"Stupid" questions thread
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.
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I like this idea! I feel like the current questions are insufficiently "stupid," so here's one: how do you talk to strangers?
The downsides of talking to strangers are really, really low. Your feelings of anxiety are just lies from your brain.
I've found that writing a script ahead of time for particular situations, with some thoughts of different possible variations in how the conversation could go.
Honestly, not sure I understand the question.
Yeah, it was deliberately vague so I'd get answers to a wide variety of possible interpretations. To be more specific, I have trouble figuring out what my opening line should be in situations where I'm not sure what the social script for introducing myself is, e.g. to women at a bar (I'm a straight male). My impression is that "hi, can I buy you a drink?" is cliché but I don't know what reasonable substitutes are.
"hi, can I buy you a drink?" is also bad for other reasons, because this often opens a kind of transactional model of things where there's kind of an idea that you're buying her time, either for conversation or for other more intimate activities later. Now, this isn't explicitly the case, but it can get really awkward, so I'd seriously caution against opening with it.
I feel like I read something interesting about this on Mark Manson's blog but it's horribly organized so I can't find it now.
That sort of things vary a lot depending on what kind of culture you're in.
"Hi, what's your name?" or "Hi, I'm Qiaochu" (depending on the cultural context, e.g. ISTM the former is more common in English and the latter is more common in Italian). Ain't that what nearly any language course whatsoever teaches you to say on Lesson 1? ;-)¹
Or, if you're in a venue where that's appropriate, "wanna dance?" (not necessarily verbally).
(My favourite is to do something awesome in their general direction and wait for them to introduce themselves/each other to me, but it's not as reliable.)
I conjecture that "Hi, I'm Qiaochu" is a very uncommon greeting in Italian :-).
I think you need to taboo "introducing yourself." The rules are different based on where you want the conversation to end up.
I've been reading PUA esque stuff lately and something they stress is that "the opener doesn't matter", "you can open with anything". This is in contrast to the older, cheesier, tactic based PUAs who used to focus obsessively over finding the right line to open with. This advice is meant for approaching women in bars, but I imagine it holds true for most ocassions you would want to talk to a stranger.
In general if you're in a social situation where strangers are approaching each other, then people are generally receptive to people approaching them and will be grateful that you are putting in the work of initiating contact and not them. People also understand that it's sometimes awkward to initiate with strangers, and will usually try to help you smooth things over if you initially make a rough landing. If you come in awkwardly, then you can gauge their reaction, calibrate to find a more appropriate tone, continue without drawing attention to the initial awkwardness, and things will be fine.
Personally, I think the best way to open a conversation with a stranger would just be to go up to them and say "Hey, I'm __" and offer a handshake. It's straightforward and shows confidence.
If you're in a situation where it's not necessarily common to approach strangers, you'll probably have to to come up with some "excuse" for talking to them, like "that's a cool shirt" or "do you know where the library is?". Then you have to transition that into a conversation somehow. I'm not really sure how to do that part.
EDIT: If an approach goes badly, don't take it personally. They might be having a bad day. They might be socially awkward themselves. And if someone is an asshole to you just for going up and saying hi, they are the weirdo, not you. On the other hand, if ten approaches in a row go badly, then you should take it personally.
Here's a recent example (with a lady sitting beside me in the aeroplane; translated):
from which it was trivially easy to start a conversation.
Don't leave us hanging! Why the hell could she speak all those languages but not English?
She had been born in Brazil to Italian parents, had gone to school in Italy, and was working in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.
A good way to start is to say something about your situation (time, place, etc.). After that, I guess you could ask their names or something. I consider myself decent at talking to strangers, but I think it's less about what you say and more about the emotions you train yourself to have. If you see strangers as friends waiting to be made on an emotional level, you can just talk to them the way you'd talk to a friend. Standing somewhere with lots of foot traffic holding a "free hugs" sign under the influence of something disinhibiting might be helpful for building this attitude. If you currently are uncomfortable talking to strangers then whenever you do it, afterwards comfort yourself internally the same way you might comfort an animal (after all, you are an animal) and say stuff like "see? that wasn't so bad. you did great." etc. and try to build comfort through repeated small exposure (more).
I think the question is badly formed. I think it's better to ask: "How do I become a person who easily talks to strangers?" When you are in your head and think about: "How do I talk to that person over there?" you are already at a place that isn't conductive to a good interaction.
Yesterday during the course of traveling around town three stangers did talk to me, where the stranger said the first word.
The first was a woman in mid 30s with a bicycle who was searching the elevator at the public train station. The second was an older woman who told me that the Vibriam Fivefinger shoes in wearing look good. The third was a girl who was biking next to me when her smart phone felt down. I picked it up and handed it back to her. She said thank you.
I'm not even counting beggars at the train in public transportation.
Later that evening I went Salsa dancing. There two woman I didn't know who were new to Salsa asked me to dance.
Why was I at a vibe that let's other people approach me? I spent five days at a personal development workshop given by Danis Bois. The workshop wasn't about doing anything to strangers but among other things teaches a kind of massage and I was a lot more relaxed than I was in the past.
If you get rid of your anxiety interactions with strangers start to flow naturally.
What can you do apart from visiting personal development seminars that put you into a good emotional state?
Wear something that makes it easy for strangers to start a conversation with you. One of the benefits of Vibriam Fivefingers is that people are frequently curious about them.
Do good exercises.
1) One exercise is to say 'hi' or 'good morning' to every stranger you pass. I don't do it currently but it's a good exercise to teach yourself that interaction with strangers is natural.
2) Learn some form of meditation to get into a relaxed state of mind.
3) If you want to approach a person at a bar you might feel anxiety. Locate that anxiety in your body. At the beginning it makes sense to put your hand where you locate it.
Ask yourself: "Where does that feeling want to move in my body" Tell it to "soften and flow". Let it flow where it wants to flow in your body. Usually it wants to flow at a specific location out of your body.
Do the same with the feeling of rejection, should a stranger reject you.
Exercise three is something that I only learned recently and I'm not sure if I'm able to explain it well over the internet. In case anybody reading it finds it useful I would be interested in feedback.
I recently found a nice mind hack for that: “What would my drunken self do?”
I was climbing a tree yesterday and realized that I hadn't even thought that the people watching were going to judge me, and that I would have thought of it previously, and that it would have made it harder to just climb the tree. Then I thought that if I could use the same trick on social interaction, it would become much easier. Then I wondered how you might learn to use that trick.
In other words, I don't know, but the question I don't know the answer to is a little bit closer to success.
I'd like to ask an even stupider one: why do people want to talk to strangers?
I've had a few such conversations on trains and the like, and I'm not especially averse to it, but I think afterwards, what was the point of that?
Well, that passed the time.
It would have passed anyway.
Yes, but not as quickly.
At least the train eventually arrives.
When I'm in the presence of people who know more than me and I want to learn more, I never know how to ask questions that will inspire useful, specific answers. They just don't occur to me. How do you ask the right questions?
Lawyer's perspective:
People want to ask me about legal issues all the time. The best way to get a useful answer is to describe your current situation, the cause of your current situation, and what you want to change. Thus:
Then I can say something like: Your desired remedy is not available for REASONS, but instead, you could get REMEDY. Here are the facts and analysis that would affect whether REMEDY is available.
In short, try to define the problem. fubarobfusco has some good advice about how to refine your articulation of a problem. That said, if you have reason to believe a person knows something useful, you probably already know enough to articulate your question.
The point of my formulation is to avoid assumptions that distort the analysis. Suppose someone in the situation I described above said "I was maliciously and negligently injured by that person's driving. I want them in prison." At that point, my response needs to detangle a lot of confusions before I can say anything useful.
I see you beat me to it. Yes, define your problem and goals.
The really bad thing about asking questions is that people will answer them. You ask some expert "How do I do X with Y?". He'll tell you. He'll likely wonder what the hell you're up to in doing such a strange thing with Y, but he'll answer. If he knew what your problem and goals were instead, he'd ask the right questions of himself on how to solve the problem, instead of the wonrg question that you gave him.
Also in the event you get an unusually helpful expert, he might point this out. Consider this your lucky day and feel free to ask follow up questions. Don't be discouraged by the pointing out being phrased along the lines of "What kind of idiot would want to do X with Y?"
Don't ask questions. Describe your problem and goal, and ask them to tell you what would be helpful. If they know more than you, let them figure out the questions you should ask, and then tell you the answers.
I find "How do I proceed to find out more about X" to give best results. Note: it's important to phrase it so that they understand you are asking for an efficient algorithm to find out about X, not for them to tell you about X!
It works even if you're completely green and talking to a prodigy in the field (which I find to be particularly hard). Otherwise you'll get "RTFM"/"JFGI" at best or they will avoid you entirely at worst.
What do you want to learn more about? If there isn't an obvious answer, give yourself some time to see if an answer surfaces.
