If you oppose a government policy that personally benefits you, you are a hypocrite who bites the hand that feeds you.

If you support the policy that benefits you, you are a greedy narcissist whose loyalty can be bought and sold.

...but neither of these are meaningfully bad things according to post-Machiavellian political thought. Machiavelli dismantled the virtue-centric, moralizing system of "naive" political thought - finding wise, moral and incorruptible men to control society, as argued by Plato or Aquinas - and showed how the strength of a republic is in its internal conflicts and contradictions, how a naked struggle of competing group interests can ultimately lead to dynamism and progress. This is what most people don't understand about his legacy, and the great emancipatory power of making self-interest, not moralism the cornerstone of politics.

So yes, in some matters we're hypocrites, in others we're greedy narcissists... but society holds more hope for all of its warring factions when these facts are honestly acknowledged rather than wrapped in a cloak of "virtue"-moralism! And pursuit of socioeconomic self-interest has very little cross-over with following moral codes in day-to-day interactions, anyway. (No examples for either Blue or Green, let's pretend to be civil.)

...

So, (like almost everyone in earlier times), today's citizens succumb to a vaguely Catholic-flavoured way of seeing society, and end up less politically progressive than a 15th century theorist. Who unjustly acquired the reputation of someone between Marquis de Sade[1] and Emperor Palpatine- not without the help of 19th century clericals and reactionaries.

[1] Early libertarian socialist, proto-feminist and human rights advocate. Never ever got a fair shake either.

Heh. Good call.

Wow, I hadn't previously read the RichardKennaway comment you linked. I think internalizing that idea would be massively helpful in combating the tendency to view disagreement as inherently combative rather than a difference between priors.

(something I need to work on)

Thanks a lot, I found your discussion of LW to be enlightening.

Edit: This post is related to the discussion and makes great points.

"Possible outcomes" is not ontologically neutral in common usage. In common usage, "possible" excludes "actual", and that connotation is strong even when trying to use it technically. "Multiple outcomes" might be an acceptable compromise.

I find that thinking about "Everett branches" forces my brain to come up with alternative possible outcomes, where by default it would focus all of its attention on just one. Saying to myself "you should consider other possible outcomes" doesn't seem to have the same effect.

Richard Feynman was a theoretician as well as a 'people person'; if you read his writings about his experiences with people it really illustrates quite well how he managed to do it.

One tactic that he employed was simply being mysterious. He knew few people could relate to a University professor and that many would feel intimidated by that, so when in the company of laypeople he never even brought it up. They would ask him what he did and he would say, "I can't say." If pressed, he would say something vague like, "I work at the University." Done properly, it's playful and coy, and even though people might think you're a bit weird, they definitely won't consider you unrelatable.

In my opinion there's no need to concern yourself with activities that you don't like, as very few people are really actually interested in your interests. Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You'll be speaking 10% of the time yet you'll appear like a brilliant conversationalist. If they ask you if you've read a particular book or heard a particular artist, just say no (but don't sound harsh or bored). You'll seem 'indie' and mysterious, and people like that. In practice, though, as one gets older, people rarely ask about these things.

It's a common mistake that I've seen often in intellectual people. They assume they have to keep up with popular media so that they can have conversations. That is not true at all.

I use the recaplets on Television without Pity to keep up with the basic plot and cliffhangers of tv shows I don't watch, but most of my friends do. That way I don't drop out of conversations just because they're talking about True Blood.

Note: the only problem this strategy has caused for me is that my now-bf assumed I was a GoT fan (instead of having read the books and TWOP'd the show recaps), invited me over to watch, and assumed I turned him down because I wasn't interested in him instead of being indifferent to the show. We sorted it out eventually.

What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?

Well, I maintain pedestrian interests, but I consider it a failure condition to not attempt to participate in them. Comparably bad to going off my diet.

Downside: This is sometimes frustrating. I like Gaming and I like Game X, but sometimes I will think "I'm only playing Game X right now so I have something to talk about in the Car with Friend X." or Alternatively, I sometimes play a game and then think "But no one other than me cares about this game, so playing it feels inefficient."

Also, some of the other people who share pedestrian interests with me will work to prevent me from dropping them. For instance, if Game Y is a pedestrian interest, and my wife wants me to play Game Y with her, that doesn't just get dropped regardless of how busy I am.

Downside: This does sometimes result in me feeling overworked (I will plan events in Game Y as I am passing out in Bed. Again, this seems efficiency related.)

Also, I spend a fair amount of time trying to help various friends/family members directly. So I frequently have that conversational topic of "How is that problem we discussed earlier going?"

