I'm not an advocate (or detractor) of those decision theories, but the answer that immediately appears to me is to question what drew this particular scenario to your attention out of all possible scenarios. Abstractly, the scenario is that in some possible world, someone doing X prevented disaster Y. For which X and Y should I therefore do X, even if disaster Y cannot occur in this world?

Somehow, you obtained the bits necessary to pull from possibility space the instance X = build a golden statue of Genghis Khan and Y = Genghis Khan in another world stops making war. What drew that instance to your attention, rather than, for example, Y' = Genghis Khan, inspired by this monument, wages war even more mightily? Or Y" = to get all this gold, the monument-builder himself must conquer the world? And so on.

It's like the type of Pascal's Mugging scenario that gives no reason to expect that particular consequence to result from the action more than any other.

A more fruitful question is "should I be the sort of person who does X-ish actions in Y-ish situations?" for various values of X and Y. Here, TDT etc. may give justifications for e.g. cooperation in PD, Parfit's hitchhiker, etc., that conventional decision theories have problems with.

And, is there an example of similar reasoning that isn't crazy?

I think one needs to significantly abstract this example to understand the reasoning at human levels. (EDIT TO ADD: And I also think your usage of the word 'imagine' is confusing because it connotates 'making things up' instead of 'attempt to accurately model in your mind'.)

E.g. Let's say you have made a habit of providing a helping hand to strangers. One day you learn that Genghis Khan, in a different time and a different continent, put an end to his butchering because he saw people helping strangers and suddenly took seriously this idea, and this made him reevaluate e.g. his cynicism towards humanity, and whether brutality truly provides happiness.

In this sense a part of you, a part of your decision process, the kindness-to-strangers part is responsible for stopping Genghis Khan. Other parts of you (your memories, your sense of identity, your personal history) aren't. Nothing "recognizably" belonging strictly to you, but part of you is 'responsible' nonetheless.

--

Or here's a different example, a more scientifictional one. An alien informs the human population that the next day, they'll select at random an adult human to observe secretly for a day from the whole human population. That person will not have to do anything special, just clap their hands once during the day. If they do that the earth will be safe, if they don't clap their hands during the day at all, the earth will be doomed. Next day, three billion people clap their hands, just to be on the safe side. Three billion other people don't -- the chance that they'll be the "one chosen" is only one in six billion afterall, close to nothing.

The aliens choose Alice. Alice happened to not clap. The earth is destroyed. My moral intuition tells me that the three billion people who chose not to clap share equally in the responsibility for the Earth's destruction; Alice who got randomly selected didn't decide anything differently from any of the rest of them and therefore is no more "responsible" than any of them in a timeless sense; since her decision process was identical to those other three billion non-clappers, by my logic and moral intuition Alice shares the responsibilty equally with the other non-clappers, even though causally only she caused the destruction of the earth, and the other 2,999,999 harmed noone.

Likewise if the aliens chose Bob and Bob was a clapper, there's no need to treat Bob as a hero that saved mankind anymore than the other 2,999,999 clappers did. The part that determined the saving of the earth was equally distributed in them; the selection of Bob in particular is random and irrelevant in comparison.

The "probability" of the imagined world is low, so the opportunity cost of this action makes it wrong. If there was a world fitting your description that had significant "probability" (for example, if you deduced that a past random event turning out differently would likely lead to the situation as you describe it), it would be a plausibly correct action to take.

(The unclear point is what contributes to a world's "probability"; presumably, arbitrary stipulations drive it down, so most thought experiments are morally irrelevant.)

Just for reference: this has been pointed out at least once before, and I believe there was a (temporary) fix implemented (but I can't find any reference to it at the moment).

But that was almost a year ago now, so it's good to bring it up again.

I don't know if the spambots are fully automatical or human-aided. If they are fully automatical, we could just add a question "What is Eliezer's surname?" The advantage would be people learning to write it correctly. :P

And I'd like "context" to show (or perhaps have an option to show) the whole tree which includes a comment rather than a single thread.

You can use the "parent" button. It sits beside the reply button and looks like a bent arrow that goes left and up. When you are at the top level comment the parent button disappears.