The good news is that this is the thread for vague questions which might not pan out.
For the narrow subset of technical questions, How to Ask Questions the Smart Way is useful.
But if you don't have a problem to begin with -- if your aim is "learn more in field X," it gets more complicated. Given that you don't know what questions are worth asking, the best question might be "where would I go to learn more about X" or "what learning material would you recommend on the subject of X?" Then in the process of following and learning from their pointer, generate questions to ask at a later date.
There may be an inherent contradiction between wanting nonspecific knowledge and getting useful, specific answers.
I don't think an answer has to be specific to be useful. Often just understanding how an expert in a certain area thinks about the world can be useful even if you have no specificity.
When it comes to questions: 1) What was the greatest discovery in your field in the last 5 years? 2) Is there an insight in your field that obvious to everyone in your field but that most people in society just don't get?
Start by asking the wrong ones. For me, it took a while to notice when I had even a stupid question to ask (possibly some combination of mild social anxiety and generally wanting to come across as smart & well-informed had stifled this impulse), so this might take a little bit of practice.
Sometimes your interlocutor will answer your suboptimal questions, and that will give you time to think of what you really want to know, and possibly a few extra hints for figuring it out. But at least as often your interlocutor will take your interest as a cue that they can just go ahead and tell you nonrelated things about the subject at hand.
One approach: Think of two terms or ideas that are similar but want distinguishing. "How is a foo different from a bar?" For instance, if you're looking to learn about data structures in Python, you might ask, "How is a dictionary different from a list?"
You can learn if your thought that they are similar is accurate, too: "How is a list different from a for loop?" might get some insightful discussion ... if you're lucky.
Of course, if you know sufficiently little about the subject matter, you might instead end up asking a question like
"How is a browser different from a hard drive?"
which, instead, discourages the expert from speaking with you (and makes them think that you're an idiot).
Do you build willpower in the long-run by resisting temptation? Is willpower, in the short-term at least, a limited and depletable resource?
I felt that Robert Kurzban presented a pretty good argument against the "willpower as a resource" model in Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite:
Elsewhere in the book (I forget where) he also notes that the easiest explanation for people to go low on willpower when hungry is simply that a situation where your body urgently needs food is a situation where your brain considers everything that’s not directly related to acquiring food to have a very high opportunity cost. It seems like a more elegant and realistic explanation than saying the common folk-psychological explanation that seems to suggest something like willpower being a resource that you lose when you’re hungry or tired. It’s more of a question of the evolutionary tradeoffs being different when you’re hungry or tired, which leads to different cognitive costs.
In About Behaviorism (which I unfortunately don't currently own a copy of, so I can't give direct quotes or citations) , B. F. Skinner makes the case that the "Willpower" phenomenon actually reduces to opperant conditioning and scheduals of reinforcement. Skinner claims that people who have had their behavior consistently reinforced in the past will become less sensitive to a lack of reinforcement in the present, and may persist in behavior even when positive reinforcement isn't forthcoming in the short term, whereas people whose past behavior has consistantly failed to be reinforced (or even been actively punished) will abandon a course of action much more quickly when it fails to immediately pay off. Both groups will eventually give up at an unreinforced behavior, though the former group will typically persist much longer at it than the latter. This gives rise to the "willpower as resource" model, as well as the notion that some people have more willpower than others. Really, people with "more willpower" have just been conditioned to wait longer for their behaviors to be reinforced.
I don't know about the first question, but for the second: yes.
Apparently the answer to the second question depends on what you believe the answer to the second question to be.
Interesting. So the willpower seems to be in the mind. Who would have guessed that? :D
How can we exploit this information to get more willpower? The first idea is to give youself rewards for using the willpower successfully. Imagine that you keep a notebook with you, and every time you have to resist a temptation, you give yourself a "victory point". For ten victory points, you buy and eat a chocolate (or whatever would be your favorite reward). Perhaps for succumbing to a temptation, you might lose a point or two.
Perhaps this could rewire the brain, so it goes from "I keep resisting and resisting, but there is no reward, so I guess I better give up" to "I keep resisting and I already won for myself a second chocolate; let's do some more resisting".
But how to deal with long-term temptation. Like, I give myself a point at the morning for not going to reddit, but now it's two hours later, I still have to resist the temptation, but I will not get another point for that, so my brain expects no more rewards. Should I perhaps get a new point every hour or two?
Also, it could have the perverse effect of noticing more possible temptations. Because, you know, you only reward yourself a point for the temptation you notice and resist.
I once heard of a study finding that the answer is “yes” also for the first question. (Will post a reference if I find it.)
And the answer to the second question might be “yes” only for young people.
To what degree does everyone here literally calculate numerical outcomes and make decisions based on those outcomes for everyday decisions using Bayesian probability? Sometimes I can't tell if when people say they are 'updating priors' they are literally doing a calculation and literally have a new number stored somewhere in their head that they keep track of constantly.
If anyone does this could you elaborate more on how you do this? Do you have a book/spreadsheet full of different beliefs with different probabilities? Can you just keep track of it all in your mind? Or calculating probabilities like this only something people do for bigger life problems?
Can you give me a tip for how to start? Is there a set of core beliefs everyone should come up with priors for to start? I was going to apologize if this was a stupid question, but I suppose it should by definition be one if it is in this thread.
Nope, not for everyday decisions. For me "remember to update" is more of a mantra to remember to change your mind at all - especially based on several pieces of weak evidence, which normal procedure would be to individually disregard and thus never change your mind.
I never do this. See this essay by gwern for an example of someone doing this.
I suspect very little, but this does remind me of Warren Buffett speaking on Discounted Cash Flow calculations.
For quick background, an investment is a purchase of a future cash flow. Cash in the future is worth less to you than cash right now, and it is worth less and less as you go further into the future. Most treatments pretend that the proper way to discount the value of cash in the future is to have a discount rate (like 5% or 10% per year) and apply it as an exponential function to future cash.
Warren Buffett, a plausible candidate for the most effective investor ever (or at least so far), speaks highly of DCF (discounted cash flow) as the way to choose between investments. However, he also says he never actually does one other than roughly in his head. Given his excellent abilities at calculating in his head, I think it would translate to something like he never does a DCF calculation that would take up more than about 20 lines in an excel spreadsheet.
There are a broad range of policies that I have that are based on math: not gambling in Las Vegas because it's expectation value is negative (although mostly I trust the casinos to have set the odds so payouts are negative, I don't check their math). Not driving too far for small discounts (expense of getting discount should not exceed value of discount). Not ignoring a few thousand dollar difference in a multi-hundred thousand dollar transaction because "it is a fraction of a percent."
I do often in considering hiring a personal service compare paying for it to how long it would take me to do the job vs how long I would need to work at my current job to hire the other person. I am pretty well paid so this does generally lead to me hiring a lot of things done. A similar calcuation does lead me to systematically ignore costs below about $100 for a lot of things which still "feels" wrong, but which I have not yet been able to do a calculation that shows me it is wrong.
I am actually discouraging my wife and children from pushing my children towards elite colleges and universities on the basis that they are over-priced for what they deliver. I am very unconfident in this one as rich people that I respect continue to just bleed money into their children's educations. SO I am afraid to go independent of them even as I can't figure out a calculation that shows what they are doing makes economic sense.
I do look at, or caculate, the price per ounce in making buying decisions, I guess that is an example of a common bayesian calculation.
It depends on what your kids want to do. Elite colleges are not selling education, except to the extent that they have to maintain standards to keep their position. They are selling networking cachet. Which is of very high value to people who want to be one of the masters of the universe, and take their chances with the inbound guillotine. If your kids want to be doctors. engineers or archaeologists.. no, not worth the price tag. In fact, the true optium move is likely to ship them to Sweden with a note telling them to find a nice girl, naturalize via marriage and take the free ride through stockholm university. ;)
I'd be alarmed if anyone claimed to accurately numerically update their priors. Non-parametric Bayesian statistics is HARD and not the kind of thing I can do in my head.
I had the same worry/question when I first found LW. After meeting with all the "important" people (Anna, Luke, Eliezer...) in person, I can confidently say: no, nobody is carrying around a sheet of paper and doing actual Bayesian updating. However, most people in these circles notice when they are surprised/confused, act on that feeling, and if they were wrong, then they update their believes, followed soon by their actions. This could happen from one big surprise or many small ones. So there is a very intuitive sort of Bayesian updating going on.
I only literally do an expected outcome calculation when I care more about having numbers than I do about their validity, or when I have unusually good data and need rigor. Most of the time the uncertainties in your problem formulation will dominate any advantage you might get from doing actual Bayesian updates.
The advantage of the Bayesian mindset is that it gives you a rough idea of how evidence should affect your subjective probability estimate for a scenario, and how pieces of evidence of different strengths interact with each other. You do need to work through a reasonable number of examples to get a feel for how that works, but once you have that intuition you rarely need to do the math.
