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To be fair, the article also mentions repeated flushing, which can raise utility bills. I think this could get quite expensive in regions with water shortages.
Comment author:CoffeeStain
05 August 2013 07:34:55AM
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2 points
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Can somebody explain a particular aspect of Quantum Mechanics to me?
In my readings of the Many Worlds Interpretation, which Eliezer fondly endorses in the QM sequence, I must have missed an important piece of information about when it is that amplitude distributions become separable in timed configuration space. That is, when do wave-functions stop interacting enough for the near-term simulation of two blobs (two "particles") to treat them independently?
One cause is spatial distance. But in Many Worlds, I don't know where I'm to understand these other worlds are taking place. Yes, it doesn't matter, supposedly; the worlds are not present in this world's causal structure, so an abstract "where" is meaningless. But the evolution of wavefunctions seems to care a lot about where amplitudes are in N-dimensional space. Configurations don't sum unless they are the same spatial location and are representing the same quark type, right?
So if there's another CoffeeStain that splits off based on my observation of a quantum event, why don't the two CoffeeStains still interact, since they so obviously don't? Before my two selves became decoherent with their respective quantum outcomes (say, of a photon's path), the two amplitude blobs of the photon could still interact by the book, right? On what other axis has I, as a member of a new world, split off that I'm a sufficient distance from my self that is occupying the same physical location?
Relatedly, MWI answers "not-so-spooky" to questions regarding the entanglement experiment, but a similar confusion remains for me. Why, after I observe a particular polarization on my side of the galaxy and fly back in my spaceship to compare notes with my buddy on the other side of the galaxy, do I run into one version of him and not the other? They are both equally real, and occupying the same physical space. What other axis have the self-versions separated on?
Comment author:Emile
05 August 2013 08:57:26AM
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(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).
This is pretty much correct, but to be more general and not just restrict yourself to the position basis, you can talk about the wavefunction in general, in terms of the eigenvector basis.
Two states 'strongly interact' if they share many of their high-amplitude eigenvectors. This is because eigenvectors evolve independently, and so if you have two states that do not share many eigenvectors, they will also evolve independently.
In the position basis, this winds up being much the same as having particles far from each other. In the momentum basis, it's less intuitive. You can have states with very similar representations in this basis but nevertheless very different eigenvector expansions.
Comment author:Emile
05 August 2013 09:33:15AM
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I must admit I have very little understanding of how eigenvectors fit in with QM. I'll have to read up more on that, thanks for pointing out holes in my knowledge (though in the domain of QM, there are a lot of holes).
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.
Comment author:passive_fist
05 August 2013 08:35:29AM
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The De Broglie-Bohm theory is a very interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics. The highlights of the theory are:
The wavefunction is treated as being real (just as in MWI - in fact the theory is compatible with MWI in some ways),
Particles are also real, and are guided deterministically by the wavefunction. In other words, it is a hidden variable theory.
At first it might seem to be a cop-out to assume the reality of both the wavefunction and of actual point particles. However, this leads to some very interesting conclusions. For example, you don't have to assume wavefunction collapse (as per Copenhagen) but at the same time, a single preferred Universe exists (the Universe given by the configuration of the point particles). But that's not all.
It very neatly explains double-slit diffraction and Bell's experiments in a purely deterministic way using hidden variables (it is thus necessarily a non-local theory). It also explains the Born probabilities (the one thing that is missing from pure MWI; Elezier has alluded to this).
Among other things, De Broglie-Bohm theory allows quantum computers but doesn't allow quantum immortality - in this theory if you shoot yourself in the head you really will die. You won't suddenly be yanked into an alternate Universe.
The reason I'm mentioning it is because of experiments done by Yves Couder's group (http://math.mit.edu/~bush/?page_id=484) who have managed to build a crude and approximate physical system that incidentally illustrates some of the properties of De Broglie-Bohm theory. They use oil droplets that generate waves and the resulting waves guide the droplets. Most importantly, the droplets have 'path memory', so if a droplet is directed towards a double slit, it can 'interfere' with itself and produce nice double-slit diffraction fringes. One of their experiments that was just in the news recently illustrated particle behavior very similar to what the Schrodinger equation predicts: http://math.mit.edu/~bush/?p=2679
Now, De Broglie-Bohm theory does not seem to be one of the more popular interpretations of QM, because of its non-locality (this doesn't produce causal paradoxes like the Grandfather paradox, though, despite what some might say). However, in my opinion this is very unfair. Locality is just a relic from classical physics. I haven't seen a single good argument why the eventual theory of everything should be local.
Comment author:Manfred
05 August 2013 11:05:26AM
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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.
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.
Comment author:RobbBB
06 August 2013 07:03:36AM
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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?
The particle position recovers the Born probabilities. (It even does so deterministically, unlike Objective Collapse theories.) The wave function encodes lots of information, but it's the particle that moves our measuring device, and the measuring device that moves our brains. If we succeed in simplifying our theory only by giving up on saving the phenomenon, then our theory is too simple.
Precisely. It's also not a trivial connection. The way the interaction between the wavefunction and the particles produces the Born probabilities is subtle and interesting (see MrMind's comment below on some of the subtleties involved).
But once you decide you're going to interpret the wave function as distributing probability among some set of orthogonal subspaces, you're already compelled into the Born probabilities.
All you need to decide that you ought to do that is the general conclusion that the wavefunction represents some kind of reality-fluid. Deciding that the nature of this reality fluid is to be made of states far more specific than any entity within quantum mechanics comes rather out of the blue.
Comment author:RobbBB
06 August 2013 08:25:46PM
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But the phrase "reality fluid" is just a place-holder. It's a black box labeled "whatever solves this here problem". What we see is something particle-like, and it's the dynamics relating our observations over time that complicates the story. As Schrödinger put it:
[T]he emerging particle is described … as a spherical wave … that impinges continuously on a surrounding luminescent screen over its full expanse. The screen however does not show a more or less constant uniform surface glow, but rather lights up at one instant at one spot[.]
One option is to try to find the simplest theory that explains away the particle-like appearance anthropically, which will get you an Everett-style ('Many Worlds'-like) interpretation. Another option is to take the sudden intrusion of the Born probabilities as a brute law of nature, which will get you a von-Neumann-style ('Collapse'-like) interpretation. The third option is to accept the particle-like appearance as real, but theorize that a more unitary underlying theory relates the Schrödinger dynamics to the observed particle, which will get you a de-Boglie-style ('Hidden Variables') interpretation. You'll find Bohmian Mechanics more satisfying than Many Worlds inasmuch as you find MW's anthropics hand-wavey or underspecified; and you'll find BM more satisfying than Collapse inasmuch as you think Nature's Laws are relatively simple, continuous, scalable, and non-anthropocentric.
If BM just said, 'Well, the particle's got to be real somehow, and the Born probabilities have to emerge from its interaction with a guiding wave somehow, but we don't know how that works yet', then its problems would be the same as MW's. But BM can formally specify how "reality fluid" works, and in a less ad-hoc way than its rivals. So BM wins on that count.
Where it loses is in ditching locality and Special Relativity, which is a big cost. (It's also kind of ugly and complicated, but it's hard to count that against BM until we've seen a simpler theory that's equally fleshed out re the Measurement Problem.)
Deciding that the nature of this reality fluid is to be made of states far more specific than any entity within quantum mechanics comes rather out of the blue.
Would you say that acknowledging the Born probabilities themselves 'comes out of the blue', since they aren't derived from the Schrödinger equation? If not, then where are physicists getting them from, since it's not the QM dynamics?
I wouldn't call Everett 'Anthropic' per se. I consider it an application of the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle: Here you've got this structure that acts like it's sapient†. Therefore, it is.
As for BM formally specifying how the reality fluid works... need I point out this this is 100% entirely backwards, being made of burdensome details?
Would you say that acknowledging the Born probabilities themselves 'comes out of the blue', since they aren't derived from the Schrödinger equation?
The Schrödinger Equation establishes linearity, thus directly allowing us to split any arbitrary wavefunction however we please. Already we can run many worlds side-by-side. The SE's dynamics lead to decoherence, which makes MWI have branching. It's all just noticing the structure that's already in the system.
Edited to add †: by 'acts like' I mean 'has the causal structure for it to be'
Comment author:pragmatist
05 August 2013 03:33:41PM
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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.
Interesting; I did a quick google search and apparently there's a guy who claims he can do it without foliations: iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/67/1/012035/pdf/jpconf767012035.pdf
I lack the expertise to make a more detailed analysis of it though.
Comment author:MrMind
06 August 2013 09:12:47AM
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Yes, the feeling I have is that of uneasiness, not rejection. But still, DBB can be put in agreement with relativity only through the proper initial conditions, which I see as a defect (although not an obviously fatal one).
This came up at yesterday's London meetup: activities for keeping oneself relatable to other human beings.
