Weekly open threads - how do you think it's working?

Commercials sound funnier if you mentally replace "up to" with "no more than."

A new study shows that manipulative behavior could be linked to the development of some forms of altruism. The study itself is unfortunately behind a paywall.

Open comment thread:

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own top-level comment in the open thread, it goes here.

(Copied since it was well received last time.)

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Boston meetup, about using causal graphs to understand bias in the medical literature. Some of you requested the slides, so I have uploaded them at http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/huitfeldt/files/using_causal_graphs_to_understand_bias_in_the_medical_literature.pptx

Note that this is intended as a "Causality for non-majors" type presentation. If you need a higher level of precision, and are able the follow the maths, you would be much better off reading Pearl's book.

(Edited to change file location)

what is a reliable way of identifying arbitrary solved or unsolved problems??

Why doesn't CFAR just tape record one of the workshops and throw it on youtube? Or at least put the notes online and update them each time they change for the next workshop? It seems like these two things would take very little effort, and while not perfect, would be a good middle ground for those unable to attend a workshop.

I can definitely appreciate the idea that person to person learning can't be matched with these, but it seems to me if the goal is to help the world through rationality, and not to make money by forcing people to attend workshops, then something like tape recording would make sense. (not an attack on CFAR, just a question from someone not overly familiar with it).

Consider the following scenario. Suppose that it can be shown that the laws of physics imply that if we do a certain action (costing 5 utils to perform), then in 1/googol of our descendent universes, 3^^^3 utils can be generated. Intuitively, it seems that we should do this action! (at least to me) But this scenario also seems isomorphic to a Pascal's mugging situation. What is different?

If I attempt to describe the thought process that leads to these differences, it seems to be something like this. What is the measure of the causal descendents where 3^^^3 utils are generated? In typical Pascal's mugging, I expect there to be absolutely zero causal descendents where 3^^^3 utils are generated, but in this example, I expect there to be "1/googol" such causal descendents, even though the subjective probability of these two scenarios is roughly the same. I then do my expected utility maximization with (# of utils)(best guess of my measure) instead of (# of utils)(subjective probability), which seems to match with my intuitions better, at least.

But this also just seems like I am passing the buck to the subjective probability of a certain model of the universe, and that this will suffer from the mugging problem as well.

So does thinking about it this way add anything, or is it just more confusing?

I don't know how technically viable hyperloop is, but it seems especially well suited for the United States.

Investing in a hyperloop system doesn't make as much sense in Europe or Japan for a number of reasons:

1. European/Japanese cities are closer together, so Hyperloop's long acceleration times are a larger relative penalty in terms of speed. The existing HSR systems reach their lower top speeds more quickly.

2. Most European countries and Japan already have decent HSR systems and are set to decline in population. Big new infrastructure projects tend not to make as much sense when populations are declining and the infrastructure cost : population ratio is increasing by default.

3. Existing HSR systems create a natural political enemy for Hyperloop proposals. For most countries, having HSR and Hyperloop doesn't make sense.

In contrast, the US seems far better suited:

1. The US is set for a massive population increase, requiring large new investments in transportation infrastructure in any case.

2. The US has lots of large but far-flung cities, so long acceleration times are not as much of a relative penalty.

3. The US has little existing HSR to act as a competitor. The political class has expressed interest in increasing passenger rail infrastructure.

4. Hyperloop is proposed to carry automobiles. Low walkability of US towns is the big killer of intercity passenger rail in the US. Taking HSR might be faster than driving, but in addition to other benefits, driving saves money on having to rent a car when you reach the destination city.

Another possible early adopter is China (because they still need more transport infrastructure, land acquisition is a trivial problem for the Communist party, and they have a larger area, mitigating the slow acceleration problem.) I see China as less likely than the US because they do have a fairly large HSR system and it is expanding quickly. Also, China is set for population decline within a few decades, although they have some decades of slow growth left.

Russia is another possible candidate. Admittedly they have the declining population problem, but they still need more transport infrastructure and they have several big, far-flung cities. The current Russian transportation system is quite unsafe, so they could be expected to be willing to invest in big new projects. The slow acceleration problem would again be mitigated by Russia's large size.

There is a circulating google docs for people who are moving into the Bay Area soonish.

Any tips for people moving in from those who are in?

People who have available rooms or houses. Let Nick Ryder know.

Artificial intelligence and Solomonoff induction: what to read?

Olle Häggström, Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Chalmers University of Technology, reads some of Marcus Hutter's work, comes away unimpressed, and asks for recommendations.