Seconding this. You can get around it by clicking the permalink button to the topmost comment and traveling up further from that but it's still anoying

I am musing about writing fiction. I would like get help on the following questions:

1. What forums to ask the following questions can you recommend?

2. What is the general rule on including real living people in fiction? I'm afraid that it's hard and fast "Don't." Where does it become ok to include real people in fiction? (sometime after they die?) Is it ok if fictional character strongly resembles a living person, but some details are left out so that one can write it off as a coincidence?

3. How many threads to the story can I have? The more the merrier? E.g. suppose that I write a story about a scientist that designs an AI to save the world, but instead bringing the doom upon us all (or vice versa). Would it be good if they are pursuing a romantic interest at the same time? What about solving a major philosophical problem, too? Where do we stop?

4. If I would like to make a story split between two interleaving timelines: e.g. the "future" and the "past" timeline. One chapter is in the "future", then the next one in the "past"; what should be the natural way to arrange the passage of time in those timelines: a) parallel (time goes forward in both threads) or b) diverging threads (time goes forward in "future", backwards in the "past"). Here's the illustration:

Book timeline

A main point is that you're bigoted if you only listen to critiques of people you disagree with (or set critique on authomatic as you read or listen to them) rather than paying attention to their words with attention to those people intend.

I do something a little like your (2), except that I don't downvote comments that I think deserve a positive score, and vice versa.

I have seen people mention two algorithms to decide whether to upvote or downvote a comment

I wager that most people don't use an algorithm beyond "I feel like upvoting/downvoting this comment", they just click and then explain/rationalize their actions.

Mostly, I think that any tool of this sort that somehow becomes sufficiently popular and effective to actually make a measurable difference to US presidential election results, relative to the effects of advertising and blogs and newspaper articles and so forth, will be co-opted by a raft of deliberately biased competitors long before that point.

That said, I do think something similar would be useful for local elections. Of course, it would be a lot more work to develop and maintain at that level. Those two facts are not unrelated.

Seconding drethelin's advice in general. I feel very empathetic towards your situation, and I did not like most of the people I met when I first went to college, and yet I made some serious long-term friends there.

Also, for fear of not having a "social role", just make sure there's something memorable about you. Like a cartoon character, have some element of style that is unique and not obviously negative - so that people can see you and think "There's that kid with the X again", and you blend into the background less. If X can also signal desirability to a relevant social group, all the better. Something that already seems cool to you, so it doesn't set off your "inauthenticity" alarm. Bow tie?

You're the hero in your own story. Don't worry that most of the people you run into are NPCs - that's normal. Keep looking and you'll find the 3-5 other PCs to join your party.

I don't mean this snarkily, but have you considered drinking or taking up a sport?

Low level sport (where everyone's a bit rubbish and no-one takes it seriously) is superb fun. Obviously, you'll be terrible at it, but if you find a club that's short of people and loses all the time anyway you'll probably be more welcome than you think. And just by taking part you'll get much better at it. It might change your life.

And if you're embedded in a society where social life revolves around alcohol you'll miss out on a vast amount of the fun and happiness that comes with being human if you don't join in. You don't have to overdo it. Just try having a glass of wine with someone you like one day and see how it goes.

I am a pretty nerdy guy, but if I had to relive my life without ever drinking alcohol or playing cricket or rowing or playing rugby I just think I'd probably not want to bother. ( I am unbelievably bad at rugby. )

If it helps encourage you, for a long time I coached novice rowers for King's College (part of the University of Cambridge). Occasionally we'd get a hopelessly non-sporty introvert turning up wanting a go. Some of these guys were so shy they could hardly speak. And they were often the people who enjoyed it the most, and became most committed and most likely to come back year after year.

I'm not going to lie to you, with one exception they never became any good. But they all became much better than they had been, and seemed to enjoy the process, and are some of the people that I most enjoyed coaching.

It helps of course that rowing is actually technically complex and I could talk to these people about how best to turn energy into momentum and how it is that a boat can balance even though its centre of gravity is above its centre of flotation and so on.

I think one of the reasons that rowing is so popular amongst the sciency types at Cambridge is that it is a sport that you can think about in terms of physics.

But it really doesn't matter what the sport is. Just go and find a small club doing something where they have trouble getting enough people together to make a team, and where there's someone nice who knows how to teach it, explain that you've not done anything like this before and ask if they could use you. Stick with it for a month, and if you really hate it give up.