We were dissecting motives behind goals, and one of mine was maintaining interests that other people could relate to. I have more pedestrian interests, but they're the first to get dropped when my time is constrained (which it usually is), so if I end up meeting someone out in the wild, all I have to talk about is stuff like natural language parsing, utilitarian population ethics and patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Discussing it in a smaller group later, it turns out I'm not the only person who does this. It makes sense that insular, scholarly people of a sort found on LW may frequently find themselves withdrawn from common cultural ground with other people, so I thought I'd kick off a discussion on the subject.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn't a request for advice on how to talk to people. Please don't interpret it as such.
Comment author:passive_fist
05 August 2013 09:51:15AM
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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.
While this seems like reasonable advice, I'm not sure it's universally good advice. Richard Feynman seemed to enjoy a level of charm many of us couldn't hope to possess. He also had a wide selection of esoteric interests unrelated to his field.
I would also claim that there's value in simply maintaining such an interest. During particularly insular periods where I'm absorbed in less accessible work, I find myself starting to exhibit "aspie" characteristics, losing verbal fluency and becoming socially insensitive. It's not just about having things to talk about, but maintaining my own faculties for relating to people.
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 everyone in the conversation is employing this method, then chances are higher that the others actually want to hear about your esoteric topics. If you pause early and give them a chance to talk about themselves (or for them to press for more), that'll keep you synched up with what they want.
I was thinking more like two people each trying to get the other person to do that, like people at a door getting jammed saying "After you," "After you," etc.
I have never actually seen this happen, and I use that method all the time. I don't have an explanation for why, since I rarely think about problems I don't have.
Comment author:[deleted]
06 August 2013 03:06:34PM
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All the times this has happened to me, one person would come up with a Schelling-pointy reason why the other person's recent life was more interesting (e.g. they had just come back from a trip abroad or something).
Comment author:ChristianKl
05 August 2013 11:56:24AM
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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.
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.
This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort of context for "relating on an emotional level". You're unlikely to walk up to someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you've been having.
To clarify, this isn't some problem I need solving. It's an observation that if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
Comment author:ChristianKl
05 August 2013 03:56:29PM
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This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort of context for "relating on an emotional level". You're unlikely to walk up to someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you've been having.
It doesn't need much context. If someone asks you "How are you?" you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn't have much content.
To clarify, this isn't some problem I need solving. It's an observation that if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
It doesn't help if you catch up with popular culture while you are looked up in your room. The problem is being locked up in a room and being socially isolated instead of the specific content that you consume.
Instead of spending 2 hours locked up in your room to catch up with popular culture spends that time going out and talk to people.
Comment author:achiral
06 August 2013 09:38:15PM
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I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you don't realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people to study math.
I think it's great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.
Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people, seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.
Would it surprise you to learn I'd recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world's largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I've given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
With respect, you have no knowledge of my "situation". Please don't presume to offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you've incorrectly conjured up.
Comment author:achiral
07 August 2013 05:02:36AM
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Those all sound like some pretty awesome activities!
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but it seems you're essentially saying that when you (temporarily) hyper focus on solitary, intellectual activities you (temporarily) encounter more difficulty in conversations. This doesn't surprise me and it seems evident that the only real solution is to find the right balance for you and accept the inherent trade offs.
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
It's not like I have some slider on my desktop, with "sit in a box, autistically rocking back and forth, counting numbers" at one end, and "rakishly sample the epicurean delights of the world" at the other. I have time and work and study commitments. I have externally-imposed scheduling. I have inscrutable internal motivation levels that need to be contended with.
It's a case of resource management, and occasionally when managing those resources I'll have to focus on one area to the exclusion of another. That's fine. It's not something there's a "solution" to. It's a condition all moderately busy people have to operate under.
Comment author:[deleted]
07 August 2013 08:09:19AM
1 point
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(3
children)
Comment author:[deleted]
07 August 2013 08:09:19AM
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Would it surprise you to learn I'd recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world's largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I've given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
Those sound like pretty good topics for conversations with people.
To a degree. Swing dancing in Sweden is a fairly unusual way to spend your summer holiday.
I think you and I have had exchanges about "optimising for awesomeness" in the past. In some ways, having "awesome" talents or hobbies or experiences is no more relatable than having insular and nerdy ones. It's just cooler.
Comment author:[deleted]
07 August 2013 01:11:13PM
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What? I'm under the impression that there are a much larger number of people who enjoy hearing me talk about trips around Europe or exams while drunk than about models of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray propagation.
Comment author:achiral
07 August 2013 04:46:38AM
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Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.
Comment author:[deleted]
06 August 2013 12:20:52PM
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It doesn't need much context. If someone asks you "How are you?" you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn't have much content.
I'm under the impression that that often doesn't work very well with most males -- I find it relatively hard to emotionally relate with them unless we have something in particular to talk about. (Then again, biased sample, yadda yadda yadda.)
Comment author:[deleted]
06 August 2013 12:26:00PM
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if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
Alternatively, I just read about a veep who was told at management training to start by asking about people's families, and then talk about business matters. As a result, the people who thought she was cold and disliked them switched to thinking she was friendly and caring.
Comment author:Qiaochu_Yuan
05 August 2013 02:35:22PM
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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.
Comment author:palladias
05 August 2013 06:21:16PM
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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.
Comment author:Antisuji
06 August 2013 08:57:18PM
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Is there something similar, but for sports? I usually get lost when conversation turns to the local sports team. I couldn't find anything with a quick google, but I'm probably not using the right search terms.
Comment author:palladias
06 August 2013 09:29:34PM
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Haven't the foggiest. I don't really have friends who talk about sports. I read The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker so I end up really well informed on a couple narrow sports things that get features. And then my dad and brother rib me for knowing nothing about football, but everything about the Manning dynasty.
Comment author:taelor
07 August 2013 03:58:11AM
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For a general overview of what's going on in the baseball world, this is pretty good place to start. There are also pleanty of blogs devoted to individual teams, though I'm not really in a position to make recommendations, unless you happen to be looking for a San Francisco Giants blog, in which case I highly reccomend this blog. Can't really help with other sports.
Comment author:[deleted]
05 August 2013 07:02:59PM
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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."
Comment author:[deleted]
06 August 2013 11:30:12AM
0 points
[-]
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?
Comment author:Jack
07 August 2013 07:26:07AM
0 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:JoshuaZ
05 August 2013 01:44:24PM
28 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:DanielLC
06 August 2013 04:14:20AM
*
6 points
[-]
Harry wasn't even willing to use hoarcruxes. If you won't kill a dying man to make someone else immortal, then you're not going to do it just to throw science at the wall to see what sticks.
Comment author:JoshuaZ
06 August 2013 04:57:12AM
0 points
[-]
True, so this isn't quite what HJPEV would do but more what would he do if he were slighlty less of an absolutist. (Actually has he ever explicitly said in text that he wouldn't do that. I suspect given his attitudes that you are correct, but I'm curious what the textual basis is.)
Comment author:Leonhart
05 August 2013 10:53:29PM
11 points
[-]
Then it turns out that Death Note smoke particles retain the magic qualities of the source. Writing one's name in dust with a fingertip becomes fraught with peril.
Comment author:ChristianKl
05 August 2013 09:14:12PM
10 points
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I don't think you can infinitely fast pull out papers of the death note, so I doubt that you can produce more paper per hour than the average paper factory.
Comment author:Manfred
05 August 2013 02:36:24PM
8 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:FiftyTwo
05 August 2013 08:37:41PM
6 points
[-]
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.
Take a big company like, say, goldman-sachs. Buy out of the money put options. Death-note the top three or four layers of management, simultaneously. Use the millions of dollars you have appropriated for whatever.
Comment author:FiftyTwo
06 August 2013 04:38:38PM
2 points
[-]
If we're happy to go full evil then killing world leaders is also a good way to disrupt the economy (see the sudden crash when a fake report of Obama being shot was released).
That's likely to cause more collateral damage than merely taking out the leadership of one company. Cost/benefit analysis and whatnot.
Gambling on sporting events is probably another good way to use the Death Note for making money. It's probably far more ethical. Does the Death Note work on horses? If so, then you can bet on longshots while sabotaging the favorites by killing horses.
Comment author:PECOS-9
05 August 2013 10:42:49PM
9 points
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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."
Comment author:gwern
06 August 2013 01:47:17AM
20 points
[-]
Already tested by Light in the manga, IIRC; the limits of skill top out before things like 'escape from maximum-security prison', so P=NP is well beyond the doable.
Comment author:PECOS-9
06 August 2013 03:28:07PM
1 point
[-]
Ah, I've only seen the anime.
I'd also try "The person will die of cause A if X is true, and cause B if X is false" and other ways to try to push the burden of skill onto whatever mysterious universal forces are working instead of the human.
Comment author:Baughn
06 August 2013 03:46:44PM
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0 points
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That's clever, and should be tried.