Downside: This this boosts my stress level again, because it increases the number of things I'm worrying about.

Finally, I have relatability notes on my phone for my wife that pop up on a semi-frequent basis. I also have these reminders on some of the helping people I'm doing, or even reminders for better advice on Game Y.

Downside: I'm really beginning to hate my phones "You have a reminder!" noise. Also, sometimes the reminders are depressing. I have a reminder "Spend time hanging out with your best friend" that has been unchecked for more than a month.

Potential Silver Lining: That being said, sometimes the reminder is encouraging: It's nice to be told "Make time for yourself." and realize "Why yes, I am doing that right now. Ahhhh."

Note: I'm positive this isn't advice, because after looking at it posted altogether, my conclusion is not "Other people should do this." but "I have a problem and this is why I'm on anti-anxiety meds."

Obvious options are consuming popular culture, e.g. popular TV shows, music, or sports. There's a lot of good TV out there these days so it shouldn't be hard to get hooked on at least one show you can talk to a lot of people about (Game of Thrones?).

If you really insist on the "you do" part, I don't do anything with this explicit goal. I just talk.

A while ago I heared from Jim Rohn that even if you don't have had a near death experience everyone has something interesting to talk about. At the time I said to myself, hey I do have an experience that sort of qualifies as a near death experience. I had 5 days of artificial coma with some strange paranormal experience after waking up out of it.

At the time I still had a hard time conversing with people even through I had experiences that qualified as interesting. I just lacked the skill to talk about them.

I don't think that relating to other people is primarily a question of the content of conversation.

It's about emotions. It's about empathy. It's about getting out of your head.

Instead of spending time in an activity that you could tell other people about, spend more time actually talking to people and practice relating on an emotional level.

One strategy: Take insular, scholarly interest in a broadly popular subject. For example, I'm interested in APBRmetrics and associated theoretical questions about the sport of basketball. One nice plus to this hobby is that it also leaves me with pretty up-to-date non-technical knowledge about NBA and college basketball.

I seldom watch TV and know very little of contemporary popular culture, and most of my conversations are about my experiences in meatspace (travels abroad, stuff I do with friends, etc.), my plans for the future, asking the other person about their experiences in meatspace and plans for the future, and (for people who appreciate it) physics.

But why do you want to keep yourself relatable to (arbitrary) people, rather than looking for people you're already relatable to, anyway?

This sort of thing is why people make fun of ev psych. That's the 2008 study that claimed to find biological reasons for girls to like pink.

I think it deserves more fairness. The abstract only claims to have measured a "cross-cultural sex difference in color preference", making no claims about the sex difference's origin. They do speculate a bit about ev-psych in the body of the paper, but they begin this speculation with the words "We speculate" and then in the conclusion they say "Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience."

This, of course, isn't how it was reported in the mainstream media.

(By the way, thanks for actually linking to the paper you mentioned, it makes it a whole lot easier when people do this.)

If you ascribe to MWI, locality is a reason to abandon De Broglie-Bohm theory, but a relatively minor one - instead, it's the way it insists on neglecting the reality of the guide wave.

If you take the guide wave to be a dynamical entity, then it's real and it's all happening so all the worlds are real, so what does the particle do here?

If you take the guide wave to be the rules of the universe (a tack I've heard) then the rules of the universe contain civilizations - literally, not as hypothetical implications. Choosing to use timeless physics (the response I got) doesn't change this.

The main problem with Bohmian mechanics, from my perspective, is not that it is non-local per se (after all, the lesson of Bell's theorem is that all interpretations of QM will be non-local in some sense), but that it's particular brand of egregious non-locality makes it very difficult to come up with a relativistic version of the theory. I have seen some attempts at developing a Bohmian quantum field theory, but they have been pretty crude (relying on undetectable preferred foliations, for instance, which I consider anathema). I haven't been keeping track, though, so maybe the state of play has changed.

I haven't seen a single good argument why the eventual theory of everything should be local.

No love for the principle of relativity? It's been real successful, and nonlocality means choosing a preferred reference frame. Even if the effects are non-observable, that implies immense contortions to jump through the hoops set by SR and GR, and reality being elegant seems to have worked so far. And sure, MWI may trample all over human uniqueness, but invoking human uniqueness didn't lead to the great cosmological breakthroughs of the 20th century.

The things that bugs me with DBB theory is that it allows superluminal comunication when the guide wave is out of equilibrium...

It's spam. The user's only contributions are this page and the FletcherEstrada user page.

One of the wiki admins will probably see this and do something about it.

(According to the MediaWiki documentation there's a way for a regular user to add a "delete label" to a page, but I couldn't figure out how.)