One nice thing about sports is that the skills are easily measurable. Working out what to do in order to make your scores better is part of the fun. Don't miss out. It will teach you so much about life.

I take it you don't have a LW meetup near by. Do you think you could start one?

The people who like drinking and sports are the most prominent in many colleges, but it doesn't mean that they're the only ones around.

I had the same problem as you my first year at college, and mainly solved it through three factors, in order of importance:

1. Making friends in math classes.

2. Going to a few student-organized clubs.

3. Blind luck.

Whatever strategy you decide, if you happen to find just one or two friends that also don't have too many friends, you can then try everything you try together and it will be much easier. I realize this might be terribly unhelpful advice.

If I may offer some advice: Be careful not to rationalize social anxiety with "they are homogeneous, they dehumanize women, they aren't as original as I am, they bore me". That's externalizing an internal problem.

There are people of considerable intellectual caliber who have no qualms engaging in random small talk (a required skill in many career paths), and you'll only find out who they are once you get past that barrier.

No simple solution, but nosce te ipsum applies.

I had very few (physical) friends in college and even fewer now. I find that I get enough social interaction online and with my family (I'm married). Of course everyone is different but you may not need as many friends as you currently seem to think.

You need to find a (physical world) subculture to get involved in.

Most people are terrible. It's a lot of work to sort the awesome people from the terrible people. I've had good luck using "gamer" "geek", "queer", and "kinky" as labels that tend to more reliably apply to interesting people or people I'm happy to get along with, but your mileage may vary. Every single one of my room-mates plays or used to play Magic the Gathering, for example.

Not making friends with the random people around you in college who are into drinking, sports, and dehumanizing women is, in my mind, a good sign. You shouldn't force yourself to try and make friends with people who don't share interests with you, or at least are interesting to talk to. Try talking to the people you see who are actively weird.

What are the people you like like?

You say you're becoming more misanthropic; did you use to like more people? What were those people like? Do you have an internal narrative about why you don't like them anymore?

On Enjoying Disagreeable Company is my post on liking people on purpose.

This is how I feel when parties are going on: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-going-to-sit-quietly-in-darkened-bedroom,29831/ . There's one going on tonight, so this is particularly apt.

I think that, however society should choose to treat parental incest, for the sake of consistency and coherency it could be compared to parents giving children legal but strong drugs - whether performance-enhancing or recreational.

Obviously any medical expert who's just doing a job and is afraid of being sued would "advise" against either if consulted. Clearly, parents don't have total sovereignity over their children, and most of the "decent" parents wouldn't ask for it anyway while most of the abusive parents would love it. On the other hand, clearly the vast majority of people are hostile to the idea of thorough, case-by-case state intervention, a social worker ordering parents where exactly to draw the line, etc - both for political and pragmatic reasons.

But still, there are obviously parents who would, in good faith and with good intentions, want to introduce their child to sex or certain drugs. In such cases, not only are their preferences being unfairly violated, they might be right about it being safe and worthwhile for their child. Is there any way at all to filter those benign cases out from deliberate abuse, dangerous carelessness, etc? I can't think of any.

(Discriminating against sibling incest is just as senseless and barbaric as discriminating against functioning drug users or homosexuals, IMO. Siblings should certainly be able to enter the complete, standard, state-sanctioned civil union with all its trappings - whether we rename it from "Marriage" to something else, as some liberals and libertarians propose, or not.)

I have no problem with non-productive incest. I also think that severely malformed embryos should be discarded before they have a chance to develop into a disabled person, effectively resolving the main objection against incest. On the other hand, I do not feel bad about the current incest laws, they seem to function well as Schelling fences.

Whenever I want to trigger a moral intuition that can't be justified by any moral system that doesn't just expressly prohibit it by fiat, I use an example that triggers incest avoidance.

Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.

The most common intelligent argument I've seen against incest is "power imbalance!" which in the case of your news story looks like a case of the noncentral fallacy.

Incest among adults is also sex between consenting adults.

True, but that's largely a noncentral fallacy.

Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.

If I'm grossed out by it, why am I watching lesbian incest hentai? :-)

Not only the motivation, but many of the arguments are basically the same as arguments in favour of homophobia. If the person's has an identity centred on fighting "bigotry" cognitive dissonance hilarity ensues.