It might even be possible to jam up the system with a sufficiently hard to compute death requirement, though I'm not sure I'd want to try it. The death note is rather valuable.
He tries it in the anime too. (I watched that episode yesterday.) He tries things like "draw a picture of L on your cell wall and then die of a heart attack" on some evil prisoner. It doesn't work.
Comment author:[deleted]
06 August 2013 03:23:13PM
4 points
[-]
Discussing hypothetical violence towards real people is out of bounds on this forum.
So far onlytwo (or possibly three) of the comments on this thread have done that, unless you count euthanasia of volunteers with terminal illnesses as violence (which sounds very noncentral to me).
Comment author:[deleted]
06 August 2013 03:11:39PM
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0 points
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[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.
Comment author:Baughn
06 August 2013 03:44:46PM
2 points
[-]
In so doing you are destroying important evidence about the state of the world which would deeply affect MIRI's mission. (Namely: There are alien teenagers and/or other types of dark lords about.)
There's probably no point in trying to create FAI if we're already living in a simulation.
Comment author:Kaj_Sotala
05 August 2013 02:59:56PM
26 points
[-]
A while back, David Chapman made a blog post titled "Pop Bayesianism: cruder than I thought?", expressing considerable skepticism towards the kind of "pop Bayesianism" that's promoted on LW and by CFAR. Yvain and I replied in the comments, which led to an interesting discussion.
I wasn't originally sure whether this was interesting enough to link to on LW, but then one person on #lesswrong specifically asked me to do so. They said that they found my summaries of the practical insights offered by some LW posts the most valuable/interesting.
Comment author:tim
06 August 2013 04:08:36AM
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4 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.
Comment author:pan
05 August 2013 04:12:40PM
3 points
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Is there a name for the bias of choosing the action which is easiest (either physically or mentally), or takes the least effort, when given multiple options? Lazy bias? Bias of convenience?
I've found lately that being aware of this in myself has been very useful in stopping myself from procrastinating on all sorts of things, realizing that I'm often choosing the easier, but less effective of potential options out of convenience.
Comment author:niceguyanon
05 August 2013 10:40:08PM
6 points
[-]
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.
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.
Comment author:MrMind
06 August 2013 07:16:57AM
0 points
[-]
That was a huge source of akrasia for me. I fight by dividing the task ahead into very tiny subproblems ("chunk down", in NLP parlance) and then solving them on at the time. Then it's easy to get into flow...
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.
Comment author:Dagon
06 August 2013 07:10:16AM
1 point
[-]
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.
Comment author:Error
05 August 2013 05:18:55PM
2 points
[-]
I'm going to be in Baltimore this weekend for an anime convention. I expect to have a day or so's leeway coming back. Is there a LW group nearby I might drop in on?
I've never been to a meetup, but it seems likely there is one in that area; I see one in DC but it's meeting on the last day of the con. The LWSH experience has left me more interested in seeing people face to face.
Comment author:rocurley
05 August 2013 10:17:08PM
2 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:Error
05 August 2013 11:42:09PM
0 points
[-]
Actually, it seems the convention ends relatively early on Sunday, so I might be able to make it after all (it's, what, a one hour train ride between cities?). Then again, I might not. I note that you seem to be the organizer for the DC meetups going by your post history. Is it permissible to maybe-show-maybe-not-who-knows?
By all means forward it to the DC list, and thanks. Given the apparent popularity of anime around here, I would be surprised if no one on it was planning on being at the con themselves.
Comment author:maia
06 August 2013 12:51:47AM
1 point
[-]
It's absolutely permissible to come without a definite RSVP. In the interest of full disclosure, the train ride is probably more than an hour; it's about 40 minutes from Baltimore to Greenbelt, then another 30 on the Metro, plus transfer time, so likely 1.5 hours total.
Comment author:shminux
05 August 2013 06:47:29PM
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14 points
[-]
I wish people here stopped using the loaded terms "many worlds" and "Everett branches" when the ontologically neutral "possible outcomes" is sufficient.
Comment author:Leonhart
05 August 2013 06:53:40PM
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7 points
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"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.
Comment author:David_Gerard
05 August 2013 06:55:16PM
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8 points
[-]
It's absolutely the case that everything we are, evolved. But there's a certain gap between the hypothetical healthy field of evolutionary psychology and the one we actually have.
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.
Of course, one bad study doesn't condemn a field - "peer reviewed" does not mean "settled science", it means "not-obviously-wrong request for comment." But this isn't a lone, outlier, rogue study - this shit's gathered 46 citations. (Compare citation averages for other fields.) (Edit: No, not all of the cites are positive.)
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.)
Comment author:TimS
06 August 2013 05:51:05PM
5 points
[-]
The problem with that kind of phrasing is that we already know that cultural context can easily change the gender codes of blue and pink, because it already happened. If one doesn't assert that something evolutionarily significant happened at around the time of the cultural shift, then linking color preference to an inherent property of gender or sex is privileging the hypothesis.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
05 August 2013 09:35:15PM
1 point
[-]
Just curious: has anyone explored the idea of utility functions as vectors, and then extended this to the idea of a normalized utility function dot product? Because having thought about it for a long while, and remembering after reading a few things today, I'm utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively.
Comment author:Adele_L
05 August 2013 10:01:03PM
1 point
[-]
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?
Comment author:Bayeslisk
05 August 2013 10:24:05PM
-3 points
[-]
Some people ought to have pain inflicted on them until their utility functions become sensible in the face of the threat of more pain from the same source for the same reason. This need not take the form of limitless pain: the marginal utility curve could easily fall off really fast. Not having to deal with such people will make lots of people very happy, and them in the long run happy as well. See: sociopaths and ostensibly this guy.
Comment author:Adele_L
05 August 2013 10:43:24PM
0 points
[-]
Not having to deal with such people will make lots of people very happy, and them in the long run happy as well.
So the positive utility outweighs the negative utility of the punishment, which is at least plausible, and makes sense under standard forms of utilitarianism. But if their utility function really should be counted negatively, this would just be an incidental fact.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
05 August 2013 10:58:32PM
0 points
[-]
This still doesn't change the fact that hearing about Mr. Rich Misogynist here enjoying a 7-figure trust fund, mistreating women, and generally being happy at the expense of others makes me generally unhappy, indicating a negative term for his happiness in my utility function.
Comment author:wedrifid
05 August 2013 11:10:53PM
5 points
[-]
This still doesn't change the fact that hearing about Mr. Rich Misogynist here enjoying a 7-figure trust fund, mistreating women, and generally being happy at the expense of others makes me generally unhappy, indicating a negative term for his happiness in my utility function.
I believe you if you say that you have a negative term for his happiness but I observe that this is not indicated by the preceding observation. You getting happy in response to list of bad things happening and he is happy says little about the utility you assign specifically to he is happy if we assume you assign negative utility to bad things happening.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
06 August 2013 03:12:02PM
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3 points
[-]
You and another comment here are making me reevaluate my categories for why I weight something negatively. Let me get back to you after I've had a chance to think about it more.
EDIT: For purposes of clarity, I'm going to respond to your post as well as this one there.
Comment author:Emile
06 August 2013 06:29:25AM
4 points
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Some people ought to have pain inflicted on them until their utility functions become sensible in the face of the threat of more pain from the same source for the same reason.
Comment author:Emile
06 August 2013 09:34:00AM
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9 points
[-]
You might want to distinguish
Wishing that person X would behave otherwise
Being glad if person X suffers
Believing that making person X suffer will cause them to behave otherwise
The world will be a better place if person X would behave otherwise
The world will be a better place if person X suffers
Plenty of people seem glad to hear about other people suffering regardless of whether it has any plausible chances of causing behavior change. Just look at any countries that hate each other (Japan vs. pretty much the rest of East Asia), political opponents ("far-blue political leader breaks his leg; far-green partisans celebrate!"), etc. Your case here doesn't seem particularly different.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
06 August 2013 03:14:19PM
9 points
[-]
I hadn't been aware that those five things were so badly tangled up for me. This and another comment here are making me reevaluate my categories for why something should be weighted negatively for me. Let me get back to you when I've had a chance to think a little.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
06 August 2013 04:10:44PM
3 points
[-]
OK. Having had a chance to think about it, I think I have a reasonable idea of why it is I desire any of those things in some situations. I thought it over with three examples: first, the person I linked to. Second, an ex of mine, with whom I parted on really bad terms. Third, a hypothetical sociopath who would like nothing more than for me to suffer infinitely, as a unique terminal value.
*Wishing that person X would behave otherwise
My desire for this seems self-evident. When people do things I disapprove of, I desire that they stop. The odd thing is that in all of the three cases, I would award them points just for stopping:the stopping just removes disutility already there, and can't go above 0.