One concept that is sometimes claimed to be of central importance in contemporary AGI research is the so-called AIXI formalism. [...] In the presentation, Hutter advices us to consult his book Universal Artificial Intelligence. Before embarking on that, however, I decided to try one of the two papers that he also directs us to in the presentation, namely his A philosophical treatise of universal induction, coauthored with Samuel Rathmanner and published in the journal Entropy in 2011. After reading the paper, I have moved the reading of Hutter's book far down my list of priorities, because gerneralizing from the paper leads me to suspect that the book is not so good.

I find the paper bad. There is nothing wrong with the ambition - to sketch various approaches to induction from Epicurus and onwards, and to try to argue how it all culminates in the concept of Solomonoff induction. There is much to agree with in the paper, such as the untenability of relying on uniform priors and the limited interest of the so-called No Free Lunch Theorems (points I've actually made myself in a different setting). The authors' emphasis on the difficulty of defending induction without resorting to circularity (see the well-known anti-induction joke for a drastic illustration) is laudable. And it's a nice perspective to view Solomonoff's prior as a kind of compromise between Epicurus and Ockham, but does this particular point need to be made in quite so many words? Judging from the style of the paper, the word "philosophical" in the title seems to mean something like "characterized by lack of rigor and general verbosity".4 Here are some examples of my more specific complaints [...]

I still consider it plausible to think that Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff induction are relavant to AGI7 (as well as to statistical inference and the theory of science), but the experience of reading Uncertainty & Induction in AGI and A philosophical treatise of universal induction strongly suggests that Hutter's writings are not the place for me to go in order to learn more about this. But where, then? Can the readers of this blog offer any advice?

I want to know more (ie anything) about game theory. What should I read?

If you had to group Less Wrong content into eight categories by subject matter, what would those categories be?

Here's a question that's been distracting me for the last few hours, and I want to get it out of my head so I can think about something else.

You're walking down an alley after making a bank withdrawal of a small sum of money. Just about when you realize this may have been a mistake, two Muggers appear from either side of the alley, blocking trivial escapes.

Mugger A: "Hi there. Give me all of that money or I will inflict 3^^^3 disutility on your utility function."

Mugger B: "Hi there. Give me all of that money or I will inflict maximum disutility on your utility function."

You: "You're working together?"

Mugger A: "No, you're just really unlucky."

Mugger B: "Yeah, I don't know this guy."

You: "But I can't give both of you all of this money!"

Mugger A: "Tell you what. You're having a horrible day, so if you give me half your money, I'll give you a 50% chance of avoiding my 3^^^3 disutility. And if you give me a quarter of your money, I'll give you a 25% chance of avoiding my 3^^^3 disutility. Maybe the other Mugger will let you have the same kind of break. Sound good to you, other Mugger?"

Mugger B: "Works for me. Start paying."

You: Do what, exactly?

I can see at least 4 vaugely plausible answers:

Pay Mugger A: 3^^^3 disutility is likely going to be more than whatever you think your maximum is and you want to be as likely as possible of avoiding that. You'll just have to try resist/escape from Mugger B (unless he's just faking).

Pay Mugger B: Maximum disutility is by it's definition of greater than or equal to any other disutility, worse than 3^^^3, and has probably happened to at least a few people with utility functions (although probably NOT to a 3^^^3 extent), so it's a serious threat and you want to be as likely as possible of avoiding that. You'll just have to try resist/escape from Mugger A (unless he's just faking).

Pay both Muggers a split of the money: For example: If you pay half to each, and they're both telling the truth, you have a 25% chance of not getting either disutility and not having to resist/escape at all (unless one or both is faking, which may improve your odds.)

Don't Pay: This seems like it becomes generally less likely than in a normal Pascal's mugging since there are no clear escape routes, and you're outnumbered, so there is at least some real threat unless they're both faking.

The problem is, I can't seem to justify any of my vaugely plausible answers to this conundrum well enough to stop thinking about it. Which makes me wonder if the question is ill formed in some way.

Thoughts?

This article, written by Dreeve's wife has displaced Yvain's polyamory essay as the most interesting relationships article I've read this year. The basic idea is that instead of trying to split chores or common goods equally, you use auctions. For example, if the bathroom needs to be cleaned, each partner says how much they'd be willing to clean it for. The person with the higher bid pays the what the other person bid, and that person does the cleaning.

It's easy to see why commenters accused them of being libertarian. But I think egalitarians should examine this system too. Most couples agree that chores and common goods should be split equally. But what does "equally" mean? It's hard to quantify exactly how much each person contributes to a relationship. This allows the more powerful person to exaggerate their contributions and pressure the weaker person into doing more than their fair share. But auctions safeguard against this abuse requiring participants to quantify how much they value each task.

