I'm not sure what you mean by "the class of Basilisks". Do you mean "sensations that cause mental suffering" or some such?

It is unclear what will be the consequences and side-effects of not knowing the specific evidence. And on meta level: what will be the consequences of modifying your cognitive algorithms to avoid the paths that seem to lead to such evidence.

Depending on all these specific details, it may be good or bad. Human imperfection makes it impossible to evaluate. And actually not knowing the specific evidence makes it impossible again. So... the question is analogical to: "If I am too stupid to understand the question, should I answer 'yes', or should I answer 'no'?" (Meaning: yes = avoid the evidence, no = don't avoid the evidence.)

As usual, examine.com has some information related to this.

The next step is TR-0 "bullbaiting" where the partner says things to the indoctrinee to get them to react. This is called finding a person's "buttons". When the person does react, he is told "flunk" and what he did to flunk and then the phrase that got him to react is repeated until the person no longer reacts. This is very effective as a behavior control method to get the person to blank out when someone starts saying negative things about Scientology.

Hm, this actually sounds like it could be useful...

I wonder if it would be valuable to get partway in to Scientology, then quit, just to observe the power of peer pressure, groupthink, and whatnot.

Interesting. Reminds me of Orwell's "crimestop":

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Game theory is not like calculus or evolutionary theory--something any alien race smart enough to develop space travel is likely to formulate. It does represent human values.

What you're referring to is a problem I've been thinking about and chipping away at for some time; I've even had some discussions about it here and people have generally been receptive. Maybe the reason you're being downvoted is that you're using the word 'human' to mean 'good'.

The core issue is that humans have empathy, and by this we mean that other people's utility function matters to us. More concisely, our perception of other people's utility forms a part of our utility which is conditionally independent of the direct benefits to us.

Our empathy not only extends to other humans, but also animals and perhaps even robots.

So what are examples of human beings who lack empathy? Lacking empathy is basically the definition of psychopathy. And, indeed, some psychopaths (not all, but some) have been violent criminals who e.g. killed babies for money, tortured people for amusement, etc. etc.

So you're essentially right that a game theory where the players do not have models of each other's utility functions shows aspects of psychopathy and 'inhumanity'.

But that doesn't mean game theory is wrong or 'inhuman'! All it means is that you're missing the 'empathy' ingredient. It also means that it would not be a good idea to build an AI without empathy. That's exactly what CEV attempts to solve. CEV is basically a crude attempt at trying to instill empathy in a machine.

Immediate consequence the second: Austrian school economics, in its reliance on allowing markets to come to equilibrium on their own, is inhuman.

I suspect all economics is inhuman. I suspect that any complex economy that connects millions or billions of people is going to be incomprehensible and inhuman. By far the best explanation I've heard of this thought is by Cosma Shalizi.

The key bit here is the conclusion:

There is a fundamental level at which Marx's nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and lose ourselves in the dance. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming.

But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find "a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all", which says how everyone should go.

not uniquely human does not imply inhuman. Lungs are not uniquely human, hardly inhuman though.

Generally, using loaded, non-factual words like "inhuman" and "monster" and "cthulhu" and "horrifying" and "puny" in a pseudo-logical format is worthy of a preacher exhorting illiterates. But is it helpful here? I"d like to think it isn't, and yet I'd rather discuss game theory in a visible thread than downvote your post.

"Inhuman" has strong connotations of inimical to human values-- your argument looks different if it starts with something like "game theory is a non-human-- it's a simplified version of some aspects of human behavior". In that case, altruism is non-human in the same sense.

Sorry, how did you go from "non human agents use X" (a statement about commonality) to "X is inhuman" (a value judgement) to "if you use X you become a monster" (an even stronger value judgement), to "being a jerk in the style of Cthulhu" (!!!???).

Does this then mean you think using eyesight is monstrous because cephalopodes also have eyes they independently evolved?

Or that maximizing functions is a bad idea because ants have a different function than humans?

Game theory is about strategies, not about values. It tells you which strategy should you use, if your goal is to maximize X. It does not tell you what X is. (Although some X's, such as survival, are instrumental goals for many different terminal goals, so they will be supported by many strategies.)

There is a risk of maximizing some X that looks like a good approximation of human values, but its actual maximization is unFriendly.