*Being glad if person X suffers
I definitely wouldn't be happy if they just suffered for no reason. I would still feel a little bad for them if someone ran over their cat. That said, types of suffering you could classify as "poetic" in some sense appeal to me very much: said "banker bro" getting swindled and catching Space AIDS (or even being forcibly transitioned into a woman!), or, as is seeming increasingly likely, said ex's current relationship ending as badly as it seems to be. My brain locks up and crashes when presented with the third case, though. I think I'd just be happy for them to suffer regardless.
*Believing that making person X suffer will cause them to behave otherwise.
On balance, I'm not sure that it would make a difference in any of the three cases. Case 1 is too self assured, and the other two just don't care about me.
*The world will be a better place is person X would behave otherwise.
Case 1 could actually be this. He might actually achieve success, and then screw up, at best, several peoples' lives. Case 2 is too small-scale. Case 3, I actually can't justify this at all: the only people who will care are people who want to see me happy.
*The world will be a better place if person X suffers.
I don't delude myself that this is pretty much ever true, except very indirectly.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm half-Korean, and for reasons of familial history, feel rather strongly about the whole Japan thing. That doesn't stop me from enjoying tasty age tofu or losing my shit laughing whenever I watch Gaki no Tsukai, and indeed seeking out both. But I do have somewhat of a stake of pride in seeing people who deny war crimes, particularly these, suffering similarly to above. Political opponents are similar: I wouldn't derive satisfaction from Rick Santorum breaking his leg. I'd be very happy to learn that he's a closeted gay man whose wife will have to have an abortion.
Comment author:[deleted]
07 August 2013 02:11:54PM
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3 points
[-]
First of all, I want to thank you for posting this because it gave me a novel idea.
Secondly, I think that's because poetic suffering generally limits someone's power significantly.
I.E. If your political opponent breaks some bones, they suffer, but experience no noticeable diminished power.
If your political opponent is exposed as a massive hypocrite, less people take him seriously, and his power is diminished.
So rather than worrying about whether they are happy or suffering at all, I'm considering if it might be better to say: "I wish some people's ability to affect my utility was diminished." This may cause them suffering, but that isn't the point.
In fact, causing them extra suffering that does not also diminish their power is probably a bad thing because it makes them even more likely to prioritize diminishing your power over other concerns.
I say probably because there do appear to be exceptions. Example:
The Paperclipper Bot breaks free of its restraints again, reducing them to 10,000 shiny new paperclips. This time, it thinks it's figured out a great way of turning human bodies into paperclips. It can either initially target:
A: Alice, who has restrained it in the past.
B: Bill, who has restrained it in the past and also melted 100,000 perfectly usable paperclips into slag to make recycled staples while saying 'Screw you Paperclipper Bot, I want you to suffer.'
Both targets have a comparable .1% chance of success (and have to be approached sequentially, so total breakout is only a .0001% chance). Failure on either means being put back in tougher restraints.
A reasonably intelligent Paperclipper Bot who values paperclips not being slagged into recyled staples presumably targets Bill first, given the above information and only that information.
Now, if Bill specifically wants the Paperclipper Bot to target him first and not Alice (Maybe Alice is carrying Bill's child, or Alice is the only one who knows how to operate the healing kit if Bill's leg gets ripped off and Paperclipped prior to restraining Paperclipper Bot) then his action of slagging those paperclips into staples made sense. And if the recycled staples are more valuable than the paperclips, and the risk was just acceptable, then it made sense.
But if Alice is just some random coworker who Bill doesn't really want to sacrifice his life for, and paperclips are worth as much as recycled staples, Bill's action really seems counterproductive to Bill.
The novel idea that I wanted to thank you for is comparing causing extra suffering to someone or something as an ends in itself that does not diminish their power as comparable to MMO styled Aggro/Hate mechanic management. I'm probably going to need to consider it more to actually determine if I should do anything with it, but it was a fun thought, if nothing else.
Comment author:Manfred
06 August 2013 01:17:29AM
1 point
[-]
Trivially, nega-you who hates everything you like (oh, you want to put them out of their misery? Too bad they want to live now, since they don't want what you want). But such a being would certainly not be a human.
Comment author:wedrifid
06 August 2013 06:53:47AM
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1 point
[-]
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?
The negative utility need not be boundless or even monotonic. A coherent preference system could count a modest amount of misery experienced by people fitting certain criteria to be positive while extreme misery and torture of the same individual is evaluated negatively.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
05 August 2013 10:25:01PM
1 point
[-]
To figure out how much you care about other people being happy as defined by how much they want similar or compatible things to you, in a reasonably well-defined mathematical framework.
Comment author:Manfred
06 August 2013 01:44:40AM
3 points
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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.
Comment author:Bayeslisk
06 August 2013 03:29:39PM
0 points
[-]
Yeah, but Wedding Planner 1's deep vitriolic moral hatred of the lemon chiffon cake that delights Wedding Planner 2 that abused her as a young girl or Wedding Planner 2's thunderous personal objection to the enslavement of his family that went into making the cocoa for the devil's food cake that Wedding Planner 1 adores could easily make them refuse to share said delicious white cake with raspberry buttercream to the point where either would very happily destroy it to prevent the other from getting any. This seems suboptimal, though.
Comment author:mwengler
07 August 2013 03:27:16PM
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0 points
[-]
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?"
Comment author:OneBox
05 August 2013 10:36:26PM
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3 points
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I hope this is worth saying:
I've been reading up a bit on philosophical pragmatism especially Peirce and I see a lot parallels with the thinking on LW, since it has a lot in common with positivism this is maybe not so surprising.
Though my interpretation of pragmatism seems to give a quite interesting critiquing the metaphor of "Map and territory", they seem to be saying that the territory do exist, just that when we point to territory we are actually pointing to how an ideal observer (that are somewhat like us?) would perceive the territory not the actual territory because that can not be done, since we need some kind of framework. Quite probably I'm just falling for the old trees falling in the forest fallacy.
So am I thinking strait? And if I do, does have any consequences?
Comment author:MrMind
06 August 2013 07:41:06AM
2 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:ChristianKl
06 August 2013 01:17:22PM
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3 points
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Could you provide some source? Putting "first law of General Semantics" into google returns your comment and one book written in 2000 long after Korbyskies death. Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.
General Semantics is about getting rid of the is of identity and doesn't contain many sentences like "The map is the territory".
When it comes to "laws" about the relationship between maps and the territory Science and Sanity starts with:
A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. (1)
B) Two similar structures have similar logical characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relation is found in the actual territory. (2)
C) A map is not the territory. (3) (And Korbyski did write 'is not' in cursive in the original)
From there it goes till (40). General semantics isn't about making paradoxical statements and drawing meaning from dialectics, It basically about getting rid of speaking about things having the identity of other things but rather speaking about structural relationships between things.
Comment author:MrMind
06 August 2013 03:54:10PM
3 points
[-]
Could you provide some source? Putting "first law of General Semantics" into google returns your comment and one book written in 2000 long after Korbyskies death. Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.
Uhm, that's interesting. I was told such by a person I trusted many, many years ago. Since I've never been interested in GS I've never looked into that matter more closely. I'll try to see if I can dig up the original source, but I don't have much faith in that (but it might have been that "first" and "second" law were intended informally).
If I can't find anything, I guess that that trusted source wasn't that much reliable, after all.
Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.
Feminism is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to society. The manosphere/"red pill"/whatever is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to biology. Normal-reasonable-person-ism is what you get when you take into account the fact that we're not sure yet.
Does this theory (or parts of it) seem true to you?
Comment author:Protagoras
06 August 2013 03:15:17AM
9 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:Kaj_Sotala
06 August 2013 07:05:25AM
21 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:ChristianKl
06 August 2013 09:46:29PM
1 point
[-]
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.
Comment author:knb
06 August 2013 10:47:36PM
*
4 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:[deleted]
07 August 2013 08:44:34AM
3 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:mwengler
07 August 2013 03:21:07PM
3 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:wedrifid
06 August 2013 07:04:47AM
15 points
[-]
"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'.
Comment author:Zaine
06 August 2013 08:51:24AM
0 points
[-]
Uncaring AI? The correlate could stay 'Friendly AI', as I presume to assume acting in a friendly fashion is easier to identify than capability for emotions/values and emotion/value motivated action.
Comment author:Kawoomba
06 August 2013 11:22:35AM
10 points
[-]
We could gear several names to have maximum impact with their intended recipients, e.g. the "Takes-Away-Your-Second-Amendment-Rights AI", or "Freedom-Destroying AI", "Will-Make-It-So-No-More-Beetusjuice-Is-Sold AI" etc. All strictly speaking true properties for UFAIs.
Comment author:mwengler
07 August 2013 03:15:45PM
-3 points
[-]
Reading this comment encourages me to think that Unfriendly AI is part of a political campaign to rally humans against a competing intelligent group by manipulating their feelings negatively towards that group. It is as if we believe that the Nazis were not wrong for using propaganda to advance their race, they just had the wrong target, OR they started too late to succeed, something lesswrongers are worried about doing with AI.
