There may be more focus on arctic amplification and the transition of the arctic from one stable state to another with no summer sea ice, and the effects of this on Northern temperate zone weather variability. The arctic ocean and immediately adjacent land has been warming at several times the rate of the rest of the world because it is subject to a number of local positive feedback loops which have relatively little effect on total global temperatures but can mess with temperature gradients in the Northern hemisphere and thus can have a disproportionate effect on the movements of air masses. Arctic ice loss has accelerated massively in recent years and there are vague indications of a bit of a phase shift ongoing.

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 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.

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

If you have any more dangerous ideas, please do contact me.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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}}

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

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.

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.

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.

Interesting point.

Friendly AI has such a wonderfully anthropocentric bias! If the baby-eaters (a non-human natural intelligence species) has what they called a Friendly AI, it would be an UAI to humans, just as the baby-eaters are an Unfriendly Natural Intelligence to humans.

Friendly AI as used here would be a meaningless concept in a universe without humans. Friendliness is not a property of the AI, it is a moral (or aesthetic) judgement on an AI made by certain humans.

Gray Wolves and Dogs are the same species. Dogs are basically the FNI (Friendly Natural Intelligence) version of a Wolf, which while actually on the scale of such things is an Indifferent Natural Intelligence, but would easily pass as Unfriendly Natural Intelligence as they are pretty dangerous to have around because they will violently assert their interests over ours.

FAI seems to me to be the domesticated version of AI. When you domesticate something smarter than you are, an alternative value-laden descriptor might be SAI, Slave Artificial Intelligence. But that is not a value laden term people favoring the development of FAI would be likely to value.

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.

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.

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.

"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'.

Feminism is: "Society has gone too far in accomodating men (more often than not, or in more important areas)." Some might say that this is due to innate differences that were never addressed; some might say it is due to cultural norms that inculcate different tendencies which disadvantages women.

"Male Reaction" (to coin a term) is: "Society has gone too far in accomodating women (with the same caveat)." In either case, some adherents will say the ideal end state is legal and social equality, and some will say the ideal end state is legal or cultural accommodations to overcome natural differences.

Normal person view is: There are not large enough gender specific problems for me to be an activist about it.

No one assumes all differences are bio or all cultural, but there is a lot of dispute for where the border is of course.

I think you describe SOME feminists.

However, many other feminists can see there really are biological differences, differences on trend. These feminists I would say believe that the natural tendencies do not need to be further reinforced by laws. That the fact that more women than men will nurture children while more men than women will run corporations in the cutthroat way required for success does NOT suggest that we should have laws that make it harder for men to raise children or for women to be CEOs.

But you are correctly warning against the stupid end of feminism in my opinion.

Another question is whether the fact that the average orange person is biologically more gibbrily than the average grey person justifies having a high-gibbriliness social role for orange people (without taking individual differences in gibbriliness into account) and treating orange people who fail to fulfil that role as ipso facto inferior, complete with slurs specifically for them.

Feminism is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to society.

Hahahahahahaha, hell no. Read up on Shulamith Firestone!

(A longer review/liveblog of her Dialectic of Sex coming soon... honestly. I'm reading it right now, and loving it. Amazing book.)

Does this theory (or parts of it) seem true to you?

The theory would be truer if it were weaker. I'm pretty sure most feminists believe that some gender differences are due to biology and most "manosphere" types don't think all gender differences are fully biological.

Also I think the "normal-reasonable-person-ism" is not "we're not sure yet." On the contrary, we have overwhelming evidence biology and culture both play a role in observed sex differences.

Having said this, I think the main disagreement between feminists and manospheroids is not about facts but about values.

In the manosphere you find concern about the fact that fathers are less likely to get custody over children after a divorce than mothers.

How courts think about giving custody to parents is obviously about how society does things, so people in the manosphere do see societal effects.

In a world where both genders engage in domestic violence feminists usually see domestic violence in a way where woman who are victims of domestic violence need support while there little thought payed to male victims.

There are many cases where the manosphere criticises society for treating males unfairly.

Feminism is one of those words that refers to such a diverse collection of opinions as to be practically meaningless.

For example, the kind of feminism that I tend to identify with is concerned with just removing inequalities regardless of their source and is also concerned with things like fat shaming, racism, the rights of the disabled, and other things that have nothing to do with gender, but there are certainly also people who identify as feminists and who would fit your description.

I'm pretty sure that some gender differences are due to society, and others are due to biology.

No.

So feminism assumes that it is due to society that women can become pregnant and men can't? Most feminists I know are normal-reasonable-people on your dichotomy, though you also ignore the fact that the category of whether differences are desireable and whether they can be influenced are far more interesting and important than whether they are at present mostly due to society or biology. I know people have a strange tendency to act as if things due to society can be trivially changed by collective whim while biology is eternal and immutable, but however common such a view, it is clearly absurd. Medicine can make all sorts of adjustments to our biology, while social engineers have historically been more likely to have unintended effects or no effect at all than they have been to successfully transform their societies in the ways they desire.

It does seem that feminism requires the additional assumption that gender differences are bad, and manosphereness that they are good.

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.

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)

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?"

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?

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.)

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.

"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.

As an actual physicist, you must only be smart in the lab.

/me runs away v fast

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the bias of choosing the action which is easiest

Laziness.

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

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

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

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)

Explicitly not post on LessWrong what I would do, or even divulge its existence to anyone, naturally.

[Deliberately pretending not to have read the other replies.]

Either sell it to the highest bidder and give the money in equal parts to MIRI and GiveWell's top recommended charity, or burn it, depending on the instantaneous level of strength of my ethical inhibitions. Most likely the latter.

EDIT: No, the former sounds like an awful idea on further thought. I'd just burn it down.

Discussing hypothetical violence towards real people is out of bounds on this forum.

I request that the moderators, if they have not done so already, consider the acceptability of this whole thread.

If I found something I thought was a Death Note I would spend a long, long time meditating on the question of how and in what way I'd gone insane.

After finding a volunteer with a terminal illness, I'd test the limits of it. E.g. "The person will either write a valid proof of P=NP or a valid proof that P!=NP and then die of a heart attack."

Assuming for the moment the magic of the death note prevents me researching and reverse engineering it in any way:

I'd research the people who's death is most likely to result in positive outcomes and kill them. Off the top of my head I'd go for current dictators and their immediate underlings. For example right now killing Robert Mugabe and the upper echelons of Zanu PF is probably the best thing that could happen to Zimbabwe (at time of writing he has just 'won' an election and the opposition are already mobilised, so a slight push is all that is really needed to collapse the regime).

Ideally, if I could ensure suitable anonymity protections I would publicly declare my intentions to have them killed in such a way that identifies me as the killer (e.g. send media outlets a statement with the exact time of targets death). Once my threats have be shown to be sufficiently reliable I will start making them conditional, giving myself the ultimate political blackmailing machine (e.g. if the international Red Cross does not have credible evidence within 30 days that all detention camps in North Korea have been closed and prisoners released, every member of the people's congress will die simultaneously). Assuming I can maintain my anonymity in the long run I would be able to do a significant amount of good.

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

This probably violates a forum rule. Though I will speculate that Light's plan of trying to kill all criminals he sees named probably does way more harm than good even if you ignore the fact that some are innocent.

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.