Edit:

Eliezer has deleted the spammy page and user.

It looks like the way to mark a page for deletion is to put the following text on the page:

{{delete}}

How would being moved by this argument help me achieve my values? I don't see how it helps me to maximize an aggregate utility function for all possible agents. I don't care intrinsically about Felix, nor is Felix capable of cooperating with me in any meaningful way.

Felix exists as multiple copies in many universes/Everett branches, and it's measure is the sum of the measures of the copies. Each version of mankind can only causally influence (e.g., make happier) the copy of Felix existing in the same universe/branch, and the measure of that copy of Felix shouldn't be much higher than that of an individual human, so there's no reason to treat Felix as a utility monster. Applying acausal reasoning doesn't change this conclusion either. For example all the parallel versions of mankind could jointly decide to make Felix happier, but while the benefit of that is greater (all the copies of Felix existing near the parallel versions of mankind would get happier), so would the cost.

If Felix is very simple it may be deriving most of its measure from a very short program that just outputs a copy of Felix (rather than the copies existing in universes/branches containing humans), but there's nothing humans can do to make this copy of Felix happier, so its existence doesn't make any difference.

http://xkcd.com/687/

Or to put it another way - probability is not just a unit. You need to keep track of probability of what, and to whom, or else you end up like the bad dimensional analysis comic.

A version of this that seems a bit more likely to me at least; the thing that matters is not the simplicity of the mind itself, but rather the ease of pointing it out among the rest of the universe; this'd mean that, basically, a a planet sized Babbage engine running a single human equivalent mind, would get more weight than a planet sized quantum computer running trillions and trillions of such minds. It'd also mean that all sorts of implementation details of how close the experiencing level is to raw physics would matter a lot, even if the I/O behaviour is identical. This is highly counter-intuitive.

One flaw; Felix almost certainly resides outside our causal reach and doesn't care about what happens here.

I would think this would be quite reassuring, as it suggests he actually has his priorities straight.

Attackers could cause the unit to unexpectedly open/close the lid, activate bidet or air-dry functions, causing discomfort or distress to user.

Heaven help us. Somebody get X-risk on this immediately.

Added to TVTropes.

I recommend being a hero and posting a meetup. Bring a book and a sign to a coffeeshop and see if people show up. Best case, you make new friends; worst reasonable case, you read a book in a coffeeshop for a few hours.

Seems like Open Thread is a fine place to put this, because, I am an entering freshman at RU, too! I just sent you a PM. :-)

I can trivially picture worse realities than this one.

I like the cut of your jib, even if there's a reasonable chance you'll turn out to be one of the boring type of certain possible cognitive hazard brokers.

"Indifferent AI" would be a better name than "Unfriendly AI".

It would unfortunately come with misleading connotations. People don't usually associate 'indifferent' with 'is certain to kill you, your family, your friends and your species'. People already get confused enough about 'indifferent' AIs without priming them with that word.

Would "Non-Friendly AI" satisfy your concerns? That gets rid of those of the connotations of 'unfriendly' that are beyond merely being 'something-other-than-friendly'.

I prefer the selective capitalisation of "unFriendly AI". This emphasizes that it's just any AI other than a Friendly AI, but still gets the message across that it's dangerous.

There are some AI in works of fiction that you could describe as indifferent. The one in neuromancer for example just wants to talk to other AI in the universe and doesn't try to transform all resources on earth into material to run itself.

An AI that does try to grow itself like a cancer is on the other hand unfriendly.

If you take about something like the malaria virus we also wouldn't call the virus indifferent but unfriendly towards humans even if the virus just tries to spread itself and doesn't have the goal of killing humans.

Eliezer assumes in the meta-ethics sequence that you cannot really ever talk outside of your general moral frame. By that assumption (which I think he is still making), Indifferent AI would be friendly or inactive. Unfriendly AI better conveys the externality to humans morality.

As a side comment, it's interesting to note that "The map is not the territory" is the first law of General Semantics, while the second law recites "The map is the territory", meaning that we cannot ever know the territory for what it really is: when we point to territory we are just basically pointing to another map.

the bias of choosing the action which is easiest

Laziness.

"I'm not lazy, I have a least-effort bias!"

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort

The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, even well designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort". It is closely related to many other similar principles: see Principle of least action or other articles listed below. This is perhaps best known or at least documented among researchers in the field of library and information science. Their principle states that an information seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method, in the least exacting mode available. Information seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found. This theory holds true regardless of the user's proficiency as a searcher, or their level of subject expertise. Also this theory takes into account the user’s previous information seeking experience. The user will use the tools that are most familiar and easy to use that find results. The principle of least effort is known as a “deterministic description of human behavior.”[1] The principle of least effort applies not only in the library context, but also to any information seeking activity. For example, one might consult a generalist co-worker down the hall rather than a specialist in another building, so long as the generalist's answers were within the threshold of acceptability.