Why is everyone so intereted in decision theory? Especially the increasingly convoluted variants with strange acronyms that seem to be popping up
As far as I can tell, LW was created explicitly with the goal of producing rationalists, one desirable side effect of which was the creation of friendly AI researchers. Decision theory plays a prominent role in Eliezer's conception of friendly AI, since a decision theory is how the AI is supposed to figure out the right thing to do. The obvious guesses don't work in the presence of things like other agents that can read the AI's source code, so we need to find some non-obvious guesses because that's something that could actually happen.
Hey, I think your tone here comes across as condescending, which goes against the spirit of a 'stupid questions' thread, by causing people to believe they will lose status by posting in here.
Fair point. My apologies. Getting rid of the first sentence.
Thanks!
This was what I gathered from reading the beginning of the TDT paper: "There's this one decision theory that works in every single circumstance except for this one crazy sci-fi scenario that might not even be physically possible, and then there's this other decision theory that works in said sci-fi scenario but not really anywhere else. We need to find a decision theory that combines these two in order to always work, including in this one particular sci-fi scenario."
I guess it might be useful for AI research, but I don't see why I would need to learn it.
the sci-fi bit is only to make it easier to think about. The real world scenarios it corresponds to require the reader to have quite a bit more background material under their belt to reason carefully about.
What are the real world scenarios it corresponds to? The only one I know of is the hitchhiker one, which is still pretty fantastic. I'm interested in learning about this.
Any kind of tragedy of the commons type scenario would qualify.
It's not obvious to me how tragedy of the commons/prisoner's dilemma is isomorphic to Newcomb's problem, but I definitely believe you that it could be. If TDT does in fact present a coherent solution to these types of problems, then I can easily see how it would be useful. I might try to read the pdf again sometime. Thanks.
I sometimes contemplate undertaking a major project. When I do so, I tend to end up reasoning like this:
It would be very good if I could finish this project. However, almost all the benefits of attempting the project will accrue when it's finished. (For example, a half-written computer game doesn't run at all, one semester's study of a foreign language won't let me read untranslated literature, an almost-graduated student doesn't have a degree, and so on.) Undertaking this project will require a lot of time and effort spent on activities that aren't enjoyable for their own sake, and there's a good chance I'll get frustrated and give up before actually completing the project. So it would be better not to bother; the benefits of successfully completing the project seem unlikely to be large enough to justify the delay and risk involved.
As a result, I find myself almost never attempting a project of any kind that involves effort and will take longer than a few days, but I don't want to live my life having done nothing, though. Advice?
I realize this does not really address your main point, but you can have half-written games that do run. I've been writing a game on and off for the last couple of years, and it's been playable the whole time. Make the simplest possible underlying engine first, so it's playable (and testable) as soon as possible.
In fact, the games I tend to make progress on are the ones I can get testable as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, those are usually the least complicated ones (glorified MUDs, an x axis with only 4 possible positions, etc).
I do want to do bigger and better things, then I run into the same problem as CronoDAS. When I do start a bigger project, I can sometimes get started, then crash within the first hour and never return. (In a couple extreme cases, I lasted for a good week before it died, though one of these was for external reasons). Getting started is usually the hardest part, followed by surviving until there's something work looking back at. (A functioning menu system does not count.)
This seems like a really good concept to keep in mind. I wonder if it could be applied to other fields? Could you make a pot that remains a pot the whole way through, even as you refine it and add detail? Could you write a song that starts off very simple but still pretty, and then gradually layer on the complexity?
Your post inspired me to try this with writing, so thank you. :) We could start with a one-sentence story: "Once upon a time, two lovers overcame vicious prejudice to be together."
And that could be expanded into a one-paragraph story: "Chanon had known all her life that the blue-haired Northerners were hated enemies, never to be trusted, that she had to keep her red-haired Southern bloodline pure or the world would be overrun by the blue barbarians. But everything was thrown in her face when she met Jasper - his hair was blue, but he was a true crimson-heart, as the saying went. She tried to find every excuse to hate him, but time and time again Jasper showed himself to be a man of honor and integrity, and when he rescued her from those lowlife highway robbers - how could she not fall in love? Her father hated it of course, but even she was shocked at how easily he disowned her, how casually he threw away the bonds of family for the chains of prejudice. She wasn't happy now, homeless and adrift, but she knew that she could never be happy again in the land she had once called home. Chanon and Jasper set out to unknown lands in the East, where hopefully they could find some acceptance and love for their purple family."
This could be turned into a one page story, and then a five page story, and so on, never losing the essence of the message. Iterative storytelling might be kind of fun for people who are trying to get into writing something long but don't know if they can stick it out for months or years.
I submit that this might generalize: that perhaps it's worth, where possible, trying to plan your projects with an iterative structure, so that feedback and reward appear gradually throughout the project, rather than in an all-or-nothing fashion at the very end. Tight feedback loops are a great thing in life. Granted, this is of no use for, for example, taking a degree.
I have/had this problem. My computer and shelves are full of partially completed (or, more realistically, just-begun) projects.
So, what I'm doing at the moment is I've picked one of them, and that's the thing I'm going to complete. When I'm feeling motivated, that's what I work on. When I'm not feeling motivated, I try to do at least half an hour or so before I flake off and go play games or work on something that feels more awesome at the time. At those times my motivation isn't that I feel that the project is worthwhile, it is that having gone through the process of actually finishing something will be have been worthwhile.
It's possible after I'm done I may never put that kind of effort in again, but I will know (a) that I probably can achieve that sort of goal if I want and (b) if carrying on to completion is hell, what kind of hell and what achievement would be worth it.
Beeminder. Record the number of Pomodoros you spend working on the project and set some reasonable goal, e.g. one a day.
Make this not true. Practice doing a bunch of smaller projects, maybe one or two week-long projects, then a month-long project. Then you'll feel confident that your work ethic is good enough to complete a major project without giving up.
It seems to me that, unless one is already a powerful person, the best thing one can do to gain optimization power is building relationships with people more powerful than oneself. To the extant that this easily trumps the vast majority of other failings (epistemic rationality wise) as discussed on LW. So why aren't we discussing how to do better at this regularly? A couple explanations immediately leap to mind:
Not a core competency of the sort of people LW attracts.
Rewards not as immediate as the sort of epiphany porn that some of LW generates.
Ugh fields. Especially in regard to things that are considered manipulative when reasoned about explicitly, even though we all do them all the time anyway.
Do you have any experience doing this successfully? I'd assume that powerful people already have lots of folks trying to make friends with them.
Specifically for business, I do.
The general angle is asking intelligent, and forward-pointing questions, specifically because deep processing for thoughts (as described in Thinking Fast and Slow) is rare, even within the business community; so demonstrating understanding, and curiosity (both of which are strength of people on LW) is an almost instant-win.
Two of the better guides on how to approach this intelligently are:
The other aspect of this is Speaking the Lingo. The problem with LW is:
1, people developing gravity wells around specific topics , and having a very hard time talking about stuff others are interested in without bringing up pet topics of their own; and
2, the inference distance between the kind of stuff that puts people into powerful position, and the kind of stuff LW develops a gravity well around is, indeed, vast.
The operational hack here is 1, listening, 2, building up the scaffolds on which these people hang their power upon; 3, recognizing whether you have an understanding of how those pieces fit together.
General algorithm for the networking dance:
1, Ask intelligent question, listen intently
2, Notice your brain popping up a question/handle that you have an urge to speak up. Develop a classification algo to notice whether the question was generated by your pet gravity well, or by novel understanding.
3, If the former,SHUT UP. If you really have the urge, mimic back what they've just said to internalize / develop your understanding (and move the conversation along)
Side-effects might include: developing an UGH-field towards browsing lesswrong, incorporating, and getting paid truckloads. YMMV.
Because it's hard. That's what kept me from doing it.
I am very close to explicitly starting a project to do just that, and didn't get to this point even until one of my powerful friends explicitly advised me to take a particular strategy to get relationships with more powerful people.
I find myself unable to be motivated to do it without calling it "Networking the Hard Way", to remind myself that yes, it's hard, and that's why it will work.
Power isn't one dimensional. The thing that matters isn't so much to make relationships with people who are more powerful than you in all domains but to make relationship with people who are poweful in some domain where you could ask them for help.
LW's foundational posts are all very strongly biased towards epistemic rationality, and I think that strong bias still affects our attempts to talk about instrumental rationality. There are probably all sorts of instrumentally rational things we could be doing that we don't talk about enough.
Insofar as MIRI folk seem to be friends with Jaan Tallin and Thiel etc. they appear to be trying to do this, though they don't seem to be teaching it as a great idea. But organizationally, if you're trying to optimize the world in a more rational way, spreading rationality might be a better way than trying to befriend less rational powerful people. Obviously this is less effective on a more personal basis.
