability correctly and optimizing the code, which seemed relevant when the recent criticism of fMRI software was published.

If nomads united into large hordes to go to war, shouldn't the change in the number of men living together have had some noticeable psychological effect on the warriors? I mean, the Wikipedia says that "a Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships", and surely they had to co-work with lots more people than during peace?

*Longtime lurker, and I've managed to fight akrasia and geniune shortage of time to put my thoughts down into a post. I think it does deserve a post, but I don't have the karma or the confidence to create a top-level post.

Comments and feedback really welcome and desired : I've gotten tired of being intellectually essentially alone.*

There are many urgent problems in the world yet Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) should be considered the defining crisis to humanity. For example, increasing drug-resistance in pathogens , reducing populations of endangered species, an increase in fundamentalism, rapid increase in lifestyle diseases, increasing inequality, etc.

The key difference is that solutions to the other problems can be either technological or economic. Even solutions to fundamentalism usually involve development and infrastructure deployment, which is a difficult, but known, process. Reducing populations of endangered species looks more insoluble, but it’s rarely land itself that’s in shortage. Better monitoring and surveillance can greatly reduce poaching.

AGW however requires, in addition to technological and economic solutions, solutions at the social, psychological, and, fundamentally, human level. Now this sounds true only in a wishy-washy way, so I’m going to back them up one by one.

AGW of course requires technological solutions. The main emitters of GHGs are electricity generation, industry and transport sector. All of these are using fossil-fuel for the energy, so we need low-carbon sources of energy. We also waste a lot of energy in various ways, and it’s a lot cheaper to not consume that unit of energy than to generate a green unit of energy, so energy efficiency is needed.

Low-carbon energy sources are relatively mature with well-known costs. Aside from certain rare metal shortages, a worldwide rollout of low-carbon energy sources is eminently possible.

Energy efficient generation, transmission and consumption devices can allow us to reduce energy consumed by half, at max. There are hard limits to the effectiveness of energy efficiency, so new low-carbon energy deployment is quite necessary.

Basically, there are technological solutions, which require gigantic capital outlay, thus passing it on to the economic sector. AGW of course also requires economic solutions, primarily for the massive capital outlay. Since low-carbon energy is more expensive than fossil-fuel energy, end-consumers will have to pay the costs in some form or the other. This would have to be accounted for by economic growth.

More insidious, however, is the requirement for continuous expansion of economy for it to remain stable. Also, economic growth and energy consumption growth are tightly linked – more energy made available creates economic value, and more affluent consumers demand more energy-intensive goods and services.

So then, we would need a way to have economic growth, without carbon-intensive energy growth – a process called decoupling. One fundamental problem with a substitution of fossil-fuel by low-carbon energy sources is the sheer scale of the operation. Indeed, “even if solar panels are as cheap as dinner plates and 100% efficient, it would still take a few decades to replace current energy sources with solar”[citation needed]. So clearly, we need to reduce energy consumption in the meantime.

Relative decoupling means the emissions intensity of the economy decreases – higher economic value generated per joule of energy consumed. This kind of decoupling means nothing for AGW if economic growth continues. Absolute decoupling means decreasing absolute energy consumed and increasing economic value. So far, this stage is proving elusive.

Unfortunately, economic growth is the only reason countries around the world can have stable societies. The moment economic growth stops, basically chaos breaks out.

This is essentially an allocation problem. We have all the technology and resources to ensure basic necessities to everyone, but 1. We have already allocated resources in a highly imbalanced manner 2. We don’t know how to deliver resources to only the resource-poor

Compound this with the fact when more resources enter the economy, those already with resources tend to accumulate more of it. Notice, however, that I made no moral position on inequality, except that today we do not want poor people to die out of lack of resources, and the cost of basic resources keeps rising (again due to economic growth).

The problem should be clear by now: we require an increasing amount of resources to simply keep the economy running.

Rectifying this requires us to get mentally used to the fact that things don't just keep getting better every year. And that's neither a technological problem, nor an economic one. It's psychological.

Elon Musk almost terminated our simulation.

Simulation is a simulation only if everybody is convinced that they are living real life. Bostrom proved that we are most likely live in a simulation, but not much people know about it. Elon Musk tweeted that we live with probability 1000000 to 1 in simulation. Now everybody knows. I think that it was 1 per cent chance that our simulation will terminate after it. It has not happen this time, but there may be some other threshold after which it will be terminated, like finding more proves that we are in a simulation or creation of an AI.

I have been asked about something like a carrier advise in field of x-risks prevention deep in EA forum so I will repost my answer here and would like to get any comments or more suggestions to the list

Q: "... it seems like it would be helpful to accompany some maps with a scheme for prioritizing the important areas. e.g. if people could know that safe ai engineering is a useful area for reducing gcrs.." http://effective-altruism.com/ea/10h/the_map_of_global_warming_prevention/#comments

A: So, some ideas for further research, that is fields which a person could undertake if he want to make an impact in the field of x-risks. So it is carrier advises. For many of them I don't have special background or needed personal qualities.

1.Legal research of international law, including work with UN and governments. Goal: prepare an international law and a panel for x-risks prevention. (Legal education is needed)

2.Convert all information about x-risks (including my maps) in large wikipedia style database. Some master of communication to attract many contributors and balance their actions is needed.

3.Create computer model of all global risks, which will be able to calculate their probabilities depending of different assumptions. Evolve this model into world model with elements of AI and connect it to monitoring and control systems.

4.Large research is safety of bio-risks, which will attract professional biologists.

5.Promoter, who could attract funding for different research without oversimplification of risks and overhyping solutions. He may be also a political activist.

1. I think that in AI safety we are already have many people, so some work to integrate their results is needed.

2. Teacher. A professor who will be able to teach a course in x-risks research for student and prepare many new researchers. May be youtube lectures.

3. Artist, who will be able to attract attention to the topic without sensationalism and bad memes.