Generally "bias" implies that you're talking more about beliefs than an actions.

If think one thing and do another because it's easier, that's referred to as "akrasia" around here.

If you're saying you believe the easier action is better, but then believe something else after putting more thought/effort/research into it, that does fall into the bias category. I don't think that's exactly cognitive laziness, more action-laziness affecting cognition. I don't have a good name, but it's some sort of causal fallacy, where the outcome (chosen action) is determining the belief (reason for choice) rather than the reverse.

Laziness can sometimes be a form of decision paralysis - when you're facing a new and difficult problem and not sure how to approach it, your brain sometimes freaks out and goes to default behavior, which is to do nothing. That's why it's important to make plans and pre-commitments.

You may have already seen this, but this article claims that the value of the Pomodoro technique is blasting through Ugh Fields.

Sorry you can't make it out to DC. AFAIK there's no baltimore meetup. However! We've had people come from baltimore before. I'll forward this to the DC list and see if anyone from there is free.

I live in Baltimore City, send me a message if you want any tips or to possibly meet up.

First: check this out.

Second: Suppose I want to demonstrate decoherence. I start out with an entangled state - two electrons that will always be magnetically aligned, but don't have a chosen collective alignment. This state is written like |up, up> + |down, down> (the electrons are both "both up" and "both down" at the same time; the |> notation here just indicates that it's a quantum state).

Now, before introducing decoherence, I just want to check that I can entangle my two electrons. How do I do that? I repeat what's called a "Bell measurement," which has four possible indications: (|up,up>+|down,down>) , (|up,up>-|down,down>) , (|up,down>+|down,up>) , (|up,down>-|down,up>).

Because my state is made of 100% Bell state 1, every time I make some entangled electrons and then measure them, I'll get back result #1. This consistency means they're entangled. If the quantum state of my particles had to be expressed as a mixture of Bell States, there might not be any entanglement - for example state 1 + state 2 just looks like |up,up>, which is boring and unentangled.

To create decoherence, I send the second electron to you. You measure whether it's up or down, then re-magnetize it and send it back with spin up if you measured up, and spin down if you measured down. But since you remember the state of the electron, you have now become entangled with it, and must be included. The relevant state is now |up, up, saw up> + |down, down, saw down>.

This state is weird, because now you, a human, are in a superposition of "saw up" and "saw down." But we'll ignore that for the moment - we can always replace you with with a third electron if it causes philosophical problems :) The question at hand is: what happens when we try to test if our electrons are still entangled?

Again, we do this a bunch of times and do a repeated Bell measurement. If we get result #1 every time, they're entangled just like before. To predict the outcome ahead of time, we can factor our state into Bell States, and see how much of each Bell State we have.

So we factor |up, up, saw up> into |(Bell state 1) + (Bell state 2), saw up>, and we factor |down, down, saw down> into |(Bell state 1) - (Bell state 2), saw down>.

Now, if that extra label about what you saw wasn't here, the ups and the downs would be physically/mathematically equivalent and we could cancel terms to just get Bell state 1. But if any of the labels are different, you can't subtract them to get 0 anymore. That is, they no longer interfere. And so you are just left with equal numbers of Bell state 1 and Bell state 2 terms. And so when we do the Bell measurement, we get results #1 and #2 with equal frequency, just like we would if the electrons were completely unentangled.

This is not to say they're not entangled - they still are. But they can no longer be shown to be entangled by a two-particle test. They're no longer usefully entangled. You need to collect all the pieces together before you can show that they're entangled, now. And that gets awful hard once a macroscopic system like a human gets entangled with the electrons and starts radiating off still-entangled photons into the environment.

This is decoherence. I can have a nice entangled system, but if I let you peek at one of my electrons, you turn the state into into |(Bell state 1) + (Bell state 2), saw up> + |(Bell state 1) - (Bell state 2), saw down>, and they don't behave in the entangled way they did anymore.

(Warning: I am not a physicist; I learnt a bit of about QM from my physics classes, the Sequences, Feynmann Lectures on Physics, and Good and Real, but I don't claim to even understand all that's in there)

I'm not sure I totally understand your question, but I'll take a stab at answering:

The important thing is configuration space, and spatial distance is just one part of that; there is just one configuration space over which the quantum wave-function is defined, and points in configuration space correspond to "universe states" (the position, spin, etc. of all particles).