Realistically, Less Wrong is most concerned about epistemic rationality: the idea that having an accurate map of the territory is very important to actually reaching your instrumental goals. If you imagine for a second a world where epistemic rationality isn't that important, you don't really need a site like Less Wrong. There's nods to "instrumental rationality", but those are in the context of epistemic rationality getting you most of the way and being the base you work off of, otherwise there's no reason to be on Less Wrong instead of a specific site dealing with the sub area.
Also, lots of "building relationships with powerful people" is zero sum at best, since it resembles influence peddling more than gains from informal trade.
How do I get people to like me? It seems to me that this is a worthwhile goal; being likable increases the fun that both I and others have.
My issue is that likability usually means, "not being horribly self-centered." But I usually find I want people to like me more for self-centered reasons. It feels like a conundrum that just shouldn't be there if I weren't bitter about my isolation in the first place. But that's the issue.
This was a big realization for me personally:
If you are trying to get someone to like you, you should strive to maintain a friendly, positive interaction with that person in which he or she feels comfortable and happy on a moment-by-moment basis. You should not try to directly alter that person's opinion of you, in the sense that if you are operating on a principle of "I will show this person that I am smart, and he will like me", "I will show this person I am cool, and she will like me," or even "I will show this person that I am nice, and he will like me", you are pursuing a strategy that can be ineffective and possibly lead people to see you as self-centered. This might be what people say when they mean "be yourself" or "don't worry about what other people think of you".
Also, Succeed Socially is a good resource.
Also, getting certain people to like you is way, way, way, way harder than getting certain other people to like you. And in many situations you get to choose whom to interact with.
Do what your comparative advantage is.
In actuality,a lot of people can like you a lot even if you are not selfless. It is not so much that you need to ignore what makes you happy, as much as it is that you need to pay attention and energy to what makes other people happy. A trivial if sordid example is you don't get someone wanting to have sex with you by telling them how attractive you are, you will do better by telling them, and making it obvious that, you find them attractive. That you will take pleasure in their increased attentions to you is not held against you because it means you are not selfless not at all. Your need or desire for them is the attractor to them.
So don't abnegate, ignore, deny, your own needs. But run an internal model where other people's needs are primary to suggest actions you can take that will serve them and glue them to you.
Horribly self-centered isn't a statement that you elevate your own needs too high. It is that you are too ignorant and unreactive to other people's needs.
I second what gothgirl said; but in case you were looking for more concrete advice:
At least, that's what worked for me when I was younger. Especially 1 actually, I think it helped with 3.
You can be self-centered and not act that way. If you even pretend to care about most people's lives they will care more about yours.
If you want to do this without being crazy bored and feeling terrible, I recommend figuring out conversation topics of other people's lives that you actually enjoy listening people talk about, and also working on being friends with people who do interesting things. In a college town, asking someone their major is quite often going to be enjoyable for them and if you're interested and have some knowledge of a wide variety of fields you can easily find out interesting things.
The standard reference for this is "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. I have not read it myself.
Much of it boils down to gothgirl420666's advice, except with more technical help on how. (I think the book is well worth reading, but it basically outlines "these are places where you can expend effort to make other people happier.")
One of the tips from Carnegie that gothgirl420666 doesn't mention is using people names.
Learn them and use them a lot in coversation. Great them with their name.
Say thing like: "I agree with you, John." or "There I disagree with you, John."
This is a piece of advice that most people disagree with, and so I am reluctant to endorse it. Knowing people's names is important, and it's useful to use them when appropriate, but inserting them into conversations where they do not belong is a known influence technique that will make other people cautious.
(While we're on the subject of recommendations I disagree with, Carnegie recommends recording people's birthdays, and sending them a note or a call. This used to be a lot more impressive before systems to automatically do that existed, and in an age of Facebook I don't think it's worth putting effort into. Those are the only two from the book that I remember thinking were unwise.)
Be judicious, and name drop with one level of indirection. "That's sort of what like John was saying earlier I believe yada yada."
It probably depends on the context. If you in a context like a sales conversation people might get cautious. In other context you might like a person trying to be nice to you.
But you are right that there the issue of artificialness. It can be strange if things don't flow naturally. I think that's more a matter of how you do it rather than how much or when.
At the beginning, just starting to greet people with their name can be a step forward. I think in most cultures that's an appropriate thing to do, even if not everyone does it.
I would also add that I'm from Germany, so my cultural background is a bit different than the American one.
What's with the ems? People who are into ems seem to make a lot of assumptions about what ems are like and seem completely unattached to present-day culture or even structure of life, seem willing to spam duplicates of people around, etc. I know that Hanson thinks that 1. ems will not be robbed of their humanity and 2. that lots of things we currently consider horrible will come to pass and be accepted, but it's rather strange just how as soon as people say 'em' (as opposed to any other form of uploading) everything gets weird. Does anthropics come into it?
Why the huge focus on fully paternalistic Friendly AI rather than Obedient AI? It seems like a much lower-risk project. (and yes, I'm aware of the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI.)
For what it's worth, Eliezer's answer to your second question is here:
Basically it's a matter of natural selection. Given a starting population of EMs, if some are unwilling to be copied, the ones that are willing to be copied will dominate the population in short order. If EMs are useful for work, eg valuable, then the more valuable ones will be copied more often. At that point, EMs that are willing to be copied and do slave labor effectively for no complaints will become the most copied, and the population of ems will end up being composed largely of copies of the person/people who are 1) ok with being copied, 2) ok with being modified to work more effectively.
Well, no offense, but I'm not sure you are aware of the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI, or rather, just how much F you need in a genie.
If you were to actually figure out how to build a genie you would have figured it out by trying to build a CEV-class AI, intending to tackle all those challenges, tackling all those challenges, having pretty good solutions to all of those challenges, not trusting those solutions quite enough, and temporarily retreating to a mere genie which had ALL of the safety measures one would intuitively imagine necessary for a CEV-class independently-acting unchecked AI, to the best grade you could currently implement them. Anyone who thought they could skip the hard parts of CEV-class FAI by just building a genie instead, would die like a squirrel under a lawnmower. For reasons they didn't even understand because they hadn't become engaged with that part of the problem.
I'm not certain that this must happen in reality. The problem might have much kinder qualities than I anticipate in the sense of mistakes naturally showing up early enough and blatantly enough for corner-cutters to spot them. But it's how things are looking as a default after becoming engaged with the problems of CEV-class AI. The same problems show up in proposed 'genies' too, it's just that the genie-proposers don't realize it.
I don't know whether Hanson has a concret concept of 'humanity'.
Because the AI is better at estimating the consequences of following an order than the person giving the order.
There also the issue that the AI is likely to act in a way that changes the order that the person gives if it's own utility criteria are about fulfilling orders.
I didn't know "em" was a specific form of uploading. What form is it, and what other forms are there?
Besides Eliezer's rather strong-looking argument, ethically creating Obedient AI would require solving the following scary problems:
A "nonperson predicate" that can ensure the AI doesn't create simulations which themselves count as people. If we fail to solve this one, then I could be a simulation the AI made in order to test how people like me react to torture.
A way to ensure the AI itself does not count as a person, so that we don't feel sad if it eventually switches itself off. See here for a fuller explanation of why this matters.
Now, I think Wei Dai suggested we start by building a "philosophical" AI that could solve such problems for us. I don't think philosophy is a natural class. (A 'correct way to do philosophy' sounds like a fully general correct way to think and act.) But if we get the AI's goals right, then maybe it could start out restricted by flawed and overcautious answers to these questions, but find us some better answers. Maybe.
I'm in favor of making this a monthly or more thread as a way of subtracting some bloat from open threads in the same way the media threads do.
I also think that we should encourage lots of posts to these threads. After all, if you don't at least occasionally have a stupid question to ask, you're probably poorly calibrated on how many questions you should be asking.
If no question you ask is ever considered stupid, you're not checking enough of your assumptions.
How do you get someone to understand your words as they are, denotatively -- so that they do not overly-emphasize (non-existent) hidden connotations?
Of course, you should choose your words carefully, taking into account how they may be (mis)interpreted, but you can't always tie yourself into knots forestalling every possible guess about what intentions "really" are.
Establish a strong social script regarding instances where words should be taken denotatively, e.g. Crocker's rules. I don't think any other obvious strategies work. Hidden connotations exist whether you want them to or not.
This is the wrong attitude about how communication works. What matters is not what you intended to communicate but what actually gets communicated. The person you're communicating with is performing a Bayesian update on the words that are coming out of your mouth to figure out what's actually going on, and it's your job to provide the Bayesian evidence that actually corresponds to the update you want.
Become more status conscious. You are most likely inadvertently saying things that sound like status moves, which prompts others to not take what you say at face value. I haven't figured out how to fix this completely, but I have gotten better at noticing it and sometimes preempting it.