Austrian school economics, in its reliance on allowing markets to come to equilibrium on their own, is inhuman

Connotational objection: so is any school of anything; at least unless the problem of Friendliness is solved.

(I haven't seen the LW co-working chat)

If you want to tell people off for being sexist, your speech is just as free as theirs. People are free to be dicks, and you're free to call them out on it and shame them for it if you want.

I think you should absolutely call it out, negative reactions be damned, but I also agree with NancyLebovitz that you may get more traction out of "what you said is sexist" as opposed to "you are sexist".

To say nothing is just as much an active choice as to say something. Decide what kind of environment you want to help create.

I'd like to see some evidence that such stuff is going on before pointing fingers and making rules that could possible alienate a large fraction of people.

I've been attending the co-working chat for about a week, on and off (I take the handle of 'fist') and so far everyone seems friendly and more than willing to accomodate the girls in the chat. Have you personally encountered any problems?

What are community norms here about sexism

Depends on how you define sexism. Some people consider admitting that men and women are different to be sexism, never mind acting on that belief :-/

TheOtherDave's answer is basically correct. Crass and condescending people don't get far, but its possible to have a discussion of issues which cost Larry Summers so dearly.

I connotationally interpret your question as: "what are the community norms about bad things?"

You're not giving us enough information so that we could know what you're talking about, and you're asking our blind permission to condemn behaviour you disagree with.

There are no official community norms on the topic.

For my own part, I observe a small but significant number of people who seem to believe that LessWrong ought to be a community where it's acceptable to differentially characterize women negatively as long as we do so in the proper linguistic register (e.g, adopting an academic and objective-sounding tone, avoiding personal characterizations, staying cool and detached).

The people who believe this ought to be unacceptable are either less common or less visible about it. The majority is generally silent on such matter, though will generally join in condemning blatant register-violations.

The usual result is something closer to wheaton's law at the surface level, but closer to "say what you think is true" at the structural level. (Which is not quite free speech, but a close enough cousin in context.) That is, it's often considered OK to say things, as long as they are properly hedged and constructed, that if said more vulgarly or directly would be condemned for violating wheaton's law, and which in other communities would be condemned for a variety of reasons.

I think there's a general awareness that this pattern-matches to sexism, though I expect that many folks here consider that to be mistaken pattern-matching (the "I'm not sexist; I can't help it if you feminists choose to interpret my words and actions that way" stance).

So my guess is that if you attempt to make people who engage in sexism (and related defenses) feel unwelcome you will most likely trigger net-negative reactions unless you're very careful with your framing.

Does that answer your question?

Ideally, I'd want the people to feel that the behavior is unwelcome rather than that they themselves are unwelcome, but people are apt to have their preferred behaviors entangled with their sense of self, so the ideal might not be feasible. Still, it's probably worth giving a little thought to discouraging behaviors rather than getting rid of people.

I don't have an answer here, just a note that this question actually contains two questions, and it would be good to answer both of them together. It would also be a good example of using rationalist taboo.

A: What are the community norms for defining sexism?

B: What are the community norms for dealing with sexism (as defined above)?

Answering B without answering A can later easily lead to motivated discussions about sexism, where people would be saying: "I think that X is [not] an example of sexism" when what they really wanted to say would be: "I think that it is [not] appropriate to use the community norm B for X".

a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution.

My favorite example is challenging people to show that stars (in space) are any less alive than stars (in Hollywood).

It just doesn't matter very much - certainly not enough to keep wrangling over the exact definition of the boundary. As long as we understand what we mean by crystal, bacterium, RNA, etc., why should we care about the fuzzy dividing line? Are ribozymes going to become more or less precious to us according only to whether we count them as living or not, given that nothing changes about their actual manifested qualities? Should they?

Every science uses terms which are called universal terms, such as ‘energy’, ‘velocity’, ‘carbon’, ‘whiteness’, ‘evolution’, ‘justice’, ‘state’, ‘humanity’. These are distinct from the sort of terms which we call singular terms or individual concepts, like ‘Alexander the Great’, ‘Halley’s Comet’, ‘The First World War’. Such terms as these are proper names, labels attached by convention to the individual things denoted by them.