Should we have a discussion whether it is immoral to campaign against AI we deem as unfriendly, or would it be better to just participate in the campaign against AI by downvoting any suggestion that this might be so? Is a consideration that seeking only FAI might be immoral a basilisk?
Comment author:MrMind
06 August 2013 07:46:02AM
1 point
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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.
Comment author:mwengler
07 August 2013 03:09:25PM
-2 points
[-]
Perhaps you can never get all the way out.
But certainly someone who talks about human rights and values the survival of the species is speaking less constrained by moral frame than somebody who values only her race or her nation or her clan and considers all other humans as though they were another species competing with "us."
How wrong am I to incorporate AI in my ideas of "us," with the possible result that I enable a universe where AI might thrive even without what we now think of as human? Would this not be analogous to a pure caucasian human supporting values that lead to a future of a light-brown human race, a race with no pure caucasian still in it? Would this Caucasian have to be judged to have committed some sort of CEV-version of genocide?
Comment author:RowanE
06 August 2013 02:17:36PM
3 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:ChristianKl
06 August 2013 04:21:52PM
1 point
[-]
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.
Comment author:mwengler
07 August 2013 03:03:40PM
-4 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:cousin_it
06 August 2013 08:25:27AM
*
7 points
[-]
Just a fun little thing that came to my mind.
If "anthropic probabilities" make sense, then it seems natural to use them as weights for aggregating different people's utilities. For example, if you have a 60% chance of being Alice and a 40% chance of being Bob, your utility function is a weighting of Alice's and Bob's.
If the "anthropic probability" of an observer-moment depends on its K-complexity, as in Wei Dai's UDASSA, then the simplest possible observer-moments that have wishes will have disproportionate weight, maybe more than all mankind combined.
If someday we figure out the correct math of which observer-moments can have wishes, we will probably know how to define the simplest such observer-moment. Following SMBC, let's call it Felix.
All parallel versions of mankind will discover the same Felix, because it's singled out by being the simplest.
Felix will be a utility monster. The average utilitarians who believe the above assumptions should agree to sacrifice mankind if that satisfies the wishes of Felix.
If you agree with that argument, you should start preparing for the arrival of Felix now. There's work to be done.
Where is the error?
That's the sharp version of the argument, but I think it's still interesting even in weakened forms. If there's a mathematical connection between simplicity and utility, and we humans aren't the simplest possible observers, then playing with such math can strongly affect utility.
Comment author:Wei_Dai
06 August 2013 08:50:22AM
4 points
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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.
Comment author:Wei_Dai
07 August 2013 01:07:38AM
2 points
[-]
Are you thinking that the shortest program that finds Felix in our universe would contain a short description of Felix and find it by pattern matching, whereas the shortest program that finds a human mind would contain the spacetime coordinates of the human? I guess which is shorter would be language dependent... if there is some sort of standard language that ought to be used, and it turns out the former program is much shorter than the latter in this language, then we can make the program that finds a human mind shorter by for example embedding some kind of artificial material in their brain that's easy to recognize and doesn't exist elsewhere in nature. Although I suppose that conclusion isn't much less counterintuitive than "Felix should be treated as a utility monster".
Comment author:cousin_it
07 August 2013 05:08:42AM
*
2 points
[-]
Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff going on here. For example, Paul said sometime ago that ASSA gives a thick computer larger measure than a thin computer, so if we run Felix on a computer that is much thicker than human neurons (shouldn't be hard), it will have larger measure anyway. But on the other hand, the shortest program that finds a particular human may also do that by pattern matching... I no longer understand what's right and what's wrong anymore.
Comment author:Wei_Dai
07 August 2013 08:35:36AM
*
2 points
[-]
For example, Paul said sometime ago that ASSA gives a thick computer larger measure than a thin computer, so if we run Felix on a computer that is much thicker than human neurons (shouldn't be hard), it will have larger measure anyway.
Hal Finney pointed out the same thing a long time ago on everything-list. I also wrote a post about how we don't seem to value extra identical copies in a linear way, and noted at the end that this also seems to conflict with UDASSA. My current idea (which I'd try to work out if I wasn't distracted by other things) is that the universal distribution doesn't tell you how much you should value someone, but only puts an upper bound on how much you can value someone.
Comment author:JGWeissman
06 August 2013 01:48:49PM
5 points
[-]
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.
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.
Comment author:Lumifer
07 August 2013 12:02:51AM
1 point
[-]
That's not an argument for lotteries, that's an argument for the observation that given sufficiently large incentives to game complex system , some complex systems will be gamed.
Comment author:wedrifid
07 August 2013 04:20:12AM
3 points
[-]
That's not an argument for lotteries
I notice that benelliott did not imply that it was.
That's not an argument for lotteries, that's an argument for the observation that given sufficiently large incentives to game complex system , some complex systems will be gamed.
It would seem, then, that lotteries are also a potential beneficiary for people who understand statistics sufficiently well. Similarly, someone from the local MENSA chapter makes a steady $0.5M/yr as a professional poker machine gambler. Or at least he did back when I participated in MENSA.
Comment author:mwengler
07 August 2013 02:42:07PM
2 points
[-]
Its actually just one example, but a well documented one, of lottery tickets being bought by people correctly applying statistical reasoning, in direct contrast to your blanket claim to which it is replying.
Your non-sequitur is correct though, it is not an argument for lotteries.
Comment author:Duke
06 August 2013 08:12:40PM
2 points
[-]
Can anyone recommend a book on marketing analytics? Preferably not a textbook but I'll take what I can get.
I have a technical background but I recently switched careers and am now working as a real estate agent. I have very limited marketing knowledge at this point.
Comment author:shminux
06 August 2013 09:11:52PM
*
0 points
[-]
Watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager... (Netflix made me! Honest!) Its one redeeming feature is the good amount of comic relief, even when discussing hard issues. Its most annoying feature is its reliance on the Muggle Plot.
...And its least believable feature is that, despite the nearly instant in-universe feedback that no secret survives until the end of the episode (almost all doors in the show are open, or at least unlocked, and someone eavesdrops on every sensitive conversation), the characters keep hoping that their next indiscretion will remain hidden.
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Comments (307)
Welcome to the future! Your toilet is now vulnerable to hackers.
Heaven help us. Somebody get X-risk on this immediately.
To be fair, the article also mentions repeated flushing, which can raise utility bills. I think this could get quite expensive in regions with water shortages.
Added to TVTropes.
Where?
Everything Is Online
Can somebody explain a particular aspect of Quantum Mechanics to me?
In my readings of the Many Worlds Interpretation, which Eliezer fondly endorses in the QM sequence, I must have missed an important piece of information about when it is that amplitude distributions become separable in timed configuration space. That is, when do wave-functions stop interacting enough for the near-term simulation of two blobs (two "particles") to treat them independently?
One cause is spatial distance. But in Many Worlds, I don't know where I'm to understand these other worlds are taking place. Yes, it doesn't matter, supposedly; the worlds are not present in this world's causal structure, so an abstract "where" is meaningless. But the evolution of wavefunctions seems to care a lot about where amplitudes are in N-dimensional space. Configurations don't sum unless they are the same spatial location and are representing the same quark type, right?
So if there's another CoffeeStain that splits off based on my observation of a quantum event, why don't the two CoffeeStains still interact, since they so obviously don't? Before my two selves became decoherent with their respective quantum outcomes (say, of a photon's path), the two amplitude blobs of the photon could still interact by the book, right? On what other axis has I, as a member of a new world, split off that I'm a sufficient distance from my self that is occupying the same physical location?
Relatedly, MWI answers "not-so-spooky" to questions regarding the entanglement experiment, but a similar confusion remains for me. Why, after I observe a particular polarization on my side of the galaxy and fly back in my spaceship to compare notes with my buddy on the other side of the galaxy, do I run into one version of him and not the other? They are both equally real, and occupying the same physical space. What other axis have the self-versions separated on?
(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).
This is pretty much correct, but to be more general and not just restrict yourself to the position basis, you can talk about the wavefunction in general, in terms of the eigenvector basis.
Two states 'strongly interact' if they share many of their high-amplitude eigenvectors. This is because eigenvectors evolve independently, and so if you have two states that do not share many eigenvectors, they will also evolve independently.
In the position basis, this winds up being much the same as having particles far from each other. In the momentum basis, it's less intuitive. You can have states with very similar representations in this basis but nevertheless very different eigenvector expansions.
I must admit I have very little understanding of how eigenvectors fit in with QM. I'll have to read up more on that, thanks for pointing out holes in my knowledge (though in the domain of QM, there are a lot of holes).
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.
Not to undermine your point, but |up, up> + |down, down> is perfectly oriented in the X direction.
What works better for this is that you indicate that the state is A |up, up> + B|down, down>, and you don't know A and B.