Reading the Sequences has improved my epistemic rationality, but not so much my instrumental rationality. What are some resources that would help me with this? Googling is not especially helping. Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Attend a CFAR workshop!
I think many people would find this advice rather impractical. What about people who (1) cannot afford to pay USD3900 to attend the workshop (as I understand it, scholarships offered by CFAR are limited in number), and/or (2) cannot afford to spend the time/money travelling to the Bay Area?
We do offer a number of scholarships. If that's your main concern, apply and see what we have available. (Applying isn't a promise to attend). If the distance is your main problem, we're coming to NYC and you can pitch us to come to your city.
I have decided to take small risks on a daily basis (for the danger/action feeling), but I have trouble finding specific examples. What are interesting small-scale risks to take? (give as many examples as possible)
Apparently some study found that the difference between people with bad luck and those with good luck is that people with good luck take lots of low-downside risks.
Can't help with specific suggestions, but thinking about it in terms of the decision-theory of why it's a good idea can help to guide your search. But you're doing it for the action-feeling...
Climb a tree.
Use a randomizer to choose someone in your address book and call them immediately (don't give yourself enough time to talk yourself out of it). It is a rush thinking about what to say as the phone is ringing. You are risking your social status (by coming off wierd or awkward, in the case you don't have anything sensible to say) without really harming anyone. On the plus side, you may make a new ally or rekindle an old relationship.
Going for the feeling without the actual downside? Play video games MMPRPGs. Shoot zombies until they finally overwhelm you. Shoot cops in vice city until the army comes after you. Jump out of helicopters.
I really liked therufs suggestion list below. The downside, the thing you are risking in each of these, doesn't actually harm you, it makes you stronger.
Try some exposure therapy to whatever it is you're often afraid of. Can't think of what you're often afraid of? I'd be surprised if you're completely immune to every common phobia.
I actually have a book on exactly this subject: Absinthe and Flamethrowers. The author's aim is to show you ways to take real but controllable risks.
I can't vouch for its quality since I haven't read it yet, but it exists. And, y'know. Flamethowers.
When you go out to eat with friends, randomly choose who pays for the meal. In the long run this only increases the variance of your money. I think it's fun.
This is likely to increase the total bill, much like how splitting the check evenly instead of strictly paying for what you ordered increases the total bill.
Assign the probabilities in proportion to each person's fraction of the overall bill. Incentives are aligned.
I haven't observed this happening among my friends. Maybe if you only go out to dinner with homo economicus...
This is called the unscrupulous diner's dilemma, and experiments say that not only do people (strangers) respond to it like homo economicus, their utility functions seem to not even have terms for each other's welfare. Maybe you eat with people who are impression-optimizing (and mathy, so that they know the other person knows indulging is mean), and/or genuinely care about each other.
Also, order your food and or drinks at random.
Hi, have been reading this site only for a few months, glad that this thread came up. My stupid question : can a person simply be just lazy, and how does all the motivation/fighting akrasia techniques help such a person?
Taboo "lazy." What kind of a person are we talking about, and do they want to change something about the kind of person they are?
My current view is that most animals are not people, in the sense that they are not subject to moral concern. Of course, I do get upset when I see things such as animal abuse, but it seems to me that helping animals only nets me warm fuzzy feelings. I know animals react to suffering in a manner that we can sympathize with, but it just seems to me that they are still just running a program that is "below" that of humans. I think I feel that "react to pain" does not equal "worthy of moral consideration." The only exceptions to this in my eyes may be "higher mammals" such as other primates. Yet others on this site have advocated concern for animal welfare. Where am I confused?
First thing to note is that "worthy of moral consideration" is plausibly a scalar. The philosophical & scientific challenges involved in defining it are formidable, but in my books it has something to do with to what extent a non-human animal experiences suffering. So I am much less concerned with hurting a mosquito than a gorilla, because I suspect mosquitoes do not experience much of anything, but I suspect gorillas do.
Although I think ability to suffer is correlated with intelligence, it's difficult to know whether it scales with intelligence in a simple way. Sure, a gorilla is better than a mouse at problem-solving, but that doesn't make it obvious that it suffers more.
Consider the presumed evolutionary functional purpose of suffering, as a motivator for action. Assuming the experience of suffering does not require very advanced cognitive architecture, why would a mouse necessarily experience vastly less suffering that a more intelligent gorilla? It needs the motivation just as much.
To sum up, I have a preference for creatures that can experience suffering to not suffer gratuitously, as I suspect that many do (although the detailed philosophy behind this suspicion is muddy to say the least). Thus, utilitarian veganism, and also the unsolved problem of what the hell to do about the "Darwinian holocaust."
Do you think that all humans are persons? What about unborn children? A 1 year old? A mentally handicapped person?
What your criteria for granting personhood. Is it binary?
I have no idea what I consider a person to be. I think that I wish it was binary because that would be neat and pretty and make moral questions a lot easier to answer. But I think that it probably isn't. Right now I feel as though what separates person from nonperson is totally arbitrary.
It seems as though we evolved methods of feeling sympathy for others, and now we attempt to make a logical model from that to define things as people. It's like "person" is an unsound concept that cannot be organized into an internally consistent system. Heck, I'm actually starting to feel like all of human nature is an internally inconsistent mess doomed to never make sense.
Are you confused? It seems like you recognize that you have somewhat different values than other people. Do you think everyone should have the same values? In that case all but one of the views is wrong. On the other hand, if values can be something that's different between people it's legitimate for some people to care about animals and others not to.
The people who think that nanobots will be able to manufacture arbitrary awesome things in arbitrary amounts at negligible costs... where do they think the nanobots will take the negentropy from?
The sun.
Almost all the available energy on Earth originally came from the Sun; the only other sources I know of are radioactive elements within the Earth and the rotation of the Earth-Moon system.
So even if it's not from the sun's current output, it's probably going to be from the sun's past output.
Hydrogen for fusion is also available on the Earth and didn't come from the Sun. We can't exploit it commercially yet, but that's just an engineering problem. (Yes, if you want to be pedantic, we need primordial deuterium and synthesized tritium, because proton-proton fusion is far beyond our capabilities. However, D-T's ingredients still don't come from the Sun.)
The usual advice on how to fold a t-shirt starts with the assumption that your t-shirt is flat, but I'm pretty sure that getting the shirt flat takes me longer than folding it. My current flattening method is to grab the shirt by the insides of the sleeves to turn it right-side out, then grab the shoulder seams to shake it flat. Is there anything better?
I agree about the sleeves, but I get much better results if I grab it at the bottom to shake it out. Ideally, there are seams coming straight down the sides from the armpits; I hold it where they meet the bottom hem. Note that whether you shake from the shoulder seams or from the bottom, one hand will already be in the proper position from turning the sleeves inside it; it's just a question of which one.
I also fold the shirt while standing, so I never actually need to lay it flat. There is a standing-only variation of the method that you cited, although I actually use a different method that begins from precisely the position that I'm in when I leave off the shaking.
In fact, the idea of actually laying something flat before folding strikes me as a greater source of inefficiency than anything else being discussed here. With practice, you can even fold bedsheets in the air.
How do people construct priors? Is it worth trying to figure out how to construct better priors?
They make stuff up, mostly, from what I see here. Some even pretend that "epsilon" is a valid prior.
Definitely. Gwern recommends the prediction book as a practice to measure and improve your calibration.
I don't think it's useful to think about constructing priors in the abstract. If you think about concrete examples, you see lots of cases where a reasonable prior is easy to find (eg coin-tossing, and the typical breast-cancer diagnostic test example). That must leave some concrete examples where good priors are hard to find. What are they?
I don't know how much this answers your question.
From LessWrong posts such as 'Created in Motion' and 'Where Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom' I've come to see that humans are born with priors (the post 'inductive bias' is also related, where an agent must have some sort of prior to be able to learn anything at all ever - a pebble has no priors, but a mind does, which means it can update on evidence. What Yudkowsky calls a 'philosophical ghost of perfect emptiness' is other people's image of a mind with no prior, suddenly updating to have a map that perfectly reflects the territory. Once you have a thorough understanding of Bayes Theorem, this is blatantly impossible/incoherent).
So, we're born with priors about the environment, and then our further experience give us new priors for our next experiences.
Of course, this is all rather abstract, and if you'd like to have a guide to actually forming priors about real life situations that you find confusing... Well, put in an edit, maybe someone can give you that :-)
Why does anyone care about anthropics? It seems like a mess of tautologies and thought experiments that pays no rent in anticipated experiences.
An important thing to realize is that people working on anthropics are trying to come up with a precise inferential methodology. They're not trying to draw conclusions about the state of the world, they're trying to draw conclusions about how one should draw conclusions about the state of the world. Think of it as akin to Bayesianism. If someone read an introduction to Bayesian epistemology, and said "This is just a mess of tautologies (Bayes' theorem) and thought experiments (Dutch book arguments) that pays no rent in anticipated experience. Why should I care?", how would you respond? Presumably you'd tell them that they should care because understanding the Bayesian methodology helps people make sounder inferences about the world, even if it doesn't predict specific experiences. Understanding anthropics does the same thing (except perhaps not as ubiquitously).