[...] The school of thinkers whom I propose to call methodological essentialists was founded by Aristotle, who taught that scientific research must penetrate to the essence of things in order to explain them. Methodological essentialists are inclined to formulate scientific questions in such terms as ‘what is matter?’ or ‘what is force?’ or ‘what is justice?’ and they believe that a penetrating answer to such questions, revealing the real or essential meaning of these terms and thereby the real or true nature of the essences denoted by them, is at least a necessary prerequisite of scientific research, if not its main task. Methodological nominalists, as opposed to this, would put their problems in such terms as ‘how does this piece of matter behave?’ or ‘how does it move in the presence of other bodies?’ For methodological nominalists hold that the task of science is only to describe how things behave, and suggest that this is to be done by freely introducing new terms wherever necessary, or by re-defining old terms wherever convenient while cheerfully neglecting their original meaning. For they regard words merely as useful instruments of description.

Most people will admit that methodological nominalism has been victorious in the natural sciences. Physics does not inquire, for instance, into the essence of atoms or of light, but it uses these terms with great freedom to explain and describe certain physical observations, and also as names of certain important and complicated physical structures. So it is with biology. Philosophers may demand from biologists the solution of such problems as ‘what is life?’ or ‘what is evolution?’ and at times some biologists may feel inclined to meet such demands. Nevertheless, scientific biology deals on the whole with different problems, and adopts explanatory and descriptive methods very similar to those used in physics.

-- Karl Popper, from The Poverty of Historicism

Just because a boundary is fuzzy doesn't mean it's meaningless.

It seems to take a lot more than 15 million years to get from "life" to "intelligent life". According to the article this period would only have lasted for a million years, so at most we would probably get a lot of monocellular life arising and then dying during the cooloff.

I don't think this is frightening. If you thought life couldn't have arisen more than 3.6 billion years ago but then discover that it could have arisen 13.8 billion years ago, you should be at most 4 times as scared.

The number of habitable planets in the galaxy over the number of habituated planets is a scary number.

The time span of earth civilization over the time span of earth life is a scary number.

4 is not a scary number.

1 - why should no intelligent life arising from a set of places that were likely habitable for only 5 million years (if they existed at all, which is doubtful) be surprising?

2 - I raise the possibility of outcomes for intelligent life that are not destruction or expansion through the universe.

Edit: Gah, that's what I get for leaving this window open while about 8 other people commented

Is that a relevant number?

Doesn't the relevant number of opportunities for life to appear have units of mass-time?

Isn't the question not how early was some Goldilocks zone, but how much mass was in a Goldilocks zone for how long? This says that the whole universe was a Goldilocks zone for just a few million years. The whole universe is big, but a few million years is small. And how much of the universe was metallic? The paper emphasizes that some of it was, but isn't this a quantitative question?

Now that is scary, although there are a few complications. Rocky bodies were probably extremely rare during that time since the metal enrichment of the Universe was extremely low. You can't build life out of just hydrogen and helium.

There weren't any planets 15 million years after the Big Bang. The first stars formed 100 million years after the Big Bang, and you need another few million on top of that for the planets to form and cool down.

So is this person a big actor in the pony fanfic culture?

The plural of "corpus" is "corpora". I don't say this to be pedantic, but because the word is quite lovely, and deserves to be used more.

If a hypothetical bothers you, maybe you should hold off proposing solutions and instead investigate whether it is a real problem.

Some time ago someone linked a paper indicating that there are benefits to fragmentation of academia by language barriers as less people are exposed to some kind of dominant view allowing them to come up with new ideas. One cited example was anthropology which had a Russian and an Anglosphere tradition.

I'd assume there not to be any major translation efforts as being a translator isn't as effective as publishing something of your own by far.

You sir, are awesome.

Sounds like somebody is trying to purchase status...

This post and reading "why our kind cannot cooperate" kicked me off my ass to donate. Thanks Tuxedage for posting.

Would anyone else be interested in pooling donations to take advantage of the 3:1 deal?

Interesting.

I have been convinced that people donating should publicly brag about it to attract other donors

It certainly seems to make sense for the sake of the cause for (especially large, well-informed) donors to make their donations public. The only downside seems to be a potentially conflicting signal on behalf of the giver.

instead of remaining silent about their donation which leads to a false impression of the amount of support MIRI has.