Agreed. But not all the arguments are basically the same. Some of the arguments are more like the "teachers shouldn't date their students" argument and the "psychologists shouldn't date their patients" or even "50-year olds shouldn't date 20-year olds" argument, and reflect on the likely unhealthy effects of power-imbalance.

The power-imbalance in intergenerational incest is obvious. In intragenerational incest it can of course be significantly less clear; especially in cases like the German couple where the siblings only met during adulthood.

Bonus round: Arguments against incestuous couples having children is a fundamentally eugenicist argument.

That's a plus to those arguments, not a minus -- because we're moving to a consequentialist perspective from an arbitrary deontologist one.

Applying it like a consequentalist results in concluding many other kinds of couples should be discouraged just as much

Perhaps they should -- but keep in mind that banning incest bars any one person from a very small subset of potentially desirable sex partners -- much like barring psychiatrists from sexing their patients. On the other hand barring e.g. old people from having sex, or gay people having sex, pretty much precludes them from having pleasurable sex altogether. The cost of such a policy seems higher in such a case.

That having been said, I'd have been all in favour of applauding the German couple (especially since they didn't grow up together) if they had only made sure they didn't have children via e.g. vasectomy, getting tubes tied, etc...

The base rate fallacy seems like an appropriate name, but in practice it seems like that's reserved specifically for confusing Pr[A|B] with Pr[B|A] in the way outlined in the Wikipedia article.

I'm not sure why you think this turns quantum mechanics on its head. Could you articulate what it is about that article that conflicts strongly with your understanding of quantum mechanics? Is it the idea that one can make measurements that don't completely destroy superpositions, or is it the idea that the experimenters could use information garnered from these measurements to drive the system back to its original pre-measurement quantum state?

It's clever, but it doesn't do anything previously thought impossible.

It's more of a quantum computing development. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be "Quantum measurements leave Schrodinger's Cat in an ambiguous state while telling us just how ambiguous the state is".

I like the idea of asking Yvain to add it to the big survey. That's probably the least obtrusive way, and it'd maximize responses, which you'd need for a decent sample size in each of 16 subcategories.

Proposed Poll:

What is your last Myers-Briggs personality type score:

• INTJ
• INTP
• ENTJ
• ENTP
• INFP
• INFJ
• ENFJ
• ENFP
• ISTJ
• ISTP
• ESTJ
• ESTP
• ISFJ
• ISFP
• ESFJ
• ESFP

These questions are interesting because there are some connections with personal development:

Regarding I/E (introversion / extroversion), have you gotten a score near the border between them, or gotten a different I/E result when taking the test multiple times?

• I got results near the border (maybe the same result maybe different).
• I got two very different results (not near the border, not the same result).
• None of the above.

(Etc. for the other three dimensions)

Personality Type Predictions:

The vast majority are introverts, ballpark 90% introverts.

Most common type: INTJ

NT types > 75% of the population

NF types - a handful or none (possibly more than the next type, possibly less)

ISTJ - a single digit percentage of the LW population

Other guardians and artisans: none or nearly none.

Define "dying".

Questions to consider: Would you feel the same way about using a Star Trek transporter? What if you replaced neurons with computer chips one at a time over a long period instead of the entire brain at once? Is everyone in a constant state of "death" as the proteins that make up their brain degrade and get replaced?

If you use the concepts of "dying" or "personal identity" in this context, you risk committing the noncentral fallacy, since uploading is an atypical case of their application, and their standard properties won't automatically carry over.

For example, concluding that an instance of you "actually dies" when there is also a recent copy doesn't necessarily imply that something bad took place, since even if you do in some sense decide that this event is an example of the concept of "dying", this is such an atypical example that its membership in that concept provides only very weak evidence for sharing the property of being bad with the more typical examples. Locating this example in the standard concepts is both difficult and useless, a wrong question.

The only way out seems to be to taboo the ideas of "dying", "personal identity", etc., and fall back on the arguments that show in what way typical dying is bad, and non-dying is good, by generalizing these arguments about badness of typical destruction of a person to badness of the less typical destruction of a copy, and goodness of not destroying a person to goodness of having a spare copy when another copy is destroyed.