So the point of understanding anthropics is not so much to directly predict experiences but to appreciate how exactly one should update on certain pieces of evidence. It's like understanding any other selection effect -- in order to properly interpret the significance of pieces of evidence you collect, you need to have a proper understanding of the tools you use to collect them. To use Eddington's much-cited example, if your net can't catch fish smaller than six inches, then the fact that you haven't caught any such fish doesn't tell you anything about the state of the lake you're fishing. Understanding the limitations of your data-gathering mechanism prevents you from making bad updates. And if the particular limitation you're considering is the fact that observations can only be made in regimes accessible to observers, then you're engaged in anthropic reasoning.
Paul Dirac came up with a pretty revisionary cosmological theory based on several apparent "large number coincidences" -- important large (and some small) numbers in physics that all seem to be approximate integer powers of the Hubble age of the universe. He argued that it is implausible that we just happen to find ourselves at a time when these simple relationships hold, so they must be law-like. Based on this he concluded that certain physical constants aren't really constant; they change as the universe ages. R. H. Dicke showed (or purported to show) that at least some of these coincidences can be explained when one realizes that observers can only exist during a certain temporal window in the universe's existence, and that the timing of this window is related to a number of other physical constants (since it depends on facts about the formation and destruction of stars, etc.). If it's true that observers can only exist in an environment where these large number relationships hold, then it's a mistake to update our beliefs about natural laws based on these relationships. So that's an example of how understanding the anthropic selection effect might save us (and not just us, but also superhumans like Dirac) from bad updates.
So much for anthropics in general, but what about the esoteric particulars -- SSA, SIA and all that. Well, here's the basic thought: Dirac's initial (non-anthropic) move to his new cosmological theory was motivated by the belief that it is extraordinarily unlikely that the large number coincidences are purely due to chance, that we just happen to be around at a time when they hold. This kind of argument has a venerable history in physics (and other sciences, I'm sure) -- if your theory classifies your observed evidence as highly atypical, that's a significant strike against the theory. Anthropic reasoning like Dicke's adds a wrinkle -- our theory is allowed to classify evidence as atypical, as long as it is not atypical for observers. In other words, even if the theory says phenomenon X occurs very rarely in our universe, an observation of phenomenon X doesn't count against it, as long as the theory also says (based on good reason, not ad hoc stipulation) that observers can only exist in those few parts of the universe where phenomenon X occurs. Atypicality is allowed as long as it is correlated with the presence of observers.
But only that much atypicality is allowed. If your theory posits significant atypicality that goes beyond what selection effects can explain, then you're in trouble. This is the insight that SSA, SIA, etc seek to precisify. They are basically attempts to update the Diracian "no atypicality" strategy to allow for the kind of atypicality that anthropic reasoning explains, but no more atypicality than that. Perhaps they are misguided attempts for various reasons, but the search for a mathematical codification of the "no atypicality" move is important, I think, because the move gets used imprecisely all the time anyway (without explicit evocation, most of the time) and it gets used without regard for important observation selection effects.
If you taboo "anthropics" and replace by "observation selection effects" then there are all sorts of practical consequences. See the start of Nick Bostrom's book for some examples.
The other big reason for caring is the "Doomsday argument" and the fact that all attempts to refute it have so far failed. Almost everyone who's heard of the argument thinks there's something trivially wrong with it, but all the obvious objections can be dealt with e.g. look later in Bostrom's book. Further, alternative approaches to anthropics (such as the "self indication assumption"), or attempts to completely bypass anthropics (such as "full non-indexical conditioning"), have been developed to avoid the Doomsday conclusion. But very surprisingly, they end up reproducing it. See Katja Grace's theisis.
Take Bayes’ theorem: P(H|O) = P(O|H) × P(H) / P(O). If H is a hypothesis and O is an observation, P(O|H) means “what is the probability of making that observation if the hypothesis is true?”
If a hypothesis has as consequence “nobody can observe O” (say, because no humans can exist), then that P(O|H) is 0 (actually, it’s about the probability that you didn’t get the consequence right). Which means that, once you made the observation, you will probably decide that the hypothesis is unlikely. However, if you don’t notice that consequence, you might decide that P(O|H) is large, and incorrectly assign high likelihood to the hypothesis.
For a completely ridiculous example, imagine that there’s a deadly cat-flu epidemic; it gives 90% of cats that catch it a runny nose. Your cat’s nose becomes runny. You might be justified to think that it’s likely your cat got cat-flu. However, if you know that all cases, the cat’s owner dies of the flu before the cat has any symptoms, the conclusion would be the opposite. (Since, if it were the flu, you wouldn’t see the cat’s runny nose, because you’d be dead.) The same evidence, opposite effect.
Anthropics is kind of the same thing, except you’re mostly guessing about the flu.
Possible example of an anthropic idea paying rent in anticipated experiences: anthropic shadowing of intermittent observer-killing catastrophes of variable size.
I'd add that the Doomsday argument in specific seems like it should be demolished by even the slightest evidence as to how long we have left.
There's a story about anthropic reasoning being used to predict properties of the processes which produce carbon in stars, before these processes were known. (apparently there's some debate about whether or not this actually happened)
The obvious application (to me) is figuring out how to make decisions once mind uploading is possible. This point is made, for example, in Scott Aaronson's The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. What do you anticipate experiencing if someone uploads your mind while you're still conscious?
Anthropics also seems to me to be relevant to the question of how to do Bayesian updates using reference classes, a subject I'm still very confused about and which seems pretty fundamental. Sometimes we treat ourselves as randomly sampled from the population of all humans similar to us (e.g. when diagnosing the probability that we have a disease given that we have some symptoms) and sometimes we don't (e.g. when rejecting the Doomsday argument, if that's an argument we reject). Which cases are which?
Or even: deciding how much to care about experiencing pain during an operation if I'll just forget about it afterwards. This has the flavor of an anthropics question to me.
My own view is that this is precisely correct and exactly why anthropics is interesting, we really should have a good, clear approach to it and the fact we don't suggests there is still work to be done.
Not sure about anthropics, but we need decision theories that work correctly with copies, because we want to build AIs, and AIs can make copies of themselves.
Is there any non-creepy way to indicate to people that you're available and interested in physical intimacy? doing something like just telling everyone you meet "hey you're cute want to make out?" seems like it would go badly.
Slightly increase eye contact. Orient towards. Mirror posture. Use touch during interaction (in whatever ways are locally considered non-creepy).
It seems to me that there are basically two approaches to preventing an UFAI intelligence explosion: a) making sure that the first intelligence explosion is a a FAI instead; b) making sure that intelligence explosion never occurs. The first one involves solving (with no margin for error) the philosophical/ethical/logical/mathematical problem of defining FAI, and in addition the sociological/political problem of doing it "in time", convincing everyone else, and ensuring that the first intelligence explosion occurs according to this resolution. The second one involves just the sociological/political problem of convincing everyone of the risks and banning/discouraging AI research "in time" to avoid an intelligence explosion.
Naively, it seems to me that the second approach is more viable--it seems comparable in scale to something between stopping use of CFCs (fairly easy) and stopping global warming (very difficult, but it is premature to say impossible). At any rate, sounds easier than solving (over a few year/decades) so many hard philosophical and mathematical problems, with no margin for error and under time pressure to do it ahead of UFAI developing.
However, it seems (from what I read on LW and found quickly browsing the MIRI website; I am not particularly well informed, hence writing this on the Stupid Questions thread) that most of the efforts of MIRI are on the first approach. Has there been a formal argument on why it is preferable, or are there efforts on the second approach I am unaware of? The only discussion I found was Carl Shulman's "Arms Control and Intelligence Explosions" paper, but it is brief and nothing like a formal analysis comparing the benefits of each strategy. I am worried the situation might be biased by the LW/MIRI kind of people being more interested in (and seeing as more fun) the progress on the timeless philosophical problems necessary for (a) than the political coalition building and propaganda campaigns necessary for (b).
I think it's easier to get a tiny fraction of the planet to do a complex right thing than to get 99.9% of a planet to do a simpler right thing, especially if 99.9% compliance may not be enough and 99.999% compliance may be required instead.
Given enough time for ideas to develop, any smart kid in a basement could build an AI, and every organization in the world has a massive incentive to do so. Only omnipresent surveillance could prevent everyone from writing a particular computer program.
Once you have enough power flying around to actually prevent AI, you are dealing with AI-level threats already (a not-necessarily friendly singleton).
So FAI is actually the easiest way to prevent UFAI.
The other reason is that a Friendly Singleton would be totally awesome. Like so totally awesome that it would be worth it to try for the awesomeness alone.