So two points in configuration space A and B "interfere" if they are similar enough that both can "evolve" into state C, i.e. state C's amplitude will be function of A and B's amplitudes. The more different A and B are, the less likely they are to have shared "descendant states" (or more precisely, descendant states of non-infinitesimal amplitude), so the more they can be treated like "parallel branches of the universe". Differences between A and B can be in psychical distance of particles, but also of polarity/spin, etc. - as long as the distance is significant on one axis (say spin of a single particle), physical distance shouldn't matter.

I think spin could be an example of "another axis" you're looking for (though even thinking in terms of Axis may be a bit misleading, since all the attributes aren't nice and orthogonal like positions in cartesian space).

I was rereading Eliezer's old posts on morality, and in Leaky Generalizations ran across something pretty close to what you're talking about:

You can say, unconditionally and flatly, that killing anyone is a huge dose of negative terminal utility. Yes, even Hitler. That doesn't mean you shouldn't shoot Hitler. It means that the net instrumental utility of shooting Hitler carries a giant dose of negative utility from Hitler's death, and an hugely larger dose of positive utility from all the other lives that would be saved as a consequence.

Many commit the type error that I warned against in Terminal Values and Instrumental Values, and think that if the net consequential expected utility of Hitler's death is conceded to be positive, then the immediate local terminal utility must also be positive, meaning that the moral principle "Death is always a bad thing" is itself a leaky generalization. But this is double counting, with utilities instead of probabilities; you're setting up a resonance between the expected utility and the utility, instead of a one-way flow from utility to expected utility.

Or maybe it's just the urge toward a one-sided policy debate: the best policy must have no drawbacks.

In my moral philosophy, the local negative utility of Hitler's death is stable, no matter what happens to the external consequences and hence to the expected utility.

Of course, you can set up a moral argument that it's an inherently a good thing to punish evil people, even with capital punishment for sufficiently evil people. But you can't carry this moral argument by pointing out that the consequence of shooting a man with a leveled gun may be to save other lives. This is appealing to the value of life, not appealing to the value of death. If expected utilities are leaky and complicated, it doesn't mean that utilities must be leaky and complicated as well. They might be! But it would be a separate argument.

(I recommend reading the whole thing, as well as the few previous posts on morality if you haven't already)

The dot product is just yer' regular old integral over the domain, weighted in some (unspecified) way.

The thing is though, the average product over the whole infinite space of possibilities isn't much use when it comes to intelligent agents. This is because only one outcome really happens, and intelligent agents will try to choose a good one, not one that's representative of the average. If two wedding planners have opposite opinions about every type of cake except they both adore white cake with raspberry buttercream, then they'll just have white cake with raspberry buttercream - the fact that the inner product of their cake functions is negative a bajillion doesn't matter, they'll both enjoy the cake.

Why would you want to throw out scalar information in a multi-term utility function?

I haven't explored that idea; can you be more specific about what this idea might bring to the table?

I'm utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively

Are you sure? You believe there are some people for which the morally right thing to do is to inflect as much misery and suffering as you can, keeping them alive so you can torture them forever, and there is not necessarily even a benefit to yourself or anyone else to doing this?

upvoted because of your username.

But seriously, folks, what does it mean to dot one person's values/utility function in to another? It is actually the differences in individual's utility functions that enable gains from trade. So the differences in our utility functions are probably what make us rich.

Counting the happiness of some people negatively as a policy suggestion, is that the same as saying "it is not the enough that I win, it must also be that others lose?"

I'll take the money. :)

IIRC this is a troll that followed me over from Common Sense Atheism. That video and a few others are fairly creepy, but The Ballad of Big Yud is actually kinda fun.

I watched it. It is either a skilled ventriloquist or a mediocre dubber performing a poorly-written conversation between himself and a sock puppet of Eliezer on the subject of his dissatisfaction with how Eliezer manages interactions with assorted people. There are terrible and badly-constructed puns. If either of the named parties value their time at less than $705/hr. and expect Kawoomba to be honest, meh, go for it.

God, was this awful. Nothing like the ballad of big yud. And btw if you gave $50 just to see their reaction, I can make one such video about yourself for less than $50 so you can experience it yourself.

Lotteries are a tax on people who don't understand statistics.

If you had a Death Note, what would you do with it?

See if I could get some very old people or otherwise have terminal illnesses volunteer to have their names written in it. We can use that data to experiment more with the note and figure out how it works. The existence of such an object implies massive things wrong with our current understanding of the universe, so figuring that out might be really helpful.

I would refrain from discussing it in a public forum like this one.