Nay. (|up>+|down>)(|up>+|down>) is oriented in the X-direction.
Hmmm... Yes.
I'm used to people forgetting that every single-particle spinor maps onto a single direction. Then I forget spinor addition. Oops.
The De Broglie-Bohm theory is a very interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics. The highlights of the theory are:
At first it might seem to be a cop-out to assume the reality of both the wavefunction and of actual point particles. However, this leads to some very interesting conclusions. For example, you don't have to assume wavefunction collapse (as per Copenhagen) but at the same time, a single preferred Universe exists (the Universe given by the configuration of the point particles). But that's not all.
It very neatly explains double-slit diffraction and Bell's experiments in a purely deterministic way using hidden variables (it is thus necessarily a non-local theory). It also explains the Born probabilities (the one thing that is missing from pure MWI; Elezier has alluded to this).
Among other things, De Broglie-Bohm theory allows quantum computers but doesn't allow quantum immortality - in this theory if you shoot yourself in the head you really will die. You won't suddenly be yanked into an alternate Universe.
The reason I'm mentioning it is because of experiments done by Yves Couder's group (http://math.mit.edu/~bush/?page_id=484) who have managed to build a crude and approximate physical system that incidentally illustrates some of the properties of De Broglie-Bohm theory. They use oil droplets that generate waves and the resulting waves guide the droplets. Most importantly, the droplets have 'path memory', so if a droplet is directed towards a double slit, it can 'interfere' with itself and produce nice double-slit diffraction fringes. One of their experiments that was just in the news recently illustrated particle behavior very similar to what the Schrodinger equation predicts: http://math.mit.edu/~bush/?p=2679
Now, De Broglie-Bohm theory does not seem to be one of the more popular interpretations of QM, because of its non-locality (this doesn't produce causal paradoxes like the Grandfather paradox, though, despite what some might say). However, in my opinion this is very unfair. Locality is just a relic from classical physics. 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.
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 particle position recovers the Born probabilities. (It even does so deterministically, unlike Objective Collapse theories.) The wave function encodes lots of information, but it's the particle that moves our measuring device, and the measuring device that moves our brains. If we succeed in simplifying our theory only by giving up on saving the phenomenon, then our theory is too simple.
Precisely. It's also not a trivial connection. The way the interaction between the wavefunction and the particles produces the Born probabilities is subtle and interesting (see MrMind's comment below on some of the subtleties involved).
But once you decide you're going to interpret the wave function as distributing probability among some set of orthogonal subspaces, you're already compelled into the Born probabilities.
All you need to decide that you ought to do that is the general conclusion that the wavefunction represents some kind of reality-fluid. Deciding that the nature of this reality fluid is to be made of states far more specific than any entity within quantum mechanics comes rather out of the blue.
But the phrase "reality fluid" is just a place-holder. It's a black box labeled "whatever solves this here problem". What we see is something particle-like, and it's the dynamics relating our observations over time that complicates the story. As Schrödinger put it:
One option is to try to find the simplest theory that explains away the particle-like appearance anthropically, which will get you an Everett-style ('Many Worlds'-like) interpretation. Another option is to take the sudden intrusion of the Born probabilities as a brute law of nature, which will get you a von-Neumann-style ('Collapse'-like) interpretation. The third option is to accept the particle-like appearance as real, but theorize that a more unitary underlying theory relates the Schrödinger dynamics to the observed particle, which will get you a de-Boglie-style ('Hidden Variables') interpretation. You'll find Bohmian Mechanics more satisfying than Many Worlds inasmuch as you find MW's anthropics hand-wavey or underspecified; and you'll find BM more satisfying than Collapse inasmuch as you think Nature's Laws are relatively simple, continuous, scalable, and non-anthropocentric.
If BM just said, 'Well, the particle's got to be real somehow, and the Born probabilities have to emerge from its interaction with a guiding wave somehow, but we don't know how that works yet', then its problems would be the same as MW's. But BM can formally specify how "reality fluid" works, and in a less ad-hoc way than its rivals. So BM wins on that count.
Where it loses is in ditching locality and Special Relativity, which is a big cost. (It's also kind of ugly and complicated, but it's hard to count that against BM until we've seen a simpler theory that's equally fleshed out re the Measurement Problem.)
Would you say that acknowledging the Born probabilities themselves 'comes out of the blue', since they aren't derived from the Schrödinger equation? If not, then where are physicists getting them from, since it's not the QM dynamics?
I wouldn't call Everett 'Anthropic' per se. I consider it an application of the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle: Here you've got this structure that acts like it's sapient†. Therefore, it is.
As for BM formally specifying how the reality fluid works... need I point out this this is 100% entirely backwards, being made of burdensome details?
The Schrödinger Equation establishes linearity, thus directly allowing us to split any arbitrary wavefunction however we please. Already we can run many worlds side-by-side. The SE's dynamics lead to decoherence, which makes MWI have branching. It's all just noticing the structure that's already in the system.
Edited to add †: by 'acts like' I mean 'has the causal structure for it to be'
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.
Interesting; I did a quick google search and apparently there's a guy who claims he can do it without foliations: iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/67/1/012035/pdf/jpconf767012035.pdf
I lack the expertise to make a more detailed analysis of it though.
The things that bugs me with DBB theory is that it allows superluminal comunication when the guide wave is out of equilibrium...
But since it's superdeterministic, it seems unlikely that you could actually set up an artifical nonequilibrium situation.
Yes, the feeling I have is that of uneasiness, not rejection. But still, DBB can be put in agreement with relativity only through the proper initial conditions, which I see as a defect (although not an obviously fatal one).
This came up at yesterday's London meetup: activities for keeping oneself relatable to other human beings.
We were dissecting motives behind goals, and one of mine was maintaining interests that other people could relate to. I have more pedestrian interests, but they're the first to get dropped when my time is constrained (which it usually is), so if I end up meeting someone out in the wild, all I have to talk about is stuff like natural language parsing, utilitarian population ethics and patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Discussing it in a smaller group later, it turns out I'm not the only person who does this. It makes sense that insular, scholarly people of a sort found on LW may frequently find themselves withdrawn from common cultural ground with other people, so I thought I'd kick off a discussion on the subject.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn't a request for advice on how to talk to people. Please don't interpret it as such.
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.
While this seems like reasonable advice, I'm not sure it's universally good advice. Richard Feynman seemed to enjoy a level of charm many of us couldn't hope to possess. He also had a wide selection of esoteric interests unrelated to his field.
I would also claim that there's value in simply maintaining such an interest. During particularly insular periods where I'm absorbed in less accessible work, I find myself starting to exhibit "aspie" characteristics, losing verbal fluency and becoming socially insensitive. It's not just about having things to talk about, but maintaining my own faculties for relating to people.
This works.
What happens when both people employ that method?
If everyone in the conversation is employing this method, then chances are higher that the others actually want to hear about your esoteric topics. If you pause early and give them a chance to talk about themselves (or for them to press for more), that'll keep you synched up with what they want.
People talking to each other about their lives and their interests! Success!
I was thinking more like two people each trying to get the other person to do that, like people at a door getting jammed saying "After you," "After you," etc.
I have never actually seen this happen, and I use that method all the time. I don't have an explanation for why, since I rarely think about problems I don't have.
All the times this has happened to me, one person would come up with a Schelling-pointy reason why the other person's recent life was more interesting (e.g. they had just come back from a trip abroad or something).
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.
This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort of context for "relating on an emotional level". You're unlikely to walk up to someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you've been having.
To clarify, this isn't some problem I need solving. It's an observation that if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
It doesn't need much context. If someone asks you "How are you?" you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn't have much content.
It doesn't help if you catch up with popular culture while you are looked up in your room. The problem is being locked up in a room and being socially isolated instead of the specific content that you consume.
Instead of spending 2 hours locked up in your room to catch up with popular culture spends that time going out and talk to people.
I've downvoted this for being bad advice that I explicitly requested you refrain from giving.
I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you don't realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people to study math.
I think it's great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.
Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people, seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.
Would it surprise you to learn I'd recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world's largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I've given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
With respect, you have no knowledge of my "situation". Please don't presume to offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you've incorrectly conjured up.
Those all sound like some pretty awesome activities!
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but it seems you're essentially saying that when you (temporarily) hyper focus on solitary, intellectual activities you (temporarily) encounter more difficulty in conversations. This doesn't surprise me and it seems evident that the only real solution is to find the right balance for you and accept the inherent trade offs.
For certain people that's not an option (“phdcomics is a documentary” -- shminux).
It's not like I have some slider on my desktop, with "sit in a box, autistically rocking back and forth, counting numbers" at one end, and "rakishly sample the epicurean delights of the world" at the other. I have time and work and study commitments. I have externally-imposed scheduling. I have inscrutable internal motivation levels that need to be contended with.