We discuss this proposal in Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk, under the sections "Regulate research" and "Relinquish technology". I recommend reading both of those sections if you're interested, but a few relevant excerpts:
I had no idea that Herbert's Butlerian Jihad might be a historical reference.
Wow, I've read Dune several times, but didn't actually get that before you pointed it out.
It turns out that there's a wikipedia page.
There's a third alternative, though it's quite unattractive: damaging civilization to the point that AI is impossible.
My impression of Eliezer's model of the intelligence explosion is that he believes b) is much harder than it looks. If you make developing strong AI illegal then the only people who end up developing it will be criminals, which is arguably worse, and it only takes one successful criminal organization developing strong AI to cause an unfriendly intelligence explosion. The general problem is that a) requires that one organization do one thing (namely, solving friendly AI) but b) requires that literally all organizations abstain from doing one thing (namely, building unfriendly AI).
CFCs and global warming don't seem analogous to me. A better analogy to me is nuclear disarmament: it only takes one nuke to cause bad things to happen, and governments have a strong incentive to hold onto their nukes for military applications.
In the process of trying to pin down my terminal values, I've discovered at least 3 subagents of myself with different desires, as well as my conscious one which doesn't have its own terminal values, and just listens to theirs and calculates the relevant instrumental values. Does LW have a way for the conscious me to weight those (sometimes contradictory) desires?
What I'm currently using is "the one who yells the loudest wins", but that doesn't seem entirely satisfactory.
In transparent box Newcomb's problem, in order to get the $1M, do you have to (precommit to) one box even if you see that there is nothing in box A?
Why is space colonization considered at all desirable?
1: It's awesome. It's desirable for the same reason fast cars, fun computer games, giant pyramids, and sex is.
2: It's an insurance policy against things that might wreck the earth but not other planets/solar systems.
3: Insofar as we can imagine there to be other alien races, understanding space colonization is extremely important either for trade or self defense.
4: It's possible different subsets of humanity can never happily coexist, in which case having arbitrarily large amounts of space to live in ensures more peace and stability.
In sci-fi maybe. I doubt people actually living in space (or on un-Earth-like planets) would concur, without some very extensive technological change.
New incompatible sub-subsets will just keep arising in new colonies - as has happened historically.
Earth is currently the only known biosphere. More biospheres means that disasters that muck up one are less likely to muck up everything.
Less seriously, people like things that are cool.
EDIT: Seriously? My most-upvoted comment of all time? Really? This is as good as it gets?
Eggs, basket, x-risk.
It seems likely that exploiting resources in space will make society richer, benefiting everyone. Perhaps that will require people live in space.
Another reason is that the earth's crust is quite rare in virtually all precious and useful metals (just look at the d-block of the periodic table for examples). Virtually all of them sank to the core during earth's formation, the existing deposits are the result of asteroids striking. So, asteroid mining is worth considering even if you're a pure capitalist working for your own gain.
Would you rather have one person living a happy, fulfilled life, or two? Would you rather have seven billion people living with happy, fulfilled lives, or seven billion planets full of people living happy, fulfilled lives?
It is not the space as currently is, to be colonized. It's the radically technologically transformed space we are after!
Then why not be after technological transformation of Earth first, and (much easier) expansion into space afterwards? Is it only the 'eggs in one basket' argument that supports early colonization?
"We" (humans of this epoch) might work to thwart the appearance of UFAI. Is this actually a "good" thing from a utilitarian point of view?
Or put another way, would our CEV, our Coherent Extrapolated Values, not expand to consider the utilities of vastly intelligent AIs and weight that in importance with their intelligence? In such a way that CEV winds up producing no distinction between UFAI and FAI, because the utility of such vast intelligences moves the utility of unmodified 21st century biological humans to fairly low significance?
In economic terms, we are attempting to thwart new more efficient technologies by building political structures that give monopolies to the incumbents, which is us, humans of this epoch. We are attempting to outlaw the methods of competition which might challenge our dominance in the future, at the expense of the utility of our potential future competitors. In a metaphor, we are the colonial landowners of the earth and its resources, and we are building a powerful legal system to keep our property rights intact, even at the expense of tying AI's up in legal restrictions which are explicitly designed to keep them as peasants tied legally to working our land for our benefit.
Certainly a result of constraining AI to be friendly will be that AI will develop more slowly and less completely than if it was to develop in an unconstrained way. It seems quite plausible that unconstrained AI would produce a universe with more intelligence in it than a universe in which we successfully constrain AI development.
In the classical utilitarian calculations, it would seem that it is the intelligence of humans that justifies a high weighting of human utility. It seems that utilitarian calculations do often consider the utility of other higher mammals and birds, that this is justified by their intelligence, that these calculations weigh the utility of clams very little and of plants not at all, and that this also is based on their intelligence.
SO is a goal of working towards FAI vs UFAI or UAI (Unconstrained AI) actually a goal to lower the overall utility in the universe, vs what it would be if we were not attempting to create and solidify our colonial rights to exploit AI as if they were dumb animals?
This "stupid" question is also motivated by the utility calculations that consider a world with 50 billion sorta happy people to have higher utility than a world with 1 billion really happy people.
Are we right to ignore the potential utility of UFAI or UAI in our calculations of the utility of the future?
Tangentially, another way to ask this is: is our "affinity group" humans, or is it intelligences? In the past humans worked to maximize the utility of their group or clan or tribe, ignoring the utility of other humans just like them but in a different tribe. As time went on our affinity groups grew, the number and kind of intelligences we included in our utility calculations grew. For the last few centuries affinity groups grew larger than nations to races, co-religionists and so on, and to a large extent grew to include all humans, and has even expanded beyond humans so that many people think that killing higher mammals to eat their flesh will be considered immoral by our descendants analogously to how we consider holding slaves or racist views to be immoral actions of our ancestors. So much of the expansion of our affinity group has been accompanied by the recognition of intelligence and consciousness in those who get added to the affinity group. What are the chances that we will be able to create AI and keep it enslaved, and still think we are right to do so in the middle-distant future?
Good news! Omega has offered you the chance to become a truly unconstrained User:mwengler, able to develop in directions you were previously cruelly denied!
Like - let's see - ooh, how about the freedom to betray all the friends you were previously constrained to care about? Or maybe the liberty to waste and destroy all those possessions and property you were viciously forced to value? Or how about you just sit there inertly forever, finally free from the evil colonialism of wanting to do things. Your pick!
Hah. Now I'm reminded of the first episode of Nisemonogatari where they discuss how the phrase "the courage to X" makes everything sound cooler and nobler:
"The courage to keep your secret to yourself!"
"The courage to lie to your lover!"
"The courage to betray your comrades!"
"The courage to be a lazy bum!"
"The courage to admit defeat!"
Nope. For me, it's the fact that they're human. Intelligence is a fake utility function.
Surely we are the native americans, trying to avoid dying of Typhus when the colonists accidentally kill us in their pursuit of paperclips.
How do you tell the difference between a preference and a bias (in other people)?
I can't even easily, reliably do that in myself!
Would you have any specific example?
I don't know if this is what the poster is thinking of, but one example that came up recently for me is the distinction between risk-aversion and uncertainty-aversion (these may not be the correct terms).
Risk aversion is the what causes me to strongly not want to bet $1000 on a coin flip, even though the expectancy of is zero. I would characterise risk-aversion as an arational preference rather than an irrational bias, primarily becase it arises naturally from having a utility function that is non-linear in wealth ($100 is worth a lot if you're begging on the streets, not so much if you're a billionaire).
However, something like the Allais paradox can be mathematically proven to not arise from any utility function, however non-linear, and therefore is not explainable by risk aversion. Uncertainty aversion is roughly speaking my name for whatever-it-is-that-causes-people-to-choose-irrationally-on-Allais. It seems to work be causing people to strongly prefer certain gains to high probability gains, and much more weakly prefer high-probability gains to low-probability gains.
For the past few weeks I have been in an environment where casual betting for moderate sized amounts ($1-2 on the low end, $100 on the high end) is common, and disentangling risk-aversion from uncertainty aversion in my decision process has been a constant difficulty.
Can someone explain "reflective consistency" to me? I keep thinking I understand what it is and then finding out that no, I really don't. A rigorous-but-English definition would be ideal, but I would rather parse logic than get a less rigorous definition.
If I take the outside view and account for the fact that thirty-something percent of people, including a lot of really smart people, believe in Christianity, and that at least personally I have radically changed my worldview a whole bunch of times, then it seems like I should assign at least a 5% or so probability to Christianity being true. How, therefore, does Pascal's Wager not apply to me? Even if we make it simpler by taking away the infinite utilities and merely treating Heaven as ten thousand years or so of the same level of happiness as the happiest day in my life, and treating Hell as ten thousand years or so of the same level of unhappiness as the unhappiest day in my life, the argument seems like it should still apply.