I'm not sure this is true. Doesn't MIRI publish its total receipts? Don't most organizations that ask for donations?

Growing up Evangelical, it was taught that we should give secretly to charities (including, mostly, the church).

I wonder why? The official Sunday School answer is so that you remain humble as the giver, etc. I wonder if there is some other mechanism whereby it made sense for Christians to propogate that concept (secret giving) among followers?

What's your budget?

How much hard drive space are you using currently?

Based on that, it seems like it's best to get one with only a solid-state drive and no magnetic drive. Is that accurate?

Not necessarily. Most laptops nowadays are equipped with anti shock hard drive mounts and the hard drives are specially designed to be resistant to shock. The advantages for an SSD are speed, not reliability.

This reliability report (with this caveat) indicates that Samsung is the most reliable brand on the market for now. I've always considered Lenovo and ASUS to be high quality, with ASUS generally having cheaper and more powerful computers (and a trade off in actually figuring out which one you want, that website is terrible).

Check out /r/suggestalaptop?

General comments: SSDs are generally faster than magnetic drives, but often fail much sooner.

If you're not positive you want to replace it altogether: You might be able to fix your heat/slowness issues just by taking a can of compressed air to it. And you could probably buy a new battery. Replacing it might still be a better proposition overall, though...

9: If I'm not doing exactly what I want to be doing, why?

That's the hardest of them all, still searching for answers.

How long have you been doing this, and have you noticed any effects?

Identical twins aren't perfectly identical

That there are differences between identical twins is known, but the article goes into detail about the types of difference, including effects which are in play before birth.

Found the actual papers the coverage is based on.

How it was done: removing T cells (the cells which kill body cells infected with viruses directly, unlike B cells which secrete antibody proteins) and using replication-incapable viruses to put in a chimeric gene composed of part of a mouse antibody against human B-cell antigens, part of the human T-cell receptor that activates the T cell when it binds to something, and an extra activation domain to make the T-cell activation and proliferation particularly strong. Cells were reinjected, and they proliferated over 1000-fold, killed off all the cancerous leukemia cells they could detect in most patients, and the T-cells are sticking around as a permanent part of the patients immune systems. Relapse rates have been pretty low (but not zero).

This type of cancer (B-cell originating leukemia) is uniquely extraordinarily well suited for this kind of intervention for two reasons. One, there is an antigen on B cells and B-cell derived cancers that can be targeted without destroying anything else important in the body other than normal B cells. Two, since the modded T cells destroy both normal B cells carrying this antigen and the cancerous B cells, the patients have a permanent lack of antibodies after treatment which makes sure their immune system has a hard time reacting against the modified receptors present on the modded T cells, which has been a problem in other studies. Fortunately people can live without B cells if they are careful - it's living without T cells you cannot do. They also suspect that pre-treating with chemotherapy majorly helped these immune cells go after the weakened cancer cell population.

You can repeat this with T-cells tuned against any protein you want, but you had better watch out for autoimmune effects or the patient's immune system going after the chimeric protein you add and eliminating the modded population. And watch out ten years down the line for any T-cell originating lymphomas derived from wonky viral insertion sites in the modded cells - though these days there are 'gentler' viral agents than in the old days with a far lower rate of such problems, and CRISPR might make modding cells in a dish even more reliable soon.

Another thing in the toolkit. No silver bullets. Still pretty darn cool.

Why does a human care about if a monkey cares about whether a human can crush leaves? For things like us primates, sometimes these things are their own reward.

It might simply be an interesting activity to teach a human how to crush leaves.

Because enjoying teaching useful stuff to people you get along with is a trait that got selected for?

What is your reason for wanting to?

I also want to learn how to be kinder. The sticking point, for me, is better prediction about what makes people feel good.

I was very ill a year ago, and at that time learned a great deal about how comforting it is to be taken care of by someone who is compassionate and knowledgeable about my condition. But for me, unless I'm very familiar with that exact situation, I have trouble anticipating what will make someone feel better.

This is also true in everyday situations. I work on figuring out how to make guests feel better in my home and how to make a host feel better when I'm the guest. (I already know that my naturally overly-analytic, overly-accommodating manner is not most effective.) I observe other people carefully, but it all seems very complex and I consider myself learning and a 'beginner' -- far behind someone who is more natural at this.