It's a case of resource management, and occasionally when managing those resources I'll have to focus on one area to the exclusion of another. That's fine. It's not something there's a "solution" to. It's a condition all moderately busy people have to operate under.
Those sound like pretty good topics for conversations with people.
To a degree. Swing dancing in Sweden is a fairly unusual way to spend your summer holiday.
I think you and I have had exchanges about "optimising for awesomeness" in the past. In some ways, having "awesome" talents or hobbies or experiences is no more relatable than having insular and nerdy ones. It's just cooler.
What? I'm under the impression that there are a much larger number of people who enjoy hearing me talk about trips around Europe or exams while drunk than about models of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray propagation.
You know there's a huge fraction of the people in the developed world who willingly spend a sizeable fraction of their waking time watching TV, right?
Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.
I'm under the impression that that often doesn't work very well with most males -- I find it relatively hard to emotionally relate with them unless we have something in particular to talk about. (Then again, biased sample, yadda yadda yadda.)
Don't do that then!
Alternatively, I just read about a veep who was told at management training to start by asking about people's families, and then talk about business matters. As a result, the people who thought she was cold and disliked them switched to thinking she was friendly and caring.
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.
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.
Is there something similar, but for sports? I usually get lost when conversation turns to the local sports team. I couldn't find anything with a quick google, but I'm probably not using the right search terms.
Haven't the foggiest. I don't really have friends who talk about sports. I read The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker so I end up really well informed on a couple narrow sports things that get features. And then my dad and brother rib me for knowing nothing about football, but everything about the Manning dynasty.
For a general overview of what's going on in the baseball world, this is pretty good place to start. There are also pleanty of blogs devoted to individual teams, though I'm not really in a position to make recommendations, unless you happen to be looking for a San Francisco Giants blog, in which case I highly reccomend this blog. Can't really help with other sports.
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."
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?
Because the overwhelming majority of people are arbitrary people. Any given person I meet is, almost definitively, going to be an arbitrary person.
Depends on where you meet them.
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.
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.
That's a really good fanfiction idea. I hope you won't mind if I swipe it.
Not at all. Although to some extent I just asked, what would HJPEV do if he got a Death Note?
Well done. You have just levelled up.
Could someone who downvoted this please tell me why? I was praising a useful thought (WWHJPEVD?).
Nonspecific praise clutters up the thread. Next time, just upvote--it conveys the same information.
Thanks!
The above is a terribly ironic reply.
Why our kind can't cooperate seems relevant. Even nonspecfic praise can create more fuzzy feelings than an upvote.
Harry wasn't even willing to use hoarcruxes. If you won't kill a dying man to make someone else immortal, then you're not going to do it just to throw science at the wall to see what sticks.
True, so this isn't quite what HJPEV would do but more what would he do if he were slighlty less of an absolutist. (Actually has he ever explicitly said in text that he wouldn't do that. I suspect given his attitudes that you are correct, but I'm curious what the textual basis is.)
-- Chapter 39: Pretending to be Wise, Pt 1
I think the fanfiction could be quite good at explaining to people modern cryptography and anonymity.
I believe it canonically can't run out of pages, so I'd think hard about how to leverage infinite free paper into world domination.
Burn the paper to fuel a turbine. Congratulations you now have infinite free energy.
And you've set global warming to continue even beyond the exhaustion of fossil fuels.
The paper is white yes? If we can cover reasonably large areas of land with it it would make a pretty good reflector of solar radiation
It may be extremely difficult to remove pages at a fast enough rate for this to be practically useful.
Then it turns out that Death Note smoke particles retain the magic qualities of the source. Writing one's name in dust with a fingertip becomes fraught with peril.
I don't think you can infinitely fast pull out papers of the death note, so I doubt that you can produce more paper per hour than the average paper factory.
You have to make sure nobody writes any names on it.
Alternately, you could have a codemned criminal slip and break his neck on the way to the lethal injection.
How do you recruit the volunteers without giving away that you have a death note and some secret service wanting to take it away from you?
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.
I would refrain from discussing it in a public forum like this one.
I'm sorry, but you've already communicated information about this sort of thing just by saying that.
Note that this in no way contradicts ygert's claim.
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.
Take a big company like, say, goldman-sachs. Buy out of the money put options. Death-note the top three or four layers of management, simultaneously. Use the millions of dollars you have appropriated for whatever.
If we're happy to go full evil then killing world leaders is also a good way to disrupt the economy (see the sudden crash when a fake report of Obama being shot was released).
That's likely to cause more collateral damage than merely taking out the leadership of one company. Cost/benefit analysis and whatnot.
Gambling on sporting events is probably another good way to use the Death Note for making money. It's probably far more ethical. Does the Death Note work on horses? If so, then you can bet on longshots while sabotaging the favorites by killing horses.
What do you tell the SEC when they asked you why you brought the options for Goldman Sachs?
LOL. That's a theme that is very well explored in fiction.
Hint: it's not as crystal clear as you think it is.
What do you do if North Korea put's out a press release that they will nuke Seoul as a reprisal if you kill all members of the congress?
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."
Already tested by Light in the manga, IIRC; the limits of skill top out before things like 'escape from maximum-security prison', so P=NP is well beyond the doable.
Ah, I've only seen the anime.
I'd also try "The person will die of cause A if X is true, and cause B if X is false" and other ways to try to push the burden of skill onto whatever mysterious universal forces are working instead of the human.
That's clever, and should be tried.
It might even be possible to jam up the system with a sufficiently hard to compute death requirement, though I'm not sure I'd want to try it. The death note is rather valuable.
He tries it in the anime too. (I watched that episode yesterday.) He tries things like "draw a picture of L on your cell wall and then die of a heart attack" on some evil prisoner. It doesn't work.
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.
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.
So far only two (or possibly three) of the comments on this thread have done that, unless you count euthanasia of volunteers with terminal illnesses as violence (which sounds very noncentral to me).
[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.
In so doing you are destroying important evidence about the state of the world which would deeply affect MIRI's mission. (Namely: There are alien teenagers and/or other types of dark lords about.)
There's probably no point in trying to create FAI if we're already living in a simulation.
See the part in square brackets at the top of my comment.
A while back, David Chapman made a blog post titled "Pop Bayesianism: cruder than I thought?", expressing considerable skepticism towards the kind of "pop Bayesianism" that's promoted on LW and by CFAR. Yvain and I replied in the comments, which led to an interesting discussion.
I wasn't originally sure whether this was interesting enough to link to on LW, but then one person on #lesswrong specifically asked me to do so. They said that they found my summaries of the practical insights offered by some LW posts the most valuable/interesting.
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.
Yvain has now made a post specifically replying to Chapman
Is there a name for the bias of choosing the action which is easiest (either physically or mentally), or takes the least effort, when given multiple options? Lazy bias? Bias of convenience?
I've found lately that being aware of this in myself has been very useful in stopping myself from procrastinating on all sorts of things, realizing that I'm often choosing the easier, but less effective of potential options out of convenience.
Laziness.
"I'm not lazy, I have a least-effort bias!"
I'm efficient, you have a least effort bias, he's just lazy.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman
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.
That was a huge source of akrasia for me. I fight by dividing the task ahead into very tiny subproblems ("chunk down", in NLP parlance) and then solving them on at the time. Then it's easy to get into flow...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort
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.
I'm going to be in Baltimore this weekend for an anime convention. I expect to have a day or so's leeway coming back. Is there a LW group nearby I might drop in on?
I've never been to a meetup, but it seems likely there is one in that area; I see one in DC but it's meeting on the last day of the con. The LWSH experience has left me more interested in seeing people face to face.
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.
Actually, it seems the convention ends relatively early on Sunday, so I might be able to make it after all (it's, what, a one hour train ride between cities?). Then again, I might not. I note that you seem to be the organizer for the DC meetups going by your post history. Is it permissible to maybe-show-maybe-not-who-knows?
By all means forward it to the DC list, and thanks. Given the apparent popularity of anime around here, I would be surprised if no one on it was planning on being at the con themselves.
It's absolutely permissible to come without a definite RSVP. In the interest of full disclosure, the train ride is probably more than an hour; it's about 40 minutes from Baltimore to Greenbelt, then another 30 on the Metro, plus transfer time, so likely 1.5 hours total.
You should go anyway though!
What Maia said.
I live in Baltimore City, send me a message if you want any tips or to possibly meet up.
I wish people here stopped using the loaded terms "many worlds" and "Everett branches" when the ontologically neutral "possible outcomes" is sufficient.
</rant>
"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.
It's absolutely the case that everything we are, evolved. But there's a certain gap between the hypothetical healthy field of evolutionary psychology and the one we actually have.
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.
Of course, one bad study doesn't condemn a field - "peer reviewed" does not mean "settled science", it means "not-obviously-wrong request for comment." But this isn't a lone, outlier, rogue study - this shit's gathered 46 citations. (Compare citation averages for other fields.) (Edit: No, not all of the cites are positive.)