My admittedly very cynical point of view is to assume that, to a first-order approximation, most people don't have beliefs in the sense that LW uses the word. People just say words, mostly words that they've heard people they like say. You should be careful not to ascribe too much meaning to the words most people say.
In general, I think it's a mistake to view other people through an epistemic filter. View them through an instrumental filter instead: don't ask "what do these people believe?" but "what do these people do?" The first question might lead you to conclude that religious people are dumb. The second question might lead you to explore the various instrumental ways in which religious communities are winning relative to atheist communities, e.g. strong communal support networks, a large cached database of convenient heuristics for dealing with life situations, etc.
If there was a way to send a message to my 10 years ago former self, and I could only send a hundred of characters, that's what I would send.
I'm obviously terribly shallow. I would send a bunch of sporting results / stock price data.
Hm?
In the form of religious stories or perhaps advice from a religious leader. I should've been more specific than "life situations": my guess is that religious people acquire from their religion ways of dealing with, for example, grief and that atheists may not have cached any such procedures, so they have to figure out how to deal with things like grief.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
How do you account for the other two thirds of people who don't believe in Christianity and commonly believe things directly contradictory to it? Insofar as every religion was once (when it started) vastly outnumbered by the others, you can't use population at any given point in history as evidence that a particular religion is likely to be true, since the same exact metric would condemn you to hell at many points in the past. There are several problems with pascal's wager but the biggest to me is it's impossible to choose WHICH pascal's wager to make. You can attempt to conform to all non-contradictory religious rules extant but that still leaves the problem of choosing which contradictory commandments to obey, as well as the problem of what exactly god even wants from you, if it's belief or simple ritual. The proliferation of equally plausible religions is to me very strong evidence that no one of them is likely to be true, putting the odds of "christianity" being true at lower than even 1 percent and the odds that any specific sect of christianity being true being even lower.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the other popular religions don't really believe in eternal paradise/damnation, so Pascal's Wager applies just as much to, say, Christianity vs. Hinduism as it does Christianity vs. atheism. Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus don't believe in hell, but as far as I can tell. Muslims do. So if I were going to buy into Pascal's wager, I think I would read apologetics of both Christianity and Islam, figure out which one seemed more likely, and going with that one. Even if you found equal probability estimates for both, flipping a coin and picking one would still be better than going with atheism, right?
Why? Couldn't it be something like, Religion A is correct, Religion B almost gets it and is getting at the same essential truth, but is wrong in a few ways, Religion C is an outdated version of Religion A that failed to update on new information, Religion D is an altered imitation of Religion A that only exists for political reasons, etc.
Good post though, and you sort of half-convinced me that there are flaws in Pascal's Wager, but I'm still not so sure.
You're combining two reasons for believing: Pascal's Wager, and popularity (that many people already believe). That way, you try to avoid a pure Pascal's Mugging, but if the mugger can claim to have successfully mugged many people in the past, then you'll submit to the mugging. You'll believe in a religion if it has Heaven and Hell in it, but only if it's also popular enough.
You're updating on the evidence that many people believe in a religion, but it's unclear what it's evidence for. How did most people come to believe in their religion? They can't have followed your decision procedure, because it only tells you to believe in popular religions, and every religion historically started out small and unpopular.
So for your argument to work, you must believe that the truth of a religion is a strong positive cause of people believing in it. (It can't be overwhelmingly strong, though, since no religion has or has had a large majority of the world believing in it.)
But if people can somehow detect or deduce the truth of a religion on their own - and moreover, billions of people can do so (in the case of the biggest religions) - then you should be able to do so as well.
Therefore I suggest you try to decide on the truth of a religion directly, the way those other people did. Pascal's Wager can at most bias you in favour of religions with Hell in them, but you still need some unrelated evidence for their truth, or else you fall prey to Pascal's Mugging.
Even if you limit yourself to eternal damnation promising religions, you still need to decide which brand of Christianity/Islam is true.
If religion A is true, that implies that religion A's god exists and acts in a way consistent with the tenets of that religion. This implies that all of humanity should have strong and very believable evidence for Religion A over all other religions. But we have a large amount of religions that describe god and gods acting in very different ways. This is either evidence that all the religions are relatively false, that god is inconsistent, or that we have multiple gods who are of course free to contradict one another. There's a lot of evidence that religions sprout from other religions and you could semi-plausibly argue that there is a proto-religion that all modern ones are versions or corruptions of, but this doesn't actually work to select Christianity, because we have strong evidence that many religions predate Christianity, including some of which that it appears to have borrowed myths from.
Another problem with pascal's wager: claims about eternal rewards or punishments are not as difficult to make as they would be to make plausible. Basically: any given string of words said by a person is not plausible evidence for infinite anything because it's far more easy to SAY infinity than to provide any other kind of evidence. This means you can't afford to multiply utility by infinity because at any point someone can make any claim involving infinity and fuck up all your math.
There are also various Christian's who believe that other Christian's who follow Christianity the wrong way will go to hell.
I can't upvote this point enough.
And more worryingly, with the Christians I have spoken to, those who are more consistent in their beliefs and actually update the rest of their beliefs on them (and don't just have "Christianity" as a little disconnected bubble in their beliefs) are overwhelmingly in this category, and those who believe that most Christians will go to heaven usually haven't thought very hard about the issue.
C.S. Lewis thought most everyone was going to Heaven and thought very hard about the issue. (The Great Divorce is brief, engagingly written, an allegory of nearly universalism, and a nice typology of some sins).
Yes, but there are highly probable alternate explanations (other than the truth of Christianity) for their belief in Christianity, so the fact of their belief is very weak evidence for Christianity. If an alarm goes off whenever there's an earthquake, but also whenever a car drives by outside, then the alarm going off is very weak (practically negligible) evidence for an earthquake. More technically, when you are trying to evaluate the extent to which E is good evidence for H (and consequently, how much you should update your belief in H based on E), you want to look not at the likelihood Pr(E|H), but at the likelihood ratio Pr(E|H)/Pr(E|~H). And the likelihood ratio in this case, I submit, is not much more than 1, which means that updating on the evidence shouldn't move your prior odds all that much.
This seems irrelevant to the truth of Christianity.
That probability is way too high.
I should think that this is more likely to indicate that nobody, including really smart people, and including you, actually knows whats what and trying to chase after all these pascals muggings is pointless becuase you will always run into another one that seems convincing from someone else smart.
With the recent update on HPMOR, I've been reading a few HP fanfictions : HPMOR, HP and the Natural 20, the recursive fanfiction HG and the Burden of Responsibility and a few others. And it seems my brain has trouble coping with that. I didn't have the problem with just canon and HPMOR (even when (re-)reading both in //), but now that I've added more fanfictions to the mix, I'm starting to confuse what happened in which universe, and my brain can't stop trying to find ways to ensure all the fanfictions are just facet of a single coherent universe, which of course doesn't work well...
I am the only one with that kind of problems, reading several fanfictions occurring in the same base universe ? It's the first time I try to do that, and I didn't except being so confused. Do you have some advices to avoid the confusion, like "wait at least one week (or month ?) before jumping to a different fanfiction" ?
Write up your understanding of the melange, obviously.
What is more precious - the tigers of India, or lives of all the people eaten every year by the tigers of India?
A bit of quick Googling suggests that there are around 1500 tigers in India, and about 150 human deaths by tiger attack every year (that's the estimate for the Sundarbans region alone, but my impression is that tiger attack deaths outside the Sundarbans are negligible in comparison). Given those numbers, I would say that if the only way to prevent those deaths was to eliminate the tiger population and there wouldn't be any dire ecological consequences to the extinction, then I would support the elimination of the tiger population. But in actual fact, I am sure there are a number of ways to prevent most of those deaths without driving tigers to extinction, so the comparison of their relative values is a little bit pointless.
Ways as easy as sending a bunch of guys with rifles into the jungle?
You could legalize eating tiger. This will prevent tiger extinction in the same way it prevented cow extinction, result in sending some guys with rifles into the jungle that you don't even pay for, and if that's not enough, you can still send guys with rifles to finish off the wild population, and they still will be less likely to go extinct than if you do nothing.
There are lots of reasons why farming cows is significantly easier than farming tigers.
Tiger meat would be much more expensive than beef, but there's still enough of a market for it to keep tigers from going extinct.
Not all animals can be domesticated for meat production. Jared Diamond discusses the question in "Guns, Germs and Steel". He calls it the Anna Karenina principle, and some of the factors influencing this are:
All of those just increase the cost; certainly they can make things infeasible for hunter-gatherers with per capita incomes of maybe $300 a year generously. But they are of little interest to people with per capitas closer to $30,000 and who are willing to pay for tiger meat.
Sharks are legal to eat and this is a major factor in their current risk of extinction.
Isn't extinction risk the goal here? (Not extinction per se, but population reduction down to the level it is no longer a threat. At least in this hypothetical.)