It seems to me that the valuable things about a living person (we've tabooed the "essence of personal identity", and are only talking about value) are all about their abstract properties, their mind, their algorithm of cognition, and not about the low-level details of how these abstract properties are implemented. Since destruction of a copied person preserves these properties (implemented in the copy), the value implemented by them is retained. Similarly, one of the bad things about typical dying (apart from the loss of a mind discussed above) seems to be the event of terminating a mind. To the extent this event is bad in itself, copying and later destroying the original will be bad. If this is so, destructive uploading will be better than uploading followed by destruction of the conscious original, but possibly worse than pure copying without any destruction.

It seems like you both die and live. It also seems like there become two different versions of you.

If the original is deleted immediately; I don't think you die.

I think there no such mystery about pattern continuation. People just keep confused when the word "identity" come. If you really bother about these things, think in normal cases like you now and tomorrow, and find a flaw in the argument.

Almost everybody starts with the intuitive notion that uploading will kill the "real you". The discussion seems to have been treading the same ground since at least the 1990s, so I don't really expect anything new to come out of yet another armchair rehash.

Chapters 9 and 10 in David Chalmers' singularity paper are a resonably good overview of the discussion. Chalmers end up finding both stances convincing given different setups for a thought experiment, and remains puzzled about the question.

Contemporary people are more or less completely bamboozled by the whole topic of minds, brains, and computers. It's like in the early days of language, when some people thought that reality was created by a divine breath speaking the true names of things, or that the alphabet existed before the universe alongside God, and so on. Language was the original information technology that was made into an idol and treated like magic because it seemed like magic. The current attitudes to computers and computation are analogous, except that we really can culture neurons and simulate them, so we are going to be creating hybrid entities even more novel, in evolutionary terms, than a primate with a verbalizing stream of consciousness (which was a hybrid of biology and language).

What is the computational paradigm of mind? Often this paradigm floats free of any material description at all, focusing solely on algorithms and information. But if we ask for a physical description of computation, it is as follows: There is an intricate physical object - a brain, a computer. Mostly it is scaffolding. There are also non-computational processes happening in it - blood circulating, fan spinning. But among all the physical events which happen inside this object, there are special localized events which are the elementary computations. A wave of depolarization travels along a cell membrane. The electrons in a transistor rearrange themselves in response to small voltages. In the intricate physical object, billions of these special events occur, in intricate trains of cause and effect. The computational paradigm of mind is that thought, self, experience, identity are all, in some sense, nothing but the pattern of these events.

These days it is commonly acknowledged that this supposed identity is somewhat mysterious or unobvious. I would go much further and say that almost everything that is believed and said about this topic is wrong, just like the language mysticism of an earlier age, but it has a hold on people's minds because the facts seem so obvious and they don't have any other way of conceiving of their own relationship to those facts. Yes, it's mysterious that mere ink on a page has such power over our minds and such practical utility, but the reality of that power and that utility are self-evident, therefore, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Yes, it's mysterious that a billion separate little events of particles in motion could feel like being a person and being alive, but we know that the brain is made of neural circuitry and that we could in principle simulate it on any computing mechanism, therefore you are a program in your brain, and if we ran that program somewhere new, you would live again.

People try with varying degrees of self-awareness and epistemic modesty to be rational about their beliefs here, but mostly it's the equivalent of different schools of language mysticism, clashing over whether the meaning-essence only inhabits the voice, or whether it can be found in the written word too. In my estimation, what people say about consciousness, uploads, and personal identity, is similarly far from the reality of how anything works and of what we really are.

If we ever extend human understanding far enough to grasp the truth, it's going to be something bizarre - that you are a perspective vortex in your cortical quantum fields, something like that, something strange and hardly expressible with our current concepts. And meanwhile, we continue to develop our abilities to analyze the brain materially, to shape it and modify it, and to make computer hardware and software. Those abilities are like riding a bicycle, we can pick them up without really knowing what we are doing or why it works, and we're in a hurry to use those abilities too.

So most likely, that biolinguistic hybrid, the primate who thinks in words, is going to create its evolutionary successor without really understanding what it's doing, and perhaps even while it is possessed with a false understanding of what it is doing, a fundamentally untrue image of reality. That's what I see at work in these discussions of mind uploading and artificial intelligence: computational superstition coupled to material power. The power means that something will be done, this isn't just talk, there will be new beings; but the superstition means that there will be a false image of what is happening as it happens.

I think the LW consensus is that the copy is also you, and personal identity as we think of it today will have to undergo significant change once uploads and copies become a thing.