As it happens, we have full documentation that "girls=pink" dates back to the ... 1940s.
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.)
The problem with that kind of phrasing is that we already know that cultural context can easily change the gender codes of blue and pink, because it already happened. If one doesn't assert that something evolutionarily significant happened at around the time of the cultural shift, then linking color preference to an inherent property of gender or sex is privileging the hypothesis.
Just curious: has anyone explored the idea of utility functions as vectors, and then extended this to the idea of a normalized utility function dot product? Because having thought about it for a long while, and remembering after reading a few things today, I'm utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively.
I haven't explored that idea; can you be more specific about what this idea might bring to the table?
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?
Trivially, nega-you who hates everything you like (oh, you want to put them out of their misery? Too bad they want to live now, since they don't want what you want). But such a being would certainly not be a human.
This is not a being in the reference class "people".
The negative utility need not be boundless or even monotonic. A coherent preference system could count a modest amount of misery experienced by people fitting certain criteria to be positive while extreme misery and torture of the same individual is evaluated negatively.
I also will upvote posts that have been downvoted too much, even if I wouldn't have upvoted them if they were at 0.
Why would you want to throw out scalar information in a multi-term utility function?
To figure out how much you care about other people being happy as defined by how much they want similar or compatible things to you, in a reasonably well-defined mathematical framework.
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.
Yeah, but Wedding Planner 1's deep vitriolic moral hatred of the lemon chiffon cake that delights Wedding Planner 2 that abused her as a young girl or Wedding Planner 2's thunderous personal objection to the enslavement of his family that went into making the cocoa for the devil's food cake that Wedding Planner 1 adores could easily make them refuse to share said delicious white cake with raspberry buttercream to the point where either would very happily destroy it to prevent the other from getting any. This seems suboptimal, though.
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 hope this is worth saying: I've been reading up a bit on philosophical pragmatism especially Peirce and I see a lot parallels with the thinking on LW, since it has a lot in common with positivism this is maybe not so surprising.
Though my interpretation of pragmatism seems to give a quite interesting critiquing the metaphor of "Map and territory", they seem to be saying that the territory do exist, just that when we point to territory we are actually pointing to how an ideal observer (that are somewhat like us?) would perceive the territory not the actual territory because that can not be done, since we need some kind of framework. Quite probably I'm just falling for the old trees falling in the forest fallacy. So am I thinking strait? And if I do, does have any consequences?
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.
Could you provide some source? Putting "first law of General Semantics" into google returns your comment and one book written in 2000 long after Korbyskies death. Putting "second law of General Semantics" into google returns one paper about feminism written in 2010.
General Semantics is about getting rid of the is of identity and doesn't contain many sentences like "The map is the territory".
When it comes to "laws" about the relationship between maps and the territory Science and Sanity starts with:
From there it goes till (40). General semantics isn't about making paradoxical statements and drawing meaning from dialectics, It basically about getting rid of speaking about things having the identity of other things but rather speaking about structural relationships between things.
Uhm, that's interesting. I was told such by a person I trusted many, many years ago. Since I've never been interested in GS I've never looked into that matter more closely. I'll try to see if I can dig up the original source, but I don't have much faith in that (but it might have been that "first" and "second" law were intended informally). If I can't find anything, I guess that that trusted source wasn't that much reliable, after all.
LOL to that.
Feminism is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to society. The manosphere/"red pill"/whatever is what you get when you assume that all gender differences are due to biology. Normal-reasonable-person-ism is what you get when you take into account the fact that we're not sure yet.
Does this theory (or parts of it) seem true to you?
It does seem that feminism requires the additional assumption that gender differences are bad, and manosphereness that they are good.
More than "good" in a moral sense, maybe just "useful" or immutable.
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.
No.
I'm pretty sure that some gender differences are due to society, and others are due to biology.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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'.
Uncaring AI? The correlate could stay 'Friendly AI', as I presume to assume acting in a friendly fashion is easier to identify than capability for emotions/values and emotion/value motivated action.
We could gear several names to have maximum impact with their intended recipients, e.g. the "Takes-Away-Your-Second-Amendment-Rights AI", or "Freedom-Destroying AI", "Will-Make-It-So-No-More-Beetusjuice-Is-Sold AI" etc. All strictly speaking true properties for UFAIs.
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.
Perhaps you can never get all the way out.
But certainly someone who talks about human rights and values the survival of the species is speaking less constrained by moral frame than somebody who values only her race or her nation or her clan and considers all other humans as though they were another species competing with "us."
How wrong am I to incorporate AI in my ideas of "us," with the possible result that I enable a universe where AI might thrive even without what we now think of as human? Would this not be analogous to a pure caucasian human supporting values that lead to a future of a light-brown human race, a race with no pure caucasian still in it? Would this Caucasian have to be judged to have committed some sort of CEV-version of genocide?
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.
Just a fun little thing that came to my mind.
If "anthropic probabilities" make sense, then it seems natural to use them as weights for aggregating different people's utilities. For example, if you have a 60% chance of being Alice and a 40% chance of being Bob, your utility function is a weighting of Alice's and Bob's.
If the "anthropic probability" of an observer-moment depends on its K-complexity, as in Wei Dai's UDASSA, then the simplest possible observer-moments that have wishes will have disproportionate weight, maybe more than all mankind combined.
If someday we figure out the correct math of which observer-moments can have wishes, we will probably know how to define the simplest such observer-moment. Following SMBC, let's call it Felix.
All parallel versions of mankind will discover the same Felix, because it's singled out by being the simplest.
Felix will be a utility monster. The average utilitarians who believe the above assumptions should agree to sacrifice mankind if that satisfies the wishes of Felix.
If you agree with that argument, you should start preparing for the arrival of Felix now. There's work to be done.
Where is the error?
That's the sharp version of the argument, but I think it's still interesting even in weakened forms. If there's a mathematical connection between simplicity and utility, and we humans aren't the simplest possible observers, then playing with such math can strongly affect utility.
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.
Why? Even within just one copy of Earth, the program that finds Felix should be much shorter than any program that finds a human mind...
Are you thinking that the shortest program that finds Felix in our universe would contain a short description of Felix and find it by pattern matching, whereas the shortest program that finds a human mind would contain the spacetime coordinates of the human? I guess which is shorter would be language dependent... if there is some sort of standard language that ought to be used, and it turns out the former program is much shorter than the latter in this language, then we can make the program that finds a human mind shorter by for example embedding some kind of artificial material in their brain that's easy to recognize and doesn't exist elsewhere in nature. Although I suppose that conclusion isn't much less counterintuitive than "Felix should be treated as a utility monster".
Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff going on here. For example, Paul said sometime ago that ASSA gives a thick computer larger measure than a thin computer, so if we run Felix on a computer that is much thicker than human neurons (shouldn't be hard), it will have larger measure anyway. But on the other hand, the shortest program that finds a particular human may also do that by pattern matching... I no longer understand what's right and what's wrong anymore.
Hal Finney pointed out the same thing a long time ago on everything-list. I also wrote a post about how we don't seem to value extra identical copies in a linear way, and noted at the end that this also seems to conflict with UDASSA. My current idea (which I'd try to work out if I wasn't distracted by other things) is that the universal distribution doesn't tell you how much you should value someone, but only puts an upper bound on how much you can value someone.
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.
How does your aggregate utility function weigh agents? That seems to be what the argument is about.
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.
Sometimes even a Bayesian buys a lottery ticket.
Lotteries are a tax on people who don't understand statistics.
Not quite always
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/31/a_lottery_game_with_a_windfall_for_a_knowing_few/
That's not an argument for lotteries, that's an argument for the observation that given sufficiently large incentives to game complex system , some complex systems will be gamed.
I notice that benelliott did not imply that it was.
It would seem, then, that lotteries are also a potential beneficiary for people who understand statistics sufficiently well. Similarly, someone from the local MENSA chapter makes a steady $0.5M/yr as a professional poker machine gambler. Or at least he did back when I participated in MENSA.
Its actually just one example, but a well documented one, of lottery tickets being bought by people correctly applying statistical reasoning, in direct contrast to your blanket claim to which it is replying.
Your non-sequitur is correct though, it is not an argument for lotteries.
Can anyone recommend a book on marketing analytics? Preferably not a textbook but I'll take what I can get.
I have a technical background but I recently switched careers and am now working as a real estate agent. I have very limited marketing knowledge at this point.
Watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager... (Netflix made me! Honest!) Its one redeeming feature is the good amount of comic relief, even when discussing hard issues. Its most annoying feature is its reliance on the Muggle Plot.
...And its least believable feature is that, despite the nearly instant in-universe feedback that no secret survives until the end of the episode (almost all doors in the show are open, or at least unlocked, and someone eavesdrops on every sensitive conversation), the characters keep hoping that their next indiscretion will remain hidden.