For example, feminists argue that women do more domestic chores than men, and that these chores go unnoticed by men. Men do a little bit, but because men don't see all the work women do, they end up thinking that they're doing their share when they aren't. Auctions safeguard against this abuse. Instead of the wife just cleaning the bathroom, she and her husbands bid for how much they'd be willing to clean the bathroom for. The lower bid is considered the fair market price of cleaning the bathroom. Then she and her husband engage in a joint-purchase auction to decide if the bathroom will be cleaned at all. Either the bathroom gets cleaned and the cleaner gets fairly compensated, or the bathroom doesn't get cleaned because the total utility of cleaning the bathroom is less than the disutility of cleaning the bathroom.

And that's it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.

When you're trying to raise the sanity waterline, dredging the swamps can be a hazardous occupation. Indian rationalist skeptic Narendra Dabholkar was assassinated this morning.

I've got an (IMHO) interesting discussion article written up, but I am unable to post it; I get a "webpage cannot be found" error when I try. I'm using IE 9. Is this a known issue, or have I done something wrong?

Do consequentialists generally hold as axiomatic that there must be a morally preferable choice (or conceivably multiple equally preferable choices) in a given situation? If so, could somebody point me to a deeper discussion of this axiom (it probably has a name, which I don't know.)

Sorry if this has been asked before, but can someone explain to me if there is any selfish reason to join Alcor while one is in good health? If I die suddenly, it will be too late to have joined, but even if I had joined it seems unlikely that they would get to me in time.

The only reason I can think of is to support Alcor.

This paper about AI from Hector J. Levesque seems to be interesting: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hector/Papers/ijcai-13-paper.pdf

It extensively discusses something called 'Winograd schema questions': If you want examples of Winograd schema questions, there is a list here: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WS.html

The paper's abstract does a fairly good job of summing it up, although it doesn't explicitly mention Winograd schema questions:

The science of AI is concerned with the study of intelligent forms of behaviour in computational terms. But what does it tell us when a good semblance of a behaviour can be achieved using cheap tricks that seem to have little to do with what we intuitively imagine intelligence to be? Are these intuitions wrong, and is intelligence really just a bag of tricks? Or are the philosophers right, and is a behavioural understanding of intelligence simply too weak? I think both of these are wrong. I suggest in the context of question-answering that what matters when it comes to the science of AI is not a good semblance of intelligent behaviour at all, but the behaviour itself, what it depends on, and how it can be achieved. I go on to discuss two major hurdles that I believe will need to be cleared.

If you have time, this seems worth a read. I started reading other Hector J. Levesque papers because of it.

Edit: Upon searching, I also found some critiques of Levesque's work as well, so looking up opposition to some of these points may also be a good idea.

We wonder about the moral impact of dust specks in the eyes of 3^^^3 people.

What about dust specks in the eyes of 3^^^3 poodles? Or more to the point, what is the moral cost of killing one person vs one poodle? How many poodles lives would we trade for the life of one person?

Or even within humans, is it human years we would account in coming up with moral equivalencies? Do we discount humans that are less smart, on the theory that we almost certainly discount poodles against humans because they are not as smart as us? Do we discount evil humans compared to helpful humans? Discount unproductive humans against productive ones? What about sims, if it is human*years we count rather than human lives, what of a sim which might be expected to run for more than a trillion subjective years in simulation, do they carry billions times more moral weight than a single meat human who has precommitted to eschew cryonics or upload?

And of course I am using poodle as an algebraic symbol to represent any one of many intelligences. Do we discount poodles against humans because they are not as smart, or is there some other measure of how to relate the moral value of a poodle to the moral value of a person? Does a sim (simulated human running in software) count equal to a meat human? Does an earthworm have epsilon<<1 times the worth of a human, or is it identically 0 times the worth of a human?

What about really big smart AI? Would an AI as smart as an entire planet be worth (morally) preserving at the expense of losing one-fifth the human population?

Has anyone done a study on redundant information in languages?

I'm just mildly curious, because a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that English is about 4.7x redundant - which on a side note explains how we can esiayl regnovze eevn hrriofclly msispled wrods.

(Actually, that would be an interesting experiment - remove or replace fraction x of the letters in a paragraph and see at what average x participants can no longer make a "corrected" copy.)

I'd predict that Chinese is much less redundant in its spoken form, and that I have no idea how to measure redundancy in its written form. (By stroke? By radical?)